GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
f-Policy Gradients: A General Framework for Goal-Conditioned RL using f-Divergences
Authors: Siddhant Agarwal; Ishan Durugkar; Peter Stone; Amy Zhang
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems often have access to sparse rewards where the agent receives a reward signal only when it has achieved the goal, making policy optimization a difficult problem.
  Several works augment this sparse reward with a learned dense reward function, but this can lead to sub-optimal policies if the reward is misaligned. 
  Moreover, recent works have demonstrated that effective shaping rewards for a particular problem can depend on the underlying learning algorithm. 
  This paper introduces a novel way to encourage exploration called
  $f$-Policy Gradients, or $f$-PG. $f$-PG minimizes the f-divergence between the agent's state visitation distribution and the goal, which we show can lead to an optimal policy. We derive gradients for various f-divergences to optimize this objective. Our learning paradigm provides dense learning signals for exploration in sparse reward settings. We further introduce an entropy-regularized policy optimization objective, that we call $state$-MaxEnt RL (or $s$-MaxEnt RL) as a special case of our objective. We show that several metric-based shaping rewards like L2 can be used with $s$-MaxEnt RL, providing a common ground to study such metric-based shaping rewards with efficient exploration. We find that $f$-PG has better performance compared to standard policy gradient methods on a challenging gridworld as well as the Point Maze and FetchReach environments. More information on our website https://agarwalsiddhant10.github.io/projects/fpg.html.
Fine-Grained Human Feedback Gives Better Rewards for Language Model Training
Authors: Zeqiu Wu; Yushi Hu; Weijia Shi; Nouha Dziri; Alane Suhr; Prithviraj Ammanabrolu; Noah A. Smith; Mari Ostendorf; Hannaneh Hajishirzi
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 spotlight)

Abstract: Language models (LMs) often exhibit undesirable text generation behaviors, including generating false, toxic, or irrelevant outputs. 
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF)---where human preference judgments on LM outputs are transformed into a learning signal---has recently shown promise in addressing these issues. However, such holistic feedback conveys limited information on long text outputs; it does not indicate which aspects of the outputs influenced user preference; e.g., which parts contain what type(s) of errors. In this paper, we use fine-grained human feedback (e.g., which sentence is false, which sub-sentence is irrelevant) as an explicit training signal. We introduce Fine-Grained RLHF, a framework that enables training and learning from reward functions that are fine-grained in two respects: (1) density, providing a reward after every segment (e.g., a sentence) is generated; and (2) incorporating multiple reward models associated with different feedback types (e.g., factual incorrectness, irrelevance, and information incompleteness). We conduct experiments on detoxification and long-form question answering to illustrate how learning with this reward function leads to improved performance, supported by both automatic and human evaluation. Additionally, we show that LM behaviors can be customized using different combinations of fine-grained reward models. We release all data, collected human feedback, and codes at https://FineGrainedRLHF.github.io.
Disentangled Wasserstein Autoencoder for T-Cell Receptor Engineering
Authors: Tianxiao Li; Hongyu Guo; Filippo Grazioli; Mark Gerstein; Martin Renqiang Min
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: In protein biophysics, the separation between the functionally important residues (forming the active site or binding surface) and those that create the overall structure (the fold) is a well-established and fundamental concept. Identifying and modifying those functional sites is critical for protein engineering but computationally non-trivial, and requires significant domain knowledge. To automate this process from a data-driven perspective, we propose a disentangled Wasserstein autoencoder with an auxiliary classifier, which isolates the function-related patterns from the rest with theoretical guarantees. This enables one-pass protein sequence editing and improves the understanding of the resulting sequences and editing actions involved. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we apply it to T-cell receptors (TCRs), a well-studied structure-function case. We show that our method can be used to alter the function of TCRs without changing the structural backbone, outperforming several competing methods in generation quality and efficiency, and requiring only 10\% of the running time needed by baseline models. To our knowledge, this is the first approach that utilizes disentangled representations for TCR engineering.
A Diffusion-Model of Joint Interactive Navigation
Authors: Matthew Niedoba; Jonathan Wilder Lavington; Yunpeng Liu; Vasileios Lioutas; Justice Sefas; Xiaoxuan Liang; Dylan Green; Setareh Dabiri; Berend Zwartsenberg; Adam Scibior; Frank Wood
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Simulation of autonomous vehicle systems requires that simulated traffic participants exhibit diverse and realistic behaviors. The use of prerecorded real-world traffic scenarios in simulation ensures realism but the rarity of safety critical events makes large scale collection of driving scenarios expensive. In this paper, we present DJINN -- a diffusion based method of generating traffic scenarios. Our approach jointly diffuses the trajectories of all agents, conditioned on a flexible set of state observations from the past, present, or future. On popular trajectory forecasting datasets, we report state of the art performance on joint trajectory metrics. In addition, we demonstrate how DJINN flexibly enables direct test-time sampling from a variety of valuable conditional distributions including goal-based sampling, behavior-class sampling, and scenario editing.
A Unifying Perspective on Multi-Calibration: Game Dynamics for Multi-Objective Learning
Authors: Nika Haghtalab; Michael Jordan; Eric Zhao
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: We provide a unifying framework for the design and analysis of multi-calibrated predictors. By placing the multi-calibration problem in the general setting of multi-objective learning---where learning guarantees must hold simultaneously over a set of distributions and loss functions---we exploit connections to game dynamics to achieve state-of-the-art guarantees for a diverse set of multi-calibration learning problems. In addition to shedding light on existing multi-calibration guarantees and greatly simplifying their analysis, our approach also yields improved guarantees, such as error tolerances that scale with the square-root of group size versus the constant tolerances guaranteed by prior works, and improving the complexity of $k$-class multi-calibration by an exponential factor of $k$ versus Gopalan et al.. Beyond multi-calibration, we use these game dynamics to address emerging considerations in the study of group fairness and multi-distribution learning.
Data-driven Optimal Filtering for Linear Systems with Unknown Noise Covariances
Authors: Shahriar Talebi; Amirhossein Taghvaei; Mehran Mesbahi
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: This paper examines learning the optimal filtering policy, known as the Kalman gain, for a linear system with unknown noise covariance matrices using noisy output data. The learning problem is formulated as a stochastic policy optimiza- tion problem, aiming to minimize the output prediction error. This formulation provides a direct bridge between data-driven optimal control and, its dual, op- timal filtering. Our contributions are twofold. Firstly, we conduct a thorough convergence analysis of the stochastic gradient descent algorithm, adopted for the filtering problem, accounting for biased gradients and stability constraints. Secondly, we carefully leverage a combination of tools from linear system theory and high-dimensional statistics to derive bias-variance error bounds that scale logarithmically with problem dimension, and, in contrast to subspace methods, the length of output trajectories only affects the bias term.
Hierarchical VAEs provide a normative account of motion processing in the primate brain
Authors: Hadi Vafaii; Jacob L. Yates; Daniel A. Butts
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: The relationship between perception and inference, as postulated by Helmholtz in the 19th century, is paralleled in modern machine learning by generative models like Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) and their hierarchical variants. Here, we evaluate the role of hierarchical inference and its alignment with brain function in the domain of motion perception. We first introduce a novel synthetic data framework, Retinal Optic Flow Learning (ROFL), which enables control over motion statistics and their causes. We then present a new hierarchical VAE and test it against alternative models on two downstream tasks: (i) predicting ground truth causes of retinal optic flow (e.g., self-motion); and (ii) predicting the responses of neurons in the motion processing pathway of primates. We manipulate the model architectures (hierarchical versus non-hierarchical), loss functions, and the causal structure of the motion stimuli. We find that hierarchical latent structure in the model leads to several improvements. First, it improves the linear decodability of ground truth variables and does so in a sparse and disentangled manner. Second, our hierarchical VAE outperforms previous state-of-the-art models in predicting neuronal responses and exhibits sparse latent-to-neuron relationships. These results depend on the causal structure of the world, indicating that alignment between brains and artificial neural networks depends not only on architecture but also on matching ecologically relevant stimulus statistics. Taken together, our results suggest that hierarchical Bayesian inference underlines the brain's understanding of the world, and hierarchical VAEs can effectively model this understanding.
Optimal testing using combined test statistics across independent studies
Authors: Lasse Vuursteen; Botond Szabo; Aad van der Vaart; Harry van Zanten
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Combining test statistics from independent trials or experiments is a popular method of meta-analysis. However, there is very limited theoretical understanding of the power of the combined test, especially in high-dimensional models considering composite hypotheses tests. We derive a mathematical framework to study standard {meta-analysis} testing approaches in the context of the many normal means model, which serves as the platform to investigate more complex models.

We introduce a natural and mild restriction on the meta-level combination functions of the local trials. This allows us to mathematically quantify the cost of compressing $m$ trials into real-valued test statistics and combining these. We then derive minimax lower and matching upper bounds for the separation rates of standard combination methods for e.g. p-values and e-values, quantifying the loss relative to using the full, pooled data. We observe an elbow effect, revealing that in certain cases combining the locally optimal tests in each trial results in a sub-optimal {meta-analysis} method and develop approaches to achieve the global optima. We also explore the possible gains of allowing limited coordination between the trial designs. Our results connect meta-analysis with bandwidth constraint distributed inference and build on recent information theoretic developments in the latter field.
Scale Alone Does not Improve Mechanistic Interpretability in Vision Models
Authors: Roland S. Zimmermann; Thomas Klein; Wieland Brendel
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 spotlight)

Abstract: In light of the recent widespread adoption of AI systems, understanding the internal information processing of neural networks has become increasingly critical. Most recently, machine vision has seen remarkable progress by scaling neural networks to unprecedented levels in dataset and model size. We here ask whether this extraordinary increase in scale also positively impacts the field of mechanistic interpretability. In other words, has our understanding of the inner workings of scaled neural networks improved as well? We use a psychophysical paradigm to quantify one form of mechanistic interpretability for a diverse suite of nine models and find no scaling effect for interpretability - neither for model nor dataset size. Specifically, none of the investigated state-of-the-art models are easier to interpret than the GoogLeNet model from almost a decade ago. Latest-generation vision models appear even less interpretable than older architectures, hinting at a regression rather than improvement, with modern models sacrificing interpretability for accuracy. These results highlight the need for models explicitly designed to be mechanistically interpretable and the need for more helpful interpretability methods to increase our understanding of networks at an atomic level. We release a dataset containing more than 130'000 human responses from our psychophysical evaluation of 767 units across nine models. This dataset facilitates research on automated instead of human-based interpretability evaluations, which can ultimately be leveraged to directly optimize the mechanistic interpretability of models.
Tracking Most Significant Shifts in Nonparametric Contextual Bandits
Authors: Joe Suk; Samory Kpotufe
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: We study nonparametric contextual bandits where Lipschitz mean reward functions may change over time.
We first establish the minimax dynamic regret rate in this less understood setting in terms of number of changes $L$ and total-variation $V$, both capturing all changes in distribution over context space, and argue that state-of-the-art procedures are suboptimal in this setting.

Next, we tend to the question of an _adaptivity_ for this setting, i.e. achieving the minimax rate without knowledge of $L$ or $V$. Quite importantly, we posit that the bandit  problem, viewed locally at a given context $X_t$, should not be affected by reward changes in other parts of context space $\cal X$. We therefore propose a notion of _change_, which we term _experienced significant shifts_, that better accounts for locality, and thus counts considerably less changes than $L$ and $V$. Furthermore, similar to recent work on non-stationary MAB (Suk & Kpotufe, 2022), _experienced significant shifts_ only count the most _significant_ changes in mean rewards, e.g., severe best-arm changes relevant to observed contexts.

Our main result is to show that this more tolerant notion of change can in fact be adapted to.
SQ Lower Bounds for Non-Gaussian Component Analysis with Weaker Assumptions
Authors: Ilias Diakonikolas; Daniel Kane; Lisheng Ren; Yuxin Sun
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: We study the complexity of Non-Gaussian Component Analysis (NGCA) in the Statistical Query (SQ) model.
Prior work developed a methodology to prove SQ lower bounds for NGCA that have been applicable to a wide range of contexts.
In particular, it was known that for any univariate distribution $A$ satisfying certain conditions,
distinguishing between a standard multivariate Gaussian and a distribution that behaves like $A$ in a random hidden direction and like a standard Gaussian in the orthogonal complement, is SQ-hard.
The required conditions were that (1) $A$ matches many low-order moments with a standard Gaussian,
and (2) the chi-squared norm of $A$ with respect to the standard Gaussian is finite.
While the moment-matching condition is clearly necessary for hardness, the chi-squared condition was only required for technical reasons.
In this work, we establish that the latter condition is indeed not necessary.
In particular, we prove near-optimal SQ lower bounds for NGCA under the moment-matching condition only.
Precise asymptotic generalization for multiclass classification with overparameterized linear models
Authors: David Xing Wu; Anant Sahai
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 spotlight)

Abstract: We study the asymptotic generalization of an overparameterized linear model for multiclass classification under the Gaussian covariates bi-level model introduced in Subramanian et al. (NeurIPS'22), where the number of data points, features, and classes all grow together. We fully resolve the conjecture posed in Subramanian et al. '22, matching the predicted regimes for which the model does and does not generalize. Furthermore, our new lower bounds are akin to an information-theoretic strong converse: they establish that the misclassification rate goes to 0 or 1 asymptotically. One surprising consequence of our tight results is that the min-norm interpolating classifier can be asymptotically suboptimal relative to noninterpolating classifiers in the regime where the min-norm interpolating regressor is known to be optimal. 

The key to our tight analysis is a new variant of the Hanson-Wright inequality which is broadly useful for multiclass problems with sparse labels. As an application, we show that the same type of analysis can be used to analyze the related multi-label classification problem under the same bi-level ensemble.
Fair Adaptive Experiments
Authors: Waverly Wei; Xinwei Ma; Jingshen Wang
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Randomized experiments have been the gold standard for assessing the effectiveness of a treatment, policy, or intervention, spanning various fields, including social sciences, biomedical studies, and e-commerce. The classical complete randomization approach assigns treatments based on a pre-specified probability and may lead to inefficient use of data. Adaptive experiments improve upon complete randomization by sequentially learning and updating treatment assignment probabilities using accrued evidence during the experiment. Hence, they can help achieve efficient data use and higher estimation efficiency. However, their application can also raise fairness and equity concerns, as assignment probabilities may vary drastically across groups of participants. Furthermore, when treatment is expected to be extremely beneficial to certain groups of participants, it is more appropriate to expose many of these participants to favorable treatment. In response to these challenges, we propose a fair adaptive experiment strategy that simultaneously enhances data use efficiency, achieves an ``envy-free'' treatment assignment guarantee, and improves the overall welfare of participants. An important feature of our proposed strategy is that we do not impose parametric modeling assumptions on the outcome variables, making it more versatile and applicable to a wider array of applications. Through our theoretical investigation, we characterize the convergence rate of the estimated treatment effects and the associated standard deviations at the group level and further prove that our adaptive treatment assignment algorithm, despite not having a closed-form expression, approaches the optimal allocation rule asymptotically. Our proof strategy takes into account the fact that the allocation decisions in our design depend on sequentially accumulated data, which poses a significant challenge in characterizing the properties and conducting statistical inference of our method. We further provide simulation evidence and two synthetic data studies to showcase the performance of our fair adaptive experiment strategy.
Diverse Shape Completion via Style Modulated Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Wesley Khademi; Li Fuxin
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Shape completion aims to recover the full 3D geometry of an object from a partial observation. This problem is inherently multi-modal since there can be many ways to plausibly complete the missing regions of a shape. Such diversity would be indicative of the underlying uncertainty of the shape and could be preferable for downstream tasks such as planning. In this paper, we propose a novel conditional generative adversarial network that can produce many diverse plausible completions of a partially observed point cloud. To enable our network to produce multiple completions for the same partial input, we introduce stochasticity into our network via style modulation. By extracting style codes from complete shapes during training, and learning a distribution over them, our style codes can explicitly carry shape category information leading to better completions. We further introduce diversity penalties and discriminators at multiple scales to prevent conditional mode collapse and to train without the need for multiple ground truth completions for each partial input. Evaluations across several synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements in respecting the partial observations while obtaining greater diversity in completions.
UNSSOR: Unsupervised Neural Speech Separation by Leveraging Over-determined Training Mixtures
Authors: Zhong-Qiu Wang; Shinji Watanabe
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: In reverberant conditions with multiple concurrent speakers, each microphone acquires a mixture signal of multiple speakers at a different location. In over-determined conditions where the microphones out-number speakers, we can narrow down the solutions to speaker images and realize unsupervised speech separation by leveraging each mixture signal as a constraint (i.e., the estimated speaker images at a microphone should add up to the mixture). Equipped with this insight, we propose UNSSOR, an algorithm for $\underline{u}$nsupervised $\underline{n}$eural $\underline{s}$peech $\underline{s}$eparation by leveraging $\underline{o}$ver-determined training mixtu$\underline{r}$es. At each training step, we feed an input mixture to a deep neural network (DNN) to produce an intermediate estimate for each speaker, linearly filter the estimates, and optimize a loss so that, at each microphone, the filtered estimates of all the speakers can add up to the mixture to satisfy the above constraint. We show that this loss can promote unsupervised separation of speakers. The linear filters are computed in each sub-band based on the mixture and DNN estimates through the forward convolutive prediction (FCP) algorithm. To address the frequency permutation problem incurred by using sub-band FCP, a loss term based on minimizing intra-source magnitude scattering is proposed. Although UNSSOR requires over-determined training mixtures, we can train DNNs to achieve under-determined separation (e.g., unsupervised monaural speech separation). Evaluation results on two-speaker separation in reverberant conditions show the effectiveness and potential of UNSSOR.