mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
DHA: Learning Decoupled-Head Attention from Transformer Checkpoints via Adaptive Heads Fusion
Authors: Linhao Zhang, Junyuan Shang, Zhenyu Zhang, Tingwen Liu, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun Yilong Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters demonstrate impressive performance. However, the widely used Multi-Head Attention (MHA) in LLMs incurs substantial computational and memory costs during inference. While some efforts have optimized attention mechanisms by pruning heads or sharing parameters among heads, these methods often lead to performance degradation or necessitate substantial continued pre-training costs to restore performance. Based on the analysis of attention redundancy, we design a Decoupled-Head Attention (DHA) mechanism. DHA adaptively configures group sharing for key heads and value heads across various layers, achieving a better balance between performance and efficiency. Inspired by the observation of clustering similar heads, we propose to progressively transform the MHA checkpoint into the DHA model through linear fusion of similar head parameters step by step, retaining the parametric knowledge of the MHA checkpoint. We construct DHA models by transforming various scales of MHA checkpoints given target head budgets. Our experiments show that DHA remarkably requires a mere 0.25\% of the original model's pre-training budgets to achieve 96.1\% of performance while saving 75\% of KV cache. Compared to Group-Query Attention (GQA), DHA achieves a 5$\times$ training acceleration, a maximum of 13.93\% performance improvement under 0.01\% pre-training budget, and 5\% relative improvement under 0.05\% pre-training budget.
Connectivity Shapes Implicit Regularization in Matrix Factorization Models for Matrix Completion
Authors: Jiajie Zhao, Yaoyu Zhang Zhiwei Bai
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Matrix factorization models have been extensively studied as a valuable test-bed for understanding the implicit biases of overparameterized models. Although both low nuclear norm and low rank regularization have been studied for these models, a unified understanding of when, how, and why they achieve different implicit regularization effects remains elusive. In this work, we systematically investigate the implicit regularization of matrix factorization for solving matrix completion problems. We empirically discover that the connectivity of observed data plays a key role in the implicit bias, with a transition from low nuclear norm to low rank as data shifts from disconnected to connected with increased observations. We identify a hierarchy of intrinsic invariant manifolds in the loss landscape that guide the training trajectory to evolve from low-rank to higher-rank solutions. Based on this finding, we theoretically characterize the training trajectory as following the hierarchical invariant manifold traversal process, generalizing the characterization of Li et al.(2020)  to include the disconnected case. Furthermore, we establish conditions that guarantee minimum nuclear norm, closely aligning with our experimental findings, and we provide a dynamics characterization condition for ensuring minimum rank. Our work reveals the intricate interplay between data connectivity, training dynamics, and implicit regularization in matrix factorization models.
Diversify, Contextualize, and Adapt: Efficient Entropy Modeling for Neural Image Codec
Authors: Seungeon Kim, Won-Hee Lee, Dokwan Oh Jun-Hyuk Kim
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Designing a fast and effective entropy model is challenging but essential for practical application of neural codecs. Beyond spatial autoregressive entropy models, more efficient backward adaptation-based entropy models have been recently developed. They not only reduce decoding time by using smaller number of modeling steps but also maintain or even improve rate--distortion performance by leveraging more diverse contexts for backward adaptation. Despite their significant progress, we argue that their performance has been limited by the simple adoption of the design convention for forward adaptation: using only a single type of hyper latent representation, which does not provide sufficient contextual information, especially in the first modeling step. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective entropy modeling framework that leverages sufficient contexts for forward adaptation without compromising on bit-rate. Specifically, we introduce a strategy of diversifying hyper latent representations for forward adaptation, i.e., using two additional types of contexts along with the existing single type of context. In addition, we present a method to effectively use the diverse contexts for contextualizing the current elements to be encoded/decoded. By addressing the limitation of the previous approach, our proposed framework leads to significant performance improvements. Experimental results on popular datasets show that our proposed framework consistently improves rate-distortion performance across various bit-rate regions, e.g., 3.73\% BD-rate gain over the state-of-the-art baseline on the Kodak dataset.
Goal-Conditioned On-Policy Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Dawei Feng, Kele Xu, Bo Ding, Huaimin Wang Xudong Gong
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Existing Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (GCRL) algorithms are built upon Hindsight Experience Replay (HER), which densifies rewards through hindsight replay and leverages historical goal-achieving information to construct a learning curriculum. However, when the task is characterized by a non-Markovian reward (NMR), whose computation depends on multiple steps of states and actions, HER can no longer densify rewards by treating a single encountered state as the hindsight goal. The lack of informative rewards hinders policy learning, resulting in rolling out failed trajectories. Consequently, the replay buffer is overwhelmed with failed trajectories, impeding the establishment of an applicable curriculum. To circumvent these limitations, we deviate from existing HER-based methods and propose an on-policy GCRL framework, GCPO, which is applicable to both multi-goal Markovian reward (MR) and NMR problems.GCPO consists of (1) Pre-training from Demonstrations, which pre-trains the policy to possess an initial goal-achieving capability, thereby diminishing the difficulty of subsequent online learning. (2) Online Self-Curriculum Learning, which first estimates the policy's goal-achieving capability based on historical evaluation information and then selects progressively challenging goals for learning based on its current capability. We evaluate GCPO on a challenging multi-goal long-horizon task: fixed-wing UAV velocity vector control. Experimental results demonstrate that GCPO is capable of effectively addressing both multi-goal MR and NMR problems.
Scribbles for All: Benchmarking Scribble Supervised Segmentation Across Datasets
Authors: Lukas Hoyer, Ozan Unal, Jan Eric Lenssen, Bernt Schiele Wolfgang Boettcher
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: In this work, we introduce Scribbles for All, a label and training data generation algorithm for semantic segmentation trained on scribble labels. Training or fine-tuning semantic segmentation models with weak supervision has become an important topic recently and was subject to significant advances in model quality. In this setting, scribbles are a promising label type to achieve high quality segmentation results while requiring a much lower annotation effort than usual pixel-wise dense semantic segmentation annotations. The main limitation of scribbles as source for weak supervision is the lack of challenging datasets for scribble segmentation, which hinders the development of novel methods and conclusive evaluations. To overcome this limitation, Scribbles for All provides scribble labels for several popular segmentation datasets and provides an algorithm to automatically generate scribble labels for any dataset with dense annotations, paving the way for new insights and model advancements in the field of weakly supervised segmentation. In addition to providing datasets and algorithm, we evaluate state-of-the-art segmentation models on our datasets and show that models trained with our synthetic labels perform competitively with respect to models trained on manual labels. Thus, our datasets enable state-of-the-art research into methods for scribble-labeled semantic segmentation. The datasets, scribble generation algorithm, and baselines are publicly available at https://github.com/wbkit/Scribbles4All.
FlowLLM: Flow Matching for Material Generation with Large Language Models as Base Distributions
Authors: Benjamin Kurt Miller, Ricky T. Q. Chen, Brandon M. Wood Anuroop Sriram
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Material discovery is a critical area of research with the potential to revolutionize various fields, including carbon capture, renewable energy, and electronics. However, the immense scale of the chemical space makes it challenging to explore all possible materials experimentally. In this paper, we introduce FlowLLM, a novel generative model that combines large language models (LLMs) and Riemannian flow matching (RFM) to design novel crystalline materials. FlowLLM first fine-tunes an LLM to learn an effective base distribution of meta-stable crystals in a text representation. After converting to a graph representation, the RFM model takes samples from the LLM and iteratively refines the coordinates and lattice parameters. Our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, increasing the generation rate of stable materials by over three times and increasing the rate for stable, unique, and novel crystals by $\sim50$% – a huge improvement on a difficult problem. Additionally, the crystals generated by FlowLLM are much closer to their relaxed state when compared with another leading model, significantly reducing post-hoc computational cost.
Training Dynamics of Transformers to Recognize Word Co-occurrence via Gradient Flow Analysis
Authors: Bhavya Kailkhura, Zhangyang Wang, Yingbin Liang Hongru Yang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Understanding the training dynamics of transformers is important to explain the impressive capabilities behind large language models. In this work, we study the dynamics of training a shallow transformer on a task of recognizing co-occurrence of two designated words. In the literature of studying training dynamics of transformers, several simplifications are commonly adopted such as weight reparameterization, attention linearization, special initialization, and lazy regime. In contrast, we analyze the gradient flow dynamics of simultaneously training three attention matrices and a linear MLP layer from random initialization, and provide a framework of analyzing such dynamics via a coupled dynamical system. We establish near minimum loss and characterize the attention model after training. We discover that gradient flow serves as an inherent mechanism that naturally divide the training process into two phases. In Phase 1, the linear MLP quickly aligns with the two target signals for correct classification, whereas the softmax attention remains almost unchanged. In Phase 2, the attention matrices and the MLP evolve jointly to enlarge the classification margin and reduce the loss to a near minimum value. Technically, we prove a novel property of the gradient flow, termed \textit{automatic balancing of gradients}, which enables the loss values of different samples to decrease almost at the same rate and further facilitates the proof of near minimum training loss. We also conduct experiments to verify our theoretical results.
BELM: Bidirectional Explicit Linear Multi-step Sampler for Exact Inversion in Diffusion Models
Authors: Hubery Yin, Yuejiang Dong, Huminhao Zhu, Chao Zhang, Hanbin Zhao, Hui Qian, Chen Li Fangyikang Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The inversion of diffusion model sampling, which aims to find the corresponding initial noise of a sample, plays a critical role in various tasks.Recently, several heuristic exact inversion samplers have been proposed to address the inexact inversion issue in a training-free manner. However, the theoretical properties of these heuristic samplers remain unknown and they often exhibit mediocre sampling quality.In this paper, we introduce a generic formulation, \emph{Bidirectional Explicit Linear Multi-step} (BELM) samplers, of the exact inversion samplers, which includes all previously proposed heuristic exact inversion samplers as special cases.The BELM formulation is derived from the variable-stepsize-variable-formula linear multi-step method via integrating a bidirectional explicit constraint. We highlight this bidirectional explicit constraint is the key of mathematically exact inversion.We systematically investigate the Local Truncation Error (LTE) within the BELM framework and show that the existing heuristic designs of exact inversion samplers yield sub-optimal LTE.Consequently, we propose the Optimal BELM (O-BELM) sampler through the LTE minimization approach.We conduct additional analysis to substantiate the theoretical stability and global convergence property of the proposed optimal sampler.Comprehensive experiments demonstrate our O-BELM sampler establishes the exact inversion property while achieving high-quality sampling.Additional experiments in image editing and image interpolation highlight the extensive  potential of applying O-BELM in varying applications.
Learning to Understand: Identifying Interactions via the Möbius Transform
Authors: Yigit Efe Erginbas, Landon Butler, Ramtin Pedarsani, Kannan Ramchandran Justin Singh Kang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: One of the key challenges in machine learning is to find interpretable representations of learned functions. The Möbius transform is essential for this purpose, as its coefficients correspond to unique *importance scores* for *sets of input variables*. This transform is closely related to widely used game-theoretic notions of importance like the *Shapley* and *Bhanzaf value*, but it also captures crucial higher-order interactions. Although computing the Möbius Transform of a function with $n$ inputs involves $2^n$ coefficients, it becomes tractable when the function is *sparse* and of *low-degree* as we show is the case for many real-world functions. Under these conditions, the complexity of the transform computation is significantly reduced. When there are $K$ non-zero coefficients, our algorithm recovers the Möbius transform in $O(Kn)$ samples and $O(Kn^2)$ time asymptotically under certain assumptions, the first non-adaptive algorithm to do so. We also uncover a surprising connection between group testing and the Möbius transform. For functions where all interactions involve at most $t$ inputs, we use group testing results to compute the Möbius transform with $O(Kt\log n)$ sample complexity and $O(K\mathrm{poly}(n))$ time.  A robust version of this algorithm withstands noise and maintains this complexity. This marks the first $n$ sub-linear query complexity, noise-tolerant algorithm for the Möbius transform. While our algorithms are conceptualized in an idealized setting, they indicate that the Möbius transform is a potent tool for interpreting deep learning models.
SparseLLM: Towards Global Pruning of Pre-trained Language Models
Authors: Yijiang Li, Chen Ling, Kibaek Kim, Liang Zhao Guangji Bai
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The transformative impact of large language models (LLMs) like LLaMA and GPT on natural language processing is countered by their prohibitive computational demands. Pruning has emerged as a pivotal compression strategy, introducing sparsity to enhance both memory and computational efficiency. Yet, traditional global pruning is impractical for LLMs due to scalability issues, while local pruning, despite its efficiency, leads to suboptimal solutions. Addressing these challenges, we propose SparseLLM, a novel framework that redefines the global pruning process into manageable, coordinated subproblems, allowing for resource-efficient optimization with global optimality. SparseLLM's approach, which conceptualizes LLMs as a chain of modular functions and leverages auxiliary variables for problem decomposition, not only facilitates a pragmatic application on LLMs but also demonstrates significant performance improvements, particularly in high-sparsity regimes where it surpasses current state-of-the-art methods. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/BaiTheBest/SparseLLM.
Text-Aware Diffusion for Policy Learning
Authors: Mandy He, Zilai Zeng, Chen Sun Calvin Luo
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Training an agent to achieve particular goals or perform desired behaviors is often accomplished through reinforcement learning, especially in the absence of expert demonstrations.  However, supporting novel goals or behaviors through reinforcement learning requires the ad-hoc design of appropriate reward functions, which quickly becomes intractable. To address this challenge, we propose Text-Aware Diffusion for Policy Learning (TADPoLe), which uses a pretrained, frozen text-conditioned diffusion model to compute dense zero-shot reward signals for text-aligned policy learning.  We hypothesize that large-scale pretrained generative models encode rich priors that can supervise a policy to behave not only in a text-aligned manner, but also in alignment with a notion of naturalness summarized from internet-scale training data.  In our experiments, we demonstrate that TADPoLe is able to learn policies for novel goal-achievement and continuous locomotion behaviors specified by natural language, in both Humanoid and Dog environments. The behaviors are learned zero-shot without ground-truth rewards or expert demonstrations, and are qualitatively more natural according to human evaluation. We further show that TADPoLe performs competitively when applied to robotic manipulation tasks in the Meta-World environment, without having access to any in-domain demonstrations.
Private Geometric Median
Authors: Thomas Steinke, Jonathan Ullman Mahdi Haghifam
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In this paper, we study differentially private (DP) algorithms for computing the geometric median (GM) of a dataset: Given $n$ points, $x_1,\dots,x_n$ in $\mathbb{R}^d$, the goal is to find a point $\theta$ that minimizes the sum of the Euclidean distances to these points, i.e., $\sum_{i=1}^{n} \lVert|\theta - x_i\rVert_2$. Off-the-shelf methods, such as DP-GD, require strong a priori knowledge locating the data within a ball of radius $R$, and the excess risk of the algorithm depends linearly on $R$. In this paper, we ask: can we design an efficient and private algorithm with an excess error guarantee that scales with the (unknown) radius containing the majority of the datapoints? Our main contribution is a pair of polynomial-time DP algorithms for the task of private GM with an excess error guarantee that scales with the effective diameter of the datapoints. Additionally, we propose an inefficient algorithm based on the inverse smooth sensitivity mechanism, which satisfies the more restrictive notion of pure DP. We complement our results with a lower bound and demonstrate the optimality of our polynomial-time algorithms in terms of sample complexity.
Goal Conditioned Reinforcement Learning for Photo Finishing Tuning
Authors: Yujin Wang, Lingen Li, Fan Zhang, Tianfan Xue Jiarui Wu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Photo finishing tuning aims to automate the manual tuning process of the photo finishing pipeline, like Adobe Lightroom or Darktable. Previous works either use zeroth-order optimization, which is slow when the set of parameters increases, or rely on a differentiable proxy of the target finishing pipeline, which is hard to train.To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel goal-conditioned reinforcement learning framework for efficiently tuning parameters using a goal image as a condition. Unlike previous approaches, our tuning framework does not rely on any proxy and treats the photo finishing pipeline as a black box. Utilizing a trained reinforcement learning policy, it can efficiently find the desired set of parameters within just 10 queries, while optimization based approaches normally take 200 queries. Furthermore, our architecture utilizes a goal image to guide the iterative tuning of pipeline parameters, allowing for flexible conditioning on pixel-aligned target images, style images, or any other visually representable goals. We conduct detailed experiments on photo finishing tuning and photo stylization tuning tasks, demonstrating the advantages of our method.
A Benchmark Suite for Evaluating Neural Mutual Information Estimators on Unstructured Datasets
Authors: Wonjong Rhee Kyungeun Lee
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Mutual Information (MI) is a fundamental metric for quantifying dependency between two random variables. When we can access only the samples, but not the underlying distribution functions, we can evaluate MI using sample-based estimators. Assessment of such MI estimators, however, has almost always relied on analytical datasets including Gaussian multivariates. Such datasets allow analytical calculations of the true MI values, but they are limited in that they do not reflect the complexities of real-world datasets. This study introduces a comprehensive benchmark suite for evaluating neural MI estimators on unstructured datasets, specifically focusing on images and texts. By leveraging same-class sampling for positive pairing and introducing a binary symmetric channel trick, we show that we can accurately manipulate true MI values of real-world datasets. Using the benchmark suite, we investigate seven challenging scenarios, shedding light on the reliability of neural MI estimators for unstructured datasets.
Private and Personalized Frequency Estimation in a Federated Setting
Authors: Vitaly Feldman, Kunal Talwar Amrith Setlur
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Motivated by the problem of next word prediction on user devices we introduce and study the problem of personalized frequency histogram estimation in a federated setting. In this problem, over some domain, each user observes a number of samples from a distribution which is specific to that user. The goal is to compute for all users a personalized estimate of the user's distribution with error measured in KL divergence. We focus on addressing two central challenges: statistical heterogeneity and protection of user privacy.Our approach to the problem relies on discovering and exploiting similar subpopulations of users which are often present and latent in real-world data, while minimizing user privacy leakage at the same time. We first present a non-private clustering-based algorithm for the problem, and give a provably joint differentially private version of it with a private data-dependent initialization scheme. Next, we propose a simple data model which is based on a mixture of Dirichlet distributions, to formally motivate our non-private algorithm and demonstrate some properties of its components. Finally, we provide an extensive empirical evaluation of our private and non-private algorithms under varying levels of statistical and size heterogeneity on the Reddit, StackOverflow, and Amazon Reviews datasets. Our results demonstrate significant improvements over standard and clustering-based baselines, and in particular, they show that it is possible to improve over direct personalization of a single global model.
II-Bench: An Image Implication Understanding Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models
Authors: Feiteng Fang, Xi Feng, Xinrun Du, Chenhao Zhang, Zekun Wang, Yuelin Bai, Qixuan Zhao, Liyang Fan, Chengguang Gan, Hongquan Lin, Jiaming Li, Yuansheng Ni, Haihong Wu, Yaswanth Narsupalli, Zhigang Zheng, Chengming Li, Xiping Hu, Ruifeng Xu, Xiaojun Chen, Min Yang, Jiaheng Liu, Ruibo Liu, Wenhao Huang, Ge Zhang, Shiwen Ni Ziqiang Liu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: The rapid advancements in the development of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have consistently led to new breakthroughs on various benchmarks. In response, numerous challenging and comprehensive benchmarks have been proposed to more accurately assess the capabilities of MLLMs. However, there is a dearth of exploration of the higher-order perceptual capabilities of MLLMs. To fill this gap, we propose the Image Implication understanding Benchmark, II-Bench, which aims to evaluate the model's higher-order perception of images. Through extensive experiments on II-Bench across multiple MLLMs, we have made significant findings. Initially, a substantial gap is observed between the performance of MLLMs and humans on II-Bench. The pinnacle accuracy of MLLMs attains 74.8%, whereas human accuracy averages 90%, peaking at an impressive 98%. Subsequently, MLLMs perform worse on abstract and complex images, suggesting limitations in their ability to understand high-level semantics and capture image details. Finally, it is observed that most models exhibit enhanced accuracy when image sentiment polarity hints are incorporated into the prompts. This observation underscores a notable deficiency in their inherent understanding of image sentiment. We believe that II-Bench will inspire the community to develop the next generation of MLLMs, advancing the journey towards expert  artificial general intelligence (AGI). II-Bench is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/m-a-p/II-Bench.
How does Gradient Descent Learn Features --- A Local Analysis for Regularized Two-Layer Neural Networks
Authors: Rong Ge Mo Zhou
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The ability of learning useful features is one of the major advantages of neural networks. Although recent works show that neural network can operate in a neural tangent kernel (NTK) regime that does not allow feature learning, many works also demonstrate the potential for neural networks to go beyond NTK regime and perform feature learning. Recently, a line of work highlighted the feature learning capabilities of the early stages of gradient-based training. In this paper we consider another mechanism for feature learning via gradient descent through a local convergence analysis. We show that once the loss is below a certain threshold, gradient descent with a carefully regularized objective will capture ground-truth directions. We further strengthen this local convergence analysis by incorporating early-stage feature learning analysis. Our results demonstrate that feature learning not only happens at the initial gradient steps, but can also occur towards the end of training.
Pipeline Parallelism with Controllable Memory
Authors: Xinyi Wan, Nyamdavaa Amar, Min Lin Penghui Qi
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Pipeline parallelism has been widely explored, but most existing schedules lack a systematic methodology. In this paper, we propose a framework to decompose pipeline schedules as repeating a building block, and show that the lifespan of the building block decides the peak activation memory of the pipeline schedule. Guided by the observations, we find that almost all existing pipeline schedules, to the best of our knowledge, are memory inefficient. To address this, we introduce a family of memory efficient building blocks with controllable activation memory, which can reduce the peak activation memory to 1/2 of 1F1B without sacrificing efficiency, and even to 1/3 with comparable throughput. We can also achieve almost zero pipeline bubbles while maintaining the same activation memory as 1F1B. Our evaluations demonstrate that in pure pipeline parallelism settings, our methods outperform 1F1B by from 7\% to 55\% in terms of throughput. When employing a grid search over hybrid parallelism hyperparameters in practical scenarios, our methods demonstrate a 16\% throughput improvement over the 1F1B baseline for large language models. The implementation is open-sourced at https://github.com/sail-sg/zero-bubble-pipeline-parallelism.
MARVEL: Multidimensional Abstraction and Reasoning through Visual Evaluation and Learning
Authors: Jiarui Zhang, Kexuan Sun, Zhivar Sourati, Kian Ahrabian, Kaixin Ma, Filip Ilievski, Jay Pujara Yifan Jiang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: While multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have shown significant progress across popular visual reasoning benchmarks, whether they possess abstract visual reasoning abilities remains an open question. Similar to the Sudoku puzzles, abstract visual reasoning (AVR) problems require finding high-level patterns (e.g., repetition constraints on numbers) that control the input shapes (e.g., digits) in a specific task configuration (e.g., matrix). However, existing AVR benchmarks only consider a limited set of patterns (addition, conjunction), input shapes (rectangle, square), and task configurations (3 × 3 matrices). And they fail to capture all abstract reasoning patterns in human cognition necessary for addressing real-world tasks, such as geometric properties and object boundary understanding in real-world navigation. To evaluate MLLMs’ AVR abilities systematically, we introduce MARVEL founded on the core knowledge system in human cognition, a multi-dimensional AVR benchmark with 770 puzzles composed of six core knowledge patterns, geometric and abstract shapes, and five different task configurations. To inspect whether the model performance is grounded in perception or reasoning, MARVEL complements the standard AVR question with perception questions in a hierarchical evaluation framework. We conduct comprehensive experiments on MARVEL with ten representative MLLMs in zero-shot and few-shot settings. Our experiments reveal that all MLLMs show near-random performance on MARVEL, with significant performance gaps (40%) compared to humans across all patterns and task configurations. Further analysis of perception questions reveals that MLLMs struggle to comprehend the visual features (near-random performance). Although closed-source MLLMs, such as GPT-4V, show a promising understanding of reasoning patterns (on par with humans) after adding textual descriptions, this advantage is hindered by their weak perception abilities. We release our entirecode and dataset at https://github.com/1171-jpg/MARVEL_AVR.
ReFIR: Grounding Large Restoration Models with Retrieval Augmentation
Authors: Tao Dai, Zhihao Ouyang, Taolin Zhang, Yaohua Zha, Bin Chen, Shu-tao Xia Hang Guo
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent advances in diffusion-based Large Restoration Models (LRMs) have significantly improved photo-realistic image restoration by leveraging the internal knowledge embedded within model weights. However, existing LRMs often suffer from the hallucination dilemma, i.e., producing incorrect contents or textures when dealing with severe degradations, due to their heavy reliance on limited internal knowledge. In this paper, we propose an orthogonal solution called the Retrieval-augmented Framework for Image Restoration (ReFIR), which incorporates retrieved images as external knowledge to extend the knowledge boundary of existing LRMs in generating details faithful to the original scene.  Specifically, we first introduce the nearest neighbor lookup to retrieve content-relevant high-quality images as reference, after which we propose the cross-image injection to modify existing LRMs to utilize high-quality textures from retrieved images. Thanks to the additional external knowledge, our ReFIR can well handle the hallucination challenge and facilitate faithfully results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReFIR can achieve not only high-fidelity but also realistic restoration results. Importantly, our ReFIR requires no training and is adaptable to various LRMs.
Grounded Answers for Multi-agent Decision-making Problem through Generative World Model
Authors: Xinrui Yang, Shiguang Sun, Long Qian, Lipeng Wan, Xingyu Chen, Xuguang Lan Zeyang Liu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent progress in generative models has stimulated significant innovations in many fields, such as image generation and chatbots. Despite their success, these models often produce sketchy and misleading solutions for complex multi-agent decision-making problems because they miss the trial-and-error experience and reasoning as humans. To address this limitation, we explore a paradigm that integrates a language-guided simulator into the multi-agent reinforcement learning pipeline to enhance the generated answer. The simulator is a world model that separately learns dynamics and reward, where the dynamics model comprises an image tokenizer as well as a causal transformer to generate interaction transitions autoregressively, and the reward model is a bidirectional transformer learned by maximizing the likelihood of trajectories in the expert demonstrations under language guidance. Given an image of the current state and the task description, we use the world model to train the joint policy and produce the image sequence as the answer by running the converged policy on the dynamics model. The empirical results demonstrate that this framework can improve the answers for multi-agent decision-making problems by showing superior performance on the training and unseen tasks of the StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge benchmark. In particular, it can generate consistent interaction sequences and explainable reward functions at interaction states, opening the path for training generative models of the future.
AlterMOMA: Fusion Redundancy Pruning for Camera-LiDAR Fusion Models with Alternative Modality Masking
Authors: Yantao Lu, Ning Liu, Bo Jiang, Jinchao Chen, Ying Zhang Shiqi Sun
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Camera-LiDAR fusion models significantly enhance perception performance in autonomous driving. The fusion mechanism leverages the strengths of each modality while minimizing their weaknesses. Moreover, in practice, camera-LiDAR fusion models utilize pre-trained backbones for efficient training. However, we argue that directly loading single-modal pre-trained camera and LiDAR backbones into camera-LiDAR fusion models introduces similar feature redundancy across modalities due to the nature of the fusion mechanism. Unfortunately, existing pruning methods are developed explicitly for single-modal models, and thus, they struggle to effectively identify these specific redundant parameters in camera-LiDAR fusion models. In this paper, to address the issue above on camera-LiDAR fusion models, we propose a novelty pruning framework Alternative Modality Masking Pruning (AlterMOMA), which employs alternative masking on each modality and identifies the redundant parameters. Specifically, when one modality parameters are masked (deactivated), the absence of features from the masked backbone compels the model to reactivate previous redundant features of the other modality backbone. Therefore, these redundant features and relevant redundant parameters can be identified via the reactivation process. The redundant parameters can be pruned by our proposed importance score evaluation function, Alternative Evaluation (AlterEva), which is based on the observation of the loss changes when certain modality parameters are activated and deactivated. Extensive experiments on the nuScene and KITTI datasets encompassing diverse tasks, baseline models, and pruning algorithms showcase that AlterMOMA outperforms existing pruning methods, attaining state-of-the-art performance.
Loss Landscape Characterization of Neural Networks without  Over-Parametrization
Authors: Niccoló Ajroldi, Antonio Orvieto, Aurelien Lucchi Rustem Islamov
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Modern machine learning heavily depends on the effectiveness of optimization techniques. While deep learning models have achieved remarkable empirical results in training, their theoretical underpinnings remain somewhat elusive. Ensuring the convergence of optimization methods requires imposing specific structures on the objective function which often do not hold in practice. One prominent example is the widely recognized Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL) inequality, which has garnered considerable attention in recent years. However, validating such assumptions for deep neural networks entails substantial and often impractical levels of over-parametrization. In order to address this limitation, we propose a novel class of functions that can characterize the loss landscape of modern deep models without requiring extensive over-parametrization and can also include saddle points. Crucially, we prove that gradient-based optimizers possess theoretical guarantees of convergence under this assumption. Finally, we validate the soundness of our assumption through both theoretical analysis and empirical experimentation across a diverse range of deep learning models.
Gradient-based Discrete Sampling with Automatic Cyclical Scheduling
Authors: Riddhiman Bhattacharya, Arun Hariharan, Ruqi Zhang Patrick Pynadath
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Discrete distributions, particularly in high-dimensional deep models, are often highly multimodal due to inherent discontinuities. While gradient-based discrete sampling has proven effective, it is susceptible to becoming trapped in local modes due to the gradient information. To tackle this challenge, we propose an automatic cyclical scheduling, designed for efficient and accurate sampling in multimodal discrete distributions. Our method contains three key components: (1) a cyclical step size schedule where large steps discover new modes and small steps exploit each mode; (2) a cyclical balancing schedule, ensuring "balanced" proposals for given step sizes and high efficiency of the Markov chain; and (3) an automatic tuning scheme for adjusting the hyperparameters in the cyclical schedules, allowing adaptability across diverse datasets with minimal tuning.  We prove the non-asymptotic convergence and inference guarantee for our method in general discrete distributions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method in sampling complex multimodal discrete distributions.
2D-OOB: Attributing Data Contribution Through Joint Valuation Framework
Authors: Jingyan Shen, Yongchan Kwon Yifan Sun
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Data valuation has emerged as a powerful framework for quantifying each datum's contribution to the training of a machine learning model. However, it is crucial to recognize that the quality of cells within a single data point can vary greatly in practice. For example, even in the case of an abnormal data point, not all cells are necessarily noisy. The single scalar score assigned by existing data valuation methods blurs the distinction between noisy and clean cells of a data point, making it challenging to interpret the data values. In this paper, we propose 2D-OOB, an out-of-bag estimation framework for jointly determining helpful (or detrimental) samples as well as the particular cells that drive them. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that 2D-OOB achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple use cases while being exponentially faster. Specifically, 2D-OOB shows promising results in detecting and rectifying fine-grained outliers at the cell level, and localizing backdoor triggers in data poisoning attacks.
Zero-Shot Tokenizer Transfer
Authors: Edoardo M. Ponti, Ivan Vulić Benjamin Minixhofer
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Language models (LMs) are bound to their tokenizer, which maps raw text to a sequence of vocabulary items (tokens). This restricts their flexibility: for example, LMs trained primarily on English may still perform well in other natural and programming languages, but have vastly decreased efficiency due to their English-centric tokenizer. To mitigate this, we should be able to swap the original LM tokenizer with an arbitrary one, on the fly, without degrading performance. Hence, in this work we define a new problem: Zero-Shot Tokenizer Transfer (ZeTT). The challenge at the core of ZeTT is finding embeddings for the tokens in the vocabulary of the new tokenizer. Since prior heuristics for initializing embeddings often perform at chance level in a ZeTT setting, we propose a new solution: we train a hypernetwork taking a tokenizer as input and predicting the corresponding embeddings. We empirically demonstrate that the hypernetwork generalizes to new tokenizers both with encoder (e.g., XLM-R) and decoder LLMs (e.g., Mistral-7B). Our method comes close to the original models' performance in cross-lingual and coding tasks while markedly reducing the length of the tokenized sequence. We also find that the remaining gap can be quickly closed by continued training on less than 1B tokens. Finally, we show that a ZeTT hypernetwork trained for a base (L)LM can also be applied to fine-tuned variants without extra training. Overall, our results make substantial strides toward detaching LMs from their tokenizer.
A Careful Examination of Large Language Model Performance on Grade School Arithmetic
Authors: Jeff Da, Dean Lee, Vaughn Robinson, Catherine Wu, Will Song, Tiffany Zhao, Pranav Raja, Charlotte Zhuang, Dylan Slack, Qin Lyu, Sean Hendryx, Russell Kaplan, Michele (Mike) Lunati, Summer Yue Hugh Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive success on many benchmarks for mathematical reasoning.However, there is growing concern that some of this performance actually reflects dataset contamination, where data closely resembling benchmark questions leaks into the training data, instead of true reasoning ability.To investigate this claim rigorously, we commission Grade School Math 1000 (GSM1k). GSM1k is designed to mirror the style and complexity of the established GSM8k benchmark,the gold standard for measuring elementary mathematical reasoning. We ensure that the two benchmarks are comparable across important metrics such as human solve rates, number of steps in solution, answer magnitude, and more.When evaluating leading open- and closed-source LLMs on GSM1k, we observe accuracy drops of up to 8%, with several families of models showing evidence of systematic overfitting across almost all model sizes.Further analysis suggests a positive relationship (Spearman's r^2=0.36) between a model's probability of generating an example from GSM8k and its performance gap between GSM8k and GSM1k, suggesting that some models may have partially memorized GSM8k.Nevertheless, many models, especially those on the frontier, show minimal signs of overfitting, and all models broadly demonstrate generalization to novel math problems guaranteed to not be in their training data.
Theoretical Analysis of Weak-to-Strong Generalization
Authors: David Sontag, Aravindan Vijayaraghavan Hunter Lang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Strong student models can learn from weaker teachers: when trained on the predictions of a weaker model, a strong pretrained student can learn to correct the weak model’s errors and generalize to examples where the teacher is not confident, even when these examples are excluded from training. This enables learning from cheap, incomplete, and possibly incorrect label information, such as coarse logical rules or the generations of a language model. We show that existing weak supervision theory results fail to account for both of these effects, which we call pseudolabel correction and coverage expansion, respectively. We give a new bound based on expansion properties of the data distribution and student hypothesis class that directly accounts for pseudolabel correction and coverage expansion. Our bound generalizes results from the co-training and self-training literature and captures the intuition that weak-to-strong generalization occurs when the mistakes of the weak model are hard for the strong model to fit without incurring additional error. We show that these expansion properties can be checked from finite data and give empirical evidence that they hold in practice.
Grasp as You Say: Language-guided Dexterous Grasp Generation
Authors: Jian-Jian Jiang, Chengyi Xing, Xian-Tuo Tan, Xiao-Ming Wu, Hao Li, Mark Cutkosky, Wei-Shi Zheng Yi-Lin Wei
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper explores a novel task "Dexterous Grasp as You Say'' (DexGYS), enabling robots to perform dexterous grasping based on human commands expressed in natural language. However, the development of this field is hindered by the lack of datasets with natural human guidance; thus, we propose a language-guided dexterous grasp dataset, named DexGYSNet, offering high-quality dexterous grasp annotations along with flexible and fine-grained human language guidance. Our dataset construction is cost-efficient, with the carefully-design hand-object interaction retargeting strategy, and the LLM-assisted language guidance annotation system. Equipped with this dataset, we introduce the DexGYSGrasp framework for generating dexterous grasps based on human language instructions, with the capability of producing grasps that are intent-aligned, high quality and diversity. To achieve this capability, our framework decomposes the complex learning process into two manageable progressive objectives and introduce two components to realize them. The first component learns the grasp distribution focusing on intention alignment and generation diversity. And the second component refines the grasp quality while maintaining intention consistency. Extensive experiments are conducted on DexGYSNet and real world environments for validation.