GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
HydraLoRA: An Asymmetric LoRA Architecture for Efficient Fine-Tuning
Authors: Chunlin Tian; Zhan Shi; Zhijiang Guo; Li Li; Cheng-zhong Xu
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 oral)

Abstract: Adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to new tasks through fine-tuning has been made more efficient by the introduction of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) techniques, such as LoRA. However, these methods often underperform compared to full fine-tuning, particularly in scenarios involving complex datasets. This issue becomes even more pronounced in complex domains, highlighting the need for improved PEFT approaches that can achieve better performance. Through a series of experiments, we have uncovered two critical insights that shed light on the training and parameter inefficiency of LoRA. Building on these insights, we have developed HydraLoRA, a LoRA framework with an asymmetric structure that eliminates the need for domain expertise. Our experiments demonstrate that HydraLoRA outperforms other PEFT approaches, even those that rely on domain knowledge during the training and inference phases. Our anonymous codes are submitted with the paper and will be publicly available. Code is available: https://github.com/Clin0212/HydraLoRA.
Is Your LiDAR Placement Optimized for 3D Scene Understanding?
Authors: Ye Li; Lingdong Kong; Hanjiang Hu; Xiaohao Xu; Xiaonan Huang
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 spotlight)

Abstract: The reliability of driving perception systems under unprecedented conditions is crucial for practical usage. Latest advancements have prompted increasing interest in multi-LiDAR perception. However, prevailing driving datasets predominantly utilize single-LiDAR systems and collect data devoid of adverse conditions, failing to capture the complexities of real-world environments accurately. Addressing these gaps, we proposed Place3D, a full-cycle pipeline that encompasses LiDAR placement optimization, data generation, and downstream evaluations. Our framework makes three appealing contributions. 1) To identify the most effective configurations for multi-LiDAR systems, we introduce the Surrogate Metric of the Semantic Occupancy Grids (M-SOG) to evaluate LiDAR placement quality. 2) Leveraging the M-SOG metric, we propose a novel optimization strategy to refine multi-LiDAR placements. 3) Centered around the theme of multi-condition multi-LiDAR perception, we collect a 280,000-frame dataset from both clean and adverse conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LiDAR placements optimized using our approach outperform various baselines. We showcase exceptional results in both LiDAR semantic segmentation and 3D object detection tasks, under diverse weather and sensor failure conditions.
Tactile DreamFusion: Exploiting Tactile Sensing for 3D Generation
Authors: Ruihan Gao; Kangle Deng; Gengshan Yang; Wenzhen Yuan; Jun-Yan Zhu
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: 3D generation methods have shown visually compelling results powered by diffusion image priors. However, they often fail to produce realistic geometric details, resulting in overly smooth surfaces or geometric details inaccurately baked in albedo maps. To address this, we introduce a new method that incorporates touch as an additional modality to improve the geometric details of generated 3D assets. We design a lightweight 3D texture field to synthesize visual and tactile textures, guided by 2D diffusion model priors on both visual and tactile domains. We condition the visual texture generation on high-resolution tactile normals and guide the patch-based tactile texture refinement with a customized TextureDreambooth. We further present a multi-part generation pipeline that enables us to synthesize different textures across various regions. To our knowledge, we are the first to leverage high-resolution tactile sensing to enhance geometric details for 3D generation tasks. We evaluate our method in both text-to-3D and image-to-3D settings. Our experiments demonstrate that our method provides customized and realistic fine geometric textures while maintaining accurate alignment between two modalities of vision and touch.
Transformers Learn to Achieve Second-Order Convergence Rates for In-Context Linear Regression
Authors: Deqing Fu; Tian-qi Chen; Robin Jia; Vatsal Sharan
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Transformers excel at *in-context learning* (ICL)---learning from demonstrations without parameter updates---but how they do so remains a mystery. Recent work suggests that Transformers may internally run Gradient Descent (GD), a first-order optimization method, to perform ICL. In this paper, we instead demonstrate that Transformers learn to approximate second-order optimization methods for ICL. For in-context linear regression, Transformers share a similar convergence rate as *Iterative Newton's Method*, both *exponentially* faster than GD. Empirically, predictions from successive Transformer layers closely match different iterations of Newton’s Method linearly, with each middle layer roughly computing 3 iterations; thus, Transformers and Newton’s method converge at roughly the same rate. In contrast, Gradient Descent converges exponentially more slowly. We also show that Transformers can learn in-context on ill-conditioned data, a setting where Gradient Descent struggles but Iterative Newton succeeds. Finally, to corroborate our empirical findings, we prove that Transformers can implement $k$ iterations of Newton's method with $k + \mathcal O(1)$ layers.
Improving Deep Reinforcement Learning by Reducing the Chain Effect of Value and Policy Churn
Authors: Hongyao Tang; Glen Berseth
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Deep neural networks provide Reinforcement Learning (RL) powerful function approximators to address large-scale decision-making problems. However, these approximators introduce challenges due to the non-stationary nature of RL training. One source of the challenges in RL is that output predictions can churn, leading to uncontrolled changes after each batch update for states not included in the batch. Although such a churn phenomenon exists in each step of network training, it remains under-explored on how churn occurs and impacts RL. In this work, we start by characterizing churn in a view of Generalized Policy Iteration with function approximation, and we discover a chain effect of churn that leads to a cycle where the churns in value estimation and policy improvement compound and bias the learning dynamics throughout the iteration. Further, we concretize the study and focus on the learning issues caused by the chain effect in different settings, including greedy action deviation in value-based methods, trust region violation in proximal policy optimization, and dual bias of policy value in actor-critic methods. We then propose a method to reduce the chain effect across different settings, called Churn Approximated ReductIoN (CHAIN), which can be easily plugged into most existing DRL algorithms. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in both reducing churn and improving learning performance across online and offline, value-based and policy-based RL settings.
MG-Net: Learn to Customize QAOA with Circuit Depth Awareness
Authors: Yang Qian; Xinbiao Wang; Yuxuan Du; Yong Luo; Dacheng Tao
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) and its variants exhibit immense potential in tackling combinatorial optimization challenges. However, their practical realization confronts a dilemma: the requisite circuit depth for satisfactory performance is problem-specific and often exceeds the maximum capability of current quantum devices. To address this dilemma, here we first analyze the convergence behavior of QAOA, uncovering the origins of this dilemma and elucidating the intricate relationship between the employed mixer Hamiltonian, the specific problem at hand, and the permissible maximum circuit depth. Harnessing this understanding, we introduce the Mixer Generator Network (MG-Net), a unified deep learning framework adept at dynamically formulating optimal mixer Hamiltonians tailored to distinct tasks and circuit depths. Systematic simulations, encompassing Ising models and weighted Max-Cut instances with up to 64 qubits, substantiate our theoretical findings, highlighting MG-Net's superior performance in terms of both approximation ratio and efficiency.
Improving Visual Prompt Tuning by Gaussian Neighborhood Minimization for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition
Authors: Mengke Li; Ye Liu; Yang Lu; Yiqun Zhang; Yiu-ming Cheung; Hui Huang
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Long-tailed visual recognition has received increasing attention recently. Despite fine-tuning techniques represented by visual prompt tuning (VPT) achieving substantial performance improvement by leveraging pre-trained knowledge, models still exhibit unsatisfactory generalization performance on tail classes. To address this issue, we propose a novel optimization strategy called Gaussian neighborhood minimization prompt tuning (GNM-PT), for VPT to address the long-tail learning problem. We introduce a novel Gaussian neighborhood loss, which provides a tight upper bound on the loss function of data distribution, facilitating a flattened loss landscape correlated to improved model generalization. Specifically, GNM-PT seeks the gradient descent direction within a random parameter neighborhood, independent of input samples, during each gradient update. Ultimately, GNM-PT enhances generalization across all classes while simultaneously reducing computational overhead. The proposed GNM-PT achieves state-of-the-art classification accuracies of 90.3%, 76.5%, and 50.1% on benchmark datasets CIFAR100-LT (IR 100), iNaturalist 2018, and Places-LT, respectively. The source code is available at https://github.com/Keke921/GNM-PT.
Knowledge Composition using Task Vectors with Learned Anisotropic Scaling
Authors: Frederic Z. Zhang; Paul Albert; Cristian Rodriguez-Opazo; Anton van den Hengel; Ehsan Abbasnejad
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Pre-trained models produce strong generic representations that can be adapted via fine-tuning on specialised datasets. The learned weight difference relative to the pre-trained model, known as a task vector, characterises the direction and stride of fine-tuning that enables the model to capture these specialised representations. The significance of task vectors is such that simple arithmetic operations on them can be used to combine diverse representations from different domains. This paper builds on these properties of task vectors and aims to answer (1) whether components of task vectors, particularly parameter blocks, exhibit similar characteristics, and (2) how such blocks can be used to enhance knowledge composition and transfer. To this end, we introduce aTLAS, an algorithm that linearly combines parameter blocks with different learned coefficients, resulting in anisotropic scaling at the task vector level. We show that such linear combinations explicitly exploit the low intrinsic dimensionality of pre-trained models, with only a few coefficients being the learnable parameters. Furthermore, composition of parameter blocks enables modular learning that effectively leverages the already learned representations, thereby reducing the dependency on large amounts of data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in task arithmetic, few-shot recognition and test-time adaptation, with supervised or unsupervised objectives. In particular, we show that (1) learned anisotropic scaling allows task vectors to be more disentangled, causing less interference in composition; (2) task vector composition excels with scarce or no labelled data and is less prone to domain shift, thus leading to better generalisability; (3) mixing the most informative parameter blocks across different task vectors prior to training can reduce the memory footprint and improve the flexibility of knowledge transfer. Moreover, we show the potential of aTLAS as a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method, particularly with less data, and demonstrate that it can be easily scaled up for higher performance.
FlowTurbo: Towards Real-time Flow-Based Image Generation with Velocity Refiner
Authors: Wenliang Zhao; Minglei Shi; Xumin Yu; Jie Zhou; Jiwen Lu
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Building on the success of diffusion models in visual generation, flow-based models reemerge as another prominent family of generative models that have achieved competitive or better performance in terms of both visual quality and inference speed. By learning the velocity field through flow-matching, flow-based models tend to produce a straighter sampling trajectory, which is advantageous during the sampling process. However, unlike diffusion models for which fast samplers are well-developed, efficient sampling of flow-based generative models has been rarely explored. In this paper, we propose a framework called FlowTurbo to accelerate the sampling of flow-based models while still enhancing the sampling quality. Our primary observation is that the velocity predictor's outputs in the flow-based models will become stable during the sampling, enabling the estimation of velocity via a lightweight velocity refiner. Additionally, we introduce several techniques including a pseudo corrector and sample-aware compilation to further reduce inference time. Since FlowTurbo does not change the multi-step sampling paradigm, it can be effectively applied for various tasks such as image editing, inpainting, etc. By integrating FlowTurbo into different flow-based models, we obtain an acceleration ratio of 53.1\%$\sim$58.3\% on class-conditional generation and 29.8\%$\sim$38.5\% on text-to-image generation. Notably, FlowTurbo reaches an FID of 2.12 on ImageNet with 100 (ms / img) and FID of 3.93 with 38 (ms / img), achieving the real-time image generation and establishing the new state-of-the-art. Code is available at https://github.com/shiml20/FlowTurbo.
Online Control with Adversarial Disturbance for Continuous-time Linear Systems
Authors: Jingwei Li; Jing Dong; Can Chang; Baoxiang Wang; Jingzhao Zhang
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: We study online control for continuous-time linear systems with finite sampling rates, where the objective is to design an online procedure that learns under non-stochastic noise and performs comparably to a fixed optimal linear controller. 
We present a novel two-level online algorithm, by integrating a higher-level learning strategy and a lower-level feedback control strategy. This method offers a practical and robust solution for online control, which achieves sublinear regret. Our work provides the first nonasymptotic results for controlling continuous-time linear systems with finite number of interactions with the system. Moreover, we examine how to train an agent in domain randomization environments from a non-stochastic control perspective. By applying our method to the SAC (Soft Actor-Critic) algorithm, we achieved improved results in multiple reinforcement learning tasks within domain randomization environments. Our work provides new insights into non-asymptotic analyses of controlling continuous-time systems. Furthermore, our work brings practical intuition into controller learning under non-stochastic environments.
AutoTimes: Autoregressive Time Series Forecasters via Large Language Models
Authors: Yong Liu; Guo Qin; Xiangdong Huang; Jianmin Wang; Mingsheng Long
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Foundation models of time series have not been fully developed due to the limited availability of time series corpora and the underexploration of scalable pre-training. Based on the similar sequential formulation of time series and natural language, increasing research demonstrates the feasibility of leveraging large language models (LLM) for time series. Nevertheless, the inherent autoregressive property and decoder-only architecture of LLMs have not been fully considered, resulting in insufficient utilization of LLM abilities. To fully revitalize the general-purpose token transition and multi-step generation capability of large language models, we propose AutoTimes to repurpose LLMs as autoregressive time series forecasters, which projects time series into the embedding space of language tokens and autoregressively generates future predictions with arbitrary lengths. Compatible with any decoder-only LLMs, the consequent forecaster exhibits the flexibility of the lookback length and scalability with larger LLMs. Further, we formulate time series as prompts, extending the context for prediction beyond the lookback window, termed in-context forecasting. By introducing LLM-embedded textual timestamps, AutoTimes can utilize chronological information to align multivariate time series. Empirically, AutoTimes achieves state-of-the-art with 0.1% trainable parameters and over $5\times$ training/inference speedup compared to advanced LLM-based forecasters. Code is available at this repository: https://github.com/thuml/AutoTimes.
Does Worst-Performing Agent Lead the Pack? Analyzing Agent Dynamics in Unified Distributed SGD
Authors: Jie Hu; Yi-Ting Ma; Do Young Eun
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Distributed learning is essential to train machine learning algorithms across *heterogeneous* agents while maintaining data privacy. We conduct an asymptotic analysis of Unified Distributed SGD (UD-SGD), exploring a variety of communication patterns, including decentralized SGD and local SGD within Federated Learning (FL), as well as the increasing communication interval in the FL setting. In this study, we assess how different sampling strategies, such as *i.i.d.* sampling, shuffling, and Markovian sampling, affect the convergence speed of UD-SGD by considering the impact of agent dynamics on the limiting covariance matrix as described in the Central Limit Theorem (CLT). Our findings not only support existing theories on linear speedup and asymptotic network independence, but also theoretically and empirically show how efficient sampling strategies employed by individual agents contribute to overall convergence in UD-SGD. Simulations reveal that a few agents using highly efficient sampling can achieve or surpass the performance of the majority employing moderately improved strategies, providing new insights beyond traditional analyses focusing on the worst-performing agent.
Theoretical Analysis of Weak-to-Strong Generalization
Authors: Hunter Lang; David Sontag; Aravindan Vijayaraghavan
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Strong student models can learn from weaker teachers: when trained on the predictions of a weaker model, a strong pretrained student can learn to correct the weak model’s errors and generalize to examples where the teacher is not confident, even when these examples are excluded from training. This enables learning from cheap, incomplete, and possibly incorrect label information, such as coarse logical rules or the generations of a language model. We show that existing weak supervision theory results fail to account for both of these effects, which we call pseudolabel correction and coverage expansion, respectively. We give a new bound based on expansion properties of the data distribution and student hypothesis class that directly accounts for pseudolabel correction and coverage expansion. Our bound generalizes results from the co-training and self-training literature and captures the intuition that weak-to-strong generalization occurs when the mistakes of the weak model are hard for the strong model to fit without incurring additional error. We show that these expansion properties can be checked from finite data and give empirical evidence that they hold in practice.
What If the Input is Expanded in OOD Detection?
Authors: Boxuan Zhang; Jianing Zhu; Zengmao Wang; Tongliang Liu; Bo Du; Bo Han
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection aims to identify OOD inputs from unknown classes, which is important for the reliable deployment of machine learning models in the open world. Various scoring functions are proposed to distinguish it from in-distribution (ID) data. However, existing methods generally focus on excavating the discriminative information from a single input, which implicitly limits its representation dimension. In this work, we introduce a novel perspective, i.e., employing different common corruptions on the input space, to expand that. We reveal an interesting phenomenon termed *confidence mutation*, where the confidence of OOD data can decrease significantly under the corruptions, while the ID data shows a higher confidence expectation considering the resistance of semantic features. Based on that, we formalize a new scoring method, namely, *Confidence aVerage* (CoVer), which can capture the dynamic differences by simply averaging the scores obtained from different corrupted inputs and the original ones, making the OOD and ID distributions more separable in detection tasks. Extensive experiments and analyses have been conducted to understand and verify the effectiveness of CoVer.
AutoGuide: Automated Generation and Selection of Context-Aware Guidelines for Large Language Model Agents
Authors: Yao Fu; Dong-Ki Kim; Jaekyeom Kim; Sungryull Sohn; Lajanugen Logeswaran; Kyunghoon Bae; Honglak Lee
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have empowered AI agents capable of performing various sequential decision-making tasks. However, effectively guiding LLMs to perform well in unfamiliar domains like web navigation, where they lack sufficient knowledge, has proven to be difficult with the demonstration-based in-context learning paradigm. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework, called AutoGuide, which addresses this limitation by automatically generating context-aware guidelines from offline experiences. Importantly, each context-aware guideline is expressed in concise natural language and follows a conditional structure, clearly describing the context where it is applicable. As a result, our guidelines facilitate the provision of relevant knowledge for the agent's current decision-making process, overcoming the limitations of the conventional demonstration-based learning paradigm. Our evaluation demonstrates that AutoGuide significantly outperforms competitive baselines in complex benchmark domains, including real-world web navigation.
FlexSBDD: Structure-Based Drug Design with Flexible Protein Modeling
Authors: ZAIXI ZHANG; Mengdi Wang; Qi Liu
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Structure-based drug design (SBDD), which aims to generate 3D ligand molecules binding to target proteins, is a fundamental task in drug discovery. Existing SBDD methods typically treat protein as rigid and neglect protein structural change when binding with ligand molecules, leading to a big gap with real-world scenarios and inferior generation qualities (e.g., many steric clashes). To bridge the gap, we propose FlexSBDD, a deep generative model capable of accurately modeling the flexible protein-ligand complex structure for ligand molecule generation. FlexSBDD adopts an efficient flow matching framework and leverages E(3)-equivariant network with scalar-vector dual representation to model dynamic structural changes. Moreover, novel data augmentation schemes based on structure relaxation/sidechain repacking are adopted to boost performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlexSBDD achieves state-of-the-art performance in generating high-affinity molecules and effectively modeling the protein's conformation change to increase favorable protein-ligand interactions (e.g., Hydrogen bonds) and decrease steric clashes.