mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Better by default: Strong pre-tuned MLPs and boosted trees on tabular data
Authors: Léo Grinsztajn, Ingo Steinwart David Holzmüller
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: For classification and regression on tabular data, the dominance of gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDTs) has recently been challenged by often much slower deep learning methods with extensive hyperparameter tuning. We address this discrepancy by introducing (a) RealMLP, an improved multilayer perceptron (MLP), and (b) strong meta-tuned default parameters for GBDTs and RealMLP. We tune RealMLP and the default parameters on a meta-train benchmark with 118 datasets and compare them to hyperparameter-optimized versions on a disjoint meta-test benchmark with 90 datasets, as well as the GBDT-friendly benchmark by Grinsztajn et al. (2022). Our benchmark results on medium-to-large tabular datasets (1K--500K samples) show that RealMLP offers a favorable time-accuracy tradeoff compared to other neural baselines and is competitive with GBDTs in terms of benchmark scores. Moreover, a combination of RealMLP and GBDTs with improved default parameters can achieve excellent results without hyperparameter tuning. Finally, we demonstrate that some of RealMLP's improvements can also considerably improve the performance of TabR with default parameters.
DAPE: Data-Adaptive Positional Encoding for Length Extrapolation
Authors: Yihang Gao, Han Shi, Minbin Huang, Jingyao Li, Jing Xiong, Xiaozhe Ren, Michael Ng, Xin Jiang, Zhenguo Li, Yu Li Chuanyang Zheng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Positional encoding plays a crucial role in transformers, significantly impact- ing model performance and length generalization. Prior research has introduced absolute positional encoding (APE) and relative positional encoding (RPE) to distinguish token positions in given sequences. However, both APE and RPE remain fixed after model training regardless of input data, limiting their adaptability and flexibility. Hence, we expect that the desired positional encoding should be data-adaptive and can be dynamically adjusted with the given attention. In this paper, we propose a Data-Adaptive Positional Encoding (DAPE) method, which dynamically and semantically adjusts based on input context and learned fixed priors. Experimental validation on real-world datasets (Arxiv, Books3, and CHE) demonstrates that DAPE enhances model performances in terms of trained length and length generalization, where the improvements are statistically significant. The model visualization suggests that our model can keep both local and anti-local information. Finally, we successfully train the model on sequence length 128 and achieve better performance at evaluation sequence length 8192, compared with other static positional encoding methods, revealing the benefit of the adaptive positional encoding method.
LLM-ESR: Large Language Models Enhancement for Long-tailed Sequential Recommendation
Authors: Xian Wu, Yejing Wang, Zijian Zhang, Feng Tian, Yefeng Zheng, Xiangyu Zhao Qidong Liu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Sequential recommender systems (SRS) aim to predict users' subsequent choices based on their historical interactions and have found applications in diverse fields such as e-commerce and social media. However, in real-world systems, most users interact with only a handful of items, while the majority of items are seldom consumed. These two issues, known as the long-tail user and long-tail item challenges, often pose difficulties for existing SRS. These challenges can adversely affect user experience and seller benefits, making them crucial to address. Though a few works have addressed the challenges, they still struggle with the seesaw or noisy issues due to the intrinsic scarcity of interactions. The advancements in large language models (LLMs) present a promising solution to these problems from a semantic perspective. As one of the pioneers in this field, we propose the Large Language Models Enhancement framework for Sequential Recommendation (LLM-ESR). This framework utilizes semantic embeddings derived from LLMs to enhance SRS without adding extra inference load. To address the long-tail item challenge, we design a dual-view modeling framework that combines semantics from LLMs and collaborative signals from conventional SRS. For the long-tail user challenge, we propose a retrieval augmented self-distillation method to enhance user preference representation using more informative interactions from similar users. To verify the effectiveness and versatility of our proposed enhancement framework, we conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets using three popular SRS models. The results consistently show that our method surpasses existing baselines. The implementation code is available in Supplementary Material.
Achieving Tractable Minimax Optimal Regret in Average Reward MDPs
Authors: Zihan Zhang Victor Boone
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In recent years, significant attention has been directed towards learning average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs).However, existing algorithms either suffer from sub-optimal regret guarantees or computational inefficiencies.In this paper, we present the first *tractable* algorithm  with minimax optimal regret of $\mathrm{O}\left(\sqrt{\mathrm{sp}(h^*) S A T \log(SAT)}\right)$ where $\mathrm{sp}(h^*)$ is the span of the optimal bias function $h^*$, $S\times A$  is the size of the state-action space and $T$ the number of learning steps. Remarkably, our algorithm does not require prior information on $\mathrm{sp}(h^*)$. Our algorithm relies on a novel subroutine, **P**rojected **M**itigated **E**xtended **V**alue **I**teration (`PMEVI`), to compute bias-constrained optimal policies efficiently. This subroutine can be applied to various previous algorithms to obtain improved regret bounds.
Universality of AdaGrad Stepsizes for Stochastic Optimization: Inexact Oracle, Acceleration and Variance Reduction
Authors: Xiaowen Jiang, Sebastian Stich Anton Rodomanov
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We present adaptive gradient methods (both basic and accelerated) for solvingconvex composite optimization problems in which the main part is approximatelysmooth (a.k.a. $(\delta, L)$-smooth) and can be accessed only via a(potentially biased) stochastic gradient oracle.This setting covers many interesting examples including Hölder smooth problemsand various inexact computations of the stochastic gradient.Our methods use AdaGrad stepsizes and are adaptive in the sense that they donot require knowing any problem-dependent constants except an estimate of thediameter of the feasible set but nevertheless achieve the best possibleconvergence rates as if they knew the corresponding constants.We demonstrate that AdaGrad stepsizes work in a variety of situationsby proving, in a unified manner, three types of new results.First, we establish efficiency guarantees for our methods in the classicalsetting where the oracle's variance is uniformly bounded.We then show that, under more refined assumptions on the variance,the same methods without any modifications enjoy implicit variancereduction properties allowing us to express their complexity estimates interms of the variance only at the minimizer.Finally, we show how to incorporate explicit SVRG-type variance reduction intoour methods and obtain even faster algorithms.In all three cases, we present both basic and accelerated algorithmsachieving state-of-the-art complexity bounds.As a direct corollary of our results, we obtain universal stochastic gradientmethods for Hölder smooth problems which can be used in all situations.
When LLM Meets DRL: Advancing Jailbreaking Efficiency via DRL-guided Search
Authors: Yuzhou Nie, Wenbo Guo, Xiangyu Zhang Xuan Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent studies developed jailbreaking attacks, which construct jailbreaking prompts to "fool" LLMs into responding to harmful questions.Early-stage jailbreaking attacks require access to model internals or significant human efforts. More advanced attacks utilize genetic algorithms for automatic and black-box attacks.However, the random nature of genetic algorithms significantly limits the effectiveness of these attacks.In this paper, we propose RLbreaker, a black-box jailbreaking attack driven by deep reinforcement learning (DRL).We model jailbreaking as a search problem and design an RL agent to guide the search, which is more effective and has less randomness than stochastic search, such as genetic algorithms.Specifically, we design a customized DRL system for the jailbreaking problem, including a novel reward function and a customized proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm.Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that RLbreaker is much more effective than existing jailbreaking attacks against six state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs. We also show that RLbreaker is robust against three SOTA defenses and its trained agents can transfer across different LLMs.We further validate the key design choices of RLbreaker via a comprehensive ablation study.
Diffusion-based  Layer-wise Semantic Reconstruction for Unsupervised Out-of-Distribution Detection
Authors: De Cheng, Chaowei Fang, Yubiao Wang, Changzhe Jiao, Lechao Cheng, Nannan Wang, Xinbo Gao Ying Yang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Unsupervised out-of-distribution (OOD) detection aims to identify out-of-domain data by learning only from unlabeled In-Distribution (ID) training samples, which is crucial for developing a safe real-world machine learning system. Current reconstruction-based method provides a good alternative approach, by measuring the reconstruction error between the input and its corresponding generative counterpart in the pixel/feature space. However, such generative methods face the key dilemma, $i.e.$, improving the reconstruction power of the generative model, while keeping compact representation of the ID data. To address this issue, we propose the diffusion-based layer-wise semantic reconstruction approach for unsupervised OOD detection. The innovation of our approach is that we leverage the diffusion model's intrinsic data reconstruction ability to distinguish ID samples from OOD samples in the latent feature space. Moreover, to set up a comprehensive and discriminative feature representation, we devise a multi-layer semantic feature extraction strategy. Through distorting the extracted features with Gaussian noises and applying the diffusion model for feature reconstruction, the separation of ID and OOD samples is implemented according to the reconstruction errors. Extensive experimental results on multiple benchmarks built upon various datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of detection accuracy and speed.
Fast samplers for Inverse Problems in Iterative Refinement models
Authors: Ruihan Yang, Stephan Mandt Kushagra Pandey
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Constructing fast samplers for unconditional diffusion and flow-matching models has received much attention recently; however, existing methods for solving inverse problems, such as super-resolution, inpainting, or deblurring, still require hundreds to thousands of iterative steps to obtain high-quality results. We propose a plug-and-play framework for constructing efficient samplers for inverse problems, requiring only pre-trained diffusion or flow-matching models. We present Conditional Conjugate Integrators, which leverage the specific form of the inverse problem to project the respective conditional diffusion/flow dynamics into a more amenable space for sampling. Our method complements popular posterior approximation methods for solving inverse problems using diffusion/flow models. We evaluate the proposed method's performance on various linear image restoration tasks across multiple datasets, employing diffusion and flow-matching models. Notably, on challenging inverse problems like 4x super-resolution on the ImageNet dataset, our method can generate high-quality samples in as few as 5 conditional sampling steps and outperforms competing baselines requiring 20-1000 steps. Our code will be publicly available at https://github.com/mandt-lab/c-pigdm.
Advancing Spiking Neural Networks for Sequential Modeling with Central Pattern Generators
Authors: Dongqi Han, Yansen Wang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang, Dongsheng Li Changze Lv
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Spiking neural networks (SNNs) represent a promising approach to developing artificial neural networks that are both energy-efficient and biologically plausible.However, applying SNNs to sequential tasks, such as text classification and time-series forecasting, has been hindered by the challenge of creating an effective and hardware-friendly spike-form positional encoding (PE) strategy.Drawing inspiration from the central pattern generators (CPGs) in the human brain,  which produce rhythmic patterned outputs without requiring rhythmic inputs, we propose a novel PE technique for SNNs, termed CPG-PE.We demonstrate that the commonly used sinusoidal PE is mathematically a specific solution to the membrane potential dynamics of a particular CPG.Moreover, extensive experiments across various domains, including time-series forecasting, natural language processing, and image classification, show that SNNs with CPG-PE outperform their conventional counterparts.Additionally, we perform analysis experiments to elucidate the mechanism through which SNNs encode positional information and to explore the function of CPGs in the human brain.This investigation may offer valuable insights into the fundamental principles of neural computation.
Evaluating the World Model Implicit in a Generative Model
Authors: Justin Y. Chen, Ashesh Rambachan, Jon Kleinberg, Sendhil Mullainathan Keyon Vafa
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent work suggests that large language models may implicitly learn world models. How should we assess this possibility? We formalize this question for the case where the underlying reality is governed by a deterministic finite automaton. This includes problems as diverse as simple logical reasoning, geographic navigation, game-playing, and chemistry. We propose new evaluation metrics for world model recovery inspired by the classic Myhill-Nerode theorem from language theory. We illustrate their utility in three domains: game playing, logic puzzles, and navigation. In all domains, the generative models we consider do well on existing diagnostics for assessing world models, but our evaluation metrics reveal their world models to be far less coherent than they appear. Such incoherence creates fragility: using a generative model to solve related but subtly different tasks can lead to failures. Building generative models that meaningfully capture the underlying logic of the domains they model would be immensely valuable; our results suggest new ways to assess how close a given model is to that goal.
Contextual Linear Optimization with Bandit Feedback
Authors: Nathan Kallus, Xiaojie Mao, Yanchen Wu Yichun Hu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Contextual linear optimization (CLO) uses predictive contextual features to reduce uncertainty in random cost coefficients and thereby improve average-cost performance. An example is the stochastic shortest path problem with random edge costs (e.g., traffic) and contextual features (e.g., lagged traffic, weather). Existing work on CLO assumes the data has fully observed cost coefficient vectors, but in many applications, we can only see the realized cost of a historical decision, that is, just one projection of the random cost coefficient vector, to which we refer as bandit feedback. We study a class of offline learning algorithms for CLO with bandit feedback, which we term induced empirical risk minimization (IERM), where we fit a predictive model to directly optimize the downstream performance of the policy it induces. We show a fast-rate regret bound for IERM that allows for misspecified model classes and flexible choices of the optimization estimate, and we develop computationally tractable surrogate losses. A byproduct of our theory of independent interest is fast-rate regret bound for IERM with full feedback and misspecified policy class. We compare the performance of different modeling choices numerically using a stochastic shortest path example and provide practical insights from the empirical results.
A Surprisingly Simple Approach to Generalized Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Haoxiang Qiu, Takayuki Katsuki, Daiki Kimura, Takayuki Osogami, Tadanobu Inoue Tomoya Sakai
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The goal of *generalized* few-shot semantic segmentation (GFSS) is to recognize *novel-class* objects through training with a few annotated examples and the *base-class* model that learned the knowledge about the base classes.Unlike the classic few-shot semantic segmentation, GFSS aims to classify pixels into both base and novel classes, meaning it is a more practical setting.Current GFSS methods rely on several techniques such as using combinations of customized modules, carefully designed loss functions, meta-learning, and transductive learning.However, we found that a simple rule and standard supervised learning substantially improve the GFSS performance.In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method for GFSS that does not use the techniques mentioned above.Also, we theoretically show that our method perfectly maintains the segmentation performance of the base-class model over most of the base classes.Through numerical experiments, we demonstrated the effectiveness of our method.It improved in novel-class segmentation performance in the $1$-shot scenario by $6.1$% on the PASCAL-$5^i$ dataset, $4.7$% on the PASCAL-$10^i$ dataset, and $1.0$% on the COCO-$20^i$ dataset.Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/IBM/BCM.
Towards Open Respiratory Acoustic Foundation Models: Pretraining and Benchmarking
Authors: Tong Xia, Jing Han, Yu Yvonne Wu, Georgios Rizos, Yang Liu, Mohammed Mosuily, Jagmohan Chauhan, Cecilia Mascolo Yuwei Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Respiratory audio, such as coughing and breathing sounds, has predictive power for a wide range of healthcare applications, yet is currently under-explored. The main problem for those applications arises from the difficulty in collecting large labeled task-specific data for model development. Generalizable respiratory acoustic foundation models pretrained with unlabeled data would offer appealing advantages and possibly unlock this impasse.  However, given the safety-critical nature of healthcare applications, it is pivotal to also ensure openness and replicability for any proposed foundation model solution. To this end, we introduce OPERA, an OPEn Respiratory Acoustic foundation model pretraining and benchmarking system, as the first approach answering this need. We curate large-scale respiratory audio datasets ($\sim$136K samples, over 400 hours), pretrain three pioneering foundation models, and build a benchmark consisting of 19 downstream respiratory health tasks for evaluation. Our pretrained models demonstrate superior performance (against existing acoustic models pretrained with general audio on 16 out of 19 tasks) and generalizability (to unseen datasets and new respiratory audio modalities). This highlights the great promise of respiratory acoustic foundation models and encourages more studies using OPERA as an open resource to accelerate research on respiratory audio for health. The system is accessible from https://github.com/evelyn0414/OPERA.
Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?
Authors: Jinsong Li, Xiaoyi Dong, Pan Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Zehui Chen, Haodong Duan, Jiaqi Wang, Yu Qiao, Dahua Lin, Feng Zhao Lin Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have recently achieved rapid progress, sparking numerous studies to evaluate their multi-modal capabilities. However, we dig into current evaluation works and identify two primary issues: 1) Visual content is unnecessary for many samples. The answers can be directly inferred from the questions and options, or the world knowledge embedded in LLMs. This phenomenon is prevalent across current benchmarks. For instance, GeminiPro achieves 42.7% on the MMMU benchmark without any visual input, and outperforms the random choice baseline across six benchmarks near 24% on average. 2) Unintentional data leakage exists in LLM and LVLM training. LLM and LVLM could still answer some visual-necessary questions without visual content, indicating the memorizing of these samples within large-scale training data. For example, Sphinx-X-MoE gets 43.6% on MMMU without accessing images, surpassing its LLM backbone with 17.9%. Both problems lead to misjudgments of actual multi-modal gains and potentially misguide the study of LVLM. To this end, we present MMStar, an elite vision-indispensable multi-modal benchmark comprising 1,500 samples meticulously selected by humans. MMStar benchmarks 6 core capabilities and 18 detailed axes, aiming to evaluate LVLMs' multi-modal capacities with carefully balanced and purified samples. These samples are first roughly selected from current benchmarks with an automated pipeline, human review is then involved to ensure each curated sample exhibits visual dependency, minimal data leakage, and requires advanced multi-modal capabilities. Moreover, two metrics are developed to measure data leakage and actual performance gain in multi-modal training. We evaluate 16 leading LVLMs on MMStar to assess their multi-modal capabilities, and on 7 benchmarks with the proposed metrics to investigate their data leakage and actual multi-modal gain.
On the Benefits of Public Representations for Private Transfer Learning under Distribution Shift
Authors: Amrith Setlur, Zhiwei Steven Wu, Virginia Smith Pratiksha Thaker
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Public pretraining is a promising approach to improve differentially private model training. However, recent work has noted that many positive research results studying this paradigm only consider in-distribution tasks, and may not apply to settings where there is distribution shift between the pretraining and finetuning data---a scenario that is likely when finetuning private tasks due to the sensitive nature of the data. In this work, we show empirically across three tasks that even in settings with large distribution shift, where both zero-shot performance from public data and training from scratch with private data give unusably weak results, public features can in fact improve private training accuracy by up to 67\% over private training from scratch. We provide a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon, showing that if the public and private data share a low-dimensional representation, public representations can improve the sample complexity of private training even if it is \emph{impossible} to learn the private task from the public data alone. Altogether, our results provide evidence that public data can indeed make private training practical in realistic settings of extreme distribution shift.
Reparameterized Multi-Resolution Convolutions for Long Sequence Modelling
Authors: Giorgio Giannone, Mingtian Zhang, Marc Peter Deisenroth Harry Jake Cunningham
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Global convolutions have shown increasing promise as powerful general-purpose sequence models. However, training long convolutions is challenging, and kernel parameterizations must be able to learn long-range dependencies without overfitting. This work introduces reparameterized multi-resolution convolutions ($\texttt{MRConv}$), a novel approach to parameterizing global convolutional kernels for long-sequence modeling. By leveraging multi-resolution convolutions, incorporating structural reparameterization and introducing learnable kernel decay, $\texttt{MRConv}$ learns expressive long-range kernels that perform well across various data modalities. Our experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on the Long Range Arena, Sequential CIFAR, and Speech Commands tasks among convolution models and linear-time transformers. Moreover, we report improved performance on ImageNet classification by replacing 2D convolutions with 1D $\texttt{MRConv}$ layers.
Streaming Bayes GFlowNets
Authors: Daniel Augusto de Souza, Diego Mesquita Tiago da Silva
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Bayes' rule naturally allows for inference refinement in a streaming fashion, without the need to recompute posteriors from scratch whenever new data arrives. In principle, Bayesian streaming is straightforward: we update our prior with the available data and use the resulting posterior as a prior when processing the next data chunk. In practice, however, this recipe entails i) approximating an intractable posterior at each time step; and ii) encapsulating results appropriately to allow for posterior propagation. For continuous state spaces, variational inference (VI) is particularly convenient due to its scalability and the tractability of variational posteriors, For discrete state spaces, however, state-of-the-art VI results in analytically intractable approximations that are ill-suited for streaming settings. To enable streaming Bayesian inference over discrete parameter spaces, we propose streaming Bayes GFlowNets (abbreviated as SB-GFlowNets) by leveraging the recently proposed GFlowNets --- a powerful class of amortized samplers for discrete compositional objects. Notably, SB-GFlowNet approximates the initial posterior using a standard GFlowNet and subsequently updates it using a tailored procedure that requires only the newly observed data. Our case studies in linear preference learning and phylogenetic inference showcase the effectiveness of SB-GFlowNets in sampling from an unnormalized posterior in a streaming setting. As expected, we also observe that SB-GFlowNets is significantly faster than repeatedly training a GFlowNet from scratch to sample from the full posterior.
Inverse Factorized Soft Q-Learning for Cooperative Multi-agent Imitation Learning
Authors: Tien Mai, Thanh Hong Nguyen The Viet Bui
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper concerns imitation learning (IL) in cooperative multi-agent systems.The learning problem under consideration poses several challenges, characterized by high-dimensional state and action spaces and intricate inter-agent dependencies. In a single-agent setting, IL was shown to be done efficiently via an inverse soft-Q learning process. However, extending this framework to a multi-agent context introduces the need to simultaneously learn both local value functions to capture local observations and individual actions, and a joint value function for exploiting centralized learning.In this work, we introduce a new multi-agent IL algorithm designed to address these challenges. Our approach enables thecentralized learning by leveraging mixing networks to aggregate  decentralized Q functions.We further establish conditions for the mixing networks under which the multi-agent IL objective function exhibits convexity within the Q function space.We present  extensive experiments conducted on some challenging multi-agent game environments, including an advanced version of the Star-Craft multi-agent challenge (SMACv2), which demonstrates the effectiveness of our algorithm.
Learning from Pattern Completion: Self-supervised Controllable Generation
Authors: Guofan Fan, Jinying Gao, Lei Ma, Bo Lei, Tiejun Huang, Shan Yu Zhiqiang Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The human brain exhibits a strong ability to spontaneously associate different visual attributes of the same or similar visual scene, such as associating sketches and graffiti with real-world visual objects, usually without supervising information. In contrast, in the field of artificial intelligence, controllable generation methods like ControlNet heavily rely on annotated training datasets such as depth maps, semantic segmentation maps, and poses, which limits the method’s scalability. Inspired by the neural mechanisms that may contribute to the brain’s associative power, specifically the cortical modularization and hippocampal pattern completion, here we propose a self-supervised controllable generation (SCG) framework. Firstly, we introduce an equivariance constraint to promote inter-module independence and intra-module correlation in a modular autoencoder network, thereby achieving functional specialization. Subsequently, based on these specialized modules, we employ a self-supervised pattern completion approach for controllable generation training. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed modular autoencoder effectively achieves functional specialization, including the modular processing of color, brightness, and edge detection, and exhibits brain-like features including orientation selectivity, color antagonism, and center-surround receptive fields. Through self-supervised training, associative generation capabilities spontaneously emerge in SCG, demonstrating excellent zero-shot generalization ability to various tasks such as superresolution, dehaze and associative or conditional generation on painting, sketches, and ancient graffiti. Compared to the previous representative method ControlNet, our proposed approach not only demonstrates superior robustness in more challenging high-noise scenarios but also possesses more promising scalability potential due to its self-supervised manner. Codes are released on Github and Gitee.
4DBInfer:  A 4D Benchmarking Toolbox for Graph-Centric Predictive Modeling on RDBs
Authors: Quan Gan, David Wipf, Zhenkun Cai, Ning Li, Jianheng Tang, Yanlin Zhang, Zizhao Zhang, Zunyao Mao, Yakun Song, Yanbo Wang, Jiahang Li, Han Zhang, Guang Yang, Xiao Qin, Chuan Lei, Muhan Zhang, Weinan Zhang, Christos Faloutsos, Zheng Zhang Minjie Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Given a relational database (RDB), how can we predict  missing column values in some target table of interest? Although RDBs store vast amounts of rich, informative data spread across interconnected tables, the progress of predictive machine learning models as applied to such tasks arguably falls well behind advances in other domains such as computer vision or natural language processing.  This deficit stems, at least in part, from the lack of established/public RDB benchmarks as needed for training and evaluation purposes.  As a result, related model development thus far often defaults to tabular approaches trained on ubiquitous single-table benchmarks, or on the relational side, graph-based alternatives such as GNNs applied to a completely different set of graph datasets devoid of tabular characteristics.  To more precisely target RDBs lying at the nexus of these two complementary regimes, we explore a broad class of baseline models predicated on: (i) converting multi-table datasets into graphs using various strategies equipped with efficient subsampling, while preserving tabular characteristics; and (ii) trainable models with well-matched inductive biases that output predictions based on these input subgraphs.  Then, to address the dearth of suitable public benchmarks and reduce siloed comparisons, we assemble a diverse collection of (i) large-scale RDB datasets and (ii) coincident predictive tasks.  From a delivery standpoint, we  operationalize the above four dimensions (4D) of exploration within a unified, scalable open-source toolbox called 4DBInfer; please see https://github.com/awslabs/multi-table-benchmark .
Diffeomorphic interpolation for efficient persistence-based topological optimization
Authors: Marc Theveneau, Théo Lacombe Mathieu Carrière
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Topological Data Analysis (TDA) provides a pipeline to extract quantitative and powerful topological descriptors from structured objects. This enables the definition of topological loss functions, which assert to which extent a given object exhibits some topological properties. One can then use these losses to perform topological optimization via gradient descent routines. While theoretically sounded, topological optimization faces an important challenge: gradients tend to be extremely sparse, in the sense that the loss function typically depends (locally) on only very few coordinates of the input object, yielding dramatically slow optimization schemes in practice. In this work, focusing on the central case of topological optimization for point clouds, we propose to overcome this limitation using diffeomorphic interpolation, turning sparse gradients into smooth vector fields defined on the whole space. In particular, this approach combines efficiently with subsampling techniques routinely used in TDA, as the diffeomorphism derived from the gradient computed on the subsample can be used to update the coordinates of the full and possibly large input object. We then illustrate the usefulness of our approach on black-box autoencoder (AE) regularization, where we aim at applying some topological priors on the latent spaces associated to fixed, black-box AE models without modifying their (unknown) architectures and parameters. We empirically show that, while vanilla topological optimization has to be re-run every time that new data comes out of the black-box models, learning a diffeomorphic flow can be done once and then re-applied to new data in linear time. Moreover, reverting the flow allows us to generate data by sampling the topologically-optimized latent space directly, allowing for better interpretability of the model.
A theoretical case-study of Scalable Oversight in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Zachary Lipton Tom Yan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: A key source of complexity in next-generation AI models is the size of model outputs, making it time-consuming to parse and provide reliable feedback on. To ensure such models are aligned, we will need to bolster our understanding of scalable oversight and how to scale up human feedback. To this end, we study the challenges of scalable oversight in the context of goal-conditioned hierarchical reinforcement learning. Hierarchical structure is a promising entrypoint into studying how to scale up human feedback, which in this work we assume can only be provided for model outputs below a threshold size. In the cardinal feedback setting, we develop an apt sub-MDP reward and algorithm that allows us to acquire and scale up low-level feedback for learning with sublinear regret. In the ordinal feedback setting, we show the necessity of both high- and low-level feedback, and develop a hierarchical experimental design algorithm that efficiently acquires both types of feedback for learning. Altogether, our work aims to consolidate the foundations of scalable oversight, formalizing and studying the various challenges thereof.
Exploring Low-Dimensional Subspace in Diffusion Models for Controllable Image Editing
Authors: Huijie Zhang, Minzhe Guo, Yifu Lu, Peng Wang, Qing Qu Siyi Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recently, diffusion models have emerged as a powerful class of generative models. Despite their success, there is still limited understanding of their semantic spaces. This makes it challenging to achieve precise and disentangled image generation without additional training, especially in an unsupervised way. In this work, we improve the understanding of their semantic spaces from intriguing observations: among a certain range of noise levels, (1) the learned posterior mean predictor (PMP) in the diffusion model is locally linear, and (2) the singular vectors of its Jacobian lie in low-dimensional semantic subspaces. We provide a solid theoretical basis to justify the linearity and low-rankness in the PMP. These insights allow us to propose an unsupervised, single-step, training-free LOw-rank COntrollable image editing (LOCO Edit) method for precise local editing in diffusion models. LOCO Edit identified editing directions with nice properties: homogeneity, transferability, composability, and linearity. These properties of LOCO Edit benefit greatly from the low-dimensional semantic subspace.Our method can further be extended to unsupervised or text-supervised editing in various text-to-image diffusion models (T-LOCO Edit). Finally, extensive empirical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of LOCO Edit. The code and the arXiv version can be found on the project website.
Efficiency for Free: Ideal Data Are Transportable Representations
Authors: Yi Jiang, Tao Lin Peng Sun
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Data, the seminal opportunity and challenge in modern machine learning, currently constrains the scalability of representation learning and impedes the pace of model evolution.In this work, we investigate the efficiency properties of data from both optimization and generalization perspectives.Our theoretical and empirical analysis reveals an unexpected finding: for a given task, utilizing a publicly available, task- and architecture-agnostic model (referred to as the `prior model' in this paper) can effectively produce efficient data.Building on this insight, we propose the Representation Learning Accelerator (ReLA), which promotes the formation and utilization of efficient data, thereby accelerating representation learning.Utilizing a ResNet-18 pre-trained on CIFAR-10 as a prior model to inform ResNet-50 training on ImageNet-1K reduces computational costs by $50\%$ while maintaining the same accuracy as the model trained with the original BYOL, which requires $100\%$ cost.Our code is available at: \url{https://github.com/LINs-lab/ReLA}.
Text2NKG: Fine-Grained N-ary Relation Extraction for N-ary relational Knowledge Graph Construction
Authors: Haihong E, Yuhao Yang, Tianyu Yao, Yikai Guo, Zichen Tang, Wentai Zhang, Shiyao Peng, Kaiyang Wan, Meina Song, Wei Lin, Yifan Zhu, Luu Anh Tuan Haoran Luo
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Beyond traditional binary relational facts, n-ary relational knowledge graphs (NKGs) are comprised of n-ary relational facts containing more than two entities, which are closer to real-world facts with broader applications. However, the construction of NKGs remains at a coarse-grained level, which is always in a single schema, ignoring the order and variable arity of entities. To address these restrictions, we propose Text2NKG, a novel fine-grained n-ary relation extraction framework for n-ary relational knowledge graph construction. We introduce a span-tuple classification approach with hetero-ordered merging and output merging to accomplish fine-grained n-ary relation extraction in different arity. Furthermore, Text2NKG supports four typical NKG schemas: hyper-relational schema, event-based schema, role-based schema, and hypergraph-based schema, with high flexibility and practicality. The experimental results demonstrate that Text2NKG achieves state-of-the-art performance in F1 scores on the fine-grained n-ary relation extraction benchmark. Our code and datasets are publicly available.
MambaLLIE: Implicit Retinex-Aware Low Light Enhancement with Global-then-Local State Space
Authors: Zhiqiang Yan, Ying Tai, Jianjun Qian, Jian Yang, Jun Li Jiangwei Weng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent advances in low light image enhancement have been dominated by Retinex-based learning framework, leveraging convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Transformers. However, the vanilla Retinex theory primarily addresses global illumination degradation and neglects local issues such as noise and blur in dark conditions. Moreover, CNNs and Transformers struggle to capture global degradation due to their limited receptive fields. While state space models (SSMs) have shown promise in the long-sequence modeling, they face challenges in combining local invariants and global context in visual data. In this paper, we introduce MambaLLIE, an implicit Retinex-aware low light enhancer featuring a global-then-local state space design. We first propose a Local-Enhanced State Space Module (LESSM) that incorporates an augmented local bias within a 2D selective scan mechanism, enhancing the original SSMs by preserving local 2D dependency. Additionally, an Implicit Retinex-aware Selective Kernel module (IRSK) dynamically selects features using spatially-varying operations, adapting to varying inputs through an adaptive kernel selection process. Our Global-then-Local State Space Block (GLSSB) integrates LESSM and IRSK with layer normalization (LN) as its core. This design enables MambaLLIE to achieve comprehensive global long-range modeling and flexible local feature aggregation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MambaLLIE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art CNN and Transformer-based methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/wengjiangwei/MambaLLIE.
On Softmax Direct Preference Optimization for Recommendation
Authors: Junfei Tan, An Zhang, Zhengyi Yang, Leheng Sheng, Enzhi Zhang, Xiang Wang, Tat-Seng Chua Yuxin Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recommender systems aim to predict personalized rankings based on user preference data. With the rise of Language Models (LMs), LM-based recommenders have been widely explored due to their extensive world knowledge and powerful reasoning abilities. Most of the LM-based recommenders convert historical interactions into language prompts, pairing with a positive item as the target response and fine-tuning LM with a language modeling loss. However, the current objective fails to fully leverage preference data and is not optimized for personalized ranking tasks, which hinders the performance of LM-based recommenders. Inspired by the current advancement of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) in human preference alignment and the success of softmax loss in recommendations, we propose Softmax-DPO (\textbf{S-DPO}) to instill ranking information into the LM to help LM-based recommenders distinguish preferred items from negatives, rather than solely focusing on positives. Specifically, we incorporate multiple negatives in user preference data and devise an alternative version of DPO loss tailored for LM-based recommenders, which is extended from the traditional full-ranking Plackett-Luce (PL) model to partial rankings and connected to softmax sampling strategies. Theoretically, we bridge S-DPO with the softmax loss over negative sampling and find that it has an inherent benefit of mining hard negatives, which assures its exceptional capabilities in recommendation tasks. Empirically, extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of S-DPO to effectively model user preference and further boost recommendation performance while providing better rewards for preferred items. Our codes are available at https://github.com/chenyuxin1999/S-DPO.
First-Explore, then Exploit: Meta-Learning to Solve Hard Exploration-Exploitation Trade-Offs
Authors: Jeff Clune Ben Norman
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Standard reinforcement learning (RL) agents never intelligently explore like a human (i.e. taking into account complex domain priors and adapting quickly based on previous exploration). Across episodes, RL agents struggle to perform even simple exploration strategies, for example systematic search that avoids exploring the same location multiple times. This poor exploration limits performance on challenging domains. Meta-RL is a potential solution, as unlike standard RL, meta-RL can learn to explore, and potentially learn highly complex strategies far beyond those of standard RL, strategies such as experimenting in early episodes to learn new skills, or conducting experiments to learn about the current environment.Traditional meta-RL focuses on the problem of learning to optimally balance exploration and exploitation to maximize the cumulative reward of the episode sequence (e.g., aiming to maximize the total wins in a tournament -- while also improving as a player).We identify a new challenge with state-of-the-art cumulative-reward meta-RL methods.When optimal behavior requires exploration that sacrifices immediate reward to enable higher subsequent reward, existing state-of-the-art cumulative-reward meta-RL methods become stuck on the local optimum of failing to explore.Our method, First-Explore, overcomes this limitation by learning two policies: one to solely explore, and one to solely exploit. When exploring requires forgoing early-episode reward, First-Explore significantly outperforms existing cumulative meta-RL methods. By identifying and solving the previously unrecognized problem of forgoing reward in early episodes, First-Explore represents a significant step towards developing meta-RL algorithms capable of human-like exploration on a broader range of domains.