GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Spectral Evolution and Invariance in Linear-width Neural Networks
Authors: Zhichao Wang; Andrew William Engel; Anand Sarwate; Ioana Dumitriu; Tony Chiang
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: We investigate the spectral properties of linear-width feed-forward neural networks, where the sample size is asymptotically proportional to network width. Empirically, we show that the spectra of weight in this high dimensional regime are invariant when trained by gradient descent for small constant learning rates; we provide a theoretical justification for this observation and prove the invariance of the bulk spectra for both conjugate and neural tangent kernels. We demonstrate similar characteristics when training with stochastic gradient descent with small learning rates. When the learning rate is large, we exhibit the emergence of an outlier whose corresponding eigenvector is aligned with the training data structure. We also show that after adaptive gradient training, where a lower test error and feature learning emerge, both weight and kernel matrices exhibit heavy tail behavior. Simple examples are provided to explain when heavy tails can have better generalizations. We exhibit different spectral properties such as invariant bulk, spike, and heavy-tailed distribution from a two-layer neural network using different training strategies, and then correlate them to the feature learning. Analogous phenomena also appear when we train conventional neural networks with real-world data. We conclude that monitoring the evolution of the spectra during training is an essential step toward understanding the training dynamics and feature learning.
Agnostic Multi-Group Active Learning
Authors: Nicholas Rittler; Kamalika Chaudhuri
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Inspired by the problem of improving classification accuracy on rare or hard subsets of a population, there has been recent interest in models of learning where the goal is to generalize to a collection of distributions, each representing a ``group''. We consider a variant of this problem from the perspective of active learning, where the learner is endowed with the power to decide which examples are labeled from each distribution in the collection, and the goal is to minimize the number of label queries while maintaining PAC-learning guarantees. Our main challenge is that standard active learning techniques such as disagreement-based active learning do not directly apply to the multi-group learning objective. We modify existing algorithms to provide a consistent active learning algorithm for an agnostic formulation of multi-group learning, which given a collection of $G$ distributions and a hypothesis class $\mathcal{H}$ with VC-dimension $d$, outputs an $\epsilon$-optimal hypothesis using $\tilde{O}\left( (\nu^2/\epsilon^2) G d  \theta_{\mathcal{G}}^2 \log^2(1/\epsilon) + G\log(1/\epsilon)/\epsilon^2 \right)$ label queries, where $\theta_{\mathcal{G}}$ is the worst-case disagreement coefficient over the collection. Roughly speaking, this guarantee improves upon the label complexity of standard multi-group learning in regimes where disagreement-based active learning algorithms may be expected to succeed, and the number of groups is not too large. We also consider the special case where each distribution in the collection is individually realizable with respect to $\mathcal{H}$, and demonstrate $\tilde{O}\left( G d \theta_{\mathcal{G}} \log(1/\epsilon) \right)$ label queries are sufficient for learning in this case. We further give an approximation result for the full agnostic case inspired by the group realizable strategy.
DropCompute: simple and more robust  distributed synchronous training via compute variance reduction
Authors: Niv Giladi; Shahar Gottlieb; Moran Shkolnik; Asaf Karnieli; Ron Banner; Elad Hoffer; Kfir Yehuda Levy; Daniel Soudry
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Background: Distributed training is essential for large scale training of deep neural networks (DNNs). The dominant methods for large scale DNN training are synchronous (e.g. All-Reduce), but these require waiting for all workers in each step. Thus, these methods are limited by the delays caused by straggling workers.
Results: We study a typical scenario in which workers are straggling due to variability in compute time. We find an analytical relation between compute time properties and scalability limitations, caused by such straggling workers. With these findings, we propose a simple yet effective decentralized method to reduce the variation among workers and thus improve the robustness of synchronous training. This method can be integrated with the widely used All-Reduce. Our findings are validated on large-scale training tasks using 200 Gaudi Accelerators.
Post Hoc Explanations of Language Models Can Improve Language Models
Authors: Satyapriya Krishna; Jiaqi Ma; Dylan Z Slack; Asma Ghandeharioun; Sameer Singh; Himabindu Lakkaraju
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in performing complex tasks. Moreover, recent research has shown that incorporating human-annotated rationales (e.g., Chain-of-Thought prompting) during in-context learning can significantly enhance the performance of these models, particularly on tasks that require reasoning capabilities. However, incorporating such rationales poses challenges in terms of scalability as this requires a high degree of human involvement. In this work, we present a novel framework, Amplifying Model Performance by Leveraging In-Context Learning with Post Hoc Explanations (AMPLIFY), which addresses the aforementioned challenges by automating the process of rationale generation. To this end, we leverage post hoc explanation methods which output attribution scores (explanations) capturing the influence of each of the input features on model predictions. More specifically, we construct automated natural language rationales that embed insights from post hoc explanations to provide corrective signals to LLMs. Extensive experimentation with real-world datasets demonstrates that our framework, AMPLIFY, leads to prediction accuracy improvements of about 10-25% over a wide range of tasks, including those where prior approaches which rely on human-annotated rationales such as Chain-of-Thought prompting fall short. Our work makes one of the first attempts at highlighting the potential of post hoc explanations as valuable tools for enhancing the effectiveness of LLMs. Furthermore, we conduct additional empirical analyses and ablation studies to demonstrate the impact of each of the components of AMPLIFY, which, in turn, lead to critical insights for refining in context learning.
Dynamic Pricing and Learning with Bayesian Persuasion
Authors: Shipra Agrawal; Yiding Feng; Wei Tang
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: We consider a novel dynamic pricing and learning setting where in addition to setting prices of products in sequential rounds, the seller also ex-ante commits to ‘advertising schemes’. That is, in the beginning of each round the seller can decide what kind of signal they will provide to the buyer about the product’s quality upon realization. Using the popular Bayesian persuasion framework to model the effect of these signals on the buyers’ valuation and purchase responses, we formulate the problem of finding an optimal design of the advertising scheme along with a pricing scheme that maximizes the seller’s expected revenue. Without any apriori knowledge of the buyers’ demand function, our goal is to design an online algorithm that can use past purchase responses to adaptively learn the optimal pricing and advertising strategy. We study the regret of the algorithm when compared to the optimal clairvoyant price and advertising
scheme. 

Our main result is a computationally efficient online algorithm that achieves an $O(T^{2/3}(m \log T )^{1/3})$ regret bound when the valuation function is linear in the product quality. Here $m$ is the cardinality of the discrete product quality domain and $T$ is the time horizon. This result requires some natural monotonicity and Lipschitz assumptions on the valuation function, but no Lipschitz or smoothness assumption on the buyers’ demand function. For constant $m$, our result matches the regret lower bound for dynamic pricing within logarithmic factors, which is a special case of our problem. We also obtain several improved results for the widely considered special case of additive valuations, including an $\tilde{O}(T^{2/3})$ regret bound independent of $m$ when $m\le T^{1/3}$.
Transformers as Statisticians: Provable In-Context Learning with In-Context Algorithm Selection
Authors: Yu Bai; Fan Chen; Huan Wang; Caiming Xiong; Song Mei
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 oral)

Abstract: Neural sequence models based on the transformer architecture have demonstrated remarkable \emph{in-context learning} (ICL) abilities, where they can perform new tasks when prompted with training and test examples, without any parameter update to the model. This work first provides a comprehensive statistical theory for transformers to perform ICL. Concretely, we show that transformers can implement a broad class of standard machine learning algorithms in context, such as least squares, ridge regression, Lasso, learning generalized linear models, and gradient descent on two-layer neural networks, with near-optimal predictive power on various in-context data distributions. Using an efficient implementation of in-context gradient descent as the underlying mechanism, our transformer constructions admit mild size bounds, and can be learned with polynomially many pretraining sequences.
    
Building on these ``base'' ICL algorithms, intriguingly, we show that transformers can implement more complex ICL procedures involving \emph{in-context algorithm selection}, akin to what a statistician can do in real life---A \emph{single} transformer can adaptively select different base ICL algorithms---or even perform qualitatively different tasks---on different input sequences, without any explicit prompting of the right algorithm or task. We both establish this in theory by explicit constructions, and also observe this phenomenon experimentally. In theory, we construct two general mechanisms for algorithm selection with concrete examples: pre-ICL testing, and post-ICL validation. As an example, we use the post-ICL validation mechanism to construct a transformer that can perform nearly Bayes-optimal ICL on a challenging task---noisy linear models with mixed noise levels. Experimentally, we demonstrate the strong in-context algorithm selection capabilities of standard transformer architectures.
Synthetic Combinations: A Causal Inference Framework for Combinatorial Interventions
Authors: Abhineet Agarwal; Anish Agarwal; Suhas Vijaykumar
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: We consider a setting where there are $N$ heterogeneous units and $p$ interventions. Our goal is to learn unit-specific potential outcomes for any combination of these $p$ interventions, i.e., $N \times 2^p$ causal parameters. Choosing a combination of interventions is a problem that naturally arises in a variety of applications such as factorial design experiments and recommendation engines (e.g., showing a set of movies that maximizes engagement for a given user). Running $N \times 2^p$ experiments to estimate the various parameters is likely expensive and/or infeasible as $N$ and $p$ grow. Further, with observational data there is likely confounding, i.e., whether or not a unit is seen under a combination is correlated with its potential outcome under that combination. We study this problem under a novel model that imposes latent structure across both units and combinations of interventions. Specifically, we assume latent similarity in potential outcomes across units (i.e., the matrix of potential outcomes is approximately rank $r$) and regularity in how combinations of interventions interact (i.e., the coefficients in the Fourier expansion of the potential outcomes is approximately $s$ sparse). We establish identification for all $N \times 2^p$ parameters despite unobserved confounding. We propose an estimation procedure, Synthetic Combinations, and establish finite-sample consistency under precise conditions on the observation pattern. We show that Synthetic Combinations is able to consistently estimate unit-specific potential outcomes given a total of $\text{poly}(r) \times \left( N + s^2p\right)$ observations. In comparison, previous methods that do not exploit structure across both units and combinations have poorer sample complexity scaling as $\min(N \times s^2p, \ \ r \times (N + 2^p))$.
A Graph-Theoretic Framework for Understanding Open-World Semi-Supervised Learning
Authors: Yiyou Sun; Zhenmei Shi; Yixuan Li
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 spotlight)

Abstract: Open-world semi-supervised learning aims at inferring both known and novel classes in unlabeled data, by harnessing prior knowledge from a labeled set with known classes. Despite its importance, there is a lack of theoretical foundations for this problem. This paper bridges the gap by formalizing a graph-theoretic framework tailored for the open-world setting, where the clustering can be theoretically characterized by graph factorization. Our graph-theoretic framework illuminates practical algorithms and provides guarantees. In particular, based on our graph formulation, we apply the algorithm called Spectral Open-world Representation Learning (SORL), and show that minimizing our loss is equivalent to performing spectral decomposition on the graph. Such equivalence allows us to derive a provable error bound on the clustering performance for both known and novel classes, and analyze rigorously when labeled data helps. Empirically, SORL can match or outperform several strong baselines on common benchmark datasets, which is appealing for practical usage while enjoying theoretical guarantees.
Learning Unseen Modality Interaction
Authors: Yunhua Zhang; Hazel Doughty; Cees G. M. Snoek
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Multimodal learning assumes all modality combinations of interest are available during training to learn cross-modal correspondences. In this paper, we challenge this modality-complete assumption for multimodal learning and instead strive for generalization to unseen modality combinations during inference. We pose the problem of unseen modality interaction and introduce a first solution. It exploits a module that projects the multidimensional features of different modalities into a common space with rich information preserved. This allows the information to be accumulated with a simple summation operation across available modalities. To reduce overfitting to less discriminative modality combinations during training, we further improve the model learning with pseudo-supervision indicating the reliability of a modality’s prediction. We demonstrate that our approach is effective for diverse tasks and modalities by evaluating it for multimodal video classification, robot state regression, and multimedia retrieval. Project website: https://xiaobai1217.github.io/Unseen-Modality-Interaction/.
No-Regret Learning with Unbounded Losses: The Case of Logarithmic Pooling
Authors: Eric Neyman; Tim Roughgarden
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: For each of $T$ time steps, $m$ experts report probability distributions over $n$ outcomes; we wish to learn to aggregate these forecasts in a way that attains a no-regret guarantee. We focus on the fundamental and practical aggregation method known as *logarithmic pooling* -- a weighted average of log odds -- which is in a certain sense the optimal choice of pooling method if one is interested in minimizing log loss (as we take to be our loss function). We consider the problem of learning the best set of parameters (i.e. expert weights) in an online adversarial setting.  We assume (by necessity) that the adversarial choices of outcomes and forecasts are consistent, in the sense that experts report calibrated forecasts. Imposing this constraint creates a (to our knowledge) novel semi-adversarial setting in which the adversary retains a large amount of flexibility. In this setting, we present an algorithm based on online mirror descent that learns expert weights in a way that attains $O(\sqrt{T} \log T)$ expected regret as compared with the best weights in hindsight.
A One-Size-Fits-All Approach to Improving Randomness in Paper Assignment
Authors: Yixuan Even Xu; Steven Jecmen; Zimeng Song; Fei Fang
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 spotlight)

Abstract: The assignment of papers to reviewers is a crucial part of the peer review processes of large publication venues, where organizers (e.g., conference program chairs) rely on algorithms to perform automated paper assignment. As such, a major challenge for the organizers of these processes is to specify paper assignment algorithms that find appropriate assignments with respect to various desiderata. Although the main objective when choosing a good paper assignment is to maximize the expertise of each reviewer for their assigned papers, several other considerations make introducing randomization into the paper assignment desirable: robustness to malicious behavior, the ability to evaluate alternative paper assignments, reviewer diversity, and reviewer anonymity. However, it is unclear in what way one should randomize the paper assignment in order to best satisfy all of these considerations simultaneously. In this work, we present a practical, one-size-fits-all method for randomized paper assignment intended to perform well across different motivations for randomness. We show theoretically and experimentally that our method outperforms currently-deployed methods for randomized paper assignment on several intuitive randomness metrics, demonstrating that the randomized assignments produced by our method are general-purpose.
Synthetic Experience Replay
Authors: Cong Lu; Philip J. Ball; Yee Whye Teh; Jack Parker-Holder
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: A key theme in the past decade has been that when large neural networks and large datasets combine they can produce remarkable results. In deep reinforcement learning (RL), this paradigm is commonly made possible through experience replay, whereby a dataset of past experiences is used to train a policy or value function. However, unlike in supervised or self-supervised learning, an RL agent has to collect its own data, which is often limited. Thus, it is challenging to reap the benefits of deep learning, and even small neural networks can overfit at the start of training. In this work, we leverage the tremendous recent progress in generative modeling and propose Synthetic Experience Replay (SynthER), a diffusion-based approach to flexibly upsample an agent's collected experience. We show that SynthER is an effective method for training RL agents across offline and online settings, in both proprioceptive and pixel-based environments. In offline settings, we observe drastic improvements when upsampling small offline datasets and see that additional synthetic data also allows us to effectively train larger networks. Furthermore, SynthER enables online agents to train with a much higher update-to-data ratio than before, leading to a significant increase in sample efficiency, without any algorithmic changes. We believe that synthetic training data could open the door to realizing the full potential of deep learning for replay-based RL algorithms from limited data. Finally, we open-source our code at https://github.com/conglu1997/SynthER.
Policy Finetuning in Reinforcement Learning via Design of Experiments using Offline Data
Authors: Ruiqi Zhang; Andrea Zanette
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: In some applications of reinforcement learning, 
a dataset of pre-collected experience is already available
but it is also possible to acquire some additional online data to help improve the quality of the policy.
However, it may be preferable to gather additional data with a single, non-reactive exploration policy
and avoid the engineering costs associated with switching policies. 

In this paper we propose an algorithm with provable guarantees 
that can leverage an offline dataset to design a single non-reactive policy for exploration. 
We theoretically analyze the algorithm and measure the quality of the final policy 
as a function of the local coverage of the original dataset and the amount of additional data collected.
Symbolic Discovery of Optimization Algorithms
Authors: Xiangning Chen; Chen Liang; Da Huang; Esteban Real; Kaiyuan Wang; Hieu Pham; Xuanyi Dong; Thang Luong; Cho-Jui Hsieh; Yifeng Lu; Quoc V Le
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: We present a method to formulate algorithm discovery as program search, and apply it to discover optimization algorithms for deep neural network training. We leverage efficient search techniques to explore an infinite and sparse program space. To bridge the large generalization gap between proxy and target tasks, we also introduce program selection and simplification strategies.
Our method discovers a simple and effective optimization algorithm, $\textbf{Lion}$ ($\textit{Evo$\textbf{L}$ved S$\textbf{i}$gn M$\textbf{o}$me$\textbf{n}$tum}$). It is more memory-efficient than Adam as it only keeps track of the momentum. Different from adaptive optimizers, its update has the same magnitude for each parameter calculated through the sign operation.
We compare Lion with widely used optimizers, such as Adam and Adafactor, for training a variety of models on different tasks. On image classification, Lion boosts the accuracy of ViT by up to 2\% on ImageNet and saves up to 5x the pre-training compute on JFT. On vision-language contrastive learning, we achieve 88.3\% $\textit{zero-shot}$ and 91.1\% $\textit{fine-tuning}$ accuracy on ImageNet, surpassing the previous best results by 2\% and 0.1\%, respectively. On diffusion models, Lion outperforms Adam by achieving a better FID score and reducing the training compute by up to 2.3x. For autoregressive, masked language modeling, and fine-tuning, Lion exhibits a similar or better performance compared to Adam. Our analysis of Lion reveals that its performance gain grows with the training batch size. It also requires a smaller learning rate than Adam due to the larger norm of the update produced by the sign function. Additionally, we examine the limitations of Lion and identify scenarios where its improvements are small or not statistically significant.