mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Learning to Generate Inversion-Resistant Model Explanations
Authors: Hoyong Jeong, Suyoung Lee, Sung Ju Hwang, Sooel Son
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: The wide adoption of deep neural networks (DNNs) in mission-critical applications has spurred the need for interpretable models that provide explanations of the model's decisions. Unfortunately, previous studies have demonstrated that model explanations facilitate information leakage, rendering DNN models vulnerable to model inversion attacks. These attacks enable the adversary to reconstruct original images based on model explanations, thus leaking privacy-sensitive features. To this end, we present Generative Noise Injector for Model Explanations (GNIME), a novel defense framework that perturbs model explanations to minimize the risk of model inversion attacks while preserving the interpretabilities of the generated explanations. Specifically, we formulate the defense training as a two-player minimax game between the inversion attack network on the one hand, which aims to invert model explanations, and the noise generator network on the other, which aims to inject perturbations to tamper with model inversion attacks. We demonstrate that GNIME significantly decreases the information leakage in model explanations, decreasing transferable classification accuracy in facial recognition models by up to 84.8% while preserving the original functionality of model explanations.
Unsupervised Multi-View Object Segmentation Using Radiance Field Propagation
Authors: Xinhang Liu, Jiaben Chen, Huai Yu, Yu-Wing Tai, Chi-Keung Tang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We present radiance field propagation (RFP), a novel approach to segmenting objects in 3D during reconstruction given only unlabeled multi-view images of a scene. RFP is derived from emerging neural radiance field-based techniques, which jointly encodes semantics with appearance and geometry. The core of our method is a novel propagation strategy for individual objects' radiance fields with a bidirectional photometric loss, enabling an unsupervised partitioning of a scene into salient or meaningful regions corresponding to different object instances. To better handle complex scenes with multiple objects and occlusions, we further propose an iterative expectation-maximization algorithm to refine object masks. To the best of our knowledge, RFP is the first unsupervised approach for tackling 3D scene object segmentation for neural radiance field (NeRF) without any supervision, annotations, or other cues such as 3D bounding boxes and prior knowledge of object class. Experiments demonstrate that RFP achieves feasible segmentation results that are more accurate than previous unsupervised image/scene segmentation approaches, and are comparable to existing supervised NeRF-based methods. The segmented object representations enable individual 3D object editing operations. Codes and datasets will be made publicly available.
Beyond Mahalanobis Distance for Textual OOD Detection
Authors: Pierre Colombo, Eduardo Dadalto, Guillaume Staerman, Nathan Noiry, Pablo Piantanida
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: As the number of AI systems keeps growing, it is fundamental to implement and develop efficient control mechanisms to ensure the safe and proper functioning of machine learning (ML) systems. Reliable out-of-distribution (OOD) detection aims to detect test samples that are statistically far from the training distribution, as they might cause failures of in-production systems. In this paper, we propose a new detector called TRUSTED. Different from previous works, TRUSTED key components (i) include a novel OOD score relying on the concept of statistical data depth, (ii) rely on the idea’s full potential that all hidden layers of the network carry information regarding OOD. Our extensive experiments, comparing over 51k model configurations including different checkpoints, seed and various datasets, demonstrate that TRUSTED achieve state-of-the-art performances by producing an improvement of over 3 AUROC points.
FasterRisk: Fast and Accurate Interpretable Risk Scores
Authors: Jiachang Liu, Chudi Zhong, Boxuan Li, Margo Seltzer, Cynthia Rudin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Over the last century, risk scores have been the most popular form of predictive model used in healthcare and criminal justice. Risk scores are sparse linear models with integer coefficients; often these models can be memorized or placed on an index card. Typically, risk scores have been created either without data or by rounding logistic regression coefficients, but these methods do not reliably produce high-quality risk scores. Recent work used mathematical programming, which is computationally slow. We introduce an approach for efficiently producing a collection of high-quality risk scores learned from data. Specifically, our approach  produces a pool of almost-optimal sparse continuous solutions, each with a different support set, using a beam-search algorithm. Each of these continuous solutions is transformed into a separate risk score through a "star ray" search, where a range of multipliers are considered before rounding the coefficients sequentially to maintain low logistic loss. Our algorithm returns all of these high-quality risk scores for the user to consider. This method completes within minutes and can be valuable in a broad variety of applications.
Graph Learning Assisted Multi-Objective Integer Programming
Authors: Yaoxin Wu, Wen Song, Zhiguang Cao, Jie Zhang, Abhishek Gupta, Mingyan Lin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Objective-space decomposition algorithms (ODAs) are widely studied for solving multi-objective integer programs. However, they often encounter difficulties in handling scalarized problems, which could cause infeasibility or repetitive nondominated points and thus induce redundant runtime. To mitigate the issue, we present a graph neural network (GNN) based method to learn the reduction rule in the ODA. We formulate the algorithmic procedure of generic ODAs as a Markov decision process, and parameterize the policy (reduction rule) with a novel two-stage GNN to fuse information from variables, constraints and especially objectives for better state representation. We train our model with imitation learning and deploy it on a state-of-the-art ODA. Results show that our method significantly improves the solving efficiency of the ODA. The learned policy generalizes fairly well to larger problems or more objectives, and the proposed GNN outperforms existing ones for integer programming in terms of test and generalization accuracy.
Revisiting Sliced Wasserstein on Images: From Vectorization to Convolution
Authors: Khai Nguyen, Nhat Ho
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: The conventional sliced Wasserstein is defined between two probability measures that have realizations as \textit{vectors}. When comparing two probability measures over images, practitioners first need to vectorize images and then project them to one-dimensional space by using matrix multiplication between the sample matrix and the projection matrix. After that, the sliced Wasserstein is evaluated by averaging the two corresponding one-dimensional projected probability measures. However, this approach has two limitations. The first limitation is that the spatial structure of images is not captured efficiently by the vectorization step; therefore, the later slicing process becomes harder to gather the discrepancy information. The second limitation is memory inefficiency since each slicing direction is a vector that has the same dimension as the images. To address these limitations, we propose novel slicing methods for sliced Wasserstein between probability measures over images that are based on the convolution operators. We derive \emph{convolution sliced Wasserstein} (CSW) and its variants via incorporating stride, dilation, and non-linear activation function into the convolution operators. We investigate the metricity of CSW as well as its sample complexity, its computational complexity, and its connection to conventional sliced Wasserstein distances. Finally, we demonstrate the favorable performance of CSW over the conventional sliced Wasserstein in comparing probability measures over images and in training deep generative modeling on images.
SignRFF: Sign Random Fourier Features
Authors: Xiaoyun Li, Ping Li
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: The industry practice has been moving to embedding based retrieval (EBR). For example, in many applications, the embedding vectors are trained by some form of two-tower models. During serving phase, candidates (embedding vectors) are retrieved according to the rankings of cosine similarities either exhaustively or by  approximate near neighbor (ANN) search algorithms. For those applications, it is natural to apply ``sign random projections'' (SignRP) or variants, on the trained embedding vectors to facilitate efficient data storage and cosine distance computations. SignRP is also one of the standard indexing schemes for conducting approximate near neighbor search. In the literature, SignRP has been   popular and, to an extent, becomes the default method for ``locality sensitive hashing'' (LSH). In this paper, we propose ``sign random Fourier features'' (SignRFF) as an alternative to SignRP. The original method of random Fourier features (RFF) is a standard technique for approximating the Gaussian kernel (as opposed to the linear cosine kernel), in the literature of large-scale machine learning. Basically, RFF applies a simple nonlinear transformation on the samples generated by random projections (RP). Thus, in the pipeline of EBR, it is straightforward to replace SignRP by SignRFF. This paper explains, in a principled manner, why it makes sense to do so. In this paper, a new analytical measure called \textbf{Ranking Efficiency (RE)} is developed, which in retrospect is closely related to the ``two-sample mean'' $t$-test statistic for binomial  variables. RE provides a systematic and unified framework for comparing different LSH methods. We compare our proposed SignRP with SignRP, KLSH (kernel LSH), as well SQ-RFF (which is another 1-bit coding scheme for RFF). According to the RE expression, SignRFF consistently outperforms KLSH (for Gaussian kernel) and SQ-RFF. SignRFF also outperforms SignRP in the relatively high similarity region. The theoretical comparison results are consistent with our empirical findings. In addition, experiments are conducted to compare SignRFF with a wide range of data-dependent and deep learning based hashing methods and show the advantage of SignRFF with a sufficient number of hash bits.
The Role of Baselines in Policy Gradient Optimization
Authors: Jincheng Mei, Wesley Chung, Valentin Thomas, Bo Dai, Csaba Szepesvari, Dale Schuurmans
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We study the effect of baselines in on-policy stochastic policy gradient optimization, and close the gap between the theory and practice of policy optimization methods. Our first contribution is to show that the \emph{state value} baseline allows on-policy stochastic \emph{natural} policy gradient (NPG) to converge to a globally optimal policy at an $O(1/t)$ rate, which was not previously known. The analysis relies on two novel findings: the expected progress of the NPG update satisfies a stochastic version of the non-uniform \L{}ojasiewicz (N\L{}) inequality, and with probability 1 the state value baseline prevents the optimal action's probability from vanishing, thus ensuring sufficient exploration. Importantly, these results provide a new understanding of the role of baselines in stochastic policy gradient: by showing that the variance of natural policy gradient estimates remains unbounded with or without a baseline, we find that variance reduction \emph{cannot} explain their utility in this setting. Instead, the analysis reveals that the primary effect of the value baseline is to \textbf{reduce the aggressiveness of the updates} rather than their variance. That is, we demonstrate that a finite variance is \emph{not necessary} for almost sure convergence of stochastic NPG, while controlling update aggressiveness is both necessary and sufficient. Additional experimental results verify these theoretical findings.
A Rotated Hyperbolic Wrapped Normal Distribution for Hierarchical Representation Learning
Authors: Seunghyuk Cho, Juyong Lee, Jaesik Park, Dongwoo Kim
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We present a rotated hyperbolic wrapped normal distribution (RoWN), a simple yet effective alteration of a hyperbolic wrapped normal distribution (HWN). The HWN expands the domain of probabilistic modeling from Euclidean to hyperbolic space, where a tree can be embedded with arbitrary low distortion in theory. In this work, we analyze the geometric properties of the diagonal HWN, a standard choice of distribution in probabilistic modeling. The analysis shows that the distribution is inappropriate to represent the data points at the same hierarchy level through their angular distance with the same norm in the Poincar\'e disk model. We then empirically verify the presence of limitations of HWN, and show how RoWN, the proposed distribution, can alleviate the limitations on various hierarchical datasets, including noisy synthetic binary tree, WordNet, and Atari 2600 Breakout. The code is available at https://github.com/ml-postech/RoWN.
Private Graph All-Pairwise-Shortest-Path Distance Release with Improved Error Rate
Authors: Chenglin Fan, Ping Li, Xiaoyun Li
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Releasing all pairwise shortest path (APSP) distances between vertices on general graphs under weight Differential Privacy (DP) is known as a challenging task. In previous work, to achieve DP with some fixed budget, with high probability the maximal absolute error among all published pairwise distances is roughly O(n) where n is the number of nodes. It was shown that this error could be reduced for some special graphs, which, however, is hard for general graphs. Therefore, whether the approximation error can be reduced to sublinear is posted as an interesting open problem.In this paper, we break the linear barrier on the distance approximation error of previous result, by proposing an algorithm that releases a constructed synthetic graph privately. Computing all pairwise distances on the constructed graph only introduces O(n^{1/2}) error in answering all pairwise shortest path distances for fixed privacy parameter. Our method is based on a novel graph diameter (link length) augmentation via constructing ``shortcuts'' for the paths. By adding a set of shortcut edges to the original graph, we show that any node pair has a shortest path with link length O(n^{1/2}). Then by adding noises with some positive mean to the edge weights, the new graph is differentially private and can be published to answer all pairwise shortest path distances with O(n^{1/2}) approximation error using standard APSP computation. Numerical examples are also provided.Additionally, we also consider the graph with small feedback vertex set number. A feedback vertex set (FVS) of a graph is a set of vertices whose removal leaves a graph without cycles, and the feedback vertex set number of a graph, k, is the size of a smallest feedback vertex set. We propose a DP algorithm with error rate O(k), which improves the error of general graphs provided k=o(n^{1/2}).
Multi-Fidelity Best-Arm Identification
Authors: Riccardo Poiani, Alberto Maria Metelli, Marcello Restelli
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: In several real-world applications, a learner has access to multiple environment simulators, each with a different precision (e.g., simulation accuracy) and cost (e.g., computational time). In such a scenario, the learner faces the trade-off between selecting expensive accurate simulators or preferring cheap imprecise ones. We formalize this setting as a multi-fidelity variant of the stochastic best-arm identification problem, where querying the original arm is expensive, but multiple and biased approximations (i.e., fidelities) are available at lower costs. The learner's goal, in this setting, is to sequentially choose which simulator to query in order to minimize the total cost, while guaranteeing to identify the optimal arm with high probability. We first derive a lower bound on the identification cost, assuming that the maximum bias of each fidelity is known to the learner. Then, we propose a novel algorithm, Iterative Imprecise Successive Elimination (IISE), which provably reduces the total cost w.r.t. algorithms that ignore the multi-fidelity structure and whose cost complexity upper bound mimics the structure of the lower bound. Furthermore, we show that the cost complexity of IISE can be further reduced when the agent has access to a more fine-grained knowledge of the error introduced by the approximators.Finally, we numerically validate IISE, showing the benefits of our method in simulated domains.
SemiFL: Semi-Supervised Federated Learning for Unlabeled Clients with Alternate Training
Authors: Enmao Diao, Jie Ding, Vahid Tarokh
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Federated Learning allows the training of machine learning models by using the computation and private data resources of many distributed clients. Most existing results on Federated Learning (FL) assume the clients have ground-truth labels. However, in many practical scenarios, clients may be unable to label task-specific data due to a lack of expertise or resource. We propose SemiFL to address the problem of combining communication-efficient FL such as FedAvg with Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL). In SemiFL, clients have completely unlabeled data and can train multiple local epochs to reduce communication costs, while the server has a small amount of labeled data. We provide a theoretical understanding of the success of data augmentation-based SSL methods to illustrate the bottleneck of a vanilla combination of communication-efficient FL with SSL. To address this issue, we propose alternate training to 'fine-tune global model with labeled data' and 'generate pseudo-labels with the global model.' We conduct extensive experiments and demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the performance of a labeled server with unlabeled clients training with multiple local epochs. Moreover, our method outperforms many existing SSFL baselines and performs competitively with the state-of-the-art FL and SSL results.
RankFeat: Rank-1 Feature Removal for Out-of-distribution Detection
Authors: Yue Song, Nicu Sebe, Wei Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: The task of out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is crucial for deploying machine learning models in real-world settings. In this paper, we observe that the singular value distributions of the in-distribution (ID) and OOD features are quite different: the OOD feature matrix tends to have a larger dominant singular value than the ID feature, and the class predictions of OOD samples are largely determined by it. This observation motivates us to propose RankFeat, a simple yet effective post hoc approach for OOD detection by removing the rank-1 matrix composed of the largest singular value and the associated singular vectors from the high-level feature. RankFeat achieves state-of-the-art performance and reduces the average false positive rate (FPR95) by 17.90% compared with the previous best method. Extensive ablation studies and comprehensive theoretical analyses are presented to support the empirical results.
Jump Self-attention: Capturing High-order Statistics in Transformers
Authors: Haoyi Zhou, Siyang Xiao, Shanghang Zhang, Jieqi Peng, Shuai Zhang, Jianxin Li
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: The recent success of Transformer has benefited many real-world applications, with its capability of building long dependency through pairwise dot-products. However, the strong assumption that elements are directly attentive to each other limits the performance of tasks with high-order dependencies such as natural language understanding and Image captioning. To solve such problems, we are the first to define the Jump Self-attention (JAT) to build Transformers. Inspired by the pieces moving of English Draughts, we introduce the spectral convolutional technique to calculate JAT on the dot-product feature map. This technique allows JAT's propagation in each self-attention head and is interchangeable with the canonical self-attention. We further develop the higher-order variants under the multi-hop assumption to increase the generality. Moreover, the proposed architecture is compatible with the pre-trained models. With extensive experiments, we empirically show that our methods significantly increase the performance on ten different tasks.
Learning Infinite-Horizon Average-Reward Restless Multi-Action Bandits via Index Awareness
Authors: GUOJUN XIONG, Shufan Wang, Jian Li
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We consider the online restless bandits with average-reward and multiple actions, where the state of each arm evolves according to a Markov decision process (MDP), and the reward of pulling an arm depends on both the current state of the corresponding MDP and the action taken.  Since finding the optimal control is typically intractable for restless bandits, existing learning algorithms are often computationally expensive or with a regret bound that is exponential in the number of arms and states.  In this paper, we advocate \textit{index-aware reinforcement learning} (RL) solutions to design RL algorithms operating on a much smaller dimensional subspace by exploiting the inherent structure in restless bandits.  Specifically, we first propose novel index policies to address dimensionality concerns, which are provably optimal.  We then leverage the indices to develop two low-complexity index-aware RL algorithms, namely, (i) GM-R2MAB, which has access to a generative model; and (ii) UC-R2MAB, which learns the model using an upper confidence style online exploitation method.  We prove that both algorithms achieve a sub-linear regret that is only polynomial in the number of arms and states.  A key differentiator between our algorithms and existing ones stems from the fact that our RL algorithms contain a novel exploitation that leverages our proposed provably optimal index policies for decision-makings.
STNDT: Modeling Neural Population Activity with Spatiotemporal Transformers
Authors: Trung Le, Eli Shlizerman
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Modeling neural population dynamics underlying noisy single-trial spiking activities is essential for relating neural observation and behavior. A recent non-recurrent method - Neural Data Transformers (NDT) - has shown great success in capturing neural dynamics with low inference latency without an explicit dynamical model. However, NDT focuses on modeling the temporal evolution of the population activity while neglecting the rich covariation between individual neurons. In this paper we introduce SpatioTemporal Neural Data Transformer (STNDT), an NDT-based architecture that explicitly models responses of individual neurons in the population across time and space to uncover their underlying firing rates. In addition, we propose a contrastive learning loss that works in accordance with mask modeling objective to further improve the predictive performance. We show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on ensemble level in estimating neural activities across four neural datasets, demonstrating its capability to capture autonomous and non-autonomous dynamics spanning different cortical regions while being completely agnostic to the specific behaviors at hand. Furthermore, STNDT spatial attention mechanism reveals consistently important subsets of neurons that play a vital role in driving the response of the entire population, providing interpretability and key insights into how the population of neurons performs computation.
ProtoVAE: A Trustworthy Self-Explainable Prototypical Variational Model
Authors: Srishti Gautam, Ahcène Boubekki, Stine Hansen, Suaiba Salahuddin, Robert Jenssen, Marina Höhne, Michael Kampffmeyer
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: The need for interpretable models has fostered the development of self-explainable classifiers. Prior approaches are either based on multi-stage optimization schemes, impacting the predictive performance of the model, or produce explanations that are not transparent, trustworthy or do not capture the diversity of the data. To address these shortcomings, we propose ProtoVAE, a variational autoencoder-based framework that learns class-specific prototypes in an end-to-end manner and enforces trustworthiness and diversity by regularizing the representation space and introducing an orthonormality constraint. Finally, the model is designed to be transparent by directly incorporating the prototypes into the decision process. Extensive comparisons with previous self-explainable approaches demonstrate the superiority of ProtoVAE, highlighting its ability to generate trustworthy and diverse explanations, while not degrading predictive performance.
If Influence Functions are the Answer, Then What is the Question?
Authors: Juhan Bae, Nathan Ng, Alston Lo, Marzyeh Ghassemi, Roger B Grosse
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Influence functions efficiently estimate the effect of removing a single training data point on a model's learned parameters. While influence estimates align well with leave-one-out retraining for linear models, recent works have shown this alignment is often poor in neural networks. In this work, we investigate the specific factors that cause this discrepancy by decomposing it into five separate terms. We study the contributions of each term on a variety of architectures and datasets and how they vary with factors such as network width and training time. While practical influence function estimates may be a poor match to leave-one-out retraining for nonlinear networks, we show that they are often a good approximation to a different object we term the proximal Bregman response function (PBRF). Since the PBRF can still be used to answer many of the questions motivating influence functions, such as identifying influential or mislabeled examples, our results suggest that current algorithms for influence function estimation give more informative results than previous error analyses would suggest.
FACT: Learning Governing Abstractions Behind Integer Sequences
Authors: Peter Belcak, Ard Kastrati, Flavio Schenker, Roger Wattenhofer
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2022

Abstract: Integer sequences are of central importance to the modeling of concepts admitting complete finitary descriptions. We introduce a novel view on the learning of such concepts and lay down a set of benchmarking tasks aimed at conceptual understanding by machine learning models. These tasks indirectly assess model ability to abstract, and challenge them to reason both interpolatively and extrapolatively from the knowledge gained by observing representative examples. To further aid research in knowledge representation and reasoning, we present FACT, the Finitary Abstraction Comprehension Toolkit. The toolkit surrounds a large dataset of integer sequences comprising both organic and synthetic entries, a library for data pre-processing and generation, a set of model performance evaluation tools, and a collection of baseline model implementations, enabling the making of the future advancements with ease.
SAPipe: Staleness-Aware Pipeline for Data Parallel DNN Training
Authors: Yangrui Chen, Cong Xie, Meng Ma, Juncheng Gu, Yanghua Peng, Haibin Lin, Chuan Wu, Yibo Zhu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Data parallelism across multiple machines is widely adopted for accelerating distributed deep learning, but it is hard to achieve linear speedup due to the heavy communication. In this paper, we propose SAPipe, a performant system that pushes the training speed of data parallelism to its fullest extent. By introducing partial staleness, the communication overlaps the computation with minimal staleness in SAPipe. To mitigate additional problems incurred by staleness, SAPipe adopts staleness compensation techniques including weight prediction and delay compensation with provably lower error bounds. Additionally, SAPipe presents an algorithm-system co-design with runtime optimization to minimize system overhead for the staleness training pipeline and staleness compensation. We have implemented SAPipe in the BytePS framework, compatible to both TensorFlow and PyTorch. Our experiments show that SAPipe achieves up to 157% speedups over BytePS (non-stale), and outperforms PipeSGD in accuracy by up to 13.7%.
Probing Classifiers are Unreliable for Concept Removal and Detection
Authors: Abhinav Kumar, Chenhao Tan, Amit Sharma
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Neural network models trained on text data have been found to encode undesirable linguistic or sensitive concepts in their representation. Removing such concepts is non-trivial because of a complex relationship between the concept, text input, and the learnt representation. Recent work has proposed post-hoc and adversarial methods to remove such unwanted concepts from a model's representation. Through an extensive theoretical and empirical analysis, we show that these methods can be counter-productive: they are unable to remove the concepts entirely, and in the worst case may end up destroying all task-relevant features. The reason is the methods' reliance on a probing classifier as a proxy for the concept. Even under the most favorable conditions for learning a probing classifier when a concept's relevant features in representation space alone can provide 100% accuracy, we prove that a probing classifier is likely to use non-concept features and thus post-hoc or adversarial methods will fail to remove the concept correctly. These theoretical implications are confirmed by experiments on models trained on synthetic, Multi-NLI, and Twitter datasets. For sensitive applications of concept removal such as fairness, we recommend caution against using these methods and propose a spuriousness metric to gauge the quality of the final classifier.
SCL-WC: Cross-Slide Contrastive Learning for Weakly-Supervised Whole-Slide Image Classification
Authors: Xiyue Wang, Jinxi Xiang, Jun Zhang, Sen Yang, Zhongyi Yang, Ming-Hui Wang, Jing Zhang, Wei Yang, Junzhou Huang, Xiao Han
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Weakly-supervised whole-slide image (WSI) classification (WSWC) is a challenging task where a large number of unlabeled patches (instances) exist within each WSI (bag) while only a slide label is given. Despite recent progress for the multiple instance learning (MIL)-based WSI analysis,  the major limitation is that it usually focuses on the easy-to-distinguish diagnosis-positive regions while ignoring positives that occupy a small ratio in the entire WSI. To obtain more discriminative features, we propose a novel weakly-supervised classification method based on cross-slide contrastive learning (called SCL-WC), which depends on task-agnostic self-supervised feature pre-extraction and task-specific weakly-supervised feature refinement and aggregation for WSI-level prediction. To enable both intra-WSI and inter-WSI information interaction, we propose a positive-negative-aware module (PNM) and a weakly-supervised cross-slide contrastive learning (WSCL) module, respectively. The WSCL aims to pull WSIs with the same disease types closer and push different WSIs away. The PNM aims to facilitate the separation of tumor-like patches and normal ones within each WSI. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of our method in three different classification tasks (e.g., over 2% of AUC in Camelyon16, 5% of F1 score in BRACS, and 3% of AUC in DiagSet). Our method also shows superior flexibility and scalability in weakly-supervised localization and semi-supervised classification experiments (e.g., first place in the BRIGHT challenge). Our code will be available at https://github.com/Xiyue-Wang/SCL-WC.
Reproducibility in Optimization: Theoretical Framework and Limits
Authors: Kwangjun Ahn, Prateek Jain, Ziwei Ji, Satyen Kale, Praneeth Netrapalli, Gil I Shamir
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We initiate a formal study of reproducibility in optimization. We define a quantitative measure of reproducibility of optimization procedures in the face of noisy or error-prone operations such as inexact or stochastic gradient computations or inexact initialization. We then analyze several convex optimization settings of interest such as smooth, non-smooth, and strongly-convex objective functions and establish tight bounds on the limits of reproducibility in each setting. Our analysis reveals a fundamental trade-off between computation and reproducibility: more computation is necessary (and sufficient) for better reproducibility.
Kernel Multimodal Continuous Attention
Authors: Alexander Moreno, Zhenke Wu, Supriya Nagesh, Walter Dempsey, James M. Rehg
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Attention mechanisms take an expectation of a data representation with respect to probability weights. Recently, (Martins et al. 2020, 2021) proposed continuous attention mechanisms, focusing on unimodal attention densities from the exponential and deformed exponential families: the latter has sparse support. (Farinhas et al 2021) extended this to to multimodality via Gaussian mixture attention densities. In this paper, we extend this to kernel exponential families (Canu and Smola 2006) and our new sparse counterpart, kernel deformed exponential families. Theoretically, we show new existence results for both kernel exponential and deformed exponential families, and that the deformed case has similar approximation capabilities to kernel exponential families. Lacking closed form expressions for the context vector, we use numerical integration: we show exponential convergence for both kernel exponential and deformed exponential families. Experiments show that kernel continuous attention often outperforms unimodal continuous attention, and the sparse variant tends to highlight peaks of time series.
VisCo Grids: Surface Reconstruction with Viscosity and Coarea Grids
Authors: Albert Pumarola, Artsiom Sanakoyeu, Lior Yariv, Ali Thabet, Yaron Lipman
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Surface reconstruction has been seeing a lot of progress lately by utilizing Implicit Neural Representations (INRs). Despite their success, INRs often introduce hard to control inductive bias (i.e., the solution surface can exhibit unexplainable behaviours), have costly inference, and are slow to train.  The goal of this work is to show that replacing neural networks with simple grid functions, along with two novel geometric priors achieve comparable results to INRs, with instant inference, and improved training times. To that end we introduce VisCo Grids: a grid-based surface reconstruction method incorporating Viscosity and Coarea priors. Intuitively, the Viscosity prior replaces the smoothness inductive bias of INRs, while the Coarea favors a minimal area solution. Experimenting with VisCo Grids on a standard reconstruction baseline provided comparable results to the best performing INRs on this dataset.
Exact Shape Correspondence via 2D graph convolution
Authors: Barakeel Fanseu Kamhoua, Lin Zhang, Yongqiang Chen, Han Yang, MA Kaili, Bo Han, Bo Li, James Cheng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: For exact 3D shape correspondence (matching or alignment), i.e., the task of matching each point on a shape to its exact corresponding point on the other shape (or to be more specific, matching at geodesic error 0), most existing methods do not perform well due to two main problems. First, on nearly-isometric shapes (i.e., low noise levels), most existing methods use the eigen-vectors (eigen-functions) of the Laplace Beltrami Operator (LBO) or other shape descriptors to update an initialized correspondence which is not exact, leading to an accumulation of update errors. Thus, though the final correspondence may generally be smooth, it is generally inexact. Second, on non-isometric shapes (noisy shapes), existing methods are generally not robust to noise as they usually assume near-isometry. In addition, existing methods that attempt to address the non-isometric shape problem (e.g., GRAMPA) are generally computationally expensive and do not generalise to nearly-isometric shapes. To address these two problems, we propose a 2D graph convolution-based framework called 2D-GEM. 2D-GEM is robust to noise on non-isometric shapes and with a few additional constraints, it also addresses the errors in the update on nearly-isometric shapes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of 2D-GEM by achieving a high accuracy of 90.5$\%$ at geodesic error 0 on the non-isometric benchmark SHREC16, i.e., TOPKIDS (while being much faster than GRAMPA), and on nearly-isometric benchmarks by achieving a high accuracy of 92.5$\%$ on TOSCA and 84.9$\%$ on SCAPE at geodesic error 0.
Posterior Matching for Arbitrary Conditioning
Authors: Ryan Strauss, Junier B Oliva
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Arbitrary conditioning is an important problem in unsupervised learning, where we seek to model the conditional densities $p(\mathbf{x}_u \mid \mathbf{x}_o)$ that underly some data, for all possible non-intersecting subsets $o, u \subset \{1, \dots , d\}$. However, the vast majority of density estimation only focuses on modeling the joint distribution $p(\mathbf{x})$, in which important conditional dependencies between features are opaque. We propose a simple and general framework, coined Posterior Matching, that enables Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) to perform arbitrary conditioning, without modification to the VAE itself. Posterior Matching applies to the numerous existing VAE-based approaches to joint density estimation, thereby circumventing the specialized models required by previous approaches to arbitrary conditioning. We find that Posterior Matching is comparable or superior to current state-of-the-art methods for a variety of tasks with an assortment of VAEs (e.g.~discrete, hierarchical, VaDE).
CARD: Classification and Regression Diffusion Models
Authors: Xizewen Han, Huangjie Zheng, Mingyuan Zhou
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Learning the distribution of a continuous or categorical response variable y given its covariates x is a fundamental problem in statistics and machine learning. Deep neural network-based supervised learning algorithms have made great progress in predicting the mean of y given x, but they are often criticized for their ability to accurately capture the uncertainty of their predictions. In this paper, we introduce classification and regression diffusion (CARD) models, which combine a denoising diffusion-based conditional generative model and a pre-trained conditional mean estimator, to accurately predict the distribution of y given x.  We demonstrate the outstanding ability of CARD in conditional distribution prediction with both toy examples and real-world datasets, the experimental results on which show that CARD, in general, outperforms state-of-the-art methods, including Bayesian neural network-based one, designed for uncertainty estimation, especially when the conditional distribution of y given x is multi-modal. In addition, we utilize the stochastic nature of the generative model outputs to obtain a finer granularity in model confidence assessment at the instance level for classification tasks.
What Can the Neural Tangent Kernel Tell Us About Adversarial Robustness?
Authors: Nikolaos Tsilivis, Julia Kempe
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: The adversarial vulnerability of neural nets, and subsequent techniques to create robust models have attracted significant attention; yet we still lack a full understanding of this phenomenon. Here, we study adversarial examples of trained neural networks through analytical tools afforded by recent theory advances connecting neural networks and kernel methods, namely the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK), following a growing body of work that leverages the NTK approximation to successfully analyze important deep learning phenomena and design algorithms for new applications. We show how NTKs allow to generate adversarial examples in a training-free'' fashion, and demonstrate that they transfer to fool their finite-width neural net counterparts in thelazy'' regime. We leverage this connection to provide an alternative view on robust and non-robust features, which have been suggested to underlie the adversarial brittleness of neural nets. Specifically, we define and study features induced by the eigendecomposition of the kernel to better understand the role of robust and non-robust features, the reliance on both for standard classification and the robustness-accuracy trade-off. We find that such features are surprisingly consistent across architectures, and that robust features tend to correspond to the largest eigenvalues of the model, and thus are learned early during training. Our framework allows us to identify and visualize non-robust yet useful features. Finally, we shed light on the robustness mechanism underlying adversarial training of neural nets used in practice: quantifying the evolution of the associated empirical NTK, we demonstrate that its dynamics falls much earlier into the ``lazy'' regime and manifests a much stronger form of the well known bias to prioritize learning features within the top eigenspaces of the kernel, compared to standard training.
Benefits of Permutation-Equivariance in Auction Mechanisms
Authors: Tian Qin, Fengxiang He, Dingfeng Shi, Wenbing Huang, Dacheng Tao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Designing an incentive-compatible auction mechanism that maximizes the auctioneer's revenue while minimizes the bidders’ ex-post regret is an important yet intricate problem in economics. Remarkable progress has been achieved through learning the optimal auction mechanism by neural networks. In this paper, we consider the popular additive valuation and symmetric valuation setting; i.e., the valuation for a set of items is defined as the sum of all items’ valuations in the set, and the valuation distribution is invariant when the bidders and/or the items are permutated. We prove that permutation-equivariant neural networks have significant advantages: the permutation-equivariance decreases the expected ex-post regret, improves the model generalizability, while maintains the expected revenue invariant. This implies that the permutation-equivariance helps approach the theoretically optimal dominant strategy incentive compatible condition, and reduces the required sample complexity for desired generalization. Extensive experiments fully support our theory. To our best knowledge, this is the first work towards understanding the benefits of permutation-equivariance in auction mechanisms.
MoCoDA: Model-based Counterfactual Data Augmentation
Authors: Silviu Pitis, Elliot Creager, Ajay Mandlekar, Animesh Garg
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: The number of states in a dynamic process is exponential in the number of objects, making  reinforcement learning (RL) difficult in complex, multi-object domains. For agents to scale to the real world, they will need to react to and reason about unseen combinations of objects. We argue that the ability to recognize and use local factorization in transition dynamics is a key element in unlocking the power of multi-object reasoning. To this end, we show that (1) known local structure in the environment transitions is sufficient for an exponential reduction in the sample complexity of training a dynamics model, and (2) a locally factored dynamics model provably generalizes out-of-distribution to unseen states and actions. Knowing the local structure also allows us to predict which unseen states and actions this dynamics model will generalize to. We propose to leverage these observations in a novel Model-based Counterfactual Data Augmentation (MoCoDA) framework. MoCoDA applies a learned locally factored dynamics model to an augmented distribution of states and actions to generate counterfactual transitions for RL. MoCoDA works with a broader set of local structures than prior work and allows for direct control over the augmented training distribution. We show that MoCoDA enables RL agents to learn policies that generalize to unseen states and actions. We use MoCoDA to train an offline RL agent to solve an out-of-distribution robotics manipulation task on which standard offline RL algorithms fail.