GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Generalizable Implicit Motion Modeling for Video Frame Interpolation
Authors: Zujin Guo; Wei Li; Chen Change Loy
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Motion modeling is critical in flow-based Video Frame Interpolation (VFI). Existing paradigms either consider linear combinations of bidirectional flows or directly predict bilateral flows for given timestamps without exploring favorable motion priors, thus lacking the capability of effectively modeling spatiotemporal dynamics in real-world videos. To address this limitation, in this study, we introduce Generalizable Implicit Motion Modeling (GIMM), a novel and effective approach to motion modeling for VFI. Specifically, to enable GIMM as an effective motion modeling paradigm, we design a motion encoding pipeline to model spatiotemporal motion latent from bidirectional flows extracted from pre-trained flow estimators, effectively representing input-specific motion priors. Then, we implicitly predict arbitrary-timestep optical flows within two adjacent input frames via an adaptive coordinate-based neural network, with spatiotemporal coordinates and motion latent as inputs. Our GIMM can be easily integrated with existing flow-based VFI works by supplying accurately modeled motion. We show that GIMM performs better than the current state of the art on standard VFI benchmarks.
CHASE: Learning Convex Hull Adaptive Shift for Skeleton-based Multi-Entity Action Recognition
Authors: Yuhang Wen; Mengyuan Liu; Songtao Wu; Beichen Ding
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Skeleton-based multi-entity action recognition is a challenging task aiming to identify interactive actions or group activities involving multiple diverse entities. Existing models for individuals often fall short in this task due to the inherent distribution discrepancies among entity skeletons, leading to suboptimal backbone optimization. To this end, we introduce a Convex Hull Adaptive Shift based multi-Entity action recognition method (CHASE), which mitigates inter-entity distribution gaps and unbiases subsequent backbones. Specifically, CHASE comprises a learnable parameterized network and an auxiliary objective. The parameterized network achieves plausible, sample-adaptive repositioning of skeleton sequences through two key components. First, the Implicit Convex Hull Constrained Adaptive Shift ensures that the new origin of the coordinate system is within the skeleton convex hull. Second, the Coefficient Learning Block provides a lightweight parameterization of the mapping from skeleton sequences to their specific coefficients in convex combinations. Moreover, to guide the optimization of this network for discrepancy minimization, we propose the Mini-batch Pair-wise Maximum Mean Discrepancy as the additional objective. CHASE operates as a sample-adaptive normalization method to mitigate inter-entity distribution discrepancies, thereby reducing data bias and improving the subsequent classifier's multi-entity action recognition performance. Extensive experiments on six datasets, including NTU Mutual 11/26, H2O, Assembly101, Collective Activity and Volleyball, consistently verify our approach by seamlessly adapting to single-entity backbones and boosting their performance in multi-entity scenarios. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Necolizer/CHASE .
DECRL: A Deep Evolutionary Clustering Jointed Temporal Knowledge Graph Representation Learning Approach
Authors: Qian Chen; Ling Chen
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Temporal Knowledge Graph (TKG) representation learning aims to map temporal evolving entities and relations to embedded representations in a continuous low-dimensional vector space. However, existing approaches cannot capture the temporal evolution of high-order correlations in TKGs. To this end, we propose a **D**eep **E**volutionary **C**lustering jointed temporal knowledge graph **R**epresentation **L**earning approach (**DECRL**). Specifically, a deep evolutionary clustering module is proposed to capture the temporal evolution of high-order correlations among entities. Furthermore, a cluster-aware unsupervised alignment mechanism is introduced to ensure the precise one-to-one alignment of soft overlapping clusters across timestamps, thereby maintaining the temporal smoothness of clusters. In addition, an implicit correlation encoder is introduced to capture latent correlations between any pair of clusters under the guidance of a global graph. Extensive experiments on seven real-world datasets demonstrate that DECRL achieves the state-of-the-art performances, outperforming the best baseline by an average of 9.53\%, 12.98\%, 10.42\%, and 14.68\% in MRR, Hits@1, Hits@3, and Hits@10, respectively.
Ada-MSHyper: Adaptive Multi-Scale Hypergraph Transformer for Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Zongjiang Shang; Ling Chen; Binqing Wu; Dongliang Cui
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Although transformer-based methods have achieved great success in multi-scale temporal pattern interaction modeling, two key challenges limit their further development: (1) Individual time points contain less semantic information, and leveraging attention to model pair-wise interactions may cause the information utilization bottleneck. (2) Multiple inherent temporal variations (e.g., rising, falling, and fluctuating) entangled in temporal patterns. To this end, we propose Adaptive Multi-Scale Hypergraph Transformer (Ada-MSHyper) for time series forecasting. Specifically, an adaptive hypergraph learning module is designed to provide foundations for modeling group-wise interactions, then a multi-scale interaction module is introduced to promote more comprehensive pattern interactions at different scales. In addition, a node and hyperedge constraint mechanism is introduced to cluster nodes with similar semantic information and differentiate the temporal variations within each scales. Extensive experiments on 11 real-world datasets demonstrate that Ada-MSHyper achieves state-of-the-art performance, reducing prediction errors by an average of 4.56%, 10.38%, and 4.97% in MSE for long-range, short-range, and ultra-long-range time series forecasting, respectively.  Code is available at https://github.com/shangzongjiang/Ada-MSHyper.
Local Superior Soups: A Catalyst for Model Merging in Cross-Silo Federated Learning
Authors: Minghui Chen; Meirui Jiang; Xin Zhang; Qi Dou; Zehua Wang; Xiaoxiao Li
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Federated learning (FL) is a learning paradigm that enables collaborative training of models using decentralized data. 
Recently, the utilization of pre-trained weight initialization in FL has been demonstrated to effectively improve model performance. 
However, the evolving complexity of current pre-trained models, characterized by a substantial increase in parameters, markedly intensifies the challenges associated with communication rounds required for their adaptation to FL. 
To address these communication cost issues and increase the performance of pre-trained model adaptation in FL, we propose an innovative model interpolation-based local training technique called ``Local Superior Soups.''
Our method enhances local training across different clients, encouraging the exploration of a connected low-loss basin within a few communication rounds through regularized model interpolation. 
This approach acts as a catalyst for the seamless adaptation of pre-trained models in in FL.
We demonstrated its effectiveness and efficiency across diverse widely-used FL datasets.
MomentumSMoE: Integrating Momentum into Sparse Mixture of Experts
Authors: Rachel Teo; Tan Minh Nguyen
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Sparse Mixture of Experts (SMoE) has become the key to unlocking unparalleled scalability in deep learning. SMoE has the potential to exponentially increase in parameter count while maintaining the efficiency of the model by only activating a small subset of these parameters for a given sample. However, it has been observed that SMoE suffers from unstable training and has difficulty adapting to new distributions, leading to the model's lack of robustness to data contamination. To overcome these limitations, we first establish a connection between the dynamics of the expert representations in SMoEs and gradient descent on a multi-objective optimization problem. Leveraging our framework, we then integrate momentum into SMoE and propose a new family of SMoEs, named MomentumSMoE. We theoretically prove and numerically validate that MomentumSMoE is more stable and robust than SMoE. In particular, we verify the advantages of MomentumSMoE over SMoE on a variety of practical tasks including ImageNet-1K object recognition and WikiText-103 language modeling. We demonstrate the applicability of MomentumSMoE to many types of SMoE models, including those in the Sparse MoE model for vision (V-MoE) and the Generalist Language Model (GLaM). We also show that other advanced momentum-based optimization methods, such as Adam, can be easily incorporated into the MomentumSMoE framework for designing new SMoE models with even better performance, almost negligible additional computation cost, and simple implementations.
Why Go Full? Elevating Federated Learning Through Partial Network Updates
Authors: Haolin Wang; Xuefeng Liu; Jianwei Niu; Wenkai Guo; Shaojie Tang
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Federated learning is a distributed machine learning paradigm designed to protect user data privacy, which has been successfully implemented across various scenarios. In traditional federated learning, the entire parameter set of local models is updated and averaged in each training round. Although this full network update method maximizes knowledge acquisition and sharing for each model layer, it prevents the layers of the global model from cooperating effectively to complete the tasks of each client, a challenge we refer to as layer mismatch. This mismatch problem recurs after every parameter averaging, consequently slowing down model convergence and degrading overall performance. To address the layer mismatch issue, we introduce the FedPart method, which restricts model updates to either a single layer or a few layers during each communication round. Furthermore, to maintain the efficiency of knowledge acquisition and sharing, we develop several strategies to select trainable layers in each round, including sequential updating and multi-round cycle training. Through both theoretical analysis and experiments, our findings demonstrate that the FedPart method significantly surpasses conventional full network update strategies in terms of convergence speed and accuracy, while also reducing communication and computational overheads.
Enhancing Chess Reinforcement Learning with Graph Representation
Authors: Tomas Rigaux; Hisashi Kashima
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Mastering games is a hard task, as games can be extremely complex, and still fundamentally different in structure from one another. While the AlphaZero algorithm has demonstrated an impressive ability to learn the rules and strategy of a large variety of games, ranging from Go and Chess, to Atari games, its reliance on extensive computational resources and rigid Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture limits its adaptability and scalability. A model trained to play on a $19\times 19$ Go board cannot be used to play on a smaller $13\times 13$ board, despite the similarity between the two Go variants.
In this paper, we focus on Chess, and explore using a more generic Graph-based Representation of a game state, rather than a grid-based one, to introduce a more general architecture based on Graph Neural Networks (GNN). We also expand the classical Graph Attention Network (GAT) layer to incorporate edge-features, to naturally provide a generic policy output format.
Our experiments, performed on smaller networks than the initial AlphaZero paper, show that this new architecture outperforms previous architectures with a similar number of parameters, being able to increase playing strength an order of magnitude faster. We also show that the model, when trained on a smaller $5\times 5$ variant of chess, is able to be quickly fine-tuned to play on regular $8\times 8$ chess, suggesting that this approach yields promising generalization abilities.
Our code is available at https://github.com/akulen/AlphaGateau.
Unveiling the Hidden Structure of Self-Attention via Kernel Principal Component Analysis
Authors: Rachel Teo; Tan Minh Nguyen
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: The remarkable success of transformers in sequence modeling tasks, spanning various applications in natural language processing and computer vision, is attributed to the critical role of self-attention. Similar to the development of most deep learning models, the construction of these attention mechanisms relies on heuristics and experience. In our work, we derive self-attention from kernel principal component analysis (kernel PCA) and show that self-attention projects its query vectors onto the principal component axes of its key matrix in a feature space. We then formulate the exact formula for the value matrix in self-attention, theoretically and empirically demonstrating that this value matrix captures the eigenvectors of the Gram matrix of the key vectors in self-attention. Leveraging our kernel PCA framework, we propose Attention with Robust Principal Components (RPC-Attention), a novel class of robust attention that is resilient to data contamination. We empirically demonstrate the advantages of RPC-Attention over softmax attention on the ImageNet-1K object classification, WikiText-103 language modeling, and ADE20K image segmentation task.
Jailbreaking Large Language Models Against Moderation Guardrails via Cipher Characters
Authors: Haibo Jin; Andy Zhou; Joe D. Menke; Haohan Wang
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically harmless but remain vulnerable to carefully crafted prompts known as ``jailbreaks'', which can bypass protective measures and induce harmful behavior. Recent advancements in LLMs have incorporated moderation guardrails that can filter outputs, which trigger processing errors for certain malicious questions. Existing red-teaming benchmarks often neglect to include questions that trigger moderation guardrails, making it difficult to evaluate jailbreak effectiveness. To address this issue, we introduce JAMBench, a harmful behavior benchmark designed to trigger and evaluate moderation guardrails. JAMBench involves 160 manually crafted instructions covering four major risk categories at multiple severity levels. Furthermore, we propose a jailbreak method, JAM (Jailbreak Against Moderation), designed to attack moderation guardrails using jailbreak prefixes to bypass input-level filters and a fine-tuned shadow model functionally equivalent to the guardrail model to generate cipher characters to bypass output-level filters. Our extensive experiments on four LLMs demonstrate that JAM achieves higher jailbreak success ($\sim$ $\times$ 19.88) and lower filtered-out rates ($\sim$ $\times$ 1/6) than baselines.
Multi-hypotheses Conditioned Point Cloud Diffusion for 3D Human Reconstruction from Occluded Images
Authors: Donghwan Kim; Tae-Kyun Kim
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: 3D human shape reconstruction under severe occlusion due to human-object or human-human interaction is a challenging problem. While implicit function methods capture detailed clothed shapes, they require aligned shape priors and or are weak at inpainting occluded regions given an image input. Parametric models i.e. SMPL, instead offer whole body shapes, however, are often misaligned with images. In this work, we propose a novel pipeline composed of a probabilistic SMPL model and point cloud diffusion for pixel-aligned detailed 3D human reconstruction under occlusion. Multiple hypotheses generated by the probabilistic SMPL method are conditioned via continuous 3D shape representations. Point cloud diffusion refines the distribution of 3D points fitted to both the multi-hypothesis shape condition and pixel-aligned image features, offering detailed clothed shapes and inpainting occluded parts of human bodies. In the experiments using the CAPE, MultiHuman and Hi4D datasets, the proposed method outperforms various SOTA methods based on SMPL, implicit functions, point cloud diffusion, and their combined, under synthetic and real occlusions. Our code is publicly available at https://donghwankim0101.github.io/projects/mhcdiff.
Functional Gradient Flows for Constrained Sampling
Authors: Shiyue Zhang; Longlin Yu; Ziheng Cheng; Cheng Zhang
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Recently, through a unified gradient flow perspective of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference (VI), particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs) have been proposed that tend to combine the best of both worlds. While typical ParVIs such as Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) approximate the gradient flow within a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), many attempts have been made recently to replace RKHS with more expressive function spaces, such as neural networks. While successful, these methods are mainly designed for sampling from unconstrained domains. In this paper, we offer a general solution to constrained sampling by introducing a boundary condition for the gradient flow which would confine the particles within the specific domain. This allows us to propose a new functional gradient ParVI method for constrained sampling, called *constrained functional gradient flow* (CFG), with provable continuous-time convergence in total variation (TV). We also present novel numerical strategies to handle the boundary integral term arising from the domain constraints. Our theory and experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
ReNO: Enhancing One-step Text-to-Image Models through Reward-based Noise Optimization
Authors: Luca Eyring; Shyamgopal Karthik; Karsten Roth; Alexey Dosovitskiy; Zeynep Akata
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Text-to-Image (T2I) models have made significant advancements in recent years, but they still struggle to accurately capture intricate details specified in complex compositional prompts. While fine-tuning T2I models with reward objectives has shown promise, it suffers from "reward hacking" and may not generalize well to unseen prompt distributions. In this work, we propose Reward-based Noise Optimization (ReNO), a novel approach that enhances T2I models at inference by optimizing the initial noise based on the signal from one or multiple human preference reward models. Remarkably, solving this optimization problem with gradient ascent for 50 iterations yields impressive results on four different one-step models across two competitive benchmarks, T2I-CompBench and GenEval. Within a computational budget of 20-50 seconds, ReNO-enhanced one-step models consistently surpass the performance of all current open-source Text-to-Image models. Extensive user studies demonstrate that our model is preferred nearly twice as often compared to the popular SDXL model and is on par with the proprietary Stable Diffusion 3 with 8B parameters. Moreover, given the same computational resources, a ReNO-optimized one-step model outperforms widely-used open-source models such as SDXL and PixArt-alpha, highlighting the efficiency and effectiveness of ReNO in enhancing T2I model performance at inference time.
Online Adaptation of Language Models with a Memory of Amortized Contexts
Authors: Jihoon Tack; Jaehyung Kim; Eric Mitchell; Jinwoo Shin; Yee Whye Teh; Jonathan Richard Schwarz
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Due to the rapid generation and dissemination of information, large language models (LLMs) quickly run out of date despite enormous development costs. To address the crucial need to keep models updated, online learning has emerged as a critical tool when utilizing LLMs for real-world applications. However, given the ever-expanding corpus of unseen documents and the large parameter space of modern LLMs, efficient adaptation is essential. To address these challenges, we propose Memory of Amortized Contexts (MAC), an efficient and effective online adaptation framework for LLMs with strong knowledge retention. We propose a feature extraction and memory-augmentation approach to compress and extract information from new documents into compact modulations stored in a memory bank. When answering questions, our model attends to and extracts relevant knowledge from this memory bank. To learn informative modulations in an efficient manner, we utilize amortization-based meta-learning, which substitutes an otherwise required optimization process with a single forward pass of the encoder. Subsequently, we learn to choose from and aggregate selected documents into a single modulation by conditioning on the question, allowing us to adapt a frozen language model during test time without requiring further gradient updates. Our experiment demonstrates the superiority of MAC in multiple aspects, including online adaptation performance, time, and memory efficiency. In addition, we show how MAC can be combined with and improve the performance of popular alternatives such as retrieval augmented generations (RAGs). Code is available at: https://github.com/jihoontack/MAC.
Tiny Time Mixers (TTMs): Fast Pre-trained Models for Enhanced Zero/Few-Shot Forecasting of Multivariate Time Series
Authors: Vijay Ekambaram; Arindam Jati; Pankaj Dayama; Sumanta Mukherjee; Nam H Nguyen; Wesley M. Gifford; Chandra Reddy; Jayant Kalagnanam
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Large pre-trained models excel in zero/few-shot learning for language and vision tasks but face challenges in multivariate time series (TS) forecasting due to diverse data characteristics. Consequently, recent research efforts have focused on developing pre-trained TS forecasting models. These models, whether built from scratch or adapted from large language models (LLMs), excel in zero/few-shot forecasting tasks. However, they are limited by slow performance, high computational demands, and neglect of cross-channel and exogenous correlations. To address this, we introduce Tiny Time Mixers (TTM), a compact model (starting from 1M parameters) with effective transfer learning capabilities, trained exclusively on public TS datasets. TTM, based on the light-weight TSMixer architecture, incorporates innovations like adaptive patching, diverse resolution sampling, and resolution prefix tuning to handle pre-training on varied dataset resolutions with minimal model capacity. Additionally, it employs multi-level modeling to capture channel correlations and infuse exogenous signals during fine-tuning. TTM outperforms existing popular benchmarks in zero/few-shot forecasting  by (4-40\%), while reducing computational requirements significantly. Moreover, TTMs are lightweight and can be executed even on CPU-only machines, enhancing usability and fostering wider adoption in resource-constrained environments. The model weights for reproducibility and research use are available at https://huggingface.co/ibm/ttm-research-r2/, while enterprise-use weights under the Apache license can be accessed as follows: the initial TTM-Q variant at https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-timeseries-ttm-r1, and the latest variants (TTM-B, TTM-E, TTM-A) weights are available at https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-timeseries-ttm-r2. The source code for the TTM model along with the usage scripts are available at https://github.com/ibm-granite/granite-tsfm/tree/main/tsfm_public/models/tinytimemixer