mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
WaterMax: breaking the LLM watermark detectability-robustness-quality trade-off
Authors: Teddy Furon Eva Giboulot
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Watermarking is a technical means to dissuade malfeasant usage of Large Language Models.This paper proposes a novel watermarking scheme, so-called WaterMax, that enjoys high detectability while sustaining the quality of the generated text of the original LLM.Its new design leaves the LLM untouched (no modification of the weights, logits or temperature).WaterMax balances robustness and  computational complexity contrary to the watermarking techniques of the literature inherently provoking a trade-off between quality and robustness.Its performance is both theoretically proven and experimentally validated.It outperforms all the SotA techniques under the most complete benchmark suite.
Gene-Gene Relationship Modeling Based on Genetic Evidence for Single-Cell RNA-Seq Data Imputation
Authors: Ji Won Yoon, Seong Jin Ahn, Yunha Yeo Daeho Um
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technologies enable the exploration of cellular heterogeneity and facilitate the construction of cell atlases. However, scRNA-seq data often contain a large portion of missing values (false zeros) or noisy values, hindering downstream analyses. To recover these false zeros, propagation-based imputation methods have been proposed using $k$-NN graphs. However they model only associating relationships among genes within a cell, while, according to well-known genetic evidence, there are both associating and dissociating relationships among genes. To apply this genetic evidence to gene-gene relationship modeling, this paper proposes a novel imputation method that newly employs dissociating relationships in addition to associating relationships. Our method constructs a $k$-NN graph to additionally model dissociating relationships via the negation of a given cell-gene matrix. Moreover, our method standardizes the value distribution (mean and variance) of each gene to have standard distributions regardless of the gene. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed method achieves exceptional performance gains over state-of-the-art methods in both cell clustering and gene expression recovery across six scRNA-seq datasets, validating the significance of using complete gene-gene relationships in accordance with genetic evidence. The source code is available at https://github.com/daehoum1/scCR.
Suppress Content Shift: Better Diffusion Features via Off-the-Shelf Generation Techniques
Authors: Qianqian Xu, Zitai Wang, Zhiyong Yang, Xiaochun Cao, Qingming Huang Benyuan Meng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Diffusion models are powerful generative models, and this capability can also be applied to discrimination. The inner activations of a pre-trained diffusion model can serve as features for discriminative tasks, namely, diffusion feature. We discover that diffusion feature has been hindered by a hidden yet universal phenomenon that we call content shift. To be specific, there are content differences between features and the input image, such as the exact shape of a certain object. We locate the cause of content shift as one inherent characteristic of diffusion models, which suggests the broad existence of this phenomenon in diffusion feature. Further empirical study also indicates that its negative impact is not negligible even when content shift is not visually perceivable. Hence, we propose to suppress content shift to enhance the overall quality of diffusion features. Specifically, content shift is related to the information drift during the process of recovering an image from the noisy input, pointing out the possibility of turning off-the-shelf generation techniques into tools for content shift suppression. We further propose a practical guideline named GATE to efficiently evaluate the potential benefit of a technique and provide an implementation of our methodology. Despite the simplicity, the proposed approach has achieved superior results on various tasks and datasets, validating its potential as a generic booster for diffusion features. Our code is available at https://github.com/Darkbblue/diffusion-content-shift.
Policy Learning from Tutorial Books via Understanding, Rehearsing and Introspecting
Authors: Ziyan Wang, Yali Du, Shengyi Jiang, Meng Fang, Yang Yu, Jun Wang Xiong-Hui Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: When humans need to learn a new skill, we can acquire knowledge through written books, including textbooks, tutorials, etc. However, current research for decision-making, like reinforcement learning (RL), has primarily required numerous real interactions with the target environment to learn a skill, while failing to utilize the existing knowledge already summarized in the text. The success of Large Language Models (LLMs) sheds light on utilizing such knowledge behind the books. In this paper, we discuss a new policy learning problem called Policy Learning from tutorial Books (PLfB) upon the shoulders of LLMs’ systems, which aims to leverage rich resources such as tutorial books to derive a policy network. Inspired by how humans learn from books, we solve the problem via a three-stage framework: Understanding, Rehearsing, and Introspecting (URI). In particular, it first rehearses decision-making trajectories based on the derived knowledge after understanding the books, then introspects in the imaginary dataset to distill a policy network.  We build two benchmarks for PLfB~based on Tic-Tac-Toe and Football games. In experiment, URI's policy achieves at least 44% net win rate against GPT-based agents without any real data; In Football game, which is a complex scenario, URI's policy beat the built-in AIs with a 37% while using GPT-based agent can only achieve a 6\% winning rate. The project page: https://plfb-football.github.io.
Image Reconstruction Via Autoencoding Sequential Deep Image Prior
Authors: Shijun Liang, Evan Bell, Qing Qu, Rongrong Wang, Saiprasad Ravishankar Ismail R. Alkhouri
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recently, Deep Image Prior (DIP) has emerged as an effective unsupervised one-shot learner, delivering competitive results across various image recovery problems. This method only requires the noisy measurements and a forward operator, relying solely on deep networks initialized with random noise to learn and restore the structure of the data. However, DIP is notorious for its vulnerability to overfitting due to the overparameterization of the network. Building upon insights into the impact of the DIP input and drawing inspiration from the gradual denoising process in cutting-edge diffusion models, we introduce Autoencoding Sequential DIP (aSeqDIP) for image reconstruction. This method progressively denoises and reconstructs the image through a sequential optimization of network weights. This is achieved using an input-adaptive DIP objective, combined with an autoencoding regularization term. Compared to diffusion models, our method does not require training data and outperforms other DIP-based methods in mitigating noise overfitting while maintaining a similar number of parameter updates as Vanilla DIP. Through extensive experiments, we validate the effectiveness of our method in various image reconstruction tasks, such as MRI and CT reconstruction, as well as in image restoration tasks like image denoising, inpainting, and non-linear deblurring.
Invariant subspaces and PCA in nearly matrix multiplication time
Authors: Marko Mladenović, Mathieu Luisier Aleksandros Sobczyk
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Approximating invariant subspaces of generalized eigenvalue problems (GEPs) is a fundamental computational problem at the core of machine learning and scientific computing. It is, for example, the root of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for dimensionality reduction, data visualization, and noise filtering, and of Density Functional Theory (DFT), arguably the most popular method to calculate the electronic structure of materials. Given Hermitian $H,S\in\mathbb{C}^{n\times n}$, where $S$ is positive-definite,  let $\Pi_k$ be the true spectral projector on the invariant subspace that is associated with the $k$ smallest (or largest) eigenvalues of the GEP $HC=SC\Lambda$, for some $k\in[n]$. We show that we can compute a matrix $\widetilde\Pi_k$ such that $\lVert\Pi_k-\widetilde\Pi_k\rVert_2\leq \epsilon$, in $O\left( n^{\omega+\eta}\mathrm{polylog}(n,\epsilon^{-1},\kappa(S),\mathrm{gap}_k^{-1}) \right)$ bit operations in the floating point model, for some $\epsilon\in(0,1)$, with probability $1-1/n$. Here, $\eta>0$ is arbitrarily small, $\omega\lesssim 2.372$ is the matrix multiplication exponent, $\kappa(S)=\lVert S\rVert_2\lVert S^{-1}\rVert_2$, and $\mathrm{gap}_k$ is the gap between eigenvalues $k$ and $k+1$. To achieve such provable "forward-error" guarantees, our methods rely on a new $O(n^{\omega+\eta})$ stability analysis for the Cholesky factorization, and a smoothed analysis for computing spectral gaps, which can be of independent interest.Ultimately, we obtain new matrix multiplication-type bit complexity upper bounds for PCA problems, including classical PCA and (randomized) low-rank approximation.
Boosting Graph Pooling with Persistent Homology
Authors: Xinjian Zhao, Tianshu Yu Chaolong Ying
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recently, there has been an emerging trend to integrate persistent homology (PH) into graph neural networks (GNNs) to enrich expressive power. However, naively plugging PH features into GNN layers always results in marginal improvement with low interpretability. In this paper, we investigate a novel mechanism for injecting global topological invariance into pooling layers using PH, motivated by the observation that filtration operation in PH naturally aligns graph pooling in a cut-off manner. In this fashion, message passing in the coarsened graph acts along persistent pooled topology, leading to improved performance. Experimentally, we apply our mechanism to a collection of graph pooling methods and observe consistent and substantial performance gain over several popular datasets, demonstrating its wide applicability and flexibility.
OpenGaussian: Towards Point-Level 3D Gaussian-based Open Vocabulary Understanding
Authors: Jiarui Meng, Haijie Li, Chenming Wu, Yahao Shi, Xinhua Cheng, Chen Zhao, Haocheng Feng, Errui Ding, Jingdong Wang, Jian Zhang Yanmin Wu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper introduces OpenGaussian, a method based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) that possesses the capability for 3D point-level open vocabulary understanding. Our primary motivation stems from observing that existing 3DGS-based open vocabulary methods mainly focus on 2D pixel-level parsing. These methods struggle with 3D point-level tasks due to weak feature expressiveness and inaccurate 2D-3D feature associations. To ensure robust feature presentation and 3D point-level understanding, we first employ SAM masks without cross-frame associations to train instance features with 3D consistency. These features exhibit both intra-object consistency and inter-object distinction. Then, we propose a two-stage codebook to discretize these features from coarse to fine levels. At the coarse level, we consider the positional information of 3D points to achieve location-based clustering, which is then refined at the fine level.Finally, we introduce an instance-level 3D-2D feature association method that links 3D points to 2D masks, which are further associated with 2D CLIP features. Extensive experiments, including open vocabulary-based 3D object selection, 3D point cloud understanding, click-based 3D object selection, and ablation studies, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The source code is available at our project page https://3d-aigc.github.io/OpenGaussian.
Proportional Fairness in Non-Centroid Clustering
Authors: Evi Micha, Nisarg Shah Ioannis Caragiannis
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We revisit the recently developed framework of proportionally fair clustering, where the goal is to provide group fairness guarantees that become stronger for groups of data points that are large and cohesive. Prior work applies this framework to centroid-based clustering, where points are partitioned into clusters, and the cost to each data point is measured by its distance to a centroid assigned to its cluster. However, real-life applications often do not require such centroids. We extend the theory of proportionally fair clustering to non-centroid clustering by considering a variety of cost functions, both metric and non-metric, for a data point to be placed in a cluster with other data points. Our results indicate that Greedy Capture, a clustering algorithm developed for centroid clustering, continues to provide strong proportional fairness guarantees for non-centroid clustering, although the guarantees are significantly different and establishing them requires novel proof ideas. We also design algorithms for auditing proportional fairness of a given clustering solution. We conduct experiments on real data which suggest that traditional clustering algorithms are highly unfair, while our algorithms achieve strong fairness guarantees with a moderate loss in common clustering objectives.
PaGoDA: Progressive Growing of a One-Step Generator from a Low-Resolution Diffusion Teacher
Authors: Chieh-Hsin Lai, Wei-Hsiang Liao, Yuhta Takida, Naoki Murata, Toshimitsu Uesaka, Yuki Mitsufuji, Stefano Ermon Dongjun Kim
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The diffusion model performs remarkable in generating high-dimensional content but is computationally intensive, especially during training. We propose Progressive Growing of Diffusion Autoencoder (PaGoDA), a novel pipeline that reduces the training costs through three stages: training diffusion on downsampled data, distilling the pretrained diffusion, and progressive super-resolution. With the proposed pipeline, PaGoDA achieves a $64\times$ reduced cost in training its diffusion model on $8\times$ downsampled data; while at the inference, with the single-step, it performs state-of-the-art on ImageNet across all resolutions from $64\times64$ to $512\times512$, and text-to-image. PaGoDA's pipeline can be applied directly in the latent space, adding compression alongside the pre-trained autoencoder in Latent Diffusion Models (e.g., Stable Diffusion). The code is available at https://github.com/sony/pagoda.
OlympicArena: Benchmarking Multi-discipline Cognitive Reasoning for Superintelligent AI
Authors: Zengzhi Wang, Shijie Xia, Xuefeng Li, Haoyang Zou, Ruijie Xu, Run-Ze Fan, Lyumanshan Ye, Ethan Chern, Yixin Ye, Yikai Zhang, Yuqing Yang, Ting Wu, Binjie Wang, Shichao Sun, Yang Xiao, Yiyuan Li, Fan Zhou, Steffi Chern, Yiwei Qin, Yan Ma, Jiadi Su, Yixiu Liu, Yuxiang Zheng, Shaoting Zhang, Dahua Lin, Yu Qiao, Pengfei Liu Zhen Huang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: The evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been significantly accelerated by advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), gradually showcasing potential cognitive reasoning abilities in problem-solving and scientific discovery (i.e., AI4Science) once exclusive to human intellect. To comprehensively evaluate current models' performance in cognitive reasoning abilities, we introduce OlympicArena, which includes 11,163 bilingual problems across both text-only and interleaved text-image modalities. These challenges encompass a wide range of disciplines spanning seven fields and 62 international Olympic competitions, rigorously examined for data leakage. We argue that the challenges in Olympic competition problems are ideal for evaluating AI's cognitive reasoning due to their complexity and interdisciplinary nature, which are essential for tackling complex scientific challenges and facilitating discoveries. Beyond evaluating performance across various disciplines using answer-only criteria, we conduct detailed experiments and analyses from multiple perspectives. We delve into the models' cognitive reasoning abilities, their performance across different modalities, and their outcomes in process-level evaluations, which are vital for tasks requiring complex reasoning with lengthy solutions. Our extensive evaluations reveal that even advanced models like GPT-4o only achieve a 39.97\%  overall accuracy (28.67\%  for mathematics and 29.71\%  for physics), illustrating current AI limitations in complex reasoning and multimodal integration. Through the OlympicArena, we aim to advance AI towards superintelligence, equipping it to address more complex challenges in science and beyond. We also provide a comprehensive set of resources to support AI research, including a benchmark dataset, an open-source annotation platform, a detailed evaluation tool, and a leaderboard with automatic submission features.
Interpretable Concept-Based Memory Reasoning
Authors: Pietro Barbiero, Francesco Giannini, Gabriele Ciravegna, Michelangelo Diligenti, Giuseppe Marra David Debot
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The lack of transparency in the decision-making processes of deep learning systems presents a significant challenge in modern artificial intelligence (AI), as it impairs users’ ability to rely on and verify these systems. To address this challenge, Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) have made significant progress by incorporating human-interpretable concepts into deep learning architectures. This approach allows predictions to be traced back to specific concept patterns that users can understand and potentially intervene on. However, existing CBMs’ task predictors are not fully interpretable, preventing a thorough analysis and any form of formal verification of their decision-making process prior to deployment, thereby raising significant reliability concerns. To bridge this gap, we introduce Concept-based Memory Reasoner (CMR), a novel CBM designed to provide a human-understandable and provably-verifiable task prediction process. Our approach is to model each task prediction as a neural selection mechanism over a memory of learnable logic rules, followed by a symbolic evaluation of the selected rule. The presence of an explicit memory and the symbolic evaluation allow domain experts to inspect and formally verify the validity of certain global properties of interest for the task prediction process. Experimental results demonstrate that CMR achieves better accuracy-interpretability trade-offs to state-of-the-art CBMs, discovers logic rules consistent with ground truths, allows for rule interventions, and allows pre-deployment verification.
Make-An-Agent: A Generalizable Policy Network Generator with Behavior-Prompted Diffusion
Authors: Tingqiang Xu, Kaizhe Hu, Guangqi Jiang, Furong Huang, Huazhe Xu Yongyuan Liang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Can we generate a control policy for an agent using just one demonstration of desired behaviors as a prompt, as effortlessly as creating an image from a textual description?In this paper, we present Make-An-Agent, a novel policy parameter generator that leverages the power of conditional diffusion models for behavior-to-policy generation. Guided by behavior embeddings that encode trajectory information, our policy generator synthesizes latent parameter representations, which can then be decoded into policy networks. Trained on policy network checkpoints and their corresponding trajectories, our generation model demonstrates remarkable versatility and scalability on multiple tasks and has a strong generalization ability on unseen tasks to output well-performed policies with only few-shot demonstrations as inputs. We showcase its efficacy and efficiency on various domains and tasks, including varying objectives, behaviors, and even across different robot manipulators. Beyond simulation, we directly deploy policies generated by Make-An-Agent onto real-world robots on locomotion tasks. Project page: https://cheryyunl.github.io/make-an-agent/.
Evaluating the design space of diffusion-based generative models
Authors: Ye He, Molei Tao Yuqing Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Most existing theoretical investigations of the accuracy of diffusion models, albeit significant, assume the score function has been approximated to a certain accuracy, and then use this a priori bound to control the error of generation. This article instead provides a first quantitative understanding of the whole generation process, i.e., both training and sampling. More precisely, it conducts a non-asymptotic convergence analysis of denoising score matching under gradient descent. In addition, a refined sampling error analysis for variance exploding models is also provided. The combination of these two results yields a full error analysis, which elucidates (again, but this time theoretically) how to design the training and sampling processes for effective generation. For instance, our theory implies a preference toward noise distribution and loss weighting in training that qualitatively agree with the ones used in [Karras et al., 2022]. It also provides perspectives on the choices of time and variance schedules in sampling: when the score is well trained, the design in [Song et al., 2021] is more preferable, but when it is less trained, the design in [Karras et al., 2022] becomes more preferable.
SOI: Scaling Down Computational Complexity by Estimating Partial States of the Model
Authors: Paweł Daniluk, Artur Szumaczuk, Jakub Tkaczuk Grzegorz Stefański
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Consumer electronics used to follow the miniaturization trend described by Moore’s Law. Despite increased processing power in Microcontroller Units (MCUs), MCUs used in the smallest appliances are still not capable of running even moderately big, state-of-the-art artificial neural networks (ANNs) especially in time-sensitive scenarios. In this work, we present a novel method called Scattered Online Inference (SOI) that aims to reduce the computational complexity of ANNs. SOI leverages the continuity and seasonality of time-series data and model predictions, enabling extrapolation for processing speed improvements, particularly in deeper layers. By applying compression, SOI generates more general inner partial states of ANN, allowing skipping full model recalculation at each inference.
Robust Neural Contextual Bandit against Adversarial Corruptions
Authors: Yikun Ban, Arindam Banerjee, Jingrui He Yunzhe Qi
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Contextual bandit algorithms aim to identify the optimal arm with the highest reward among a set of candidates, based on the accessible contextual information. Among these algorithms, neural contextual bandit methods have shown generally superior performances against linear and kernel ones, due to the representation power of neural networks. However, similar to other neural network applications, neural bandit algorithms can be vulnerable to adversarial attacks or corruptions on the received labels (i.e., arm rewards), which can lead to unexpected performance degradation without proper treatments. As a result, it is necessary to improve the robustness of neural bandit models against potential reward corruptions. In this work, we propose a novel neural contextual bandit algorithm named R-NeuralUCB, which utilizes a novel context-aware Gradient Descent (GD) training strategy to improve the robustness against adversarial reward corruptions. Under over-parameterized neural network settings, we provide regret analysis for R-NeuralUCB to quantify  reward corruption impacts, without the commonly adopted arm separateness assumption in existing neural bandit works. We also conduct experiments against baselines on real data sets under different scenarios, in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed R-NeuralUCB.
An Expectation-Maximization Algorithm for Training Clean Diffusion Models from Corrupted Observations
Authors: Yifei Wang, Wenzheng Chen, He Sun Weimin Bai
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Diffusion models excel in solving imaging inverse problems due to their ability to model complex image priors. However, their reliance on large, clean datasets for training limits their practical use where clean data is scarce. In this paper, we propose EMDiffusion, an expectation-maximization (EM) approach to train diffusion models from corrupted observations. Our method alternates between reconstructing clean images from corrupted data using a known diffusion model (E-step) and refining diffusion model weights based on these reconstructions (M-step). This iterative process leads the learned diffusion model to gradually converge to a local optimum, that is, to approximate the true clean data distribution. We validate our method through extensive experiments on diverse computational imaging tasks, including random inpainting, denoising, and deblurring, achieving new state-of-the-art performance.
ShareGPT4Video: Improving Video Understanding and Generation with Better Captions
Authors: Xilin Wei, Jinsong Li, Xiaoyi Dong, Pan Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Zehui Chen, Haodong Duan, Bin Lin, Zhenyu Tang, Li Yuan, Yu Qiao, Dahua Lin, Feng Zhao, Jiaqi Wang Lin Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: We present the ShareGPT4Video series, aiming to facilitate the video understanding of large video-language models (LVLMs) and the video generation of text-to-video models (T2VMs) via dense and precise captions. The series comprises: 1) ShareGPT4Video, 40K GPT4V annotated dense captions of videos with various lengths and sources, developed through carefully designed data filtering and annotating strategy. 2) ShareCaptioner-Video, an efficient and capable captioning model for arbitrary videos, with 4.8M high-quality aesthetic videos annotated by it. 3) ShareGPT4Video-8B, a simple yet superb LVLM that reached SOTA performance on three advancing video benchmarks. To achieve this, taking aside the non-scalable costly human annotators, we find using GPT4V to caption video with a naive multi-frame or frame-concatenation input strategy leads to less detailed and sometimes temporal-confused results. We argue the challenge of designing a high-quality video captioning strategy lies in three aspects: 1) Inter-frame precise temporal change understanding. 2) Intra-frame detailed content description. 3) Frame-number scalability for arbitrary-length videos. To this end, we meticulously designed a differential video captioning strategy, which is stable, scalable, and efficient for generating captions for videos with arbitrary resolution, aspect ratios, and length. Based on it, we construct ShareGPT4Video, which contains 40K high-quality videos spanning a wide range of categories, and the resulting captions encompass rich world knowledge, object attributes, camera movements, and crucially, detailed and precise temporal descriptions of events. Based on ShareGPT4Video, we further develop ShareCaptioner-Video, a superior captioner capable of efficiently generating high-quality captions for arbitrary videos. We annotated 4.8M aesthetically appealing videos by it and verified their effectiveness on a 10-second text2video generation task. For video understanding, we verified the effectiveness of ShareGPT4Video on several current LVLM architectures and presented our superb new LVLM ShareGPT4Video-8B. All the models, strategies, and annotations will be open-sourced and we hope this project can serve as a pivotal resource for advancing both the LVLMs and T2VMs community.
Beyond Slow Signs in High-fidelity Model Extraction
Authors: Robert Mullins, Ilia Shumailov, Jamie Hayes Hanna Foerster
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Deep neural networks, costly to train and rich in intellectual property value, areincreasingly threatened by model extraction attacks that compromise their confiden-tiality. Previous attacks have succeeded in reverse-engineering model parametersup to a precision of float64 for models trained on random data with at most threehidden layers using cryptanalytical techniques. However, the process was identifiedto be very time consuming and not feasible for larger and deeper models trained onstandard benchmarks. Our study evaluates the feasibility of parameter extractionmethods of Carlini et al. [1] further enhanced by Canales-Martínez et al. [2] formodels trained on standard benchmarks. We introduce a unified codebase thatintegrates previous methods and reveal that computational tools can significantlyinfluence performance. We develop further optimisations to the end-to-end attackand improve the efficiency of extracting weight signs by up to 14.8 times com-pared to former methods through the identification of easier and harder to extractneurons. Contrary to prior assumptions, we identify extraction of weights, notextraction of weight signs, as the critical bottleneck. With our improvements, a16,721 parameter model with 2 hidden layers trained on MNIST is extracted withinonly 98 minutes compared to at least 150 minutes previously. Finally, addressingmethodological deficiencies observed in previous studies, we propose new ways ofrobust benchmarking for future model extraction attacks.
FUGAL: Feature-fortified Unrestricted Graph Alignment
Authors: Harshith Reddy Vonteri, Konstantinos Skitsas, Sayan Ranu, Davide Mottin, Panagiotis Karras Aditya Bommakanti
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The necessity to align two graphs, minimizing a structural distance metric, is prevalent in biology, chemistry, recommender systems, and social network analysis. Due to the problem’s NP-hardness, prevailing graph alignment methods follow a modular and mediated approach, solving the problem by restricting to the domain of intermediary graph representations or products like embeddings, spectra, and graph signals. Restricting the problem to this intermediate space may distort the original problem and are hence predisposed to miss high-quality solutions. In this paper, we propose an unrestricted method, FUGAL, which finds a permutation matrix that maps one graph to another by directly operating on their adjacency matrices with judicious constraint relaxation. Extensive experimentation demonstrates that FUGAL consistently surpasses state-of-the-art graph alignment methods in accuracy across all benchmark datasets without encumbering efficiency.
Revisiting Few-Shot Object Detection with Vision-Language Models
Authors: Neehar Peri, Shu Kong, Deva Ramanan Anish Madan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: The era of vision-language models (VLMs) trained on web-scale datasets challenges conventional formulations of “open-world" perception. In this work, we revisit the task of few-shot object detection (FSOD) in the context of recent foundational VLMs. First, we point out that zero-shot predictions from VLMs such as GroundingDINO significantly outperform state-of-the-art few-shot detectors (48 vs. 33 AP) on COCO. Despite their strong zero-shot performance, such foundation models may still be sub-optimal. For example, trucks on the web may be defined differently from trucks for a target applications such as autonomous vehicle perception. We argue that the task of few-shot recognition can be reformulated as aligning foundation models to target concepts using a few examples. Interestingly, such examples can be multi-modal, using both text and visual cues, mimicking instructions that are often given to human annotators when defining a target concept of interest. Concretely, we propose Foundational FSOD, a new benchmark protocol that evaluates detectors pre-trained on any external data and fine-tuned on multi-modal (text and visual) K-shot examples per target class. We repurpose nuImages for Foundational FSOD, benchmark several popular open-source VLMs, and provide an empirical analysis of state-of-the-art methods. Lastly, we discuss our recent CVPR 2024 Foundational FSOD competition and share insights from the community. Notably, the winning team significantly outperforms our baseline by 23.3 mAP!
Progressive Entropic Optimal Transport Solvers
Authors: Aram-Alexandre Pooladian, Michal Klein, James Thornton, Jonathan Niles-Weed, Marco Cuturi Parnian Kassraie
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Optimal transport (OT) has profoundly impacted machine learning by providing theoretical and computational tools to realign datasets.In this context, given two large point clouds of sizes $n$ and $m$ in $\mathbb{R}^d$, entropic OT (EOT) solvers have emerged as the most reliable tool to either solve the Kantorovich problem and output a $n\times m$ coupling matrix, or to solve the Monge problem and learn a vector-valued push-forward map. While the robustness of EOT couplings/maps makes them a go-to choice in practical applications, EOT solvers remain difficult to tune because of a small but influential set of hyperparameters, notably the omnipresent entropic regularization strength $\varepsilon$. Setting $\varepsilon$ can be difficult, as it simultaneously impacts various performance metrics, such as compute speed, statistical performance, generalization, and bias. In this work, we propose a new class of EOT solvers (ProgOT), that can estimate both plans and transport maps.We take advantage of several opportunities to optimize the computation of EOT solutions by *dividing* mass displacement using a time discretization, borrowing inspiration from dynamic OT formulations, and *conquering* each of these steps using EOT with properly scheduled parameters. We provide experimental evidence demonstrating that ProgOT is a faster and more robust alternative to *standard solvers* when computing couplings at large scales, even outperforming neural network-based approaches. We also prove statistical consistency of our approach for estimating OT maps.
Optimizing the coalition gain in Online Auctions with Greedy Structured Bandits
Authors: Hugo Richard, Maria Cherifa, Clément Calauzènes, Vianney Perchet Dorian Baudry
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Motivated by online display advertising, this work considers repeated second-price auctions, where agents sample their value from an unknown distribution with cumulative distribution function $F$. In each auction $t$, a decision-maker bound by limited observations selects $n_t$ agents from a coalition of $N$ to compete for a prize with $p$ other agents, aiming to maximize the cumulative reward of the coalition across all auctions.The problem is framed as an $N$-armed structured bandit, each number of player sent being an arm $n$, with expected reward $r(n)$ fully characterized by $F$ and $p+n$. We present two algorithms, Local-Greedy (LG) and Greedy-Grid (GG), both achieving *constant* problem-dependent regret. This relies on three key ingredients: **1.** an estimator of $r(n)$ from feedback collected from any arm $k$, **2.** concentration bounds of these estimates for $k$ within an estimation neighborhood of $n$ and **3.** the unimodality property of $r$ under standard assumptions on $F$. Additionally, GG exhibits problem-independent guarantees on top of best problem-dependent guarantees. However, by avoiding to rely on confidence intervals, LG practically outperforms GG, as well as standard unimodal bandit algorithms such as OSUB or multi-armed bandit algorithms.
DEFT: Efficient Fine-tuning of Diffusion Models by Learning the Generalised $h$-transform
Authors: Francisco Vargas, Shreyas Padhy, Kieran Didi, Simon Mathis, Vincent Dutordoir, Riccardo Barbano, Emile Mathieu, Urszula Julia Komorowska, Pietro Lio Alexander Denker
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Generative modelling paradigms based on denoising diffusion processes have emerged as a leading candidate for conditional sampling in inverse problems. In many real-world applications, we often have access to large, expensively trained unconditional diffusion models, which we aim to exploit for improving conditional sampling.Most recent approaches are motivated heuristically and lack a unifying framework, obscuring connections between them. Further, they often suffer from issues such as being very sensitive to hyperparameters, being expensive to train or needing access to weights hidden behind a closed API. In this work, we unify conditional training and sampling using the mathematically well-understood Doob's h-transform. This new perspective allows us to unify many existing methods under a common umbrella. Under this framework, we propose DEFT (Doob's h-transform Efficient FineTuning), a new approach for conditional generation that simply fine-tunes a very small network to quickly learn the conditional $h$-transform, while keeping the larger unconditional network unchanged. DEFT is much faster than existing baselines while achieving state-of-the-art performance across a variety of linear and non-linear benchmarks. On image reconstruction tasks, we achieve speedups of up to 1.6$\times$, while having the best perceptual quality on natural images and reconstruction performance on medical images. Further, we also provide initial experiments on protein motif scaffolding and outperform reconstruction guidance methods.
LookHere: Vision Transformers with Directed Attention Generalize and Extrapolate
Authors: Daniel G. Kyrollos, Yousef Yassin, James R. Green Anthony Fuller
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: High-resolution images offer more information about scenes that can improve model accuracy. However, the dominant model architecture in computer vision, the vision transformer (ViT), cannot effectively leverage larger images without finetuning — ViTs poorly extrapolate to more patches at test time, although transformers offer sequence length flexibility. We attribute this shortcoming to the current patch position encoding methods, which create a distribution shift when extrapolating.We propose a drop-in replacement for the position encoding of plain ViTs that restricts attention heads to fixed fields of view, pointed in different directions, using 2D attention masks. Our novel method, called LookHere, provides translation-equivariance, ensures attention head diversity, and limits the distribution shift that attention heads face when extrapolating. We demonstrate that LookHere improves performance on classification (avg. 1.6%), against adversarial attack (avg. 5.4%), and decreases calibration error (avg. 1.5%) — on ImageNet without extrapolation. With extrapolation, LookHere outperforms the current SoTA position encoding method, 2D-RoPE, by 21.7% on ImageNet when trained at $224^2$ px and tested at $1024^2$ px. Additionally, we release a high-resolution test set to improve the evaluation of high-resolution image classifiers, called ImageNet-HR.
Achieving Near-Optimal Convergence for Distributed Minimax Optimization with Adaptive Stepsizes
Authors: Xiang Li, Yipeng Shen, Niao He, Jinming Xu Yan Huang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In this paper, we show that applying adaptive methods directly to distributed minimax problems can result in non-convergence due to inconsistency in locally computed adaptive stepsizes. To address this challenge, we propose D-AdaST, a Distributed Adaptive minimax method with Stepsize Tracking. The key strategy is to employ an adaptive stepsize tracking protocol involving the transmission of two extra (scalar) variables. This protocol ensures the consistency among stepsizes of nodes, eliminating the steady-state error due to the lack of coordination of stepsizes among nodes that commonly exists in vanilla distributed adaptive methods, and thus guarantees exact convergence. For nonconvex-strongly-concave distributed minimax problems, we characterize the specific transient times that ensure time-scale separation of stepsizes and quasi-independence of networks, leading to a near-optimal convergence rate of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}} \left( \epsilon ^{-\left( 4+\delta \right)} \right)$ for any small $\delta > 0$, matching that of the centralized counterpart. To our best knowledge, D-AdaST is the *first* distributed adaptive method achieving near-optimal convergence without knowing any problem-dependent parameters for nonconvex minimax problems. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate our theoretical results.
Metacognitive Capabilities of LLMs: An Exploration in Mathematical Problem Solving
Authors: Anirudh Goyal, Nan Rosemary Ke, Siyuan Guo, Michal Valko, Timothy Lillicrap, Danilo Rezende, Yoshua Bengio, Michael Mozer, Sanjeev Arora Aniket Didolkar
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: \emph{Metacognitive knowledge} refers to humans' intuitive knowledge of their own thinking and reasoning processes. Today's best LLMs clearly possess some reasoning processes. The paper gives evidence that they also  have metacognitive knowledge, including ability to name skills and procedures to apply given a task. We explore this primarily in context of math reasoning, developing a prompt-guided interaction procedure  to get a powerful  LLM to assign sensible skill labels to math questions, followed by having it perform semantic clustering to obtain coarser families of skill labels. These coarse skill labels look interpretable to humans.To validate that these skill labels are meaningful and relevant to the LLM's reasoning processes we perform the following experiments. (a) We ask GPT-4 to assign skill labels to training questions in math datasets GSM8K and MATH.  (b) When using an LLM to solve the test questions, we present it with the full list of skill labels and ask it to identify the skill needed. Then it is presented with randomly selected exemplar solved questions associated with that skill label.  This improves accuracy on GSM8k and MATH for several strong LLMs, including code-assisted models. The methodology presented is domain-agnostic,  even though this article applies it to math problems.
Complete Graphical Criterion for Sequential Covariate Adjustment in Causal Inference
Authors: Min Woo Park, Sanghack Lee Yonghan Jung
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Covariate adjustment, also known as back-door adjustment, is a fundamental tool in causal inference. Although a sound and complete graphical identification criterion, known as the adjustment criterion (Shpitser, 2010), exists for static contexts, sequential contexts present challenges. Current practices, such as the sequential back-door adjustment (Pearl, 1995) or multi-outcome sequential back-door adjustment (Jung, 2020), are sound but incomplete; i.e., there are graphical scenarios where the causal effect is expressible via covariate adjustment, yet these criteria do not cover. In this paper, we exemplify this incompleteness and then present the sequential adjustment criterion, a sound and complete criterion for sequential covariate adjustment. We provide a constructive sequential adjustment criterion that identifies a set that satisfies the sequential adjustment criterion if and only if the causal effect can be expressed as a sequential covariate adjustment. Finally, we present an algorithm for identifying a minimal sequential covariate adjustment set, which optimizes efficiency by ensuring that no unnecessary vertices are included.
RETR: Multi-View Radar Detection Transformer for Indoor Perception
Authors: Adriano Cardace, Pu (Perry) Wang, Petros Boufounos, Ryuhei Takahashi Ryoma Yataka
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Indoor radar perception has seen rising interest due to affordable costs driven by emerging automotive imaging radar developments and the benefits of reduced privacy concerns and reliability under hazardous conditions (e.g., fire and smoke). However, existing radar perception pipelines fail to account for distinctive characteristics of the multi-view radar setting. In this paper, we propose Radar dEtection TRansformer (RETR), an extension of the popular DETR architecture, tailored for multi-view radar perception. RETR inherits the advantages of DETR, eliminating the need for hand-crafted components for object detection and segmentation in the image plane. More importantly, RETR incorporates carefully designed modifications such as 1) depth-prioritized feature similarity via a tunable positional encoding (TPE); 2) a tri-plane loss from both radar and camera coordinates; and 3) a learnable radar-to-camera transformation via reparameterization, to account for the unique multi-view radar setting. Evaluated on two indoor radar perception datasets, our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by a margin of 15.38+ AP for object detection and 11.91+ IoU for instance segmentation, respectively. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/merlresearch/radar-detection-transformer.