OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Weakly-Supervised Audio-Visual Segmentation
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2023
Year: 2023

Audio-visual segmentation is a challenging task that aims to predict pixel-level masks for sound sources in a video. Previous work applied a comprehensive manually designed architecture with countless pixel-wise accurate masks as supervision. However, these pixel-level masks are expensive and not available in all cases. In this work, we aim to simplify the supervision as the instance-level annotation, i.e., weakly-supervised audio-visual segmentation. We present a novel Weakly-Supervised Audio-Visual Segmentation framework, namely WS-AVS, that can learn multi-scale audio-visual alignment with multi-scale multiple-instance contrastive learning for audio-visual segmentation. Extensive experiments on AVSBench demonstrate the effectiveness of our WS-AVS in the weakly-supervised audio-visual segmentation of single-source and multi-source scenarios.
Online Ad Allocation with Predictions
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2023
Year: 2023

Display Ads and the generalized assignment problem are two well-studied online packing problems with important applications in ad allocation and other areas. In both problems, ad impressions arrive online and have to be allocated immediately to budget-constrained advertisers. Worst-case algorithms that achieve the ideal competitive ratio are known, but might act overly conservative given the predictable and usually tame nature of real-world input. Given this discrepancy, we develop an algorithm for both problems that incorporate machine-learned predictions and can thus improve the performance beyond the worst-case. Our algorithm is based on the work of Feldman et al. (2009) and similar in nature to Mahdian et al. (2007) who were the first to develop a learning-augmented algorithm for the related, but more structured Ad Words problem. We use a novel analysis to show that our algorithm is able to capitalize on a good prediction, while being robust against poor predictions. We experimentally evaluate our algorithm on synthetic and real-world data on a wide range of predictions. Our algorithm is consistently outperforming the worst-case algorithm without predictions.
Towards Robust and Expressive Whole-body Human Pose and Shape Estimation
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2023
Year: 2023

Whole-body pose and shape estimation aims to jointly predict different behaviors (e.g., pose, hand gesture, facial expression) of the entire human body from a monocular image. Existing methods often exhibit degraded performance under the complexity of in-the-wild scenarios. We argue that the accuracy and reliability of these models are significantly affected by the quality of the predicted \textit{bounding box}, e.g., the scale and alignment of body parts. The natural discrepancy between the ideal bounding box annotations and model detection results is particularly detrimental to the performance of whole-body pose and shape estimation. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to enhance the robustness of whole-body pose and shape estimation. Our framework incorporates three new modules to address the above challenges from three perspectives: \textbf{1) Localization Module} enhances the model's awareness of the subject's location and semantics within the image space. \textbf{2) Contrastive Feature Extraction Module} encourages the model to be invariant to robust augmentations by incorporating contrastive loss with dedicated positive samples. \textbf{3) Pixel Alignment Module} ensures the reprojected mesh from the predicted camera and body model parameters are accurate and pixel-aligned. We perform comprehensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework on body, hands, face and whole-body benchmarks. Codebase is available at \url{https://github.com/robosmplx/robosmplx}.
Dynamic Non-monotone Submodular Maximization
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2023
Year: 2023

Maximizing submodular functions has been increasingly used in many applications of machine learning, such as data summarization, recommendation systems, and feature selection. Moreover, there has been a growing interest in both submodular maximization and dynamic algorithms. In 2020, Monemizadeh and Lattanzi, Mitrovic, Norouzi{-}Fard, Tarnawski, and Zadimoghaddam initiated developing dynamic algorithms for the monotone submodular maximization problem under the cardinality constraint $k$. Recently, there have been some improvements on the topic made by Banihashem, Biabani, Goudarzi, Hajiaghayi, Jabbarzade, and Monemizadeh. In 2022, Chen and Peng studied the complexity of this problem and raised an important open question: "Can we extend [fully dynamic] results (algorithm or hardness) to non-monotone submodular maximization?". We affirmatively answer their question by demonstrating a reduction from maximizing a non-monotone submodular function under the cardinality constraint $k$ to maximizing a monotone submodular function under the same constraint. Through this reduction, we obtain the first dynamic algorithms to solve the non-monotone submodular maximization problem under the cardinality constraint $k$. Our algorithms maintain an $(8+ε)$-approximate of the solution and use expected amortized $O(ε^{-3}k^3\log^3(n)\log(k))$ or $O(ε^{-1}k^2\log^3(k))$ oracle queries per update, respectively. Furthermore, we showcase the benefits of our dynamic algorithm for video summarization and max-cut problems on several real-world data sets.
Semi-Implicit Denoising Diffusion Models (SIDDMs)
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2023
Year: 2023

Despite the proliferation of generative models, achieving fast sampling during inference without compromising sample diversity and quality remains challenging. Existing models such as Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM) deliver high-quality, diverse samples but are slowed by an inherently high number of iterative steps. The Denoising Diffusion Generative Adversarial Networks (DDGAN) attempted to circumvent this limitation by integrating a GAN model for larger jumps in the diffusion process. However, DDGAN encountered scalability limitations when applied to large datasets. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel approach that tackles the problem by matching implicit and explicit factors. More specifically, our approach involves utilizing an implicit model to match the marginal distributions of noisy data and the explicit conditional distribution of the forward diffusion. This combination allows us to effectively match the joint denoising distributions. Unlike DDPM but similar to DDGAN, we do not enforce a parametric distribution for the reverse step, enabling us to take large steps during inference. Similar to the DDPM but unlike DDGAN, we take advantage of the exact form of the diffusion process. We demonstrate that our proposed method obtains comparable generative performance to diffusion-based models and vastly superior results to models with a small number of sampling steps.
Implicit Convolutional Kernels for Steerable CNNs
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2023
Year: 2023

Steerable convolutional neural networks (CNNs) provide a general framework for building neural networks equivariant to translations and transformations of an origin-preserving group $G$, such as reflections and rotations. They rely on standard convolutions with $G$-steerable kernels obtained by analytically solving the group-specific equivariance constraint imposed onto the kernel space. As the solution is tailored to a particular group $G$, implementing a kernel basis does not generalize to other symmetry transformations, complicating the development of general group equivariant models. We propose using implicit neural representation via multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) to parameterize $G$-steerable kernels. The resulting framework offers a simple and flexible way to implement Steerable CNNs and generalizes to any group $G$ for which a $G$-equivariant MLP can be built. We prove the effectiveness of our method on multiple tasks, including N-body simulations, point cloud classification and molecular property prediction.
Efficient Neural Music Generation
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2023
Year: 2023

Recent progress in music generation has been remarkably advanced by the state-of-the-art MusicLM, which comprises a hierarchy of three LMs, respectively, for semantic, coarse acoustic, and fine acoustic modelings. Yet, sampling with the MusicLM requires processing through these LMs one by one to obtain the fine-grained acoustic tokens, making it computationally expensive and prohibitive for a real-time generation. Efficient music generation with a quality on par with MusicLM remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we present MeLoDy (M for music; L for LM; D for diffusion), an LM-guided diffusion model that generates music audios of state-of-the-art quality meanwhile reducing 95.7% or 99.6% forward passes in MusicLM, respectively, for sampling 10s or 30s music. MeLoDy inherits the highest-level LM from MusicLM for semantic modeling, and applies a novel dual-path diffusion (DPD) model and an audio VAE-GAN to efficiently decode the conditioning semantic tokens into waveform. DPD is proposed to simultaneously model the coarse and fine acoustics by incorporating the semantic information into segments of latents effectively via cross-attention at each denoising step. Our experimental results suggest the superiority of MeLoDy, not only in its practical advantages on sampling speed and infinitely continuable generation, but also in its state-of-the-art musicality, audio quality, and text correlation. Our samples are available at https://Efficient-MeLoDy.github.io/.
Diffusion-TTA: Test-time Adaptation of Discriminative Models via Generative Feedback
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2023
Year: 2023

The advancements in generative modeling, particularly the advent of diffusion models, have sparked a fundamental question: how can these models be effectively used for discriminative tasks? In this work, we find that generative models can be great test-time adapters for discriminative models. Our method, Diffusion-TTA, adapts pre-trained discriminative models such as image classifiers, segmenters and depth predictors, to each unlabelled example in the test set using generative feedback from a diffusion model. We achieve this by modulating the conditioning of the diffusion model using the output of the discriminative model. We then maximize the image likelihood objective by backpropagating the gradients to discriminative model's parameters. We show Diffusion-TTA significantly enhances the accuracy of various large-scale pre-trained discriminative models, such as, ImageNet classifiers, CLIP models, image pixel labellers and image depth predictors. Diffusion-TTA outperforms existing test-time adaptation methods, including TTT-MAE and TENT, and particularly shines in online adaptation setups, where the discriminative model is continually adapted to each example in the test set. We provide access to code, results, and visualizations on our website: https://diffusion-tta.github.io/.
Fragment-based Pretraining and Finetuning on Molecular Graphs
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2023
Year: 2023

Property prediction on molecular graphs is an important application of Graph Neural Networks. Recently, unlabeled molecular data has become abundant, which facilitates the rapid development of self-supervised learning for GNNs in the chemical domain. In this work, we propose pretraining GNNs at the fragment level, a promising middle ground to overcome the limitations of node-level and graph-level pretraining. Borrowing techniques from recent work on principal subgraph mining, we obtain a compact vocabulary of prevalent fragments from a large pretraining dataset. From the extracted vocabulary, we introduce several fragment-based contrastive and predictive pretraining tasks. The contrastive learning task jointly pretrains two different GNNs: one on molecular graphs and the other on fragment graphs, which represents higher-order connectivity within molecules. By enforcing consistency between the fragment embedding and the aggregated embedding of the corresponding atoms from the molecular graphs, we ensure that the embeddings capture structural information at multiple resolutions. The structural information of fragment graphs is further exploited to extract auxiliary labels for graph-level predictive pretraining. We employ both the pretrained molecular-based and fragment-based GNNs for downstream prediction, thus utilizing the fragment information during finetuning. Our graph fragment-based pretraining (GraphFP) advances the performances on 5 out of 8 common molecular benchmarks and improves the performances on long-range biological benchmarks by at least 11.5%. Code is available at: https://github.com/lvkd84/GraphFP.
Characterizing Out-of-Distribution Error via Optimal Transport
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2023
Year: 2023

Out-of-distribution (OOD) data poses serious challenges in deployed machine learning models, so methods of predicting a model's performance on OOD data without labels are important for machine learning safety. While a number of methods have been proposed by prior work, they often underestimate the actual error, sometimes by a large margin, which greatly impacts their applicability to real tasks. In this work, we identify pseudo-label shift, or the difference between the predicted and true OOD label distributions, as a key indicator to this underestimation. Based on this observation, we introduce a novel method for estimating model performance by leveraging optimal transport theory, Confidence Optimal Transport (COT), and show that it provably provides more robust error estimates in the presence of pseudo-label shift. Additionally, we introduce an empirically-motivated variant of COT, Confidence Optimal Transport with Thresholding (COTT), which applies thresholding to the individual transport costs and further improves the accuracy of COT's error estimates. We evaluate COT and COTT on a variety of standard benchmarks that induce various types of distribution shift -- synthetic, novel subpopulation, and natural -- and show that our approaches significantly outperform existing state-of-the-art methods with an up to 3x lower prediction error.
Does Localization Inform Editing? Surprising Differences in Causality-Based Localization vs. Knowledge Editing in Language Models
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2023
Year: 2023

Language models learn a great quantity of factual information during pretraining, and recent work localizes this information to specific model weights like mid-layer MLP weights. In this paper, we find that we can change how a fact is stored in a model by editing weights that are in a different location than where existing methods suggest that the fact is stored. This is surprising because we would expect that localizing facts to specific model parameters would tell us where to manipulate knowledge in models, and this assumption has motivated past work on model editing methods. Specifically, we show that localization conclusions from representation denoising (also known as Causal Tracing) do not provide any insight into which model MLP layer would be best to edit in order to override an existing stored fact with a new one. This finding raises questions about how past work relies on Causal Tracing to select which model layers to edit. Next, we consider several variants of the editing problem, including erasing and amplifying facts. For one of our editing problems, editing performance does relate to localization results from representation denoising, but we find that which layer we edit is a far better predictor of performance. Our results suggest, counterintuitively, that better mechanistic understanding of how pretrained language models work may not always translate to insights about how to best change their behavior. Our code is available at https://github.com/google/belief-localization
The Geometry of Neural Nets' Parameter Spaces Under Reparametrization
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2023
Year: 2023

Model reparametrization, which follows the change-of-variable rule of calculus, is a popular way to improve the training of neural nets. But it can also be problematic since it can induce inconsistencies in, e.g., Hessian-based flatness measures, optimization trajectories, and modes of probability densities. This complicates downstream analyses: e.g. one cannot definitively relate flatness with generalization since arbitrary reparametrization changes their relationship. In this work, we study the invariance of neural nets under reparametrization from the perspective of Riemannian geometry. From this point of view, invariance is an inherent property of any neural net if one explicitly represents the metric and uses the correct associated transformation rules. This is important since although the metric is always present, it is often implicitly assumed as identity, and thus dropped from the notation, then lost under reparametrization. We discuss implications for measuring the flatness of minima, optimization, and for probability-density maximization. Finally, we explore some interesting directions where invariance is useful.
A Dataset of Relighted 3D Interacting Hands
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2023
Year: 2023

The two-hand interaction is one of the most challenging signals to analyze due to the self-similarity, complicated articulations, and occlusions of hands. Although several datasets have been proposed for the two-hand interaction analysis, all of them do not achieve 1) diverse and realistic image appearances and 2) diverse and large-scale groundtruth (GT) 3D poses at the same time. In this work, we propose Re:InterHand, a dataset of relighted 3D interacting hands that achieve the two goals. To this end, we employ a state-of-the-art hand relighting network with our accurately tracked two-hand 3D poses. We compare our Re:InterHand with existing 3D interacting hands datasets and show the benefit of it. Our Re:InterHand is available in https://mks0601.github.io/ReInterHand/.
Multi-Objective Intrinsic Reward Learning for Conversational Recommender Systems
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2023
Year: 2023

Conversational Recommender Systems (CRS) actively elicit user preferences to generate adaptive recommendations. Mainstream reinforcement learning-based CRS solutions heavily rely on handcrafted reward functions, which may not be aligned with user intent in CRS tasks. Therefore, the design of task-specific rewards is critical to facilitate CRS policy learning, which remains largely under-explored in the literature. In this work, we propose a novel approach to address this challenge by learning intrinsic rewards from interactions with users. Specifically, we formulate intrinsic reward learning as a multi-objective bi-level optimization problem. The inner level optimizes the CRS policy augmented by the learned intrinsic rewards, while the outer level drives the intrinsic rewards to optimize two CRS-specific objectives: maximizing the success rate and minimizing the number of turns to reach a successful recommendation in conversations. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct extensive experiments on three public CRS benchmarks. The results show that our algorithm significantly improves CRS performance by exploiting informative learned intrinsic rewards.
What Makes Good Examples for Visual In-Context Learning?
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2023
Year: 2023

Large-scale models trained on broad data have recently become the mainstream architecture in computer vision due to their strong generalization performance. In this paper, the main focus is on an emergent ability in large vision models, known as in-context learning, which allows inference on unseen tasks by conditioning on in-context examples (a.k.a.~prompt) without updating the model parameters. This concept has been well-known in natural language processing but has only been studied very recently for large vision models. We for the first time provide a comprehensive investigation on the impact of in-context examples in computer vision, and find that the performance is highly sensitive to the choice of in-context examples. To overcome the problem, we propose a prompt retrieval framework to automate the selection of in-context examples. Specifically, we present (1) an unsupervised prompt retrieval method based on nearest example search using an off-the-shelf model, and (2) a supervised prompt retrieval method, which trains a neural network to choose examples that directly maximize in-context learning performance. The results demonstrate that our methods can bring non-trivial improvements to visual in-context learning in comparison to the commonly-used random selection.
Parameterizing Context: Unleashing the Power of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning and In-Context Tuning for Continual Table Semantic Parsing
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2023
Year: 2023

Continual table semantic parsing aims to train a parser on a sequence of tasks, where each task requires the parser to translate natural language into SQL based on task-specific tables but only offers limited training examples. Conventional methods tend to suffer from overfitting with limited supervision, as well as catastrophic forgetting due to parameter updates. Despite recent advancements that partially alleviate these issues through semi-supervised data augmentation and retention of a few past examples, the performance is still limited by the volume of unsupervised data and stored examples. To overcome these challenges, this paper introduces a novel method integrating \textit{parameter-efficient fine-tuning} (PEFT) and \textit{in-context tuning} (ICT) for training a continual table semantic parser. Initially, we present a task-adaptive PEFT framework capable of fully circumventing catastrophic forgetting, which is achieved by freezing the pre-trained model backbone and fine-tuning small-scale prompts. Building on this, we propose a teacher-student framework-based solution. The teacher addresses the few-shot problem using ICT, which procures contextual information by demonstrating a few training examples. In turn, the student leverages the proposed PEFT framework to learn from the teacher's output distribution, and subsequently compresses and saves the contextual information to the prompts, eliminating the need to store any training examples. Experimental evaluations on two benchmarks affirm the superiority of our method over prevalent few-shot and continual learning baselines across various metrics.
DFRD: Data-Free Robustness Distillation for Heterogeneous Federated Learning
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2023
Year: 2023

Federated Learning (FL) is a privacy-constrained decentralized machine learning paradigm in which clients enable collaborative training without compromising private data. However, how to learn a robust global model in the data-heterogeneous and model-heterogeneous FL scenarios is challenging. To address it, we resort to data-free knowledge distillation to propose a new FL method (namely DFRD). DFRD equips a conditional generator on the server to approximate the training space of the local models uploaded by clients, and systematically investigates its training in terms of fidelity, transferability} and diversity. To overcome the catastrophic forgetting of the global model caused by the distribution shifts of the generator across communication rounds, we maintain an exponential moving average copy of the generator on the server. Additionally, we propose dynamic weighting and label sampling to accurately extract knowledge from local models. Finally, our extensive experiments on various image classification tasks illustrate that DFRD achieves significant performance gains compared to SOTA baselines.