mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Identifying General Mechanism Shifts in Linear Causal Representations
Authors: Tianyu Chen, Kevin Bello, Francesco Locatello, Bryon Aragam, Pradeep Ravikumar
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We consider the linear causal representation learning setting where we observe a linear mixing of $d$ unknown latent factors, which follow a linear structural causal model. Recent work has shown that it is possible to recover the latent factors as well as the underlying structural causal model over them, up to permutation and scaling, provided that we have at least $d$ environments, each of which corresponds to perfect interventions on a single latent node (factor). After this powerful result, a key open problem faced by the community has been to relax these conditions: allow for coarser than perfect single-node interventions, and allow for fewer than $d$ of them, since the number of latent factors $d$ could be very large. In this work, we consider precisely such a setting, where we allow a smaller than $d$ number of environments, and also allow for very coarse interventions that can very coarsely \textit{change the entire causal graph over the latent factors}. On the flip side, we relax what we wish to extract to simply the \textit{list of nodes that have shifted between one or more environments}. We provide a surprising identifiability result that it is indeed possible, under some very mild standard assumptions, to identify the set of shifted nodes. Our identifiability proof moreover is a constructive one: we explicitly provide necessary and sufficient conditions for a node to be a shifted node, and show that we can check these conditions given observed data. Our algorithm lends itself very naturally to the sample setting where instead of just interventional distributions, we are provided datasets of samples from each of these distributions. We corroborate our results on both synthetic experiments as well as an interesting psychometric dataset. The code can be found at https://github.com/TianyuCodings/iLCS.
Wasserstein Distributionally Robust Optimization through the Lens of Structural Causal Models and Individual Fairness
Authors: Ahmad-Reza Ehyaei, Golnoosh Farnadi, Samira Samadi
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In recent years, Wasserstein Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) has garnered substantial interest for its efficacy in data-driven decision-making under distributional uncertainty. However, limited research has explored the application of DRO to address individual fairness concerns, particularly when considering causal structures and discrete sensitive attributes in learning problems.To address this gap, we first formulate the DRO problem from the perspectives of causality and individual fairness. We then present the DRO dual formulation as an efficient tool to convert the main problem into a more tractable and computationally efficient form. Next, we characterize the closed form of the approximate worst-case loss quantity as a regularizer, eliminating the max-step in the Min-Max DRO problem. We further estimate the regularizer in more general cases and explore the relationship between DRO and classical robust optimization. Finally, by removing the assumption of a known structural causal model, we provide finite sample error bounds when designing DRO with empirical distributions and estimated causal structures to ensure efficiency and robust learning.
Accurate and Steady Inertial Pose Estimation through Sequence Structure Learning and Modulation
Authors: Yinghao Wu, Chaoran Wang, Lu Yin, Shihui Guo, Yipeng Qin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Transformer models excel at capturing long-range dependencies in sequential data, but lack explicit mechanisms to leverage structural patterns inherent in fixed-length input sequences. In this paper, we propose a novel sequence structure learning and modulation approach that endows Transformers with the ability to model and utilize such fixed-sequence structural properties for improved performance on inertial pose estimation tasks.Specifically, our method introduces a Sequence Structure Module (SSM) that utilizes structural information of fixed-length inertial sensor readings to adjust the input features of transformers.Such structural information can either be acquired by learning or specified based on users' prior knowledge.To justify the prospect of our approach, we show that i) injecting spatial structural information of IMUs/joints learned from data improves accuracy, while ii) injecting temporal structural information based on smooth priors reduces jitter (i.e., improves steadiness), in a spatial-temporal transformer solution for inertial pose estimation.Extensive experiments across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach against state-of-the-art methods and has the potential to advance the design of the transformer architecture for fixed-length sequences.
Approximated Orthogonal Projection Unit: Stabilizing Regression Network Training Using Natural Gradient
Authors: Shaoqi Wang, Chunjie Yang, Siwei Lou
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Neural networks (NN) are extensively studied in cutting-edge soft sensor models due to their  feature extraction and function approximation capabilities. Current research into network-based methods primarily focuses on models' offline accuracy. Notably, in industrial soft sensor context, online optimizing stability and interpretability are prioritized, followed by accuracy. This requires a clearer understanding of network's training process. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel NN named the Approximated Orthogonal Projection Unit (AOPU) which has solid mathematical basis and presents superior training stability. AOPU truncates the gradient backpropagation at dual parameters, optimizes the trackable parameters updates, and enhances the robustness of training. We further prove that AOPU attains minimum variance estimation in NN, wherein the truncated gradient approximates the natural gradient. Empirical results on two chemical process datasets clearly show that AOPU outperforms other models in achieving stable convergence, marking a significant advancement in soft sensor field.
Beyond Prompts: Dynamic Conversational Benchmarking of Large Language Models
Authors: David Castillo-Bolado, Joseph Davidson, Finlay Gray, Marek Rosa
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: We introduce a dynamic benchmarking system for conversational agents that evaluates their performance through a single, simulated, and lengthy user$\leftrightarrow$agent interaction. The interaction is a conversation between the user and agent, where multiple tasks are introduced and then undertaken concurrently. We context switch regularly to interleave the tasks, which constructs a realistic testing scenario in which we assess the Long-Term Memory, Continual Learning, and Information Integration capabilities of the agents. Results from both proprietary and open-source Large-Language Models show that LLMs in general perform well on single-task interactions, but they struggle on the same tasks when they are interleaved. Notably, short-context LLMs supplemented with an LTM system perform as well as or better than those with larger contexts. Our benchmark suggests that there are other challenges for LLMs responding to more natural interactions that contemporary benchmarks have heretofore not been able to capture.
InternLM-XComposer2-4KHD: A Pioneering Large Vision-Language Model Handling Resolutions from 336 Pixels to 4K HD
Authors: Xiaoyi Dong, Pan Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Yuhang Cao, Bin Wang, Linke Ouyang, Songyang Zhang, Haodong Duan, Wenwei Zhang, Yining Li, Hang Yan, Yang Gao, Zhe Chen, Xinyue Zhang, Wei Li, Jingwen Li, Wenhai Wang, Kai Chen, Conghui He, Xingcheng Zhang, Jifeng Dai, Yu Qiao, Dahua Lin, Jiaqi Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The Large Vision-Language Model (LVLM) field has seen significant advancements, yet its progression has been hindered by challenges in comprehending fine-grained visual content due to limited resolution. Recent efforts have aimed to enhance the high-resolution understanding capabilities of LVLMs, yet they remain capped at approximately 1500 $\times$ 1500 pixels and constrained to a relatively narrow resolution range. This paper represents InternLM-XComposer2-4KHD, a groundbreaking exploration into elevating LVLM resolution capabilities up to 4K HD (3840 × 1600) and beyond. Concurrently, considering the ultra-high resolution may not be necessary in all scenarios, it supports a wide range of diverse resolutions from 336 pixels to 4K standard, significantly broadening its scope of applicability. Specifically, this research advances the patch division paradigm by introducing a novel extension: dynamic resolution with automatic patch configuration. It maintains the training image aspect ratios while automatically varying patch counts and configuring layouts based on a pre-trained Vision Transformer (ViT) (336 $\times$ 336), leading to dynamic training resolution from 336 pixels to 4K standard. Our research demonstrates that scaling training resolution up to 4K HD leads to consistent performance enhancements without hitting the ceiling of potential improvements. InternLM-XComposer2-4KHD shows superb capability that matches or even surpasses GPT-4V and Gemini Pro in 10 of the 16 benchmarks.
IllumiNeRF: 3D Relighting Without Inverse Rendering
Authors: Xiaoming Zhao, Pratul P. Srinivasan, Dor Verbin, Keunhong Park, Ricardo Martin-Brualla, Philipp Henzler
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Existing methods for relightable view synthesis --- using a set of images of an object under unknown lighting to recover a 3D representation that can be rendered from novel viewpoints under a target illumination --- are based on inverse rendering, and attempt to disentangle the object geometry, materials, and lighting that explain the input images. Furthermore, this typically involves optimization through differentiable Monte Carlo rendering, which is brittle and computationally-expensive. In this work, we propose a simpler approach: we first relight each input image using an image diffusion model conditioned on target environment lighting and estimated object geometry. We then reconstruct a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) with these relit images, from which we render novel views under the target lighting. We demonstrate that this strategy is surprisingly competitive and achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple relighting benchmarks. Please see our project page at illuminerf.github.io.
Genetic-guided GFlowNets for Sample Efficient Molecular Optimization
Authors: Hyeonah Kim, Minsu Kim, Sanghyeok Choi, Jinkyoo Park
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The challenge of discovering new molecules with desired properties is crucial in domains like drug discovery and material design. Recent advances in deep learning-based generative methods have shown promise but face the issue of sample efficiency due to the computational expense of evaluating the reward function. This paper proposes a novel algorithm for sample-efficient molecular optimization by distilling a powerful genetic algorithm into deep generative policy using GFlowNets training, the off-policy method for amortized inference. This approach enables the deep generative policy to learn from domain knowledge, which has been explicitly integrated into the genetic algorithm. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in the official molecular optimization benchmark, significantly outperforming previous methods. It also demonstrates effectiveness in designing inhibitors against SARS-CoV-2 with substantially fewer reward calls.
Slicing Vision Transformer for Flexible Inference
Authors: Yitian Zhang, Huseyin Coskun, Xu Ma, Huan Wang, Ke Ma, Xi (Stephen) Chen, Derek Hao Hu, Yun Fu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Vision Transformers (ViT) is known for its scalability. In this work, we target to scale down a ViT to fit in an environment with dynamic-changing resource constraints. We observe that smaller ViTs are intrinsically the sub-networks of a larger ViT with different widths. Thus, we propose a general framework, named Scala, to enable a single network to represent multiple smaller ViTs with flexible inference capability, which aligns with the inherent design of ViT to vary from widths. Concretely, Scala activates several subnets during training, introduces Isolated Activation to disentangle the smallest sub-network from other subnets, and leverages Scale Coordination to ensure each sub-network receives simplified, steady, and accurate learning objectives. Comprehensive empirical validations on different tasks demonstrate that with only one-shot training, Scala learns slimmable representation without modifying the original ViT structure and matches the performance of Separate Training. Compared with the prior art, Scala achieves an average improvement of 1.6% on ImageNet-1K with fewer parameters.
Unleashing the Potential of the Diffusion Model in Few-shot Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Muzhi Zhu, Yang Liu, Zekai Luo, Chenchen Jing, Hao Chen, Guangkai Xu, Xinlong Wang, Chunhua Shen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The Diffusion Model has not only garnered noteworthy achievements in the realm of image generation but has also demonstrated its potential as an effective pretraining method utilizing unlabeled data. Drawing from the extensive potential unveiled by the Diffusion Model in both semantic correspondence and open vocabulary segmentation, our work initiates an investigation into employing the Latent Diffusion Model for Few-shot Semantic Segmentation.Recently, inspired by the in-context learning ability of large language models, Few-shot Semantic Segmentation has evolved into In-context Segmentation tasks, morphing into a crucial element in assessing generalist segmentation models.In this context, we concentrate on Few-shot Semantic Segmentation, establishing a solid foundation for the future development of a Diffusion-based generalist model for segmentation. Our initial focus lies in understanding how to facilitate interaction between the query image and the support image, resulting in the proposal of a KV fusion method within the self-attention framework.Subsequently, we delve deeper into optimizing the infusion of information from the support mask and simultaneously re-evaluating how to provide reasonable supervision from the query mask.Based on our analysis, we establish a simple and effective framework named DiffewS, maximally retaining the original Latent Diffusion Model's generative framework and effectively utilizing the pre-training prior. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the previous SOTA models in multiple settings.
This Too Shall Pass: Removing Stale Observations in Dynamic Bayesian Optimization
Authors: Anthony Bardou, Patrick Thiran, Giovanni Ranieri
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Bayesian Optimization (BO) has proven to be very successful at optimizing a static, noisy, costly-to-evaluate black-box function $f : \mathcal{S} \to \mathbb{R}$. However, optimizing a black-box which is also a function of time (*i.e.*, a *dynamic* function) $f : \mathcal{S} \times \mathcal{T} \to \mathbb{R}$ remains a challenge, since a dynamic Bayesian Optimization (DBO) algorithm has to keep track of the optimum over time. This changes the nature of the optimization problem in at least three aspects: (i) querying an arbitrary point in $\mathcal{S} \times \mathcal{T}$ is impossible, (ii) past observations become less and less relevant for keeping track of the optimum as time goes by and (iii) the DBO algorithm must have a high sampling frequency so it can collect enough relevant observations to keep track of the optimum through time. In this paper, we design a Wasserstein distance-based criterion able to quantify the relevancy of an observation with respect to future predictions. Then, we leverage this criterion to build W-DBO, a DBO algorithm able to remove irrelevant observations from its dataset on the fly, thus maintaining simultaneously a good predictive performance and a high sampling frequency, even in continuous-time optimization tasks with unknown horizon. Numerical experiments establish the superiority of W-DBO, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a comfortable margin.
Learning symmetries via weight-sharing with doubly stochastic tensors
Authors: Putri A. van der Linden, Alejandro García-Castellanos, Sharvaree Vadgama, Thijs P. Kuipers, Erik J. Bekkers
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Group equivariance has emerged as a valuable inductive bias in deep learning, enhancing generalization, data efficiency, and robustness. Classically, group equivariant methods require the groups of interest to be known beforehand, which may not be realistic for real-world data. Additionally, baking in fixed group equivariance may impose overly restrictive constraints on model architecture. This highlights the need for methods that can dynamically discover and apply symmetries as soft constraints. For neural network architectures, equivariance is commonly achieved through group transformations of a canonical weight tensor, resulting in weight sharing over a given group $G$. In this work, we propose to *learn* such a weight-sharing scheme by defining a collection of learnable doubly stochastic matrices that act as soft permutation matrices on canonical weight tensors, which can take regular group representations as a special case. This yields learnable kernel transformations that are jointly optimized with downstream tasks. We show that when the dataset exhibits strong symmetries, the permutation matrices will converge to regular group representations and our weight-sharing networks effectively become regular group convolutions. Additionally, the flexibility of the method enables it to effectively pick up on partial symmetries.
Taming Diffusion Prior for Image Super-Resolution with Domain Shift SDEs
Authors: Qinpeng Cui, Yixuan Liu, Xinyi Zhang, Qiqi Bao, Qingmin Liao, Li Wang, Tian Lu, Zicheng liu, Zhongdao Wang, Emad Barsoum
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Diffusion-based image super-resolution (SR) models have attracted substantial interest due to their powerful image restoration capabilities. However, prevailing diffusion models often struggle to strike an optimal balance between efficiency and performance. Typically, they either neglect to exploit the potential of existing extensive pretrained models, limiting their generative capacity, or they necessitate a dozens of forward passes starting from random noises, compromising inference efficiency. In this paper, we present DoSSR, a $\textbf{Do}$main $\textbf{S}$hift diffusion-based SR model that capitalizes on the generative powers of pretrained diffusion models while significantly enhancing efficiency by initiating the diffusion process with low-resolution (LR) images. At the core of our approach is a domain shift equation that integrates seamlessly with existing diffusion models. This integration not only improves the use of diffusion prior but also boosts inference efficiency. Moreover, we advance our method by transitioning the discrete shift process to a continuous formulation, termed as DoS-SDEs. This advancement leads to the fast and customized solvers that further enhance sampling efficiency. Empirical results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on synthetic and real-world datasets, while notably requiring $\textbf{\emph{only 5 sampling steps}}$. Compared to previous diffusion prior based methods, our approach achieves a remarkable speedup of 5-7 times, demonstrating its superior efficiency.
Improved Sample Complexity for Multiclass PAC Learning
Authors: Steve Hanneke, Shay Moran, Qian Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We aim to understand the optimal PAC sample complexity in multiclass learning. While finiteness of the Daniely-Shalev-Shwartz (DS) dimension has been shown to characterize the PAC learnability of a concept class [Brukhim, Carmon, Dinur, Moran, and Yehudayoff, 2022], there exist polylog factor gaps in the leading term of the sample complexity. In this paper, we reduce the gap in terms of the dependence on the error parameter to a single log factor and also propose two possible routes towards completely resolving the optimal sample complexity, each based on a key open question we formulate: one concerning list learning with bounded list size, the other concerning a new type of shifting for multiclass concept classes. We prove that a positive answer to either of the two questions would completely resolve the optimal sample complexity up to log factors of the DS dimension.
Online Estimation via Offline Estimation: An Information-Theoretic Framework
Authors: Dylan J. Foster, Yanjun Han, Jian Qian, Alexander Rakhlin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The classical theory of statistical estimation aims to estimate a parameter of interest under data generated from a fixed design (''offline estimation''), while the contemporary theory of online learning provides algorithms for estimation under adaptively chosen covariates (''online estimation''). Motivated by connections between estimation and interactive decision making, we ask: is it possible to convert offline estimation algorithms into online estimation algorithms in a black-box fashion? We investigate this question from an information-theoretic perspective by introducing a new framework, Oracle-Efficient Online Estimation (OEOE), where the learner can only interact with the data stream indirectly through a sequence of offline estimators produced by a black-box algorithm operating on the stream. Our main results settle the statistical and computational complexity of online estimation in this framework.   $\bullet$ Statistical complexity. We show that information-theoretically, there exist algorithms that achieve near-optimal online estimation error via black-box offline estimation oracles, and give a nearly-tight characterization for minimax rates in the OEOE framework.  $\bullet$ Computational complexity. We show that the guarantees above cannot be achieved in a computationally efficient fashion in general, but give a refined characterization for the special case of conditional density estimation: computationally efficient online estimation via black-box offline estimation is possible whenever it is possible via unrestricted algorithms.Finally, we apply our results to give offline oracle-efficient algorithms for interactive decision making.
HEMM: Holistic Evaluation of Multimodal Foundation Models
Authors: Paul Pu Liang, Akshay Goindani, Talha Chafekar, Leena Mathur, Haofei Yu, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Louis-Philippe Morency
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Multimodal foundation models that can holistically process text alongside images, video, audio, and other sensory modalities are increasingly used in a variety of real-world applications. However, it is challenging to characterize and study progress in multimodal foundation models, given the range of possible modeling decisions, tasks, and domains. In this paper, we introduce Holistic Evaluation of Multimodal Models (HEMM) to systematically evaluate the capabilities of multimodal foundation models across a set of 3 dimensions: basic skills, information flow, and real-world use cases. Basic multimodal skills are internal abilities required to solve problems, such as learning interactions across modalities, fine-grained alignment, multi-step reasoning, and the ability to handle external knowledge. Information flow studies how multimodal content changes during a task through querying, translation, editing, and fusion. Use cases span domain-specific challenges introduced in real-world multimedia, affective computing, natural sciences, healthcare, and human-computer interaction applications. Through comprehensive experiments across the 30 tasks in HEMM, we (1) identify key dataset dimensions (e.g., basic skills, information flows, and use cases) that pose challenges to today’s models, and (2) distill performance trends regarding how different modeling dimensions (e.g., scale, pre-training data, multimodal alignment, pre-training, and instruction tuning objectives) influence performance. Our conclusions regarding challenging multimodal interactions, use cases, and tasks requiring reasoning and external knowledge, the benefits of data and model scale, and the impacts of instruction-tuning yield actionable insights for future work in multimodal foundation models.
Revisiting the Integration of Convolution and Attention for Vision Backbone
Authors: Lei Zhu, Xinjiang Wang, Wayne Zhang, Rynson Lau
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Convolutions (Convs) and multi-head self-attentions (MHSAs) are typically considered alternatives to each other for building vision backbones. Although some works try to integrate both, they apply the two operators simultaneously at the finest pixel granularity. With Convs responsible for per-pixel feature extraction already, the question is whether we still need to include the heavy MHSAs at such a fine-grained level. In fact, this is the root cause of the scalability issue w.r.t. the input resolution for vision transformers. To address this important problem, we propose in this work to use MSHAs and Convs in parallel \textbf{at different granularity levels} instead. Specifically, in each layer, we use two different ways to represent an image: a fine-grained regular grid and a coarse-grained set of semantic slots. We apply different operations to these two representations: Convs to the grid for local features, and MHSAs to the slots for global features. A pair of fully differentiable soft clustering and dispatching modules is introduced to bridge the grid and set representations, thus enabling local-global fusion. Through extensive experiments on various vision tasks, we empirically verify the potential of the proposed integration scheme, named \textit{GLMix}: by offloading the burden of fine-grained features to light-weight Convs, it is sufficient to use MHSAs in a few (e.g., 64) semantic slots to match the performance of recent state-of-the-art backbones, while being more efficient. Our visualization results also demonstrate that the soft clustering module produces a meaningful semantic grouping effect with only IN1k classification supervision, which may induce better interpretability and inspire new weakly-supervised semantic segmentation approaches. Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/rayleizhu/GLMix}.
Embedding Trajectory for Out-of-Distribution Detection in Mathematical Reasoning
Authors: Yiming Wang, Pei Zhang, Baosong Yang, Derek F. Wong, Zhuosheng Zhang, Rui Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Real-world data deviating from the independent and identically distributed (\textit{i.i.d.}) assumption of in-distribution training data poses security threats to deep networks, thus advancing out-of-distribution (OOD) detection algorithms. Detection methods in generative language models (GLMs) mainly focus on uncertainty estimation and embedding distance measurement, with the latter proven to be most effective in traditional linguistic tasks like summarization and translation. However, another complex generative scenario mathematical reasoning poses significant challenges to embedding-based methods due to its high-density feature of output spaces, but this feature causes larger discrepancies in the embedding shift trajectory between different samples in latent spaces. Hence, we propose a trajectory-based method TV score, which uses trajectory volatility for OOD detection in mathematical reasoning. Experiments show that our method outperforms all traditional algorithms on GLMs under mathematical reasoning scenarios and can be extended to more applications with high-density features in output spaces, such as multiple-choice questions.
RL on Incorrect Synthetic Data Scales the Efficiency of LLM Math Reasoning by Eight-Fold
Authors: Amrith Setlur, Saurabh Garg, Xinyang (Young) Geng, Naman Garg, Virginia Smith, Aviral Kumar
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Training on model-generated synthetic data is a promising approach for finetuning LLMs, but it remains unclear when it helps or hurts. In this paper, we investigate this question for math reasoning via an empirical study, followed by building a conceptual understanding of our observations. First, we find that while the typical approach of finetuning a model on synthetic correct or positive problem-solution pairs generated by capable models offers modest performance gains, sampling more correct solutions from the finetuned learner itself followed by subsequent fine-tuning on this self-generated data doubles the efficiency of the same synthetic problems. At the same time, training on model-generated positives can amplify various spurious  correlations, resulting in flat or even inverse scaling trends as the amount of data increases. Surprisingly, we find that several of these issues can be addressed if we also utilize negative responses, i.e., model-generated responses that are deemed incorrect by a final answer verifier. Crucially, these negatives must be constructed such that the training can appropriately recover the utility or advantage of each intermediate step in the negative response. With this per-step scheme, we are able to attain consistent gains over only positive data, attaining performance similar to amplifying the amount of synthetic data by $\mathbf{8 \times}$. We show that training on per-step negatives can help to unlearn spurious correlations in the positive data, and is equivalent to advantage-weighted reinforcement learning (RL), implying that it inherits robustness benefits of RL over imitating positive data alone.
Learning Formal Mathematics From Intrinsic Motivation
Authors: Gabriel Poesia, David Broman, Nick Haber, Noah D. Goodman
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: How did humanity coax mathematics from the aether? We explore the Platonic view that mathematics can be discovered from its axioms---a game of conjecture and proof. We describe an agent that jointly learns to pose challenging problems for itself (conjecturing) and solve them (theorem proving). Given a mathematical domain axiomatized in dependent type theory, we first combine methods for constrained decoding and type-directed synthesis to sample valid conjectures from a language model. Our method guarantees well-formed conjectures by construction, even as we start with a randomly initialized model. We use the same model to represent a policy and value function for guiding proof search. Our agent targets generating hard but provable conjectures --- a moving target, since its own theorem proving ability also improves as it trains. We propose novel methods for hindsight relabeling on proof search trees to significantly improve the agent's sample efficiency in both tasks. Experiments on 3 axiomatic domains (propositional logic, arithmetic and group theory) demonstrate that our agent can bootstrap from only the axioms, self-improving in generating true and challenging conjectures and in finding proofs.
Hollowed Net for On-Device Personalization of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Authors: Wonguk Cho, Seokeon Choi, Debasmit Das, Matthias Reisser, Taesup Kim, Sungrack Yun, Fatih Porikli
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent advancements in text-to-image diffusion models have enabled the personalization of these models to generate custom images from textual prompts. This paper presents an efficient LoRA-based personalization approach for on-device subject-driven generation, where pre-trained diffusion models are fine-tuned with user-specific data on resource-constrained devices. Our method, termed Hollowed Net, enhances memory efficiency during fine-tuning by modifying the architecture of a diffusion U-Net to temporarily remove a fraction of its deep layers, creating a hollowed structure. This approach directly addresses on-device memory constraints and substantially reduces GPU memory requirements for training, in contrast to previous methods that primarily focus on minimizing training steps and reducing the number of parameters to update. Additionally, the personalized Hollowed Net can be transferred back into the original U-Net, enabling inference without additional memory overhead. Quantitative and qualitative analyses demonstrate that our approach not only reduces training memory to levels as low as those required for inference but also maintains or improves personalization performance compared to existing methods.
LACIE: Listener-Aware Finetuning for Calibration in Large Language Models
Authors: Elias Stengel-Eskin, Peter Hase, Mohit Bansal
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: When answering questions, large language models (LLMs) can convey not only an answer to the question, but a level of confidence about the answer being correct. This includes explicit markers of confidence (e.g. giving a numeric confidence score) as well as implicit markers, like using an authoritative tone or elaborating with additional knowledge of a subject. For LLMs to be trustworthy sources of knowledge, the confidence they convey should match their actual expertise on a topic; however, this is currently not the case, with most models tending towards overconfidence. To calibrate both implicit and explicit confidence markers, we introduce a pragmatic, listener-aware finetuning method (LACIE) that directly models the listener, considering not only whether an answer is right, but whether it will be accepted by a listener. Specifically, we cast calibration as a preference optimization problem, creating data via a two-agent speaker-listener game, where a speaker model’s outputs are judged by a simulated listener. We then finetune three different LLMs (Mistral-7B, Llama3-8B, Llama3-70B) with LACIE, and show that the models resulting from this multi-agent optimization are better calibrated on TriviaQA with respect to a simulated listener. Crucially, these trends transfer to human listeners, helping them correctly predict model correctness: we conduct a human evaluation where annotators accept or reject an LLM’s answers to trivia questions, finding that training with LACIE results in 47% fewer incorrect answers being accepted while maintaining the same level of acceptance for correct answers. Furthermore, LACIE generalizes to another dataset, resulting in a large increase in truthfulness on TruthfulQA when trained on TriviaQA. Our analysis indicates that LACIE leads to a better separation in confidence between correct and incorrect examples. Qualitatively, we find that a LACIE-trained model hedges more when uncertain and adopts implicit cues to signal certainty when it is correct, such as using an authoritative tone or including details. Finally, finetuning with our listener- aware method leads to an emergent increase in model abstention (e.g. saying “I don’t know”) for answers that are likely to be wrong, trading recall for precision.
Temporal Sentence Grounding with Relevance Feedback in Videos
Authors: Jianfeng Dong, Xiaoman Peng, Daizong Liu, Xiaoye Qu, Xun Yang, Cuizhu Bao, Meng Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: As a widely explored multi-modal task, Temporal Sentence Grounding in videos (TSG) endeavors to retrieve a specific video segment matched with a given query text from a video. The traditional paradigm for TSG generally assumes that relevant segments always exist within a given video. However, this assumption is restrictive and unrealistic in real-world applications where the existence of a query-related segment is uncertain, easily resulting in erroneous grounding. Motivated by the research gap and practical application, this paper introduces a new task, named Temporal Sentence Grounding with Relevance Feedback (TSG-RF) in videos, which accommodates the possibility that a video may or may not include a segment related to the query. This task entails localizing precise video segments that semantically align with the query text when such content is present, while delivering definitive feedback on the non-existence of related segments when absent. Moreover, we propose a novel Relation-aware Temporal Sentence Grounding (RaTSG) network for addressing this challenging task. This network first reformulates the TSG-RF task as a foreground-background detection problem by investigating whether the query-related semantics exist in both frame and video levels. Then, a multi-granularity relevance discriminator is exploited to produce precise video-query relevance feedback and a relation-aware segment grounding module is employed to selectively conduct the grounding process, dynamically adapting to the presence or absence of query-related segments in videos. To validate our RaTSG network, we reconstruct two popular TSG datasets, establishing a rigorous benchmark for TSG-RF. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed RaTSG for the TSG-RF task. Our source code is available at https://github.com/HuiGuanLab/RaTSG.
Revisiting Self-Supervised Heterogeneous Graph Learning from Spectral Clustering Perspective
Authors: Yujie Mo, Zhihe Lu, Runpeng Yu, Xiaofeng Zhu, Xinchao Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Self-supervised heterogeneous graph learning (SHGL) has shown promising potential in diverse scenarios. However,  while existing SHGL methods share a similar essential with clustering approaches, they encounter two significant limitations: (i) noise in graph structures is often introduced during the message-passing process to weaken node representations, and (ii) cluster-level information may be inadequately captured and leveraged, diminishing the performance in downstream tasks. In this paper, we address these limitations by theoretically revisiting SHGL from the spectral clustering perspective and introducing a novel framework enhanced by rank and dual consistency constraints. Specifically, our framework incorporates a rank-constrained spectral clustering method that refines the affinity matrix to exclude noise effectively. Additionally, we integrate node-level and cluster-level consistency constraints that concurrently capture invariant and clustering information to facilitate learning in downstream tasks. We theoretically demonstrate that the learned representations are divided into distinct partitions based on the number of classes and exhibit enhanced generalization ability across tasks. Experimental results affirm the superiority of our method, showcasing remarkable improvements in several downstream tasks compared to existing methods.
Beyond Accuracy: Ensuring Correct Predictions With Correct Rationales
Authors: Tang Li, Mengmeng Ma, Xi Peng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large pretrained foundation models demonstrate exceptional performance and, in some high-stakes applications, even surpass human experts. However, most of these models are currently evaluated primarily on prediction accuracy, overlooking the validity of the rationales behind their accurate predictions. For the safe deployment of foundation models, there is a pressing need to ensure double-correct predictions, i.e., correct prediction backed by correct rationales. To achieve this, we propose a two-phase scheme: First, we curate a new dataset that offers structured rationales for visual recognition tasks. Second, we propose a rationale-informed optimization method to guide the model in disentangling and localizing visual evidence for each rationale, without requiring manual annotations. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art models by up to 10.1\% in prediction accuracy across a wide range of tasks. Furthermore, our method significantly improves the model's rationale correctness, improving localization by 7.5\% and disentanglement by 36.5\%. Our dataset, source code, and pretrained weights: https://github.com/deep-real/DCP
LinNet: Linear Network for Efficient Point Cloud Representation Learning
Authors: Hao Deng, Kunlei Jing, Shengmei Cheng, Cheng Liu, Jiawei Ru, Jiang Bo, Lin Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Point-based methods have made significant progress, but improving their scalability in large-scale 3D scenes is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we delve into the point-based method and develop a simpler, faster, stronger variant model, dubbed as LinNet. In particular, we first propose the disassembled set abstraction (DSA) module, which is more effective than the previous version of set abstraction. It achieves more efficient local aggregation by leveraging spatial anisotropy and channel anisotropy separately. Additionally, by mapping 3D point clouds onto 1D space-filling curves, we enable parallelization of downsampling and neighborhood queries on GPUs with linear complexity. LinNet, as a purely point-based method, outperforms most previous methods in both indoor and outdoor scenes without any extra attention, and sparse convolution but merely relying on a simple MLP. It achieves the mIoU of 73.7\%, 81.4\%, and 69.1\% on the S3DIS Area5, NuScenes, and SemanticKITTI validation benchmarks, respectively, while speeding up almost 10x times over PointNeXt. Our work further reveals both the efficacy and efficiency potential of the vanilla point-based models in large-scale representation learning. Our code will be available upon publication.
Mean-Field Analysis for Learning Subspace-Sparse Polynomials with Gaussian Input
Authors: Ziang Chen, Rong Ge
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In this work, we study the mean-field flow for learning subspace-sparse polynomials using stochastic gradient descent and two-layer neural networks, where the input distribution is standard Gaussian and the output only depends on the projection of the input onto a low-dimensional subspace. We establish a necessary condition for SGD-learnability, involving both the characteristics of the target function and the expressiveness of the activation function. In addition, we prove that the condition is almost sufficient, in the sense that a condition slightly stronger than the necessary condition can guarantee the exponential decay of the loss functional to zero.
Exploiting Activation Sparsity with Dense to Dynamic-k Mixture-of-Experts Conversion
Authors: Filip Szatkowski, Bartosz Wójcik, Mikołaj Piórczyński, Simone Scardapane
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Transformer models can face practical limitations due to their high computational requirements. At the same time, such models exhibit significant activation sparsity, which can be leveraged to reduce the inference cost by converting parts of the network into equivalent Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layers. Despite the crucial role played by activation sparsity, its impact on this process remains unexplored. We demonstrate that the efficiency of the conversion can be significantly enhanced by a proper regularization of the activation sparsity of the base model. Moreover, motivated by the high variance of the number of activated neurons for different inputs, we introduce a more effective dynamic-$k$ expert selection rule that adjusts the number of executed experts on a per-token basis. To achieve further savings, we extend this approach to multi-head attention projections. Finally, we develop an efficient implementation that translates these computational savings into actual wall-clock speedup. The proposed method, Dense to Dynamic-$k$ Mixture-of-Experts (D2DMoE), outperforms existing approaches on common NLP and vision tasks, reducing inference cost by up to 60\% without significantly impacting performance.
TinyTTA: Efficient Test-time Adaptation via Early-exit Ensembles on Edge Devices
Authors: Hong Jia, Young D. Kwon, Alessio Orsino, Ting Dang, Domenico Talia, Cecilia Mascolo
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The increased adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has led to the generation of large data streams with applications in healthcare, sustainability, and robotics. In some cases, deep neural networks have been deployed directly on these resource-constrained units to limit communication overhead, increase efficiency and privacy, and enable real-time applications. However, a common challenge in this setting is the continuous adaptation of models necessary to accommodate changing environments, i.e., data distribution shifts. Test-time adaptation (TTA) has emerged as one potential solution, but its validity has yet to be explored in resource-constrained hardware settings, such as those involving microcontroller units (MCUs). TTA on constrained devices generally suffers from i) memory overhead due to the full backpropagation of a large pre-trained network, ii) lack of support for normalization layers on MCUs, and iii) either memory exhaustion with large batch sizes required for updating or poor performance with small batch sizes. In this paper, we propose TinyTTA, to enable, for the first time, efficient TTA on constrained devices with limited memory. To address the limited memory constraints, we introduce a novel self-ensemble and batch-agnostic early-exit strategy for TTA, which enables continuous adaptation with small batch sizes for reduced memory usage, handles distribution shifts, and improves latency efficiency. Moreover, we develop the TinyTTA Engine, a first-of-its-kind MCU library that enables on-device TTA. We validate TinyTTA on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W and an STM32H747 MCU. Experimental results demonstrate that TinyTTA improves TTA accuracy by up to 57.6\%, reduces memory usage by up to six times, and achieves faster and more energy-efficient TTA. Notably, TinyTTA is the only framework able to run TTA on MCU STM32H747 with a 512 KB memory constraint while maintaining high performance.