mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Model Decides How to Tokenize: Adaptive DNA Sequence Tokenization with MxDNA
Authors: Lifeng Qiao, Peng Ye, Yuchen Ren, Weiqiang Bai, Chaoqi Liang, Xinzhu Ma, Nanqing Dong, Wanli Ouyang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Foundation models have made significant strides in understanding the genomic language of DNA sequences. However, previous models typically adopt the tokenization methods designed for natural language, which are unsuitable for DNA sequences due to their unique characteristics. In addition, the optimal approach to tokenize DNA remains largely under-explored, and may not be intuitively understood by humans even if discovered. To address these challenges, we introduce MxDNA, a novel framework where the model autonomously learns an effective DNA tokenization strategy through gradient decent. MxDNA employs a sparse Mixture of Convolution Experts coupled with a deformable convolution to model the tokenization process, with the discontinuous, overlapping, and ambiguous nature of meaningful genomic segments explicitly considered. On Nucleotide Transformer Benchmarks and Genomic Benchmarks, MxDNA demonstrates superior performance to existing methods with less pretraining data and time, highlighting its effectiveness. Finally, we show that MxDNA learns unique tokenization strategy distinct to those of previous methods and captures genomic functionalities at a token level during self-supervised pretraining. Our MxDNA aims to provide a new perspective on DNA tokenization, potentially offering broad applications in various domains and yielding profound insights. Code is available at https://github.com/qiaoqiaoLF/MxDNA.
Provably and Practically Efficient Adversarial Imitation Learning with General Function Approximation
Authors: Tian Xu, Zhilong Zhang, Ruishuo Chen, Yihao Sun, Yang Yu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: As a prominent category of imitation learning methods, adversarial imitation learning (AIL) has garnered significant practical success powered by neural network approximation. However, existing theoretical studies on AIL are primarily limited to simplified scenarios such as tabular and linear function approximation and involve complex algorithmic designs that hinder practical implementation, highlighting a gap between theory and practice. In this paper, we explore the theoretical underpinnings of online AIL with general function approximation. We introduce a new method called optimization-based AIL (OPT-AIL), which centers on performing online optimization for reward functions and optimism-regularized Bellman error minimization for Q-value functions. Theoretically, we prove that OPT-AIL achieves polynomial expert sample complexity and interaction complexity for learning near-expert policies. To our best knowledge, OPT-AIL is the first provably efficient AIL method with general function approximation. Practically, OPT-AIL only requires the approximate optimization of two objectives, thereby facilitating practical implementation. Empirical studies demonstrate that OPT-AIL outperforms previous state-of-the-art deep AIL methods in several challenging tasks.
EGonc : Energy-based Open-Set Node Classification with substitute Unknowns
Authors: Qin Zhang, Zelin Shi, Shirui Pan, Junyang Chen, Huisi Wu, Xiaojun Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Open-set Classification (OSC) is a critical requirement for safely deploying machine learning models in the open world, which aims to classify samples from known classes and reject samples from out-of-distribution (OOD). Existing methods exploit the feature space of trained network and attempt at estimating the uncertainty in the predictions.However, softmax-based neural networks are found to be overly confident in their predictions even on data they have never seen before andthe immense diversity of the OOD examples also makes such methods fragile.To this end, we follow the idea of estimating the underlying density of the training data to decide whether a given input is close to the in-distribution (IND) data and adopt Energy-based models (EBMs) as density estimators. A novel energy-based generative open-set node classification method, \textit{EGonc}, is proposed to achieve open-set graph learning. Specifically, we generate substitute unknowns to mimic the distribution of real open-set samples firstly, based on the information of graph structures. Then, an additional energy logit representing the virtual OOD class is learned from the residual of the feature against the principal space, and matched with the original logits by a constant scaling. This virtual logit serves as the indicator of OOD-ness. EGonc has nice theoretical properties that guarantee an overall distinguishable margin between the detection scores for IND and OOD samples. Comprehensive experimental evaluations of EGonc also demonstrate its superiority.
Latent Functional Maps: a spectral framework for representation alignment
Authors: Marco Fumero, Marco Pegoraro, Valentino Maiorca, Francesco Locatello, Emanuele Rodolà
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Neural models learn data representations that lie on low-dimensional manifolds, yet modeling the relation between these representational spaces is an ongoing challenge.By integrating spectral geometry principles into neural modeling, we show that this problem can be better addressed in the functional domain, mitigating complexity, while enhancing interpretability and performances on downstream tasks. To this end, we introduce a multi-purpose framework to the representation learning community, which allows to: (i) compare different spaces in an interpretable way and measure their intrinsic similarity; (ii) find correspondences between them, both in unsupervised and weakly supervised settings, and (iii) to effectively transfer representations between distinct spaces.We validate our framework on various applications, ranging from stitching to retrieval tasks, and on multiple modalities, demonstrating that Latent Functional Maps can serve as a swiss-army knife for representation alignment.
Learning Neural Contracting Dynamics: Extended Linearization and Global Guarantees
Authors: Sean Jaffe, Alexander Davydov, Deniz Lapsekili, Ambuj K. Singh, Francesco Bullo
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Global stability and robustness guarantees in learned dynamical systems are essential to ensure well-behavedness of the systems in the face of uncertainty. We present Extended Linearized Contracting Dynamics (ELCD), the first neural network-based dynamical system with global contractivity guarantees in arbitrary metrics. The key feature of ELCD is a parametrization of the extended linearization of the nonlinear vector field. In its most basic form, ELCD is guaranteed to be (i) globally exponentially stable, (ii) equilibrium contracting, and (iii) globally contracting with respect to some metric. To allow for contraction with respect to more general metrics in the data space, we train diffeomorphisms between the data space and a latent space and enforce contractivity in the latent space, which ensures global contractivity in the data space. We demonstrate the performance of ELCD on the high dimensional LASA, multi-link pendulum, and Rosenbrock datasets.
Just Add $100 More: Augmenting Pseudo-LiDAR Point Cloud for Resolving Class-imbalance Problem
Authors: Mincheol Chang, Siyeong Lee, Jinkyu Kim, Namil Kim
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Typical LiDAR-based 3D object detection models are trained with real-world data collection, which is often imbalanced over classes.To deal with it, augmentation techniques are commonly used, such as copying ground truth LiDAR points and pasting them into scenes.However, existing methods struggle with the lack of sample diversity for minority classes and the limitation of suitable placement.In this work, we introduce a novel approach that utilizes pseudo LiDAR point clouds generated from low-cost miniatures or real-world videos, which is called Pseudo Ground Truth augmentation (PGT-Aug).PGT-Aug involves three key steps: (i) volumetric 3D instance reconstruction using a 2D-to-3D view synthesis model, (ii) object-level domain alignment with LiDAR intensity simulation, and (iii) a hybrid context-aware placement method from ground and map information. We demonstrate the superiority and generality of our method through performance improvements in extensive experiments conducted on popular benchmarks, i.e., nuScenes, KITTI, and Lyft, especially for the datasets with large domain gaps captured by different LiDAR configurations.The project webpage is https://just-add-100-more.github.io.
A Novel Unified Architecture for Low-Shot Counting by Detection and Segmentation
Authors: Jer Pelhan, Alan Lukežič, Vitjan Zavrtanik, Matej Kristan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Low-shot object counters estimate the number of objects in an image using few or no annotated exemplars. Objects are localized by matching them to prototypes, which are constructed by unsupervised image-wide object appearance aggregation.Due to potentially diverse object appearances, the existing approaches often lead to overgeneralization and false positive detections.Furthermore, the best-performing methods train object localization by a surrogate loss, that predicts a unit Gaussian at each object center. This loss is sensitive to annotation error, hyperparameters and does not directly optimize the detection task, leading to suboptimal counts.We introduce GeCo, a novel low-shot counter that achieves accurate object detection, segmentation, and count estimation in a unified architecture.GeCo robustly generalizes the prototypes across objects appearances through a novel dense object query formulation. In addition, a novel counting loss is proposed, that directly optimizes the detection task and avoids the issues of the standard surrogate loss. GeCo surpasses the leading few-shot detection-based counters by $\sim$25\% in the total count MAE, achieves superior detection accuracy and sets a new solid state-of-the-art result across all low-shot counting setups. The code will be available on GitHub.
cPAPERS: A Dataset of Situated and Multimodal Interactive Conversations in Scientific Papers
Authors: Anirudh Sundar, Jin Xu, William Gay, Christopher Richardson, Larry Heck
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: An emerging area of research in situated and multimodal interactive conversations (SIMMC) includes interactions in scientific papers. Since scientific papers are primarily composed of text, equations, figures, and tables, SIMMC methods must be developed specifically for each component to support the depth of inquiry and interactions required by research scientists.      This work introduces $Conversational Papers$ (cPAPERS), a dataset of conversational question-answer pairs from reviews of academic papers grounded in these paper components and their associated references from scientific documents available on arXiv. We present a data collection strategy to collect these question-answer pairs from OpenReview and associate them with contextual information from $LaTeX$ source files. Additionally, we present a series of baseline approaches utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) in both zero-shot and fine-tuned configurations to address the cPAPERS dataset.
RouterDC: Query-Based Router by Dual Contrastive Learning for Assembling Large Language Models
Authors: Shuhao Chen, Weisen Jiang, Baijiong Lin, James T. Kwok, Yu Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent works show that assembling multiple off-the-shelf large language models (LLMs) can harness their complementary abilities. To achieve this, routing is a promising method, which learns a router to select the most suitable LLM for each query. However, existing routing models are ineffective when multiple LLMs perform well for a query. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a method called query-based Router by Dual Contrastive learning (RouterDC). The RouterDC model, which consists of an encoder and LLM embeddings, is trained by two proposed contrastive losses (sample-LLM and sample-sample losses). Experimental results show that RouterDC is effective in assembling LLMs and largely outperforms individual top-performing LLMs as well as existing routing methods on both in-distribution (+2.76\%) and out-of-distribution (+1.90\%) tasks. The source code is available at https://github.com/shuhao02/RouterDC.
Terra: A Multimodal Spatio-Temporal Dataset Spanning the Earth
Authors: Wei Chen, Xixuan Hao, Yuankai Wu, Yuxuan Liang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Since the inception of our planet, the meteorological environment, as reflected through spatio-temporal data, has always been a fundamental factor influencing human life, socio-economic progress, and ecological conservation. A comprehensive exploration of this data is thus imperative to gain a deeper understanding and more accurate forecasting of these environmental shifts. Despite the success of deep learning techniques within the realm of spatio-temporal data and earth science, existing public datasets are beset with limitations in terms of spatial scale, temporal coverage, and reliance on limited time series data. These constraints hinder their optimal utilization in practical applications. To address these issues, we introduce Terra, a multimodal spatio-temporal dataset spanning the earth. This dataset encompasses hourly time series data from 6,480,000 grid areas worldwide over the past 45 years, while also incorporating multimodal spatial supplementary information including geo-images and explanatory text. Through a detailed data analysis and evaluation of existing deep learning models within earth sciences, utilizing our constructed dataset. we aim to provide valuable opportunities for enhancing future research in spatio-temporal data mining, thereby advancing towards more spatio-temporal general intelligence. Our source code and data can be accessed at https://github.com/CityMind-Lab/NeurIPS24-Terra.
OneBit: Towards Extremely Low-bit Large Language Models
Authors: Yuzhuang Xu, Xu Han, Zonghan Yang, Shuo Wang, Qingfu Zhu, Zhiyuan Liu, Weidong Liu, Wanxiang Che
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Model quantification uses low bit-width values to represent the weight matrices of existing models to be quantized, which is a promising approach to reduce both storage and computational overheads of deploying highly anticipated LLMs. However, current quantization methods suffer severe performance degradation when the bit-width is extremely reduced, and thus focus on utilizing 4-bit or 8-bit values to quantize models. This paper boldly quantizes the weight matrices of LLMs to 1-bit, paving the way for the extremely low bit-width deployment of LLMs. For this target, we introduce a 1-bit model compressing framework named OneBit, including a novel 1-bit parameter representation method to better quantize LLMs as well as an effective parameter initialization method based on matrix decomposition to improve the convergence speed of the quantization framework. Sufficient experimental results indicate that OneBit achieves good performance (at least 81% of the non-quantized performance on LLaMA models) with robust training processes when only using 1-bit weight matrices.
Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Without Prompting
Authors: Xuezhi Wang, Denny Zhou
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), prior research primarily focuses on specific prompting techniques such as few-shot or zero-shot chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. These methods, while effective, often involve manually intensive prompt engineering. Our study takes a novel approach by asking: Can LLMs reason effectively without any prompting? Our findings reveal that, intriguingly, CoT reasoning paths can be elicited from pre-trained LLMs by simply altering the \textit{decoding} process. Rather than conventional greedy decoding, we investigate the top-$k$ alternative tokens, uncovering that CoT paths are frequently inherent in these sequences. This approach not only bypasses the confounders of prompting but also allows us to assess the LLMs' \textit{intrinsic} reasoning abilities. Moreover, we observe that the presence of a CoT in the decoding path correlates with a higher confidence in the model's decoded answer. This confidence metric effectively differentiates between CoT and non-CoT paths. Extensive empirical studies on various reasoning benchmarks show that the proposed CoT-decoding effectively elicits reasoning capabilities from language models, which were previously obscured by standard greedy decoding.
Slack-Free Spiking Neural Network Formulation for Hypergraph Minimum Vertex Cover
Authors: Tam Ngoc-Bang Nguyen, Anh-Dzung Doan, Zhipeng Cai, Tat-Jun Chin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Neuromorphic computers open up the potential of energy-efficient computation using spiking neural networks (SNN), which consist of neurons that exchange spike-based information asynchronously. In particular, SNNs have shown promise in solving combinatorial optimization. Underpinning the SNN methods is the concept of energy minimization of an Ising model, which is closely related to quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO). Thus, the starting point for many SNN methods is reformulating the target problem as QUBO, then executing an SNN-based QUBO solver. For many combinatorial problems, the reformulation entails introducing penalty terms, potentially with slack variables, that implement feasibility constraints in the QUBO objective. For more complex problems such as hypergraph minimum vertex cover (HMVC), numerous slack variables are introduced which drastically increase the search domain and reduce the effectiveness of the SNN solver. In this paper, we propose a novel SNN formulation for HMVC. Rather than using penalty terms with slack variables, our SNN architecture introduces additional spiking neurons with a constraint checking and correction mechanism that encourages convergence to feasible solutions. In effect, our method obviates the need for reformulating HMVC as QUBO. Experiments on neuromorphic hardware show that our method consistently yielded high quality solutions for HMVC on real and synthetic instances where the SNN-based QUBO solver often failed, while consuming measurably less energy than global solvers on CPU.
Federated Model Heterogeneous Matryoshka Representation Learning
Authors: Liping Yi, Han Yu, Chao Ren, Gang Wang, Xiaoguang Liu, Xiaoxiao Li
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Model heterogeneous federated learning (MHeteroFL) enables FL clients to collaboratively train models with heterogeneous structures in a distributed fashion. However, existing MHeteroFL methods rely on training loss to transfer knowledge between the client model and the server model, resulting in limited knowledge exchange. To address this limitation, we propose the **Fed**erated model heterogeneous **M**atryoshka **R**epresentation **L**earning (**FedMRL**) approach for supervised learning tasks. It adds an auxiliary small homogeneous model shared by clients with heterogeneous local models. (1) The generalized and personalized representations extracted by the two models' feature extractors are fused by a personalized lightweight representation projector. This step enables representation fusion to adapt to local data distribution. (2) The fused representation is then used to construct Matryoshka representations with multi-dimensional and multi-granular embedded representations learned by the global homogeneous model header and the local heterogeneous model header. This step facilitates multi-perspective representation learning and improves model learning capability. Theoretical analysis shows that FedMRL achieves a $O(1/T)$ non-convex convergence rate. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate its superior model accuracy with low communication and computational costs compared to seven state-of-the-art baselines. It achieves up to 8.48% and 24.94% accuracy improvement compared with the state-of-the-art and the best same-category baseline, respectively.
MaskFactory: Towards High-quality Synthetic Data Generation for Dichotomous Image Segmentation
Authors: Haotian Qian, YD Chen, Shengtao Lou, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Xiaogang Jin, Deng-Ping Fan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Dichotomous Image Segmentation (DIS) tasks require highly precise annotations, and traditional dataset creation methods are labor intensive, costly, and require extensive domain expertise. Although using synthetic data for DIS is a promising solution to these challenges, current generative models and techniques struggle with the issues of scene deviations, noise-induced errors, and limited training sample variability. To address these issues, we introduce a novel approach, Mask Factory, which provides a scalable solution for generating diverse and precise datasets, markedly reducing preparation time and costs. We first introduce a general mask editing method that combines rigid and non-rigid editing techniques to generate high-quality synthetic masks. Specially, rigid editing leverages geometric priors from diffusion models to achieve precise viewpoint transformations under zero-shot conditions, while non-rigid editing employs adversarial training and self-attention mechanisms for complex, topologically consistent modifications. Then, we generate pairs of high-resolution image and accurate segmentation mask using a multi-conditional control generation method. Finally, our experiments on the widely-used DIS5K dataset benchmark demonstrate superior performance in quality and efficiency compared to existing methods. The code is available at https://qian-hao-tian.github.io/MaskFactory/.
Unveiling Induction Heads: Provable Training Dynamics and Feature Learning in Transformers
Authors: Siyu Chen, Heejune Sheen, Tianhao Wang, Zhuoran Yang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) is a cornerstone of large language model (LLM) functionality, yet its theoretical foundations remain elusive due to the complexity of transformer architectures. In particular, most existing work only theoretically explains how the attention mechanism facilitates ICL under certain data models. It remains unclear how the other building blocks of the transformer contribute to ICL. To address this question, we study how a two-attention-layer transformer is trained to perform ICL on $n$-gram Markov chain data, where each token in the Markov chain statistically depends on the previous n tokens. We analyze a sophisticated transformer model featuring relative positional embedding, multi-head softmax attention,  and a feed-forward layer with normalization. We prove that the gradient flow with respect to a cross-entropy ICL loss converges to a limiting model that performs a generalized version of the "induction head" mechanism with a learned feature, resulting from the congruous contribution of all the building blocks. Specifically, the first attention layer acts as a copier, copying past tokens within a given window to each position, and the feed-forward network with normalization acts as a selector that generates a feature vector by only looking at informationally relevant parents from the window. Finally, the second attention layer is a classifier thatcompares these features with the feature at the output position, and uses the resulting similarity scores to generate the desired output. Our theory is further validated by simulation experiments.
Optimal Top-Two Method for Best Arm Identification and Fluid Analysis
Authors: Agniv Bandyopadhyay, Sandeep Juneja, Shubhada Agrawal
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Top-2 methods have become popular in solving the best arm identification (BAI) problem. The best arm, or the arm with the largest mean amongst finitely many, is identified through an algorithm that at any sequential step independently pulls the empirical best arm, with a fixed probability $\beta$, and pulls the best challenger arm otherwise. The probability of incorrect selection is guaranteed to lie below a specified $\delta>0$. Information theoretic lower bounds on sample complexity are well known for BAI problem and are matched asymptotically as $\delta\to 0$ by computationally demanding plug-in methods. The above top 2 algorithm for any $\beta\in(0, 1)$ has sample complexity within a constant of the lower bound. However, determining the optimal β that matches the lower bound has proven difficult. In this paper, we address this and propose an optimal top-2 type algorithm. We consider a function of allocations anchored at a threshold. If it exceeds the threshold then the algorithm samples the empirical best arm. Otherwise, it samples the challenger arm. We show that the proposed algorithm is optimal as $\delta\to 0$. Our analysis relies on identifying a limiting fluid dynamics of allocations that satisfy a series of ordinary differential equations pasted together and that describe the asymptotic path followed by our algorithm. We rely on the implicit function theorem to show existence and uniqueness of these fluid ode’s and to show that the proposed algorithm remains close to the ode solution.
Training Data Attribution via Approximate Unrolling
Authors: Juhan Bae, Wu Lin, Jonathan Lorraine, Roger Grosse
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Many training data attribution (TDA) methods aim to estimate how a model's behavior would change if one or more data points were removed from the training set. Methods based on implicit differentiation, such as influence functions, can be made computationally efficient, but fail to account for underspecification, the implicit bias of the optimization algorithm, or multi-stage training pipelines. By contrast, methods based on unrolling address these issues but face scalability challenges. In this work, we connect the implicit-differentiation-based and unrolling-based approaches and combine their benefits by introducing Source, an approximate unrolling-based TDA method that is computed using an influence-function-like formula. While being computationally efficient compared to unrolling-based approaches, Source is suitable in cases where implicit-differentiation-based approaches struggle, such as in non-converged models and multi-stage training pipelines. Empirically, Source outperforms existing TDA techniques in counterfactual prediction, especially in settings where implicit-differentiation-based approaches fall short.
Parsimony or Capability? Decomposition Delivers Both in Long-term Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Jinliang Deng, Feiyang Ye, Du Yin, Xuan Song, Ivor Tsang, Hui Xiong
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Long-term time series forecasting (LTSF) represents a critical frontier in time series analysis, characterized by extensive input sequences, as opposed to the shorter spans typical of traditional approaches. While longer sequences inherently offer richer information for enhanced predictive precision, prevailing studies often respond by escalating model complexity. These intricate models can inflate into millions of parameters, resulting in prohibitive parameter scales. Our study demonstrates, through both theoretical and empirical evidence, that decomposition is key to containing excessive model inflation while achieving uniformly superior and robust results across various datasets. Remarkably, by tailoring decomposition to the intrinsic dynamics of time series data, our proposed model outperforms existing benchmarks, using over 99\% fewer parameters than the majority of competing methods. Through this work, we aim to unleash the power of a restricted set of parameters by capitalizing on domain characteristics—a timely reminder that in the realm of LTSF, bigger is not invariably better. The code is available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SSCNN-321D/}.
The Impact of Geometric Complexity on Neural Collapse in Transfer Learning
Authors: Michael Munn, Benoit Dherin, Javier Gonzalvo
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Many of the recent advances in computer vision and language models can be attributed to the success of transfer learning via the pre-training of large foundation models. However, a theoretical framework which explains this empirical success is incomplete and remains an active area of research. Flatness of the loss surface and neural collapse have recently emerged as useful pre-training metrics which shed light on the implicit biases underlying pre-training. In this paper, we explore the geometric complexity of a model's learned representations as a fundamental mechanism that relates these two concepts. We show through experiments and theory that mechanisms which affect the geometric complexity of the pre-trained network also influence the neural collapse. Furthermore, we show how this effect of the geometric complexity generalizes to the neural collapse of new classes as well, thus encouraging better performance on downstream tasks, particularly in the few-shot setting.
Cross-modal Representation Flattening for Multi-modal Domain Generalization
Authors: Yunfeng Fan, Wenchao Xu, Haohao Wang, Song Guo
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Multi-modal domain generalization (MMDG) requires that models trained on multi-modal source domains can generalize to unseen target distributions with the same modality set. Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) is an effective technique for traditional uni-modal domain generalization (DG), however, with limited improvement in MMDG. In this paper, we identify that modality competition and discrepant uni-modal flatness are two main factors that restrict multi-modal generalization. To overcome these challenges, we propose to construct consistent flat loss regions and enhance knowledge exploitation for each modality via cross-modal knowledge transfer. Firstly, we turn to the optimization on representation-space loss landscapes instead of traditional parameter space, which allows us to build connections between modalities directly. Then, we introduce a novel method to flatten the high-loss region between minima from different modalities by interpolating mixed multi-modal representations. We implement this method by distilling and optimizing generalizable interpolated representations and assigning distinct weights for each modality considering their divergent generalization capabilities. Extensive experiments are performed on two benchmark datasets, EPIC-Kitchens and Human-Animal-Cartoon (HAC), with various modality combinations, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method under multi-source and single-source settings. Our code is open-sourced.
FM-Delta: Lossless Compression for Storing Massive Fine-tuned Foundation Models
Authors: Wanyi Ning, Jingyu Wang, Qi Qi, Mengde Zhu, Haifeng Sun, Daixuan Cheng, Jianxin Liao, Ce Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Pre-trained foundation models, particularly large language models, have achieved remarkable success and led to massive fine-tuned variants. These models are commonly fine-tuned locally and then uploaded by users to cloud platforms such as HuggingFace for secure storage. However, the huge model number and their billion-level parameters impose heavy storage overhead for cloud with limited resources. Our empirical and theoretical analysis reveals that most fine-tuned models in cloud have a small difference (delta) from their pre-trained models. To this end, we propose a novel lossless compression scheme FM-Delta specifically for storing massive fine-tuned models in cloud. FM-Delta maps fine-tuned and pre-trained model parameters into integers with the same bits, and entropy codes their integer delta. In this way, cloud only needs to store one uncompressed pre-trained model and other compressed fine-tuned models. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that FM-Delta efficiently reduces cloud storage consumption for massive fine-tuned models by an average of around 50% with only negligible additional time in most end-to-end cases. For example, on up to 10 fine-tuned models in the GPT-NeoX-20B family, FM-Delta reduces the original storage requirement from 423GB to 205GB, significantly saving cloud storage costs.
Interpretable Concept Bottlenecks to Align Reinforcement Learning Agents
Authors: Quentin Delfosse, Sebastian Sztwiertnia, Mark Rothermel, Wolfgang Stammer, Kristian Kersting
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Goal misalignment, reward sparsity and difficult credit assignment are only a few of the many issues that make it difficult for deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn optimal policies. Unfortunately, the black-box nature of deep neural networks impedes the inclusion of domain experts for inspecting the model and revising suboptimal policies.To this end, we introduce Successive Concept Bottleneck Agents (SCoBots), that integrate consecutive concept bottleneck (CB) layers. In contrast to current CB models, SCoBots do not just represent concepts as properties of individual objects, but also as relations between objects which is crucial for many RL tasks. Our experimental results provide evidence of SCoBots' competitive performances, but also of their potential for domain experts to understand and regularize their behavior. Among other things, SCoBots enabled us to identify a previously unknown misalignment problem in the iconic video game, Pong, and resolve it. Overall, SCoBots thus result in more human-aligned RL agents.
Back to the Continuous Attractor
Authors: Ábel Ságodi, Guillermo Martín-Sánchez, Piotr Sokół, Il Memming Park
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Continuous attractors offer a unique class of solutions for storing continuous-valued variables in recurrent system states for indefinitely long time intervals.Unfortunately, continuous attractors suffer from severe structural instability in general---they are destroyed by most infinitesimal changes of the dynamical law that defines them.This fragility limits their utility especially in biological systems as their recurrent dynamics are subject to constant perturbations.We observe that the bifurcations from continuous attractors in theoretical neuroscience models display various structurally stable forms.Although their asymptotic behaviors to maintain memory are categorically distinct, their finite-time behaviors are similar.We build on the persistent manifold theory to explain the commonalities between bifurcations from and approximations of continuous attractors.Fast-slow decomposition analysis uncovers the existence of a persistent slow manifold that survives the seemingly destructive bifurcation, relating the flow within the manifold to the size of the perturbation. Moreover, this allows the bounding of the memory error of these approximations of continuous attractors.Finally, we train recurrent neural networks on analog memory tasks to support the appearance of these systems as solutions and their generalization capabilities.Therefore, we conclude that continuous attractors are functionally robust and remain useful as a universal analogy for understanding analog memory.
CriticEval: Evaluating Large-scale Language Model as Critic
Authors: Tian Lan, Wenwei Zhang, Chen Xu, Heyan Huang, Dahua Lin, Kai Chen, Xian-Ling Mao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Critique ability, i.e., the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to identify and rectify flaws in responses, is crucial for their applications in self-improvement and scalable oversight. While numerous studies have been proposed to evaluate critique ability of LLMs, their comprehensiveness and reliability are still limited. To overcome this problem, we introduce CriticEval, a novel benchmark designed to comprehensively and reliably evaluate critique ability of LLMs. Specifically, to ensure the comprehensiveness, CriticEval evaluates critique ability from four dimensions across nine diverse task scenarios. It evaluates both scalar-valued and textual critiques, targeting responses of varying quality. To ensure the reliability, a large number of critiques are annotated to serve as references, enabling GPT-4 to evaluate textual critiques reliably. Extensive evaluations of open-source and closed-source LLMs first validate the reliability of evaluation in CriticEval. Then, experimental results demonstrate the promising potential of open-source LLMs, the effectiveness of critique datasets and several intriguing relationships between the critique ability and some critical factors, including task types, response qualities and critique dimensions.
Learning Distributions on Manifolds with Free-Form Flows
Authors: Peter Sorrenson, Felix Draxler, Armand Rousselot, Sander Hummerich, Ullrich Köthe
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We propose Manifold Free-Form Flows (M-FFF), a simple new generative model for data on manifolds. The existing approaches to learning a distribution on arbitrary manifolds are expensive at inference time, since sampling requires solving a differential equation. Our method overcomes this limitation by sampling in a single function evaluation. The key innovation is to optimize a neural network via maximum likelihood on the manifold, possible by adapting the free-form flow framework to Riemannian manifolds. M-FFF is straightforwardly adapted to any manifold with a known projection. It consistently matches or outperforms previous single-step methods specialized to specific manifolds. It is typically two orders of magnitude faster than multi-step methods based on diffusion or flow matching, achieving better likelihoods in several experiments. We provide our code at https://github.com/vislearn/FFF.
Truthful High Dimensional Sparse Linear Regression
Authors: Liyang Zhu, Amina Manseur, Meng Ding, Jinyan Liu, Jinhui Xu, Di Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We study the problem of fitting the high dimensional sparse linear regression model, where the data are provided by strategic or self-interested agents (individuals) who prioritize their privacy of data disclosure. In contrast to the classical setting, our focus is on designing mechanisms that can effectively incentivize most agents to truthfully report their data while preserving the privacy of individual reports. Simultaneously, we seek an estimator which should be close to the underlying parameter. We attempt to solve the problem by deriving a novel private estimator that has a closed-form expression. Based on the estimator, we propose a mechanism which has the following properties via some appropriate design of the computation and payment scheme:  (1) the mechanism is $(o(1), O(n^{-\Omega({1})}))$-jointly differentially private, where $n$ is the number of agents; (2) it is an $o(\frac{1}{n})$-approximate Bayes Nash equilibrium for a $(1-o(1))$-fraction of agents to truthfully report their data; (3) the output could achieve an error of $o(1)$ to the underlying parameter; (4) it is individually rational for a $(1-o(1))$ fraction of agents in the mechanism; (5) the payment budget required from the analyst to run the mechanism is $o(1)$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on designing truthful (and privacy-preserving) mechanisms for high dimensional sparse linear regression.
Exploratory Retrieval-Augmented Planning For Continual Embodied Instruction Following
Authors: Minjong Yoo, Jinwoo Jang, Wei-jin Park, Honguk Woo
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: This study presents an Exploratory Retrieval-Augmented Planning (ExRAP) framework, designed to tackle continual instruction following tasks of embodied agents in dynamic, non-stationary environments. The framework enhances Large Language Models' (LLMs) embodied reasoning capabilities by efficiently exploring the physical environment and establishing the environmental context memory, thereby effectively grounding the task planning process in time-varying environment contexts. In ExRAP, given multiple continual instruction following tasks, each instruction is decomposed into queries on the environmental context memory and task executions conditioned on the query results. To efficiently handle these multiple tasks that are performed continuously and simultaneously, we implement an exploration-integrated task planning scheme by incorporating the information-based exploration into the LLM-based planning process. Combined with memory-augmented query evaluation, this integrated scheme not only allows for a better balance between the validity of the environmental context memory and the load of environment exploration, but also improves overall task performance. Furthermore, we devise a temporal consistency refinement scheme for query evaluation to address the inherent decay of knowledge in the memory. Through experiments with VirtualHome, ALFRED, and CARLA, our approach demonstrates robustness against a variety of embodied instruction following scenarios involving different instruction scales and types, and non-stationarity degrees, and it consistently outperforms other state-of-the-art LLM-based task planning approaches in terms of both goal success rate and execution efficiency.
Divide-and-Conquer Meets Consensus: Unleashing the Power of Functions in Code Generation
Authors: Jingchang Chen, Hongxuan Tang, Zheng Chu, Qianglong Chen, Zekun Wang, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Despite recent progress made by large language models in code generation, they still struggle with programs that meet complex requirements. Recent work utilizes plan-and-solve decomposition to decrease the complexity and leverage self-tests to refine the generated program. Yet, planning deep-inside requirements in advance can be challenging, and the tests need to be accurate to accomplish self-improvement. To this end, we propose FunCoder, a code generation framework incorporating the divide-and-conquer strategy with functional consensus. Specifically, FunCoder recursively branches off sub-functions as smaller goals during code generation, represented by a tree hierarchy. These sub-functions are then composited to attain more complex objectives. Additionally, we designate functions via a consensus formed by identifying similarities in program behavior, mitigating error propagation. FunCoder outperforms state-of-the-art methods by +9.8% on average in HumanEval, MBPP, xCodeEval and MATH with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Moreover, our method demonstrates superiority on smaller models: With FunCoder, StableCode-3b surpasses GPT-3.5 by +18.6% and achieves 97.7% of GPT-4's performance on HumanEval. Further analysis reveals that our proposed dynamic function decomposition is capable of handling complex requirements, and the functional consensus prevails over self-testing in correctness evaluation.
Navigating the Maze of Explainable AI: A Systematic Approach to Evaluating Methods and Metrics
Authors: Lukas Klein, Carsten Lüth, Udo Schlegel, Till Bungert, Mennatallah El-Assady, Paul Jäger
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Explainable AI (XAI) is a rapidly growing domain with a myriad of proposed methods as well as metrics aiming to evaluate their efficacy. However, current studies are often of limited scope, examining only a handful of XAI methods and ignoring underlying design parameters for performance, such as the model architecture or the nature of input data.  Moreover, they often rely on one or a few metrics and neglect thorough validation, increasing the risk of selection bias and ignoring discrepancies among metrics. These shortcomings leave practitioners confused about which method to choose for their problem. In response, we introduce LATEC, a large-scale benchmark that critically evaluates 17 prominent XAI methods using 20 distinct metrics.  We systematically incorporate vital design parameters like varied architectures and diverse input modalities, resulting in 7,560 examined combinations.  Through LATEC, we showcase the high risk of conflicting metrics leading to unreliable rankings and consequently propose a more robust evaluation scheme. Further, we comprehensively evaluate various XAI methods to assist practitioners in selecting appropriate methods aligning with their needs. Curiously, the emerging top-performing method, Expected Gradients, is not examined in any relevant related study. LATEC reinforces its role in future XAI research by publicly releasing all 326k saliency maps and 378k metric scores as a (meta-)evaluation dataset. The benchmark is hosted at: https://github.com/IML-DKFZ/latec.