mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Exploring the Edges of Latent State Clusters for Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Guofeng Cui, He Zhu Yuanlin Duan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Exploring unknown environments efficiently is a fundamental challenge in unsupervised goal-conditioned reinforcement learning. While selecting exploratory goals at the frontier of previously explored states is an effective strategy, the policy during training may still have limited capability of reaching rare goals on the frontier, resulting in reduced exploratory behavior. We propose "Cluster Edge Exploration" (CE$^2$), a new goal-directed exploration algorithm that when choosing goals in sparsely explored areas of the state space gives priority to goal states that remain accessible to the agent. The key idea is clustering to group states that are easily reachable from one another by the current policy under training in a latent space, and traversing to states holding significant exploration potential on the boundary of these clusters before doing exploratory behavior. In challenging robotics environments including navigating a maze with a multi-legged ant robot, manipulating objects with a robot arm on a cluttered tabletop, and rotating objects in the palm of an anthropomorphic robotic hand, CE$^2$ demonstrates superior efficiency in exploration compared to baseline methods and ablations.
Spec-Gaussian: Anisotropic View-Dependent Appearance for 3D Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Xinyu Gao, Yang-Tian Sun, Yi-Hua Huang, Xiaoyang Lyu, Wen Zhou, Shaohui Jiao, Xiaojuan Qi, Xiaogang Jin Ziyi Yang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The recent advancements in 3D Gaussian splatting (3D-GS) have not only facilitated real-time rendering through modern GPU rasterization pipelines but have also attained state-of-the-art rendering quality. Nevertheless, despite its exceptional rendering quality and performance on standard datasets, 3D-GS  frequently encounters difficulties in accurately modeling specular and anisotropic components. This issue stems from the limited ability of spherical harmonics (SH) to represent high-frequency information. To overcome this challenge, we introduce Spec-Gaussian, an approach that utilizes an anisotropic spherical Gaussian (ASG) appearance field instead of SH for modeling the view-dependent appearance of each 3D Gaussian. Additionally, we have developed a coarse-to-fine training strategy to improve learning efficiency and eliminate floaters caused by overfitting in real-world scenes. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method surpasses existing approaches in terms of rendering quality. Thanks to ASG, we have significantly improved the ability of 3D-GS to model scenes with specular and anisotropic components without increasing the number of 3D Gaussians. This improvement extends the applicability of 3D GS to handle intricate scenarios with specular and anisotropic surfaces.
$\textit{Trans-LoRA}$: towards data-free Transferable Parameter Efficient Finetuning
Authors: Soumya Ghosh, David Cox, Diego Antognini, Aude Oliva, Rogerio Feris, Leonid Karlinsky Runqian Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Low-rank adapters (LoRA) and their variants are popular parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques that closely match full model fine-tune performance while requiring only a small number of additional parameters. These additional LoRA parameters are specific to the base model being adapted. When the base model needs to be deprecated and replaced with a new one, all the associated LoRA modules need to be re-trained. Such re-training requires access to the data used to train the LoRA for the original base model. This is especially problematic for commercial cloud applications where the LoRA modules and the base models are hosted by service providers who may not be allowed to host proprietary client task data. To address this challenge, we propose $\textit{Trans-LoRA}$ --- a novel method for lossless, nearly data-free transfer of LoRAs across base models. Our approach relies on synthetic data to transfer LoRA modules. Using large language models, we design a synthetic data generator to approximate the data-generating process of the $\textit{observed}$ task data subset. Training on the resulting synthetic dataset transfers LoRA modules to new models. We show the effectiveness of our approach using both LLama and Gemma model families. Our approach achieves lossless (mostly improved) LoRA transfer between models within and across different base model families, and even between different PEFT methods, on a wide variety of tasks.
PACE: Marrying generalization in PArameter-efficient fine-tuning with Consistency rEgularization
Authors: Shan Zhang, Piotr Koniusz Yao Ni
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) effectively adapts pre-trained transformers to downstream tasks. However, the optimization of tasks performance often comes at the cost of generalizability in fine-tuned models. To address this issue, we theoretically connect smaller weight gradient norms during training and larger datasets to the improvements in model generalization. Motivated by this connection, we propose reducing gradient norms for enhanced generalization and aligning fine-tuned model with the pre-trained counterpart to retain knowledge from large-scale pre-training data. Yet, naive alignment does not guarantee gradient reduction and can potentially cause gradient explosion, complicating efforts to manage gradients. To address such an issue, we propose PACE, marrying generalization of PArameter-efficient fine-tuning with Consistency rEgularization. We perturb features learned from the adapter with the multiplicative noise and ensure the fine-tuned model remains consistent for same sample under different perturbations. Theoretical analysis shows that PACE not only implicitly regularizes gradients for enhanced generalization, but also implicitly aligns the fine-tuned and pre-trained models to retain knowledge. Experimental evidence supports our theories. PACE surpasses existing PEFT methods in visual adaptation tasks (VTAB-1k, FGVC, few-shot learning, domain adaptation) showcasing its potential for resource-efficient fine-tuning. It also improves LoRA in text classification (GLUE) and mathematical reasoning (GSM-8K).
Real-Time Selection Under General Constraints via Predictive Inference
Authors: Lin Lu, Haojie Ren, Changliang Zou Yuyang Huo
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Real-time decision-making gets more attention in the big data era. Here, we consider the problem of sample selection in the online setting, where one encounters a possibly infinite sequence of individuals collected over time with covariate information available. The goal is to select samples of interest that are characterized by their unobserved responses until the user-specified stopping time. We derive a new decision rule that enables us to find more preferable samples that meet practical requirements by simultaneously controlling two types of general constraints: individual and interactive constraints, which include the widely utilized False Selection Rate (FSR), cost limitations, and diversity of selected samples. The key elements of our approach involve quantifying the uncertainty of response predictions via predictive inference and addressing individual and interactive constraints in a sequential manner. Theoretical and numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in controlling both individual and interactive constraints.
Unsupervised Homography Estimation on Multimodal Image Pair via Alternating Optimization
Authors: Jaihyun Lew, Hyemi Jang, Sungroh Yoon Sanghyeob Song
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Estimating the homography between two images is crucial for mid- or high-level vision tasks, such as image stitching and fusion. However, using supervised learning methods is often challenging or costly due to the difficulty of collecting ground-truth data. In response, unsupervised learning approaches have emerged. Most early methods, though, assume that the given image pairs are from the same camera or have minor lighting differences. Consequently, while these methods perform effectively under such conditions, they generally fail when input image pairs come from different domains, referred to as multimodal image pairs.To address these limitations, we propose AltO, an unsupervised learning framework for estimating homography in multimodal image pairs. Our method employs a two-phase alternating optimization framework, similar to Expectation-Maximization (EM), where one phase reduces the geometry gap and the other addresses the modality gap. To handle these gaps, we use Barlow Twins loss for the modality gap and propose an extended version, Geometry Barlow Twins, for the geometry gap. As a result, we demonstrate that our method, AltO, can be trained on multimodal datasets without any ground-truth data. It not only outperforms other unsupervised methods but is also compatible with various architectures of homography estimators.The source code can be found at: https://github.com/songsang7/AltO
Self-Supervised Alignment with Mutual Information: Learning to Follow Principles without Preference Labels
Authors: Eric Zelikman, Rafael Rafailov, Kanishk Gandhi, Tobias Gerstenberg, Noah D. Goodman Jan-Philipp Fränken
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: When prompting a language model (LM), users often expect the model to adhere to a set of behavioral principles across diverse tasks, such as producing insightful content while avoiding harmful or biased language. Instilling such principles (i.e., a constitution) into a model is resource-intensive, technically challenging, and generally requires human preference labels or examples. We introduce SAMI, an iterative algorithm that finetunes a pretrained language model (without requiring preference labels or demonstrations) to increase the conditional mutual information between constitutions and self-generated responses given queries from a dataset. On single-turn dialogue and summarization, a SAMI-trained mistral-7b outperforms the initial pretrained model, with win rates between 66% and 77%. Strikingly, it also surpasses an instruction-finetuned baseline (mistral-7b-instruct) with win rates between 55% and 57% on single-turn dialogue. SAMI requires a model that writes the principles. To avoid dependence on strong models for writing principles, we align a strong pretrained model (mixtral-8x7b) using constitutions written by a weak instruction-finetuned model (mistral-7b-instruct), achieving a 65% win rate on summarization. Finally, we investigate whether SAMI generalizes to diverse summarization principles (e.g., "summaries should be scientific") and scales to stronger models (llama3-70b), finding that it achieves win rates of up to 68% for learned and 67% for held-out principles compared to the base model. Our results show that a pretrained LM can learn to follow constitutions without using preference labels, demonstrations, or human oversight.
Talking Heads: Understanding Inter-Layer Communication in Transformer Language Models
Authors: Carsten Eickhoff, Ellie Pavlick Jack Merullo
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Although it is known that transformer language models (LMs) pass features from early layers to later layers, it is not well understood how this information is represented and routed by the model. We analyze a mechanism used in two LMs to selectively inhibit items in a context in one task, and find that it underlies a commonly used abstraction across many context-retrieval behaviors. Specifically, we find that models write into low-rank subspaces of the residual stream to represent features which are then read out by later layers, forming low-rank communication channels (Elhage et al., 2021) between layers. A particular 3D subspace in model activations in GPT-2 can be traversed to positionally index items in lists, and we show that this mechanism can explain an otherwise arbitrary-seeming sensitivity of the model to the order of items in the prompt. That is, the model has trouble copying the correct information from context when many items ``crowd" this limited space. By decomposing attention heads with the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), we find that previously described interactions between heads separated by one or more layers can be predicted via analysis of their weight matrices alone. We show that it is possible to manipulate the internal model representations as well as edit model weights based on the mechanism we discover in order to significantly improve performance on our synthetic Laundry List task, which requires recall from a list, often improving task accuracy by over 20\%. Our analysis reveals a surprisingly intricate interpretable structure learned from language model pretraining, and helps us understand why sophisticated LMs sometimes fail in simple domains, facilitating future analysis of more complex behaviors.
The Fine-Grained Complexity of Gradient Computation for Training Large Language Models
Authors: Zhao Song Josh Alman
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have made fundamental contributions over the last a few years. To train an LLM, one needs to alternatingly run `forward' computations and backward computations. The forward computation can be viewed as attention function evaluation, and the backward computation can be viewed as a gradient computation. In previous work by [Alman and Song, NeurIPS 2023], it was proved that the forward step can be performed in almost-linear time in certain parameter regimes, but that there is no truly sub-quadratic time algorithm in the remaining parameter regimes unless the popular hypothesis $\mathsf{SETH}$ is false. In this work, we show nearly identical results for the harder-seeming problem of computing the gradient of loss function of one layer attention network, and thus for the entire process of LLM training. This completely characterizes the fine-grained complexity of every step of LLM training.
Learning Cut Generating Functions for Integer Programming
Authors: Amitabh Basu Hongyu Cheng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The branch-and-cut algorithm is the method of choice to solve large scale integer programming problems in practice. A key ingredient of branch-and-cut is the use of cutting planes which are derived constraints that reduce the search space for an optimal solution. Selecting effective cutting planes to produce small branch-and-cut trees is a critical challenge in the branch-and-cut algorithm. Recent advances have employed a data-driven approach to select good cutting planes from a parameterized family, aimed at reducing the branch-and-bound tree size (in expectation) for a given distribution of integer programming instances. We extend this idea to the selection of the best cut generating function (CGF), which is a tool in the integer programming literature for generating a wide variety of cutting planes that generalize the well-known Gomory Mixed-Integer (GMI) cutting planes. We provide rigorous sample complexity bounds for the selection of an effective CGF from certain parameterized families that provably performs well for any specified distribution on the problem instances. Our empirical results show that the selected CGF can outperform the GMI cuts for certain distributions. Additionally, we explore the sample complexity of using neural networks for instance-dependent CGF selection.
Worst-Case Offline Reinforcement Learning with Arbitrary Data Support
Authors: Kohei Miyaguchi
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We propose a method of offline reinforcement learning (RL) featuring the performance guarantee without any assumptions on the data support. Under such conditions, estimating or optimizing the conventional performance metric is generally infeasible due to the distributional discrepancy between data and target policy distributions. To address this issue, we employ a worst-case policy value as a new metric and constructively show that the sample complexity bound of $O(\epsilon^{−2})$ is attainable without any data-support conditions, where $\epsilon>0$ is the policy suboptimality in the new metric. Moreover, as the new metric generalizes the conventional one, the algorithm can address standard offline RL tasks without modification. In this context, our sample complexity bound can be seen as a strict improvement on the previous bounds under the single-policy concentrability and the single-policy realizability.
Fairness without Harm: An Influence-Guided Active Sampling Approach
Authors: Jialu Wang, Zhaowei Zhu, Yuanshun Yao, Chen Qian, Yang Liu Jinlong Pang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The pursuit of fairness in machine learning (ML), ensuring that the models do not exhibit biases toward protected demographic groups, typically results in a compromise scenario. This compromise can be explained by a Pareto frontier where given certain resources (e.g., data), reducing the fairness violations often comes at the cost of lowering the model accuracy. In this work, we aim to train models that mitigate group fairness disparity without causing harm to model accuracy.Intuitively, acquiring more data is a natural and promising approach to achieve this goal by reaching a better Pareto frontier of the fairness-accuracy tradeoff. The current data acquisition methods, such as fair active learning approaches, typically require annotating sensitive attributes. However, these sensitive attribute annotations should be protected due to privacy and safety concerns. In this paper, we propose a tractable active data sampling algorithm that does not rely on training group annotations, instead only requiring group annotations on a small validation set. Specifically, the algorithm first scores each new example by its influence on fairness and accuracy evaluated on the validation dataset, and then selects a certain number of examples for training. We theoretically analyze how acquiring more data can improve fairness without causing harm, and validate the possibility of our sampling approach in the context of risk disparity. We also provide the upper bound of generalization error and risk disparity as well as the corresponding connections.Extensive experiments on real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. Our code is available at github.com/UCSC-REAL/FairnessWithoutHarm.
Opponent Modeling with In-context Search
Authors: Bingyun Liu, Kai Li, Yifan Zang, Haobo Fu, Qiang Fu, Junliang Xing, Jian Cheng Yuheng Jing
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Opponent modeling is a longstanding research topic aimed at enhancing decision-making by modeling information about opponents in multi-agent environments. However, existing approaches often face challenges such as having difficulty generalizing to unknown opponent policies and conducting unstable performance. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel approach based on in-context learning and decision-time search named Opponent Modeling with In-context Search (OMIS). OMIS leverages in-context learning-based pretraining to train a Transformer model for decision-making. It consists of three in-context components: an actor learning best responses to opponent policies, an opponent imitator mimicking opponent actions, and a critic estimating state values. When testing in an environment that features unknown non-stationary opponent agents, OMIS uses pretrained in-context components for decision-time search to refine the actor's policy. Theoretically, we prove that under reasonable assumptions, OMIS without search converges in opponent policy recognition and has good generalization properties; with search, OMIS provides improvement guarantees, exhibiting performance stability. Empirically, in competitive, cooperative, and mixed environments, OMIS demonstrates more effective and stable adaptation to opponents than other approaches. See our project website at https://sites.google.com/view/nips2024-omis.
On Sampling Strategies for Spectral Model Sharding
Authors: Christos Louizos Denis Korzhenkov
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The problem of heterogeneous clients in federated learning has recently drawn a lot of attention. Spectral model sharding, i.e., partitioning the model parameters into low-rank matrices based on the singular value decomposition, has been one of the proposed solutions for more efficient on-device training in such settings. In this work we present two sampling strategies for such sharding, obtained as solutions to specific optimization problems. The first produces unbiased estimators of the original weights, while the second aims to minimize the squared approximation error. We discuss how both of these estimators can be incorporated in the federated learning loop and practical considerations that arise during local training. Empirically, we demonstrate that both of these methods can lead to improved performance in various commonly used datasets.
S-SOS: Stochastic Sum-Of-Squares for Parametric Polynomial Optimization
Authors: Mathias Oster, Yuehaw Khoo Richard L. Zhu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Global polynomial optimization is an important tool across applied mathematics, with many applications in operations research, engineering, and the physical sciences. In various settings, the polynomials depend on external parameters that may be random. We discuss a stochastic sum-of-squares (S-SOS) algorithm based on the sum-of-squares hierarchy that constructs a series of semidefinite programs to jointly find strict lower bounds on the global minimum and extracts candidates for parameterized global minimizers. We prove quantitative convergence of the hierarchy as the degree increases and use it to solve unconstrained and constrained polynomial optimization problems parameterized by random variables. By employing n-body priors from condensed matter physics to induce sparsity, we can use S-SOS to produce solutions and uncertainty intervals for sensor network localization problems containing up to 40 variables and semidefinite matrix sizes surpassing 800 x 800.
TopoLogic: An Interpretable  Pipeline for Lane Topology Reasoning on Driving Scenes
Authors: Wenbin Liao, Xinyuan Liu, Hang Xu, Yike Ma, Yucheng Zhang, Feng Dai Yanping Fu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: As an emerging task that integrates perception and reasoning, topology reasoning in autonomous driving scenes has recently garnered widespread attention.  However, existing work often emphasizes "perception over reasoning": they typically boost reasoning performance by enhancing the perception of lanes and directly adopt vanilla MLPs to learn lane topology from lane query. This paradigm overlooks the geometric features intrinsic to the lanes themselves and are prone to being influenced by inherent endpoint shifts in lane detection. To tackle this issue, we propose an interpretable method for lane topology reasoning based on lane geometric distance and lane query similarity, named TopoLogic. This method mitigates the impact of endpoint shifts in geometric space, and introduces explicit similarity calculation in semantic space as a complement. By integrating results from both spaces, our methods provides more comprehensive information for lane topology.  Ultimately, our approach significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods on the mainstream benchmark OpenLane-V2 (23.9 v.s. 10.9 in TOP$_{ll}$ and 44.1 v.s. 39.8 in OLS on subsetA). Additionally, our proposed geometric distance topology reasoning method can be incorporated into well-trained models without re-training, significantly enhancing the performance of lane topology reasoning. The code is released at https://github.com/Franpin/TopoLogic.
Detecting and Measuring Confounding Using Causal Mechanism Shifts
Authors: Vineeth N Balasubramanian Abbavaram Gowtham Reddy
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Detecting and measuring confounding effects from data is a key challenge in causal inference. Existing methods frequently assume causal sufficiency, disregarding the presence of unobserved confounding variables. Causal sufficiency is both unrealistic and empirically untestable. Additionally, existing methods make strong parametric assumptions about the underlying causal generative process to guarantee the identifiability of confounding variables. Relaxing the causal sufficiency and parametric assumptions and leveraging recent advancements in causal discovery and confounding analysis with non-i.i.d. data, we propose a comprehensive approach for detecting and measuring confounding. We consider various definitions of confounding and introduce tailored methodologies to achieve three objectives: (i) detecting and measuring confounding among a set of variables, (ii) separating observed and unobserved confounding effects, and (iii) understanding the relative strengths of confounding bias between different sets of variables. We present useful properties of a confounding measure and present measures that satisfy those properties. Our empirical results support the usefulness of the proposed measures.
Robust Gaussian Processes via Relevance Pursuit
Authors: Elizabeth Santorella, David Eriksson, Ben Letham, Maximilian Balandat, Eytan Bakshy Sebastian Ament
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Gaussian processes (GPs) are non-parametric probabilistic regression models that are popular due to their flexibility, data efficiency, and well-calibrated uncertainty estimates. However, standard GP models assume homoskedastic Gaussian noise, while many real-world applications are subject to non-Gaussian corruptions. Variants of GPs that are more robust to alternative noise models have been proposed, and entail significant trade-offs between accuracy and robustness, and between computational requirements and theoretical guarantees. In this work, we propose and study a GP model that achieves robustness against sparse outliers by inferring data-point-specific noise levels with a sequential selection procedure maximizing the log marginal likelihood that we refer to as relevance pursuit. We show, surprisingly, that the model can be parameterized such that the associated log marginal likelihood is strongly concave in the data-point-specific noise variances, a property rarely found in either robust regression objectives or GP marginal likelihoods. This in turn implies the weak submodularity of the corresponding subset selection problem, and thereby proves approximation guarantees for the proposed algorithm. We compare the model’s performance relative to other approaches on diverse regression and Bayesian optimization tasks, including the challenging but common setting of sparse corruptions of the labels within or close to the function range.
No "Zero-Shot" Without Exponential Data: Pretraining Concept Frequency Determines Multimodal Model Performance
Authors: Ameya Prabhu, Adhiraj Ghosh, Yash Sharma, Philip H.S. Torr, Adel Bibi, Samuel Albanie, Matthias Bethge Vishaal Udandarao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Web-crawled pretraining datasets underlie the impressive "zero-shot" evaluation performance of multimodal models, such as CLIP for classification and Stable-Diffusion for image generation. However, it is unclear how meaningful the notion of "zero-shot" generalization is for such multimodal models, as it is not known to what extent their pretraining datasets encompass the downstream concepts targeted for during "zero-shot" evaluation. In this work, we ask: How is the performance of multimodal models on downstream concepts influenced by the frequency of these concepts in their pretraining datasets?We comprehensively investigate this question across 34 models and 5 standard pretraining datasets (CC-3M, CC-12M, YFCC-15M, LAION-400M, LAION-Aesthetics), generating over 300GB of data artifacts. We consistently find that, far from exhibiting "zero-shot" generalization, multimodal models require exponentially more data to achieve linear improvements in downstream "zero-shot" performance, following a sample inefficient log-linear scaling trend. This trend persists even when controlling for sample-level similarity between pretraining and downstream datasets, and testing on purely synthetic data distributions. Furthermore, upon benchmarking models on long-tailed data sampled based on our analysis, we demonstrate that multimodal models across the board perform poorly. We contribute this long-tail test set as the Let it Wag! benchmark to further research in this direction. Taken together, our study reveals an exponential need for training data which implies that the key to "zero-shot" generalization capabilities under large-scale training data and compute paradigms remains to be found.
On the Minimax Regret for Contextual Linear Bandits and Multi-Armed Bandits with Expert Advice
Authors: Shinji Ito
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper examines two extensions of multi-armed bandit problems: multi-armed bandits with expert advice and contextual linear bandits.  For the former problem, multi-armed bandits with expert advice, the previously known best upper and lower bounds have been $O(\sqrt{KT \log \frac{N}{K} })$ and $\Omega( \sqrt{KT \frac{ \log N }{\log K }} )$, respectively.  Here, $K$, $N$, and $T$ represent the numbers of arms, experts, and rounds, respectively.  We provide a lower bound of $\Omega( \sqrt{KT \log \frac{N}{K}} )$ for the setup in which the player chooses an expert before observing the advices in each round.  For the latter problem, contextual linear bandits, we provide an algorithm that achieves $O ( \sqrt{d T \log ( K \min\{ 1, \frac{S}{d} \} )} )$ together with a matching lower bound, where $d$ and $S$ represent the dimensionality of feature vectors and the size of the context space, respectively.
Gradient Rewiring for Editable Graph Neural Network Training
Authors: Zirui Liu, Xiaotian Han, Qizhang Feng, Hongye Jin, Qiaoyu Tan, Kaixiong Zhou, Na Zou, Xia Hu Zhimeng Jiang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Deep neural networks are ubiquitously adopted in many applications, such as computer vision, natural language processing, and graph analytics. However, well-trained neural networks can make prediction errors after deployment as the world changes. \textit{Model editing} involves updating the base model to correct prediction errors with less accessible training data and computational resources.Despite recent advances in model editors in computer vision and natural language processing, editable training in graph neural networks (GNNs) is rarely explored. The challenge with editable GNN training lies in the inherent information aggregation across neighbors, which can lead model editors to affect the predictions of other nodes unintentionally. In this paper, we first observe the gradient of cross-entropy loss for the target node and training nodes with significant inconsistency, which indicates that directly fine-tuning the base model using the loss on the target node deteriorates the performance on training nodes. Motivated by the gradient inconsistency observation, we propose a simple yet effective \underline{G}radient \underline{R}ewiring method for \underline{E}ditable graph neural network training, named \textbf{GRE}. Specifically, we first store the anchor gradient of the loss on training nodes to preserve the locality. Subsequently, we rewire the gradient of the loss on the target node to preserve performance on the training node using anchor gradient. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of GRE on various model architectures and graph datasets in terms of multiple editing situations. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/zhimengj0326/Gradientrewiringediting}.
Understanding Bias in Large-Scale Visual Datasets
Authors: Yida Yin, Zhuang Liu Boya Zeng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: A recent study has shown that large-scale visual datasets are very biased: they can be easily classified by modern neural networks. However, the concrete forms of bias among these datasets remain unclear. In this study, we propose a framework to identify the unique visual attributes distinguishing these datasets. Our approach applies various transformations to extract semantic, structural, boundary, color, and frequency information from datasets, and assess how much each type of information reflects their bias. We further decompose their semantic bias with object-level analysis, and leverage natural language methods to generate detailed, open-ended descriptions of each dataset's characteristics. Our work aims to help researchers understand the bias in existing large-scale pre-training datasets, and build more diverse and representative ones in the future. Our project page and code are available at boyazeng.github.io/understand_bias.
4M-21: An Any-to-Any Vision Model for Tens of Tasks and Modalities
Authors: Oğuzhan Fatih Kar, David Mizrahi, Ali Garjani, Mingfei Gao, David Griffiths, Jiaming Hu, Afshin Dehghan, Amir Zamir Roman Bachmann
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Current multimodal and multitask foundation models, like 4M or UnifiedIO, show promising results. However, their out-of-the-box abilities to accept diverse inputs and perform diverse tasks are limited by the (usually small) number of modalities and tasks they are trained on. In this paper, we develop a single any-to-any model trained on tens of highly diverse modalities and by performing co-training on large-scale multimodal datasets and text corpora. This includes training on images and text along with several semantic and geometric modalities, feature maps from recent state of the art models like DINOv2 and ImageBind, pseudo labels of specialist models like SAM and 4DHumans, and a range of new modalities that allow for novel ways to interact with the model and steer the generation, for example, image metadata or color palettes.A crucial step in this process is performing discrete tokenization on various modalities, whether they are image-like, neural network feature maps, vectors, structured data like instance segmentation or human poses, or data that can be represented as text.    Through this, we show the possibility of training one model to solve at least 3x more tasks/modalities than existing models and doing so without a loss in performance. In addition, this enables more fine-grained and controllable multimodal generation capabilities and allows studying the distillation of models trained on diverse data and objectives into one unified model.We scale the training to a three billion parameter and different datasets. The multimodal models and training code are open sourced at https://4m.epfl.ch/.
BOLD: Boolean Logic Deep Learning
Authors: Cristian Ocampo, Aymen Askri, Louis Leconte, Ba-Hien Tran Van Minh Nguyen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Computational intensiveness of deep learning has motivated low-precision arithmetic designs. However, the current quantized/binarized training approaches are limited by: (1) significant performance loss due to arbitrary approximations of the latent weight gradient through its discretization/binarization function, and (2) training computational intensiveness due to the reliance on full-precision latent weights. This paper proposes a novel mathematical principle by introducing the notion of Boolean variation such that neurons made of Boolean weights and/or activations can be trained ---for the first time--- natively in Boolean domain instead of latent-weight gradient descent and real arithmetic. We explore its convergence, conduct extensively experimental benchmarking, and provide consistent complexity evaluation by considering chip architecture, memory hierarchy, dataflow, and arithmetic precision. Our approach achieves baseline full-precision accuracy in ImageNet classification and surpasses state-of-the-art results in semantic segmentation, with notable performance in image super-resolution, and natural language understanding with transformer-based models. Moreover, it significantly reduces energy consumption during both training and inference.
Unifying Generation and Prediction on Graphs with Latent Graph Diffusion
Authors: Xiyuan Wang, Muhan Zhang Cai Zhou
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In this paper, we propose the first framework that enables solving graph learning tasks of all levels (node, edge and graph) and all types (generation, regression and classification) using one formulation. We first formulate prediction tasks including regression and classification into a generic (conditional) generation framework, which enables diffusion models to perform deterministic tasks with provable guarantees. We then propose Latent Graph Diffusion (LGD), a generative model that can generate node, edge, and graph-level features of all categories simultaneously. We achieve this goal by embedding the graph structures and features into a latent space leveraging a powerful encoder and decoder, then training a diffusion model in the latent space. LGD is also capable of conditional generation through a specifically designed cross-attention mechanism. Leveraging LGD and the ``all tasks as generation'' formulation, our framework is capable of solving graph tasks of various levels and types. We verify the effectiveness of our framework with extensive experiments, where our models achieve state-of-the-art or highly competitive results across a wide range of generation and regression tasks.
Template-free Articulated Gaussian Splatting for Real-time Reposable Dynamic View Synthesis
Authors: Yuxiang Wang, Ruijie Lu, Gang Zeng Diwen Wan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: While novel view synthesis for dynamic scenes has made significant progress, capturing skeleton models of objects and re-posing them remains a challenging task. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel approach to automatically discover the associated skeleton model for dynamic objects from videos without the need for object-specific templates. Our approach utilizes 3D Gaussian Splatting and superpoints to reconstruct dynamic objects. Treating superpoints as rigid parts, we can discover the underlying skeleton model through intuitive cues and optimize it using the kinematic model.  Besides, an adaptive control strategy is applied to avoid the emergence of redundant superpoints.  Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method in obtaining re-posable 3D objects. Not only can our approach achieve excellent visual fidelity, but it also allows for the real-time rendering of high-resolution images.
DART-Eval: A Comprehensive DNA Language Model Evaluation Benchmark on Regulatory DNA
Authors: Arpita Singhal, Austin Wang, Anusri Pampari, Maya Kasowski, Anshul Kundaje Aman Patel
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent advances in self-supervised models for natural language, vision, and protein sequences have inspired the development of large genomic DNA language models (DNALMs). These models aim to learn generalizable representations of diverse DNA elements, potentially enabling various genomic prediction, interpretation and design tasks. Despite their potential, existing benchmarks do not adequately assess the capabilities of DNALMs on key downstream applications involving an important class of non-coding DNA elements critical for regulating gene activity. In this study, we introduce DART-Eval, a suite of representative benchmarks specifically focused on regulatory DNA to evaluate model performance across zero-shot, probed, and fine-tuned scenarios against contemporary ab initio models as baselines. Our benchmarks target biologically meaningful downstream tasks such as functional sequence feature discovery, predicting cell-type specific regulatory activity, and counterfactual prediction of the impacts of genetic variants. We find that current DNALMs exhibit inconsistent performance and do not offer compelling gains over alternative baseline models for most tasks, while requiring significantly more computational resources. We discuss potentially promising modeling, data curation, and evaluation strategies for the next generation of DNALMs. Our  code is available at https://github.com/kundajelab/DART-Eval
MAN TruckScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous trucking in diverse conditions
Authors: Fabian Kuttenreich, Florian Ruch, Farija Rizwin, Stefan Juergens, Lorenz Lechermann, Christian Nissler, Andrea Perl, Ulrich Voll, Min Yan, Markus Lienkamp Felix Fent
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Autonomous trucking is a promising technology that can greatly impact modern logistics and the environment. Ensuring its safety on public roads is one of the main duties that requires an accurate perception of the environment. To achieve this, machine learning methods rely on large datasets, but to this day, no such datasets are available for autonomous trucks. In this work, we present MAN TruckScenes, the first multimodal dataset for autonomous trucking. MAN TruckScenes allows the research community to come into contact with truck-specific challenges, such as trailer occlusions, novel sensor perspectives, and terminal environments for the first time. It comprises more than 740 scenes of 20 s each within a multitude of different environmental conditions. The sensor set includes 4 cameras, 6 lidar, 6 radar sensors, 2 IMUs, and a high-precision GNSS. The dataset's 3D bounding boxes were manually annotated and carefully reviewed to achieve a high quality standard. Bounding boxes are available for 27 object classes, 15 attributes, and a range of more than 230 m. The scenes are tagged according to 34 distinct scene tags, and all objects are tracked throughout the scene to promote a wide range of applications. Additionally, MAN TruckScenes is the first dataset to provide 4D radar data with 360° coverage and is thereby the largest radar dataset with annotated 3D bounding boxes. Finally, we provide extensive dataset analysis and baseline results. The dataset, development kit, and more will be available online.
Rethinking The Training And Evaluation of Rich-Context Layout-to-Image Generation
Authors: Zixu Zhao, Tong He, Tianjun Xiao, Zheng Zhang, Yicong Zhou Jiaxin Cheng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent advancements in generative models have significantly enhanced their capacity for image generation, enabling a wide range of applications such as image editing, completion and video editing. A specialized area within generative modeling is layout-to-image (L2I) generation, where predefined layouts of objects guide the generative process. In this study, we introduce a novel regional cross-attention module tailored to enrich layout-to-image generation. This module notably improves the representation of layout regions, particularly in scenarios where existing methods struggle with highly complex and detailed textual descriptions. Moreover, while current open-vocabulary L2I methods are trained in an open-set setting, their evaluations often occur in closed-set environments. To bridge this gap, we propose two metrics to assess L2I performance in open-vocabulary scenarios. Additionally, we conduct a comprehensive user study to validate the consistency of these metrics with human preferences.
Facilitating Multimodal Classification via Dynamically Learning Modality Gap
Authors: Fengqiang Wan, Qing-Yuan Jiang, Yi Xu Yang Yang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Multimodal learning falls into the trap of the optimization dilemma due to the modality imbalance phenomenon, leading to unsatisfactory performance in real applications. A core reason for modality imbalance is that the models of each modality converge at different rates. Many attempts naturally focus on adjusting learning procedures adaptively. Essentially, the reason why models converge at different rates is because the difficulty of fitting category labels is inconsistent for each modality during learning. From the perspective of fitting labels, we find that appropriate positive intervention label fitting can correct this difference in learning ability. By exploiting the ability of contrastive learning to intervene in the learning of category label fitting, we propose a novel multimodal learning approach that dynamically integrates unsupervised contrastive learning and supervised multimodal learning to address the modality imbalance problem. We find that a simple yet heuristic integration strategy can significantly alleviate the modality imbalance phenomenon. Moreover, we design a learning-based integration strategy to integrate two losses dynamically, further improving the performance. Experiments on widely used datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method compared with state-of-the-art (SOTA) multimodal learning approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/njustkmg/NeurIPS24-LFM.