mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Simulation-Free Training of Neural ODEs on Paired Data
Authors: Jaehoon Yoo, Jinwoo Kim, Yeonwoo Cha, Saehoon Kim, Seunghoon Hong Semin Kim
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In this work, we investigate a method for simulation-free training of Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODEs) for learning deterministic mappings between paired data. Despite the analogy of NODEs as continuous-depth residual networks, their application in typical supervised learning tasks has not been popular, mainly due to the large number of function evaluations required by ODE solvers and numerical instability in gradient estimation. To alleviate this problem, we employ the flow matching framework for simulation-free training of NODEs, which directly regresses the parameterized dynamics function to a predefined target velocity field. Contrary to generative tasks, however, we show that applying flow matching directly between paired data can often lead to an ill-defined flow that breaks the coupling of the data pairs (e.g., due to crossing trajectories). We propose a simple extension that applies flow matching in the embedding space of data pairs, where the embeddings are learned jointly with the dynamic function to ensure the validity of the flow which is also easier to learn. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on both regression and classification tasks, where our method outperforms existing NODEs with a significantly lower number of function evaluations. The code is available at https://github.com/seminkim/simulation-free-node.
Infusing Synthetic Data with Real-World Patterns for Zero-Shot Material State Segmentation
Authors: Jolina Yining Li, Manuel S. Drehwald, Alan Aspuru-Guzik Sagi Eppel
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Visual recognition of materials and their states is essential for understanding the physical world, from identifying wet regions on surfaces or stains on fabrics to detecting infected areas or minerals in rocks. Collecting data that captures this vast variability is complex due to the scattered and gradual nature of material states. Manually annotating real-world images is constrained by cost and precision, while synthetic data, although accurate and inexpensive, lacks real-world diversity. This work aims to bridge this gap by infusing patterns automatically extracted from real-world images into synthetic data. Hence, patterns collected from natural images are used to generate and map materials into synthetic scenes. This unsupervised approach captures the complexity of the real world while maintaining the precision and scalability of synthetic data. We also present the first comprehensive benchmark for zero-shot material state segmentation, utilizing real-world images across a diverse range of domains, including food, soils, construction, plants, liquids, and more, each appears in various states such as wet, dry, infected, cooked, burned, and many others. The annotation includes partial similarity between regions with similar but not identical materials and hard segmentation of only identical material states. This benchmark eluded top foundation models, exposing the limitations of existing data collection methods. Meanwhile, nets trained on the infused data performed significantly better on this and related tasks. The dataset, code, and trained model are publicly available. We also share 300,000 extracted textures and SVBRDF/PBR materials to facilitate future datasets generation.
ETO:Efficient Transformer-based Local Feature Matching by Organizing Multiple Homography Hypotheses
Authors: Guofeng Zhang, Guanglin Li, Yijin Li, Xinyang Liu, Zhaoyang Huang, Hujun Bao Junjie Ni
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We tackle the efficiency problem of learning local feature matching.Recent advancements have given rise to purely CNN-based and transformer-based approaches, each augmented with deep learning techniques. While CNN-based methods often excel in matching speed, transformer-based methods tend to provide more accurate matches. We propose an efficient transformer-based network architecture for local feature matching.This technique is built on constructing multiple homography hypotheses to approximate the continuous correspondence in the real world and uni-directional cross-attention to accelerate the refinement. On the YFCC100M dataset, our matching accuracy is competitive with LoFTR, a state-of-the-art transformer-based architecture, while the inference speed is boosted to 4 times, even outperforming the CNN-based methods.Comprehensive evaluations on other open datasets such as Megadepth, ScanNet, and HPatches demonstrate our method's efficacy, highlighting its potential to significantly enhance a wide array of downstream applications.
SemCoder: Training Code Language Models with Comprehensive Semantics Reasoning
Authors: Jinjun Peng, Marcus J. Min, Gail Kaiser, Junfeng Yang, Baishakhi Ray Yangruibo Ding
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Code Large Language Models (Code LLMs) have excelled at tasks like code completion but often miss deeper semantics such as execution effects and dynamic states. This paper aims to bridge the gap between Code LLMs' reliance on static text data and the need for semantic understanding for complex tasks like debugging and program repair. We introduce a novel strategy, monologue reasoning, to train Code LLMs to reason comprehensive semantics, encompassing high-level functional descriptions, local execution effects of individual statements, and overall input/output behavior, thereby linking static code text with dynamic execution states.We begin by collecting PyX, a clean Python corpus of fully executable code samples with functional descriptions and test cases. We propose training Code LLMs not only to write code but also to understand code semantics by reasoning about key properties, constraints, and execution behaviors using natural language, mimicking human verbal debugging, i.e., rubber-duck debugging. This approach led to the development of SemCoder, a Code LLM with only 6.7B parameters, which shows competitive performance with GPT-3.5-turbo on code generation and execution reasoning tasks. SemCoder achieves 79.3% on HumanEval (GPT-3.5-turbo: 76.8%), 63.6% on CRUXEval-I (GPT-3.5-turbo: 50.3%), and 63.9% on CRUXEval-O (GPT-3.5-turbo: 59.0%). We also study the effectiveness of SemCoder's monologue-style execution reasoning compared to concrete scratchpad reasoning, showing that our approach integrates semantics from multiple dimensions more smoothly. Finally, we demonstrate the potential of applying learned semantics to improve Code LLMs' debugging and self-refining capabilities. Our data, code, and models are available at: https://github.com/ARiSE-Lab/SemCoder.
On the Limitations of Fractal Dimension as a Measure of Generalization
Authors: Inés García-Redondo, Qiquan Wang, Michael M. Bronstein, Anthea Monod Charlie B. Tan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Bounding and predicting the generalization gap of overparameterized neural networks remains a central open problem in theoretical machine learning. There is a recent and growing body of literature that proposes the framework of fractals to model optimization trajectories of neural networks, motivating generalization bounds and measures based on the fractal dimension of the trajectory. Notably, the persistent homology dimension has been proposed to correlate with the generalization gap. This paper performs an empirical evaluation of these persistent homology-based generalization measures, with an in-depth statistical analysis. Our study reveals confounding effects in the observed correlation between generalization and topological measures due to the variation of hyperparameters. We also observe that fractal dimension fails to predict generalization of models trained from poor initializations. We lastly reveal the intriguing manifestation of model-wise double descent in these topological generalization measures. Our work forms a basis for a deeper investigation of the causal relationships between fractal geometry, topological data analysis, and neural network optimization.
ColJailBreak: Collaborative Generation and Editing for Jailbreaking Text-to-Image Deep Generation
Authors: Shanmin Pang, Qi Guo, Tianyu Wei, Qing Guo Yizhuo Ma
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The commercial text-to-image deep generation models (e.g. DALL·E) can produce high-quality images based on input language descriptions. These models incorporate a black-box safety filter to prevent the generation of unsafe or unethical content, such as violent, criminal, or hateful imagery. Recent jailbreaking methods generate adversarial prompts capable of bypassing safety filters and producing unsafe content, exposing vulnerabilities in influential commercial models. However, once these adversarial prompts are identified, the safety filter can be updated to prevent the generation of unsafe images. In this work, we propose an effective, simple, and difficult-to-detect jailbreaking solution: generating safe content initially with normal text prompts and then editing the generations to embed unsafe content. The intuition behind this idea is that the deep generation model cannot reject safe generation with normal text prompts, while the editing models focus on modifying the local regions of images and do not involve a safety strategy. However, implementing such a solution is non-trivial, and we need to overcome several challenges: how to automatically confirm the normal prompt to replace the unsafe prompts, and how to effectively perform editable replacement and naturally generate unsafe content. In this work, we propose the collaborative generation and editing for jailbreaking text-to-image deep generation (ColJailBreak), which comprises three key components: adaptive normal safe substitution, inpainting-driven injection of unsafe content, and contrastive language-image-guided collaborative optimization. We validate our method on three datasets and compare it to two baseline methods. Our method could generate unsafe content through two commercial deep generation models including GPT-4 and DALL·E 2.
DI-MaskDINO: A Joint Object Detection and Instance Segmentation Model
Authors: Xianghong Li, Tao Xiang, Jifeng Dai Zhixiong Nan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper is motivated by an interesting phenomenon: the performance of object detection lags behind that of instance segmentation (i.e., performance imbalance) when investigating the intermediate results from the beginning transformer decoder layer of MaskDINO (i.e., the SOTA model for joint detection and segmentation). This phenomenon inspires us to think about a question: will the performance imbalance at the beginning layer of transformer decoder constrain the upper bound of the final performance? With this question in mind, we further conduct qualitative and quantitative pre-experiments, which validate the negative impact of detection-segmentation imbalance issue on the model performance. To address this issue, this paper proposes DI-MaskDINO model, the core idea of which is to improve the final performance by alleviating the detection-segmentation imbalance. DI-MaskDINO is implemented by configuring our proposed De-Imbalance (DI) module and Balance-Aware Tokens Optimization (BATO) module to MaskDINO. DI is responsible for generating balance-aware query, and BATO uses the balance-aware query to guide the optimization of the initial feature tokens. The balance-aware query and optimized feature tokens are respectively taken as the Query and Key&Value of transformer decoder to perform joint object detection and instance segmentation. DI-MaskDINO outperforms existing joint object detection and instance segmentation models on COCO and BDD100K benchmarks, achieving +1.2 $AP^{box}$ and +0.9 $AP^{mask}$ improvements compared to SOTA joint detection and segmentation model MaskDINO. In addition, DI-MaskDINO also obtains +1.0 $AP^{box}$ improvement compared to SOTA object detection model DINO and +3.0 $AP^{mask}$ improvement compared to SOTA segmentation model Mask2Former.
Leveraging partial stragglers within gradient coding
Authors: Ruoyu Meng, Vrinda S. Girimaji Aditya Ramamoorthy
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Within distributed learning, workers typically compute gradients on their assigned dataset chunks and send them to the parameter server (PS), which aggregates them to compute either an exact or approximate version of $\nabla L$ (gradient of the loss function $L$). However, in large-scale clusters, many workers are slower than their promised speed or even failure-prone. A gradient coding solution introduces redundancy within the assignment of chunks to the workers and uses coding theoretic ideas to allow the PS to recover $\nabla L$ (exactly or approximately), even in the presence of stragglers. Unfortunately, most existing gradient coding protocols are inefficient from a computation perspective as they coarsely classify workers as operational or failed; the potentially valuable work performed by slow workers (partial stragglers) is ignored. In this work, we present novel gradient coding protocols that judiciously leverage the work performed by partial stragglers. Our protocols are efficient from a computation and communication perspective and numerically stable. For an important class of chunk assignments, we present efficient algorithms for optimizing the relative ordering of chunks within the workers; this ordering affects the overall execution time. For exact gradient reconstruction, our protocol is around $2\times$ faster than the original class of protocols and for approximate gradient reconstruction, the mean-squared-error of our reconstructed gradient is several orders of magnitude better.
Multiclass Transductive Online Learning
Authors: Vinod Raman, Amirreza Shaeri, Unqiue Subedi Steve Hanneke
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We consider the problem of multiclass transductive online learning when the number of labels can be unbounded. Previous works by  Ben-David et al. [1997] and Hanneke et al. [2024] only consider the case of binary and finite label spaces respectively.  The latter work determined that their techniques fail to extend to the case of unbounded label spaces, and they pose the question of characterizing the optimal mistake bound for unbounded label spaces. We answer this question, by showing that a new dimension, termed the Level-constrained Littlestone dimension, characterizes online learnability in this setting. Along the way, we show that the trichotomy of possible minimax rates established by Hanneke et al. [2024] for finite label spaces in the realizable setting continues to hold even when the label space is unbounded. In particular, if the learner plays for $T \in \mathbb{N}$ rounds, its minimax expected number of mistakes can only grow like $\Theta(T)$, $\Theta(\log T)$, or $\Theta(1)$. To prove this result, we give another combinatorial dimension, termed the Level-constrained Branching dimension, and show that its finiteness characterizes constant minimax expected mistake-bounds. The trichotomy is then determined by a combination of the Level-constrained Littlestone and Branching dimensions. Quantitatively, our upper bounds improve upon existing multiclass upper bounds in Hanneke et al. [2024] by removing the dependence on the label set size. In doing so, we explicitly construct learning algorithms that can handle extremely large or unbounded label spaces. A key component of our algorithm is a new notion of shattering that exploits the sequential nature of transductive online learning. Finally, we complete our results by proving expected regret bounds in the agnostic setting, extending the result of Hanneke et al. [2024].
Generating Code World Models with Large Language Models Guided by Monte Carlo Tree Search
Authors: Matteo Merler, Minttu Alakuijala, Pekka Marttinen Nicola Dainese
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In this work we consider Code World Models, world models generated by a Large Language Model (LLM) in the form of Python code for model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL). Calling code instead of LLMs for planning has potential to be more precise, reliable, interpretable, and extremely efficient.However, writing appropriate Code World Models requires the ability to understand complex instructions, to generate exact code with non-trivial logic and to self-debug a long program with feedback from unit tests and environment trajectories. To address these challenges, we propose Generate, Improve and Fix with Monte Carlo Tree Search (GIF-MCTS), a new code generation strategy for LLMs. To test our approach in an offline RL setting, we introduce the Code World Models Benchmark (CWMB), a suite of program synthesis and planning tasks comprised of 18 diverse RL environments paired with corresponding textual descriptions and curated trajectories. GIF-MCTS surpasses all baselines on the CWMB and two other benchmarks, and we show that the Code World Models synthesized with it can be successfully used for planning, resulting in model-based RL agents with greatly improved sample efficiency and inference speed.
Localizing Memorization in SSL Vision Encoders
Authors: Adam Dziedzic, Michael Backes, Franziska Boenisch Wenhao Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent work on studying memorization in self-supervised learning (SSL) suggests that even though SSL encoders are trained on millions of images, they still memorize individual data points. While effort has been put into characterizing the memorized data and linking encoder memorization to downstream utility, little is known about where the memorization happens inside SSL encoders. To close this gap, we propose two metrics for localizing memorization in SSL encoders on a per-layer (LayerMem) and per-unit basis (UnitMem). Our localization methods are independent of the downstream task, do not require any label information, and can be performed in a forward pass. By localizing memorization in various encoder architectures (convolutional and transformer-based) trained on diverse datasets with contrastive and non-contrastive SSL frameworks, we find that (1) while SSL memorization increases with layer depth, highly memorizing units are distributed across the entire encoder, (2) a significant fraction of units in SSL encoders experiences surprisingly high memorization of individual data points, which is in contrast to models trained under supervision, (3) atypical (or outlier) data points cause much higher layer and unit memorization than standard data points, and (4) in vision transformers, most memorization happens in the fully-connected layers. Finally, we show that localizing memorization in SSL has the potential to improve fine-tuning and to inform pruning strategies.
LibAMM: Empirical Insights into Approximate Computing for Accelerating Matrix Multiplication
Authors: Wenchao Jiang, Shuhao Zhang Xianzhi Zeng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Matrix multiplication (MM) is pivotal in fields from deep learning to scientific computing, driving the quest for improved computational efficiency. Accelerating MM encompasses strategies like complexity reduction, parallel and distributed computing, hardware acceleration, and approximate computing techniques, namely AMM algorithms. Amidst growing concerns over the resource demands of large language models (LLMs), AMM has garnered renewed focus. However, understanding the nuances that govern AMM’s effectiveness remains incomplete. This study delves into AMM by examining algorithmic strategies, operational specifics, dataset characteristics, and their application in real-world tasks. Through comprehensive testing across diverse datasets and scenarios, we analyze how these factors affect AMM’s performance, uncovering that the selection of AMM approaches significantly influences the balance between efficiency and accuracy, with factors like memory access playing a pivotal role. Additionally, dataset attributes are shown to be vital for the success of AMM in applications. Our results advocate for tailored algorithmic approaches and careful strategy selection to enhance AMM’s effectiveness. To aid in the practical application and ongoing research of AMM, we introduce LibAMM —a toolkit offering a wide range of AMM algorithms, benchmarks, and tools for experiment management. LibAMM aims to facilitate research and application in AMM, guiding future developments towards more adaptive and context-aware computational solutions.
Opponent Modeling based on Subgoal Inference
Authors: Jiechuan Jiang, Zongqing Lu Xiaopeng Yu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: When an agent is in a multi-agent environment, it may face previously unseen opponents, and it is a challenge to cooperate with other agents to accomplish the task together or to maximize its own rewards. Most opponent modeling methods deal with the non-stationarity caused by unknown opponent policies via predicting the opponent’s actions. However, focusing on the opponent’s action is shortsighted, which also constrains the adaptability to unknown opponents in complex tasks. In this paper, we propose opponent modeling based on subgoal inference, which infers the opponent’s subgoals through historical trajectories. As subgoals are likely to be shared by different opponent policies, predicting subgoals can yield better generalization to unknown opponents. Additionally, we design two subgoal selection modes for cooperative games and general-sum games respectively. Empirically, we show that our method achieves more effective adaptation than existing methods in a variety of tasks.
Scaling Laws in Linear Regression: Compute, Parameters, and Data
Authors: Jingfeng Wu, Sham M. Kakade, Peter L. Bartlett, Jason D. Lee Licong Lin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Empirically, large-scale deep learning models often satisfy a neural scaling law: the test error of the trained model improves polynomially as the model size and data size grow. However, conventional wisdom suggests the test error consists of approximation, bias, and variance errors, where the variance error increases with model size. This disagrees with the general form of neural scaling laws, which predict that increasing model size monotonically improves performance.We study the theory of scaling laws in an infinite dimensional linear regression setup. Specifically, we consider a model with $M$ parameters as a linear function of sketched covariates. The model is trained by one-pass stochastic gradient descent (SGD) using $N$ data. Assuming the optimal parameter satisfies a Gaussian prior and the data covariance matrix has a power-law spectrum of degree $a>1$, we show that the reducible part of the test error is $\Theta(M^{-(a-1)} + N^{-(a-1)/a})$. The variance error, which increases with $M$, is dominated by the other errors due to the implicit regularization of SGD, thus disappearing from the bound. Our theory is consistent with the empirical neural scaling laws and verified by numerical simulation.
Cherry on Top: Parameter Heterogeneity and Quantization in Large Language Models
Authors: Qianle Wang Wanyun Cui
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper reveals the phenomenon of parameter heterogeneity in large language models (LLMs). We find that a small subset of ``cherry'' parameters exhibit a disproportionately large influence on model performance, while the vast majority of parameters have minimal impact. This heterogeneity is found to be prevalent across different model families, scales, and types. Motivated by this observation, we propose CherryQ, a novel quantization method that unifies the optimization of mixed-precision parameters. CherryQ identifies and preserves the critical cherry parameters in high precision while aggressively quantizing the remaining parameters to low precision. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CherryQ. CherryQ outperforms existing quantization approaches in terms of perplexity and downstream task performance. Notably, our 3-bit quantized Vicuna-1.5 exhibits competitive performance compared to their 16-bit counterparts. These findings highlight the potential of CherryQ for enabling efficient deployment of LLMs by taking advantage of parameter heterogeneity.
How Do Large Language Models Acquire Factual Knowledge During Pretraining?
Authors: Jinho Park, Seonghyeon Ye, Sohee Yang, Youngkyung Seo, Du-Seong Chang, Minjoon Seo Hoyeon Chang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Despite the recent observation that large language models (LLMs) can store substantial factual knowledge, there is a limited understanding of the mechanisms of how they acquire factual knowledge through pretraining. This work addresses this gap by studying how LLMs acquire factual knowledge during pretraining. The findings reveal several important insights into the dynamics of factual knowledge acquisition during pretraining. First, counterintuitively, we observe that pretraining on more data shows no significant improvement in the model's capability to acquire and maintain factual knowledge. Next, LLMs undergo forgetting of memorization and generalization of factual knowledge, and LLMs trained with duplicated training data exhibit faster forgetting. Third, training LLMs with larger batch sizes can enhance the models' robustness to forgetting. Overall, our observations suggest that factual knowledge acquisition in LLM pretraining occurs by progressively increasing the probability of factual knowledge presented in the pretraining data at each step. However, this increase is diluted by subsequent forgetting. Based on this interpretation, we demonstrate that we can provide plausible explanations on recently observed behaviors of LLMs, such as the poor performance of LLMs on long-tail knowledge and the benefits of deduplicating the pretraining corpus.
YouDream: Generating Anatomically Controllable Consistent Text-to-3D Animals
Authors: Oindrila Saha, Alan C. Bovik Sandeep Mishra
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: 3D generation guided by text-to-image diffusion models enables the creation of visually compelling assets. However previous methods explore generation based on image or text. The boundaries of creativity are limited by what can be expressed through words or the images that can be sourced. We present YouDream, a method to generate high-quality anatomically controllable animals. YouDream is guided using a text-to-image diffusion model controlled by 2D views of a 3D pose prior. Our method is capable of generating novel imaginary animals that previous text-to-3D generative methods are unable to create. Additionally, our method can preserve anatomic consistency in the generated animals, an area where prior approaches often struggle. Moreover, we design a fully automated pipeline for generating commonly observed animals. To circumvent the need for human intervention to create a 3D pose, we propose a multi-agent LLM that adapts poses from a limited library of animal 3D poses to represent the desired animal. A user study conducted on the outcomes of YouDream demonstrates the preference of the animal models generated by our method over others. Visualizations and code are available at https://youdream3d.github.io/.
Online Consistency of the Nearest Neighbor Rule
Authors: Geelon So Sanjoy Dasgupta
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In the realizable online setting, a learner is tasked with making predictions for a stream of instances, where the correct answer is revealed after each prediction. A learning rule is online consistent if its mistake rate eventually vanishes. The nearest neighbor rule is fundamental prediction strategy, but it is only known to be consistent under strong statistical or geometric assumptions: the instances come i.i.d. or the label classes are well-separated. We prove online consistency for all measurable functions in doubling metric spaces under the mild assumption that instances are generated by a process that is uniformly absolutely continuous with respect to an underlying finite, upper doubling measure.
Constrained Binary Decision Making
Authors: Vojtěch Franc Daniel Průša
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Binary statistical decision making involves choosing between two states based on statistical evidence. The optimal decision strategy is typically formulated through a constrained optimization problem, where both the objective and constraints are expressed as integrals involving two Lebesgue measurable functions, one of which represents the strategy being optimized. In this work, we present a comprehensive formulation of the binary decision making problem and provide a detailed characterization of the optimal solution. Our framework encompasses a wide range of well-known and recently proposed decision making problems as specific cases. We demonstrate how our generic approach can be used to derive the optimal decision strategies for these diverse instances. Our results offer a robust mathematical tool that simplifies the process of solving both existing and novel formulations of binary decision making problems which are in the core of many Machine Learning algorithms.
Found in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts Better via Plug-and-Play Positional Encoding
Authors: Runjin Chen, Shiwei Liu, Zhewei Yao, Olatunji Ruwase, Beidi Chen, Xiaoxia Wu, Zhangyang Wang Zhenyu Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper aims to overcome the ``lost-in-the-middle'' challenge of large language models (LLMs). While recent advancements have successfully enabled LLMs to perform stable language modeling with up to 4 million tokens, the persistent difficulty faced by most LLMs in identifying relevant information situated in the middle of the context has not been adequately tackled. To address this problem, this paper introduces Multi-scale Positional Encoding (Ms-PoE) which is a simple yet effective plug-and-play approach to enhance the capacity of LLMs to handle the relevant information located in the middle of the context, without fine-tuning or introducing any additional overhead. Ms-PoE leverages the position indice rescaling to relieve the long-term decay effect introduced by RoPE, while meticulously assigning distinct scaling ratios to different attention heads to preserve essential knowledge learned during the pre-training step, forming a multi-scale context fusion from short to long distance. Extensive experiments with a wide range of LLMs demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. Notably, Ms-PoE achieves an average accuracy gain of up to 3.8 on the Zero-SCROLLS benchmark over the original LLMs. Code will be made public upon acceptence.
HW-GPT-Bench: Hardware-Aware Architecture Benchmark for Language Models
Authors: Arber Zela, Benedikt Staffler, Aaron Klein, Lennart Purucker, Jörg K. H. Franke, Frank Hutter Rhea Sanjay Sukthanker
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: The increasing size of language models necessitates a thorough analysis across multiple dimensions to assess trade-offs among crucial hardware metrics such as latency, energy consumption, GPU memory usage, and performance. Identifying optimal model configurations under specific hardware constraints is becoming essential but remains challenging due to the computational load of exhaustive training and evaluation on multiple devices. To address this, we introduce HW-GPT-Bench, a hardware-aware benchmark that utilizes surrogate predictions to approximate various hardware metrics across 13 devices of architectures in the GPT-2 family, with architectures containing up to 1.55B parameters. Our surrogates, via calibrated predictions and reliable uncertainty estimates, faithfully model the heteroscedastic noise inherent in the energy and latency measurements. To estimate perplexity, we employ weight-sharing techniques from Neural Architecture Search (NAS), inheriting pretrained weights from the largest GPT-2 model. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of HW-GPT-Bench by simulating optimization trajectories of various multi-objective optimization algorithms in just a few seconds.
RA-PbRL: Provably Efficient Risk-Aware Preference-Based Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Jose Efraim Aguilar Escamill, Weyl Lu, Huazheng Wang Yujie Zhao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has recently surged in popularity, particularly for aligning large language models and other AI systems with human intentions. At its core, RLHF can be viewed as a specialized instance of Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL), where the preferences specifically originate from human judgments rather than arbitrary evaluators. Despite this connection, most existing approaches in both RLHF and PbRL primarily focus on optimizing a mean reward objective, neglecting scenarios that necessitate risk-awareness, such as AI safety, healthcare, and autonomous driving. These scenarios often operate under a one-episode-reward setting, which makes conventional risk-sensitive objectives inapplicable. To address this, we explore and prove the applicability of two risk-aware objectives to PbRL : nested and static quantile risk objectives. We also introduce Risk-AwarePbRL (RA-PbRL), an algorithm designed to optimize both nested and static objectives. Additionally, we provide a theoretical analysis of the regret upper bounds, demonstrating that they are sublinear with respect to the number of episodes, and present empirical results to support our findings. Our code is available in https://github.com/aguilarjose11/PbRLNeurips.
Inferring Neural Signed Distance Functions by Overfitting on Single Noisy Point Clouds through Finetuning Data-Driven based Priors
Authors: Yu-Shen Liu, Zhizhong Han Chao Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: It is important to estimate an accurate signed distance function (SDF) from a point cloud in many computer vision applications. The latest methods learn neural SDFs using either a data-driven based or an overfitting-based strategy. However, these two kinds of methods are with either poor generalization or slow convergence, which limits their capability under challenging scenarios like highly noisy point clouds. To resolve this issue, we propose a method to prompt pros of both data-driven based and overfitting-based methods for better generalization, faster inference, and higher accuracy in learning neural SDFs. We introduce a novel statistical reasoning algorithm in local regions which is able to finetune data-driven based priors without signed distance supervision, clean point cloud, or point normals. This helps our method start with a good initialization, and converge to a minimum in a much faster way. Our numerical and visual comparisons with the stat-of-the-art methods show our superiority over these methods in surface reconstruction and point cloud denoising on widely used shape and scene benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/chenchao15/LocalN2NM.
Flipped Classroom: Aligning Teacher Attention with Student in Generalized Category Discovery
Authors: Wenbin An, Jiahao Wang, Yan Chen, Feng Tian, Mengmeng Wang, Guang Dai, Qianying Wang, Jingdong Wang Haonan Lin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent advancements have shown promise in applying traditional Semi-Supervised Learning strategies to the task of Generalized Category Discovery (GCD). Typically, this involves a teacher-student framework in which the teacher imparts knowledge to the student to classify categories, even in the absence of explicit labels. Nevertheless, GCD presents unique challenges, particularly the absence of priors for new classes, which can lead to the teacher's misguidance and unsynchronized learning with the student, culminating in suboptimal outcomes. In our work, we delve into why traditional teacher-student designs falter in generalized category discovery as compared to their success in closed-world semi-supervised learning. We identify inconsistent pattern learning as the crux of this issue and introduce FlipClass—a method that dynamically updates the teacher to align with the student's attention, instead of maintaining a static teacher reference. Our teacher-attention-update strategy refines the teacher's focus based on student feedback, promoting consistent pattern recognition and synchronized learning across old and new classes. Extensive experiments on a spectrum of benchmarks affirm that FlipClass significantly surpasses contemporary GCD methods, establishing new standards for the field.
A Canonicalization Perspective on Invariant and Equivariant Learning
Authors: Yifei Wang, Derek Lim, Stefanie Jegelka, Yisen Wang George Ma
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In many applications, we desire neural networks to exhibit invariance or equivariance to certain groups due to symmetries inherent in the data. Recently, frame-averaging methods emerged to be a unified framework for attaining symmetries efficiently by averaging over input-dependent subsets of the group, i.e., frames. What we currently lack is a principled understanding of the design of frames. In this work, we introduce a canonicalization perspective that provides an essential and complete view of the design of frames. Canonicalization is a classic approach for attaining invariance by mapping inputs to their canonical forms. We show that there exists an inherent connection between frames and canonical forms. Leveraging this connection, we can efficiently compare the complexity of frames as well as determine the optimality of certain frames. Guided by this principle, we design novel frames for eigenvectors that are strictly superior to existing methods --- some are even optimal --- both theoretically and empirically. The reduction to the canonicalization perspective further uncovers equivalences between previous methods. These observations suggest that canonicalization provides a fundamental understanding of existing frame-averaging methods and unifies existing equivariant and invariant learning methods. Code is available at https://github.com/PKU-ML/canonicalization.
TEG-DB: A Comprehensive Dataset and Benchmark of Textual-Edge Graphs
Authors: Zixing Gou, Xiangnan Zhang, Zhongyuan Liu, Sirui Li, Yuntong Hu, Chen Ling, Zheng Zhang, Liang Zhao Zhuofeng Li
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) augment graph structures with natural language descriptions, facilitating detailed depictions of data and their interconnections across various real-world settings. However, existing TAG datasets predominantly feature textual information only at the nodes, with edges typically represented by mere binary or categorical attributes. This lack of rich textual edge annotations significantly limits the exploration of contextual relationships between entities, hindering deeper insights into graph-structured data. To address this gap, we introduce Textual-Edge Graphs Datasets and Benchmark (TEG-DB), a comprehensive and diverse collection of benchmark textual-edge datasets featuring rich textual descriptions on nodes and edges. The TEG-DB datasets are large-scale and encompass a wide range of domains, from citation networks to social networks. In addition, we conduct extensive benchmark experiments on TEG-DB to assess the extent to which current techniques, including pre-trained language models, graph neural networks, and their combinations, can utilize textual node and edge information. Our goal is to elicit advancements in   textual-edge graph research, specifically in developing methodologies that exploit rich textual node and edge descriptions to enhance graph analysis and provide deeper insights into complex real-world networks. The entire TEG-DB project is publicly accessible as an open-source repository on Github, accessible at https://github.com/Zhuofeng-Li/TEG-Benchmark.
Neural Conditional Probability for Uncertainty Quantification
Authors: Karim Lounici, Grégoire Pacreau, Giacomo Turri, Pietro Novelli, Massimiliano Pontil Vladimir R. Kostic
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We introduce Neural Conditional Probability (NCP), an operator-theoretic approach to learning conditional distributions with a focus on statistical inference tasks. NCP can be used to build conditional confidence regions and extract key statistics such as conditional quantiles, mean, and covariance. It offers streamlined learning via a single unconditional training phase, allowing efficient inference without the need for retraining even when conditioning changes. By leveraging the approximation capabilities of neural networks, NCP efficiently handles a wide variety of complex probability distributions. We provide theoretical guarantees that ensure both optimization consistency and statistical accuracy. In experiments, we show that NCP with a 2-hidden-layer network matches or outperforms leading methods. This demonstrates that a a minimalistic architecture with a theoretically grounded loss can achieve competitive results,  even in the face of more complex architectures.
DDR: Exploiting Deep Degradation Response as Flexible Image Descriptor
Authors: Zhangkai Ni, Hanli Wang, Wenhan Yang, Yuyin Zhou, Shiqi Wang Juncheng Wu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Image deep features extracted by pre-trained networks are known to contain rich and informative representations. In this paper, we present Deep Degradation Response (DDR), a method to quantify changes in image deep features under varying degradation conditions. Specifically, our approach facilitates flexible and adaptive degradation, enabling the controlled synthesis of image degradation through text-driven prompts. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the versatility of DDR as an image descriptor, with strong correlations observed with key image attributes such as complexity, colorfulness, sharpness, and overall quality. Moreover, we demonstrate the efficacy of DDR across a spectrum of applications. It excels as a blind image quality assessment metric, outperforming existing methodologies across multiple datasets. Additionally, DDR serves as an effective unsupervised learning objective in image restoration tasks, yielding notable advancements in image deblurring and single-image super-resolution. Our code is available at: https://github.com/eezkni/DDR.
Tree of Attacks: Jailbreaking Black-Box LLMs Automatically
Authors: Manolis Zampetakis, Paul Kassianik, Blaine Nelson, Hyrum Anderson, Yaron Singer, Amin Karbasi Anay Mehrotra
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) display versatile functionality, they continue to generate harmful, biased, and toxic content, as demonstrated by the prevalence of human-designed jailbreaks. In this work, we present Tree of Attacks with Pruning  (TAP), an automated method for generating jailbreaks that only requires black-box access to the target LLM. TAP utilizes an attacker LLM to iteratively refine candidate (attack) prompts until one of the refined prompts jailbreaks the target. In addition, before sending prompts to the target, TAP assesses them and prunes the ones unlikely to result in jailbreaks, reducing the number of queries sent to the target LLM. In empirical evaluations, we observe that TAP generates prompts that jailbreak state-of-the-art LLMs (including GPT4-Turbo and GPT4o) for more than 80% of the prompts. This significantly improves upon the previous state-of-the-art black-box methods for generating jailbreaks while using a smaller number of queries than them. Furthermore, TAP is also capable of jailbreaking LLMs protected by state-of-the-art guardrails, e.g., LlamaGuard.
Repurposing Language Models into Embedding Models: Finding the Compute-Optimal Recipe
Authors: Alicja Ziarko, Bartosz Piotrowski, Wenda Li, Mateja Jamnik, Piotr Miłoś Albert Q. Jiang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Text embeddings are essential for tasks such as document retrieval, clustering, and semantic similarity assessment. In this paper, we study how to contrastively train text embedding models in a compute-optimal fashion, given a suite of pretrained decoder-only language models. Our innovation is an algorithm that produces optimal configurations of model sizes, data quantities, and fine-tuning methods for text-embedding models at different computational budget levels. The resulting recipe, which we obtain through extensive experiments, can be used by practitioners to make informed design choices for their embedding models. Specifically, our findings suggest that full fine-tuning and Low-Rank Adaptation fine-tuning produce optimal models at lower and higher computational budgets respectively.
Diffusion Priors for Variational Likelihood Estimation and Image Denoising
Authors: Shan Tan Jun Cheng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Real-world noise removal is crucial in low-level computer vision. Due to the remarkable generation capabilities of diffusion models, recent attention has shifted towards leveraging diffusion priors for image restoration tasks. However, existing diffusion priors-based methods either consider simple noise types or rely on approximate posterior estimation, limiting their effectiveness in addressing structured and signal-dependent noise commonly found in real-world images. In this paper, we build upon diffusion priors and propose adaptive likelihood estimation and MAP inference during the reverse diffusion process to tackle real-world noise. We introduce an independent, non-identically distributed likelihood combined with the noise precision (inverse variance) prior and dynamically infer the precision posterior using variational Bayes during the generation process. Meanwhile, we rectify the estimated noise variance through local Gaussian convolution. The final denoised image is obtained by propagating intermediate MAP solutions that balance the updated likelihood and diffusion prior. Additionally, we explore the local diffusion prior inherent in low-resolution diffusion models, enabling direct handling of high-resolution noisy images. Extensive experiments and analyses on diverse real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/HUST-Tan/DiffusionVI.