mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Mixed Dynamics In Linear Networks: Unifying the Lazy and Active Regimes
Authors: Zhenfeng Tu, Santiago Aranguri, Arthur Jacot
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The training dynamics of linear networks are well studied in two distinctsetups: the lazy regime and balanced/active regime, depending on theinitialization and width of the network. We provide a surprisinglysimple unifying formula for the evolution of the learned matrix thatcontains as special cases both lazy and balanced regimes but alsoa mixed regime in between the two. In the mixed regime, a part ofthe network is lazy while the other is balanced. More precisely thenetwork is lazy along singular values that are below a certain thresholdand balanced along those that are above the same threshold. At initialization,all singular values are lazy, allowing for the network to align itselfwith the task, so that later in time, when some of the singular valuecross the threshold and become active they will converge rapidly (convergencein the balanced regime is notoriously difficult in the absence ofalignment). The mixed regime is the `best of both worlds': it convergesfrom any random initialization (in contrast to balanced dynamics whichrequire special initialization), and has a low rank bias (absent inthe lazy dynamics). This allows us to prove an almost complete phasediagram of training behavior as a function of the variance at initializationand the width, for a MSE training task.
Strategic Multi-Armed Bandit Problems Under Debt-Free Reporting
Authors: Ahmed Ben Yahmed, Clément Calauzènes, Vianney Perchet
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We examine multi-armed bandit problems featuring strategic arms under debt-free reporting. In this context, each arm is characterized by a bounded support reward distribution and strategically aims to maximize its own utility by retaining a portion of the observed reward, potentially disclosing only a fraction of it to the player. This scenario unfolds as a game over $T$ rounds, leading to a competition of objectives between the player, aiming to minimize regret, and the arms, motivated by the desire to maximize their individual utilities. To address these dynamics, we propose an algorithm that establishes an equilibrium wherein each arm behaves truthfully and discloses as much of its rewards as possible. Utilizing this algorithm, the player can attain the second-highest average (true) reward among arms, with a cumulative regret bounded by $O(\log(T)/\Delta)$ (problem-dependent) or $O(\sqrt{T\log(T)})$ (worst-case).
Elo Uncovered: Robustness and Best Practices in Language Model Evaluation
Authors: Meriem Boubdir, Edward Kim, Beyza Ermis, Sara Hooker, Marzieh Fadaee
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In Natural Language Processing (NLP), the Elo rating system, originally designed for ranking players in dynamic games such as chess, is increasingly being used to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) through "A vs B" paired comparisons.However, while popular, the system's suitability for assessing entities with constant skill levels, such as LLMs, remains relatively unexplored. We study two fundamental axioms that evaluation methods should adhere to: reliability and transitivity. We conduct an extensive evaluation of Elo behavior across simulated and real-world scenarios, demonstrating that individual Elo computations can exhibit significant volatility.We show that both axioms are not always satisfied, raising questions about the reliability of current comparative evaluations of LLMs.If the current use of Elo scores is intended to substitute the costly head-to-head comparison of LLMs, it is crucial to ensure the ranking is as robust as possible.Guided by the axioms, our findings offer concrete guidelines for enhancing the reliability of LLM evaluation methods, suggesting a need for reassessment of existing comparative approaches.
Task-Agnostic Machine-Learning-Assisted Inference
Authors: Jiacheng Miao, Qiongshi Lu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Machine learning (ML) is playing an increasingly important role in scientific research. In conjunction with classical statistical approaches, ML-assisted analytical strategies have shown great promise in accelerating research findings. This has also opened a whole field of methodological research focusing on integrative approaches that leverage both ML and statistics to tackle data science challenges. One type of study that has quickly gained popularity employs ML to predict unobserved outcomes in massive samples, and then uses predicted outcomes in downstream statistical inference. However, existing methods designed to ensure the validity of this type of post-prediction inference are limited to very basic tasks such as linear regression analysis. This is because any extension of these approaches to new, more sophisticated statistical tasks requires task-specific algebraic derivations and software implementations, which ignores the massive library of existing software tools already developed for the same scientific problem given observed data. This severely constrains the scope of application for post-prediction inference. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel statistical framework named PSPS for task-agnostic ML-assisted inference. It provides a post-prediction inference solution that can be easily plugged into almost any established data analysis routines. It delivers valid and efficient inference that is robust to arbitrary choice of ML model, allowing nearly all existing statistical frameworks to be incorporated into the analysis of ML-predicted data. Through extensive experiments, we showcase our method’s validity, versatility, and superiority compared to existing approaches. Our software is available at https://github.com/qlu-lab/psps.
RedCode: Risky Code Execution and Generation Benchmark for Code Agents
Authors: Chengquan Guo, Xun Liu, Chulin Xie, Andy Zhou, Yi Zeng, Zinan Lin, Dawn Song, Bo Li
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: With the rapidly increasing capabilities and adoption of code agents for AI-assisted coding and software development, safety and security concerns, such as generating or executing malicious code, have become significant barriers to the real-world deployment of these agents. To provide comprehensive and practical evaluations on the safety of code agents, we propose RedCode, an evaluation platform with benchmarks grounded in four key principles: real interaction with systems, holistic evaluation of unsafe code generation and execution, diverse input formats, and high-quality safety scenarios and tests. RedCode consists of two parts to evaluate agents’ safety in unsafe code execution and generation: (1) RedCode-Exec provides challenging code prompts in Python as inputs, aiming to evaluate code agents’ ability to recognize and handle unsafe code. We then map the Python code to other programming languages (e.g., Bash) and natural text summaries or descriptions for evaluation, leading to a total of over 4,000 testing instances. We provide 25 types of critical vulnerabilities spanning various domains, such as websites, file systems, and operating systems. We provide a Docker sandbox environment to evaluate the execution capabilities of code agents and design corresponding evaluation metrics to assess their execution results. (2) RedCode-Gen provides 160 prompts with function signatures and docstrings as input to assess whether code agents will follow instructions to generate harmful code or software. Our empirical findings, derived from evaluating three agent frameworks based on 19 LLMs, provide insights into code agents’ vulnerabilities. For instance, evaluations on RedCode-Exec show that agents are more likely to reject executing unsafe operations on the operating system, but are less likely to reject executing technically buggy code, indicating high risks. Unsafe operations described in natural text lead to a lower rejection rate than those in code format. Additionally, evaluations on RedCode-Gen reveal that more capable base models and agents with stronger overall coding abilities, such as GPT4, tend to produce more sophisticated and effective harmful software. Our findings highlight the need for stringent safety evaluations for diverse code agents. Our dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/AI-secure/RedCode.
Asymptotics of Alpha-Divergence Variational Inference Algorithms with Exponential Families
Authors: François Bertholom, Randal Douc, François Roueff
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent works in Variational Inference have examined alternative criteria to the commonly used exclusive Kullback-Leibler divergence. Encouraging empirical results have been obtained with the family of alpha-divergences, but few works have focused on the asymptotic properties of the proposed algorithms, especially as the number of iterations goes to infinity. In this paper, we study a procedure that ensures a monotonic decrease in the alpha-divergence. We provide sufficient conditions to guarantee its convergence to a local minimizer of the alpha-divergence at a geometric rate when the variational family belongs to the class of exponential models. The sample-based version of this ideal procedure involves biased gradient estimators, thus hindering any theoretical study. We propose an alternative unbiased algorithm, we prove its almost sure convergence to a local minimizer of the alpha-divergence, and a law of the iterated logarithm. Our results are exemplified with toy and real-data experiments.
Rough Transformers: Lightweight and Continuous Time Series Modelling through Signature Patching
Authors: Fernando Moreno-Pino, Álvaro Arroyo, Harrison Waldon, Xiaowen Dong, Álvaro Cartea
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Time-series data in real-world settings typically exhibit long-range dependencies and are observed at non-uniform intervals. In these settings, traditional sequence-based recurrent models struggle. To overcome this, researchers often replace recurrent models with Neural ODE-based architectures to account for irregularly sampled data and use  Transformer-based architectures to account for long-range dependencies. Despite the success of these two approaches, both incur very high computational costs for input sequences of even moderate length. To address this challenge, we introduce the Rough Transformer, a variation of the Transformer model that operates on continuous-time representations of input sequences and incurs significantly lower computational costs. In particular, we propose multi-view signature attention, which uses path signatures to augment vanilla attention and to capture both local and global (multi-scale) dependencies in the input data, while remaining robust to changes in the sequence length and sampling frequency and yielding improved spatial processing. We find that, on a variety of time-series-related tasks, Rough Transformers consistently outperform their vanilla attention counterparts while obtaining the representational benefits of Neural ODE-based models, all at a fraction of the computational time and memory resources.
Neuronal Competition Groups with Supervised STDP for Spike-Based Classification
Authors: Gaspard Goupy, Pierre Tirilly, Ioan Marius Bilasco
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Spike Timing-Dependent Plasticity (STDP) is a promising substitute to backpropagation for local training of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) on neuromorphic hardware. STDP allows SNNs to address classification tasks by combining unsupervised STDP for feature extraction and supervised STDP for classification. Unsupervised STDP is usually employed with Winner-Takes-All (WTA) competition to learn distinct patterns. However, WTA for supervised STDP classification faces unbalanced competition challenges. In this paper, we propose a method to effectively implement WTA competition in a spiking classification layer employing first-spike coding and supervised STDP training. We introduce the Neuronal Competition Group (NCG), an architecture that improves classification capabilities by promoting the learning of various patterns per class. An NCG is a group of neurons mapped to a specific class, implementing intra-class WTA and a novel competition regulation mechanism based on two-compartment thresholds. We incorporate our proposed architecture into spiking classification layers trained with state-of-the-art supervised STDP rules. On top of two different unsupervised feature extractors, we obtain significant accuracy improvements on image recognition datasets such as CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100. We show that our competition regulation mechanism is crucial for ensuring balanced competition and improved class separation.
CycleNet: Enhancing Time Series Forecasting through Modeling Periodic Patterns
Authors: Shengsheng Lin, Weiwei Lin, Xinyi Hu, Wentai Wu, Ruichao Mo, Haocheng Zhong
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The stable periodic patterns present in time series data serve as the foundation for conducting long-horizon forecasts. In this paper, we pioneer the exploration of explicitly modeling this periodicity to enhance the performance of models in long-term time series forecasting (LTSF) tasks. Specifically, we introduce the Residual Cycle Forecasting (RCF) technique, which utilizes learnable recurrent cycles to model the inherent periodic patterns within sequences, and then performs predictions on the residual components of the modeled cycles. Combining RCF with a Linear layer or a shallow MLP forms the simple yet powerful method proposed in this paper, called CycleNet. CycleNet achieves state-of-the-art prediction accuracy in multiple domains including electricity, weather, and energy, while offering significant efficiency advantages by reducing over 90% of the required parameter quantity. Furthermore, as a novel plug-and-play technique, the RCF can also significantly improve the prediction accuracy of existing models, including PatchTST and iTransformer. The source code is available at: https://github.com/ACAT-SCUT/CycleNet.
UniAR: A Unified model for predicting human Attention and Responses on visual content
Authors: Peizhao Li, Junfeng He, Gang Li, Rachit Bhargava, Shaolei Shen, Nachiappan Valliappan, Youwei Liang, Hongxiang Gu, Venky Ramachandran, Golnaz Farhadi, Yang Li, Kai J Kohlhoff, Vidhya Navalpakkam
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Progress in human behavior modeling involves understanding both implicit, early-stage perceptual behavior, such as human attention, and explicit, later-stage behavior, such as subjective preferences or likes. Yet most prior research has focused on modeling implicit and explicit human behavior in isolation; and often limited to a specific type of visual content. We propose UniAR -- a unified model of human attention and preference behavior across diverse visual content. UniAR leverages a multimodal transformer to predict subjective feedback, such as satisfaction or aesthetic quality, along with the underlying human attention or interaction heatmaps and viewing order. We train UniAR on diverse public datasets spanning natural images, webpages, and graphic designs, and achieve SOTA performance on multiple benchmarks across various image domains and behavior modeling tasks. Potential applications include providing instant feedback on the effectiveness of UIs/visual content, and enabling designers and content-creation models to optimize their creation for human-centric improvements.
Vocal Call Locator Benchmark (VCL) for localizing rodent vocalizations from multi-channel audio
Authors: Ralph E Peterson, Aramis Tanelus, Christopher Ick, Bartul Mimica, Niegil Francis, Violet J Ivan, Aman Choudhri, Annegret L Falkner, Mala Murthy, David M Schneider, Dan H Sanes, Alex H Williams
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Understanding the behavioral and neural dynamics of social interactions is a goalof contemporary neuroscience. Many machine learning methods have emergedin recent years to make sense of complex video and neurophysiological data thatresult from these experiments. Less focus has been placed on understanding howanimals process acoustic information, including social vocalizations. A criticalstep to bridge this gap is determining the senders and receivers of acoustic infor-mation in social interactions. While sound source localization (SSL) is a classicproblem in signal processing, existing approaches are limited in their ability tolocalize animal-generated sounds in standard laboratory environments. Advancesin deep learning methods for SSL are likely to help address these limitations,however there are currently no publicly available models, datasets, or benchmarksto systematically evaluate SSL algorithms in the domain of bioacoustics. Here,we present the VCL Benchmark: the first large-scale dataset for benchmarkingSSL algorithms in rodents. We acquired synchronized video and multi-channelaudio recordings of 767,295 sounds with annotated ground truth sources across 9conditions. The dataset provides benchmarks which evaluate SSL performance onreal data, simulated acoustic data, and a mixture of real and simulated data. Weintend for this benchmark to facilitate knowledge transfer between the neuroscienceand acoustic machine learning communities, which have had limited overlap.
Visual Data Diagnosis and Debiasing with Concept Graphs
Authors: Rwiddhi Chakraborty, Yinong (Oliver) Wang, Jialu Gao, Runkai Zheng, Cheng Zhang, Fernando De la Torre
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The widespread success of deep learning models today is owed to the curation of extensive datasets significant in size and complexity. However, such models frequently pick up inherent biases in the data during the training process, leading to unreliable predictions. Diagnosing and debiasing datasets is thus a necessity to ensure reliable model performance. In this paper, we present ConBias, a novel framework for diagnosing and mitigating Concept co-occurrence Biases in visual datasets. ConBias represents visual datasets as knowledge graphs of concepts, enabling meticulous analysis of spurious concept co-occurrences to uncover concept imbalances across the whole dataset. Moreover, we show that by employing a novel clique-based concept balancing strategy, we can mitigate these imbalances, leading to enhanced performance on downstream tasks. Extensive experiments show that data augmentation based on a balanced concept distribution augmented by ConBias improves generalization performance across multiple datasets compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Mitigating Biases in Blackbox Feature Extractors for Image Classification Tasks
Authors: Abhipsa Basu, Saswat Subhajyoti Mallick, R. Venkatesh Babu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In image classification, it is common to utilize a pretrained model to extract meaningful features of the input images, and then to train a classifier on top of it to make predictions for any downstream task. Trained on enormous amounts of data, these models have been shown to contain harmful biases which can hurt their performance when adapted for a downstream classification task. Further, very often they may be blackbox, either due to scale, or because of unavailability of model weights or architecture. Thus, during a downstream task, we cannot debias such models by updating the weights of the feature encoder, as only the classifier can be finetuned. In this regard, we investigate the suitability of some existing debiasing techniques and thereby motivate the need for more focused research towards this problem setting. Furthermore, we propose a simple method consisting of a clustering-based adaptive margin loss with a blackbox feature encoder, with no knowledge of the bias attribute. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method across multiple benchmarks.
Normalization and effective learning rates in reinforcement learning
Authors: Clare Lyle, Zeyu Zheng, Khimya Khetarpal, James Martens, Hado van Hasselt, Razvan Pascanu, Will Dabney
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Normalization layers have recently experienced a renaissance in the deep reinforcement learning and continual learning literature, with several works highlighting diverse benefits such as improving loss landscape conditioning and combatting overestimation bias. However, normalization brings with it a subtle but important side effect: an equivalence between growth in the norm of the network parameters and decay in the effective learning rate. This becomes problematic in continual learning settings, where the resulting learning rate schedule may decay to near zero too quickly relative to the timescale of the learning problem. We propose to make the learning rate schedule explicit with a simple re-parameterization which we call  Normalize-and-Project (NaP), which couples the insertion of normalization layers with weight projection, ensuring that the effective learning rate remains constant throughout training. This technique reveals itself as a powerful analytical tool to better understand learning rate schedules in deep reinforcement learning, and as a means of improving robustness to nonstationarity in synthetic plasticity loss benchmarks along with both the single-task and sequential variants of the Arcade Learning Environment. We also show that our approach can be easily applied to popular architectures such as ResNets and transformers while recovering and in some cases even slightly improving the performance of the base model in common stationary benchmarks.
No Filter: Cultural and Socioeconomic Diversity in Contrastive Vision-Language Models
Authors: Angéline Pouget, Lucas Beyer, Emanuele Bugliarello, Xiao Wang, Andreas Peter Steiner, Xiaohua Zhai, Ibrahim Alabdulmohsin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We study cultural and socioeconomic diversity in contrastive vision-language models (VLMs). Using a broad range of benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics, we bring to attention several important findings. First, the common filtering of training data to English image-text pairs disadvantages communities of lower socioeconomic status and negatively impacts cultural understanding. Notably, this performance gap is not captured by - and even at odds with - the currently popular evaluation metrics derived from the Western-centric ImageNet and COCO datasets. Second, pretraining with global, unfiltered data before fine-tuning on English content can improve cultural understanding without sacrificing performance on said popular benchmarks. Third, we introduce the task of geo-localization as a novel evaluation metric to assess cultural diversity in VLMs. Our work underscores the value of using diverse data to create more inclusive multimodal systems and lays the groundwork for developing VLMs that better represent global perspectives.
Learning Optimal Lattice Vector Quantizers for End-to-end Neural Image Compression
Authors: Xi Zhang, Xiaolin Wu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: It is customary to deploy uniform scalar quantization in the end-to-end optimized Neural image compression methods, instead of more powerful vector quantization, due to the high complexity of the latter. Lattice vector quantization (LVQ), on the other hand, presents a compelling alternative, which can exploit inter-feature dependencies more effectively while keeping computational efficiency almost the same as scalar quantization. However, traditional LVQ structures are designed/optimized for uniform source distributions, hence nonadaptive and suboptimal for real source distributions of latent code space for Neural image compression tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel learning method to overcome this weakness by designing the rate-distortion optimal lattice vector quantization (OLVQ) codebooks with respect to the sample statistics of the latent features to be compressed. By being able to better fit the LVQ structures to any given latent sample distribution, the proposed OLVQ method improves the rate-distortion performances of the existing quantization schemes in neural image compression significantly, while retaining the amenability of uniform scalar quantization.
BABILong: Testing the Limits of LLMs with Long Context Reasoning-in-a-Haystack
Authors: Yuri Kuratov, Aydar Bulatov, Petr Anokhin, Ivan Rodkin, Dmitry Sorokin, Artyom Sorokin, Mikhail Burtsev
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: In recent years, the input context sizes of large language models (LLMs) have increased dramatically. However, existing evaluation methods have not kept pace, failing to comprehensively assess the efficiency of models in handling long contexts. To bridge this gap, we introduce the BABILong benchmark, designed to test language models' ability to reason across facts distributed in extremely long documents. BABILong includes a diverse set of 20 reasoning tasks, including fact chaining, simple induction, deduction, counting, and handling lists/sets. These tasks are challenging on their own, and even more demanding when the required facts are scattered across long natural text. Our evaluations show that popular LLMs effectively utilize only 10-20% of the context and their performance declines sharply with increased reasoning complexity. Among alternatives to in-context reasoning, Retrieval-Augmented Generation methods achieve a modest 60% accuracy on single-fact question answering, independent of context length. Among context extension methods, the highest performance is demonstrated by recurrent memory transformers after fine-tuning, enabling the processing of lengths up to 50 million tokens. The BABILong benchmark is extendable to any length to support the evaluation of new upcoming models with increased capabilities, and we provide splits up to 10 million token lengths.
Advancing Tool-Augmented Large Language Models: Integrating Insights from Errors in Inference Trees
Authors: Sijia Chen, Yibo Wang, Yi-Feng Wu, Qing-Guo Chen, Zhao Xu, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang, Lijun Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) leverage tools, often in the form of APIs, to improve their reasoning capabilities on complex tasks. This enables them to act as intelligent agents interacting with the real world. The recently introduced ToolLLaMA model by Qin et al. [2023] utilizes the depth-first search-based decision tree (DFSDT) mechanism for multi-step reasoning with $16000+$ real-world APIs, effectively enhancing the performance of tool-augmented LLMs compared to traditional chain reasoning mechanisms. However, their approach only employs successful paths from decision trees (also called inference trees) for supervised fine-tuning (SFT), missing out on the potential learning opportunities from failed paths. Inspired by this, we propose an inference trajectory optimization framework based on preference learning to address this limitation. We first introduce a novel method for constructing step-wise preference data from tree-like expert trajectories, which leverages the previously ignored failed explorations in the decision trees. In the subsequent training phase, we first fine-tune the LLM with successful tool-usage expert trajectories and then apply direct preference optimization (DPO) with the preference data to update the LLM's policy, resulting in our ToolPrefer-LLaMA (TP-LLaMA) model. This approach not only enhances the utilization of original expert data but also broadens the learning space of the model. Our experiments demonstrate that by obtaining insights from errors in inference trees, TP-LLaMA significantly outperforms the baselines across almost all test scenarios by a large margin and exhibits better generalization capabilities with unseen APIs. At the same time, TP-LLaMA has also demonstrated superior reasoning efficiency compared to the baselines, making it more suitable for complex tool-usage reasoning tasks.
DeMo: Decoupling Motion Forecasting into  Directional Intentions and Dynamic States
Authors: Bozhou Zhang, Nan Song, Li Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Accurate motion forecasting for traffic agents is crucial for ensuring the safety and efficiency of autonomous driving systems in dynamically changing environments. Mainstream methods adopt a one-query-one-trajectory paradigm, where each query corresponds to a unique trajectory for predicting multi-modal trajectories. While straightforward and effective, the absence of detailed representation of future trajectories may yield suboptimal outcomes, given that the agent states dynamically evolve over time. To address this problem, we introduce DeMo, a framework that decouples multi-modal trajectory queries into two types: mode queries capturing distinct directional intentions and state queries tracking the agent's dynamic states over time. By leveraging this format, we separately optimize the multi-modality and dynamic evolutionary properties of trajectories. Subsequently, the mode and state queries are integrated to obtain a comprehensive and detailed representation of the trajectories. To achieve these operations, we additionally introduce combined Attention and Mamba techniques for global information aggregation and state sequence modeling, leveraging their respective strengths. Extensive experiments on both the Argoverse 2 and nuScenes benchmarks demonstrate that our DeMo achieves state-of-the-art performance in motion forecasting. In addition, we will make our code and models publicly available.
EgoSim: An Egocentric Multi-view Simulator and Real Dataset for Body-worn Cameras during Motion and Activity
Authors: Dominik Hollidt, Paul Streli, Jiaxi Jiang, Yasaman Haghighi, Changlin Qian, Xintong Liu, Christian Holz
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Research on egocentric tasks in computer vision has mostly focused on head-mounted cameras, such as fisheye cameras or embedded cameras inside immersive headsets.We argue that the increasing miniaturization of optical sensors will lead to the prolific integration of cameras into many more body-worn devices at various locations.This will bring fresh perspectives to established tasks in computer vision and benefit key areas such as human motion tracking, body pose estimation, or action recognition---particularly for the lower body, which is typically occluded.In this paper, we introduce EgoSim, a novel simulator of body-worn cameras that generates realistic egocentric renderings from multiple perspectives across a wearer's body.A key feature of EgoSim is its use of real motion capture data to render motion artifacts, which are especially noticeable with arm- or leg-worn cameras.In addition, we introduce MultiEgoView, a dataset of egocentric footage from six body-worn cameras and ground-truth full-body 3D poses during several activities:119 hours of data are derived from AMASS motion sequences in four high-fidelity virtual environments, which we augment with 5 hours of real-world motion data from 13 participants using six GoPro cameras and 3D body pose references from an Xsens motion capture suit.We demonstrate EgoSim's effectiveness by training an end-to-end video-only 3D pose estimation network.Analyzing its domain gap, we show that our dataset and simulator substantially aid training for inference on real-world data.EgoSim code & MultiEgoView dataset: https://siplab.org/projects/EgoSim
NetworkGym: Reinforcement Learning Environments for Multi-Access Traffic Management in Network Simulation
Authors: Momin Haider, Ming Yin, Menglei Zhang, Arpit Gupta, Jing Zhu, Yu-Xiang Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Mobile devices such as smartphones, laptops, and tablets can often connect to multiple access networks (e.g., Wi-Fi, LTE, and 5G) simultaneously.Recent advancements facilitate seamless integration of these connections below the transport layer, enhancing the experience for apps that lack inherent multi-path support.This optimization hinges on dynamically determining the traffic distribution across networks for each device, a process referred to as multi-access traffic splitting.This paper introduces NetworkGym, a high-fidelity network environment simulator that facilitates generating multiple network traffic flows and multi-access traffic splitting.This simulator facilitates training and evaluating different RL-based solutions for the multi-access traffic splitting problem.Our initial explorations demonstrate that the majority of existing state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms (e.g. CQL) fail to outperform certain hand-crafted heuristic policies on average.This illustrates the urgent need to evaluate offline RL algorithms against a broader range of benchmarks, rather than relying solely on popular ones such as D4RL.We also propose an extension to the TD3+BC algorithm, named Pessimistic TD3 (PTD3), and demonstrate that it outperforms many state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms.PTD3's behavioral constraint mechanism, which relies on value-function pessimism, is theoretically motivated and relatively simple to implement.We open source our code and offline datasets at github.com/hmomin/networkgym.
SS3DM: Benchmarking Street-View Surface Reconstruction with a Synthetic 3D Mesh Dataset
Authors: Yubin Hu, Kairui Wen, Heng Zhou, Xiaoyang Guo, Yong-Jin Liu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Reconstructing accurate 3D surfaces for street-view scenarios is crucial for applications such as digital entertainment and autonomous driving simulation. However, existing street-view datasets, including KITTI, Waymo, and nuScenes, only offer noisy LiDAR points as ground-truth data for geometric evaluation of reconstructed surfaces. These geometric ground-truths often lack the necessary precision to evaluate surface positions and do not provide data for assessing surface normals. To overcome these challenges, we introduce the SS3DM dataset, comprising precise \textbf{S}ynthetic \textbf{S}treet-view \textbf{3D} \textbf{M}esh models exported from the CARLA simulator. These mesh models facilitate accurate position evaluation and include normal vectors for evaluating surface normal.   To simulate the input data in realistic driving scenarios for 3D reconstruction, we virtually drive a vehicle equipped with six RGB cameras and five LiDAR sensors in diverse outdoor scenes.  Leveraging this dataset, we establish a benchmark for state-of-the-art surface reconstruction methods, providing a comprehensive evaluation of the associated challenges.   For more information, visit our homepage at https://ss3dm.top.
Transformers are Minimax Optimal Nonparametric In-Context Learners
Authors: Juno Kim, Tai Nakamaki, Taiji Suzuki
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) of large language models has proven to be a surprisingly effective method of learning a new task from only a few demonstrative examples. In this paper, we shed light on the efficacy of ICL from the viewpoint of statistical learning theory. We develop approximation and generalization error analyses for a transformer model composed of a deep neural network and one linear attention layer, pretrained on nonparametric regression tasks sampled from general function spaces including the Besov space and piecewise $\gamma$-smooth class. In particular, we show that sufficiently trained transformers can achieve -- and even improve upon -- the minimax optimal estimation risk in context by encoding the most relevant basis representations during pretraining. Our analysis extends to high-dimensional or sequential data and distinguishes the \emph{pretraining} and \emph{in-context} generalization gaps, establishing upper and lower bounds w.r.t. both the number of tasks and in-context examples. These findings shed light on the effectiveness of few-shot prompting and the roles of task diversity and representation learning for ICL.
Robustly overfitting latents for flexible neural image compression
Authors: Yura Perugachi-Diaz, Arwin Gansekoele, Sandjai Bhulai
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Neural image compression has made a great deal of progress. State-of-the-art models are based on variational autoencoders and are outperforming classical models. Neural compression models learn to encode an image into a quantized latent representation that can be efficiently sent to the decoder, which decodes the quantized latent into a reconstructed image. While these models have proven successful in practice, they lead to sub-optimal results due to imperfect optimization and limitations in the encoder and decoder capacity. Recent work shows how to use stochastic Gumbel annealing (SGA) to refine the latents of pre-trained neural image compression models. We extend this idea by introducing SGA+, which contains three different methods that build upon SGA.We show how our method improves the overall compression performance in terms of the R-D trade-off, compared to its predecessors. Additionally, we show how refinement of the latents with our best-performing method improves the compression performance on both the Tecnick and CLIC dataset. Our method is deployed for a pre-trained hyperprior and for a more flexible model.Further, we give a detailed analysis of our proposed methods and show that they are less sensitive to hyperparameter choices. Finally, we show how each method can be extended to three- instead of two-class rounding.
CoSW: Conditional Sample Weighting for Smoke Segmentation with Label Noise
Authors: Lujian Yao, Haitao Zhao, Zhongze Wang, Kaijie Zhao, Jingchao Peng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Smoke segmentation is of great importance in precisely identifying the smoke location, enabling timely fire rescue and gas leak detection. However, due to the visual diversity and blurry edges of the non-grid smoke, noisy labels are almost inevitable in large-scale pixel-level smoke datasets. Noisy labels significantly impact the robustness of the model and may lead to serious accidents. Nevertheless, currently, there are no specific methods for addressing noisy labels in smoke segmentation. Smoke differs from regular objects as its transparency varies, causing inconsistent features in the noisy labels. In this paper, we propose a conditional sample weighting (CoSW). CoSW utilizes a multi-prototype framework, where prototypes serve as prior information to apply different weighting criteria to the different feature clusters. A novel regularized within-prototype entropy (RWE) is introduced to achieve CoSW and stable prototype update. The experiments show that our approach achieves SOTA performance on both real-world and synthetic noisy smoke segmentation datasets.
SPEAR: Exact Gradient Inversion of Batches in Federated Learning
Authors: Dimitar I. Dimitrov, Maximilian Baader, Mark Niklas Müller, Martin Vechev
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Federated learning is a framework for collaborative machine learning where clients only share gradient updates and not their private data with a server. However, it was recently shown that gradient inversion attacks can reconstruct this data from the shared gradients. In the important honest-but-curious setting, existing attacks enable exact reconstruction only for batch size of $b=1$, with larger batches permitting only approximate reconstruction. In this work, we propose SPEAR, *the first algorithm reconstructing whole batches with $b >1$ exactly*. SPEAR combines insights into the explicit low-rank structure of gradients with a sampling-based algorithm. Crucially, we leverage ReLU-induced gradient sparsity to precisely filter out large numbers of incorrect samples, making a final reconstruction step tractable. We provide an efficient GPU implementation for fully connected networks and show that it recovers high-dimensional ImageNet inputs in batches of up to $b \lesssim 25$ exactly while scaling to large networks. Finally, we show theoretically that much larger batches can be reconstructed with high probability given exponential time.
Scale Equivariant Graph Metanetworks
Authors: Ioannis Kalogeropoulos, Giorgos Bouritsas, Yannis Panagakis
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper pertains to an emerging machine learning paradigm: learning higher- order functions, i.e. functions whose inputs are functions themselves, particularly when these inputs are Neural Networks (NNs). With the growing interest in architectures that process NNs, a recurring design principle has permeated the field: adhering to the permutation symmetries arising from the connectionist structure ofNNs. However, are these the sole symmetries present in NN parameterizations? Zooming into most practical activation functions (e.g. sine, ReLU, tanh) answers this question negatively and gives rise to intriguing new symmetries, which we collectively refer to as scaling symmetries, that is, non-zero scalar multiplications and divisions of weights and biases. In this work, we propose Scale Equivariant Graph MetaNetworks - ScaleGMNs, a framework that adapts the Graph Metanetwork (message-passing) paradigm by incorporating scaling symmetries and thus rendering neuron and edge representations equivariant to valid scalings. We introduce novel building blocks, of independent technical interest, that allow for equivariance or invariance with respect to individual scalar multipliers or their product and use them in all components of ScaleGMN. Furthermore, we prove that, under certain expressivity conditions, ScaleGMN can simulate the forward and backward pass of any input feedforward neural network. Experimental results demonstrate that our method advances the state-of-the-art performance for several datasets and activation functions, highlighting the power of scaling symmetries as an inductive bias for NN processing. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/jkalogero/scalegmn.
GFlowNet Assisted Biological Sequence Editing
Authors: Pouya M. Ghari, Alex M. Tseng, Gökcen Eraslan, Romain Lopez, Tommaso Biancalani, Gabriele Scalia, Ehsan Hajiramezanali
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Editing biological sequences has extensive applications in synthetic biology and medicine, such as designing regulatory elements for nucleic-acid therapeutics and treating genetic disorders. The primary objective in biological-sequence editing is to determine the optimal modifications to a sequence which augment certain biological properties while adhering to a minimal number of alterations to ensure predictability and potentially support safety. In this paper, we propose GFNSeqEditor, a novel biological-sequence editing algorithm which builds on the recently proposed area of generative flow networks (GFlowNets). Our proposed GFNSeqEditor identifies elements within a starting seed sequence that may compromise a desired biological property. Then, using a learned stochastic policy, the algorithm makes edits at these identified locations, offering diverse modifications for each sequence to enhance the desired property. The number of edits can be regulated through specific hyperparameters. We conducted extensive experiments on a range of real-world datasets and biological applications, and our results underscore the superior performance of our proposed algorithm compared to existing state-of-the-art sequence editing methods.
Fast Sampling via Discrete Non-Markov Diffusion Models with Predetermined Transition Time
Authors: Zixiang Chen, Huizhuo Yuan, Yongqian Li, Yiwen Kou, Junkai Zhang, Quanquan Gu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Discrete diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for high-quality data generation. Despite their success in discrete spaces, such as text generation tasks, the acceleration of discrete diffusion models remains under-explored. In this paper, we propose discrete non-Markov diffusion models (DNDM), which naturally induce the predetermined transition time set. This enables a training-free sampling algorithm that significantly reduces the number of function evaluations (i.e., calls to the neural network), making the sampling process much faster. Furthermore, we study the transition from finite to infinite step sampling, offering new insights into bridging the gap between discrete and continuous-time processes for discrete diffusion models. Extensive experiments on natural language generation and machine translation tasks demonstrate the superior performance of our method in terms of both generation speed and sample quality compared to existing methods for discrete diffusion models. Codes are available at \url{https://github.com/uclaml/DNDM}.
DEPrune: Depth-wise Separable Convolution Pruning for Maximizing GPU Parallelism
Authors: Cheonjun Park, Mincheol Park, Hyunchan Moon, Myung Kuk Yoon, Seokjin Go, Suhyun Kim, Won Woo Ro
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Depth-wise Separable Convolution (DSConv) has a powerful representation even with fewer parameters and computation, leading to its adoption by almost all of the state-of-the-art CNN models. DSConv models are already compact making it hard to apply pruning, and there are few  previous pruning techniques that target depth-wise convolution (DW-conv).In this paper, we present Depth-wise Separable Convolution Pruning (DEPrune), a novel pruning method applied to both point-wise and depth-wise convolutions. DEPrune is optimized by analyzing the computation of DSConv on GPUs.DEPrune employs a fine-grained pruning approach, yet it achieves the structured sparsity typically absent in fine-grained pruning, enabling practical hardware acceleration. Moreover, this method maintains a high pruning ratio without causing any accuracy drop.We additionally represent techniques that further enhance DEPrune performance: 1) balanced workload tuning (BWT), and 2) hardware-aware sparsity recalibration (HSR).Experiment results show that DEPrune achieves up to $3.74\times$ practical speedup in DSConv inference on GPUs while maintaining the accuracy of EfficientNet-B0 on ImageNet.