mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Efficient Uncertainty Quantification and Reduction for Over-Parameterized Neural Networks
Authors: Ziyi Huang, Henry Lam, Haofeng Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is important for reliability assessment and enhancement of machine learning models. In deep learning, uncertainties arise not only from data, but also from the training procedure that often injects substantial noises and biases. These hinder the attainment of statistical guarantees and, moreover, impose computational challenges on UQ due to the need for repeated network retraining. Building upon the recent neural tangent kernel theory, we create statistically guaranteed schemes to principally \emph{characterize}, and \emph{remove}, the uncertainty of over-parameterized neural networks with very low computation effort. In particular, our approach, based on what we call a procedural-noise-correcting (PNC) predictor, removes the procedural uncertainty by using only \emph{one} auxiliary network that is trained on a suitably labeled dataset, instead of many retrained networks employed in deep ensembles. Moreover, by combining our PNC predictor with suitable light-computation resampling methods, we build several approaches to construct asymptotically exact-coverage confidence intervals using as low as four trained networks without additional overheads.
LuminAIRe: Illumination-Aware Conditional Image Repainting for Lighting-Realistic Generation
Authors: Jiajun Tang, Haofeng Zhong, Shuchen Weng, Boxin Shi
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We present the ilLumination-Aware conditional Image Repainting (LuminAIRe) task to address the unrealistic lighting effects in recent conditional image repainting (CIR) methods. The environment lighting and 3D geometry conditions are explicitly estimated from given background images and parsing masks using a parametric lighting representation and learning-based priors. These 3D conditions are then converted into illumination images through the proposed physically-based illumination rendering and illumination attention module. With the injection of illumination images, physically-correct lighting information is fed into the lighting-realistic generation process and repainted images with harmonized lighting effects in both foreground and background regions can be acquired, whose superiority over the results of state-of-the-art methods is confirmed through extensive experiments. For facilitating and validating the LuminAIRe task, a new dataset Car-LuminAIRe with lighting annotations and rich appearance variants is collected.
Class-Conditional Conformal Prediction with Many Classes
Authors: Tiffany Ding, Anastasios Angelopoulos, Stephen Bates, Michael I. Jordan, Ryan J Tibshirani
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Standard conformal prediction methods provide a marginal coverage guarantee,which means that for a random test point, the conformal prediction set contains the true label with a user-specified probability. In many classificationproblems, we would like to obtain a stronger guarantee--that for test pointsof a specific class, the prediction set contains the true label with thesame user-chosen probability. For the latter goal, existing conformal predictionmethods do not work well when there is a limited amount of labeled data perclass, as is often the case in real applications where the number of classes islarge. We propose a method called clustered conformal prediction thatclusters together classes having "similar" conformal scores and performs conformal prediction at the cluster level. Based on empirical evaluation acrossfour image data sets with many (up to 1000) classes, we find that clusteredconformal typically outperforms existing methods in terms of class-conditionalcoverage and set size metrics.
Reward Imputation with Sketching for Contextual Batched Bandits
Authors: Xiao Zhang, Ninglu Shao, Zihua Si, Jun Xu, Wenhan Wang, Hanjing Su, Ji-Rong Wen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Contextual batched bandit (CBB) is a setting where a batch of rewards is observed from the environment at the end of each episode, but the rewards of the non-executed actions are unobserved, resulting in partial-information feedback. Existing approaches for CBB often ignore the rewards of the non-executed actions, leading to underutilization of feedback information. In this paper, we propose an efficient approach called Sketched Policy Updating with Imputed Rewards (SPUIR) that completes the unobserved rewards using sketching, which approximates the full-information feedbacks. We formulate reward imputation as an imputation regularized ridge regression problem that captures the feedback mechanisms of both executed and non-executed actions. To reduce time complexity, we solve the regression problem using randomized sketching. We prove that our approach achieves an instantaneous regret with controllable bias and smaller variance than approaches without reward imputation. Furthermore, our approach enjoys a sublinear regret bound against the optimal policy. We also present two extensions, a rate-scheduled version and a version for nonlinear rewards, making our approach more practical. Experimental results show that SPUIR outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on synthetic, public benchmark, and real-world datasets.
A Unified Model and Dimension for Interactive Estimation
Authors: Nataly Brukhim, Miro Dudik, Aldo Pacchiano, Robert E. Schapire
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We study an abstract framework for interactive learning called interactive estimation in which the goal is to estimate a target from its ``similarity'' to points queried by the learner.We introduce a combinatorial measure called Dissimilarity dimension which largely captures learnability in our model.We present a simple, general, and broadly-applicable algorithm, for which we obtain both regret and PAC generalization bounds that are polynomial in the new dimension. We show that our framework subsumes and thereby unifies two classic learning models:statistical-query learning and structured bandits. We also delineate how the Dissimilarity dimension is related to well-known parameters for both frameworks, in some cases yielding significantly improved analyses.
Simple, Scalable and Effective Clustering via One-Dimensional Projections
Authors: Moses Charikar, Monika Henzinger, Lunjia Hu, Maximilian Vötsch, Erik Waingarten
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Clustering is a fundamental problem in unsupervised machine learning with many applications in data analysis. Popular clustering algorithms such as Lloyd's algorithm and $k$-means++ can take $\Omega(ndk)$ time when clustering $n$ points in a $d$-dimensional space (represented by an $n\times d$ matrix $X$) into $k$ clusters. On massive datasets with moderate to large $k$, the multiplicative $k$ factor can become very expensive. We introduce a simple randomized clustering algorithm that provably runs in expected time $O(\mathsf{nnz}(X) + n\log n)$ for arbitrary $k$. Here $\mathsf{nnz}(X)$ is the total number of non-zero entries in the input dataset $X$, which is upper bounded by $nd$ and can be significantly smaller for sparse datasets. We prove that our algorithm achieves approximation ratio $\widetilde{O}(k^4)$ on any input dataset for the $k$-means objective, and our experiments show that the quality of the clusters found by our algorithm is usually much better than this worst-case bound. We use our algorithm for $k$-means clustering and for coreset construction; our experiments show that it gives a new tradeoff between running time and cluster quality compared to previous state-of-the-art methods for these tasks. Our theoretical analysis is based on novel results of independent interest. We show that the approximation ratio achieved after a random one-dimensional projection can be lifted to the original points and that $k$-means++ seeding can be implemented in expected time $O(n\log n)$ in one dimension.
Streaming PCA for Markovian Data
Authors: Syamantak Kumar, Purnamrita Sarkar
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Since its inception in 1982, Oja's algorithm has become an established method for streaming principle component analysis (PCA). We study the problem of streaming PCA, where the data-points are sampled from an irreducible, aperiodic, and reversible Markov chain starting in stationarity. Our goal is to estimate the top eigenvector of the unknown covariance matrix of the stationary distribution. This setting has implications in scenarios where data can solely be sampled from a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) type algorithm, and the objective is to perform inference on parameters of the stationary distribution. Most convergence guarantees for Oja's algorithm in the literature assume that the data-points are sampled IID. For data streams with Markovian dependence, one typically downsamples the data to get a "nearly" independent data stream. In this paper, we obtain the first near-optimal rate for Oja's algorithm on the entire data, where we remove the logarithmic dependence on the sample size, $n$, resulting from throwing data away in downsampling strategies.
Generalized Logit Adjustment: Calibrating Fine-tuned Models by Removing Label Bias in Foundation Models
Authors: Beier Zhu, Kaihua Tang, QIANRU SUN, Hanwang Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Foundation models like CLIP allow zero-shot transfer on various tasks without additional training data. Yet, the zero-shot performance is less competitive than a fully supervised one. Thus, to enhance the performance, fine-tuning and ensembling are also commonly adopted to better fit the downstream tasks. However, we argue that such prior work has overlooked the inherent biases in foundation models. Due to the highly imbalanced Web-scale training set, these foundation models are inevitably skewed toward frequent semantics, and thus the subsequent fine-tuning or ensembling is still biased. In this study, we systematically examine the biases in foundation models and demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed Generalized Logit Adjustment (GLA) method. Note that bias estimation in foundation models is challenging, as most pre-train data cannot be explicitly assessed like in traditional long-tailed classification tasks.To this end, GLA has an optimization-based bias estimation approach for debiasing foundation models. As our work resolves a fundamental flaw in the pre-training, the proposed GLA demonstrates significant improvements across a diverse range of tasks: it achieves 1.5 pp accuracy gains on ImageNet, an large average improvement (1.4-4.6 pp) on 11 few-shot datasets, 2.4 pp gains on long-tailed classification. Codes are in https://github.com/BeierZhu/GLA.
Learning to Parameterize Visual Attributes for Open-set Fine-grained Retrieval
Authors: Shijie Wang, Jianlong Chang, Haojie Li, Zhihui Wang, Wanli Ouyang, Qi Tian
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Open-set fine-grained retrieval is an emerging challenging task that allows to retrieve unknown categories beyond the training set. The best solution for handling unknown categories is to represent them using a set of visual attributes learnt from known categories, as widely used in zero-shot learning. Though important, attribute modeling usually requires significant manual annotations and thus is labor-intensive. Therefore, it is worth to investigate how to transform retrieval models trained by image-level supervision from category semantic extraction to attribute modeling. To this end, we propose a novel Visual Attribute Parameterization Network (VAPNet) to learn visual attributes from known categories and parameterize them into the retrieval model, without the involvement of any attribute annotations.In this way, VAPNet could utilize its parameters to parse a set of visual attributes from unknown categories and precisely represent them.Technically, VAPNet explicitly attains some semantics with rich details via making use of local image patches and distills the visual attributes from these discovered semantics. Additionally, it integrates the online refinement of these visual attributes into the training process to iteratively enhance their quality. Simultaneously, VAPNet treats these attributes as supervisory signals to tune the retrieval models, thereby achieving attribute parameterization. Extensive experiments on open-set fine-grained retrieval datasets validate the superior performance of our VAPNet over existing solutions.
Learning List-Level Domain-Invariant Representations for Ranking
Authors: Ruicheng Xian, Honglei Zhuang, Zhen Qin, Hamed Zamani, Jing Lu, Ji Ma, Kai Hui, Han Zhao, Xuanhui Wang, Michael Bendersky
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Domain adaptation aims to transfer the knowledge learned on (data-rich) source domains to (low-resource) target domains, and a popular method is invariant representation learning, which matches and aligns the data distributions on the feature space. Although this method is studied extensively and applied on classification and regression problems, its adoption on ranking problems is sporadic, and the few existing implementations lack theoretical justifications. This paper revisits invariant representation learning for ranking. Upon reviewing prior work, we found that they implement what we call item-level alignment, which aligns the distributions of the items being ranked from all lists in aggregate but ignores their list structure. However, the list structure should be leveraged, because it is intrinsic to ranking problems where the data and the metrics are defined and computed on lists, not the items by themselves. To close this discrepancy, we propose list-level alignment—learning domain-invariant representations at the higher level of lists. The benefits are twofold: it leads to the first domain adaptation generalization bound for ranking, in turn providing theoretical support for the proposed method, and it achieves better empirical transfer performance for unsupervised domain adaptation on ranking tasks, including passage reranking.
Homotopy-based training of NeuralODEs for accurate dynamics discovery
Authors: Joon-Hyuk Ko, Hankyul Koh, Nojun Park, Wonho Jhe
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NeuralODEs) present an attractive way to extract dynamical laws from time series data, as they bridge neural networks with the differential equation-based modeling paradigm of the physical sciences. However, these models often display long training times and suboptimal results, especially for longer duration data. While a common strategy in the literature imposes strong constraints to the NeuralODE architecture to inherently promote stable model dynamics, such methods are ill-suited for dynamics discovery as the unknown governing equation is not guaranteed to satisfy the assumed constraints. In this paper, we develop a new training method for NeuralODEs, based on synchronization and homotopy optimization, that does not require changes to the model architecture. We show that synchronizing the model dynamics and the training data tames the originally irregular loss landscape, which homotopy optimization can then leverage to enhance training. Through benchmark experiments, we demonstrate our method achieves competitive or better training loss while often requiring less than half the number of training epochs compared to other model-agnostic techniques. Furthermore, models trained with our method display better extrapolation capabilities, highlighting the effectiveness of our method.
SGFormer: Simplifying and Empowering Transformers for Large-Graph Representations
Authors: Qitian Wu, Wentao Zhao, Chenxiao Yang, Hengrui Zhang, Fan Nie, Haitian Jiang, Yatao Bian, Junchi Yan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Learning representations on large-sized graphs is a long-standing challenge due to the inter-dependence nature involved in massive data points. Transformers, as an emerging class of foundation encoders for graph-structured data, have shown promising performance on small graphs due to its global attention capable of capturing all-pair influence beyond neighboring nodes. Even so, existing approaches tend to inherit the spirit of Transformers in language and vision tasks, and embrace complicated models by stacking deep multi-head attentions. In this paper, we critically demonstrate that even using a one-layer attention can bring up surprisingly competitive performance across node property prediction benchmarks where node numbers range from thousand-level to billion-level. This encourages us to rethink the design philosophy for Transformers on large graphs, where the global attention is a computation overhead hindering the scalability. We frame the proposed scheme as Simplified Graph Transformers (SGFormer), which is empowered by a simple attention model that can efficiently propagate information among arbitrary nodes in one layer. SGFormer requires none of positional encodings, feature/graph pre-processing or augmented loss. Empirically, SGFormer successfully scales to the web-scale graph ogbn-papers100M and yields up to 141x inference acceleration over SOTA Transformers on medium-sized graphs. Beyond current results, we believe the proposed methodology alone enlightens a new technical path of independent interest for building Transformers on large graphs.
Understanding the Limitations of Deep Models for Molecular property prediction: Insights and Solutions
Authors: Jun Xia, Lecheng Zhang, Xiao Zhu, Yue Liu, Zhangyang Gao, Bozhen Hu, Cheng Tan, Jiangbin Zheng, Siyuan Li, Stan Z. Li
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Molecular Property Prediction (MPP) is a crucial task in the AI-driven Drug Discovery (AIDD) pipeline, which has recently gained considerable attention thanks to advancements in deep learning. However, recent research has revealed that deep models struggle to beat traditional non-deep ones on MPP. In this study, we benchmark 12 representative models (3 non-deep models and 9 deep models) on 15 molecule datasets. Through the most comprehensive study to date, we make the following key observations: \textbf{(\romannumeral 1)} Deep models are generally unable to outperform non-deep ones; \textbf{(\romannumeral 2)} The failure of deep models on MPP cannot be solely attributed to the small size of molecular datasets; \textbf{(\romannumeral 3)} In particular, some traditional models including XGB and RF that use molecular fingerprints as inputs tend to perform better than other competitors. Furthermore, we conduct extensive empirical investigations into the unique patterns of molecule data and inductive biases of various models underlying these phenomena. These findings stimulate us to develop a simple-yet-effective feature mapping method for molecule data prior to feeding them into deep models. Empirically, deep models equipped with this mapping method can beat non-deep ones in most MoleculeNet datasets. Notably, the effectiveness is further corroborated by extensive experiments on cutting-edge dataset related to COVID-19 and activity cliff datasets.
Neural Circuits for Fast Poisson Compressed Sensing in the Olfactory Bulb
Authors: Jacob Zavatone-Veth, Paul Masset, William Tong, Joseph D. Zak, Venkatesh Murthy, Cengiz Pehlevan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Within a single sniff, the mammalian olfactory system can decode the identity and concentration of odorants wafted on turbulent plumes of air. Yet, it must do so given access only to the noisy, dimensionally-reduced representation of the odor world provided by olfactory receptor neurons. As a result, the olfactory system must solve a compressed sensing problem, relying on the fact that only a handful of the millions of possible odorants are present in a given scene. Inspired by this principle, past works have proposed normative compressed sensing models for olfactory decoding. However, these models have not captured the unique anatomy and physiology of the olfactory bulb, nor have they shown that sensing can be achieved within the 100-millisecond timescale of a single sniff. Here, we propose a rate-based Poisson compressed sensing circuit model for the olfactory bulb. This model maps onto the neuron classes of the olfactory bulb, and recapitulates salient features of their connectivity and physiology. For circuit sizes comparable to the human olfactory bulb, we show that this model can accurately detect tens of odors within the timescale of a single sniff. We also show that this model can perform Bayesian posterior sampling for accurate uncertainty estimation. Fast inference is possible only if the geometry of the neural code is chosen to match receptor properties, yielding a distributed neural code that is not axis-aligned to individual odor identities. Our results illustrate how normative modeling can help us map function onto specific neural circuits to generate new hypotheses.
SUPA: A Lightweight Diagnostic Simulator for Machine Learning in Particle Physics
Authors: Atul Kumar Sinha, Daniele Paliotta, Bálint Máté, John Raine, Tobias Golling, François Fleuret
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2023

Abstract: Deep learning methods have gained popularity in high energy physics for fast modeling of particle showers in detectors. Detailed simulation frameworks such as the gold standard \textsc{Geant4} are computationally intensive, and current deep generative architectures work on discretized, lower resolution versions of the detailed simulation. The development of models that work at higher spatial resolutions is currently hindered by the complexity of the full simulation data, and by the lack of simpler, more interpretable benchmarks. Our contribution is \textsc{SUPA}, the SUrrogate PArticle propagation simulator, an algorithm and software package for generating data by simulating simplified particle propagation, scattering and shower development in matter. The generation is extremely fast and easy to use compared to \textsc{Geant4}, but still exhibits the key characteristics and challenges of the detailed simulation. The proposed simulator generates thousands of particle showers per second on a desktop machine, a speed up of up to 6 orders of magnitudes over \textsc{Geant4}, and stores detailed geometric information about the shower propagation. \textsc{\textsc{SUPA}} provides much greater flexibility for setting initial conditions and defining multiple benchmarks for the development of models. Moreover, interpreting particle showers as point clouds creates a connection to geometric machine learning and provides challenging and fundamentally new datasets for the field.
LagrangeBench: A Lagrangian Fluid Mechanics Benchmarking Suite
Authors: Artur Toshev, Gianluca Galletti, Fabian Fritz, Stefan Adami, Nikolaus Adams
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2023

Abstract: Machine learning has been successfully applied to grid-based PDE modeling in various scientific applications. However, learned PDE solvers based on Lagrangian particle discretizations, which are the preferred approach to problems with free surfaces or complex physics, remain largely unexplored. We present LagrangeBench, the first benchmarking suite for Lagrangian particle problems, focusing on temporal coarse-graining. In particular, our contribution is: (a) seven new fluid mechanics datasets (four in 2D and three in 3D) generated with the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method including the Taylor-Green vortex, lid-driven cavity, reverse Poiseuille flow, and dam break, each of which includes different physics like solid wall interactions or free surface, (b) efficient JAX-based API with various recent training strategies and three neighbor search routines, and (c) JAX implementation of established Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) like GNS and SEGNN with baseline results. Finally, to measure the performance of learned surrogates we go beyond established position errors and introduce physical metrics like kinetic energy MSE and Sinkhorn distance for the particle distribution. Our codebase is available under the URL: https://github.com/tumaer/lagrangebench.
Group Fairness in Peer Review
Authors: Haris Aziz, Evi Micha, Nisarg Shah
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Large conferences such as NeurIPS and AAAI serve as crossroads  of various AI fields, since they attract submissions from a vast number of communities. However, in some cases, this has resulted in a poor reviewing experience for some communities, whose submissions get assigned to less qualified reviewers outside of their communities. An often-advocated solution is to break up any such large conference into smaller conferences, but this can lead to isolation of communities and harm interdisciplinary research. We tackle this challenge by introducing a  notion of group fairness, called the core, which requires that every possible community (subset of researchers) to be treated in a way that prevents them from unilaterally benefiting by  withdrawing from a large conference. We study a simple peer review model, prove that it always admits a reviewing assignment in the core, and design an efficient algorithm to find one such assignment. We use real data from CVPR and ICLR conferences to compare our algorithm to existing reviewing assignment algorithms on a number of metrics.
Diffusion Model is an Effective Planner and Data Synthesizer for Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Haoran He, Chenjia Bai, Kang Xu, Zhuoran Yang, Weinan Zhang, Dong Wang, Bin Zhao, Xuelong Li
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Diffusion models have demonstrated highly-expressive generative capabilities in vision and NLP. Recent studies in reinforcement learning (RL) have shown that diffusion models are also powerful in modeling complex policies or trajectories in offline datasets. However, these works have been limited to single-task settings where a generalist agent capable of addressing multi-task predicaments is absent. In this paper, we aim to investigate the effectiveness of a single diffusion model in modeling large-scale multi-task offline data, which can be challenging due to diverse and multimodal data distribution. Specifically, we propose Multi-Task Diffusion Model (\textsc{MTDiff}), a diffusion-based method that incorporates Transformer backbones and prompt learning for generative planning and data synthesis in multi-task offline settings. \textsc{MTDiff} leverages vast amounts of knowledge available in multi-task data and performs implicit knowledge sharing among tasks. For generative planning, we find \textsc{MTDiff} outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms across 50 tasks on Meta-World and 8 maps on Maze2D. For data synthesis, \textsc{MTDiff} generates high-quality data for testing tasks given a single demonstration as a prompt, which enhances the low-quality datasets for even unseen tasks.
Single-Call Stochastic Extragradient Methods for Structured Non-monotone Variational Inequalities: Improved Analysis under Weaker Conditions
Authors: Sayantan Choudhury, Eduard Gorbunov, Nicolas Loizou
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Single-call stochastic extragradient methods, like stochastic past extragradient (SPEG) and stochastic optimistic gradient (SOG),  have gained a lot of interest in recent years and are one of the most efficient algorithms for solving large-scale min-max optimization and variational inequalities problems (VIP) appearing in various machine learning tasks. However, despite their undoubted popularity, current convergence analyses of SPEG and SOG require strong assumptions like bounded variance or growth conditions. In addition, several important questions regarding the convergence properties of these methods are still open, including mini-batching, efficient step-size selection, and convergence guarantees under different sampling strategies. In this work, we address these questions and provide convergence guarantees for two large classes of structured non-monotone VIPs: (i) quasi-strongly monotone problems (a generalization of strongly monotone problems) and (ii) weak Minty variational inequalities (a generalization of monotone and Minty VIPs). We introduce the expected residual condition, explain its benefits, and show how it allows us to obtain a strictly weaker bound than previously used growth conditions, expected co-coercivity, or bounded variance assumptions. Finally, our convergence analysis holds under the arbitrary sampling paradigm, which includes importance sampling and various mini-batching strategies as special cases.
Assessor360: Multi-sequence Network for Blind Omnidirectional Image Quality Assessment
Authors: Tianhe Wu, Shuwei Shi, Haoming Cai, Mingdeng Cao, Jing Xiao, Yinqiang Zheng, Yujiu Yang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Blind Omnidirectional Image Quality Assessment (BOIQA) aims to objectively assess the human perceptual quality of omnidirectional images (ODIs) without relying on pristine-quality image information. It is becoming more significant with the increasing advancement of virtual reality (VR) technology. However, the quality assessment of ODIs is severely hampered by the fact that the existing BOIQA pipeline lacks the modeling of the observer's browsing process. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel multi-sequence network for BOIQA called Assessor360, which is derived from the realistic multi-assessor ODI quality assessment procedure. Specifically, we propose a generalized Recursive Probability Sampling (RPS) method for the BOIQA task, combining content and details information to generate multiple pseudo viewport sequences from a given starting point. Additionally, we design a Multi-scale Feature Aggregation (MFA) module with a Distortion-aware Block (DAB) to fuse distorted and semantic features of each viewport. We also devise Temporal Modeling Module (TMM) to learn the viewport transition in the temporal domain. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Assessor360 outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multiple OIQA datasets. The code and models are available at https://github.com/TianheWu/Assessor360.
Lossy Image Compression with Conditional Diffusion Models
Authors: Ruihan Yang, Stephan Mandt
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: This paper outlines an end-to-end optimized lossy image compression framework using diffusion generative models. The approach relies on the transform coding paradigm, where an image is mapped into a latent space for entropy coding and, from there, mapped back to the data space for reconstruction. In contrast to VAE-based neural compression, where the (mean) decoder is a deterministic neural network, our decoder is a conditional diffusion model. Our approach thus introduces an additional "content" latent variable on which the reverse diffusion process is conditioned and uses this variable to store information about the image. The remaining ``texture'' variables characterizing the diffusion process are synthesized at decoding time. We show that the model's performance can be tuned toward perceptual metrics of interest. Our extensive experiments involving multiple datasets and image quality assessment metrics show that our approach yields stronger reported FID scores than the GAN-based model, while also yielding competitive performance with VAE-based models in several distortion metrics. Furthermore, training the diffusion with  $\mathcal{X}$-parameterization enables high-quality reconstructions in only a handful of decoding steps, greatly affecting the model's practicality. Our code is available at: https://github.com/buggyyang/CDC_compression
Leveraging the two-timescale regime to demonstrate convergence of neural networks
Authors: Pierre Marion, Raphaël Berthier
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We study the training dynamics of shallow neural networks, in a two-timescale regime in which the stepsizes for the inner layer are much smaller than those for the outer layer. In this regime, we prove convergence of the gradient flow to a global optimum of the non-convex optimization problem in a simple univariate setting. The number of neurons need not be asymptotically large for our result to hold, distinguishing our result from popular recent approaches such as the neural tangent kernel or mean-field regimes. Experimental illustration is provided, showing that the stochastic gradient descent behaves according to our description of the gradient flow and thus converges to a global optimum in the two-timescale regime, but can fail outside of this regime.
Grammar Prompting for Domain-Specific Language Generation with  Large Language Models
Authors: Bailin Wang, Zi Wang, Xuezhi Wang, Yuan Cao, Rif A. Saurous, Yoon Kim
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs)  can learn to perform a wide range of natural language tasks from just a  handful of in-context examples. However, for generating strings from highly structured  languages (e.g., semantic parsing to complex domain-specific languages), it is challenging for the LLM to generalize from just a few exemplars. We propose \emph{grammar prompting}, a simple approach to enable LLMs to use external knowledge and domain-specific constraints, expressed through a grammar in Backus--Naur Form (BNF), during in-context learning. Grammar prompting augments each demonstration example with a specialized grammar that is minimally sufficient for generating the particular output example, where the specialized grammar is a subset of the full DSL grammar.  For inference, the LLM first predicts a BNF grammar given a test input, and then generates the output according to the rules of the grammar. Experiments demonstrate that grammar prompting can enable LLMs to perform competitively on a diverse set of DSL generation tasks, including semantic parsing (SMCalFlow, Overnight, GeoQuery), PDDL planning, and SMILES-based molecule generation.
Don’t just prune by magnitude! Your mask topology is a secret weapon
Authors: Duc Hoang, Souvik Kundu, Shiwei Liu, Zhangyang "Atlas" Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed significant progress in understanding the relationship between the connectivity of a deep network's architecture as a graph, and the network's performance. A few prior arts connected deep architectures to expander graphs or Ramanujan graphs, and particularly,[7] demonstrated the use of such graph connectivity measures with ranking and relative performance of various obtained sparse sub-networks  (i.e. models with prune masks) without the need for training. However, no prior work explicitly explores the role of parameters in the graph's connectivity, making the graph-based understanding of prune masks and the magnitude/gradient-based pruning practice isolated from one another. This paper strives to fill in this gap, by analyzing the Weighted Spectral Gap of Ramanujan structures in sparse neural networks and investigates its correlation with final performance. We specifically examine the evolution of sparse structures under a popular dynamic sparse-to-sparse network training scheme, and intriguingly find that the generated random topologies inherently maximize Ramanujan graphs. We also identify a strong correlation between masks, performance, and the weighted spectral gap. Leveraging this observation, we propose to construct a new "full-spectrum coordinate'' aiming to comprehensively characterize a sparse neural network's promise. Concretely, it consists of the classical Ramanujan's gap (structure), our proposed weighted spectral gap (parameters), and the constituent nested regular graphs within. In this new coordinate system, a sparse subnetwork's L2-distance from its original initialization is found to have nearly linear correlated with its performance. Eventually, we apply this unified perspective to develop a new actionable pruning method, by sampling sparse masks to maximize the L2-coordinate distance. Our method can be augmented with the "pruning at initialization" (PaI) method, and significantly outperforms existing PaI methods. With only a few iterations of training (e.g 500 iterations), we can get LTH-comparable performance as that yielded via "pruning after training", significantly saving pre-training costs. Codes can be found at:  https://github.com/VITA-Group/FullSpectrum-PAI.
Learning Human Action Recognition Representations Without Real Humans
Authors: Howard Zhong, Samarth Mishra, Donghyun Kim, SouYoung Jin, Rameswar Panda, Hilde Kuehne, Leonid Karlinsky, Venkatesh Saligrama, Aude Oliva, Rogerio Feris
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2023

Abstract: Pre-training on massive video datasets has become essential to achieve high action recognition performance on smaller downstream datasets. However, most large-scale video datasets contain images of people and hence are accompanied with issues related to privacy, ethics, and data protection, often preventing them from being publicly shared for reproducible research. Existing work has attempted to alleviate these problems by blurring faces, downsampling videos, or training on synthetic data. On the other hand, analysis on the {\em transferability} of privacy-preserving pre-trained models to downstream tasks has been limited. In this work, we study this problem by first asking the question: can we pre-train models for human action recognition with data that does not include real humans? To this end, we present, for the first time, a benchmark that leverages real-world videos with {\em humans removed} and synthetic data containing virtual humans to pre-train a model. We then evaluate the transferability of the representation learned on this data to a diverse set of downstream action recognition benchmarks. Furthermore, we propose a novel pre-training strategy, called Privacy-Preserving MAE-Align, to effectively combine synthetic data and human-removed real data. Our approach outperforms previous baselines by up to 5\% and closes the performance gap between human and no-human action recognition representations on downstream tasks, for both linear probing and fine-tuning. Our benchmark, code, and models are available at https://github.com/howardzh01/PPMA.
Primal-Attention: Self-attention through Asymmetric Kernel SVD in Primal Representation
Authors: Yingyi Chen, Qinghua Tao, Francesco Tonin, Johan Suykens
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Recently, a new line of works has emerged to understand and improve self-attention in Transformers by treating it as a kernel machine. However, existing works apply the methods for symmetric kernels to the asymmetric self-attention, resulting in a nontrivial gap between the analytical understanding and numerical implementation. In this paper, we provide a new perspective to represent and optimize self-attention through asymmetric Kernel Singular Value Decomposition (KSVD), which is also motivated by the low-rank property of self-attention normally observed in deep layers. Through asymmetric KSVD, i) a primal-dual representation of self-attention is formulated, where the optimization objective is cast to maximize the projection variances in the attention outputs; ii) a novel attention mechanism, i.e., Primal-Attention, is proposed via the primal representation of KSVD, avoiding explicit computation of the kernel matrix in the dual; iii) with KKT conditions, we prove that the stationary solution to the KSVD optimization in Primal-Attention yields a zero-value objective. In this manner, KSVD optimization can be implemented by simply minimizing a regularization loss, so that low-rank property is promoted without extra decomposition. Numerical experiments show state-of-the-art performance of our Primal-Attention with improved efficiency. Moreover, we demonstrate that the deployed KSVD optimization regularizes Primal-Attention with a sharper singular value decay than that of the canonical self-attention, further verifying the great potential of our method. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that provides a primal-dual representation for the asymmetric kernel in self-attention and successfully applies it to modelling and optimization.
End-To-End Latent Variational Diffusion Models for Inverse Problems in High Energy Physics
Authors: Alexander Shmakov, Kevin Greif, Michael Fenton, Aishik Ghosh, Pierre Baldi, Daniel Whiteson
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: High-energy collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) provide valuable insights into open questions in particle physics. However, detector effects must be corrected before measurements can be compared to certain theoretical predictions or measurements from other detectors. Methods to solve this inverse problem of mapping detector observations to theoretical quantities of the underlying collision are essential parts of many physics analyses at the LHC. We investigate and compare various generative deep learning methods to approximate this inverse mapping. We introduce a novel unified architecture, termed latent variational diffusion models, which combines the latent learning of cutting-edge generative art approaches with an end-to-end variational framework. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach for reconstructing global distributions of theoretical kinematic quantities, as well as for ensuring the adherence of the learned posterior distributions to known physics constraints. Our unified approach achieves a distribution-free distance to the truth of over 20 times smaller than non-latent state-of-the-art baseline and 3 times smaller than traditional latent diffusion models.
AVeriTeC: A Dataset for Real-world Claim Verification with Evidence from the Web
Authors: Michael Schlichtkrull, Zhijiang Guo, Andreas Vlachos
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2023

Abstract: Existing datasets for automated fact-checking have substantial limitations, such as relying on artificial claims, lacking annotations for evidence and intermediate reasoning, or including evidence published after the claim. In this paper we introduce AVeriTeC, a new dataset of 4,568 real-world claims covering fact-checks by 50 different organizations. Each claim is annotated with question-answer pairs supported by evidence available online, as well as textual justifications explaining how the evidence combines to produce a verdict. Through a multi-round annotation process, we avoid common pitfalls including context dependence, evidence insufficiency, and temporal leakage, and reach a substantial inter-annotator agreement of $\kappa=0.619$ on verdicts. We develop a baseline as well as an evaluation scheme for verifying claims through question-answering against the open web.
DiffTraj: Generating GPS Trajectory with Diffusion Probabilistic Model
Authors: Yuanshao Zhu, Yongchao Ye, Shiyao Zhang, Xiangyu Zhao, James Yu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Pervasive integration of GPS-enabled devices and data acquisition technologies has led to an exponential increase in GPS trajectory data, fostering advancements in spatial-temporal data mining research. Nonetheless, GPS trajectories contain personal geolocation information, rendering serious privacy concerns when working with raw data. A promising approach to address this issue is trajectory generation, which involves replacing original data with generated, privacy-free alternatives. Despite the potential of trajectory generation, the complex nature of human behavior and its inherent stochastic characteristics pose challenges in generating high-quality trajectories. In this work, we propose a spatial-temporal diffusion probabilistic model for trajectory generation (DiffTraj). This model effectively combines the generative abilities of diffusion models with the spatial-temporal features derived from real trajectories. The core idea is to reconstruct and synthesize geographic trajectories from white noise through a reverse trajectory denoising process. Furthermore, we propose a Trajectory UNet (Traj-UNet) deep neural network to embed conditional information and accurately estimate noise levels during the reverse process. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that DiffTraj can be intuitively applied to generate high-fidelity trajectories while retaining the original distributions. Moreover, the generated results can support downstream trajectory analysis tasks and significantly outperform other methods in terms of geo-distribution evaluations.
Meta-in-context learning in large language models
Authors: Julian Coda-Forno, Marcel Binz, Zeynep Akata, Matt Botvinick, Jane Wang, Eric Schulz
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Large language models have shown tremendous performance in a variety of tasks.  In-context learning  -- the ability to improve at a task after being provided with a number of demonstrations -- is seen as one of the main contributors to their success. In the present paper, we demonstrate that the in-context learning abilities of large language models can be recursively improved via in-context learning itself. We coin this phenomenon meta-in-context learning. Looking at two idealized domains, a one-dimensional regression task and a two-armed bandit task, we show that meta-in-context learning adaptively reshapes a large language model's priors over expected tasks. Furthermore, we find that meta-in-context learning modifies the in-context learning strategies of such models. Finally, we broaden the scope of our investigation to encompass two diverse benchmarks: one focusing on real-world regression problems and the other encompassing multiple NLP tasks. In both cases, we observe competitive performance comparable to that of traditional learning algorithms. Taken together, our work improves our understanding of in-context learning and paves the way toward adapting large language models to the environment they are applied purely through meta-in-context learning rather than traditional finetuning.