mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
MARPLE: A Benchmark for Long-Horizon Inference
Authors: Emily Jin, Zhuoyi Huang, Jan-Philipp Fränken, Weiyu Liu, Hannah Cha, Erik Brockbank, Sarah Wu, Ruohan Zhang, Jiajun Wu, Tobias Gerstenberg
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Reconstructing past events requires reasoning across long time horizons. To figure out what happened, humans draw on prior knowledge about the world and human behavior and integrate insights from various sources of evidence including visual, language, and auditory cues. We introduce MARPLE, a benchmark for evaluating long-horizon inference capabilities using multi-modal evidence. Our benchmark features agents interacting with simulated households, supporting vision, language, and auditory stimuli, as well as procedurally generated environments and agent behaviors. Inspired by classic ``whodunit'' stories, we ask AI models and human participants to infer which agent caused a change in the environment based on a step-by-step replay of what actually happened. The goal is to correctly identify the culprit as early as possible. Our findings show that human participants outperform both traditional Monte Carlo simulation methods and an LLM baseline (GPT-4) on this task. Compared to humans, traditional inference models are less robust and performant, while GPT-4 has difficulty comprehending environmental changes. We analyze factors influencing inference performance and ablate different modes of evidence, finding that all modes are valuable for performance. Overall, our experiments demonstrate that the long-horizon, multimodal inference tasks in our benchmark present a challenge to current models. Project website: https://marple-benchmark.github.io/.
GenRec: Unifying Video Generation and Recognition with Diffusion Models
Authors: Zejia Weng, Xitong Yang, Zhen Xing, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Video diffusion models are able to generate high-quality videos by learning strong spatial-temporal priors on large-scale datasets. In this paper, we aim to investigate whether such priors derived from a generative process are suitable for video recognition, and eventually joint optimization of generation and recognition. Building upon Stable Video Diffusion, we introduce GenRec, the first unified framework trained with a random-frame conditioning process so as to learn generalized spatial-temporal representations. The resulting framework can naturally supports generation and recognition, and more importantly is robust even when visual inputs contain limited information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of GenRec for both recognition and generation. In particular, GenRec achieves competitive recognition performance, offering 75.8% and 87.2% accuracy on SSV2 and K400, respectively. GenRec also performs the best on class-conditioned image-to-video generation, achieving 46.5 and 49.3 FVD scores on SSV2 and EK-100 datasets. Furthermore, GenRec demonstrates extraordinary robustness in scenarios that only limited frames can be observed. Code will be available at https://github.com/wengzejia1/GenRec.
Rule Based Rewards for Language Model Safety
Authors: Tong Mu, Alec Helyar, Johannes Heidecke, Joshua Achiam, Andrea Vallone, Ian Kivlichan, Molly Lin, Alex Beutel, John Schulman, Lilian Weng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Reinforcement learning based fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) on human preferences has been shown to enhance both their capabilities and safety behavior.  However, in cases related to safety, without precise instructions to human annotators, the data collected may cause the model to become overly cautious, or to respond in an undesirable style, such as being judgmental.  Additionally, as model capabilities and usage patterns evolve, there may be a costly need to add or relabel data to modify safety behavior.   We propose a novel preference modeling approach that utilizes AI feedback and only requires a small amount of human data.   Our method, Rule Based Rewards (RBR), uses a collection of rules for desired or undesired behaviors (e.g. refusals should not be judgmental) along with a LLM grader.  In contrast to prior methods using AI feedback, our method uses fine-grained, composable, LLM-graded few-shot prompts as reward directly in RL training, resulting in greater control, accuracy and ease of updating.  We show that RBRs are an effective training method, achieving an F1 score of 97.1, compared to a human-feedback baseline of 91.7, resulting in much higher safety-behavior accuracy through better balancing usefulness and safety.
Learning Superconductivity from Ordered and Disordered Material Structures
Authors: Pin Chen, Luoxuan Peng, Rui Jiao, Qing Mo, Zhen Wang, Wenbing Huang, Yang Liu, Yutong Lu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Superconductivity is a fascinating phenomenon observed in certain materials under certain conditions. However, some critical aspects of it, such as the relationship between superconductivity and materials' chemical/structural features, still need to be understood. Recent successes of data-driven approaches in material science strongly inspire researchers to study this relationship with them, but a corresponding dataset is still lacking. Hence, we present a new dataset for data-driven approaches, namely SuperCon3D, containing both 3D crystal structures and experimental superconducting transition temperature (Tc) for the first time. Based on SuperCon3D, we propose two deep learning methods for designing high Tc superconductors. The first is SODNet, a novel equivariant graph attention model for screening known structures, which differs from existing models in incorporating both ordered and disordered geometric content. The second is a diffusion generative model DiffCSP-SC for creating new structures, which enables high Tc-targeted generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that both our proposed dataset and models are advantageous for designing new high Tc superconducting candidates.
Discretely beyond $1/e$: Guided Combinatorial Algortihms for Submodular Maximization
Authors: Yixin Chen, Ankur Nath, Chunli Peng, Alan Kuhnle
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: For constrained, not necessarily monotone submodular maximization, all known approximation algorithms with ratio greater than $1/e$ require continuous ideas, such as queries to the multilinear extension of a submodular function and its gradient, which are typically expensive to simulate with the original set function. For combinatorial algorithms, the best known approximation ratios for both size and matroid constraint are obtained by a simple randomized greedy algorithm of Buchbinder et al. [9]: $1/e \approx 0.367$ for size constraint and $0.281$ for the matroid constraint in $\mathcal O (kn)$ queries, where $k$ is the rank of the matroid. In this work, we develop the first combinatorial algorithms to break the $1/e$ barrier: we obtain approximation ratio of $0.385$ in $\mathcal O (kn)$ queries to the submodular set function for size constraint, and $0.305$ for a general matroid constraint. These are achieved by guiding the randomized greedy algorithm with a fast local search algorithm. Further, we develop deterministic versions of these algorithms, maintaining the same ratio and asymptotic time complexity. Finally, we develop a deterministic, nearly linear time algorithm with ratio $0.377$.
Understanding and Improving Training-free Loss-based Diffusion Guidance
Authors: Yifei Shen, Xinyang Jiang, Yifan Yang, Yezhen Wang, Dongqi Han, Dongsheng Li
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Adding additional guidance to pretrained diffusion models has become an increasingly popular research area, with extensive applications in computer vision, reinforcement learning, and AI for science. Recently, several studies have proposed training-free loss-based guidance by using off-the-shelf networks pretrained on clean images. This approach enables zero-shot conditional generation for universal control formats, which appears to offer a free lunch in diffusion guidance. In this paper, we aim to develop a deeper understanding of training-free guidance, as well as overcome its limitations. We offer a theoretical analysis that supports training-free guidance from the perspective of optimization, distinguishing it from classifier-based (or classifier-free) guidance. To elucidate their drawbacks, we theoretically demonstrate that training-free guidance is more susceptible to misaligned gradients and exhibits slower convergence rates compared to classifier guidance. We then introduce a collection of techniques designed to overcome the limitations, accompanied by theoretical rationale and empirical evidence. Our experiments in image and motion generation confirm the efficacy of these techniques.
Nearly Minimax Optimal Regret for Multinomial Logistic Bandit
Authors: Joongkyu Lee, Min-hwan Oh
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In this paper, we study the contextual multinomial logit (MNL) bandit problem in which a learning agent sequentially selects an assortment based on contextual information, and user feedback follows an MNL choice model.There has been a significant discrepancy between lower and upper regret bounds, particularly regarding the maximum assortment size  $K$. Additionally, the variation in reward structures between these bounds complicates the quest for optimality. Under uniform rewards, where all items have the same expected reward, we establish a regret lower bound of $\Omega(d\sqrt{\smash[b]{T/K}})$ and propose a constant-time algorithm, OFU-MNL+, that achieves a matching upper bound of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(d\sqrt{\smash[b]{T/K}})$. We also provide instance-dependent minimax regret bounds under uniform rewards.Under non-uniform rewards, we prove a lower bound of $\Omega(d\sqrt{T})$ and an upper bound of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(d\sqrt{T})$, also achievable by OFU-MNL+. Our empirical studies support these theoretical findings. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work in the contextual MNL bandit literature to prove minimax optimality --- for either uniform or non-uniform reward setting --- and to propose a computationally efficient algorithm that achieves this optimality up to logarithmic factors.
Partial Structure Discovery is Sufficient for No-regret Learning in Causal Bandits
Authors: Muhammad Qasim Elahi, Mahsa Ghasemi, Murat Kocaoglu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Causal knowledge about the relationships among decision variables and a reward variable in a bandit setting can accelerate the learning of an optimal decision. Current works often assume the causal graph is known, which may not always be available a priori. Motivated by this challenge, we focus on the causal bandit problem in scenarios where the underlying causal graph is unknown and may include latent confounders. While intervention on the parents of the reward node is optimal in the absence of latent confounders, this is not necessarily the case in general. Instead, one must consider a set of possibly optimal arms/interventions, each being a special subset of the ancestors of the reward node, making causal discovery beyond the parents of the reward node essential. For regret minimization, we identify that discovering the full causal structure is unnecessary; however, no existing work provides the necessary and sufficient components of the causal graph. We formally characterize the set of necessary and sufficient latent confounders one needs to detect or learn to ensure that all possibly optimal arms are identified correctly. We also propose a randomized algorithm for learning the causal graph with a limited number of samples, providing a sample complexity guarantee for any desired confidence level. In the causal bandit setup, we propose a two-stage approach. In the first stage, we learn the induced subgraph on ancestors of the reward, along with a necessary and sufficient subset of latent confounders, to construct the set of possibly optimal arms. We show that for our proposed algorithm, the number of intervention samples required to learn the set of possibly optimal arms scales polynomially with respect to the number of nodes. The second phase involves the application of a standard bandit algorithm, such as the UCB algorithm. We also establish a regret bound for our two-phase approach, which is sublinear in the number of rounds.
Iteration Head: A Mechanistic Study of Chain-of-Thought
Authors: Vivien Cabannes, Charles Arnal, Wassim Bouaziz, Alice Yang, Francois Charton, Julia Kempe
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning is known to improve Large Language Models both empirically and in terms of theoretical approximation power.However, our understanding of the inner workings and conditions of apparition of CoT capabilities remains limited.This paper helps fill this gap by demonstrating how CoT reasoning emerges in transformers in a controlled and interpretable setting.In particular, we observe the appearance of a specialized attention mechanism dedicated to iterative reasoning, which we coined "iteration heads".We track both the emergence and the precise working of these iteration heads down to the attention level, and measure the transferability of the CoT skills to which they give rise between tasks.
Causal Inference in the Closed-Loop: Marginal Structural Models for Sequential Excursion Effects
Authors: Alexander W. Levis, Gabriel Loewinger, Francisco Pereira
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Optogenetics is widely used to study the effects of neural circuit manipulation on behavior. However, the paucity of causal inference methodological work on this topic has resulted in analysis conventions that discard information, and constrain the scientific questions that can be posed. To fill this gap, we introduce a nonparametric causal inference framework for analyzing "closed-loop" designs, which use dynamic policies that assign treatment based on covariates. In this setting, standard methods can introduce bias and occlude causal effects. Building on the sequentially randomized experiments literature in causal inference, our approach extends history-restricted marginal structural models for dynamic regimes. In practice, our framework can identify a wide range of causal effects of optogenetics on trial-by-trial behavior, such as, fast/slow-acting, dose-response, additive/antagonistic, and floor/ceiling. Importantly, it does so without requiring negative controls, and can estimate how causal effect magnitudes evolve across time points. From another view, our work extends "excursion effect" methods---popular in the mobile health literature---to enable estimation of causal contrasts for treatment sequences greater than length one, in the presence of positivity violations. We derive rigorous statistical guarantees, enabling hypothesis testing of these causal effects. We demonstrate our approach on data from a recent study of dopaminergic activity on learning, and show how our method reveals relevant effects obscured in standard analyses.
Rethinking Out-of-Distribution Detection on Imbalanced Data Distribution
Authors: Kai Liu, Zhihang Fu, Sheng Jin, Chao Chen, Ze Chen, Rongxin Jiang, Fan Zhou, Yaowu Chen, Jieping Ye
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Detecting and rejecting unknown out-of-distribution (OOD) samples is critical for deployed neural networks to void unreliable predictions. In real-world scenarios, however, the efficacy of existing OOD detection methods is often impeded by the inherent imbalance of in-distribution (ID) data, which causes significant performance decline. Through statistical observations, we have identified two common challenges faced by different OOD detectors: misidentifying tail class ID samples as OOD, while erroneously predicting OOD samples as head class from ID. To explain this phenomenon, we introduce a generalized statistical framework, termed ImOOD, to formulate the OOD detection problem on imbalanced data distribution. Consequently, the theoretical analysis reveals that there exists a class-aware bias item between balanced and imbalanced OOD detection, which contributes to the performance gap. Building upon this finding, we present a unified training-time regularization technique to mitigate the bias and boost imbalanced OOD detectors across architecture designs. Our theoretically grounded method translates into consistent improvements on the representative CIFAR10-LT, CIFAR100-LT, and ImageNet-LT benchmarks against several state-of-the-art OOD detection ap- proaches. Code is available at https://github.com/alibaba/imood.
Mitigating Covariate Shift in Behavioral Cloning via Robust Stationary Distribution Correction
Authors: Seokin Seo, Byung-Jun Lee, Jongmin Lee, HyeongJoo Hwang, Hongseok Yang, Kee-Eung Kim
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We consider offline imitation learning (IL), which aims to train an agent to imitate from the dataset of expert demonstrations without online interaction with the environment. Behavioral Cloning (BC) has been a simple yet effective approach to offline IL, but it is also well-known to be vulnerable to the covariate shift resulting from the mismatch between the state distributions induced by the learned policy and the expert policy. Moreover, as often occurs in practice, when expert datasets are collected from an arbitrary state distribution instead of a stationary one, these shifts become more pronounced, potentially leading to substantial failures in existing IL methods. Specifically, we focus on covariate shift resulting from arbitrary state data distributions, such as biased data collection or incomplete trajectories, rather than shifts induced by changes in dynamics or noisy expert actions. In this paper, to mitigate the effect of the covariate shifts in BC, we propose DrilDICE, which utilizes a distributionally robust BC objective by employing a stationary distribution correction ratio estimation (DICE) to derive a feasible solution. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method through an extensive set of experiments covering diverse covariate shift scenarios. The results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach in improving the robustness against the shifts, outperforming existing offline IL methods in such scenarios.
DeBaRA: Denoising-Based 3D Room Arrangement Generation
Authors: Léopold Maillard, Nicolas Sereyjol-Garros, Tom Durand, Maks Ovsjanikov
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Generating realistic and diverse layouts of furnished indoor 3D scenes unlocks multiple interactive applications impacting a wide range of industries. The inherent complexity of object interactions, the limited amount of available data and the requirement to fulfill spatial constraints all make generative modeling for 3D scene synthesis and arrangement challenging. Current methods address these challenges autoregressively or by using off-the-shelf diffusion objectives by simultaneously predicting all attributes without 3D reasoning considerations. In this paper, we introduce DeBaRA, a score-based model specifically tailored for precise, controllable and flexible arrangement generation in a bounded environment. We argue that the most critical component of a scene synthesis system is to accurately establish the size and position of various objects within a restricted area. Based on this insight, we propose a lightweight conditional score-based model designed with 3D spatial awareness at its core. We demonstrate that by focusing on spatial attributes of objects, a single trained DeBaRA model can be leveraged at test time to perform several downstream applications such as scene synthesis, completion and re-arrangement. Further, we introduce a novel Self Score Evaluation procedure so it can be optimally employed alongside external LLM models. We evaluate our approach through extensive experiments and demonstrate significant improvement upon state-of-the-art approaches in a range of scenarios.
Optimal ablation for interpretability
Authors: Maximilian Li, Lucas Janson
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Interpretability studies often involve tracing the flow of information through machine learning models to identify specific model components that perform relevant computations for tasks of interest. Prior work quantifies the importance of a model component on a particular task by measuring the impact of performing ablation on that component, or simulating model inference with the component disabled. We propose a new method, optimal ablation (OA), and show that OA-based component importance has theoretical and empirical advantages over measuring importance via other ablation methods. We also show that OA-based component importance can benefit several downstream interpretability tasks, including circuit discovery, localization of factual recall, and latent prediction.
Bridging Geometric States via Geometric Diffusion Bridge
Authors: Shengjie Luo, Yixian Xu, Di He, Shuxin Zheng, Tie-Yan Liu, Liwei Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The accurate prediction of geometric state evolution in complex systems is critical for advancing scientific domains such as quantum chemistry and material modeling. Traditional experimental and computational methods face challenges in terms of environmental constraints and computational demands, while current deep learning approaches still fall short in terms of precision and generality. In this work, we introduce the Geometric Diffusion Bridge (GDB), a novel generative modeling framework that accurately bridges initial and target geometric states. GDB leverages a probabilistic approach to evolve geometric state distributions, employing an equivariant diffusion bridge derived by a modified version of Doob's $h$-transform for connecting geometric states. This tailored diffusion process is anchored by initial and target geometric states as fixed endpoints and governed by equivariant transition kernels. Moreover, trajectory data can be seamlessly leveraged in our GDB framework by using a chain of equivariant diffusion bridges, providing a more detailed and accurate characterization of evolution dynamics. Theoretically, we conduct a thorough examination to confirm our framework's ability to preserve joint distributions of geometric states and capability to completely model the underlying dynamics inducing trajectory distributions with negligible error. Experimental evaluations across various real-world scenarios show that GDB surpasses existing state-of-the-art approaches, opening up a new pathway for accurately bridging geometric states and tackling crucial scientific challenges with improved accuracy and applicability.
Visual Pinwheel Centers Act as Geometric Saliency Detectors
Authors: Haixin Zhong, Mingyi Huang, Wei P. Dai, Haoyu Wang, Anna Wang Roe, Yuguo Yu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: During natural evolution, the primary visual cortex (V1) of lower mammals typically forms salt-and-pepper organizations, while higher mammals and primates develop pinwheel structures with distinct topological properties. Despite the general belief that V1 neurons primarily serve as edge detectors, the functional advantages of pinwheel structures over salt-and-peppers are not well recognized. To this end, we propose a two-dimensional self-evolving spiking neural network that integrates Hebbian-like plasticity and empirical morphological data. Through extensive exposure to image data, our network evolves from salt-and-peppers to pinwheel structures, with neurons becoming localized bandpass filters responsive to various orientations. This transformation is accompanied by an increase in visual field overlap. Our findings indicate that neurons in pinwheel centers (PCs) respond more effectively to complex spatial textures in natural images, exhibiting quicker responses than those in salt-and-pepper organizations. PCs act as first-order stage processors with heightened sensitivity and reduced latency to intricate contours, while adjacent iso-orientation domains serve as second-order stage processors that refine edge representations for clearer perception. This study presents the first theoretical evidence that pinwheel structures function as crucial detectors of spatial contour saliency in the visual cortex.
Adaptive Layer Sparsity for Large Language Models via Activation Correlation Assessment
Authors: Wei Li, Lujun Li, Mark Lee, Shengjie Sun
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing with their impressive capabilities. However, their enormous size presents challenges for deploying them in real-world applications. Traditional compression techniques, like pruning, often lead to suboptimal performance due to their uniform pruning ratios and lack of consideration for the varying importance of features across different layers. To address these limitations, we present a novel  Adaptive Layer Sparsity (ALS) approach to optimize LLMs. Our approach consists of two key steps. Firstly, we estimate the correlation matrix between intermediate layers by leveraging the concept of information orthogonality. This novel perspective allows for a precise measurement of the importance of each layer across the model. Secondly, we employ a linear optimization algorithm to develop an adaptive sparse allocation strategy based on evaluating the correlation matrix. This strategy enables us to selectively prune features in intermediate layers, achieving fine-grained optimization of the LLM model. Considering the varying importance across different layers, we can significantly reduce the model size without sacrificing performance. We conduct extensive experiments on publicly available language processing datasets, including the LLaMA-V1|V2|V3 family and OPT, covering various benchmarks. Our experimental results validate the effectiveness of our ALS method, showcasing its superiority over previous approaches. The performance gains demonstrate its potential for enhancing LLMs' efficiency and resource utilization. Notably, our approach surpasses the state-of-the-art models Wanda and SparseGPT, showcasing its ability to excel even under high sparsity levels.  Codes at: https://github.com/lliai/ALS.
Virtual Scanning: Unsupervised Non-line-of-sight Imaging from Irregularly Undersampled Transients
Authors: Xingyu Cui, Huanjing Yue, Song Li, Xiangjun Yin, Yusen Hou, Yun Meng, Kai Zou, Xiaolong Hu, Jingyu Yang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging allows for seeing hidden scenes around corners through active sensing.Most previous algorithms for NLOS reconstruction require dense transients acquired through regular scans over a large relay surface, which limits their applicability in realistic scenarios with irregular relay surfaces.In this paper, we propose an unsupervised learning-based framework for NLOS imaging from irregularly undersampled transients~(IUT).Our method learns implicit priors from noisy irregularly undersampled transients without requiring paired data, which is difficult and expensive to acquire and align. To overcome the ambiguity of the measurement consistency constraint in inferring the albedo volume, we design a virtual scanning process that enables the network to learn within both range and null spaces for high-quality reconstruction.We devise a physics-guided SURE-based denoiser to enhance robustness to ubiquitous noise in low-photon imaging conditions. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world data validate the performance and generalization of our method.Compared with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) method, our method achieves higher fidelity, greater robustness, and remarkably faster inference times by orders of magnitude.The code and model are available at https://github.com/XingyuCuii/Virtual-Scanning-NLOS.
Learning to Edit Visual Programs with Self-Supervision
Authors: R. Kenny Jones, Renhao Zhang, Aditya Ganeshan, Daniel Ritchie
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We design a system that learns how to edit visual programs. Our edit network consumes a complete input program and a visual target. From this input, we task our network with predicting a local edit operation that could be applied to the input program to improve its similarity to the target. In order to apply this scheme for domains that lack program annotations, we develop a self-supervised learning approach that integrates this edit network into a bootstrapped finetuning loop along with a network that predicts entire programs in one-shot. Our joint finetuning scheme, when coupled with an inference procedure that initializes a population from the one-shot model and evolves members of this population with the edit network, helps to infer more accurate visual programs. Over multiple domains, we experimentally compare our method against the alternative of using only the one-shot model, and find that even under equal search-time budgets, our editing-based paradigm provides significant advantages.
DiffTORI: Differentiable Trajectory Optimization for Deep Reinforcement and Imitation Learning
Authors: Weikang Wan, Ziyu Wang, Yufei Wang, Zackory Erickson, David Held
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper introduces DiffTORI, which utilizes $\textbf{Diff}$erentiable $\textbf{T}$rajectory $\textbf{O}$ptimization as the policy representation to generate actions for deep $\textbf{R}$einforcement and $\textbf{I}$mitation learning. Trajectory optimization is a powerful and widely used algorithm in control, parameterized by a cost and a dynamics function. The key to our approach is to leverage the recent progress in differentiable trajectory optimization, which enables computing the gradients of the loss with respect to the parameters of trajectory optimization.  As a result, the cost and dynamics functions of trajectory optimization can be learned end-to-end. DiffTORI addresses the “objective mismatch” issue of prior model-based RL algorithms, as the dynamics model in DiffTORI is learned to directly maximize task performance by differentiating the policy gradient loss through the trajectory optimization process. We further benchmark DiffTORI  for imitation learning on standard robotic manipulation task suites with high-dimensional sensory observations and compare our method to feedforward policy classes as well as Energy-Based Models (EBM) and Diffusion. Across 15 model based RL tasks and 35 imitation learning tasks with high-dimensional image and point cloud inputs, DiffTORI outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods in both domains.
Amortized Bayesian Experimental Design for Decision-Making
Authors: Daolang Huang, Yujia Guo, Luigi Acerbi, Samuel Kaski
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Many critical decisions, such as personalized medical diagnoses and product pricing, are made based on insights gained from designing, observing, and analyzing a series of experiments. This highlights the crucial role of experimental design, which goes beyond merely collecting information on system parameters as in traditional Bayesian experimental design (BED), but also plays a key part in facilitating downstream decision-making. Most recent BED methods use an amortized policy network to rapidly design experiments. However, the information gathered through these methods is suboptimal for down-the-line decision-making, as the experiments are not inherently designed with downstream objectives in mind. In this paper, we present an amortized decision-aware BED framework that prioritizes maximizing downstream decision utility. We introduce a novel architecture, the Transformer Neural Decision Process (TNDP), capable of instantly proposing the next experimental design, whilst inferring the downstream decision, thus effectively amortizing both tasks within a unified workflow. We demonstrate the performance of our method across several tasks, showing that it can deliver informative designs and facilitate accurate decision-making.
xRAG: Extreme Context Compression for Retrieval-augmented Generation with One Token
Authors: Xin Cheng, Xun Wang, Xingxing Zhang, Tao Ge, Si-Qing Chen, Furu Wei, Huishuai Zhang, Dongyan Zhao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper introduces xRAG, an innovative context compression method tailored for retrieval-augmented generation. xRAG reinterprets document embeddings in dense retrieval--traditionally used solely for retrieval--as features from the retrieval modality. By employing a modality fusion methodology, xRAG seamlessly integrates these embeddings into the language model representation space, effectively eliminating the need for their textual counterparts and achieving an extreme compression rate. In xRAG, the only trainable component is the modality bridge, while both the retriever and the language model remain frozen. This design choice allows for the reuse of offline-constructed document embeddings and preserves the plug-and-play nature of retrieval augmentation. Experimental results demonstrate that xRAG achieves an average improvement of over 10% across six knowledge-intensive tasks, adaptable to various language model backbones, ranging from a dense 7B model to an 8x7B Mixture of Experts configuration. xRAG not only significantly outperforms previous context compression methods but also matches the performance of uncompressed models on several datasets, while reducing overall FLOPs by a factor of 3.53. Our work pioneers new directions in retrieval-augmented generation from the perspective of multimodality fusion, and we hope it lays the foundation for future efficient and scalable retrieval-augmented systems.
Approximately Pareto-optimal Solutions for Bi-Objective k-Clustering
Authors: Anna Arutyunova, Jan Eube, Heiko Röglin, Melanie Schmidt, Sarah Sturm, Julian Wargalla
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: As a major unsupervised learning method, clustering has received a lot of attention over multiple decades. The various clustering problems that have been studied intensively include, e.g., the $k$-means problem and the $k$-center problem. However, in applications, it is common that good clusterings should optimize multiple objectives (e.g., visualizing data on a map by clustering districts into areas that are both geographically compact but also homogeneous with respect to the data).  We study combinations of different objectives, for example optimizing $k$-center and $k$-means simultaneously or optimizing $k$-center with respect to two different metrics. Usually these objectives are conflicting and cannot be optimized simultaneously, making it necessary to find trade-offs. We develop novel algorithms for computing the set of Pareto-optimal solutions (approximately) for various combinations of two objectives. Our algorithms achieve provable approximation guarantees and we demonstrate in several experiments that the (approximate) Pareto set contains good clusterings that cannot be found by considering one of the objectives separately.
Customized Subgraph Selection and Encoding for Drug-drug Interaction Prediction
Authors: Haotong Du, Quanming Yao, Juzheng Zhang, Yang Liu, Zhen Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Subgraph-based methods have proven to be effective and interpretable in predicting drug-drug interactions (DDIs),which are essential for medical practice and drug development. Subgraph selection and encoding are critical stages in these methods, yet customizing these components remains underexplored due to the high cost of manual adjustments. In this study, inspired by the success of neural architecture search (NAS), we propose a method to search for data-specific components within subgraph-based frameworks. Specifically, we introduce extensive subgraph selection and encoding spaces that account for the diverse contexts of drug interactions in DDI prediction. To address the challenge of large search spaces and high sampling costs, we design a relaxation mechanism that uses an approximation strategy to efficiently explore optimal subgraph configurations. This approach allows for robust exploration of the search space. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method, with the discovered subgraphs and encoding functions highlighting the model’s adaptability.
LLM Processes: Numerical Predictive Distributions Conditioned on Natural Language
Authors: James Requeima, John Bronskill, Dami Choi, Richard E. Turner, David Duvenaud
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Machine learning practitioners often face significant challenges in formally integrating their prior knowledge and beliefs into predictive models, limiting the potential for nuanced and context-aware analyses. Moreover, the expertise needed to integrate this prior knowledge into probabilistic modeling typically limits the application of these models to specialists. Our goal is to build a regression model that can process numerical data and make probabilistic predictions at arbitrary locations, guided by natural language text which describes a user's prior knowledge. Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a useful starting point for designing such a tool since they 1) provide an interface where users can incorporate expert insights in natural language and 2) provide an opportunity for leveraging latent problem-relevant knowledge encoded in LLMs that users may not have themselves. We start by exploring strategies for eliciting explicit, coherent numerical predictive distributions from LLMs. We examine these joint predictive distributions, which we call LLM Processes, over arbitrarily-many quantities in settings such as forecasting, multi-dimensional regression, black-box optimization, and image modeling. We investigate the practical details of prompting to elicit coherent predictive distributions, and demonstrate their effectiveness at regression. Finally, we demonstrate the ability to usefully incorporate text into numerical predictions, improving predictive performance and giving quantitative structure that reflects qualitative descriptions. This lets us begin to explore the rich, grounded hypothesis space that LLMs implicitly encode.
Generalizing Consistency Policy to Visual RL with Prioritized Proximal Experience Regularization
Authors: Haoran Li, Zhennan Jiang, Yuhui Chen, Dongbin Zhao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: With high-dimensional state spaces, visual reinforcement learning (RL) faces significant challenges in exploitation and exploration, resulting in low sample efficiency and training stability. As a time-efficient diffusion model, although consistency models have been validated in online state-based RL, it is still an open question whether it can be extended to visual RL. In this paper, we investigate the impact of non-stationary distribution and the actor-critic framework on consistency policy in online RL, and find that consistency policy was unstable during the training, especially in visual RL with the high-dimensional state space. To this end, we suggest sample-based entropy regularization to stabilize the policy training, and propose a consistency policy with prioritized proximal experience regularization (CP3ER) to improve sample efficiency. CP3ER achieves new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in 21 tasks across DeepMind control suite and Meta-world. To our knowledge, CP3ER is the first method to apply diffusion/consistency models to visual RL and demonstrates the potential of consistency models in visual RL.
WikiContradict: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Real-World Knowledge Conflicts from Wikipedia
Authors: Yufang Hou, Alessandra Pascale, Javier Carnerero-Cano, Tigran Tchrakian, Radu Marinescu, Elizabeth Daly, Inkit Padhi, Prasanna Sattigeri
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising solution to mitigate the limitations of large language models (LLMs), such as hallucinations and outdated information. However, it remains unclear how LLMs handle knowledge conflicts arising from different augmented retrieved passages, especially when these passages originate from the same source and have equal trustworthiness. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of LLM-generated answers to questions that have varying answers based on contradictory passages from Wikipedia, a dataset widely regarded as a high-quality pre-training resource for most LLMs. Specifically, we introduce WikiContradict, a benchmark consisting of 253 high-quality, human-annotated instances designed to assess the performance of LLMs in providing a complete perspective on conflicts from the retrieved documents, rather than choosing one answer over another, when augmented with retrieved passages containing real-world knowledge conflicts. We benchmark a diverse range of both closed and open-source LLMs under different QA scenarios, including RAG with a single  passage, and RAG with 2 contradictory passages. Through rigorous human evaluations on a subset of WikiContradict instances involving 5 LLMs and over 3,500 judgements, we shed light on the behaviour and limitations of these models. For instance, when provided with two passages containing contradictory facts, all models struggle to generate answers that accurately reflect the conflicting nature of the context, especially for implicit conflicts requiring reasoning. Since human evaluation is costly, wealso introduce an automated model that estimates LLM performance using a strong open-source language model, achieving an F-score of 0.8. Using this automated metric, we evaluate more than 1,500 answers from seven LLMs across all WikiContradict instances.
Elliptical Attention
Authors: Stefan K. Nielsen, Laziz U. Abdullaev, Rachel S.Y. Teo, Tan M. Nguyen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Pairwise dot-product self-attention is key to the success of transformers that achieve state-of-the-art performance across a variety of applications in language and vision. This dot-product self-attention computes attention weights among the input tokens using Euclidean distance, which makes the model prone to representation collapse and vulnerable to contaminated samples. In this paper, we propose using a Mahalanobis distance metric for computing the attention weights to stretch the underlying feature space in directions of high contextual relevance. In particular, we define a hyper-ellipsoidal neighborhood around each query to increase the attention weights of the tokens lying in the contextually important directions. We term this novel class of attention Elliptical Attention. Our Elliptical Attention provides two benefits: 1) reducing representation collapse and 2) enhancing the model's robustness as the Elliptical Attention pays more attention to contextually relevant information, rather than focusing on some small subset of informative features. We empirically demonstrate the advantages of Elliptical Attention over the baseline dot-product attention and state-of-the-art attention methods on various practical tasks, including object classification, imagesegmentation, and language modeling across different data modalities.
Evaluation of Text-to-Video Generation Models: A Dynamics Perspective
Authors: Mingxiang Liao, Hannan Lu, Xinyu Zhang, Fang Wan, Tianyu Wang, Yuzhong Zhao, Wangmeng Zuo, Qixiang Ye, Jingdong Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Comprehensive and constructive evaluation protocols play an important role when developing sophisticated text-to-video (T2V) generation models. Existing evaluation protocols primarily focus on temporal consistency and content continuity, yet largely ignore dynamics of video content. Such dynamics is an essential dimension measuring the visual vividness and the honesty of video content to text prompts. In this study, we propose an effective evaluation protocol, termed DEVIL, which centers on the dynamics dimension to evaluate T2V generation models, as well as improving existing evaluation metrics. In practice, we define a set of dynamics scores corresponding to multiple temporal granularities, and a new benchmark of text prompts under multiple dynamics grades. Upon the text prompt benchmark, we assess the generation capacity of T2V models, characterized by metrics of dynamics ranges and T2V alignment. Moreover, we analyze the relevance of existing metrics to dynamics metrics, improving them from the perspective of dynamics. Experiments show that DEVIL evaluation metrics enjoy up to about 90\% consistency with human ratings, demonstrating the potential to advance T2V generation models.
Nonconvex Federated Learning on Compact Smooth Submanifolds With Heterogeneous Data
Authors: Jiaojiao Zhang, Jiang Hu, Anthony Man-Cho So, Mikael Johansson
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Many machine learning tasks, such as principal component analysis and low-rank matrix completion, give rise to manifold optimization problems. Although there is a large body of work studying the design and analysis of algorithms for manifold optimization in the centralized setting, there are currently very few works addressing the federated setting. In this paper, we consider nonconvex federated learningover a compact smooth submanifold in the setting of heterogeneous client data. We propose an algorithm that leverages stochastic Riemannian gradients and a manifold projection operator to improve computational efficiency, uses local updates to improve communication efficiency, and avoids client drift. Theoretically, we show that our proposed algorithm converges sub-linearly to a neighborhood of a first-order optimal solution by using a novel analysis that jointly exploits the manifold structure and properties of the loss functions. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our algorithm has significantly smaller computational and communication overhead than existing methods.