mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Finding Naturally Occurring Physical Backdoors in Image Datasets
Authors: Emily Wenger, Roma Bhattacharjee, Arjun Nitin Bhagoji, Josephine Passananti, Emilio Andere, Heather Zheng, Ben Zhao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2022

Abstract: Extensive literature on backdoor poison attacks has studied attacks and defenses for backdoors using  “digital trigger patterns.” In contrast, “physical backdoors” use physical objects as triggers, have only recently been identified, and are qualitatively different enough to resist most defenses targeting digital trigger backdoors. Research on physical backdoors is limited by access to large datasets containing real images of physical objects co-located with misclassification targets. Building these datasets is time- and labor-intensive.This work seeks to address the challenge of accessibility for research on physical backdoor attacks. We hypothesize that there may be naturally occurring physically co-located objects already present in popular datasets such as ImageNet. Once identified, a careful relabeling of these data can transform them into training samples for physical backdoor attacks. We propose a method to scalably identify these subsets of potential triggers in existing datasets, along with the specific classes they can poison. We call these naturally occurring trigger-class subsets natural backdoor datasets. Our techniques successfully identify natural backdoors in widely-available datasets, and produce models behaviorally equivalent to those trained on manually curated datasets. We release our code to allow the research community to create their own datasets for research on physical backdoor attacks.
Unsupervised Representation Learning from Pre-trained Diffusion Probabilistic Models
Authors: Zijian Zhang, Zhou Zhao, Zhijie Lin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPMs) have shown a powerful capacity of generating high-quality image samples. Recently, diffusion autoencoders (Diff-AE) have been proposed to explore DPMs for representation learning via autoencoding. Their key idea is to jointly train an encoder for discovering meaningful representations from images and a conditional DPM as the decoder for reconstructing images. Considering that training DPMs from scratch will take a long time and there have existed numerous pre-trained DPMs, we propose \textbf{P}re-trained \textbf{D}PM \textbf{A}uto\textbf{E}ncoding (\textbf{PDAE}), a general method to adapt existing pre-trained DPMs to the decoders for image reconstruction, with better training efficiency and performance than Diff-AE. Specifically, we find that the reason that pre-trained DPMs fail to reconstruct an image from its latent variables is due to the information loss of forward process, which causes a gap between their predicted posterior mean and the true one. From this perspective, the classifier-guided sampling method can be explained as computing an extra mean shift to fill the gap, reconstructing the lost class information in samples. These imply that the gap corresponds to the lost information of the image, and we can reconstruct the image by filling the gap. Drawing inspiration from this, we employ a trainable model to predict a mean shift according to encoded representation and train it to fill as much gap as possible, in this way, the encoder is forced to learn as much information as possible from images to help the filling. By reusing a part of network of pre-trained DPMs and redesigning the weighting scheme of diffusion loss, PDAE can learn meaningful representations from images efficiently. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency and flexibility of PDAE.
Learning Causally Invariant Representations for Out-of-Distribution Generalization on Graphs
Authors: Yongqiang Chen, Yonggang Zhang, Yatao Bian, Han Yang, MA Kaili, Binghui Xie, Tongliang Liu, Bo Han, James Cheng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Despite recent success in using the invariance principle for out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization on Euclidean data (e.g., images), studies on graph data are still limited. Different from images, the complex nature of graphs poses unique challenges to adopting the invariance principle. In particular, distribution shifts on graphs can appear in a variety of forms such as attributes and structures, making it difficult to identify the invariance. Moreover, domain or environment partitions, which are often required by OOD methods on Euclidean data, could be highly expensive to obtain for graphs. To bridge this gap, we propose a new framework, called Causality Inspired Invariant Graph LeArning (CIGA), to capture the invariance of graphs for guaranteed OOD generalization under various distribution shifts. Specifically, we characterize potential distribution shifts on graphs with causal models, concluding that OOD generalization on graphs is achievable when models focus only on subgraphs containing the most information about the causes of labels. Accordingly, we propose an information-theoretic objective to extract the desired subgraphs that maximally preserve the invariant intra-class information. Learning with these subgraphs is immune to distribution shifts. Extensive experiments on 16 synthetic or real-world datasets, including a challenging setting -- DrugOOD, from AI-aided drug discovery, validate the superior OOD performance of CIGA.
To update or not to update? Neurons at equilibrium in deep models
Authors: Andrea Bragagnolo, Enzo Tartaglione, Marco Grangetto
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Recent advances in deep learning optimization showed that, with some a-posteriori information on fully-trained models, it is possible to match the same performance by simply training a subset of their parameters. Such a discovery has a broad impact from theory to applications, driving the research towards methods to identify the minimum subset of parameters to train without look-ahead information exploitation. However, the methods proposed do not match the state-of-the-art performance, and rely on unstructured sparsely connected models.In this work we shift our focus from the single parameters to the behavior of the whole neuron, exploiting the concept of neuronal equilibrium (NEq). When a neuron is in a configuration at equilibrium (meaning that it has learned a specific input-output relationship), we can halt its update; on the contrary, when a neuron is at non-equilibrium, we let its state evolve towards an equilibrium state, updating its parameters. The proposed approach has been tested on different state-of-the-art learning strategies and tasks, validating NEq and observing that the neuronal equilibrium depends on the specific learning setup.
Non-convex online learning via algorithmic equivalence
Authors: Udaya Ghai, Zhou Lu, Elad Hazan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We study an algorithmic equivalence technique between non-convex gradient descent and convex mirror descent. We start by looking at a harder problem of regret minimization in online non-convex optimization. We show that under certain geometric and smoothness conditions, online gradient descent applied to  non-convex  functions is an approximation of online mirror descent applied to convex functions under reparameterization. In continuous time, the gradient flow with this reparameterization was shown to be \emph{exactly} equivalent to continuous-time mirror descent by Amid and Warmuth, but theory for the analogous discrete time algorithms is left as an open problem. We prove an $O(T^{\frac{2}{3}})$ regret bound for non-convex online gradient descent in this setting, answering this open problem. Our analysis is based on a new and simple algorithmic equivalence method.
TA-MoE: Topology-Aware Large Scale Mixture-of-Expert Training
Authors: Chang Chen, Min Li, Zhihua Wu, Dianhai Yu, Chao Yang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Sparsely gated Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) has demonstrated its effectiveness in scaling up deep neural networks to an extreme scale. Despite that numerous efforts have been made to improve the performance of MoE from the model design or system optimization perspective, existing MoE dispatch patterns are still not able to fully exploit the underlying heterogeneous network environments. In this paper, we propose TA-MoE, a topology-aware routing strategy for large-scale MoE trainging, from a model-system co-design perspective, which can dynamically adjust the MoE dispatch pattern according to the network topology. Based on communication modeling, we abstract the dispatch problem into an optimization objective and obtain the approximate dispatch pattern under different topologies. On top of that, we design a topology-aware auxiliary loss, which can adaptively route the data to fit in the underlying topology without sacrificing the model accuracy. Experiments show that TA-MoE can substantially outperform its counterparts on various hardware and model configurations, with roughly 1.01x-1.61x, 1.01x-4.77x, 1.25x-1.54x improvements over the popular DeepSpeed-MoE, FastMoE and FasterMoE systems.
A Combinatorial Perspective on the Optimization of Shallow ReLU Networks
Authors: Michael S Matena, Colin A Raffel
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: The NP-hard problem of optimizing a shallow ReLU network can be characterized as a combinatorial search over each training example’s activation pattern followed by a constrained convex problem given a fixed set of activation patterns. We explore the implications of this combinatorial aspect of ReLU optimization in this work. We show that it can be naturally modeled via a geometric and combinatoric object known as a zonotope with its vertex set isomorphic to the set of feasible activation patterns. This assists in analysis and provides a foundation for further research. We demonstrate its usefulness when we explore the sensitivity of the optimal loss to perturbations of the training data. Later we discuss methods of zonotope vertex selection and its relevance to optimization. Overparameterization assists in training by making a randomly chosen vertex more likely to contain a good solution. We then introduce a novel polynomial-time vertex selection procedure that provably picks a vertex containing the global optimum using only double the minimum number of parameters required to fit the data. We further introduce a local greedy search heuristic over zonotope vertices and demonstrate that it outperforms gradient descent on underparameterized problems.
Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners
Authors: Takeshi Kojima, Shixiang (Shane) Gu, Machel Reid, Yutaka Matsuo, Yusuke Iwasawa
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Pretrained large language models (LLMs) are widely used in many sub-fields of natural language processing (NLP) and generally known as excellent few-shot learners with task-specific exemplars. Notably, chain of thought (CoT) prompting, a recent technique for eliciting complex multi-step reasoning through step-by-step answer examples, achieved the state-of-the-art performances in arithmetics and symbolic reasoning, difficult system-2 tasks that do not follow the standard scaling laws for LLMs. While these successes are often attributed to LLMs' ability for few-shot learning, we show that LLMs are decent zero-shot reasoners by simply adding ``Let's think step by step'' before each answer. Experimental results demonstrate that our Zero-shot-CoT, using the same single prompt template, significantly outperforms zero-shot LLM performances on diverse benchmark reasoning tasks including arithmetics (MultiArith, GSM8K, AQUA-RAT, SVAMP), symbolic reasoning (Last Letter, Coin Flip), and other logical reasoning tasks (Date Understanding, Tracking Shuffled Objects),  without any hand-crafted few-shot examples, e.g. increasing the accuracy on MultiArith from 17.7% to 78.7% and GSM8K from 10.4% to 40.7% with large-scale InstructGPT model (text-davinci-002), as well as similar magnitudes of improvements with another off-the-shelf large model, 540B parameter PaLM. The versatility of this single prompt across very diverse reasoning tasks hints at untapped and understudied fundamental zero-shot capabilities of LLMs, suggesting high-level, multi-task broad cognitive capabilities may be extracted by simple prompting. We hope our work not only serves as the minimal strongest zero-shot baseline for the challenging reasoning benchmarks, but also highlights the importance of carefully exploring and analyzing the enormous zero-shot knowledge hidden inside LLMs before crafting finetuning datasets or few-shot exemplars.
Trading off Utility, Informativeness, and Complexity in Emergent Communication
Authors: Mycal Tucker, Roger P. Levy, Julie A Shah, Noga Zaslavsky
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Emergent communication (EC) research often focuses on optimizing task-specific utility as a driver for communication. However, there is increasing evidence that human languages are shaped by task-general communicative constraints and evolve under pressure to optimize the Information Bottleneck (IB) tradeoff between the informativeness and complexity of the lexicon. Here, we integrate these two approaches by trading off utility, informativeness, and complexity in EC. To this end, we propose Vector-Quantized Variational Information Bottleneck (VQ-VIB), a method for training neural agents to encode inputs into discrete signals embedded in a continuous space. We evaluate our approach in multi-agent reinforcement learning settings and in color reference games and show that: (1) VQ-VIB agents can continuously adapt to changing communicative needs and, in the color domain, align with human languages; (2) the emergent VQ-VIB embedding spaces are semantically meaningful and perceptually grounded; and (3) encouraging informativeness leads to faster convergence rates and improved utility, both in VQ-VIB and in prior neural architectures for symbolic EC, with VQ-VIB achieving higher utility for any given complexity. This work offers a new framework for EC that is grounded in information-theoretic principles that are believed to characterize human language evolution and that may facilitate human-agent interaction.
FiLM-Ensemble: Probabilistic Deep Learning via Feature-wise Linear Modulation
Authors: Mehmet Ozgur Turkoglu, Alexander Becker, Hüseyin Anil Gündüz, Mina Rezaei, Bernd Bischl, Rodrigo Caye Daudt, Stefano D'Aronco, Jan Wegner, Konrad Schindler
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: The ability to estimate epistemic uncertainty is often crucial when deploying machine learning in the real world, but modern methods often produce overconfident, uncalibrated uncertainty predictions. A common approach to quantify epistemic uncertainty, usable across a wide class of prediction models, is to train a model ensemble. In a naive implementation, the ensemble approach has high computational cost and high memory demand. This challenges in particular modern deep learning, where even a single deep network is already demanding in terms of compute and memory, and has given rise to a number of attempts to emulate the model ensemble without actually instantiating separate ensemble members. We introduce FiLM-Ensemble, a deep, implicit ensemble method based on the concept of Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM). That technique was originally developed for multi-task learning, with the aim of decoupling different tasks. We show that the idea can be extended to uncertainty quantification: by modulating the network activations of a single deep network with FiLM, one obtains a model ensemble with high diversity, and consequently well-calibrated estimates of epistemic uncertainty, with low computational overhead in comparison. Empirically, FiLM-Ensemble outperforms other implicit ensemble methods, and it comes very close to the upper bound of an explicit ensemble of networks (sometimes even beating it), at a fraction of the memory cost.
Meta-DMoE: Adapting to Domain Shift by Meta-Distillation from Mixture-of-Experts
Authors: Tao Zhong, Zhixiang Chi, Li Gu, Yang Wang, Yuanhao Yu, Jin Tang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: In this paper, we tackle the problem of domain shift. Most existing methods perform training on multiple source domains using a single model, and the same trained model is used on all unseen target domains. Such solutions are sub-optimal as each target domain exhibits its own specialty, which is not adapted. Furthermore, expecting single-model training to learn extensive knowledge from multiple source domains is counterintuitive. The model is more biased toward learning only domain-invariant features and may result in negative knowledge transfer. In this work, we propose a novel framework for unsupervised test-time adaptation, which is formulated as a knowledge distillation process to address domain shift. Specifically, we incorporate Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) as teachers, where each expert is separately trained on different source domains to maximize their specialty. Given a test-time target domain, a small set of unlabeled data is sampled to query the knowledge from MoE. As the source domains are correlated to the target domains, a transformer-based aggregator then combines the domain knowledge by examining the interconnection among them. The output is treated as a supervision signal to adapt a student prediction network toward the target domain. We further employ meta-learning to enforce the aggregator to distill positive knowledge and the student network to achieve fast adaptation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art and validates the effectiveness of each proposed component. Our code is available at https://github.com/n3il666/Meta-DMoE.
Beyond Time-Average Convergence: Near-Optimal Uncoupled Online Learning via Clairvoyant Multiplicative Weights Update
Authors: Georgios Piliouras, Ryann Sim, Stratis Skoulakis
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: In this paper we provide a novel and simple algorithm, Clairvoyant Multiplicative Weights Updates (CMWU), for convergence to \textit{Coarse Correlated Equilibria} (CCE) in general games. CMWU effectively corresponds to the standard MWU algorithm but where all agents, when updating their mixed strategies, use the payoff profiles based on tomorrow's behavior, i.e. the agents are clairvoyant. CMWU achieves constant regret of $\ln(m)/\eta$ in all normal-form games with m actions and fixed step-sizes $\eta$. Although CMWU encodes in its definition a fixed point computation, which in principle could result in dynamics that are neither computationally efficient nor uncoupled, we show that both of these issues can be largely circumvented. Specifically, as long as the step-size $\eta$ is upper bounded by $\frac{1}{(n-1)V}$, where $n$ is the number of agents and $[0,V]$ is the payoff range, then the CMWU updates can be computed linearly fast via a contraction map. This implementation results in an uncoupled online learning dynamic that admits a $O(\log T)$-sparse sub-sequence where each agent experiences at most $O(nV\log m)$ regret. This implies that the CMWU dynamics converge with rate $O(nV \log m \log T / T)$ to a CCE and improves on the current state-of-the-art convergence rate.
Meta-Reward-Net: Implicitly Differentiable Reward Learning for Preference-based Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Runze Liu, Fengshuo Bai, Yali Du, Yaodong Yang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Setting up a well-designed reward function has been challenging for many reinforcement learning applications. Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) provides a new framework that avoids reward engineering by leveraging human preferences (i.e., preferring apples over oranges) as the reward signal. Therefore, improving the efficacy of data usage for preference data becomes critical. In this work, we propose Meta-Reward-Net (MRN), a data-efficient PbRL framework that incorporates bi-level optimization for both reward and policy learning. The key idea of MRN is to adopt the performance of the Q-function as the learning target. Based on this, MRN learns the Q-function and the policy in the inner level while updating the reward function adaptively according to the performance of the Q-function on the preference data in the outer level. Our experiments on robotic simulated manipulation tasks and locomotion tasks demonstrate that MRN outperforms prior methods in the case of few preference labels and significantly improves data efficiency, achieving state-of-the-art in preference-based RL. Ablation studies further demonstrate that MRN learns a more accurate Q-function compared to prior work and shows obvious advantages when only a small amount of human feedback is available. The source code and videos of this project are released at https://sites.google.com/view/meta-reward-net.
One-shot Neural Backdoor Erasing via Adversarial Weight Masking
Authors: Shuwen Chai, Jinghui Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Recent studies show that despite achieving high accuracy on a number of real-world applications, deep neural networks (DNNs) can be backdoored: by injecting triggered data samples into the training dataset, the adversary can mislead the trained model into classifying any test data to the target class as long as the trigger pattern is presented. To nullify such backdoor threats, various methods have been proposed. Particularly, a line of research aims to purify the potentially compromised model. However, one major limitation of this line of work is the requirement to access sufficient original training data: the purifying performance is a lot worse when the available training data is limited. In this work, we propose Adversarial Weight Masking (AWM), a novel method capable of erasing the neural backdoors even in the one-shot setting. The key idea behind our method is to formulate this into a min-max optimization problem: first, adversarially recover the non-robust perturbation patterns and then (soft) mask the network weights that are sensitive to the recovered patterns. Comprehensive evaluations of several benchmark datasets suggest that AWM can largely improve the purifying effects over other state-of-the-art methods on various available training dataset sizes.
Revisiting Neural Scaling Laws in Language and Vision
Authors: Ibrahim M Alabdulmohsin, Behnam Neyshabur, Xiaohua Zhai
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: The remarkable progress in deep learning in recent years is largely driven by improvements in scale, where bigger models are trained on larger datasets for longer schedules. To predict the benefit of scale empirically, we argue for a more rigorous methodology based on the extrapolation loss, instead of reporting the best-fitting (interpolating) parameters. We then present a recipe for estimating scaling law parameters reliably from learning curves. We demonstrate that it extrapolates more accurately than previous methods in a wide range of architecture families across several domains, including image classification, neural machine translation (NMT) and  language modeling, in addition to tasks from the BIG-Bench evaluation benchmark. Finally, we release a benchmark dataset comprising of 90 evaluation tasks to facilitate research in this domain.
Efficient Phi-Regret Minimization in Extensive-Form Games via Online Mirror Descent
Authors: Yu Bai, Chi Jin, Song Mei, Ziang Song, Tiancheng Yu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: A conceptually appealing approach for learning Extensive-Form Games (EFGs) is to convert them to Normal-Form Games (NFGs). This approach enables us to directly translate state-of-the-art techniques and analyses in NFGs to learning EFGs, but typically suffers from computational intractability due to the exponential blow-up of the game size introduced by the conversion. In this paper, we address this problem in natural and important setups for the \emph{$\Phi$-Hedge} algorithm---A generic algorithm capable of learning a large class of equilibria for NFGs. We show that $\Phi$-Hedge can be directly used to learn Nash Equilibria (zero-sum settings), Normal-Form Coarse Correlated Equilibria (NFCCE), and Extensive-Form Correlated Equilibria (EFCE) in EFGs. We prove that, in those settings, the \emph{$\Phi$-Hedge} algorithms are equivalent to standard Online Mirror Descent (OMD) algorithms for EFGs with suitable dilated regularizers, and run in polynomial time. This new connection further allows us to design and analyze a new class of OMD algorithms based on modifying its log-partition function. In particular, we design an improved algorithm with balancing techniques that achieves a sharp $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{XAT})$ EFCE-regret under bandit-feedback in an EFG with $X$ information sets, $A$ actions, and $T$ episodes. To our best knowledge, this is the first such rate and matches the information-theoretic lower bound.
Long Range Graph Benchmark
Authors: Vijay Prakash Dwivedi, Ladislav Rampášek, Michael Galkin, Ali Parviz, Guy Wolf, Anh Tuan Luu, Dominique Beaini
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2022

Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) that are based on the message passing (MP) paradigm generally exchange information between 1-hop neighbors to build node representations at each layer. In principle, such networks are not able to capture long-range interactions (LRI) that may be desired or necessary for learning a given task on graphs. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in development of Transformer-based methods for graphs that can consider full node connectivity beyond the original sparse structure, thus enabling the modeling of LRI. However, MP-GNNs that simply rely on 1-hop message passing often fare better in several existing graph benchmarks when combined with positional feature representations, among other innovations, hence limiting the perceived utility and ranking of Transformer-like architectures. Here, we present the Long Range Graph Benchmark (LRGB) with 5 graph learning datasets: $\texttt{PascalVOC-SP}$, $\texttt{COCO-SP}$, $\texttt{PCQM-Contact}$, $\texttt{Peptides-func}$ and $\texttt{Peptides-struct}$ that arguably require LRI reasoning to achieve strong performance in a given task. We benchmark both baseline GNNs and Graph Transformer networks to verify that the models which capture long-range dependencies perform significantly better on these tasks. Therefore, these datasets are suitable for benchmarking and exploration of MP GNNs and Graph Transformer architectures that are intended to capture LRI.
On the inability of Gaussian process regression to optimally learn compositional functions
Authors: Matteo Giordano, Kolyan Ray, Johannes Schmidt-Hieber
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We rigorously prove that deep Gaussian process priors can outperform Gaussian process priors if the target function has a compositional structure. To this end, we study information-theoretic lower bounds for posterior contraction rates for Gaussian process regression in a continuous regression model. We show that if the true function is a generalized additive function, then the posterior based on any mean-zero Gaussian process can only recover the truth at a rate that is strictly slower than the minimax rate by a factor that is polynomially suboptimal in the sample size $n$.
Active Learning Through a Covering Lens
Authors: Ofer Yehuda, Avihu Dekel, Guy Hacohen, Daphna Weinshall
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Deep active learning aims to reduce the annotation cost for the training of deep models, which is notoriously data-hungry. Until recently, deep active learning methods were ineffectual in the low-budget regime, where only a small number of examples are annotated. The situation has been alleviated by recent advances in representation and self-supervised learning, which impart the geometry of the data representation with rich information about the points. Taking advantage of this progress, we study the problem of subset selection for annotation through a “covering” lens, proposing ProbCover – a new active learning algorithm for the low budget regime, which seeks to maximize Probability Coverage. We then describe a dual way to view the proposed formulation, from which one can derive strategies suitable for the high budget regime of active learning, related to existing methods like Coreset. We conclude with extensive experiments, evaluating ProbCover in the low-budget regime. We show that our principled active learning strategy improves the state-of-the-art in the low-budget regime in several image recognition benchmarks. This method is especially beneficial in the semi-supervised setting, allowing state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods to match the performance of fully supervised methods, while using much fewer labels nonetheless. Code is available at https://github.com/avihu111/TypiClust.
Uplifting Bandits
Authors: Yu-Guan Hsieh, Shiva P. Kasiviswanathan, Branislav Kveton
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We introduce a new multi-armed bandit model where the reward is a sum of multiple random variables, and each action only alters the distributions of some of these variables. Upon taking an action, the agent observes the realizations of all variables. This model is motivated by marketing campaigns and recommender systems, where the variables represent outcomes on individual customers, such as clicks. We propose UCB-style algorithms that estimate the uplifts of the actions over a baseline. We study multiple variants of the problem, including when the baseline and affected variables are unknown, and prove sublinear regret bounds for all of these. In addition, we provide regret lower bounds that justify the necessity of our modeling assumptions. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the benefit of methods that estimate the uplifts over policies that do not use this structure.
Training Uncertainty-Aware Classifiers with Conformalized Deep Learning
Authors: Bat-Sheva Einbinder, Yaniv Romano, Matteo Sesia, Yanfei Zhou
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Deep neural networks are powerful tools to detect hidden patterns in data and leverage them to make predictions, but they are not designed to understand uncertainty and estimate reliable probabilities. In particular, they tend to be overconfident. We begin to address this problem in the context of multi-class classification by developing a novel training algorithm producing models with more dependable uncertainty estimates, without sacrificing predictive power. The idea is to mitigate overconfidence by minimizing a loss function, inspired by advances in conformal inference, that quantifies model uncertainty by carefully leveraging hold-out data. Experiments with synthetic and real data demonstrate this method can lead to smaller conformal prediction sets with higher conditional coverage, after exact calibration with hold-out data, compared to state-of-the-art alternatives.
A general approximation lower bound in $L^p$ norm, with applications to feed-forward neural networks
Authors: El Mehdi Achour, Armand Foucault, Sébastien Gerchinovitz, François Malgouyres
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We study the fundamental limits to the expressive power of neural networks. Given two sets $F$, $G$ of real-valued functions, we first prove a general lower bound on how well functions in $F$ can be approximated in $L^p(\mu)$ norm by functions in $G$, for any $p \geq 1$ and any probability measure $\mu$. The lower bound depends on the packing number of $F$, the range of $F$, and the fat-shattering dimension of $G$. We then instantiate this bound to the case where $G$ corresponds to a piecewise-polynomial feedforward neural network, and describe in details the application to two sets $F$: Hölder balls and multivariate monotonic functions. Beside matching (known or new) upper bounds up to log factors, our lower bounds shed some light on the similarities or differences between approximation in $L^p$ norm or in sup norm, solving an open question by DeVore et al. (2021). Our proof strategy differs from the sup norm case and uses a key probability result of Mendelson (2002).
EnvPool: A Highly Parallel Reinforcement Learning Environment Execution Engine
Authors: Jiayi Weng, Min Lin, Shengyi Huang, Bo Liu, Denys Makoviichuk, Viktor Makoviychuk, Zichen Liu, Yufan Song, Ting Luo, Yukun Jiang, Zhongwen Xu, Shuicheng Yan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2022

Abstract: There has been significant progress in developing reinforcement learning (RL) training systems. Past works such as IMPALA, Apex, Seed RL, Sample Factory, and others, aim to improve the system's overall throughput. In this paper, we aim to address a common bottleneck in the RL training system, i.e., parallel environment execution, which is often the slowest part of the whole system but receives little attention. With a curated design for paralleling RL environments, we have improved the RL environment simulation speed across different hardware setups, ranging from a laptop and a modest workstation, to a high-end machine such as NVIDIA DGX-A100. On a high-end machine, EnvPool achieves one million frames per second for the environment execution on Atari environments and three million frames per second on MuJoCo environments. When running EnvPool on a laptop, the speed is 2.8x that of the Python subprocess. Moreover, great compatibility with existing RL training libraries has been demonstrated in the open-sourced community, including CleanRL, rl_games, DeepMind Acme, etc. Finally, EnvPool allows researchers to iterate their ideas at a much faster pace and has great potential to become the de facto RL environment execution engine. Example runs show that it only takes five minutes to train agents to play Atari Pong and MuJoCo Ant on a laptop.  EnvPool is open-sourced at https://github.com/sail-sg/envpool.
Generative Visual Prompt: Unifying Distributional Control of Pre-Trained Generative Models
Authors: Chen Henry Wu, Saman Motamed, Shaunak Srivastava, Fernando D De la Torre
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Generative models (e.g., GANs, diffusion models) learn the underlying data distribution in an unsupervised manner. However, many applications of interest require sampling from a particular region of the output space or sampling evenly over a range of characteristics. For efficient sampling in these scenarios, we propose Generative Visual Prompt (PromptGen), a framework for distributional control over pre-trained generative models by incorporating knowledge of other off-the-shelf models. PromptGen defines control as energy-based models (EBMs) and samples images in a feed-forward manner by approximating the EBM with invertible neural networks, avoiding optimization at inference. Our experiments demonstrate how PromptGen can efficiently sample from several unconditional generative models (e.g., StyleGAN2, StyleNeRF, diffusion autoencoder, NVAE) in a controlled or/and de-biased manner using various off-the-shelf models: (1) with the CLIP model as control, PromptGen can sample images guided by text, (2) with image classifiers as control, PromptGen can de-bias generative models across a set of attributes or attribute combinations, and (3) with inverse graphics models as control, PromptGen can sample images of the same identity in different poses. (4) Finally, PromptGen reveals that the CLIP model shows a "reporting bias" when used as control, and PromptGen can further de-bias this controlled distribution in an iterative manner. The code is available at https://github.com/ChenWu98/Generative-Visual-Prompt.
Implicit Warping for Animation with Image Sets
Authors: Arun Mallya, Ting-Chun Wang, Ming-Yu Liu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We present a new implicit warping framework for image animation using sets of source images through the transfer of motion of a driving video. A single cross-modal attention layer is used to find correspondences between the source images and the driving image, choose the most appropriate features from different source images, and warp the selected features. This is in contrast to the existing methods that use explicit flow-based warping, which is designed for animation using a single source and does not extend well to multiple sources. The pick-and-choose capability of our framework helps it achieve state-of-the-art results on multiple datasets for image animation using both single and multiple source images.
FNeVR: Neural Volume Rendering for Face Animation
Authors: Bohan Zeng, Boyu Liu, Hong Li, Xuhui Liu, Jianzhuang Liu, Dapeng Chen, Wei Peng, Baochang Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Face animation, one of the hottest topics in computer vision, has achieved a promising performance with the help of generative models. However, it remains a critical challenge to generate identity preserving and photo-realistic images due to the sophisticated motion deformation and complex facial detail modeling. To address these problems, we propose a Face Neural Volume Rendering (FNeVR) network to fully explore the potential of 2D motion warping and 3D volume rendering in a unified framework. In FNeVR, we design a 3D Face Volume Rendering (FVR) module to enhance the facial details for image rendering. Specifically, we first extract 3D information with a well designed architecture, and then introduce an orthogonal adaptive ray-sampling module for efficient rendering. We also design a lightweight pose editor, enabling FNeVR to edit the facial pose in a simple yet effective way. Extensive experiments show that our FNeVR obtains the best overall quality and performance on widely used talking-head benchmarks.
Ontologue: Declarative Benchmark Construction for Ontological Multi-Label Classification
Authors: Sean Yang, Bernease Herman, Bill Howe
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2022

Abstract: We describe a customizable benchmark for hierarchical and ontological multi-label classification, a task where labels are equipped with a graph structure and data items can be assigned multiple labels.  We find that current benchmarks do not adequately represent the problem space, casting doubt on the generalizability of current results. We consider three dimensions of the problem space: context (availability of rich features on the data and labels), distribution of labels over data, and graph structure. For context, the lack of complex features on the labels (and in some cases, the data) artificially prevent the use of modern representation learning techniques as an appropriate baseline.  For distribution, we find the long tail of labels over data constitute a few-shot learning problem that artificially confounds the results: for most common benchmarks, over 40% of the labels have fewer than 5 data points in the training set.  For structure, we find that the correlation between performance and the height of the tree can explain some of the variation in performance, informing practical utility. In this paper, we demonstrate how the lack of diversity in benchmarks can confound performance analysis, then present a declarative query system called Ontologue for generating custom benchmarks with specific properties, then use this system to design 4 new benchmarks extracted from DBPedia that better represent the problem space. We evaluate state-of-the-art algorithms on both existing and new benchmarks and show that the performance conclusions can vary significantly depending on the dimensions we consider.  We intend the system and derived benchmarks to improve the analysis of generalizability for these problems.
Make an Omelette with Breaking Eggs: Zero-Shot Learning for Novel Attribute Synthesis
Authors: Yu-Hsuan Li, Tzu-Yin Chao, Ching-Chun Huang, Pin-Yu Chen, Wei-Chen Chiu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Most of the existing algorithms for zero-shot classification problems typically rely on the attribute-based semantic relations among categories to realize the classification of novel categories without observing any of their instances. However, training the zero-shot classification models still requires attribute labeling for each class (or even instance) in the training dataset, which is also expensive. To this end, in this paper, we bring up a new problem scenario: ''Can we derive zero-shot learning for novel attribute detectors/classifiers and use them to automatically annotate the dataset for labeling efficiency?'' Basically, given only a small set of detectors that are learned to recognize some manually annotated attributes (i.e., the seen attributes), we aim to synthesize the detectors of novel attributes in a zero-shot learning manner. Our proposed method, Zero-Shot Learning for Attributes (ZSLA), which is the first of its kind to the best of our knowledge, tackles this new research problem by applying the set operations to first decompose the seen attributes into their basic attributes and then recombine these basic attributes into the novel ones. Extensive experiments are conducted to verify the capacity of our synthesized detectors for accurately capturing the semantics of the novel attributes and show their superior performance in terms of detection and localization compared to other baseline approaches. Moreover, we demonstrate the application of automatic annotation using our synthesized detectors on Caltech-UCSD Birds-200-2011 dataset. Various generalized zero-shot classification algorithms trained upon the dataset re-annotated by ZSLA shows comparable performance with those trained with the manual ground-truth annotations.
Exploiting Semantic Relations for Glass Surface Detection
Authors: Jiaying Lin, Yuen-Hei Yeung, Rynson Lau
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Glass surfaces are omnipresent in our daily lives and often go unnoticed by the majority of us. While humans are generally able to infer their locations and thus avoid collisions, it can be difficult for current object detection systems to handle them due to the transparent nature of glass surfaces. Previous methods approached the problem by extracting global context information to obtain priors such as object boundaries and reflections. However, their performances cannot be guaranteed when these deterministic features are not available. We observe that humans often reason through the semantic context of the environment, which offers insights into the categories of and proximity between entities that are expected to appear in the surrounding. For example, the odds of co-occurrence of glass windows with walls and curtains are generally higher than that with other objects such as cars and trees, which have relatively less semantic relevance. Based on this observation, we propose a model ('GlassSemNet') that integrates the contextual relationship of the scenes for glass surface detection with two novel modules: (1) Scene Aware Activation (SAA) Module to adaptively filter critical channels with respect to spatial and semantic features, and (2) Context Correlation Attention (CCA) Module to progressively learn the contextual correlations among objects both spatially and semantically. In addition, we propose a large-scale glass surface detection dataset named {\it Glass Surface Detection - Semantics} ('GSD-S'), which contains 4,519 real-world RGB glass surface images from diverse real-world scenes with detailed annotations for both glass surface detection and semantic segmentation. Experimental results show that our model outperforms contemporary works, especially with 42.6\% MAE improvement on our proposed GSD-S dataset. Code, dataset, and models are available at https://jiaying.link/neurips2022-gsds/
Differentially Private Generalized Linear Models Revisited
Authors: Raman Arora, Raef Bassily, Cristóbal Guzmán, Michael Menart, Enayat Ullah
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We study the problem of $(\epsilon,\delta)$-differentially private learning of linear predictors with convex losses. We provide results for two subclasses of loss functions. The first case is when the loss is smooth and non-negative but not necessarily Lipschitz (such as the squared loss). For this case, we establish an  upper bound on the excess population risk of $\tilde{O}\left(\frac{\Vert w^*\Vert}{\sqrt{n}} + \min\left\{\frac{\Vert w^* \Vert^2}{(n\epsilon)^{2/3}},\frac{\sqrt{d}\Vert w^*\Vert^2}{n\epsilon}\right\}\right)$, where $n$ is the number of samples, $d$ is the dimension of the problem, and $w^*$ is the minimizer of the population risk. Apart from the dependence on $\Vert w^\ast\Vert$, our bound is essentially tight in all parameters. In particular, we show a lower bound of $\tilde{\Omega}\left(\frac{1}{\sqrt{n}} + {\min\left\{\frac{\Vert w^*\Vert^{4/3}}{(n\epsilon)^{2/3}}, \frac{\sqrt{d}\Vert w^*\Vert}{n\epsilon}\right\}}\right)$. We also revisit the previously studied case of Lipschitz losses \cite{SSTT21}.  For this case, we close the gap in the existing work and show that the optimal rate is (up to log factors) $\Theta\left(\frac{\Vert w^*\Vert}{\sqrt{n}} + \min\left\{\frac{\Vert w^*\Vert}{\sqrt{n\epsilon}},\frac{\sqrt{\text{rank}}\Vert w^*\Vert}{n\epsilon}\right\}\right)$, where $\text{rank}$ is the rank of the design matrix. This improves over existing work in the high privacy regime. Finally, our algorithms involve a private model selection approach that we develop to enable attaining the stated rates without a-priori knowledge of $\Vert w^*\Vert$.