mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
On the Theoretical Properties of Noise Correlation in Stochastic Optimization
Authors: Aurelien Lucchi, Frank Proske, Antonio Orvieto, Francis R. Bach, Hans Kersting
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Studying the properties of stochastic noise to optimize complex non-convex functions has been an active area of research in the field of machine learning. Prior work~\citep{zhou2019pgd, wei2019noise} has shown that the noise of stochastic gradient descent improves optimization by overcoming undesirable obstacles in the landscape. Moreover, injecting artificial Gaussian noise has become a popular idea to quickly escape saddle points. Indeed, in the absence of reliable gradient information, the noise is used to explore the landscape, but it is unclear what type of noise is optimal in terms of exploration ability. In order to narrow this gap in our knowledge, we study a general type of continuous-time non-Markovian process, based on fractional Brownian motion, that allows for the increments of the process to be correlated. This generalizes processes based on Brownian motion, such as the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. We demonstrate how to discretize such processes which gives rise to the new algorithm ``fPGD''. This method is a generalization of the known algorithms PGD and Anti-PGD~\citep{orvieto2022anti}. We study the properties of fPGD both theoretically and empirically, demonstrating that it possesses  exploration abilities that, in some cases, are favorable over PGD and Anti-PGD. These results open the field to novel ways to exploit noise for training machine learning models.
Test-Time Prompt Tuning for Zero-Shot Generalization in Vision-Language Models
Authors: Manli Shu, Weili Nie, De-An Huang, Zhiding Yu, Tom Goldstein, Anima Anandkumar, Chaowei Xiao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Pre-trained vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) have shown promising zero-shot generalization in many downstream tasks with properly designed text prompts. Instead of relying on hand-engineered prompts, recent works learn prompts using the training data from downstream tasks. While effective, training on domain-specific data reduces a model's generalization capability to unseen new domains. In this work, we propose test-time prompt tuning (TPT), a method that can learn adaptive prompts on the fly with a single test sample. TPT optimizes the prompt by minimizing the entropy with confidence selection so that the model has consistent predictions across different augmented views of each test sample. In evaluating generalization to natural distribution shifts, TPT improves the zero-shot top-1 accuracy of CLIP by 3.6\% on average, surpassing previous prompt tuning approaches that require additional task-specific training data. In evaluating cross-dataset generalization with unseen categories, TPTperforms on par with the state-of-the-art approaches that use additional training data.
SemMAE: Semantic-Guided Masking for Learning Masked Autoencoders
Authors: Gang Li, Heliang Zheng, Daqing Liu, Chaoyue Wang, Bing Su, Changwen Zheng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Recently, significant progress has been made in masked image modeling to catch up to masked language modeling. However, unlike words in NLP, the lack of semantic decomposition of images still makes masked autoencoding (MAE) different between vision and language. In this paper, we explore a potential visual analogue of words, i.e., semantic parts, and we integrate semantic information into the training process of MAE by proposing a Semantic-Guided Masking strategy. Compared to widely adopted random masking, our masking strategy can gradually guide the network to learn various information, i.e., from intra-part patterns to inter-part relations. In particular, we achieve this in two steps. 1) Semantic part learning: we design a self-supervised part learning method to obtain semantic parts by leveraging and refining the multi-head attention of a ViT-based encoder. 2) Semantic-guided MAE (SemMAE) training: we design a masking strategy that varies from masking a portion of patches in each part to masking a portion of (whole) parts in an image. Extensive experiments on various vision tasks show that SemMAE can learn better image representation by integrating semantic information. In particular, SemMAE achieves 84.5% fine-tuning accuracy on ImageNet-1k, which outperforms the vanilla MAE by 1.4%. In the semantic segmentation and fine-grained recognition tasks, SemMAE also brings significant improvements and yields the state-of-the-art performance.
BiT: Robustly Binarized Multi-distilled Transformer
Authors: Zechun Liu, Barlas Oguz, Aasish Pappu, Lin Xiao, Scott Yih, Meng Li, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Yashar Mehdad
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Modern pre-trained transformers have rapidly advanced the state-of-the-art in machine learning, but have also grown in parameters and computational complexity, making them increasingly difficult to deploy in resource-constrained environments. Binarization of the weights and activations of the network can significantly alleviate these issues, however, is technically challenging from an optimization perspective. In this work, we identify a series of improvements that enables binary transformers at a much higher accuracy than what was possible previously. These include a two-set binarization scheme, a novel elastic binary activation function with learned parameters, and a method to quantize a network to its limit by successively distilling higher precision models into lower precision students. These approaches allow for the first time, fully binarized transformer models that are at a practical level of accuracy, approaching a full-precision BERT baseline on the GLUE language understanding benchmark within as little as 5.9%. Code and models are available at:https://github.com/facebookresearch/bit.
Perturbation Learning Based Anomaly Detection
Authors: Jinyu Cai, Jicong Fan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: This paper presents a simple yet effective method for anomaly detection. The main idea is to learn small perturbations to perturb normal data and learn a classifier to classify the normal data and the perturbed data into two different classes. The perturbator and classifier are jointly learned using deep neural networks. Importantly, the perturbations should be as small as possible but the classifier is still able to recognize the perturbed data from unperturbed data. Therefore, the perturbed data are regarded as abnormal data and the classifier provides a decision boundary between the normal data and abnormal data, although the training data do not include any abnormal data.Compared with the state-of-the-art of anomaly detection, our method does not require any assumption about the shape (e.g. hypersphere) of the decision boundary and has fewer hyper-parameters to determine. Empirical studies on benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness and superiority of our method.
Knowledge-Aware Bayesian Deep Topic Model
Authors: Dongsheng Wang, Yi.shi Xu, Miaoge Li, Zhibin Duan, Chaojie Wang, Bo Chen, Mingyuan Zhou
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We propose a Bayesian generative model for incorporating prior domain knowledge into hierarchical topic modeling. Although embedded topic models (ETMs) and its variants have gained promising performance in text analysis, they mainly focus on mining word co-occurrence patterns, ignoring potentially easy-to-obtain prior topic hierarchies that could help enhance topic coherence. While several knowledge-based topic models have recently been proposed, they are either only applicable to shallow hierarchies or sensitive to the quality of the provided prior knowledge. To this end, we develop a novel deep ETM that jointly models the documents and the given prior knowledge by embedding the words and topics into the same space. Guided by the provided domain knowledge, the proposed model tends to discover topic hierarchies that are organized into interpretable taxonomies. Moreover, with a technique for adapting a given graph, our extended version allows the structure of the prior knowledge to be fine-tuned to match the target corpus. Extensive experiments show that our proposed model efficiently integrates the prior knowledge and improves both hierarchical topic discovery and document representation.
SelecMix: Debiased Learning by Contradicting-pair Sampling
Authors: Inwoo Hwang, Sangjun Lee, Yunhyeok Kwak, Seong Joon Oh, Damien Teney, Jin-Hwa Kim, Byoung-Tak Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Neural networks trained with ERM (empirical risk minimization) sometimes learn unintended decision rules, in particular when their training data is biased, i.e., when training labels are strongly correlated with undesirable features. To prevent a network from learning such features, recent methods augment training data such that examples displaying spurious correlations (i.e., bias-aligned examples) become a minority, whereas the other, bias-conflicting examples become prevalent. However, these approaches are sometimes difficult to train and scale to real-world data because they rely on generative models or disentangled representations. We propose an alternative based on mixup, a popular augmentation that creates convex combinations of training examples. Our method, coined SelecMix, applies mixup to contradicting pairs of examples, defined as showing either (i) the same label but dissimilar biased features, or (ii) different labels but similar biased features. Identifying such pairs requires comparing examples with respect to unknown biased features. For this, we utilize an auxiliary contrastive model with the popular heuristic that biased features are learned preferentially during training. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the method, in particular when label noise complicates the identification of bias-conflicting examples.
Are all Frames Equal? Active Sparse Labeling for Video Action Detection
Authors: Aayush Rana, Yogesh Rawat
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Video action detection requires annotations at every frame, which drastically increases the labeling cost. In this work, we focus on efficient labeling of videos for action detection to minimize this cost. We propose active sparse labeling (ASL), a novel active learning strategy for video action detection. Sparse labeling will reduce the annotation cost but poses two main challenges; 1) how to estimate the utility of annotating a single frame for action detection as detection is performed at video level?, and 2) how these sparse labels can be used for action detection which require annotations on all the frames? This work attempts to address these challenges within a simple active learning framework. For the first challenge, we propose a novel frame-level scoring mechanism aimed at selecting most informative frames in a video. Next, we introduce a novel loss formulation which enables training of action detection model with these sparsely selected frames. We evaluate the proposed approach on two different action detection benchmark datasets, UCF-101-24 and J-HMDB-21, and observed that active sparse labeling can be very effective in saving annotation costs. We demonstrate that the proposed approach performs better than random selection, outperforming all other baselines, with performance comparable to supervised approach using merely 10% annotations.
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation using Depth Distribution
Authors: Quanliang Wu, Huajun Liu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed significant advancements made in the field of unsupervised domain adaptation for semantic segmentation. Depth information has been proved to be effective in building a bridge between synthetic datasets and real-world datasets. However, the existing methods may not pay enough attention to depth distribution in different categories, which makes it possible to use them for further improvement. Besides the existing methods that only use depth regression as an auxiliary task, we propose to use depth distribution density to support semantic segmentation. Therefore, considering the relationship among depth distribution density, depth and semantic segmentation, we also put forward a branch balance loss for these three subtasks in multi-task learning schemes. In addition, we also propose a spatial aggregation priors of pixels in different categories, which is used to refine the pseudo-labels for self-training, thus further improving the performance of the prediction model. Experiments on SYNTHIA-to-Cityscapes and SYNTHIA-to-Mapillary benchmarks show the effectiveness of our proposed method.
P2P: Tuning Pre-trained Image Models for Point Cloud Analysis with Point-to-Pixel Prompting
Authors: Ziyi Wang, Xumin Yu, Yongming Rao, Jie Zhou, Jiwen Lu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Nowadays, pre-training big models on large-scale datasets has become a crucial topic in deep learning. The pre-trained models with high representation ability and transferability achieve a great success and dominate many downstream tasks in natural language processing and 2D vision. However, it is non-trivial to promote such a pretraining-tuning paradigm to the 3D vision, given the limited training data that are relatively inconvenient to collect. In this paper, we provide a new perspective of leveraging pre-trained 2D knowledge in 3D domain to tackle this problem, tuning pre-trained image models with the novel Point-to-Pixel prompting for point cloud analysis at a minor parameter cost. Following the principle of prompting engineering, we transform point clouds into colorful images with geometry-preserved projection and geometry-aware coloring to adapt to pre-trained image models, whose weights are kept frozen during the end-to-end optimization of point cloud analysis tasks. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that cooperating with our proposed Point-to-Pixel Prompting, better pre-trained image model will lead to consistently better performance in 3D vision. Enjoying prosperous development from image pre-training field, our method attains 89.3% accuracy on the hardest setting of ScanObjectNN, surpassing conventional point cloud models with much fewer trainable parameters. Our framework also exhibits very competitive performance on ModelNet classification and ShapeNet Part Segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/wangzy22/P2P.
Finding Differences Between Transformers and ConvNets Using Counterfactual Simulation Testing
Authors: Nataniel Ruiz, Sarah Bargal, Cihang Xie, Kate Saenko, Stan Sclaroff
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Modern deep neural networks tend to be evaluated on static test sets. One shortcoming of this is the fact that these deep neural networks cannot be easily evaluated for robustness issues with respect to specific scene variations. For example, it is hard to study the robustness of these networks to variations of object scale, object pose, scene lighting and 3D occlusions. The main reason is that collecting real datasets with fine-grained naturalistic variations of sufficient scale can be extremely time-consuming and expensive. In this work, we present Counterfactual Simulation Testing, a counterfactual framework that allows us to study the robustness of neural networks with respect to some of these naturalistic variations by building realistic synthetic scenes that allow us to ask counterfactual questions to the models, ultimately providing answers to questions such as "Would your classification still be correct if the object were viewed from the top?" or "Would your classification still be correct if the object were partially occluded by another object?". Our method allows for a fair comparison of the robustness of recently released, state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Networks and Vision Transformers, with respect to these naturalistic variations. We find evidence that ConvNext is more robust to pose and scale variations than Swin, that ConvNext generalizes better to our simulated domain and that Swin handles partial occlusion better than ConvNext. We also find that robustness for all networks improves with network scale and with data scale and variety. We release the Naturalistic Variation Object Dataset (NVD), a large simulated dataset of 272k images of everyday objects with naturalistic variations such as object pose, scale, viewpoint, lighting and occlusions. Project page: https://counterfactualsimulation.github.io
In the Eye of the Beholder: Robust Prediction with Causal User Modeling
Authors: Amir Feder, Guy Horowitz, Yoav Wald, Roi Reichart, Nir Rosenfeld
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Accurately predicting the relevance of items to users is crucial to the success of many social platforms. Conventional approaches train models on logged historical data; but recommendation systems, media services, and online marketplaces all exhibit a constant influx of new content---making relevancy a moving target, to which standard predictive models are not robust. In this paper, we propose a learning framework for relevance prediction that is robust to changes in the data distribution. Our key observation is that robustness can be obtained by accounting for \emph{how users causally perceive the environment}. We model users as boundedly-rational decision makers whose causal beliefs are encoded by a causal graph, and show how minimal information regarding the graph can be used to contend with distributional changes. Experiments in multiple settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Variational inference via Wasserstein gradient flows
Authors: Marc Lambert, Sinho Chewi, Francis R. Bach, Silvère Bonnabel, Philippe Rigollet
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Along with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, variational inference (VI) has emerged as a central computational approach to large-scale Bayesian inference. Rather than sampling from the true posterior $\pi$, VI aims at producing a simple but effective approximation $\hat \pi$ to $\pi$ for which summary statistics are easy to compute. However, unlike the well-studied MCMC methodology, algorithmic guarantees for VI are still relatively less well-understood. In this work, we propose principled methods for VI, in which $\hat \pi$ is taken to be a Gaussian or a mixture of Gaussians, which rest upon the theory of gradient flows on the Bures--Wasserstein space of Gaussian measures. Akin to MCMC, it comes with strong theoretical guarantees when $\pi$ is log-concave.
projUNN: efficient method for training deep networks with unitary matrices
Authors: Bobak Kiani, Randall Balestriero, Yann LeCun, Seth Lloyd
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: In learning with recurrent or very deep feed-forward networks, employing unitary matrices in each layer can be very effective at maintaining long-range stability. However, restricting network parameters to be unitary typically comes at the cost of expensive parameterizations or increased training runtime. We propose instead an efficient method based on rank-$k$ updates -- or their rank-$k$ approximation -- that maintains performance at a nearly optimal training runtime. We introduce two variants of this method, named Direct (projUNN-D) and Tangent (projUNN-T) projected Unitary Neural Networks, that can parameterize full $N$-dimensional unitary or orthogonal matrices with a training runtime scaling as $O(kN^2)$. Our method either projects low-rank gradients onto the closest unitary matrix (projUNN-T) or transports unitary matrices in the direction of the low-rank gradient (projUNN-D). Even in the fastest setting ($k=1$), projUNN is able to train a model's unitary parameters to reach comparable performances against baseline implementations. In recurrent neural network settings, projUNN closely matches or exceeds benchmarked results from prior unitary neural networks. Finally, we preliminarily explore projUNN in training orthogonal convolutional neural networks, which are currently unable to outperform state of the art models but can potentially enhance stability and robustness at large depth.
Reinforcement Learning in a Birth and Death Process: Breaking the Dependence on the State Space
Authors: Jonatha Anselmi, Bruno Gaujal, Louis-Sébastien Rebuffi
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: In this paper, we revisit  the regret of  undiscounted  reinforcement learning in MDPs  with a birth and death structure. Specifically, we consider a controlled queue  with impatient jobs and the main objective is to optimize a trade-off between energy consumption and user-perceived performance. Within this setting, the diameter $D$ of the MDP is $\Omega(S^S)$, where $S$ is the number of states. Therefore, the existing lower and upper bounds on the regret at time $T$, of  order $O (\sqrt{DSAT})$ for MDPs with $S$ states and $A$ actions, may suggest that reinforcement learning is inefficient here. In our main result however, we exploit the structure of our MDPs to show that the regret of a slightly-tweaked version of the classical learning algorithm UCRL2 is in fact upper bounded by $\tilde{\mathcal{O}} (\sqrt{E_2AT})$ where $E_2$ is a weighted second moment of the stationary measure of a reference policy. Importantly, $E_2$ is bounded independently of $S$. Thus, our bound is asymptotically independent of the number of states and of the diameter. This result is based on a careful study of the number of visits performed by the learning algorithm to the states of the MDP, which is highly non-uniform.
Multi-dataset Training of Transformers for Robust Action Recognition
Authors: Junwei Liang, Enwei Zhang, Jun Zhang, Chunhua Shen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We study the task of robust feature representations, aiming to generalize well on multiple datasets for action recognition. We build our method on Transformers for its efficacy. Although we have witnessed great progress for video action recognition in the past decade, it remains challenging yet valuable how to train a single model that can perform well across multiple datasets. Here, we propose a novel multi-dataset training paradigm, MultiTrain, with the design of two new loss terms, namely informative loss and projection loss, aiming tolearn robust representations for action recognition. In particular, the informative loss maximizes the expressiveness of the feature embedding while the projection loss for each dataset mines the intrinsic relations between classes across datasets. We verify the effectiveness of our method on five challenging datasets, Kinetics-400, Kinetics-700, Moments-in-Time, Activitynet and Something-something-v2 datasets. Extensive experimental results show that our method can consistently improve state-of-the-art performance. Code and models are released.
An Embarrassingly Simple Approach to Semi-Supervised Few-Shot Learning
Authors: Xiu-Shen Wei, H.-Y. Xu, Faen Zhang, Yuxin Peng, Wei Zhou
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Semi-supervised few-shot learning consists in training a classifier to adapt to new tasks with limited labeled data and a fixed quantity of unlabeled data. Many sophisticated methods have been developed to address the challenges this problem comprises. In this paper, we propose a simple but quite effective approach to predict accurate negative pseudo-labels of unlabeled data from an indirect learning perspective, and then augment the extremely label-constrained support set in few-shot classification tasks. Our approach can be implemented in just few lines of code by only using off-the-shelf operations, yet it is able to outperform state-of-the-art methods on four benchmark datasets.
Recipe for a General, Powerful, Scalable Graph Transformer
Authors: Ladislav Rampášek, Michael Galkin, Vijay Prakash Dwivedi, Anh Tuan Luu, Guy Wolf, Dominique Beaini
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We propose a recipe on how to build a general, powerful, scalable (GPS) graph Transformer with linear complexity and state-of-the-art results on a diverse set of benchmarks. Graph Transformers (GTs) have gained popularity in the field of graph representation learning with a variety of recent publications but they lack a common foundation about what constitutes a good positional or structural encoding, and what differentiates them. In this paper, we summarize the different types of encodings with a clearer definition and categorize them as being $\textit{local}$, $\textit{global}$ or $\textit{relative}$. The prior GTs are constrained to small graphs with a few hundred nodes, here we propose the first architecture with a complexity linear in the number of nodes and edges $O(N+E)$ by decoupling the local real-edge aggregation from the fully-connected Transformer. We argue that this decoupling does not negatively affect the expressivity, with our architecture being a universal function approximator on graphs. Our GPS recipe consists of choosing 3 main ingredients: (i) positional/structural encoding, (ii) local message-passing mechanism, and (iii) global attention mechanism. We provide a modular framework $\textit{GraphGPS}$ that supports multiple types of encodings and that provides efficiency and scalability both in small and large graphs. We test our architecture on 16 benchmarks and show highly competitive results in all of them, show-casing the empirical benefits gained by the modularity and the combination of different strategies.
ALIFE: Adaptive Logit Regularizer and Feature Replay for Incremental Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Youngmin Oh, Donghyeon Baek, Bumsub Ham
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We address the problem of incremental semantic segmentation (ISS) recognizing novel object/stuff categories continually without forgetting previous ones that have been learned. The catastrophic forgetting problem is particularly severe in ISS, since pixel-level ground-truth labels are available only for the novel categories at training time. To address the problem, regularization-based methods exploit probability calibration techniques to learn semantic information from unlabeled pixels. While such techniques are effective, there is still a lack of theoretical understanding of them. Replay-based methods propose to memorize a small set of images for previous categories. They achieve state-of-the-art performance at the cost of large memory footprint. We propose in this paper a novel ISS method, dubbed ALIFE, that provides a better compromise between accuracy and efficiency. To this end, we first show an in-depth analysis on the calibration techniques to better understand the effects on ISS. Based on this, we then introduce an adaptive logit regularizer (ALI) that enables our model to better learn new categories, while retaining knowledge for previous ones. We also present a feature replay scheme that memorizes features, instead of images directly, in order to reduce memory requirements significantly. Since a feature extractor is changed continually, memorized features should also be updated at every incremental stage. To handle this, we introduce category-specific rotation matrices updating the features for each category separately. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with extensive experiments on standard ISS benchmarks, and show that our method achieves a better trade-off in terms of accuracy and efficiency.
Rare Gems: Finding Lottery Tickets at Initialization
Authors: Kartik Sreenivasan, Jy-yong Sohn, Liu Yang, Matthew Grinde, Alliot Nagle, Hongyi Wang, Eric P. Xing, Kangwook Lee, Dimitris Papailiopoulos
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Large neural networks can be pruned to a small fraction of their original size, with little loss in accuracy, by following a time-consuming "train, prune, re-train" approach. Frankle & Carbin conjecture that we can avoid this by training lottery tickets, i.e., special sparse subnetworks found at initialization, that can be trained to high accuracy. However, a subsequent line of work presents concrete evidence that current algorithms for finding trainable networks at initialization, fail simple baseline comparisons, e.g., against training random sparse subnetworks. Finding lottery tickets that train to better accuracy compared to simple baselines remains an open problem. In this work, we resolve this open problem by proposing Gem-Miner which finds lottery tickets at initialization that beat current baselines. Gem-Miner finds lottery tickets trainable to accuracy competitive or better than Iterative Magnitude Pruning (IMP), and does so up to $19\times$ faster.
Fast Vision Transformers with HiLo Attention
Authors: Zizheng Pan, Jianfei Cai, Bohan Zhuang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Vision Transformers (ViTs) have triggered the most recent and significant breakthroughs in computer vision. Their efficient designs are mostly guided by the indirect metric of computational complexity, i.e., FLOPs, which however has a clear gap with the direct metric such as throughput. Thus, we propose to use the direct speed evaluation on the target platform as the design principle for efficient ViTs. Particularly, we introduce LITv2, a simple and effective ViT which performs favourably against the existing state-of-the-art methods across a spectrum of different model sizes with faster speed. At the core of LITv2 is a novel self-attention mechanism, which we dub HiLo. HiLo is inspired by the insight that high frequencies in an image capture local fine details and low frequencies focus on global structures, whereas a multi-head self-attention layer neglects the characteristic of different frequencies. Therefore, we propose to disentangle the high/low frequency patterns in an attention layer by separating the heads into two groups, where one group encodes high frequencies via self-attention within each local window, and another group encodes low frequencies by performing global attention between the average-pooled low-frequency keys and values from each window and each query position in the input feature map. Benefiting from the efficient design for both groups, we show that HiLo is superior to the existing attention mechanisms by comprehensively benchmarking FLOPs, speed and memory consumption on GPUs and CPUs. For example, HiLo is 1.4× faster than spatial reduction attention and 1.6× faster than local window attention on CPUs. Powered by HiLo, LITv2 serves as a strong backbone for mainstream vision tasks including image classification, dense detection and segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/ziplab/LITv2.
Online Bipartite Matching with Advice: Tight Robustness-Consistency Tradeoffs for the Two-Stage Model
Authors: Billy Jin, Will Ma
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We study the two-stage vertex-weighted online bipartite matching problem of Feng, Niazadeh, and Saberi (SODA ‘21) in a setting where the algorithm has access to a suggested matching that is recommended in the first stage. We evaluate an algorithm by its robustness $R$, which is its performance relative to that of the optimal offline matching, and its consistency $C$, which is its performance when the advice or the prediction given is correct.  We characterize for this problem the Pareto-efficient frontier between robustness and consistency, which is rare in the literature on advice-augmented algorithms, yet necessary for quantifying such an algorithm to be optimal. Specifically, we propose an algorithm that is $R$-robust and $C$-consistent for any $(R,C)$ with $0 \leq R \leq \frac{3}{4}$ and $\sqrt{1-R} + \sqrt{1-C} = 1$, and prove that no other algorithm can achieve a better tradeoff.
Identifying good directions to escape the NTK regime and efficiently learn low-degree plus sparse polynomials
Authors: Eshaan Nichani, Yu Bai, Jason Lee
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: A recent goal in the theory of deep learning is to identify how neural networks can escape the “lazy training,” or Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) regime, where the network is coupled with its first order Taylor expansion at initialization. While the NTK is minimax optimal for learning dense polynomials (Ghorbani et al, 2021), it cannot learn features, and hence has poor sample complexity for learning many classes of functions including sparse polynomials. Recent works have thus aimed to identify settings where gradient based algorithms provably generalize better than the NTK. One such example is the “QuadNTK” approach of Bai & Lee (2020), which analyzes the second-order term in the Taylor expansion. Bai & Lee (2020) show that the second-order term can learn sparse polynomials efficiently; however, it sacrifices the ability to learn general dense polynomials.In this paper, we analyze how gradient descent on a two-layer neural network can escape the NTK regime by utilizing a spectral characterization of the NTK (Montanari & Zhong, 2020) and building on the QuadNTK approach. We first expand upon the spectral analysis to identify “good” directions in parameter space in which we can move without harming generalization. Next, we show that a wide two-layer neural network can jointly use the NTK and QuadNTK to fit target functions consisting of a dense low-degree term and a sparse high-degree term -- something neither the NTK nor the QuadNTK can do on their own. Finally, we construct a regularizer which encourages the parameter vector to move in the “good" directions, and show that gradient descent on the regularized loss will converge to a global minimizer, which also has low test error. This yields an end to end convergence and generalization guarantee with provable sample complexity improvement over both the NTK and QuadNTK on their own.
Pure Transformers are Powerful Graph Learners
Authors: Jinwoo Kim, Dat Nguyen, Seonwoo Min, Sungjun Cho, Moontae Lee, Honglak Lee, Seunghoon Hong
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We show that standard Transformers without graph-specific modifications can lead to promising results in graph learning both in theory and practice. Given a graph, we simply treat all nodes and edges as independent tokens, augment them with token embeddings, and feed them to a Transformer. With an appropriate choice of token embeddings, we prove that this approach is theoretically at least as expressive as an invariant graph network (2-IGN) composed of equivariant linear layers, which is already more expressive than all message-passing Graph Neural Networks (GNN). When trained on a large-scale graph dataset (PCQM4Mv2), our method coined Tokenized Graph Transformer (TokenGT) achieves significantly better results compared to GNN baselines and competitive results compared to Transformer variants with sophisticated graph-specific inductive bias. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/jw9730/tokengt.
Orthogonal Transformer: An Efficient Vision Transformer Backbone with Token Orthogonalization
Authors: Huaibo Huang, Xiaoqiang Zhou, Ran He
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We present a general vision transformer backbone, called as Orthogonal Transformer, in pursuit of both efficiency and effectiveness. A major challenge for vision transformer is that self-attention, as the key element in capturing long-range dependency, is very computationally expensive for dense prediction tasks (e.g., object detection). Coarse global self-attention and local self-attention are then designed to reduce the cost, but they suffer from either neglecting local correlations or hurting global modeling. We present an orthogonal self-attention mechanism to alleviate these issues. Specifically, self-attention is computed in the orthogonal space that is reversible to the spatial domain but has much lower resolution. The capabilities of learning global dependency and exploring local correlations are maintained because every orthogonal token in self-attention can attend to the entire visual tokens. Remarkably, orthogonality is realized by constructing an endogenously orthogonal matrix that is friendly to neural networks and can be optimized as arbitrary orthogonal matrices. We also introduce Positional MLP to incorporate position information for arbitrary input resolutions as well as enhance the capacity of MLP. Finally, we develop a hierarchical architecture for Orthogonal Transformer. Extensive experiments demonstrate its strong performance on a broad range of vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, instance segmentation and semantic segmentation.
Using Mixup as a Regularizer Can Surprisingly Improve Accuracy & Out-of-Distribution Robustness
Authors: Francesco Pinto, Harry Yang, Ser Nam Lim, Philip Torr, Puneet Dokania
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We show that the effectiveness of the well celebrated Mixup can be further improved if instead of using it as the sole learning objective, it is utilized as an additional regularizer to the standard cross-entropy loss. This simple change not only improves accuracy but also significantly improves the quality of the predictive uncertainty estimation of Mixup in most cases under various forms of covariate shifts and out-of-distribution detection experiments. In fact, we observe that Mixup otherwise yields much degraded performance on detecting out-of-distribution samples possibly, as we show empirically, due to its tendency to learn models exhibiting high-entropy throughout; making it difficult to differentiate in-distribution samples from out-of-distribution ones. To show the efficacy of our approach (RegMixup), we provide thorough analyses and experiments on vision datasets (ImageNet & CIFAR-10/100) and compare it with a suite of recent approaches for reliable uncertainty estimation.
NeurOLight: A Physics-Agnostic Neural Operator Enabling Parametric Photonic Device Simulation
Authors: Jiaqi Gu, Zhengqi Gao, Chenghao Feng, Hanqing Zhu, Ray Chen, Duane Boning, David Pan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Optical computing has become emerging technology in next-generation efficient artificial intelligence (AI) due to its ultra-high speed and efficiency. Electromagnetic field simulation is critical to the design, optimization, and validation of photonic devices and circuits.However, costly numerical simulation significantly hinders the scalability and turn-around time in the photonic circuit design loop. Recently, physics-informed neural networks were proposed to predict the optical field solution of a single instance of a partial differential equation (PDE) with predefined parameters. Their complicated PDE formulation and lack of efficient parametrization mechanism limit their flexibility and generalization in practical simulation scenarios. In this work, for the first time, a physics-agnostic neural operator-based framework, dubbed NeurOLight, is proposed to learn a family of frequency-domain Maxwell PDEs for ultra-fast parametric photonic device simulation. Specifically, we discretize different devices into a unified domain, represent parametric PDEs with a compact wave prior, and encode the incident light via masked source modeling. We design our model to have parameter-efficient cross-shaped NeurOLight blocks and adopt superposition-based augmentation for data-efficient learning. With those synergistic approaches, NeurOLight demonstrates 2-orders-of-magnitude faster simulation speed than numerical solvers and outperforms prior NN-based models by ~54% lower prediction error using ~44% fewer parameters.
Learning the Structure of Large Networked Systems Obeying Conservation Laws
Authors: Anirudh Rayas, Rajasekhar Anguluri, Gautam Dasarathy
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Many networked systems such as electric networks, the brain, and social networks of opinion dynamics are known to obey conservation laws. Examples of this phenomenon include the Kirchoff laws in electric networks and opinion consensus in social networks. Conservation laws in networked systems are modeled as balance equations of the form $X = B^\ast Y$, where the sparsity pattern of $B^\ast \in \mathbb{R}^{p\times p}$ captures the connectivity of the network on $p$ nodes, and  $Y, X \in \mathbb{R}^p$ are vectors of ''potentials'' and ''injected flows'' at the nodes respectively. The node potentials $Y$ cause flows across edges which aim to balance out the potential difference, and the flows $X$ injected at the nodes are extraneous to the network dynamics. In several practical systems, the network structure is often unknown and needs to be estimated from data to facilitate modeling, management, and control. To this end, one has access to samples of the node potentials $Y$, but only the statistics of the node injections $X$. Motivated by this important problem, we study the estimation of the sparsity structure of the matrix $B^\ast$ from $n$ samples of $Y$ under the assumption that the node injections $X$ follow a Gaussian distribution with a known covariance $\Sigma_X$. We propose a new $\ell_{1}$-regularized maximum likelihood estimator for tackling this problem in the high-dimensional regime where the size of the network may be vastly larger than the number of samples $n$. We show that this optimization problem is convex in the objective and admits a unique solution. Under a new mutual incoherence condition, we establish sufficient conditions on the triple $(n,p,d)$ for which exact sparsity recovery of $B^\ast$ is possible with high probability; $d$ is the degree of the underlying graph. We also establish guarantees for the recovery of $B^\ast$ in the element-wise maximum, Frobenius, and operator norms. Finally, we complement these theoretical results with experimental validation of the performance of the proposed estimator on synthetic and real-world data.
FP8 Quantization: The Power of the Exponent
Authors: Andrey Kuzmin, Mart van Baalen, Yuwei Ren, Markus Nagel, Jorn Peters, Tijmen Blankevoort
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: When quantizing neural networks for efficient inference, low-bit integers are the go-to format for efficiency. However, low-bit floating point numbers have an extra degree of freedom, assigning some bits to work on an exponential scale instead. This paper in-depth investigates this benefit of the floating point format for neural network inference. We detail the choices that can be made for the FP8 format, including the important choice of the number of bits for the mantissa and exponent, and show analytically in which settings these choices give better performance. Then we show how these findings translate to real networks, provide an efficient implementation for FP8 simulation, and a new algorithm that enables the learning of both the scale parameters and number of exponent bits in the FP8 format. Our chief conclusion is that when doing post-training quantization for a wide range of networks, the FP8 format is better than INT8 in terms of accuracy, and the choice of the number of exponent bits is driven by the severity of outliers in the network. We also conduct experiments with quantization-aware training where the difference in formats disappears as the network is trained to reduce the effect of outliers.
Bridging the Gap Between Vision Transformers and Convolutional Neural Networks on Small Datasets
Authors: Zhiying Lu, Hongtao Xie, Chuanbin Liu, Yongdong Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: There still remains an extreme performance gap between Vision Transformers (ViTs) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) when training from scratch on small datasets, which is concluded to the lack of inductive bias. In this paper, we further consider this problem and point out two weaknesses of ViTs in inductive biases, that is, the spatial relevance and diverse channel representation. First, on spatial aspect, objects are locally compact and relevant, thus fine-grained feature needs to be extracted from a token and its neighbors. While the lack of data hinders ViTs to attend the spatial relevance. Second, on channel aspect, representation exhibits diversity on different channels. But the scarce data can not enable ViTs to learn strong enough representation for accurate recognition. To this end, we propose Dynamic Hybrid Vision Transformer (DHVT) as the solution to enhance the two inductive biases. On spatial aspect, we adopt a hybrid structure, in which convolution is integrated into patch embedding and multi-layer perceptron module, forcing the model to capture the token features as well as their neighboring features. On channel aspect, we introduce a dynamic feature aggregation module in MLP and a brand new "head token" design in multi-head self-attention module to help re-calibrate channel representation and make different channel group representation interacts with each other. The fusion of weak channel representation forms a strong enough representation for classification. With this design, we successfully eliminate the performance gap between CNNs and ViTs, and our DHVT achieves a series of state-of-the-art performance with a lightweight model, 85.68% on CIFAR-100 with 22.8M parameters, 82.3% on ImageNet-1K with 24.0M parameters. Code is available at https://github.com/ArieSeirack/DHVT.