mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Interventionally Consistent Surrogates for Complex Simulation Models
Authors: Nicholas Bishop, Yorgos Felekis, Fabio Massimo Zennaro, Anisoara Calinescu, Theodoros Damoulas, Michael Wooldridge Joel Dyer
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large-scale simulation models of complex socio-technical systems provide decision-makers with high-fidelity testbeds in which policy interventions can be evaluated and what-if scenarios explored. Unfortunately, the high computational cost of such models inhibits their widespread use in policy-making settings. Surrogate models can address these computational limitations, but to do so they must behave consistently with the simulator under interventions of interest. In this paper, we build upon recent developments in causal abstractions to develop a framework for learning interventionally consistent surrogate models for large-scale, complex simulation models. We provide theoretical results showing that our proposed approach induces surrogates to behave consistently with high probability with respect to the simulator across interventions of interest, facilitating rapid experimentation with policy interventions in complex systems. We further demonstrate with empirical studies that conventionally trained surrogates can misjudge the effect of interventions and misguide decision-makers towards suboptimal interventions, while surrogates trained for interventional consistency with our method closely mimic the behaviour of the original simulator under interventions of interest.
PEACE: A Dataset of Pharmaceutical Care for Cancer Pain Analgesia Evaluation and Medication Decision
Authors: Huimin Yu, Wei Li, Jingyang Li, Fei Xia, Jian Xiao Yutao Dou
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Over half of cancer patients experience long-term pain management challenges. Recently, interest has grown in systems for cancer pain treatment effectiveness assessment (TEA) and medication recommendation (MR) to optimize pharmacological care. These systems aim to improve treatment effectiveness by recommending personalized medication plans based on comprehensive patient information. Despite progress, current systems lack multidisciplinary treatment (MDT) team assessments of treatment and the patient's perception of medication, crucial for effective cancer pain management. Moreover, managing cancer pain medication requires multiple adjustments to the treatment plan based on the patient's evolving condition, a detail often missing in existing datasets. To tackle these issues, we designed the PEACE dataset specifically for cancer pain medication research. It includes detailed pharmacological care records for over 38,000 patients, covering demographics, clinical examination, treatment outcomes, medication plans, and patient self-perceptions. Unlike existing datasets, PEACE records not only long-term and multiple follow-ups both inside and outside hospitals but also includes patients' self-assessments of medication effects and the impact on their lives. We conducted a proof-of-concept study with 13 machine learning algorithms on the PEACE dataset for the TEA (classification task) and MR (regression task). These experiments provide valuable insights into the potential of the PEACE dataset for advancing personalized cancer pain management. The dataset is accessible at: [https://github.com/YTYTYD/PEACE].
Depth Anything V2
Authors: Bingyi Kang, Zilong Huang, Zhen Zhao, Xiaogang Xu, Jiashi Feng, Hengshuang Zhao Lihe Yang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: This work presents Depth Anything V2. Without pursuing fancy techniques, we aim to reveal crucial findings to pave the way towards building a powerful monocular depth estimation model. Notably, compared with V1, this version produces much finer and more robust depth predictions through three key practices: 1) replacing all labeled real images with synthetic images, 2) scaling up the capacity of our teacher model, and 3) teaching student models via the bridge of large-scale pseudo-labeled real images. Compared with the latest models built on Stable Diffusion, our models are significantly more efficient (more than 10x faster) and more accurate. We offer models of different scales (ranging from 25M to 1.3B params) to support extensive scenarios. Benefiting from their strong generalization capability, we fine-tune them with metric depth labels to obtain our metric depth models. In addition to our models, considering the limited diversity and frequent noise in current test sets, we construct a versatile evaluation benchmark with sparse depth annotations to facilitate future research. Models are available at https://github.com/DepthAnything/Depth-Anything-V2.
Transferring disentangled representations: bridging the gap between synthetic and real images
Authors: Nicoletta Noceti, Francesca Odone Jacopo Dapueto
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Developing meaningful and efficient representations that separate the fundamental structure of the data generation mechanism is crucial in representation learning. However, Disentangled Representation Learning has not fully shown its potential on real images, because of correlated generative factors, their resolution and limited access to ground truth labels. Specifically on the latter, we investigate the possibility of leveraging synthetic data to learn general-purpose disentangled representations applicable to real data, discussing the effect of fine-tuning and what properties of disentanglement are preserved after the transfer. We provide an extensive empirical study to address these issues. In addition, we propose a new interpretable intervention-based metric, to measure the quality of factors encoding in the representation. Our results indicate that some level of disentanglement, transferring a representation from synthetic to real data, is possible and effective.
Absorb & Escape: Overcoming Single Model Limitations in Generating Heterogeneous Genomic Sequences
Authors: Yuhao Ni, Guoxuan Xia, William Beardall, Akashaditya Das, Guy-Bart Stan, Yiren Zhao Zehui Li
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent advances in immunology and synthetic biology have accelerated the development of deep generative methods for DNA sequence design. Two dominant approaches in this field are AutoRegressive (AR) models and Diffusion Models (DMs). However, genomic sequences are functionally heterogeneous, consisting of multiple connected regions (e.g., Promoter Regions, Exons, and Introns) where elements within each region come from the same probability distribution, but the overall sequence is non-homogeneous. This heterogeneous nature presents challenges for a single model to accurately generate genomic sequences. In this paper, we analyze the properties of AR models and DMs in heterogeneous genomic sequence generation, pointing out crucial limitations in both methods: (i) AR models capture the underlying distribution of data by factorizing and learning the transition probability but fail to capture the global property of DNA sequences. (ii) DMs learn to recover the global distribution but tend to produce errors at the base pair level. To overcome the limitations of both approaches, we propose a post-training sampling method, termed Absorb & Escape (A&E) to perform compositional generation from AR models and DMs. This approach starts with samples generated by DMs and refines the sample quality using an AR model through the alternation of the Absorb and Escape steps.  To assess the quality of generated sequences, we conduct extensive experiments on 15 species for conditional and unconditional DNA generation. The experiment results from motif distribution, diversity checks, and genome integration tests unequivocally show that A&E outperforms state-of-the-art AR models and DMs in genomic sequence generation. A&E does not suffer from the slowness of traditional MCMC to sample from composed distributions with Energy-Based Models whilst it obtains higher quality samples than single models. Our research sheds light on the limitations of current single-model approaches in DNA generation and provides a simple but effective solution for heterogeneous sequence generation. Code is available at the Github Repo.
Can We Leave Deepfake Data Behind in Training Deepfake Detector?
Authors: Zhiyuan Yan, Ying Zhang, Yuhao Luo, Zhongyuan Wang, Chen Li Jikang Cheng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The generalization ability of deepfake detectors is vital for their applications in real-world scenarios. One effective solution to enhance this ability is to train the models with manually-blended data, which we termed ''blendfake'', encouraging models to learn generic forgery artifacts like blending boundary. Interestingly, current SoTA methods utilize blendfake $\textit{without}$ incorporating any deepfake data in their training process. This is likely because previous empirical observations suggest that vanilla hybrid training (VHT), which combines deepfake and blendfake data, results in inferior performance to methods using only blendfake data (so-called "1+1<2"). Therefore, a critical question arises: Can we leave deepfake behind and rely solely on blendfake data to train an effective deepfake detector? Intuitively, as deepfakes also contain additional informative forgery clues ($\textit{e.g.,}$ deep generative artifacts), excluding all deepfake data in training deepfake detectors seems counter-intuitive. In this paper, we rethink the role of blendfake in detecting deepfakes and formulate the process from "real to blendfake to deepfake" to be a $\textit{progressive transition}$. Specifically, blendfake and deepfake can be explicitly delineated as the oriented pivot anchors between "real-to-fake" transitions. The accumulation of forgery information should be oriented and progressively increasing during this transition process. To this end, we propose an $\underline{O}$riented $\underline{P}$rogressive $\underline{R}$egularizor (OPR) to establish the constraints that compel the distribution of anchors to be discretely arranged. Furthermore, we introduce feature bridging to facilitate the smooth transition between adjacent anchors.  Extensive experiments confirm that our design allows leveraging forgery information from both blendfake and deepfake effectively and comprehensively. Code is available at https://github.com/beautyremain/ProDet.
RAGChecker: A Fine-grained Framework for Diagnosing Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Authors: Lin Qiu, Xiangkun Hu, Tianhang Zhang, Peng Shi, Shuaichen Chang, Cheng Jiayang, Cunxiang Wang, Shichao Sun, Huanyu Li, Zizhao Zhang, Binjie Wang, Jiarong Jiang, Tong He, Zhiguo Wang, Pengfei Liu, Yue Zhang, Zheng Zhang Dongyu Ru
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Despite Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has shown promising capability in leveraging external knowledge, a comprehensive evaluation of RAG systems is still challenging due to the modular nature of RAG, evaluation of long-form responses and reliability of measurements. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained evaluation framework, RAGChecker, that incorporates a suite of diagnostic metrics for both the retrieval and generation modules. Meta evaluation verifies that RAGChecker has significantly better correlations with human judgments than other evaluation metrics. Using RAGChecker, we evaluate 8 RAG systems and conduct an in-depth analysis of their performance, revealing insightful patterns and trade-offs in the design choices of RAG architectures. The metrics of RAGChecker can guide researchers and practitioners in developing more effective RAG systems.
UNION: Unsupervised 3D Object Detection using Object Appearance-based Pseudo-Classes
Authors: Holger Caesar, Dariu M. Gavrila Ted Lentsch
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Unsupervised 3D object detection methods have emerged to leverage vast amounts of data without requiring manual labels for training. Recent approaches rely on dynamic objects for learning to detect mobile objects but penalize the detections of static instances during training. Multiple rounds of (self) training are used to add detected static instances to the set of training targets; this procedure to improve performance is computationally expensive. To address this, we propose the method UNION. We use spatial clustering and self-supervised scene flow to obtain a set of static and dynamic object proposals from LiDAR. Subsequently, object proposals' visual appearances are encoded to distinguish static objects in the foreground and background by selecting static instances that are visually similar to dynamic objects. As a result, static and dynamic mobile objects are obtained together, and existing detectors can be trained with a single training. In addition, we extend 3D object discovery to detection by using object appearance-based cluster labels as pseudo-class labels for training object classification. We conduct extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset and increase the state-of-the-art performance for unsupervised 3D object discovery, i.e. UNION more than doubles the average precision to 38.4. The code is available at github.com/TedLentsch/UNION.
Adaptive Variance Reduction for Stochastic Optimization under Weaker Assumptions
Authors: Sifan Yang, Yibo Wang, Lijun Zhang Wei Jiang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper explores adaptive variance reduction methods for stochastic optimization based on the STORM technique. Existing adaptive extensions of STORM rely on strong assumptions like bounded gradients and bounded function values, or suffer an additional $\mathcal{O}(\log T)$ term in the convergence rate. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel adaptive STORM method that achieves an optimal convergence rate of $\mathcal{O}(T^{-1/3})$ for non-convex functions with our newly designed learning rate strategy. Compared with existing approaches, our method requires weaker assumptions and attains the optimal convergence rate without the additional $\mathcal{O}(\log T)$ term. We also extend the proposed technique to stochastic compositional optimization, obtaining the same optimal rate of $\mathcal{O}(T^{-1/3})$. Furthermore, we investigate the non-convex finite-sum problem and develop another innovative adaptive variance reduction method that achieves an optimal convergence rate of $\mathcal{O}(n^{1/4} T^{-1/2} )$, where $n$ represents the number of component functions. Numerical experiments across various tasks validate the effectiveness of our method.
Kaleidoscope: Learnable Masks for Heterogeneous Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Ling Pan, Jun Zhang Xinran Li
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), parameter sharing is commonly employed to enhance sample efficiency. However, the popular approach of full parameter sharing often leads to homogeneous policies among agents, potentially limiting the performance benefits that could be derived from policy diversity. To address this critical limitation, we introduce \emph{Kaleidoscope}, a novel adaptive partial parameter sharing scheme that fosters policy heterogeneity while still maintaining high sample efficiency. Specifically, Kaleidoscope maintains one set of common parameters alongside multiple sets of distinct, learnable masks for different agents, dictating the sharing of parameters. It promotes diversity among policy networks by encouraging discrepancy among these masks, without sacrificing the efficiencies of parameter sharing. This design allows Kaleidoscope to dynamically balance high sample efficiency with a broad policy representational capacity, effectively bridging the gap between full parameter sharing and non-parameter sharing across various environments. We further extend Kaleidoscope to critic ensembles in the context of actor-critic algorithms, which could help improve value estimations. Our empirical evaluations across extensive environments, including multi-agent particle environment, multi-agent MuJoCo and StarCraft multi-agent challenge v2, demonstrate the superior performance of Kaleidoscope compared with existing parameter sharing approaches, showcasing its potential for performance enhancement in MARL. The code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/LXXXXR/Kaleidoscope}.
SeafloorAI: A Large-scale Vision-Language Dataset for Seafloor Geological Survey
Authors: Fengchun Qiao, Arthur Trembanis, Xi Peng Kien X. Nguyen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: A major obstacle to the advancements of machine learning models in marine science, particularly in sonar imagery analysis, is the scarcity of AI-ready datasets.  While there have been efforts to make AI-ready sonar image dataset publicly available, they suffer from limitations in terms of environment setting and scale.  To bridge this gap, we introduce $\texttt{SeafloorAI}$, the first extensive AI-ready datasets for seafloor mapping across 5 geological layers that is curated in collaboration with marine scientists. We further extend the dataset to $\texttt{SeafloorGenAI}$ by incorporating the language component in order to facilitate the development of both $\textit{vision}$- and $\textit{language}$-capable machine learning models for sonar imagery.  The dataset consists of 62 geo-distributed data surveys spanning 17,300 square kilometers, with 696K sonar images, 827K annotated segmentation masks, 696K detailed language descriptions and approximately 7M question-answer pairs.   By making our data processing source code publicly available, we aim to engage the marine science community to enrich the data pool and inspire the machine learning community to develop more robust models.   This collaborative approach will enhance the capabilities and applications of our datasets within both fields.
Multimodal Task Vectors Enable Many-Shot Multimodal In-Context Learning
Authors: Chancharik Mitra, Assaf Arbelle, Leonid Karlinsky, Trevor Darrell, Roei Herzig Brandon Huang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The recent success of interleaved Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) in few-shot learning suggests that in-context learning (ICL) with many examples can be promising for learning new tasks. However, this many-shot multimodal ICL setting has one crucial problem: it is fundamentally limited by the model's context length set at pretraining. The problem is especially prominent in the multimodal domain, which processes both text and images, requiring additional tokens. This motivates the need for a multimodal method to compress many shots into fewer tokens without finetuning. In this work, we enable LMMs to perform multimodal, many-shot in-context learning by leveraging Multimodal Task Vectors (MTV)---compact implicit representations of in-context examples compressed in the model's attention heads. Specifically, we first demonstrate the existence of such MTV in LMMs and then leverage these extracted MTV to enable many-shot in-context learning for various vision-and-language tasks. Our experiments suggest that MTV can scale in performance with the number of compressed shots and generalize to similar out-of-domain tasks without additional context length for inference. Code: https://github.com/Brandon3964/MultiModal-Task-Vector
Quadratic Quantum Variational Monte Carlo
Authors: Qiang Liu Baiyu Su
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper introduces the Quadratic Quantum Variational Monte Carlo (Q$^2$VMC) algorithm, an innovative algorithm in quantum chemistry that significantly enhances the efficiency and accuracy of solving the Schrödinger equation. Inspired by the discretization of imaginary-time Schrödinger evolution, Q$^2$VMC employs a novel quadratic update mechanism that integrates seamlessly with neural network-based ansatzes. Our extensive experiments showcase Q$^2$VMC's superior performance, achieving faster convergence and lower ground state energies in wavefunction optimization across various molecular systems, without additional computational cost. This study not only advances the field of computational quantum chemistry but also highlights the important role of discretized evolution in variational quantum algorithms, offering a scalable and robust framework for future quantum research.
Lorentz-Equivariant Geometric Algebra Transformers for High-Energy Physics
Authors: Victor Bresó, Pim de Haan, Tilman Plehn, Jesse Thaler, Johann Brehmer Jonas Spinner
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Extracting scientific understanding from particle-physics experiments requires solving diverse learning problems with high precision and good data efficiency. We propose the Lorentz Geometric Algebra Transformer (L-GATr), a new multi-purpose architecture for high-energy physics. L-GATr represents high-energy data in a geometric algebra over four-dimensional space-time and is equivariant under Lorentz transformations, the symmetry group of relativistic kinematics. At the same time, the architecture is a Transformer, which makes it versatile and scalable to large systems. L-GATr is first demonstrated on regression and classification tasks from particle physics. We then construct the first Lorentz-equivariant generative model: a continuous normalizing flow based on an L-GATr network, trained with Riemannian flow matching. Across our experiments, L-GATr is on par with or outperforms strong domain-specific baselines.
Rethinking the Power of Timestamps for Robust Time Series Forecasting: A Global-Local Fusion Perspective
Authors: Qi Qi, Jingyu Wang, Haifeng Sun, Zirui Zhuang, Jinming Wu, Jianxin Liao Chengsen Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Time series forecasting has played a pivotal role across various industries, including finance, transportation, energy, healthcare, and climate. Due to the abundant seasonal information they contain, timestamps possess the potential to offer robust global guidance for forecasting techniques. However, existing works primarily focus on local observations, with timestamps being treated merely as an optional supplement that remains underutilized. When data gathered from the real world is polluted, the absence of global information will damage the robust prediction capability of these algorithms. To address these problems, we propose a novel framework named GLAFF. Within this framework, the timestamps are modeled individually to capture the global dependencies. Working as a plugin, GLAFF adaptively adjusts the combined weights for global and local information, enabling seamless collaboration with any time series forecasting backbone. Extensive experiments conducted on nine real-world datasets demonstrate that GLAFF significantly enhances the average performance of widely used mainstream forecasting models by 12.5\%, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art method by 5.5\%.
Position Coupling: Improving Length Generalization of Arithmetic Transformers Using Task Structure
Authors: Jaeyoung Cha, Pranjal Awasthi, Srinadh Bhojanapalli, Anupam Gupta, Chulhee Yun Hanseul Cho
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Even for simple arithmetic tasks like integer addition, it is challenging for Transformers to generalize to longer sequences than those encountered during training. To tackle this problem, we propose position coupling, a simple yet effective method that directly embeds the structure of the tasks into the positional encoding of a (decoder-only) Transformer. Taking a departure from the vanilla absolute position mechanism assigning unique position IDs to each of the tokens, we assign the same position IDs to two or more "relevant" tokens; for integer addition tasks, we regard digits of the same significance as in the same position. On the empirical side, we show that with the proposed position coupling, our models trained on 1 to 30-digit additions can generalize up to 200-digit additions (6.67x of the trained length). On the theoretical side, we prove that a 1-layer Transformer with coupled positions can solve the addition task involving exponentially many digits, whereas any 1-layer Transformer without positional information cannot entirely solve it. We also demonstrate that position coupling can be applied to other algorithmic tasks such as Nx2 multiplication and a two-dimensional task. Our codebase is available at github.com/HanseulJo/position-coupling.
Advancing Fine-Grained Classification by Structure and Subject Preserving Augmentation
Authors: Ohad Fried Eyal Michaeli
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) involves classifying closely related subcategories. This task is inherently difficult due to the subtle differences between classes and the high intra-class variance. Moreover, FGVC datasets are typically small and challenging to gather, thus highlighting a significant need for effective data augmentation.Recent advancements in text-to-image diffusion models have introduced new possibilities for data augmentation in image classification. While these models have been used to generate training data for classification tasks, their effectiveness in full-dataset training of FGVC models remains under-explored. Recent techniques that rely on text-to-image generation or Img2Img methods, such as SDEdit, often struggle to generate images that accurately represent the class while modifying them to a degree that significantly increases the dataset's diversity. To address these challenges, we present SaSPA: Structure and Subject Preserving Augmentation. Contrary to recent methods, our method does not use real images as guidance, thereby increasing generation flexibility and promoting greater diversity. To ensure accurate class representation, we employ conditioning mechanisms, specifically by conditioning on image edges and subject representation.We conduct extensive experiments and benchmark SaSPA against both traditional and generative data augmentation techniques. SaSPA consistently outperforms all established baselines across multiple settings, including full dataset training and contextual bias. Additionally, our results reveal interesting patterns in using synthetic data for FGVC models; for instance, we find a relationship between the amount of real data used and the optimal proportion of synthetic data.
RCDN: Towards Robust Camera-Insensitivity Collaborative Perception via Dynamic Feature-based 3D Neural Modeling
Authors: Fan Lu, Zehan Zheng, Guang Chen, Changjun Jiang Tianhang Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Collaborative perception is dedicated to tackling the constraints of single-agent perception, such as occlusions, based on the multiple agents' multi-view sensor inputs. However, most existing works assume an ideal condition that all agents' multi-view cameras are continuously available. In reality, cameras may be highly noisy, obscured or even failed during the collaboration. In this work, we introduce a new robust camera-insensitivity problem: how to overcome the issues caused by the failed camera perspectives, while stabilizing high collaborative performance with low calibration cost? To address above problems, we propose RCDN, a Robust Camera-insensitivity collaborative perception with a novel Dynamic feature-based 3D Neural modeling mechanism. The key intuition of RCDN is to construct collaborative neural rendering field representations to recover failed perceptual messages sent by multiple agents. To better model collaborative neural rendering field, RCDN first establishes a geometry BEV feature based time-invariant static field with other agents via fast hash grid modeling. Based on the static background field, the proposed time-varying dynamic field can model corresponding motion vector for foregrounds with appropriate positions. To validate RCDN, we create OPV2V-N, a new large-scale dataset with manual labelling under different camera failed scenarios. Extensive experiments conducted on OPV2V-N show that RCDN can be ported to other baselines and improve their robustness in extreme camera-insensitivity setting. Our code and datasets will be available soon.
TFG: Unified Training-Free Guidance for Diffusion Models
Authors: Haowei Lin, Jiaqi Han, Minkai Xu, Sheng Liu, Yitao Liang, Jianzhu Ma, James Zou, Stefano Ermon Haotian Ye
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Given an unconditional diffusion model and a predictor for a target property of interest (e.g., a classifier), the goal of training-free guidance is to generate samples with desirable target properties without additional training. Existing methods, though effective in various individual applications, often lack theoretical grounding and rigorous testing on extensive benchmarks. As a result, they could even fail on simple tasks, and applying them to a new problem becomes unavoidably difficult. This paper introduces a novel algorithmic framework encompassing existing methods as special cases, unifying the study of training-free guidance into the analysis of an algorithm-agnostic design space. Via theoretical and empirical investigation, we propose an efficient and effective hyper-parameter searching strategy that can be readily applied to any downstream task. We systematically benchmark across 7 diffusion models on 16 tasks with 40 targets, and improve performance by 8.5% on average. Our framework and benchmark offer a solid foundation for conditional generation in a training-free manner.
Rethinking Weight Decay for Robust Fine-Tuning of Foundation Models
Authors: Chengyue Huang, Zsolt Kira Junjiao Tian
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Modern optimizers such as AdamW, equipped with momentum and adaptive learning rate, are designed to escape local minima and explore the vast parameter space. This exploration is beneficial for finding good loss basins when training from scratch. It is not necessarily ideal when resuming from a powerful foundation model because it can lead to large deviations from the pre-trained initialization and, consequently, worse robustness and generalization. At the same time, strong regularization on all parameters can lead to under-fitting. We hypothesize that selectively regularizing the parameter space is the key to fitting and retraining the pre-trained knowledge. This paper proposes a new weight decay technique, Selective Projection Decay (SPD), that selectively imposes a strong penalty on certain layers while allowing others to change freely. Intuitively, SPD expands and contracts the parameter search space for layers with consistent and inconsistent loss reduction, respectively. Experimentally, when equipped with SPD, Adam consistently provides better in-distribution generalization and out-of-distribution robustness performance on multiple popular vision and language benchmarks.
Is Your HD Map Constructor Reliable under Sensor Corruptions?
Authors: Mengchuan Wei, Yifan Yang, Haimei Zhao, Hui Zhang, Yi Zhou, Qiang Wang, Weiming Li, Lingdong Kong, Jing Zhang Xiaoshuai Hao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Driving systems often rely on high-definition (HD) maps for precise environmental information, which is crucial for planning and navigation. While current HD map constructors perform well under ideal conditions, their resilience to real-world challenges, \eg, adverse weather and sensor failures, is not well understood, raising safety concerns. This work introduces MapBench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the robustness of HD map construction methods against various sensor corruptions. Our benchmark encompasses a total of 29 types of corruptions that occur from cameras and LiDAR sensors. Extensive evaluations across 31 HD map constructors reveal significant performance degradation of existing methods under adverse weather conditions and sensor failures, underscoring critical safety concerns. We identify effective strategies for enhancing robustness, including innovative approaches that leverage multi-modal fusion, advanced data augmentation, and architectural techniques. These insights provide a pathway for developing more reliable HD map construction methods, which are essential for the advancement of autonomous driving technology. The benchmark toolkit and affiliated code and model checkpoints have been made publicly accessible.
Efficient multi-prompt evaluation of LLMs
Authors: Ronald Xu, Lucas Weber, Mírian Silva, Onkar Bhardwaj, Leshem Choshen, Allysson Flavio Melo de Oliveira, Yuekai Sun, Mikhail Yurochkin Felipe Maia Polo
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Most popular benchmarks for comparing LLMs rely on a limited set of prompt templates, which may not fully capture the LLMs’ abilities and can affect the reproducibility of results on leaderboards. Many recent works empirically verify prompt sensitivity and advocate for changes in LLM evaluation. In this paper, we consider the problem of estimating the performance distribution across many prompt variants instead of finding a single prompt to evaluate with. We introduce PromptEval, a method for estimating performance across a large set of prompts borrowing strength across prompts and examples to produce accurate estimates under practical evaluation budgets. The resulting distribution can be used to obtain performance quantiles to construct various robust performance metrics (e.g., top 95% quantile or median). We prove that PromptEval consistently estimates the performance distribution and demonstrate its efficacy empirically on three prominent LLM benchmarks: MMLU, BIG-bench Hard, and LMentry; for example, PromptEval can accurately estimate performance quantiles across 100 prompt templates on MMLU with a budget equivalent to two single-prompt evaluations. Moreover, we show how PromptEval can be useful in LLM-as-a-judge and best prompt identification applications.
FLoRA: Federated Fine-Tuning Large Language Models with Heterogeneous Low-Rank Adaptations
Authors: Zheyu Shen, Yexiao He, Guoheng Sun, Hongyi Wang, Lingjuan Lyu, Ang Li Ziyao Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has been pivotal in advancing AI, with pre-trained LLMs being adaptable to diverse downstream tasks through fine-tuning. Federated learning (FL) further enhances fine-tuning in a privacy-aware manner by utilizing clients' local data through in-situ computation, eliminating the need for data movement. However, fine-tuning LLMs, given their massive scale of parameters, poses challenges for clients with constrained and heterogeneous resources in FL. Previous methods employed low-rank adaptation (LoRA) for efficient federated fine-tuning but utilized traditional FL aggregation strategies on LoRA adapters. This approach led to mathematically inaccurate aggregation noise, reducing fine-tuning effectiveness and failing to address heterogeneous LoRAs. In this work, we first highlight the mathematical incorrectness of LoRA aggregation in existing federated fine-tuning methods. We introduce a new approach called FLoRA that enables federated fine-tuning on heterogeneous LoRA adapters across clients through a novel stacking-based aggregation method. Our approach is noise-free and seamlessly supports heterogeneous LoRAs. Extensive experiments demonstrate FLoRA's superior performance in both homogeneous and heterogeneous settings, surpassing state-of-the-art methods. We envision this work as a milestone for efficient, privacy-preserving, and accurate federated fine-tuning of LLMs.
Learning the Expected Core of Strictly Convex Stochastic Cooperative Games
Authors: The Anh Ta, Shuqing Shi, Debmalya Mandal, Yali Du, Long Tran-Thanh Nam Phuong Tran
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Reward allocation, also known as the credit assignment problem, has been an important topic in economics, engineering, and machine learning. An important concept in reward allocation is the core, which is the set of stable allocations where no agent has the motivation to deviate from the grand coalition. In previous works, computing the core requires either knowledge of the reward function in deterministic games or the reward distribution in stochastic games. However, this is unrealistic, as the reward function or distribution is often only partially known and may be subject to uncertainty. In this paper, we consider the core learning problem in stochastic cooperative games, where the reward distribution is unknown. Our goal is to learn the expected core, that is, the set of allocations that are stable in expectation, given an oracle that returns a stochastic reward for an enquired coalition each round. Within the class of strictly convex games, we present an algorithm named \texttt{Common-Points-Picking} that returns a point in the expected core given a polynomial number of samples, with high probability. To analyse the algorithm, we develop a new extension of the separation hyperplane theorem for multiple convex sets.t.
ParallelEdits: Efficient Multi-Aspect Text-Driven Image Editing with Attention Grouping
Authors: Jialing Cai, Shan Jia, Vishnu Suresh Lokhande, Siwei Lyu Mingzhen Huang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Text-driven image synthesis has made significant advancements with the development of diffusion models, transforming how visual content is generated from text prompts. Despite these advances, text-driven image editing, a key area in computer graphics, faces unique challenges. A major challenge is making simultaneous edits across multiple objects or attributes. Applying these methods sequentially for multi-attribute edits increases computational demands and efficiency losses.     In this paper, we address these challenges with significant contributions. Our main contribution is the development of ParallelEdits, a method that seamlessly manages simultaneous edits across multiple attributes. In contrast to previous approaches, ParallelEdits not only preserves the quality of single attribute edits but also significantly improves the performance of multitasking edits. This is achieved through innovative attention distribution mechanism and multi-branch design that operates across several processing heads.     Additionally, we introduce the PIE-Bench++ dataset, an expansion of the original PIE-Bench dataset, to better support evaluating image-editing tasks involving multiple objects and attributes simultaneously. This dataset is a benchmark for evaluating text-driven image editing methods in multifaceted scenarios.
Looks Too Good To Be True: An Information-Theoretic Analysis of Hallucinations in Generative Restoration Models
Authors: Idan Kligvasser, Ehud Rivlin, Daniel Freedman Regev Cohen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The pursuit of high perceptual quality in image restoration has driven the development of revolutionary generative models, capable of producing results often visually indistinguishable from real data.However, as their perceptual quality continues to improve, these models also exhibit a growing tendency to generate hallucinations – realistic-looking details that do not exist in the ground truth images.Hallucinations in these models create uncertainty about their reliability, raising major concerns about their practical application.This paper investigates this phenomenon through the lens of information theory, revealing a fundamental tradeoff between uncertainty and perception. We rigorously analyze the relationship between these two factors, proving that the global minimal uncertainty in generative models grows in tandem with perception. In particular, we define the inherent uncertainty of the restoration problem and show that attaining perfect perceptual quality entails at least twice this uncertainty. Additionally, we establish a relation between distortion, uncertainty and perception, through which we prove the aforementioned uncertainly-perception tradeoff induces the well-known perception-distortion tradeoff.We demonstrate our theoretical findings through experiments with super-resolution and inpainting algorithms.This work uncovers fundamental limitations of generative models in achieving both high perceptual quality and reliable predictions for image restoration. Thus, we aim to raise awareness among practitioners about this inherent tradeoff, empowering them to make informed decisions and potentially prioritize safety over perceptual performance.
Implicit Optimization Bias of Next-token Prediction in Linear Models
Authors: Christos Thrampoulidis
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We initiate an investigation into the optimization properties of next-token prediction (NTP), the dominant training paradigm for modern language models. Specifically, we study the structural properties of the solutions selected by gradient-based optimizers among the many possible minimizers of the NTP objective. By framing NTP as cross-entropy minimization  across \emph{distinct} contexts, each tied with a \emph{sparse}  conditional probability distribution across a finite vocabulary of tokens, we introduce ``NTP-separability conditions'' that enable reaching the data-entropy lower bound. With this setup, and focusing on linear models with fixed context embeddings, we characterize the optimization bias of gradient descent (GD): Within the data subspace defined by the sparsity patterns of distinct contexts, GD selects parameters that equate the logits' differences of in-support tokens to their log-odds. In the orthogonal subspace, the GD parameters diverge in norm and select the direction that maximizes a margin specific to NTP. These findings extend previous research on implicit bias in one-hot classification to the NTP setting, highlighting key differences and prompting further research into the optimization and generalization properties of NTP, irrespective of the specific architecture used to generate the context embeddings.
Not so griddy: Internal representations of RNNs path integrating more than one agent
Authors: Francisco Acosta, Santiago Acosta-Mendoza, Nina Miolane William T. Redman
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Success in collaborative and competitive environments, where agents must work with or against each other, requires individuals to encode the position and trajectory of themselves and others. Decades of neurophysiological experiments have shed light on how brain regions [e.g., medial entorhinal cortex (MEC), hippocampus] encode the self's position and trajectory. However, it has only recently been discovered that MEC and hippocampus are modulated by the positions and trajectories of others. To understand how encoding spatial information of multiple agents shapes neural representations, we train a recurrent neural network (RNN) model that captures properties of MEC to path integrate trajectories of two agents simultaneously navigating the same environment. We find significant differences between these RNNs and those trained to path integrate only a single agent. At the individual unit level, RNNs trained to path integrate more than one agent develop weaker grid responses, stronger border responses, and tuning for the relative position of the two agents. At the population level, they develop more distributed and robust representations, with changes in network dynamics and manifold topology. Our results provide testable predictions and open new directions with which to study the neural computations supporting spatial navigation.
Out-Of-Distribution Detection with Diversification (Provably)
Authors: Zongbo Han, Huazhu Fu, Xi Peng, Qinghua Hu, Changqing Zhang Haiyun Yao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is crucial for ensuring reliable deployment of machine learning models. Recent advancements focus on utilizing easily accessible auxiliary outliers (e.g., data from the web or other datasets) in training. However, we experimentally reveal that these methods still struggle to generalize their detection capabilities to unknown OOD data, due to the limited diversity of the auxiliary outliers collected. Therefore, we thoroughly examine this problem from the generalization perspective and demonstrate that a more diverse set of auxiliary outliers is essential for enhancing the detection capabilities. However, in practice, it is difficult and costly to collect sufficiently diverse auxiliary outlier data. Therefore, we propose a simple yet practical approach with a theoretical guarantee, termed Diversity-induced Mixup for OOD detection (diverseMix), which enhances the diversity of auxiliary outlier set for training in an efficient way. Extensive experiments show that diverseMix achieves superior performance on commonly used and recent challenging large-scale benchmarks, which further confirm the importance of the diversity of auxiliary outliers.
Breaking Determinism: Fuzzy Modeling of Sequential Recommendation Using Discrete State Space Diffusion Model
Authors: Hao Wang, Luankang Zhang, Rui Zhou, Defu Lian, Enhong Chen Wenjia Xie
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Sequential recommendation (SR) aims to predict items that users may be interested in based on their historical behavior sequences. We revisit SR from a novel information-theoretic perspective and find that conventional sequential modeling methods fail to adequately capture the randomness and unpredictability of user behavior. Inspired by fuzzy information processing theory, this paper introduces the DDSR model, which uses fuzzy sets of interaction sequences to overcome the limitations and better capture the evolution of users' real interests. Formally based on diffusion transition processes in discrete state spaces, which is unlike common diffusion models such as DDPM that operate in continuous domains. It is better suited for discrete data, using structured transitions instead of arbitrary noise introduction to avoid information loss. Additionally, to address the inefficiency of matrix transformations due to the vast discrete space, we use semantic labels derived from quantization or RQ-VAE to replace item IDs, enhancing efficiency and improving cold start issues. Testing on three public benchmark datasets shows that DDSR outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in various settings, demonstrating its potential and effectiveness in handling SR tasks.