GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Learning from Active Human Involvement through Proxy Value Propagation
Authors: Zhenghao Peng; Wenjie Mo; Chenda Duan; Quanyi Li; Bolei Zhou
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 spotlight)

Abstract: Learning from active human involvement enables the human subject to actively intervene and demonstrate to the AI agent during training. The interaction and corrective feedback from human brings safety and AI alignment to the learning process. In this work, we propose a new reward-free active human involvement method called Proxy Value Propagation for policy optimization. Our key insight is that a proxy value function can be designed to express human intents, wherein state- action pairs in the human demonstration are labeled with high values, while those agents’ actions that are intervened receive low values. Through the TD-learning framework, labeled values of demonstrated state-action pairs are further propagated to other unlabeled data generated from agents’ exploration. The proxy value function thus induces a policy that faithfully emulates human behaviors. Human- in-the-loop experiments show the generality and efficiency of our method. With minimal modification to existing reinforcement learning algorithms, our method can learn to solve continuous and discrete control tasks with various human control devices, including the challenging task of driving in Grand Theft Auto V. Demo video and code are available at: https://metadriverse.github.io/pvp.
Towards Last-layer Retraining for Group Robustness with Fewer Annotations
Authors: Tyler LaBonte; Vidya Muthukumar; Abhishek Kumar
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Empirical risk minimization (ERM) of neural networks is prone to over-reliance on spurious correlations and poor generalization on minority groups. The recent deep feature reweighting (DFR) technique achieves state-of-the-art group robustness via simple last-layer retraining, but it requires held-out group and class annotations to construct a group-balanced reweighting dataset. In this work, we examine this impractical requirement and find that last-layer retraining can be surprisingly effective with no group annotations (other than for model selection) and only a handful of class annotations. We first show that last-layer retraining can greatly improve worst-group accuracy even when the reweighting dataset has only a small proportion of worst-group data. This implies a "free lunch" where holding out a subset of training data to retrain the last layer can substantially outperform ERM on the entire dataset with no additional data, annotations, or computation for training. To further improve group robustness, we introduce a lightweight method called selective last-layer finetuning (SELF), which constructs the reweighting dataset using misclassifications or disagreements. Our experiments present the first evidence that model disagreement upsamples worst-group data, enabling SELF to nearly match DFR on four well-established benchmarks across vision and language tasks with no group annotations and less than 3% of the held-out class annotations.
Differentiable Sampling of Categorical Distributions Using the CatLog-Derivative Trick
Authors: Lennert De Smet; Emanuele Sansone; Pedro Zuidberg Dos Martires
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Categorical random variables can faithfully represent the discrete and uncertain aspects of data as part of a discrete latent variable model. Learning in such models necessitates taking gradients with respect to the parameters of the categorical probability distributions, which is often intractable due to their combinatorial nature. A popular technique to estimate these otherwise intractable gradients is the Log-Derivative trick. This trick forms the basis of the well-known REINFORCE gradient estimator and its many extensions. While the Log-Derivative trick allows us to differentiate through samples drawn from categorical distributions, it does not take into account the discrete nature of the distribution itself. Our first contribution addresses this shortcoming by introducing the CatLog-Derivative trick -- a variation of the Log-Derivative trick tailored towards categorical distributions. Secondly, we use the CatLog-Derivative trick to introduce IndeCateR, a novel and unbiased gradient estimator for the important case of products of independent categorical distributions with provably lower variance than REINFORCE. Thirdly, we empirically show that IndeCateR can be efficiently implemented and that its gradient estimates have significantly lower bias and variance for the same number of samples compared to the state of the art.
Importance Weighted Actor-Critic for Optimal Conservative Offline Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Hanlin Zhu; Paria Rashidinejad; Jiantao Jiao
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: We propose A-Crab (Actor-Critic Regularized by Average Bellman error), a new practical algorithm for offline reinforcement learning (RL) in complex environments with insufficient data coverage. Our algorithm combines the marginalized importance sampling framework with the actor-critic paradigm, where the critic returns evaluations of the actor (policy) that are pessimistic relative to the offline data and have a small average (importance-weighted) Bellman error. Compared to existing methods, our algorithm simultaneously offers a number of advantages:
(1) It achieves the optimal statistical rate of $1/\sqrt{N}$---where $N$ is the size of offline dataset---in converging to the best policy covered in the offline dataset, even when combined with general function approximators.
(2) It relies on a weaker \textit{average} notion of policy coverage (compared to the $\ell_\infty$ single-policy concentrability) that exploits the structure of policy visitations.
(3) It outperforms the data-collection behavior policy over a wide range of specific hyperparameters.
 We provide both theoretical analysis and experimental results to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. The code is available at https://github.com/zhuhl98/ACrab.
Meet in the Middle: A New Pre-training Paradigm
Authors: Anh Tuan Nguyen; Nikos Karampatziakis; Weizhu Chen
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Most language models (LMs) are trained and applied in an autoregressive left-to-right fashion, predicting the next token from the preceding ones. However, this ignores that the full sequence is available during training. 
In this paper, we introduce ``Meet in the Middle'' (MIM) a new pre-training paradigm that improves data 
efficiency by training in two directions, left-to-right and right-to-left, and encouraging the respective models
to agree on their token distribution for each position. While the primary outcome is an improved left-to-right LM,
we also obtain secondary benefits in the infilling task. There, we leverage the two pre-trained directions to propose an infilling procedure that builds the completion simultaneously from both sides. We conduct extensive experiments on both programming and natural languages and show that MIM significantly surpasses existing pre-training paradigms, in both left-to-right generation as well as infilling.
Code and models available at https://github.com/microsoft/Meet-in-the-Middle
Adversarial Examples Are Not Real Features
Authors: Ang Li; Yifei Wang; Yiwen Guo; Yisen Wang
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: The existence of adversarial examples has been a mystery for years and attracted much interest. A well-known theory by \citet{ilyas2019adversarial} explains adversarial vulnerability from a data perspective by showing that one can extract non-robust features from adversarial examples and these features alone are useful for classification. However, the explanation remains quite counter-intuitive since non-robust features are mostly noise features to humans. In this paper, we re-examine the theory from a larger context by incorporating multiple learning paradigms. Notably, we find that contrary to their good usefulness under supervised learning, non-robust features attain poor usefulness when transferred to other self-supervised learning paradigms, such as contrastive learning, masked image modeling, and diffusion models. It reveals that non-robust features are not really as useful as robust or natural features that enjoy good transferability between these paradigms. Meanwhile, for robustness, we also show that naturally trained encoders from robust features are largely non-robust under AutoAttack. Our cross-paradigm examination suggests that the non-robust features are not really useful but more like paradigm-wise shortcuts, and robust features alone might be insufficient to attain reliable model robustness. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/PKU-ML/AdvNotRealFeatures}.
Debiasing Pretrained Generative Models by Uniformly Sampling Semantic Attributes
Authors: Walter Gerych; Kevin Hickey; Luke Buquicchio; Kavin Chandrasekaran; Abdulaziz Alajaji; Elke Rundensteiner; Emmanuel Agu
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Generative models are being increasingly used in science and industry applications. Unfortunately,  they often perpetuate the biases present in their training sets, such as societal biases causing certain groups to be underrepresented in the data. For instance, image generators may overwhelmingly produce images of white people due to few non-white samples in their training data. It is imperative to debias generative models so they synthesize an equal number of instances for each group, while not requiring retraining of the model to avoid  prohibitive expense. We thus propose a *distribution mapping module* that produces samples from a *fair noise distribution*, such that the  pretrained generative model produces *semantically uniform* outputs -  an equal number of instances for each group - when conditioned on these samples. This does *not* involve retraining the generator, nor does it require *any* real training data. Experiments on debiasing generators trained on popular real-world  datasets show that our method outperforms existing approaches.
Principle-Driven Self-Alignment of Language Models from Scratch with Minimal Human Supervision
Authors: Zhiqing Sun; Yikang Shen; Qinhong Zhou; Hongxin Zhang; Zhenfang Chen; David Daniel Cox; Yiming Yang; Chuang Gan
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 spotlight)

Abstract: Recent AI-assistant agents, such as ChatGPT, predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with human annotations and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to align the output of large language models (LLMs) with human intentions, ensuring they are helpful, ethical, and reliable. However, this dependence can significantly constrain the true potential of AI-assistant agents due to the high cost of obtaining human supervision and the related issues on quality, reliability, diversity, self-consistency, and undesirable biases. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach called SELF-ALIGN, which combines principle-driven reasoning and the generative power of LLMs for the self-alignment of AI agents with minimal human supervision. Our approach encompasses four stages: first, we use an LLM to generate synthetic prompts, and a topic-guided method to augment the prompt diversity; second, we use a small set of human-written principles for AI models to follow, and guide the LLM through in-context learning from demonstrations (of principles application) to produce helpful, ethical, and reliable responses to user's queries; third, we fine-tune the original LLM with the high-quality self-aligned responses so that the resulting model can generate desirable responses for each query directly without the principle set and the demonstrations anymore; and finally, we offer a refinement step to address the issues of overly-brief or indirect responses. Applying SELF-ALIGN to the LLaMA-65b base language model, we develop an AI assistant named Dromedary. With fewer than 300 lines of human annotations (including < 200 seed prompts, 16 generic principles, and 5 exemplars for in-context learning). Dromedary significantly surpasses the performance of several state-of-the-art AI systems, including Text-Davinci-003 and Alpaca, on benchmark datasets with various settings.
Combinatorial Group Testing with Selfish Agents
Authors: Giorgos Chionas; Dariusz Rafal Kowalski; Piotr Krysta
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: We study the Combinatorial Group Testing (CGT) problem in a novel game-theoretic framework, with a solution concept of Adversarial Equilibrium (AE). In this new framework, we have $n$ selfish agents corresponding to the elements of the universe $[n] =\{0,1,\ldots,n-1\}$ and a hidden set $K \subseteq [n]$ of active agents of size $|K| = k \ll n$. In each round of the game, each active agent decides if it is present in a query $Q \subseteq [n]$, and all agents receive feedback on $Q \cap K$. The goal of each active agent is to assure that its id could be learned from the feedback as early as possible. 

We present a comprehensive set of results in this new game, where we design and analyze adaptive algorithmic strategies of agents which are AE's. In particular, if $k$ is known to the agents, then we design adaptive AE strategies with provably near optimal learning time of $O(k \log(n/k))$. In the case of unknown $k$, we design an adaptive AE strategies with learning time of order $n^k$, and we prove a lower bound of $\Omega(n)$ on the learning time of any such algorithmic strategies. This shows a strong separations between the two models of known and unknown $k$, as well as between the classic CGT, i.e., without selfish agents, and our game theoretic CGT model.
A graphon-signal analysis of graph neural networks
Authors: Ron Levie
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: We present an approach for analyzing message passing graph neural networks (MPNNs) based on an extension of graphon analysis to a so called graphon-signal analysis. A MPNN is a function that takes a graph and a signal on the graph (a graph-signal) and returns some value. Since the input space of MPNNs is non-Euclidean, i.e., graphs can be of any size and topology, properties such as generalization are less well understood for MPNNs than for Euclidean neural networks. We claim that one important missing ingredient in past work is a meaningful notion of graph-signal similarity measure, that endows the space of inputs to MPNNs with a regular structure. We present such a similarity measure, called the graphon-signal cut distance, which makes the space of all graph-signals a dense subset of a compact metric space -- the graphon-signal space. Informally, two deterministic graph-signals are close in cut-distance if they ``look like'' they were sampled from the same random graph-signal model. Hence, our cut distance is a natural notion of graph-signal similarity, which allows comparing any pair of graph-signals of any size and topology. We prove that MPNNs are Lipschitz continuous functions over the graphon-signal metric space. We then give two applications of this result: 1) a generalization bound for MPNNs, and, 2) the stability of MPNNs to subsampling of graph-signals. Our results apply to any regular enough MPNN on any distribution of graph-signals, making the analysis rather universal.
Diffusion with Forward Models: Solving Stochastic Inverse Problems Without Direct Supervision
Authors: Ayush Tewari; Tianwei Yin; George Cazenavette; Semon Rezchikov; Joshua B. Tenenbaum; Fredo Durand; William T. Freeman; Vincent Sitzmann
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 spotlight)

Abstract: Denoising diffusion models are a powerful type of generative models used to capture complex distributions of real-world signals. However, their applicability is limited to scenarios where training samples are readily available, which is not always the case in real-world applications. For example, in inverse graphics, the goal is to generate samples from a distribution of 3D scenes that align with a given image, but ground-truth 3D scenes are unavailable and only 2D images are accessible. To address this limitation, we propose a novel class of denoising diffusion probabilistic models that learn to sample from distributions of signals that are never directly observed. Instead, these signals are measured indirectly through a known differentiable forward model, which produces partial observations of the unknown signal. Our approach involves integrating the forward model directly into the denoising process. A key contribution of our work is the integration of a differentiable forward model into the denoising process. This integration effectively connects the generative modeling of observations with the generative modeling of the underlying signals, allowing for end-to-end training of a conditional generative model over signals. During inference, our approach enables sampling from the distribution of underlying signals that are consistent with a given partial observation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on three challenging computer vision tasks. For instance, in the context of inverse graphics, our model enables direct sampling from the distribution of 3D scenes that align with a single 2D input image.
Generative Neural Fields by Mixtures of Neural Implicit Functions
Authors: Tackgeun You; Mijeong Kim; Jungtaek Kim; Bohyung Han
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: We propose a novel approach to learning the generative neural fields represented by linear combinations of implicit basis networks. Our algorithm learns basis networks in the form of implicit neural representations and their coefficients in a latent space by either conducting meta-learning or adopting auto-decoding paradigms. The proposed method easily enlarges the capacity of generative neural fields by increasing the number of basis networks while maintaining the size of a network for inference to be small through their weighted model averaging. Consequently, sampling instances using the model is efficient in terms of latency and memory footprint. Moreover, we customize denoising diffusion probabilistic model for a target task to sample latent mixture coefficients, which allows our final model to generate unseen data effectively. Experiments show that our approach achieves competitive generation performance on diverse benchmarks for images, voxel data, and NeRF scenes without sophisticated designs for specific modalities and domains.
DIFUSCO: Graph-based Diffusion Solvers for Combinatorial Optimization
Authors: Zhiqing Sun; Yiming Yang
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 spotlight)

Abstract: Neural network-based Combinatorial Optimization (CO) methods have shown promising results in solving various NP-complete (NPC) problems without relying on hand-crafted domain knowledge. This paper broadens the current scope of neural solvers for NPC problems by introducing a new graph-based diffusion framework, namely DIFUSCO. It formulates NPC problems into a discrete {0, 1}-vector space and uses graph-based denoising diffusion models to generate high-quality solutions. Specifically, we explore diffusion models with Gaussian and Bernoulli noise, respectively, and also introduce an effective inference schedule to improve the generation quality. We evaluate our methods on two well-studied combinatorial optimization problems: Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and Maximal Independent Set (MIS). Experimental results show that DIFUSCO strongly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art neural solvers, improving the performance gap between ground-truth and neural solvers from 1.76% to 0.46% on TSP-500, from 2.46% to 1.17% on TSP-1000, and from 3.19% to 2.58% on TSP-10000. For the MIS problem, DIFUSCO outperforms the previous state-of-the-art neural solver on the challenging SATLIB benchmark. Our code is available at [this url](https://github.com/Edward-Sun/DIFUSCO).
Real-Time Motion Prediction via Heterogeneous Polyline Transformer with Relative Pose Encoding
Authors: Zhejun Zhang; Alexander Liniger; Christos Sakaridis; Fisher Yu; Luc Van Gool
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: The real-world deployment of an autonomous driving system requires its components to run on-board and in real-time, including the motion prediction module that predicts the future trajectories of surrounding traffic participants. Existing agent-centric methods have demonstrated outstanding performance on public benchmarks. However, they suffer from high computational overhead and poor scalability as the number of agents to be predicted increases. To address this problem, we introduce the K-nearest neighbor attention with relative pose encoding (KNARPE), a novel attention mechanism allowing the pairwise-relative representation to be used by Transformers. Then, based on KNARPE we present the Heterogeneous Polyline Transformer with Relative pose encoding (HPTR), a hierarchical framework enabling asynchronous token update during the online inference. By sharing contexts among agents and reusing the unchanged contexts, our approach is as efficient as scene-centric methods, while performing on par with state-of-the-art agent-centric methods. Experiments on Waymo and Argoverse-2 datasets show that HPTR achieves superior performance among end-to-end methods that do not apply expensive post-processing or model ensembling. The code is available at https://github.com/zhejz/HPTR.
Unleashing the Power of Randomization in Auditing Differentially Private ML
Authors: Krishna Pillutla; Galen Andrew; Peter Kairouz; Hugh Brendan McMahan; Alina Oprea; Sewoong Oh
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: We present a rigorous methodology for auditing differentially private machine learning by adding multiple carefully designed examples called canaries. We take a first principles approach based on three key components. First, we introduce Lifted Differential Privacy (LiDP) that expands the definition of differential privacy to handle randomized datasets. This gives us the freedom to design randomized canaries. Second, we audit LiDP by trying to distinguish between the model trained with $K$ canaries versus $K-1$ canaries in the dataset, leaving one canary out. By drawing the canaries i.i.d., LiDP can leverage the symmetry in the design and reuse each privately trained model to run multiple statistical tests, one for each canary. Third, we introduce novel confidence intervals that take advantage of the multiple test statistics by adapting to the empirical higher-order correlations. Together, this new recipe demonstrates significant improvements in sample complexity, both theoretically and empirically, using synthetic and real data. Further, recent advances in designing stronger canaries can be readily incorporated in the new framework.