GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Task Groupings Regularization: Data-Free Meta-Learning with Heterogeneous Pre-trained Models
Authors: Yongxian Wei; Zixuan Hu; Li Shen; Zhenyi Wang; Yu Li; Chun Yuan; Dacheng Tao
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Data-Free Meta-Learning (DFML) aims to derive knowledge from a collection of pre-trained models without accessing their original data, enabling the rapid adaptation to new unseen tasks. Current methods often overlook the heterogeneity among pre-trained models, which leads to performance degradation due to task conflicts. In this paper, we empirically and theoretically identify and analyze the model heterogeneity in DFML. We find that model heterogeneity introduces a heterogeneity-homogeneity trade-off, where homogeneous models reduce task conflicts but also increase the overfitting risk. Balancing this trade-off is crucial for learning shared representations across tasks. Based on our findings, we propose Task Groupings Regularization, a novel approach that benefits from model heterogeneity by grouping and aligning conflicting tasks. Specifically, we embed pre-trained models into a task space to compute dissimilarity, and group heterogeneous models together based on this measure. Then, we introduce implicit gradient regularization within each group to mitigate potential conflicts. By encouraging a gradient direction suitable for all tasks, the meta-model captures shared representations that generalize across tasks. Comprehensive experiments showcase the superiority of our approach in multiple benchmarks, effectively tackling the model heterogeneity in challenging multi-domain and multi-architecture scenarios.
Factored-Reward Bandits with Intermediate Observations
Authors: Marco Mussi; Simone Drago; Marcello Restelli; Alberto Maria Metelli
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: In several real-world sequential decision problems, at every step, the learner is required to select different actions. Every action affects a specific part of the system and generates an observable intermediate effect. In this paper, we introduce the Factored-Reward Bandits (FRBs), a novel setting able to effectively capture and exploit the structure of this class of scenarios, where the reward is computed as the product of the action intermediate observations. We characterize the statistical complexity of the learning problem in the FRBs, by deriving worst-case and asymptotic instance-dependent regret lower bounds. Then, we devise and analyze two regret minimization algorithms. The former, F-UCB, is an anytime optimistic approach matching the worst-case lower bound (up to logarithmic factors) but fails to perform optimally from the instance-dependent perspective. The latter, F-Track, is a bound-tracking approach, that enjoys optimal asymptotic instance-dependent regret guarantees.
UP2ME: Univariate Pre-training to Multivariate Fine-tuning as a General-purpose Framework for Multivariate Time Series Analysis
Authors: Yunhao Zhang; Minghao Liu; Shengyang Zhou; Junchi Yan
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Despite the success of self-supervised pre-training in texts and images, applying it to multivariate time series (MTS) falls behind tailored methods for tasks like forecasting, imputation and anomaly detection. We propose a general-purpose framework, named UP2ME (**U**nivariate **P**re-training to **M**ultivariate Fin**e**-tuning). It conducts task-agnostic pre-training when downstream tasks are unspecified. Once the task and setting (e.g. forecasting length) are determined, it gives sensible solutions with frozen pre-trained parameters, which has not been achieved before. UP2ME is further refined by fine-tuning. A univariate-to-multivariate paradigm is devised to address the heterogeneity of temporal and cross-channel dependencies. In univariate pre-training, univariate instances with diverse lengths are generated for Masked AutoEncoder (MAE) pre-training, discarding cross-channel dependency. The pre-trained model handles downstream tasks by formulating them into specific mask-reconstruction problems. In multivariate fine-tuning, it constructs a dependency graph among channels using the pre-trained encoder to enhance cross-channel dependency capture. Experiments on eight real-world datasets show its SOTA performance in forecasting and imputation, approaching task-specific performance in anomaly detection. Our code is available at https://github.com/Thinklab-SJTU/UP2ME.
Imitation Learning in Discounted Linear MDPs without exploration assumptions
Authors: Luca Viano; Stratis Skoulakis; Volkan Cevher
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: We present a new algorithm for imitation learning in infinite horizon linear MDPs dubbed ILARL which greatly improves the bound on the number of trajectories that the learner needs to sample from the environment. In particular, we remove exploration assumptions required in previous works and we improve the dependence on the desired accuracy $\epsilon$ from $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-5})$ to $\mathcal{O} (\epsilon^{-4})$. Our result relies on a connection between imitation learning and online learning in MDPs with adversarial losses. For the latter setting, we present the first result for infinite horizon linear MDP which may be of independent interest. Moreover, we are able to provide a strengthen result for the finite horizon case where we achieve $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-2})$. Numerical experiments with linear function approximation shows that ILARL outperforms other commonly used algorithms.
Language Agents with Reinforcement Learning for Strategic Play in the Werewolf Game
Authors: Zelai Xu; Chao Yu; Fei Fang; Yu Wang; Yi Wu
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Agents built with large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential across a wide range of domains. However, in complex decision-making tasks, pure LLM-based agents tend to exhibit intrinsic bias in their choice of actions, which is inherited from the model's training data and results in suboptimal performance. To develop *strategic language agents*, i.e., agents that generate flexible language actions and possess strong decision-making abilities, we propose a novel framework that powers LLM-based agents with reinforcement learning (RL). We consider Werewolf, a popular social deduction game, as a challenging testbed that emphasizes versatile communication and strategic gameplay. To mitigate the intrinsic bias in language actions, our agents use an LLM to perform deductive reasoning and generate a diverse set of action candidates. Then an RL policy trained to optimize the decision-making ability chooses an action from the candidates to play in the game. Extensive experiments show that our agents overcome the intrinsic bias and outperform existing LLM-based agents in the Werewolf game. We also conduct human-agent experiments and find that our agents achieve human-level performance and demonstrate strong strategic play.
Data-free Neural Representation Compression with Riemannian Neural Dynamics
Authors: Zhengqi Pei; Anran Zhang; Shuhui Wang; Xiangyang Ji; Qingming Huang
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Oral)

Abstract: Neural models are equivalent to dynamic systems from a physics-inspired view, implying that computation on neural networks can be interpreted as the dynamical interactions between neurons. However, existing work models neuronal interaction as a weight-based linear transformation, and the nonlinearity comes from the nonlinear activation functions, which leads to limited nonlinearity and data-fitting ability of the whole neural model. Inspired by Riemannian geometry, we interpret neural structures by projecting neurons onto the Riemannian neuronal state space and model neuronal interaction with Riemannian metric (${\it RieM}$), which provides a more efficient neural representation with higher parameter efficiency. With ${\it RieM}$, we further design a novel data-free neural compression mechanism that does not require additional fine-tuning with real data. Using backbones like ResNet and Vision Transformer, we conduct extensive experiments on datasets such as MNIST, CIFAR-100, ImageNet-1k, and COCO object detection. Empirical results show that, under equal compression rates and computational complexity, models compressed with ${\it RieM}$ achieve superior inference accuracy compared to existing data-free compression methods.
IIANet: An Intra- and Inter-Modality Attention Network for Audio-Visual Speech Separation
Authors: Kai Li; Runxuan Yang; Fuchun Sun; Xiaolin Hu
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Recent research has made significant progress in designing fusion modules for audio-visual speech separation. However, they predominantly focus on multi-modal fusion at a single temporal scale of auditory and visual features without employing selective attention mechanisms, which is in sharp contrast with the brain. To address this, We propose a novel model called intra- and inter-attention network (IIANet), which leverages the attention mechanism for efficient audio-visual feature fusion. IIANet consists of two types of attention blocks: intra-attention (IntraA) and inter-attention (InterA) blocks, where the InterA blocks are distributed at the top, middle and bottom of IIANet. Heavily inspired by the way how human brain selectively focuses on relevant content at various temporal scales, these blocks maintain the ability to learn modality-specific features and enable the extraction of different semantics from audio-visual features. Comprehensive experiments on three standard audio-visual separation benchmarks (LRS2, LRS3, and VoxCeleb2) demonstrate the effectiveness of IIANet, outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods while maintaining comparable inference time. In particular, the fast version of IIANet (IIANet-fast) has only 7% of CTCNet’s MACs and is 40% faster than CTCNet on CPUs while achieving better separation quality, showing the great potential of attention mechanism for efficient and effective multimodal fusion.
Revisiting Context Aggregation for Image Matting
Authors: Qinglin Liu; Xiaoqian Lv; Quanling Meng; Zonglin Li; Xiangyuan Lan; Shuo Yang; Shengping Zhang; Liqiang Nie
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Traditional studies emphasize the significance of context information in improving matting performance. Consequently, deep learning-based matting methods delve into designing pooling or affinity-based context aggregation modules to achieve superior results. However, these modules cannot well handle the context scale shift caused by the difference in image size during training and inference, resulting in matting performance degradation. In this paper, we revisit the context aggregation mechanisms of matting networks and find that a basic encoder-decoder network without any context aggregation modules can actually learn more universal context aggregation, thereby achieving higher matting performance compared to existing methods. Building on this insight, we present AEMatter, a matting network that is straightforward yet very effective. AEMatter adopts a Hybrid-Transformer backbone with appearance-enhanced axis-wise learning (AEAL) blocks to build a basic network with strong context aggregation learning capability. Furthermore, AEMatter leverages a large image training strategy to assist the network in learning context aggregation from data. Extensive experiments on five popular matting datasets demonstrate that the proposed AEMatter outperforms state-of-the-art matting methods by a large margin. The source code is available at https://github.com/aipixel/AEMatter.
Two Heads Are Better Than One: Boosting Graph Sparse Training via Semantic and Topological Awareness
Authors: Guibin Zhang; Yanwei Yue; Kun Wang; Junfeng Fang; Yongduo Sui; Kai Wang; Yuxuan Liang; Dawei Cheng; Shirui Pan; Tianlong Chen
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel in various graph learning tasks but face computational challenges when applied to large-scale graphs. A promising solution is to remove non-essential edges to reduce the computational overheads in GNN. Previous literature generally falls into two categories: topology-guided and semantic-guided. The former maintains certain graph topological properties yet often underperforms on GNNs. % due to low integration with neural network training. The latter performs well at lower sparsity on GNNs but faces performance collapse at higher sparsity levels. With this in mind, we propose a new research line and concept termed **Graph Sparse Training** **(GST)**, which dynamically manipulates sparsity at the data level. Specifically, GST initially constructs a topology & semantic anchor at a low training cost, followed by performing dynamic sparse training to align the sparse graph with the anchor. We introduce the **Equilibria Sparsification Principle** to guide this process, balancing the preservation of both topological and semantic information. Ultimately, GST produces a sparse graph with maximum topological integrity and no performance degradation. Extensive experiments on 6 datasets and 5 backbones showcase that GST **(I)** identifies subgraphs at higher graph sparsity levels ($1.67\%\sim15.85\%$$\uparrow$) than state-of-the-art sparsification methods, **(II)** preserves more key spectral properties, **(III)** achieves $1.27-3.42\times$ speedup in GNN inference and **(IV)** successfully helps graph adversarial defense and graph lottery tickets.
Efficient Exploration in Average-Reward Constrained Reinforcement Learning: Achieving Near-Optimal Regret With Posterior Sampling
Authors: Danil Provodin; Maurits Clemens Kaptein; Mykola Pechenizkiy
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: We present a new algorithm based on posterior sampling for learning in Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDP) in the infinite-horizon undiscounted setting. The algorithm achieves near-optimal regret bounds while being advantageous empirically compared to the existing algorithms. Our main theoretical result is a Bayesian regret bound for each cost component of $\tilde{O} (DS\sqrt{AT})$ for any communicating CMDP with $S$ states, $A$ actions, and diameter $D$. This regret bound matches the lower bound in order of time horizon $T$ and is the best-known regret bound for communicating CMDPs achieved by a computationally tractable algorithm. Empirical results show that our posterior sampling algorithm outperforms the existing algorithms for constrained reinforcement learning.
Revisiting Zeroth-Order Optimization for Memory-Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning: A Benchmark
Authors: Yihua Zhang; Pingzhi Li; Junyuan Hong; Jiaxiang Li; Yimeng Zhang; Wenqing Zheng; Pin-Yu Chen; Jason D. Lee; Wotao Yin; Mingyi Hong; Zhangyang Wang; Sijia Liu; Tianlong Chen
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: In the evolving landscape of natural language processing (NLP), fine-tuning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) with first-order (FO) optimizers like SGD and Adam has become standard. Yet, as LLMs grow in size, the substantial memory overhead from back-propagation (BP) for FO gradient computation presents a significant challenge. Addressing this issue is crucial, especially for applications like on-device training where memory efficiency is paramount. This paper proposes a shift towards BP-free, zeroth-order (ZO) optimization as a solution for reducing memory costs during LLM fine-tuning, building on the initial concept introduced by (Malladi et al., 2023). Unlike traditional ZO-SGD methods, ou让work expands the exploration to a wider array of ZO optimization techniques, through a comprehensive, first-of-its-kind benchmarking study across five LLM families, three task complexities, and five fine-tuning schemes. Our study unveils previously overlooked optimization principles, highlighting the importance of task alignment, the role of the forward gradient method, and the balance between algorithm complexity and fine-tuning performance. We further introduce novel enhancements to ZO optimization, including block-wise descent, hybrid training, and gradient sparsity. Our study offers a promising direction for achieving further memory-efficient LLM fine-tuning. Codes to reproduce all our experiments will be made public.
Language Models Represent Beliefs of Self and Others
Authors: Wentao Zhu; Zhining Zhang; Yizhou Wang
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Understanding and attributing mental states, known as Theory of Mind (ToM), emerges as a fundamental capability for human social reasoning. While Large Language Models (LLMs) appear to possess certain ToM abilities, the mechanisms underlying these capabilities remain elusive. In this study, we discover that it is possible to linearly decode the belief status from the perspectives of various agents through neural activations of language models, indicating the existence of internal representations of self and others' beliefs. By manipulating these representations, we observe dramatic changes in the models' ToM performance, underscoring their pivotal role in the social reasoning process. Additionally, our findings extend to diverse social reasoning tasks that involve different causal inference patterns, suggesting the potential generalizability of these representations.
FedBAT: Communication-Efficient Federated Learning via Learnable Binarization
Authors: Shiwei Li; Wenchao Xu; Haozhao Wang; Xing Tang; Yining Qi; Shijie Xu; weihongluo; Yuhua Li; xiuqiang He; Ruixuan Li
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Federated learning is a promising distributed machine learning paradigm that can effectively exploit large-scale data without exposing users' privacy. However, it may incur significant communication overhead, thereby potentially impairing the training efficiency. To address this challenge, numerous studies suggest binarizing the model updates. Nonetheless, traditional methods usually binarize model updates in a post-training manner, resulting in significant approximation errors and consequent degradation in model accuracy. To this end, we propose **Federated Binarization-Aware Training (FedBAT)**, a novel framework that directly learns binary model updates during the local training process, thus inherently reducing the approximation errors. FedBAT incorporates an innovative binarization operator, along with meticulously designed derivatives to facilitate efficient learning. In addition, we establish theoretical guarantees regarding the convergence of FedBAT. Extensive experiments are conducted on four popular datasets. The results show that FedBAT significantly accelerates the convergence and exceeds the accuracy of baselines by up to 9%, even surpassing that of FedAvg in some cases.
Differentially Private Decentralized Learning with Random Walks
Authors: Edwige Cyffers; Aurélien Bellet; Jalaj Upadhyay
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: The popularity of federated learning comes from the possibility of better scalability and the ability for participants to keep control of their data, improving data security and sovereignty. Unfortunately, sharing model updates also creates a new privacy attack surface. In this work, we characterize the privacy guarantees of decentralized learning with random walk algorithms, where a model is updated by traveling from one node to another along the edges of a communication graph. Using a recent variant of differential privacy tailored to the study of decentralized algorithms, namely Pairwise Network Differential Privacy, we derive closed-form expressions for the privacy loss between each pair of nodes where the impact of the communication topology is captured by graph theoretic quantities. Our results further reveal that random walk algorithms tends to yield better privacy guarantees than gossip algorithms for nodes close from each other. We supplement our theoretical results with empirical evaluation on synthetic and real-world graphs and datasets.
Harmonizing Generalization and Personalization in Federated Prompt Learning
Authors: Tianyu Cui; Hongxia Li; Jingya Wang; Ye Shi
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Federated Prompt Learning (FPL) incorporates large pre-trained Vision-Language models (VLM) into federated learning through prompt tuning. The transferable representations and remarkable generalization capacity of VLM make them highly compatible with the integration of federated learning. Addressing data heterogeneity in federated learning requires personalization, but excessive focus on it across clients could compromise the model's ability to generalize effectively. To preserve the impressive generalization capability of VLM, it is crucial to strike a balance between personalization and generalization in FPL. To tackle this challenge, we proposed Federated Prompt Learning with CLIP Generalization and low-rank Personalization (FedPGP), which employs pre-trained CLIP to provide knowledge-guidance on the global prompt for improved generalization and incorporates a low-rank adaptation term to personalize the global prompt. Further, FedPGP integrates a prompt-wise contrastive loss to achieve knowledge guidance and personalized adaptation simultaneously, enabling a harmonious balance between personalization and generalization in FPL. We conduct extensive experiments on various datasets to explore base-to-novel generalization in both category-level and domain-level scenarios with heterogeneous data, showing the superiority of FedPGP in balancing generalization and personalization.
Surface-VQMAE: Vector-quantized Masked Auto-encoders on Molecular Surfaces
Authors: Fang Wu; Stan Z. Li
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Molecular surfaces imply fingerprints of interaction patterns between proteins. However, non-equivalent efforts have been paid to incorporating the abundant protein surface information for analyzing proteins' biological functions in juxtaposition to amino acid sequences and 3D structures. We propose a novel surface-based unsupervised learning algorithm termed Surface-VQMAE to overcome this obstacle. In light of surface point clouds' sparsity and disorder properties, we first partition them into patches and obtain the sequential arrangement via the Morton curve. Successively, a Transformer-based architecture named SurfFormer was introduced to integrate the surface geometry and capture patch-level relations. At last, we enhance the prevalent masked auto-encoder (MAE) with the vector quantization (VQ) technique, which establishes a surface pattern codebook to enforce a discrete posterior distribution of latent variables and achieve more condensed semantics. Our work is the foremost to implement pretraining purely on molecular surfaces and extensive experiments on diverse real-life scenarios including binding site scoring, binding affinity prediction, and mutant effect estimation demonstrate its effectiveness. The code is available at https://github.com/smiles724/VQMAE.