GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
NVFi: Neural Velocity Fields for 3D Physics Learning from Dynamic Videos
Authors: Jinxi Li; Ziyang Song; Bo Yang
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: In this paper, we aim to model 3D scene dynamics from multi-view videos. Unlike the majority of existing works which usually focus on the common task of novel view synthesis within the training time period, we propose to simultaneously learn the geometry, appearance, and physical velocity of 3D scenes only from video frames, such that multiple desirable applications can be supported, including future frame extrapolation, unsupervised 3D semantic scene decomposition, and dynamic motion transfer. Our method consists of three major components, 1) the keyframe dynamic radiance field, 2) the interframe velocity field, and 3) a joint keyframe and interframe optimization module which is the core of our framework to effectively  train both networks. To validate our method, we further introduce two dynamic 3D datasets: 1) Dynamic Object dataset, and 2) Dynamic Indoor Scene dataset. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple datasets, demonstrating the superior performance of our method over all baselines, particularly in the critical tasks of future frame extrapolation and unsupervised 3D semantic scene decomposition.
Distribution-Free Model-Agnostic Regression Calibration via Nonparametric Methods
Authors: Shang Liu; Zhongze Cai; Xiaocheng Li
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: In this paper, we consider the uncertainty quantification problem for regression models. Specifically, we consider an individual calibration objective for characterizing the quantiles of the prediction model. While such an objective is well-motivated from downstream tasks such as newsvendor cost, the existing methods have been largely heuristic and lack of statistical guarantee in terms of individual calibration. We show via simple examples that the existing methods focusing on population-level calibration guarantees such as average calibration or sharpness can lead to harmful and unexpected results. We propose simple nonparametric calibration methods that are agnostic of the underlying prediction model and enjoy both computational efficiency and statistical consistency. Our approach enables a better understanding of the possibility of individual calibration, and we establish matching upper and lower bounds for the calibration error of our proposed methods. Technically, our analysis combines the nonparametric analysis with a covering number argument for parametric analysis, which advances the existing theoretical analyses in the literature of nonparametric density estimation and quantile bandit problems. Importantly, the nonparametric perspective sheds new theoretical insights into regression calibration in terms of the curse of dimensionality and reconciles the existing results on the impossibility of individual calibration. To our knowledge, we make the first effort to reach both individual calibration and finite-sample guarantee with minimal assumptions in terms of conformal prediction. Numerical experiments show the advantage of such a simple approach under various metrics, and also under covariates shift. We hope our work provides a simple benchmark and a starting point of theoretical ground for future research on regression calibration.
Near-Linear Time Algorithm for the Chamfer Distance
Authors: Ainesh Bakshi; Piotr Indyk; Rajesh Jayaram; Sandeep Silwal; Erik Waingarten
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: For any two point sets $A,B \subset \mathbb{R}^d$ of size up to $n$, the Chamfer distance from $A$ to $B$ is defined as $\texttt{CH}(A,B)=\sum_{a \in A} \min_{b \in B} d_X(a,b)$, where $d_X$ is the underlying distance measure (e.g., the Euclidean or Manhattan distance). The Chamfer distance is a popular measure of dissimilarity between point clouds, used in many machine learning, computer vision, and graphics applications, and admits a straightforward $O(d n^2)$-time brute force algorithm. Further, Chamfer distance is often used as a  proxy for the more computationally demanding Earth-Mover (Optimal Transport) Distance. However, the \emph{quadratic} dependence on $n$ in the running time  makes the naive approach intractable for large datasets.

We overcome this bottleneck and present the first $(1+\epsilon)$-approximate algorithm for estimating Chamfer distance with a near-linear running time. Specifically, our algorithm runs in time $O(nd \log (n)/\epsilon^2)$ and is implementable. Our experiments demonstrate that it is both accurate and fast on large high-dimensional datasets. We believe that our algorithm will open new avenues for analyzing large high-dimensional point clouds. We also give evidence that if the goal is to report a $(1+\epsilon)$-approximate mapping from $A$ to $B$ (as opposed to just its value), then any sub-quadratic  time algorithm is unlikely to exist.
Language Model Tokenizers Introduce Unfairness Between Languages
Authors: Aleksandar Petrov; Emanuele La Malfa; Philip Torr; Adel Bibi
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Recent language models have shown impressive multilingual performance, even when not explicitly trained for it.
Despite this, there are concerns about the quality of their outputs across different languages.
In this paper, we show how disparity in the treatment of different languages arises at the tokenization stage, well before a model is even invoked.
The same text translated into different languages can have drastically different tokenization lengths, with differences up to 15 times in some cases.
These disparities persist even for tokenizers that are intentionally trained for multilingual support.
Character-level and byte-level models also exhibit over 4 times the difference in the encoding length for some language pairs.
This induces unfair treatment for some language communities in regard to the cost of accessing commercial language services, the processing time and latency, as well as the amount of content that can be provided as context to the models.
Therefore, we make the case that we should train future language models using multilingually fair subword tokenizers.
History Filtering in Imperfect Information Games: Algorithms and Complexity
Authors: Christopher Solinas; Doug Rebstock; Nathan R. Sturtevant; Michael Buro
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Historically applied exclusively to perfect information games, depth-limited search with value functions has been key to recent advances in AI for imperfect information games. Most prominent approaches with strong theoretical guarantees require *subgame decomposition* - a process in which a subgame is computed from public information and player beliefs. However, subgame decomposition can itself require non-trivial computations, and its tractability depends on the existence of efficient algorithms for either full enumeration or generation of the histories that form the root of the subgame. Despite this, no formal analysis of the tractability of such computations has been established in prior work, and application domains have often consisted of games, such as poker, for which enumeration is trivial on modern hardware.

Applying these ideas to more complex domains requires understanding their cost. In this work, we introduce and analyze the computational aspects and tractability of filtering histories for subgame decomposition. We show that constructing a single history from the root of the subgame is generally intractable, and then provide a necessary and sufficient condition for efficient enumeration. We also introduce a novel Markov Chain Monte Carlo-based generation algorithm for trick-taking card games - a domain where enumeration is often prohibitively expensive. Our experiments demonstrate its improved scalability in the trick-taking card game *Oh Hell*.
These contributions clarify when and how depth-limited search via subgame decomposition can be an effective tool for sequential decision-making in imperfect information settings.
Adversarial Training for Graph Neural Networks: Pitfalls, Solutions, and New Directions
Authors: Lukas Gosch; Simon Geisler; Daniel Sturm; Bertrand Charpentier; Daniel Zügner; Stephan Günnemann
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Despite its success in the image domain, adversarial training did not (yet) stand out as an effective defense for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) against graph structure perturbations. In the pursuit of fixing adversarial training  (1) we show and overcome fundamental theoretical as well as practical limitations of the adopted graph learning setting in prior work; (2) we reveal that flexible GNNs based on learnable graph diffusion are able to adjust to adversarial perturbations, while the learned message passing scheme is naturally interpretable; (3) we introduce the first attack for structure perturbations that, while targeting multiple nodes at once, is capable of handling global (graph-level) as well as local (node-level) constraints. Including these contributions, we demonstrate that adversarial training is a state-of-the-art defense against adversarial structure perturbations.
Fast Trainable Projection for Robust Fine-tuning
Authors: Junjiao Tian; Yen-Cheng Liu; James Smith; Zsolt Kira
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Robust fine-tuning aims to achieve competitive in-distribution (ID) performance while maintaining the out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness of a pre-trained model when transferring it to a downstream task. Recently, projected gradient descent has been successfully used in robust fine-tuning by constraining the deviation from the initialization of the fine-tuned model explicitly through projection. However, algorithmically, two limitations prevent this method from being adopted more widely, scalability and efficiency.  In this paper, we propose a new projection-based fine-tuning algorithm, Fast Trainable Projection (FTP) for computationally efficient learning of per-layer projection constraints, resulting in an average 35% speedup on our benchmarks compared to prior works. FTP can be combined with existing optimizers such as AdamW, and be used in a plug-and-play fashion. Finally, we show that FTP is a special instance of hyper-optimizers that tune the hyper-parameters of optimizers in a learnable manner through nested differentiation. Empirically, we show superior robustness on OOD datasets, including domain shifts and natural corruptions, across four different vision tasks with five different pre-trained models. Additionally, we demonstrate that FTP is broadly applicable and beneficial to other learning scenarios such as low-label and continual learning settings thanks to its easy adaptability. The code will be available at https://github.com/GT-RIPL/FTP.git.
MultiFusion: Fusing Pre-Trained Models for Multi-Lingual, Multi-Modal Image Generation
Authors: Marco Bellagente; Manuel Brack; Hannah Benita Teufel; Felix Friedrich; Björn Deiseroth; Constantin Eichenberg; Andrew Dai; Robert John Nicholas Baldock; Souradeep Nanda; Koen Oostermeijer; Andres Felipe Cruz-Salinas; Patrick Schramowski; Kristian Kersting; Samuel Weinbach
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: The recent popularity of text-to-image diffusion models (DM) can largely be attributed to the intuitive interface they provide to users. The intended generation can be expressed in natural language, with the model producing faithful interpretations of text prompts. However, expressing complex or nuanced ideas in text alone can be difficult. To ease image generation, we propose MultiFusion that allows one to express complex and nuanced concepts with arbitrarily interleaved inputs of multiple modalities and languages. MultiFusion leverages pre-trained models and aligns them for integration into a cohesive system, thereby avoiding the need for extensive training from scratch. Our experimental results demonstrate the efficient transfer of capabilities from individual modules to the downstream model. Specifically, the fusion of all independent components allows the image generation module to utilize multilingual, interleaved multimodal inputs despite being trained solely on monomodal data in a single language.
Entropic Neural Optimal Transport via Diffusion Processes
Authors: Nikita Gushchin; Alexander Kolesov; Alexander Korotin; Dmitry P. Vetrov; Evgeny Burnaev
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 oral)

Abstract: We propose a novel neural algorithm for the fundamental problem of computing the entropic optimal transport (EOT) plan between probability distributions which are accessible by samples. Our algorithm is based on the saddle point reformulation of the dynamic version of EOT which is known as the Schrödinger Bridge problem. In contrast to the prior methods for large-scale EOT, our algorithm is end-to-end and consists of a single learning step, has fast inference procedure, and allows handling small values of the entropy regularization coefficient which is of particular importance in some applied problems. Empirically, we show the performance of the method on several large-scale EOT tasks. The code for the ENOT solver can be found at https://github.com/ngushchin/EntropicNeuralOptimalTransport
Semi-Supervised Domain Generalization with Known and Unknown Classes
Authors: Lei Zhang; Ji-Fu Li; Wei Wang
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 spotlight)

Abstract: Semi-Supervised Domain Generalization (SSDG) aims to learn a model that is generalizable to an unseen target domain with only a few labels, and most existing SSDG methods assume that unlabeled training and testing samples are all known classes. However, a more realistic scenario is that known classes may be mixed with some unknown classes in unlabeled training and testing data. To deal with such a scenario, we propose the Class-Wise Adaptive Exploration and Exploitation (CWAEE) method. In particular, we explore unlabeled training data by using one-vs-rest classifiers and class-wise adaptive thresholds to detect known and unknown classes, and exploit them by adopting consistency regularization on augmented samples based on Fourier Transformation to improve the unseen domain generalization. The experiments conducted on real-world datasets verify the effectiveness and superiority of our method.
Better Correlation and Robustness: A Distribution-Balanced Self-Supervised Learning Framework for Automatic Dialogue Evaluation
Authors: Peiwen Yuan; Xinglin Wang; Jiayi Shi; Bin Sun; Yiwei Li; Kan Li
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Turn-level dialogue evaluation models (TDEMs), using self-supervised learning (SSL) framework, have achieved state-of-the-art performance in open-domain dialogue evaluation. However, these models inevitably face two potential problems. First, they have low correlations with humans on medium coherence samples as the SSL framework often brings training data with unbalanced coherence distribution. Second, the SSL framework leads TDEM to nonuniform score distribution. There is a danger that the nonuniform score distribution will weaken the robustness of TDEM through our theoretical analysis. To tackle these problems, we propose Better Correlation and Robustness (BCR), a distribution-balanced self-supervised learning framework for TDEM. Given a dialogue dataset, BCR offers an effective training set reconstructing method to provide coherence-balanced training signals and further facilitate balanced evaluating abilities of TDEM. To get a uniform score distribution, a novel loss function is proposed, which can adjust adaptively according to the uniformity of score distribution estimated by kernel density estimation. Comprehensive experiments on 17 benchmark datasets show that vanilla BERT-base using BCR outperforms SOTA methods significantly by 11.3% on average. BCR also demonstrates strong generalization ability as it can lead multiple SOTA methods to attain better correlation and robustness.
Representation Learning via Consistent Assignment of Views over Random Partitions
Authors: Thalles Santos Silva; Adín Ramírez Rivera
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: We present Consistent Assignment of Views over Random Partitions (CARP), a self-supervised clustering method for representation learning of visual features. CARP learns prototypes in an end-to-end online fashion using gradient descent without additional non-differentiable modules to solve the cluster assignment problem. CARP optimizes a new pretext task based on random partitions of prototypes that regularizes the model and enforces consistency between views' assignments.  Additionally, our method improves training stability and prevents collapsed solutions in joint-embedding training. Through an extensive evaluation, we demonstrate that CARP's representations are suitable for learning downstream tasks. We evaluate CARP's representations capabilities in 17 datasets across many standard protocols, including linear evaluation, few-shot classification, $k$-NN, $k$-means, image retrieval, and copy detection. We compare CARP performance to 11 existing self-supervised methods. We extensively ablate our method and demonstrate that our proposed random partition pretext task improves the quality of the learned representations by devising multiple random classification tasks.
In transfer learning tasks, CARP achieves the best performance on average against many SSL methods trained for a longer time.
Drift doesn't Matter: Dynamic Decomposition with Diffusion Reconstruction for Unstable Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection
Authors: Chengsen Wang; Zirui Zhuang; Qi Qi; Jingyu Wang; Xingyu Wang; Haifeng Sun; Jianxin Liao
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Many unsupervised methods have recently been proposed for multivariate time series anomaly detection. However, existing works mainly focus on stable data yet often omit the drift generated from non-stationary environments, which may lead to numerous false alarms. We propose **D**ynamic **D**ecomposition with **D**iffusion **R**econstruction (D$^3$R), a novel anomaly detection network for real-world unstable data to fill the gap. D$^3$R tackles the drift via decomposition and reconstruction. In the decomposition procedure, we utilize data-time mix-attention to dynamically decompose long-period multivariate time series, overcoming the limitation of the local sliding window. The information bottleneck is critical yet difficult to determine in the reconstruction procedure. To avoid retraining once the bottleneck changes, we control it externally by noise diffusion and directly reconstruct the polluted data. The whole model can be trained end-to-end. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets demonstrate that D$^3$R significantly outperforms existing methods, with a 11% average relative improvement over the previous SOTA models.
Test-time Training for Matching-based Video Object Segmentation
Authors: Juliette Bertrand; Giorgos Kordopatis-Zilos; Yannis Kalantidis; Giorgos Tolias
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: The video object segmentation (VOS) task involves the segmentation of an object over time based on a single initial mask. Current state-of-the-art approaches use a memory of previously processed frames and rely on matching to estimate segmentation masks of subsequent frames. Lacking any adaptation mechanism, such methods are prone to test-time distribution shifts. This work focuses on matching-based VOS under distribution shifts such as video corruptions, stylization, and sim-to-real transfer. We explore test-time training strategies that are agnostic to the specific task as well as strategies that are designed specifically for VOS. This includes a variant based on mask cycle consistency tailored to matching-based VOS methods. The experimental results on common benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed test-time training yields significant improvements in performance. In particular for the sim-to-real scenario and despite using only a single test video, our approach manages to recover a substantial portion of the performance gain achieved through training on real videos. Additionally, we introduce DAVIS-C, an augmented version of the popular DAVIS test set, featuring extreme distribution shifts like image-/video-level corruptions and stylizations. Our results illustrate that test-time training enhances performance even in these challenging cases.
Data Augmentations for Improved (Large) Language Model Generalization
Authors: Amir Feder; Yoav Wald; Claudia Shi; Suchi Saria; David Blei
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: The reliance of text classifiers on spurious correlations can lead to poor generalization at deployment, raising concerns about their use in safety-critical domains such as healthcare. In this work, we propose to use counterfactual data augmentation, guided by knowledge of the causal structure of the data, to simulate interventions on spurious features and to learn more robust text classifiers. We show that this strategy is appropriate in prediction problems where the label is spuriously correlated with an attribute. Under the assumptions of such problems, we discuss the favorable sample complexity of counterfactual data augmentation, compared to importance re-weighting. Pragmatically, we match examples using auxiliary data, based on diff-in-diff methodology, and use a large language model (LLM) to represent a conditional probability of text. Through extensive experimentation on learning caregiver-invariant predictors of clinical diagnoses from medical narratives and on semi-synthetic data, we demonstrate that our method for simulating interventions improves out-of-distribution (OOD) accuracy compared to baseline invariant learning algorithms.
Revisiting Implicit Differentiation for Learning Problems in Optimal Control
Authors: Ming Xu; Timothy L Molloy; Stephen Gould
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: This paper proposes a new method for differentiating through optimal trajectories arising from non-convex, constrained discrete-time optimal control (COC) problems using the implicit function theorem (IFT). Previous works solve a differential Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) system for the trajectory derivative, and achieve this efficiently by solving an auxiliary Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) problem. In contrast, we directly evaluate the matrix equations which arise from applying variable elimination on the Lagrange multiplier terms in the (differential) KKT system. By appropriately accounting for the structure of the terms within the resulting equations, we show that the trajectory derivatives scale linearly with the number of timesteps. Furthermore, our approach allows for easy parallelization, significantly improved scalability with model size, direct computation of vector-Jacobian products and improved numerical stability compared to prior works. As an additional contribution, we unify prior works, addressing claims that computing trajectory derivatives using IFT scales quadratically with the number of timesteps. We evaluate our method on a both synthetic benchmark and four challenging, learning from demonstration benchmarks including a 6-DoF maneuvering quadrotor and 6-DoF rocket powered landing.