mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Rethinking Symbolic Regression: Morphology and Adaptability in the Context of Evolutionary Algorithms
Authors: Kei Sen Fong, Shelvia Wongso, Mehul Motani
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Symbolic Regression (SR) is the well-studied problem of finding closed-form analytical expressions that describe the relationship between variables in a measurement dataset. In this paper, we rethink SR from two perspectives: morphology and adaptability. Morphology: Current SR algorithms typically use several man-made heuristics to influence the morphology (or structure) of the expressions in the search space. These man-made heuristics may introduce unintentional bias and data leakage, especially with the relatively few equation-recovery benchmark problems available for evaluating SR approaches. To address this, we formulate a novel minimalistic approach, based on constructing a depth-aware mathematical language model trained on terminal walks of expression trees, as a replacement to these heuristics. Adaptability: Current SR algorithms tend to select expressions based on only a single fitness function (e.g., MSE on the training set). We promote the use of an adaptability framework in evolutionary SR which uses fitness functions that alternate across generations. This leads to robust expressions that perform well on the training set and are close to the true functional form. We demonstrate this by alternating fitness functions that quantify faithfulness to values (via MSE) and empirical derivatives (via a novel theoretically justified fitness metric coined MSEDI). Proof-of-concept: We combine these ideas into a minimalistic evolutionary SR algorithm that outperforms all benchmark and state of-the-art SR algorithms in problems with unknown constants added, which we claim are more reflective of SR performance for real-world applications. Our claim is then strengthened by reproducing the superior performance on real-world regression datasets from SRBench. For researchers interested in equation-recovery problems, we also propose a set of conventions that can be used to promote fairness in comparison across SR methods and to reduce unintentional bias.
Quantized Compressed Sensing with Score-Based Generative Models
Authors: Xiangming Meng, Yoshiyuki Kabashima
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We consider the general problem of recovering a high-dimensional signal from noisy quantized measurements. Quantization, especially coarse quantization such as 1-bit sign measurements, leads to severe information loss and thus a good prior knowledge of the unknown signal is helpful for accurate recovery. Motivated by the power of score-based generative models (SGM, also known as diffusion models) in capturing the rich structure of natural signals beyond simple sparsity, we propose an unsupervised data-driven approach called quantized compressed sensing with SGM (QCS-SGM), where the prior distribution is modeled by a pre-trained SGM. To perform posterior sampling, an annealed pseudo-likelihood score called ${\textit{noise perturbed pseudo-likelihood score}}$ is introduced and combined with the prior score of SGM. The proposed QCS-SGM applies to an arbitrary number of quantization bits. Experiments on a variety of baseline datasets demonstrate that the proposed QCS-SGM significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art algorithms by a large margin for both in-distribution and out-of-distribution samples. Moreover, as a posterior sampling method, QCS-SGM can be easily used to obtain confidence intervals or uncertainty estimates of the reconstructed results. $\textit{The code  is available at}$ https://github.com/mengxiangming/QCS-SGM.
ILA-DA: Improving Transferability of Intermediate Level Attack with Data Augmentation
Authors: Chiu Wai Yan, Tsz-Him Cheung, Dit-Yan Yeung
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Adversarial attack aims to generate deceptive inputs to fool a machine learning model. In deep learning, an adversarial input created for a specific neural network can also trick other neural networks. This intriguing property is known as black-box transferability of adversarial examples. To improve black-box transferability, a previously proposed method called Intermediate Level Attack (ILA) fine-tunes an adversarial example by maximizing its perturbation on an intermediate layer of the source model. Meanwhile, it has been shown that simple image transformations can also enhance attack transferability. Based on these two observations, we propose ILA-DA, which employs three novel augmentation techniques to enhance ILA. Specifically, we propose (1) an automated way to apply effective image transformations, (2) an efficient reverse adversarial update technique, and (3) an attack interpolation method to create more transferable adversarial examples. Shown by extensive experiments, ILA-DA greatly outperforms ILA and other state-of-the-art attacks by a large margin. On ImageNet, we attain an average attack success rate of 84.5%, which is 19.5% better than ILA and 4.7% better than the previous state-of-the-art across nine undefended models. For defended models, ILA-DA also leads existing attacks and provides further gains when incorporated into more advanced attack methods.
Disentanglement of Correlated Factors via Hausdorff Factorized Support
Authors: Karsten Roth, Mark Ibrahim, Zeynep Akata, Pascal Vincent, Diane Bouchacourt
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: A grand goal in deep learning research is to learn representations capable of generalizing across distribution shifts.
Disentanglement is one promising direction aimed at aligning a model's representation with the underlying factors generating the data (e.g. color or background). Existing disentanglement methods, however, rely on an often unrealistic assumption: that factors are statistically independent. In reality, factors (like object color and shape) are correlated. To address this limitation, we consider the use of a relaxed disentanglement criterion -- the Hausdorff Factorized Support (HFS) criterion -- that encourages only pairwise factorized support, rather than a factorial distribution, by minimizing a Hausdorff distance. This allows for arbitrary distributions of the factors over their support, including correlations between them. We show that the use of HFS consistently facilitates disentanglement and recovery of ground-truth factors across a variety of correlation settings and benchmarks, even under severe training correlations and correlation shifts, with in parts over +60% in relative improvement over existing disentanglement methods. In addition, we find that leveraging HFS for representation learning can even facilitate transfer to downstream tasks such as classification under distribution shifts. We hope our original approach and positive empirical results inspire further progress on the open problem of robust generalization. Code available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/disentangling-correlated-factors.
Multi-Rate VAE: Train Once, Get the Full Rate-Distortion Curve
Authors: Juhan Bae, Michael R. Zhang, Michael Ruan, Eric Wang, So Hasegawa, Jimmy Ba, Roger Baker Grosse
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are powerful tools for learning latent representations of data used in a wide range of applications. In practice, VAEs usually require multiple training rounds to choose the amount of information the latent variable should retain. This trade-off between the reconstruction error (distortion) and the KL divergence (rate) is typically parameterized by a hyperparameter $\beta$. In this paper, we introduce Multi-Rate VAE (MR-VAE), a computationally efficient framework for learning optimal parameters corresponding to various $\beta$ in a single training run. The key idea is to explicitly formulate a response function using hypernetworks that maps $\beta$ to the optimal parameters. MR-VAEs construct a compact response hypernetwork where the pre-activations are conditionally gated based on $\beta$. We justify the proposed architecture by analyzing linear VAEs and showing that it can represent response functions exactly for linear VAEs. With the learned hypernetwork, MR-VAEs can construct the rate-distortion curve without additional training and can be deployed with significantly less hyperparameter tuning. Empirically, our approach is competitive and often exceeds the performance of multiple $\beta$-VAEs training with minimal computation and memory overheads.
SMART: Sentences as Basic Units for Text Evaluation
Authors: Reinald Kim Amplayo, Peter J Liu, Yao Zhao, Shashi Narayan
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Widely used evaluation metrics for text generation either do not work well with longer texts or fail to evaluate all aspects of text quality. In this paper, we introduce a new metric called SMART to mitigate such limitations. Specifically, we treat sentences as basic units of matching instead of tokens, and use a sentence matching function to soft-match candidate and reference sentences. Candidate sentences are also compared to sentences in the source documents to allow grounding (e.g., factuality) evaluation. Our results show that system-level correlations of our proposed metric with a model-based matching function outperforms all competing metrics on the SummEval summarization meta-evaluation dataset, while the same metric with a string-based matching function is competitive with current model-based metrics. The latter does not use any neural model, which is useful during model development phases where resources can be limited and fast evaluation is required. SMART also outperforms all factuality evaluation metrics on the TRUE benchmark. Finally, we also conducted extensive analyses showing that our proposed metrics work well with longer  summaries and are less biased towards specific models.
HyperDeepONet: learning operator with complex target function space using the limited resources via hypernetwork
Authors: Jae Yong Lee, SungWoong CHO, Hyung Ju Hwang
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Fast and accurate predictions for complex physical dynamics are a big challenge across various applications. Real-time prediction on resource-constrained hardware is even more crucial in the real-world problems. The deep operator network (DeepONet) has recently been proposed as a framework for learning nonlinear mappings between function spaces. However, the DeepONet requires many parameters and has a high computational cost when learning operators, particularly those with complex (discontinuous or non-smooth) target functions. In this study, we propose HyperDeepONet, which uses the expressive power of the hypernetwork to enable learning of a complex operator with smaller set of parameters. The DeepONet and its variant models can be thought of as a method of injecting the input function information into the target function. From this perspective, these models can be viewed as a special case of HyperDeepONet. We analyze the complexity of DeepONet and conclude that HyperDeepONet needs relatively lower complexity to obtain the desired accuracy for operator learning. HyperDeepONet was successfully applied to various operator learning problems using low computational resources compared to other benchmarks.
Autoregressive Conditional Neural Processes
Authors: Wessel Bruinsma, Stratis Markou, James Requeima, Andrew Y. K. Foong, Tom Andersson, Anna Vaughan, Anthony Buonomo, Scott Hosking, Richard E Turner
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Conditional neural processes (CNPs; Garnelo et al., 2018a) are attractive meta-learning models which produce well-calibrated predictions and are trainable via a simple maximum likelihood procedure. Although CNPs have many advantages, they are unable to model dependencies in their predictions. Various works propose solutions to this, but these come at the cost of either requiring approximate inference or being limited to Gaussian predictions. In this work, we instead propose to change how CNPs are deployed at test time, without any modifications to the model or training procedure. Instead of making predictions independently for every target point, we autoregressively define a joint predictive distribution using the chain rule of probability, taking inspiration from the neural autoregressive density estimator (NADE) literature. We show that this simple procedure allows factorised Gaussian CNPs to model highly dependent, non-Gaussian predictive distributions. Perhaps surprisingly, in an extensive range of tasks with synthetic and real data, we show that CNPs in autoregressive (AR) mode not only significantly outperform non-AR CNPs, but are also competitive with more sophisticated models that are significantly more computationally expensive and challenging to train. This performance is remarkable given that AR CNPs are not trained to model joint dependencies. Our work provides an example of how ideas from neural distribution estimation can benefit neural processes, and motivates research into the AR deployment of other neural process models.
Quasi-optimal Reinforcement Learning with Continuous Actions
Authors: Yuhan Li, Wenzhuo Zhou, Ruoqing Zhu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) require making decisions in continuous action environments. In particular, determining the optimal dose level plays a vital role in developing medical treatment regimes. One challenge in adapting existing RL algorithms to medical applications, however, is that the popular infinite support stochastic policies, e.g., Gaussian policy, may assign riskily high dosages and harm patients seriously. Hence, it is important to induce a policy class whose support only contains near-optimal actions, and shrink the action-searching area for effectiveness and reliability. To achieve this, we develop a novel quasi-optimal learning algorithm, which can be easily optimized in off-policy settings with guaranteed convergence under general function approximations. Theoretically, we analyze the consistency, sample complexity, adaptability, and convergence of the proposed algorithm. We evaluate our algorithm with comprehensive simulated experiments and a dose suggestion real application to Ohio Type 1 diabetes dataset.
Guarded Policy Optimization with Imperfect Online Demonstrations
Authors: Zhenghai Xue, Zhenghao Peng, Quanyi Li, Zhihan Liu, Bolei Zhou
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: The Teacher-Student Framework (TSF) is a reinforcement learning setting where a teacher agent guards the training of a student agent by intervening and providing online demonstrations. Assuming optimal, the teacher policy has the perfect timing and capability to intervene in the learning process of the student agent, providing safety guarantee and exploration guidance. Nevertheless, in many real-world settings it is expensive or even impossible to obtain a well-performing teacher policy. In this work, we relax the assumption of a well-performing teacher and develop a new method that can incorporate arbitrary teacher policies with modest or inferior performance. We instantiate an Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning algorithm, termed Teacher-Student Shared Control (TS2C), which incorporates teacher intervention based on trajectory-based value estimation. Theoretical analysis validates that the proposed TS2C algorithm attains efficient exploration and substantial safety guarantee without being affected by the teacher's own performance. Experiments on various continuous control tasks show that our method can exploit teacher policies at different performance levels while maintaining a low training cost. Moreover, the student policy surpasses the imperfect teacher policy in terms of higher accumulated reward in held-out testing environments. Code is available at https://metadriverse.github.io/TS2C.
Words are all you need? Language as an approximation for human similarity judgments
Authors: Raja Marjieh, Pol Van Rijn, Ilia Sucholutsky, Theodore Sumers, Harin Lee, Thomas L. Griffiths, Nori Jacoby
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Human similarity judgments are a powerful supervision signal for machine learning applications based on techniques such as contrastive learning, information retrieval, and model alignment, but classical methods for collecting human similarity judgments are too expensive to be used at scale. Recent methods propose using pre-trained deep neural networks (DNNs) to approximate human similarity, but pre-trained DNNs may not be available for certain domains (e.g., medical images, low-resource languages) and their performance in approximating human similarity has not been extensively tested. We conducted an evaluation of 611 pre-trained models across three domains -- images, audio, video -- and found that there is a large gap in performance between human similarity judgments and pre-trained DNNs. To address this gap, we propose a new class of similarity approximation methods based on language. To collect the language data required by these new methods, we also developed and validated a novel adaptive tag collection pipeline. We find that our proposed language-based methods are significantly cheaper, in the number of human judgments, than classical methods, but still improve performance over the DNN-based methods. Finally, we also develop `stacked' methods that combine language embeddings with DNN embeddings, and find that these consistently provide the best approximations for human similarity across all three of our modalities. Based on the results of this comprehensive study, we provide a concise guide for researchers interested in collecting or approximating human similarity data. To accompany this guide, we also release all of the similarity and language data, a total of 206,339 human judgments, that we collected in our experiments, along with a detailed breakdown of all modeling results.
FIGARO: Controllable Music Generation using Learned and Expert Features
Authors: Dimitri von Rütte, Luca Biggio, Yannic Kilcher, Thomas Hofmann
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Recent symbolic music generative models have achieved significant improvements in the quality of the generated samples. Nevertheless, it remains hard for users to control the output in such a way that it matches their expectation. To address this limitation, high-level, human-interpretable conditioning is essential. In this work, we release FIGARO, a Transformer-based conditional model trained to generate symbolic music based on a sequence of high-level control codes. To this end, we propose description-to-sequence learning, which consists of automatically extracting fine-grained, human-interpretable features (the description) and training a sequence-to-sequence model to reconstruct the original sequence given only the description as input. FIGARO achieves state-of-the-art performance in multi-track symbolic music generation both in terms of style transfer and sample quality. We show that performance can be further improved by combining human-interpretable with learned features. Our extensive experimental evaluation shows that FIGARO is able to generate samples that closely adhere to the content of the input descriptions, even when they deviate significantly from the training distribution.
Interpretability in the Wild: a Circuit for Indirect Object Identification in GPT-2 Small
Authors: Kevin Ro Wang, Alexandre Variengien, Arthur Conmy, Buck Shlegeris, Jacob Steinhardt
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Research in mechanistic interpretability seeks to explain behaviors of ML models in terms of their internal components. However, most previous work either focuses on simple behaviors in small models, or describes complicated behaviors in larger models with broad strokes. In this work, we bridge this gap by presenting an explanation for how GPT-2 small performs a natural language task that requires logical reasoning: indirect object identification (IOI). Our explanation encompasses 28 attention heads grouped into 7 main classes, which we discovered using a combination of interpretability approaches including causal interventions and projections.
To our knowledge, this investigation is the largest end-to-end attempt at reverse-engineering a natural behavior "in the wild" in a language model.  We evaluate the reliability of our explanation using three quantitative criteria - faithfulness, completeness and minimality. Though these criteria support our explanation, they also point to remaining gaps in our understanding. 
Our work provides evidence that a mechanistic understanding of large ML models is feasible, opening opportunities to scale our understanding to both larger models and more complex tasks.
GoBigger: A Scalable Platform for Cooperative-Competitive Multi-Agent Interactive Simulation
Authors: Ming Zhang, Shenghan Zhang, Zhenjie Yang, Lekai Chen, Jinliang Zheng, Chao Yang, Chuming Li, Hang Zhou, Yazhe Niu, Yu Liu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: The emergence of various multi-agent environments has motivated powerful algorithms to explore agents' cooperation or competition. Even though this has greatly promoted the development of multi-agent reinforcement learning  (MARL), it is still not enough to support further exploration on the behavior of swarm intelligence between multiple teams, and cooperation between multiple agents due to their limited scalability. To alleviate this, we introduce GoBigger, a scalable platform for cooperative-competition multi-agent interactive simulation. GoBigger is an enhanced environment for the Agar-like game, enabling the simulation of multiple scales of agent intra-team cooperation and inter-team competition. Compared with existing multi-agent simulation environments, our platform supports multi-team games with more than two teams simultaneously, which dramatically expands the diversity of agent cooperation and competition, and can more effectively simulate the swarm intelligent agent behavior. Besides, in GoBigger, the cooperation between the agents in a team can lead to much higher performance. We offer a diverse set of challenging scenarios, built-in bots, and visualization tools for best practices in benchmarking. We evaluate several state-of-the-art algorithms on GoBigger and demonstrate the potential of the environment. We believe this platform can inspire various emerging research directions in MARL, swarm intelligence, and large-scale agent interactive learning. Both GoBigger and its related benchmark are open-sourced. More information could be found at https://github.com/opendilab/GoBigger.
Decision Transformer under Random Frame Dropping
Authors: Kaizhe Hu, Ray Chen Zheng, Yang Gao, Huazhe Xu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Controlling agents remotely with deep reinforcement learning~(DRL) in the real world is yet to come. One crucial stepping stone is to devise RL algorithms that are robust in the face of dropped information from corrupted communication or malfunctioning sensors. Typical RL methods usually require considerable online interaction data that are costly and unsafe to collect in the real world. Furthermore, when applying to the frame dropping scenarios, they perform unsatisfactorily even with moderate drop rates. To address these issues, we propose  Decision Transformer under Random Frame Dropping~(DeFog), an offline RL algorithm that enables agents to act robustly in frame dropping scenarios without online interaction. DeFog first randomly masks out data in the offline datasets and explicitly adds the time span of frame dropping as inputs. After that, a finetuning stage on the same offline dataset with a higher mask rate would further boost the performance. Empirical results show that DeFog outperforms strong baselines under severe frame drop rates like 90\%, while maintaining similar returns under non-frame-dropping conditions in the regular MuJoCo control benchmarks and the Atari environments. Our approach offers a robust and deployable solution for controlling agents in real-world environments with limited or unreliable data.
DamoFD: Digging into Backbone Design on Face Detection
Authors: Yang Liu, Jiankang Deng, Fei Wang, Lei Shang, Xuansong Xie, Baigui Sun
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Face detection (FD) has achieved remarkable success over the past few years, yet,
these leaps often arrive when consuming enormous computation costs. Moreover,
when considering a realistic situation, i.e., building a lightweight face detector
under a computation-scarce scenario, such heavy computation cost limits the application
of the face detector. To remedy this, several pioneering works design
tiny face detectors through off-the-shelf neural architecture search (NAS) technologies,
which are usually applied to the classification task. Thus, the searched
architectures are sub-optimal for the face detection task since some design criteria
between detection and classification task are different. As a representative, the
face detection backbone design needs to guarantee the stage-level detection ability
while it is not required for the classification backbone. Furthermore, the detection
backbone consumes a vast body of inference budgets in the whole detection framework.
Considering the intrinsic design requirement and the virtual importance role
of the face detection backbone, we thus ask a critical question: How to employ
NAS to search FD-friendly backbone architecture? To cope with this question,
we propose a distribution-dependent stage-aware ranking score (DDSAR-Score)
to explicitly characterize the stage-level expressivity and identify the individual
importance of each stage, thus satisfying the aforementioned design criterion of
the FD backbone. Based on our proposed DDSAR-Score, we conduct comprehensive
experiments on the challenging Wider Face benchmark dataset and achieve
dominant performance across a wide range of compute regimes. In particular,
compared to the tiniest face detector SCRFD-0.5GF, our method is +2.5 % better
in Average Precision (AP) score when using the same amount of FLOPs. The
code is avaliable at https://github.com/ly19965/FaceMaas/tree/master/face_project/face_detection/DamoFD.
Multitask Prompt Tuning Enables Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning
Authors: Zhen Wang, Rameswar Panda, Leonid Karlinsky, Rogerio Feris, Huan Sun, Yoon Kim
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Prompt tuning, in which a base pretrained model is adapted to each task via conditioning on learned prompt vectors, has emerged as a promising approach for efficiently adapting large language models to multiple downstream tasks. However, existing methods typically learn soft prompt vectors from scratch, and it has not been clear how to exploit the rich cross-task knowledge with prompt vectors in a multitask learning setting. We propose multitask prompt tuning (MPT), which first learns a single transferable prompt by distilling knowledge from multiple task-specific source prompts. We then learn multiplicative low rank updates to this shared prompt to efficiently adapt it to each downstream target task. Extensive experiments on 23 NLP datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, including the full finetuning baseline in some cases, despite only tuning $0.035\%$ as many task-specific parameters.
Learning What and Where: Disentangling Location and Identity Tracking Without Supervision
Authors: Manuel Traub, Sebastian Otte, Tobias Menge, Matthias Karlbauer, Jannik Thuemmel, Martin V. Butz
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Our brain can almost effortlessly decompose visual data streams into background and salient objects. Moreover, it can anticipate object motion and interactions, which are crucial abilities for conceptual planning and reasoning. Recent object reasoning datasets, such as CATER, have revealed fundamental shortcomings of current vision-based AI systems, particularly when targeting explicit object representations, object permanence, and object reasoning. Here we introduce a self-supervised LOCation and Identity tracking system (Loci), which excels on the CATER tracking challenge. Inspired by the dorsal and ventral pathways in the brain, Loci tackles the binding problem by processing separate, slot-wise encodings of 'what' and 'where'. Loci's predictive coding-like processing encourages active error minimization, such that individual slots tend to encode individual objects. Interactions between objects and object dynamics are processed in the disentangled latent space. Truncated backpropagation through time combined with forward eligibility accumulation significantly speeds up learning and improves memory efficiency. Besides exhibiting superior performance in current benchmarks, Loci effectively extracts objects from video streams and separates them into location and Gestalt components. We believe that this separation offers a representation that will facilitate effective planning and reasoning on conceptual levels.
Near-optimal Coresets for Robust Clustering
Authors: Lingxiao Huang, Shaofeng H.-C. Jiang, Jianing Lou, Xuan Wu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We consider robust clustering problems in $\mathbb{R}^d$, specifically $k$-clustering problems (e.g., $k$-Median and $k$-Means) with $m$ \emph{outliers}, where the cost for a given center set $C \subset \mathbb{R}^d$ aggregates the distances from $C$ to all but the furthest $m$ data points, instead of all points as in classical clustering. We focus on the $\epsilon$-coreset for robust clustering, a small proxy of the dataset that preserves the clustering cost within $\epsilon$-relative error for all center sets. Our main result is an $\epsilon$-coreset of size $O(m + \mathrm{poly}(k \epsilon^{-1}))$ that can be constructed in near-linear time. This significantly improves previous results, which either suffers an exponential dependence on $(m + k)$ [Feldman and Schulman, SODA'12], or has a weaker bi-criteria guarantee [Huang et al., FOCS'18]. Furthermore, we show this dependence in $m$ is nearly-optimal, and the fact that it is isolated from other factors may be crucial for dealing with large number of outliers. We construct our coresets by adapting to the outlier setting a recent framework [Braverman et al., FOCS'22] which was designed for capacity-constrained clustering, overcoming a new challenge that the participating terms in the cost, particularly the excluded $m$ outlier points, are dependent on the center set $C$. We validate our coresets on various datasets, and we observe a superior size-accuracy tradeoff compared with popular baselines including uniform sampling and sensitivity sampling. We also achieve a significant speedup of existing approximation algorithms for robust clustering using our coresets.
Diffusion-based Image Translation using disentangled style and content representation
Authors: Gihyun Kwon, Jong Chul Ye
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Diffusion-based image translation guided by  semantic texts   or a single target image   has enabled flexible style transfer which is not limited to the specific domains. 
Unfortunately, due to the stochastic nature of diffusion models, it is often  difficult to maintain the original content of the image  during the reverse diffusion.
To address this, here we present a novel diffusion-based unsupervised image translation method, dubbed as DiffuseIT, using disentangled style and content representation.
 Specifically, inspired by the  slicing Vision Transformer, we extract intermediate keys of multihead self attention layer  from ViT model and used them as the content preservation loss. Then, an image guided style transfer is performed by matching the [CLS] classification token from the denoised samples and target image, whereas additional CLIP loss is used for the text-driven style transfer.
  To further accelerate the semantic change during the reverse  diffusion, we also propose a novel semantic divergence loss and resampling strategy. 
 Our experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models in both text-guided and image-guided translation tasks.
Human-Guided Fair Classification for Natural Language Processing
Authors: Florian E. Dorner, Momchil Peychev, Nikola Konstantinov, Naman Goel, Elliott Ash, Martin Vechev
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Text classifiers have promising applications in high-stake tasks such as resume screening and content moderation. These classifiers must be fair and avoid discriminatory decisions by being invariant to perturbations of sensitive attributes such as gender or ethnicity. However, there is a gap between human intuition about these perturbations and the formal similarity specifications capturing them. While existing research has started to address this gap, current methods are based on hardcoded word replacements, resulting in specifications with limited expressivity or ones that fail to fully align with human intuition (e.g., in cases of asymmetric counterfactuals). This work proposes novel methods for bridging this gap by discovering expressive and intuitive individual fairness specifications. We show how to leverage unsupervised style transfer and GPT-3's zero-shot capabilities to automatically generate expressive candidate pairs of semantically similar sentences that differ along sensitive attributes. We then validate the generated pairs via an extensive crowdsourcing study, which confirms that a lot of these pairs align with human intuition about fairness in the context of toxicity classification. Finally, we show how limited amounts of human feedback can be leveraged to learn a similarity specification that can be used to train downstream fairness-aware models.
LilNetX: Lightweight Networks with EXtreme Model Compression and Structured Sparsification
Authors: Sharath Girish, Kamal Gupta, Saurabh Singh, Abhinav Shrivastava
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We introduce LilNetX, an end-to-end trainable technique for neural networks that enables learning models with specified accuracy-rate-computation trade-off. Prior works approach these problems one at a time and often require post-processing or multistage training which become less practical and do not scale very well for large datasets or architectures. Our method constructs a joint training objective that penalizes the self information of network parameters in a latent representation space to encourage small model size while also introducing priors to increase structured sparsity in the parameter space to reduce computation. When compared with existing state-of-the-art model compression methods, we achieve up to 50% smaller model size and 98% model sparsity on ResNet-20 on the CIFAR-10 dataset as well as 37% smaller model size and 71% structured sparsity on ResNet-50 trained on ImageNet while retaining the same accuracy as those methods. We show that the resulting sparsity can improve the inference time of the models by almost 1.8 times the dense ResNet-50 baseline model. Code is available at https://github.com/Sharath-girish/LilNetX.
Simple Emergent Action Representations from Multi-Task Policy Training
Authors: Pu Hua, Yubei Chen, Huazhe Xu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: The low-level sensory and motor signals in deep reinforcement learning, which exist in high-dimensional spaces such as image observations or motor torques, are inherently challenging to understand or utilize directly for downstream tasks. While sensory representations have been extensively studied, the representations of motor actions are still an area of active exploration. Our work reveals that a space containing meaningful action representations emerges when a multi-task policy network takes as inputs both states and task embeddings. Moderate constraints are added to improve its representation ability. Therefore, interpolated or composed embeddings can function as a high-level interface within this space, providing instructions to the agent for executing meaningful action sequences. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed action representations are effective for intra-action interpolation and inter-action composition with limited or no additional learning. Furthermore, our approach exhibits superior task adaptation ability compared to strong baselines in Mujoco locomotion tasks. Our work sheds light on the promising direction of learning action representations for efficient, adaptable, and composable RL, forming the basis of abstract action planning and the understanding of motor signal space. Project page: https://sites.google.com/view/emergent-action-representation/
Designing BERT for Convolutional Networks: Sparse and Hierarchical Masked Modeling
Authors: Keyu Tian, Yi Jiang, qishuai diao, Chen Lin, Liwei Wang, Zehuan Yuan
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We identify and overcome two key obstacles in extending the success of BERT-style pre-training, or masked image modeling, to convolutional networks (convnets): (i) convolution operation cannot handle irregular, randomly masked input images; (ii) the single-scale nature of BERT pre-training is inconsistent with convnet’s hierarchical structure. For (i), we treat unmasked pixels as sparse voxels of 3D point clouds and use sparse convolution to encode. This is the first use of sparse convolution for 2D masked modeling. For (ii), we develop a hierarchical decoder to reconstruct images from multi-scale encoded features. Our method, called Sparse masKed modeling (SparK), is general: it can be used directly on any convolutional model without backbone modifications. We validate it on both classical (ResNet) and modern (ConvNeXt) models: on three downstream tasks, it surpasses both state-of-the-art contrastive learning and transformer-based masked modeling by similarly large margins (around +1.0%). The improvements on object detection and instance segmentation are more significant (up to +3.5%), validating the strong transferability of features learned. We also find SparK’s favorable scaling behavior by observing more gains on larger networks. All of these findings support the promising future of generative pre-training on convnets. Both codes and pre-trained models have been released at https://github.com/keyu-tian/SparK.
Multimodal Analogical Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Ningyu Zhang, Lei Li, Xiang Chen, Xiaozhuan Liang, Shumin Deng, Huajun Chen
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Analogical reasoning is fundamental to human cognition and holds an important place in various fields. However, previous studies mainly focus on single-modal analogical reasoning and ignore taking advantage of structure knowledge. Notably, the research in cognitive psychology has demonstrated that information from multimodal sources always brings more powerful cognitive transfer than single modality sources. To this end, we introduce the new task of multimodal analogical reasoning over knowledge graphs, which requires multimodal reasoning ability with the help of background knowledge. Specifically, we construct a Multimodal Analogical Reasoning dataSet (MARS) and a multimodal knowledge graph MarKG. We evaluate with multimodal knowledge graph embedding and pre-trained Transformer baselines, illustrating the potential challenges of the proposed task. We further propose a novel model-agnostic Multimodal analogical reasoning framework with Transformer (MarT) motivated by the structure mapping theory, which can obtain better performance. We hope our work can deliver benefits and inspire future research. Code and datasets are available in https://github.com/zjunlp/MKG_Analogy.
Deep Transformers without Shortcuts: Modifying Self-attention for Faithful Signal Propagation
Authors: Bobby He, James Martens, Guodong Zhang, Aleksandar Botev, Andrew Brock, Samuel L Smith, Yee Whye Teh
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Skip connections and normalisation layers form two standard architectural components that are ubiquitous for the training of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), but whose precise roles are poorly understood. Recent approaches such as Deep Kernel Shaping have made progress towards reducing our reliance on them, using insights from wide NN kernel theory to improve signal propagation in vanilla DNNs (which we define as networks without skips or normalisation). However, these approaches are incompatible with the self-attention layers present in transformers, whose kernels are intrinsically more complicated to analyse and control.  And so the question remains: \emph{is it possible to train deep vanilla transformers?} We answer this question in the affirmative by designing several approaches that use combinations of parameter initialisations, bias matrices and location-dependent rescaling to achieve faithful signal propagation in vanilla transformers. Our methods address various intricacies specific to signal propagation in transformers, including the interaction with positional encoding and causal masking. In experiments on WikiText-103 and C4, our approaches enable deep transformers without normalisation to train at speeds matching their standard counterparts, and deep vanilla transformers to reach the same performance as standard ones after about 5 times more iterations.
H2RBox: Horizontal Box Annotation is All You Need for Oriented Object Detection
Authors: Xue Yang, Gefan Zhang, Wentong Li, Yue Zhou, Xuehui Wang, Junchi Yan
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Oriented object detection emerges in many applications from aerial images to autonomous driving, while many existing detection benchmarks are annotated with horizontal bounding box only which is also less costive than fine-grained rotated box, leading to a gap between the readily available training corpus and the rising demand for oriented object detection.  This paper proposes a simple yet effective oriented object detection approach called H2RBox merely using horizontal box annotation for weakly-supervised training, which closes the above gap and shows competitive performance even against those trained with rotated boxes.  The cores of our method are weakly- and self-supervised learning, which predicts the angle of the object by learning the consistency of two different views. To our best knowledge, H2RBox is the first horizontal box annotation-based oriented object detector. Compared to an alternative i.e. horizontal box-supervised instance segmentation with our post adaption to oriented object detection, our approach is not susceptible to the prediction quality of mask and can perform more robustly in complex scenes containing a large number of dense objects and outliers. Experimental results show that H2RBox has significant performance and speed advantages over horizontal box-supervised instance segmentation methods, as well as lower memory requirements. While compared to rotated box-supervised oriented object detectors, our method shows very close performance and speed. The source code is available at PyTorch-based \href{https://github.com/yangxue0827/h2rbox-mmrotate}{MMRotate} and Jittor-based \href{https://github.com/yangxue0827/h2rbox-jittor}{JDet}.
NERDS: A General Framework to Train Camera Denoisers from Raw-RGB Noisy Image Pairs
Authors: Heewon Kim, Kyoung Mu Lee
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract:   We aim to train accurate denoising networks for smartphone/digital cameras from single noisy images. Downscaling is commonly used as a practical denoiser for low-resolution images. Based on this processing, we found that the pixel variance of the natural images is more robust to downscaling than the pixel variance of the camera noises. Intuitively, downscaling easily removes high-frequency noises than natural textures. To utilize this property, we can adopt noisy/clean image synthesis at low-resolution to train camera denoisers. On this basis, we propose a new solution pipeline -- NERDS that estimates camera noises and synthesizes noisy-clean image pairs from only noisy images.  In particular, it first models the noise in raw-sensor images as a Poisson-Gaussian distribution, then estimates the noise parameters using the difference of pixel variances by downscaling. We formulate the noise estimation as a gradient-descent-based optimization problem through a reparametrization trick. We further introduce a new Image Signal Processor (ISP) estimation method that enables denoiser training in a human-readable RGB space by transforming the synthetic raw images to the style of a given RGB noisy image. The noise and ISP estimations utilize rich augmentation to synthesize image pairs for denoiser training. Experiments show that our NERDS can accurately train CNN-based denoisers (e.g., DnCNN, ResNet-style network) outperforming previous noise-synthesis-based and self-supervision-based denoisers in real datasets.
Empowering Networks With Scale and Rotation Equivariance Using A Similarity Convolution
Authors: Zikai Sun, Thierry Blu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: The translational equivariant nature of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is a reason for its great success in computer vision. However, networks do not enjoy more general equivariance properties such as rotation or scaling, ultimately limiting their generalization performance. To address this limitation, we devise a method that endows CNNs with simultaneous equivariance with respect to translation, rotation, and scaling.  Our approach defines a convolution-like operation and ensures equivariance based on our proposed scalable Fourier-Argand representation. The method maintains similar efficiency as a traditional network and hardly introduces any additional learnable parameters, since it does not face the computational issue that often occurs in group-convolution operators. We validate the efficacy of our approach in the image classification task, demonstrating its robustness and the generalization ability to both scaled and rotated inputs.