GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
MILP-FBGen: LP/MILP Instance Generation with Feasibility/Boundedness
Authors: Yahong Zhang; Chenchen Fan; Donghui Chen; Congrui Li; Wenli Ouyang; Mingda Zhu; Junchi Yan
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Machine learning (ML) has been actively adopted in Linear Programming (LP) and Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP), whose potential is hindered by instance scarcity. Current synthetic instance generation methods often fall short in closely mirroring the distribution of original datasets or ensuring the feasibility and boundedness of the generated data — a critical requirement for obtaining reliable supervised labels in model training. In this paper, we present a diffusion-based LP/MILP instance generative framework called MILP-FBGen. It strikes a balance between structural similarity and novelty while maintaining feasibility/boundedness via a meticulously designed structure-preserving generation module and a feasibility/boundedness-constrained sampling module. Our method shows superiority on two fronts: 1) preservation of key properties (hardness, feasibility, and boundedness) of LP/MILP instances, and 2) enhanced performance on downstream tasks. Extensive studies show two-fold superiority that our method ensures higher distributional similarity and 100% feasibility in both easy and hard datasets, surpassing current state-of-the-art techniques.
Multi-View Stochastic Block Models
Authors: Vincent Cohen-Addad; Tommaso d'Orsi; Silvio Lattanzi; Rajai Nasser
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Graph clustering is a central topic in unsupervised learning with a multitude of practical applications. In recent years, multi-view graph clustering has gained a lot of attention for its applicability to real-world instances where one often has access to multiple data sources. In this paper we formalize a new family of models, called *multi-view stochastic block models* that capture this setting. For this model, we first study efficient algorithms that naively work on the union of multiple graphs. Then, we introduce a new efficient algorithm that provably outperforms previous approaches by analyzing the structure of each graph separately. Finally, we complement our results with an information-theoretic lower bound studying the limits of what can be done in this model.
SiT: Symmetry-invariant Transformers for Generalisation in Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Matthias Weissenbacher; Rishabh Agarwal; Yoshinobu Kawahara
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: An open challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) is the effective deployment of a trained policy to new or slightly different situations as well as semantically-similar environments. We introduce **S**ymmetry-**I**nvariant **T**ransformer (**SiT**), a scalable vision transformer (ViT) that leverages both local and global data patterns in a self-supervised manner to improve generalisation. Central to our approach is Graph Symmetric Attention, which refines the traditional self-attention mechanism to preserve graph symmetries, resulting in invariant and equivariant latent representations. We showcase SiT's superior generalization over ViTs on MiniGrid and Procgen RL benchmarks, and its sample efficiency on Atari 100k and CIFAR10.
Boximator: Generating Rich and Controllable Motions for Video Synthesis
Authors: Jiawei Wang; Yuchen Zhang; Jiaxin Zou; Yan Zeng; Guoqiang Wei; Liping Yuan; Hang Li
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Generating rich and controllable motion is a pivotal challenge in video synthesis. We propose *Boximator*, a new approach for fine-grained motion control. Boximator introduces two constraint types: *hard box* and *soft box*. Users select objects in the conditional frame using hard boxes and then use either type of boxes to roughly or rigorously define the object’s position, shape, or motion path in future frames. Boximator functions as a plug-in for existing video diffusion models. Its training process preserves the base model’s knowledge by freezing the original weights and training only the control module. To address training challenges, we introduce a novel *self-tracking* technique that greatly simplifies the learning of box-object correlations. Empirically, Boximator achieves state-of-the-art video quality (FVD) scores, improving on two base models, and further enhanced after incorporating box constraints. Its robust motion controllability is validated by drastic increases in the bounding box alignment metric. Human evaluation also shows that users favor Boximator generation results over the base model.
TSLANet: Rethinking Transformers for Time Series Representation Learning
Authors: Emadeldeen Eldele; Mohamed Ragab; Zhenghua Chen; Min Wu; Xiaoli Li
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Time series data, characterized by its intrinsic long and short-range dependencies, poses a unique challenge across analytical applications. While Transformer-based models excel at capturing long-range dependencies, they face limitations in noise sensitivity, computational efficiency, and overfitting with smaller datasets. In response, we introduce a novel **T**ime **S**eries **L**ightweight **A**daptive **Net**work (**TSLANet**), as a universal convolutional model for diverse time series tasks. Specifically, we propose an Adaptive Spectral Block, harnessing Fourier analysis to enhance feature representation and to capture both long-term and short-term interactions while mitigating noise via adaptive thresholding. Additionally, we introduce an Interactive Convolution Block and leverage self-supervised learning to refine the capacity of TSLANet for decoding complex temporal patterns and improve its robustness on different datasets. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that TSLANet outperforms state-of-the-art models in various tasks spanning classification, forecasting, and anomaly detection, showcasing its resilience and adaptability across a spectrum of noise levels and data sizes. The code is available at https://github.com/emadeldeen24/TSLANet.
Bring Your Own (Non-Robust) Algorithm to Solve Robust MDPs by Estimating The Worst Kernel
Authors: Uri Gadot; Kaixin Wang; Navdeep Kumar; Kfir Yehuda Levy; Shie Mannor
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) provide a framework for sequential decision-making that is robust to perturbations on the transition kernel. However, current RMDP methods are often limited to small-scale problems, hindering their use in high-dimensional domains. To bridge this gap, we present EWoK, a novel online approach to solve RMDP that Estimates the Worst transition Kernel to learn robust policies. Unlike previous works that regularize the policy or value updates, EWoK achieves robustness by simulating the worst scenarios for the agent while retaining complete flexibility in the learning process. Notably, EWoK can be applied on top of any off-the-shelf non-robust RL algorithm, enabling easy scaling to high-dimensional domains. Our experiments, spanning from simple Cartpole to high-dimensional DeepMind Control Suite environments, demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of the EWoK paradigm as a practical method for learning robust policies.
Few-shot Adaptation to Distribution Shifts By Mixing Source and Target Embeddings
Authors: Yihao Xue; Ali Payani; Yu Yang; Baharan Mirzasoleiman
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Pretrained machine learning models need to be adapted to distribution shifts when deployed in new target environments. When obtaining labeled data from the target distribution is expensive, few-shot adaptation with only a few examples from the target distribution becomes essential. In this work, we propose MixPro, a lightweight and highly data-efficient approach for few-shot adaptation. MixPro first generates a relatively large dataset by mixing (linearly combining) pre-trained embeddings of large source data with those of the few target examples. This process preserves important features of both source and target distributions, while mitigating the specific noise in the small target data. Then, it trains a linear classifier on the mixed embeddings to effectively adapts the model to the target distribution without overfitting the small target data. Theoretically, we demonstrate the advantages of MixPro over previous methods. Our experiments, conducted across various model architectures on 8 datasets featuring different types of distribution shifts, reveal that MixPro can outperform baselines by as much as 7%, with only 2-4 target examples.
Toward Availability Attacks in 3D Point Clouds
Authors: Yifan Zhu; Yibo Miao; Yinpeng Dong; Xiao-Shan Gao
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Despite the great progress of 3D vision, data privacy and security issues in 3D deep learning are not explored systematically. In the domain of 2D images, many availability attacks have been proposed to prevent data from being illicitly learned by unauthorized deep models. However, unlike images represented on a fixed dimensional grid, point clouds are characterized as unordered and unstructured sets, posing a significant challenge in designing an effective availability attack for 3D deep learning. In this paper, we theoretically show that extending 2D availability attacks directly to 3D point clouds under distance regularization is susceptible to the degeneracy, rendering the generated poisons weaker or even ineffective. This is because in bi-level optimization, introducing regularization term can result in update directions out of control. To address this issue, we propose a novel Feature Collision Error-Minimization (FC-EM) method, which creates additional shortcuts in the feature space, inducing different update directions to prevent the degeneracy of bi-level optimization. Moreover, we provide a theoretical analysis that demonstrates the effectiveness of the FC-EM attack. Extensive experiments on typical point cloud datasets, 3D intracranial aneurysm medical dataset, and 3D face dataset verify the superiority and practicality of our approach.
A Study of First-Order Methods with a Deterministic Relative-Error Gradient Oracle
Authors: Nadav Hallak; Kfir Yehuda Levy
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: This paper studies the theoretical guarantees of the classical projected gradient and conditional gradient methods applied to constrained optimization problems with biased relative-error gradient oracles. These oracles are used in various settings, such as distributed optimization systems or derivative-free optimization, and are particularly common when gradients are compressed, quantized, or estimated via finite differences computations. Several settings are investigated: Optimization over the box with a coordinate-wise erroneous gradient oracle, optimization over a general compact convex set, and three more specific scenarios. Convergence guarantees are established with respect to the relative-error magnitude, and in particular, we show that the conditional gradient is invariant to relative-error when applied over the box with a coordinate-wise erroneous gradient oracle, and the projected gradient maintains its convergence guarantees when optimizing a nonconvex objective function.
Mapping the Multiverse of Latent Representations
Authors: Jeremy Wayland; Corinna Coupette; Bastian Rieck
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Echoing recent calls to counter reliability and robustness concerns in machine learning via *multiverse analysis*, we present PRESTO, a principled framework for *mapping the multiverse* of machine-learning models that rely on *latent representations*. Although such models enjoy widespread adoption, the variability in their embeddings remains poorly understood, resulting in unnecessary complexity and untrustworthy representations. Our framework uses *persistent homology* to characterize the latent spaces arising from different combinations of diverse machine-learning methods, (hyper)parameter configurations, and datasets, allowing us to measure their pairwise *(dis)similarity* and statistically reason about their *distributions*. As we demonstrate both theoretically and empirically, our pipeline preserves desirable properties of collections of latent representations, and it can be leveraged to perform sensitivity analysis, detect anomalous embeddings, or efficiently and effectively navigate hyperparameter search spaces.
A connection between Tempering and Entropic Mirror Descent
Authors: Nicolas Chopin; Francesca Crucinio; Anna Korba
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: This paper explores the connections between tempering (for Sequential Monte Carlo; SMC) and entropic mirror descent to sample from a target probability distribution whose unnormalized density is known. We establish that tempering SMC corresponds to entropic mirror descent applied to the reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence and obtain convergence rates for the tempering iterates. Our result motivates the tempering iterates from an optimization point of view, showing that tempering can be seen as a descent scheme of the KL divergence with respect to the Fisher-Rao geometry, in contrast to Langevin dynamics that perform descent of the KL with respect to the Wasserstein-2 geometry. We exploit the connection between tempering and mirror descent iterates to justify common practices in SMC and derive adaptive tempering rules that improve over other alternative benchmarks in the literature.
What is Dataset Distillation Learning?
Authors: William Yang; Ye Zhu; Zhiwei Deng; Olga Russakovsky
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Dataset distillation has emerged as a strategy to overcome the hurdles associated with large datasets by learning a compact set of synthetic data that retains essential information from the original dataset. While distilled data can be used to train high performing models, little is understood about how the information is stored. In this study, we posit and answer three questions about the behavior, representativeness, and point-wise information content of distilled data. We reveal distilled data cannot serve as a substitute for real data during training outside the standard evaluation setting for dataset distillation. Additionally, the distillation process retains high task performance by compressing information related to the early training dynamics of real models. Finally, we provide an framework for interpreting distilled data and reveal that individual distilled data points contain meaningful semantic information. This investigation sheds light on the intricate nature of distilled data, providing a better understanding on how they can be effectively utilized.
DFlow: A Generative Model Combining Denoising AutoEncoder and Normalizing Flow for High Fidelity Waveform Generation
Authors: Chenfeng Miao; Qingying Zhu; Minchuan Chen; Wei Hu; Zijian Li; Shaojun Wang; Jing Xiao
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: In this work, we present DFlow, a novel generative framework that combines Normalizing Flow (NF) with a Denoising AutoEncoder (DAE), for high-fidelity waveform generation. With a tactfully designed structure, DFlow seamlessly integrates the capabilities of both NF and DAE, resulting in a significantly improved performance compared to the standard NF models. Experimental results showcase DFlow's superiority, achieving the highest MOS score among the existing methods on commonly used datasets and the fastest synthesis speed among all likelihood models. We further demonstrate the generalization ability of DFlow by generating high-quality out-of-distribution audio samples, such as singing and music audio. Additionally, we extend the model capacity of DFlow by scaling up both the model size and training set size. Our large-scale universal vocoder, DFlow-XL, achieves highly competitive performance against the best universal vocoder, BigVGAN.
Learning Exceptional Subgroups by End-to-End Maximizing KL-Divergence
Authors: Sascha Xu; Nils Philipp Walter; Janis Kalofolias; Jilles Vreeken
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Spotlight)

Abstract: Finding and describing sub-populations that are exceptional in terms of a target property has important applications in many scientific disciplines, from identifying disadvantaged demographic groups in census data to finding conductive molecules within gold nanoparticles. Current approaches to finding such subgroups require pre-discretized predictive variables, do not permit non-trivial target distributions, do not scale to large datasets, and struggle to find diverse results. To address these limitations, we propose SYFLOW, an end-to-end optimizable approach in which we leverage normalizing flows to model arbitrary target distributions and introduce a novel neural layer that results in easily interpretable subgroup descriptions. We demonstrate on synthetic data, real-world data, and via a case study, that SYFLOW reliably finds highly exceptional subgroups accompanied by insightful descriptions.
Better Safe than Sorry: Pre-training CLIP against Targeted Data Poisoning and Backdoor Attacks
Authors: Wenhan Yang; Jingdong Gao; Baharan Mirzasoleiman
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) on large image-caption datasets has achieved remarkable success in zero-shot classification and enabled transferability to new domains. However, CLIP is extremely more vulnerable to targeted data poisoning and backdoor attacks compared to supervised learning. Perhaps surprisingly, poisoning 0.0001% of CLIP pre-training data is enough to make targeted data poisoning attacks successful. This is four orders of magnitude smaller than what is required to poison supervised models. Despite this vulnerability, existing methods are very limited in defending CLIP models during pre-training. In this work, we propose a strong defense, SAFECLIP, to safely pre-train CLIP against targeted data poisoning and backdoor attacks. SAFECLIP warms up the model by applying unimodal contrastive learning (CL) on image and text modalities separately. Then, it divides the data into safe and risky sets by applying a Gaussian Mixture Model to the cosine similarity of image-caption pair representations. SAFECLIP pre-trains the model by applying the CLIP loss to the safe set and applying unimodal CL to image and text modalities of the risky set separately. By gradually increasing the size of the safe set during pre-training, SAFECLIP effectively breaks targeted data poisoning and backdoor attacks without harming the CLIP performance. Our extensive experiments on CC3M, Visual Genome, and MSCOCO demonstrate that SAFECLIP significantly reduces the success rate of targeted data poisoning attacks from 93.75% to 0% and that of various backdoor attacks from up to 100% to 0%, without harming CLIP’s performance.
Conditional Normalizing Flows for Active Learning of Coarse-Grained Molecular Representations
Authors: Henrik Schopmans; Pascal Friederich
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Efficient sampling of the Boltzmann distribution of molecular systems is a long-standing challenge. Recently, instead of generating long molecular dynamics simulations, generative machine learning methods such as normalizing flows have been used to learn the Boltzmann distribution directly, without samples. However, this approach is susceptible to mode collapse and thus often does not explore the full configurational space. In this work, we address this challenge by separating the problem into two levels, the fine-grained and coarse-grained degrees of freedom. A normalizing flow conditioned on the coarse-grained space yields a probabilistic connection between the two levels. To explore the configurational space, we employ coarse-grained simulations with active learning which allows us to update the flow and make all-atom potential energy evaluations only when necessary. Using alanine dipeptide as an example, we show that our methods obtain a speedup to molecular dynamics simulations of approximately $15.9$ to $216.2$ compared to the speedup of $4.5$ of the current state-of-the-art machine learning approach.
Geometric Active Exploration in Markov Decision Processes: the Benefit of Abstraction
Authors: Riccardo De Santi; Federico Arangath Joseph; Noah Liniger; Mirco Mutti; Andreas Krause
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: How can a scientist use a Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm to design experiments over a dynamical system's state space? In the case of finite and Markovian systems, an area called *Active Exploration* (AE) relaxes the optimization problem of experiments design into Convex RL, a generalization of RL admitting a wider notion of reward. Unfortunately, this framework is currently not scalable and the potential of AE is hindered by the vastness of experiments spaces typical of scientific discovery applications. However, these spaces are often endowed with natural geometries, e.g., permutation invariance in molecular design, that an agent could leverage to improve the statistical and computational efficiency of AE. To achieve this, we bridge AE and MDP homomorphisms, which offer a way to exploit known geometric structures via abstraction. Towards this goal, we make two fundamental contributions: we extend MDP homomorphisms formalism to Convex RL, and we present, to the best of our knowledge, the first analysis that formally captures the benefit of abstraction via homomorphisms on sample efficiency. Ultimately, we propose the Geometric Active Exploration (GAE) algorithm, which we analyse theoretically and experimentally in environments motivated by problems in scientific discovery.
Spike Distance Function as a Learning Objective for Spike Prediction
Authors: Kevin Doran; Marvin Seifert; Carola A. M. Yovanovich; Tom Baden
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Approaches to predicting neuronal spike responses commonly use a Poisson learning objective. This objective quantizes responses into spike counts within a fixed summation interval, typically on the order of 10 to 100 milliseconds in duration; however, neuronal responses are often time accurate down to a few milliseconds, and Poisson models struggle to precisely model them at these timescales. We propose the concept of a spike distance function that maps points in time to the temporal distance to the nearest spike. We show that neural networks can be trained to approximate spike distance functions, and we present an efficient algorithm for inferring spike trains from the outputs of these models. Using recordings of chicken and frog retinal ganglion cells responding to visual stimuli, we compare the performance of our approach to that of Poisson models trained with various summation intervals. We show that our approach outperforms the use of Poisson models at spike train inference.
Leveraging (Biased) Information: Multi-armed Bandits with Offline Data
Authors: Wang Chi Cheung; Lixing Lyu
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Spotlight)

Abstract: We leverage offline data to facilitate online learning in stochastic multi-armed bandits. The probability distributions that govern the offline data and the online rewards can be different. Without any non-trival upper bound on their difference, we show that no non-anticipatory policy can out-perform the UCB policy by (Auer et al. 2002), even in the presence of offline data. In complement, we propose an online policy MIN-UCB, which outperforms UCB when a non-trivial upper bound is given. MIN-UCB adaptively chooses to utilize the offline data when they are deemed informative, and to ignore them otherwise. MIN-UCB is shown to be tight in terms of both instance indepedent and dependent regret bounds. Finally, we corroborate the theoretical results with numerical experiments.