mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Adaptive Domain Learning for Cross-domain Image Denoising
Authors: Chenyang Qi, Ka Lung Law, Hao Fu, Chenyang Lei, Qifeng Chen Zian Qian
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Different camera sensors have different noise patterns, and thus an image denoising model trained on one sensor often does not generalize well to a different sensor. One plausible solution is to collect a large dataset for each sensor for training or fine-tuning, which is inevitably time-consuming. To address this cross-domain challenge, we present a novel adaptive domain learning (ADL) scheme for cross-domain RAW image denoising by utilizing existing data from different sensors (source domain) plus a small amount of data from the new sensor (target domain). The ADL training scheme automatically removes the data in the source domain that are harmful to fine-tuning a model for the target domain (some data are harmful as adding them during training lowers the performance due to domain gaps). Also, we introduce a modulation module to adopt sensor-specific information (sensor type and ISO) to understand input data for image denoising. We conduct extensive experiments on public datasets with various smartphone and DSLR cameras, which show our proposed model outperforms prior work on cross-domain image denoising, given a small amount of image data from the target domain sensor.
On the Inductive Bias of Stacking Towards Improving Reasoning
Authors: Stefani Karp, Shankar Krishnan, Sobhan Miryoosefi, Sashank J. Reddi, Sanjiv Kumar Nikunj Saunshi
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Given the increasing scale of model sizes, efficient training strategies like gradual stacking have garnered interest. Stacking enables efficient training by gradually growing the depth of a model in stages and using layers from a smaller model in an earlier stage to initialize the next stage. Although efficient for training, the model biases induced by such growing approaches are largely unexplored. In this work, we examine this fundamental aspect of gradual stacking, going beyond its efficiency benefits. We propose a variant of gradual stacking called MIDAS that can speed up language model training by up to 40\%. Furthermore we discover an intriguing phenomenon: MIDAS is not only training-efficient but surprisingly also has an inductive bias towards improving downstream tasks, especially tasks that require reasoning abilities like reading comprehension and math problems, despite having similar or slightly worse perplexity compared to baseline training. To further analyze this inductive bias, we construct {\em reasoning primitives} – simple synthetic tasks that are building blocks for reasoning – and find that a model pretrained with stacking is significantly better than standard pretraining on these primitives, with and without fine-tuning. This provides stronger and more robust evidence for this inductive bias towards reasoning. These findings of training efficiency and inductive bias towards reasoning are verified at 1B, 2B and 8B parameter language models. Finally, we conjecture the underlying reason for this inductive bias by exploring the connection of stacking to looped models and provide strong supporting empirical analysis.
All-in-One Image Coding for Joint Human-Machine Vision with Multi-Path Aggregation
Authors: Peiyao Guo, Ming Lu, Zhan Ma Xu Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Image coding for multi-task applications, catering to both human perception and machine vision, has been extensively investigated. Existing methods often rely on multiple task-specific encoder-decoder pairs, leading to high overhead of parameter and bitrate usage, or face challenges in multi-objective optimization under a unified representation, failing to achieve both performance and efficiency. To this end, we propose Multi-Path Aggregation (MPA) integrated into existing coding models for joint human-machine vision, unifying the feature representation with an all-in-one architecture. MPA employs a predictor to allocate latent features among task-specific paths based on feature importance varied across tasks, maximizing the utility of shared features while preserving task-specific features for subsequent refinement. Leveraging feature correlations, we develop a two-stage optimization strategy to alleviate multi-task performance degradation. Upon the reuse of shared features, as low as 1.89\% parameters are further augmented and fine-tuned for a specific task, which completely avoids extensive optimization of the entire model. Experimental results show that MPA achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods in both task-specific and multi-objective optimization across human viewing and machine analysis tasks. Moreover, our all-in-one design supports seamless transitions between human- and machine-oriented reconstruction, enabling task-controllable interpretation without altering the unified model. Code is available at https://github.com/NJUVISION/MPA.
FouRA: Fourier Low-Rank Adaptation
Authors: Shreya Kadambi, Nilesh Prasad Pandey, Kartikeya Bhardwaj, Viswanath Ganapathy, Sweta Priyadarshi, Risheek Garrepalli, Rafael Esteves, Munawar Hayat, Fatih Porikli Shubhankar Borse
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: While Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has proven beneficial for efficiently fine-tuning large models, LoRA fine-tuned text-to-image diffusion models lack diversity in the generated images, as the model tends to copy data from the observed training samples. This effect becomes more pronounced at higher values of adapter strength and for adapters with higher ranks which are fine-tuned on smaller datasets. To address these challenges, we present FouRA, a novel low-rank method that learns projections in the Fourier domain along with learning a flexible input-dependent adapter rank selection strategy. Through extensive experiments and analysis, we show that FouRA successfully solves the problems related to data copying and distribution collapse while significantly improving the generated image quality. We demonstrate that FouRA enhances the generalization of fine-tuned models thanks to its adaptive rank selection. We further show that the learned projections in the frequency domain are decorrelated and prove effective when merging multiple adapters. While FouRA is motivated for vision tasks, we also demonstrate its merits for language tasks on commonsense reasoning and GLUE benchmarks.
Learning to Assist Humans without Inferring Rewards
Authors: Evan Ellis, Sergey Levine, Benjamin Eysenbach, Anca Dragan Vivek Myers
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Assistive agents should make humans' lives easier. Classically, such assistance is studied through the lens of inverse reinforcement learning, where an assistive agent (e.g., a chatbot, a robot) infers a human's intention and then selects actions to help the human reach that goal. This approach requires inferring intentions, which can be difficult in high-dimensional settings. We build upon prior work that studies assistance through the lens of empowerment: an assistive agent aims to maximize the influence of the human's actions such that they exert a greater control over the environmental outcomes and can solve tasks in fewer steps. We lift the major limitation of prior work in this area—scalability to high-dimensional settings—with contrastive successor representations. We formally prove that these representations estimate a similar notion of empowerment to that studied by prior work and provide a ready-made mechanism for optimizing it. Empirically, our proposed method outperforms prior methods on synthetic benchmarks, and scales to Overcooked, a cooperative game setting. Theoretically, our work connects ideas from information theory, neuroscience, and reinforcement learning, and charts a path for representations to play a critical role in solving assistive problems. Our code is available at https://github.com/vivekmyers/empowermentsuccessorrepresentations.
Are Your Models Still Fair? Fairness Attacks on Graph Neural Networks via Node Injections
Authors: Hong Huang, Yongkang Zhou, Jiping Zhang, Nuo Chen, Hai Jin Zihan Luo
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Despite the remarkable capabilities demonstrated by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in graph-related tasks, recent research has revealed the fairness vulnerabilities in GNNs when facing malicious adversarial attacks. However, all existing fairness attacks require manipulating the connectivity between existing nodes, which may be prohibited in reality. To this end, we introduce a Node Injection-based Fairness Attack (NIFA), exploring the vulnerabilities of GNN fairness in such a more realistic setting. In detail, NIFA first designs two insightful principles for node injection operations, namely the uncertainty-maximization principle and homophily-increase principle, and then optimizes injected nodes’ feature matrix to further ensure the effectiveness of fairness attacks. Comprehensive experiments on three real-world datasets consistently demonstrate that NIFA can significantly undermine the fairness of mainstream GNNs, even including fairness-aware GNNs, by injecting merely 1% of nodes. We sincerely hope that our work can stimulate increasing attention from researchers on the vulnerability of GNN fairness, and encourage the development of corresponding defense mechanisms. Our code and data are released at: https://github.com/CGCL-codes/NIFA.
Trace is the Next AutoDiff: Generative Optimization with Rich Feedback, Execution Traces, and LLMs
Authors: Allen Nie, Adith Swaminathan Ching-An Cheng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We study a class of optimization problems motivated by automating the design and update of AI systems like coding assistants, robots, and copilots. AutoDiff frameworks, like PyTorch, enable efficient end-to-end optimization of differentiable systems. However, general computational workflows can be non-differentiable and involve rich feedback (e.g. console output or user’s responses), heterogeneous parameters (e.g. prompts, codes), and intricate objectives (beyond maximizing a score). We investigate end-to-end generative optimization – using generative models such as LLMs within the optimizer for automatic updating of general computational workflows. We discover that workflow execution traces are akin to back-propagated gradients in AutoDiff and can provide key information to interpret feedback for efficient optimization. Formally, we frame a new mathematical setup, Optimization with Trace Oracle (OPTO). In OPTO, an optimizer receives an execution trace along with feedback on the computed output and updates parameters iteratively. We provide a Python library, Trace, that efficiently converts a workflow optimization problem into an OPTO instance using PyTorch-like syntax. Using Trace, we develop a general LLM-based generative optimizer called OptoPrime. In empirical studies, we find that OptoPrime is capable of first-order numerical optimization, prompt optimization, hyper-parameter tuning, robot controller design, code debugging, etc., and is often competitive with specialized optimizers for each domain. We envision Trace as an open research platform for devising novel generative optimizers and developing the next generation of interactive learning agents. Website: https://microsoft.github.io/Trace/.
Integrating Deep Metric Learning with Coreset for Active Learning in 3D Segmentation
Authors: Zukang Yang, Andrew Choi, Jungseock Joo, Fabien Scalzo, Yizhou Sun Arvind Murari Vepa
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Deep learning has seen remarkable advancements in machine learning, yet it often demands extensive annotated data. Tasks like 3D semantic segmentation impose a substantial annotation burden, especially in domains like medicine, where expert annotations drive up the cost. Active learning (AL) holds great potential to alleviate this annotation burden in 3D medical segmentation. The majority of existing AL methods, however, are not tailored to the medical domain. While weakly-supervised methods have been explored to reduce annotation burden, the fusion of AL with weak supervision remains unexplored, despite its potential to significantly reduce annotation costs. Additionally, there is little focus on slice-based AL for 3D segmentation, which can also significantly reduce costs in comparison to conventional volume-based AL. This paper introduces a novel metric learning method for Coreset to perform slice-based active learning in 3D medical segmentation. By merging contrastive learning with inherent data groupings in medical imaging, we learn a metric that emphasizes the relevant differences in samples for training 3D medical segmentation models. We perform comprehensive evaluations using both weak and full annotations across four datasets (medical and non-medical). Our findings demonstrate that our approach surpasses existing active learning techniques on both weak and full annotations and obtains superior performance with low-annotation budgets which is crucial in medical imaging. Source code for this project is available in the supplementary materials and on GitHub: https://github.com/arvindmvepa/al-seg.
Great Minds Think Alike: The Universal Convergence Trend of Input Salience
Authors: Jeffrey Mark Siskind, Xiaoqian Wang Yipei Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Uncertainty is introduced in optimized DNNs through stochastic algorithms, forming specific distributions. Training models can be seen as random sampling from this distribution of optimized models. In this work, we study the distribution of optimized DNNs as a family of functions by leveraging a pointwise approach. We focus on the input saliency maps, as the input gradient field is decisive to the models' mathematical essence. Our investigation of saliency maps reveals a counter-intuitive trend: two stochastically optimized models tend to resemble each other more as either of their capacities increases. Therefore, we hypothesize several properties of these distributions, suggesting that (1) Within the same model architecture (e.g., CNNs, ResNets), different family variants (e.g., varying capacities) tend to align in terms of their population mean directions of the input salience. And (2) the distributions of optimized models follow a convergence trend to their shared population mean as the capacity increases. Furthermore, we also propose semi-parametric distributions based on the Saw distribution to model the convergence trend, satisfying all the counter-intuitive observations. Our experiments shed light on the significant implications of our hypotheses in various application domains, including black-box attacks, deep ensembles, etc. These findings not only enhance our understanding of DNN behaviors but also offer valuable insights for their practical application in diverse areas of deep learning.
Marrying Causal Representation Learning with Dynamical Systems for Science
Authors: Caroline Muller, Francesco Locatello Dingling Yao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Causal representation learning promises to extend causal models to hidden causal variables from raw entangled measurements. However, most progress has focused on proving identifiability results in different settings, and we are not aware of any successful real-world application. At the same time, the field of dynamical systems benefited from deep learning and scaled to countless applications but does not allow parameter identification. In this paper, we draw a clear connection between the two and their key assumptions, allowing us to apply identifiable methods developed in causal representation learning to dynamical systems. At the same time, we can leverage scalable differentiable solvers developed for differential equations to build models that are both identifiable and practical. Overall, we learn explicitly controllable models that isolate the trajectory-specific parameters for further downstream tasks such as out-of-distribution classification or treatment effect estimation. We experiment with a wind simulator with partially known factors of variation. We also apply the resulting model to real-world climate data and successfully answer downstream causal questions in line with existing literature on climate change.
OMG-LLaVA: Bridging Image-level, Object-level, Pixel-level Reasoning and Understanding
Authors: Xiangtai Li, Hao Fei, Haobo Yuan, Shengqiong Wu, Shunping Ji, Chen Change Loy, Shuicheng Yan Tao Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Current universal segmentation methods demonstrate strong capabilities in pixel-level image and video understanding. However, they lack reasoning abilities and cannot be controlled via text instructions. In contrast, large vision-language multimodal models exhibit powerful vision-based conversation and reasoning capabilities but lack pixel-level understanding and have difficulty accepting visual prompts for flexible user interaction. This paper proposes OMG-LLaVA, a new and elegant framework combining powerful pixel-level vision understanding with reasoning abilities. It can accept various visual and text prompts for flexible user interaction. Specifically, we use a universal segmentation method as the visual encoder, integrating image information, perception priors, and visual prompts into visual tokens provided to the LLM. The LLM is responsible for understanding the user's text instructions and providing text responses and pixel-level segmentation results based on the visual information. We propose perception prior embedding to better integrate perception priors with image features. OMG-LLaVA achieves image-level, object-level, and pixel-level reasoning and understanding in a single model, matching or surpassing the performance of specialized methods on multiple benchmarks. Rather than using LLM to connect each specialist, our work aims at end-to-end training on one encoder, one decoder, and one LLM. The code and model have been released for further research.
CorDA: Context-Oriented Decomposition Adaptation of Large Language Models for Task-Aware Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning
Authors: Xiaojie Li, Zhongzhu Zhou, Shuaiwen Leon Song, Jianlong Wu, Liqiang Nie, Bernard Ghanem Yibo Yang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Current parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods build adapters widely agnostic of the context of downstream task to learn, or the context of important knowledge to maintain. As a result, there is often a performance gap compared to full-parameter fine-tuning, and meanwhile the fine-tuned model suffers from catastrophic forgetting of the pre-trained world knowledge. In this paper, we propose **CorDA**, a Context-oriented Decomposition Adaptation method that builds learnable **task-aware adapters** from weight decomposition oriented by the context of downstream task or the world knowledge to maintain. Concretely, we collect a few data samples, and perform singular value decomposition for each linear layer of a pre-trained LLM multiplied by the covariance matrix of the input activation using these samples. The inverse of the covariance matrix is multiplied with the decomposed components to reconstruct the original weights. By doing so, the context of the representative samples is captured through deciding the factorizing orientation. Our method enables two options, the **knowledge-preserved adaptation** and the **instruction-previewed adaptation**. For the former, we use question-answering samples to obtain the covariance matrices, and use the decomposed components with the smallest $r$ singular values to initialize a learnable adapter, with the others frozen such that the world knowledge is better preserved. For the latter, we use the instruction data from the fine-tuning task, such as math or coding, to orientate the decomposition and train the largest $r$ components that most correspond to the task to learn. We conduct extensive experiments on Math, Code, and Instruction Following tasks. Our knowledge-preserved adaptation not only achieves better performance than LoRA on fine-tuning tasks, but also mitigates the forgetting of world knowledge. Our instruction-previewed adaptation is able to further enhance the fine-tuning performance to be comparable with full fine-tuning, surpassing the state-of-the-art PEFT methods such as LoRA, DoRA, and PiSSA.
Neural Concept Binder
Authors: Antonia Wüst, David Steinmann, Kristian Kersting Wolfgang Stammer
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The challenge in object-based visual reasoning lies in generating concept representations that are both descriptive and distinct. Achieving this in an unsupervised manner requires human users to understand the model's learned concepts and, if necessary, revise incorrect ones. To address this challenge, we introduce the Neural Concept Binder (NCB), a novel framework for deriving both discrete and continuous concept representations, which we refer to as "concept-slot encodings". NCB employs two types of binding: "soft binding", which leverages the recent SysBinder mechanism to obtain object-factor encodings, and subsequent "hard binding", achieved through hierarchical clustering and retrieval-based inference. This enables obtaining expressive, discrete representations from unlabeled images. Moreover, the structured nature of NCB's concept representations allows for intuitive inspection and the straightforward integration of external knowledge, such as human input or insights from other AI models like GPT-4. Additionally, we demonstrate that incorporating the hard binding mechanism preserves model performance while enabling seamless integration into both neural and symbolic modules for complex reasoning tasks. We validate the effectiveness of NCB through evaluations on our newly introduced CLEVR-Sudoku dataset.
Megalodon: Efficient LLM Pretraining and Inference with Unlimited Context Length
Authors: Xiaomeng Yang, Wenhan Xiong, Beidi Chen, Lili Yu, Hao Zhang, Jonathan May, Luke Zettlemoyer, Omer Levy, Chunting Zhou Xuezhe Ma
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The quadratic complexity and weak length extrapolation of Transformers limits their ability to scale to long sequences, and while sub-quadratic solutions like linear attention and state space models exist, they empirically underperform Transformers in pretraining efficiency and downstream task accuracy. We introduce MEGALODON, an neural architecture for efficient sequence modeling with unlimited context length. MEGALODON inherits the architecture of MEGA (exponential moving average with gated attention), and further introduces multiple technical components to improve its capability and stability, including complex exponential moving average (CEMA), timestep normalization layer, normalized attention mechanism and pre-norm with two-hop residual configuration. In a controlled head-to-head comparison with LLAMA2, MEGALODON achieves better efficiency than Transformer in the scale of 7 billion parameters and 2 trillion training tokens. MEGALODON reaches a training loss of 1.70, landing mid-way between LLAMA2-7B (1.75) and LLAMA2-13B (1.67). This result is robust throughout a wide range of benchmarks, where MEGALODON consistently outperforms Transformers across different tasks, domains, and modalities.
Arctique: An artificial histopathological dataset unifying realism and controllability for uncertainty quantification
Authors: Claudia Winklmayr, Vanessa E. Guarino, Christoph Karg, Xiaoyan Yu, Nora Koreuber, Jan P. Albrecht, Philip Bischoff, Dagmar Kainmueller Jannik Franzen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) is crucial for reliable image segmentation. Yet, while the field sees continual development of novel methods, a lack of agreed-upon benchmarks limits their systematic comparison and evaluation: Current UQ methods are typically tested either on overly simplistic toy datasets or on complex real-world datasets that do not allow to discern true uncertainty. To unify both controllability and complexity, we introduce Arctique, a procedurally generated dataset modeled after histopathological colon images. We chose histopathological images for two reasons: 1) their complexity in terms of intricate object structures and highly variable appearance, which yields challenging segmentation problems, and 2) their broad prevalence for medical diagnosis and respective relevance of high-quality UQ. To generate Arctique, we established a Blender-based framework for 3D scene creation with intrinsic noise manipulation. Arctique contains up to 50,000 rendered images with precise masks as well as noisy label simulations. We show that by independently controlling the uncertainty in both images and labels, we can effectively study the performance of several commonly used UQ methods. Hence, Arctique serves as a critical resource for benchmarking and advancing UQ techniques and other methodologies in complex, multi-object environments, bridging the gap between realism and controllability. All code is publicly available, allowing re-creation and controlled manipulations of our shipped images as well as creation and rendering of new scenes.
Boosted Conformal Prediction Intervals
Authors: Rina Foygel Barber, Emmanuel J. Candès Ran Xie
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper introduces a boosted conformal procedure designed to tailor conformalized prediction intervals toward specific desired properties, such as enhanced conditional coverage or reduced interval length. We employ machine learning techniques, notably gradient boosting, to systematically improve upon a predefined conformity score function. This process is guided by carefully constructed loss functions that measure the deviation of prediction intervals from the targeted properties. The procedure operates post-training, relying solely on model predictions and without modifying the trained model (e.g., the deep network).  Systematic experiments demonstrate that starting from conventional conformal methods, our boosted procedure achieves substantial improvements in reducing interval length and decreasing deviation from target conditional coverage.
Enriching Disentanglement: From Logical Definitions to Quantitative Metrics
Authors: Masashi Sugiyama Yivan Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Disentangling the explanatory factors in complex data is a promising approach for generalizable and data-efficient representation learning. While a variety of quantitative metrics for learning and evaluating disentangled representations have been proposed, it remains unclear what properties these metrics truly quantify. In this work, we establish algebraic relationships between logical definitions and quantitative metrics to derive theoretically grounded disentanglement metrics. Concretely, we introduce a compositional approach for converting a higher-order predicate into a real-valued quantity by replacing (i) equality with a strict premetric, (ii) the Heyting algebra of binary truth values with a quantale of continuous values, and (iii) quantifiers with aggregators. The metrics induced by logical definitions have strong theoretical guarantees, and some of them are easily differentiable and can be used as learning objectives directly. Finally, we empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed metrics by isolating different aspects of disentangled representations.
Active preference learning for ordering items in- and out-of-sample
Authors: Emil Carlsson, Devdatt Dubhashi, Fredrik D. Johansson Herman Bergström
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Learning an ordering of items based on pairwise comparisons is useful when items are difficult to rate consistently on an absolute scale, for example, when annotators have to make subjective assessments. When exhaustive comparison is infeasible, actively sampling item pairs can reduce the number of annotations necessary for learning an accurate ordering. However, many algorithms ignore shared structure between items, limiting their sample efficiency and precluding generalization to new items. It is also common to disregard how noise in comparisons varies between item pairs, despite it being informative of item similarity. In this work, we study active preference learning for ordering items with contextual attributes, both in- and out-of-sample. We give an upper bound on the expected ordering error of a logistic preference model as a function of which items have been compared. Next, we propose an active learning strategy that samples items to minimize this bound by accounting for aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty in comparisons. We evaluate the resulting algorithm, and a variant aimed at reducing model misspecification, in multiple realistic ordering tasks with comparisons made by human annotators. Our results demonstrate superior sample efficiency and generalization compared to non-contextual ranking approaches and active preference learning baselines.
Introspective Planning: Aligning Robots' Uncertainty with Inherent Task Ambiguity
Authors: Zixu Zhang, Jaime Fernández Fisac Kaiqu Liang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit advanced reasoning skills, enabling robots to comprehend natural language instructions and strategically plan high-level actions through proper grounding. However, LLM hallucination may result in robots confidently executing plans that are misaligned with user goals or even unsafe in critical scenarios. Additionally, inherent ambiguity in natural language instructions can introduce uncertainty into the LLM's reasoning and planning. We propose introspective planning, a systematic approach that guides LLMs to refine their own uncertainty in alignment with inherent task ambiguity. Our approach constructs a knowledge base containing introspective reasoning examples as post-hoc rationalizations of human-selected safe and compliant plans, which are retrieved during deployment. Evaluations on three tasks, including a new safe mobile manipulation benchmark, indicate that introspection substantially improves both compliance and safety over state-of-the-art LLM-based planning methods. Additionally, we empirically show that introspective planning, in combination with conformal prediction, achieves tighter confidence bounds, maintaining statistical success guarantees while minimizing unnecessary user clarification requests.
Can Transformers Smell Like Humans?
Authors: Miguel Vasco, Antônio H. Ribeiro, Mårten Björkman, Danica Kragic Farzaneh Taleb
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The human brain encodes stimuli from the environment into representations that form a sensory perception of the world. Despite recent advances in understanding visual and auditory perception, olfactory perception remains an under-explored topic in the machine learning community due to the lack of large-scale datasets annotated with labels of human olfactory perception. In this work, we ask the question of whether pre-trained transformer models of chemical structures encode representations that are aligned with human olfactory perception, i.e., can transformers smell like humans? We demonstrate that representations encoded from transformers pre-trained on general chemical structures are highly aligned with human olfactory perception.  We use multiple datasets and different types of perceptual representations to show that the representations encoded by transformer models are able to predict: (i) labels associated with odorants provided by experts; (ii) continuous ratings provided by human participants with respect to pre-defined descriptors; and (iii) similarity ratings between odorants provided by human participants. Finally, we evaluate the extent to which this alignment is associated with physicochemical features of odorants known to be relevant for olfactory decoding.
Universal In-Context Approximation By Prompting Fully Recurrent Models
Authors: Tom A. Lamb, Alasdair Paren, Philip H.S. Torr, Adel Bibi Aleksandar Petrov
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Zero-shot and in-context learning enable solving tasks without model fine-tuning, making them essential for developing generative model solutions. Therefore, it is crucial to understand whether a pretrained model can be prompted to approximate any function, i.e., whether it is a universal in-context approximator. While it was recently shown that transformer models do possess this property, these results rely on their attention mechanism. Hence, these findings do not apply to fully recurrent architectures like RNNs, LSTMs, and the increasingly popular SSMs. We demonstrate that RNNs, LSTMs, GRUs, Linear RNNs, and linear gated architectures such as Mamba and Hawk/Griffin can also serve be universal in-context approximators. To streamline our argument, we introduce a programming language called LSRL that compiles to these fully recurrent architectures. LSRL may be of independent interest for further studies of fully recurrent models, such as constructing interpretability benchmarks. We also study the role of multiplicative gating and observe that architectures incorporating such gating (e.g., LSTMs, GRUs, Hawk/Griffin) can implement certain operations more stably, making them more viable candidates for practical in-context universal approximation.
TabEBM: A Tabular Data Augmentation Method with Distinct Class-Specific Energy-Based Models
Authors: Xiangjian Jiang, Nikola Simidjievski, Mateja Jamnik Andrei Margeloiu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Data collection is often difficult in critical fields such as medicine, physics, and chemistry, yielding typically only small tabular datasets. However, classification methods tend to struggle with these small datasets, leading to poor predictive performance. Increasing the training set with additional synthetic data, similar to data augmentation in images, is commonly believed to improve downstream tabular classification performance. However, current tabular generative methods that learn either the joint distribution $ p(\mathbf{x}, y) $ or the class-conditional distribution $ p(\mathbf{x} \mid y) $ often overfit on small datasets, resulting in poor-quality synthetic data, usually worsening classification performance compared to using real data alone. To solve these challenges, we introduce TabEBM, a novel class-conditional generative method using Energy-Based Models (EBMs). Unlike existing tabular methods that use a shared model to approximate all class-conditional densities, our key innovation is to create distinct EBM generative models for each class, each modelling its class-specific data distribution individually. This approach creates robust energy landscapes, even in ambiguous class distributions. Our experiments show that TabEBM generates synthetic data with higher quality and better statistical fidelity than existing methods. When used for data augmentation, our synthetic data consistently leads to improved classification performance across diverse datasets of various sizes, especially small ones. Code is available at https://github.com/andreimargeloiu/TabEBM.
Training an Open-Vocabulary Monocular 3D Detection Model without 3D Data
Authors: Henry Zheng, Yan Wang, Zhuofan Xia, Marco Pavone, Gao Huang Rui Huang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Open-vocabulary 3D object detection has recently attracted considerable attention due to its broad applications in autonomous driving and robotics, which aims to effectively recognize novel classes in previously unseen domains. However, existing point cloud-based open-vocabulary 3D detection models are limited by their high deployment costs. In this work, we propose a novel open-vocabulary monocular 3D object detection framework, dubbed OVM3D-Det, which trains detectors using only RGB images, making it both cost-effective and scalable to publicly available data. Unlike traditional methods, OVM3D-Det does not require high-precision LiDAR or 3D sensor data for either input or generating 3D bounding boxes. Instead, it employs open-vocabulary 2D models and pseudo-LiDAR to automatically label 3D objects in RGB images, fostering the learning of open-vocabulary monocular 3D detectors. However, training 3D models with labels directly derived from pseudo-LiDAR is inadequate due to imprecise boxes estimated from noisy point clouds and severely occluded objects. To address these issues, we introduce two innovative designs: adaptive pseudo-LiDAR erosion and bounding box refinement with prior knowledge from large language models. These techniques effectively calibrate the 3D labels and enable RGB-only training for 3D detectors. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of OVM3D-Det over baselines in both indoor and outdoor scenarios. The code will be released.
Automatically Learning Hybrid Digital Twins of Dynamical Systems
Authors: Tennison Liu, Mihaela van der Schaar Samuel Holt
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Digital Twins (DTs) are computational models that simulate the states and temporal dynamics of real-world systems, playing a crucial role in prediction, understanding, and decision-making across diverse domains. However, existing approaches to DTs often struggle to generalize to unseen conditions in data-scarce settings, a crucial requirement for such models. To address these limitations, our work begins by establishing the essential desiderata for effective DTs. Hybrid Digital Twins (HDTwins) represent a promising approach to address these requirements, modeling systems using a composition of both mechanistic and neural components. This hybrid architecture simultaneously leverages (partial) domain knowledge and neural network expressiveness to enhance generalization, with its modular design facilitating improved evolvability. While existing hybrid models rely on expert-specified architectures with only parameters optimized on data, automatically specifying and optimizing HDTwins remains intractable due to the complex search space and the need for flexible integration of domain priors. To overcome this complexity, we propose an evolutionary algorithm (HDTwinGen) that employs Large Language Models (LLMs) to autonomously propose, evaluate, and optimize HDTwins. Specifically, LLMs iteratively generate novel model specifications, while offline tools are employed to optimize emitted parameters. Correspondingly, proposed models are evaluated and evolved based on targeted feedback, enabling the discovery of increasingly effective hybrid models. Our empirical results reveal that HDTwinGen produces generalizable, sample-efficient, and evolvable models, significantly advancing DTs' efficacy in real-world applications.
DISP-LLM: Dimension-Independent Structural Pruning for Large Language Models
Authors: Chi-Heng Lin, Ting Hua, Tang Zheng, Yilin Shen, Hongxia Jin, Yen-Chang Hsu Shangqian Gao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in various natural language processing tasks, including language modeling, understanding, and generation. However, the increased memory and computational costs associated with these models pose significant challenges for deployment on resource-limited devices. Structural pruning has emerged as a promising solution to reduce the costs of LLMs without requiring post-processing steps. Prior structural pruning methods either follow the dependence of structures at the cost of limiting flexibility, or introduce non-trivial additional parameters by incorporating different projection matrices. In this work, we propose a novel approach that relaxes the constraint imposed by regular structural pruning methods and eliminates the structural dependence along the embedding dimension. Our dimension-independent structural pruning method offers several benefits. Firstly, our method enables different blocks to utilize different subsets of the feature maps. Secondly, by removing structural dependence, we facilitate each block to possess varying widths along its input and output dimensions, thereby significantly enhancing the flexibility of structural pruning. We evaluate our method on various LLMs, including OPT, LLaMA, LLaMA-2, Phi-1.5, and Phi-2. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, showing for the first time that structural pruning can achieve an accuracy similar to semi-structural pruning.
EEG2Video: Towards Decoding Dynamic Visual Perception from EEG Signals
Authors: Yan-Kai Liu, Yansen Wang, Kan Ren, Hanwen Shi, Zilong Wang, Dongsheng Li, Bao-Liang Lu, Wei-Long Zheng Xuan-Hao Liu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Our visual experience in daily life are dominated by dynamic change. Decoding such dynamic information from brain activity can enhance the understanding of the brain’s visual processing system. However, previous studies predominately focus on reconstructing static visual stimuli. In this paper, we explore to decode dynamic visual perception from electroencephalography (EEG), a neuroimaging technique able to record brain activity with high temporal resolution (1000 Hz) for capturing rapid changes in brains. Our contributions are threefold: Firstly, we develop a large dataset recording signals from 20 subjects while they were watching 1400 dynamic video clips of 40 concepts. This dataset fills the gap in the lack of EEG-video pairs. Secondly, we annotate each video clips to investigate the potential for decoding some specific meta information (e.g., color, dynamic, human or not) from EEG. Thirdly, we propose a novel baseline EEG2Video for video reconstruction from EEG signals that better aligns dynamic movements with high temporal resolution brain signals by Seq2Seq architecture. EEG2Video achieves a 2-way accuracy of 79.8% in semantic classification tasks and 0.256 in structural similarity index (SSIM). Overall, our works takes an important step towards decoding dynamic visual perception from EEG signals. Our dataset and code will be released soon.
Physics-informed Neural Networks for Functional Differential Equations: Cylindrical Approximation and Its Convergence Guarantees
Authors: Takeru Yokota Taiki Miyagawa
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We propose the first learning scheme for functional differential equations (FDEs).FDEs play a fundamental role in physics, mathematics, and optimal control.However, the numerical analysis of FDEs has faced challenges due to its unrealistic computational costs and has been a long standing problem over decades.Thus, numerical approximations of FDEs have been developed, but they often oversimplify the solutions. To tackle these two issues, we propose a hybrid approach combining physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) with the *cylindrical approximation*. The cylindrical approximation expands functions and functional derivatives with an orthonormal basis and transforms FDEs into high-dimensional PDEs. To validate the reliability of the cylindrical approximation for FDE applications, we prove the convergence theorems of approximated functional derivatives and solutions.Then, the derived high-dimensional PDEs are numerically solved with PINNs.Through the capabilities of PINNs, our approach can handle a broader class of functional derivatives more efficiently than conventional discretization-based methods, improving the scalability of the cylindrical approximation.As a proof of concept, we conduct experiments on two FDEs and demonstrate that our model can successfully achieve typical $L^1$ relative error orders of PINNs $\sim 10^{-3}$.Overall, our work provides a strong backbone for physicists, mathematicians, and machine learning experts to analyze previously challenging FDEs, thereby democratizing their numerical analysis, which has received limited attention.
PPLNs: Parametric Piecewise Linear Networks for Event-Based Temporal Modeling and Beyond
Authors: Zhenxiao Liang, Bo Sun, Qixing Huang Chen Song
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We present Parametric Piecewise Linear Networks (PPLNs) for temporal vision inference. Motivated by the neuromorphic principles that regulate biological neural behaviors, PPLNs are ideal for processing data captured by event cameras, which are built to simulate neural activities in the human retina. We discuss how to represent the membrane potential of an artificial neuron by a parametric piecewise linear function with learnable coefficients. This design echoes the idea of building deep models from learnable parametric functions recently popularized by Kolmogorov–Arnold Networks (KANs). Experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of PPLNs in event-based and image-based vision applications, including steering prediction, human pose estimation, and motion deblurring.
ADOPT: Modified Adam Can Converge with Any $\beta_2$ with the Optimal Rate
Authors: Keno Harada, Gouki Minegishi, Yuta Oshima, Seong Cheol Jeong, Go Nagahara, Tomoshi Iiyama, Masahiro Suzuki, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo Shohei Taniguchi
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Adam is one of the most popular optimization algorithms in deep learning. However, it is known that Adam does not converge in theory unless choosing a hyperparameter, i.e., $\beta_2$, in a problem-dependent manner. There have been many attempts to fix the non-convergence (e.g., AMSGrad), but they require an impractical assumption that the gradient noise is uniformly bounded. In this paper, we propose a new adaptive gradient method named ADOPT, which achieves the optimal convergence rate of $\mathcal{O} ( 1 / \sqrt{T} )$ with any choice of $\beta_2$ without depending on the bounded noise assumption. ADOPT addresses the non-convergence issue of Adam by removing the current gradient from the second moment estimate and changing the order of the momentum update and the normalization by the second moment estimate. We also conduct intensive numerical experiments, and verify that our ADOPT achieves superior results compared to Adam and its variants across a wide range of tasks, including image classification, generative modeling, natural language processing, and deep reinforcement learning. The implementation is available at https://github.com/iShohei220/adopt.