mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Repetition In Repetition Out: Towards Understanding Neural Text Degeneration from the Data Perspective
Authors: Huayang Li, Tian Lan, Zihao Fu, Deng Cai, Lemao Liu, Nigel Collier, Taro Watanabe, Yixuan Su
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: There are a number of diverging hypotheses about the neural text degeneration problem, i.e., generating repetitive and dull loops, which makes this problem both interesting and confusing. In this work, we aim to advance our understanding by presenting a straightforward and fundamental explanation from the data perspective. Our preliminary investigation reveals a strong correlation between the degeneration issue and the presence of repetitions in training data. Subsequent experiments also demonstrate that by selectively dropping out the attention to repetitive words in training data, degeneration can be significantly minimized. Furthermore, our empirical analysis illustrates that prior works addressing the degeneration issue from various standpoints, such as the high-inflow words, the likelihood objective, and the self-reinforcement phenomenon, can be interpreted by one simple explanation. That is, penalizing the repetitions in training data is a common and fundamental factor for their effectiveness. Moreover, our experiments reveal that penalizing the repetitions in training data remains critical even when considering larger model sizes and instruction tuning.
Facing Off World Model Backbones: RNNs, Transformers, and S4
Authors: Fei Deng, Junyeong Park, Sungjin Ahn
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: World models are a fundamental component in model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL). To perform temporally extended and consistent simulations of the future in partially observable environments, world models need to possess long-term memory. However, state-of-the-art MBRL agents, such as Dreamer, predominantly employ recurrent neural networks (RNNs) as their world model backbone, which have limited memory capacity. In this paper, we seek to explore alternative world model backbones for improving long-term memory. In particular, we investigate the effectiveness of Transformers and Structured State Space Sequence (S4) models, motivated by their remarkable ability to capture long-range dependencies in low-dimensional sequences and their complementary strengths. We propose S4WM, the first world model compatible with parallelizable SSMs including S4 and its variants. By incorporating latent variable modeling, S4WM can efficiently generate high-dimensional image sequences through latent imagination. Furthermore, we extensively compare RNN-, Transformer-, and S4-based world models across four sets of environments, which we have tailored to assess crucial memory capabilities of world models, including long-term imagination, context-dependent recall, reward prediction, and memory-based reasoning. Our findings demonstrate that S4WM outperforms Transformer-based world models in terms of long-term memory, while exhibiting greater efficiency during training and imagination. These results pave the way for the development of stronger MBRL agents.
STARSS23: An Audio-Visual Dataset of Spatial Recordings of Real Scenes with Spatiotemporal Annotations of Sound Events
Authors: Kazuki Shimada, Archontis Politis, Parthasaarathy Sudarsanam, Daniel A. Krause, Kengo Uchida, Sharath Adavanne, Aapo Hakala, Yuichiro Koyama, Naoya Takahashi, Shusuke Takahashi, Tuomas Virtanen, Yuki Mitsufuji
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2023

Abstract: While direction of arrival (DOA) of sound events is generally estimated from multichannel audio data recorded in a microphone array, sound events usually derive from visually perceptible source objects, e.g., sounds of footsteps come from the feet of a walker. This paper proposes an audio-visual sound event localization and detection (SELD) task, which uses multichannel audio and video information to estimate the temporal activation and DOA of target sound events. Audio-visual SELD systems can detect and localize sound events using signals from a microphone array and audio-visual correspondence. We also introduce an audio-visual dataset, Sony-TAu Realistic Spatial Soundscapes 2023 (STARSS23), which consists of multichannel audio data recorded with a microphone array, video data, and spatiotemporal annotation of sound events. Sound scenes in STARSS23 are recorded with instructions, which guide recording participants to ensure adequate activity and occurrences of sound events. STARSS23 also serves human-annotated temporal activation labels and human-confirmed DOA labels, which are based on tracking results of a motion capture system. Our benchmark results demonstrate the benefits of using visual object positions in audio-visual SELD tasks. The data is available at https://zenodo.org/record/7880637.
Inserting Anybody in Diffusion Models via Celeb Basis
Authors: Ge Yuan, Xiaodong Cun, Yong Zhang, Maomao Li, Chenyang Qi, Xintao Wang, Ying Shan, Huicheng Zheng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Exquisite demand exists for customizing the pretrained large text-to-image model, $e.g.$ Stable Diffusion, to generate innovative concepts, such as the users themselves. However, the newly-added concept from previous customization methods often shows weaker combination abilities than the original ones even given several images during training. We thus propose a new personalization method that allows for the seamless integration of a unique individual into the pre-trained diffusion model using just $one\ facial\ photograph$ and only $1024\ learnable\ parameters$ under $3\ minutes$. So we can effortlessly generate stunning images of this person in any pose or position, interacting with anyone and doing anything imaginable from text prompts. To achieve this, we first analyze and build a well-defined celeb basis from the embedding space of the pre-trained large text encoder. Then, given one facial photo as the target identity, we generate its own embedding by optimizing the weight of this basis and locking all other parameters. Empowered by the proposed celeb basis, the new identity in our customized model showcases a better concept combination ability than previous personalization methods. Besides, our model can also learn several new identities at once and interact with each other where the previous customization model fails to. Project page is at: http://celeb-basis.github.io. Code is at: https://github.com/ygtxr1997/CelebBasis.
Scaling Open-Vocabulary Object Detection
Authors: Matthias Minderer, Alexey Gritsenko, Neil Houlsby
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Open-vocabulary object detection has benefited greatly from pretrained vision-language models, but is still limited by the amount of available detection training data. While detection training data can be expanded by using Web image-text pairs as weak supervision, this has not been done at scales comparable to image-level pretraining. Here, we scale up detection data with self-training, which uses an existing detector to generate pseudo-box annotations on image-text pairs. Major challenges in scaling self-training are the choice of label space, pseudo-annotation filtering, and training efficiency. We present the OWLv2 model and OWL-ST self-training recipe, which address these challenges. OWLv2 surpasses the performance of previous state-of-the-art open-vocabulary detectors already at comparable training scales (~10M examples). However, with OWL-ST, we can scale to over 1B examples, yielding further large improvement: With an L/14 architecture, OWL-ST improves AP on LVIS rare classes, for which the model has seen no human box annotations, from 31.2% to 44.6% (43% relative improvement). OWL-ST unlocks Web-scale training for open-world localization, similar to what has been seen for image classification and language modelling. Code and checkpoints are available on GitHub.
Formulating Discrete Probability Flow Through Optimal Transport
Authors: Pengze Zhang, Hubery Yin, Chen Li, Xiaohua Xie
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Continuous diffusion models are commonly acknowledged to display a deterministic probability flow, whereas discrete diffusion models do not. In this paper, we aim to establish the fundamental theory for the probability flow of discrete diffusion models. Specifically, we first prove that the continuous probability flow is the Monge optimal transport map under certain conditions, and also present an equivalent evidence for discrete cases.  In view of these findings, we are then able to define the discrete probability flow in line with the principles of optimal transport. Finally, drawing upon our newly established definitions, we propose a novel sampling method that surpasses previous discrete diffusion models in its ability to generate more certain outcomes. Extensive experiments on the synthetic toy dataset and the CIFAR-10 dataset have validated the effectiveness of our proposed discrete probability flow. Code is released at: https://github.com/PangzeCheung/Discrete-Probability-Flow.
Successor-Predecessor Intrinsic Exploration
Authors: Changmin Yu, Neil Burgess, Maneesh Sahani, Samuel J Gershman
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning, particularly in environments where external rewards are sparse. Here we focus on exploration with intrinsic rewards, where the agent transiently augments the external rewards with self-generated intrinsic rewards. Although the study of intrinsic rewards has a long history, existing methods focus on composing the intrinsic reward based on measures of future prospects of states, ignoring the information contained in the retrospective structure of transition sequences. Here we argue that the agent can utilise retrospective information to generate explorative behaviour with structure-awareness, facilitating efficient exploration based on global instead of local information. We propose Successor-Predecessor Intrinsic Exploration (SPIE), an exploration algorithm based on a novel intrinsic reward combining prospective and retrospective information. We show that SPIE yields more efficient and ethologically plausible exploratory behaviour in environments with sparse rewards and bottleneck states  than competing methods. We also implement SPIE in deep reinforcement learning agents, and show that the resulting agent achieves stronger empirical performance than existing methods on sparse-reward Atari games.
TFLEX: Temporal Feature-Logic Embedding Framework for Complex Reasoning over Temporal Knowledge Graph
Authors: Xueyuan Lin, Haihong E, Chengjin Xu, Gengxian Zhou, Haoran Luo, Tianyi Hu, Fenglong Su, Ningyuan Li, Mingzhi Sun
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Multi-hop logical reasoning over knowledge graph plays a fundamental role in many artificial intelligence tasks.  Recent complex query embedding methods for reasoning focus on static KGs, while temporal knowledge graphs have not been fully explored.  Reasoning over TKGs has two challenges: 1. The query should answer entities or timestamps; 2. The operators should consider both set logic on entity set and temporal logic on timestamp set.To bridge this gap, we introduce the multi-hop logical reasoning problem on TKGs and then propose the first temporal complex query embedding named Temporal Feature-Logic Embedding framework (TFLEX) to answer the temporal complex queries.  Specifically, we utilize fuzzy logic to compute the logic part of the Temporal Feature-Logic embedding, thus naturally modeling all first-order logic operations on the entity set.  In addition, we further extend fuzzy logic on timestamp set to cope with three extra temporal operators (After, Before and Between).Experiments on numerous query patterns demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
StyleGAN knows Normal, Depth, Albedo, and More
Authors: Anand Bhattad, Daniel McKee, Derek Hoiem, David A. Forsyth
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Intrinsic images, in the original sense, are image-like maps of scene properties like depth, normal, albedo, or shading. This paper demonstrates that StyleGAN can easily be induced to produce intrinsic images.  The procedure is straightforward. We show that if StyleGAN produces $G({\bf w})$ from latent ${\bf w}$, then for each type of intrinsic image, there is a fixed offset ${\bf d}_c$ so that $G({\bf w}+{\bf d}_c)$ is that type of intrinsic image for $G({\bf w})$. Here ${\bf d}_c$ is {\em independent of ${\bf w}$}.  The StyleGAN we used was pretrained by others, so this property is not some accident of our training regime.  We show that there are image transformations StyleGAN will {\em not} produce in this fashion, so StyleGAN is not a generic image regression engine.  It is conceptually exciting that an image generator should ``know'' and represent intrinsic images. There may also be practical advantages to using a generative model to produce intrinsic images. The intrinsic images obtained from StyleGAN compare well both qualitatively and quantitatively with those obtained by using SOTA image regression techniques; but StyleGAN's intrinsic images are robust to relighting effects, unlike SOTA methods.
Are Vision Transformers More Data Hungry Than Newborn Visual Systems?
Authors: Lalit Pandey, Samantha Wood, Justin Wood
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Vision transformers (ViTs) are top-performing models on many computer vision benchmarks and can accurately predict human behavior on object recognition tasks. However, researchers question the value of using ViTs as models of biological learning because ViTs are thought to be more “data hungry” than brains, with ViTs requiring more training data than brains to reach similar levels of performance. To test this assumption, we directly compared the learning abilities of ViTs and animals, by performing parallel controlled-rearing experiments on ViTs and newborn chicks. We first raised chicks in impoverished visual environments containing a single object, then simulated the training data available in those environments by building virtual animal chambers in a video game engine. We recorded the first-person images acquired by agents moving through the virtual chambers and used those images to train self-supervised ViTs that leverage time as a teaching signal, akin to biological visual systems. When ViTs were trained “through the eyes” of newborn chicks, the ViTs solved the same view-invariant object recognition tasks as the chicks. Thus, ViTs were not more data hungry than newborn chicks: both learned view-invariant object representations in impoverished visual environments. The flexible and generic attention-based learning mechanism in ViTs—combined with the embodied data streams available to newborn animals—appears sufficient to drive the development of animal-like object recognition.
How to Scale Your EMA
Authors: Dan Busbridge, Jason Ramapuram, Pierre Ablin, Tatiana Likhomanenko, Eeshan Gunesh Dhekane, Xavier Suau Cuadros, Russell Webb
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Preserving training dynamics across batch sizes is an important tool for practical machine learning as it enables the trade-off between batch size and wall-clock time. This trade-off is typically enabled by a scaling rule, for example, in stochastic gradient descent, one should scale the learning rate linearly with the batch size. Another important machine learning tool is the model EMA, a functional copy of a target model, whose parameters move towards those of its target model according to an Exponential Moving Average (EMA) at a rate parameterized by a momentum hyperparameter. This model EMA can improve the robustness and generalization of supervised learning, stabilize pseudo-labeling, and provide a learning signal for Self-Supervised Learning (SSL). Prior works have not considered the optimization of the model EMA when performing scaling, leading to different training dynamics across batch sizes and lower model performance. In this work, we provide a scaling rule for optimization in the presence of a model EMA and demonstrate the rule's validity across a range of architectures, optimizers, and data modalities.  We also show the rule's validity where the model EMA contributes to the optimization of the target model, enabling us to train EMA-based pseudo-labeling and SSL methods at small and large batch sizes. For SSL, we enable training of BYOL up to batch size 24,576 without sacrificing performance, a 6$\times$ wall-clock time reduction under idealized hardware settings.
Unsupervised Graph Neural Architecture Search with Disentangled Self-Supervision
Authors: Zeyang Zhang, Xin Wang, Ziwei Zhang, Guangyao Shen, Shiqi Shen, Wenwu Zhu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: The existing graph neural architecture search (GNAS) methods heavily rely on supervised labels during the search process, failing to handle ubiquitous scenarios where supervisions are not available. In this paper, we study the problem of unsupervised graph neural architecture search, which remains unexplored in the literature. The key problem is to discover the latent graph factors that drive the formation of graph data as well as the underlying relations between the factors and the optimal neural architectures. Handling this problem is challenging given that the latent graph factors together with architectures are highly entangled due to the nature of the graph and the complexity of the neural architecture search process. To address the challenge, we propose a novel Disentangled Self-supervised Graph Neural Architecture Search (DSGAS) model, which is able to discover the optimal architectures capturing various latent graph factors in a self-supervised fashion based on unlabeled graph data. Specifically, we first design a disentangled graph super-network capable of incorporating multiple architectures with factor-wise disentanglement, which are optimized simultaneously. Then, we estimate the performance of architectures under different factors by our proposed self-supervised training with joint architecture-graph disentanglement. Finally, we propose a contrastive search with architecture augmentations to discover architectures with factor-specific expertise. Extensive experiments on 11 real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance against several baseline methods in an unsupervised manner.
Setting the Trap: Capturing and Defeating Backdoors in Pretrained Language Models through Honeypots
Authors: Ruixiang (Ryan) Tang, Jiayi Yuan, Yiming Li, Zirui Liu, Rui Chen, Xia Hu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: In the field of natural language processing, the prevalent approach involves fine-tuning pretrained language models (PLMs) using local samples. Recent research has exposed the susceptibility of PLMs to backdoor attacks, wherein the adversaries can embed malicious prediction behaviors by manipulating a few training samples. In this study, our objective is to develop a backdoor-resistant tuning procedure that yields a backdoor-free model, no matter whether the fine-tuning dataset contains poisoned samples. To this end, we propose and integrate an \emph{honeypot module} into the original PLM, specifically designed to absorb backdoor information exclusively. Our design is motivated by the observation that lower-layer representations in PLMs carry sufficient backdoor features while carrying minimal information about the original tasks. Consequently, we can impose penalties on the information acquired by the honeypot module to inhibit backdoor creation during the fine-tuning process of the stem network. Comprehensive experiments conducted on benchmark datasets substantiate the effectiveness and robustness of our defensive strategy. Notably, these results indicate a substantial reduction in the attack success rate ranging from 10\% to 40\% when compared to prior state-of-the-art methods.
Learning Large-Scale MTP$_2$ Gaussian Graphical Models via Bridge-Block Decomposition
Authors: Xiwen WANG, Jiaxi Ying, Daniel Palomar
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: This paper studies the problem of learning the large-scale Gaussian graphical models that are multivariate totally positive of order two ($\text{MTP}_2$). By introducing the concept of bridge, which commonly exists in large-scale sparse graphs, we show that the entire problem can be equivalently optimized through (1) several smaller-scaled sub-problems induced by a \emph{bridge-block decomposition} on the thresholded sample covariance graph and (2) a set of explicit solutions on entries corresponding to  \emph{bridges}. From practical aspect, this simple and provable discipline can be applied to break down a large problem into small tractable ones, leading to enormous reduction on the computational complexity and substantial improvements for all existing algorithms.  The synthetic and real-world experiments demonstrate that our proposed method presents a significant speed-up compared to the state-of-the-art benchmarks.
Collaborative Score Distillation for Consistent Visual Editing
Authors: Subin Kim, Kyungmin Lee, June Suk Choi, Jongheon Jeong, Kihyuk Sohn, Jinwoo Shin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Generative priors of large-scale text-to-image diffusion models enable a wide range of new generation and editing applications on diverse visual modalities. However, when adapting these priors to complex visual modalities, often represented as multiple images (e.g., video or 3D scene), achieving consistency across a set of images is challenging. In this paper, we address this challenge with a novel method, Collaborative Score Distillation (CSD). CSD is based on the Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD). Specifically, we propose to consider multiple samples as “particles” in the SVGD update and combine their score functions to distill generative priors over a set of images synchronously. Thus, CSD facilitates the seamless integration of information across 2D images, leading to a consistent visual synthesis across multiple samples. We show the effectiveness of CSD in a variety of editing tasks, encompassing the visual editing of panorama images, videos, and 3D scenes. Our results underline the competency of CSD as a versatile method for enhancing inter-sample consistency, thereby broadening the applicability of text-to-image diffusion models.
FLuID: Mitigating Stragglers in Federated Learning using Invariant Dropout
Authors: Irene Wang, Prashant Nair, Divya Mahajan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) allows machine learning models to train locally on individual mobile devices, synchronizing model updates via a shared server. This approach safeguards user privacy; however, it also generates a heterogeneous training environment due to the varying performance capabilities across devices. As a result, “straggler” devices with lower performance often dictate the overalltraining time in FL. In this work, we aim to alleviate this performance bottleneck due to stragglers by dynamically balancing the training load across the system. We introduce Invariant Dropout, a method that extracts a sub-model based on the weight update threshold, thereby minimizing potential impacts on accuracy. Building on this dropout technique, we develop an adaptive training framework, Federated Learning using Invariant Dropout (FLuID). FLuID offers a lightweight sub-model extraction to regulate computational intensity, thereby reducing the load on straggler devices without affecting model quality. Our method leverages neuron updates from non-straggler devices to construct a tailored sub-model for each straggler based on client performance profiling. Furthermore, FLuID can dynamically adapt to changes in stragglers as runtime conditions shift. We evaluate FLuID using five real-world mobile clients. The evaluations show that Invariant Dropout maintains baseline model efficiency while alleviating the performance bottleneck of stragglers through a dynamic, runtime approach.
Learning to Augment Distributions for Out-of-distribution Detection
Authors: Qizhou Wang, Zhen Fang, Yonggang Zhang, Feng Liu, Yixuan Li, Bo Han
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Open-world classification systems should discern out-of-distribution (OOD) data whose labels deviate from those of in-distribution (ID) cases, motivating recent studies in OOD detection. Advanced works, despite their promising progress, may still fail in the open world, owing to the lacking knowledge about unseen OOD data in advance. Although one can access auxiliary OOD data (distinct from unseen ones) for model training, it remains to analyze how such auxiliary data will work in the open world. To this end, we delve into such a problem from a learning theory perspective, finding that the distribution discrepancy between the auxiliary and the unseen real OOD data is the key to affect the open-world detection performance. Accordingly, we propose Distributional-Augmented OOD Learning (DAOL), alleviating the OOD distribution discrepancy by crafting an OOD distribution set that contains all distributions in a Wasserstein ball centered on the auxiliary OOD distribution. We justify that the predictor trained over the worst OOD data in the ball can shrink the OOD distribution discrepancy, thus improving the open-world detection performance given only the auxiliary OOD data. We conduct extensive evaluations across representative OOD detection setups, demonstrating the superiority of our DAOL over its advanced counterparts.
Covariance-adaptive best arm identification
Authors: El Mehdi Saad, Gilles Blanchard, Nicolas Verzelen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We consider the problem of best arm identification in the multi-armed bandit model, under fixed confidence. Given a confidence input $\delta$, the goal is to identify the arm with the highest mean reward with a probability of at least $1 - \delta$, while minimizing the number of arm pulls. While the literature provides solutions to this problem under the assumption of independent arms distributions, we propose a more flexible scenario where arms can be dependent and rewards can be sampled simultaneously. This framework allows the learner to estimate the covariance among the arms distributions, enabling a more efficient identification of the best arm. The relaxed setting we propose is relevant in various applications, such as clinical trials, where similarities between patients or drugs suggest underlying correlations in the outcomes. We introduce new algorithms that adapt to the unknown covariance of the arms and demonstrate through theoretical guarantees that substantial improvement can be achieved over the standard setting. Additionally, we provide new lower bounds for the relaxed setting and present numerical simulations that support their theoretical findings.
What a MESS: Multi-Domain Evaluation of Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Benedikt Blumenstiel, Johannes Jakubik, Hilde Kuehne, Michael Vössing
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2023

Abstract: While semantic segmentation has seen tremendous improvements in the past, there are still significant labeling efforts necessary and the problem of limited generalization to classes that have not been present during training. To address this problem, zero-shot semantic segmentation makes use of large self-supervised vision-language models, allowing zero-shot transfer to unseen classes. In this work, we build a benchmark for Multi-domain Evaluation of Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation (MESS), which allows a holistic analysis of performance across a wide range of domain-specific datasets such as medicine, engineering, earth monitoring, biology, and agriculture. To do this, we reviewed 120 datasets, developed a taxonomy, and classified the datasets according to the developed taxonomy. We select a representative subset consisting of 22 datasets and propose it as the MESS benchmark. We evaluate eight recently published models on the proposed MESS benchmark and analyze characteristics for the performance of zero-shot transfer models. The toolkit is available at https://github.com/blumenstiel/MESS.
Swarm Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Mesh Refinement
Authors: Niklas Freymuth, Philipp Dahlinger, Tobias Würth, Simon Reisch, Luise Kärger, Gerhard Neumann
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: The Finite Element Method, an important technique in engineering, is aided by Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR), which dynamically refines mesh regions to allow for a favorable trade-off between computational speed and simulation accuracy. Classical methods for AMR depend on task-specific heuristics or expensive error estimators, hindering their use for complex simulations. Recent learned AMR methods tackle these problems, but so far scale only to simple toy examples. We formulate AMR as a novel Adaptive Swarm Markov Decision Process in which a mesh is modeled as a system of simple collaborating agents that may split into multiple new agents. This framework allows for a spatial reward formulation that simplifies the credit assignment problem, which we combine with Message Passing Networks to propagate information between neighboring mesh elements. We experimentally validate the effectiveness of our approach, Adaptive Swarm Mesh Refinement (ASMR), showing that it learns reliable, scalable, and efficient refinement strategies on a set of challenging problems. Our approach significantly speeds up computation, achieving up to 30-fold improvement compared to uniform refinements in complex simulations. Additionally, we outperform learned baselines and achieve a refinement quality that is on par with a traditional error-based AMR strategy without expensive oracle information about the error signal.
Fast Projected Newton-like Method for Precision Matrix Estimation under Total Positivity
Authors: Jian-Feng CAI, José Vinícius de Miranda Cardoso, Daniel Palomar, Jiaxi Ying
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We study the problem of estimating precision matrices in Gaussian distributions that are multivariate totally positive of order two ($\mathrm{MTP}_2$). The precision matrix in such a distribution is an M-matrix. This problem can be formulated as a sign-constrained log-determinant program. Current algorithms are designed using the block coordinate descent method or the proximal point algorithm, which becomes computationally challenging in high-dimensional cases due to the requirement to solve numerous nonnegative quadratic programs or large-scale linear systems. To address this issue, we propose a novel algorithm based on the two-metric projection method, incorporating a carefully designed search direction and variable partitioning scheme. Our algorithm substantially reduces computational complexity, and its theoretical convergence is established. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed algorithm provides a significant improvement in computational efficiency compared to the state-of-the-art methods.
BanditPAM++: Faster $k$-medoids Clustering
Authors: Mo Tiwari, Ryan Kang, Donghyun Lee, Sebastian Thrun, Ilan Shomorony, Martin J Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Clustering is a fundamental task in data science with wide-ranging applications. In $k$-medoids clustering, cluster centers must be actual datapoints and arbitrary distance metrics may be used; these features allow for greater interpretability of the cluster centers and the clustering of exotic objects in $k$-medoids clustering, respectively. $k$-medoids clustering has recently grown in popularity due to the discovery of more efficient $k$-medoids algorithms. In particular, recent research has proposed BanditPAM, a randomized $k$-medoids algorithm with state-of-the-art complexity and clustering accuracy. In this paper, we present BanditPAM++, which accelerates BanditPAM via two algorithmic improvements, and is $O(k)$ faster than BanditPAM in complexity and substantially faster than BanditPAM in wall-clock runtime. First, we demonstrate that BanditPAM has a special structure that allows the reuse of clustering information $\textit{within}$ each iteration. Second, we demonstrate that BanditPAM has additional structure that permits the reuse of information $\textit{across}$ different iterations. These observations inspire our proposed algorithm, BanditPAM++, which returns the same clustering solutions as BanditPAM but often several times faster. For example, on the CIFAR10 dataset, BanditPAM++ returns the same results as BanditPAM but runs over 10$\times$ faster. Finally, we provide a high-performance C++ implementation of BanditPAM++, callable from Python and R, that may be of interest to practitioners at https://github.com/motiwari/BanditPAM. Auxiliary code to reproduce all of our experiments via a one-line script is available at https://github.com/ThrunGroup/BanditPAM_plusplus_experiments.
Minigrid & Miniworld: Modular & Customizable Reinforcement Learning Environments for Goal-Oriented Tasks
Authors: Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert, Bolun Dai, Mark Towers, Rodrigo Perez-Vicente, Lucas Willems, Salem Lahlou, Suman Pal, Pablo Samuel Castro, J Terry
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2023

Abstract: We present the Minigrid and Miniworld libraries which provide a suite of goal-oriented 2D and 3D environments. The libraries were explicitly created with a minimalistic design paradigm to allow users to rapidly develop new environments for a wide range of research-specific needs. As a result, both have received widescale adoption by the RL community, facilitating research in a wide range of areas. In this paper, we outline the design philosophy, environment details, and their world generation API.  We also showcase the additional capabilities brought by the unified API between Minigrid and Miniworld through case studies on transfer learning (for both RL agents and humans) between the different observation spaces. The source code of Minigrid and Miniworld can be found at https://github.com/Farama-Foundation/Minigrid and https://github.com/Farama-Foundation/Miniworld along with their documentation at https://minigrid.farama.org/ and https://miniworld.farama.org/.
Cross-Domain Policy Adaptation via Value-Guided Data Filtering
Authors: Kang Xu, Chenjia Bai, Xiaoteng Ma, Dong Wang, Bin Zhao, Zhen Wang, Xuelong Li, Wei Li
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Generalizing policies across different domains with dynamics mismatch poses a significant challenge in reinforcement learning. For example, a robot learns the policy in a simulator, but when it is deployed in the real world, the dynamics of the environment may be different. Given the source and target domain with dynamics mismatch, we consider the online dynamics adaptation problem, in which case the agent can access sufficient source domain data while online interactions with the target domain are limited. Existing research has attempted to solve the problem from the dynamics discrepancy perspective. In this work, we reveal the limitations of these methods and explore the problem from the value difference perspective via a novel insight on the value consistency across domains. Specifically, we present the Value-Guided Data Filtering (VGDF) algorithm, which selectively shares transitions from the source domain based on the proximity of paired value targets across the two domains. Empirical results on various environments with kinematic and morphology shifts demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance compared to prior approaches.
Connecting Certified and Adversarial Training
Authors: Yuhao Mao, Mark Müller, Marc Fischer, Martin Vechev
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Training certifiably robust neural networks remains a notoriously hard problem.While adversarial training optimizes under-approximations of the worst-case loss, which leads to insufficient regularization for certification, sound certified training methods, optimize loose over-approximations, leading to over-regularization and poor (standard) accuracy.In this work, we propose TAPS, an (unsound) certified training method that combines IBP and PGD training to optimize more precise, although not necessarily sound, worst-case loss approximations, reducing over-regularization and increasing certified and standard accuracies.Empirically, TAPS achieves a new state-of-the-art in many settings, e.g., reaching a certified accuracy of $22$% on TinyImageNet for $\ell_\infty$-perturbations with radius $\epsilon=1/255$. We make our implementation and networks public at https://github.com/eth-sri/taps.
Effectively Learning Initiation Sets in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Akhil Bagaria, Ben Abbatematteo, Omer Gottesman, Matt Corsaro, Sreehari Rammohan, George Konidaris
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: An agent learning an option in hierarchical reinforcement learning must solve three problems: identify the option's subgoal (termination condition), learn a policy, and learn where that policy will succeed (initiation set). The termination condition is typically identified first, but the option policy and initiation set must be learned simultaneously, which is challenging because the initiation set depends on the option policy, which changes as the agent learns. Consequently, data obtained from option execution becomes invalid over time, leading to an inaccurate initiation set that subsequently harms downstream task performance. We highlight three issues---data non-stationarity, temporal credit assignment, and pessimism---specific to learning initiation sets, and propose to address them using tools from off-policy value estimation and classification. We show that our method learns higher-quality initiation sets faster than existing methods (in MiniGrid and Montezuma's Revenge), can automatically discover promising grasps for robot manipulation (in Robosuite), and improves the performance of a state-of-the-art option discovery method in a challenging maze navigation task in MuJoCo.
Alignment with human representations supports robust few-shot learning
Authors: Ilia Sucholutsky, Tom Griffiths
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Should we care whether AI systems have representations of the world that are similar to those of humans? We provide an information-theoretic analysis that suggests that there should be a U-shaped relationship between the degree of representational alignment with humans and performance on few-shot learning tasks. We confirm this prediction empirically, finding such a relationship in an analysis of the performance of 491 computer vision models. We also show that highly-aligned models are more robust to both natural adversarial attacks and domain shifts. Our results suggest that human-alignment is often a sufficient, but not necessary, condition for models to make effective use of limited data, be robust, and generalize well.
ReMaX: Relaxing for Better Training on Efficient Panoptic Segmentation
Authors: Shuyang Sun, WEIJUN WANG, Andrew Howard, Qihang Yu, Philip Torr, Liang-Chieh Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: This paper presents a new mechanism to facilitate the training of mask transformers for efficient panoptic segmentation, democratizing its deployment. We observe that due to the high complexity in the training objective of panoptic segmentation, it will inevitably lead to much higher penalization on false positive. Such unbalanced loss makes the training process of the end-to-end mask-transformer based architectures difficult, especially for efficient models. In this paper, we present ReMaX that adds relaxation to mask predictions and class predictions during the training phase for panoptic segmentation. We demonstrate that via these simple relaxation techniques during training, our model can be consistently improved by a clear margin without any extra computational cost on inference. By combining our method with efficient backbones like MobileNetV3-Small, our method achieves new state-of-the-art results for efficient panoptic segmentation on COCO, ADE20K and Cityscapes. Code and pre-trained checkpoints will be available at https://github.com/google-research/deeplab2.
The Behavior and Convergence of Local Bayesian Optimization
Authors: Kaiwen Wu, Kyurae Kim, Roman Garnett, Jacob Gardner
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: A recent development in Bayesian optimization is the use of local optimization strategies, which can deliver strong empirical performance on high-dimensional problems compared to traditional global strategies. The "folk wisdom" in the literature is that the focus on local optimization sidesteps the curse of dimensionality; however, little is known concretely about the expected behavior or convergence of Bayesian local optimization routines. We first study the behavior of the local approach, and find that the statistics of individual local solutions of Gaussian process sample paths are surprisingly good compared to what we would expect to recover from global methods. We then present the first rigorous analysis of such a Bayesian local optimization algorithm recently proposed by Müller et al. (2021), and derive convergence rates in both the noisy and noiseless settings.
Contrastive Sampling Chains in Diffusion Models
Authors: Junyu Zhang, Daochang Liu, Shichao Zhang, Chang Xu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: The past few years have witnessed great success in the use of diffusion models (DMs) to generate high-fidelity images with the help of stochastic differential equations (SDEs). However, discretization error is an inevitable limitation when utilizing numerical solvers to solve SDEs. To address this limitation, we provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating that an appropriate combination of the contrastive loss and score matching serves as an upper bound of the KL divergence between the true data distribution and the model distribution. To obtain this bound, we utilize a contrastive loss to construct a contrastive sampling chain to fine-tuning the pre-trained DM. In this manner, our method reduces the discretization error and thus yields a smaller gap between the true data distribution and our model distribution. Moreover, the presented method can be applied to fine-tuning various pre-trained DMs, both with or without fast sampling algorithms, contributing to better sample quality or slightly faster sampling speeds. To validate the efficacy of our method, we conduct comprehensive experiments. For example, on CIFAR10, when applied to a pre-trained EDM, our method improves the FID from 2.04 to 1.88 with 35 neural function evaluations (NFEs), and reduces NFEs from 35 to 25 to achieve the same 2.04 FID.
Effective Robustness against Natural Distribution Shifts for Models with Different Training Data
Authors: Zhouxing Shi, Nicholas Carlini, Ananth Balashankar, Ludwig Schmidt, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Alex Beutel, Yao Qin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: ``Effective robustness'' measures the extra out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness beyond what can be predicted from the in-distribution (ID) performance. Existing effective robustness evaluations typically use a single test set such as ImageNet to evaluate the ID accuracy. This becomes problematic when evaluating models trained on different data distributions, e.g., comparing models trained on ImageNet vs. zero-shot language-image pre-trained models trained on LAION. In this paper, we propose a new evaluation metric to evaluate and compare the effective robustness of models trained on different data. To do this, we control for the accuracy on multiple ID test sets that cover the training distributions for all the evaluated models. Our new evaluation metric provides a better estimate of effective robustness when there are models with different training data. It may also explain the surprising effective robustness gains of zero-shot CLIP-like models exhibited in prior works that used ImageNet as the only ID test set, while the gains diminish under our new evaluation. Additional artifacts including interactive visualizations are provided at https://shizhouxing.github.io/effective-robustness.
Tailoring Self-Attention for Graph via Rooted Subtrees
Authors: Siyuan Huang, Yunchong Song, Jiayue Zhou, Zhouhan Lin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36  (NeurIPS 2023) (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Attention mechanisms have made significant strides in graph learning, yet they still exhibit notable limitations: local attention faces challenges in capturing long-range information due to the inherent problems of the message-passing scheme, while global attention cannot reflect the hierarchical neighborhood structure and fails to capture fine-grained local information. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-hop graph attention mechanism, named Subtree Attention (STA), to address the aforementioned issues. STA seamlessly bridges the fully-attentional structure and the rooted subtree, with theoretical proof that STA approximates the global attention under extreme settings. By allowing direct computation of attention weights among multi-hop neighbors, STA mitigates the inherent problems in existing graph attention mechanisms. Further we devise an efficient form for STA by employing kernelized softmax, which yields a linear time complexity. Our resulting GNN architecture, the STAGNN, presents a simple yet performant STA-based graph neural network leveraging a hop-aware attention strategy. Comprehensive evaluations on ten node classification datasets demonstrate that STA-based models outperform existing graph transformers and mainstream GNNs. The codeis available at https://github.com/LUMIA-Group/SubTree-Attention.