mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Unveiling Encoder-Free Vision-Language Models
Authors: Haiwen Diao, Yufeng Cui, Xiaotong Li, Yueze Wang, Huchuan Lu, Xinlong Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Existing vision-language models (VLMs) mostly rely on vision encoders to extract visual features followed by large language models (LLMs) for visual-language tasks. However, the vision encoders set a strong inductive bias in abstracting visual representation, e.g., resolution, aspect ratio, and semantic priors, which could impede the flexibility and efficiency of the VLMs. Training pure VLMs that accept the seamless vision and language inputs, i.e., without vision encoders, remains challenging and rarely explored. Empirical observations reveal that direct training without encoders results in slow convergence and large performance gaps. In this work, we bridge the gap between encoder-based and encoder-free models, and present a simple yet effective training recipe towards pure VLMs. Specifically, we unveil the key aspects of training encoder-free VLMs efficiently via thorough experiments: (1) Bridging vision-language representation inside one unified decoder; (2) Enhancing visual recognition capability via extra supervision. With these strategies, we launch EVE, an encoder-free vision-language model that can be trained and forwarded efficiently. Notably, solely utilizing 35M publicly accessible data, EVE can impressively rival the encoder-based VLMs of similar capacities across multiple vision-language benchmarks. It significantly outperforms the counterpart Fuyu-8B with mysterious training procedures and undisclosed training data. We believe that EVE provides a transparent and efficient route for developing pure decoder-only architecture across modalities.
Density-based User Representation using Gaussian Process Regression for Multi-interest Personalized Retrieval
Authors: Haolun Wu, Ofer Meshi, Masrour Zoghi, Fernando Diaz, Xue Liu, Craig Boutilier, Maryam Karimzadehgan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Accurate modeling of the diverse and dynamic interests of users remains a significant challenge in the design of personalized recommender systems. Existing user modeling methods, like single-point and multi-point representations, have limitations w.r.t.\ accuracy, diversity, and adaptability. To overcome these deficiencies, we introduce density-based user representations (DURs), a novel method that leverages Gaussian process regression (GPR) for effective multi-interest recommendation and retrieval. Our approach, GPR4DUR, exploits DURs to capture user interest variability without manual tuning, incorporates uncertainty-awareness, and scales well to large numbers of users. Experiments using real-world offline datasets confirm the adaptability and efficiency of GPR4DUR, while online experiments with simulated users demonstrate its ability to address the exploration-exploitation trade-off by effectively utilizing model uncertainty.
Frequency-aware Generative Models for Multivariate Time Series Imputation
Authors: Xinyu Yang, Yu Sun, Xiaojie Yuan, Xinyang Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Missing data in multivariate time series are common issues that can affect the analysis and downstream applications.Although multivariate time series data generally consist of the trend, seasonal and residual terms, existing works mainly focus on optimizing the modeling for the first two items. However, we find that the residual term is more crucial for getting accurate fillings, since it is more related to the diverse changes of data and the biggest component of imputation errors.Therefore, in this study, we introduce frequency-domain information and design Frequency-aware Generative Models for Multivariate Time Series Imputation (FGTI). Specifically, FGTI employs a high-frequency filter to boost the residual term imputation, supplemented by a dominant-frequency filter for the trend and seasonal imputation. Cross-domain representation learning module then fuses frequency-domain insights with deep representations.Experiments over various datasets with real-world missing values show that FGTI achieves superiority in both data imputation and downstream applications.
Overfitting Behaviour of Gaussian Kernel Ridgeless Regression: Varying Bandwidth or Dimensionality
Authors: Marko Medvedev, Gal Vardi, Nathan Srebro
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We consider the overfitting behavior of minimum norm interpolating solutions of Gaussian kernel ridge regression (i.e. kernel ridgeless regression), when the bandwidth or input dimension varies with the sample size. For fixed dimensions, we show that even with varying or tuned bandwidth, the ridgeless solution is never consistent and, at least with large enough noise, always worse than the null predictor. For increasing dimension, we give a generic characterization of the overfitting behavior for any scaling of the dimension with sample size. We use this to provide the first example of benign overfitting using the Gaussian kernel with sub-polynomial scaling dimension.  All our results are under the Gaussian universality ansatz and the (non-rigorous) risk predictions in terms of the kernel eigenstructure.
Empowering and Assessing the Utility of Large Language Models in Crop Science
Authors: Hang Zhang, Jiawei Sun, Renqi Chen, Wei Liu, Zhonghang Yuan, Xinzhe Zheng, Zhefan Wang, Zhiyuan Yang, Hang Yan, Hansen Zhong, Xiqing Wang, Wanli Ouyang, Fan Yang, Nanqing Dong
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable efficacy across knowledge-intensive tasks. Nevertheless, their untapped potential in crop science presents an opportunity for advancement. To narrow this gap, we introduce CROP, which includes a novel instruction tuning dataset specifically designed to enhance LLMs’ professional capabilities in the crop science sector, along with a benchmark that serves as a comprehensive evaluation of LLMs’ understanding of the domain knowledge. The CROP dataset is curated through a task-oriented and LLM-human integrated pipeline, comprising 210,038 single-turn and 1,871 multi-turn dialogues related to crop science scenarios. The CROP benchmark includes 5,045 multiple-choice questions covering three difficulty levels. Our experiments based on the CROP benchmark demonstrate notable enhancements in crop science-related tasks when LLMs are fine-tuned with the CROP dataset. To the best of our knowledge, CROP dataset is the first-ever instruction tuning dataset in the crop science domain. We anticipate that CROP will accelerate the adoption of LLMs in the domain of crop science, ultimately contributing to global food production.
Toward Self-Improvement of LLMs via Imagination, Searching, and Criticizing
Authors: Ye Tian, Baolin Peng, Linfeng Song, Lifeng Jin, Dian Yu, Lei Han, Haitao Mi, Dong Yu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Despite the impressive capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) on various tasks, they still struggle with scenarios that involves complex reasoning and planning. Self-correction and self-learning emerge as viable solutions, employing strategies that allow LLMs to refine their outputs and learn from self-assessed rewards. Yet, the efficacy of LLMs in self-refining its response, particularly in complex reasoning and planning task, remains dubious. In this paper, we introduce AlphaLLM for the self-improvements of LLMs, which integrates Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with LLMs to establish a self-improving loop, thereby enhancing the capabilities of LLMs without additional annotations. Drawing inspiration from the success of AlphaGo, AlphaLLM addresses the unique challenges of combining MCTS with LLM for self-improvement, including data scarcity, the vastness search spaces of language tasks, and the subjective nature of feedback in language tasks. AlphaLLM is comprised of prompt synthesis component, an efficient MCTS approach tailored for language tasks, and a trio of critic models for precise feedback. Our experimental results in mathematical reasoning tasks demonstrate that AlphaLLM significantly enhances the performance of LLMs without additional annotations, showing the potential for self-improvement in LLMs.
A Theory of Optimistically Universal Online Learnability for General Concept Classes
Authors: Steve Hanneke, Hongao Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We provide a full characterization of the concept classes that are optimistically universally online learnable with {0, 1} labels. The notion of optimistically universal online learning was defined in [Hanneke, 2021] in order to understand learnability under minimal assumptions. In this paper, following the philosophy behind that work, we investigate two questions, namely, for every concept class: (1) What are the minimal assumptions on the data process admitting online learnability? (2) Is there a learning algorithm which succeeds under every data process satisfying the minimal assumptions? Such an algorithm is said to be optimistically universal for the given concept class. We resolve both of these questions for all concept classes, and moreover, as part of our solution we design general learning algorithms for each case. Finally, we extend these algorithms and results to the agnostic case, showing an equivalence between the minimal assumptions on the data process for learnability in the agnostic and realizable cases, for every concept class, as well as the equivalence of optimistically universal learnability.
Belief-State Query Policies for User-Aligned POMDPs
Authors: Daniel Bramblett, Siddharth Srivastava
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Planning in real-world settings often entails addressing partial observability while aligning with users' requirements. We present a novel framework for expressing users' constraints and preferences about agent behavior in a partially observable setting using parameterized belief-state query (BSQ) policies in the setting of goal-oriented partially observable Markov decision processes (gPOMDPs). We present the first formal analysis of such constraints and prove that while the expected cost function of a parameterized BSQ policy w.r.t its parameters is not convex, it is piecewise constant and yields an implicit discrete parameter search space that is finite for finite horizons. This theoretical result leads to novel algorithms that optimize gPOMDP agent behavior with guaranteed user alignment. Analysis proves that our algorithms converge to the optimal user-aligned behavior in the limit. Empirical results show that parameterized BSQ policies provide a computationally feasible approach for user-aligned planning in partially observable settings.
Adversarially Trained Weighted Actor-Critic for Safe Offline Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Honghao Wei, Xiyue Peng, Arnob Ghosh, Xin Liu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We propose WSAC (Weighted Safe Actor-Critic), a novel algorithm for Safe Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) under functional approximation, which can robustly optimize policies to improve upon an arbitrary reference policy with limited data coverage. WSAC is designed as a two-player Stackelberg game to optimize a refined objective function. The actor optimizes the policy against two adversarially trained value critics with small importance-weighted Bellman errors, which focus on scenarios where the actor's performance is inferior to the reference policy. In theory, we demonstrate that when the actor employs a no-regret optimization oracle, WSAC achieves a number of guarantees: $(i)$ For the first time in the safe offline  RL setting, we establish that WSAC can produce a policy that outperforms {\bf any} reference policy while maintaining the same level of safety, which is critical to designing a safe algorithm for offline RL. $(ii)$ WSAC achieves the optimal statistical convergence rate of $1/\sqrt{N}$ to the reference policy, where $N$ is the size of the offline dataset. $(iii)$ We theoretically show that WSAC guarantees a safe policy improvement across a broad range of hyperparameters that control the degree of pessimism, indicating its practical robustness. Additionally, we offer a practical version of WSAC and compare it with existing state-of-the-art safe offline RL algorithms in several continuous control environments. WSAC outperforms all baselines across a range of tasks, supporting the theoretical results.
Fast Iterative Hard Thresholding Methods with Pruning Gradient Computations
Authors: Yasutoshi Ida, Sekitoshi Kanai, Atsutoshi Kumagai, Tomoharu Iwata, Yasuhiro Fujiwara
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We accelerate the iterative hard thresholding (IHT) method, which finds (k) important elements from a parameter vector in a linear regression model. Although the plain IHT repeatedly updates the parameter vector during the optimization, computing gradients is the main bottleneck. Our method safely prunes unnecessary gradient computations to reduce the processing time.The main idea is to efficiently construct a candidate set, which contains (k) important elements in the parameter vector, for each iteration. Specifically, before computing the gradients, we prune unnecessary elements in the parameter vector for the candidate set by utilizing upper bounds on absolute values of the parameters. Our method guarantees the same optimization results as the plain IHT because our pruning is safe. Experiments show that our method is up to 73 times faster than the plain IHT without degrading accuracy.
InterDreamer: Zero-Shot Text to 3D Dynamic Human-Object Interaction
Authors: Sirui Xu, Ziyin Wang, Yu-Xiong Wang, Liang-Yan Gui
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Text-conditioned human motion generation has experienced significant advancements with diffusion models trained on extensive motion capture data and corresponding textual annotations. However, extending such success to 3D dynamic human-object interaction (HOI) generation faces notable challenges, primarily due to the lack of large-scale interaction data and comprehensive descriptions that align with these interactions. This paper takes the initiative and showcases the potential of generating human-object interactions without direct training on text-interaction pair data. Our key insight in achieving this is that interaction semantics and dynamics can be decoupled. Being unable to learn interaction semantics through supervised training, we instead leverage pre-trained large models, synergizing knowledge from a large language model and a text-to-motion model. While such knowledge offers high-level control over interaction semantics, it cannot grasp the intricacies of low-level interaction dynamics. To overcome this issue, we introduce a world model designed to comprehend simple physics, modeling how human actions influence object motion. By integrating these components, our novel framework, InterDreamer, is able to generate text-aligned 3D HOI sequences without relying on paired text-interaction data. We apply InterDreamer to the BEHAVE, OMOMO, and CHAIRS datasets, and our comprehensive experimental analysis demonstrates its capability to generate realistic and coherent interaction sequences that seamlessly align with the text directives.
Graph Convolutions Enrich the Self-Attention in Transformers!
Authors: Jeongwhan Choi, Hyowon Wi, Jayoung Kim, Yehjin Shin, Kookjin Lee, Nathaniel Trask, Noseong Park
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Transformers, renowned for their self-attention mechanism, have achieved state-of-the-art performance across various tasks in natural language processing, computer vision, time-series modeling, etc. However, one of the challenges with deep Transformer models is the oversmoothing problem, where representations across layers converge to indistinguishable values, leading to significant performance degradation. We interpret the original self-attention as a simple graph filter and redesign it from a graph signal processing (GSP) perspective. We propose a graph-filter-based self-attention (GFSA) to learn a general yet effective one, whose complexity, however, is slightly larger than that of the original self-attention mechanism. We demonstrate that GFSA improves the performance of Transformers in various fields, including computer vision, natural language processing, graph-level tasks, speech recognition, and code classification.
FineStyle: Fine-grained Controllable Style Personalization for Text-to-image Models
Authors: Gong Zhang, Kihyuk Sohn, Meera Hahn, Humphrey Shi, Irfan Essa
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Few-shot fine-tuning of text-to-image (T2I) generation models enables people to create unique images in their own style using natural languages without requiring extensive prompt engineering. However, fine-tuning with only a handful, as little as one, of image-text paired data prevents fine-grained control of style attributes at generation. In this paper, we present FineStyle, a few-shot fine-tuning method that allows enhanced controllability for style personalized text-to-image generation. To overcome the lack of training data for fine-tuning, we propose a novel concept-oriented data scaling that amplifies the number of image-text pair, each of which focuses on different concepts (e.g., objects) in the style reference image. We also identify the benefit of parameter-efficient adapter tuning of key and value kernels of cross-attention layers. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of FineStyle at following fine-grained text prompts and delivering visual quality faithful to the specified style, measured by CLIP scores and human raters.
Alias-Free Mamba Neural Operator
Authors: Jianwei Zheng, Wei Li, Ni Xu, Junwei Zhu, Xiaoxu Lin, Xiaoqin Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Benefiting from the booming deep learning techniques, neural operators (NO) are considered as an ideal alternative to break the traditions of solving Partial Differential Equations (PDE) with expensive cost.Yet with the remarkable progress, current solutions concern little on the holistic function features--both global and local information-- during the process of solving PDEs.Besides, a meticulously designed kernel integration to meet desirable performance often suffers from a severe computational burden, such as GNO with $O(N(N-1))$, FNO with $O(NlogN)$, and Transformer-based NO with $O(N^2)$.To counteract the dilemma, we propose a mamba neural operator with $O(N)$ computational complexity, namely MambaNO.Functionally, MambaNO achieves a clever balance between global integration, facilitated by state space model of Mamba that scans the entire function, and local integration, engaged with an alias-free architecture. We prove a property of continuous-discrete equivalence to show the capability ofMambaNO in approximating operators arising from universal PDEs to desired accuracy. MambaNOs are evaluated on a diverse set of benchmarks with possibly multi-scale solutions and set new state-of-the-art scores, yet with fewer parameters and better efficiency.
Guiding a Diffusion Model with a Bad Version of Itself
Authors: Tero Karras, Miika Aittala, Tuomas Kynkäänniemi, Jaakko Lehtinen, Timo Aila, Samuli Laine
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The primary axes of interest in image-generating diffusion models are image quality, the amount of variation in the results, and how well the results align with a given condition, e.g., a class label or a text prompt. The popular classifier-free guidance approach uses an unconditional model to guide a conditional model, leading to simultaneously better prompt alignment and higher-quality images at the cost of reduced variation. These effects seem inherently entangled, and thus hard to control. We make the surprising observation that it is possible to obtain disentangled control over image quality without compromising the amount of variation by guiding generation using a smaller, less-trained version of the model itself rather than an unconditional model. This leads to significant improvements in ImageNet generation, setting record FIDs of 1.01 for 64x64 and 1.25 for 512x512, using publicly available networks. Furthermore, the method is also applicable to unconditional diffusion models, drastically improving their quality.
Multilinear Mixture of Experts: Scalable Expert Specialization through Factorization
Authors: James Oldfield, Markos Georgopoulos, Grigorios G. Chrysos, Christos Tzelepis, Yannis Panagakis, Mihalis A. Nicolaou, Jiankang Deng, Ioannis Patras
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The Mixture of Experts (MoE) paradigm provides a powerful way to decompose dense layers into smaller, modular computations often more amenable to human interpretation, debugging, and editability. However, a major challenge lies in the computational cost of scaling the number of experts high enough to achieve fine-grained specialization. In this paper, we propose the Multilinear Mixture of Experts (μMoE) layer to address this, focusing on vision models. μMoE layers enable scalable expert specialization by performing an implicit computation on prohibitively large weight tensors entirely in factorized form. Consequently, μMoEs (1) avoid the restrictively high inference-time costs of dense MoEs, yet (2) do not inherit the training issues of the popular sparse MoEs' discrete (non-differentiable) expert routing. We present both qualitative and quantitative evidence that scaling μMoE layers when fine-tuning foundation models for vision tasks leads to more specialized experts at the class-level, further enabling manual bias correction in CelebA attribute classification. Finally, we show qualitative results demonstrating the expert specialism achieved when pre-training large GPT2 and MLP-Mixer models with parameter-matched μMoE blocks at every layer, maintaining comparable accuracy. Our code is available at: https://github.com/james-oldfield/muMoE.
ERBench: An Entity-Relationship based Automatically Verifiable Hallucination Benchmark for Large Language Models
Authors: Jio Oh, Soyeon Kim, Junseok Seo, Jindong Wang, Ruochen Xu, Xing Xie, Steven Euijong Whang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved unprecedented performances in various applications, yet evaluating them is still challenging. Existing benchmarks are either manually constructed or are automatic, but lack the ability to evaluate the thought process of LLMs with arbitrary complexity. We contend that utilizing existing relational databases based on the entity-relationship (ER) model is a promising approach for constructing benchmarks as they contain structured knowledge that can be used to question LLMs. Unlike knowledge graphs, which are also used to evaluate LLMs, relational databases have integrity constraints that can be used to better construct complex in-depth questions and verify answers: (1) functional dependencies can be used to pinpoint critical keywords that an LLM must know to properly answer a given question containing certain attribute values; and (2) foreign key constraints can be used to join relations and construct multi-hop questions, which can be arbitrarily long and used to debug intermediate answers. We thus propose ERBench, which uses these integrity constraints to convert any database into an LLM benchmark. ERBench supports continuous evaluation as databases change, multimodal questions, and various prompt engineering techniques. In our experiments, we construct LLM benchmarks using databases of multiple domains and make an extensive comparison of contemporary LLMs. We show how ERBench can properly evaluate any LLM by not only checking for answer correctness, but also effectively verifying the rationales by looking for the right keywords.
Doing Experiments and Revising Rules with Natural Language and Probabilistic Reasoning
Authors: Wasu Top Piriyakulkij, Cassidy Langenfeld, Tuan Anh Le, Kevin Ellis
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We give a model of how to infer natural language rules by doing experiments. Themodel integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with Monte Carlo algorithms forprobabilistic inference, interleaving online belief updates with experiment designunder information-theoretic criteria. We conduct a human-model comparison on aZendo-style task, finding that a critical ingredient for modeling the human data is toassume that humans also consider fuzzy, probabilistic rules, in addition to assumingthat humans perform approximately-Bayesian belief updates. We also comparewith recent algorithms for using LLMs to generate and revise hypotheses, findingthat our online inference method yields higher accuracy at recovering the trueunderlying rule, and provides better support for designing optimal experiments.
Understanding Emergent Abilities of Language Models from the Loss Perspective
Authors: Zhengxiao Du, Aohan Zeng, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent studies have put into question the belief that emergent abilities in language models are exclusive to large models. This skepticism arises from two observations: 1) smaller models can also exhibit high performance on emergent abilities and 2) there is doubt on the discontinuous metrics used to measure these abilities. In this paper, we propose to study emergent abilities in the lens of pre-training loss, instead of model size or training compute. We demonstrate that the Transformer models with the same pre-training loss, but different model and data sizes, generate the same performance on various downstream tasks, with a fixed data corpus, tokenization, and model architecture. We also discover that a model exhibits emergent abilities on certain tasks—regardless of the continuity of metrics—when its pre-training loss falls below a specific threshold. Before reaching this threshold, its performance remains at the level of random guessing. This inspires us to redefine emergent abilities as those that manifest in models with lower pre-training losses, highlighting that these abilities cannot be predicted by merely extrapolating the performance trends of models with higher pre-training losses.
HourVideo: 1-Hour Video-Language Understanding
Authors: Keshigeyan Chandrasegaran, Agrim Gupta, Lea M. Hadzic, Taran Kota, Jimming He, Cristobal Eyzaguirre, Zane Durante, Manling Li, Jiajun Wu, Li Fei-Fei
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: We present HourVideo, a benchmark dataset for hour-long video-language understanding. Our dataset consists of a novel task suite comprising summarization, perception (recall, tracking), visual reasoning (spatial, temporal, predictive, causal, counterfactual), and navigation (room-to-room, object retrieval) tasks. HourVideo includes 500 manually curated egocentric videos from the Ego4D dataset, spanning durations of 20 to 120 minutes, and features 12,976 high-quality, five-way multiple-choice questions. Benchmarking results reveal that multimodal models, including GPT-4 and LLaVA-NeXT, achieve marginal improvements over random chance. In stark contrast, human experts significantly outperform the state-of-the-art long-context multimodal model, Gemini Pro 1.5 (85.0\% vs. 37.3\%), highlighting a substantial gap in multimodal capabilities. Our benchmark, evaluation toolkit, prompts, and documentation are available at https://hourvideo.stanford.edu.
G3: An Effective and Adaptive Framework for Worldwide Geolocalization Using Large Multi-Modality Models
Authors: Pengyue Jia, Yiding Liu, Xiaopeng Li, Yuhao Wang, Yantong Du, Xiao Han, Xuetao Wei, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Xiangyu Zhao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Worldwide geolocalization aims to locate the precise location at the coordinate level of photos taken anywhere on the Earth. It is very challenging due to 1) the difficulty of capturing subtle location-aware visual semantics, and 2) the heterogeneous geographical distribution of image data. As a result, existing studies have clear limitations when scaled to a worldwide context. They may easily confuse distant images with similar visual contents, or cannot adapt to various locations worldwide with different amounts of relevant data. To resolve these limitations, we propose G3, a novel framework based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). In particular, G3 consists of three steps, i.e., Geo-alignment, Geo-diversification, and Geo-verification to optimize both retrieval and generation phases of worldwide geolocalization. During Geo-alignment, our solution jointly learns expressive multi-modal representations for images, GPS and textual descriptions, which allows us to capture location-aware semantics for retrieving nearby images for a given query. During Geo-diversification, we leverage a prompt ensembling method that is robust to inconsistent retrieval performance for different image queries. Finally, we combine both retrieved and generated GPS candidates in Geo-verification for location prediction. Experiments on two well-established datasets IM2GPS3k and YFCC4k verify the superiority of G3 compared to other state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available online https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/G3 for reproduction.
WelQrate: Defining the Gold Standard in Small Molecule Drug Discovery Benchmarking
Authors: Yunchao (Lance) Liu, Ha Dong, Xin Wang, Rocco Moretti, Yu Wang, Zhaoqian Su, Jiawei Gu, Bobby Bodenheimer, Charles David Weaver, Jens Meiler, Tyler Derr
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: While deep learning has revolutionized computer-aided drug discovery, the AI community has predominantly focused on model innovation and placed less emphasis on establishing best benchmarking practices. We posit that without a sound model evaluation framework, the AI community's efforts cannot reach their full potential, thereby slowing the progress and transfer of innovation into real-world drug discovery.Thus, in this paper, we seek to establish a new gold standard for small molecule drug discovery benchmarking, WelQrate. Specifically, our contributions are threefold: WelQrate dataset collection - we introduce a meticulously curated collection of 9 datasets spanning 5 therapeutic target classes. Our hierarchical curation pipelines, designed by drug discovery experts, go beyond the primary high-throughput screen by leveraging additional confirmatory and counter screens along with rigorous domain-driven preprocessing, such as Pan-Assay Interference Compounds (PAINS) filtering, to ensure the high-quality data in the datasets; WelQrate Evaluation Framework - we propose a standardized model evaluation framework considering high-quality datasets, featurization, 3D conformation generation, evaluation metrics, and data splits, which provides a reliable benchmarking for drug discovery experts conducting real-world virtual screening; Benchmarking - we evaluate model performance through various research questions using the WelQrate dataset collection, exploring the effects of different models, dataset quality, featurization methods, and data splitting strategies on the results.In summary, we recommend adopting our proposed WelQrate as the gold standard in small molecule drug discovery benchmarking. The WelQrate dataset collection, along with the curation codes, and experimental scripts are all publicly available at www.WelQrate.org.
Color-Oriented Redundancy Reduction in Dataset Distillation
Authors: Bowen Yuan, Zijian Wang, Mahsa Baktashmotlagh, Yadan Luo, Zi Huang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Dataset Distillation (DD) is designed to generate condensed representations of extensive image datasets, enhancing training efficiency. Despite recent advances, there remains considerable potential for improvement, particularly in addressing the notable redundancy within the color space of distilled images. In this paper, we propose a two-fold optimization strategy to minimize color redundancy at the individual image and overall dataset levels, respectively. At the image level, we employ a palette network, a specialized neural network, to dynamically allocate colors from a reduced color space to each pixel. The palette network identifies essential areas in synthetic images for model training, and consequently assigns more unique colors to them. At the dataset level, we develop a color-guided initialization strategy to minimize redundancy among images. Representative images with the least replicated color patterns are selected based on the information gain. A comprehensive performance study involving various datasets and evaluation scenarios is conducted, demonstrating the superior performance of our proposed color-aware DD compared to existing DD methods.
Euclidean distance compression via deep random features
Authors: Brett Leroux, Luis Rademacher
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Motivated by the problem of compressing point sets into as few bits as possible while maintaining information about approximate distances between points, we construct random nonlinear maps $\varphi_\ell$ that compress point sets in the following way. For a point set $S$, the map $\varphi_\ell:\mathbb{R}^d \to N^{-1/2}\{-1,1\}^N$ has the property that storing  $\varphi_\ell(S)$ (a sketch of $S$) allows one to report squared distances between points up to some  multiplicative  $(1\pm \epsilon)$ error with high probability.  The maps $\varphi_\ell$ are the $\ell$-fold composition of a certain type of random feature mapping. Compared to existing techniques, our maps offer several advantages. The standard method for compressing point sets by random mappings relies on the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma and involves compressing point sets with a random linear map. The main advantage of our maps $\varphi_\ell$ over random linear maps is that ours map point sets directly into the discrete cube $N^{-1/2}\{-1,1\}^N$ and so there is no additional step needed to convert the sketch to bits. For some range of parameters, our maps $\varphi_\ell$ produce sketches using fewer bits of storage space. We validate the method with experiments, including an application to nearest neighbor search.
LRM-Zero: Training Large Reconstruction Models with Synthesized Data
Authors: Desai Xie, Sai Bi, Zhixin Shu, Kai Zhang, Zexiang Xu, Yi Zhou, Sören Pirk, Arie Kaufman, Xin Sun, Hao Tan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We present LRM-Zero, a Large Reconstruction Model (LRM) trained entirely on synthesized 3D data, achieving high-quality sparse-view 3D reconstruction. The core of LRM-Zero is our procedural 3D dataset, Zeroverse, which is automatically synthesized from simple primitive shapes with random texturing and augmentations (e.g., height fields, boolean differences, and wireframes). Unlike previous 3D datasets (e.g., Objaverse) which are often captured or crafted by humans to approximate real 3D data, Zeroverse completely ignores realistic global semantics but is rich in complex geometric and texture details that are locally similar to or even more intricate than real objects. We demonstrate that our LRM-Zero, trained with our fully synthesized Zeroverse, can achieve high visual quality in the reconstruction of real-world objects, competitive with models trained on Objaverse. We also analyze several critical design choices of Zeroverse that contribute to LRM-Zero's capability and training stability. Our work demonstrates that 3D reconstruction, one of the core tasks in 3D vision, can potentially be addressed without the semantics of real-world objects. The Zeroverse's procedural synthesis code and interactive visualization are available at: https://desaixie.github.io/lrm-zero/.
Uncertainty-aware Fine-tuning of Segmentation Foundation Models
Authors: Kangning Liu, Brian Price, Jason Kuen, Yifei Fan, Zijun Wei, Luis Figueroa, Krzysztof J. Geras, Carlos Fernandez-Granda
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The Segment Anything Model (SAM) is a large-scale foundation model that has revolutionized segmentation methodology. Despite its impressive generalization ability, the segmentation accuracy of SAM on images with intricate structures is often unsatisfactory. Recent works have proposed lightweight fine-tuning using high-quality annotated data to improve accuracy on such images. However, here we provide extensive empirical evidence that this strategy leads to forgetting how to "segment anything": these models lose the original generalization abilities of SAM, in the sense that they perform worse for segmentation tasks not represented in the annotated fine-tuning set. To improve performance without forgetting, we introduce a novel framework that combines high-quality annotated data with a large unlabeled dataset. The framework relies on two methodological innovations. First, we quantify the uncertainty in the SAM pseudo labels associated with the unlabeled data and leverage it to perform uncertainty-aware fine-tuning. Second, we encode the type of segmentation task associated with each training example using a $\textit{task prompt}$ to reduce ambiguity. We evaluated the proposed Segmentation with Uncertainty Model (SUM) on a diverse test set consisting of 14 public benchmarks, where it achieves state-of-the-art results. Notably, our method consistently surpasses SAM by 3-6 points in mean IoU and 4-7 in mean boundary IoU across point-prompt interactive segmentation rounds. Code is available at https://github.com/Kangningthu/SUM
Learning via Surrogate PAC-Bayes
Authors: Antoine Picard-Weibel, Roman Moscoviz, Benjamin Guedj
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: PAC-Bayes learning is a comprehensive setting for (i) studying the generalisation ability of learning algorithms and (ii) deriving new learning algorithms by optimising a generalisation bound. However, optimising generalisation bounds might not always be viable for tractable or computational reasons, or both. For example, iteratively querying the empirical risk might prove computationally expensive.In response, we introduce a novel principled strategy for building an iterative learning algorithm via the optimisation of a sequence of surrogate training objectives, inherited from PAC-Bayes generalisation bounds. The key argument is to replace the empirical risk (seen as a function of hypotheses) in the generalisation bound by its projection onto a constructible low dimensional functional space: these projections can be queried much more efficiently than the initial risk. On top of providing that generic recipe for learning via surrogate PAC-Bayes bounds, we (i) contribute theoretical results establishing that iteratively optimising our surrogates implies the optimisation of the original generalisation bounds, (ii) instantiate this strategy to the framework of meta-learning, introducing a meta-objective offering a closed form expression for meta-gradient, (iii) illustrate our approach with numerical experiments inspired by an industrial biochemical problem.
MACM: Utilizing a Multi-Agent System for Condition Mining in Solving Complex Mathematical Problems
Authors: Bin Lei, Yi Zhang, Shan Zuo, Ali Payani, Caiwen Ding
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent advancements in large language models, such as GPT-4, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in processing standard queries. Despite these advancements, their performance substantially declines in advanced mathematical problems requiring complex, multi-step logical reasoning. To enhance their inferential capabilities, current research has delved into prompting engineering, exemplified by methodologies such as the Tree of Thought and Graph of Thought.Nonetheless, these existing approaches encounter two significant limitations. Firstly, their effectiveness in tackling complex mathematical problems is somewhat constrained. Secondly, the necessity to design distinct prompts for individual problems hampers their generalizability.In response to these limitations, this paper introduces the Multi-Agent System for conditional Mining (MACM) prompting method. It not only resolves intricate mathematical problems but also demonstrates strong generalization capabilities across various mathematical contexts.With the assistance of MACM, the accuracy of GPT-4 Turbo on the most challenging level five mathematical problems in the MATH dataset increase from $\mathbf{54.68\\%}  \text{ to } \mathbf{76.73\\%}$.
ECMamba: Consolidating Selective State Space Model with Retinex Guidance for Efficient Multiple Exposure Correction
Authors: Wei Dong, Han Zhou, Yulun Zhang, Xiaohong Liu, Jun Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Exposure Correction (EC) aims to recover proper exposure conditions for images captured under over-exposure or under-exposure scenarios. While existing deep learning models have shown promising results, few have fully embedded Retinex theory into their architecture, highlighting a gap in current methodologies. Additionally, the balance between high performance and efficiency remains an under-explored problem for exposure correction task. Inspired by Mamba which demonstrates powerful and highly efficient sequence modeling, we introduce a novel framework based on \textbf{Mamba} for \textbf{E}xposure \textbf{C}orrection (\textbf{ECMamba}) with dual pathways, each dedicated to the restoration of reflectance and illumination map, respectively. Specifically, we firstly derive the Retinex theory and we train a Retinex estimator capable of mapping inputs into two intermediary spaces, each approximating the target reflectance and illumination map, respectively. This setup facilitates the refined restoration process of the subsequent \textbf{E}xposure \textbf{C}orrection \textbf{M}amba \textbf{M}odule (\textbf{ECMM}). Moreover, we develop a novel \textbf{2D S}elective \textbf{S}tate-space layer guided by \textbf{Retinex} information (\textbf{Retinex-SS2D}) as the core operator of \textbf{ECMM}. This architecture incorporates an innovative 2D scanning strategy based on deformable feature aggregation, thereby enhancing both efficiency and effectiveness. Extensive experiment results and comprehensive ablation studies demonstrate the outstanding performance and the importance of each component of our proposed ECMamba. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/LowlevelAI/ECMamba}.
Provable Tempered Overfitting of Minimal Nets and Typical Nets
Authors: Itamar Harel, William M. Hoza, Gal Vardi, Itay Evron, Nathan Srebro, Daniel Soudry
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We study the overfitting behavior of fully connected deep Neural Networks (NNs) with binary weights fitted to perfectly classify a noisy training set. We consider interpolation using both the smallest NN (having the minimal number of weights) and a random interpolating NN. For both learning rules, we prove overfitting is tempered. Our analysis rests on a new bound on the size of a threshold circuit consistent with a partial function. To the best of our knowledge, ours are the first theoretical results on benign or tempered overfitting that: (1) apply to deep NNs, and (2) do not require a very high or very low input dimension.
Dynamic Service Fee Pricing under Strategic Behavior: Actions as Instruments and Phase Transition
Authors: Rui Ai, David Simchi-Levi, Feng Zhu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We study a dynamic pricing problem for third-party platform service fees under strategic, far-sighted customers. In each time period, the platform sets a service fee based on historical data, observes the resulting transaction quantities, and collects revenue. The platform also monitors equilibrium prices influenced by both demand and supply. The objective is to maximize total revenue over a time horizon $T$. Our problem incorporates three practical challenges: (a) initially, the platform lacks knowledge of the demand side beforehand, necessitating a balance between exploring (learning the demand curve) and exploiting (maximizing revenue) simultaneously; (b) since only equilibrium prices and quantities are observable, traditional Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimators would be biased and inconsistent; (c) buyers are rational and strategic, seeking to maximize their consumer surplus and potentially misrepresenting their preferences. To address these challenges, we propose novel algorithmic solutions. Our approach involves: (i) a carefully designed active randomness injection to balance exploration and exploitation effectively; (ii) using non-i.i.d. actions as instrumental variables (IV) to consistently estimate demand; (iii) a low-switching cost design that promotes nearly truthful buyer behavior. We show an expected regret bound of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}} (\sqrt{T}\wedge\sigma_S^{-2})$ and demonstrate its optimality, up to logarithmic factors, with respect to both the time horizon $T$ and the randomness in supply $\sigma_S$. Despite its simplicity, our model offers valuable insights into the use of actions as estimation instruments, the benefits of low-switching pricing policies in mitigating strategic buyer behavior, and the role of supply randomness in facilitating exploration which leads to a phase transition of policy performance.