GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Probabilistic Adaptation of Black-Box Text-to-Video Models
Authors: Sherry Yang; Yilun Du; Bo Dai; Dale Schuurmans; Joshua B. Tenenbaum; Pieter Abbeel
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Large text-to-video models trained on internet-scale data have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in generating high-fidelity videos from arbitrary textual descriptions. However, similar to proprietary language models, large text-to-video models are often black boxes whose weight parameters are not publicly available, posing a significant challenge to adapting these models to specific domains such as robotics, animation, and personalized stylization. Inspired by how a large language model can be prompted to perform new tasks without access to the model weights, we investigate how to adapt a black-box pretrained text-to-video model to a variety of downstream domains without weight access to the pretrained model. In answering this question, we propose \emph{\methodname}, which leverages the score function of a large pretrained video diffusion model as a probabilistic prior to guide the generation of a task-specific small video model. Our experiments show that, by incorporating broad knowledge and fidelity of the pretrained model probabilistically, a small model with as few as 1.25% parameters of the pretrained model can generate high-quality yet domain-specific videos for a variety of downstream domains such as animation, egocentric modeling, and modeling of simulated and real-world robotics data. As large text-to-video models starting to become available as a service similar to large language models, we advocate for private institutions to expose scores of video diffusion models as outputs in addition to generated videos to allow flexible adaptation of large pretrained text-to-video models by the general public.
Horizon-Free Regret for Linear Markov Decision Processes
Authors: Zihan Zhang; Jason D. Lee; Yuxin Chen; Simon Shaolei Du
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: A recent line of works showed regret bounds in reinforcement learning (RL) can be (nearly) independent of planning horizon, a.k.a. the horizon-free bounds. However, these regret bounds only apply to settings where a polynomial dependency on the size of transition model is allowed, such as tabular Markov Decision Process (MDP) and linear mixture MDP. We give the first horizon-free bound for the popular linear MDP setting where the size of the transition model can be exponentially large or even uncountable.  In contrast to prior works which explicitly estimate the transition model and compute the inhomogeneous value functions at different time steps, we directly estimate the value functions and confidence sets.  We obtain the horizon-free bound by: (1) maintaining multiple weighted least square estimators for the value functions; and (2) a structural lemma which shows the maximal total variation of the inhomogeneous value functions is bounded by a polynomial factor of the feature dimension.
Faithful Rule Extraction for Differentiable Rule Learning Models
Authors: Xiaxia Wang; David Jaime Tena Cucala; Bernardo Cuenca Grau; Ian Horrocks
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: There is increasing interest in methods for extracting interpretable rules from ML models trained to solve a wide range of tasks over knowledge graphs (KGs), such as KG completion, node classification, question answering and recommendation. Many such approaches, however, lack formal guarantees establishing the precise relationship between the model and the extracted rules, and this lack of assurance becomes especially problematic when the extracted rules are applied in safety-critical contexts or to ensure compliance with legal requirements. Recent research has examined whether the rules derived from the influential Neural-LP model exhibit soundness (or completeness), which means that the results obtained by applying the model to any dataset always contain (or are contained in) the results obtained by applying the rules to the same dataset. In this paper, we extend this analysis to the context of DRUM, an approach that has demonstrated superior practical performance. After observing that the rules currently extracted from a DRUM model can be unsound and/or incomplete, we propose a novel algorithm where the output rules, expressed in an extension of Datalog, ensure both soundness and completeness. This algorithm, however, can be inefficient in practice and hence we propose additional constraints to DRUM models facilitating rule extraction, albeit at the expense of reduced expressive power.
Score-based generative models break the curse of dimensionality in learning a family of sub-Gaussian distributions
Authors: Frank Cole; Yulong Lu
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: While score-based generative models (SGMs) have achieved remarkable successes in enormous image generation tasks, their mathematical foundations are still limited. In this paper, we analyze the approximation and generalization of SGMs in learning a family of sub-Gaussian probability distributions. We introduce a measure of complexity for probability distributions in terms of their relative density with respect to the standard Gaussian measure. We prove that if the log-relative density can be locally approximated by a neural network whose parameters can be suitably bounded, then the distribution generated by empirical score matching approximates the target distribution in total variation with a dimension-independent rate. We illustrate our theory through examples, which include certain mixtures of Gaussians. An essential ingredient of our proof is to derive a dimension-free deep network approximation rate for the true score function associated to the forward process, which is interesting in its own right.
SNIP: Bridging Mathematical Symbolic and Numeric Realms with Unified Pre-training
Authors: Kazem Meidani; Parshin Shojaee; Chandan K. Reddy; Amir Barati Farimani
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 spotlight)

Abstract: In an era where symbolic mathematical equations are indispensable for modeling complex natural phenomena, scientific inquiry often involves collecting observations and translating them into mathematical expressions. Recently, deep learning has emerged as a powerful tool for extracting insights from data. However, existing models typically specialize in either numeric or symbolic domains, and are usually trained in a supervised manner tailored to specific tasks. This approach neglects the substantial benefits that could arise from a task-agnostic multi-modal understanding between symbolic equations and their numeric counterparts. To bridge the gap, we introduce SNIP, a Symbolic-Numeric Integrated Pre-training model, which employs contrastive learning between symbolic and numeric domains, enhancing their mutual similarities in the embeddings. By performing latent space analysis, we observe that SNIP provides cross-domain insights into the representations, revealing that symbolic supervision enhances the embeddings of numeric data and vice versa. We evaluate SNIP across diverse tasks, including symbolic-to-numeric mathematical property prediction and numeric-to-symbolic equation discovery, commonly known as symbolic regression. Results show that SNIP effectively transfers to various tasks, consistently outperforming fully supervised baselines and competing strongly with established task-specific methods, especially in the low data regime scenarios where available data is limited.
Scalable Diffusion for Materials Generation
Authors: Sherry Yang; KwangHwan Cho; Amil Merchant; Pieter Abbeel; Dale Schuurmans; Igor Mordatch; Ekin Dogus Cubuk
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: ​​​​Generative models trained on internet-scale data are capable of generating novel and realistic texts, images, and videos. A natural next question is whether these models can advance science, for example by generating novel stable materials. Traditionally, models with explicit structures (e.g., graphs) have been used in modeling structural relationships in scientific data (e.g., atoms and bonds in crystals), but generating structures can be difficult to scale to large and complex systems. Another challenge in generating materials is the mismatch between standard generative modeling metrics and downstream applications. For instance, common metrics such as the reconstruction error do not correlate well with the downstream goal of discovering novel stable materials. In this work, we tackle the scalability challenge by developing a unified crystal representation that can represent any crystal structure (UniMat), followed by training a diffusion probabilistic model on these UniMat representations. Our empirical results suggest that despite the lack of explicit structure modeling, UniMat can generate high fidelity crystal structures from larger and more complex chemical systems, outperforming previous graph-based approaches under various generative modeling metrics. To better connect the generation quality of materials to downstream applications, such as discovering novel stable materials, we propose additional metrics for evaluating generative models of materials, including per-composition formation energy and stability with respect to convex hulls through decomposition energy from Density Function Theory (DFT). Lastly, we show that conditional generation with UniMat can scale to previously established crystal datasets with up to millions of crystals structures, outperforming random structure search (the current leading method for structure discovery) in discovering new stable materials.
Towards Optimal Feature-Shaping Methods for Out-of-Distribution Detection
Authors: Qinyu Zhao; Ming Xu; Kartik Gupta; Akshay Asthana; Liang Zheng; Stephen Gould
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Feature shaping refers to a family of methods that exhibit state-of-the-art performance for out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. These approaches manipulate the feature representation, typically from the penultimate layer of a pre-trained deep learning model, so as to better differentiate between in-distribution (ID) and OOD samples. However, existing feature-shaping methods usually employ rules manually designed for specific model architectures and OOD datasets, which consequently limit their generalization ability. To address this gap, we first formulate an abstract optimization framework for studying feature-shaping methods. We then propose a concrete reduction of the framework with a simple piecewise constant shaping function and show that existing feature-shaping methods approximate the optimal solution to the concrete optimization problem. Further, assuming that OOD data is inaccessible, we propose a formulation that yields a closed-form solution for the piecewise constant shaping function, utilizing solely the ID data. Through extensive experiments, we show that the feature-shaping function optimized by our method improves the generalization ability of OOD detection across a large variety of datasets and model architectures. Our code is available at https://github.com/Qinyu-Allen-Zhao/OptFSOOD.
Guess & Sketch: Language Model Guided Transpilation
Authors: Celine Lee; Abdulrahman Mahmoud; Michal Kurek; Simone Campanoni; David Brooks; Stephen Chong; Gu-Yeon Wei; Alexander M Rush
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Maintaining legacy software requires many software and systems engineering hours. Assembly code programs, which demand low-level control over the computer machine state and have no variable names, are particularly difficult for humans to analyze.
Existing conventional program translators guarantee correctness, but are hand-engineered for the source and target programming languages in question. Learned transpilation, i.e.  automatic translation of code, offers an alternative to manual re-writing and engineering efforts. Automated symbolic program translation approaches guarantee correctness but struggle to scale to longer programs due to the exponentially large search space. Their rigid rule-based systems also limit their expressivity, so they can only reason about a reduced space of programs. Probabilistic neural language models (LMs) produce plausible outputs for every input, but do so at the cost of guaranteed correctness. In this work, we leverage the strengths of LMs and symbolic solvers in a neurosymbolic approach to learned transpilation for assembly code. Assembly code is an appropriate setting for a neurosymbolic approach, since assembly code can be divided into shorter non-branching basic blocks amenable to the use of symbolic methods. Guess & Sketch extracts alignment and confidence information from features of the LM then passes it to a symbolic solver to resolve semantic equivalence of the transpilation input and output. We test Guess & Sketch on three different test sets of assembly transpilation tasks, varying in difficulty, and show that it successfully transpiles 57.6% more examples than GPT-4 and 39.6% more examples than an engineered transpiler. We also share a training and evaluation dataset for this task.
Motif: Intrinsic Motivation from Artificial Intelligence Feedback
Authors: Martin Klissarov; Pierluca D'Oro; Shagun Sodhani; Roberta Raileanu; Pierre-Luc Bacon; Pascal Vincent; Amy Zhang; Mikael Henaff
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Exploring rich environments and evaluating one's actions without prior knowledge is immensely challenging. In this paper, we propose Motif, a general method to interface such prior knowledge from a Large Language Model (LLM) with an agent. Motif is based on the idea of grounding LLMs for decision-making without requiring them to interact with the environment: it elicits preferences from an LLM over pairs of captions to construct an intrinsic reward, which is then used to train agents with reinforcement learning. We evaluate Motif's performance and behavior on the challenging, open-ended and procedurally-generated NetHack game. Surprisingly, by only learning to maximize its intrinsic reward, Motif achieves a higher game score than an algorithm directly trained to maximize the score itself. When combining Motif's intrinsic reward with the environment reward, our method significantly outperforms existing approaches and makes progress on tasks where no advancements have ever been made without demonstrations. Finally, we show that Motif mostly generates intuitive human-aligned behaviors which can be steered easily through prompt modifications, while scaling well with the LLM size and the amount of information given in the prompt.
On Differentially Private Federated Linear Contextual Bandits
Authors: Xingyu Zhou; Sayak Ray Chowdhury
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: We consider cross-silo federated linear contextual bandit (LCB) problem under differential privacy, where multiple silos interact with their respective local users and communicate via a central server to realize collaboration without sacrificing each user's privacy. We identify three issues in the state-of-the-art~\citep{dubey2020differentially}: (i) failure of claimed privacy protection, (ii) incorrect regret bound due to noise miscalculation and (iii) ungrounded communication cost. 
To resolve these issues, we take a two-step approach. First, we design an algorithmic framework consisting of a generic federated LCB algorithm and flexible privacy protocols. Then, leveraging the proposed framework, we study federated LCBs under two different privacy constraints. We first establish privacy and regret guarantees under silo-level local differential privacy, which fix the issues present in state-of-the-art algorithm.
To further improve the regret performance, we next consider shuffle model of differential privacy, under which we show that our algorithm can achieve nearly ``optimal'' regret without a trusted server. 
We accomplish this via two different schemes --  one relies on a new result on privacy amplification via shuffling for DP mechanisms and another one leverages the integration of a shuffle protocol for vector sum into the tree-based mechanism, both of which might be of independent interest. Finally, we support our theoretical results with
numerical evaluations over contextual bandit instances generated from both synthetic and real-life data.
Generative Human Motion Stylization in Latent Space
Authors: chuan guo; Yuxuan Mu; Xinxin Zuo; Peng Dai; Youliang Yan; Juwei Lu; Li Cheng
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Human motion stylization aims to revise the style of an input motion while keeping its content unaltered. Unlike existing works that operate directly in pose space, we leverage the \textit{latent space} of pretrained autoencoders as a more expressive and robust representation for motion extraction and infusion. Building upon this, we present a novel \textit{generative} model that produces diverse stylization results of a single motion (latent) code. During training, a motion code is decomposed into two coding components: a deterministic content code, and a probabilistic style code adhering to a prior distribution; then a generator massages the random combination of content and style codes to reconstruct the corresponding motion codes. Our approach is versatile, allowing the learning of probabilistic style space from either style labeled or unlabeled motions, providing notable flexibility in stylization as well. In inference, users can opt to stylize a motion using style cues from a reference motion or a label. Even in the absence of explicit style input, our model facilitates novel re-stylization by sampling from the unconditional style prior distribution. Experimental results show that our proposed stylization models, despite their lightweight design, outperform the state-of-the-arts in style reeanactment, content preservation, and generalization across various applications and settings.
Neural Neighborhood Search for Multi-agent Path Finding
Authors: Zhongxia Yan; Cathy Wu
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Multi-agent path finding (MAPF) is the combinatorial problem of planning optimal collision-avoiding paths for multiple agents, with application to robotics, logistics, and transportation. Though many recent learning-based works have focused on large-scale combinatorial problems by guiding their decomposition into sequences of smaller subproblems, the combined spatiotemporal and time-restricted nature of MAPF poses a particular challenge for learning-based guidance of iterative approaches like large neighborhood search (LNS), which is already a state-of-the-art approach for MAPF even without learning. We address this challenge of neural-guided LNS for MAPF by designing an architecture which interleaves convolution and attention to efficiently represent MAPF subproblems, enabling practical guidance of LNS in benchmark settings. We demonstrate the speedup of our method over existing state-of-the-art LNS-based methods for MAPF as well as the robustness of our method to unseen settings. Our proposed method expands the horizon of effective deep learning-guided LNS methods into multi-path planning problems, and our proposed representation may be more broadly applicable for representing path-wise interactions.
Teaching Language Models to Hallucinate Less with Synthetic Tasks
Authors: Erik Jones; Hamid Palangi; Clarisse Simões Ribeiro; Varun Chandrasekaran; Subhabrata Mukherjee; Arindam Mitra; Ahmed Hassan Awadallah; Ece Kamar
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) frequently hallucinate on abstractive summarization tasks such as document-based question-answering, meeting summarization, and clinical report generation, even though all necessary information is included in context. However, optimizing to make LLMs hallucinate less is challenging, as hallucination is hard to efficiently, cheaply, and reliably evaluate at each optimization step. In this work, we show that reducing hallucination on a _synthetic task_ can also reduce hallucination on real-world downstream tasks. Our method, SynTra, first designs a synthetic task where hallucinations are easy to elicit and measure. It next optimizes the LLM's system message via prefix tuning on the synthetic task, then uses the system message on realistic, hard-to-optimize tasks. Across three realistic abstractive summarization tasks, we reduce hallucination for two 13B-parameter LLMs using supervision signal from only a synthetic retrieval task. We also find that optimizing the system message rather than the model weights can be critical; fine-tuning the entire model on the synthetic task can counterintuitively _increase_ hallucination. Overall, SynTra demonstrates that the extra flexibility of working with synthetic data can help mitigate undesired behaviors in practice.
Enabling Lanuguage Models to Implicitly Learn Self-Improvement
Authors: Ziqi Wang; Le Hou; Tianjian Lu; Yuexin Wu; Yunxuan Li; Hongkun Yu; Heng Ji
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in open-ended text generation tasks. However, the inherent open-ended nature of these tasks implies that there is always room for improvement in the quality of model responses. To address this challenge, various approaches have been proposed to enhance the performance of LLMs. There has been a growing focus on enabling LLMs to self-improve their response quality, thereby reducing the reliance on extensive human annotation efforts for collecting diverse and high-quality training data. Recently, prompting-based methods have been widely explored among self-improvement methods owing to their effectiveness, efficiency, and convenience. However, those methods usually require explicitly and thoroughly written rubrics as inputs to LLMs. It is expensive and challenging to manually derive and provide all necessary rubrics with a real-world complex goal for improvement (e.g., being more helpfulness and less harmful). To this end, we propose an imPlicit self-ImprovemenT (PIT) framework that implicitly learns the improvement goal from human preference data. PIT only requires preference data that are used to train reward models with no extra human efforts. Specifically, we reformulate the training objective of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) -- instead of maximizing response quality for a given input, we maximize the quality gap of the response conditioned on a reference response. In this way, PIT is implicitly trained with the improvement goal of better aligning with human preferences. Experiments on two real-world datasets and one synthetic dataset show that our method significantly outperforms prompting-based methods.