mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Spectral Evolution and Invariance in Linear-width Neural Networks
Authors: Zhichao Wang, Andrew Engel, Anand D Sarwate, Ioana Dumitriu, Tony Chiang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We investigate the spectral properties of linear-width feed-forward neural networks, where the sample size is asymptotically proportional to network width. Empirically, we show that the spectra of weight in this high dimensional regime are invariant when trained by gradient descent for small constant learning rates; we provide a theoretical justification for this observation and prove the invariance of the bulk spectra for both conjugate and neural tangent kernels. We demonstrate similar characteristics when training with stochastic gradient descent with small learning rates. When the learning rate is large, we exhibit the emergence of an outlier whose corresponding eigenvector is aligned with the training data structure. We also show that after adaptive gradient training, where a lower test error and feature learning emerge, both weight and kernel matrices exhibit heavy tail behavior. Simple examples are provided to explain when heavy tails can have better generalizations. We exhibit different spectral properties such as invariant bulk, spike, and heavy-tailed distribution from a two-layer neural network using different training strategies, and then correlate them to the feature learning. Analogous phenomena also appear when we train conventional neural networks with real-world data. We conclude that monitoring the evolution of the spectra during training is an essential step toward understanding the training dynamics and feature learning.
Paxion: Patching Action Knowledge in Video-Language Foundation Models
Authors: Zhenhailong Wang, Ansel Blume, Sha Li, Genglin Liu, Jaemin Cho, Zineng Tang, Mohit Bansal, Heng Ji
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Action knowledge involves the understanding of textual, visual, and temporal aspects of actions. We introduce the Action Dynamics Benchmark (ActionBench) containing two carefully designed probing tasks: Action Antonym and Video Reversal, which targets multimodal alignment capabilities and temporal understanding skills of the model, respectively. Despite recent video-language models’ (VidLM) impressive performance on various benchmark tasks, our diagnostic tasks reveal their surprising deficiency (near-random performance) in action knowledge, suggesting that current models rely on object recognition abilities as a shortcut for action understanding. To remedy this, we propose a novel framework, Paxion, along with a new Discriminative Video Dynamics Modeling (DVDM) objective. The Paxion framework utilizes a Knowledge Patcher network to encode new action knowledge and a Knowledge Fuser component to integrate the Patcher into frozen VidLMs without compromising their existing capabilities. Due to limitations of the widely-used Video-Text Contrastive (VTC) loss for learning action knowledge, we introduce the DVDM objective to train the Knowledge Patcher. DVDM forces the model to encode the correlation between the action text and the correct ordering of video frames. Our extensive analyses show that Paxion and DVDM together effectively fill the gap in action knowledge understanding (~50% → 80%), while maintaining or improving performance on a wide spectrum of both object- and action-centric downstream tasks.
ProPILE: Probing Privacy Leakage in Large Language Models
Authors: Siwon Kim, Sangdoo Yun, Hwaran Lee, Martin Gubri, Sungroh Yoon, Seong Joon Oh
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: The rapid advancement and widespread use of large language models (LLMs) have raised significant concerns regarding the potential leakage of personally identifiable information (PII). These models are often trained on vast quantities of web-collected data, which may inadvertently include sensitive personal data. This paper presents ProPILE, a novel probing tool designed to empower data subjects, or the owners of the PII, with awareness of potential PII leakage in LLM-based services. ProPILE lets data subjects formulate prompts based on their own PII to evaluate the level of privacy intrusion in LLMs. We demonstrate its application on the OPT-1.3B model trained on the publicly available Pile dataset. We show how hypothetical data subjects may assess the likelihood of their PII being included in the Pile dataset being revealed. ProPILE can also be leveraged by LLM service providers to effectively evaluate their own levels of PII leakage with more powerful prompts specifically tuned for their in-house models. This tool represents a pioneering step towards empowering the data subjects for their awareness and control over their own data on the web.
Mind the spikes: Benign overfitting of kernels and neural networks in fixed dimension
Authors: Moritz Haas, David Holzmüller, Ulrike V. Luxburg, Ingo Steinwart
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: The success of over-parameterized neural networks trained to near-zero training error has caused great interest in the phenomenon of benign overfitting, where estimators are statistically consistent even though they interpolate noisy training data. While benign overfitting in fixed dimension has been established for some learning methods, current literature suggests that for regression with typical kernel methods and wide neural networks, benign overfitting requires a high-dimensional setting, where the dimension grows with the sample size. In this paper, we show that the smoothness of the estimators, and not the dimension, is the key: benign overfitting is possible if and only if the estimator's derivatives are large enough. We generalize existing inconsistency results to non-interpolating models and more kernels to show that benign overfitting with moderate derivatives is impossible in fixed dimension. Conversely, we show that benign overfitting is possible for regression with a sequence of spiky-smooth kernels with large derivatives. Using neural tangent kernels, we translate our results to wide neural networks. We prove that while infinite-width networks do not overfit benignly with the ReLU activation, this can be fixed by adding small high-frequency fluctuations to the activation function. Our experiments verify that such neural networks, while overfitting, can indeed generalize well even on low-dimensional data sets.
The Goldilocks of Pragmatic Understanding: Fine-Tuning Strategy Matters for Implicature Resolution by LLMs
Authors: Laura Ruis, Akbir Khan, Stella Biderman, Sara Hooker, Tim Rocktäschel, Edward Grefenstette
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Despite widespread use of LLMs as conversational agents, evaluations of performance fail to capture a crucial aspect of communication: interpreting language in context---incorporating its pragmatics. Humans interpret language using beliefs and prior knowledge about the world. For example, we intuitively understand the response "I wore gloves" to the question "Did you leave fingerprints?" as meaning "No". To investigate whether LLMs have the ability to make this type of inference, known as an implicature, we design a simple task and evaluate four categories of widely used state-of-the-art models. We find that, despite only evaluating on utterances that require a binary inference (yes or no), models in three of these categories perform close to random. However, LLMs instruction-tuned at the example-level perform significantly better. These results suggest that certain fine-tuning strategies are far better at inducing pragmatic understanding in models. We present our findings as the starting point for further research into evaluating how LLMs interpret language in context and to drive the development of more pragmatic and useful models of human discourse.
Slow and Weak Attractor Computation Embedded in Fast and Strong E-I Balanced Neural Dynamics
Authors: Xiaohan Lin, Liyuan Li, Boxin Shi, Tiejun Huang, Yuanyuan Mi, Si Wu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Attractor networks require neuronal connections to be highly structured in order to maintain attractor states that represent information, while excitation and inhibition balanced networks (E-INNs) require neuronal connections to be random and sparse to generate irregular neuronal firings. Despite being regarded as canonical models of neural circuits, both types of networks are usually studied in isolation, and it remains unclear how they coexist in the brain, given their very different structural demands. In this study, we investigate the compatibility of continuous attractor neural networks (CANNs) and E-INNs. In line with recent experimental data, we find that a neural circuit can exhibit both the traits of CANNs and E-INNs if the neuronal synapses consist of two sets: one set is strong and fast for irregular firing, and the other set is weak and slow for attractor dynamics. Our results from simulations and theoretical analysis reveal that the network also exhibits enhanced performance compared to the case of using only one set of synapses, with accelerated convergence of attractor states and retained E-I balanced condition for localized input. We also apply the network model to solve a real-world tracking problem and demonstrate that it can track fast-moving objects well. We hope that this study provides insight into how structured neural computations are realized by irregular firings of neurons.
Test-time Training for Matching-based Video Object Segmentation
Authors: Juliette Bertrand, Giorgos Kordopatis Zilos, Yannis Kalantidis, Giorgos Tolias
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: The video object segmentation (VOS) task involves the segmentation of an object over time based on a single initial mask. Current state-of-the-art approaches use a memory of previously processed frames and rely on matching to estimate segmentation masks of subsequent frames. Lacking any adaptation mechanism, such methods are prone to test-time distribution shifts. This work focuses on matching-based VOS under distribution shifts such as video corruptions, stylization, and sim-to-real transfer. We explore test-time training strategies that are agnostic to the specific task as well as strategies that are designed specifically for VOS. This includes a variant based on mask cycle consistency tailored to matching-based VOS methods. The experimental results on common benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed test-time training yields significant improvements in performance. In particular for the sim-to-real scenario and despite using only a single test video, our approach manages to recover a substantial portion of the performance gain achieved through training on real videos. Additionally, we introduce DAVIS-C, an augmented version of the popular DAVIS test set, featuring extreme distribution shifts like image-/video-level corruptions and stylizations. Our results illustrate that test-time training enhances performance even in these challenging cases.
Causal Effect Regularization: Automated Detection and Removal of Spurious Correlations
Authors: Abhinav Kumar, Amit Deshpande, Amit Sharma
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: In many classification datasets, the task labels are spuriously correlated with some input attributes. Classifiers trained on such datasets often rely on these attributes for prediction, especially when the spurious correlation is high, and thus fail togeneralize whenever there is a shift in the attributes’ correlation at deployment. If we assume that the spurious attributes are known a priori, several methods have been proposed to learn a classifier that is invariant to the specified attributes. However, in real-world data, information about spurious attributes is typically unavailable. Therefore, we propose a method that automatically identifies spurious attributes by estimating their causal effect on the label and then uses a regularization objective to mitigate the classifier’s reliance on them. Although causal effect of an attribute on the label is not always identified, we present two commonly occurring data-generating processes where the effect can be identified. Compared to recent work for identifying spurious attributes, we find that our method, AutoACER, ismore accurate in removing the attribute from the learned model, especially when spurious correlation is high. Specifically, across synthetic, semi-synthetic, and real-world datasets, AutoACER shows significant improvement in a metric used to quantify the dependence of a classifier on spurious attributes ($\Delta$Prob), while obtaining better or similar accuracy. Empirically we find that AutoACER mitigatesthe reliance on spurious attributes even under noisy estimation of causal effects or when the causal effect is not identified. To explain the empirical robustness of our method, we create a simple linear classification task with two sets of attributes: causal and spurious. Under this setting, we prove that AutoACER only requires the ranking of estimated causal effects to be correct across attributes to select thecorrect classifier.
Multi-resolution Spectral Coherence for Graph Generation with Score-based Diffusion
Authors: Hyuna Cho, Minjae Jeong, Sooyeon Jeon, Sungsoo Ahn, Won Hwa Kim
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Successful graph generation depends on the accurate estimation of the joint distribution of graph components such as nodes and edges from training data. While recent deep neural networks have demonstrated sampling of realistic graphs together with diffusion models, however, they still suffer from oversmoothing problems which are inherited from conventional graph convolution and thus high-frequency characteristics of nodes and edges become intractable. To overcome such issues and generate graphs with high fidelity, this paper introduces a novel approach that captures the dependency between nodes and edges at multiple resolutions in the spectral space. By modeling the joint distribution of node and edge signals in a shared graph wavelet space, together with a score-based diffusion model, we propose a Wavelet Graph Diffusion Model (Wave-GD) which lets us sample synthetic graphs with real-like frequency characteristics of nodes and edges. Experimental results on four representative benchmark datasets validate the superiority of the Wave-GD over existing approaches, highlighting its potential for a wide range of applications that involve graph data.
Real-World Image Super-Resolution as Multi-Task Learning
Authors: Wenlong Zhang, Xiaohui Li, Guangyuan SHI, Xiangyu Chen, Yu Qiao, Xiaoyun Zhang, Xiao-Ming Wu, Chao Dong
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: In this paper, we take a new look at real-world image super-resolution (real-SR) from a multi-task learning perspective. We demonstrate that the conventional formulation of real-SR can be viewed as solving multiple distinct degradation tasks using a single shared model. This poses a challenge known as task competition or task conflict in multi-task learning, where certain tasks dominate the learning process, resulting in poor performance on other tasks. This problem is exacerbated in the case of real-SR, due to the involvement of numerous degradation tasks. To address the issue of task competition in real-SR, we propose a task grouping approach. Our approach efficiently identifies the degradation tasks where a real-SR model falls short and groups these unsatisfactory tasks into multiple task groups. We then utilize the task groups to fine-tune the real-SR model in a simple way, which effectively mitigates task competition and facilitates knowledge transfer. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method achieves significantly enhanced performance across a wide range of degradation scenarios.
Exact Representation of Sparse Networks with Symmetric Nonnegative Embeddings
Authors: Sudhanshu Chanpuriya, Ryan Rossi, Anup B. Rao, Tung Mai, Nedim Lipka, Zhao Song, Cameron Musco
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Graph models based on factorization of the adjacency matrix often fail to capture network structures related to links between dissimilar nodes (heterophily). We introduce a novel graph factorization model that leverages two nonnegative vectors per node to interpretably account for links between both similar and dissimilar nodes. We prove that our model can exactly represent any graph with low arboricity, a property that many real-world networks satisfy; our proof also applies to related models but has much greater scope than the closest prior bound, which is based on low max degree. Our factorization also has compelling properties besides expressiveness: due to its symmetric structure and nonnegativity, fitting the model inherently finds node communities, and the model's link predictions can be interpreted in terms of these communities. In experiments on real-world networks, we demonstrate our factorization's effectiveness on a variety of tasks, including community detection and link prediction.
Data-Centric Learning from Unlabeled Graphs with Diffusion Model
Authors: Gang Liu, Eric Inae, Tong Zhao, Jiaxin Xu, Tengfei Luo, Meng Jiang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Graph property prediction tasks are important and numerous. While each task offers a small size of labeled examples, unlabeled graphs have been collected from various sources and at a large scale. A conventional approach is training a model with the unlabeled graphs on self-supervised tasks and then fine-tuning the model on the prediction tasks. However, the self-supervised task knowledge could not be aligned or sometimes conflicted with what the predictions needed. In this paper, we propose to extract the knowledge underlying the large set of unlabeled graphs as a specific set of useful data points to augment each property prediction model. We use a diffusion model to fully utilize the unlabeled graphs and design two new objectives to guide the model's denoising process with each task's labeled data to generate task-specific graph examples and their labels. Experiments demonstrate that our data-centric approach performs significantly better than fifteen existing various methods on fifteen tasks. The performance improvement brought by unlabeled data is visible as the generated labeled examples unlike the self-supervised learning.
Wasserstein Gradient Flows for Optimizing Gaussian Mixture Policies
Authors: Hanna Ziesche, Leonel Rozo
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Robots often rely on a repertoire of previously-learned motion policies for performing tasks of diverse complexities.  When facing unseen task conditions or when new task requirements arise, robots must adapt their motion policies accordingly. In this context, policy optimization is the \emph{de facto} paradigm to adapt robot policies as a function of task-specific objectives.  Most commonly-used motion policies carry particular structures that are often overlooked in policy optimization algorithms.  We instead propose to leverage the structure of probabilistic policies by casting the policy optimization as an optimal transport problem. Specifically, we focus on robot motion policies that build on Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) and formulate the policy optimization as a Wassertein gradient flow over the GMMs space. This naturally allows us to constrain the policy updates via the $L^2$-Wasserstein distance between GMMs to enhance the stability of the policy optimization process. Furthermore, we leverage the geometry of the Bures-Wasserstein manifold to optimize the Gaussian distributions of the GMM policy via Riemannian optimization. We evaluate our approach on common robotic settings: Reaching motions, collision-avoidance behaviors, and multi-goal tasks. Our results show that our method outperforms common policy optimization baselines in terms of task success rate and low-variance solutions.
Change point detection and inference in multivariate non-parametric models under mixing conditions
Authors: Carlos Misael Madrid Padilla, Haotian Xu, Daren Wang, OSCAR HERNAN MADRID PADILLA, Yi Yu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of localizing and inferring multiple change points, in non-parametric multivariate time series settings. Specifically, we consider a multivariate time series with potentially short-range dependence, whose underlying distributions have Hölder smooth densities and can change over time in a piecewise-constant manner. The change points, which correspond to the times when the distribution changes, are unknown. We present the limiting distributions of the change point estimators under the scenarios where the minimal jump size vanishes or remains constant.  Such results have not been revealed in the literature in non-parametric change point settings. As byproducts, we develop a sharp estimator that can accurately localize the change points in multivariate non-parametric time series, and a consistent block-type long-run variance estimator.  Numerical studies are provided to complement our theoretical findings.
Near-optimal learning with average Hölder smoothness
Authors: Guy Kornowski, Steve Hanneke, Aryeh Kontorovich
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We generalize the notion of average Lipschitz smoothness proposed by Ashlagi et al. (COLT 2021) by extending it to Hölder smoothness. This measure of the "effective smoothness" of a function is sensitive to the underlying distribution and can be dramatically smaller than its classic "worst-case" Hölder constant.We consider both the realizable and the agnostic (noisy) regression settings, proving upper and lower risk bounds in terms of the average Hölder smoothness; these rates improve upon both previously known rates even in the special case of average Lipschitz smoothness.Moreover, our lower bound is tight in the realizable setting up to log factors, thus we establish the minimax rate.From an algorithmic perspective, since our notion of average smoothness is defined with respect to the unknown underlying distribution, the learner does not have an explicit representation of the function class, hence is unable to execute ERM. Nevertheless, we provide distinct learning algorithms that achieve both (nearly) optimal learning rates.Our results hold in any totally bounded metric space, and are stated in terms of its intrinsic geometry.Overall, our results show that the classic worst-case notion of Hölder smoothness can be essentially replaced by its average, yielding considerably sharper guarantees.
Neural-Logic Human-Object Interaction Detection
Authors: Liulei Li, Jianan Wei, Wenguan Wang, Yi Yang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: The interaction decoder utilized in prevalent Transformer-based HOI detectors typically accepts pre-composed human-object pairs as inputs. Though achieving remarkable performance, such a paradigm lacks feasibility and cannot explore novel combinations over entities during decoding. We present LogicHOI, a new HOI detector that leverages neural-logic reasoning and Transformer to infer feasible interactions between. entities. Specifically, we modify. self-attention mechanism in the vanilla Transformer, enabling it to reason over the ⟨ human, action, object ⟩ triplet and constitute novel interactions. Meanwhile, such a reasoning process is guided by two crucial properties for understanding HOI: affordances (the potential actions an object can facilitate) and proxemics (the spatial relations between humans and objects). We formulate these two properties in first-order logic and ground them into continuous space to constrain the learning process of our approach, leading to improved performance and zero-shot generalization capabilities. We evaluate L OGIC HOI on V-COCO and HICO-DET under both normal and zero-shot setups, achieving significant improvements over existing methods.
Which Models have Perceptually-Aligned Gradients? An Explanation via Off-Manifold Robustness
Authors: Suraj Srinivas, Sebastian Bordt, Himabindu Lakkaraju
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: One of the remarkable properties of robust computer vision models is that their input-gradients are often aligned with human perception, referred to in the literature as perceptually-aligned gradients (PAGs). Despite only being trained for classification, PAGs cause robust models to have rudimentary generative capabilities, including image generation, denoising, and in-painting. However, the underlying mechanisms behind these phenomena remain unknown. In this work, we provide a first explanation of PAGs via \emph{off-manifold robustness}, which states that models must be more robust off- the data manifold than they are on-manifold. We first demonstrate theoretically that off-manifold robustness leads input gradients to lie approximately on the data manifold, explaining their perceptual alignment. We then show that Bayes optimal models satisfy off-manifold robustness, and confirm the same empirically for robust models trained via gradient norm regularization, randomized smoothing, and adversarial training with projected gradient descent. Quantifying the perceptual alignment of model gradients via their similarity with the gradients of generative models, we show that off-manifold robustness correlates well with perceptual alignment. Finally, based on the levels of on- and off-manifold robustness, we identify three different regimes of robustness that affect both perceptual alignment and model accuracy: weak robustness, bayes-aligned robustness, and excessive robustness. Code is available at https://github.com/tml-tuebingen/pags.
Inferring the Future by Imagining the Past
Authors: Kartik Chandra, Tony Chen, Tzu-Mao Li, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, Josh Tenenbaum
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: A single panel of a comic book can say a lot: it can depict not only where the characters currently are, but also their motions, their motivations, their emotions, and what they might do next. More generally, humans routinely infer complex sequences of past and future events from a static snapshot of a dynamic scene, even in situations they have never seen before.In this paper, we model how humans make such rapid and flexible inferences. Building on a long line of work in cognitive science, we offer a Monte Carlo algorithm whose inferences correlate well with human intuitions in a wide variety of domains, while only using a small, cognitively-plausible number of samples. Our key technical insight is a surprising connection between our inference problem and Monte Carlo path tracing, which allows us to apply decades of ideas from the computer graphics community to this seemingly-unrelated theory of mind task.
The Grand Illusion: The Myth of Software Portability and Implications for ML Progress.
Authors: Fraser Mince, Dzung Dinh, Jonas Kgomo, Neil Thompson, Sara Hooker
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Pushing the boundaries of machine learning often requires exploring different hardware and software combinations. However, this ability to experiment with different systems can be at odds with the drive for efficiency, which has produced increasingly specialized AI hardware and incentivized consolidation around a narrow set of ML frameworks. Exploratory research can be further restricted if software and hardware are co-evolving, making it even harder to stray away from a given tooling stack. While this friction increasingly impacts the rate of innovation in machine learning, to our knowledge the lack of portability in tooling has not been quantified. In this work we ask: How portable are popular ML software frameworks? We conduct a large scale study of the portability of mainstream ML frameworks across different hardware types. Our findings paint an uncomfortable picture -- frameworks can lose more than 40% of their key functions when ported to other hardware. Worse, even when functions are portable, the slowdown in their performance can be extreme. Collectively, our results reveal how costly straying from a narrow set of hardware-software combinations can be - and thus how specialization incurs an exploration cost that can impede innovation in machine learning research.
Computing Optimal Nash Equilibria in Multiplayer Games
Authors: Youzhi Zhang, Bo An, Venkatramanan Subrahmanian
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Designing efficient algorithms to compute a Nash Equilibrium (NE) in multiplayer games is still an open challenge. In this paper, we focus on computing an NE that optimizes a given objective function. For example, when there is a team of players independently playing against an adversary in a game (e.g., several groups in a forest trying to interdict illegal loggers in green security games), these team members may need to find an NE minimizing the adversary’s utility. Finding an optimal NE in multiplayer games can be formulated as a mixed-integer bilinear program by introducing auxiliary variables to represent bilinear terms, leading to a huge number of bilinear terms, making it hard to solve. To overcome this challenge, we first propose a general framework for this formulation based on a set of correlation plans. We then develop a novel algorithm called CRM based on this framework, which uses correlation plans with their relations to strictly reduce the feasible solution space after the convex relaxation of bilinear terms while minimizing the number of correlation plans to significantly reduce the number of bilinear terms. We show that our techniques can significantly reduce the time complexity and CRM can be several orders of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art baseline.
AND: Adversarial Neural Degradation for Learning Blind Image Super-Resolution
Authors: Fangzhou Luo, Xiaolin Wu, Yanhui Guo
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Learnt deep neural networks for image super-resolution fail easily if the assumed degradation model in training mismatches that of the real degradation source at the inference stage. Instead of attempting to exhaust all degradation variants in simulation, which is unwieldy and impractical, we propose a novel adversarial neural degradation (AND) model that can, when trained in conjunction with a deep restoration neural network under a minmax criterion, generate a wide range of highly nonlinear complex degradation effects without any explicit supervision. The AND model has a unique advantage over the current state of the art in that it can generalize much better to unseen degradation variants and hence deliver significantly improved restoration performance on real-world images.
Into the LAION’s Den: Investigating Hate in Multimodal Datasets
Authors: Abeba Birhane, vinay prabhu, Sanghyun Han, Vishnu Boddeti, Sasha Luccioni
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2023

Abstract: `Scale the model, scale the data, scale the compute' is the reigning sentiment in the world of generative AI today. While the impact of model scaling has been extensively studied, we are only beginning to scratch the surface of data scaling and its consequences. This is especially of critical importance in the context of vision-language datasets such as LAION. These datasets are continually growing in size and are built based on large-scale internet dumps such as the Common Crawl, which is known to have numerous drawbacks ranging from quality, legality, and content. The datasets then serve as the backbone for large generative models, contributing to the operationalization and perpetuation of harmful societal and historical biases and stereotypes. In this paper, we investigate the effect of scaling datasets on hateful content through a comparative audit of two datasets: LAION-400M and LAION-2B. Our results show that hate content increased by nearly 12% with dataset scale, measured both qualitatively and quantitatively using a metric that we term as Hate Content Rate (HCR). We also found that filtering dataset contents based on Not Safe For Work (NSFW) values calculated based on images alone does not exclude all the harmful content in alt-text. Instead, we found that trace amounts of hateful, targeted, and aggressive text remain even when carrying out conservative filtering. We end with a reflection and a discussion of the significance of our results for dataset curation and usage in the AI community.Code and the meta-data assets curated in this paper are publicly available at https://github.com/vinayprabhu/hate_scaling. Content warning: This paper contains examples of hateful text that might be disturbing, distressing, and/or offensive.
SE(3) Diffusion Model-based Point Cloud Registration for Robust 6D Object Pose Estimation
Authors: Haobo Jiang, Mathieu Salzmann, Zheng Dang, Jin Xie, Jian Yang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce an SE(3) diffusion model-based point cloud registration framework for 6D object pose estimation in real-world scenarios. Our approach formulates the 3D registration task as a denoising diffusion process, which progressively refines the pose of the source point cloud to obtain a precise alignment with the model point cloud. Training our framework involves two operations: An SE(3) diffusion process and an SE(3) reverse process. The SE(3) diffusion process gradually perturbs the optimal rigid transformation of a pair of point clouds by continuously injecting noise (perturbation transformation). By contrast, the SE(3) reverse process focuses on learning a denoising network that refines the noisy transformation step-by-step, bringing it closer to the optimal transformation for accurate pose estimation. Unlike standard diffusion models used in linear Euclidean spaces, our diffusion model operates on the SE(3) manifold. This requires exploiting the linear Lie algebra $\mathfrak{se}(3)$ associated with SE(3) to constrain the transformation transitions during the diffusion and reverse processes. Additionally, to effectively train our denoising network, we derive a registration-specific variational lower bound as the optimization objective for model learning. Furthermore, we show that our denoising network can be constructed with a surrogate registration model, making our approach applicable to different deep registration networks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our diffusion registration framework presents outstanding pose estimation performance on the real-world TUD-L, LINEMOD, and Occluded-LINEMOD datasets.
RoboDepth: Robust Out-of-Distribution Depth Estimation under Corruptions
Authors: Lingdong Kong, Shaoyuan Xie, Hanjiang Hu, Lai Xing Ng, Benoit Cottereau, Wei Tsang Ooi
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2023

Abstract: Depth estimation from monocular images is pivotal for real-world visual perception systems. While current learning-based depth estimation models train and test on meticulously curated data, they often overlook out-of-distribution (OoD) situations. Yet, in practical settings -- especially safety-critical ones like autonomous driving -- common corruptions can arise. Addressing this oversight, we introduce a comprehensive robustness test suite, RoboDepth, encompassing 18 corruptions spanning three categories: i) weather and lighting conditions; ii) sensor failures and movement; and iii) data processing anomalies. We subsequently benchmark 42 depth estimation models across indoor and outdoor scenes to assess their resilience to these corruptions. Our findings underscore that, in the absence of a dedicated robustness evaluation framework, many leading depth estimation models may be susceptible to typical corruptions. We delve into design considerations for crafting more robust depth estimation models, touching upon pre-training, augmentation, modality, model capacity, and learning paradigms. We anticipate our benchmark will establish a foundational platform for advancing robust OoD depth estimation.
Fed-CO$_{2}$: Cooperation of Online and Offline Models for Severe Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning
Authors: Zhongyi Cai, Ye Shi, Wei Huang, Jingya Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising distributed learning paradigm that enables multiple clients to learn a global model collaboratively without sharing their private data. However, the effectiveness of FL is highly dependent on the quality of the data that is being used for training. In particular, data heterogeneity issues, such as label distribution skew and feature skew, can significantly impact the performance of FL. Previous studies in FL have primarily focused on addressing label distribution skew data heterogeneity, while only a few recent works have made initial progress in tackling feature skew issues. Notably, these two forms of data heterogeneity have been studied separately and have not been well explored within a unified FL framework. To address this gap, we propose Fed-CO$_2$, a universal FL framework that handles both label distribution skew and feature skew within a Cooperation mechanism between the Online and Offline models. Specifically, the online model learns general knowledge that is shared among all clients, while the offline model is trained locally to learn the specialized knowledge of each individual client. To further enhance model cooperation in the presence of feature shifts, we design an intra-client knowledge transfer mechanism that reinforces mutual learning between the online and offline models, and an inter-client knowledge transfer mechanism to increase the models’ domain generalization ability. Extensive experiments show that our Fed-CO$_2$ outperforms a wide range of existing personalized federated learning algorithms in terms of handling label distribution skew and feature skew, both individually and collectively. The empirical results are supported by our convergence analyses in a simplified setting.
Combating Bilateral Edge Noise for Robust Link Prediction
Authors: Zhanke Zhou, Jiangchao Yao, Jiaxu Liu, Xiawei Guo, Quanming Yao, LI He, Liang Wang, Bo Zheng, Bo Han
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Although link prediction on graphs has achieved great success with the development of graph neural networks (GNNs), the potential robustness under the edge noise is still less investigated. To close this gap, we first conduct an empirical study to disclose that the edge noise bilaterally perturbs both input topology and target label, yielding severe performance degradation and representation collapse. To address this dilemma, we propose an information-theory-guided principle, Robust Graph Information Bottleneck (RGIB), to extract reliable supervision signals and avoid representation collapse. Different from the basic information bottleneck, RGIB further decouples and balances the mutual dependence among graph topology, target labels, and representation, building new learning objectives for robust representation against the bilateral noise. Two instantiations, RGIB-SSL and RGIB-REP, are explored to leverage the merits of different methodologies, i.e., self-supervised learning and data reparameterization, for implicit and explicit data denoising, respectively. Extensive experiments on six datasets and three GNNs with diverse noisy scenarios verify the effectiveness of our RGIB instantiations. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/tmlr-group/RGIB.
SyncTREE: Fast Timing Analysis for Integrated Circuit Design through a Physics-informed Tree-based Graph Neural Network
Authors: Yuting Hu, Jiajie Li, Florian Klemme, Gi-Joon Nam, Tengfei Ma, Hussam Amrouch, Jinjun Xiong
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Nowadays integrated circuits (ICs) are underpinning all major information technology innovations including the current trends of artificial intelligence (AI). Modern IC designs often involve analyses of complex phenomena (such as timing, noise, and power etc.) for tens of billions of electronic components, like resistance (R), capacitance (C), transistors and gates, interconnected in various complex structures. Those analyses often need to strike a balance between accuracy and speed as those analyses need to be carried out many times throughout the entire IC design cycles. With the advancement of AI, researchers also start to explore news ways in leveraging AI to improve those analyses. This paper focuses on one of the most important analyses, timing analysis for interconnects. Since IC interconnects can be represented as an RC-tree, a specialized graph as tree, we design a novel tree-based graph neural network, SyncTREE, to speed up the timing analysis by incorporating both the structural and physical properties of electronic circuits. Our major innovations include (1) a two-pass message-passing (bottom-up and top-down) for graph embedding, (2) a tree contrastive loss to guide learning, and (3) a closed formular-based approach to conduct fast timing.  Our experiments show that, compared to conventional GNN models, SyncTREE achieves the best timing prediction in terms of both delays and slews, all in reference to the industry golden numerical analyses results on real IC design data.
Hierarchical Open-vocabulary Universal Image Segmentation
Authors: Xudong Wang, Shufan Li, Konstantinos Kallidromitis, Yusuke Kato, Kazuki Kozuka, Trevor Darrell
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Open-vocabulary image segmentation aims to partition an image into semantic regions according to arbitrary text descriptions. However, complex visual scenes can be naturally decomposed into simpler parts and abstracted at multiple lev4 els of granularity, introducing inherent segmentation ambiguity. Unlike existing methods that typically sidestep this ambiguity and treat it as an external factor, our approach actively incorporates a hierarchical representation encompassing different semantic-levels into the learning process. We propose a decoupled text-image fusion mechanism and representation learning modules for both “things” and “stuff”. Additionally, we systematically examine the differences that exist in the textual and visual features between these types of categories. Our resulting model, named HIPIE, tackles HIerarchical, oPen-vocabulary, and unIvErsal segmentation tasks within a unified framework. Benchmarked on diverse datasets, e.g., ADE20K,COCO, Pascal-VOC Part, and RefCOCO/RefCOCOg, HIPIE achieves the state-of14 the-art results at various levels of image comprehension, including semantic-level (e.g., semantic segmentation), instance-level (e.g., panoptic/referring segmentationand object detection), as well as part-level (e.g., part/subpart segmentation) tasks.
Fairly Recommending with Social Attributes: A Flexible and Controllable Optimization Approach
Authors: Jinqiu Jin, Haoxuan Li, Fuli Feng, Sihao Ding, Peng Wu, Xiangnan He
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Item-side group fairness (IGF) requires a recommendation model to treat different item groups similarly, and has a crucial impact on information diffusion, consumption activity, and market equilibrium. Previous IGF notions only focus on the direct utility of the item exposures, i.e., the exposure numbers across different item groups. Nevertheless, the item exposures also facilitate utility gained from the neighboring users via social influence, called social utility, such as information sharing on the social media. To fill this gap, this paper introduces two social attribute-aware IGF metrics, which require similar user social attributes on the exposed items across the different item groups. In light of the trade-off between the direct utility and social utility, we formulate a new multi-objective optimization problem for training recommender models with flexible trade-off while ensuring controllable accuracy. To solve this problem, we develop a gradient-based optimization algorithm and theoretically show that the proposed algorithm can find Pareto optimal solutions with varying trade-off and guaranteed accuracy. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our approach.
Look Ma, No Hands! Agent-Environment Factorization of Egocentric Videos
Authors: Matthew Chang, Aditya Prakash, Saurabh Gupta
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: The analysis and use of egocentric videos for robotics tasks is made challenging by occlusion and the visual mismatch between the human hand and a robot end-effector. Past work views the human hand as a nuisance and removes it from the scene. However, the hand also provides a valuable signal for learning. In this work, we propose to extract a factored representation of the scene that separates the agent (human hand) and the environment. This alleviates both occlusion and mismatch while preserving the signal, thereby easing the design of models for downstream robotics tasks. At the heart of this factorization is our proposed Video Inpainting via Diffusion Model (VIDM) that leverages both a prior on real-world images (through a large-scale pre-trained diffusion model) and the appearance of the object in earlier frames of the video (through attention). Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of VIDM at improving the in-painting quality in egocentric videos and the power of our factored representation for numerous tasks: object detection, 3D reconstruction of manipulated objects, and learning of reward functions, policies, and affordances from videos.