mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Local Superior Soups: A Catalyst for Model Merging in Cross-Silo Federated Learning
Authors: Meirui Jiang, Xin Zhang, Qi Dou, Zehua Wang, Xiaoxiao Li Minghui Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Federated learning (FL) is a learning paradigm that enables collaborative training of models using decentralized data. Recently, the utilization of pre-trained weight initialization in FL has been demonstrated to effectively improve model performance. However, the evolving complexity of current pre-trained models, characterized by a substantial increase in parameters, markedly intensifies the challenges associated with communication rounds required for their adaptation to FL. To address these communication cost issues and increase the performance of pre-trained model adaptation in FL, we propose an innovative model interpolation-based local training technique called ``Local Superior Soups.''Our method enhances local training across different clients, encouraging the exploration of a connected low-loss basin within a few communication rounds through regularized model interpolation. This approach acts as a catalyst for the seamless adaptation of pre-trained models in in FL.We demonstrated its effectiveness and efficiency across diverse widely-used FL datasets.
Boosting the Transferability of Adversarial Attack on Vision Transformer with Adaptive Token Tuning
Authors: Peng Ren, Yunlong Wang, Xin Feng Di Ming
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Vision transformers (ViTs) perform exceptionally well in various computer vision tasks but remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Recent studies have shown that the transferability of adversarial examples exists for CNNs, and the same holds true for ViTs. However, existing ViT attacks aggressively regularize the largest token gradients to exact zero within each layer of the surrogate model, overlooking the interactions between layers, which limits their transferability in attacking black-box models. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on boosting the transferability of adversarial attacks on ViTs through adaptive token tuning (ATT). Specifically, we propose three optimization strategies: an adaptive gradient re-scaling strategy to reduce the overall variance of token gradients, a self-paced patch out strategy to enhance the diversity of input tokens, and a hybrid token gradient truncation strategy to weaken the effectiveness of attention mechanism. We demonstrate that scaling correction of gradient changes using gradient variance across different layers can produce highly transferable adversarial examples. In addition, introducing attentional truncation can mitigate the overfitting over complex interactions between tokens in deep ViT layers to further improve the transferability. On the other hand, using feature importance as a guidance to discard a subset of perturbation patches in each iteration, along with combining self-paced learning and progressively more sampled attacks, significantly enhances the transferability over attacks that use all perturbation patches. Extensive experiments conducted on ViTs, undefended CNNs, and defended CNNs validate the superiority of our proposed ATT attack method. On average, our approach improves the attack performance by 10.1% compared to state-of-the-art transfer-based attacks. Notably, we achieve the best attack performance with an average of 58.3% on three defended CNNs. Code is available at https://github.com/MisterRpeng/ATT.
Maia-2: A Unified Model for Human-AI Alignment in Chess
Authors: Difan Jiao, Reid McIlroy-Young, Jon Kleinberg, Siddhartha Sen, Ashton Anderson Zhenwei Tang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: There are an increasing number of domains in which artificial intelligence (AI) systems both surpass human ability and accurately model human behavior. This introduces the possibility of algorithmically-informed teaching in these domains through more relatable AI partners and deeper insights into human decision-making. Critical to achieving this goal, however, is coherently modeling human behavior at various skill levels. Chess is an ideal model system for conducting research into this kind of human-AI alignment, with its rich history as a pivotal testbed for AI research, mature superhuman AI systems like AlphaZero, and precise measurements of skill via chess rating systems. Previous work in modeling human decision-making in chess uses completely independent models to capture human style at different skill levels, meaning they lack coherence in their ability to adapt to the full spectrum of human improvement and are ultimately limited in their effectiveness as AI partners and teaching tools. In this work, we propose a unified modeling approach for human-AI alignment in chess that coherently captures human style across different skill levels and directly captures how people improve. Recognizing the complex, non-linear nature of human learning, we introduce a skill-aware attention mechanism to dynamically integrate players’ strengths with encoded chess positions, enabling our model to be sensitive to evolving player skill. Our experimental results demonstrate that this unified framework significantly enhances the alignment between AI and human players across a diverse range of expertise levels, paving the way for deeper insights into human decision-making and AI-guided teaching tools.
Derivative-enhanced Deep Operator Network
Authors: Nolan Bridges, Peng Chen Yuan Qiu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The deep operator networks (DeepONet), a class of neural operators that learn mappings between function spaces, have recently been developed as surrogate models for parametric partial differential equations (PDEs). In this work we propose a derivative-enhanced deep operator network (DE-DeepONet), which leverages derivative information to enhance the solution prediction accuracy and provides a more accurate approximation of solution-to-parameter derivatives, especially when training data are limited. DE-DeepONet explicitly incorporates linear dimension reduction of high dimensional parameter input into DeepONet to reduce training cost and adds derivative loss in the loss function to reduce the number of required parameter-solution pairs. We further demonstrate that the use of derivative loss can be extended to enhance other neural operators, such as the Fourier neural operator (FNO). Numerical experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach.
No-Regret Bandit Exploration based on Soft Tree Ensemble Model
Authors: Shinya Suzumura Shogo Iwazaki
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We propose a novel stochastic bandit algorithm that employs reward estimates using a tree ensemble model. Specifically, our focus is on a soft tree model, a variant of the conventional decision tree that has undergone both practical and theoretical scrutiny in recent years. By deriving several non-trivial properties of soft trees, we extend the existing analytical techniques used for neural bandit algorithms to our soft tree-based algorithm. We demonstrate that our algorithm achieves a smaller cumulative regret compared to the existing ReLU-based neural bandit algorithms. We also show that this advantage comes with a trade-off: the hypothesis space of the soft tree ensemble model is more constrained than that of a ReLU-based neural network.
A Unified Debiasing Approach for Vision-Language Models across Modalities and Tasks
Authors: Taeuk Jang, Xiaoqian Wang Hoin Jung
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enabled complex multimodal tasks by processing text and image data simultaneously, significantly enhancing the field of artificial intelligence. However, these models often exhibit biases that can skew outputs towards societal stereotypes, thus necessitating debiasing strategies. Existing debiasing methods focus narrowly on specific modalities or tasks, and require extensive retraining. To address these limitations, this paper introduces Selective Feature Imputation for Debiasing (SFID), a novel methodology that integrates feature pruning and low confidence imputation (LCI) to effectively reduce biases in VLMs. SFID is versatile, maintaining the semantic integrity of outputs and costly effective by eliminating the need for retraining. Our experimental results demonstrate SFID's effectiveness across various VLMs tasks including zero-shot classification, text-to-image retrieval, image captioning, and text-to-image generation, by significantly reducing gender biases without compromising performance. This approach not only enhances the fairness of VLMs applications but also preserves their efficiency and utility across diverse scenarios.
Bridging semantics and pragmatics in information-theoretic emergent communication
Authors: Mycal Tucker, Roger P. Levy, Noga Zaslavsky Eleonora Gualdoni
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Human languages support both semantic categorization and local pragmatic interactions that require context-sensitive reasoning about meaning. While semantics and pragmatics are two fundamental aspects of language, they are typically studied independently and their co-evolution is largely under-explored. Here, we aim to bridge this gap by studying how a shared lexicon may emerge from local pragmatic interactions. To this end, we extend a recent information-theoretic framework for emergent communication in artificial agents, which integrates utility maximization, associated with pragmatics, with general communicative constraints that are believed to shape human semantic systems. Specifically, we show how to adapt this framework to train agents via unsupervised pragmatic interactions, and then evaluate their emergent lexical semantics. We test this approach in a rich visual domain of naturalistic images, and find that key human-like properties of the lexicon emerge when agents are guided by both context-specific utility and general communicative pressures, suggesting that both aspects are crucial for understanding how language may evolve in humans and in artificial agents.
Watermarking Makes Language Models Radioactive
Authors: Pierre Fernandez, Alain Durmus, Matthijs Douze, Teddy Furon Tom Sander
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We investigate the radioactivity of text generated by large language models (LLM), \ie whether it is possible to detect that such synthetic input was used to train a subsequent LLM.Current methods like membership inference or active IP protection either work only in settings where the suspected text is known or do not provide reliable statistical guarantees.We discover that, on the contrary, it is possible to reliably determine if a language model was trained on synthetic data if that data is output by a watermarked LLM.Our new methods, specialized for radioactivity, detects with a provable confidence weak residuals of the watermark signal in the fine-tuned LLM.We link the radioactivity contamination level to the following properties: the watermark robustness, its proportion in the training set, and the fine-tuning process.For instance, if the suspect model is open-weight, we demonstrate that training on watermarked instructions can be detected with high confidence ($p$-value $< 10^{-5}$) even when as little as $5\%$ of training text is watermarked.
Approximation-Aware Bayesian Optimization
Authors: Kyurae Kim, Geoff Pleiss, David Eriksson, John P. Cunningham, Jacob R. Gardner Natalie Maus
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: High-dimensional Bayesian optimization (BO) tasks such as molecular design often require $>10,$$000$ function evaluations before obtaining meaningful results. While methods like sparse variational Gaussian processes (SVGPs) reduce computational requirements in these settings, the underlying approximations result in suboptimal data acquisitions that slow the progress of optimization. In this paper we modify SVGPs to better align with the goals of BO: targeting informed data acquisition over global posterior fidelity. Using the framework of utility-calibrated variational inference (Lacoste–Julien et al., 2011), we unify GP approximation and data acquisition into a joint optimization problem, thereby ensuring optimal decisions under a limited computational budget. Our approach can be used with any decision-theoretic acquisition function and is readily compatible with trust region methods like TuRBO (Eriksson et al., 2019). We derive efficient joint objectives for the expected improvement (EI) and knowledge gradient (KG) acquisition functions in both the standard and batch BO settings. On a variety of recent high dimensional benchmark tasks in control and molecular design, our approach significantly outperforms standard SVGPs and is capable of achieving comparable rewards with up to $10\times$ fewer function evaluations.
Differential Privacy in Scalable General Kernel Learning via $K$-means Nystr{\"o}m Random Features
Authors: Jeongyoun Ahn, Cheolwoo Park Bonwoo Lee
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: As the volume of data invested in statistical learning increases and concerns regarding privacy grow, the privacy leakage issue has drawn significant attention. Differential privacy has emerged as a widely accepted concept capable of mitigating privacy concerns, and numerous differentially private (DP) versions of machine learning algorithms have been developed. However, existing works on DP kernel learning algorithms have exhibited practical limitations, including scalability, restricted choice of kernels, or dependence on test data availability. We propose DP scalable kernel empirical risk minimization (ERM) algorithms and a DP kernel mean embedding (KME) release algorithm suitable for general kernels. Our approaches address the shortcomings of previous algorithms by employing Nyström methods, classical techniques in non-private scalable kernel learning. These methods provide data-dependent low-rank approximations of the kernel matrix for general kernels in a DP manner. We present excess empirical risk bounds and computational complexities for the scalable kernel DP ERM, KME algorithms, contrasting them with established methodologies. Furthermore, we develop a private data-generating algorithm capable of learning diverse kernel models. We conduct experiments to demonstrate the performance of our algorithms, comparing them with existing methods to highlight their superiority.
Taming Generative Diffusion Prior for Universal Blind Image Restoration
Authors: Weidong Yang, Ben Fei Siwei Tu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Diffusion models have been widely utilized for image restoration. However, previous blind image restoration methods still need to assume the type of degradation model while leaving the parameters to be optimized, limiting their real-world applications. Therefore, we aim to tame generative diffusion prior for universal blind image restoration dubbed BIR-D, which utilizes an optimizable convolutional kernel to simulate the degradation model and dynamically update the parameters of the kernel in the diffusion steps, enabling it to achieve blind image restoration results even in various complex situations. Besides, based on mathematical reasoning, we have provided an empirical formula for the chosen of adaptive guidance scale, eliminating the need for a grid search for the optimal parameter. Experimentally, Our BIR-D has demonstrated superior practicality and versatility than off-the-shelf unsupervised methods across various tasks both on real-world and synthetic datasets, qualitatively and quantitatively. BIR-D is able to fulfill multi-guidance blind image restoration. Moreover, BIR-D can also restore images that undergo multiple and complicated degradations, demonstrating the practical applications. The code is available at https://github.com/Tusiwei/BIR-D.
Discrete Dictionary-based Decomposition Layer for Structured Representation Learning
Authors: Hyun-Chul Kim, Minho Lee Taewon Park
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Neuro-symbolic neural networks have been extensively studied to integrate symbolic operations with neural networks, thereby improving systematic generalization. Specifically, Tensor Product Representation (TPR) framework enables neural networks to perform differentiable symbolic operations by encoding the symbolic structure of data within vector spaces. However, TPR-based neural networks often struggle to decompose unseen data into structured TPR representations, undermining their symbolic operations. To address this decomposition problem, we propose a Discrete Dictionary-based Decomposition (D3) layer designed to enhance the decomposition capabilities of TPR-based models. D3 employs discrete, learnable key-value dictionaries trained to capture symbolic features essential for decomposition operations. It leverages the prior knowledge acquired during training to generate structured TPR representations by mapping input data to pre-learned symbolic features within these dictionaries. D3 is a straightforward drop-in layer that can be seamlessly integrated into any TPR-based model without modifications. Our experimental results demonstrate that D3 significantly improves the systematic generalization of various TPR-based models while requiring fewer additional parameters. Notably, D3 outperforms baseline models on the synthetic task that demands the systematic decomposition of unseen combinatorial data.
ChronoMagic-Bench: A Benchmark for Metamorphic Evaluation of Text-to-Time-lapse Video Generation
Authors: Jinfa Huang, Yongqi Xu, Yaoyang Liu, Shaofeng Zhang, Yujun Shi, Ruijie Zhu, Xinhua Cheng, Jiebo Luo, Li Yuan Shenghai Yuan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: We propose a novel text-to-video (T2V) generation benchmark, ChronoMagic-Bench, to evaluate the temporal and metamorphic knowledge skills in time-lapse video generation of the T2V models (e.g. Sora and Lumiere). Compared to existing benchmarks that focus on visual quality and text relevance of generated videos, ChronoMagic-Bench focuses on the models’ ability to generate time-lapse videos with significant metamorphic amplitude and temporal coherence. The benchmark probes T2V models for their physics, biology, and chemistry capabilities, in a free-form text control. For these purposes, ChronoMagic-Bench introduces 1,649 prompts and real-world videos as references, categorized into four major types of time-lapse videos: biological, human creation, meteorological, and physical phenomena, which are further divided into 75 subcategories. This categorization ensures a comprehensive evaluation of the models’ capacity to handle diverse and complex transformations. To accurately align human preference on the benchmark, we introduce two new automatic metrics, MTScore and CHScore, to evaluate the videos' metamorphic attributes and temporal coherence. MTScore measures the metamorphic amplitude, reflecting the degree of change over time, while CHScore assesses the temporal coherence, ensuring the generated videos maintain logical progression and continuity. Based on the ChronoMagic-Bench, we conduct comprehensive manual evaluations of eighteen representative T2V models, revealing their strengths and weaknesses across different categories of prompts, providing a thorough evaluation framework that addresses current gaps in video generation research. More encouragingly, we create a large-scale ChronoMagic-Pro dataset, containing 460k high-quality pairs of 720p time-lapse videos and detailed captions. Each caption ensures high physical content and large metamorphic amplitude, which have a far-reaching impact on the video generation community. The source data and code are publicly available on https://pku-yuangroup.github.io/ChronoMagic-Bench.
WildGaussians: 3D Gaussian Splatting In the Wild
Authors: Songyou Peng, Zuzana Kukelova, Marc Pollefeys, Torsten Sattler Jonas Kulhanek
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: While the field of 3D scene reconstruction is dominated by NeRFs due to their photorealistic quality, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged, offering similar quality with real-time rendering speeds. However, both methods primarily excel with well-controlled 3D scenes, while in-the-wild data - characterized by occlusions, dynamic objects, and varying illumination - remains challenging. NeRFs can adapt to such conditions easily through per-image embedding vectors, but 3DGS struggles due to its explicit representation and lack of shared parameters. To address this, we introduce WildGaussians, a novel approach to handle occlusions and appearance changes with 3DGS. By leveraging robust DINO features and integrating an appearance modeling module within 3DGS, our method achieves state-of-the-art results. We demonstrate that WildGaussians matches the real-time rendering speed of 3DGS while surpassing both 3DGS and NeRF baselines in handling in-the-wild data, all within a simple architectural framework.
What If the Input is Expanded in OOD Detection?
Authors: Jianing Zhu, Zengmao Wang, Tongliang Liu, Bo Du, Bo Han Boxuan Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

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.
RelBench: A Benchmark for Deep Learning on Relational Databases
Authors: Rishabh Ranjan, Weihua Hu, Kexin Huang, Jiaqi Han, Alejandro Dobles, Matthias Fey, Jan E. Lenssen, Yiwen Yuan, Zecheng Zhang, Xinwei He, Jure Leskovec Joshua Robinson
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: We present RelBench, a public benchmark for solving predictive tasks in relational databases with deep learning.  RelBench provides databases and tasks spanning diverse domains, scales, and database dimensions, and is intended to be a foundational infrastructure for future research in this direction. We use RelBench to conduct the first comprehensive empirical study of graph neural network (GNN) based predictive models on relational data, as recently proposed by Fey et al. 2024.  End-to-end learned GNNs are capable fully exploiting the predictive signal encoded in links between entities, marking a significant shift away from the dominant paradigm of manual feature engineering combined with tabular machine learning. To thoroughly evaluate GNNs against the prior gold-standard we conduct a user study, where an experienced data scientist manually engineers features for each task. In this study, GNNs learn better models whilst reducing human work needed by more than an order of magnitude. This result demonstrates the power of GNNs for solving predictive tasks in relational databases, opening up new research opportunities.
PageRank Bandits for Link Prediction
Authors: Jiaru Zou, Zihao Li, Yunzhe Qi, Dongqi Fu, Jian Kang, Hanghang Tong, Jingrui He Yikun Ban
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Link prediction is a critical problem in graph learning with broad applications such as recommender systems and knowledge graph completion. Numerous research efforts have been directed at solving this problem, including approaches based on similarity metrics and Graph Neural Networks (GNN). However, most existing solutions are still rooted in conventional supervised learning, which makes it challenging to adapt over time to changing customer interests and to address the inherent dilemma of exploitation versus exploration in link prediction.To tackle these challenges, this paper reformulates link prediction as a sequential decision-making process, where each link prediction interaction occurs sequentially. We propose a novel fusion algorithm, PRB (PageRank Bandits), which is the first to combine contextual bandits with PageRank for collaborative exploitation and exploration. We also introduce a new reward formulation and provide a theoretical performance guarantee for PRB. Finally, we extensively evaluate PRB in both online and offline settings, comparing it with bandit-based and graph-based methods. The empirical success of PRB demonstrates the value of the proposed fusion approach. Our code is released at https://github.com/jiaruzouu/PRB.
DreamMesh4D: Video-to-4D Generation with Sparse-Controlled Gaussian-Mesh Hybrid Representation
Authors: Yiming Chen, Peidong Liu Zhiqi Li
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent advancements in 2D/3D generative techniques have facilitated the generation of dynamic 3D objects from monocular videos. Previous methods mainly rely on the implicit neural radiance fields (NeRF) or explicit Gaussian Splatting as the underlying representation, and struggle to achieve satisfactory spatial-temporal consistency and surface appearance. Drawing inspiration from modern 3D animation pipelines, we introduce DreamMesh4D, a novel framework combining mesh representation with geometric skinning technique to generate high-quality 4D object from a monocular video. Instead of utilizing classical texture map for appearance, we bind Gaussian splats to triangle face of mesh for differentiable optimization of both the texture and mesh vertices. In particular, DreamMesh4D begins with a coarse mesh obtained through an image-to-3D generation procedure. Sparse points are then uniformly sampled across the mesh surface, and are used to build a deformation graph to drive the motion of the 3D object for the sake of computational efficiency and providing additional constraint. For each step, transformations of sparse control points are predicted using a deformation network, and the mesh vertices as well as the surface Gaussians are deformed via a novel geometric skinning algorithm. The skinning algorithm is a hybrid approach combining LBS (linear blending skinning) and DQS (dual-quaternion skinning), mitigating drawbacks associated with both approaches. The static surface Gaussians and mesh vertices as well as the dynamic deformation network are learned via reference view photometric loss, score distillation loss as well as other regularization losses in a two-stage manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior performance of our method in terms of both rendering quality and spatial-temporal consistency. Furthermore, our method is compatible with modern graphic pipelines, showcasing its potential in the 3D gaming and film industry.
Spatio-Temporal Interactive Learning for Efficient Image Reconstruction of Spiking Cameras
Authors: Jiaoyang Yin, Yuchao Dai, Chao Xu, Tiejun Huang, Boxin Shi Bin Fan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The spiking camera is an emerging neuromorphic vision sensor that records high-speed motion scenes by asynchronously firing continuous binary spike streams. Prevailing image reconstruction methods, generating intermediate frames from these spike streams, often rely on complex step-by-step network architectures that overlook the intrinsic collaboration of spatio-temporal complementary information. In this paper, we propose an efficient spatio-temporal interactive reconstruction network to jointly perform inter-frame feature alignment and intra-frame feature filtering in a coarse-to-fine manner. Specifically, it starts by extracting hierarchical features from a concise hybrid spike representation, then refines the motion fields and target frames scale-by-scale, ultimately obtaining a full-resolution output. Meanwhile, we introduce a symmetric interactive attention block and a multi-motion field estimation block to further enhance the interaction capability of the overall network. Experiments on synthetic and real-captured data show that our approach exhibits excellent performance while maintaining low model complexity.
Acceleration Exists! Optimization Problems When Oracle Can Only Compare Objective Function Values
Authors: Alexander Gasnikov, Andrei Krasnov Aleksandr Lobanov
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Frequently, the burgeoning field of black-box optimization encounters challenges due to a limited understanding of the mechanisms of the objective function. To address such problems, in this work we focus on the deterministic concept of Order Oracle, which only utilizes order access between function values (possibly with some bounded noise), but without assuming access to their values. As theoretical results, we propose a new approach to create non-accelerated optimization algorithms (obtained by integrating Order Oracle into existing optimization “tools”) in non-convex, convex, and strongly convex settings that are as good as both SOTA coordinate algorithms with first-order oracle and SOTA algorithms with Order Oracle up to logarithm factor. Moreover, using the proposed approach, we provide the first accelerated optimization algorithm using the Order Oracle. And also, using an already different approach we provide the asymptotic convergence of the first algorithm with the stochastic Order Oracle concept. Finally, our theoretical results demonstrate effectiveness of proposed algorithms through numerical experiments.
Towards the Transferability of Rewards Recovered via Regularized Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Maryam Kamgarpour Andreas Schlaginhaufen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to infer a reward from expert demonstrations, motivated by the idea that the reward, rather than the policy, is the most succinct and transferable description of a task [Ng et al., 2000]. However, the reward corresponding to an optimal policy is not unique, making it unclear if an IRL-learned reward is transferable to new transition laws in the sense that its optimal policy aligns with the optimal policy corresponding to the expert's true reward. Past work has addressed this problem only under the assumption of full access to the expert's policy, guaranteeing transferability when learning from two experts with the same reward but different transition laws that satisfy a specific rank condition [Rolland et al., 2022]. In this work, we show that the conditions developed under full access to the expert's policy cannot guarantee transferability in the more practical scenario where we have access only to demonstrations of the expert. Instead of a binary rank condition, we propose principal angles as a more refined measure of similarity and dissimilarity between transition laws. Based on this, we then establish two key results: 1) a sufficient condition for transferability to any transition laws when learning from at least two experts with sufficiently different transition laws, and 2) a sufficient condition for transferability to local changes in the transition law when learning from a single expert. Furthermore, we also provide a probably approximately correct (PAC) algorithm and an end-to-end analysis for learning transferable rewards from demonstrations of multiple experts.
OneActor: Consistent Subject Generation via Cluster-Conditioned Guidance
Authors: Caixia Yan, Haonan Lin, Weizhan Zhang, Mengmeng Wang, Tieliang Gong, Guang Dai, Hao Sun Jiahao Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Text-to-image diffusion models benefit artists with high-quality image generation. Yet their stochastic nature hinders artists from creating consistent images of the same subject. Existing methods try to tackle this challenge and generate consistent content in various ways. However, they either depend on external restricted data or require expensive tuning of the diffusion model. For this issue, we propose a novel one-shot tuning paradigm, termed OneActor. It efficiently performs consistent subject generation solely driven by prompts via a learned semantic guidance to bypass the laborious backbone tuning. We lead the way to formalize the objective of consistent subject generation from a clustering perspective, and thus design a cluster-conditioned model. To mitigate the overfitting challenge shared by one-shot tuning pipelines, we augment the tuning with auxiliary samples and devise two inference strategies: semantic interpolation and cluster guidance. These techniques are later verified to significantly improve the generation quality. Comprehensive experiments show that our method outperforms a variety of baselines with satisfactory subject consistency, superior prompt conformity as well as high image quality. Our method is capable of multi-subject generation and compatible with popular diffusion extensions. Besides, we achieve a $4\times$ faster tuning speed than tuning-based baselines and, if desired, avoid increasing the inference time. Furthermore, our method can be naturally utilized to pre-train a consistent subject generation network from scratch, which will implement this research task into more practical applications. (Project page: https://johnneywang.github.io/OneActor-webpage/)
Injecting Undetectable Backdoors in Obfuscated Neural Networks and Language Models
Authors: Amin Karbasi, Argyris Oikonomou, Katerina Sotiraki, Grigoris Velegkas, Manolis Zampetakis Alkis Kalavasis
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: As ML models become increasingly complex and integral to high-stakes domains such as finance and healthcare, they also become more susceptible to sophisticated adversarial attacks. We investigate the threat posed by undetectable backdoors, as defined in Goldwasser et al. [2022], in models developed by insidious external expert firms. When such backdoors exist, they allow the designer of the model to sell information on how to slightly perturb their input to change the outcome of the model. We develop a general strategy to plant backdoors to obfuscated neural networks, that satisfy the security properties of the celebrated notion of indistinguishability obfuscation. Applying obfuscation before releasing neural networks is a strategy that is well motivated to protect sensitive information of the external expert firm. Our method to plant backdoors ensures that even if the weights and architecture of the obfuscated model are accessible, the existence ofthe backdoor is still undetectable. Finally, we introduce the notion of undetectable backdoors to language models and extend our neural network backdoor attacks to such models based on the existence of steganographic functions.
Nimbus: Secure and Efficient Two-Party Inference for Transformers
Authors: Kang Yang, Jin Tan, Wen-jie Lu, Haoqi Wu, Xiao Wang, Yu Yu, Derun Zhao, Yancheng Zheng, Minyi Guo, Jingwen Leng Zhengyi Li
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Transformer models have gained significant attention due to their power in machine learning tasks. Their extensive deployment has raised concerns about the potential leakage of sensitive information during inference. However, when being applied to Transformers, existing approaches based on secure two-party computation (2PC) bring about efficiency limitations in two folds: (1) resource-intensive matrix multiplications in linear layers, and (2) complex non-linear activation functions like $\mathsf{GELU}$ and $\mathsf{Softmax}$. This work presents a new two-party inference framework $\mathsf{Nimbus}$ for Transformer models. Specifically, we propose a new 2PC paradigm to securely compute matrix multiplications based on an outer-product insight, which achieves $2.9\times \sim 12.5\times$ performance improvements compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) protocol. Furthermore, through a new observation of utilizing the input distribution, we propose an approach of low-degree polynomial approximation for $\mathsf{GELU}$ and $\mathsf{Softmax}$, which improves the performance of the SOTA polynomial approximation by $2.9\times \sim 4.0\times$, where the average accuracy loss of our approach is 0.08\% compared to the non-2PC inference without privacy. Compared with the SOTA two-party inference, $\mathsf{Nimbus}$ improves the end-to-end performance of $BERT_{base}$ inference by $2.7\times \sim 4.7\times$ across different network settings.
SureMap: Simultaneous mean estimation for single-task and multi-task disaggregated evaluation
Authors: Lester Mackey, Alexandra Chouldechova, Miroslav Dudík Mikhail Khodak
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Disaggregated evaluation—estimation of performance of a machine learning model on different subpopulations—is a core task when assessing performance and group-fairness of AI systems.A key challenge is that evaluation data is scarce, and subpopulations arising from intersections of attributes (e.g., race, sex, age) are often tiny.Today, it is common for multiple clients to procure the same AI model from a model developer, and the task of disaggregated evaluation is faced by each customer individually.  This gives rise to what we call the multi-task disaggregated evaluation problem, wherein multiple clients seek to conduct a disaggregated evaluation of a given model in their own data setting (task).  In this work we develop a disaggregated evaluation method called SureMap that has high estimation accuracy for both multi-task and single-task disaggregated evaluations of blackbox models.  SureMap's efficiency gains come from(1) transforming the problem into structured simultaneous Gaussian mean estimation and (2) incorporating external data, e.g., from the AI system creator or from their other clients.  Our method combines maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation using a well-chosen prior together with cross-validation-free tuning via Stein's unbiased risk estimate (SURE).We evaluate SureMap on disaggregated evaluation tasks in multiple domains, observing significant accuracy improvements over several strong competitors.
Is Function Similarity Over-Engineered? Building a Benchmark
Authors: Chang Liu, Noah Fleischmann, Richard Zak, Kristopher Micinski, Edward Raff, James Holt Rebecca Saul
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Binary analysis is a core component of many critical security tasks, including reverse engineering, malware analysis, and vulnerability detection. Manual analysis is often time-consuming, but identifying commonly-used or previously-seen functions can reduce the time it takes to understand a new file. However, given the complexity of assembly, and the NP-hard nature of determining function equivalence, this task is extremely difficult. Common approaches often use sophisticated disassembly and decompilation tools, graph analysis, and other expensive pre-processing steps to perform function similarity searches over some corpus. In this work, we identify a number of discrepancies between the current research environment and the underlying application need. To remedy this, we build a new benchmark, REFuSe-Bench, for binary function similarity detection consisting of high-quality datasets and tests that better reflect real-world use cases. In doing so, we address issues like data duplication and accurate labeling, experiment with real malware, and perform the first serious evaluation of ML binary function similarity models on Windows data. Our benchmark reveals that a new, simple baseline — one which looks at only the raw bytes of a function, and requires no disassembly or other pre-processing --- is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance in multiple settings. Our findings challenge conventional assumptions that complex models with highly-engineered features are being used to their full potential, and demonstrate that simpler approaches can provide significant value.
FUSE: Fast Unified Simulation and Estimation for PDEs
Authors: Dana Grund, Siddhartha Mishra, Georgios Kissas Levi E. Lingsch
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The joint prediction of continuous fields and statistical estimation of the underlying discrete parameters is a common problem for many physical systems, governed by PDEs. Hitherto, it has been separately addressed by employing operator learning surrogates for field prediction while using simulation-based inference (and its variants) for statistical parameter determination. Here, we argue that solving both problems within the same framework can lead to consistent gains in accuracy and robustness. To this end, we propose a novel and flexible formulation of the operator learning problem that jointly predicts continuous quantities and infers distributions of discrete parameters, thereby amortizing the cost of both the inverse and the surrogate models to a joint pre-training step. We present the capabilities of the proposed methodology for predicting continuous and discrete biomarkers in full-body haemodynamics simulations under different levels of missing information. We also consider a test case for atmospheric large-eddy simulation of a two-dimensional dry cold bubble, where we infer both continuous time-series and information about the system's conditions. We present comparisons against different baselines to showcase significantly increased accuracy in both the inverse and the surrogate tasks.
The Collusion of Memory and Nonlinearity in Stochastic Approximation With Constant Stepsize
Authors: Yixuan Zhang, Yudong Chen, Qiaomin Xie Dongyan Lucy Huo
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In this work, we investigate stochastic approximation (SA) with Markovian data and nonlinear updates under constant stepsize $\alpha>0$. Existing work has primarily focused on either i.i.d. data or linear update rules. We take a new perspective and carefully examine the simultaneous presence of Markovian dependency of data and nonlinear update rules, delineating how the interplay between these two structures leads to complications that are not captured by prior techniques. By leveraging the smoothness and recurrence properties of the SA updates, we develop a fine-grained analysis of the correlation between the SA iterates $\theta_k$ and Markovian data $x_k$. This enables us to overcome the obstacles in existing analysis and establish for the first time the weak convergence of the joint process $(x_k, \theta_k)$. Furthermore, we present a precise characterization of the asymptotic bias of the SA iterates, given by $\mathbb{E}[\theta_\infty]-\theta^\ast=\alpha(b_\textup{m}+b_\textup{n}+b_\textup{c})+\mathcal{O}(\alpha^{3/2})$. Here, $b_\textup{m}$ is associated with the Markovian noise, $b_\textup{n}$ is tied to the nonlinearity of the SA operator, and notably, $b_\textup{c}$ represents a multiplicative interaction between the Markovian noise and the nonlinearity of the operator, which is absent in previous works. As a by-product of our analysis, we derive finite-time bounds on higher moment $\mathbb{E}[||\theta_k-\theta^\ast||^{2p}]$ and present non-asymptotic geometric convergence rates for the iterates, along with a Central Limit Theorem.
BetterBench: Assessing AI Benchmarks, Uncovering Issues, and Establishing Best Practices
Authors: Amelia Hardy, Chandler Smith, Max Lamparth, Malcolm Hardy, Mykel J. Kochenderfer Anka Reuel
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: AI models are increasingly prevalent in high-stakes environments, necessitating thorough assessment of their capabilities and risks. Benchmarks are popular for measuring these attributes and for comparing model performance, tracking progress, and identifying weaknesses in foundation and non-foundation models. They can inform model selection for downstream tasks and influence policy initiatives. However, not all benchmarks are the same: their quality depends on their design and usability. In this paper, we develop an assessment framework considering 40 best practices across a benchmark's life cycle and evaluate 25 AI benchmarks against it. We find that there exist large quality differences and that commonly used benchmarks suffer from significant issues. We further find that most benchmarks do not report statistical significance of their results nor can results be easily replicated. To support benchmark developers in aligning with best practices, we provide a checklist for minimum quality assurance based on our assessment. We also develop a living repository of benchmark assessments to support benchmark comparability.