GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Self-Play Fine-Tuning Converts Weak Language Models to Strong Language Models
Authors: Zixiang Chen; Yihe Deng; Huizhuo Yuan; Kaixuan Ji; Quanquan Gu
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Harnessing the power of human-annotated data through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is pivotal for advancing Large Language Models (LLMs). In this paper, we delve into the prospect of growing a strong LLM out of a weak one without the need for acquiring additional human-annotated data. We propose a new fine-tuning method called Self-Play fIne-tuNing (SPIN), which starts from a supervised fine-tuned model. At the heart of SPIN lies a self-play mechanism, where the LLM refines its capability by playing against instances of itself. More specifically, the LLM generates its own training data from its previous iterations, refining its policy by discerning these self-generated responses from those obtained from human-annotated data. Our method progressively elevates the LLM from a nascent model to a formidable one, unlocking the full potential of human-annotated demonstration data for SFT. Theoretically, we prove that the global optimum to the training objective function of our method is achieved only when the LLM policy aligns with the target data distribution. Empirically, we evaluate our method on several benchmark datasets including the HuggingFace Open LLM Leaderboard, MT-Bench, and datasets from Big-Bench. Our results show that SPIN can significantly improve the LLM's performance across a variety of benchmarks and even outperform models trained through direct preference optimization (DPO) supplemented with extra GPT-4 preference data. This sheds light on the promise of self-play, enabling the achievement of human-level performance in LLMs without the need for expert opponents.
FedCal: Achieving Local and Global Calibration in Federated Learning via Aggregated Parameterized Scaler
Authors: Hongyi Peng; Han Yu; Xiaoli Tang; Xiaoxiao Li
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative machine learning across distributed data owners, but data heterogeneity poses a challenge for model calibration. While prior work focused on improving accuracy for non-iid data, calibration remains under-explored. This study reveals existing FL aggregation approaches lead to sub-optimal calibration, and theoretical analysis shows despite constraining variance in clients’ label distributions, global calibration error is still asymptotically lower bounded. To address this, we propose a novel Federated Calibration (FedCal) approach, emphasizing both local and global calibration. It leverages client-specific scalers for local calibration to effectively correct output misalignment without sacrificing prediction accuracy. These scalers are then aggregated via weight averaging to generate a global scaler, minimizing the global calibration error. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FedCal significantly outperforms the best-performing baseline, reducing global calibration error by 47.66% on average.
Interpreting and Improving Large Language Models in Arithmetic Calculation
Authors: Wei Zhang; Chaoqun Wan; Yonggang Zhang; Yiu-ming Cheung; Xinmei Tian; Xu Shen; Jieping Ye
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Oral)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential across numerous applications and have shown an emergent ability to tackle complex reasoning tasks, such as mathematical computations. However, even for the simplest arithmetic calculations, the intrinsic mechanisms behind LLMs remains mysterious, making it challenging to ensure reliability. In this work, we delve into uncovering a specific mechanism by which LLMs execute calculations. Through comprehensive experiments, we find that LLMs frequently involve a small fraction (<5%) of attention heads, which play a pivotal role in focusing on operands and operators during calculation processes. Subsequently, the information from these operands is processed through multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs), progressively leading to the final solution. These pivotal heads/MLPs, though identified on a specific dataset, exhibit transferability across different datasets and even distinct tasks. This insight prompted us to investigate the potential benefits of selectively fine-tuning these essential heads/MLPs to boost the LLMs' computational performance. We empirically find that such precise tuning can yield notable enhancements on mathematical prowess, without compromising the performance on non-mathematical tasks. Our work serves as a preliminary exploration into the arithmetic calculation abilities inherent in LLMs, laying a solid foundation to reveal more intricate mathematical tasks.
DPN: Decoupling Partition and Navigation for Neural Solvers of Min-max Vehicle Routing Problems
Authors: Zhi Zheng; Shunyu Yao; Zhenkun Wang; Tong Xialiang; Mingxuan Yuan; Ke Tang
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: The min-max vehicle routing problem (min-max VRP) traverses all given customers by assigning several routes and aims to minimize the length of the longest route. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL)-based sequential planning methods have exhibited advantages in solving efficiency and optimality. However, these methods fail to exploit the problem-specific properties in learning representations, resulting in less effective features for decoding optimal routes. This paper considers the sequential planning process of min-max VRPs as two coupled optimization tasks: customer partition for different routes and customer navigation in each route (i.e., partition and navigation). To effectively process min-max VRP instances, we present a novel attention-based Partition-and-Navigation encoder (P&N Encoder) that learns distinct embeddings for partition and navigation. Furthermore, we utilize an inherent symmetry in decoding routes and develop an effective agent-permutation-symmetric (APS) loss function. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed Decoupling-Partition-Navigation (DPN) method significantly surpasses existing learning-based methods in both single-depot and multi-depot min-max VRPs. Our code is available at
Split-and-Denoise: Protect large language model inference with local differential privacy
Authors: Peihua Mai; Ran Yan; Zhe Huang; Youjia Yang; Yan Pang
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in natural language understanding by capturing hidden semantics in vector space. This process enriches the value of text embeddings for various downstream tasks, thereby fostering the Embedding-as-a-Service (EaaS) business model. However, the risk of privacy leakage due to direct text transmission to servers remains a critical concern. To address this, we introduce Split-N-Denoise (SnD), an private inference framework that splits the model to execute the token embedding layer on the client side at minimal computational cost. This allows the client to introduce noise prior to transmitting the embeddings to the server, and subsequently receive and denoise the perturbed output embeddings for downstream tasks. Our approach is designed for the inference stage of LLMs and requires no modifications to the model parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate SnD’s effectiveness in optimizing the privacy-utility tradeoff across various LLM architectures and diverse downstream tasks. The results reveal an improvement in performance under the same privacy budget compared to the baselines by over 10% on average, offering clients a privacy-preserving solution for local privacy protection.
Conditionally-Conjugate Gaussian Process Factor Analysis for Spike Count Data via Data Augmentation
Authors: Yididiya Y. Nadew; Xuhui Fan; Christopher John Quinn
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Gaussian process factor analysis (GPFA) is a latent variable modeling technique commonly used to identify smooth, low-dimensional latent trajectories underlying high-dimensional neural recordings. Specifically, researchers model spiking rates as Gaussian observations, resulting in tractable inference. Recently, GPFA has been extended to model spike count data. However, due to the non-conjugacy of the likelihood, the inference becomes intractable. Prior works rely on either black-box inference techniques, numerical integration or polynomial approximations of the likelihood to handle intractability. To overcome this challenge, we propose a conditionally-conjugate Gaussian process factor analysis (ccGPFA) resulting in both analytically and computationally tractable inference for modeling neural activity from spike count data. In particular, we develop a novel data augmentation based method that renders the model conditionally conjugate. Consequently, our model enjoys the advantage of simple closed-form updates using a variational EM algorithm. Furthermore, due to its conditional conjugacy, we show our model can be readily scaled using sparse Gaussian Processes and accelerated inference via natural gradients. To validate our method, we empirically demonstrate its efficacy through experiments.
Amortizing Pragmatic Program Synthesis with Rankings
Authors: Yewen Pu; Saujas Vaduguru; Priyan Vaithilingam; Elena Glassman; Daniel Fried
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: The usage of Rational Speech Acts (RSA) framework has been successful in building *pragmatic* program synthesizers that return programs which, in addition to being logically consistent with user-generated examples, account for the fact that a user chooses their examples informatively. We present a general method of amortizing the slow, exact RSA synthesizer. Our method first compiles a communication dataset of partially ranked programs by querying the exact RSA synthesizer. It then distills a *global ranking* -- a single, total ordering of all programs, to approximate the partial rankings from this dataset. This global ranking is then used at inference time to rank multiple logically consistent candidate programs generated from a fast, non-pragmatic synthesizer. Experiments on two program synthesis domains using our ranking method resulted in orders of magnitudes of speed ups compared to the exact RSA synthesizer, while being more accurate than a non-pragmatic synthesizer. Finally, we prove that in the special case of synthesis from a single example, this approximation is exact.
Zero-Sum Positional Differential Games as a Framework for Robust Reinforcement Learning: Deep Q-Learning Approach
Authors: Anton Plaksin; Vitaly Kalev
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Robust Reinforcement Learning (RRL) is a promising Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigm aimed at training robust to uncertainty or disturbances models, making them more efficient for real-world applications. Following this paradigm, uncertainty or disturbances are interpreted as actions of a second adversarial agent, and thus, the problem is reduced to seeking the agents' policies robust to any opponent's actions. This paper is the first to propose considering the RRL problems within the positional differential game theory, which helps us to obtain theoretically justified intuition to develop a centralized Q-learning approach. Namely, we prove that under Isaacs's condition (sufficiently general for real-world dynamical systems), the same Q-function can be utilized as an approximate solution of both minimax and maximin Bellman equations. Based on these results, we present the Isaacs Deep Q-Network algorithms and demonstrate their superiority compared to other baseline RRL and Multi-Agent RL algorithms in various environments.
AegisFL: Efficient and Flexible Privacy-Preserving Byzantine-Robust Cross-silo Federated Learning
Authors: Dong Chen; Hongyuan Qu; Guangwu Xu
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Privacy attacks and poisoning attacks are two of the thorniest problems in federation learning (FL). Homomorphic encryption (HE), which allows certain mathematical operations to be done in the ciphertext state, provides a way to solve these two problems simultaneously. However, existing Paillier-based and CKKS-based privacy-preserving byzantine-robust FL (PBFL) solutions not only suffer from low efficiency but also expose the final model to the server. Additionally, these methods are limited to one robust aggregation algorithm (AGR) and are therefore vulnerable to AGR-tailored poisoning attacks. In this paper, we present AegisFL, an efficient PBLF system that provides the flexibility to change the AGR. We first observe that the core of the existing advanced AGRs is to calculate the inner products, $L_2$ norms and mean values for vectors. Based on this observation, we tailor a packing scheme for PBFL, which fits perfectly with RLWE-based fully homomorphic encryption. Under this packing scheme, the server only needs to perform one ciphertext multiplication to construct any required AGR, while the global model only belongs to honest clients. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on different datasets and adversary settings, which also confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of our scheme.
SparseTSF: Modeling Long-term Time Series Forecasting with *1k* Parameters
Authors: Shengsheng Lin; Weiwei Lin; Wentai Wu; Haojun Chen; Junjie Yang
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Oral)

Abstract: This paper introduces SparseTSF, a novel, extremely lightweight model for Long-term Time Series Forecasting (LTSF), designed to address the challenges of modeling complex temporal dependencies over extended horizons with minimal computational resources. At the heart of SparseTSF lies the Cross-Period Sparse Forecasting technique, which simplifies the forecasting task by decoupling the periodicity and trend in time series data. This technique involves downsampling the original sequences to focus on cross-period trend prediction, effectively extracting periodic features while minimizing the model's complexity and parameter count. Based on this technique, the SparseTSF model uses fewer than *1k* parameters to achieve competitive or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art models. Furthermore, SparseTSF showcases remarkable generalization capabilities, making it well-suited for scenarios with limited computational resources, small samples, or low-quality data. The code is publicly available at this repository: https://github.com/lss-1138/SparseTSF.
Conditional Language Learning with Context
Authors: Xiao Zhang; Miao Li; Ji Wu
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Language models can learn sophisticated language understanding skills from fitting raw text. They also unselectively learn useless corpus statistics and biases, especially during finetuning on domain-specific corpora. In this paper, we propose a simple modification to causal language modeling called conditional finetuning, which performs language modeling conditioned on a context. We show that a context can "explain away" certain corpus statistics and make the model avoid learning them. In this fashion, conditional finetuning achieves selective learning from a corpus, learning knowledge useful for downstream tasks while avoiding learning useless corpus statistics like topic biases. This selective learning effect leads to less forgetting and better stability-plasticity tradeoff in domain finetuning, potentially benefitting lifelong learning with language models.
Progressive Inference: Explaining Decoder-Only Sequence Classification Models Using Intermediate Predictions
Authors: Sanjay Kariyappa; Freddy Lecue; Saumitra Mishra; Christopher Pond; Daniele Magazzeni; Manuela Veloso
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: This paper proposes Progressive inference--a framework to explain the predictions of decoder-only transformer models trained to perform sequence classification tasks. Our work is based on the insight that the classification head of a decoder-only model can be used to make intermediate predictions by evaluating them at different points in the input sequence. Due to the masked attention mechanism used in decoder-only models, these intermediate predictions only depend on the tokens seen before the inference point, allowing us to obtain the model's prediction on a masked input sub-sequence, with negligible computational overheads. We develop two methods to provide sub-sequence level attributions using this core insight. First, we propose Single Pass-Progressive Inference (SP-PI) to compute attributions by simply taking the difference between intermediate predictions. Second, we exploit a connection with Kernel SHAP to develop Multi Pass-Progressive Inference (MP-PI); this uses intermediate predictions from multiple masked versions of the input to compute higher-quality attributions that approximate SHAP values. We perform studies on several text classification datasets to demonstrate that our proposal provides better explanations compared to prior work, both in the single-pass and multi-pass settings.
Learning Divergence Fields for Shift-Robust Graph Representations
Authors: Qitian Wu; Fan Nie; Chenxiao Yang; Junchi Yan
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Real-world data generation often involves certain geometries (e.g., graphs) that induce instance-level interdependence. This characteristic makes the generalization of learning models more difficult due to the intricate interdependent patterns that impact data-generative distributions and can vary from training to testing. In this work, we propose a geometric diffusion model with learnable divergence fields for the challenging generalization problem with interdependent data. We generalize the diffusion equation with stochastic diffusivity at each time step, which aims to capture the multi-faceted information flows among interdependent data. Furthermore, we derive a new learning objective through causal inference, which can guide the model to learn generalizable patterns of interdependence that are insensitive across domains. Regarding practical implementation, we introduce three model instantiations that can be considered as the generalized versions of GCN, GAT, and Transformers, respectively, which possess advanced robustness against distribution shifts. We demonstrate their promising efficacy for out-of-distribution generalization on diverse real-world datasets. Source codes are available at https://github.com/fannie1208/GLIND.
Sparse-to-dense Multimodal Image Registration via Multi-Task Learning
Authors: Kaining Zhang; Jiayi Ma
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Aligning image pairs captured by different sensors or those undergoing significant appearance changes is crucial for various computer vision and robotics applications. Existing approaches cope with this problem via either Sparse feature Matching (SM) or Dense direct Alignment (DA) paradigms. Sparse methods are efficient but lack accuracy in textureless scenes, while dense ones are more accurate in all scenes but demand for good initialization. In this paper, we propose SDME, a Sparse-to-Dense Multimodal feature Extractor based on a novel multi-task network that simultaneously predicts SM and DA features for robust multimodal image registration. We propose the sparse-to-dense registration paradigm: we first perform initial registration via SM and then refine the result via DA. By using the well-designed SDME, the sparse-to-dense approach combines the merits from both SM and DA. Extensive experiments on MSCOCO, GoogleEarth, VIS-NIR and VIS-IR-drone datasets demonstrate that our method achieves remarkable performance on multimodal cases. Furthermore, our approach exhibits robust generalization capabilities, enabling the fine-tuning of models initially trained on single-modal datasets for use with smaller multimodal datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/KN-Zhang/SDME.
SimPro: A Simple Probabilistic Framework Towards Realistic Long-Tailed Semi-Supervised Learning
Authors: Chaoqun Du; Yizeng Han; Gao Huang
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Recent advancements in semi-supervised learning have focused on a more realistic yet challenging task: addressing imbalances in labeled data while the class distribution of unlabeled data remains both unknown and potentially mismatched. Current approaches in this sphere often presuppose rigid assumptions regarding the class distribution of unlabeled data, thereby limiting the adaptability of models to only certain distribution ranges. In this study, we propose a novel approach, introducing a highly adaptable framework, designated as **SimPro**, which does not rely on any predefined assumptions about the distribution of unlabeled data. Our framework, grounded in a probabilistic model, innovatively refines the expectation-maximization (EM) method by separating the modeling of conditional and marginal class distributions. This separation facilitates a closed-form solution for class distribution estimation during the maximization phase, leading to the formulation of a Bayes classifier. The Bayes classifier, in turn, enhances the quality of pseudo-labels in the expectation phase. Remarkably, the SimPro framework is not only straightforward to implement but also comes with theoretical guarantees. Moreover, we introduce two novel class distributions broadening the scope of the evaluation. Our method showcases consistent state-of-the-art performance across diverse benchmarks and data distribution scenarios. benchmarks and data distribution scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/SimPro.
Achieving Margin Maximization Exponentially Fast via Progressive Norm Rescaling
Authors: Mingze Wang; Zeping Min; Lei Wu
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: In this work, we investigate the margin-maximization bias exhibited by gradient-based algorithms in classifying linearly separable data. We present an in-depth analysis of the specific properties of the velocity field associated with (normalized) gradients, focusing on their role in margin maximization. Inspired by this analysis, we propose a novel algorithm called Progressive Rescaling Gradient Descent (PRGD) and show that PRGD can maximize the margin at an *exponential rate*. This stands in stark contrast to all existing algorithms, which maximize the margin at a slow *polynomial rate*. Specifically, we identify mild conditions on data distribution under which existing algorithms such as gradient descent (GD) and normalized gradient descent (NGD) *provably fail* in maximizing the margin efficiently. To validate our theoretical findings, we present both synthetic and real-world experiments. Notably, PRGD also shows promise in enhancing the generalization performance when applied to linearly non-separable datasets and deep neural networks.
On the Last-Iterate Convergence of Shuffling Gradient Methods
Authors: Zijian Liu; Zhengyuan Zhou
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Oral)

Abstract: Shuffling gradient methods are widely used in modern machine learning tasks and include three popular implementations: Random Reshuffle (RR), Shuffle Once (SO), and Incremental Gradient (IG). Compared to the empirical success, the theoretical guarantee of shuffling gradient methods was not well-understood for a long time. Until recently, the convergence rates had just been established for the average iterate for convex functions and the last iterate for strongly convex problems (using squared distance as the metric). However, when using the function value gap as the convergence criterion, existing theories cannot interpret the good performance of the last iterate in different settings (e.g., constrained optimization). To bridge this gap between practice and theory, we prove the first last-iterate convergence rates for shuffling gradient methods with respect to the objective value even without strong convexity. Our new results either (nearly) match the existing last-iterate lower bounds or are as fast as the previous best upper bounds for the average iterate.