GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Reconciling Competing Sampling Strategies of Network Embedding
Authors: Yuchen Yan; Baoyu Jing; Lihui Liu; Ruijie Wang; Jinning Li; Tarek Abdelzaher; Hanghang Tong
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Network embedding plays a significant role in a variety of applications. To capture the topology of the network, most of the existing network embedding algorithms follow a sampling training procedure, which maximizes the similarity (e.g., embedding vectors' dot product) between positively sampled node pairs and minimizes the similarity between negatively sampled node pairs in the embedding space. Typically, close node pairs function as positive samples while distant node pairs are usually considered as negative samples. However, under different or even competing sampling strategies, some methods champion sampling distant node pairs as positive samples to encapsulate longer distance information in link prediction, whereas others advocate adding close nodes into the negative sample set to boost the performance of node recommendation. In this paper, we seek to understand the intrinsic relationships between these competing strategies. To this end, we identify two properties (discrimination and monotonicity) that given any node pair proximity distribution, node embeddings should embrace.
Moreover, we quantify the empirical error of the trained similarity score w.r.t. the sampling strategy, which leads to an important finding that the discrimination property and the monotonicity property for all node pairs can not be satisfied simultaneously in real-world applications. Guided by such analysis, a simple yet novel model (SENSEI) is proposed, which seamlessly fulfills the discrimination property and the partial monotonicity within the top-$K$ ranking list. Extensive experiments show that SENSEI outperforms the state-of-the-arts in plain network embedding.
Convergence of Actor-Critic with Multi-Layer Neural Networks
Authors: Haoxing Tian; Alex Olshevsky; Ioannis Paschalidis
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: The early theory of actor-critic methods considered convergence using linear function approximators for the policy and value functions. Recent work has established convergence using neural network approximators with a single hidden layer. In this work we are taking the natural next step and establish convergence using deep neural networks with an arbitrary number of hidden layers, thus closing a gap between theory and practice. We show that actor-critic updates projected on a ball around the initial condition will converge to a neighborhood where the average of the squared gradients is $\tilde{O} \left( 1/\sqrt{m} \right) + O \left( \epsilon \right)$, with $m$ being the width of the neural network and $\epsilon$ the approximation quality of the best critic neural network over the projected set.
On the Generalization Properties of Diffusion Models
Authors: Puheng Li; Zhong Li; Huishuai Zhang; Jiang Bian
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Diffusion models are a class of generative models that serve to establish a stochastic transport map between an empirically observed, yet unknown, target distribution and a known prior. Despite their remarkable success in real-world applications, a theoretical understanding of their generalization capabilities remains underdeveloped. This work embarks on a comprehensive theoretical exploration of the generalization attributes of diffusion models. We establish the theoretical estimates of the generalization gap that evolves in tandem with the training dynamics of score-based diffusion models, suggesting a polynomially small generalization error ($O(n^{-2/5}+m^{-4/5})$) on both the sample size $n$ and the model capacity $m$, evading the curse of dimensionality (i.e., independent of the data dimension) when *early-stopped*. Furthermore, we extend our quantitative analysis to a *data-dependent* scenario, wherein target distributions are portrayed as a succession of densities with progressively increasing distances between modes. This precisely elucidates the *adverse* effect of "*modes shift*'' in ground truths on the model generalization. Furthermore, these estimates are not solely theoretical constructs but have also been confirmed through numerical simulations. Our findings contribute to the rigorous understanding of diffusion models' generalization properties and provide insights that may guide practical applications.
An Efficient Doubly-Robust Test for the Kernel Treatment Effect
Authors: Diego Martinez-Taboada; Aaditya Ramdas; Edward Kennedy
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: The average treatment effect, which is the difference in expectation of the counterfactuals, is probably the most popular target effect in causal inference with binary treatments. However, treatments may have effects beyond the mean, for instance decreasing or increasing the variance. We propose a new kernel-based test for distributional effects of the treatment. It is, to the best of our knowledge, the first kernel-based, doubly-robust test with provably valid type-I error. Furthermore, our proposed algorithm is computationally efficient, avoiding the use of permutations.
Incentivizing Honesty among Competitors in Collaborative Learning and Optimization
Authors: Florian E. Dorner; Nikola Konstantinov; Georgi Stoyanov Pashaliev; Martin Vechev
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Collaborative learning techniques have the potential to enable training machine learning models that are superior to models trained on a single entity’s data. However, in many cases, potential participants in such collaborative schemes are competitors on a downstream task, such as firms that each aim to attract customers by providing the best recommendations. This can incentivize dishonest updates that damage other participants' models, potentially undermining the benefits of collaboration. In this work, we formulate a game that models such interactions and study two learning tasks within this framework: single-round mean estimation and multi-round SGD on strongly-convex objectives. For a natural class of player actions, we show that rational clients are incentivized to strongly manipulate their updates, preventing learning. We then propose mechanisms that incentivize honest communication and ensure learning quality comparable to full cooperation. Lastly, we empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our incentive scheme on a standard non-convex federated learning benchmark. Our work shows that explicitly modeling the incentives and actions of dishonest clients, rather than assuming them malicious, can enable strong robustness guarantees for collaborative learning.
From Trainable Negative Depth to Edge Heterophily in Graphs
Authors: Yuchen Yan; Yuzhong Chen; Huiyuan Chen; Minghua Xu; Mahashweta Das; Hao Yang; Hanghang Tong
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Finding the proper depth $d$ of a graph convolutional network (GCN) that provides strong representation ability has drawn significant attention, yet nonetheless  largely  remains an open problem for the graph learning community. Although noteworthy progress has been made, the depth or the number of layers of a corresponding GCN is realized by a series of graph convolution operations, which naturally makes $d$ a positive integer ($d \in \mathbb{N}+$). An interesting question is whether breaking the constraint of $\mathbb{N}+$ by making $d$ a real number ($d \in \mathbb{R}$) can bring new insights into graph learning mechanisms. In this work, by redefining GCN's depth $d$ as a trainable parameter continuously adjustable within $(-\infty,+\infty)$, we open a new door of controlling its signal processing capability to model graph homophily/heterophily (nodes with similar/dissimilar labels/attributes tend to be inter-connected). A simple and powerful GCN model TEDGCN, is proposed to retain the simplicity of GCN and meanwhile automatically search for the optimal $d$ without the prior knowledge regarding whether the input graph is homophilic or heterophilic. Negative-valued $d$ intrinsically enables high-pass frequency filtering functionality via augmented topology for graph heterophily. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of TEDGCN on node classification tasks for a variety of homophilic and heterophilic graphs.
Siamese Masked Autoencoders
Authors: Agrim Gupta; Jiajun Wu; Jia Deng; Li Fei-Fei
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 oral)

Abstract: Establishing correspondence between images or scenes is a significant challenge in computer vision, especially given occlusions, viewpoint changes, and varying object appearances. In this paper, we present Siamese Masked Autoencoders (SiamMAE), a simple extension of Masked Autoencoders (MAE) for learning visual correspondence from videos. SiamMAE operates on pairs of randomly sampled video frames and asymmetrically masks them. These frames are processed independently by an encoder network, and a decoder composed of a sequence of cross-attention layers is tasked with predicting the missing patches in the future frame. By masking a large fraction (95%) of patches in the future frame while leaving the past frame unchanged, SiamMAE encourages the network to focus on object motion and learn object-centric representations. Despite its conceptual simplicity, features learned via SiamMAE outperform state-of-the-art self-supervised methods on video object segmentation, pose keypoint propagation, and semantic part propagation tasks. SiamMAE achieves competitive results without relying on data augmentation, handcrafted tracking-based pretext tasks, or other techniques to prevent representational collapse.
PoET: A generative model of protein families as sequences-of-sequences
Authors: Timothy Fei Truong Jr; Tristan Bepler
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Generative protein language models are a natural way to design new proteins with desired functions. However, current models are either difficult to direct to produce a protein from a specific family of interest, or must be trained on a large multiple sequence alignment (MSA) from the specific family of interest, making them unable to benefit from transfer learning across families. To address this, we propose **P**r**o**tein **E**volutionary **T**ransformer (PoET), an autoregressive generative model of whole protein families that learns to generate sets of related proteins as sequences-of-sequences across tens of millions of natural protein sequence clusters. PoET can be used as a retrieval-augmented language model to generate and score arbitrary modifications conditioned on any protein family of interest, and can extrapolate from short context lengths to generalize well even for small families. This is enabled by a unique Transformer layer; we model tokens sequentially within sequences while attending between sequences order invariantly, allowing PoET to scale to context lengths beyond those used during training. In extensive experiments on deep mutational scanning datasets, we show that PoET outperforms existing protein language models and evolutionary sequence models for variant function prediction across proteins of all MSA depths. We also demonstrate PoET's ability to controllably generate new protein sequences.
Conformal Prediction for Uncertainty-Aware Planning with Diffusion Dynamics Model
Authors: Jiankai Sun; Yiqi Jiang; Jianing Qiu; Parth Talpur Nobel; Mykel Kochenderfer; Mac Schwager
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Robotic applications often involve working in environments that are uncertain, dynamic, and partially observable. Recently, diffusion models have been proposed for learning trajectory prediction models trained from expert demonstrations, which can be used for planning in robot tasks. Such models have demonstrated a strong ability to overcome challenges such as multi-modal action distributions, high-dimensional output spaces, and training instability. It is crucial to quantify the uncertainty of these dynamics models when using them for planning. In this paper, we quantify the uncertainty of diffusion dynamics models using Conformal Prediction (CP). Given a finite number of exchangeable expert trajectory examples (called the “calibration set”), we use CP to obtain a set in the trajectory space (called the “coverage region”) that is guaranteed to contain the output of the diffusion model with a user-defined probability (called the “coverage level”). In PlanCP, inspired by concepts from conformal prediction, we modify the loss function for training the diffusion model to include a quantile term to encourage more robust performance across the variety of training examples. At test time, we then calibrate PlanCP with a conformal prediction process to obtain coverage sets for the trajectory prediction with guaranteed coverage level. We evaluate our algorithm on various planning tasks and model-based offline reinforcement learning tasks and show that it reduces the uncertainty of the learned trajectory prediction model. As a by-product, our algorithm PlanCP outperforms prior algorithms on existing offline RL benchmarks and challenging continuous planning tasks. Our method can be combined with most model-based planning approaches to produce uncertainty estimates of the closed-loop system.
ConRad: Image Constrained Radiance Fields for 3D Generation from a Single Image
Authors: Senthil Purushwalkam; Nikhil Naik
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: We present a novel method for reconstructing 3D objects from a single RGB image. Our method leverages the latest image generation models to infer the hidden 3D structure while remaining faithful to the input image. While existing methods obtain impressive results in generating 3D models from text prompts, they do not provide an easy approach for conditioning on input RGB data. Naive extensions of these methods often lead to improper alignment in appearance between the input image and the 3D reconstructions. We address these challenges by introducing Image Constrained Radiance Fields (ConRad), a novel variant of neural radiance fields. ConRad is an efficient 3D representation that explicitly captures the appearance of an input image in one viewpoint. We propose a training algorithm that leverages the single RGB image in conjunction with pretrained Diffusion Models to optimize the parameters of a ConRad representation. Extensive experiments show that ConRad representations can simplify preservation of image details while producing a realistic 3D reconstruction. Compared to existing state-of-the-art baselines, we show that our 3D reconstructions remain more faithful to the input and produce more consistent 3D models while demonstrating significantly improved quantitative performance on a ShapeNet object benchmark.
A Unified Fast Gradient Clipping Framework for DP-SGD
Authors: Weiwei Kong; Andres Munoz medina
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: A well-known numerical bottleneck in the differentially-private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) algorithm is the computation of the gradient norm for each example in a large input batch. When the loss function in DP-SGD is consists of an intermediate linear operation, existing methods in the literature have proposed decompositions of gradients that are amenable to fast norm computations. In this paper, we present a framework that generalizes the above approach to arbitrary (possibly nonlinear) intermediate operations. Moreover, we show that for certain operations, such as fully-connected and embedding layer computations, further improvements to the runtime and storage costs of existing decompositions can be deduced using certain components of our framework. Finally, preliminary numerical experiments are given to demonstrate the substantial effects of the aforementioned improvements.
LART: Neural Correspondence Learning with Latent Regularization Transformer for 3D Motion Transfer
Authors: Haoyu Chen; Hao Tang; Radu Timofte; Luc Van Gool; Guoying Zhao
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: 3D motion transfer aims at transferring the motion from a dynamic input sequence to a static 3D object and outputs an identical motion of the target with high-fidelity and realistic visual effects. In this work, we propose a novel 3D Transformer framework called LART for 3D motion transfer. With carefully-designed architectures, LART is able to implicitly learn the correspondence via a flexible geometry perception. Thus, unlike other existing methods, LART does not require any key point annotations or pre-defined correspondence between the motion source and target meshes and can also handle large-size full-detailed unseen 3D targets. Besides, we introduce a novel latent metric regularization on the Transformer for better motion generation. Our rationale lies in the observation that the decoded motions can be approximately expressed as linearly geometric distortion at the frame level. The metric preservation of motions could be translated to the formation of linear paths in the underlying latent space as a rigorous constraint to control the synthetic motions occurring in the construction of the latent space. The proposed LART shows a high learning efficiency with the need for a few samples from the AMASS dataset to generate motions with plausible visual effects. The experimental results verify the potential of our generative model in applications of motion transfer, content generation, temporal interpolation, and motion denoising. The code is made available: https://github.com/mikecheninoulu/LART.
Continual Learning for Instruction Following from Realtime Feedback
Authors: Alane Suhr; Yoav Artzi
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 spotlight)

Abstract: We propose and deploy an approach to  continually train an instruction-following agent from feedback provided by users during collaborative interactions. During interaction, human users instruct an agent using natural language, and provide realtime binary feedback as they observe the agent following their instructions. We design a contextual bandit learning approach, converting  user feedback to immediate reward. We evaluate through thousands of human-agent interactions, demonstrating 15.4% absolute improvement in instruction execution accuracy over time. We also show our approach is robust to several design variations, and that the feedback signal is roughly equivalent to the learning signal of supervised demonstration data.
Neural Data Transformer 2: Multi-context Pretraining for Neural Spiking Activity
Authors: Joel Ye; Jennifer L Collinger; Leila Wehbe; Robert Gaunt
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: The neural population spiking activity recorded by intracortical brain-computer interfaces (iBCIs) contain rich structure. Current models of such spiking activity are largely prepared for individual experimental contexts, restricting data volume to that collectable within a single session and limiting the effectiveness of deep neural networks (DNNs). The purported challenge in aggregating neural spiking data is the pervasiveness of context-dependent shifts in the neural data distributions. However, large scale unsupervised pretraining by nature spans heterogeneous data, and has proven to be a fundamental recipe for successful representation learning across deep learning. We thus develop Neural Data Transformer 2 (NDT2), a spatiotemporal Transformer for neural spiking activity, and demonstrate that pretraining can leverage motor BCI datasets that span sessions, subjects, and experimental tasks. NDT2 enables rapid adaptation to novel contexts in downstream decoding tasks and opens the path to deployment of pretrained DNNs for iBCI control. Code: https://github.com/joel99/context_general_bci
Penguin: Parallel-Packed Homomorphic Encryption for Fast Graph Convolutional Network Inference
Authors: Ran Ran; Nuo Xu; Tao Liu; Wei Wang; Gang Quan; Wujie Wen
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: The marriage of Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and Homomorphic Encryption (HE) enables the inference of graph data on the cloud with significantly enhanced client data privacy. However, the tremendous computation and memory overhead associated with HE operations challenges the practicality of HE-based GCN inference. GCN inference involves a sequence of expensive matrix-matrix multiplications, and we observe that directly applying the state-of-the-art HE-based secure matrix-matrix multiplication solutions to accelerate HE-GCN inference is far less efficient as it does not exploit the unique aggregation mechanism of two-dimension graph node-features in GCN layer computation. 
As a result, in this paper, we propose a novel HE-based ciphertext packing technique, i.e., Penguin, that can take advantage of the unique computation pattern during the HE-GCN inference to significantly reduce the computation and memory overhead associated with HE operations.
Specifically, Penguin employs (i) an effective two-dimension parallel packing technique for feature ciphertext with optimal graph node partitioning and graph feature interleaving, and (ii) an interleaved assembly technique that can effectively make use of the blank slots to merge ciphertexts after feature reduction and significantly reduce the costly rotation operation.
We provide theoretical analysis and experimental validation to demonstrate the speedup achieved by Penguin in accelerating GCN inference using popular GCN models and datasets. Our results show that Penguin can achieve up to $\sim10\times$ speedup and around $\sim79$% reduction in computational memory overhead, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art solutions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that can ensure the protection of both graph structure and features when accelerating HE-GCN inference on encrypted data. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ranran0523/Penguin.
Winner-Take-All Column Row Sampling for Memory Efficient Adaptation of Language Model
Authors: Zirui Liu; Guanchu Wang; Shaochen Zhong; Zhaozhuo Xu; Daochen Zha; Ruixiang Tang; Zhimeng Jiang; Kaixiong Zhou; Vipin Chaudhary; Shuai Xu; Xia Hu
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: As the model size grows rapidly, fine-tuning the large pre-trained language model has become increasingly difficult due to its extensive memory usage. 
Previous works usually focus on reducing the number of trainable parameters in the network. 
While the model parameters do contribute to memory usage, the primary memory bottleneck during training arises from storing feature maps, also known as activations, as they are crucial for gradient calculation. 
Notably, machine learning models are typically trained using stochastic gradient descent.
We argue that in stochastic optimization, models can handle noisy gradients as long as the gradient estimator is unbiased with reasonable variance.
Following this motivation, we propose a new family of unbiased estimators called \sas, for matrix production with reduced variance, which only requires storing the sub-sampled activations for calculating the gradient.
Our work provides both theoretical and experimental evidence that, in the context of tuning transformers, our proposed estimators exhibit lower variance compared to existing ones.
By replacing the linear operation with our approximated one in transformers, we can achieve up to 2.7X peak memory reduction with almost no accuracy drop and enables up to $6.4\times$ larger batch size.
Under the same hardware, \sas enables better down-streaming task performance by applying larger models and/or faster training speed with larger batch sizes.
The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/WTACRS-A5C5/.