GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Multi-Agent First Order Constrained Optimization in Policy Space
Authors: Youpeng Zhao; Yaodong Yang; Zhenbo Lu; Wengang Zhou; Houqiang Li
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: In the realm of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), achieving high performance is crucial for a successful multi-agent system.
Meanwhile, the ability to avoid unsafe actions is becoming an urgent and imperative problem to solve for real-life applications. 
Whereas, it is still challenging to develop a safety-aware method for multi-agent systems in MARL. In this work, we introduce a novel approach called Multi-Agent First Order Constrained Optimization in Policy Space (MAFOCOPS), which effectively addresses the dual objectives of attaining satisfactory performance and enforcing safety constraints. Using data generated from the current policy, MAFOCOPS first finds the optimal update policy by solving a constrained optimization problem in the nonparameterized policy space. Then, the update policy is projected back into the parametric policy space to achieve a feasible policy. Notably, our method is first-order in nature, ensuring the ease of implementation, and exhibits an approximate upper bound on the worst-case constraint violation. Empirical results show that our approach achieves remarkable performance while satisfying safe constraints on several safe MARL benchmarks.
Active Bipartite Ranking
Authors: James Cheshire; Vincent Laurent; Stephan Clémençon
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: In this paper, we develop an active learning framework for the bipartite ranking problem.
Motivated by numerous applications, ranging from supervised anomaly detection to credit-scoring through the design of medical diagnosis support systems, and usually formulated as the problem of optimizing (a scalar summary of) the ROC curve, bipartite ranking has been the subject of much attention in the passive context. Various dedicated algorithms have been recently proposed and studied by the machine-learning community. In contrast, active bipartite ranking rule is poorly documented in the literature. Due to its global nature, a strategy for labeling sequentially data points that are difficult to rank w.r.t. to the others is required. This learning task is much more complex than binary classification, for which many active algorithms have been designed. It is the goal of this article to provide a rigorous formulation of such a selective sampling approach. We propose a dedicated algorithm, referred to as active-rank, which aims to minimise the distance between the ROC curve of the ranking function built and the optimal one, w.r.t. the sup norm. We show that, for a fixed confidence level $\epsilon$ and probability $\delta$,  active-rank is PAC$(\epsilon,\delta)$. In addition, we provide a problem dependent upper bound on the expected sampling time of  active-rank and also demonstrate a problem dependent lower bound on the expected sampling time of any PAC$(\epsilon,\delta)$ algorithm. Beyond the theoretical analysis carried out, numerical results are presented, providing strong empirical evidence of the performance of the algorithm proposed, which compares favorably with more naive approaches.
Enhancing Adversarial Robustness via Score-Based Optimization
Authors: Boya Zhang; Weijian Luo; Zhihua Zhang
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Adversarial attacks have the potential to mislead deep neural network classifiers by introducing slight perturbations. Developing algorithms that can mitigate the effects of these attacks is crucial for ensuring the safe use of artificial intelligence. Recent studies have suggested that score-based diffusion models are effective in adversarial defenses. However, existing diffusion-based defenses rely on the sequential simulation of the reversed stochastic differential equations of diffusion models, which are computationally inefficient and yield suboptimal results. In this paper, we introduce a novel adversarial defense scheme named ScoreOpt, which optimizes adversarial samples at test-time, towards original clean data  in the direction guided by score-based priors. We conduct comprehensive experiments on multiple datasets, including CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and ImageNet. Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing adversarial defenses in terms of both robustness performance and inference speed.
The Pursuit of Human Labeling: A New Perspective on Unsupervised Learning
Authors: Artyom Gadetsky; Maria Brbic
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 spotlight)

Abstract: We present HUME, a simple model-agnostic framework for inferring human labeling of a given dataset without any external supervision. The key insight behind our approach is that classes defined by many human labelings are linearly separable regardless of the representation space used to represent a dataset. HUME utilizes this insight to guide the search over all possible labelings of a dataset to discover an underlying human labeling. We show that the proposed optimization objective is strikingly well-correlated with the ground truth labeling of the dataset. In effect, we only train linear classifiers on top of pretrained representations that remain fixed during training, making our framework compatible with any large pretrained and self-supervised model. Despite its simplicity, HUME outperforms a supervised linear classifier on top of self-supervised representations on the STL-10 dataset by a large margin and achieves comparable performance on the CIFAR-10 dataset. Compared to the existing unsupervised baselines, HUME achieves state-of-the-art performance on four benchmark image classification datasets including the large-scale ImageNet-1000 dataset. Altogether, our work provides a fundamentally new view to tackle unsupervised learning by searching for consistent labelings between different representation spaces.
Accelerated Zeroth-order Method for Non-Smooth Stochastic Convex Optimization Problem with Infinite Variance
Authors: Nikita Kornilov; Ohad Shamir; Aleksandr Lobanov; Darina Dvinskikh; Alexander Gasnikov; Innokentiy Andreevich Shibaev; Eduard Gorbunov; Samuel Horváth
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: In this paper, we consider non-smooth stochastic convex optimization with two function evaluations per round under infinite noise variance. In the classical setting when noise has finite variance, an optimal algorithm, built upon the batched accelerated gradient method, was proposed in (Gasnikov et. al., 2022). This optimality is defined in terms of iteration and oracle complexity, as well as the maximal admissible level of adversarial noise. However, the assumption of finite variance is burdensome and it might not hold in many practical scenarios. To address this, we demonstrate how to adapt a refined clipped version of the accelerated gradient (Stochastic Similar Triangles) method from (Sadiev et al., 2023) for a two-point zero-order oracle. This adaptation entails extending the batching technique to accommodate infinite variance — a non-trivial task that stands as a distinct contribution of this paper.
RayDF: Neural Ray-surface Distance Fields with Multi-view Consistency
Authors: Zhuoman Liu; Bo Yang; Yan Luximon; Ajay Kumar; Jinxi Li
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: In this paper, we study the problem of continuous 3D shape representations. The majority of existing successful methods are coordinate-based implicit neural representations. However, they are inefficient to render novel views or recover explicit surface points. A few works start to formulate 3D shapes as ray-based neural functions, but the learned structures are inferior due to the lack of multi-view geometry consistency. To tackle these challenges, we propose a new framework called RayDF. It consists of three major components: 1) the simple ray-surface distance field, 2) the novel dual-ray visibility classifier, and 3) a multi-view consistency optimization module to drive the learned ray-surface distances to be multi-view geometry consistent. We extensively evaluate our method on three public datasets, demonstrating remarkable performance in 3D surface point reconstruction on both synthetic and challenging real-world 3D scenes, clearly surpassing existing coordinate-based and ray-based baselines. Most notably, our method achieves a 1000x faster speed than coordinate-based methods to render an 800x800 depth image, showing the superiority of our method for 3D shape representation. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/vLAR-group/RayDF
Class-Distribution-Aware Pseudo-Labeling for Semi-Supervised Multi-Label Learning
Authors: Ming-Kun Xie; Jia-Hao Xiao; Hao-Zhe Liu; Gang Niu; Masashi Sugiyama; Sheng-Jun Huang
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Pseudo-labeling has emerged as a popular and effective approach for utilizing unlabeled data. However, in the context of semi-supervised multi-label learning (SSMLL), conventional pseudo-labeling methods encounter difficulties when dealing with instances associated with multiple labels and an unknown label count. These limitations often result in the introduction of false positive labels or the neglect of true positive ones. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a novel solution called Class-Aware Pseudo-Labeling (CAP) that performs pseudo-labeling in a class-aware manner. The proposed approach introduces a regularized learning framework incorporating class-aware thresholds, which effectively control the assignment of positive and negative pseudo-labels for each class. Notably, even with a small proportion of labeled examples, our observations demonstrate that the estimated class distribution serves as a reliable approximation. Motivated by this finding, we develop a class-distribution-aware thresholding strategy to ensure the alignment of pseudo-label distribution with the true distribution. The correctness of the estimated class distribution is theoretically verified, and a generalization error bound is provided for our proposed method. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets confirm the efficacy of CAP in addressing the challenges of SSMLL problems.
Mask Propagation for Efficient Video Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Yuetian Weng; Mingfei Han; Haoyu He; Mingjie Li; Lina Yao; Xiaojun Chang; Bohan Zhuang
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Video Semantic Segmentation (VSS) involves assigning a semantic label to each pixel in a video sequence. Prior work in this field has demonstrated promising results by extending image semantic segmentation models to exploit temporal relationships across video frames; however, these approaches often incur significant computational costs. In this paper, we propose an efficient mask propagation framework for VSS, called MPVSS. Our approach first employs a strong query-based image segmentor on sparse key frames to generate accurate binary masks and class predictions. We then design a flow estimation module utilizing the learned queries to generate a set of segment-aware flow maps, each associated with a mask prediction from the key frame. Finally, the mask-flow pairs are warped to serve as the mask predictions for the non-key frames. By reusing predictions from key frames, we circumvent the need to process a large volume of video frames individually with resource-intensive segmentors, alleviating temporal redundancy and significantly reducing computational costs. Extensive experiments on VSPW and Cityscapes demonstrate that our mask propagation framework achieves SOTA accuracy and efficiency trade-offs. For instance, our best model with Swin-L backbone outperforms the SOTA MRCFA using MiT-B5 by 4.0% mIoU, requiring only 26% FLOPs on the VSPW dataset. Moreover, our framework reduces up to 4× FLOPs compared to the per-frame Mask2Former baseline with only up to 2% mIoU degradation on the Cityscapes validation set. Code is available at https://github.com/ziplab/MPVSS.
Fantastic Robustness Measures: The Secrets of Robust Generalization
Authors: Hoki Kim; Jinseong Park; Yujin Choi; Jaewook Lee
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Adversarial training has become the de-facto standard method for improving the robustness of models against adversarial examples. However, robust overfitting remains a significant challenge, leading to a large gap between the robustness on the training and test datasets. To understand and improve robust generalization, various measures have been developed, including margin, smoothness, and flatness-based measures. In this study, we present a large-scale analysis of robust generalization to empirically verify whether the relationship between these measures and robust generalization remains valid in diverse settings. We demonstrate when and how these measures effectively capture the robust generalization gap by comparing over 1,300 models trained on CIFAR-10 under the $L_\infty$ norm and further validate our findings through an evaluation of more than 100 models from RobustBench across CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet. We hope this work can help the community better understand adversarial robustness and motivate the development of more robust defense methods against adversarial attacks.
The geometry of hidden representations of large transformer models
Authors: Lucrezia Valeriani; Diego Doimo; Francesca Cuturello; Alessandro Laio; Alessio ansuini; Alberto Cazzaniga
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Large transformers are powerful architectures used for self-supervised data analysis across various data types, including protein sequences, images, and text. In these models, the semantic structure of the dataset emerges from a sequence of transformations between one representation and the next. 
We characterize the geometric and statistical properties of these representations and how they change as we move through the layers.
By analyzing the intrinsic dimension (ID) and neighbor composition, we find that the representations evolve similarly in transformers trained on protein language taskand image reconstruction tasks. In the first layers, the data manifold expands, becoming high-dimensional, and then contracts significantly in the intermediate layers. In the last part of the model, the ID remains approximately constant or forms a second shallow peak. 
We show that the semantic information of the dataset is better expressed at the end of the first peak, and this phenomenon can be observed across many models trained on diverse datasets.
Based on our findings, we point out an explicit strategy to identify, without supervision, the layers that maximize semantic content: representations at intermediate layers corresponding to a relative minimum of the ID profile are more suitable for downstream learning tasks.
Two Heads are Better Than One: A Simple Exploration Framework for Efficient Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Jiahui Li; Kun Kuang; Baoxiang Wang; Xingchen Li; Fei Wu; Jun Xiao; Long Chen
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Exploration strategy plays an important role in reinforcement learning, especially in sparse-reward tasks. In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning~(MARL), designing a suitable exploration strategy is much more challenging due to the large state space and the complex interaction among agents. Currently, mainstream exploration methods in MARL either contribute to exploring the unfamiliar states which are large and sparse, or measuring the interaction among agents with high computational costs. We found an interesting phenomenon that different kinds of exploration plays a different role in different MARL scenarios, and choosing a suitable one is often more effective than designing an exquisite algorithm. In this paper, we propose a exploration method that incorporate the \underline{C}uri\underline{O}sity-based and \underline{IN}fluence-based exploration~(COIN) which is simple but effective in various situations. First, COIN measures the influence of each agent on the other agents based on mutual information theory and designs it as intrinsic rewards which are applied to each individual value function. Moreover, COIN computes the curiosity-based intrinsic rewards via prediction errors which are added to the extrinsic reward. For integrating the two kinds of intrinsic rewards, COIN utilizes a novel framework in which they complement each other and lead to a sufficient and effective exploration on cooperative MARL tasks. We perform extensive experiments on different challenging benchmarks, and results across different scenarios show the superiority of our method.
Sample-Efficient and Safe Deep Reinforcement Learning via Reset Deep Ensemble Agents
Authors: Woojun Kim; Yongjae Shin; Jongeui Park; Youngchul Sung
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in solving complex tasks through its integration with deep neural networks (DNNs) as function approximators. However, the reliance on DNNs has introduced a new challenge called primacy bias, whereby these function approximators tend to prioritize early experiences, leading to overfitting. To alleviate this bias, a reset method has been proposed, which involves periodic resets of a portion or the entirety of a deep RL agent while preserving the replay buffer. However, the use of this method can result in performance collapses after executing the reset, raising concerns from the perspective of safe RL and regret minimization. In this paper, we propose a novel reset-based method that leverages deep ensemble learning to address the limitations of the vanilla reset method and enhance sample efficiency. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through various experiments including those in the domain of safe RL. Numerical results demonstrate its potential for real-world applications requiring high sample efficiency and safety considerations.
Visual Programming for Step-by-Step Text-to-Image Generation and Evaluation
Authors: Jaemin Cho; Abhay Zala; Mohit Bansal
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: As large language models have demonstrated impressive performance in many domains, recent works have adopted language models (LMs) as controllers of visual modules for vision-and-language tasks. While existing work focuses on equipping LMs with visual understanding, we propose two novel interpretable/explainable visual programming frameworks for text-to-image (T2I) generation and evaluation. First, we introduce VPGen, an interpretable step-by-step T2I generation framework that decomposes T2I generation into three steps: object/count generation, layout generation, and image generation. We employ an LM to handle the first two steps (object/count generation and layout generation), by finetuning it on text-layout pairs. Our step-by-step T2I generation framework provides stronger spatial control than end-to-end models, the dominant approach for this task. Furthermore, we leverage the world knowledge of pretrained LMs, overcoming the limitation of previous layout-guided T2I works that can only handle predefined object classes. We demonstrate that our VPGen has improved control in counts/spatial relations/scales of objects than state-of-the-art T2I generation models. Second, we introduce VPEval, an interpretable and explainable evaluation framework for T2I generation based on visual programming. Unlike previous T2I evaluations with a single scoring model that is accurate in some skills but unreliable in others, VPEval produces evaluation programs that invoke a set of visual modules that are experts in different skills, and also provides visual+textual explanations of the evaluation results. Our analysis shows that VPEval provides a more human-correlated evaluation for skill-specific and open-ended prompts than widely used single model-based evaluation. We hope that our work encourages future progress on interpretable/explainable generation and evaluation for T2I models.
Distributional Pareto-Optimal Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Xin-Qiang Cai; Pushi Zhang; Li Zhao; Jiang Bian; Masashi Sugiyama; Ashley Juan Llorens
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) has been proposed to learn control policies over multiple competing objectives with each possible preference over returns. However, current MORL algorithms fail to account for distributional preferences over the multi-variate returns, which are particularly important in real-world scenarios such as autonomous driving. To address this issue, we extend the concept of Pareto-optimality in MORL into distributional Pareto-optimality, which captures the optimality of return distributions, rather than the expectations. Our proposed method, called Distributional Pareto-Optimal Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning~(DPMORL), is capable of learning distributional Pareto-optimal policies that balance multiple objectives while considering the return uncertainty. We evaluated our method on several benchmark problems and demonstrated its effectiveness in discovering distributional Pareto-optimal policies and satisfying diverse distributional preferences compared to existing MORL methods.
Reliable Off-Policy Learning for Dosage Combinations
Authors: Jonas Schweisthal; Dennis Frauen; Valentyn Melnychuk; Stefan Feuerriegel
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Decision-making in personalized medicine such as cancer therapy or critical care must often make choices for dosage combinations, i.e., multiple continuous treatments. Existing work for this task has modeled the effect of multiple treatments independently, while estimating the joint effect has received little attention but comes with non-trivial challenges. In this paper, we propose a novel method for reliable off-policy learning for dosage combinations. Our method proceeds along three steps: (1) We develop a tailored neural network that estimates the individualized dose-response function while accounting for the joint effect of multiple dependent dosages. (2) We estimate the generalized propensity score using conditional normalizing flows in order to detect regions with limited overlap in the shared covariate-treatment space. (3) We present a gradient-based learning algorithm to find the optimal, individualized dosage combinations. Here, we ensure reliable estimation of the policy value by avoiding regions with limited overlap. We finally perform an extensive evaluation of our method to show its effectiveness. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first work to provide a method for reliable off-policy learning for optimal dosage combinations.
Bounce: Reliable High-Dimensional Bayesian Optimization for Combinatorial and Mixed Spaces
Authors: Leonard Papenmeier; Luigi Nardi; Matthias Poloczek
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Impactful applications such as materials discovery, hardware design, neural architecture search, or portfolio optimization require optimizing high-dimensional black-box functions with mixed and combinatorial input spaces.
While Bayesian optimization has recently made significant progress in solving such problems, an in-depth analysis reveals that the current state-of-the-art methods are not reliable. 
Their performances degrade substantially when the unknown optima of the function do not have a certain structure. 
To fill the need for a reliable algorithm for combinatorial and mixed spaces, this paper proposes Bounce that relies on a novel map of various variable types into nested embeddings of increasing dimensionality.
Comprehensive experiments show that Bounce reliably achieves and often even improves upon state-of-the-art performance on a variety of high-dimensional problems.