GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Stochastic Optimization Schemes for Performative Prediction with Nonconvex Loss
Authors: Qiang LI; Hoi To Wai
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: This paper studies a risk minimization problem with decision dependent data distribution. The problem pertains to the performative prediction setting in which a trained model can affect the outcome estimated by the model. Such dependency creates a feedback loop that influences the stability of optimization algorithms such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD). We present the first study on performative prediction with smooth but possibly non-convex loss. We analyze a greedy deployment scheme with SGD (SGD-GD). Note that in the literature, SGD-GD is often studied with strongly convex loss. We first propose the definition of stationary performative stable (SPS) solutions through relaxing the popular performative stable condition. We then prove that SGD-GD converges to a biased SPS solution in expectation. We consider two conditions of sensitivity on the distribution shifts: (i) the sensitivity is characterized by Wasserstein-1 distance and the loss is Lipschitz w.r.t.~data samples, or (ii) the sensitivity is characterized by total variation (TV) divergence and the loss is bounded. In both conditions, the bias levels are proportional to the stochastic gradient's variance and sensitivity level. 
Our analysis is extended to a lazy deployment scheme where models are deployed once per several SGD updates, and we show that it converges to an SPS solution with reduced bias. Numerical experiments corroborate our theories.
DreamClear: High-Capacity Real-World Image Restoration with Privacy-Safe Dataset Curation
Authors: Yuang Ai; Xiaoqiang Zhou; Huaibo Huang; Xiaotian Han; Zhengyu Chen; Quanzeng You; Hongxia Yang
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Image restoration (IR) in real-world scenarios presents significant challenges due to the lack of high-capacity models and comprehensive datasets.
To tackle these issues, we present a dual strategy: GenIR, an innovative data curation pipeline, and DreamClear, a cutting-edge Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based image restoration model.
**GenIR**, our pioneering contribution, is a dual-prompt learning pipeline that overcomes the limitations of existing datasets, which typically comprise only a few thousand images and thus offer limited generalizability for larger models. 
GenIR streamlines the process into three stages: image-text pair construction, dual-prompt based fine-tuning, and data generation \& filtering. This approach circumvents the laborious data crawling process, ensuring copyright compliance and providing a cost-effective, privacy-safe solution for IR dataset construction. The result is a large-scale dataset of one million high-quality images.
Our second contribution, **DreamClear**, is a DiT-based image restoration model. It utilizes the generative priors of text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models and the robust perceptual capabilities of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to achieve photorealistic restoration. To boost the model's adaptability to diverse real-world degradations, we introduce the Mixture of Adaptive Modulator (MoAM). It employs token-wise degradation priors to dynamically integrate various restoration experts, thereby expanding the range of degradations the model can address.
Our exhaustive experiments confirm DreamClear's superior performance, underlining the efficacy of our dual strategy for real-world image restoration. Code and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/shallowdream204/DreamClear.
AUC Maximization under Positive Distribution Shift
Authors: Atsutoshi Kumagai; Tomoharu Iwata; Hiroshi Takahashi; Taishi Nishiyama; Yasuhiro Fujiwara
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Maximizing the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) is a popular approach to imbalanced binary classification problems. Existing AUC maximization methods usually assume that training and test distributions are identical. However, this assumption is often violated in practice due to {\it a positive distribution shift}, where the negative-conditional density does not change but the positive-conditional density can vary. This shift often occurs in imbalanced classification since positive data are often more diverse and time-varying than negative data. To deal with this shift, we theoretically show that the AUC on the test distribution can be expressed by using the positive and marginal training densities and the marginal test density. Based on this result, we can maximize the AUC on the test distribution by using positive and unlabeled data in the training distribution and unlabeled data in the test distribution. The proposed method requires only positive labels in the training distribution as supervision. Moreover, the derived AUC has a simple form and thus is easy to implement. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown with four real-world datasets.
Exploring DCN-like architecture for fast image generation with arbitrary resolution
Authors: Shuai Wang; Zexian Li; Tianhui Song; Xubin Li; Tiezheng Ge; Bo Zheng; Limin Wang
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Arbitrary-resolution image generation still remains a challenging task in AIGC, as it requires handling varying resolutions and aspect ratios while maintaining high visual quality. Existing transformer-based diffusion methods suffer from quadratic computation cost and limited resolution extrapolation capabilities, making them less effective for this task. In this paper, we propose FlowDCN, a purely convolution-based generative model with linear time and memory complexity, that can efficiently generate high-quality images at arbitrary resolutions. Equipped with a new design of learnable group-wise deformable convolution block, our FlowDCN yields higher flexibility and capability to handle different resolutions with a single model.
FlowDCN achieves the state-of-the-art 4.30 sFID on $256\times256$ ImageNet Benchmark and comparable resolution extrapolation results, surpassing transformer-based counterparts in terms of convergence speed (only $\frac{1}{5}$ images), visual quality, parameters ($8\%$ reduction) and FLOPs ($20\%$ reduction). We believe FlowDCN offers a promising solution to scalable and flexible image synthesis.
How Does Black-Box Impact the Learning Guarantee of Stochastic Compositional Optimization?
Authors: Jun Chen; Hong Chen; Bin Gu
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Stochastic compositional optimization (SCO) problem constitutes a class of optimization problems characterized by the objective function with a compositional form, including the tasks with known derivatives, such as AUC maximization, and the derivative-free tasks exemplified by black-box vertical federated learning (VFL). From the learning theory perspective, the learning guarantees of SCO algorithms with known derivatives have been studied in the literature. However, the potential impacts of the derivative-free setting on the learning guarantees of SCO remains unclear and merits further investigation. This paper aims to reveal the impacts by developing a theoretical analysis for two derivative-free algorithms, black-box SCGD and SCSC. Specifically, we first provide the sharper generalization upper bounds of convex SCGD and SCSC based on a new stability analysis framework more effective than prior work under some milder conditions, which is further developed to the non-convex case using the almost co-coercivity property of smooth function. Then, we derive the learning guarantees of three black-box variants of non-convex SCGD and SCSC with additional optimization analysis. Comparing these results, we theoretically uncover the impacts that a better gradient estimation brings a tighter learning guarantee and a larger proportion of unknown gradients may lead to a stronger dependence on the gradient estimation quality. Finally, our analysis is applied to two SCO algorithms, FOO-based vertical VFL and VFL-CZOFO, to build the first learning guarantees for VFL that align with the findings of SCGD and SCSC.
Robust and Faster Zeroth-Order Minimax Optimization: Complexity and Applications
Authors: Weixin An; Yuanyuan Liu; Fanhua Shang; Hongying Liu
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Many zeroth-order (ZO) optimization algorithms have been developed to solve nonconvex minimax problems in machine learning and computer vision areas. However, existing ZO minimax algorithms have high complexity and rely on some strict restrictive conditions for ZO estimations. To address these issues, we design a new unified ZO gradient descent extragradient ascent (ZO-GDEGA) algorithm, which reduces the overall complexity to $\mathcal{O}(d\epsilon^{-6})$ to find an $\epsilon$-stationary point of the function $\psi$ for nonconvex-concave (NC-C) problems, where $d$ is the variable dimension. To the best of our knowledge, ZO-GDEGA is the first ZO algorithm with complexity guarantees to solve stochastic NC-C problems. Moreover, ZO-GDEGA requires weaker conditions on the ZO estimations and achieves more robust theoretical results. As a by-product, ZO-GDEGA has advantages on the condition number for the NC-strongly concave case. Experimentally, ZO-GDEGA can generate more effective poisoning attack data with an average accuracy reduction of 5\%. The improved AUC performance also verifies the robustness of gradient estimations.
Validating Climate Models with Spherical Convolutional Wasserstein Distance
Authors: Robert C. Garrett; Trevor Harris; Zhuo Wang; Bo Li
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 spotlight)

Abstract: The validation of global climate models is crucial to ensure the accuracy and efficacy of model output. We introduce the spherical convolutional Wasserstein distance to more comprehensively measure differences between climate models and reanalysis data. This new similarity measure accounts for spatial variability using convolutional projections and quantifies local differences in the distribution of climate variables. We apply this method to evaluate the historical model outputs of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) members by comparing them to observational and reanalysis data products. Additionally, we investigate the progression from CMIP phase 5 to phase 6 and find modest improvements in the phase 6 models regarding their ability to produce realistic climatologies.
Interpret Your Decision: Logical Reasoning Regularization for Generalization in Visual Classification
Authors: Zhaorui Tan; Xi Yang; Qiufeng Wang; Anh Nguyen; Kaizhu Huang
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 spotlight)

Abstract: Vision models excel in image classification but struggle to generalize to unseen data, such as classifying images from unseen domains or discovering novel categories. In this paper, we explore the relationship between logical reasoning and deep learning generalization in visual classification. A logical regularization termed L-Reg is derived which bridges a logical analysis framework to image classification. Our work reveals that L-Reg reduces the complexity of the model in terms of the feature distribution and classifier weights. Specifically, we unveil the interpretability brought by L-Reg, as it enables the model to extract the salient features, such as faces to persons, for classification. Theoretical analysis and experiments demonstrate that L-Reg enhances generalization across various scenarios, including multi-domain generalization and generalized category discovery. In complex real-world scenarios where images span unknown classes and unseen domains, L-Reg consistently improves generalization, highlighting its practical efficacy.
Last-Iterate Convergence for Generalized Frank-Wolfe in Monotone Variational Inequalities
Authors: Zaiwei Chen; Eric Mazumdar
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: We study the convergence behavior of a generalized Frank-Wolfe algorithm in constrained (stochastic) monotone variational inequality (MVI) problems. In recent years, there have been numerous efforts to design algorithms for solving constrained MVI problems due to their connections with optimization, machine learning, and equilibrium computation in games. Most work in this domain has focused on extensions of simultaneous gradient play, with particular emphasis on understanding the convergence properties of extragradient and optimistic gradient methods. In contrast, we examine the performance of an algorithm from another well-known class of optimization algorithms: Frank-Wolfe. We show that a generalized variant of this algorithm achieves a fast $\mathcal{O}(T^{-1/2})$ last-iterate convergence rate in constrained MVI problems. By drawing connections between our generalized Frank-Wolfe algorithm and the well-known smoothed fictitious play (FP) from game theory, we also derive a finite-sample convergence rate for smoothed FP in zero-sum matrix games. Furthermore, we demonstrate that a stochastic variant of the generalized Frank-Wolfe algorithm for MVI problems also converges in a last-iterate sense, albeit at a slower $\mathcal{O}(T^{-1/6})$ convergence rate.
Cluster-wise Graph Transformer with Dual-granularity Kernelized Attention
Authors: Siyuan Huang; Yunchong Song; Jiayue Zhou; Zhouhan Lin
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 spotlight)

Abstract: In the realm of graph learning, there is a category of methods that conceptualize graphs as hierarchical structures, utilizing node clustering to capture broader structural information. While generally effective, these methods often rely on a fixed graph coarsening routine, leading to overly homogeneous cluster representations and loss of node-level information. In this paper, we envision the graph as a network of interconnected node sets without compressing each cluster into a single embedding. To enable effective information transfer among these node sets, we propose the Node-to-Cluster Attention (N2C-Attn) mechanism. N2C-Attn incorporates techniques from Multiple Kernel Learning into the kernelized attention framework, effectively capturing information at both node and cluster levels. We then devise an efficient form for N2C-Attn using the cluster-wise message-passing framework, achieving linear time complexity. We further analyze how N2C-Attn combines bi-level feature maps of queries and keys, demonstrating its capability to merge dual-granularity information. The resulting architecture, Cluster-wise Graph Transformer (Cluster-GT), which uses node clusters as tokens and employs our proposed N2C-Attn module, shows superior performance on various graph-level tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/LUMIA-Group/Cluster-wise-Graph-Transformer.
The Benefits of Balance: From Information Projections to Variance Reduction
Authors: Lang Liu; Ronak Mehta; Soumik Pal; Zaid Harchaoui
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Data balancing across multiple modalities and sources appears in various forms in foundation models in machine learning and AI, e.g., in CLIP and DINO. We show that data balancing across modalities and sources actually offers an unsuspected benefit: variance reduction. We present a non-asymptotic statistical bound that quantifies this variance reduction effect and relates it to the eigenvalue decay of Markov operators. Furthermore, we describe how various forms of data balancing in contrastive multimodal learning and self-supervised clustering can be better understood, and even improved upon, owing to our variance reduction viewpoint.
Generalized Tensor Decomposition for Understanding Multi-Output Regression under Combinatorial Shifts
Authors: Andong Wang; Yuning Qiu; Mingyuan Bai; Zhong Jin; Guoxu Zhou; Qibin Zhao
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: In multi-output regression, we identify a previously neglected challenge that arises from the inability of training distribution to cover all combinations of input features, leading to combinatorial distribution shift (CDS). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to formally define and address this problem. We tackle it through a novel tensor decomposition perspective, proposing the Functional t-Singular Value Decomposition (Ft-SVD) theorem which extends the classical tensor SVD to infinite and continuous feature domains, providing a natural tool for representing and analyzing multi-output functions. Within the Ft-SVD framework, we formulate the multi-output regression problem under CDS as a low-rank tensor estimation problem under the missing not at random (MNAR) setting, and introduce a series of assumptions about the true functions, training and testing distributions, and spectral properties of the ground-truth embeddings, making the problem more tractable.
To address the challenges posed by CDS in multi-output regression, we develop a tailored Double-Stage Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM-DS) algorithm that leverages the spectral properties of the embeddings and uses specific hypothesis classes in each frequency component to better capture the varying spectral decay patterns. We provide rigorous theoretical analyses that establish performance guarantees for the ERM-DS algorithm. This work lays a preliminary theoretical foundation for multi-output regression under CDS.
Focus On What Matters: Separated Models For Visual-Based RL Generalization
Authors: Di Zhang; Bowen Lv; Hai Zhang; Feifan Yang; Junqiao Zhao; Hang Yu; Chang Huang; Hongtu Zhou; Chen Ye; changjun jiang
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: A primary challenge for visual-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) is to generalize effectively across unseen environments. Although previous studies have explored different auxiliary tasks to enhance generalization, few adopt image reconstruction due to concerns about exacerbating overfitting to task-irrelevant features during training. Perceiving the pre-eminence of image reconstruction in representation learning, we propose SMG (\blue{S}eparated \blue{M}odels for \blue{G}eneralization), a novel approach that exploits image reconstruction for generalization. SMG introduces two model branches to extract task-relevant and task-irrelevant representations separately from visual observations via cooperatively reconstruction. Built upon this architecture, we further emphasize the importance of task-relevant features for generalization. Specifically, SMG incorporates two additional consistency losses to guide the agent's focus toward task-relevant areas across different scenarios, thereby achieving free from overfitting. Extensive experiments in DMC demonstrate the SOTA performance of SMG in generalization, particularly excelling in video-background settings. Evaluations on robotic manipulation tasks further confirm the robustness of SMG in real-world applications. Source code is available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SMG/}.
Principled Probabilistic Imaging using Diffusion Models as Plug-and-Play Priors
Authors: Zihui Wu; Yu Sun; Yifan Chen; Bingliang Zhang; Yisong Yue; Katherine Bouman
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Diffusion models (DMs) have recently shown outstanding capabilities in modeling complex image distributions, making them expressive image priors for solving Bayesian inverse problems. However, most existing DM-based methods rely on approximations in the generative process to be generic to different inverse problems, leading to inaccurate sample distributions that deviate from the target posterior defined within the Bayesian framework. To harness the generative power of DMs while avoiding such approximations, we propose a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm that performs posterior sampling for general inverse problems by reducing it to sampling the posterior of a Gaussian denoising problem. Crucially, we leverage a general DM formulation as a unified interface that allows for rigorously solving the denoising problem with a range of state-of-the-art DMs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on six inverse problems (three linear and three nonlinear), including a real-world black hole imaging problem. Experimental results indicate that our proposed method offers more accurate reconstructions and posterior estimation compared to existing DM-based imaging inverse methods.
EGonc : Energy-based Open-Set Node Classification with substitute Unknowns
Authors: Qin Zhang; Zelin Shi; Shirui Pan; Junyang Chen; Huisi Wu; Xiaojun Chen
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Open-set Classification (OSC) is a critical requirement for safely deploying machine learning models in the open world, which aims to classify samples from known classes and reject samples from out-of-distribution (OOD). 
Existing methods exploit the feature space of trained network and attempt at estimating the uncertainty in the predictions.
However, softmax-based neural networks are found to be overly confident in their predictions even on data they have never seen before and
the immense diversity of the OOD examples also makes such methods fragile.
To this end, we follow the idea of estimating the underlying density of the training data to decide whether a given input is close to the in-distribution (IND) data and adopt Energy-based models (EBMs) as density estimators. 
A novel energy-based generative open-set node classification method, \textit{EGonc}, is proposed to achieve open-set graph learning. 
Specifically, we generate substitute unknowns to mimic the distribution of real open-set samples firstly, based on the information of graph structures. 
Then, an additional energy logit representing the virtual OOD class is learned from the residual of the feature against the principal space, and matched with the original logits by a constant scaling. This virtual logit serves as the indicator of OOD-ness. 
EGonc has nice theoretical properties that guarantee an overall distinguishable margin between the detection scores for IND and OOD samples. 
Comprehensive experimental evaluations of EGonc also demonstrate its superiority.
HiCo: Hierarchical Controllable Diffusion Model for Layout-to-image Generation
Authors: Bocheng; YuhangMa; wuliebucha; Shanyuan Liu; Ao Ma; Xiaoyu Wu; Dawei Leng; Yuhui Yin
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: The task of layout-to-image generation involves synthesizing images based on the captions of objects and their spatial positions. Existing methods still struggle in complex layout generation, where common bad cases include object missing, inconsistent lighting, conflicting view angles, etc. To effectively address these issues, we propose a \textbf{Hi}erarchical \textbf{Co}ntrollable (HiCo) diffusion model for layout-to-image generation, featuring object seperable conditioning branch structure. Our key insight is to achieve spatial disentanglement through hierarchical modeling of layouts. We use a multi branch structure to represent hierarchy and aggregate them in fusion module. To evaluate the performance of multi-objective controllable layout generation in natural scenes, we introduce the HiCo-7K benchmark, derived from the GRIT-20M dataset and manually cleaned. https://github.com/360CVGroup/HiCo_T2I.