mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Unraveling the Gradient Descent Dynamics of Transformers
Authors: Boran Han, Shuai Zhang, Jie Ding, Mingyi Hong Bingqing Song
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: While the Transformer architecture has achieved remarkable success across various domains, a thorough theoretical foundation explaining its optimization dynamics is yet to be fully developed. In this study, we aim to bridge this understanding gap by answering the following two core questions: (1) Which types of Transformer architectures allow Gradient Descent (GD) to achieve guaranteed convergence? and (2) Under what initial conditions and architectural specifics does the Transformer achieve rapid convergence during training? By analyzing the loss landscape of a single Transformer layer using Softmax and Gaussian attention kernels, our work provides concrete answers to these questions. Our findings demonstrate that, with appropriate weight initialization, GD can train a Transformer model (with either kernel type) to achieve a global optimal solution, especially when the input embedding dimension is large. Nonetheless, certain scenarios highlight potential pitfalls: training a Transformer using the Softmax attention kernel may sometimes lead to suboptimal local solutions. In contrast,  the Gaussian attention kernel exhibits a much favorable behavior. Our empirical study further validate the theoretical findings.
Optimized Feature Generation for Tabular Data via LLMs with Decision Tree Reasoning
Authors: Kyuyoung Kim, Seunghyuk Oh, Jihoon Tack, Jaehyung Kim, Jinwoo Shin Jaehyun Nam
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In tabular prediction tasks, tree-based models combined with automated feature engineering methods often outperform deep learning approaches that rely on learned representations. While these feature engineering techniques are effective, they typically depend on a pre-defined search space and primarily use validation scores for feature selection, thereby missing valuable insights from previous experiments.To address these limitations, we propose a novel tabular learning framework that utilizes large language models (LLMs), termed Optimizing Column feature generator with decision Tree reasoning (OCTree). Our key idea is to leverage the reasoning capabilities of LLMs to identify effective feature generation rules without manually specifying the search space and provide language-based reasoning information highlighting past experiments as feedback for iterative rule improvements. We use decision trees to convey this reasoning information, as they can be easily represented in natural language, effectively providing knowledge from prior experiments (i.e., the impact of the generated features on performance) to the LLMs. Our empirical results demonstrate that OCTree consistently enhances the performance of various prediction models across diverse benchmarks, outperforming competing automated feature engineering methods. Code is available at https://github.com/jaehyun513/OCTree.
Infinite-Dimensional Feature Interaction
Authors: Fuxun Yu, Maoliang Li, Zihao Zheng, Zirui Xu, Jinjun Xiong, Xiang Chen Chenhui Xu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The past neural network design has largely focused on feature \textit{representation space} dimension and its capacity scaling (e.g., width, depth), but overlooked the feature \textit{interaction space} scaling.  Recent advancements have shown shifted focus towards element-wise multiplication to facilitate higher-dimensional feature interaction space for better information transformation. Despite this progress, multiplications predominantly capture low-order interactions, thus remaining confined to a finite-dimensional interaction space. To transcend this limitation, classic kernel methods emerge as a promising solution to engage features in an infinite-dimensional space. We introduce InfiNet, a model architecture that enables feature interaction within an infinite-dimensional space created by RBF kernel. Our experiments reveal that InfiNet achieves new state-of-the-art, owing to its capability to leverage infinite-dimensional interactions, significantly enhancing model performance.
QGym: Scalable Simulation and Benchmarking of Queuing Network Controllers
Authors: Ang Li, Ethan Che, Tianyi Peng, Jing Dong, Hongseok Namkoong Haozhe Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Queuing network control allows allocation of  scarce resources to manage congestion, a fundamental problem in manufacturing, communications, and healthcare. Compared to standard RL problems, queueing problems  are distinguished by unique challenges: i) a system operating in continuous time, ii) high stochasticity, and iii) long horizons over which the system can become unstable (exploding delays). To provide the empirical foundations for methodological development tackling these challenges, we present an open-sourced  queueing simulation framework, QGym, that benchmark queueing policies across realistic problem instances. Our modular framework allows the researchers to build on our initial instances, which provide a wide range of environments including parallel servers, criss-cross, tandem, and re-entrant networks, as well as a realistically calibrated hospital queuing system.  From these, various policies can be easily tested, including both model-free RL methods and classical queuing policies. Our testbed significantly expands the scope of empirical benchmarking in prior work, and complements thetraditional focus on evaluating algorithms based on mathematical guarantees in idealized settings. QGym code is open-sourced at https://github.com/namkoong-lab/QGym.
ConStat: Performance-Based Contamination Detection in Large Language Models
Authors: Mark Niklas Müller, Martin Vechev Jasper Dekoninck
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Public benchmarks play an essential role in the evaluation of large language models.  However, data contamination can lead to inflated performance, rendering them unreliable for model comparison. It is therefore crucial to detect contamination and estimate its impact on measured performance. Unfortunately, existing detection methods can be easily evaded and fail to quantify contamination. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel definition of contamination as artificially inflated and non-generalizing benchmark performance instead of the inclusion of benchmark samples in the training data. This perspective enables us to detect any model with inflated performance, i.e., performance that does not generalize to rephrased samples, synthetic samples from the same distribution, or different benchmarks for the same task. Based on this insight, we develop ConStat, a statistical method that reliably detects and quantifies contamination by comparing performance between a primary and reference benchmark relative to a set of reference models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ConStat in an extensive evaluation of diverse model architectures, benchmarks, and contamination scenarios and find high levels of contamination in multiple popular models including Mistral, Llama, Yi, and the top-3 Open LLM Leaderboard models.
Spectral-Risk Safe Reinforcement Learning with Convergence Guarantees
Authors: Taehyun Cho, Seungyub Han, Hojun Chung, Kyungjae Lee, Songhwai Oh Dohyeong Kim
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The field of risk-constrained reinforcement learning (RCRL) has been developed to effectively reduce the likelihood of worst-case scenarios by explicitly handling risk-measure-based constraints.However, the nonlinearity of risk measures makes it challenging to achieve convergence and optimality.To overcome the difficulties posed by the nonlinearity, we propose a spectral risk measure-constrained RL algorithm, spectral-risk-constrained policy optimization (SRCPO), a bilevel optimization approach that utilizes the duality of spectral risk measures.In the bilevel optimization structure, the outer problem involves optimizing dual variables derived from the risk measures, while the inner problem involves finding an optimal policy given these dual variables.The proposed method, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to guarantee convergence to an optimum in the tabular setting.Furthermore, the proposed method has been evaluated on continuous control tasks and showed the best performance among other RCRL algorithms satisfying the constraints.Our code is available at https://github.com/rllab-snu/Spectral-Risk-Constrained-RL.
GeSS: Benchmarking Geometric Deep Learning under Scientific Applications with Distribution Shifts
Authors: Shikun Liu, Siqi Miao, Victor Fung, Shiyu Chang, Pan Li Deyu Zou
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Geometric deep learning (GDL) has gained significant attention in scientific fields, for its proficiency in modeling data with intricate geometric structures. Yet, very few works have delved into its capability of tackling the distribution shift problem, a prevalent challenge in many applications.To bridge this gap, we propose GeSS, a comprehensive benchmark designed for evaluating the performance of GDL models in scientific scenarios with distribution shifts.Our evaluation datasets cover diverse scientific domains from particle physics, materials science to biochemistry, and encapsulate a broad spectrum of distribution shifts including conditional, covariate, and concept shifts. Furthermore, we study three levels of information access from the out-of-distribution (OOD) test data, including no OOD information, only unlabeled OOD data, and OOD data with a few labels. Overall, our benchmark results in 30 different experiment settings, and evaluates 3 GDL backbones and 11 learning algorithms in each setting. A thorough analysis of the evaluation results is provided, poised to illuminate insights for GDL researchers and domain practitioners who are to use GDL in their applications.
One-Step Effective Diffusion Network for Real-World  Image Super-Resolution
Authors: Lingchen Sun, Zhiyuan Ma, Lei Zhang Rongyuan Wu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models have been increasingly employed to tackle the real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) problem due to their powerful generative image priors. Most of the existing methods start from random noise to reconstruct the high-quality (HQ) image under the guidance of the given low-quality (LQ) image. While promising results have been achieved, such Real-ISR methods require multiple diffusion steps to reproduce the HQ image, increasing the computational cost. Meanwhile, the random noise introduces uncertainty in the output, which is unfriendly to image restoration tasks. To address these issues, we propose a one-step effective diffusion network, namely OSEDiff, for the Real-ISR problem. We argue that the LQ image contains rich information to restore its HQ counterpart, and hence the given LQ image can be directly taken as the starting point for diffusion, eliminating the uncertainty introduced by random noise sampling. We finetune the pre-trained diffusion network with trainable layers to adapt it to complex image degradations. To ensure that the one-step diffusion model could yield HQ Real-ISR output, we apply variational score distillation in the latent space to conduct KL-divergence regularization. As a result, our OSEDiff model can efficiently and effectively generate HQ images in just one diffusion step. Our experiments demonstrate that OSEDiff achieves comparable or even better Real-ISR results, in terms of both objective metrics and subjective evaluations, than previous diffusion model-based Real-ISR methods that require dozens or hundreds of steps. The source codes are released at https://github.com/cswry/OSEDiff.
MECD: Unlocking Multi-Event Causal Discovery in Video Reasoning
Authors: Huabin Liu, Tianyao He, Yihang Chen, Chaofan Gan, Xiao Ma, Cheng Zhong, Yang Zhang, Yingxue Wang, Hui Lin, Weiyao Lin Tieyuan Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Video causal reasoning aims to achieve a high-level understanding of video content from a causal perspective. However, current video reasoning tasks are limited in scope, primarily executed in a question-answering paradigm and focusing on short videos containing only a single event and simple causal relationships, lacking comprehensive and structured causality analysis for videos with multiple events. To fill this gap, we introduce a new task and dataset, Multi-Event Causal Discovery (MECD). It aims to uncover the causal relationships between events distributed chronologically across long videos. Given visual segments and textual descriptions of events, MECD requires identifying the causal associations between these events to derive a comprehensive, structured event-level video causal diagram explaining why and how the final result event occurred. To address MECD, we devise a novel framework inspired by the Granger Causality method, using an efficient mask-based event prediction model to perform an Event Granger Test, which estimates causality by comparing the predicted result event when premise events are masked versus unmasked. Furthermore, we integrate causal inference techniques such as front-door adjustment and counterfactual inference to address challenges in MECD like causality confounding and illusory causality. Experiments validate the effectiveness of our framework in providing causal relationships in multi-event videos, outperforming GPT-4o and VideoLLaVA by 5.7% and 4.1%, respectively.
DiP-GO: A Diffusion Pruner via Few-step Gradient Optimization
Authors: Dehua Tang, Ji Liu, Mingjie Lu, Jintu Zheng, Jinzhang Peng, Dong Li, Yu Wang, Fan Jiang, Lu Tian, Spandan Tiwari, Ashish Sirasao, Junhai Yong, Bin Wang, Emad Barsoum Haowei Zhu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in the field of image generation due to their outstanding capabilities. However, these models require substantial computing resources because of the multi-step denoising process during inference. While traditional pruning methods have been employed to optimize these models, the retraining process necessitates large-scale training datasets and extensive computational costs to maintain generalization ability, making it neither convenient nor efficient. Recent studies attempt to utilize the similarity of features across adjacent denoising stages to reduce computational costs through simple and static strategies. However, these strategies cannot fully harness the potential of the similar feature patterns across adjacent timesteps. In this work, we propose a novel pruning method that derives an efficient diffusion model via a more intelligent and differentiable pruner. At the core of our approach is casting the model pruning process into a SubNet search process. Specifically, we first introduce a SuperNet based on standard diffusion via adding some backup connections built upon the similar features. We then construct a plugin pruner network and design optimization losses to identify redundant computation. Finally, our method can identify an optimal SubNet through few-step gradient optimization and a simple post-processing procedure. We conduct extensive experiments on various diffusion models including Stable Diffusion series and DiTs. Our DiP-GO approach achieves 4.4 x speedup for SD-1.5 without any loss of accuracy, significantly outperforming the previous state-of-the-art methods.
Reasoning Multi-Agent Behavioral Topology for Interactive Autonomous Driving
Authors: Li Chen, Yu Qiao, Chen Lv, Hongyang Li Haochen Liu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Autonomous driving system aims for safe and social-consistent driving through the behavioral integration among interactive agents. However, challenges remain due to multi-agent scene uncertainty and heterogeneous interaction. Current dense and sparse behavioral representations struggle with inefficiency and inconsistency in multi-agent modeling, leading to instability of collective behavioral patterns when integrating prediction and planning (IPP). To address this, we initiate a topological formation that serves as a compliant behavioral foreground to guide downstream trajectory generations. Specifically, we introduce Behavioral Topology (BeTop), a pivotal topological formulation that explicitly represents the consensual behavioral pattern among multi-agent future. BeTop is derived from braid theory to distill compliant interactive topology from multi-agent future trajectories. A synergistic learning framework (BeTopNet) supervised by BeTop facilitates the consistency of behavior prediction and planning within the predicted topology priors. Through imitative contingency learning, BeTop also effectively manages behavioral uncertainty for prediction and planning. Extensive verification on large-scale real-world datasets, including nuPlan and WOMD, demonstrates that BeTop achieves state-of-the-art performance in both prediction and planning tasks. Further validations on the proposed interactive scenario benchmark showcase planning compliance in interactive cases. Code and model is available at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/BeTop.
In-Context Learning with Transformers: Softmax Attention Adapts to Function Lipschitzness
Authors: Advait Parulekar, Aryan Mokhtari, Sujay Sanghavi, Sanjay Shakkottai Liam Collins
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: A striking property of transformers is their ability to perform in-context learning (ICL), a machine learning framework in which the learner is presented with a novel context during inference implicitly through some data, and tasked with making a prediction in that context. As such, that learner must adapt to the context without additional training. We explore the role of softmax attention in an ICL setting where each context encodes a regression task. We show that an attention unit learns a window that it uses to implement a nearest-neighbors predictor adapted to the landscape of the pretraining tasks. Specifically, we show that this window widens with decreasing Lipschitzness and increasing label noise in the pretraining tasks. We also show that on low-rank, linear problems, the attention unit learns to project onto the appropriate subspace before inference. Further, we show that this adaptivity relies crucially on the softmax activation and thus cannot be replicated by the linear activation often studied in prior theoretical analyses.
Rethinking the Membrane Dynamics and Optimization Objectives of Spiking Neural Networks
Authors: Qian Zheng, Huamin Wang, Gang Pan Hangchi Shen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Despite spiking neural networks (SNNs) have demonstrated notable energy efficiency across various fields, the limited firing patterns of spiking neurons within fixed time steps restrict the expression of information, which impedes further improvement of SNN performance. In addition, current implementations of SNNs typically consider the firing rate or average membrane potential of the last layer as the output, lacking exploration of other possibilities. In this paper, we identify that the limited spike patterns of spiking neurons stem from the initial membrane potential (IMP), which is set to 0. By adjusting the IMP, the spiking neurons can generate additional firing patterns and pattern mappings. Furthermore, we find that in static tasks, the accuracy of SNNs at each time step increases as the membrane potential evolves from zero. This observation inspires us to propose a learnable IMP, which can accelerate the evolution of membrane potential and enables higher performance within a limited number of time steps. Additionally, we introduce the last time step (LTS) approach to accelerate convergence in static tasks, and we propose a label smooth temporal efficient training (TET) loss to mitigate the conflicts between optimization objective and regularization term in the vanilla TET. Our methods improve the accuracy by 4.05\% on ImageNet compared to baseline and achieve state-of-the-art performance of 87.80\% on CIFAR10-DVS and 87.86\% on N-Caltech101.
When Is Inductive Inference Possible?
Authors: Zhou Lu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Can a physicist make only a finite number of errors in the eternal quest to uncover the law of nature?This millennium-old philosophical problem, known as inductive inference, lies at the heart of epistemology.Despite its significance to understanding human reasoning, a rigorous justification of inductive inference has remained elusive.At a high level, inductive inference asks whether one can make at most finite errors amidst an infinite sequence of observations, when deducing the correct hypothesis from a given hypothesis class.Historically, the only theoretical guarantee has been that if the hypothesis class is countable, inductive inference is possible, as exemplified by Solomonoff induction for learning Turing machines.In this paper, we provide a tight characterization of inductive inference by establishing a novel link to online learning theory.As our main result, we prove that inductive inference is possible if and only if the hypothesis class is a countable union of online learnable classes, potentially with an uncountable size, no matter the observations are adaptively chosen or iid sampled.Moreover, the same condition is also sufficient and necessary in the agnostic setting, where any hypothesis class meeting this criterion enjoys an $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret bound for any time step $T$, while others require an arbitrarily slow rate of regret.Our main technical tool is a novel non-uniform online learning framework, which may be of independent interest.Our main technical tool is a novel non-uniform online learning framework, which may be of independent interest.
Collaborative Refining for Learning from Inaccurate Labels
Authors: Yi-Xuan Sun, Ya-Lin Zhang, Libang Zhang, Haoran Hu, Longfei Li, Jun Zhou, Guo Ye, Huimei He Bin Han
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper considers the problem of learning from multiple sets of inaccurate labels, which can be easily obtained from low-cost annotators, such as rule-based annotators. Previous works typically concentrate on aggregating information from all the annotators, overlooking the significance of data refinement. This paper presents a collaborative refining approach for learning from inaccurate labels. To refine the data, we introduce the annotator agreement as an instrument, which refers to whether multiple annotators agree or disagree on the labels for a given sample. For samples where some annotators disagree, a comparative strategy is proposed to filter noise. Through theoretical analysis, the connections among multiple sets of labels, the respective models trained on them, and the true labels are uncovered to identify relatively reliable labels. For samples where all annotators agree, an aggregating strategy is designed to mitigate potential noise. Guided by theoretical bounds on loss values, a sample selection criterion is introduced and modified to be more robust against potentially problematic values. Through these two methods, all the samples are refined during training, and these refined samples are used to train a lightweight model simultaneously. Extensive experiments are conducted on benchmark and real-world datasets to demonstrate the superiority of our methods.
CausalChaos! Dataset for Comprehensive Causal Action Question Answering Over Longer Causal Chains Grounded in Dynamic Visual Scenes
Authors: Eric Peh, Ruirui Chen, Ting En Lam, Yuhan Chen, Elston Tan, Basura Fernando Paritosh Parmar
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Causal video question answering (QA) has garnered increasing interest, yet existing datasets often lack depth in causal reasoning. To address this gap, we capitalize on the unique properties of cartoons and construct CausalChaos!, a novel, challenging causal Why-QA dataset built upon the iconic "Tom and Jerry" cartoon series. Cartoons use the principles of animation that allow animators to create expressive, unambiguous causal relationships between events to form a coherent storyline. Utilizing these properties, along with thought-provoking questions and multi-level answers (answer and detailed causal explanation), our questions involve causal chains that interconnect multiple dynamic interactions between characters and visual scenes. These factors demand models to solve more challenging, yet well-defined causal relationships. We also introduce hard incorrect answer mining, including a causally confusing version that is even more challenging. While models perform well, there is much room for improvement, especially, on open-ended answers. We identify more advanced/explicit causal relationship modeling \& joint modeling of vision and language as the immediate areas for future efforts to focus upon. Along with the other complementary datasets, our new challenging dataset will pave the way for these developments in the field. Dataset and Code: https://github.com/LUNAProject22/CausalChaos
Improved Regret of Linear Ensemble Sampling
Authors: Min-hwan Oh Harin Lee
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In this work, we close the fundamental gap of theory and practice by providing an improved regret bound for linear ensemble sampling. We prove that with an ensemble size logarithmic in $T$, linear ensemble sampling can achieve a frequentist regret bound of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(d^{3/2}\sqrt{T})$, matching state-of-the-art results for randomized linear bandit algorithms, where $d$ and $T$ are the dimension of the parameter and the time horizon respectively. Our approach introduces a general regret analysis framework for linear bandit algorithms. Additionally, we reveal a significant relationship between linear ensemble sampling and Linear Perturbed-History Exploration (LinPHE), showing that LinPHE is a special case of linear ensemble sampling when the ensemble size equals $T$. This insight allows us to derive a new regret bound of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(d^{3/2}\sqrt{T})$ for LinPHE, independent of the number of arms. Our contributions advance the theoretical foundation of ensemble sampling, bringing its regret bounds in line with the best known bounds for other randomized exploration algorithms.
Learning Equilibria in Adversarial Team Markov Games: A Nonconvex-Hidden-Concave Min-Max Optimization Problem
Authors: Jingming Yan, Ioannis Panageas Fivos Kalogiannis
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We study the problem of learning a Nash equilibrium (NE) in Markov games which is a cornerstone in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). In particular, we focus on infinite-horizon adversarial team Markov games (ATMGs) in which agents that share a common reward function compete against a single opponent, *the adversary*. These games unify two-player zero-sum Markov games and Markov potential games, resulting in a setting that encompasses both collaboration and competition. Kalogiannis et al. (2023) provided an efficient equilibrium computation algorithm for ATMGs which presumes knowledge of the reward and transition functions and has no sample complexity guarantees. We contribute a learning algorithm that utilizes MARL policy gradient methods with iteration and sample complexity that is polynomial in the approximation error $\epsilon$ and the natural parameters of the ATMG, resolving the main caveats of the solution by (Kalogiannis et al., 2023). It is worth noting that previously, the existence of learning algorithms for NE was known for Markov two-player zero-sum and potential games but not for ATMGs.    Seen through the lens of min-max optimization, computing a NE in these games consists a nonconvex--nonconcave saddle-point problem. Min-max optimization has received an extensive study. Nevertheless, the case of nonconvex--nonconcave landscapes remains elusive: in full generality, finding saddle-points is computationally intractable (Daskalakis et al., 2021). We circumvent the aforementioned intractability by developing techniques that exploit the hidden structure of the objective function via a nonconvex--concave reformulation. However, this introduces a challenge of a feasibility set with coupled constraints. We tackle these challenges by establishing novel techniques for optimizing weakly-smooth nonconvex functions, extending the framework of (Devolder et al., 2014).
BEACON: Benchmark for Comprehensive RNA Tasks and Language Models
Authors: Zhiyuan Chen, Lifeng Qiao, Hongtai Jing, Yuchen Cai, Sheng Xu, Peng Ye, Xinzhu Ma, Siqi Sun, Hongliang Yan, Dong Yuan, Wanli Ouyang, Xihui Liu Yuchen Ren
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: RNA plays a pivotal role in translating genetic instructions into functional outcomes, underscoring its importance in biological processes and disease mechanisms. Despite the emergence of numerous deep learning approaches for RNA, particularly universal RNA language models, there remains a significant lack of standardized benchmarks to assess the effectiveness of these methods. In this study, we introduce the first comprehensive RNA benchmark BEACON BEnchmArk for  COmprehensive RNA Task and Language Models).First, BEACON comprises 13 distinct tasks derived from extensive previous work covering structural analysis, functional studies, and engineering applications, enabling a comprehensive assessment of the performance of methods on various RNA understanding tasks. Second, we examine a range of models, including traditional approaches like CNNs, as well as advanced RNA foundation models based on language models, offering valuable insights into the task-specific performances of these models. Third, we investigate the vital RNA language model components from the tokenizer and positional encoding aspects. Notably, our findings emphasize the superiority of single nucleotide tokenization and the effectiveness of Attention with Linear Biases (ALiBi) over traditional positional encoding methods. Based on these insights, a simple yet strong baseline called BEACON-B is proposed, which can achieve outstanding performance with limited data and computational resources. The datasets and source code of our benchmark are available at https://github.com/terry-r123/RNABenchmark.
InterpBench: Semi-Synthetic Transformers for Evaluating Mechanistic Interpretability Techniques
Authors: Iván Arcuschin, Thomas Kwa, Adrià Garriga-Alonso Rohan Gupta
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability methods aim to identify the algorithm a neural network implements, but it is difficult to validate such methods when the true algorithm is unknown. This work presents InterpBench, a collection of semi-synthetic yet realistic transformers with known circuits for evaluating these techniques. We train simple neural networks using a stricter version of Interchange Intervention Training (IIT) which we call Strict IIT (SIIT). Like the original, SIIT trains neural networks by aligning their internal computation with a desired high-level causal model, but it also prevents non-circuit nodes from affecting the model's output. We evaluate SIIT on sparse transformers produced by the Tracr tool and find that SIIT models maintain Tracr's original circuit while being more realistic. SIIT can also train transformers with larger circuits, like Indirect Object Identification (IOI). Finally, we use our benchmark to evaluate existing circuit discovery techniques.
Understanding Model Selection for Learning in Strategic Environments
Authors: Eric Mazumdar Tinashe Handina
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The deployment of ever-larger machine learning models reflects a growing consensus that the more expressive the model class one optimizes over—and the more data one has access to—the more one can improve performance. As models get deployed in a variety of real-world scenarios, they inevitably face strategic environments. In this work, we consider the natural question of how the interplay of models and strategic interactions affects the relationship between performance at equilibrium and the expressivity of model classes. We find that strategic interactions can break the conventional view—meaning that performance does not necessarily monotonically improve as model classes get larger or more expressive (even with infinite data).  We show the implications of this result in several contexts including strategic regression, strategic classification, and multi-agent reinforcement learning. In particular, we show that each of these settings admits a Braess' paradox-like phenomenon in which optimizing over less expressive model classes allows one to achieve strictly better equilibrium outcomes. Motivated by these examples, we then propose a new paradigm for model selection in games wherein an agent seeks to choose amongst different model classes to use as their action set in a game.
CALVIN: Improved Contextual Video Captioning via Instruction Tuning
Authors: Arkabandhu Chowdhury, Ronen Basri, Jonas Geiping, Tom Goldstein, David Jacobs Gowthami Somepalli
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The recent emergence of powerful Vision-Language models (VLMs) has significantly improved image captioning. Some of these models are extended to caption videos as well. However, their capabilities to understand complex scenes are limited, and the descriptions they provide for scenes tend to be overly verbose and focused on the superficial appearance of objects. Scene descriptions, especially in movies, require a deeper contextual understanding, unlike general-purpose video captioning. To address this challenge, we propose a model, CALVIN, a specialized video LLM that leverages previous movie context to generate fully "contextual" scene descriptions. To achieve this, we train our model on a suite of tasks that integrate both image-based question-answering and video captioning within a unified framework, before applying instruction tuning to refine the model's ability to provide scene captions. Lastly, we observe that our model responds well to prompt engineering and few-shot in-context learning techniques, enabling the user to adapt it to any new movie with very little additional annotation.
Homology Consistency Constrained Efficient Tuning for Vision-Language Models
Authors: Lei Zhang, Yongdong Zhang, Zhendong Mao Huatian Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Efficient transfer learning has shown remarkable performance in tuning large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) toward downstream tasks with limited data resources. The key challenge of efficient transfer lies in adjusting image-text alignment to be task-specific while preserving pre-trained general knowledge. However, existing methods adjust image-text alignment merely on a set of observed samples, e.g., data set and external knowledge base, which cannot guarantee to keep the correspondence of general concepts between image and text latent manifolds without being disrupted and thereby a weak generalization of the adjusted alignment. In this work, we propose a Homology Consistency (HC) constraint for efficient transfer on VLMs, which explicitly constrains the correspondence of image and text latent manifolds through structural equivalence based on persistent homology in downstream tuning. Specifically, we build simplicial complex on the top of data to mimic the topology of latent manifolds, then track the persistence of the homology classes of topological features across multiple scales, and guide the directions of persistence tracks in image and text manifolds to coincide each other, with a deviating perturbation additionally. For practical application, we tailor the implementation of our proposed HC constraint for two main paradigms of adapter tuning. Extensive experiments on few-shot learning over 11 datasets and domain generalization demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method.
Designing Cell-Type-Specific Promoter Sequences Using Conservative Model-Based Optimization
Authors: Xinyang Geng, Michael H. Herschl, Sathvik Kolli, Aviral Kumar, Patrick D. Hsu, Sergey Levine, Nilah M. Ioannidis Aniketh Janardhan Reddy
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Gene therapies have the potential to treat disease by delivering therapeutic genetic cargo to disease-associated cells. One limitation to their widespread use is the lack of short regulatory sequences, or promoters, that differentially induce the expression of delivered genetic cargo in target cells, minimizing side effects in other cell types. Such cell-type-specific promoters are difficult to discover using existing methods, requiring either manual curation or access to large datasets of promoter-driven expression from both targeted and untargeted cells. Model-based optimization (MBO) has emerged as an effective method to design biological sequences in an automated manner, and has recently been used in promoter design methods. However, these methods have only been tested using large training datasets that are expensive to collect, and focus on designing promoters for markedly different cell types, overlooking the complexities associated with designing promoters for closely related cell types that share similar regulatory features. Therefore, we introduce a comprehensive framework for utilizing MBO to design promoters in a data-efficient manner, with an emphasis on discovering promoters for similar cell types. We use conservative objective models (COMs) for MBO and highlight practical considerations such as best practices for improving sequence diversity, getting estimates of model uncertainty, and choosing the optimal set of sequences for experimental validation. Using three leukemia cell lines (Jurkat, K562, and THP1), we show that our approach discovers many novel cell-type-specific promoters after experimentally validating the designed sequences. For K562 cells, in particular, we discover a promoter that has 75.85\% higher cell-type-specificity than the best promoter from the initial dataset used to train our models. Our code and data will be available at https://github.com/young-geng/promoter_design.
Matrix Denoising with Doubly Heteroscedastic Noise: Fundamental Limits and Optimal Spectral Methods
Authors: Marco Mondelli Yihan Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We study the matrix denoising problem of estimating the singular vectors of a rank-$1$ signal corrupted by noise with both column and row correlations. Existing works are either unable to pinpoint the exact asymptotic estimation error or, when they do so, the resulting approaches (e.g., based on whitening or singular value shrinkage) remain vastly suboptimal. On top of this, most of the literature has focused on the special case of estimating the left singular vector of the signal when the noise only possesses row correlation (one-sided heteroscedasticity). In contrast, our work establishes the information-theoretic and algorithmic limits of matrix denoising with doubly heteroscedastic noise. We characterize the exact asymptotic minimum mean square error, and design a novel spectral estimator with rigorous optimality guarantees: under a technical condition, it attains positive correlation with the signals whenever information-theoretically possible and, for one-sided heteroscedasticity, it also achieves the Bayes-optimal error. Numerical experiments demonstrate the significant advantage of our theoretically principled method with the state of the art. The proofs draw connections with statistical physics and approximate message passing, departing drastically from standard random matrix theory techniques.
Batched Energy-Entropy acquisition for Bayesian Optimization
Authors: Carsten Stahlhut, Jesper Ferkinghoff-Borg Felix Teufel
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Bayesian optimization (BO) is an attractive machine learning framework for performing sample-efficient global optimization of black-box functions. The optimization process is guided by an acquisition function that selects points to acquire in each round of BO. In batched BO, when multiple points are acquired in parallel, commonly used acquisition functions are often high-dimensional and intractable, leading to the use of sampling-based alternatives. We propose a statistical physics inspired acquisition function that can natively handle batches. Batched Energy-Entropy acquisition for BO (BEEBO) enables tight control of the explore-exploit trade-off of the optimization process and generalizes to heteroskedastic black-box problems. We demonstrate the applicability of BEEBO on a range of problems, showing competitive performance to existing acquisition functions.
SLowcalSGD : Slow Query Points Improve Local-SGD for Stochastic Convex Optimization
Authors: Kfir Y. Levy Tehila Dahan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We consider  distributed learning scenarios where $M$ machines interact with a parameter server along several communication rounds in order to minimize a joint objective function. Focusing on the heterogeneous case, where different machines may draw samples from different data-distributions, we design the first local update method that provably benefits over the two most prominent distributed baselines: namely Minibatch-SGD and Local-SGD. Key to our approach is a slow querying technique  that we customize to the distributed setting, which in turn enables a better mitigation of the bias caused by local updates.
Boosting Weakly Supervised Referring Image Segmentation via Progressive Comprehension
Authors: Yuhao Liu, Jiaying Lin, Gerhard Hancke, Rynson W.H. Lau Zaiquan Yang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper explores the weakly-supervised referring image segmentation (WRIS) problem, and focuses on a challenging setup where target localization is learned directly from image-text pairs. We note that the input text description typically already contains detailed information on how to localize the target object, and we also observe that humans often follow a step-by-step comprehension process (\ie, progressively utilizing target-related attributes and relations as cues) to identify the target object. Hence, we propose a novel Progressive Comprehension Network (PCNet) to leverage target-related textual cues from the input description for progressively localizing the target object.Specifically, we first use a Large Language Model (LLM) to decompose the input text description into short phrases. These short phrases are taken as target-related cues and fed into a Conditional Referring Module (CRM) in multiple stages, to allow updating the referring text embedding and enhance the response map for target localization in a multi-stage manner.Based on the CRM, we then propose a Region-aware Shrinking (RaS) loss to constrain the visual localization to be conducted progressively in a coarse-to-fine manner across different stages.Finally, we introduce an Instance-aware Disambiguation (IaD) loss to suppress instance localization ambiguity by differentiating overlapping response maps generated by different referring texts on the same image. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms SOTA methods on three common benchmarks.
When Your AIs Deceive You: Challenges of Partial Observability in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
Authors: Davis Foote, Stuart Russell, Anca Dragan, Erik Jenner, Scott Emmons Leon Lang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Past analyses of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) assume that the human evaluators fully observe the environment. What happens when human feedback is based only on partial observations? We formally define two failure cases: deceptive inflation and overjustification. Modeling the human as Boltzmann-rational w.r.t. a belief over trajectories, we prove conditions under which RLHF is guaranteed to result in policies that deceptively inflate their performance, overjustify their behavior to make an impression, or both. Under the new assumption that the human's partial observability is known and accounted for, we then analyze how much information the feedback process provides about the return function. We show that sometimes, the human's feedback determines the return function uniquely up to an additive constant, but in other realistic cases, there is irreducible ambiguity. We propose exploratory research directions to help tackle these challenges and experimentally validate both the theoretical concerns and potential mitigations, and caution against blindly applying RLHF in partially observable settings.
Identifiable Object-Centric Representation Learning via Probabilistic Slot Attention
Authors: Francesco Locatello, Ainkaran Santhirasekaram, Francesca Toni, Ben Glocker, Fabio De Sousa Ribeiro Avinash Kori
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Learning modular object-centric representations is said to be crucial for systematic generalization. Existing methods show promising object-binding capabilities empirically, but theoretical identifiability guarantees remain relatively underdeveloped. Understanding when object-centric representations can theoretically be identified is important for scaling slot-based methods to high-dimensional images with correctness guarantees. To that end, we propose a probabilistic slot-attention algorithm that imposes an aggregate mixture prior over object-centric slot representations, thereby providing slot identifiability guarantees without supervision, up to an equivalence relation. We provide empirical verification of our theoretical identifiability result using both simple 2-dimensional data and high-resolution imaging datasets.