mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
ElasTST: Towards Robust Varied-Horizon Forecasting with Elastic Time-Series Transformer
Authors: Jiawen Zhang, Shun Zheng, Xumeng Wen, Xiaofang Zhou, Jiang Bian, Jia Li
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Numerous industrial sectors necessitate models capable of providing robust forecasts across various horizons. Despite the recent strides in crafting specific architectures for time-series forecasting and developing pre-trained universal models, a comprehensive examination of their capability in accommodating varied-horizon forecasting during inference is still lacking. This paper bridges this gap through the design and evaluation of the Elastic Time-Series Transformer (ElasTST). The ElasTST model incorporates a non-autoregressive design with placeholders and structured self-attention masks, warranting future outputs that are invariant to adjustments in inference horizons. A tunable version of rotary position embedding is also integrated into ElasTST to capture time-series-specific periods and enhance adaptability to different horizons. Additionally, ElasTST employs a multi-scale patch design, effectively integrating both fine-grained and coarse-grained information.  During the training phase, ElasTST uses a horizon reweighting strategy that approximates the effect of random sampling across multiple horizons with a single fixed horizon setting. Through comprehensive experiments and comparisons with state-of-the-art time-series architectures and contemporary foundation models, we demonstrate the efficacy of ElasTST's unique design elements. Our findings position ElasTST as a robust solution for the practical necessity of varied-horizon forecasting.
Optimal Transport-based Labor-free Text Prompt Modeling for Sketch Re-identification
Authors: Rui Li, Tingting Ren, Jie Wen, Jinxing Li
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Sketch Re-identification (Sketch Re-ID), which aims to retrieve target person from an image gallery based on a sketch query, is crucial for criminal investigation, law enforcement, and missing person searches. Existing methods aim to alleviate the modality gap by employing semantic metrics constraints or auxiliary modal guidance. However, they incur expensive labor costs and inevitably omit fine-grained modality-consistent information due to the abstraction of sketches.To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel $\textit{Optimal Transport-based Labor-free Text Prompt Modeling}$ (OLTM) network, which hierarchically extracts coarse- and fine-grained similarity representations guided by textual semantic information without any additional annotations. Specifically, multiple target attributes are flexibly obtained by a pre-trained visual question answering (VQA) model. Subsequently, a text prompt reasoning module employs learnable prompt strategy and optimal transport algorithm to extract discriminative global and local text representations, which serve as a bridge for hierarchical and multi-granularity modal alignment between sketch and image modalities.Additionally, instead of measuring the similarity of two samples by only computing their distance, a novel triplet assignment loss is further proposed, in which the whole data distribution also contributes to optimizing the inter/intra-class distances. Extensive experiments conducted on two public benchmarks consistently demonstrate the robustness and superiority of our OLTM over state-of-the-art methods.
Unlocking the Potential of Global Human Expertise
Authors: Elliot Meyerson, Olivier Francon, Darren Sargent, Babak Hodjat, Risto Miikkulainen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Solving societal problems on a global scale requires the collection and processing of ideas and methods from diverse sets of international experts. As the number and diversity of human experts increase, so does the likelihood that elements in this collective knowledge can be combined and refined to discover novel and better solutions. However, it is difficult to identify, combine, and refine complementary information in an increasingly large and diverse knowledge base. This paper argues that artificial intelligence (AI) can play a crucial role in this process. An evolutionary AI framework, termed RHEA, fills this role by distilling knowledge from diverse models created by human experts into equivalent neural networks, which are then recombined and refined in a population-based search. The framework was implemented in a formal synthetic domain, demonstrating that it is transparent and systematic. It was then applied to the results of the XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge, in which over 100 teams of experts across 23 countries submitted models based on diverse methodologies to predict COVID-19 cases and suggest non-pharmaceutical intervention policies for 235 nations, states, and regions across the globe. Building upon this expert knowledge, by recombining and refining the 169 resulting policy suggestion models, RHEA discovered a broader and more effective set of policies than either AI or human experts alone, as evaluated based on real-world data. The results thus suggest that AI can play a crucial role in realizing the potential of human expertise in global problem-solving.
Physically Compatible 3D Object Modeling from a Single Image
Authors: Minghao Guo, Bohan Wang, Pingchuan Ma, Tianyuan Zhang, Crystal Elaine Owens, Chuang Gan, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Kaiming He, Wojciech Matusik
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We present a computational framework that transforms single images into 3D physical objects. The visual geometry of a physical object in an image is determined by three orthogonal attributes: mechanical properties, external forces, and rest-shape geometry. Existing single-view 3D reconstruction methods often overlook this underlying composition, presuming rigidity or neglecting external forces. Consequently, the reconstructed objects fail to withstand real-world physical forces, resulting in instability or undesirable deformation -- diverging from their intended designs as depicted in the image. Our optimization framework addresses this by embedding physical compatibility into the reconstruction process. We explicitly decompose the three physical attributes and link them through static equilibrium, which serves as a hard constraint, ensuring that the optimized physical shapes exhibit desired physical behaviors. Evaluations on a dataset collected from Objaverse demonstrate that our framework consistently enhances the physical realism of 3D models over existing methods. The utility of our framework extends to practical applications in dynamic simulations and 3D printing, where adherence to physical compatibility is paramount.
Fetch and Forge: Efficient Dataset Condensation for Object Detection
Authors: Ding Qi, Jian Li, Jinlong Peng, Bo Zhao, Shuguang Dou, Jialin Li, Jiangning Zhang, Yabiao Wang, Chengjie Wang, Cairong Zhao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Dataset condensation (DC) is an emerging technique capable of creating compact synthetic datasets from large originals while maintaining considerable performance. It is crucial for accelerating network training and reducing data storage requirements. However, current research on DC mainly focuses on image classification, with less exploration of object detection.This is primarily due to two challenges: (i) the multitasking nature of object detection complicates the condensation process, and (ii) Object detection datasets are characterized by large-scale and high-resolution data, which are difficult for existing DC methods to handle.As a remedy, we propose DCOD, the first dataset condensation framework for object detection. It operates in two stages: Fetch and Forge, initially storing key localization and classification information into model parameters, and then reconstructing synthetic images via model inversion. For the complex of multiple objects in an image, we propose Foreground Background Decoupling to centrally update the foreground of multiple instances and Incremental PatchExpand to further enhance the diversity of foregrounds.Extensive experiments on various detection datasets demonstrate the superiority of DCOD. Even at an extremely low compression rate of 1\%, we achieve 46.4\% and 24.7\% $\text{AP}_{50}$ on the VOC and COCO, respectively, significantly reducing detector training duration.
Multiple Physics Pretraining for Spatiotemporal Surrogate Models
Authors: Michael McCabe, Bruno Régaldo-Saint Blancard, Liam Parker, Ruben Ohana, Miles Cranmer, Alberto Bietti, Michael Eickenberg, Siavash Golkar, Geraud Krawezik, Francois Lanusse, Mariel Pettee, Tiberiu Tesileanu, Kyunghyun Cho, Shirley Ho
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We introduce multiple physics pretraining (MPP), an autoregressive task-agnostic pretraining approach for physical surrogate modeling of spatiotemporal systems with transformers. In MPP, rather than training one model on a specific physical system, we train a backbone model to predict the dynamics of multiple heterogeneous physical systems simultaneously in order to learn features that are broadly useful across systems and facilitate transfer. In order to learn effectively in this setting, we introduce a shared embedding and normalization strategy that projects the fields of multiple systems into a shared embedding space. We validate the efficacy of our approach on both pretraining and downstream tasks over a broad fluid mechanics-oriented benchmark. We show that a single MPP-pretrained transformer is able to match or outperform task-specific baselines on all pretraining sub-tasks without the need for finetuning. For downstream tasks, we demonstrate that finetuning MPP-trained models results in more accurate predictions across multiple time-steps on systems with previously unseen physical components or higher dimensional systems compared to training from scratch or finetuning pretrained video foundation models. We open-source our code and model weights trained at multiple scales for reproducibility.
Streaming Long Video Understanding with Large Language Models
Authors: Rui Qian, Xiaoyi Dong, Pan Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Shuangrui Ding, Dahua Lin, Jiaqi Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper presents VideoStreaming, an advanced vision-language large model (VLLM) for video understanding, that capably understands arbitrary-length video with a constant number of video tokens streamingly encoded and adaptively selected.The challenge of video understanding in the vision language area mainly lies in the significant computational burden caused by the great number of tokens extracted from long videos. Previous works rely on sparse sampling or frame compression to reduce tokens. However, such approaches either disregard temporal information in a long time span or sacrifice spatial details, resulting in flawed compression. To address these limitations, our VideoStreaming has two core designs: Memory-Propagated Streaming Encoding and Adaptive Memory Selection. The Memory-Propagated Streaming Encoding architecture segments long videos into short clips and sequentially encodes each clip with a propagated memory. In each iteration, we utilize the encoded results of the preceding clip as historical memory, which is integrated with the current clip to distill a condensed representation that encapsulates the video content up to the current timestamp. This method not only incorporates long-term temporal dynamics into the streaming encoding process but also yields a fixed-length memory as a global representation for arbitrarily long videos. After the encoding process, the Adaptive Memory Selection strategy selects a constant number of question-related memories from all the historical memories, and feeds them into the LLM to generate informative responses. The question-related selection reduces redundancy within the memories, enabling efficient and precise video understanding. Meanwhile, the disentangled video extraction and reasoning design allows the LLM to answer different questions about a video by directly selecting corresponding memories, without the need to encode the whole video for each question. Through extensive experiments, our model achieves superior performance and higher efficiency on long video benchmarks, showcasing precise temporal comprehension for detailed question answering.
Geometry Cloak: Preventing TGS-based 3D Reconstruction from Copyrighted Images
Authors: Qi Song, Ziyuan Luo, Ka Chun Cheung, Simon See, Renjie Wan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Single-view 3D reconstruction methods like Triplane Gaussian Splatting (TGS) have enabled high-quality 3D model generation from just a single image input within seconds. However, this capability raises concerns about potential misuse, where malicious users could exploit TGS to create unauthorized 3D models from copyrighted images. To prevent such infringement, we propose a novel image protection approach that embeds invisible geometry perturbations, termed ``geometry cloaks'', into images before supplying them to TGS. These carefully crafted perturbations encode a customized message that is revealed when TGS attempts 3D reconstructions of the cloaked image. Unlike conventional adversarial attacks that simply degrade output quality, our method forces TGS to fail the 3D reconstruction in a specific way - by generating an identifiable customized pattern that acts as a watermark. This watermark allows copyright holders to assert ownership over any attempted 3D reconstructions made from their protected images. Extensive experiments have verified the effectiveness of our geometry cloak.
Tackling Uncertain Correspondences for Multi-Modal Entity Alignment
Authors: Liyi Chen, Ying Sun, Shengzhe Zhang, Yuyang Ye, Wei Wu, Hui Xiong
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recently, multi-modal entity alignment has emerged as a pivotal endeavor for the integration of Multi-Modal Knowledge Graphs (MMKGs) originating from diverse data sources. Existing works primarily focus on fully depicting entity features by designing various modality encoders or fusion approaches. However, uncertain correspondences between inter-modal or intra-modal cues, such as weak inter-modal associations, description diversity, and modality absence, still severely hinder the effective exploration of aligned entity similarities. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel Tackling uncertain correspondences method for Multi-modal Entity Alignment (TMEA). Specifically, to handle diverse attribute knowledge descriptions, we design alignment-augmented abstract representation that incorporates the large language model and in-context learning into attribute alignment and filtering for generating and embedding the attribute abstract. In order to mitigate the influence of the modality absence, we propose to unify all modality features into a shared latent subspace and generate pseudo features via variational autoencoders according to existing modal features. Then, we develop an inter-modal commonality enhancement mechanism based on cross-attention with orthogonal constraints, to address weak semantic associations between modalities. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of TMEA with a clear improvement over competitive baselines.
Human-Aware Vision-and-Language Navigation: Bridging Simulation to Reality with Dynamic Human Interactions
Authors: Heng Li, Minghan Li, Zhi-Qi Cheng, Yifei Dong, Yuxuan Zhou, Jun-Yan He, Qi Dai, Teruko Mitamura, Alexander G. Hauptmann
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) aims to develop embodied agents that navigate based on human instructions. However, current VLN frameworks often rely on static environments and optimal expert supervision, limiting their real-world applicability. To address this, we introduce Human-Aware Vision-and-Language Navigation (HA-VLN), extending traditional VLN by incorporating dynamic human activities and relaxing key assumptions. We propose the Human-Aware 3D (HA3D) simulator, which combines dynamic human activities with the Matterport3D dataset, and the Human-Aware Room-to-Room (HA-R2R) dataset, extending R2R with human activity descriptions. To tackle HA-VLN challenges, we present the Expert-Supervised Cross-Modal (VLN-CM) and Non-Expert-Supervised Decision Transformer (VLN-DT) agents, utilizing cross-modal fusion and diverse training strategies for effective navigation in dynamic human environments. A comprehensive evaluation, including metrics considering human activities, and systematic analysis of HA-VLN's unique challenges, underscores the need for further research to enhance HA-VLN agents' real-world robustness and adaptability. Ultimately, this work provides benchmarks and insights for future research on embodied AI and Sim2Real transfer, paving the way for more realistic and applicable VLN systems in human-populated environments.
Diversity-Driven Synthesis: Enhancing Dataset Distillation through Directed Weight Adjustment
Authors: Jiawei Du, Xin Zhang, Juncheng Hu, Wenxing Huang, Joey Tianyi Zhou
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The sharp increase in data-related expenses has motivated research into condensing datasets while retaining the most informative features. Dataset distillation has thus recently come to the fore. This paradigm generates synthetic datasets that are representative enough to replace the original dataset in training a neural network. To avoid redundancy in these synthetic datasets, it is crucial that each element contains unique features and remains diverse from others during the synthesis stage. In this paper, we provide a thorough theoretical and empirical analysis of diversity within synthesized datasets. We argue that enhancing diversity can improve the parallelizable yet isolated synthesizing approach. Specifically, we introduce a novel method that employs dynamic and directed weight adjustment techniques to modulate the synthesis process, thereby maximizing the representativeness and diversity of each synthetic instance. Our method ensures that each batch of synthetic data mirrors the characteristics of a large, varying subset of the original dataset. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets, including CIFAR, Tiny-ImageNet, and ImageNet-1K, demonstrate the superior performance of our method, highlighting its effectiveness in producing diverse and representative synthetic datasets with minimal computational expense. Our code is available at https://github.com/AngusDujw/Diversity-Driven-Synthesis.
MR-Ben: A Meta-Reasoning Benchmark for Evaluating System-2 Thinking in LLMs
Authors: Zhongshen Zeng, Yinhong Liu, Yingjia Wan, Jingyao Li, Pengguang Chen, Jianbo Dai, Yuxuan Yao, Rongwu Xu, Zehan Qi, Wanru Zhao, Linling Shen, Jianqiao Lu, Haochen Tan, Yukang Chen, Hao Zhang, Zhan Shi, Bailin Wang, Zhijiang Guo, Jiaya Jia
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown increasing capability in problem-solving and decision-making, largely based on the step-by-step chain-of-thought reasoning processes. However, evaluating these reasoning abilities has become increasingly challenging. Existing outcome-based benchmarks are beginning to saturate, becoming less effective in tracking meaningful progress. To address this, we present a process-based benchmark MR-Ben that demands a meta-reasoning skill, where LMs are asked to locate and analyse potential errors in automatically generated reasoning steps. Our meta-reasoning paradigm is especially suited for system-2 slow thinking, mirroring the human cognitive process of carefully examining assumptions, conditions, calculations, and logic to identify mistakes. MR-Ben comprises 5,975 questions curated by human experts across a wide range of subjects, including physics, chemistry, logic, coding, and more. Through our designed metrics for assessing meta-reasoning on this benchmark, we identify interesting limitations and weaknesses of current LLMs (open-source and closed-source models). For example, with models like the o1 series from OpenAI demonstrating strong performance by effectively scrutinizing the solution space, many other state-of-the-art models fall significantly behind on MR-Ben, exposing potential shortcomings in their training strategies and inference methodologies.
Learning diverse causally emergent representations from time series data
Authors: David McSharry, Christos Kaplanis, Fernando E. Rosas, Pedro A.M. Mediano
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Cognitive processes usually take place at a macroscopic scale in systems characterised by emergent properties, which make the whole ‘more than the sum of its parts.’ While recent proposals have provided quantitative, information-theoretic metrics to detect emergence in time series data, it is often highly non-trivial to identify the relevant macroscopic variables a priori. In this paper we leverage recent advances in representation learning and differentiable information estimators to put forward a data-driven method to find emergent variables. The proposed method successfully detects emergent variables and recovers the ground-truth emergence values in a synthetic dataset. Furthermore, we show the method can be extended to learn multiple independent features, extracting a diverse set of emergent quantities. We finally show that a modified method scales to real experimental data from primate brain activity, paving the ground for future analyses uncovering the emergent structure of cognitive representations in biological and artificial intelligence systems.
How Transformers Utilize Multi-Head Attention in In-Context Learning? A Case Study on Sparse Linear Regression
Authors: Xingwu Chen, Lei Zhao, Difan Zou
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Despite the remarkable success of transformer-based models in various real-world tasks, their underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. Recent studies have suggested that transformers can implement gradient descent as an in-context learner for linear regression problems and have developed various theoretical analyses accordingly. However, these works mostly focus on the expressive power of transformers by designing specific parameter constructions, lacking a comprehensive understanding of their inherent working mechanisms post-training. In this study, we consider a sparse linear regression problem and investigate how a trained multi-head transformer performs in-context learning. We experimentally discover that the utilization of multi-heads exhibits different patterns across layers: multiple heads are utilized and essential in the first layer, while usually only a single head is sufficient for subsequent layers. We provide a theoretical explanation for this observation: the first layer preprocesses the context data, and the following layers execute simple optimization steps based on the preprocessed context. Moreover, we demonstrate that such a preprocess-then-optimize algorithm can significantly outperform naive gradient descent and ridge regression algorithms. Further experimental results support our explanations. Our findings offer insights into the benefits of multi-head attention and contribute to understanding the more intricate mechanisms hidden within trained transformers.
Diffusion Policy Attacker: Crafting Adversarial Attacks for Diffusion-based Policies
Authors: Yipu Chen, Haotian Xue, Yongxin Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Diffusion models have emerged as a promising approach for behavior cloning (BC), leveraging their exceptional ability to model multi-modal distributions. Diffusion policies (DP) have elevated BC performance to new heights, demonstrating robust efficacy across diverse tasks, coupled with their inherent flexibility and ease of implementation. Despite the increasing adoption of Diffusion Policies (DP) as a foundation for policy generation, the critical issue of safety remains largely unexplored. While previous attempts have targeted deep policy networks, DP used diffusion models as the policy network, making it ineffective to be attacked using previous methods because of its chained structure and randomness injected. In this paper, we undertake a comprehensive examination of DP safety concerns by introducing adversarial scenarios, encompassing offline and online attacks, global and patch-based attacks. We propose DP-Attacker, a suite of algorithms that can craft effective adversarial attacks across all aforementioned scenarios. We conduct attacks on pre-trained diffusion policies across various manipulation tasks. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that DP-Attacker has the capability to significantly decrease the success rate of DP for all scenarios. Particularly in offline scenarios, we exhibit the generation of highly transferable perturbations applicable to all frames. Furthermore, we illustrate the creation of adversarial physical patches that, when applied to the environment, effectively deceive the model. Video results areput in: https://sites.google.com/view/dp-attacker-videos/.
InfLLM: Training-Free Long-Context Extrapolation for LLMs with an Efficient Context Memory
Authors: Chaojun Xiao, Pengle Zhang, Xu Han, Guangxuan Xiao, Yankai Lin, Zhengyan Zhang, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a cornerstone in real-world applications with lengthy streaming inputs (e.g., LLM-driven agents). However, existing LLMs, pre-trained on sequences with a restricted maximum length, cannot process longer sequences due to the out-of-domain and distraction issues. Common solutions often involve continual pre-training on longer sequences, which will introduce expensive computational overhead and uncontrollable change in model capabilities. In this paper, we unveil the intrinsic capacity of LLMs for understanding extremely long sequences without any fine-tuning. To this end, we introduce a training-free memory-based method, InfLLM. Specifically, InfLLM stores distant contexts into additional memory units and employs an efficient mechanism to lookup token-relevant units for attention computation. Thereby, InfLLM allows LLMs to efficiently process long sequences with a limited context window and well capture long-distance dependencies. Without any training, InfLLM enables LLMs that are pre-trained on sequences consisting of a few thousand tokens to achieve comparable performance with competitive baselines that continually train these LLMs on long sequences. Even when the sequence length is scaled to 1,024K, InfLLM still effectively captures long-distance dependencies. Our code can be found at https://github.com/thunlp/InfLLM.
ALPINE: Unveiling The Planning Capability of Autoregressive Learning in Language Models
Authors: Siwei Wang, Yifei Shen, Shi Feng, Haoran Sun, Shang-Hua Teng, Wei Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Planning is a crucial element of both human intelligence and contemporary large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we initiate a theoretical investigation into the emergence of planning capabilities in Transformer-based LLMs via their next-word prediction mechanisms. We model planning as a network path-finding task, where the objective is to generate a valid path from a specified source node to a designated target node. Our mathematical characterization  shows that Transformer architectures can execute path-finding by embedding the adjacency and reachability matrices within their weights. Furthermore, our theoretical analysis of gradient-based learning dynamics reveals that LLMs can learn both the adjacency  and a limited form of the reachability matrices. These theoretical insights are then validated through experiments, which demonstrate that Transformer architectures indeed learn the adjacency and an incomplete reachability matrices, consistent with our theoretical predictions. When applying our methodology to the real-world planning benchmark Blocksworld, our observations remain consistent. Additionally, our analyses uncover a fundamental limitation of current Transformer architectures in path-finding: these architectures cannot identify reachability relationships through transitivity, which leads to failures in generating paths when concatenation is required. These findings provide new insights into how the internal mechanisms of autoregressive learning facilitate intelligent planning and deepen our understanding of how future LLMs might achieve more advanced and general planning-and-reasoning capabilities across diverse applications.
Latent Paraphrasing: Perturbation on Layers Improves Knowledge Injection in Language Models
Authors: Minki Kang, Sung Ju Hwang, Gibbeum Lee, Jaewoong Cho
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in specialized domains with continuously evolving knowledge, the need for timely and precise knowledge injection has become essential. Fine-tuning with paraphrased data is a common approach to enhance knowledge injection, yet it faces two significant challenges: high computational costs due to repetitive external model usage and limited sample diversity. To this end, we introduce LaPael, a latent-level paraphrasing method that applies input-dependent noise to early LLM layers.This approach enables diverse and semantically consistent augmentations directly within the model. Furthermore, it eliminates the recurring costs of paraphrase generation for each knowledge update. Our extensive experiments on question-answering benchmarks demonstrate that LaPael improves knowledge injection over standard fine-tuning and existing noise-based approaches. Additionally, combining LaPael with data-level paraphrasing further enhances performance.
Articulate your NeRF: Unsupervised articulated object modeling via conditional view synthesis
Authors: Jianning Deng, Kartic Subr, Hakan Bilen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We propose a novel unsupervised method to learn pose and part-segmentation of articulated objects with rigid parts.    Given two observations of an object in different articulation states, our method learns the geometry and appearance of object parts by using an implicit model from the first observation, distills the part segmentation and articulation from the second observation while rendering the latter observation.    Additionally, to tackle the complexities in the joint optimization of part segmentation and articulation, we propose a voxel grid based initialization strategy and a decoupled optimization procedure.    Compared to the prior unsupervised work, our model obtains significantly better performance, generalizes to objects with multiple parts while it can be efficiently from few views for the latter observation.
Fearless Stochasticity in Expectation Propagation
Authors: Jonathan So, Richard E. Turner
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Expectation propagation (EP) is a family of algorithms for performing approximate inference in probabilistic models. The updates of EP involve the evaluation of moments—expectations of certain functions—which can be estimated from Monte Carlo (MC) samples. However, the updates are not robust to MC noise when performed naively, and various prior works have attempted to address this issue in different ways. In this work, we provide a novel perspective on the moment-matching updates of EP; namely, that they perform natural-gradient-based optimisation of a variational objective. We use this insight to motivate two new EP variants, with updates that are particularly well-suited to MC estimation. They remain stable and are most sample-efficient when estimated with just a single sample. These new variants combine the benefits of their predecessors and address key weaknesses. In particular, they are easier to tune, offer an improved speed-accuracy trade-off, and do not rely on the use of debiasing estimators. We demonstrate their efficacy on a variety of probabilistic inference tasks.
Most Influential Subset Selection: Challenges, Promises, and Beyond
Authors: Yuzheng Hu, Pingbang Hu, Han Zhao, Jiaqi W. Ma
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: How can we attribute the behaviors of machine learning models to their training data? While the classic influence function sheds light on the impact of individual samples, it often fails to capture the more complex and pronounced collective influence of a set of samples. To tackle this challenge, we study the Most Influential Subset Selection (MISS) problem, which aims to identify a subset of training samples with the greatest collective influence. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of the prevailing approaches in MISS, elucidating their strengths and weaknesses. Our findings reveal that influence-based greedy heuristics, a dominant class of algorithms in MISS, can provably fail even in linear regression. We delineate the failure modes, including the errors of influence function and the non-additive structure of the collective influence. Conversely, we demonstrate that an adaptive version of these heuristics which applies them iteratively, can effectively capture the interactions among samples and thus partially address the issues. Experiments on real-world datasets corroborate these theoretical findings, and further demonstrate that the merit of adaptivity can extend to more complex scenarios such as classification tasks and non-linear neural networks. We conclude our analysis by emphasizing the inherent trade-off between performance and computational efficiency, questioning the use of additive metrics such as the linear datamodeling score, and offering a range of discussions.
Expectile Regularization for Fast and Accurate Training of Neural Optimal Transport
Authors: Nazar Buzun, Maksim Bobrin, Dmitry V. Dylov
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We present a new approach for Neural Optimal Transport (NOT) training procedure, capable of accurately and efficiently estimating optimal transportation plan via specific regularization on dual Kantorovich potentials. The main bottleneck of existing NOT solvers is associated with the procedure of finding a near-exact approximation of the conjugate operator (i.e., the c-transform), which is done either by optimizing over non-convex max-min objectives or by the computationally intensive fine-tuning of the initial approximated prediction. We resolve both issues by proposing a new theoretically justified loss in the form of expectile regularization which enforces binding conditions on the learning process of the dual potentials. Such a regularization provides the upper bound estimation over the distribution of possible conjugate potentials and makes the learning stable, completely eliminating the need for additional extensive fine-tuning. Proposed method, called Expectile-Regularized Neural Optimal Transport (ENOT), outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches in the established Wasserstein-2 benchmark tasks by a large margin (up to a 3-fold improvement in quality and up to a 10-fold improvement in runtime). Moreover, we showcase performance of ENOT for various cost functions in different tasks, such as image generation, demonstrating generalizability and robustness of the proposed algorithm.
Ensemble Learning for Heterogeneous Large Language Models with Deep Parallel Collaboration
Authors: Yichong Huang, Xiaocheng Feng, Baohang Li, Yang Xiang, Hui Wang, Ting Liu, Bing Qin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit complementary strengths in various tasks, motivating the research of LLM ensembling.However, existing work focuses on training an extra reward model or fusion model to select or combine all candidate answers, posing a great challenge to the generalization on unseen data distributions.Besides, prior methods use textual responses as communication media, ignoring the valuable information in the internal representations.In this work, we propose a training-free ensemble framework \textsc{DeePEn}, fusing the informative probability distributions yielded by different LLMs at each decoding step.Unfortunately, the vocabulary discrepancy between heterogeneous LLMs directly makes averaging the distributions unfeasible due to the token misalignment.To address this challenge, \textsc{DeePEn} maps the probability distribution of each model from its own probability space to a universal \textit{relative space} based on the relative representation theory, and performs aggregation.Next, we devise a search-based inverse transformation to transform the aggregated result back to the probability space of one of the ensembling LLMs (main model), in order to determine the next token.We conduct extensive experiments on ensembles of different number of LLMs, ensembles of LLMs with different architectures, and ensembles between the LLM and the specialist model.Experimental results show that (i) \textsc{DeePEn} achieves consistent improvements across six benchmarks covering subject examination, reasoning, and knowledge, (ii) a well-performing specialist model can benefit from a less effective LLM through distribution fusion, and (iii) \textsc{DeePEn} has complementary strengths with other ensemble methods such as voting.
OPUS: Occupancy Prediction Using a Sparse Set
Authors: Jiabao Wang, Zhaojiang Liu, Qiang Meng, Liujiang Yan, Ke Wang, Jie Yang, Wei Liu, Qibin Hou, Ming-Ming Cheng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Occupancy prediction, aiming at predicting the occupancy status within voxelized 3D environment, is quickly gaining momentum within the autonomous driving community. Mainstream occupancy prediction works first discretize the 3D environment into voxels, then perform classification on such dense grids. However, inspection on sample data reveals that the vast majority of voxels is unoccupied. Performing classification on these empty voxels demands suboptimal computation resource allocation, and reducing such empty voxels necessitates complex algorithm designs. To this end, we present a novel perspective on the occupancy prediction task: formulating it as a streamlined set prediction paradigm without the need for explicit space modeling or complex sparsification procedures. Our proposed framework, called OPUS, utilizes a transformer encoder-decoder architecture to simultaneously predict occupied locations and classes using a set of learnable queries. Firstly, we employ the Chamfer distance loss to scale the set-to-set comparison problem to unprecedented magnitudes, making training such model end-to-end a reality. Subsequently, semantic classes are adaptively assigned using nearest neighbor search based on the learned locations. In addition, OPUS incorporates a suite of non-trivial strategies to enhance model performance, including coarse-to-fine learning, consistent point sampling, and adaptive re-weighting, etc. Finally, compared with current state-of-the-art methods, our lightest model achieves superior RayIoU on the Occ3D-nuScenes dataset at near 2x FPS, while our heaviest model surpasses previous best results by 6.1 RayIoU.
Chimera: Effectively Modeling Multivariate Time Series with 2-Dimensional State Space Models
Authors: Ali Behrouz, Michele Santacatterina, Ramin Zabih
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Modeling multivariate time series is a well-established problem with a wide range of applications from healthcare to financial markets. It, however, is challenging as it requires methods to (1) have high expressive power of representing complicated dependencies along the time axis to capture both long-term progression and seasonal patterns, (2) capture the inter-variate dependencies when it is informative, (3) dynamically model the dependencies of variate and time dimensions, and (4) have efficient training and inference for very long sequences. Traditional State Space Models (SSMs) are classical approaches for univariate time series modeling due to their simplicity and expressive power to represent linear dependencies. They, however, have fundamentally limited expressive power to capture non-linear dependencies, are slow in practice, and fail to model the inter-variate information flow. Despite recent attempts to improve the expressive power of SSMs by using deep structured SSMs, the existing methods are either limited to univariate time series, fail to model complex patterns (e.g., seasonal patterns), fail to dynamically model the dependencies of variate and time dimensions, and/or are input-independent.  We present Chimera, an expressive variation of the 2-dimensional SSMs with careful design of parameters to maintain high expressive power while keeping the training complexity linear. Using two SSM heads with different discretization processes and input-dependent parameters, Chimera is provably able to learn long-term progression, seasonal patterns, and desirable dynamic autoregressive processes. To improve the efficiency of complex 2D recurrence, we present a fast training using a new 2-dimensional parallel selective scan. Our experimental evaluation shows the superior performance of Chimera on extensive and diverse benchmarks, including ECG and speech time series classification, long-term and short-term time series forecasting, and time series anomaly detection.
AutoGuide: Automated Generation and Selection of Context-Aware Guidelines for Large Language Model Agents
Authors: Yao Fu, Dong-Ki Kim, Jaekyeom Kim, Sungryull Sohn, Lajanugen Logeswaran, Kyunghoon Bae, Honglak Lee
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have empowered AI agents capable of performing various sequential decision-making tasks. However, effectively guiding LLMs to perform well in unfamiliar domains like web navigation, where they lack sufficient knowledge, has proven to be difficult with the demonstration-based in-context learning paradigm. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework, called AutoGuide, which addresses this limitation by automatically generating context-aware guidelines from offline experiences. Importantly, each context-aware guideline is expressed in concise natural language and follows a conditional structure, clearly describing the context where it is applicable. As a result, our guidelines facilitate the provision of relevant knowledge for the agent's current decision-making process, overcoming the limitations of the conventional demonstration-based learning paradigm. Our evaluation demonstrates that AutoGuide significantly outperforms competitive baselines in complex benchmark domains, including real-world web navigation.
Aligning Diffusion Behaviors with Q-functions for Efficient Continuous Control
Authors: Huayu Chen, Kaiwen Zheng, Hang Su, Jun Zhu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Drawing upon recent advances in language model alignment, we formulate offline Reinforcement Learning as a two-stage optimization problem: First pretraining expressive generative policies on reward-free behavior datasets, then finetuning these policies to align with task-specific annotations like Q-values. This strategy allows us to leverage abundant and diverse behavior data to enhance generalization and enable rapid adaptation to downstream tasks using minimal annotations. In particular, we introduce Efficient Diffusion Alignment (EDA) for solving continuous control problems. EDA utilizes diffusion models for behavior modeling. However, unlike previous approaches, we represent diffusion policies as the derivative of a scalar neural network with respect to action inputs. This representation is critical because it enables direct density calculation for diffusion models, making them compatible with existing LLM alignment theories. During policy fine-tuning, we extend preference-based alignment methods like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to align diffusion behaviors with continuous Q-functions. Our evaluation on the D4RL benchmark shows that EDA exceeds all baseline methods in overall performance. Notably, EDA maintains about 95\% of performance and still outperforms several baselines given only 1\% of Q-labelled data during fine-tuning.
Label Delay in Online Continual Learning
Authors: Botos Csaba, Wenxuan Zhang, Matthias Müller, Ser-Nam Lim, Mohamed Elhoseiny, Philip H.S. Torr, Adel Bibi
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Online continual learning, the process of training models on streaming data, has gained increasing attention in recent years. However, a critical aspect often overlooked is the label delay, where new data may not be labeled due to slow and costly annotation processes. We introduce a new continual learning framework with explicit modeling of the label delay between data and label streams over time steps. In each step, the framework reveals both unlabeled data from the current time step t and labels delayed with d steps, from the time step t−d. In our extensive experiments amounting to 1060 GPU days, we show that merely augmenting the computational resources is insufficient to tackle this challenge. Our findings underline a notable performance decline when solely relying on labeled data when the label delay becomes significant. More surprisingly, when using state-of-the-art SSL and TTA techniques to utilize the newer, unlabeled data, they fail to surpass the performance of a naïve method that simply trains on the delayed supervised stream. To this end, we introduce a simple, efficient baseline that rehearses from the labeled memory samples that are most similar to the new unlabeled samples. This method bridges the accuracy gap caused by label delay without significantly increasing computational complexity. We show experimentally that our method is the least affected by the label delay factor and in some cases successfully recovers the accuracy of the non-delayed counterpart. We conduct various ablations and sensitivity experiments, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.