mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Optimization Algorithm Design via Electric Circuits
Authors: Stephen P. Boyd, Tetiana Parshakova, Ernest K. Ryu, Jaewook J. Suh
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We present a novel methodology for convex optimization algorithm design using ideas from electric RLC circuits. Given an optimization problem, the first stage of the methodology is to design an appropriate electric circuit whose continuous-time dynamics converge to the solution of the optimization problem at hand. Then, the second stage is an automated, computer-assisted discretization of the continuous-time dynamics, yielding a provably convergent discrete-time algorithm. Our methodology recovers many classical (distributed) optimization algorithms and enables users to quickly design and explore a wide range of new algorithms with convergence guarantees.
iVideoGPT: Interactive VideoGPTs are Scalable World Models
Authors: Jialong Wu, Shaofeng Yin, Ningya Feng, Xu He, Dong Li, Jianye Hao, Mingsheng Long
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: World models empower model-based agents to interactively explore, reason, and plan within imagined environments for real-world decision-making. However, the high demand for interactivity poses challenges in harnessing recent advancements in video generative models for developing world models at scale. This work introduces Interactive VideoGPT (iVideoGPT), a scalable autoregressive transformer framework that integrates multimodal signals—visual observations, actions, and rewards—into a sequence of tokens, facilitating an interactive experience of agents via next-token prediction. iVideoGPT features a novel compressive tokenization technique that efficiently discretizes high-dimensional visual observations. Leveraging its scalable architecture, we are able to pre-train iVideoGPT on millions of human and robotic manipulation trajectories, establishing a versatile foundation that is adaptable to serve as interactive world models for a wide range of downstream tasks. These include action-conditioned video prediction, visual planning, and model-based reinforcement learning, where iVideoGPT achieves competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art methods. Our work advances the development of interactive general world models, bridging the gap between generative video models and practical model-based reinforcement learning applications. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://thuml.github.io/iVideoGPT.
Smoothed Online Classification can be Harder than Batch Classification
Authors: Vinod Raman, Unique Subedi, Ambuj Tewari
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We study online classification under smoothed adversaries. In this setting, at each time point, the adversary draws an example from a distribution that has a bounded density with respect to a fixed base measure, which is known apriori to the learner. For binary classification and scalar-valued regression, previous works [Haghtalab et al., 2020, Block et al., 2022] have shown that smoothed online learning is as easy as learning in the iid batch setting under PAC model. However, we show that smoothed online classification can be harder than the iid batch classification when the label space is unbounded. In particular, we construct a hypothesis class that is learnable in the iid batch setting under the PAC model but is not learnable under the smoothed online model. Finally, we identify a condition that ensures that the PAC learnability of a hypothesis class is sufficient for its smoothed online learnability.
Optimal Classification under Performative Distribution Shift
Authors: Edwige Cyffers, Muni Sreenivas Pydi, Jamal Atif, Oliver Cappé
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Performative learning addresses the increasingly pervasive situations in which algorithmic decisions may induce changes in the data distribution as a consequence of their public deployment.  We propose a novel view in which these performative effects are modelled as push forward measures. This general framework encompasses existing models and enables novel performative gradient estimation methods, leading to more efficient and scalable learning strategies. For distribution shifts, unlike previous models which require full specification of the data distribution, we only assume knowledge of the shift operator that represents the performative changes. This approach can also be integrated into various change-of-variable-based models, such as VAEs or normalizing flows. Focusing on classification with a linear-in-parameters performative effect, we prove the convexity of the performative risk under a new set of assumptions. Notably, we do not limit the strength of performative effects but rather their direction, requiring only that classification becomes harder when deploying more accurate models. In this case, we also establish a connection with adversarially robust classification by reformulating the performative risk as a min-max variational problem. Finally, we illustrate our approach on synthetic and real datasets.
IndicVoices-R: Unlocking a Massive Multilingual Multi-speaker Speech Corpus for Scaling Indian TTS
Authors: Ashwin Sankar, Srija Anand, Praveen Srinivasa Varadhan, Sherry Thomas, Mehak Singal, Shridhar Kumar, Deovrat Mehendale, Aditi Krishana, Giri Raju, Mitesh Khapra
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent advancements in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis show that large-scale models trained with extensive web data produce highly natural-sounding output. However, such data is scarce for Indian languages due to the lack of high-quality, manually subtitled data on platforms like LibriVox or YouTube. To address this gap, we enhance existing large-scale ASR datasets containing natural conversations collected in low-quality environments to generate high-quality TTS training data. Our pipeline leverages the cross-lingual generalization of denoising and speech enhancement models trained on English and applied to Indian languages. This results in IndicVoices-R (IV-R), the largest multilingual Indian TTS dataset derived from an ASR dataset, with 1,704 hours of high-quality speech from 10,496 speakers across 22 Indian languages. IV-R matches the quality of gold-standard TTS datasets like LJSpeech, LibriTTS, and IndicTTS. We also introduce the IV-R Benchmark, the first to assess zero-shot, few-shot, and many-shot speaker generalization capabilities of TTS models on Indian voices, ensuring diversity in age, gender, and style. We demonstrate that fine-tuning an English pre-trained model on a combined dataset of high-quality IndicTTS and our IV-R dataset results in better zero-shot speaker generalization compared to fine-tuning on the IndicTTS dataset alone. Further, our evaluation reveals limited zero-shot generalization for Indian voices in TTS models trained on prior datasets, which we improve by fine-tuning the model on our data containing diverse set of speakers across language families. We open-source code and data for all 22 official Indian languages.
Improving Robustness of 3D Point Cloud Recognition from a Fourier Perspective
Authors: Yibo Miao, Yinpeng Dong, Jinlai Zhang, Lijia Yu, Xiao Yang, Xiao-Shan Gao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Although 3D point cloud recognition has achieved substantial progress on standard benchmarks, the typical models are vulnerable to point cloud corruptions, leading to security threats in real-world applications. To improve the corruption robustness, various data augmentation methods have been studied, but they are mainly limited to the spatial domain. As the point cloud has low information density and significant spatial redundancy, it is challenging to analyze the effects of corruptions. In this paper, we focus on the frequency domain to observe the underlying structure of point clouds and their corruptions. Through graph Fourier transform (GFT), we observe a correlation between the corruption robustness of point cloud recognition models and their sensitivity to different frequency bands, which is measured by the GFT spectrum of the model’s Jacobian matrix. To reduce the sensitivity and improve the corruption robustness, we propose Frequency Adversarial Training (FAT) that adopts frequency-domain adversarial examples as data augmentation to train robust point cloud recognition models against corruptions. Theoretically, we provide a guarantee of FAT on its out-of-distribution generalization performance. Empirically, we conduct extensive experiments with various network architectures to validate the effectiveness of FAT, which achieves the new state-of-the-art results.
Deep Graph Neural Networks via Posteriori-Sampling-based Node-Adaptative Residual Module
Authors: Jingbo Zhou, Yixuan Du, Ruqiong Zhang, Jun Xia, Zhizhi Yu, Zelin Zang, Di Jin, Carl Yang, Rui Zhang, Stan Z. Li
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), a type of neural network that can learn from graph-structured data through neighborhood information aggregation, have shown superior performance in various downstream tasks. However, as the number of layers increases, node representations becomes indistinguishable, which is known as over-smoothing. To address this issue, many residual methods have emerged. In this paper, we focus on the over-smoothing issue and related residual methods. Firstly, we revisit over-smoothing from the perspective of overlapping neighborhood subgraphs, and based on this, we explain how residual methods can alleviate over-smoothing by integrating multiple orders neighborhood subgraphs to avoid the indistinguishability of the single high-order neighborhood subgraphs. Additionally, we reveal the drawbacks of previous residual methods, such as the lack of node adaptability and severe loss of high-order neighborhood subgraph information, and propose a \textbf{Posterior-Sampling-based, Node-Adaptive Residual module (PSNR)}. We theoretically demonstrate that PSNR can alleviate the drawbacks of previous residual methods. Furthermore, extensive experiments verify the superiority of the PSNR module in fully observed node classification and missing feature scenarios. Our codeis available at \href{https://github.com/jingbo02/PSNR-GNN}{https://github.com/jingbo02/PSNR-GNN}.
John Ellipsoids via Lazy Updates
Authors: David P. Woodruff, Taisuke Yasuda
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We give a faster algorithm for computing an approximate John ellipsoid around $n$ points in $d$ dimensions. The best known prior algorithms are based on repeatedly computing the leverage scores of the points and reweighting them by these scores (Cohen et al., 2019). We show that this algorithm can be substantially sped up by delaying the computation of high accuracy leverage scores by using sampling, and then later computing multiple batches of high accuracy leverage scores via fast rectangular matrix multiplication. We also give low-space streaming algorithms for John ellipsoids using similar ideas.
Inversion-based Latent Bayesian Optimization
Authors: Jaewon Chu, Jinyoung Park, Seunghun Lee, Hyunwoo J. Kim
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Latent Bayesian optimization (LBO) approaches have successfully adopted Bayesian optimization over a continuous latent space by employing an encoder-decoder architecture to address the challenge of optimization in a high dimensional or discrete input space. LBO learns a surrogate model to approximate the black-box objective function in the latent space. However, we observed that most LBO methods suffer from the `misalignment problem', which is induced by the reconstruction error of the encoder-decoder architecture. It hinders learning an accurate surrogate model and generating high-quality solutions. In addition, several trust region-based LBO methods select the anchor, the center of the trust region, based solely on the objective function value without considering the trust region's potential to enhance the optimization process. To address these issues, we propose $\textbf{Inv}$ersion-based Latent $\textbf{B}$ayesian $\textbf{O}$ptimization (InvBO), a plug-and-play module for LBO. InvBO consists of two components: an inversion method and a potential-aware trust region anchor selection. The inversion method searches the latent code that completely reconstructs the given target data. The potential-aware trust region anchor selection considers the potential capability of the trust region for better local optimization. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of InvBO on nine real-world benchmarks, such as molecule design and arithmetic expression fitting tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/InvBO.
ZipCache: Accurate and Efficient KV Cache Quantization with Salient Token Identification
Authors: Yefei He, Luoming Zhang, Weijia Wu, Jing Liu, Hong Zhou, Bohan Zhuang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: KV cache stores key and value states from previous tokens to avoid re-computation, yet it demands substantial storage space, especially for long sequences.   Adaptive KV cache compression seeks to discern the saliency of tokens, preserving vital information while aggressively compressing those of less importance.  However, previous methods of this approach exhibit significant performance degradation at high compression ratios due to inaccuracies in identifying salient tokens.   Additionally, the compression process introduces excessive overhead, substantially increasing memory burdens and the generation latency.  In this paper, we present ZipCache, an accurate and efficient KV cache quantization method for large language models (LLMs).   First, we construct a strong baseline for quantizing KV cache. Through the proposed channel-separable tokenwise quantization scheme, the memory overhead of quantization parameters are substantially reduced compared to fine-grained groupwise quantization.  To enhance the compression ratio, we propose normalized attention score as an effective metric for identifying salient tokens by considering the lower triangle characteristics of the attention matrix. The quantization bit-width for each token is then adaptively assigned based on their saliency.  Moreover, we develop an efficient approximation method that decouples the saliency metric from full attention scores, enabling compatibility with fast attention implementations like FlashAttention.  Extensive experiments demonstrate that ZipCache achieves superior compression ratios, fast generation speed and minimal performance losses compared with previous KV cache compression methods. For instance, when evaluating Mistral-7B model on GSM8k dataset, ZipCache is capable of compressing the KV cache by $4.98\times$, with only a 0.38% drop in accuracy. In terms of efficiency, ZipCache also showcases a 37.3% reduction in prefill-phase latency, a 56.9% reduction in decoding-phase latency, and a 19.8% reduction in GPU memory usage when evaluating LLaMA3-8B model with a input length of 4096. Code is available at https://github.com/ThisisBillhe/ZipCache/.
Policy Aggregation
Authors: Parand A. Alamdari, Soroush Ebadian, Ariel D. Procaccia
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We consider the challenge of AI value alignment with multiple individuals that have different reward functions and optimal policies in an underlying Markov decision process. We formalize this problem as one of policy aggregation, where the goal is to identify a desirable collective policy. We argue that an approach informed by social choice theory is especially suitable. Our key insight is that social choice methods can be reinterpreted by identifying ordinal preferences with volumes of subsets of the state-action occupancy polytope. Building on this insight, we demonstrate that a variety of methods — including approval voting, Borda count, the proportional veto core, and quantile fairness — can be practically applied to policy aggregation.
When is an Embedding Model  More Promising than Another?
Authors: Maxime DARRIN, Philippe FORMONT, Ismail BEN AYED, Jackie Chi Kit CHEUNG, Pablo PIANTANIDA
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Embedders play a central role in machine learning, projecting any object into numerical representations that can, in turn, be leveraged to perform various downstream tasks. The evaluation of embedding models typically depends on domain-specific empirical approaches utilizing downstream tasks, primarily because of the lack of a standardized framework for comparison. However, acquiring adequately large and representative datasets for conducting these assessments is not always viable and can prove to be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming.  In this paper, we present a unified approach to evaluate embedders. First, we establish theoretical foundations for comparing embedding models, drawing upon the concepts of sufficiency and informativeness. We then leverage these concepts to devise a tractable comparison criterion (information sufficiency), leading to a task-agnostic and self-supervised ranking procedure. We demonstrate experimentally that our approach aligns closely with the capability of embedding models to facilitate various downstream tasks in both natural language processing and molecular biology. This effectively offers practitioners a valuable tool for prioritizing model trials.
Sample-Efficient Constrained Reinforcement Learning with General Parameterization
Authors: Washim Uddin Mondal, Vaneet Aggarwal
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We consider a constrained Markov Decision Problem (CMDP) where the goal of an agent is to maximize the expected discounted sum of rewards over an infinite horizon while ensuring that the expected discounted sum of costs exceeds a certain threshold. Building on the idea of momentum-based acceleration, we develop the Primal-Dual Accelerated Natural Policy Gradient (PD-ANPG) algorithm that ensures an $\epsilon$ global optimality gap and $\epsilon$ constraint violation with $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}((1-\gamma)^{-7}\epsilon^{-2})$ sample complexity for general parameterized policies where $\gamma$ denotes the discount factor. This improves the state-of-the-art sample complexity in general parameterized CMDPs by a factor of $\mathcal{O}((1-\gamma)^{-1}\epsilon^{-2})$ and achieves the theoretical lower bound in $\epsilon^{-1}$.
What Is Missing For Graph Homophily? Disentangling Graph Homophily For Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Yilun Zheng, Sitao Luan, Lihui Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Graph homophily refers to the phenomenon that connected nodes tend to share similar characteristics. Understanding this concept and its related metrics is crucial for designing effective Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). The most widely used homophily metrics, such as edge or node homophily, quantify such "similarity" as label consistency across the graph topology. These metrics are believed to be able to reflect the performance of GNNs, especially on node-level tasks. However, many recent studies have empirically demonstrated that the performance of GNNs does not always align with homophily metrics, and how homophily influences GNNs still remains unclear and controversial. Then, a crucial question arises: What is missing in our current understanding of homophily? To figure out the missing part, in this paper, we disentangle the graph homophily into three aspects: label, structural, and feature homophily, which are derived from the three basic elements of graph data. We argue that the synergy of the three homophily can provide a more comprehensive understanding of GNN performance. Our new proposed structural and feature homophily consider the neighborhood consistency and feature dependencies among nodes, addressing the previously overlooked structural and feature aspects in graph homophily. To investigate their synergy, we propose a Contextual Stochastic Block Model with three types of Homophily (CSBM-3H), where the topology and feature generation are controlled by the three metrics. Based on the theoretical analysis of CSBM-3H, we derive a new composite metric, named Tri-Hom, that considers all three aspects and overcomes the limitations of conventional homophily metrics. The theoretical conclusions and the effectiveness of Tri-Hom have been verified through synthetic experiments on CSBM-3H. In addition, we conduct experiments on $31$ real-world benchmark datasets and calculate the correlations between homophily metrics and model performance. Tri-Hom has significantly higher correlation values than $17$ existing metrics that only focus on a single homophily aspect, demonstrating its superiority and the importance of homophily synergy. Our code is available at https://github.com/zylMozart/Disentangle_GraphHom.
HDR-GS: Efficient High Dynamic Range Novel View Synthesis at 1000x Speed via Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Yuanhao Cai, Zihao Xiao, Yixun Liang, Minghan Qin, Yulun Zhang, Xiaokang Yang, Yaoyao Liu, Alan Yuille
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: High dynamic range (HDR) novel view synthesis (NVS) aims to create photorealistic images from novel viewpoints using HDR imaging techniques. The rendered HDR images capture a wider range of brightness levels containing more details of the scene than normal low dynamic range (LDR) images. Existing HDR NVS methods are mainly based on NeRF. They suffer from long training time and slow inference speed. In this paper, we propose a new framework, High Dynamic Range Gaussian Splatting (HDR-GS), which can efficiently render novel HDR views and reconstruct LDR images with a user input exposure time. Specifically, we design a Dual Dynamic Range (DDR) Gaussian point cloud model that uses spherical harmonics to fit HDR color and employs an MLP-based tone-mapper to render LDR color. The HDR and LDR colors are then fed into two Parallel Differentiable Rasterization (PDR) processes to reconstruct HDR and LDR views. To establish the data foundation for the research of 3D Gaussian splatting-based methods in HDR NVS, we recalibrate the camera parameters and compute the initial positions for Gaussian point clouds. Comprehensive experiments show that HDR-GS surpasses the state-of-the-art NeRF-based method by 3.84 and 1.91 dB on LDR and HDR NVS while enjoying 1000$\times$ inference speed and only costing 6.3\% training time. Code and data are released at https://github.com/caiyuanhao1998/HDR-GS
GraphMorph: Tubular Structure Extraction by Morphing Predicted Graphs
Authors: Zhao Zhang, Ziwei Zhao, Dong Wang, Liwei Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Accurately restoring topology is both challenging and crucial in tubular structure extraction tasks, such as blood vessel segmentation and road network extraction. Diverging from traditional approaches based on pixel-level classification, our proposed method, named GraphMorph, focuses on branch-level features of tubular structures to achieve more topologically accurate predictions. GraphMorph comprises two main components: a Graph Decoder and a Morph Module. Utilizing multi-scale features extracted from an image patch by the segmentation network, the Graph Decoder facilitates the learning of branch-level features and generates a graph that accurately represents the tubular structure in this patch. The Morph Module processes two primary inputs: the graph and the centerline probability map, provided by the Graph Decoder and the segmentation network, respectively. Employing a novel SkeletonDijkstra algorithm, the Morph Module produces a centerline mask that aligns with the predicted graph. Furthermore, we observe that employing centerline masks predicted by GraphMorph significantly reduces false positives in the segmentation task, which is achieved by a simple yet effective post-processing strategy. The efficacy of our method in the centerline extraction and segmentation tasks has been substantiated through experimental evaluations across various datasets. Source code will be released soon.
Revisiting Ensembling in One-Shot Federated Learning
Authors: Youssef Allouah, Akash Dhasade, Rachid Guerraoui, Nirupam Gupta, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Rafael Pinot, Rafael Pires, Rishi Sharma
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) is an appealing approach to training machine learning models without sharing raw data.  However, standard FL algorithms are iterative and thus induce a significant communication cost. One-Shot FL (OFL) trades the iterative exchange of models between clients and the server with a single round of communication, thereby saving substantially on communication costs. Not surprisingly, OFL exhibits a performance gap in terms of accuracy with respect to FL, especially under high data heterogeneity. We introduce Fens, a novel federated ensembling scheme that approaches the accuracy of FL with the communication efficiency of OFL. Learning in Fens proceeds in two phases: first, clients train models locally and send them to the server, similar to OFL; second, clients collaboratively train a lightweight prediction aggregator model using FL. We showcase the effectiveness of Fens through exhaustive experiments spanning several datasets and heterogeneity levels. In the particular case of heterogeneously distributed CIFAR-10 dataset, Fens achieves up to a $26.9$% higher accuracy over SOTA OFL, being only $3.1$%  lower than FL. At the same time, Fens incurs at most $4.3\times$ more communication than OFL, whereas FL is at least $10.9\times$ more communication-intensive than Fens.
Few-Shot Diffusion Models Escape the Curse of Dimensionality
Authors: Ruofeng Yang, Bo Jiang, Cheng Chen, Ruinan Jin, Baoxiang Wang, Shuai Li
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: While diffusion models have demonstrated impressive performance, there is a growing need for generating samples tailored to specific user-defined concepts. The customized requirements promote the development of few-shot diffusion models, which use limited $n_{ta}$ target samples to fine-tune a pre-trained diffusion model trained on $n_s$ source samples. Despite the empirical success, no theoretical work specifically analyzes few-shot diffusion models. Moreover, the existing results for diffusion models without a fine-tuning phase can not explain why few-shot models generate great samples due to the curse of dimensionality. In this work, we analyze few-shot diffusion models under a linear structure distribution with a latent dimension $d$. From the approximation perspective, we prove that few-shot models have a $\widetilde{O}(n_s^{-2/d}+n_{ta}^{-1/2})$ bound to approximate the target score function, which is better than $n_{ta}^{-2/d}$ results. From the optimization perspective, we consider a latent Gaussian special case and prove that the optimization problem has a closed-form minimizer. This means few-shot models can directly obtain an approximated minimizer without a complex optimization process. Furthermore, we also provide the accuracy bound $\widetilde{O}(1/n_{ta}+1/\sqrt{n_s})$ for the empirical solution, which still has better dependence on $n_{ta}$ compared to $n_s$. The results of the real-world experiments also show that the models obtained by only fine-tuning the encoder and decoder specific to the target distribution can produce novel images with the target feature, which supports our theoretical results.
Safetywashing: Do AI Safety Benchmarks Actually Measure Safety Progress?
Authors: Richard Ren, Steven Basart, Adam Khoja, Alexander Pan, Alice Gatti, Long Phan, Xuwang Yin, Mantas Mazeika, Gabriel Mukobi, Ryan Hwang Kim, Stephen Fitz, Dan Hendrycks
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Performance on popular ML benchmarks is highly correlated with model scale, suggesting that most benchmarks tend to measure a similar underlying factor of general model capabilities. However, substantial research effort remains devoted to designing new benchmarks, many of which claim to measure novel phenomena. In the spirit of the Bitter Lesson, we leverage spectral analysis to measure an underlying capabilities component, the direction in benchmark-performance-space which explains most variation in model performance. In an extensive analysis of existing safety benchmarks, we find that variance in model performance on many safety benchmarks is largely explained by the capabilities component. In response, we argue that safety research should prioritize metrics which are not highly correlated with scale. Our work provides a lens to analyze both novel safety benchmarks and novel safety methods, which we hope will enable future work to make differential progress on safety.
Binocular-Guided 3D Gaussian Splatting with View Consistency for Sparse View Synthesis
Authors: Liang Han, Junsheng Zhou, Yu-Shen Liu, Zhizhong Han
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Novel view synthesis from sparse inputs is a vital yet challenging task in 3D computer vision. Previous methods explore 3D Gaussian Splatting with neural priors (e.g. depth priors) as an additional supervision, demonstrating promising quality and efficiency compared to the NeRF based methods. However, the neural priors from 2D pretrained models are often noisy and blurry, which struggle to precisely guide the learning of radiance fields. In this paper, We propose a novel method for synthesizing novel views from sparse views with Gaussian Splatting that does not require external prior as supervision. Our key idea lies in exploring the self-supervisions inherent in the binocular stereo consistency between each pair of binocular images constructed with disparity-guided image warping. To this end, we additionally introduce a Gaussian opacity constraint which regularizes the Gaussian locations and avoids Gaussian redundancy forimproving the robustness and efficiency of inferring 3D Gaussians from sparse views. Extensive experiments on the LLFF, DTU, and Blender datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
Solving Zero-Sum Markov Games with Continuous State via Spectral Dynamic Embedding
Authors: Chenhao Zhou, Zebang Shen, Chao Zhang, Hanbin Zhao, Hui Qian
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a provably efficient natural policy gradient algorithm called Spectral Dynamic Embedding Policy Optimization (\SDEPO) for two-player zero-sum stochastic Markov games with continuous state space and finite action space.  In the policy evaluation procedure of our algorithm, a novel kernel embedding method is employed to construct a finite-dimensional linear approximations to the state-action value function.  We explicitly analyze the approximation error in policy evaluation, and show that \SDEPO\  achieves an $\tilde{O}(\frac{1}{(1-\gamma)^3\epsilon})$ last-iterate convergence to the $\epsilon-$optimal Nash equilibrium, which is independent of the cardinality of the state space.  The complexity result matches the best-known results for global convergence of policy gradient algorithms for single agent setting.  Moreover, we also propose a practical variant of \SDEPO\ to deal with continuous action space and empirical results demonstrate the practical superiority of the proposed method.
FlashAttention-3: Fast and Accurate Attention with Asynchrony and Low-precision
Authors: Jay Shah, Ganesh Bikshandi, Ying Zhang, Vijay Thakkar, Pradeep Ramani, Tri Dao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Attention, as a core layer of the ubiquitous Transformer architecture, is the bottleneck for large language models and long-context applications. elaborated an approach to speed up attention on GPUs through minimizing memory reads/writes. However, it has yet to take advantage of new capabilities present in recent hardware, with FlashAttention-2 achieving only 35% utilization on the H100 GPU.We develop three main techniques to speed up attention on Hopper GPUs: exploiting asynchrony of the Tensor Cores and TMA to (1) overlap overall computation and data movement via warp-specialization and (2) interleave block-wise matmul and softmax operations, and (3) block quantization and incoherent processing that leverages hardware support for FP8 low-precision. We demonstrate that our method, FlashAttention-3, achieves speedup on H100 GPUs by 1.5-2.0$\times$ with BF16 reaching up to 840 TFLOPs/s (85\% utilization), and with FP8 reaching 1.3 PFLOPs/s. We validate that FP8 FlashAttention-3 achieves 2.6$\times$ lower numerical error than a baseline FP8 attention.
Factorized Diffusion Architectures for Unsupervised Image Generation and Segmentation
Authors: Xin Yuan, Michael Maire
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We develop a neural network architecture which, trained in an unsupervised manner as a denoising diffusion model, simultaneously learns to both generate and segment images.  Learning is driven entirely by the denoising diffusion objective, without any annotation or prior knowledge about regions during training.  A computational bottleneck, built into the neural architecture, encourages the denoising network to partition an input into regions, denoise them in parallel, and combine the results.  Our trained model generates both synthetic images and, by simple examination of its internal predicted partitions, semantic segmentations of those images.  Without fine-tuning, we directly apply our unsupervised model to the downstream task of segmenting real images via noising and subsequently denoising them.  Experiments demonstrate that our model achieves accurate unsupervised image segmentation and high-quality synthetic image generation across multiple datasets.
Group and Shuffle: Efficient Structured Orthogonal Parametrization
Authors: Mikhail Gorbunov, Nikolay Yudin, Vera Soboleva, Aibek Alanov, Alexey Naumov, Maxim Rakhuba
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The increasing size of neural networks has led to a growing demand for methods of efficient finetuning. Recently, an orthogonal finetuning paradigm was introduced that uses orthogonal matrices for adapting the weights of a pretrained model. In this paper, we introduce a new class of structured matrices, which unifies and generalizes structured classes from previous works. We examine properties of this class and build a structured orthogonal parametrization upon it.  We then use this parametrization to modify the orthogonal finetuning framework, improving parameter efficiency. We empirically validate our method on different domains, including adapting of text-to-image diffusion models and downstream task finetuning in language modeling. Additionally, we adapt our construction for orthogonal convolutions and conduct experiments with 1-Lipschitz neural networks.
Scaling transformer neural networks for skillful and reliable medium-range weather forecasting
Authors: Tung Nguyen, Rohan Shah, Hritik Bansal, Troy Arcomano, Romit Maulik, Veerabhadra Kotamarthi, Ian Foster, Sandeep Madireddy, Aditya Grover
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Weather forecasting is a fundamental problem for anticipating and mitigating the impacts of climate change. Recently, data-driven approaches for weather forecasting based on deep learning have shown great promise, achieving accuracies that are competitive with operational systems. However, those methods often employ complex, customized architectures without sufficient ablation analysis, making it difficult to understand what truly contributes to their success. Here we introduce Stormer, a simple transformer model that achieves state-of-the art performance on weather forecasting with minimal changes to the standard transformer backbone. We identify the key components of Stormer through careful empirical analyses, including weather-specific embedding, randomized dynamics forecast, and pressure-weighted loss. At the core of Stormer is a randomized forecasting objective that trains the model to forecast the weather dynamics over varying time intervals. During inference, this allows us to produce multiple forecasts for a target lead time and combine them to obtain better forecast accuracy. On WeatherBench 2, Stormer performs competitively at short to medium-range forecasts and outperforms current methods beyond 7 days, while requiring orders-of-magnitude less training data and compute. Additionally, we demonstrate Stormer’s favorable scaling properties, showing consistent improvements in forecast accuracy with increases in model size and training tokens. Code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/tung-nd/stormer.
LLM Evaluators Recognize and Favor Their Own Generations
Authors: Arjun Panickssery, Samuel R. Bowman, Shi Feng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Self-evaluation using large language models (LLMs) has proven valuable not only in benchmarking but also methods like reward modeling, constitutional AI, and self-refinement. But new biases are introduced due to the same LLM acting as both the evaluator and the evaluatee. One such bias is self-preference, where an LLM evaluator scores its own outputs higher than others’ while human annotators consider them of equal quality. But do LLMs actually recognize their own outputs when they give those texts higher scores, or is it just a coincidence? In this paper, we investigate if self-recognition capability contributes to self-preference. We discover that, out of the box, LLMs such as GPT-4 and Llama 2 have non-trivial accuracy at distinguishing themselves from other LLMs and humans. By finetuning LLMs, we discover a linear correlation between self-recognition capability and the strength of self-preference bias; using controlled experiments, we show that the causal explanation resists straightforward confounders. We discuss how self-recognition can interfere with unbiased evaluations and AI safety more generally.
SpatialPIN: Enhancing Spatial Reasoning Capabilities of Vision-Language Models through Prompting and Interacting 3D Priors
Authors: Chenyang Ma, Kai Lu, Ta-Ying Cheng, Niki Trigoni, Andrew Markham
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Current state-of-the-art spatial reasoning-enhanced VLMs are trained to excel at spatial visual question answering (VQA). However, we believe that higher-level 3D-aware tasks, such as articulating dynamic scene changes and motion planning, require a fundamental and explicit 3D understanding beyond current spatial VQA datasets. In this work, we present SpatialPIN, a framework designed to enhance the spatial reasoning capabilities of VLMs through prompting and interacting with priors from multiple 3D foundation models in a zero-shot, training-free manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our spatial reasoning-imbued VLM performs well on various forms of spatial VQA and can extend to help in various downstream robotics tasks such as pick and stack and trajectory planning.
Reasons and Solutions for the Decline in Model Performance after Editing
Authors: Xiusheng Huang, Jiaxiang Liu, Yequan Wang, Kang Liu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Knowledge editing technology has received widespread attention for low-cost updates of incorrect or outdated knowledge in large-scale language models. However, recent research has found that edited models often exhibit varying degrees of performance degradation. The reasons behind this phenomenon and potential solutions have not yet been provided. In order to investigate the reasons for the performance decline of the edited model and optimize the editing method, this work explores the underlying reasons from both data and model perspectives. Specifically, 1) from a data perspective, to clarify the impact of data on the performance of editing models, this paper first constructs a Multi-Question Dataset (MQD) to evaluate the impact of different types of editing data on model performance. The performance of the editing model is mainly affected by the diversity of editing targets and sequence length, as determined through experiments. 2) From a model perspective, this article explores the factors that affect the performance of editing models. The results indicate a strong correlation between the L1-norm of the editing model layer and the editing accuracy, and clarify that this is an important factor leading to the bottleneck of editing performance. Finally, in order to improve the performance of the editing model, this paper further proposes a Dump for Sequence (D4S) method, which successfully overcomes the previous editing bottleneck by reducing the L1-norm of the editing layer, allowing users to perform multiple effective edits and minimizing model damage. Our code is available at https://github.com/nlpkeg/D4S.
Changing the Training Data Distribution to Reduce Simplicity Bias Improves In-distribution Generalization
Authors: Tuan Hai Dang Nguyen, Paymon Haddad, Eric Gan, Baharan Mirzasoleiman
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Can we modify the training data distribution to encourage the underlying optimization method toward finding solutions with superior generalization performance on in-distribution data? In this work, we approach this question for the first time by comparing the inductive bias of gradient descent (GD) with that of sharpness-aware minimization (SAM). By studying a two-layer CNN, we rigorously prove that SAM learns different features more uniformly, particularly in early epochs. That is, SAM is less susceptible to simplicity bias compared to GD. We also show that examples constraining features that are learned early are separable from the rest based on the model’s output. Based on this observation, we propose a method that (i) clusters examples based on the network output early in training, (ii) identifies a cluster of examples with similar network output, and (iii) upsamples the rest of examples only once to alleviate the simplicity bias. We show empirically that USEFUL effectively improves the generalization performance on the original data distribution when training with various gradient methods, including (S)GD and SAM. Notably, we demonstrate that our method can be combined with SAM variants and existing data augmentation strategies to achieve, to the best of our knowledge, state-of-the-art performance for training ResNet18 on CIFAR10, STL10, CINIC10, Tiny-ImageNet; ResNet34 on CIFAR100; and VGG19 and DenseNet121 on CIFAR10.
P$^2$C$^2$Net: PDE-Preserved Coarse Correction Network for efficient prediction of spatiotemporal dynamics
Authors: Qi Wang, Pu Ren, Hao Zhou, Xin-Yang Liu, Zhiwen Deng, Yi Zhang, Ruizhi Chengze, Hongsheng Liu, Zidong Wang, Jian-Xun Wang, Ji-Rong Wen, Hao Sun, Yang Liu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: When solving partial differential equations (PDEs), classical numerical methods often require fine mesh grids and small time stepping to meet stability, consistency, and convergence conditions, leading to high computational cost. Recently, machine learning has been increasingly utilized to solve PDE problems, but they often encounter challenges related to interpretability, generalizability, and strong dependency on rich labeled data. Hence, we introduce a new PDE-Preserved Coarse Correction Network (P$^2$C$^2$Net) to efficiently solve spatiotemporal PDE problems on coarse mesh grids in small data regimes. The model consists of two synergistic modules: (1) a trainable PDE block that learns to update the coarse solution (i.e., the system state), based on a high-order numerical scheme with boundary condition encoding, and (2) a neural network block that consistently corrects the solution on the fly. In particular, we propose a learnable symmetric Conv filter, with weights shared over the entire model, to accurately estimate the spatial derivatives of PDE based on the neural-corrected system state. The resulting physics-encoded model is capable of handling limited training data (e.g., 3--5 trajectories) and accelerates the prediction of PDE solutions on coarse spatiotemporal grids while maintaining a high accuracy. P$^2$C$^2$Net achieves consistent state-of-the-art performance with over 50\% gain (e.g., in terms of relative prediction error) across four datasets covering complex reaction-diffusion processes and turbulent flows.
Approximation Rate of the Transformer Architecture for Sequence Modeling
Authors: Haotian Jiang, Qianxiao Li
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The Transformer architecture is widely applied in sequence modeling applications, yet the theoretical understanding of its working principles remains limited. In this work, we investigate the approximation rate for single-layer Transformers with one head. We consider general non-linear relationships and identify a novel notion of complexity measures to establish an explicit Jackson-type approximation rate estimate for the Transformer. This rate reveals the structural properties of the Transformer and suggests the types of sequential relationships it is best suited for approximating. In particular, the results on approximation rates enable us to concretely analyze the differences between the Transformer and classical sequence modeling methods, such as recurrent neural networks.