mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
AUDIT: Audio Editing by Following Instructions with Latent Diffusion Models
Authors: Yuancheng Wang, Zeqian Ju, Xu Tan, Lei He, Zhizheng Wu, Jiang Bian, sheng zhao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Audio editing is applicable for various purposes, such as adding background sound effects, replacing a musical instrument, and repairing damaged audio. Recently, some diffusion-based methods achieved zero-shot audio editing by using a diffusion and denoising process conditioned on the text description of the output audio. However, these methods still have some problems: 1) they have not been trained on editing tasks and cannot ensure good editing effects; 2) they can erroneously modify audio segments that do not require editing; 3) they need a complete description of the output audio, which is not always available or necessary in practical scenarios. In this work, we propose AUDIT, an instruction-guided audio editing model based on latent diffusion models. Specifically, \textbf{AUDIT} has three main design features: 1) we construct triplet training data (instruction, input audio, output audio) for different audio editing tasks and train a diffusion model using instruction and input (to be edited) audio as conditions and generating output (edited) audio; 2) it can automatically learn to only modify segments that need to be edited by comparing the difference between the input and output audio; 3) it only needs edit instructions instead of full target audio descriptions as text input. AUDIT achieves state-of-the-art results in both objective and subjective metrics for several audio editing tasks (e.g., adding, dropping, replacement, inpainting, super-resolution). Demo samples are available at https://audit-demopage.github.io/.
An Optimization-based Approach To Node Role Discovery in Networks: Approximating Equitable Partitions
Authors: Michael Scholkemper, Michael T Schaub
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Similar to community detection, partitioning the nodes of a complex network according to their structural roles aims to identify fundamental building blocks of a network, which can be used, e.g., to find simplified descriptions of the network connectivity, to derive reduced order models for dynamical processes unfolding on processes, or as ingredients for various network analysis and graph mining tasks. In this work, we offer a fresh look on the problem of role extraction and its differences to community detection and present a definition of node roles and two associated optimization problems (cost functions) grounded in ideas related to graph-isomorphism tests, the Weisfeiler-Leman algorithm and equitable partitions. We present theoretical guarantees and validate our approach via a novel “role-infused partition benchmark”, a network model from which we can sample networks in which nodes are endowed with different roles in a stochastic way.
Robust Model Reasoning and Fitting via Dual Sparsity Pursuit
Authors: Xingyu Jiang, Jiayi Ma
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: In this paper, we contribute to solving a threefold problem: outlier rejection, true model reasoning and parameter estimation with a unified optimization modeling. To this end, we first pose this task as a sparse subspace recovering problem, to search a maximum of independent bases under an over-embedded data space. Then we convert the objective into a continuous optimization paradigm that estimates sparse solutions for both bases and errors. Wherein a fast and robust solver is proposed to accurately estimate the sparse subspace parameters and error entries, which is implemented by a proximal approximation method under the alternating optimization framework with the ``optimal'' sub-gradient descent. Extensive experiments regarding known and unknown model fitting on synthetic and challenging real datasets have demonstrated the superiority of our method against the state-of-the-art. We also apply our method to multi-class multi-model fitting and loop closure detection, and achieve promising results both in accuracy and efficiency. Code is released at: https://github.com/StaRainJ/DSP.
Evaluating the Robustness of Interpretability Methods through Explanation Invariance and Equivariance
Authors: Jonathan Crabbé, Mihaela van der Schaar
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Interpretability methods are valuable only if their explanations faithfully describe the explained model. In this work, we consider neural networks whose predictions are invariant under a specific symmetry group. This includes popular architectures, ranging from convolutional to graph neural networks. Any explanation that faithfully explains this type of model needs to be in agreement with this invariance property. We formalize this intuition through the notion of explanation invariance and equivariance by leveraging the formalism from geometric deep learning. Through this rigorous formalism, we derive (1) two metrics to measure the robustness of any interpretability method with respect to the model symmetry group; (2) theoretical robustness guarantees for some popular interpretability methods and (3) a systematic approach to increase the invariance of any interpretability method with respect to a symmetry group. By empirically measuring our metrics for explanations of models associated with various modalities and symmetry groups, we derive a set of 5 guidelines to allow users and developers of interpretability methods to produce robust explanations.
Back-Modality: Leveraging Modal Transformation for Data Augmentation
Authors: Zhi Li, Yifan Liu, Yin Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We introduce Back-Modality, a novel data augmentation schema predicated on modal transformation. Data from an initial modality undergoes transformation to an intermediate modality, followed by a reverse transformation. This framework serves dual roles. On one hand, it operates as a general data augmentation strategy. On the other hand, it allows for other augmentation techniques, suitable for the intermediate modality, to enhance the initial modality. For instance, data augmentation methods applicable to pure text can be employed to augment images, thereby facilitating the cross-modality of data augmentation techniques. To validate the viability and efficacy of our framework, we proffer three instantiations of Back-Modality: back-captioning, back-imagination, and back-speech. Comprehensive evaluations across tasks such as image classification, sentiment classification, and textual entailment demonstrate that our methods consistently enhance performance under data-scarce circumstances.
Gradient-Based Feature Learning under Structured Data
Authors: Alireza Mousavi-Hosseini, Denny Wu, Taiji Suzuki, Murat A Erdogdu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Recent works have demonstrated that the sample complexity of gradient-based learning of single index models, i.e. functions that depend on a 1-dimensional projection of the input data, is governed by their information exponent. However, these results are only concerned with isotropic data, while in practice the input often contains additional structure which can implicitly guide the algorithm. In this work, we investigate the effect of a spiked covariance structure and reveal several interesting phenomena. First, we show that in the anisotropic setting, the commonly used spherical gradient dynamics may fail to recover the true direction, even when the spike is perfectly aligned with the target direction. Next, we show that appropriate weight normalization that is reminiscent of batch normalization can alleviate this issue. Further, by exploiting the alignment between the (spiked) input covariance and the target, we obtain improved sample complexity compared to the isotropic case. In particular, under the spiked model with a suitably large spike, the sample complexity of gradient-based training can be made independent of the information exponent while also outperforming lower bounds for rotationally invariant kernel methods.
Does Invariant Graph Learning via Environment Augmentation Learn Invariance?
Authors: Yongqiang Chen, Yatao Bian, Kaiwen Zhou, Binghui Xie, Bo Han, James Cheng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Invariant graph representation learning aims to learn the invariance among data from different environments for out-of-distribution generalization on graphs. As the graph environment partitions are usually expensive to obtain, augmenting the environment information has become the de facto approach. However, the usefulness of the augmented environment information has never been verified. In this work, we find that it is fundamentally impossible to learn invariant graph representations via environment augmentation without additional assumptions. Therefore, we develop a set of minimal assumptions, including variation sufficiency and variation consistency, for feasible invariant graph learning. We then propose a new framework Graph invAriant Learning Assistant (GALA). GALA incorporates an assistant model that needs to be sensitive to graph environment changes or distribution shifts. The correctness of the proxy predictions by the assistant model hence can differentiate the variations in spurious subgraphs. We show that extracting the maximally invariant subgraph to the proxy predictions provably identifies the underlying invariant subgraph for successful OOD generalization under the established minimal assumptions. Extensive experiments on datasets including DrugOOD with various graph distribution shifts confirm the effectiveness of GALA.
Mitigating Test-Time Bias for Fair Image Retrieval
Authors: Fanjie Kong, Shuai Yuan, Weituo Hao, Ricardo Henao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We address the challenge of generating fair and unbiased image retrieval results given neutral textual queries (with no explicit gender or race connotations), while maintaining the utility (performance) of the underlying vision-language (VL) model. Previous methods aim to disentangle learned representations of images and text queries from gender and racial characteristics. However, we show these are inadequate at alleviating bias for the desired equal representation result, as there usually exists test-time bias in the target retrieval set. So motivated, we introduce a straightforward technique, Post-hoc Bias Mitigation (PBM), that post-processes the outputs from the pre-trained vision-language model. We evaluate our algorithm on real-world image search datasets, Occupation 1 and 2, as well as two large-scale image-text datasets, MS-COCO and Flickr30k. Our approach achieves the lowest bias, compared with various existing bias-mitigation methods, in text-based image retrieval result while maintaining satisfactory retrieval performance. The source code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/timqqt/FairTextbasedImageRetrieval}.
Lower Bounds on Adaptive Sensing for Matrix Recovery
Authors: Praneeth Kacham, David Woodruff
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We study lower bounds on adaptive sensing algorithms for recovering low rank matrices using linear measurements. Given an $n \times n$ matrix $A$, a general linear measurement $S(A)$, for an $n \times n$ matrix $S$, is just the inner product of $S$ and $A$, each treated as $n^2$-dimensional vectors. By performing as few linear measurements as possible on a rank-$r$ matrix $A$, we hope to construct a matrix $\hat{A}$ that satisfies $|A - \hat{A}|\_F^2 \le c |A|\_F^2$, for a small constant $c$. Here $|A|\_F$ denotes the Frobenius norm $(\sum_{i,j} A_{i,j}^2)^{1/2}$. It is commonly assumed that when measuring $A$ with $S$, the response is corrupted with an independent Gaussian random variable of mean $0$ and variance $\sigma^2$. Candès and Plan (IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory 2011) study non-adaptive algorithms for low rank matrix recovery using random linear measurements. They use the restricted isometry property (RIP) of Random Gaussian Matrices to give tractable algorithms to estimate $A$ from the measurements.At the edge of the noise level where recovery is information-theoretically feasible, it is known that their non-adaptive algorithms need to perform $\Omega(n^2)$ measurements, which amounts to reading the entire matrix. An important question is whether adaptivity helps in decreasing the overall number of measurements. While for the related problem of sparse recovery, adaptive algorithms have been extensively studied, as far as we are aware adaptive algorithms and lower bounds on them seem largely unexplored for matrix recovery. We show that any adaptive algorithm that uses $k$ linear measurements in each round and outputs an approximation as in (1) with probability $\ge 9/10$ must run for $t = \Omega(\log(n^2/k)/\log\log n)$ rounds. Our lower bound shows that any adaptive algorithm which uses $n^{2-\beta}$ ($\beta > 0$ is arbitrary constant) linear measurements in each round must run for $\Omega(\log n/\log\log n)$ rounds. Our techniques also readily extend to obtain lower bounds on adaptive algorithms for tensor recovery. Our hard distribution also allows us to give a measurement-vs-rounds trade-off for many sensing problems in numerical linear algebra, such as spectral norm low rank approximation, Frobenius norm low rank approximation, singular vector approximation, and more.
Transient Neural Radiance Fields for Lidar View Synthesis and 3D Reconstruction
Authors: Anagh Malik, Parsa Mirdehghan, Sotiris Nousias, Kyros Kutulakos, David Lindell
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Neural radiance fields (NeRFs) have become a ubiquitous tool for modeling scene appearance and geometry from multiview imagery. Recent work has also begun to explore how to use additional supervision from lidar or depth sensor measurements in the NeRF framework. However, previous lidar-supervised NeRFs focus on rendering conventional camera imagery and use lidar-derived point cloud data as auxiliary supervision; thus, they fail to incorporate the underlying image formation model of the lidar. Here, we propose a novel method for rendering transient NeRFs that take as input the raw, time-resolved photon count histograms measured by a single-photon lidar system, and we seek to render such histograms from novel views. Different from conventional NeRFs, the approach relies on a time-resolved version of the volume rendering equation to render the lidar measurements and capture transient light transport phenomena at picosecond timescales. We evaluate our method on a first-of-its-kind dataset of simulated and captured transient multiview scans from a prototype single-photon lidar. Overall, our work brings NeRFs to a new dimension of imaging at transient timescales, newly enabling rendering of transient imagery from novel views. Additionally, we show that our approach recovers improved geometry and conventional appearance compared to point cloud-based supervision when training on few input viewpoints. Transient NeRFs may be especially useful for applications which seek to simulate raw lidar measurements for downstream tasks in autonomous driving, robotics, and remote sensing.
An Exploration-by-Optimization Approach to Best of Both Worlds in Linear Bandits
Authors: Shinji Ito, Kei Takemura
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: In this paper, we consider how to construct best-of-both-worlds linear bandit algorithms that achieve nearly optimal performance for both stochastic and adversarial environments.  For this purpose, we show that a natural approach referred to as exploration by optimization [Lattimore and Szepesvári, 2020] works well. Specifically, an algorithm constructed using this approach achieves $O(d \sqrt{ T \log{T}})$-regret in adversarial environments and $O(\frac{d^2 \log T}{\Delta_{\min}} )$-regret in stochastic environments.  Symbols $d$, $T$ and $\Delta_{\min}$ here represent the dimensionality of the action set, the time horizon, and the minimum sub-optimality gap, respectively.  We also show that this algorithm has even better theoretical guarantees for important special cases including the multi-armed bandit problem and multitask bandits.
The expressive power of pooling in Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Filippo Maria Bianchi, Veronica Lachi
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: In Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), hierarchical pooling operators generate local summaries of the data by coarsening the graph structure and the vertex features. Considerable attention has been devoted to analyzing the expressive power of message-passing (MP) layers in GNNs, while a study on how graph pooling affects the expressiveness of a GNN is still lacking. Additionally, despite the recent advances in the design of pooling operators, there is not a principled criterion to compare them. In this work, we derive sufficient conditions for a pooling operator to fully preserve the expressive power of the MP layers before it. These conditions serve as a universal and theoretically-grounded criterion for choosing among existing pooling operators or designing new ones. Based on our theoretical findings, we analyze several existing pooling operators and identify those that fail to satisfy the expressiveness conditions. Finally, we introduce an experimental setup to verify empirically the expressive power of a GNN equipped with pooling layers, in terms of its capability to perform a graph isomorphism test.
Cal-DETR: Calibrated Detection Transformer
Authors: Muhammad Akhtar Munir, Salman H Khan, Muhammad Haris Khan, Mohsen Ali, Fahad Shahbaz Khan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Albeit revealing impressive predictive performance for several computer vision tasks, deep neural networks (DNNs) are prone to making overconfident predictions. This limits the adoption and wider utilization of DNNs in many safety-critical applications. There have been recent efforts toward calibrating DNNs, however, almost all of them focus on the classification task. Surprisingly, very little attention has been devoted to calibrating modern DNN-based object detectors, especially detection transformers, which have recently demonstrated promising detection performance and are influential in many decision-making systems. In this work, we address the problem by proposing a mechanism for calibrated detection transformers (Cal-DETR), particularly for Deformable-DETR, UP-DETR, and DINO. We pursue the train-time calibration route and make the following contributions. First, we propose a simple yet effective approach for quantifying uncertainty in transformer-based object detectors. Second, we develop an uncertainty-guided logit modulation mechanism that leverages the uncertainty to modulate the class logits. Third, we develop a logit mixing approach that acts as a regularizer with detection-specific losses and is also complementary to the uncertainty-guided logit modulation technique to further improve the calibration performance. Lastly, we conduct extensive experiments across three in-domain and four out-domain scenarios. Results corroborate the effectiveness of Cal-DETR against the competing train-time methods in calibrating both in-domain and out-domain detections while maintaining or even improving the detection performance. Our codebase and pre-trained models can be accessed at \url{https://github.com/akhtarvision/cal-detr}.
Trajectory Alignment: Understanding the Edge of Stability Phenomenon via Bifurcation Theory
Authors: Minhak Song, Chulhee Yun
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Cohen et al. (2021) empirically study the evolution of the largest eigenvalue of the loss Hessian, also known as sharpness, along the gradient descent (GD) trajectory and observe the Edge of Stability (EoS) phenomenon. The sharpness increases at the early phase of training (referred to as progressive sharpening), and eventually saturates close to the threshold of $2 / \text{(step size)}$. In this paper, we start by demonstrating through empirical studies that when the EoS phenomenon occurs, different GD trajectories (after a proper reparameterization) align on a specific bifurcation diagram independent of initialization. We then rigorously prove this trajectory alignment phenomenon for a two-layer fully-connected linear network and a single-neuron nonlinear network trained with a single data point. Our trajectory alignment analysis establishes both progressive sharpening and EoS phenomena, encompassing and extending recent findings in the literature.
OBELICS: An Open Web-Scale Filtered Dataset of Interleaved Image-Text Documents
Authors: Hugo Laurençon, Lucile Saulnier, Leo Tronchon, Stas Bekman, Amanpreet Singh, Anton Lozhkov, Thomas Wang, Siddharth Karamcheti, Alexander Rush, Douwe Kiela, Matthieu Cord, Victor Sanh
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2023

Abstract: Large multimodal models trained on natural documents, which interleave images and text, outperform models trained on image-text pairs on various multimodal benchmarks. However, the datasets used to train these models have not been released, and the collection process has not been fully specified.  We introduce the OBELICS dataset, an open web-scale filtered dataset of interleaved image-text documents comprising 141 million web pages extracted from Common Crawl, 353 million associated images, and 115 billion text tokens. We describe the dataset creation process, present comprehensive filtering rules, and provide an analysis of the dataset's content. To show the viability of OBELICS, we train on the dataset vision and language models of 9 and 80 billion parameters, IDEFICS-9B and IDEFICS, and obtain competitive performance on different multimodal benchmarks. We release our dataset, models and code.
ID and OOD Performance Are Sometimes Inversely Correlated on Real-world Datasets
Authors: Damien Teney, Yong Lin, Seong Joon Oh, Ehsan Abbasnejad
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Several studies have compared the in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) performance of models in computer vision and NLP. They report a frequent positive correlation and some surprisingly never even observe an inverse correlation indicative of a necessary trade-off. The possibility of inverse patterns is important to determine whether ID performance can serve as a proxy for OOD generalization capabilities.This paper shows that inverse correlations between ID and OOD performance do happen with multiple real-world datasets, not only in artificial worst-case settings. We explain theoretically how these cases arise and how past studies missed them because of improper methodologies that examined a biased selection of models.Our observations lead to recommendations that contradict those found in much of the current literature.- High OOD performance sometimes requires trading off ID performance.- Focusing on ID performance alone may not lead to optimal OOD performance. It may produce diminishing (eventually negative) returns in OOD performance.- In these cases, studies on OOD generalization that use ID performance for model selection (a common recommended practice) will necessarily miss the best-performing models, making these studies blind to a whole range of phenomena.
On Generalization Bounds for Projective Clustering
Authors: Maria Sofia Bucarelli, Matilde Larsen, Chris Schwiegelshohn, Mads Toftrup
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Given a set of points, clustering consists of finding a partition of a point set into $k$ clusters such that the center to which a point is assigned is as close as possible. Most commonly, centers are points themselves, which leads to the famous $k$-median and $k$-means objectives. One may also choose centers to be $j$ dimensional subspaces, which gives rise to subspace clustering. In this paper, we consider learning bounds for these problems. That is, given a set of $n$ samples $P$ drawn independently from some unknown, but fixed distribution $\mathcal{D}$, how quickly does a solution computed on $P$ converge to the optimal clustering of $\mathcal{D}$?We give several near optimal results. In particular, 1. For center-based objectives, we show a convergence rate of $\tilde{O}\left(\sqrt{{k}/{n}}\right)$. This matches the known optimal bounds of [Fefferman, Mitter, and Narayanan, Journal of the Mathematical Society 2016] and [Bartlett, Linder, and Lugosi, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 1998] for $k$-means and extends it to other important objectives such as $k$-median. 2. For subspace clustering with $j$-dimensional subspaces, we show a convergence rate of $\tilde{O}\left(\sqrt{{(kj^2)}/{n}}\right)$. These are the first provable bounds for most of these problems. For the specific case of projective clustering, which generalizes $k$-means, we show a converge rate of $\Omega\left(\sqrt{{(kj)}/{n}}\right)$ is necessary, thereby proving that the bounds from [Fefferman, Mitter, and Narayanan, Journal of the Mathematical Society 2016] are essentially optimal.
Emergence of Shape Bias in Convolutional Neural Networks through Activation Sparsity
Authors: Tianqin Li, Ziqi Wen, Yangfan Li, Tai Sing Lee
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Current deep-learning models for object recognition are known to be heavily biased toward texture. In contrast, human visual systems are known to be biased toward shape and structure. What could be the design principles in human visual systems that led to this difference? How could we introduce more shape bias into the deep learning models? In this paper, we report that sparse coding, a ubiquitous principle in the brain,  can in itself introduce shape bias into the network. We found that enforcing the sparse coding constraint using a non-differential Top-K operation  can lead to the emergence of structural encoding in neurons in convolutional neural networks,  resulting in a smooth decomposition of objects into parts and subparts and endowing the networks with shape bias.  We demonstrated this emergence of shape bias and its functional benefits for different network structures with various datasets. For object recognition convolutional neural networks, the shape bias leads to greater robustness against style and pattern change distraction. For the image synthesis generative adversary networks,  the emerged shape bias leads to more coherent and decomposable structures in the synthesized images. Ablation studies suggest that sparse codes tend to encode structures, whereas the more distributed codes tend to favor texture. Our code is host at the github repository: https://topk-shape-bias.github.io/
Resilient Constrained Learning
Authors: Ignacio Hounie, Alejandro Ribeiro, Luiz F. O. Chamon
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: When deploying machine learning solutions, they must satisfy multiple requirements beyond accuracy, such as fairness, robustness, or safety. These requirements are imposed during training either implicitly, using penalties, or explicitly, using constrained optimization methods based on Lagrangian duality. Either way, specifying requirements is hindered by the presence of compromises and limited prior knowledge about the data. Furthermore, their impact on performance can often only be evaluated by actually solving the learning problem. This paper presents a constrained learning approach that adapts the requirements while simultaneously solving the learning task. To do so, it relaxes the learning constraints in a way that contemplates how much they affect the task at hand by balancing the performance gains obtained from the relaxation against a user-defined cost of that relaxation. We call this approach resilient constrained learning after the term used to describe ecological systems that adapt to disruptions by modifying their operation. We show conditions under which this balance can be achieved and introduce a practical algorithm to compute it, for which we derive approximation and generalization guarantees. We showcase the advantages of this resilient learning method in image classification tasks involving multiple potential invariances and in federated learning under distribution shift.
Recovering Simultaneously Structured Data via Non-Convex Iteratively Reweighted Least Squares
Authors: Christian Kümmerle, Johannes Maly
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We propose a new algorithm for the problem of recovering data that adheres to multiple, heterogenous low-dimensional structures from linear observations. Focussing on data matrices that are simultaneously row-sparse and low-rank, we propose and analyze an iteratively reweighted least squares (IRLS) algorithm that is able to leverage both structures. In particular, it optimizes a combination of non-convex surrogates for row-sparsity and rank, a balancing of which is built into the algorithm. We prove locally quadratic convergence of the iterates to a simultaneously structured data matrix in a regime of minimal sample complexity (up to constants and a logarithmic factor), which is known to be impossible for a combination of convex surrogates. In experiments, we show that the IRLS method exhibits favorable empirical convergence, identifying simultaneously row-sparse and low-rank matrices from fewer measurements than state-of-the-art methods.
Error Bounds for Learning with Vector-Valued Random Features
Authors: Samuel Lanthaler, Nicholas H. Nelsen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: This paper provides a comprehensive error analysis of learning with vector-valued random features (RF). The theory is developed for RF ridge regression in a fully general infinite-dimensional input-output setting, but nonetheless applies to and improves existing finite-dimensional analyses. In contrast to comparable work in the literature, the approach proposed here relies on a direct analysis of the underlying risk functional and completely avoids the explicit RF ridge regression solution formula in terms of random matrices. This removes the need for concentration results in random matrix theory or their generalizations to random operators. The main results established in this paper include strong consistency of vector-valued RF estimators under model misspecification and minimax optimal convergence rates in the well-specified setting. The parameter complexity (number of random features) and sample complexity (number of labeled data) required to achieve such rates are comparable with Monte Carlo intuition and free from logarithmic factors.
CoDA: Collaborative Novel Box Discovery and Cross-modal Alignment for Open-vocabulary 3D Object Detection
Authors: Yang Cao, Zeng Yihan, Hang Xu, Dan Xu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Open-vocabulary 3D Object Detection (OV-3DDet) aims to detect objects from an arbitrary list of categories within a 3D scene, which remains seldom explored in the literature. There are primarily two fundamental problems in OV-3DDet, i.e., localizing and classifying novel objects. This paper aims at addressing the two problems simultaneously via a unified framework, under the condition of limited base categories. To localize novel 3D objects, we propose an effective 3D Novel Object Discovery strategy, which utilizes both the 3D box geometry priors and 2D semantic open-vocabulary priors to generate pseudo box labels of the novel objects. To classify novel object boxes, we further develop a cross-modal alignment module based on discovered novel boxes, to align feature spaces between 3D pointcloud and image/text modalities. Specifically, the alignment process contains a class-agnostic and a class-discriminative alignment, incorporating not only the base objects with annotations but also the increasingly discovered novel objects, resulting in an iteratively enhanced alignment. The novel box discovery and crossmodal alignment are jointly learned to collaboratively benefit each other. Thenovel object discovery can directly impact the cross-modal alignment, while a better feature alignment can, in turn, boost the localization capability, leading to a unified OV-3DDet framework, named CoDA, for simultaneous novel object localization and classification. Extensive experiments on two challenging datasets (i.e., SUN-RGBD and ScanNet) demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and also show a significant mAP improvement upon the best-performing alternative method by 80%. Codes and pre-trained models are released on the project page.
Don’t blame Dataset Shift! Shortcut Learning due to Gradients and Cross Entropy
Authors: Aahlad Puli, Lily Zhang, Yoav Wald, Rajesh Ranganath
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Common explanations for shortcut learning assume that the shortcut improves prediction only under the training distribution. Thus, models trained in the typical way by minimizing log-loss using gradient descent, which we call default-ERM, should utilize the shortcut. However, even when the stable feature determines the label in the training distribution and the shortcut does not provide any additional information, like in perception tasks, default-ERM exhibits shortcut learning. Why are such solutions preferred when the loss can be driven to zero when using the stable feature alone? By studying a linear perception task, we show that default-ERM’s preference for maximizing the margin, even without overparameterization, leads to models that depend more on the shortcut than the stable feature. This insight suggests that default-ERM’s implicit inductive bias towards max-margin may be unsuitable for perception tasks. Instead, we consider inductive biases toward uniform margins. We show that uniform margins guarantee sole dependence on the perfect stable feature in the linear perception task and suggest alternative loss functions, termed margin control (MARG-CTRL), that encourage uniform-margin solutions. MARG-CTRL techniques mitigate shortcut learning on a variety of vision and language tasks, showing that changing inductive biases can remove the need for complicated shortcut-mitigating methods in perception tasks.
Scan and Snap: Understanding Training Dynamics and Token Composition in 1-layer Transformer
Authors: Yuandong Tian, Yiping Wang, Beidi Chen, Simon S Du
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Transformer architecture has shown impressive performance in multiple research domains and has become the backbone of many neural network models. However, there is limited understanding on how it works. In particular, with a simple predictive loss,  how the representation emerges from the gradient \emph{training dynamics} remains a mystery. In this paper, for 1-layer transformer with one self-attention layer plus one decoder layer, we analyze its SGD training dynamics for the task of next token prediction in a mathematically rigorous manner. We open the black box of the dynamic process of how the self-attention layer combines input tokens, and reveal the nature of underlying inductive bias. More specifically, with the assumption (a) no positional encoding, (b) long input sequence, and (c) the decoder layer learns faster than the self-attention layer, we prove that self-attention acts as a \emph{discriminative scanning algorithm}:  starting from uniform attention, it gradually attends more to distinct key tokens for a specific next token to be predicted, and pays less attention to common key tokens that occur across different next tokens. Among distinct tokens, it progressively drops attention weights, following the order of low to high co-occurrence between the key and the query token in the training set. Interestingly, this procedure does not lead to winner-takes-all, but stops due to a \emph{phase transition} that is controllable by the learning rate of the decoder layer, leaving (almost) fixed token combination. We verify this \textbf{\emph{scan and snap}} dynamics on synthetic and real-world data (WikiText-103).
Stein $\Pi$-Importance Sampling
Authors: Congye Wang, Ye Chen, Heishiro Kanagawa, Chris J Oates
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Stein discrepancies have emerged as a powerful tool for retrospective improvement of Markov chain Monte Carlo output.  However, the question of how to design Markov chains that are well-suited to such post-processing has yet to be addressed.  This paper studies Stein importance sampling, in which weights are assigned to the states visited by a $\Pi$-invariant Markov chain to obtain a consistent approximation of $P$, the intended target.  Surprisingly, the optimal choice of $\Pi$ is not identical to the target $P$; we therefore propose an explicit construction for $\Pi$ based on a novel variational argument.  Explicit conditions for convergence of Stein $\Pi$-Importance Sampling are established.  For $\approx 70$% of tasks in the PosteriorDB benchmark, a significant improvement over the analogous post-processing of $P$-invariant Markov chains is reported.
GPT4Tools: Teaching Large Language Model to Use Tools via Self-instruction
Authors: Rui Yang, Lin Song, Yanwei Li, Sijie Zhao, Yixiao Ge, Xiu Li, Ying Shan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: This paper aims to efficiently enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to use multi-modal tools.The advanced proprietary LLMs, such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, have shown great potential for tool usage through sophisticated prompt engineering.Nevertheless, these models typically rely on prohibitive computational costs and publicly inaccessible data.To address these challenges, we propose the GPT4Tools based on self-instruct to enable open-source LLMs, such as LLaMA and OPT, to use tools.It generates an instruction-following dataset by prompting an advanced teacher with various multi-modal contexts.By using the Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) optimization, our approach facilitates the open-source LLMs to solve a range of visual problems, including visual comprehension and image generation.Moreover, we provide a benchmark to evaluate the ability of LLMs to use tools, which is performed in both zero-shot and fine-tuning ways.Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on various language models, which not only significantly improves the accuracy of invoking seen tools, but also enables the zero-shot capacity for unseen tools.
Reinforcement Learning with Fast and Forgetful Memory
Authors: Steven Morad, Ryan Kortvelesy, Stephan Liwicki, Amanda Prorok
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Nearly all real world tasks are inherently partially observable, necessitating the use of memory in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Most model-free approaches summarize the trajectory into a latent Markov state using memory models borrowed from Supervised Learning (SL), even though RL tends to exhibit different training and efficiency characteristics. Addressing this discrepancy, we introduce Fast and Forgetful Memory, an algorithm-agnostic memory model designed specifically for RL. Our approach constrains the model search space via strong structural priors inspired by computational psychology. It is a drop-in replacement for recurrent neural networks (RNNs) in recurrent RL algorithms, achieving greater reward than RNNs across various recurrent benchmarks and algorithms without changing any hyperparameters. Moreover, Fast and Forgetful Memory exhibits training speeds two orders of magnitude faster than RNNs, attributed to its logarithmic time and linear space complexity. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/proroklab/ffm.
Systematic Visual Reasoning through Object-Centric Relational Abstraction
Authors: Taylor Webb, Shanka Subhra Mondal, Jonathan D Cohen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Human visual reasoning is characterized by an ability to identify abstract patterns from only a small number of examples, and to systematically generalize those patterns to novel inputs. This capacity depends in large part on our ability to represent complex visual inputs in terms of both objects and relations. Recent work in computer vision has introduced models with the capacity to extract object-centric representations, leading to the ability to process multi-object visual inputs, but falling short of the systematic generalization displayed by human reasoning. Other recent models have employed inductive biases for relational abstraction to achieve systematic generalization of learned abstract rules, but have generally assumed the presence of object-focused inputs. Here, we combine these two approaches, introducing Object-Centric Relational Abstraction (OCRA), a model that extracts explicit representations of both objects and abstract relations, and achieves strong systematic generalization in tasks (including a novel dataset, CLEVR-ART, with greater visual complexity) involving complex visual displays.
In-Context Impersonation Reveals Large Language Models' Strengths and Biases
Authors: Leonard Salewski, Stephan Alaniz, Isabel Rio-Torto, Eric Schulz, Zeynep Akata
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: In everyday conversations, humans can take on different roles and adapt their vocabulary to their chosen roles. We explore whether LLMs can take on, that is impersonate, different roles when they generate text in-context. We ask LLMs to assume different personas before solving vision and language tasks. We do this by prefixing the prompt with a persona that is associated either with a social identity or domain expertise. In a multi-armed bandit task, we find that LLMs pretending to be children of different ages recover human-like developmental stages of exploration. In a language-based reasoning task, we find that LLMs impersonating domain experts perform better than LLMs impersonating non-domain experts. Finally, we test whether LLMs' impersonations are complementary to visual information when describing different categories. We find that impersonation can improve performance: an LLM prompted to be a bird expert describes birds better than one prompted to be a car expert. However, impersonation can also uncover LLMs' biases: an LLM prompted to be a man describes cars better than one prompted to be a woman. These findings demonstrate that LLMs are capable of taking on diverse roles and that this in-context impersonation can be used to uncover their strengths and hidden biases. Our code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/in-context-impersonation.
The s-value: evaluating stability with respect to distributional shifts
Authors: Suyash Gupta, Dominik Rothenhäusler
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Common statistical measures of uncertainty such as $p$-values and confidence intervals quantify the uncertainty due to sampling, that is, the uncertainty due to not observing the full population. However, sampling is not the only source of uncertainty. In practice, distributions change between locations and across time. This makes it difficult to gather knowledge that transfers across data sets. We propose a measure of instability that quantifies the distributional instability of a statistical parameter with respect to Kullback-Leibler divergence, that is, the sensitivity of the parameter under general distributional perturbations within a Kullback-Leibler divergence ball. In addition, we quantify the instability of parameters with respect to directional or variable-specific shifts. Measuring instability with respect to directional shifts can be used to detect under which kind of distribution shifts a statistical conclusion might be reversed. We discuss how such knowledge can inform data collection for transfer learning of statistical parameters under shifted distributions. We evaluate the performance of the proposed measure on real data and show that it can elucidate the distributional instability of a parameter with respect to certain shifts and can be used to improve estimation accuracy under shifted distributions.
When Does Optimizing a Proper Loss Yield Calibration?
Authors: Jaroslaw Blasiok, Parikshit Gopalan, Lunjia Hu, Preetum Nakkiran
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Optimizing proper loss functions is popularly believed to yield predictors with good calibration properties; the intuition being that for such losses, the global optimum is to predict the ground-truth probabilities, which is indeed calibrated. However, typical machine learning models are trained to approximately minimize loss over restricted families of predictors, that are unlikely to contain the ground truth. Under what circumstances does optimizing proper loss  over a restricted family yield calibrated models? What precise calibration guarantees does it give? In this work, we provide a rigorous answer to these questions. We replace the global optimality with a local optimality condition stipulating that the (proper) loss of the predictor cannot be reduced much by post-processing its predictions with a certain family of Lipschitz functions. We show that any predictor with this local optimality satisfies smooth calibration as defined in [Kakade and Foster, 2008, Błasiok et al., 2023]. Local optimality is plausibly satisfied by well-trained DNNs, which suggests an explanation for why they are calibrated from proper loss minimization alone. Finally, we show that the connection between local optimality and calibration error goes both ways: nearly calibrated predictors are also nearly locally optimal.