mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Federated Linear Contextual Bandits with User-level Differential Privacy
Authors: Huang, Ruiquan and Zhang, Huanyu and Melis, Luca and Shen, Milan and Hejazinia, Meisam and Yang, Jing
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: This paper studies federated linear contextual bandits under the notion of user-level differential privacy (DP). We first introduce a unified federated bandits framework that can accommodate various definitions of DP in the sequential decision-making setting. We then formally introduce user-level central DP (CDP) and local DP (LDP) in the federated bandits framework, and investigate the fundamental trade-offs between the learning regrets and the corresponding DP guarantees in a federated linear contextual bandits model. For CDP, we propose a federated algorithm termed as $\textttROBIN$ and show that it is near-optimal in terms of the number of clients $M$ and the privacy budget $ɛ$ by deriving nearly-matching upper and lower regret bounds when user-level DP is satisfied. For LDP, we obtain several lower bounds, indicating that learning under user-level $(ɛ,δ)$-LDP must suffer a regret blow-up factor at least $\min\1/ɛ,M\$ or $\min\1/\sqrtɛ,\sqrtM\$ under different conditions.
Straightening Out the Straight-Through Estimator: Overcoming Optimization Challenges in Vector Quantized Networks
Authors: Huh, Minyoung and Cheung, Brian and Agrawal, Pulkit and Isola, Phillip
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: This work examines the challenges of training neural networks using vector quantization using straight-through estimation. We find that the main cause of training instability is the discrepancy between the model embedding and the code-vector distribution. We identify the factors that contribute to this issue, including the codebook gradient sparsity and the asymmetric nature of the commitment loss, which leads to misaligned code-vector assignments. We propose to address this issue via affine re-parameterization of the code vectors. Additionally, we introduce an alternating optimization to reduce the gradient error introduced by the straight-through estimation. Moreover, we propose an improvement to the commitment loss to ensure better alignment between the codebook representation and the model embedding. These optimization methods improve the mathematical approximation of the straight-through estimation and, ultimately, the model performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods on several common model architectures, such as AlexNet, ResNet, and ViT, across various tasks, including image classification and generative modeling.
Cut your Losses with Squentropy
Authors: Hui, Like and Belkin, Mikhail and Wright, Stephen
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Nearly all practical neural models for classification are trained using the cross-entropy loss. Yet this ubiquitous choice is supported by little theoretical or empirical evidence. Recent work (Hui & Belkin, 2020) suggests that training using the (rescaled) square loss is often superior in terms of the classification accuracy. In this paper we propose the "squentropy" loss, which is the sum of two terms: the cross-entropy loss and the average square loss over the incorrect classes. We provide an extensive set of experiment on multi-class classification problems showing that the squentropy loss outperforms both the pure cross-entropy and rescaled square losses in terms of the classification accuracy. We also demonstrate that it provides significantly better model calibration than either of these alternative losses and, furthermore, has less variance with respect to the random initialization. Additionally, in contrast to the square loss, squentropy loss can frequently be trained using exactly the same optimization parameters, including the learning rate, as the standard cross-entropy loss, making it a true ”plug-and-play” replacement. Finally, unlike the rescaled square loss, multiclass squentropy contains no parameters that need to be adjusted.
SOM-CPC: Unsupervised Contrastive Learning with Self-Organizing Maps for Structured Representations of High-Rate Time Series
Authors: Huijben, Iris A.M. and Nijdam, Arthur Andreas and Overeem, Sebastiaan and Van Gilst, Merel M and Van Sloun, Ruud
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Continuous monitoring with an ever-increasing number of sensors has become ubiquitous across many application domains. However, acquired time series are typically high-dimensional and difficult to interpret. Expressive deep learning (DL) models have gained popularity for dimensionality reduction, but the resulting latent space often remains difficult to interpret. In this work we propose SOM-CPC, a model that visualizes data in an organized 2D manifold, while preserving higher-dimensional information. We address a largely unexplored and challenging set of scenarios comprising high-rate time series, and show on both synthetic and real-life data (physiological data and audio recordings) that SOM-CPC outperforms strong baselines like DL-based feature extraction, followed by conventional dimensionality reduction techniques, and models that jointly optimize a DL model and a Self-Organizing Map (SOM). SOM-CPC has great potential to acquire a better understanding of latent patterns in high-rate data streams.
One-Shot Federated Conformal Prediction
Authors: Humbert, Pierre and Le Bars, Batiste and Bellet, Aurélien and Arlot, Sylvain
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: In this paper, we present a Conformal Prediction method that computes prediction sets in a one-shot Federated Learning (FL) setting. More specifically, we introduce a novel quantile-of-quantiles estimator and prove that for any distribution, it is possible to compute prediction sets with desired coverage in only one round of communication. To mitigate privacy issues, we also describe a locally differentially private version of our estimator. Finally, over a wide range of experiments, we show that our method returns prediction sets with coverage and length very similar to those obtained in a centralized setting. These results demonstrate that our method is well-suited for one-shot Federated Learning.
The Impact of Exploration on Convergence and Performance of Multi-Agent Q-Learning Dynamics
Authors: Hussain, Aamal and Belardinelli, Francesco and Paccagnan, Dario
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Understanding the impact of exploration on the behaviour of multi-agent learning has, so far, benefited from the restriction to potential, or network zero-sum games in which convergence to an equilibrium can be shown. Outside of these classes, learning dynamics rarely converge and little is known about the effect of exploration in the face of non-convergence. To progress this front, we study the smooth Q- Learning dynamics. We show that, in any network game, exploration by agents results in the convergence of Q-Learning to a neighbourhood of an equilibrium. This holds independently of whether the dynamics reach the equilibrium or display complex behaviours. We show that increasing the exploration rate decreases the size of this neighbourhood and also decreases the ability of all agents to improve their payoffs. Furthermore, in a broad class of games, the payoff performance of Q-Learning dynamics, measured by Social Welfare, decreases when the exploration rate increases. Our experiments show this to be a general phenomenon, namely that exploration leads to improved convergence of Q-Learning, at the cost of payoff performance.
Combinatorial Neural Bandits
Authors: Hwang, Taehyun and Chai, Kyuwook and Oh, Min-Hwan
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We consider a contextual combinatorial bandit problem where in each round a learning agent selects a subset of arms and receives feedback on the selected arms according to their scores. The score of an arm is an unknown function of the arm’s feature. Approximating this unknown score function with deep neural networks, we propose algorithms: Combinatorial Neural UCB ($\textttCN-UCB$) and Combinatorial Neural Thompson Sampling ($\textttCN-TS$). We prove that $\textttCN-UCB$ achieves $\tilde\mathcalO(\tilded \sqrtT)$ or $\tilde\mathcalO(\sqrt\tilded T K)$ regret, where $\tilded$ is the effective dimension of a neural tangent kernel matrix, $K$ is the size of a subset of arms, and $T$ is the time horizon. For $\textttCN-TS$, we adapt an optimistic sampling technique to ensure the optimism of the sampled combinatorial action, achieving a worst-case (frequentist) regret of $\tilde\mathcalO(\tilded \sqrtTK)$. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first combinatorial neural bandit algorithms with regret performance guarantees. In particular, $\textttCN-TS$ is the first Thompson sampling algorithm with the worst-case regret guarantees for the general contextual combinatorial bandit problem. The numerical experiments demonstrate the superior performances of our proposed algorithms.
MAGANet: Achieving Combinatorial Generalization by Modeling a Group Action
Authors: Hwang, Geonho and Choi, Jaewoong and Cho, Hyunsoo and Kang, Myungjoo
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Combinatorial generalization refers to the ability to collect and assemble various attributes from diverse data to generate novel unexperienced data. This ability is considered a necessary passing point for achieving human-level intelligence. To achieve this ability, previous unsupervised approaches mainly focused on learning the disentangled representation, such as the variational autoencoder. However, recent studies discovered that the disentangled representation is insufficient for combinatorial generalization and is not even correlated. In this regard, we propose a novel framework for data generation that can robustly generalize under these distribution shift situations. Instead of representing each data, our model discovers the fundamental transformation between a pair of data by simulating a group action. To test the combinatorial generalizability, we evaluated our model in two settings: Recombination-to-Element and Recombination-to-Range. The experiments demonstrated that our method has quantitatively and qualitatively superior generalizability and generates better images than traditional models.
Information-Theoretic State Space Model for Multi-View Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Hwang, Hyeongjoo and Seo, Seokin and Jang, Youngsoo and Kim, Sungyoon and Kim, Geon-Hyeong and Hong, Seunghoon and Kim, Kee-Eung
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Multi-View Reinforcement Learning (MVRL) seeks to find an optimal control for an agent given multi-view observations from various sources. Despite recent advances in multi-view learning that aim to extract the latent representation from multi-view data, it is not straightforward to apply them to control tasks, especially when the observations are temporally dependent on one another. The problem can be even more challenging if the observations are intermittently missing for a subset of views. In this paper, we introduce Fuse2Control (F2C), an information-theoretic approach to capturing the underlying state space model from the sequences of multi-view observations. We conduct an extensive set of experiments in various control tasks showing that our method is highly effective in aggregating task-relevant information across many views, that scales linearly with the number of views while retaining robustness to arbitrary missing view scenarios.
Under-Counted Tensor Completion with Neural Incorporation of Attributes
Authors: Ibrahim, Shahana and Fu, Xiao and Hutchinson, Rebecca and Seo, Eugene
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Systematic under-counting effects are observed in data collected across many disciplines, e.g., epidemiology and ecology. Under-counted tensor completion (UC-TC) is well-motivated for many data analytics tasks, e.g., inferring the case numbers of infectious diseases at unobserved locations from under-counted case numbers in neighboring regions. However, existing methods for similar problems often lack supports in theory, making it hard to understand the underlying principles and conditions beyond empirical successes. In this work, a low-rank Poisson tensor model with an expressive unknown nonlinear side information extractor is proposed for under-counted multi-aspect data. A joint low-rank tensor completion and neural network learning algorithm is designed to recover the model. Moreover, the UC-TC formulation is supported by theoretical analysis showing that the fully counted entries of the tensor and each entry’s under-counting probability can be provably recovered from partial observations—under reasonable conditions. To our best knowledge, the result is the first to offer theoretical supports for under-counted multi-aspect data completion. Simulations and real-data experiments corroborate the theoretical claims.
On the Identifiability and Estimation of Causal Location-Scale Noise Models
Authors: Immer, Alexander and Schultheiss, Christoph and Vogt, Julia E and Schölkopf, Bernhard and Bühlmann, Peter and Marx, Alexander
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We study the class of location-scale or heteroscedastic noise models (LSNMs), in which the effect $Y$ can be written as a function of the cause $X$ and a noise source $N$ independent of $X$, which may be scaled by a positive function $g$ over the cause, i.e., $Y = f(X) + g(X)N$. Despite the generality of the model class, we show the causal direction is identifiable up to some pathological cases. To empirically validate these theoretical findings, we propose two estimators for LSNMs: an estimator based on (non-linear) feature maps, and one based on neural networks. Both model the conditional distribution of $Y$ given $X$ as a Gaussian parameterized by its natural parameters. When the feature maps are correctly specified, we prove that our estimator is jointly concave, and a consistent estimator for the cause-effect identification task. Although the the neural network does not inherit those guarantees, it can fit functions of arbitrary complexity, and reaches state-of-the-art performance across benchmarks.
Stochastic Marginal Likelihood Gradients using Neural Tangent Kernels
Authors: Immer, Alexander and Van Der Ouderaa, Tycho F. A. and Van Der Wilk, Mark and Ratsch, Gunnar and Schölkopf, Bernhard
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Selecting hyperparameters in deep learning greatly impacts its effectiveness but requires manual effort and expertise. Recent works show that Bayesian model selection with Laplace approximations can allow to optimize such hyperparameters just like standard neural network parameters using gradients and on the training data. However, estimating a single hyperparameter gradient requires a pass through the entire dataset, limiting the scalability of such algorithms. In this work, we overcome this issue by introducing lower bounds to the linearized Laplace approximation of the marginal likelihood. In contrast to previous estimators, these bounds are amenable to stochastic-gradient-based optimization and allow to trade off estimation accuracy against computational complexity. We derive them using the function-space form of the linearized Laplace, which can be estimated using the neural tangent kernel. Experimentally, we show that the estimators can significantly accelerate gradient-based hyperparameter optimization.
Differentially Private Hierarchical Clustering with Provable Approximation Guarantees
Authors: Imola, Jacob and Epasto, Alessandro and Mahdian, Mohammad and Cohen-Addad, Vincent and Mirrokni, Vahab
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Hierarchical Clustering is a popular unsupervised machine learning method with decades of history and numerous applications. We initiate the study of <em>differentially-private</em> approximation algorithms for hierarchical clustering under the rigorous framework introduced by Dasgupta (2016). We show strong lower bounds for the problem: that any $ε$-DP algorithm must exhibit $O(|V|^2/ ε)$-additive error for an input dataset $V$. Then, we exhibit a polynomial-time approximation algorithm with $O(|V|^2.5/ ε)$-additive error, and an exponential-time algorithm that meets the lower bound. To overcome the lower bound, we focus on the stochastic block model, a popular model of graphs, and, with a separation assumption on the blocks, propose a private $1+o(1)$ approximation algorithm which also recovers the blocks exactly. Finally, we perform an empirical study of our algorithms and validate their performance.
Neural Network Accelerated Implicit Filtering: Integrating Neural Network Surrogates With Provably Convergent Derivative Free Optimization Methods
Authors: Irwin, Brian and Haber, Eldad and Gal, Raviv and Ziv, Avi
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce neural network accelerated implicit filtering (NNAIF), a novel family of methods for solving noisy derivative free (i.e. black box, zeroth order) optimization problems. NNAIF intelligently combines the established literature on implicit filtering (IF) optimization methods with a neural network (NN) surrogate model of the objective function, resulting in accelerated derivative free methods for unconstrained optimization problems. The NN surrogate model consists of a fixed number of parameters, which can be as few as $≈ 1.3 \times 10^4$, that are updated as NNAIF progresses. We show that NNAIF directly inherits the convergence properties of IF optimization methods, and thus NNAIF is guaranteed to converge towards a critical point of the objective function under appropriate assumptions. Numerical experiments with $31$ noisy problems from the CUTEst optimization benchmark set demonstrate the benefits and costs associated with NNAIF. These benefits include NNAIF’s ability to minimize structured functions of several thousand variables much more rapidly than well-known alternatives, such as Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) and finite difference based variants of gradient descent (GD) and BFGS, as well as its namesake IF.
Principled Offline RL in the Presence of Rich Exogenous Information
Authors: Islam, Riashat and Tomar, Manan and Lamb, Alex and Efroni, Yonathan and Zang, Hongyu and Didolkar, Aniket Rajiv and Misra, Dipendra and Li, Xin and Seijen, Harm Van and Tachet Des Combes, Remi and Langford, John
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Learning to control an agent from offline data collected in a rich pixel-based visual observation space is vital for real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL). A major challenge in this setting is the presence of input information that is hard to model and irrelevant to controlling the agent. This problem has been approached by the theoretical RL community through the lens of <em>exogenous information</em>, i.e., any control-irrelevant information contained in observations. For example, a robot navigating in busy streets needs to ignore irrelevant information, such as other people walking in the background, textures of objects, or birds in the sky. In this paper, we focus on the setting with visually detailed exogenous information and introduce new offline RL benchmarks that offer the ability to study this problem. We find that contemporary representation learning techniques can fail on datasets where the noise is a complex and time-dependent process, which is prevalent in practical applications. To address these, we propose to use multi-step inverse models to learn Agent-Centric Representations for Offline-RL (ACRO). Despite being simple and reward-free, we show theoretically and empirically that the representation created by this objective greatly outperforms baselines.
Unveiling the Latent Space Geometry of Push-Forward Generative Models
Authors: Issenhuth, Thibaut and Tanielian, Ugo and Mary, Jeremie and Picard, David
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Many deep generative models are defined as a push-forward of a Gaussian measure by a continuous generator, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) or Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs). This work explores the latent space of such deep generative models. A key issue with these models is their tendency to output samples outside of the support of the target distribution when learning disconnected distributions. We investigate the relationship between the performance of these models and the geometry of their latent space. Building on recent developments in geometric measure theory, we prove a sufficient condition for optimality in the case where the dimension of the latent space is larger than the number of modes. Through experiments on GANs, we demonstrate the validity of our theoretical results and gain new insights into the latent space geometry of these models. Additionally, we propose a truncation method that enforces a simplicial cluster structure in the latent space and improves the performance of GANs.
CO-BED: Information-Theoretic Contextual Optimization via Bayesian Experimental Design
Authors: Ivanova, Desi R. and Jennings, Joel and Rainforth, Tom and Zhang, Cheng and Foster, Adam
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We formalize the problem of contextual optimization through the lens of Bayesian experimental design and propose CO-BED—a general, model-agnostic framework for designing contextual experiments using information-theoretic principles. After formulating a suitable information-based objective, we employ black-box variational methods to simultaneously estimate it and optimize the designs in a single stochastic gradient scheme. In addition, to accommodate discrete actions within our framework, we propose leveraging continuous relaxation schemes, which can naturally be integrated into our variational objective. As a result, CO-BED provides a general and automated solution to a wide range of contextual optimization problems. We illustrate its effectiveness in a number of experiments, where CO-BED demonstrates competitive performance even when compared to bespoke, model-specific alternatives.
DoG is SGD’s Best Friend: A Parameter-Free Dynamic Step Size Schedule
Authors: Ivgi, Maor and Hinder, Oliver and Carmon, Yair
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We propose a tuning-free dynamic SGD step size formula, which we call Distance over Gradients (DoG). The DoG step sizes depend on simple empirical quantities (distance from the initial point and norms of gradients) and have no “learning rate” parameter. Theoretically, we show that, for stochastic convex optimization, a slight variation of the DoG formula enjoys strong, high-probability parameter-free convergence guarantees and iterate movement bounds. Empirically, we consider a broad range of vision and language transfer learning tasks, and show that DoG’s performance is close to that of SGD with tuned learning rate. We also propose a per-layer variant of DoG that generally outperforms tuned SGD, approaching the performance of tuned Adam. A PyTorch implementation of our algorithms is available at https://github.com/formll/dog.
Maximal Initial Learning Rates in Deep ReLU Networks
Authors: Iyer, Gaurav and Hanin, Boris and Rolnick, David
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Training a neural network requires choosing a suitable learning rate, which involves a trade-off between speed and effectiveness of convergence. While there has been considerable theoretical and empirical analysis of how large the learning rate can be, most prior work focuses only on late-stage training. In this work, we introduce the maximal initial learning rate $η^*$ - the largest learning rate at which a randomly initialized neural network can successfully begin training and achieve (at least) a given threshold accuracy. Using a simple approach to estimate $η^*$, we observe that in constant-width fully-connected ReLU networks, $η^*$ behaves differently from the maximum learning rate later in training. Specifically, we find that $η^*$ is well predicted as a power of depth $\times$ width, provided that (i) the width of the network is sufficiently large compared to the depth, and (ii) the input layer is trained at a relatively small learning rate. We further analyze the relationship between $η^*$ and the sharpness $łambda_1$ of the network at initialization, indicating they are closely though not inversely related. We formally prove bounds for $łambda_1$ in terms of depth $\times$ width that align with our empirical results.
Data-Driven Subgroup Identification for Linear Regression
Authors: Izzo, Zachary and Liu, Ruishan and Zou, James
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Medical studies frequently require to extract the relationship between each covariate and the outcome with statistical confidence measures. To do this, simple parametric models are frequently used (e.g. coefficients of linear regression) but always fitted on the whole dataset. However, it is common that the covariates may not have a uniform effect over the whole population and thus a unified simple model can miss the heterogeneous signal. For example, a linear model may be able to explain a subset of the data but fail on the rest due to the nonlinearity and heterogeneity in the data. In this paper, we propose DDGroup (data-driven group discovery), a data-driven method to effectively identify subgroups in the data with a uniform linear relationship between the features and the label. DDGroup outputs an interpretable region in which the linear model is expected to hold. It is simple to implement and computationally tractable for use. We show theoretically that, given a large enough sample, DDGroup recovers a region where a single linear model with low variance is well-specified (if one exists), and experiments on real-world medical datasets confirm that it can discover regions where a local linear model has improved performance. Our experiments also show that DDGroup can uncover subgroups with qualitatively different relationships which are missed by simply applying parametric approaches to the whole dataset.
Efficient Training of Language Models using Few-Shot Learning
Authors: J. Reddi, Sashank and Miryoosefi, Sobhan and Karp, Stefani and Krishnan, Shankar and Kale, Satyen and Kim, Seungyeon and Kumar, Sanjiv
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Large deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art performance across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks and demonstrated remarkable few-shot learning performance. However, training them is often challenging and resource-intensive. In this paper, we study an efficient approach to train language models using few-shot learners. We show that, by leveraging the fast learning nature of few-shot learners, one can train language models efficiently in a stagewise manner. Our main insight is that stacking a good few-shot learner on a good small language model provides a good initializer for a larger language model. Using this insight and building upon progressive stacking approaches, we develop novel approaches for training such networks in a stagewise manner. Furthermore, we also provide a theoretical framework and accompanying empirical studies to support our insights, thereby creating a theoretical foundation for progressive stacking. Finally, we provide empirical results to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in reducing the training time of few-shot learners.
Scalable Adaptive Computation for Iterative Generation
Authors: Jabri, Allan and Fleet, David J. and Chen, Ting
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Natural data is redundant yet predominant architectures tile computation uniformly across their input and output space. We propose the Recurrent Interface Network (RIN), an attention-based architecture that decouples its core computation from the dimensionality of the data, enabling adaptive computation for more scalable generation of high-dimensional data. RINs focus the bulk of computation (i.e. global self-attention) on a set of latent tokens, using cross-attention to read and write (i.e. route) information between latent and data tokens. Stacking RIN blocks allows bottom-up (data to latent) and top-down (latent to data) feedback, leading to deeper and more expressive routing. While this routing introduces challenges, this is less problematic in recurrent computation settings where the task (and routing problem) changes gradually, such as iterative generation with diffusion models. We show how to leverage recurrence by conditioning the latent tokens at each forward pass of the reverse diffusion process with those from prior computation, i.e. latent self-conditioning. RINs yield state-of-the-art pixel diffusion models for image and video generation, scaling to1024×1024 images without cascades or guidance, while being domain-agnostic and up to 10× more efficient than 2D and 3D U-Nets.
Unconstrained Online Learning with Unbounded Losses
Authors: Jacobsen, Andrew and Cutkosky, Ashok
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Algorithms for online learning typically require one or more boundedness assumptions: that the domain is bounded, that the losses are Lipschitz, or both. In this paper, we develop a new setting for online learning with unbounded domains and non-Lipschitz losses. For this setting we provide an algorithm which guarantees $R_T(u)łe \tilde O(G\|u\|\sqrtT+L\|u\|^2\sqrtT)$ regret on any problem where the subgradients satisfy $\|g_t\|łe G+L\|w_t\|$, and show that this bound is unimprovable without further assumptions. We leverage this algorithm to develop new saddle-point optimization algorithms that converge in duality gap in unbounded domains, even in the absence of meaningful curvature. Finally, we provide the first algorithm achieving non-trivial dynamic regret in an unbounded domain for non-Lipschitz losses, as well as a matching lower bound. The regret of our dynamic regret algorithm automatically improves to a novel $L^*$ bound when the losses are smooth.
Multi-Objective GFlowNets
Authors: Jain, Moksh and Raparthy, Sharath Chandra and Hernández-García, Alex and Rector-Brooks, Jarrid and Bengio, Yoshua and Miret, Santiago and Bengio, Emmanuel
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We study the problem of generating <em>diverse</em> candidates in the context of Multi-Objective Optimization. In many applications of machine learning such as drug discovery and material design, the goal is to generate candidates which simultaneously optimize a set of potentially conflicting objectives. Moreover, these objectives are often imperfect evaluations of some underlying property of interest, making it important to generate diverse candidates to have multiple options for expensive downstream evaluations. We propose Multi-Objective GFlowNets (MOGFNs), a novel method for generating diverse Pareto optimal solutions, based on GFlowNets. We introduce two variants of MOGFNs: MOGFN-PC, which models a family of independent sub-problems defined by a scalarization function, with reward-conditional GFlowNets, and MOGFN-AL, which solves a sequence of sub-problems defined by an acquisition function in an active learning loop. Our experiments on wide variety of synthetic and benchmark tasks demonstrate advantages of the proposed methods in terms of the Pareto performance and importantly, improved candidate diversity, which is the main contribution of this work.
The Price of Differential Privacy under Continual Observation
Authors: Jain, Palak and Raskhodnikova, Sofya and Sivakumar, Satchit and Smith, Adam
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We study the accuracy of differentially private mechanisms in the continual release model. A continual release mechanism receives a sensitive dataset as a stream of $T$ inputs and produces, after receiving each input, an output that is accurate for all the inputs received so far. We provide the first strong lower bounds on the error of continual release mechanisms. In particular, for two fundamental problems that are closely related to empirical risk minimization and widely studied and used in the standard (batch) model, we prove that the worst case error of every continual release algorithm is $\tilde Ømega(T^1/3)$ times larger than that of the best batch algorithm. Previous work shows only a $Ømega(łog T)$ gap between the worst case error achievable in these two models. We also formulate a model that allows for adaptively selected inputs, thus capturing dependencies that arise in many applications of continual release. Even though, in general, both privacy and accuracy are harder to attain in this model, we show that our lower bounds are matched by the error of simple algorithms that work even for adaptively selected inputs.
Graph Ladling: Shockingly Simple Parallel GNN Training without Intermediate Communication
Authors: Jaiswal, Ajay Kumar and Liu, Shiwei and Chen, Tianlong and Ding, Ying and Wang, Zhangyang
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Graphs are omnipresent and GNNs are a powerful family of neural networks for learning over graphs. Despite their popularity, scaling GNNs either by deepening or widening suffers from prevalent issues of $\textitunhealthy gradients, over-smoothening, information squashing$, which often lead to sub-standard performance. In this work, we are interested in exploring a principled way to scale GNNs capacity without deepening or widening, which can improve its performance across multiple small and large graphs. Motivated by the recent intriguing phenomenon of model soups, which suggest that fine-tuned weights of multiple large-language pre-trained models can be merged to a better minima, we argue to exploit the fundamentals of model soups to mitigate the aforementioned issues of memory bottleneck and trainability during GNNs scaling. More specifically, we propose not to deepen or widen current GNNs, but instead present $\textbffirst data-centric perspective$ of model soups to build powerful GNNs by dividing giant graph data to build independently and parallelly trained multiple comparatively weaker GNNs without any intermediate communication, and $\textitcombining their strength$ using a greedy interpolation soup procedure to achieve state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, we provide a wide variety of model soup preparation techniques by leveraging state-of-the-art graph sampling and graph partitioning approaches that can handle large graph data structures. Our extensive experiments across many real-world small and large graphs, illustrate the effectiveness of our approach and point towards a promising orthogonal direction for GNN scaling. Codes are available at: https://github.com/VITA-Group/graph_ladling
Instant Soup: Cheap Pruning Ensembles in A Single Pass Can Draw Lottery Tickets from Large Models
Authors: Jaiswal, Ajay Kumar and Liu, Shiwei and Chen, Tianlong and Ding, Ying and Wang, Zhangyang
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Large pre-trained transformers have been receiving explosive attention in the past few years, due to their acculturation for numerous downstream applications via fine-tuning, but their exponentially increasing parameter counts are becoming a primary hurdle to even just fine-tune them without industry-standard hardware. Recently, Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) and its variants, have been exploited to prune these large pre-trained models generating subnetworks which can achieve similar performance as their dense counterparts, but LTH pragmatism is enormously inhibited by repetitive full training and pruning routine of iterative magnitude pruning (IMP) which worsens with increasing model size. Motivated by the recent observations of model soups, which suggest that fine-tuned weights of multiple models can be merged to a better minima, we propose <b>Instant Soup Pruning (ISP)</b> to generate lottery ticket quality subnetworks, using a fraction of the original IMP cost by replacing the expensive intermediate pruning stages of IMP with computationally efficient weak mask generation and aggregation routine. More specifically, during the mask generation stage, ISP takes a small handful of iterations using varying training protocols and data subsets to generate many weak and noisy subnetworks, and superpose them to average out the noise creating a high-quality denoised subnetwork. Our extensive experiments and ablation on two popular large-scale pre-trained models: $\textttCLIP (unexplored in pruning till date)$ and $\textttBERT$ across multiple benchmark vision $\texttt\MNIST, SVHN, Cars, GTSRB, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100\$ and language datasets $\texttt\MNLI, QNLI, QQP, SST, ...\$ validate the effectiveness of ISP compared to several state-of-the-art pruning methods. Additionally, we show that ISP can be easily modified with minimal overhead to produce benefits comparable to model soups, without the prerequisite to generate multiple candidates fine-tuned models. Codes are available at: https://github.com/VITA-Group/instant_soup.
Exploring the Benefits of Training Expert Language Models over Instruction Tuning
Authors: Jang, Joel and Kim, Seungone and Ye, Seonghyeon and Kim, Doyoung and Logeswaran, Lajanugen and Lee, Moontae and Lee, Kyungjae and Seo, Minjoon
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Recently, Language Models (LMs) instruction-tuned on multiple tasks, also known as multitask-prompted fine-tuning (MT), have shown capabilities to generalize to unseen tasks. Previous work has shown that scaling the number of finetuning datasets and instructions is the key component in making stronger MT LMs. In this work, we report surprising findings that show an expert LM trained on just a single task can outperform an MT LM trained with 300+ different tasks on 11 different unseen datasets and on 13 datasets of the BIG-bench benchmark by an average of 3.20% and 1.29%, respectively. This finding casts doubt on the previously held belief that simply scaling the number of tasks makes stronger MT LMs. Leveraging this finding, we further show that this distributed approach of training multiple expert LMs instead of a single MT LM for zero-shot inference possesses many benefits including (1) avoiding negative task transfer that often occurs during instruction tuning, (2) being able to continually learn new tasks without having to re-train on previous tasks to avoid catastrophic forgetting, and (3) showing compositional capabilities when merging individual experts together.
Learning to Boost Training by Periodic Nowcasting Near Future Weights
Authors: Jang, Jinhyeok and Yun, Woo-Han and Kim, Won Hwa and Yoon, Youngwoo and Kim, Jaehong and Lee, Jaeyeon and Han, Byungok
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Recent complicated problems require large-scale datasets and complex model architectures, however, it is difficult to train such large networks due to high computational issues. Significant efforts have been made to make the training more efficient such as momentum, learning rate scheduling, weight regularization, and meta-learning. Based on our observations on 1) high correlation between past eights and future weights, 2) conditions for beneficial weight prediction, and 3) feasibility of weight prediction, we propose a more general framework by intermittently skipping a handful of epochs by periodically forecasting near future weights, i.e., a Weight Nowcaster Network (WNN). As an add-on module, WNN predicts the future weights to make the learning process faster regardless of tasks and architectures. Experimental results show that WNN can significantly save actual time cost for training with an additional marginal time to train WNN. We validate the generalization capability of WNN under various tasks, and demonstrate that it works well even for unseen tasks. The code and pre-trained model are available at https://github.com/jjh6297/WNN.
Unscented Autoencoder
Authors: Janjos, Faris and Rosenbaum, Lars and Dolgov, Maxim and Zoellner, J. Marius
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: The Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is a seminal approach in deep generative modeling with latent variables. Interpreting its reconstruction process as a nonlinear transformation of samples from the latent posterior distribution, we apply the Unscented Transform (UT) – a well-known distribution approximation used in the Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) from the field of filtering. A finite set of statistics called sigma points, sampled deterministically, provides a more informative and lower-variance posterior representation than the ubiquitous noise-scaling of the reparameterization trick, while ensuring higher-quality reconstruction. We further boost the performance by replacing the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence with the Wasserstein distribution metric that allows for a sharper posterior. Inspired by the two components, we derive a novel, deterministic-sampling flavor of the VAE, the Unscented Autoencoder (UAE), trained purely with regularization-like terms on the per-sample posterior. We empirically show competitive performance in Fréchet Inception Distance scores over closely-related models, in addition to a lower training variance than the VAE.
Curiosity in Hindsight: Intrinsic Exploration in Stochastic Environments
Authors: Jarrett, Daniel and Tallec, Corentin and Altché, Florent and Mesnard, Thomas and Munos, Remi and Valko, Michal
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Consider the problem of exploration in sparse-reward or reward-free environments, such as in Montezuma’s Revenge. In the <em>curiosity-driven</em> paradigm, the agent is rewarded for how much each realized outcome differs from their predicted outcome. But using predictive error as intrinsic motivation is fragile in <em>stochastic environments</em>, as the agent may become trapped by high-entropy areas of the state-action space, such as a "noisy TV". In this work, we study a natural solution derived from structural causal models of the world: Our key idea is to learn representations of the future that capture precisely the <em>unpredictable</em> aspects of each outcome—which we use as additional input for predictions, such that intrinsic rewards only reflect the <em>predictable</em> aspects of world dynamics. First, we propose incorporating such hindsight representations into models to disentangle "noise" from "novelty", yielding <em>Curiosity in Hindsight</em>: a simple and scalable generalization of curiosity that is robust to stochasticity. Second, we instantiate this framework for the recently introduced BYOL-Explore algorithm as our prime example, resulting in the noise-robust BYOL-Hindsight. Third, we illustrate its behavior under a variety of different stochasticities in a grid world, and find improvements over BYOL-Explore in hard-exploration Atari games with sticky actions. Notably, we show state-of-the-art results in exploring Montezuma’s Revenge with sticky actions, while preserving performance in the non-sticky setting.
BiRT: Bio-inspired Replay in Vision Transformers for Continual Learning
Authors: Jeeveswaran, Kishaan and Bhat, Prashant Shivaram and Zonooz, Bahram and Arani, Elahe
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: The ability of deep neural networks to continually learn and adapt to a sequence of tasks has remained challenging due to catastrophic forgetting of previously learned tasks. Humans, on the other hand, have a remarkable ability to acquire, assimilate, and transfer knowledge across tasks throughout their lifetime without catastrophic forgetting. The versatility of the brain can be attributed to the rehearsal of abstract experiences through a complementary learning system. However, representation rehearsal in vision transformers lacks diversity, resulting in overfitting and consequently, performance drops significantly compared to raw image rehearsal. Therefore, we propose BiRT, a novel representation rehearsal-based continual learning approach using vision transformers. Specifically, we introduce controllable noises at various stages of the vision transformer and enforce consistency in predictions with respect to an exponential moving average of the working model. Our method provides consistent performance gain over raw image and vanilla representation rehearsal on several challenging CL benchmarks while being memory efficient and robust to natural and adversarial corruptions.
Recovering Top-Two Answers and Confusion Probability in Multi-Choice Crowdsourcing
Authors: Jeong, Hyeonsu and Chung, Hye Won
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Crowdsourcing has emerged as an effective platform for labeling large amounts of data in a cost- and time-efficient manner. Most previous work has focused on designing an efficient algorithm to recover only the ground-truth labels of the data. In this paper, we consider multi-choice crowdsourcing tasks with the goal of recovering not only the ground truth, but also the most confusing answer and the confusion probability. The most confusing answer provides useful information about the task by revealing the most plausible answer other than the ground truth and how plausible it is. To theoretically analyze such scenarios, we propose a model in which there are the top two plausible answers for each task, distinguished from the rest of the choices. Task difficulty is quantified by the probability of confusion between the top two, and worker reliability is quantified by the probability of giving an answer among the top two. Under this model, we propose a two-stage inference algorithm to infer both the top two answers and the confusion probability. We show that our algorithm achieves the minimax optimal convergence rate. We conduct both synthetic and real data experiments and demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms other recent algorithms. We also show the applicability of our algorithms in inferring the difficulty of tasks and in training neural networks with top-two soft labels.