mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Language Is Not All You Need: Aligning Perception with Language Models
Authors: Shaohan Huang, Li Dong, Wenhui Wang, Yaru Hao, Saksham Singhal, Shuming Ma, Tengchao Lv, Lei Cui, Owais Khan Mohammed, Barun Patra, Qiang Liu, Kriti Aggarwal, Zewen Chi, Nils Bjorck, Vishrav Chaudhary, Subhojit Som, XIA SONG, Furu Wei
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: A big convergence of language, multimodal perception, action, and world modeling is a key step toward artificial general intelligence. In this work, we introduce KOSMOS-1, a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that can perceive general modalities, learn in context (i.e., few-shot), and follow instructions (i.e., zero-shot). Specifically, we train KOSMOS-1 from scratch on web-scale multi-modal corpora, including arbitrarily interleaved text and images, image-caption pairs, and text data. We evaluate various settings, including zero-shot, few-shot, and multimodal chain-of-thought prompting, on a wide range of tasks without any gradient updates or finetuning. Experimental results show that KOSMOS-1 achieves impressive performance on (i) language understanding, generation, and even OCR-free NLP (directly fed with document images), (ii) perception-language tasks, including multimodal dialogue, image captioning, visual question answering, and (iii) vision tasks, such as image recognition with descriptions (specifying classification via text instructions). We also show that MLLMs can benefit from cross-modal transfer, i.e., transfer knowledge from language to multimodal, and from multimodal to language. In addition, we introduce a dataset of Raven IQ test, which diagnoses the nonverbal reasoning capability of MLLMs.
Out-of-distribution Detection Learning with Unreliable Out-of-distribution Sources
Authors: Haotian Zheng, Qizhou Wang, Zhen Fang, Xiaobo Xia, Feng Liu, Tongliang Liu, Bo Han
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection discerns OOD data where the predictor cannot make valid predictions as in-distribution (ID) data, thereby increasing the reliability of open-world classification. However, it is typically hard to collect real out-of-distribution (OOD) data for training a predictor capable of discerning ID and OOD patterns. This obstacle gives rise to data generation-based learning methods, synthesizing OOD data via data generators for predictor training without requiring any real OOD data. Related methods typically pre-train a generator on ID data and adopt various selection procedures to find those data likely to be the OOD cases. However, generated data may still coincide with ID semantics, i.e., mistaken OOD generation remains, confusing the predictor between ID and OOD data. To this end, we suggest that generated data (with mistaken OOD generation) can be used to devise an auxiliary OOD detection task to facilitate real OOD detection. Specifically, we can ensure that learning from such an auxiliary task is beneficial if the ID and the OOD parts have disjoint supports, with the help of a well-designed training procedure for the predictor. Accordingly, we propose a powerful data generation-based learning method named Auxiliary Task-based OOD Learning (ATOL) that can relieve the mistaken OOD generation. We conduct extensive experiments under various OOD detection setups, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method against its advanced counterparts.
Robust covariance estimation with missing values and cell-wise contamination
Authors: Grégoire Pacreau, Karim Lounici
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Large datasets are often affected by cell-wise outliers in the form of missing or erroneous data. However, discarding any samples containing outliers may result in a dataset that is too small to accurately estimate the covariance matrix. Moreover, the robust procedures designed to address this problem require the invertibility of the covariance operator and thus are not effective on high-dimensional data. In this paper, we propose an unbiased estimator for the covariance in the presence of missing values that does not require any imputation step and still achieves near minimax statistical accuracy with the operator norm. We also advocate for its use in combination with cell-wise outlier detection methods to tackle cell-wise contamination in a high-dimensional and low-rank setting, where state-of-the-art methods may suffer from numerical instability and long computation times. To complement our theoretical findings, we conducted an experimental study which demonstrates the superiority of our approach over the state of the art both in low and high dimension settings.
Patch Diffusion: Faster and More Data-Efficient Training of Diffusion Models
Authors: Zhendong Wang, Yifan Jiang, Huangjie Zheng, Peihao Wang, Pengcheng He, Zhangyang "Atlas" Wang, Weizhu Chen, Mingyuan Zhou
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Diffusion models are powerful, but they require a lot of time and data to train. We propose Patch Diffusion, a generic patch-wise training framework, to significantly reduce the training time costs while improving data efficiency, which thus helps democratize diffusion model training to broader users. At the core of our innovations is a new conditional score function at the patch level, where the patch location in the original image is included as additional coordinate channels, while the patch size is randomized and diversified throughout training to encode the cross-region dependency at multiple scales. Sampling with our method is as easy as in the original diffusion model. Through Patch Diffusion, we could achieve $\mathbf{\ge 2\times}$ faster training, while maintaining comparable or better generation quality. Patch Diffusion meanwhile improves the performance of diffusion models trained on relatively small datasets, $e.g.$, as few as 5,000 images to train from scratch. We achieve outstanding FID scores in line with state-of-the-art benchmarks: 1.77 on CelebA-64$\times$64, 1.93 on AFHQv2-Wild-64$\times$64, and 2.72 on ImageNet-256$\times$256. We share our code and pre-trained models at https://github.com/Zhendong-Wang/Patch-Diffusion.
Clustering the Sketch: Dynamic Compression for Embedding Tables
Authors: Henry Tsang, Thomas Ahle
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Embedding tables are used by machine learning systems  to work with categorical features.In modern Recommendation Systems, these tables can be very large, necessitating the development of new methods for fitting them in memory, even during training.We suggest Clustered Compositional Embeddings (CCE) which combines clustering-based compression like quantization to codebooks with dynamic methods like The Hashing Trick and Compositional Embeddings [Shi et al., 2020].Experimentally CCE achieves the best of both worlds: The high compression rate of codebook-based quantization, but \emph{dynamically} like hashing-based methods, so it can be used during training.Theoretically, we prove that CCE is guaranteed to converge to the optimal codebook and give a tight bound for the number of iterations required.
Dynamic Personalized Federated Learning with Adaptive Differential Privacy
Authors: Xiyuan Yang, Wenke Huang, Mang Ye
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Personalized federated learning with differential privacy has been considered a feasible solution to address non-IID distribution of data and privacy leakage risks. However, current personalized federated learning methods suffer from inflexible personalization and convergence difficulties due to two main factors: 1) Firstly, we observe that the prevailing personalization methods mainly achieve this by personalizing a fixed portion of the model, which lacks flexibility. 2) Moreover, we further demonstrate that the default gradient calculation is sensitive to the widely-used clipping operations in differential privacy, resulting in difficulties in convergence. Considering that Fisher information values can serve as an effective measure for estimating the information content of parameters by reflecting the model sensitivity to parameters, we aim to leverage this property to address the aforementioned challenges. In this paper, we propose a novel federated learning method with Dynamic Fisher Personalization and Adaptive Constraint (FedDPA) to handle these challenges. Firstly, by using layer-wise Fisher information to measure the information content of local parameters, we retain local parameters with high Fisher values during the personalization process, which are considered informative, simultaneously prevent these parameters from noise perturbation. Secondly, we introduce an adaptive approach by applying differential constraint strategies to personalized parameters and shared parameters identified in the previous for better convergence.  Our method boosts performance through flexible personalization while mitigating the slow convergence caused by clipping operations. Experimental results on CIFAR-10, FEMNIST and SVHN dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in achieving better performance and robustness against clipping, under personalized federated learning with differential privacy.
Bias in Evaluation Processes: An Optimization-Based Model
Authors: L. Elisa Celis, Amit Kumar, Anay Mehrotra, Nisheeth K. Vishnoi
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Biases with respect to socially-salient attributes of individuals have been well documented in evaluation processes used in settings such as admissions and hiring. We view such an evaluation process as a transformation of a  distribution of the true utility of an individual for a task to an observed distribution and model it as a solution to a loss minimization problem subject to an information constraint. Our model has two parameters that have been identified as factors leading to biases: the resource-information trade-off parameter in the information constraint and the risk-averseness parameter in the loss function.  We characterize the distributions that arise from our model and study the effect of the parameters on the observed distribution. The outputs of our model enrich the class of distributions that can be used to capture variation across groups in the observed evaluations. We empirically validate our model by fitting real-world datasets and use it to study the effect of interventions in a downstream selection task. These results contribute to an understanding of the emergence of bias in evaluation processes and provide tools to guide the deployment of interventions to mitigate biases.
Data Minimization at Inference Time
Authors: Cuong Tran, Ferdinando Fioretto
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: In high-stakes domains such as legal, banking, hiring, and healthcare, learning models frequently rely on sensitive user information for inference, necessitating the complete set of features. This not only poses significant privacy risks for individuals but also demands substantial human effort from organizations to verify information accuracy. This study asks whether it is necessary to use all input features for accurate predictions at inference time. The paper demonstrates that, in a personalized setting, individuals may only need to disclose a small subset of features without compromising decision-making accuracy. The paper also provides an efficient sequential algorithm to determine the appropriate attributes for each individual to provide. Evaluations across various learning tasks show that individuals can potentially report as little as 10\% of their information while maintaining the same accuracy level as a model that employs the full set of user information.
Learning Adaptive Tensorial Density Fields for Clean Cryo-ET Reconstruction
Authors: YUANHAO WANG, Ramzi Idoughi, Wolfgang Heidrich
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We present a novel learning-based framework for reconstructing 3D structures from tilt-series cryo-Electron Tomography (cryo-ET) data. Cryo-ET is a powerful imaging technique that can achieve near-atomic resolutions. Still, it suffers from challenges such as missing-wedge acquisition, large data size, and high noise levels. Our framework addresses these challenges by using an adaptive tensorial-based representation for the 3D density field of the scanned sample. First, we optimize a quadtree structure to partition the volume of interest. Then, we learn a vector-matrix factorization of the tensor representing the density field in each node. Moreover, we use a loss function that combines a differentiable tomographic formation model with three regularization terms: total variation, boundary consistency constraint, and an isotropic Fourier prior. Our framework allows us to query the density at any location using the learned representation and obtain a high-quality 3D tomogram. We demonstrate the superiority of our framework over existing methods using synthetic and real data. Thus, our framework boosts the quality of the reconstruction while reducing the computation time and the memory footprint. The code is available at https://github.com/yuanhaowang1213/adaptivetensordf.
Resetting the Optimizer in Deep RL: An Empirical Study
Authors: Kavosh Asadi, Rasool Fakoor, Shoham Sabach
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We focus on the task of approximating the optimal value function in deep reinforcement learning. This iterative process is comprised of solving a sequence of optimization problems where the loss function changes per iteration. The common approach to solving this sequence of problems is to employ modern variants of the stochastic gradient descent algorithm such as Adam. These optimizers maintain their own internal parameters such as estimates of the first-order and the second-order moments of the gradient, and update them over time. Therefore, information obtained in previous iterations is used to solve the optimization problem in the current iteration. We demonstrate that this can contaminate the moment estimates because the optimization landscape can change arbitrarily from one iteration to the next one. To hedge against this negative effect, a simple idea is to reset the internal parameters of the optimizer when starting a new iteration. We empirically investigate this resetting idea by employing various optimizers in conjunction with the Rainbow algorithm. We demonstrate that this simple modification significantly improves the performance of deep RL on the Atari benchmark.
Why Does Sharpness-Aware Minimization Generalize Better Than SGD?
Authors: Zixiang Chen, Junkai Zhang, Yiwen Kou, Xiangning Chen, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Quanquan Gu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: The challenge of overfitting, in which the model memorizes the training data and fails to generalize to test data, has become increasingly significant in the training of large neural networks. To tackle this challenge, Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has emerged as a promising training method, which can improve the generalization of neural networks even in the presence of label noise. However, a deep understanding of how SAM works, especially in the setting of nonlinear neural networks and classification tasks, remains largely missing. This paper fills this gap by demonstrating why SAM generalizes better than Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for a certain data model and two-layer convolutional ReLU networks. The loss landscape of our studied problem is nonsmooth, thus current explanations for the success of SAM based on the Hessian information are insufficient. Our result explains the benefits of SAM, particularly its ability to prevent noise learning in the early stages, thereby facilitating more effective learning of features. Experiments on both synthetic and real data corroborate our theory.
Grassmann Manifold Flows for Stable Shape Generation
Authors: Ryoma Yataka, Kazuki Hirashima, Masashi Shiraishi
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Recently, studies on machine learning have focused on methods that use symmetry implicit in a specific manifold as an inductive bias.Grassmann manifolds provide the ability to handle fundamental shapes represented as shape spaces, enabling stable shape analysis. In this paper, we present a novel approach in which we establish the theoretical foundations for learning distributions on the Grassmann manifold via continuous normalization flows, with the explicit goal of generating stable shapes.Our approach facilitates more robust generation by effectively eliminating the influence of extraneous transformations, such as rotations and inversions, through learning and generating within a Grassmann manifold designed to accommodate the essential shape information of the object.The experimental results indicated that the proposed method could generate high-quality samples by capturing the data structure.Furthermore, the proposed method significantly outperformed state-of-the-art methods in terms of the log-likelihood or evidence lower bound.The results obtained are expected to stimulate further research in this field, leading to advances for stable shape generation and analysis.
Marich: A Query-efficient Distributionally Equivalent Model Extraction Attack
Authors: Pratik Karmakar, Debabrota Basu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We study design of black-box model extraction attacks that can *send minimal number of queries from* a *publicly available dataset* to a target ML model through a predictive API with an aim *to create an informative and distributionally equivalent replica* of the target.First, we define *distributionally equivalent* and *Max-Information model extraction* attacks, and reduce them into a variational optimisation problem. The attacker sequentially solves this optimisation problem to select the most informative queries that simultaneously maximise the entropy and reduce the mismatch between the target and the stolen models. This leads to *an active sampling-based query selection algorithm*, Marich, which is *model-oblivious*. Then, we evaluate Marich on different text and image data sets, and different models, including CNNs and BERT. Marich extracts models that achieve $\sim 60-95\%$ of true model's accuracy and uses $\sim 1,000 - 8,500$ queries from the publicly available datasets, which are different from the private training datasets. Models extracted by Marich yield prediction distributions, which are $\sim2-4\times$ closer to the target's distribution in comparison to the existing active sampling-based attacks. The extracted models also lead to 84-96$\%$ accuracy under membership inference attacks. Experimental results validate that Marich is *query-efficient*, and capable of performing task-accurate, high-fidelity, and informative model extraction.
Evaluating Post-hoc Explanations for Graph Neural Networks via Robustness Analysis
Authors: Junfeng Fang, Wei Liu, Yuan Gao, Zemin Liu, An Zhang, Xiang Wang, Xiangnan He
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: This work studies the evaluation of explaining graph neural networks (GNNs), which is crucial to the credibility of post-hoc explainability in practical usage. Conventional evaluation metrics, and even explanation methods -- which mainly follow the paradigm of feeding the explanatory subgraph and measuring output difference -- always suffer from the notorious out-of-distribution (OOD) issue. In this work, we endeavor to confront the issue by introducing a novel evaluation metric, termed OOD-resistant Adversarial Robustness (OAR). Specifically, we draw inspiration from the notion of adversarial robustness and evaluate post-hoc explanation subgraphs by calculating their robustness under attack. On top of that, an elaborate OOD reweighting block is inserted into the pipeline to confine the evaluation process to the original data distribution. For applications involving large datasets, we further devise a Simplified version of OAR (SimOAR), which achieves a significant improvement in computational efficiency at the cost of a small amount of performance. Extensive empirical studies validate the effectiveness of our OAR and SimOAR.
A Unifying Perspective on Multi-Calibration: Game Dynamics for Multi-Objective Learning
Authors: Nika Haghtalab, Michael I. Jordan, Eric Zhao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We provide a unifying framework for the design and analysis of multi-calibrated predictors. By placing the multi-calibration problem in the general setting of multi-objective learning---where learning guarantees must hold simultaneously over a set of distributions and loss functions---we exploit connections to game dynamics to achieve state-of-the-art guarantees for a diverse set of multi-calibration learning problems. In addition to shedding light on existing multi-calibration guarantees and greatly simplifying their analysis, our approach also yields improved guarantees, such as error tolerances that scale with the square-root of group size versus the constant tolerances guaranteed by prior works, and improving the complexity of $k$-class multi-calibration by an exponential factor of $k$ versus Gopalan et al.. Beyond multi-calibration, we use these game dynamics to address emerging considerations in the study of group fairness and multi-distribution learning.
Not All Neuro-Symbolic Concepts Are Created Equal: Analysis and Mitigation of Reasoning Shortcuts
Authors: Emanuele Marconato, Stefano Teso, Antonio Vergari, Andrea Passerini
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Neuro-Symbolic (NeSy) predictive models hold the promise of improved compliance with given constraints, systematic generalization, and interpretability, as they allow to infer labels that are consistent with some prior knowledge by reasoning over high-level concepts extracted from sub-symbolic inputs. It was recently shown that NeSy predictors are affected by reasoning shortcuts: they can attain high accuracy but by leveraging concepts with \textit{unintended semantics}, thus coming short of their promised advantages. Yet, a systematic characterization of reasoning shortcuts and of potential mitigation strategies is missing. This work fills this gap by characterizing them as unintended optima of the learning objective and identifying four key conditions behind their occurrence. Based on this, we derive several natural mitigation strategies, and analyze their efficacy both theoretically and empirically. Our analysis shows reasoning shortcuts are difficult to deal with, casting doubts on the trustworthiness and interpretability of existing NeSy solutions.
Contrastive Moments: Unsupervised Halfspace Learning in Polynomial Time
Authors: Xinyuan Cao, Santosh Vempala
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We give a polynomial-time algorithm for learning high-dimensional halfspaces with margins in $d$-dimensional space to within desired Total Variation (TV) distance when the ambient distribution is an unknown affine transformation of the $d$-fold product of an (unknown) symmetric one-dimensional logconcave distribution, and the halfspace is introduced by deleting at least an $\epsilon$ fraction of the data in one of the component distributions. Notably, our algorithm does not need labels and establishes the unique (and efficient) identifiability of the hidden halfspace under this distributional assumption.  The sample and time complexity of the algorithm are polynomial in the dimension and $1/\epsilon$. The algorithm uses only the first two moments of *suitable re-weightings* of the empirical distribution, which we call *contrastive moments*; its analysis uses classical facts about generalized Dirichlet polynomials and relies crucially on a new monotonicity property of the moment ratio of truncations of logconcave distributions. Such algorithms, based only on first and second moments were suggested in earlier work, but hitherto eluded rigorous guarantees.Prior work addressed the special case when the underlying distribution is Gaussian via Non-Gaussian Component Analysis. We improve on this by providing polytime guarantees based on TV distance, in place of existing moment-bound guarantees that can be super-polynomial. Our work is also the first to go beyond Gaussians in this setting.
Boosting Spectral Clustering on Incomplete Data via Kernel Correction and Affinity Learning
Authors: Fangchen Yu, Runze Zhao, Zhan Shi, Yiwen Lu, Jicong Fan, Yicheng Zeng, Jianfeng Mao, Wenye Li
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Spectral clustering has gained popularity for clustering non-convex data due to its simplicity and effectiveness. It is essential to construct a similarity graph using a high-quality affinity measure that models the local neighborhood relations among the data samples. However, incomplete data can lead to inaccurate affinity measures, resulting in degraded clustering performance. To address these issues, we propose an imputation-free framework with two novel approaches to improve spectral clustering on incomplete data. Firstly, we introduce a new kernel correction method that enhances the quality of the kernel matrix estimated on incomplete data with a theoretical guarantee, benefiting classical spectral clustering on pre-defined kernels. Secondly, we develop a series of affinity learning methods that equip the self-expressive framework with $\ell_p$-norm to construct an intrinsic affinity matrix with an adaptive extension. Our methods outperform existing data imputation and distance calibration techniques on benchmark datasets, offering a promising solution to spectral clustering on incomplete data in various real-world applications.
DASpeech: Directed Acyclic Transformer for Fast and High-quality Speech-to-Speech Translation
Authors: Qingkai Fang, Yan Zhou, Yang Feng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Direct speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) translates speech from one language into another using a single model. However, due to the presence of linguistic and acoustic diversity, the target speech follows a complex multimodal distribution, posing challenges to achieving both high-quality translations and fast decoding speeds for S2ST models. In this paper, we propose DASpeech, a non-autoregressive direct S2ST model which realizes both fast and high-quality S2ST. To better capture the complex distribution of the target speech, DASpeech adopts the two-pass architecture to decompose the generation process into two steps, where a linguistic decoder first generates the target text, and an acoustic decoder then generates the target speech based on the hidden states of the linguistic decoder. Specifically, we use the decoder of DA-Transformer as the linguistic decoder, and use FastSpeech 2 as the acoustic decoder. DA-Transformer models translations with a directed acyclic graph (DAG). To consider all potential paths in the DAG during training, we calculate the expected hidden states for each target token via dynamic programming, and feed them into the acoustic decoder to predict the target mel-spectrogram. During inference, we select the most probable path and take hidden states on that path as input to the acoustic decoder. Experiments on the CVSS Fr$\rightarrow$En benchmark demonstrate that DASpeech can achieve comparable or even better performance than the state-of-the-art S2ST model Translatotron 2, while preserving up to 18.53$\times$ speedup compared to the autoregressive baseline. Compared with the previous non-autoregressive S2ST model, DASpeech does not rely on knowledge distillation and iterative decoding, achieving significant improvements in both translation quality and decoding speed. Furthermore, DASpeech shows the ability to preserve the speaker's voice of the source speech during translation.
Learning Large-scale Neural Fields via Context Pruned Meta-Learning
Authors: Jihoon Tack, Subin Kim, Sihyun Yu, Jaeho Lee, Jinwoo Shin, Jonathan Richard Schwarz
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We introduce an efficient optimization-based meta-learning technique for large-scale neural field training by realizing significant memory savings through automated online context point selection. This is achieved by focusing each learning step on the subset of data with the highest expected immediate improvement in model quality, resulting in the almost instantaneous modeling of global structure and subsequent refinement of high-frequency details. We further improve the quality of our meta-learned initialization by introducing a bootstrap correction resulting in the minimization of any error introduced by reduced context sets while simultaneously mitigating the well-known myopia of optimization-based meta-learning. Finally, we show how gradient re-scaling at meta-test time allows the learning of extremely high-quality neural fields in significantly shortened optimization procedures. Our framework is model-agnostic, intuitive, straightforward to implement, and shows significant reconstruction improvements for a wide range of signals. We provide an extensive empirical evaluation on nine datasets across multiple multiple modalities, demonstrating state-of-the-art results while providing additional insight through careful analysis of the algorithmic components constituting our method. Code is available at https://github.com/jihoontack/GradNCP
AlberDICE: Addressing Out-Of-Distribution Joint Actions in Offline Multi-Agent RL via Alternating Stationary Distribution Correction Estimation
Authors: Daiki E. Matsunaga, Jongmin Lee, Jaeseok Yoon, Stefanos Leonardos, Pieter Abbeel, Kee-Eung Kim
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: One of the main challenges in offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the distribution shift that arises from the learned policy deviating from the data collection policy. This is often addressed by avoiding out-of-distribution (OOD) actions during policy improvement as their presence can lead to substantial performance degradation. This challenge is amplified in the offline Multi-Agent RL (MARL) setting since the joint action space grows exponentially with the number of agents.To avoid this curse of dimensionality, existing MARL methods adopt either value decomposition methods or fully decentralized training of individual agents. However, even when combined with standard conservatism principles, these methods can still result in the selection of OOD joint actions in offline MARL. To this end, we introduce AlberDICE,an offline MARL algorithm that alternatively performs centralized training of individual agents based on stationary distribution optimization. AlberDICE circumvents the exponential complexity of MARL by computing the best response of one agent at a time while effectively avoiding OOD joint action selection. Theoretically, we show that the alternating optimization procedure converges to Nash policies. In the experiments, we demonstrate that AlberDICE significantly outperforms baseline algorithms on a standard suite of MARL benchmarks.
Approximate inference of marginals using the IBIA framework
Authors: Shivani Bathla, Vinita Vasudevan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Exact inference of marginals in probabilistic graphical models (PGM) is known to be intractable, necessitating the use of approximate methods. Most of the existing variational techniques perform iterative message passing in loopy graphs which is slow to converge for many benchmarks. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for marginal inference that is based on the incremental build-infer-approximate (IBIA) paradigm. Our algorithm converts the PGM into a sequence of linked clique tree forests (SLCTF) with bounded clique sizes, and then uses a heuristic belief update algorithm to infer the marginals. For the special case of Bayesian networks, we show that if the incremental build step in IBIA uses the topological order of variables then (a) the prior marginals are consistent in all CTFs in the SLCTF  and (b) the posterior marginals are consistent once all evidence variables are added to the SLCTF. In our approach, the belief propagation step is non-iterative and the accuracy-complexity trade-off is controlled using user-defined clique size bounds. Results for several benchmark sets from recent UAI competitions show that our method gives either better or comparable accuracy than existing variational and sampling based methods, with smaller runtimes.
HiNeRV: Video Compression with Hierarchical Encoding-based Neural Representation
Authors: Ho Man Kwan, Ge Gao, Fan Zhang, Andrew Gower, David Bull
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Learning-based video compression is currently a popular research topic, offering the potential to compete with conventional standard video codecs. In this context, Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have previously been used to represent and compress image and video content, demonstrating relatively high decoding speed compared to other methods. However, existing INR-based methods have failed to deliver rate quality performance comparable with the state of the art in video compression. This is mainly due to the simplicity of the employed network architectures, which limit their representation capability. In this paper, we propose HiNeRV, an INR that combines light weight layers with novel hierarchical positional encodings. We employs depth-wise convolutional, MLP and interpolation layers to build the deep and wide network architecture with high capacity. HiNeRV is also a unified representation encoding videos in both frames and patches at the same time, which offers higher performance and flexibility than existing methods. We further build a video codec based on HiNeRV and a refined pipeline for training, pruning and quantization that can better preserve HiNeRV's performance during lossy model compression. The proposed method has been evaluated on both UVG and MCL-JCV datasets for video compression, demonstrating significant improvement over all existing INRs baselines and competitive performance when compared to learning-based codecs (72.3\% overall bit rate saving over HNeRV and 43.4\% over DCVC on the UVG dataset, measured in PSNR).
Bicriteria Approximation Algorithms for the Submodular Cover Problem
Authors: Wenjing Chen, Victoria Crawford
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: In this paper, we consider the optimization problem Submodular Cover (SCP), which is to find a minimum cardinality subset of a finite universe $U$ such that the value of a submodular function $f$ is above an input threshold $\tau$. In particular, we consider several variants of SCP including the general case, the case where $f$ is additionally assumed to be monotone, and finally the case where $f$ is a regularized monotone submodular function. Our most significant contributions are that: (i) We propose a scalable algorithm for monotone SCP that achieves nearly the same approximation guarantees as the standard greedy algorithm in significantly faster time; (ii) We are the first to develop an algorithm for general SCP that achieves a solution arbitrarily close to being feasible; and finally (iii) we are the first to develop algorithms for regularized SCP. Our algorithms are then demonstrated to be effective in an extensive experimental section on data summarization and graph cut, two applications of SCP.
Responsible AI (RAI) Games and Ensembles
Authors: Yash Gupta, Runtian Zhai, Arun Suggala, Pradeep K. Ravikumar
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Several recent works have studied the societal effects of AI; these include issues such as fairness, robustness, and safety.  In many of these objectives, a learner seeks to minimize its worst-case loss over a set of predefined distributions (known as uncertainty sets), with usual examples being perturbed versions of the empirical distribution. In other words, the aforementioned problems can be written as min-max problems over these uncertainty sets. In this work, we provide a general framework for studying these problems, which we refer to as Responsible AI (RAI) games. We provide two classes of algorithms for solving these games:  (a) game-play based algorithms, and (b) greedy stagewise estimation algorithms. The former class is motivated by online learning and game theory, whereas the latter class is motivated by the classical statistical literature on boosting, and regression. We empirically demonstrate the applicability and competitive performance of our techniques for solving several RAI problems, particularly around subpopulation shift.
May the Force be with You: Unified Force-Centric Pre-Training for 3D Molecular Conformations
Authors: Rui Feng, Qi Zhu, Huan Tran, Binghong Chen, Aubrey Toland, Rampi Ramprasad, Chao Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Recent works have shown the promise of learning pre-trained models for 3D molecular representation.However, existing pre-training models focus predominantly on equilibrium data and largely overlook off-equilibrium conformations.It is challenging to extend these methods to off-equilibrium data because their training objective relies on assumptions ofconformations being the local energy minima. We address this gap by proposing a force-centric pretraining model for 3D molecular conformations covering both equilibrium and off-equilibrium data.For off-equilibrium data, our model learns directly from their atomic forces. For equilibrium data, we introduce zero-force regularization and forced-based denoising techniques to approximate near-equilibrium forces.We obtain a unified pre-trained model for 3D molecular representation with over 15 million diverse conformations. Experiments show that, with our pre-training objective, we increase forces accuracy by around 3 times compared to the un-pre-trained Equivariant Transformer model. By incorporating regularizations on equilibrium data, we solved the problem of unstable MD simulations in vanilla Equivariant Transformers, achieving state-of-the-art simulation performance with 2.45 times faster inference time than NequIP.  As a powerful molecular encoder, our pre-trained model achieves on-par performance with state-of-the-art property prediction tasks.
Deep Fractional Fourier Transform
Authors: Hu Yu, Jie Huang, Lingzhi LI, man zhou, Feng Zhao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Existing deep learning-based computer vision methods usually operate in the spatial and frequency domains, which are two orthogonal \textbf{individual} perspectives for image processing.In this paper, we introduce a new spatial-frequency analysis tool, Fractional Fourier Transform (FRFT), to provide comprehensive \textbf{unified} spatial-frequency perspectives.The FRFT is a unified continuous spatial-frequency transform that simultaneously reflects an image's spatial and frequency representations, making it optimal for processing non-stationary image signals.We explore the properties of the FRFT for image processing and present a fast implementation of the 2D FRFT, which facilitates its widespread use.Based on these explorations, we introduce a simple yet effective operator, Multi-order FRactional Fourier Convolution (MFRFC), which exhibits the remarkable merits of processing images from more perspectives in the spatial-frequency plane. Our proposed MFRFC is a general and basic operator that can be easily integrated into various tasks for performance improvement.We experimentally evaluate the MFRFC on various computer vision tasks, including object detection, image classification, guided super-resolution, denoising, dehazing, deraining, and low-light enhancement. Our proposed MFRFC consistently outperforms baseline methods by significant margins across all tasks.
Learn to Categorize or Categorize to Learn? Self-Coding for Generalized Category Discovery
Authors: Sarah Rastegar, Hazel Doughty, Cees Snoek
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: In the quest for unveiling novel categories at test time, we confront the inherent limitations of traditional supervised recognition models that are restricted by a predefined category set. While strides have been made in the realms of self-supervised and open-world learning towards test-time category discovery, a crucial yet often overlooked question persists: what exactly delineates a category? In this paper, we conceptualize a category through the lens of optimization, viewing it as an optimal solution to a well-defined problem. Harnessing this unique conceptualization, we propose a novel, efficient and self-supervised method capable of discovering previously unknown categories at test time. A salient feature of our approach is the assignment of minimum length category codes to individual data instances, which encapsulates the implicit category hierarchy prevalent in real-world datasets. This mechanism affords us enhanced control over category granularity, thereby equipping our model to handle fine-grained categories adeptly. Experimental evaluations, bolstered by state-of-the-art benchmark comparisons, testify to the efficacy of our solution in managing unknown categories at test time. Furthermore, we fortify our proposition with a theoretical foundation, providing proof of its optimality. Our code is available at: https://github.com/SarahRastegar/InfoSieve.
Training Chain-of-Thought via Latent-Variable Inference
Authors: Du Phan, Matthew Douglas Hoffman, David Dohan, Sholto Douglas, Tuan Anh Le, Aaron Parisi, Pavel Sountsov, Charles A. Sutton, Sharad Vikram, Rif A. Saurous
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) solve problems more accurately and interpretably when instructed to work out the answer step by step using a "chain-of-thought" (CoT) prompt. One can also improve LLMs' performance on a specific task by supervised fine-tuning, i.e., by using gradient ascent on some tunable parameters to maximize the average log-likelihood of correct answers from a labeled training set. Naively combining CoT with supervised tuning requires supervision not just of the correct answers, but also of detailed rationales that lead to those answers; these rationales are expensive to produce by hand. Instead, we propose a fine-tuning strategy that tries to maximize the \emph{marginal} log-likelihood of generating a correct answer using CoT prompting, approximately averaging over all possible rationales. The core challenge is sampling from the posterior over rationales conditioned on the correct answer; we address it using a simple Markov-chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm inspired by the self-taught reasoner (STaR), memoized wake-sleep, Markovian score climbing, and persistent contrastive divergence. This algorithm also admits a novel control-variate technique that drives the variance of our gradient estimates to zero as the model improves. Applying our technique to GSM8K and the tasks in BIG-Bench Hard, we find that this MCMC-EM fine-tuning technique typically improves the model's accuracy on held-out examples more than STaR or prompt-tuning with or without CoT.
VAST: A Vision-Audio-Subtitle-Text Omni-Modality Foundation Model and Dataset
Authors: Sihan Chen, Handong Li, Qunbo Wang, Zijia Zhao, Mingzhen Sun, Xinxin Zhu, Jing Liu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Vision and text have been fully explored  in contemporary video-text foundational models, while other modalities such as audio and subtitles in videos have not received sufficient attention. In this paper, we resort to establish connections between multi-modality video tracks, including Vision, Audio, and Subtitle, and Text by exploring an automatically generated large-scale omni-modality video caption dataset called VAST-27M. Specifically, we first collect 27 million open-domain video clips and separately train a vision and an audio captioner to generate vision and audio captions. Then, we employ an off-the-shelf Large Language Model (LLM) to integrate the generated captions, together with subtitles and instructional prompts into omni-modality captions. Based on the proposed VAST-27M dataset, we train an omni-modality video-text foundational model named VAST, which can perceive and process vision, audio, and subtitle modalities from video, and better support various tasks including  vision-text, audio-text, and multi-modal video-text tasks (retrieval, captioning and QA). Extensive experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed VAST-27M corpus and VAST foundation model. VAST achieves 22 new state-of-the-art results on various cross-modality benchmarks.
Bayesian Learning via Q-Exponential Process
Authors: Shuyi Li, Michael O'Connor, Shiwei Lan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Regularization is one of the most fundamental topics in optimization, statistics and machine learning. To get sparsity in estimating a parameter $u\in\mathbb{R}^d$, an $\ell_q$ penalty term, $\Vert u\Vert_q$, is usually added to the objective function. What is the probabilistic distribution corresponding to such $\ell_q$ penalty? What is the \emph{correct} stochastic process corresponding to $\Vert u\Vert_q$ when we model functions $u\in L^q$? This is important for statistically modeling high-dimensional objects such as images, with penalty to preserve certainty properties, e.g. edges in the image.In this work, we generalize the $q$-exponential distribution (with density proportional to) $\exp{(- \frac{1}{2}|u|^q)}$ to a stochastic process named \emph{$Q$-exponential (Q-EP) process} that corresponds to the $L_q$ regularization of functions. The key step is to specify consistent multivariate $q$-exponential distributions by choosing from a large family of elliptic contour distributions. The work is closely related to Besov process which is usually defined in terms of series. Q-EP can be regarded as a definition of Besov process with explicit probabilistic formulation, direct control on the correlation strength, and tractable prediction formula. From the Bayesian perspective, Q-EP provides a flexible prior on functions with sharper penalty ($q<2$) than the commonly used Gaussian process (GP, $q=2$).We compare GP, Besov and Q-EP in modeling functional data, reconstructing images and solving inverse problems and demonstrate the advantage of our proposed methodology.