mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Siamese Masked Autoencoders
Authors: Agrim Gupta, Jiajun Wu, Jia Deng, Fei-Fei Li
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Establishing correspondence between images or scenes is a significant challenge in computer vision, especially given occlusions, viewpoint changes, and varying object appearances. In this paper, we present Siamese Masked Autoencoders (SiamMAE), a simple extension of Masked Autoencoders (MAE) for learning visual correspondence from videos. SiamMAE operates on pairs of randomly sampled video frames and asymmetrically masks them. These frames are processed independently by an encoder network, and a decoder composed of a sequence of cross-attention layers is tasked with predicting the missing patches in the future frame. By masking a large fraction (95%) of patches in the future frame while leaving the past frame unchanged, SiamMAE encourages the network to focus on object motion and learn object-centric representations. Despite its conceptual simplicity, features learned via SiamMAE outperform state-of-the-art self-supervised methods on video object segmentation, pose keypoint propagation, and semantic part propagation tasks. SiamMAE achieves competitive results without relying on data augmentation, handcrafted tracking-based pretext tasks, or other techniques to prevent representational collapse.
Score-based Generative Models with Lévy Processes
Authors: EUN BI YOON, Keehun Park, Sungwoong Kim, Sungbin Lim
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Investigating the optimal stochastic process beyond Gaussian for noise injection in a score-based generative model remains an open question. Brownian motion is a light-tailed process with continuous paths, which leads to a slow convergence rate for the Number of Function Evaluation (NFE). Recent studies have shown that diffusion models suffer from mode-collapse issues on imbalanced data.In order to overcome the limitations of Brownian motion, we introduce a novel score-based generative model referred to as Lévy-Itō Model (LIM). This model utilizes isotropic $\alpha$-stable Lévy processes. We first derive an exact reverse-time stochastic differential equation driven by the Lévy process and develop the corresponding fractional denoising score matching. The proposed generative model takes advantage of the heavy-tailed properties of the Lévy process. Our experimental results show LIM allows for faster and more diverse sampling while maintaining high fidelity compared to existing diffusion models across various image datasets such as CIFAR10, CelebA, and imbalanced dataset CIFAR10LT. Comparing our results to those of DDPM with 3.21 Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) and 0.6437 Recall on the CelebA dataset, we achieve 1.58 FID and 0.7006 Recall using the same architecture. LIM shows the best performance in NFE 500 with $2\times$ faster total wall-clock time than the baseline.
3D Indoor Instance Segmentation in an Open-World
Authors: Mohamed El Amine Boudjoghra, Salwa Al Khatib, Jean Lahoud, Hisham Cholakkal, Rao Anwer, Salman H Khan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Existing 3D instance segmentation methods typically assume that all semantic classes to be segmented would be available during training and only seen categories are segmented at inference. We argue that such a closed-world assumption is restrictive and explore for the first time 3D indoor instance segmentation in an open-world setting, where the model is allowed to distinguish a set of known classes as well as identify an unknown object as unknown and then later incrementally learning the semantic category of the unknown when the corresponding category labels are available. To this end, we introduce an open-world 3D indoor instance segmentation method, where an auto-labeling scheme is employed to produce pseudo-labels during training and induce separation to separate known and unknown category labels. We further improve the pseudo-labels quality at inference by adjusting the unknown class probability based on the objectness score distribution. We also introduce carefully curated open-world splits leveraging realistic scenarios based on inherent object distribution, region-based indoor scene exploration and randomness aspect of open-world classes. Extensive experiments reveal the efficacy of the proposed contributions leading to promising open-world 3D instance segmentation performance. Code and splits are available at: https://github.com/aminebdj/3D-OWIS.
AbDiffuser: full-atom generation of in-vitro functioning antibodies
Authors: Karolis Martinkus, Jan Ludwiczak, WEI-CHING LIANG, Julien Lafrance-Vanasse, Isidro Hotzel, Arvind Rajpal, Yan Wu, Kyunghyun Cho, Richard Bonneau, Vladimir Gligorijevic, Andreas Loukas
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We introduce AbDiffuser, an equivariant and physics-informed diffusion model for the joint generation of antibody 3D structures and sequences. AbDiffuser is built on top of a new representation of protein structure, relies on a novel architecture for aligned proteins, and utilizes strong diffusion priors to improve the denoising process. Our approach improves protein diffusion by taking advantage of domain knowledge and physics-based constraints; handles sequence-length changes; and reduces memory complexity by an order of magnitude, enabling backbone and side chain generation. We validate AbDiffuser in silico and in vitro. Numerical experiments showcase the ability of AbDiffuser to generate antibodies that closely track the sequence and structural properties of a reference set. Laboratory experiments confirm that all 16 HER2 antibodies discovered were expressed at high levels and that 57.1% of the selected designs were tight binders.
Structure Learning with Adaptive Random Neighborhood Informed MCMC
Authors: Xitong Liang, Alberto Caron, Samuel Livingstone, Jim Griffin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a novel MCMC sampler, PARNI-DAG, for a fully-Bayesian approach to the problem of structure learning under observational data. Under the assumption of causal sufficiency, the algorithm allows for approximate sampling directly from the posterior distribution on Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs). PARNI-DAG performs efficient sampling of DAGs via locally informed, adaptive random neighborhood proposal that results in better mixing properties. In addition, to ensure better scalability with the number of nodes, we couple PARNI-DAG with a pre-tuning procedure of the sampler's parameters that exploits a skeleton graph derived through some constraint-based or scoring-based algorithms. Thanks to these novel features, PARNI-DAG quickly converges to high-probability regions and is less likely to get stuck in local modes in the presence of high correlation between nodes in high-dimensional settings. After introducing the technical novelties in PARNI-DAG, we empirically demonstrate its mixing efficiency and accuracy in learning DAG structures on a variety of experiments.
Reining Generalization in Offline Reinforcement Learning via Representation Distinction
Authors: Yi Ma, Hongyao Tang, Dong Li, Zhaopeng Meng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to address the challenge of distribution shift between the dataset and the learned policy, where the value of out-of-distribution (OOD) data may be erroneously estimated due to overgeneralization. It has been observed that a considerable portion of the benefits derived from the conservative terms designed by existing offline RL approaches originates from their impact on the learned representation. This observation prompts us to scrutinize the learning dynamics of offline RL, formalize the process of generalization, and delve into the prevalent overgeneralization issue in offline RL. We then investigate the potential to rein the generalization from the representation perspective to enhance offline RL. Finally, we present  Representation Distinction (RD), an innovative plug-in method for improving offline RL algorithm performance by explicitly differentiating between the representations of in-sample and OOD state-action pairs generated by the learning policy. Considering scenarios in which the learning policy mirrors the behavioral policy and similar samples may be erroneously distinguished, we suggest a dynamic adjustment mechanism for RD based on an OOD data generator to prevent data representation collapse and further enhance policy performance. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by applying RD to specially-designed backbone algorithms and widely-used offline RL algorithms. The proposed RD method significantly improves their performance across various continuous control tasks on D4RL datasets, surpassing several state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms.
BIRD: Generalizable Backdoor Detection and Removal for Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Xuan Chen, Wenbo Guo, Guanhong Tao, Xiangyu Zhang, Dawn Song
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Backdoor attacks pose a severe threat to the supply chain management of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) policies. Despite initial defenses proposed in recent studies, these methods have very limited generalizability and scalability. To address this issue, we propose BIRD, a technique to detect and remove backdoors from a pretrained DRL policy in a clean environment without requiring any knowledge about the attack specifications and accessing its training process. By analyzing the unique properties and behaviors of backdoor attacks, we formulate trigger restoration as an optimization problem and design a novel metric to detect backdoored policies. We also design a finetuning method to remove the backdoor, while maintaining the agent's performance in the clean environment. We evaluate BIRD against three backdoor attacks in ten different single-agent or multi-agent environments. Our results verify the effectiveness, efficiency, and generalizability of BIRD, as well as its robustness to different attack variations and adaptions.
Cluster-aware Semi-supervised Learning: Relational Knowledge Distillation Provably Learns Clustering
Authors: Yijun Dong, Kevin Miller, Qi Lei, Rachel Ward
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Despite the empirical success and practical significance of (relational) knowledge distillation that matches (the relations of) features between teacher and student models, the corresponding theoretical interpretations remain limited for various knowledge distillation paradigms. In this work, we take an initial step toward a theoretical understanding of relational knowledge distillation (RKD), with a focus on semi-supervised classification problems. We start by casting RKD as spectral clustering on a population-induced graph unveiled by a teacher model. Via a notion of clustering error that quantifies the discrepancy between the predicted and ground truth clusterings, we illustrate that RKD over the population provably leads to low clustering error. Moreover, we provide a sample complexity bound for RKD with limited unlabeled samples. For semi-supervised learning, we further demonstrate the label efficiency of RKD through a general framework of cluster-aware semi-supervised learning that assumes low clustering errors. Finally, by unifying data augmentation consistency regularization into this cluster-aware framework, we show that despite the common effect of learning accurate clusterings, RKD facilitates a "global" perspective through spectral clustering, whereas consistency regularization focuses on a "local" perspective via expansion.
Bicriteria Multidimensional Mechanism Design with Side Information
Authors: Siddharth Prasad, Maria-Florina F Balcan, Tuomas Sandholm
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We develop a versatile new methodology for multidimensional mechanism design that incorporates side information about agent types to generate high social welfare and high revenue simultaneously. Prominent sources of side information in practice include predictions from a machine-learning model trained on historical agent data, advice from domain experts, and even the mechanism designer's own gut instinct. In this paper we adopt a prior-free perspective that makes no assumptions on the correctness, accuracy, or source of the side information. First, we design a meta-mechanism that integrates input side information with an improvement of the classical VCG mechanism. The welfare, revenue, and incentive properties of our meta-mechanism are characterized by novel constructions we introduce based on the notion of a weakest competitor, which is an agent that has the smallest impact on welfare. We show that our meta-mechanism, when carefully instantiated, simultaneously achieves strong welfare and revenue guarantees parameterized by errors in the side information. When the side information is highly informative and accurate, our mechanism achieves welfare and revenue competitive with the total social surplus, and its performance decays continuously and gradually as the quality of the side information decreases. Finally, we apply our meta-mechanism to a setting where each agent's type is determined by a constant number of parameters. Specifically, agent types lie on constant-dimensional subspaces (of the potentially high-dimensional ambient type space) that are known to the mechanism designer. We use our meta-mechanism to obtain the first known welfare and revenue guarantees in this setting.
Are These the Same Apple? Comparing Images Based on Object Intrinsics
Authors: Klemen Kotar, Stephen Tian, Hong-Xing Yu, Dan Yamins, Jiajun Wu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2023

Abstract: The human visual system can effortlessly recognize an object under different extrinsic factors such as lighting, object poses, and background, yet current computer vision systems often struggle with these variations. An important step to understanding and improving artificial vision systems is to measure image similarity purely based on intrinsic object properties that define object identity. This problem has been studied in the computer vision literature as re-identification, though mostly restricted to specific object categories such as people and cars. We propose to extend it to general object categories, exploring an image similarity metric based on object intrinsics. To benchmark such measurements, we collect the Common paired objects Under differenT Extrinsics (CUTE) dataset of 18, 000 images of 180 objects under different extrinsic factors such as lighting, poses, and imaging conditions. While existing methods such as LPIPS and CLIP scores do not measure object intrinsics well, we find that combining deep features learned from contrastive self-supervised learning with foreground filtering is a simple yet effective approach to approximating the similarity. We conduct an extensive survey of pre-trained features and foreground extraction methods to arrive at a strong baseline that best measures intrinsic object-centric image similarity among current methods. Finally, we demonstrate that our approach can aid in downstream applications such as acting as an analog for human subjects and improving generalizable re-identification. Please see our project website at https://s-tian.github.io/projects/cute/ for visualizations of the data and demos of our metric.
The ToMCAT Dataset
Authors: Adarsh Pyarelal, Eric Duong, Caleb Shibu, Paulo Soares, Savannah Boyd, Payal Khosla, Valeria A. Pfeifer, Diheng Zhang, Eric Andrews, Rick Champlin, Vincent Raymond, Meghavarshini Krishnaswamy, Clayton T. Morrison, Emily Butler, Kobus Barnard
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2023

Abstract: We present a rich, multimodal dataset consisting of data from 40 teams of three humans conducting simulated urban search-and-rescue (SAR) missions in a Minecraft-based testbed, collected for the Theory of Mind-based Cognitive Architecture for Teams (ToMCAT) project. Modalities include two kinds of brain scan data---functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and electroencephalography (EEG), as well as skin conductance, heart rate, eye tracking, face images, spoken dialog audio data with automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcriptions, game screenshots, gameplay data, game performance data, demographic data, and self-report questionnaires. Each team undergoes up to six consecutive phases: three behavioral tasks, one mission training session, and two collaborative SAR missions. As time-synchronized multimodal data collected under a variety of circumstances, this dataset will support studying a large variety of research questions on topics including teamwork, coordination, plan recognition, affective computing, physiological linkage, entrainment, and dialog understanding.  We provide an initial public release of the de-identified data, along with analyses illustrating the utility of this dataset to both computer scientists and social scientists.
Exploring Diverse In-Context Configurations for Image Captioning
Authors: Xu Yang, Yongliang Wu, Mingzhuo Yang, Haokun Chen, Xin Geng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: After discovering that Language Models (LMs) can be good in-context few-shot learners, numerous strategies have been proposed to optimize in-context sequence configurations. Recently, researchers in Vision-Language (VL) domains also develop their few-shot learners, while they only use the simplest way, \ie, randomly sampling, to configure in-context image-text pairs. In order to explore the effects of varying configurations on VL in-context learning, we devised four strategies for image selection and four for caption assignment to configure in-context image-text pairs for image captioning. Here Image Captioning is used as the case study since it can be seen as the visually-conditioned LM. Our comprehensive experiments yield two counter-intuitive but valuable insights, highlighting the distinct characteristics of VL in-context learning due to multi-modal synergy, as compared to the NLP case. Furthermore, in our exploration of optimal combination strategies, we observed an average performance enhancement of 20.9 in CIDEr scores compared to the baseline. The code is given in https://github.com/yongliang-wu/ExploreCfg.
DELIFFAS: Deformable Light Fields for Fast Avatar Synthesis
Authors: Youngjoong Kwon, Lingjie Liu, Henry Fuchs, Marc Habermann, Christian Theobalt
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Generating controllable and photorealistic digital human avatars is a long-standing and important problem in Vision and Graphics. Recent methods have shown great progress in terms of either photorealism or inference speed while the combination of the two desired properties still remains unsolved. To this end, we propose a novel method, called DELIFFAS, which parameterizes the appearance of the human as a surface light field that is attached to a controllable and deforming human mesh model. At the core, we represent the light field around the human with a deformable two-surface parameterization, which enables fast and accurate inference of the human appearance. This allows perceptual supervision on the full image compared to previous approaches that could only supervise individual pixels or small patches due to their slow runtime. Our carefully designed human representation and supervision strategy leads to state-of-the-art synthesis results and inference time. The video results and code are available at https://vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/DELIFFAS.
Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection via Batch Normalization
Authors: Aodong Li, Chen Qiu, Marius Kloft, Padhraic Smyth, Maja Rudolph, Stephan Mandt
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Anomaly detection (AD) plays a crucial role in many safety-critical application domains. The challenge of adapting an anomaly detector to drift in the normal data distribution, especially when no training data is available for the "new normal," has led to the development of zero-shot AD techniques. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method called Adaptive Centered Representations (ACR) for zero-shot batch-level AD. Our approach trains off-the-shelf deep anomaly detectors (such as deep SVDD) to adapt to a set of inter-related training data distributions in combination with batch normalization, enabling automatic zero-shot generalization for unseen AD tasks. This simple recipe, batch normalization plus meta-training, is a highly effective and versatile tool. Our results demonstrate the first zero-shot AD results for tabular data and outperform existing methods in zero-shot anomaly detection and segmentation on image data from specialized domains.
What Makes Data Suitable for a Locally Connected Neural Network? A Necessary and Sufficient Condition Based on Quantum Entanglement.
Authors: ‪Yotam Alexander‬‏, Nimrod De La Vega, Noam Razin, Nadav Cohen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: The question of what makes a data distribution suitable for deep learning is a fundamental open problem. Focusing on locally connected neural networks (a prevalent family of architectures that includes convolutional and recurrent neural networks as well as local self-attention models), we address this problem by adopting theoretical tools from quantum physics. Our main theoretical result states that a certain locally connected neural network is capable of accurate prediction over a data distribution if and only if the data distribution admits low quantum entanglement under certain canonical partitions of features. As a practical application of this result, we derive a preprocessing method for enhancing the suitability of a data distribution to locally connected neural networks. Experiments with widespread models over various datasets demonstrate our findings. We hope that our use of quantum entanglement will encourage further adoption of tools from physics for formally reasoning about the relation between deep learning and real-world data.
Parameter and Computation Efficient Transfer Learning for Vision-Language Pre-trained Models
Authors: Qiong Wu, Wei Yu, Yiyi Zhou, Shubin Huang, Xiaoshuai Sun, Rongrong Ji
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: With ever increasing parameters and computation, vision-language pre-trained (VLP) models exhibit prohibitive expenditure in downstream task adaption. Recent endeavors mainly focus on parameter efficient transfer learning (PETL) for VLP models by only updating a small number of parameters. However, excessive computational overhead still plagues the application of VLPs. In this paper, we aim at parameter and computation efficient transfer learning (PCETL) for VLP models. In particular, PCETL not only needs to limit the number of trainable parameters in VLP models, but also to reduce the computational redundancy during inference, thus enabling a more efficient transfer. To approach this target, we propose a novel dynamic architecture skipping (DAS) approach towards effective PCETL. Instead of directly optimizing the intrinsic architectures of VLP models, DAS first observes the significances of their modules to downstream tasks via a reinforcement learning (RL) based process, and then skips the redundant ones with lightweight networks, i.e. adapters, according to the obtained rewards. In this case, the VLP model can well maintain the scale of trainable parameters while speeding up its inference on downstream tasks. To validate DAS, we apply it to two representative VLP models, namely ViLT and METER, and conduct extensive experiments on a bunch of VL tasks. The experimental results not only show the great advantages of DAS in reducing computational complexity, e.g. -11.97%  FLOPs of METER on VQA2.0, but also confirm its competitiveness against existing PETL methods in terms of parameter scale and performance. Our source code is given in our appendix.
A Dynamical System View of Langevin-Based Non-Convex Sampling
Authors: Mohammad Reza Karimi Jaghargh, Ya-Ping Hsieh, Andreas Krause
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Non-convex sampling is a key challenge in machine learning, central to non-convex optimization in deep learning as well as to approximate probabilistic inference. Despite its significance, theoretically there remain some important challenges: Existing guarantees suffer from the drawback of lacking guarantees for the last-iterates, and little is known beyond the elementary schemes of stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics. To address these issues, we develop a novel framework that lifts the above issues by harnessing several tools from the theory of dynamical systems. Our key result is that, for a large class of state-of-the-art sampling schemes, their last-iterate convergence in Wasserstein distances can be reduced to the study of their continuous-time counterparts, which is much better understood. Coupled with standard assumptions of MCMC sampling, our theory immediately yields the last-iterate Wasserstein convergence of many advanced sampling schemes such as mirror Langevin, proximal, randomized mid-point, and Runge-Kutta methods.
OKRidge: Scalable Optimal k-Sparse Ridge Regression
Authors: Jiachang Liu, Sam Rosen, Chudi Zhong, Cynthia Rudin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We consider an important problem in scientific discovery, namely identifying sparse governing equations for nonlinear dynamical systems. This involves solving sparse ridge regression problems to provable optimality in order to determine which terms drive the underlying dynamics. We propose a fast algorithm, OKRidge, for sparse ridge regression, using a novel lower bound calculation involving, first, a saddle point formulation, and from there, either solving (i) a linear system or (ii) using an ADMM-based approach, where the proximal operators can be efficiently evaluated by solving another linear system and an isotonic regression problem. We also propose a method to warm-start our solver, which leverages a beam search. Experimentally, our methods attain provable optimality with run times that are orders of magnitude faster than those of the existing MIP formulations solved by the commercial solver Gurobi.
Cold Diffusion: Inverting Arbitrary Image Transforms Without Noise
Authors: Arpit Bansal, Eitan Borgnia, Hong-Min Chu, Jie Li, Hamid Kazemi, Furong Huang, Micah Goldblum, Jonas Geiping, Tom Goldstein
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Standard diffusion models involve an image transform  -- adding Gaussian noise -- and an image restoration operator that inverts this degradation.  We observe that the generative behavior of diffusion models is not strongly dependent on the choice of image degradation, and in fact, an entire family of generative models can be constructed by varying this choice. Even when using completely deterministic degradations (e.g., blur, masking, and more), the training and test-time update rules that underlie diffusion models can be easily generalized to create generative models. The success of these fully deterministic models calls into question the community's understanding of diffusion models, which relies on noise in either gradient Langevin dynamics or variational inference and paves the way for generalized diffusion models that invert arbitrary processes.
Towards the Difficulty for a Deep Neural Network to Learn Concepts of Different Complexities
Authors: Dongrui Liu, Huiqi Deng, Xu Cheng, Qihan Ren, Kangrui Wang, Quanshi Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: This paper theoretically explains the intuition that simple concepts are more likely to be learned by deep neural networks (DNNs) than complex concepts. In fact, recent studies have observed [24, 15] and proved [26] the emergence of interactive concepts in a DNN, i.e., it is proven that a DNN usually only encodes a small number of interactive concepts, and can be considered to use their interaction effects to compute inference scores. Each interactive concept is encoded by the DNN to represent the collaboration between a set of input variables. Therefore, in this study, we aim to theoretically explain that interactive concepts involving more input variables (i.e., more complex concepts) are more difficult to learn. Our finding clarifies the exact conceptual complexity that boosts the learning difficulty.
Limits, approximation and size transferability for GNNs on sparse graphs via graphops
Authors: Thien Le, Stefanie Jegelka
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Can graph neural networks generalize to graphs that are different from the graphs they were trained on, e.g., in size? In this work, we study this question from a theoretical perspective. While recent work established such transferability and approximation results via graph limits, e.g., via graphons, these only apply nontrivially to dense graphs. To include frequently encountered sparse graphs such as bounded-degree or power law graphs, we take a perspective of taking limits of operators derived from graphs, such as the aggregation operation that makes up GNNs. This leads to the recently introduced limit notion of graphops (Backhausz and Szegedy, 2022). We demonstrate how the operator perspective allows us to develop quantitative bounds on the distance between a finite GNN and its limit on an infinite graph, as well as the distance between the GNN on graphs of different sizes that share structural properties, under a regularity assumption verified for various graph sequences. Our results hold for dense and sparse graphs, and various notions of graph limits.
The Adversarial Consistency of Surrogate Risks for Binary Classification
Authors: Natalie Frank, Jonathan Niles-Weed
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We study the consistency of surrogate risks for robust binary classification.It is common to learn robust classifiers by adversarial training, which seeks to minimize the expected $0$-$1$ loss when each example can be maliciously corrupted within a small ball.We give a simple and complete characterization of the set of surrogate loss functions that are \emph{consistent}, i.e., that can replace the $0$-$1$ loss without affecting the minimizing sequences of the original adversarial risk, for any data distribution.We also prove a quantitative version of adversarial consistency for the $\rho$-margin loss.Our results reveal that the class of adversarially consistent surrogates is substantially smaller than in the standard setting, where many common surrogates are known to be consistent.
The Cambridge Law Corpus: A Dataset for Legal AI Research
Authors: Andreas Östling, Holli Sargeant, Huiyuan Xie, Ludwig Bull, Alexander Terenin, Leif Jonsson, Måns Magnusson, Felix Steffek
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2023

Abstract: We introduce the Cambridge Law Corpus (CLC), a corpus for legal AI research. It consists of over 250 000 court cases from the UK. Most cases are from the 21st century, but the corpus includes cases as old as the 16th century. This paper presents the first release of the corpus, containing the raw text and meta-data. Together with the corpus, we provide annotations on case outcomes for 638 cases, done by legal experts. Using our annotated data, we have trained and evaluated case outcome extraction with GPT-3, GPT-4 and RoBERTa models to provide benchmarks. We include an extensive legal and ethical discussion to address the potentially sensitive nature of this material. As a consequence, the corpus will only be released for research purposes under certain restrictions.
Large Language Models of Code Fail at Completing Code with Potential Bugs
Authors: Tuan Dinh, Jinman Zhao, Samson Tan, Renato Negrinho, Leonard Lausen, Sheng Zha, George Karypis
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Large language models of code (Code-LLMs) have recently brought tremendous advances to code completion, a fundamental feature of programming assistance and code intelligence. However, most existing works ignore the possible presence of bugs in the code context for generation, which are inevitable in software development. Therefore, we introduce and study the buggy-code completion problem, inspired by the realistic scenario of real-time code suggestion where the code context contains potential bugs – anti-patterns that can become bugs in the completed program. To systematically study the task, we introduce two datasets: one with synthetic bugs derived from semantics-altering operator changes (buggy-HumanEval) and one with realistic bugs derived from user submissions to coding problems (buggy-FixEval). We find that the presence of potential bugs significantly degrades the generation performance of the high-performing Code-LLMs. For instance, the passing rates of CODEGEN-2B-MONO on test cases of buggy-HumanEval drop more than 50% given a single potential bug in the context. Finally, we investigate several post-hoc methods for mitigating the adverse effect of potential bugs and find that there remains a large gap in post-mitigation performance.
Doubly-Robust Self-Training
Authors: Banghua Zhu, Mingyu Ding, Philip Jacobson, Ming Wu, Wei Zhan, Michael I. Jordan, Jiantao Jiao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Self-training is a well-established technique in semi-supervised learning, which leverages unlabeled data by generating pseudo-labels and incorporating them with a limited labeled dataset for training. The effectiveness of self-training heavily relies on the accuracy of these pseudo-labels. In this paper, we introduce doubly-robust self-training, an innovative semi-supervised algorithm that provably balances between two extremes. When pseudo-labels are entirely incorrect, our method reduces to a training process solely using labeled data. Conversely, when pseudo-labels are completely accurate, our method transforms into a training process utilizing all pseudo-labeled data and labeled data, thus increasing the effective sample size. Through empirical evaluations on both the ImageNet dataset for image classification and the nuScenes autonomous driving dataset for 3D object detection, we demonstrate the superiority of the doubly-robust loss over the self-training baseline.
FairLISA: Fair User Modeling with Limited Sensitive Attributes Information
Authors: zheng zhang, Qi Liu, Hao Jiang, Fei Wang, Yan Zhuang, Le Wu, Weibo Gao, Enhong Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: User modeling techniques profile users' latent characteristics (e.g., preference) from their observed behaviors, and play a crucial role in decision-making. Unfortunately, traditional user models may unconsciously capture biases related to sensitive attributes (e.g., gender) from behavior data, even when this sensitive information is not explicitly provided. This can lead to unfair issues and discrimination against certain groups based on these sensitive attributes.  Recent studies have been proposed to improve fairness by explicitly decorrelating user modeling results and sensitive attributes. However, most existing approaches assume that fully sensitive attribute labels are available in the training set, which is unrealistic due to collection limitations like privacy concerns, and hence bear the limitation of performance. In this paper, we focus on a practical situation with limited sensitive data and propose a novel FairLISA framework, which can efficiently utilize data with known and unknown sensitive attributes to facilitate fair model training. We first propose a novel theoretical perspective to build the relationship between data with both known and unknown sensitive attributes with the fairness objective.  Then, based on this, we provide a general adversarial framework to effectively leverage the whole user data for fair user modeling. We conduct experiments on representative user modeling tasks including recommender system and cognitive diagnosis. The results demonstrate that our FairLISA can effectively improve fairness while retaining high accuracy in scenarios with different ratios of missing sensitive attributes.
Inference-Time Intervention: Eliciting Truthful Answers from a Language Model
Authors: Kenneth Li, Oam Patel, Fernanda Viégas, Hanspeter Pfister, Martin Wattenberg
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We introduce Inference-Time Intervention (ITI), a technique designed to enhance the "truthfulness" of large language models (LLMs). ITI operates by shifting model activations during inference, following a learned set of directions across a limited number of attention heads. This intervention significantly improves the performance of LLaMA models on the TruthfulQA benchmark. On an instruction-finetuned LLaMA called Alpaca, ITI improves its truthfulness from $32.5\%$ to $65.1\%$. We identify a tradeoff between truthfulness and helpfulness and demonstrate how to balance it by tuning the intervention strength. ITI is minimally invasive and computationally inexpensive. Moreover, the technique is data efficient: while approaches like RLHF require extensive annotations, ITI locates truthful directions using only few hundred examples. Our findings suggest that LLMs may have an internal representation of the likelihood of something being true, even as they produce falsehoods on the surface.
Composable Coresets for Determinant Maximization: Greedy is Almost Optimal
Authors: Siddharth Gollapudi, Sepideh Mahabadi, Varun Sivashankar
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Given a set of $n$ vectors in $\mathbb{R}^d$, the goal of the \emph{determinant maximization} problem is to pick $k$ vectors with the maximum volume. Determinant maximization is the MAP-inference task for determinantal point processes (DPP) and has recently received considerable attention for modeling diversity. As most applications for the problem use large amounts of data, this problem has been studied in the relevant \textit{composable coreset} setting.In particular, [Indyk-Mahabadi-OveisGharan-Rezaei--SODA'20, ICML'19] showed that one can get composable coresets with optimal approximation factor of $\tilde O(k)^k$ for the problem, and that a local search algorithm achieves an almost optimal approximation guarantee of $O(k)^{2k}$.In this work, we show that the widely-used Greedy algorithm also provides composable coresets with an almost optimal approximation factor of $O(k)^{3k}$, which improves over the previously known guarantee of $C^{k^2}$, and supports the prior experimental results showing the practicality of the greedy algorithm as a coreset.Our main result follows by showing a local optimality property for Greedy:swapping a single point from the greedy solution with a vector that was not picked by the greedy algorithm can increase the volume by a factor of at most $(1+\sqrt{k})$. This is tight up to the additive constant $1$. Finally, our experiments show that the local optimality of the greedy algorithm is even lower than the theoretical bound on real data sets.
ProBio: A Protocol-guided Multimodal Dataset for Molecular Biology Lab
Authors: Jieming Cui, Ziren Gong, Baoxiong Jia, Siyuan Huang, Zilong Zheng, Jianzhu Ma, Yixin Zhu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2023

Abstract: The challenge of replicating research results has posed a significant impediment to the field of molecular biology. The advent of modern intelligent systems has led to notable progress in various domains. Consequently, we embarked on an investigation of intelligent monitoring systems as a means of tackling the issue of the reproducibility crisis. Specifically, we first curate a comprehensive multimodal dataset, named ProBio, as an initial step towards this objective. This dataset comprises fine-grained hierarchical annotations intended for the purpose of studying activity understanding in BioLab. Next, we devise two challenging benchmarks, transparent solution tracking and multimodal action recognition, to emphasize the unique characteristics and difficulties associated with activity understanding in BioLab settings. Finally, we provide a thorough experimental evaluation of contemporary video understanding models and highlight their limitations in this specialized domain to identify potential avenues for future research. We hope \dataset with associated benchmarks may garner increased focus on modern AI techniques in the realm of molecular biology.
Spuriosity Rankings: Sorting Data to Measure and Mitigate Biases
Authors: Mazda Moayeri, Wenxiao Wang, Sahil Singla, Soheil Feizi
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We present a simple but effective method to measure and mitigate model biases caused by reliance on spurious cues. Instead of requiring costly changes to one's data or model training, our method better utilizes the data one already has by sorting them. Specifically, we rank images within their classes based on spuriosity (the degree to which common spurious cues are present), proxied via deep neural features of an interpretable network. With spuriosity rankings, it is easy to identify minority subpopulations (i.e. low spuriosity images) and assess model bias as the gap in accuracy between high and low spuriosity images. One can even efficiently remove a model's bias at little cost to accuracy by finetuning its classification head on low spuriosity images, resulting in fairer treatment of samples regardless of spuriosity. We demonstrate our method on ImageNet, annotating $5000$ class-feature dependencies ($630$ of which we find to be spurious) and generating a dataset of $325k$ soft segmentations for these features along the way. Having computed spuriosity rankings via the identified spurious neural features, we assess biases for $89$ diverse models and find that class-wise biases are highly correlated across models. Our results suggest that model bias due to spurious feature reliance is influenced far more by what the model is trained on than how it is trained.
NEO-KD: Knowledge-Distillation-Based Adversarial Training for Robust Multi-Exit Neural Networks
Authors: Seokil Ham, Jungwuk Park, Dong-Jun Han, Jaekyun Moon
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: While multi-exit neural networks are regarded as a promising solution for making efficient inference via early exits, combating adversarial attacks remains a challenging problem. In multi-exit networks, due to the high dependency among different submodels, an adversarial example targeting a specific exit not only degrades the performance of the target exit but also reduces the performance of all other exits concurrently. This makes multi-exit networks highly vulnerable to simple adversarial attacks. In this paper, we propose NEO-KD, a knowledge-distillation-based adversarial training strategy that tackles this fundamental challenge based on two key contributions. NEO-KD first resorts to neighbor knowledge distillation to guide the output of the adversarial examples to tend to the ensemble outputs of neighbor exits of clean data. NEO-KD also employs exit-wise orthogonal knowledge distillation for reducing adversarial transferability across different submodels. The result is a significantly improved robustness against adversarial attacks. Experimental results on various datasets/models show that our method achieves the best adversarial accuracy with reduced computation budgets, compared to the baselines relying on existing adversarial training or knowledge distillation techniques for multi-exit networks.
Self-Evaluation Guided Beam Search for Reasoning
Authors: Yuxi Xie, Kenji Kawaguchi, Yiran Zhao, James Xu Zhao, Min-Yen Kan, Junxian He, Michael Xie
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Breaking down a problem into intermediate steps has demonstrated impressive performance in Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning. However, the growth of the reasoning chain introduces uncertainty and error accumulation, making it challenging to elicit accurate final results. To tackle this challenge of uncertainty in multi-step reasoning, we introduce a stepwise self-evaluation mechanism to guide and calibrate the reasoning process of LLMs. We propose a decoding algorithm integrating the self-evaluation guidance via stochastic beam search. The self-evaluation guidance serves as a better-calibrated automatic criterion, facilitating an efficient search in the reasoning space and resulting in superior prediction quality. Stochastic beam search balances exploitation and exploration of the search space with temperature-controlled randomness. Our approach surpasses the corresponding Codex-backboned baselines in few-shot accuracy by $6.34$%, $9.56$%, and $5.46$% on the GSM8K, AQuA, and StrategyQA benchmarks, respectively. Experiment results with Llama-2 on arithmetic reasoning demonstrate the efficiency of our method in outperforming the baseline methods with comparable computational budgets. Further analysis in multi-step reasoning finds our self-evaluation guidance pinpoints logic failures and leads to higher consistency and robustness. Our code is publicly available at [https://guideddecoding.github.io/](https://guideddecoding.github.io/).