GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Beyond Individual Input for Deep Anomaly Detection on Tabular Data
Authors: Hugo Thimonier; Fabrice Popineau; Arpad Rimmel; Bich-Liên DOAN
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Anomaly detection is vital in many domains, such as finance, healthcare, and cybersecurity. In this paper, we propose a novel deep anomaly detection method for tabular data that leverages Non-Parametric Transformers (NPTs), a model initially proposed for supervised tasks, to capture both feature-feature and sample-sample dependencies. In a reconstruction-based framework, we train an NPT to reconstruct masked features of normal samples. In a non-parametric fashion, we leverage the whole training set during inference and use the model's ability to reconstruct the masked features to generate an anomaly score. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to successfully combine feature-feature and sample-sample dependencies for anomaly detection on tabular datasets. Through extensive experiments on 31 benchmark tabular datasets, we demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing methods by 2.4% and 1.2% in terms of F1-score and AUROC, respectively. Our ablation study further proves that modeling both types of dependencies is crucial for anomaly detection on tabular data.
SCoRe: Submodular Combinatorial Representation Learning
Authors: Anay Majee; Suraj Nandkishor Kothawade; Krishnateja Killamsetty; Rishabh K Iyer
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: In this paper we introduce the **SCoRe** (**S**ubmodular **Co**mbinatorial **Re**presentation Learning) framework, a novel approach in representation learning that addresses inter-class bias and intra-class variance. SCoRe provides a new combinatorial viewpoint to representation learning, by introducing a family of loss functions based on set-based submodular information measures. We develop two novel combinatorial formulations for loss functions, using the *Total Information* and *Total Correlation*, that naturally minimize intra-class variance and inter-class bias. Several commonly used metric/contrastive learning loss functions like supervised contrastive loss, orthogonal projection loss, and N-pairs loss, are all instances of SCoRe, thereby underlining the versatility and applicability of SCoRe in a broad spectrum of learning scenarios. Novel objectives in SCoRe naturally model class-imbalance with up to 7.6% improvement in classification on CIFAR-10-LT, CIFAR-100-LT, MedMNIST, 2.1% on ImageNet-LT, and 19.4% in object detection on IDD and LVIS (v1.0), demonstrating its effectiveness over existing approaches.
Locally Estimated Global Perturbations are Better than Local Perturbations for Federated Sharpness-aware Minimization
Authors: Ziqing Fan; Shengchao Hu; Jiangchao Yao; Gang Niu; Ya Zhang; Masashi Sugiyama; Yanfeng Wang
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Spotlight)

Abstract: In federated learning (FL), the multi-step update and data heterogeneity among clients often lead to a loss landscape with sharper minima, degenerating the performance of the resulted global model. Prevalent federated approaches incorporate sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) into local training to mitigate this problem. However, the local loss landscapes may not accurately reflect the flatness of global loss landscape in heterogeneous environments; as a result, minimizing local sharpness and calculating perturbations on client data might not align the efficacy of SAM in FL with centralized training. To overcome this challenge, we propose FedLESAM, a novel algorithm that locally estimates the direction of global perturbation on client side as the difference between global models received in the previous active and current rounds. Besides the improved quality, FedLESAM also speed up federated SAM-based approaches since it only performs once backpropagation in each iteration. Theoretically, we prove a slightly tighter bound than its original FedSAM by ensuring consistent perturbation. Empirically, we conduct comprehensive experiments on four federated benchmark datasets under three partition strategies to demonstrate the superior performance and efficiency of FedLESAM.
Outlier-aware Slicing for Post-Training Quantization in Vision Transformer
Authors: Yuexiao Ma; Huixia Li; Xiawu Zheng; Feng Ling; Xuefeng Xiao; Rui Wang; Shilei Wen; Fei Chao; Rongrong Ji
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is a vital technique for network compression and acceleration, gaining prominence as model sizes increase. This paper addresses a critical challenge in PTQ: **the severe impact of outliers on the accuracy of quantized transformer architectures.** Specifically, we introduce the concept of `reconstruction granularity' as a novel solution to this issue, which has been overlooked in previous works. Our work provides theoretical insights into the role of reconstruction granularity in mitigating the outlier problem in transformer models. This theoretical framework is supported by empirical analysis, demonstrating that varying reconstruction granularities significantly influence quantization performance. Our findings indicate that different architectural designs necessitate distinct optimal reconstruction granularities. For instance, the multi-stage Swin Transformer architecture benefits from finer granularity, a deviation from the trends observed in ViT and DeiT models. We further develop an algorithm for determining the optimal reconstruction granularity for various ViT models, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in PTQ. For example, applying our method to $4$-bit quantization, the Swin-Base model achieves a Top-1 accuracy of $82.24\%$ on the ImageNet classification task. This result surpasses the RepQ-ViT by $3.92\%$ ($82.24\%$ VS $78.32\%$). Similarly, our approach elevates the ViT-Small to a Top-1 accuracy of $80.50\%$, outperforming NoisyQuant by $3.64\%$ ($80.50\%$ VS $76.86\%$). Codes are available in Supplementary Materials.
Prodigy: An Expeditiously Adaptive Parameter-Free Learner
Authors: Konstantin Mishchenko; Aaron Defazio
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: We consider the problem of estimating the learning rate in adaptive methods, such as AdaGrad and Adam. We propose Prodigy, an algorithm that provably estimates the distance to the solution $D$, which is needed to set the learning rate optimally. At its core, Prodigy is a modification of the D-Adaptation method for learning-rate-free learning. It improves upon the convergence rate of D-Adaptation by a factor of $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{\log(D/d_0)})$, where $d_0$ is the initial estimate of $D$. We test Prodigy on 12 common logistic-regression benchmark datasets, VGG11 and ResNet-50 training on CIFAR10, ViT training on Imagenet, LSTM training on IWSLT14, DLRM training on Criteo dataset, VarNet on Knee MRI dataset, as well as RoBERTa and GPT transformer training on BookWiki. Our experimental results show that our approach consistently outperforms D-Adaptation and reaches test accuracy values close to that of hand-tuned Adam.
Designing Decision Support Systems using Counterfactual Prediction Sets
Authors: Eleni Straitouri; Manuel Gomez Rodriguez
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Spotlight)

Abstract: Decision support systems for classification tasks are predominantly designed to predict the value of the ground truth labels. However, since their predictions are not perfect, these systems also need to make human experts understand when and how to use these predictions to update their own predictions. Unfortunately, this has been proven challenging. In this context, it has been recently argued that an alternative type of decision support systems may circumvent this challenge. Rather than providing a single label prediction, these systems provide a set of label prediction values constructed using a conformal predictor, namely a prediction set, and forcefully ask experts to predict a label value from the prediction set. However, the design and evaluation of these systems have so far relied on stylized expert models, questioning their promise. In this paper, we revisit the design of this type of systems from the perspective of online learning and develop a methodology that does not require, nor assumes, an expert model. Our methodology leverages the nested structure of the prediction sets provided by any conformal predictor and a natural counterfactual monotonicity assumption to achieve an exponential improvement in regret in comparison to vanilla bandit algorithms. We conduct a large-scale human subject study ($n = 2{,}751$) to compare our methodology to several competitive baselines. The results show that, for decision support systems based on prediction sets, limiting experts’ level of agency leads to greater performance than allowing experts to always exercise their own agency.
MM-Vet: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Integrated Capabilities
Authors: Weihao Yu; Zhengyuan Yang; Linjie Li; Jianfeng Wang; Kevin Lin; Zicheng Liu; Xinchao Wang; Lijuan Wang
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: We propose MM-Vet, an evaluation benchmark that examines large multimodal models (LMMs) on complicated multimodal tasks. Recent LMMs have shown various intriguing abilities, such as solving math problems written on the blackboard, reasoning about events and celebrities in news images, and explaining visual jokes. Rapid model advancements pose challenges to evaluation benchmark development. Problems include: (1) How to systematically structure and evaluate the complicated multimodal tasks; (2) How to design evaluation metrics that work well across question and answer types; and (3) How to give model insights beyond a simple performance ranking. To this end, we present MM-Vet, designed based on the insight that the intriguing ability to solve complicated tasks is often achieved by a generalist model being able to integrate different core vision-language (VL) capabilities. MM-Vet defines 6 core VL capabilities and examines the 16 integrations of interest derived from the capability combination. For evaluation metrics, we propose an LLM-based evaluator for open-ended outputs. The evaluator enables the evaluation across different question types and answer styles, resulting in a unified scoring metric. We evaluate representative LMMs on MM-Vet, providing insights into the capabilities of different LMM system paradigms and models.
Going beyond Compositions, DDPMs Can Produce Zero-Shot Interpolations
Authors: Justin Deschenaux; Igor Krawczuk; Grigorios Chrysos; Volkan Cevher
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities in image generation, with studies suggesting that they can generalize by composing latent factors learned from the training data. In this work, we go further and study DDPMs trained on strictly separate subsets of the data distribution with large gaps on the support of the latent factors. We show that such a model can effectively generate images in the unexplored, intermediate regions of the distribution. For instance, when trained on clearly smiling and non-smiling faces, we demonstrate a sampling procedure which can generate slightly smiling faces without reference images (zero-shot interpolation). We replicate these findings for other attributes as well as other datasets. [Our code is available on GitHub](https://github.com/jdeschena/ddpm-zero-shot-interpolation).
Momentum Particle Maximum Likelihood
Authors: Jen Ning Lim; Juan Kuntz; Samuel Power; Adam Michael Johansen
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of latent variable models is often recast as the minimization of a free energy functional over an extended space of parameters and probability distributions. This perspective was recently combined with insights from optimal transport to obtain novel particle-based algorithms for fitting latent variable models to data. Drawing inspiration from prior works which interpret `momentum-enriched' optimization algorithms as discretizations of ordinary differential equations, we propose an analogous dynamical-systems-inspired approach to minimizing the free energy functional. The result is a dynamical system that blends elements of Nesterov's Accelerated Gradient method, the underdamped Langevin diffusion, and particle methods. Under suitable assumptions, we prove that the continuous-time system minimizes the functional. By discretizing the system, we obtain a practical algorithm for MLE in latent variable models. The algorithm outperforms existing particle methods in numerical experiments and compares favourably with other MLE algorithms.
Task-aware Orthogonal Sparse Network for Exploring Shared Knowledge in Continual Learning
Authors: Yusong Hu; De Cheng; Dingwen Zhang; Nannan Wang; Tongliang Liu; Xinbo Gao
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Continual learning (CL) aims to learn from sequentially arriving tasks without catastrophic forgetting (CF). By partitioning the network into two parts based on the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis---one for holding the knowledge of the old tasks while the other for learning the knowledge of the new task---the recent progress has achieved forget-free CL. Although addressing the CF issue well, such methods would encounter serious under-fitting in long-term CL, in which the learning process will continue for a long time and the number of new tasks involved will be much higher. To solve this problem, this paper partitions the network into three parts---with a new part for exploring the knowledge sharing between the old and new tasks. With the shared knowledge, this part of network can be learnt to simultaneously consolidate the old tasks and fit to the new task. To achieve this goal, we propose a task-aware **Orthogonal Sparse Network** (OSN), which contains shared knowledge induced network partition and sharpness-aware orthogonal sparse network learning. The former partitions the network to select shared parameters, while the latter guides the exploration of shared knowledge through shared parameters. Qualitative and quantitative analyses, show that the proposed OSN induces minimum to no interference with past tasks, *i.e.*, approximately no forgetting, while greatly improves the model plasticity and capacity, and finally achieves the state-of-the-art performances.
Adaptive Stabilization Based on Machine Learning for Column Generation
Authors: Yunzhuang Shen; Yuan Sun; Xiaodong Li; Zhiguang Cao; Andrew Eberhard; Guangquan Zhang
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Column generation (CG) is a well-established method for solving large-scale linear programs. It involves iteratively optimizing a subproblem containing a subset of columns and using its dual solution to generate new columns with negative reduced costs. This process continues until the dual values converge to the optimal dual solution to the original problem. A natural phenomenon in CG is the heavy oscillation of the dual values during iterations, which can lead to a substantial slowdown in the convergence rate. *Stabilization* techniques are devised to accelerate the convergence of dual values by using information beyond the state of the current subproblem. However, there remains a significant gap in obtaining more accurate dual values at an earlier stage. To further narrow this gap, this paper introduces a novel approach consisting of 1) a *machine learning* approach for accurate prediction of optimal dual solutions and 2) an *adaptive stabilization* technique that effectively capitalizes on accurate predictions. On the graph coloring problem, we show that our method achieves a significantly improved convergence rate compared to traditional methods.
Neural Networks Learn Statistics of Increasing Complexity
Authors: Nora Belrose; Quintin Pope; Lucia Quirke; Alex Troy Mallen; Xiaoli Fern
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: The _distributional simplicity bias_ (DSB) posits that neural networks learn low-order moments of the data distribution first, before moving on to higher-order correlations. In this work, we present compelling new evidence for the DSB by showing that networks automatically learn to perform well on maximum-entropy distributions whose low-order statistics match those of the training set early in training, then lose this ability later. We also extend the DSB to discrete domains by proving an equivalence between token $n$-gram frequencies and the moments of embedding vectors, and by finding empirical evidence for the bias in LLMs. Finally we use optimal transport methods to surgically edit the low-order statistics of one class to match those of another, and show that early-training networks treat the edited samples as if they were drawn from the target class. Code is available at https://github.com/EleutherAI/features-across-time.
Data-efficient Large Vision Models through Sequential Autoregression
Authors: Zhiwei Hao; Jianyuan Guo; Chengcheng Wang; Yehui Tang; Han Wu; Han Hu; Kai Han; Chang Xu
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Training general-purpose vision models on purely sequential visual data, eschewing linguistic inputs, has heralded a new frontier in visual understanding. These models are intended to not only comprehend but also seamlessly transit to out-of-domain tasks. However, current endeavors are hamstrung by an over-reliance on colossal models, exemplified by models with upwards of 3B parameters, and the necessity for an extensive corpus of visual data, often comprising a staggering 400B tokens. In this paper, we delve into the development of an efficient, autoregression-based vision model, innovatively architected to operate on a limited dataset. We meticulously demonstrate how this model achieves proficiency in a spectrum of visual tasks spanning both high-level and low-level semantic understanding during the testing phase. Our empirical evaluations underscore the model's agility in adapting to various tasks, heralding a significant reduction in the parameter footprint, and a marked decrease in training data requirements, thereby paving the way for more sustainable and accessible advancements in the field of generalist vision models. The code is available at https://github.com/ggjy/DeLVM.
Socialized Learning: Making Each Other Better Through Multi-Agent Collaboration
Authors: Xinjie Yao; Yu Wang; Pengfei Zhu; Wanyu Lin; Jialu Li; Weihao Li; Qinghua Hu
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Learning new knowledge frequently occurs in our dynamically changing world, e.g., humans culturally evolve by continuously acquiring new abilities to sustain their survival, leveraging collective intelligence rather than a large number of individual attempts. The effective learning paradigm during cultural evolution is termed socialized learning (SL). Consequently, a straightforward question arises: Can multi-agent systems acquire more new abilities like humans? In contrast to most existing methods that address continual learning and multi-agent collaboration, our emphasis lies in a more challenging problem: we prioritize the knowledge in the original expert classes, and as we adeptly learn new ones, the accuracy in the original expert classes stays superior among all in a directional manner. Inspired by population genetics and cognitive science, leading to unique and complete development, we propose Multi-Agent Socialized Collaboration (MASC), which achieves SL through interactions among multiple agents. Specifically, we introduce collective collaboration and reciprocal altruism modules, organizing collaborative behaviors, promoting information sharing, and facilitating learning and knowledge interaction among individuals. We demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-agent collaboration in an extensive empirical study. Our code will be publicly available at https://github.com/yxjdarren/SL.
FiT: Flexible Vision Transformer for Diffusion Model
Authors: Zeyu Lu; ZiDong Wang; Di Huang; Chengyue Wu; Xihui Liu; Wanli Ouyang; LEI BAI
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Spotlight)

Abstract: In the context of this reality, existing diffusion models, such as Diffusion Transformers, often face challenges when processing image resolutions outside of their trained domain. To overcome this limitation, we present the Flexible Vision Transformer (FiT), a transformer architecture specifically designed for generating images with unrestricted resolutions and aspect ratios. Unlike traditional methods that perceive images as static-resolution grids, FiT conceptualizes images as sequences of dynamically-sized tokens. This perspective enables a flexible training strategy that effortlessly adapts to diverse aspect ratios during both training and inference phases, thus promoting resolution generalization and eliminating biases induced by image cropping. Enhanced by a meticulously adjusted network structure and the integration of training-free extrapolation techniques, FiT exhibits remarkable flexibility in resolution extrapolation generation. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the exceptional performance of FiT across a broad range of resolutions. Repository available at https://github.com/whlzy/FiT.
Learning Causal Dynamics Models in Object-Oriented Environments
Authors: Zhongwei Yu; Jingqing Ruan; Dengpeng Xing
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Causal dynamics models (CDMs) have demonstrated significant potential in addressing various challenges in reinforcement learning. To learn CDMs, recent studies have performed causal discovery to capture the causal dependencies among environmental variables. However, the learning of CDMs is still confined to small-scale environments due to computational complexity and sample efficiency constraints. This paper aims to extend CDMs to large-scale object-oriented environments, which consist of a multitude of objects classified into different categories. We introduce the Object-Oriented CDM (OOCDM) that shares causalities and parameters among objects belonging to the same class. Furthermore, we propose a learning method for OOCDM that enables it to adapt to a varying number of objects. Experiments on large-scale tasks indicate that OOCDM outperforms existing CDMs in terms of causal discovery, prediction accuracy, generalization, and computational efficiency.
Online bipartite matching with imperfect advice
Authors: Davin Choo; Themistoklis Gouleakis; Chun Kai Ling; Arnab Bhattacharyya
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: We study the problem of online unweighted bipartite matching with $n$ offline vertices and $n$ online vertices where one wishes to be competitive against the optimal offline algorithm. While the classic RANKING algorithm of (Karp et al., 1990) provably attains competitive ratio of $1-1/e > 1/2$, we show that no learning-augmented method can be both 1-consistent and strictly better than 1/2-robust under the adversarial arrival model. Meanwhile, under the random arrival model, we show how one can utilize methods from distribution testing to design an algorithm that takes in external advice about the online vertices and provably achieves competitive ratio interpolating between any ratio attainable by advice-free methods and the optimal ratio of 1, depending on the advice quality.