GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
CS-Isolate: Extracting Hard Confident Examples by Content and Style Isolation
Authors: Yexiong Lin; Yu Yao; Xiaolong Shi; Mingming Gong; Xu Shen; Dong Xu; Tongliang Liu
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Label noise widely exists in large-scale image datasets. To mitigate the side effects of label noise, state-of-the-art methods focus on selecting confident examples by leveraging semi-supervised learning. Existing research shows that the ability to extract hard confident examples, which are close to the decision boundary, significantly influences the generalization ability of the learned classifier.
In this paper, we find that a key reason for some hard examples being close to the decision boundary is due to the entanglement of style factors with content factors. The hard examples become more discriminative when we focus solely on content factors, such as semantic information, while ignoring style factors. Nonetheless, given only noisy data, content factors are not directly observed and have to be inferred.
To tackle the problem of inferring content factors for classification when learning with noisy labels, our objective is to ensure that the content factors of all examples in the same underlying clean class remain unchanged as their style information changes.
To achieve this, we utilize different data augmentation techniques to alter the styles while regularizing content factors based on some confident examples. By training existing methods with our inferred content factors, CS-Isolate proves their effectiveness in learning hard examples on benchmark datasets. The implementation is available at https://github.com/tmllab/2023_NeurIPS_CS-isolate.
Beyond Pretrained Features: Noisy Image Modeling Provides Adversarial Defense
Authors: Zunzhi You; Daochang Liu; Bohyung Han; Chang Xu
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Recent advancements in masked image modeling (MIM) have made it a prevailing framework for self-supervised visual representation learning. The MIM pretrained models, like most deep neural network methods, remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, limiting their practical application, and this issue has received little research attention. In this paper, we investigate how this powerful self-supervised learning paradigm can provide adversarial robustness to downstream classifiers. During the exploration, we find that noisy image modeling (NIM), a simple variant of MIM that adopts denoising as the pre-text task, reconstructs noisy images surprisingly well despite severe corruption. Motivated by this observation, we propose an adversarial defense method, referred to as De^3, by exploiting the pretrained decoder for denoising. Through De^3, NIM is able to enhance adversarial robustness beyond providing pretrained features. Furthermore, we incorporate a simple modification, sampling the noise scale hyperparameter from random distributions, and enable the defense to achieve a better and tunable trade-off between accuracy and robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that, in terms of adversarial robustness, NIM is superior to MIM thanks to its effective denoising capability. Moreover, the defense provided by NIM achieves performance on par with adversarial training while offering the extra tunability advantage. Source code and models are available at https://github.com/youzunzhi/NIM-AdvDef.
RDumb: A simple approach that questions our progress in continual test-time adaptation
Authors: Ori Press; Steffen Schneider; Matthias Kuemmerer; Matthias Bethge
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) allows to update pre-trained models to changing data distributions at deployment time. While early work tested these algorithms for individual fixed distribution shifts, recent work proposed and applied methods for continual adaptation over long timescales. To examine the reported progress in the field, we propose the Continually Changing Corruptions (CCC) benchmark to measure asymptotic performance of TTA techniques. We find that eventually all but one state-of-the-art methods collapse and perform worse than a non-adapting model, including models specifically proposed to be robust to performance collapse. In addition, we introduce a simple baseline, "RDumb", that periodically resets the model to its pretrained state. RDumb performs better or on par with the previously proposed state-of-the-art in all considered benchmarks.
Our results show that previous TTA approaches are neither effective at regularizing adaptation to avoid collapse nor able to outperform a simplistic resetting strategy.
Practical Sharpness-Aware Minimization Cannot Converge All the Way to Optima
Authors: Dongkuk Si; Chulhee Yun
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 spotlight)

Abstract: Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is an optimizer that takes a descent step based on the gradient at a perturbation $y_t = x_t + \rho \frac{\nabla f(x_t)}{\lVert \nabla f(x_t) \rVert}$ of the current point $x_t$. 
Existing studies prove convergence of SAM for smooth functions, but they do so by assuming decaying perturbation size $\rho$ and/or no gradient normalization in $y_t$, which is detached from practice. To address this gap, we study deterministic/stochastic versions of SAM with practical configurations (i.e., constant $\rho$ and gradient normalization in $y_t$) and explore their convergence properties on smooth functions with (non)convexity assumptions.
Perhaps surprisingly, in many scenarios, we find out that SAM has limited capability to converge to global minima or stationary points.
For smooth strongly convex functions, we show that while deterministic SAM enjoys tight global convergence rates of $\tilde \Theta(\frac{1}{T^2})$, the convergence bound of stochastic SAM suffers an inevitable additive term $\mathcal O(\rho^2)$, indicating convergence only up to neighborhoods of optima.
In fact, such $\mathcal O(\rho^2)$ factors arise for stochastic SAM in all the settings we consider, and also for deterministic SAM in nonconvex cases; importantly, we prove by examples that such terms are unavoidable.
Our results highlight vastly different characteristics of SAM with vs. without decaying perturbation size or gradient normalization, and suggest that the intuitions gained from one version may not apply to the other.
Streaming PCA for Markovian Data
Authors: Syamantak Kumar; Purnamrita Sarkar
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 spotlight)

Abstract: Since its inception in 1982, Oja's algorithm has become an established method for streaming principle component analysis (PCA). We study the problem of streaming PCA, where the data-points are sampled from an irreducible, aperiodic, and reversible Markov chain starting in stationarity. Our goal is to estimate the top eigenvector of the unknown covariance matrix of the stationary distribution. This setting has implications in scenarios where data can solely be sampled from a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) type algorithm, and the objective is to perform inference on parameters of the stationary distribution. Most convergence guarantees for Oja's algorithm in the literature assume that the data-points are sampled IID. For data streams with Markovian dependence, one typically downsamples the data to get a "nearly" independent data stream. In this paper, we obtain the first near-optimal rate for Oja's algorithm on the entire data, where we remove the logarithmic dependence on the sample size, $n$, resulting from throwing data away in downsampling strategies.
Lookaround Optimizer: $k$ steps around, 1 step average
Authors: Jiangtao Zhang; Shunyu Liu; Jie Song; Tongtian Zhu; Zhengqi Xu; Mingli Song
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Weight Average (WA) is an active research topic due to its simplicity in ensembling deep networks and the effectiveness in promoting generalization. Existing weight average approaches, however, are often carried out along only one training trajectory in a post-hoc manner (i.e., the weights are averaged after the entire training process is finished), which significantly degrades the diversity between networks and thus impairs the effectiveness. In this paper, inspired by weight average, we propose Lookaround, a straightforward yet effective SGD-based optimizer leading to flatter minima with better generalization. Specifically, Lookaround iterates two steps during the whole training period: the around step and the average step. In each iteration, 1) the around step starts from a common point and trains multiple networks simultaneously, each on transformed data by a different data augmentation, and 2) the average step averages these trained networks to get the averaged network, which serves as the starting point for the next iteration. The around step improves the functionality diversity while the average step guarantees the weight locality of these networks during the whole training, which is essential for WA to work. We theoretically explain the superiority of Lookaround by convergence analysis, and make extensive experiments to evaluate Lookaround on popular benchmarks including CIFAR and ImageNet with both CNNs and ViTs, demonstrating clear superiority over state-of-the-arts. Our code is available at https://github.com/Ardcy/Lookaround.
Bringing regularized optimal transport to lightspeed: a splitting method adapted for GPUs
Authors: Jacob Lindbäck; Zesen Wang; Mikael Johansson
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: We present an efficient algorithm for regularized optimal transport. In contrast to
previous methods, we use the Douglas-Rachford splitting technique to develop
an efficient solver that can handle a broad class of regularizers. The algorithm
has strong global convergence guarantees, low per-iteration cost, and can exploit
GPU parallelization, making it considerably faster than the state-of-the-art for
many problems. We illustrate its competitiveness in several applications, including
domain adaptation and learning of generative models.
Template-free Articulated Neural Point Clouds for Reposable View Synthesis
Authors: Lukas Uzolas; Elmar Eisemann; Petr Kellnhofer
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Dynamic Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) achieve remarkable visual quality when synthesizing novel views of time-evolving 3D scenes. However, the common reliance on backward deformation fields makes reanimation of the captured object poses challenging. Moreover, the state of the art dynamic models are often limited by low visual fidelity, long reconstruction time or specificity to narrow application domains.  In this paper, we present a novel method utilizing a point-based representation and Linear Blend Skinning (LBS) to jointly learn a Dynamic NeRF and an associated skeletal model from even sparse multi-view video. Our forward-warping approach achieves state-of-the-art visual fidelity when synthesizing novel views and poses while significantly reducing the necessary learning time when compared to existing work. We demonstrate the versatility of our representation on a variety of articulated objects from common datasets and obtain reposable 3D reconstructions without the need of object-specific skeletal templates.
Locally Invariant Explanations: Towards Stable and Unidirectional Explanations through Local Invariant Learning
Authors: Amit Dhurandhar; Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy; Kartik Ahuja; Vijay Arya
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Locally interpretable model agnostic explanations (LIME) method is one of the most popular methods used to explain black-box models at a per example level. Although many variants have been proposed, few provide a simple way to produce high fidelity explanations that are also stable and intuitive. In this work, we provide a novel perspective by proposing a model agnostic local explanation method inspired by the invariant risk minimization (IRM) principle -- originally proposed for (global) out-of-distribution generalization -- to provide such high fidelity explanations that are also stable and unidirectional across nearby examples. Our method is based on a game theoretic formulation where we theoretically show that our approach has a strong tendency to eliminate features where the gradient of the black-box function abruptly changes sign in the locality of the example we want to explain, while in other cases it is more careful and will choose a more conservative (feature) attribution, a behavior which can be highly desirable for recourse. Empirically, we show on tabular, image and text data that the quality of our explanations with neighborhoods formed using random perturbations are much better than LIME and in some cases even comparable to other methods that use realistic neighbors sampled from the data manifold. This is desirable given that learning a manifold to either create realistic neighbors or to project explanations is typically expensive or may even be impossible. Moreover, our algorithm is simple and efficient to train, and can ascertain stable input features for local decisions of a black-box without access to side information such as a (partial) causal graph as has been seen in some recent works.
Fully Dynamic $k$-Clustering in $\tilde O(k)$ Update Time
Authors: Sayan Bhattacharya; Martin Costa; Silvio Lattanzi; Nikos Parotsidis
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: We present a $O(1)$-approximate fully dynamic algorithm for the $k$-median and $k$-means problems on metric spaces with amortized update time $\tilde O(k)$ and worst-case query time $\tilde O(k^2)$. We complement our theoretical analysis with the first in-depth experimental study for the dynamic $k$-median problem on general metrics, focusing on comparing our dynamic algorithm to the current state-of-the-art by Henzinger and Kale [ESA'20]. Finally, we also provide a lower bound for dynamic $k$-median which shows that any $O(1)$-approximate algorithm with $\tilde O(\text{poly}(k))$ query time must have $\tilde \Omega(k)$ amortized update time, even in the incremental setting.
Connecting Certified and Adversarial Training
Authors: Yuhao Mao; Mark Niklas Mueller; Marc Fischer; Martin Vechev
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Training certifiably robust neural networks remains a notoriously hard problem.
While adversarial training optimizes under-approximations of the worst-case loss, which leads to insufficient regularization for certification, sound certified training methods, optimize loose over-approximations, leading to over-regularization and poor (standard) accuracy.
In this work, we propose TAPS, an (unsound) certified training method that combines IBP and PGD training to optimize more precise, although not necessarily sound, worst-case loss approximations, reducing over-regularization and increasing certified and standard accuracies.
Empirically, TAPS achieves a new state-of-the-art in many settings, e.g., reaching a certified accuracy of $22$% on TinyImageNet for $\ell_\infty$-perturbations with radius $\epsilon=1/255$. We make our implementation and networks public at https://github.com/eth-sri/taps.
Quantizable Transformers: Removing Outliers by Helping Attention Heads Do Nothing
Authors: Yelysei Bondarenko; Markus Nagel; Tijmen Blankevoort
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Transformer models have been widely adopted in various domains over the last years and especially large language models have advanced the field of AI significantly. Due to their size, the capability of these networks has increased tremendously, but this has come at the cost of a significant increase in necessary compute. Quantization is one of the most effective ways for reducing the computational time and memory consumption of neural networks. Many studies have shown, however, that modern transformer models tend to learn strong outliers in their activations, making them difficult to quantize. To retain acceptable performance, the existence of these outliers requires activations to be in higher-bitwidth or the use of different numeric formats, extra fine-tuning, or other workarounds. We show that strong outliers are related to very specific behavior of attention heads that try to learn a "no-op", or just a partial update of the residual. To achieve the exact zeros needed in the attention matrix for a no-update, the input to the softmax is pushed to be larger and larger during training, causing outliers in other parts of the network. Based on these observations, we propose two simple (independent) modifications to the attention mechanism - _clipped softmax_ and _gated attention_. We empirically show that models pre-trained using our methods learn significantly smaller outliers while maintaining and sometimes even improving the floating-point task performance. This enables us to quantize transformers to full INT8 quantization of the activations without any additional effort. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods on both language models (BERT, OPT) and vision transformers.
Toward Understanding Generative Data Augmentation
Authors: Chenyu Zheng; Guoqiang Wu; Chongxuan Li
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Generative data augmentation, which scales datasets by obtaining fake labeled examples from a trained conditional generative model, boosts classification performance in various learning tasks including (semi-)supervised learning, few-shot learning, and adversarially robust learning. However, little work has theoretically investigated the effect of generative data augmentation. To fill this gap, we establish a general stability bound in this not independently and identically
distributed (non-i.i.d.) setting, where the learned distribution is dependent on the original train set and generally not the same as the true distribution. Our theoretical result includes the divergence between the learned distribution and the true distribution. It shows that generative data augmentation can enjoy a faster learning rate when the order of divergence term is $o(\max\left( \log(m)\beta_m, 1 / \sqrt{m})\right)$, where $m$ is the train set size and $\beta_m$ is the corresponding stability constant. We further specify the learning setup to the Gaussian mixture model and generative adversarial nets. We prove that in both cases, though generative data augmentation does not enjoy a faster learning rate, it can improve the learning guarantees at a constant level when the train set is small, which is significant when the awful overfitting occurs. Simulation results on the Gaussian mixture model and empirical results on generative adversarial nets support our theoretical conclusions.
Adapting Neural Link Predictors for Data-Efficient Complex Query Answering
Authors: Erik Arakelyan; Pasquale Minervini; Daniel Daza; Michael Cochez; Isabelle Augenstein
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Answering complex queries on incomplete knowledge graphs is a challenging task where a model needs to answer complex logical queries in the presence of missing knowledge. Prior work in the literature has proposed to address this problem by designing architectures trained end-to-end for the complex query answering task with a reasoning process that is hard to interpret while requiring data and resource-intensive training.  Other lines of research have proposed re-using simple neural link predictors to answer complex queries, reducing the amount of training data by orders of magnitude while providing interpretable answers. The neural link predictor used in such approaches is not explicitly optimised for the complex query answering task, implying that its scores are not calibrated to interact together. We propose to address these problems via CQD$^{\mathcal{A}}$, a parameter-efficient score \emph{adaptation} model optimised to re-calibrate neural link prediction scores for the complex query answering task. While the neural link predictor is frozen, the adaptation component -- which only increases the number of model parameters by $0.03\%$ -- is trained on the downstream complex query answering task. Furthermore, the calibration component enables us to support reasoning over queries that include atomic negations, which was previously impossible with link predictors. In our experiments, CQD$^{\mathcal{A}}$ produces significantly more accurate results than current state-of-the-art methods, improving from $34.4$ to $35.1$ Mean Reciprocal Rank values averaged across all datasets and query types while using $\leq 30\%$ of the available training query types. We further show that CQD$^{\mathcal{A}}$ is data-efficient, achieving competitive results with only $1\%$ of the complex training queries and robust in out-of-domain evaluations. Source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/EdinburghNLP/adaptive-cqd.
Provable Training for Graph Contrastive Learning
Authors: Yue Yu; Xiao Wang; Mengmei Zhang; Nian Liu; Chuan Shi
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 spotlight)

Abstract: Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has emerged as a popular training approach for learning node embeddings from augmented graphs without labels. Despite the key principle that maximizing the similarity between positive node pairs while minimizing it between negative node pairs is well established, some fundamental problems are still unclear. Considering the complex graph structure, are some nodes consistently well-trained and following this principle even with different graph augmentations? Or are there some nodes more likely to be untrained across graph augmentations and violate the principle? How to distinguish these nodes and further guide the training of GCL? To answer these questions, we first present experimental evidence showing that the training of GCL is indeed imbalanced across all nodes. To address this problem, we propose the metric "node compactness", which is the lower bound of how a node follows the GCL principle related to the range of augmentations. We further derive the form of node compactness theoretically through bound propagation, which can be integrated into binary cross-entropy as a regularization. To this end, we propose the PrOvable Training (POT) for GCL, which regularizes the training of GCL to encode node embeddings that follows the GCL principle better. Through extensive experiments on various benchmarks, POT consistently improves the existing GCL approaches, serving as a friendly plugin.
Learning Layer-wise Equivariances Automatically using Gradients
Authors: Tycho F.A. van der Ouderaa; Alexander Immer; Mark van der Wilk
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 spotlight)

Abstract: Convolutions encode equivariance symmetries into neural networks leading to better generalisation performance. However, symmetries provide fixed hard constraints on the functions a network can represent, need to be specified in advance, and can not be adapted. Our goal is to allow flexible symmetry constraints that can automatically be learned from data using gradients. Learning symmetry and associated weight connectivity structures from scratch is difficult for two reasons. First, it requires efficient and flexible parameterisations of layer-wise equivariances. Secondly, symmetries act as constraints and are therefore not encouraged by training losses measuring data fit. To overcome these challenges, we improve parameterisations of soft equivariance and learn the amount of equivariance in layers by optimising the marginal likelihood, estimated using differentiable Laplace approximations. The objective balances data fit and model complexity enabling layer-wise symmetry discovery in deep networks. We demonstrate the ability to automatically learn layer-wise equivariances on image classification tasks, achieving equivalent or improved performance over baselines with hard-coded symmetry.