GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
LLaNA: Large Language and NeRF Assistant
Authors: Andrea Amaduzzi; Pierluigi Zama Ramirez; Giuseppe Lisanti; Samuele Salti; Luigi di Stefano
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated an excellent understanding of images and 3D data. However, both modalities have shortcomings in holistically capturing the appearance and geometry of objects. Meanwhile, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), which encode information within the weights of a simple Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), have emerged as an increasingly widespread modality that simultaneously encodes the geometry and photorealistic appearance of objects. This paper investigates the feasibility and effectiveness of ingesting NeRF into MLLM. We create LLaNA, the first general-purpose NeRF-language
assistant capable of performing new tasks such as NeRF captioning and Q&A. Notably, our method directly processes the weights of the NeRF’s MLP to extract information about the represented objects without the need to render images or materialize 3D data structures. Moreover, we build a dataset of NeRFs with text annotations for various NeRF-language tasks with no human intervention.
Based on this dataset, we develop a benchmark to evaluate the NeRF understanding capability of our method. Results show that processing NeRF weights performs favourably against extracting 2D or 3D representations from NeRFs.
MimicTalk: Mimicking a personalized and expressive 3D talking face in minutes
Authors: Zhenhui Ye; Tianyun Zhong; Yi Ren; Ziyue Jiang; Jiawei Huang; Rongjie Huang; Jinglin Liu; Jinzheng He; Chen Zhang; Zehan Wang; Xize Cheng; Xiang Yin; Zhou Zhao
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Talking face generation (TFG) aims to animate a target identity's face to create realistic talking videos. Personalized TFG is a variant that emphasizes the perceptual identity similarity of the synthesized result (from the perspective of appearance and talking style). While previous works typically solve this problem by learning an individual neural radiance field (NeRF) for each identity to implicitly store its static and dynamic information, we find it inefficient and non-generalized due to the per-identity-per-training framework and the limited training data. To this end, we propose MimicTalk, the first attempt that exploits the rich knowledge from a NeRF-based person-agnostic generic model for improving the efficiency and robustness of personalized TFG. To be specific, (1) we first come up with a person-agnostic 3D TFG model as the base model and propose to adapt it into a specific identity; (2) we propose a static-dynamic-hybrid adaptation pipeline to help the model learn the personalized static appearance and facial dynamic features; (3) To generate the facial motion of the personalized talking style, we propose an in-context stylized audio-to-motion model that mimics the implicit talking style provided in the reference video without information loss by an explicit style representation. The adaptation process to an unseen identity can be performed in 15 minutes, which is 47 times faster than previous person-dependent methods. Experiments show that our MimicTalk surpasses previous baselines regarding video quality, efficiency, and expressiveness. Video samples are available at https://mimictalk.github.io .
Reasons and Solutions for the Decline in Model Performance after Editing
Authors: Xiusheng Huang; Jiaxiang Liu; Yequan Wang; Kang Liu
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Knowledge editing technology has received widespread attention for low-cost updates of incorrect or outdated knowledge in large-scale language models. However, recent research has found that edited models often exhibit varying degrees of performance degradation. The reasons behind this phenomenon and potential solutions have not yet been provided. In order to investigate the reasons for the performance decline of the edited model and optimize the editing method, this work explores the underlying reasons from both data and model perspectives. Specifically, 1) from a data perspective, to clarify the impact of data on the performance of editing models, this paper first constructs a **M**ulti-**Q**uestion **D**ataset (**MQD**) to evaluate the impact of different types of editing data on model performance. The performance of the editing model is mainly affected by the diversity of editing targets and sequence length, as determined through experiments. 2) From a model perspective, this article explores the factors that affect the performance of editing models. The results indicate a strong correlation between the L1-norm of the editing model layer and the editing accuracy, and clarify that this is an important factor leading to the bottleneck of editing performance. Finally, in order to improve the performance of the editing model, this paper further proposes a **D**ump **for** **S**equence (**D4S**) method, which successfully overcomes the previous editing bottleneck by reducing the L1-norm of the editing layer, allowing users to perform multiple effective edits and minimizing model damage. Our code is available at https://github.com/nlpkeg/D4S.
Spherical Frustum Sparse Convolution Network for LiDAR Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Yu Zheng; Guangming Wang; Jiuming Liu; Marc Pollefeys; Hesheng Wang
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: LiDAR point cloud semantic segmentation enables the robots to obtain fine-grained semantic information of the surrounding environment. Recently, many works project the point cloud onto the 2D image and adopt the 2D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) or vision transformer for LiDAR point cloud semantic segmentation. However, since more than one point can be projected onto the same 2D position but only one point can be preserved, the previous 2D projection-based segmentation methods suffer from inevitable quantized information loss, which results in incomplete geometric structure, especially for small objects. To avoid quantized information loss, in this paper, we propose a novel spherical frustum structure, which preserves all points projected onto the same 2D position. Additionally, a hash-based representation is proposed for memory-efficient spherical frustum storage. Based on the spherical frustum structure, the Spherical Frustum sparse Convolution (SFC) and Frustum Farthest Point Sampling (F2PS) are proposed to convolve and sample the points stored in spherical frustums respectively. Finally, we present the Spherical Frustum sparse Convolution Network (SFCNet) to adopt 2D CNNs for LiDAR point cloud semantic segmentation without quantized information loss. Extensive experiments on the SemanticKITTI and nuScenes datasets demonstrate that our SFCNet outperforms previous 2D projection-based semantic segmentation methods based on conventional spherical projection and shows better performance on small object segmentation by preserving complete geometric structure. Codes will be available at https://github.com/IRMVLab/SFCNet.
Protecting Your LLMs with Information Bottleneck
Authors: Zichuan Liu; Zefan Wang; Linjie Xu; Jinyu Wang; Lei Song; Tianchun Wang; Chunlin Chen; Wei Cheng; Jiang Bian
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: The advent of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized the field of natural language processing, yet they might be attacked to produce harmful content.
Despite efforts to ethically align LLMs, these are often fragile and can be circumvented by jailbreaking attacks through optimized or manual adversarial prompts.
To address this, we introduce the Information Bottleneck Protector (IBProtector), a defense mechanism grounded in the information bottleneck principle, and we modify the objective to avoid trivial solutions.
The IBProtector selectively compresses and perturbs prompts, facilitated by a lightweight and trainable extractor, preserving only essential information for the target LLMs to respond with the expected answer.
Moreover, we further consider a situation where the gradient is not visible to be compatible with any LLM.
Our empirical evaluations show that IBProtector outperforms current defense methods in mitigating jailbreak attempts, without overly affecting response quality or inference speed. 
Its effectiveness and adaptability across various attack methods and target LLMs underscore the potential of IBProtector as a novel, transferable defense that bolsters the security of LLMs without requiring modifications to the underlying models.
Transformers Represent Belief State Geometry in their Residual Stream
Authors: Adam Shai; Lucas Teixeira; Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel; Sarah Marzen; Paul M. Riechers
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: What computational structure are we building into large language models when we train them on next-token prediction? Here, we present evidence that this structure is given by the meta-dynamics of belief updating over hidden states of the data- generating process. Leveraging the theory of optimal prediction, we anticipate and then find that belief states are linearly represented in the residual stream of transformers, even in cases where the predicted belief state geometry has highly nontrivial fractal structure. We investigate cases where the belief state geometry is represented in the final residual stream or distributed across the residual streams of multiple layers, providing a framework to explain these observations. Furthermore we demonstrate that the inferred belief states contain information about the entire future, beyond the local next-token prediction that the transformers are explicitly trained on. Our work provides a general framework connecting the structure of training data to the geometric structure of activations inside transformers.
Stochastic Kernel Regularisation Improves Generalisation in Deep Kernel Machines
Authors: Edward Milsom; Ben Anson; Laurence Aitchison
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Recent work developed convolutional deep kernel machines, achieving 92.7% test accuracy on CIFAR-10 using a ResNet-inspired architecture, which is SOTA for kernel methods. However, this still lags behind neural networks, which easily achieve over 94% test accuracy with similar architectures. In this work we introduce several modifications to improve the convolutional deep kernel machine’s generalisation, including stochastic kernel regularisation, which adds noise to the learned Gram matrices during training. The resulting model achieves 94.5% test accuracy on CIFAR-10. This finding has important theoretical and practical implications, as it demonstrates that the ability to perform well on complex tasks like image classification is not unique to neural networks. Instead, other approaches including deep kernel methods can achieve excellent performance on such tasks, as long as they have the capacity to learn representations from data.
Unveiling The Matthew Effect Across Channels: Assessing Layer Width Sufficiency via Weight Norm Variance
Authors: Yiting Chen; Jiazi Bu; Junchi Yan
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: The trade-off between cost and performance has been a longstanding and critical issue for deep neural networks. 
One key factor affecting the computational cost is the width of each layer. 
However, in practice, the width of layers in a neural network is mostly empirically determined. In this paper, we show that a pattern regarding the variance of weight norm corresponding to different channels can indicate whether the layer is sufficiently wide and may help us better allocate computational resources across the layers.
Starting from a simple intuition that channels with larger weights would have larger gradients and the difference in weight norm enlarges between channels with similar weight, we empirically validate that wide and narrow layers show two different patterns with experiments across different data modalities and network architectures. 
Based on the two different patterns, we identify three stages during training and explain each stage with corresponding evidence. We further propose to adjust the width based on the identified pattern and show that conventional layer width settings for CNNs could be adjusted to reduce the number of parameters while boosting the performance.
Controlling Continuous Relaxation for Combinatorial Optimization
Authors: Yuma Ichikawa
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Unsupervised learning (UL)-based solvers for combinatorial optimization (CO) train a neural network that generates a soft solution by directly optimizing the CO objective using a continuous relaxation strategy. These solvers offer several advantages over traditional methods and other learning-based methods, particularly for large-scale CO problems. However, UL-based solvers face two practical issues: (I) an optimization issue, where UL-based solvers are easily trapped at local optima, and (II) a rounding issue, where UL-based solvers require artificial post-learning rounding from the continuous space back to the original discrete space, undermining the robustness of the results. This study proposes a Continuous Relaxation Annealing (CRA) strategy, an effective rounding-free learning method for UL-based solvers. CRA introduces a penalty term that dynamically shifts from prioritizing continuous solutions, effectively smoothing the non-convexity of the objective function, to enforcing discreteness, eliminating artificial rounding. Experimental results demonstrate that CRA significantly enhances the performance of UL-based solvers, outperforming existing UL-based solvers and greedy algorithms in complex CO problems. Additionally, CRA effectively eliminates artificial rounding and accelerates the learning process.
What Rotary Position Embedding Can Tell Us: Identifying Query and Key Weights Corresponding to Basic Syntactic or High-level Semantic Information
Authors: Yiting Chen; Junchi Yan
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have successfully handled various tasks. As one fundamental module in Transformers, position encoding encodes the positional information of tokens in a sequence. Specifically, rotary position embedding (RoPE), one of the most widely used techniques, encodes the positional information by dividing the query or key value with $d$ elements into $d/2$ pairs and rotating the 2d vectors corresponding to each pair of elements. Therefore, the direction of each pair and the position-related rotation jointly determine the attention score. In this paper, we show that the direction of the 2d pair is largely affected by the angle between the corresponding weight vector pair. We theoretically show that non-orthogonal weight vector pairs lead to great attention on tokens at a certain relative position and are less sensitive to the input which may correspond to basic syntactic information. Meanwhile, the orthogonal weight vector pairs are more flexible regarding the relative position, which may correspond to high-level syntactic information. Empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that shallow layers of LLMs focus more on local syntax and deep layers focus more on high-level semantics. Furthermore, we show that LLMs fine-tuning mainly changes the pairs of weight vectors that are nearly orthogonal, i.e., the weight corresponding to high-level semantics, which enables the reduction of the number of trainable parameters during fine-tuning without sacrificing performance. We propose a method namely Angle-based Weight Selection (AWS) to reduce the fine-tuning overhead and verify the effectiveness of the proposed method on widely used Alpaca fine-tuned Llama-2.
Reparameterized Multi-Resolution Convolutions for Long Sequence Modelling
Authors: Harry Jake Cunningham; Giorgio Giannone; Mingtian Zhang; Marc Peter Deisenroth
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Global convolutions have shown increasing promise as powerful general-purpose sequence models. However, training long convolutions is challenging, and kernel parameterizations must be able to learn long-range dependencies without overfitting. This work introduces reparameterized multi-resolution convolutions ($\texttt{MRConv}$), a novel approach to parameterizing global convolutional kernels for long-sequence modeling. By leveraging multi-resolution convolutions, incorporating structural reparameterization and introducing learnable kernel decay, $\texttt{MRConv}$ learns expressive long-range kernels that perform well across various data modalities. Our experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on the Long Range Arena, Sequential CIFAR, and Speech Commands tasks among convolution models and linear-time transformers. Moreover, we report improved performance on ImageNet classification by replacing 2D convolutions with 1D $\texttt{MRConv}$ layers.
Instruction-Guided Visual Masking
Authors: Jinliang Zheng; Jianxiong Li; Sijie Cheng; Yinan Zheng; Jiaming Li; Jihao Liu; Yu Liu; Jingjing Liu; Xianyuan Zhan
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Instruction following is crucial in contemporary LLM. However, when extended to multimodal setting, it often suffers from misalignment between specific textual instruction and targeted local region of an image. To achieve more accurate and nuanced multimodal instruction following, we introduce Instruction-guided Visual Masking (IVM), a new versatile visual grounding model that is compatible with diverse multimodal models, such as LMM and robot model. By constructing visual masks for instruction-irrelevant regions, IVM-enhanced multimodal models can effectively focus on task-relevant image regions to better align with complex instructions. Specifically, we design a visual masking data generation pipeline and create an IVM-Mix-1M dataset with 1 million image-instruction pairs. We further introduce a new learning technique, Discriminator Weighted Supervised Learning (DWSL) for preferential IVM training that prioritizes high-quality data samples. Experimental results on generic multimodal tasks such as VQA and embodied robotic control demonstrate the versatility of IVM, which as a plug-and-play tool, significantly boosts the performance of diverse multimodal models, yielding new state-of-the-art results across challenging multimodal benchmarks. Code, model and data are available at https://github.com/2toinf/IVM.
Panacea: Pareto Alignment via Preference Adaptation for LLMs
Authors: Yifan Zhong; Chengdong Ma; Xiaoyuan Zhang; Ziran Yang; Haojun Chen; Qingfu Zhang; Siyuan Qi; Yaodong Yang
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Current methods for large language model alignment typically use scalar human preference labels. However, this convention tends to oversimplify the multi-dimensional and heterogeneous nature of human preferences, leading to reduced expressivity and even misalignment. This paper presents Panacea, an innovative approach that reframes alignment as a multi-dimensional preference optimization problem. Panacea trains a single model capable of adapting online and Pareto-optimally to diverse sets of preferences without the need for further tuning. A major challenge here is using a low-dimensional preference vector to guide the model's behavior, despite it being governed by an overwhelmingly large number of parameters. To address this, Panacea is designed to use singular value decomposition (SVD)-based low-rank adaptation, which allows the preference vector to be simply injected online as singular values. Theoretically, we prove that Panacea recovers the entire Pareto front with common loss aggregation methods under mild conditions. Moreover, our experiments demonstrate, for the first time, the feasibility of aligning a single LLM to represent an exponentially vast spectrum of human preferences through various optimization methods. Our work marks a step forward in effectively and efficiently aligning models to diverse and intricate human preferences in a controllable and Pareto-optimal manner.
FilterNet: Harnessing Frequency Filters for Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Kun Yi; Jingru Fei; Qi Zhang; Hui He; Shufeng Hao; Defu Lian; Wei Fan
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Given the ubiquitous presence of time series data across various domains, precise forecasting of time series holds significant importance and finds widespread real-world applications such as energy, weather, healthcare, etc. While numerous forecasters have been proposed using different network architectures, the Transformer-based models have state-of-the-art performance in time series forecasting. However, forecasters based on Transformers are still suffering from vulnerability to high-frequency signals, efficiency in computation, and bottleneck in full-spectrum utilization, which essentially are the cornerstones for accurately predicting time series with thousands of points. In this paper, we explore a novel perspective of enlightening signal processing for deep time series forecasting. Inspired by the filtering process, we introduce one simple yet effective network, namely FilterNet, built upon our proposed learnable frequency filters to extract key informative temporal patterns by selectively passing or attenuating certain components of time series signals. Concretely, we propose two kinds of learnable filters in the FilterNet: (i) Plain shaping filter, that adopts a universal frequency kernel for signal filtering and temporal modeling; (ii) Contextual shaping filter, that utilizes filtered frequencies examined in terms of its compatibility with input signals for
dependency learning. Equipped with the two filters, FilterNet can approximately surrogate the linear and attention mappings widely adopted in time series literature, while enjoying superb abilities in handling high-frequency noises and utilizing the whole frequency spectrum that is beneficial for forecasting. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on eight time series forecasting benchmarks, and experimental results have demonstrated our superior performance in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency compared with state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at$^1$.
Divide-and-Conquer Posterior Sampling for Denoising Diffusion priors
Authors: Yazid Janati; Badr MOUFAD; Alain Oliviero Durmus; Eric Moulines; Jimmy Olsson
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Recent advancements in solving Bayesian inverse problems have spotlighted denoising diffusion models (DDMs) as effective priors.
Although these have great potential, DDM priors yield complex posterior distributions that are challenging to sample from.
Existing approaches to posterior sampling in this context address this problem either by retraining model-specific components, leading to stiff and cumbersome methods, or by introducing approximations with uncontrolled errors that affect the accuracy of the produced samples.
We present an innovative framework, divide-and-conquer posterior sampling, which leverages the inherent structure of DDMs to construct a sequence of intermediate posteriors that guide the produced samples to the target posterior.
Our method significantly reduces the approximation error associated with current techniques without the need for retraining.
We demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of our approach for a wide range of Bayesian inverse problems.
The code is available at \url{https://github.com/Badr-MOUFAD/dcps}