mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
On Pre-Training for Visuo-Motor Control: Revisiting a Learning-from-Scratch Baseline
Authors: Hansen, Nicklas and Yuan, Zhecheng and Ze, Yanjie and Mu, Tongzhou and Rajeswaran, Aravind and Su, Hao and Xu, Huazhe and Wang, Xiaolong
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of pre-training for visuo-motor control tasks. We revisit a simple Learning-from-Scratch (LfS) baseline that incorporates data augmentation and a shallow ConvNet, and find that this baseline is surprisingly competitive with recent approaches (PVR, MVP, R3M) that leverage frozen visual representations trained on large-scale vision datasets – across a variety of algorithms, task domains, and metrics in simulation and on a real robot. Our results demonstrate that these methods are hindered by a significant domain gap between the pre-training datasets and current benchmarks for visuo-motor control, which is alleviated by finetuning. Based on our findings, we provide recommendations for future research in pre-training for control and hope that our simple yet strong baseline will aid in accurately benchmarking progress in this area. Code: https://github.com/gemcollector/learning-from-scratch.
Leveraging Demonstrations to Improve Online Learning: Quality Matters
Authors: Hao, Botao and Jain, Rahul and Lattimore, Tor and Van Roy, Benjamin and Wen, Zheng
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We investigate the extent to which offline demonstration data can improve online learning. It is natural to expect some improvement, but <em>the question is how, and by how much?</em> We show that the degree of improvement must depend on the <em>quality</em> of the demonstration data. To generate portable insights, we focus on Thompson sampling (TS) applied to a multi-armed bandit as a prototypical online learning algorithm and model. The demonstration data is generated by an expert with a given <em>competence</em> level, a notion we introduce. We propose an informed TS algorithm that utilizes the demonstration data in a coherent way through Bayes’ rule and derive a prior-dependent Bayesian regret bound. This offers insight into how pretraining can greatly improve online performance and how the degree of improvement increases with the expert’s competence level. We also develop a practical, approximate informed TS algorithm through Bayesian bootstrapping and show substantial empirical regret reduction through experiments.
Coupled Variational Autoencoder
Authors: Hao, Xiaoran and Shafto, Patrick
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Variational auto-encoders are powerful probabilistic models in generative tasks but suffer from generating low-quality samples which are caused by the holes in the prior. We propose the Coupled Variational Auto-Encoder (C-VAE), which formulates the VAE problem as one of Optimal Transport (OT) between the prior and data distributions. The C-VAE allows greater flexibility in priors and natural resolution of the prior hole problem by enforcing coupling between the prior and the data distribution and enables flexible optimization through the primal, dual, and semi-dual formulations of entropic OT. Simulations on synthetic and real data show that the C-VAE outperforms alternatives including VAE, WAE, and InfoVAE in fidelity to the data, quality of the latent representation, and in quality of generated samples.
GNOT: A General Neural Operator Transformer for Operator Learning
Authors: Hao, Zhongkai and Wang, Zhengyi and Su, Hang and Ying, Chengyang and Dong, Yinpeng and Liu, Songming and Cheng, Ze and Song, Jian and Zhu, Jun
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Learning partial differential equations’ (PDEs) solution operators is an essential problem in machine learning. However, there are several challenges for learning operators in practical applications like the irregular mesh, multiple input functions, and complexity of the PDEs’ solution. To address these challenges, we propose a general neural operator transformer (GNOT), a scalable and effective transformer-based framework for learning operators. By designing a novel heterogeneous normalized attention layer, our model is highly flexible to handle multiple input functions and irregular meshes. Besides, we introduce a geometric gating mechanism which could be viewed as a soft domain decomposition to solve the multi-scale problems. The large model capacity of the transformer architecture grants our model the possibility to scale to large datasets and practical problems. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple challenging datasets from different domains and achieve a remarkable improvement compared with alternative methods. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/thu-ml/GNOT.
Algorithmic Collective Action in Machine Learning
Authors: Hardt, Moritz and Mazumdar, Eric and Mendler-Dünner, Celestine and Zrnic, Tijana
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We initiate a principled study of algorithmic collective action on digital platforms that deploy machine learning algorithms. We propose a simple theoretical model of a collective interacting with a firm’s learning algorithm. The collective pools the data of participating individuals and executes an algorithmic strategy by instructing participants how to modify their own data to achieve a collective goal. We investigate the consequences of this model in three fundamental learning-theoretic settings: nonparametric optimal learning, parametric risk minimization, and gradient-based optimization. In each setting, we come up with coordinated algorithmic strategies and characterize natural success criteria as a function of the collective’s size. Complementing our theory, we conduct systematic experiments on a skill classification task involving tens of thousands of resumes from a gig platform for freelancers. Through more than two thousand model training runs of a BERT-like language model, we see a striking correspondence emerge between our empirical observations and the predictions made by our theory. Taken together, our theory and experiments broadly support the conclusion that algorithmic collectives of exceedingly small fractional size can exert significant control over a platform’s learning algorithm.
Gaussian Process Priors for Systems of Linear Partial Differential Equations with Constant Coefficients
Authors: Harkonen, Marc and Lange-Hegermann, Markus and Raita, Bogdan
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Partial differential equations (PDEs) are important tools to model physical systems and including them into machine learning models is an important way of incorporating physical knowledge. Given any system of linear PDEs with constant coefficients, we propose a family of Gaussian process (GP) priors, which we call EPGP, such that all realizations are exact solutions of this system. We apply the Ehrenpreis-Palamodov fundamental principle, which works as a non-linear Fourier transform, to construct GP kernels mirroring standard spectral methods for GPs. Our approach can infer probable solutions of linear PDE systems from any data such as noisy measurements, or pointwise defined initial and boundary conditions. Constructing EPGP-priors is algorithmic, generally applicable, and comes with a sparse version (S-EPGP) that learns the relevant spectral frequencies and works better for big data sets. We demonstrate our approach on three families of systems of PDEs, the heat equation, wave equation, and Maxwell’s equations, where we improve upon the state of the art in computation time and precision, in some experiments by several orders of magnitude.
Theoretical Guarantees of Learning Ensembling Strategies with Applications to Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Hasson, Hilaf and Maddix, Danielle C. and Wang, Bernie and Gupta, Gaurav and Park, Youngsuk
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Ensembling is among the most popular tools in machine learning (ML) due to its effectiveness in minimizing variance and thus improving generalization. Most ensembling methods for black-box base learners fall under the umbrella of "stacked generalization," namely training an ML algorithm that takes the inferences from the base learners as input. While stacking has been widely applied in practice, its theoretical properties are poorly understood. In this paper, we prove a novel result, showing that choosing the best stacked generalization from a (finite or finite-dimensional) family of stacked generalizations based on cross-validated performance does not perform "much worse" than the oracle best. Our result strengthens and significantly extends the results in Van der Laan et al. (2007). Inspired by the theoretical analysis, we further propose a particular family of stacked generalizations in the context of probabilistic forecasting, each one with a different sensitivity for how much the ensemble weights are allowed to vary across items, timestamps in the forecast horizon, and quantiles. Experimental results demonstrate the performance gain of the proposed method.
Global Context Vision Transformers
Authors: Hatamizadeh, Ali and Yin, Hongxu and Heinrich, Greg and Kautz, Jan and Molchanov, Pavlo
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We propose global context vision transformer (GC ViT), a novel architecture that enhances parameter and compute utilization for computer vision. Our method leverages global context self-attention modules, joint with standard local self-attention, to effectively and efficiently model both long and short-range spatial interactions, without the need for expensive operations such as computing attention masks or shifting local windows. In addition, we address the lack of the inductive bias in ViTs, and propose to leverage a modified fused inverted residual blocks in our architecture. Our proposed GC ViT achieves state-of-the-art results across image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation tasks. On ImageNet-1K dataset for classification, the variants of GC ViT with 51M, 90M and 201M parameters achieve 84.3%, 85.0% and 85.7% Top-1 accuracy, respectively, at 224 image resolution and without any pre-training, hence surpassing comparably-sized prior art such as CNN-based ConvNeXt and ViT-based MaxViT and Swin Transformer by a large margin. Pre-trained GC ViT backbones in downstream tasks of object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation using MS COCO and ADE20K datasets outperform prior work consistently. Specifically, GC ViT with a 4-scale DINO detection head achieves a box AP of 58.3 on MS COCO dataset.
Counterfactual Analysis in Dynamic Latent State Models
Authors: Haugh, Martin B and Singal, Raghav
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We provide an optimization-based framework to perform counterfactual analysis in a dynamic model with hidden states. Our framework is grounded in the “abduction, action, and prediction” approach to answer counterfactual queries and handles two key challenges where (1) the states are hidden and (2) the model is dynamic. Recognizing the lack of knowledge on the underlying causal mechanism and the possibility of infinitely many such mechanisms, we optimize over this space and compute upper and lower bounds on the counterfactual quantity of interest. Our work brings together ideas from causality, state-space models, simulation, and optimization, and we apply it on a breast cancer case study. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to compute lower and upper bounds on a counterfactual query in a dynamic latent-state model.
Sampling-based Nyström Approximation and Kernel Quadrature
Authors: Hayakawa, Satoshi and Oberhauser, Harald and Lyons, Terry
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We analyze the Nyström approximation of a positive definite kernel associated with a probability measure. We first prove an improved error bound for the conventional Nyström approximation with i.i.d. sampling and singular-value decomposition in the continuous regime; the proof techniques are borrowed from statistical learning theory. We further introduce a refined selection of subspaces in Nyström approximation with theoretical guarantees that is applicable to non-i.i.d. landmark points. Finally, we discuss their application to convex kernel quadrature and give novel theoretical guarantees as well as numerical observations.
Width and Depth Limits Commute in Residual Networks
Authors: Hayou, Soufiane and Yang, Greg
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We show that taking the width and depth to infinity in a deep neural network with skip connections, when branches are scaled by $1/\sqrtdepth$, result in the same covariance structure no matter how that limit is taken. This explains why the standard infinite-width-then-depth approach provides practical insights even for networks with depth of the same order as width. We also demonstrate that the pre-activations, in this case, have Gaussian distributions which has direct applications in Bayesian deep learning. We conduct extensive simulations that show an excellent match with our theoretical findings.
A Generalization of ViT/MLP-Mixer to Graphs
Authors: He, Xiaoxin and Hooi, Bryan and Laurent, Thomas and Perold, Adam and Lecun, Yann and Bresson, Xavier
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown great potential in the field of graph representation learning. Standard GNNs define a local message-passing mechanism which propagates information over the whole graph domain by stacking multiple layers. This paradigm suffers from two major limitations, over-squashing and poor long-range dependencies, that can be solved using global attention but significantly increases the computational cost to quadratic complexity. In this work, we propose an alternative approach to overcome these structural limitations by leveraging the ViT/MLP-Mixer architectures introduced in computer vision. We introduce a new class of GNNs, called Graph ViT/MLP-Mixer, that holds three key properties. First, they capture long-range dependency and mitigate the issue of over-squashing as demonstrated on Long Range Graph Benchmark and TreeNeighbourMatch datasets. Second, they offer better speed and memory efficiency with a complexity linear to the number of nodes and edges, surpassing the related Graph Transformer and expressive GNN models. Third, they show high expressivity in terms of graph isomorphism as they can distinguish at least 3-WL non-isomorphic graphs. We test our architecture on 4 simulated datasets and 7 real-world benchmarks, and show highly competitive results on all of them. The source code is available for reproducibility at: https://github.com/XiaoxinHe/Graph-ViT-MLPMixer.
Domain Adaptation for Time Series Under Feature and Label Shifts
Authors: He, Huan and Queen, Owen and Koker, Teddy and Cuevas, Consuelo and Tsiligkaridis, Theodoros and Zitnik, Marinka
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) enables the transfer of models trained on source domains to unlabeled target domains. However, transferring complex time series models presents challenges due to the dynamic temporal structure variations across domains. This leads to feature shifts in the time and frequency representations. Additionally, the label distributions of tasks in the source and target domains can differ significantly, posing difficulties in addressing label shifts and recognizing labels unique to the target domain. Effectively transferring complex time series models remains a formidable problem. We present RAINCOAT, the first model for both closed-set and universal domain adaptation on complex time series. RAINCOAT addresses feature and label shifts by considering both temporal and frequency features, aligning them across domains, and correcting for misalignments to facilitate the detection of private labels. Additionally, RAINCOAT improves transferability by identifying label shifts in target domains. Our experiments with 5 datasets and 13 state-of-the-art UDA methods demonstrate that RAINCOAT can improve transfer learning performance by up to 16.33% and can handle both closed-set and universal domain adaptation.
Contrastive Learning Meets Homophily: Two Birds with One Stone
Authors: He, Dongxiao and Zhao, Jitao and Guo, Rui and Feng, Zhiyong and Jin, Di and Huang, Yuxiao and Wang, Zhen and Zhang, Weixiong
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has recently enjoyed great success as an efficient self-supervised representation learning approach. However, the existing methods have focused on designing of contrastive modes and used data augmentation with a rigid and inefficient one-to-one sampling strategy. We adopted node neighborhoods to extend positive samplings and made avoided resorting to data augmentation to create different views. We also considered the homophily problem in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) between the inter-class node pairs. The key novelty of our method hinged upon analyzing this GNNs problem and integrating the GCL sampling strategy with homophily discrimination, where we solved these two significant problems using one approach. We introduced a new parameterized neighbor sampling component to replace the conventional sub-optimal samplings. By keeping and updating the neighbor sets, both the positive sampling of GCL and the message passing of GNNs can be optimized. Moreover, we theoretically proved that the new method provided a lower bound of mutual information for unsupervised semantic learning, and it can also keep the lower bound with downstream tasks. In essence, our method is a new self-supervised approach, which we refer to as group discrimination, and it can make the downstream fine-tuning efficient. Our extensive empirical results demonstrate that the new method can significantly outperform the existing GCL methods because the former can solve the homophily problem in a self-supervised way with the new group discrimination method used.
Nearly Minimax Optimal Reinforcement Learning for Linear Markov Decision Processes
Authors: He, Jiafan and Zhao, Heyang and Zhou, Dongruo and Gu, Quanquan
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We study reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation. For episodic time-inhomogeneous linear Markov decision processes (linear MDPs) whose transition probability can be parameterized as a linear function of a given feature mapping, we propose the first computationally efficient algorithm that achieves the nearly minimax optimal regret $\tilde O(d\sqrtH^3K)$, where $d$ is the dimension of the feature mapping, $H$ is the planning horizon, and $K$ is the number of episodes. Our algorithm is based on a weighted linear regression scheme with a carefully designed weight, which depends on a new variance estimator that (1) directly estimates the variance of the <em>optimal</em> value function, (2) monotonically decreases with respect to the number of episodes to ensure a better estimation accuracy, and (3) uses a rare-switching policy to update the value function estimator to control the complexity of the estimated value function class. Our work provides a complete answer to optimal RL with linear MDPs, and the developed algorithm and theoretical tools may be of independent interest.
CRISP: Curriculum based Sequential neural decoders for Polar code family
Authors: Hebbar, S Ashwin and Nadkarni, Viraj Vivek and Makkuva, Ashok Vardhan and Bhat, Suma and Oh, Sewoong and Viswanath, Pramod
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Polar codes are widely used state-of-the-art codes for reliable communication that have recently been included in the $5^\textth$ generation wireless standards ($5$G). However, there still remains room for design of polar decoders that are both efficient and reliable in the short blocklength regime. Motivated by recent successes of data-driven channel decoders, we introduce a novel $\textbf C$ur$\textbfRI$culum based $\textbfS$equential neural decoder for $\textbfP$olar codes (CRISP). We design a principled curriculum, guided by information-theoretic insights, to train CRISP and show that it outperforms the successive-cancellation (SC) decoder and attains near-optimal reliability performance on the $\textPolar(32,16)$ and $\textPolar(64,22)$ codes. The choice of the proposed curriculum is critical in achieving the accuracy gains of CRISP, as we show by comparing against other curricula. More notably, CRISP can be readily extended to Polarization-Adjusted-Convolutional (PAC) codes, where existing SC decoders are significantly less reliable. To the best of our knowledge, CRISP constructs the first data-driven decoder for PAC codes and attains near-optimal performance on the $\textPAC(32,16)$ code.
Sketch-Flip-Merge: Mergeable Sketches for Private Distinct Counting
Authors: Hehir, Jonathan and Ting, Daniel and Cormode, Graham
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Data sketching is a critical tool for distinct counting, enabling multisets to be represented by compact summaries that admit fast cardinality estimates. Because sketches may be merged to summarize multiset unions, they are a basic building block in data warehouses. Although many practical sketches for cardinality estimation exist, none provide privacy when merging. We propose the first practical cardinality sketches that are simultaneously mergeable, differentially private (DP), and have low empirical errors. These introduce a novel randomized algorithm for performing logical operations on noisy bits, a tight privacy analysis, and provably optimal estimation. Our sketches dramatically outperform existing theoretical solutions in simulations and on real-world data.
Functional Neural Networks: Shift invariant models for functional data with applications to EEG classification
Authors: Heinrichs, Florian and Heim, Mavin and Weber, Corinna
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: It is desirable for statistical models to detect signals of interest independently of their position. If the data is generated by some smooth process, this additional structure should be taken into account. We introduce a new class of neural networks that are shift invariant and preserve smoothness of the data: functional neural networks (FNNs). For this, we use methods from functional data analysis (FDA) to extend multi-layer perceptrons and convolutional neural networks to functional data. We propose different model architectures, show that the models outperform a benchmark model from FDA in terms of accuracy and successfully use FNNs to classify electroencephalography (EEG) data.
Distance Weighted Supervised Learning for Offline Interaction Data
Authors: Hejna, Joey and Gao, Jensen and Sadigh, Dorsa
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Sequential decision making algorithms often struggle to leverage different sources of unstructured offline interaction data. Imitation learning (IL) methods based on supervised learning are robust, but require optimal demonstrations, which are hard to collect. Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms promise to learn from sub-optimal data, but face optimization challenges especially with high-dimensional data. To bridge the gap between IL and RL, we introduce Distance Weighted Supervised Learning or DWSL, a supervised method for learning goal-conditioned policies from offline data. DWSL models the entire distribution of time-steps between states in offline data with only supervised learning, and uses this distribution to approximate shortest path distances. To extract a policy, we weight actions by their reduction in distance estimates. Theoretically, DWSL converges to an optimal policy constrained to the data distribution, an attractive property for offline learning, without any bootstrapping. Across all datasets we test, DWSL empirically maintains behavior cloning as a lower bound while still exhibiting policy improvement. In high-dimensional image domains, DWSL surpasses the performance of both prior goal-conditioned IL and RL algorithms. Visualizations and code can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/dwsl/home.
Group Equivariant Fourier Neural Operators for Partial Differential Equations
Authors: Helwig, Jacob and Zhang, Xuan and Fu, Cong and Kurtin, Jerry and Wojtowytsch, Stephan and Ji, Shuiwang
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We consider solving partial differential equations (PDEs) with Fourier neural operators (FNOs), which operate in the frequency domain. Since the laws of physics do not depend on the coordinate system used to describe them, it is desirable to encode such symmetries in the neural operator architecture for better performance and easier learning. While encoding symmetries in the physical domain using group theory has been studied extensively, how to capture symmetries in the frequency domain is under-explored. In this work, we extend group convolutions to the frequency domain and design Fourier layers that are equivariant to rotations, translations, and reflections by leveraging the equivariance property of the Fourier transform. The resulting $G$-FNO architecture generalizes well across input resolutions and performs well in settings with varying levels of symmetry. Our code is publicly available as part of the AIRS library (https://github.com/divelab/AIRS).
Training-Free Neural Active Learning with Initialization-Robustness Guarantees
Authors: Hemachandra, Apivich and Dai, Zhongxiang and Singh, Jasraj and Ng, See-Kiong and Low, Bryan Kian Hsiang
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Existing neural active learning algorithms have aimed to optimize the predictive performance of neural networks (NNs) by selecting data for labelling. However, other than a good predictive performance, being robust against random parameter initializations is also a crucial requirement in safety-critical applications. To this end, we introduce our expected variance with Gaussian processes (EV-GP) criterion for neural active learning, which is theoretically guaranteed to select data points which lead to trained NNs with both (a) good predictive performances and (b) initialization robustness. Importantly, our EV-GP criterion is training-free, i.e., it does not require any training of the NN during data selection, which makes it computationally efficient. We empirically demonstrate that our EV-GP criterion is highly correlated with both initialization robustness and generalization performance, and show that it consistently outperforms baseline methods in terms of both desiderata, especially in situations with limited initial data or large batch sizes.
A Study of Global and Episodic Bonuses for Exploration in Contextual MDPs
Authors: Henaff, Mikael and Jiang, Minqi and Raileanu, Roberta
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Exploration in environments which differ across episodes has received increasing attention in recent years. Current methods use some combination of global novelty bonuses, computed using the agent’s entire training experience, and episodic novelty bonuses, computed using only experience from the current episode. However, the use of these two types of bonuses has been ad-hoc and poorly understood. In this work, we shed light on the behavior of these two types of bonuses through controlled experiments on easily interpretable tasks as well as challenging pixel-based settings. We find that the two types of bonuses succeed in different settings, with episodic bonuses being most effective when there is little shared structure across episodes and global bonuses being effective when more structure is shared. We develop a conceptual framework which makes this notion of shared structure precise by considering the variance of the value function across contexts, and which provides a unifying explanation of our empirical results. We furthermore find that combining the two bonuses can lead to more robust performance across different degrees of shared structure, and investigate different algorithmic choices for defining and combining global and episodic bonuses based on function approximation. This results in an algorithm which sets a new state of the art across 16 tasks from the MiniHack suite used in prior work, and also performs robustly on Habitat and Montezuma’s Revenge.
Robust Camera Pose Refinement for Multi-Resolution Hash Encoding
Authors: Heo, Hwan and Kim, Taekyung and Lee, Jiyoung and Lee, Jaewon and Kim, Soohyun and Kim, Hyunwoo J. and Kim, Jin-Hwa
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Multi-resolution hash encoding has recently been proposed to reduce the computational cost of neural renderings, such as NeRF. This method requires accurate camera poses for the neural renderings of given scenes. However, contrary to previous methods jointly optimizing camera poses and 3D scenes, the naive gradient-based camera pose refinement method using multi-resolution hash encoding severely deteriorates performance. We propose a joint optimization algorithm to calibrate the camera pose and learn a geometric representation using efficient multi-resolution hash encoding. Showing that the oscillating gradient flows of hash encoding interfere with the registration of camera poses, our method addresses the issue by utilizing smooth interpolation weighting to stabilize the gradient oscillation for the ray samplings across hash grids. Moreover, the curriculum training procedure helps to learn the level-wise hash encoding, further increasing the pose refinement. Experiments on the novel-view synthesis datasets validate that our learning frameworks achieve state-of-the-art performance and rapid convergence of neural rendering.
Generalized Teacher Forcing for Learning Chaotic Dynamics
Authors: Hess, Florian and Monfared, Zahra and Brenner, Manuel and Durstewitz, Daniel
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Chaotic dynamical systems (DS) are ubiquitous in nature and society. Often we are interested in reconstructing such systems from observed time series for prediction or mechanistic insight, where by reconstruction we mean learning geometrical and invariant temporal properties of the system in question (like attractors). However, training reconstruction algorithms like recurrent neural networks (RNNs) on such systems by gradient-descent based techniques faces severe challenges. This is mainly due to exploding gradients caused by the exponential divergence of trajectories in chaotic systems. Moreover, for (scientific) interpretability we wish to have as low dimensional reconstructions as possible, preferably in a model which is mathematically tractable. Here we report that a surprisingly simple modification of teacher forcing leads to provably strictly all-time bounded gradients in training on chaotic systems, and, when paired with a simple architectural rearrangement of a tractable RNN design, piecewise-linear RNNs (PLRNNs), allows for faithful reconstruction in spaces of at most the dimensionality of the observed system. We show on several DS that with these amendments we can reconstruct DS better than current SOTA algorithms, in much lower dimensions. Performance differences were particularly compelling on real world data with which most other methods severely struggled. This work thus led to a simple yet powerful DS reconstruction algorithm which is highly interpretable at the same time.
Causal Modeling of Policy Interventions From Treatment-Outcome Sequences
Authors: Hızlı, Çağlar and John, S. T. and Juuti, Anne Tuulikki and Saarinen, Tuure Tapani and Pietiläinen, Kirsi Hannele and Marttinen, Pekka
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: A <em>treatment policy</em> defines when and what treatments are applied to affect some outcome of interest. Data-driven decision-making requires the ability to predict <em>what happens if a policy is changed</em>. Existing methods that predict how the outcome evolves under different scenarios assume that the tentative sequences of future treatments are fixed in advance, while in practice the treatments are determined stochastically by a policy and may depend, for example, on the efficiency of previous treatments. Therefore, the current methods are not applicable if the treatment policy is unknown or a counterfactual analysis is needed. To handle these limitations, we model the treatments and outcomes jointly in continuous time, by combining Gaussian processes and point processes. Our model enables the estimation of a treatment policy from observational sequences of treatments and outcomes, and it can predict the interventional and counterfactual progression of the outcome <em>after an intervention on the treatment policy</em> (in contrast with the causal effect of a single treatment). We show with real-world and semi-synthetic data on blood glucose progression that our method can answer causal queries more accurately than existing alternatives.
Monotonicity and Double Descent in Uncertainty Estimation with Gaussian Processes
Authors: Hodgkinson, Liam and Van Der Heide, Chris and Roosta, Fred and Mahoney, Michael W.
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Despite their importance for assessing reliability of predictions, uncertainty quantification (UQ) measures in machine learning models have only recently begun to be rigorously characterized. One prominent issue is the <em>curse of dimensionality</em>: it is commonly believed that the marginal likelihood should be reminiscent of cross-validation metrics and both should deteriorate with larger input dimensions. However, we prove that by tuning hyperparameters to maximize marginal likelihood (the empirical Bayes procedure), performance, as measured by the marginal likelihood, <em>improves monotonically</em> with the input dimension. On the other hand, cross-validation metrics exhibit qualitatively different behavior that is characteristic of double descent. Cold posteriors, which have recently attracted interest due to their improved performance in certain settings, appear to exacerbate these phenomena. We verify empirically that our results hold for real data, beyond our considered assumptions, and we explore consequences involving synthetic covariates.
AdaBoost is not an Optimal Weak to Strong Learner
Authors: Høgsgaard, Mikael Møller and Larsen, Kasper Green and Ritzert, Martin
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: AdaBoost is a classic boosting algorithm for combining multiple inaccurate classifiers produced by a weak learner, to produce a strong learner with arbitrarily high accuracy when given enough training data. Determining the optimal number of samples necessary to obtain a given accuracy of the strong learner, is a basic learning theoretic question. Larsen and Ritzert (NeurIPS’22) recently presented the first provably optimal weak-to-strong learner. However, their algorithm is somewhat complicated and it remains an intriguing question whether the prototypical boosting algorithm AdaBoost also makes optimal use of training samples. In this work, we answer this question in the negative. Concretely, we show that the sample complexity of AdaBoost, and other classic variations thereof, are sub-optimal by at least one logarithmic factor in the desired accuracy of the strong learner.
Dual Propagation: Accelerating Contrastive Hebbian Learning with Dyadic Neurons
Authors: Høier, Rasmus and Staudt, D. and Zach, Christopher
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Activity difference based learning algorithms—such as contrastive Hebbian learning and equilibrium propagation—have been proposed as biologically plausible alternatives to error back-propagation. However, on traditional digital chips these algorithms suffer from having to solve a costly inference problem twice, making these approaches more than two orders of magnitude slower than back-propagation. In the analog realm equilibrium propagation may be promising for fast and energy efficient learning, but states still need to be inferred and stored twice. Inspired by lifted neural networks and compartmental neuron models we propose a simple energy based compartmental neuron model, termed dual propagation, in which each neuron is a dyad with two intrinsic states. At inference time these intrinsic states encode the error/activity duality through their difference and their mean respectively. The advantage of this method is that only a single inference phase is needed and that inference can be solved in layerwise closed-form. Experimentally we show on common computer vision datasets, including Imagenet32x32, that dual propagation performs equivalently to back-propagation both in terms of accuracy and runtime.
Multi-Task Off-Policy Learning from Bandit Feedback
Authors: Hong, Joey and Kveton, Branislav and Zaheer, Manzil and Katariya, Sumeet and Ghavamzadeh, Mohammad
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Many practical problems involve solving similar tasks. In recommender systems, the tasks can be users with similar preferences; in search engines, the tasks can be items with similar affinities. To learn statistically efficiently, the tasks can be organized in a hierarchy, where the task affinity is captured using an unknown latent parameter. We study the problem of off-policy learning for similar tasks from logged bandit feedback. To solve the problem, we propose a hierarchical off-policy optimization algorithm HierOPO. The key idea is to estimate the task parameters using the hierarchy and then act pessimistically with respect to them. To analyze the algorithm, we develop novel Bayesian error bounds. Our bounds are the first in off-policy learning that improve with a more informative prior and capture statistical gains due to hierarchical models. Therefore, they are of a general interest. HierOPO also performs well in practice. Our experiments demonstrate the benefits of using the hierarchy over solving each task independently.
Constrained Optimization via Exact Augmented Lagrangian and Randomized Iterative Sketching
Authors: Hong, Ilgee and Na, Sen and Mahoney, Michael W. and Kolar, Mladen
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We consider solving equality-constrained nonlinear, nonconvex optimization problems. This class of problems appears widely in a variety of applications in machine learning and engineering, ranging from constrained deep neural networks, to optimal control, to PDE-constrained optimization. We develop an adaptive inexact Newton method for this problem class. In each iteration, we solve the Lagrangian Newton system inexactly via a randomized iterative sketching solver, and select a suitable stepsize by performing line search on an exact augmented Lagrangian merit function. The randomized solvers have advantages over deterministic linear system solvers by significantly reducing per-iteration flops complexity and storage cost, when equipped with suitable sketching matrices. Our method adaptively controls the accuracy of the randomized solver and the penalty parameters of the exact augmented Lagrangian, to ensure that the inexact Newton direction is a descent direction of the exact augmented Lagrangian. This allows us to establish a global almost sure convergence. We also show that a unit stepsize is admissible locally, so that our method exhibits a local linear convergence. Furthermore, we prove that the linear convergence can be strengthened to superlinear convergence if we gradually sharpen the adaptive accuracy condition on the randomized solver. We demonstrate the superior performance of our method on benchmark nonlinear problems in CUTEst test set, constrained logistic regression with data from LIBSVM, and a PDE-constrained problem.
Revisiting Data-Free Knowledge Distillation with Poisoned Teachers
Authors: Hong, Junyuan and Zeng, Yi and Yu, Shuyang and Lyu, Lingjuan and Jia, Ruoxi and Zhou, Jiayu
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Data-free knowledge distillation (KD) helps transfer knowledge from a pre-trained model (known as the teacher model) to a smaller model (known as the student model) without access to the original training data used for training the teacher model. However, the security of the synthetic or out-of-distribution (OOD) data required in data-free KD is largely unknown and under-explored. In this work, we make the first effort to uncover the security risk of data-free KD w.r.t. untrusted pre-trained models. We then propose Anti-Backdoor Data-Free KD (ABD), the first plug-in defensive method for data-free KD methods to mitigate the chance of potential backdoors being transferred. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed ABD in diminishing transferred backdoor knowledge while maintaining compatible downstream performances as the vanilla KD. We envision this work as a milestone for alarming and mitigating the potential backdoors in data-free KD. Codes are released at https://github.com/illidanlab/ABD .
simple diffusion: End-to-end diffusion for high resolution images
Authors: Hoogeboom, Emiel and Heek, Jonathan and Salimans, Tim
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Currently, applying diffusion models in pixel space of high resolution images is difficult. Instead, existing approaches focus on diffusion in lower dimensional spaces (latent diffusion), or have multiple super-resolution levels of generation referred to as cascades. The downside is that these approaches add additional complexity to the diffusion framework. This paper aims to improve denoising diffusion for high resolution images while keeping the model as simple as possible. The paper is centered around the research question: How can one train a standard denoising diffusion models on high resolution images, and still obtain performance comparable to these alternate approaches? The four main findings are: 1) the noise schedule should be adjusted for high resolution images, 2) It is sufficient to scale only a particular part of the architecture, 3) dropout should be added at specific locations in the architecture, and 4) downsampling is an effective strategy to avoid high resolution feature maps. Combining these simple yet effective techniques, we achieve state-of-the-art on image generation among diffusion models without sampling modifiers on ImageNet.
Causal Strategic Classification: A Tale of Two Shifts
Authors: Horowitz, Guy and Rosenfeld, Nir
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: When users can benefit from certain predictive outcomes, they may be prone to act to achieve those outcome, e.g., by strategically modifying their features. The goal in strategic classification is therefore to train predictive models that are robust to such behavior. However, the conventional framework assumes that changing features does not change actual outcomes, which depicts users as "gaming" the system. Here we remove this assumption, and study learning in a causal strategic setting where true outcomes do change. Focusing on accuracy as our primary objective, we show how strategic behavior and causal effects underlie two complementing forms of distribution shift. We characterize these shifts, and propose a learning algorithm that balances between these two forces and over time, and permits end-to-end training. Experiments on synthetic and semi-synthetic data demonstrate the utility of our approach.
Fair and Accurate Decision Making through Group-Aware Learning
Authors: Hosseini, Ramtin and Zhang, Li and Garg, Bhanu and Xie, Pengtao
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: The integration of machine learning models in various real-world applications is becoming more prevalent to assist humans in their daily decision-making tasks as a result of recent advancements in this field. However, it has been discovered that there is a tradeoff between the accuracy and fairness of these decision-making tasks. In some cases, these AI systems can be unfair by exhibiting bias or discrimination against certain social groups, which can have severe consequences in real life. Inspired by one of the most well-known human learning skills called grouping, we address this issue by proposing a novel machine learning (ML) framework where the ML model learns to group a diverse set of problems into distinct subgroups to solve each subgroup using its specific sub-model. Our proposed framework involves three stages of learning, which are formulated as a three-level optimization problem: 1) grouping problems into subgroups, 2) learning group-specific sub-models for problem-solving, and 3) updating group assignments of training examples by minimizing validation loss. These three learning stages are performed end-to-end in a joint manner using gradient descent. To improve fairness and accuracy, we develop an efficient optimization algorithm to solve this three-level optimization problem. To further decrease the risk of overfitting in small datasets using our LBG method, we incorporate domain adaptation techniques in the second stage of training. We further apply our method to differentiable neural architecture search (NAS) methods.