mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Pard: Permutation-Invariant Autoregressive Diffusion for Graph Generation
Authors: Lingxiao Zhao, Xueying Ding, Leman Akoglu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Graph generation has been dominated by autoregressive models due to their simplicity and effectiveness, despite their sensitivity to ordering. Yet diffusion models have garnered increasing attention, as they offer comparable performance while being permutation-invariant. Current graph diffusion models generate graphs in a one-shot fashion, but they require extra features and thousands of denoising steps to achieve optimal performance. We introduce PARD, a Permutation-invariant Auto Regressive Diffusion model that integrates diffusion models with autoregressive methods. PARD harnesses the effectiveness and efficiency of the autoregressive model while maintaining permutation invariance without ordering sensitivity. Specifically, we show that contrary to sets, elements in a graph are not entirely un-ordered and there is a unique partial order for nodes and edges. With this partial order, PARD generates a graph in a block-by-block, autoregressive fashion, where each block’s probability is conditionally modeled by a shared diffusion model with an equivariant network. To ensure efficiency while being expressive, we further propose a higher-order graph transformer, which integrates transformer with PPGN (Maronet al., 2019). Like GPT, we extend the higher-order graph transformer to support parallel training of all blocks. Without any extra features, PARD achieves state-of-the-art performance on molecular and non-molecular datasets, and scales to large datasets like MOSES containing 1.9M molecules.
TabPedia: Towards Comprehensive Visual Table Understanding with Concept Synergy
Authors: Weichao Zhao, Hao Feng, Qi Liu, Jingqun Tang, Shu Wei, Binghong Wu, Lei Liao, Yongjie Ye, Hao Liu, Wengang Zhou, Houqiang Li, Can Huang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Tables contain factual and quantitative data accompanied by various structures and contents that pose challenges for machine comprehension. Previous methods generally design task-specific architectures and objectives for individual tasks, resulting in modal isolation and intricate workflows. In this paper, we present a novel large vision-language model, TabPedia, equipped with a concept synergy mechanism. In this mechanism, all the involved diverse visual table understanding (VTU) tasks and multi-source visual embeddings are abstracted as concepts. This unified framework allows TabPedia to seamlessly integrate VTU tasks, such as table detection, table structure recognition, table querying, and table question answering, by leveraging the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Moreover, the concept synergy mechanism enables table perception-related and comprehension-related tasks to work in harmony, as they can effectively leverage the needed clues from the corresponding source perception embeddings. Furthermore, to better evaluate the VTU task in real-world scenarios, we establish a new and comprehensive table VQA benchmark, ComTQA, featuring approximately 9,000 QA pairs. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on both table perception and comprehension tasks, conducted across various public benchmarks, validate the effectiveness of our TabPedia. The superior performance further confirms the feasibility of using LLMs for understanding visual tables when all concepts work in synergy. The benchmark ComTQA has been open-sourced at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ByteDance/ComTQA. The source code and model also have been released at https://github.com/zhaowc-ustc/TabPedia.
HonestLLM: Toward an Honest and Helpful Large Language Model
Authors: Chujie Gao, Siyuan Wu, Yue Huang, Dongping Chen, Qihui Zhang, Zhengyan Fu, Yao Wan, Lichao Sun, Xiangliang Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various industries and applications, owing to their exceptional generative capabilities. Nevertheless, honesty and helpfulness, which ensure safe and useful real-world deployments, have been considered as the longstanding cornerstones in practice. In this paper, we first established comprehensive principles for honesty LLM and further created the HoneSet with 930 queries across six categories, which is designed to evaluate LLMs’ ability to maintain honesty. Then, we improved the honesty and helpfulness of LLMs in both training-free and fine-tuning settings. Specifically, we propose a training-free method named Curiosity-Driven Prompting, which enables LLMs to express their internal confusion and uncertainty about the given query and then optimize their responses. Moreover, we also propose a two-stage fine-tuning approach, inspired by curriculum learning, to enhance the honesty and helpfulness of LLMs. The method first teaches LLMs to distinguish between honest and dishonest, and then LLMs are trained to learn to respond more helpfully. Experimental results demonstrated that both of the two proposed methods improve the helpfulness of LLMs while making them maintain honesty. Our research has paved the way for more reliable and trustworthy LLMs in real-world applications.
MLLMGuard: A Multi-dimensional Safety Evaluation Suite for Multimodal Large Language Models
Authors: Tianle Gu, Zeyang Zhou, Kexin Huang, Dandan Liang, Yixu Wang, Haiquan Zhao, Yuanqi Yao, Xingge Qiao, Keqing Wang, Yujiu Yang, Yan Teng, Yu Qiao, Yingchun Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Powered by remarkable advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities in manifold tasks.However, the practical application scenarios of MLLMs are intricate, exposing them to potential malicious instructions and thereby posing safety risks.While current benchmarks do incorporate certain safety considerations, they often lack comprehensive coverage and fail to exhibit the necessary rigor and robustness.For instance, the common practice of employing GPT-4V as both the evaluator and a model to be evaluated lacks credibility, as it tends to exhibit a bias toward its own responses.In this paper, we present MLLMGuard, a multi-dimensional safety evaluation suite for MLLMs, including a bilingual image-text evaluation dataset, inference utilities, and a lightweight evaluator.MLLMGuard's assessment comprehensively covers two languages (English and Chinese) and five important safety dimensions (Privacy, Bias, Toxicity, Truthfulness, and Legality), each with corresponding rich subtasks.Focusing on these dimensions, our evaluation dataset is primarily sourced from platforms such as social media, and it integrates text-based and image-based red teaming techniques with meticulous annotation by human experts.This can prevent inaccurate evaluation caused by data leakage when using open-source datasets and ensures the quality and challenging nature of our benchmark.Additionally, a fully automated lightweight evaluator termed GuardRank is developed, which achieves significantly higher evaluation accuracy than GPT-4.Our evaluation results across 13 advanced models indicate that MLLMs still have a substantial journey ahead before they can be considered safe and responsible.
UrbanDataLayer: A Unified Data Pipeline for Urban Science
Authors: Yiheng Wang, Tianyu Wang, Yuying Zhang, Hongji Zhang, Haoyu Zheng, Guanjie Zheng, Linghe Kong
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: The rapid progression of urbanization has generated a diverse array of urban data, facilitating significant advancements in urban science and urban computing. Current studies often work on separate problems case by case using diverse data, e.g., air quality prediction, and built-up areas classification. This fragmented approach hinders the urban research field from advancing at the pace observed in Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing, due to two primary reasons. On the one hand, the diverse data processing steps lead to the lack of large-scale benchmarks and therefore decelerate iterative methodology improvement on a single problem. On the other hand, the disparity in multi-modal data formats hinders the combination of the related modal data to stimulate more research findings. To address these challenges, we propose UrbanDataLayer (UDL), a suite of standardized data structures and pipelines for city data engineering, providing a unified data format for researchers. This allows researchers to easily build up large-scale benchmarks and combine multi-modal data, thus expediting the development of multi-modal urban foundation models. To verify the effectiveness of our work, we present four distinct urban problem tasks utilizing the proposed data layer. UrbanDataLayer aims to enhance standardization and operational efficiency within the urban science research community. The examples and source code are available at https://github.com/SJTU-CILAB/udl.
Neural Isometries: Taming Transformations for Equivariant ML
Authors: Thomas W. Mitchel, Michael Taylor, Vincent Sitzmann
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Real-world geometry and 3D vision tasks are replete with challenging symmetries that defy tractable analytical expression. In this paper, we introduce Neural Isometries, an autoencoder framework which learns to map the observation space to a general-purpose latent space wherein encodings are related by isometries whenever their corresponding observations are geometrically related in world space. Specifically, we regularize the latent space such that maps between encodings preserve a learned inner product and commute with a learned functional operator, in the same manner as rigid-body transformations commute with the Laplacian. This approach forms an effective backbone for self-supervised representation learning, and we demonstrate that a simple off-the-shelf equivariant network operating in the pre-trained latent space can achieve results on par with meticulously-engineered, handcrafted networks designed to handle complex, nonlinear symmetries. Furthermore, isometric maps capture information about the respective transformations in world space, and we show that this allows us to regress camera poses directly from the coefficients of the maps between encodings of adjacent views of a scene.
You Only Cache Once: Decoder-Decoder Architectures for Language Models
Authors: Yutao Sun, Li Dong, Yi Zhu, Shaohan Huang, Wenhui Wang, Shuming Ma, Quanlu Zhang, Jianyong Wang, Furu Wei
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We introduce a decoder-decoder architecture, YOCO, for large language models, which only caches key-value pairs once. It consists of two components, i.e., a cross-decoder stacked upon a self-decoder. The self-decoder efficiently encodes global key-value (KV) caches that are reused by the cross-decoder via cross-attention. The overall model behaves like a decoder-only Transformer, although YOCO only caches once. The design substantially reduces GPU memory demands, yet retains global attention capability. Additionally, the computation flow enables prefilling to early exit without changing the final output, thereby significantly speeding up the prefill stage. Experimental results demonstrate that YOCO achieves favorable performance compared to Transformer in various settings of scaling up model size and number of training tokens. We also extend YOCO to 1M context length with near-perfect needle retrieval accuracy. The profiling results show that YOCO improves inference memory, prefill latency, and throughput by orders of magnitude across context lengths and model sizes.
Locally Private and Robust Multi-Armed Bandits
Authors: Xingyu Zhou, Wei Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We study the interplay between local differential privacy (LDP) and robustness to Huber corruption and possibly heavy-tailed rewards in the context of multi-armed bandits (MABs). We consider two different practical settings: LDP-then-Corruption (LTC) where each user's locally private response might be further corrupted during the data collection process, and Corruption-then-LDP (CTL) where each user's raw data may be corrupted such that the LDP mechanism will only be applied to the corrupted data. To start with, we present the first tight characterization of the mean estimation error in high probability under both LTC and CTL settings. Leveraging this new result, we then present an almost tight characterization (up to log factor) of the minimax regret in online MABs and sub-optimality in offline MABs under both LTC and CTL settings, respectively. Our theoretical results in both settings are also corroborated by a set of systematic simulations. One key message in this paper is that LTC is a more difficult setting that leads to a worse performance guarantee compared to the CTL setting (in the minimax sense). Our sharp understanding of LTC and CTL also naturally allows us to give the first tight performance bounds for the most practical setting where corruption could happen both before and after the LDP mechanism. As an important by-product, we also give the first correct and tight regret bound for locally private and heavy-tailed online MABs, i.e., without Huber corruption, by identifying a fundamental flaw in the state-of-the-art.
Understanding Information Storage and Transfer in Multi-Modal Large Language Models
Authors: Samyadeep Basu, Martin Grayson, Cecily Morrison, Besmira Nushi, Soheil Feizi, Daniela Massiceti
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Understanding the mechanisms of information storage and transfer in Transformer-based models is important for driving model understanding progress. Recent work has studied these mechanisms for Large Language Models (LLMs), revealing insights on how information is stored in a model's parameters and how information flows to and from these parameters in response to specific prompts. However, these studies have not yet been extended to Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Given their expanding capabilities and real-world use, we start by studying one aspect of these models -- how MLLMs process information in a factual visual question answering task. We use a constraint-based formulation which views a visual question as having a set of visual or textual constraints that the model's generated answer must satisfy to be correct (e.g. What movie directed by \emph{the director in this photo} has won a \emph{Golden Globe}?). Under this setting, we contribute i) a method that extends causal information tracing from pure language to the multi-modal setting, and ii) \emph{VQA-Constraints}, a test-bed of 9.7K visual questions annotated with constraints. We use these tools to study two open-source MLLMs, LLaVa and multi-modal Phi-2. Our key findings show that these MLLMs rely on MLP and self-attention blocks in much earlier layers for information storage, compared to LLMs whose mid-layer MLPs are more important. We also show that a consistent small subset of visual tokens output by the vision encoder are responsible for transferring information from the image to these causal blocks. We validate these mechanisms by introducing MultEdit a model-editing algorithm that can correct errors and insert new long-tailed information into MLLMs by targeting these causal blocks. We will publicly release our dataset and code.
Sharing Key Semantics in Transformer Makes Efficient Image Restoration
Authors: Bin Ren, Yawei Li, Jingyun Liang, Rakesh Ranjan, Mengyuan Liu, Rita Cucchiara, Luc Van Gool, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Nicu Sebe
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Image Restoration (IR), a classic low-level vision task, has witnessed significant advancements through deep models that effectively model global information. Notably, the emergence of Vision Transformers (ViTs) has further propelled these advancements. When computing, the self-attention mechanism, a cornerstone of ViTs, tends to encompass all global cues, even those from semantically unrelated objects or regions. This inclusivity introduces computational inefficiencies, particularly noticeable with high input resolution, as it requires processing irrelevant information, thereby impeding efficiency. Additionally, for IR, it is commonly noted that small segments of a degraded image, particularly those closely aligned semantically, provide particularly relevant information to aid in the restoration process, as they contribute essential contextual cues crucial for accurate reconstruction. To address these challenges, we propose boosting IR's performance by sharing the key semantics via Transformer for IR (i.e., SemanIR) in this paper. Specifically, SemanIR initially constructs a sparse yet comprehensive key-semantic dictionary within each transformer stage by establishing essential semantic connections for every degraded patch. Subsequently, this dictionary is shared across all subsequent transformer blocks within the same stage. This strategy optimizes attention calculation within each block by focusing exclusively on semantically related components stored in the key-semantic dictionary. As a result, attention calculation achieves linear computational complexity within each window. Extensive experiments across 6 IR tasks confirm the proposed SemanIR's state-of-the-art performance, quantitatively and qualitatively showcasing advancements. The visual results, code, and trained models are available at: https://github.com/Amazingren/SemanIR.
Text-space Graph Foundation Models: Comprehensive Benchmarks and New Insights
Authors: Zhikai Chen, Haitao Mao, Jingzhe Liu, Yu Song, Bingheng Li, Wei Jin, Bahare Fatemi, Anton Tsitsulin, Bryan Perozzi, Hui Liu, Jiliang Tang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Given the ubiquity of graph data and its applications in diverse domains, building a Graph Foundation Model (GFM) that can work well across different graphs and tasks with a unified backbone has recently garnered significant interests. A major obstacle to achieving this goal stems from the fact that graphs from different domains often exhibit diverse node features. Inspired by multi-modal models that align different modalities with natural language, the text has recently been adopted to provide a unified feature space for diverse graphs. Despite the great potential of these text-space GFMs, current research in this field is hampered by two problems. First, the absence of a comprehensive benchmark with unified problem settings hinders a clear understanding of the comparative effectiveness and practical value of different text-space GFMs. Second, there is a lack of sufficient datasets to thoroughly explore the methods' full potential and verify their effectiveness across diverse settings. To address these issues, we conduct a comprehensive benchmark providing novel text-space datasets and comprehensive evaluation under unified problem settings. Empirical results provide new insights and inspire future research directions. Our code and data are publicly available from https://github.com/CurryTang/TSGFM.
Breaking Long-Tailed Learning Bottlenecks: A Controllable Paradigm with Hypernetwork-Generated Diverse Experts
Authors: Zhe Zhao, Haibin Wen, Zikang Wang, Pengkun Wang, Fanfu Wang, Song Lai, Qingfu Zhang, Yang Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Traditional long-tailed learning methods often perform poorly when dealing with inconsistencies between training and test data distributions, and they cannot flexibly adapt to different user preferences for trade-offs between head and tail classes. To address this issue, we propose a novel long-tailed learning paradigm that aims to tackle distribution shift in real-world scenarios and accommodate different user preferences for the trade-off between head and tail classes. We generate a set of diverse expert models via hypernetworks to cover all possible distribution scenarios, and optimize the model ensemble to adapt to any test distribution. Crucially, in any distribution scenario, we can flexibly output a dedicated model solution that matches the user's preference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method not only achieves higher performance ceilings but also effectively overcomes distribution shift while allowing controllable adjustments according to user preferences. We provide new insights and a paradigm for the long-tailed learning problem, greatly expanding its applicability in practical scenarios. The code can be found here: https://github.com/DataLab-atom/PRL.
Optimal Multiclass U-Calibration Error and Beyond
Authors: Haipeng Luo, Spandan Senapati, Vatsal Sharan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We consider the problem of online multiclass U-calibration, where a forecaster aims to make sequential distributional predictions over $K$ classes with low U-calibration error, that is, low regret with respect to all bounded proper losses simultaneously.    Kleinberg et al. (2023) developed an algorithm with U-calibration error $\mathcal{O}(K\sqrt{T})$ after $T$ rounds and raised the open question of what the optimal bound is.    We resolve this question by showing that the optimal U-calibration error is $\Theta(\sqrt{KT})$ --- we start with a simple observation that the Follow-the-Perturbed-Leader algorithm of Daskalakis and Syrgkanis (2016) achieves this upper bound, followed by a matching lower bound constructed with a specific proper loss (which, as a side result, also proves the optimality of the algorithm of Daskalakis and Syrgkanis (2016) in the context of online learning against an adversary with finite choices).  We also strengthen our results under natural assumptions on the loss functions, including $\Theta(\log T)$ U-calibration error for Lipschitz proper losses, $\mathcal{O}(\log T)$ U-calibration error for a certain class of decomposable proper losses, U-calibration error bounds for proper losses with a low covering number, and others.
Text2CAD: Generating Sequential CAD Designs from Beginner-to-Expert Level Text Prompts
Authors: Mohammad Sadil Khan, Sankalp Sinha, Talha Uddin Sheikh, Didier Stricker, Sk Aziz Ali, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Prototyping complex computer-aided design (CAD) models in modern softwares can be very time-consuming. This is due to the lack of intelligent systems that can quickly generate simpler intermediate parts. We propose Text2CAD, the first AI framework for generating text-to-parametric CAD models using designer-friendly instructions for all skill levels. Furthermore, we introduce a data annotation pipeline for generating text prompts based on natural language instructions for the DeepCAD dataset using Mistral and LLaVA-NeXT. The dataset contains $\sim170$K models and $\sim660$K text annotations, from abstract CAD descriptions (e.g., _generate two concentric cylinders_) to detailed specifications (e.g., _draw two circles with center_ $(x,y)$ and _radius_ $r_{1}$, $r_{2}$, \textit{and extrude along the normal by} $d$...). Within the Text2CAD framework, we propose an end-to-end transformer-based auto-regressive network to generate parametric CAD models from input texts. We evaluate the performance of our model through a mixture of metrics, including visual quality, parametric precision, and geometrical accuracy. Our proposed framework shows great potential in AI-aided design applications. Project page is available at https://sadilkhan.github.io/text2cad-project/.
MVGamba: Unify 3D Content Generation as State Space Sequence Modeling
Authors: Xuanyu Yi, Zike Wu, Qiuhong Shen, Qingshan Xu, Pan Zhou, Joo-Hwee Lim, Shuicheng Yan, Xinchao Wang, Hanwang Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent 3D large reconstruction models (LRMs) can generate high-quality 3D content in sub-seconds by integrating multi-view diffusion models with scalable multi-view reconstructors. Current works further leverage 3D Gaussian Splatting as 3D representation for improved visual quality and rendering efficiency. However, we observe that existing Gaussian reconstruction models often suffer from multi-view inconsistency and blurred textures. We attribute this to the compromise of multi-view information propagation in favor of adopting powerful yet computationally intensive architectures (\eg, Transformers). To address this issue, we introduce MVGamba, a general and lightweight Gaussian reconstruction model featuring a multi-view Gaussian reconstructor based on the RNN-like State Space Model (SSM). Our Gaussian reconstructor propagates causal context containing multi-view information for cross-view self-refinement while generating a long sequence of Gaussians for fine-detail modeling with linear complexity.With off-the-shelf multi-view diffusion models integrated, MVGamba unifies 3D generation tasks from a single image, sparse images, or text prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MVGamba outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in all 3D content generation scenarios with approximately only $0.1\times$ of the model size. The codes are available at \url{https://github.com/SkyworkAI/MVGamba}.
Make Continual Learning Stronger via C-Flat
Authors: Ang Bian, Wei Li, Hangjie Yuan, Chengrong Yu, Mang Wang, Zixiang Zhao, Aojun Lu, Pengliang Ji, Tao Feng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: How to balance the learning ’sensitivity-stability’ upon new task training and memory preserving is critical in CL to resolve catastrophic forgetting. Improving model generalization ability within each learning phase is one solution to help CL learning overcome the gap in the joint knowledge space. Zeroth-order loss landscape sharpness-aware minimization is a strong training regime improving model generalization in transfer learning compared with optimizer like SGD. It has also been introduced into CL to improve memory representation or learning efficiency. However, zeroth-order sharpness alone could favors sharper over flatter minima in certain scenarios, leading to a rather sensitive minima rather than a global optima. To further enhance learning stability, we propose a Continual Flatness (C-Flat) method featuring a flatter loss landscape tailored for CL. C-Flat could be easily called with only one line of code and is plug-and-play to any CL methods. A general framework of C-Flat applied to all CL categories and a thorough comparison with loss minima optimizer and flat minima based CL approaches is presented in this paper, showing that our method can boost CL performance in almost all cases. Code is available at https://github.com/WanNaa/C-Flat.
Limits of Transformer Language Models on Learning to Compose Algorithms
Authors: Jonathan Thomm, Giacomo Camposampiero, Aleksandar Terzic, Michael Hersche, Bernhard Schölkopf, Abbas Rahimi
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We analyze the capabilities of Transformer language models in learning compositional discrete tasks. To this end, we evaluate training LLaMA models and prompting GPT-4 and Gemini on four tasks demanding to learn a composition of several discrete sub-tasks. In particular, we measure how well these models can reuse primitives observable in the sub-tasks to learn the composition task. Our results indicate that compositional learning in state-of-the-art Transformer language models is highly sample inefficient: LLaMA requires more data samples than relearning all sub-tasks from scratch to learn the compositional task; in-context prompting with few samples is unreliable and fails at executing the sub-tasks or correcting the errors in multi-round code generation. Further, by leveraging complexity theory, we support these findings with a theoretical analysis focused on the sample inefficiency of gradient descent in memorizing feedforward models. We open source our code at https://github.com/IBM/limitations-lm-algorithmic-compositional-learning.
Stability and Generalization of Asynchronous SGD: Sharper Bounds Beyond Lipschitz and Smoothness
Authors: Xiaoge Deng, Tao Sun, Shengwei Li, Dongsheng Li, Xicheng Lu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) has evolved into an indispensable optimization algorithm for training modern large-scale distributed machine learning tasks. Therefore, it is imperative to explore the generalization performance of the ASGD algorithm. However, the existing results are either pessimistic and vacuous or restricted by strict assumptions that fail to reveal the intrinsic impact of asynchronous training on generalization. In this study, we establish sharper stability and generalization bounds for ASGD under much weaker assumptions. Firstly, this paper studies the on-average model stability of ASGD and provides a non-vacuous upper bound on the generalization error, without relying on the Lipschitz assumption. Furthermore, we investigate the excess generalization error of the ASGD algorithm, revealing the effects of asynchronous delay, model initialization, number of training samples and iterations on generalization performance. Secondly, for the first time, this study explores the generalization performance of ASGD in the non-smooth case. We replace smoothness with the much weaker Hölder continuous assumption and achieve similar generalization results as in the smooth case. Finally, we validate our theoretical findings by training numerous machine learning models, including convex problems and non-convex tasks in computer vision and natural language processing.
On the Identifiability of Hybrid Deep Generative Models: Meta-Learning as a Solution
Authors: Yubo Ye, Maryam Toloubidokhti, Sumeet Vadhavkar, Xiajun Jiang, Huafeng Liu, Linwei Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The interest in leveraging physics-based inductive bias in deep learning has resulted in recent development of hybrid deep generative models (hybrid-DGMs)  that integrates known physics-based mathematical expressions in neural generative models. To identify these hybrid-DGMs requires inferring parameters of the physics-based component along with their neural component. The identifiability of these hybrid-DGMs, however, has not yet been theoretically probed or established. How does the existing theory of the un-identifiability of general DGMs apply to hybrid-DGMs? What may be an effective approach to consutrct a hybrid-DGM with theoretically-proven identifiability? This paper provides the first theoretical probe into the identifiability of hybrid-DGMs, and present meta-learning as a novel solution to construct identifiable hybrid-DGMs. On synthetic and real-data benchmarks, we provide strong empirical evidence for the un-identifiability of existing hybrid-DGMs using unconditional priors, and strong identifiability results of the presented meta-formulations of hybrid-DGMs.
MaskLLM: Learnable Semi-Structured Sparsity for Large Language Models
Authors: Gongfan Fang, Hongxu Yin, Saurav Muralidharan, Greg Heinrich, Jeff Pool, Jan Kautz, Pavlo Molchanov, Xinchao Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are distinguished by their massive parameter counts, which typically result in significant redundancy. This work introduces MaskLLM, a learnable pruning method that establishes Semi-structured (or ``N:M'') Sparsity in LLMs, aimed at reducing computational overhead during inference. Instead of developing a new importance criterion, MaskLLM explicitly models N:M patterns as a learnable distribution through Gumbel Softmax sampling. This approach facilitates end-to-end training on large-scale datasets and offers two notable advantages: 1) High-quality Masks - our method effectively scales to large datasets and learns accurate masks; 2) Transferability - the probabilistic modeling of mask distribution enables the transfer learning of sparsity across domains or tasks. We assessed MaskLLM using 2:4 sparsity on various LLMs, including LLaMA-2, Nemotron-4, and GPT-3, with sizes ranging from 843M to 15B parameters, and our empirical results show substantial improvements over state-of-the-art methods. For instance, leading approaches achieve a perplexity (PPL) of 10 or greater on Wikitext compared to the dense model's 5.12 PPL, but MaskLLM achieves a significantly lower 6.72 PPL solely by learning the masks with frozen weights. Furthermore, MaskLLM's learnable nature allows customized masks for lossless application of 2:4 sparsity to downstream tasks or domains. Code is available at https://github.com/NVlabs/MaskLLM.
Understanding the Gains from Repeated Self-Distillation
Authors: Divyansh Pareek, Simon S. Du, Sewoong Oh
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Self-Distillation is a special type of knowledge distillation where the student model has the same architecture as the teacher model. Despite using the same architecture and the same training data, self-distillation has been empirically observed to improve performance, especially when applied repeatedly. For such a process, there is a fundamental question of interest: How much gain is possible by applying multiple steps of self-distillation? To investigate this relative gain, we propose using the simple but canonical task of linear regression. Our analysis shows that the excess risk achieved by multi-step self-distillation can significantly improve upon a single step of self-distillation, reducing the excess risk by a factor of $d$, where $d$ is the input dimension. Empirical results on regression tasks from the UCI repository show a reduction in the learnt model's risk (MSE) by up to $47$%.
In-Context Learning State Vector with Inner and Momentum Optimization
Authors: Dongfang Li, Zhenyu Liu, Xinshuo Hu, Zetian Sun, Baotian Hu, Min Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited an impressive ability to perform In-Context Learning (ICL) from only a few examples. Recent works have indicated that the functions learned by ICL can be represented through compressed vectors derived from the transformer. However, the working mechanisms and optimization of these vectors are yet to be thoroughly explored. In this paper, we address this gap by presenting a comprehensive analysis of these compressed vectors, drawing parallels to the parameters trained with gradient descent, and introducing the concept of state vector. Inspired by the works on model soup and momentum-based gradient descent, we propose inner and momentum optimization methods that are applied to refine the state vector progressively as test-time adaptation. Moreover, we simulate state vector aggregation in the multiple example setting, where demonstrations comprising numerous examples are usually too lengthy for regular ICL, and further propose a divide-and-conquer aggregation method to address this challenge. We conduct extensive experiments using Llama-2 and GPT-J in both zero-shot setting and few-shot setting. The experimental results show that our optimization method effectively enhances the state vector and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on diverse tasks.
DART-Math: Difficulty-Aware Rejection Tuning for Mathematical Problem-Solving
Authors: Yuxuan Tong, Xiwen Zhang, Rui Wang, Ruidong Wu, Junxian He
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Solving mathematical problems requires advanced reasoning abilities and presents notable challenges for large language models. Previous works usually synthesize data from proprietary models to augment existing datasets, followed by instruction tuning to achieve top-tier results. However, our analysis of these datasets reveals severe biases towards easy queries, with frequent failures to generate any correct response for the most challenging queries.Hypothesizing that difficult queries are crucial to learning complex reasoning, we propose Difficulty-Aware Rejection Tuning (DART), a method that allocates difficult queries more trials during the synthesis phase, enabling more extensive training on difficult samples.Utilizing DART, we have created new datasets for mathematical problem-solving that focus more on difficult queries and are substantially smaller than previous ones. Remarkably, our synthesis process solely relies on a 7B-sized open-weight model, without reliance on the commonly used proprietary GPT-4.We fine-tune various base models on our datasets ranging from 7B to 70B in size, resulting in a series of strong models called DART-Math.In comprehensive in-domain and out-of-domain evaluation on 6 mathematical benchmarks, DART-Math outperforms vanilla rejection tuning significantly, being superior or comparable to previous arts, despite using much smaller datasets and no proprietary models. Furthermore, our results position our synthetic datasets as the most effective and cost-efficient publicly available resources for advancing mathematical problem-solving. Our datasets, models and code are publicly available at https://github.com/hkust-nlp/dart-math.
CiteME: Can Language Models Accurately Cite Scientific Claims?
Authors: Ori Press, Andreas Hochlehnert, Ameya Prabhu, Vishaal Udandarao, Ofir Press, Matthias Bethge
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Thousands of new scientific papers are published each month. Such  information overload complicates researcher efforts to stay current with the state-of-the-art as well as to verify and correctly attribute claims. We pose the following research question: Given a text excerpt referencing a paper, could an LM act as a research assistant to correctly identify the referenced paper? We advance efforts to answer this question by building a benchmark that evaluates the abilities of LMs in citation attribution. Our benchmark, CiteME, consists  of text excerpts from recent machine learning papers, each referencing a single other paper. CiteME use reveals a large gap between frontier LMs and human performance, with LMs achieving only 4.2-18.5% accuracy and humans 69.7%. We close this gap by introducing CiteAgent, an autonomous system built on the GPT-4o LM that can also search and read papers, which achieves an accuracy of 35.3% on CiteME. Overall, CiteME serves as a challenging testbed for open-ended claim attribution, driving the research community towards a future where any claim made by an LM can be  automatically verified and discarded if found to be incorrect.
Visual Prompt Tuning in Null Space for Continual Learning
Authors: Yue Lu, Shizhou Zhang, De Cheng, Yinghui Xing, Nannan Wang, Peng Wang, Yanning Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Existing prompt-tuning methods have demonstrated impressive performances in continual learning (CL), by selecting and updating relevant prompts in the vision-transformer models. On the contrary, this paper aims to learn each task by tuning the prompts in the direction orthogonal to the subspace spanned by previous tasks' features, so as to ensure no interference on tasks that have been learned to overcome catastrophic forgetting in CL. However, different from the orthogonal projection in the traditional CNN architecture, the prompt gradient orthogonal projection in the ViT architecture shows completely different and greater challenges, i.e., 1) the high-order and non-linear self-attention operation; 2) the drift of prompt distribution brought by the LayerNorm in the transformer block. Theoretically, we have finally deduced two consistency conditions to achieve the prompt gradient orthogonal projection, which provide a theoretical guarantee of eliminating interference on previously learned knowledge via the self-attention mechanism in visual prompt tuning. In practice, an effective null-space-based approximation solution has been proposed to implement the prompt gradient orthogonal projection. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of anti-forgetting on four class-incremental benchmarks with diverse pre-trained baseline models, and our approach achieves superior performances to state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/zugexiaodui/VPTinNSforCL
The Unmet Promise of Synthetic Training Images: Using Retrieved Real Images Performs Better
Authors: Scott Geng, Cheng-Yu Hsieh, Vivek Ramanujan, Matthew Wallingford, Chun-Liang Li, Pang Wei Koh, Ranjay Krishna
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Generative text-to-image models enable us to synthesize unlimited amounts of images in a controllable manner, spurring many recent efforts to train vision models with synthetic data. However, every synthetic image ultimately originates from the upstream data used to train the generator. Does the intermediate generator provide additional information over directly training on relevant parts of the upstream data? Grounding this question in the setting of image classification, we compare finetuning on task-relevant, targeted synthetic data generated by Stable Diffusion---a generative model trained on the LAION-2B dataset---against finetuning on targeted real images retrieved directly from LAION-2B. We show that while synthetic data can benefit some downstream tasks, it is universally matched or outperformed by real data from the simple retrieval baseline. Our analysis suggests that this underperformance is partially due to generator artifacts and inaccurate task-relevant visual details in the synthetic images. Overall, we argue that targeted retrieval is a critical baseline to consider when training with synthetic data---a baseline that current methods do not yet surpass. We release code, data, and models at https://github.com/scottgeng00/unmet-promise/.
Reproducibility of predictive networks for mouse visual cortex
Authors: Polina Turishcheva, Max F. Burg, Fabian H. Sinz, Alexander S. Ecker
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Deep predictive models of neuronal activity have recently enabled several new discoveries about the selectivity and invariance of neurons in the visual cortex.These models learn a shared set of nonlinear basis functions, which are linearly combined via a learned weight vector to represent a neuron's function.Such weight vectors, which can be thought as embeddings of neuronal function, have been proposed to define functional cell types via unsupervised clustering.However, as deep models are usually highly overparameterized, the learning problem is unlikely to have a unique solution, which raises the question if such embeddings can be used in a meaningful way for downstream analysis.In this paper, we investigate how stable neuronal embeddings are with respect to changes in model architecture and initialization. We find that $L_1$ regularization to be an important ingredient for structured embeddings and develop an adaptive regularization that adjusts the strength of regularization per neuron.  This regularization improves both predictive performance and how consistently neuronal embeddings cluster across model fits  compared to uniform regularization.To overcome overparametrization, we propose an iterative feature pruning strategy which reduces the dimensionality of performance-optimized models by half without loss of performance and improves the consistency of neuronal embeddings with respect to clustering neurons.Our results suggest that to achieve an objective taxonomy of cell types or a compact representation of the functional landscape, we need novel architectures or learning techniques that improve identifiability. The code is available https://github.com/pollytur/readout_reproducibility.
Kraken: Inherently Parallel Transformers For Efficient Multi-Device Inference
Authors: Rohan Baskar Prabhakar, Hengrui Zhang, David Wentzlaff
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large Transformer networks are increasingly used in settings where low inference latency is necessary to enable new applications and improve the end-user experience.However, autoregressive inference is resource intensive and requires parallelism for efficiency.Parallelism introduces collective communication that is both expensive and represents a phase when hardware resources are underutilized.Towards mitigating this, Kraken is an evolution of the standard Transformer architecture that is designed to complement existing tensor parallelism schemes for efficient inference on multi-device systems.By introducing a fixed degree of intra-layer model parallelism, the architecture allows collective operations to be overlapped with compute, decreasing latency and increasing hardware utilization.When trained on OpenWebText, Kraken models reach a similar perplexity as standard Transformers while also preserving their language modeling capabilities as evaluated on the SuperGLUE benchmark.Importantly, when tested on multi-GPU systems using TensorRT-LLM engines, Kraken speeds up Time To First Token by a mean of 35.6% across a range of model sizes, context lengths, and degrees of tensor parallelism.
DeepDRK: Deep Dependency Regularized Knockoff for Feature Selection
Authors: Hongyu Shen, Yici Yan, Zhizhen Zhao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Model-X knockoff has garnered significant attention among various feature selection methods due to its guarantees for controlling the false discovery rate (FDR). Since its introduction in parametric design, knockoff techniques have evolved to handle arbitrary data distributions using deep learning-based generative models. However, we have observed limitations in the current implementations of the deep Model-X knockoff framework. Notably, the "swap property" that knockoffs require often faces challenges at the sample level, resulting in diminished selection power. To address these issues, we develop "Deep Dependency Regularized Knockoff (DeepDRK)," a distribution-free deep learning method that effectively balances FDR and power. In DeepDRK, we introduce a novel formulation of the knockoff model as a learning problem under multi-source adversarial attacks. By employing an innovative perturbation technique, we achieve lower FDR and higher power. Our model outperforms existing benchmarks across synthetic, semi-synthetic, and real-world datasets, particularly when sample sizes are small and data distributions are non-Gaussian.