mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
MultiViz: Towards Visualizing and Understanding Multimodal Models
Authors: Paul Pu Liang, Yiwei Lyu, Gunjan Chhablani, Nihal Jain, Zihao Deng, Xingbo Wang, Louis-Philippe Morency, Ruslan Salakhutdinov
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: The promise of multimodal models for real-world applications has inspired research in visualizing and understanding their internal mechanics with the end goal of empowering stakeholders to visualize model behavior, perform model debugging, and promote trust in machine learning models. However, modern multimodal models are typically black-box neural networks, which makes it challenging to understand their internal mechanics. How can we visualize the internal modeling of multimodal interactions in these models? Our paper aims to fill this gap by proposing MultiViz, a method for analyzing the behavior of multimodal models by scaffolding the problem of interpretability into 4 stages: (1) unimodal importance: how each modality contributes towards downstream modeling and prediction, (2) cross-modal interactions: how different modalities relate with each other, (3) multimodal representations: how unimodal and cross-modal interactions are represented in decision-level features, and (4) multimodal prediction: how decision-level features are composed to make a prediction. MultiViz is designed to operate on diverse modalities, models, tasks, and research areas. Through experiments on 8 trained models across 6 real-world tasks, we show that the complementary stages in MultiViz together enable users to (1) simulate model predictions, (2) assign interpretable concepts to features, (3) perform error analysis on model misclassifications, and (4) use insights from error analysis to debug models. MultiViz is publicly available, will be regularly updated with new interpretation tools and metrics, and welcomes inputs from the community.
Pruning Deep Neural Networks from a Sparsity Perspective
Authors: Enmao Diao, Ganghua Wang, Jiawei Zhang, Yuhong Yang, Jie Ding, Vahid Tarokh
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: In recent years, deep network pruning has attracted significant attention in order to enable the rapid deployment of AI into small devices with computation and memory constraints. Pruning is often achieved by dropping redundant weights, neurons, or layers of a deep network while attempting to retain a comparable test performance. Many deep pruning algorithms have been proposed with impressive empirical success. However, existing approaches lack a quantifiable measure to estimate the compressibility of a sub-network during each pruning iteration and thus may under-prune or over-prune the model. In this work, we propose PQ Index (PQI) to measure the potential compressibility of deep neural networks and use this to develop a Sparsity-informed Adaptive Pruning (SAP) algorithm. Our extensive experiments corroborate the hypothesis that for a generic pruning procedure, PQI decreases first when a large model is being effectively regularized and then increases when its compressibility reaches a limit that appears to correspond to the beginning of underfitting. Subsequently, PQI decreases again when the model collapse and significant deterioration in the performance of the model start to occur. Additionally, our experiments demonstrate that the proposed adaptive pruning algorithm with proper choice of hyper-parameters is superior to the iterative pruning algorithms such as the lottery ticket-based pruning methods, in terms of both compression efficiency and robustness.
In-context Reinforcement Learning with Algorithm Distillation
Authors: Michael Laskin, Luyu Wang, Junhyuk Oh, Emilio Parisotto, Stephen Spencer, Richie Steigerwald, DJ Strouse, Steven Stenberg Hansen, Angelos Filos, Ethan Brooks, maxime gazeau, Himanshu Sahni, Satinder Singh, Volodymyr Mnih
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We propose Algorithm Distillation (AD), a method for distilling reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms into neural networks by modeling their training histories with a causal sequence model. Algorithm Distillation treats learning to reinforcement learn as an across-episode sequential prediction problem. A dataset of learning histories is generated by a source RL algorithm, and then a causal transformer is trained by autoregressively predicting actions given their preceding learning histories as context. Unlike sequential policy prediction architectures that distill post-learning or expert sequences, AD is able to improve its policy entirely in-context without updating its network parameters. We demonstrate that AD can reinforcement learn in-context in a variety of environments with sparse rewards, combinatorial task structure, and pixel-based observations, and find that AD learns a more data-efficient RL algorithm than the one that generated the source data.
Statistical Theory of Differentially Private Marginal-based Data Synthesis Algorithms
Authors: Ximing Li, Chendi Wang, Guang Cheng
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract:  Marginal-based methods achieve promising performance in the synthetic data competition hosted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
 To deal with high-dimensional data, the distribution of synthetic data is represented by a probabilistic graphical model (e.g., a Bayesian network), while the raw data distribution is approximated by a collection of low-dimensional marginals.
 Differential privacy (DP) is guaranteed by introducing random noise to each low-dimensional marginal distribution.
 Despite its promising performance in practice, the statistical properties of marginal-based methods are rarely studied in the literature.
 In this paper, we study DP data synthesis algorithms based on Bayesian networks (BN) from a statistical perspective. We establish a rigorous accuracy guarantee for BN-based algorithms, where the errors are measured by the total variation (TV) distance or the $L^2$ distance. 
 Related to downstream machine learning tasks, an upper bound for the utility error of the DP synthetic data is also derived. To complete the picture, we establish a lower bound for TV accuracy that holds for every $\epsilon$-DP synthetic data generator.
PerFedMask: Personalized Federated Learning with Optimized Masking Vectors
Authors: Mehdi Setayesh, Xiaoxiao Li, Vincent W.S. Wong
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Recently, various personalized federated learning (FL) algorithms have been proposed to tackle data heterogeneity. To mitigate device heterogeneity, a common approach is to use masking.  In this paper, we first show that using random masking can lead to a bias in the obtained solution of the learning model. To this end, we propose a personalized FL algorithm with optimized masking vectors called PerFedMask. In particular, PerFedMask facilitates each device to obtain its optimized masking vector based on its computational capability before training.  Fine-tuning is performed after training. PerFedMask is a generalization of a recently proposed personalized FL algorithm, FedBABU (Oh et al., 2022). PerFedMask can be combined with other FL algorithms including HeteroFL (Diao et al., 2021) and Split-Mix FL (Hong et al., 2022). Results based on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets show that the proposed PerFedMask algorithm provides a higher test accuracy after fine-tuning and lower average number of trainable parameters when compared with six existing state-of-the-art FL algorithms in the literature. The codes are available at https://github.com/MehdiSet/PerFedMask.
CodeBPE: Investigating Subtokenization Options for Large Language Model Pretraining on Source Code
Authors: Nadezhda Chirkova, Sergey Troshin
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Recent works have widely adopted large language model pretraining for source code, suggested source code-specific pretraining objectives and investigated the applicability of various Transformer-based language model architectures for source code. This work investigates another important aspect of such models, the effect of different subtokenization options, and aims at identifying most effective and length-efficient subtokenizations, taking into account source code specifics. We propose subtokenziation that reduces average length by 17--40% without downstream performance drop, and show that a carefully chosen subtokenization may improve  quality by 0.5-2%, possibly with some length increase.
Learning to Induce Causal Structure 
Authors: Nan Rosemary Ke, Silvia Chiappa, Jane X Wang, Jorg Bornschein, Anirudh Goyal, Melanie Rey, Theophane Weber, Matthew Botvinick, Michael Curtis Mozer, Danilo Jimenez Rezende
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: The fundamental challenge in causal induction is to infer the underlying graph structure given observational and/or interventional data. Most existing causal induction algorithms operate by generating candidate graphs and evaluating them using either score-based methods (including continuous optimization) or independence tests. In our work, we instead treat the inference process as a black box and design a neural network architecture that learns the mapping from both observational and interventional data to graph structures via supervised training on synthetic graphs. The learned model generalizes to new synthetic graphs, is robust to train-test distribution shifts, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on naturalistic graphs for low sample complexity.
Dual Algorithmic Reasoning
Authors: Danilo Numeroso, Davide Bacciu, Petar Veličković
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Neural Algorithmic Reasoning is an emerging area of machine learning which seeks to infuse algorithmic computation in neural networks, typically by training neural models to approximate steps of classical algorithms. In this context, much of the current work has focused on learning reachability and shortest path graph algorithms, showing that joint learning on similar algorithms is beneficial for generalisation. However, when targeting more complex problems, such "similar" algorithms become more difficult to find. Here, we propose to learn algorithms by exploiting duality of the underlying algorithmic problem. Many algorithms solve optimisation problems. We demonstrate that simultaneously learning the dual definition of these optimisation problems in algorithmic learning allows for better learning and qualitatively better solutions. Specifically, we exploit the max-flow min-cut theorem to simultaneously learn these two algorithms over synthetically generated graphs, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach. We then validate the real-world utility of our dual algorithmic reasoner by deploying it on a challenging brain vessel classification task, which likely depends on the vessels’ flow properties. We demonstrate a clear performance gain when using our model within such a context, and empirically show that learning the max-flow and min-cut algorithms together is critical for achieving such a result.
Out-of-distribution Detection with Implicit Outlier Transformation
Authors: Qizhou Wang, Junjie Ye, Feng Liu, Quanyu Dai, Marcus Kalander, Tongliang Liu, Jianye HAO, Bo Han
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Outlier exposure (OE) is powerful in out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, enhancing detection capability via model fine-tuning with surrogate OOD data. However, surrogate data typically deviate from test OOD data. Thus, the performance of OE when facing unseen OOD data, can be weaken. To address this issue, we propose a novel OE-based approach that makes the model perform well for unseen OOD situations, even for unseen OOD cases. It leads to a min-max learning scheme---searching to synthesize OOD data that leads to worst judgments and learning from such OOD data for the uniform performance in OOD detection. In our realization, these worst OOD data are synthesized by transforming original surrogate ones, where the associated transform functions are learned implicitly based on our novel insight that model perturbation leads to data transformation. Our methodology offers an efficient way of synthesizing OOD data, which can further benefit the detection model, besides the surrogate OOD data. We conduct extensive experiments under various OOD detection setups, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method against its advanced counterparts.
Deep Ensembles for Graphs with Higher-order Dependencies
Authors: Steven Krieg, William Burgis, Patrick Soga, Nitesh Chawla
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) continue to achieve state-of-the-art performance on many graph learning tasks, but rely on the assumption that a given graph is a sufficient approximation of the true neighborhood structure. In the presence of higher-order sequential dependencies, we show that the tendency of traditional graph representations to underfit each node's neighborhood causes existing GNNs to generalize poorly. To address this, we propose a novel Deep Graph Ensemble (DGE), which captures neighborhood variance by training an ensemble of GNNs on different neighborhood subspaces of the same node within a higher-order network structure. We show that DGE consistently outperforms existing GNNs on semisupervised and supervised tasks on six real-world data sets with known higher-order dependencies, even under a similar parameter budget. We demonstrate that learning diverse and accurate base classifiers is central to DGE's success, and discuss the implications of these findings for future work on GNNs.
Linear Connectivity Reveals Generalization Strategies
Authors: Jeevesh Juneja, Rachit Bansal, Kyunghyun Cho, João Sedoc, Naomi Saphra
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: In the mode connectivity literature, it is widely accepted that there are common circumstances in which two neural networks, trained similarly on the same data, will maintain loss when interpolated in the weight space. In particular, transfer learning is presumed to ensure the necessary conditions for linear mode connectivity across training runs. In contrast to existing results from image classification, we find that among text classifiers (trained on MNLI, QQP, and CoLA), some pairs of finetuned models have large barriers of increasing loss on the linear paths between them. On each task, we find distinct clusters of models which are linearly connected on the test loss surface, but are disconnected from models outside the cluster---models that occupy separate basins on the surface. By measuring performance on specially-crafted diagnostic datasets, we find that these clusters correspond to different generalization strategies. For example, on MNLI, one cluster behaves like a bag of words model under domain shift, while another cluster uses syntactic heuristics. Our work demonstrates how the geometry of the loss surface can guide models towards different heuristic functions in standard finetuning settings.
Towards Interpretable Deep Reinforcement Learning with Human-Friendly Prototypes
Authors: Eoin M. Kenny, Mycal Tucker, Julie Shah
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Despite recent success of deep learning models in research settings, their application in sensitive domains remains limited because of their opaque decision-making processes. Taking to this challenge, people have proposed various eXplainable AI (XAI) techniques designed to calibrate trust and understandability of black-box models, with the vast majority of work focused on supervised learning. Here, we focus on making an "interpretable-by-design" deep reinforcement learning agent which is forced to use human-friendly prototypes in its decisions, thus making its reasoning process clear. Our proposed method, dubbed Prototype-Wrapper Network (PW-Net), wraps around any neural agent backbone, and results indicate that it does not worsen performance relative to black-box models. Most importantly, we found in a user study that PW-Nets supported better trust calibration and task performance relative to standard interpretability approaches and black-boxes.
Divide to Adapt: Mitigating Confirmation Bias for Domain Adaptation of Black-Box Predictors
Authors: Jianfei Yang, Xiangyu Peng, Kai Wang, Zheng Zhu, Jiashi Feng, Lihua Xie, Yang You
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Domain Adaptation of Black-box Predictors (DABP) aims to learn a model on an unlabeled target domain supervised by a black-box predictor trained on a source domain. It does not require access to both the source-domain data and the predictor parameters, thus addressing the data privacy and portability issues of standard domain adaptation methods. Existing DABP approaches mostly rely on knowledge distillation (KD) from the black-box predictor, i.e., training the model with its noisy target-domain predictions, which however inevitably introduces the confirmation bias accumulated from the prediction noises and leads to degrading performance. To mitigate such bias, we propose a new strategy, \textit{divide-to-adapt}, that purifies cross-domain knowledge distillation by proper domain division. This is inspired by an observation we make for the first time in domain adaptation: the target domain usually contains easy-to-adapt and hard-to-adapt samples that have different levels of domain discrepancy w.r.t. the source domain, and deep models tend to fit easy-to-adapt samples first. Leveraging easy-to-adapt samples with less noise can help KD alleviate the negative effect of prediction noises from black-box predictors. In this sense, the target domain can be divided into an easy-to-adapt subdomain with less noise and a hard-to-adapt subdomain at the early stage of training. Then the adaptation is achieved by semi-supervised learning. We further reduce distribution discrepancy between subdomains and develop weak-strong augmentation strategy to filter the predictor errors progressively. As such, our method is a simple yet effective solution to reduce error accumulation in cross-domain knowledge distillation for DABP. Moreover, we prove that the target error of DABP is bounded by the noise ratio of two subdomains, i.e., the confirmation bias, which provides the theoretical justifications for our method. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method achieves state of the art on all DABP benchmarks, outperforming the existing best approach by 7.0\% on VisDA-17, and is even comparable with the standard domain adaptation methods that use the source-domain data.
InCoder: A Generative Model for Code Infilling and Synthesis
Authors: Daniel Fried, Armen Aghajanyan, Jessy Lin, Sida Wang, Eric Wallace, Freda Shi, Ruiqi Zhong, Scott Yih, Luke Zettlemoyer, Mike Lewis
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Code is seldom written in a single left-to-right pass and is instead repeatedly edited and refined. We introduce InCoder, a unified generative model that can perform program synthesis (via left-to-right generation) as well as editing (via masking and infilling). InCoder is trained to generate code files from a large corpus of permissively licensed code, where regions of code have been randomly masked and moved to the end of each file, allowing code infilling with bidirectional context. Our model is the first large generative code model that is able to infill arbitrary regions of code, which we evaluate in a zero-shot setting on challenging tasks such as type inference, comment generation, and variable re-naming. We find that the ability to condition on bidirectional context substantially improves performance on these tasks, while still performing comparably on standard program synthesis benchmarks in comparison to left-to-right only models pretrained at similar scale. Our models and code will be publicly released.
Pink Noise Is All You Need: Colored Noise Exploration in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Onno Eberhard, Jakob Hollenstein, Cristina Pinneri, Georg Martius
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: In off-policy deep reinforcement learning with continuous action spaces, exploration is often implemented by injecting action noise into the action selection process. Popular algorithms based on stochastic policies, such as SAC or MPO, inject white noise by sampling actions from uncorrelated Gaussian distributions. In many tasks, however, white noise does not provide sufficient exploration, and temporally correlated noise is used instead. A common choice is Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) noise, which is closely related to Brownian motion (red noise). Both red noise and white noise belong to the broad family of colored noise. In this work, we perform a comprehensive experimental evaluation on MPO and SAC to explore the effectiveness of other colors of noise as action noise. We find that pink noise, which is halfway between white and red noise, significantly outperforms white noise, OU noise, and other alternatives on a wide range of environments. Thus, we recommend it as the default choice for action noise in continuous control.
Behavior Prior Representation learning for Offline Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Hongyu Zang, Xin Li, Jie Yu, Chen Liu, Riashat Islam, Remi Tachet des Combes, Romain Laroche
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) struggles in environments with rich and noisy inputs, where the agent only has access to a fixed dataset without environment interactions. Past works have proposed common workarounds based on the pre-training of state representations, followed by policy training. In this work, we introduce a simple, yet effective approach for learning state representations. Our method, Behavior Prior Representation (BPR), learns state representations with an easy-to-integrate objective based on behavior cloning of the dataset: we first learn a state representation by mimicking actions from the dataset, and then train a policy on top of the fixed representation, using any off-the-shelf Offline RL algorithm. Theoretically, we prove that BPR carries out performance guarantees when integrated into algorithms that have either policy improvement guarantees (conservative algorithms) or produce lower bounds of the policy values (pessimistic algorithms). Empirically, we show that BPR combined with existing state-of-the-art Offline RL algorithms leads to significant improvements across several offline control benchmarks. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/bit1029public/offline_bpr}
Is Model Ensemble Necessary? Model-based RL via a Single Model with Lipschitz Regularized Value Function
Authors: Ruijie Zheng, Xiyao Wang, Huazhe Xu, Furong Huang
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Probabilistic dynamics model ensemble is widely used in existing model-based reinforcement learning methods as it outperforms a single dynamics model in both asymptotic performance and sample efficiency. In this paper, we provide both practical and theoretical insights on the empirical success of the probabilistic dynamics model ensemble through the lens of Lipschitz continuity. We find that, for a value function, the stronger the Lipschitz condition is, the smaller the gap between the true dynamics- and learned dynamics-induced Bellman operators is, thus enabling the converged value function to be closer to the optimal value function. Hence, we hypothesize that the key functionality of the probabilistic dynamics model ensemble is to regularize the Lipschitz condition of the value function using generated samples. To validate this hypothesis, we devise two practical robust training mechanisms through computing the adversarial noise and regularizing the value network’s spectral norm to directly regularize the Lipschitz condition of the value functions. Empirical results show that combined with our mechanisms, model-based RL algorithms with a single dynamics model outperform those with ensemble of the probabilistic dynamics models. These findings not only support the theoretical insight, but also provide a practical solution for developing computationally efficient model-based RL algorithms.
Collaborative Pure Exploration in Kernel Bandit
Authors: Yihan Du, Wei Chen, Yuko Kuroki, Longbo Huang
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel Collaborative Pure Exploration in Kernel Bandit model (CoPE-KB), where multiple agents collaborate to complete different but related tasks with limited communication. Our model generalizes prior CoPE formulation with the single-task and classic MAB setting to allow multiple tasks and general reward structures. We propose a novel communication scheme with an efficient kernelized estimator, and design optimal algorithms CoKernelFC and CoKernelFB for CoPE-KB with fixed-confidence  and fixed-budget objectives, respectively. Nearly matching upper and lower bounds in both sampling and communication complexity are established to demonstrate the optimality of our algorithms. Our theoretical results explicitly quantify how task similarities influence learning speedup, and only depend on the effective dimension of feature space. Our novel techniques including an efficient kernelized estimator and linear structured instance transformation, which overcome the communication difficulty in high-dimensional feature space and derive communication round lower bounds, can be of independent interests.
On the Sensitivity of Reward Inference to Misspecified Human Models
Authors: Joey Hong, Kush Bhatia, Anca Dragan
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Inferring reward functions from human behavior is at the center of value alignment – aligning AI objectives with what we, humans, actually want. But doing so relies on models of how humans behave given their objectives. After decades of research in cognitive science, neuroscience, and behavioral economics, obtaining accurate human models remains an open research topic. This begs the question: how accurate do these models need to be in order for the reward inference to be accurate? On the one hand, if small errors in the model can lead to catastrophic error in inference, the entire framework of reward learning seems ill-fated, as we will never have perfect models of human behavior. On the other hand, if as our models improve, we can have a guarantee that reward accuracy also improves, this would show the benefit of more work on the modeling side. We study this question both theoretically and empirically. We do show that it is unfortunately possible to construct small adversarial biases in behavior that lead to arbitrarily large errors in the inferred reward. However, and arguably more importantly, we are also able to identify reasonable assumptions under which the reward inference error can be bounded linearly in the error in the human model. Finally, we verify our theoretical insights in discrete and continuous control tasks with simulated and human data.
Generating Sequences by Learning to Self-Correct
Authors: Sean Welleck, Ximing Lu, Peter West, Faeze Brahman, Tianxiao Shen, Daniel Khashabi, Yejin Choi
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Sequence generation applications require satisfying semantic constraints, such as ensuring that programs are correct, using certain keywords, or avoiding undesirable content. Language models, whether fine-tuned or prompted with few-shot demonstrations, frequently violate these constraints, and lack a mechanism to iteratively revise their outputs. Moreover, some powerful language models are of extreme scale or inaccessible, making it inefficient, if not infeasible, to update their parameters for task-specific adaptation. We present Self-Correction, an approach that decouples an imperfect base generator (an off-the-shelf language model or supervised sequence-to-sequence model) from a separate corrector that learns to iteratively correct imperfect generations. To train the corrector, we propose an online training procedure that can use either scalar or natural language feedback on intermediate imperfect generations. We show that  Self-Correction improves upon the base generator in three diverse generation tasks - mathematical program synthesis, lexically-constrained generation, and toxicity control - even when the corrector is much smaller than the base generator.
Federated Learning from Small Datasets
Authors: Michael Kamp, Jonas Fischer, Jilles Vreeken
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Federated learning allows multiple parties to collaboratively train a joint model without having to share any local data. It enables applications of machine learning in settings where data is inherently distributed and undisclosable, such as in the medical domain. Joint training is usually achieved by aggregating local models. When local datasets are small, locally trained models can vary greatly from a globally good model. Bad local models can arbitrarily deteriorate the aggregate model quality, causing federating learning to fail in these settings. We propose a novel approach that avoids this problem by interleaving model aggregation and permutation steps. During a permutation step we redistribute local models across clients through the server, while preserving data privacy, to allow each local model to train on a daisy chain of local datasets. This enables successful training in data-sparse domains. Combined with model aggregation, this approach enables effective learning even if the local datasets are extremely small, while retaining the privacy benefits of federated learning.
Enhancing Meta Learning via Multi-Objective Soft Improvement Functions
Authors: Runsheng Yu, Weiyu Chen, Xinrun Wang, James Kwok
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Meta-learning tries to leverage information from similar learning tasks. In the commonly-used bilevel optimization formulation, the shared parameter is learned in the outer loop by minimizing the average loss over all tasks. However, the converged solution may be comprised in that it only focuses on optimizing on a small subset of tasks. To alleviate this problem, we consider meta-learning as a multi-objective optimization (MOO) problem, in which each task is an objective. However, existing MOO solvers need to access all the objectives’ gradients in each iteration, and cannot scale to the huge number of tasks in typical meta-learning settings. To alleviate this problem, we propose a scalable gradient-based solver with the use of mini-batch. We provide theoretical guarantees on the Pareto optimality or Pareto stationarity of the converged solution. Empirical studies on various machine learning settings demonstrate that the proposed method is efficient, and achieves better performance than the baselines, particularly on improving the performance of the poorly-performing tasks and thus alleviating the compromising phenomenon.
Regression with Label Differential Privacy
Authors: Badih Ghazi, Pritish Kamath, Ravi Kumar, Ethan Leeman, Pasin Manurangsi, Avinash Varadarajan, Chiyuan Zhang
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We study the task of training regression models with the guarantee of _label_ differential privacy (DP). Based on a global prior distribution of label values, which could be obtained privately, we derive a label DP randomization mechanism that is optimal under a given regression loss function. We prove that the optimal mechanism takes the form of a "randomized response on bins", and propose an efficient algorithm for finding the optimal bin values. We carry out a thorough experimental evaluation on several datasets demonstrating the efficacy of our algorithm.
Basic Binary Convolution Unit for Binarized Image Restoration Network
Authors: Bin Xia, Yulun Zhang, Yitong Wang, Yapeng Tian, Wenming Yang, Radu Timofte, Luc Van Gool
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Lighter and faster image restoration (IR) models are crucial for the deployment on resource-limited devices. Binary neural network (BNN), one of the most promising model compression methods, can dramatically reduce the computations and parameters of full-precision convolutional neural networks (CNN). However, there are different properties between BNN and full-precision CNN, and we can hardly use the experience of designing CNN to develop BNN. In this study, we reconsider components in binary convolution, such as residual connection, BatchNorm, activation function, and structure, for IR tasks. We conduct systematic analyses to explain each component's role in binary convolution and discuss the pitfalls. Specifically, we find that residual connection can reduce the information loss caused by binarization; BatchNorm can solve the value range gap between residual connection and binary convolution; The position of the activation function dramatically affects the performance of BNN. Based on our findings and analyses, we design a simple yet efficient basic binary convolution unit (BBCU). Furthermore, we divide IR networks into four parts and specially design variants of BBCU for each part to explore the benefit of binarizing these parts. We conduct experiments on different IR tasks, and our BBCU significantly outperforms other BNNs and lightweight models, which shows that BBCU can serve as a basic unit for binarized IR networks. All codes and models will be released.
Self-Guided Noise-Free Data Generation for Efficient Zero-Shot Learning
Authors: Jiahui Gao, Renjie Pi, LIN Yong, Hang Xu, Jiacheng Ye, Zhiyong Wu, WEIZHONG ZHANG, Xiaodan Liang, Zhenguo Li, Lingpeng Kong
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: There is a rising interest in further exploring the zero-shot learning potential of large pre-trained language models (PLMs). A new paradigm called data-generation-based zero-shot learning has achieved impressive success. In this paradigm, the synthesized data from the PLM acts as the carrier of knowledge, which is used to train a task-specific model with orders of magnitude fewer parameters than the PLM, achieving both higher performance and efficiency than prompt-based zero-shot learning methods on PLMs. The main hurdle of this approach is that the synthesized data from PLM usually contains a significant portion of low-quality samples. Fitting on such data will greatly hamper the performance of the task-specific model, making it unreliable for deployment. Previous methods remedy this issue mainly by filtering synthetic data using heuristic metrics(e.g., output confidence), or refining the data with the help of a human expert, which comes with excessive manual tuning or expensive costs. In this paper, we propose a novel noise-robust re-weighting framework SunGen to automatically construct high-quality data for zero-shot classification problems. Our framework features the ability to learn the sample weights indicating data quality without requiring any human annotation. We theoretically and empirically verify the ability of our method to help construct good-quality synthetic datasets. Notably, SunGen-LSTM yields a 9.8% relative improvement than the baseline on average accuracy across eight different established text classification tasks.
Towards One-shot Neural Combinatorial Solvers: Theoretical and Empirical Notes on the Cardinality-Constrained Case
Authors: Runzhong Wang, Li Shen, Yiting Chen, Xiaokang Yang, Dacheng Tao, Junchi Yan
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: One-shot non-autoregressive neural networks, different from RL-based ones, have been actively adopted for solving combinatorial optimization (CO) problems, which can be trained by the objective score in a self-supervised manner. Such methods have shown their superiority in efficiency (e.g. by parallelization) and potential for tackling predictive CO problems for decision-making under uncertainty. While the discrete constraints often become a bottleneck for gradient-based neural solvers, as currently handled in three typical ways: 1) adding a soft penalty in the objective, where a bounded violation of the constraints cannot be guaranteed, being critical to many constraint-sensitive scenarios; 2) perturbing the input to generate an approximate gradient in a black-box manner, though the constraints are exactly obeyed while the approximate gradients can hurt the performance on the objective score; 3) a compromise by developing soft algorithms whereby the output of neural networks obeys a relaxed constraint, and there can still occur an arbitrary degree of constraint-violation. Towards the ultimate goal of establishing a general framework for neural CO solver with the ability to control an arbitrary-small degree of constraint violation, in this paper, we focus on a more achievable and common setting: the cardinality constraints, which in fact can be readily encoded by a differentiable optimal transport (OT) layer. Based on this observation, we propose OT-based cardinality constraint encoding for end-to-end CO problem learning with two variants: Sinkhorn and Gumbel-Sinkhorn, whereby their violation of the constraints can be exactly characterized and bounded by our theoretical results. On synthetic and real-world CO problem instances, our methods surpass the state-of-the-art CO network and are comparable to (if not superior to) the commercial solver Gurobi. In particular, we further showcase a case study of applying our approach to the predictive portfolio optimization task on real-world asset price data, improving the Sharpe ratio from 1.1 to 2.0 of a strong LSTM+Gurobi baseline under the classic predict-then-optimize paradigm.
Revisiting Robustness in Graph Machine Learning
Authors: Lukas Gosch, Daniel Sturm, Simon Geisler, Stephan Günnemann
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Many works show that node-level predictions of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are unrobust to small, often termed adversarial, changes to the graph structure. However, because manual inspection of a graph is difficult, it is unclear if the studied perturbations always preserve a core assumption of adversarial examples: that of unchanged semantic content. To address this problem, we introduce a more principled notion of an adversarial graph, which is aware of semantic content change. Using Contextual Stochastic Block Models (CSBMs) and real-world graphs, our results suggest: $i)$ for a majority of nodes the prevalent perturbation models include a large fraction of perturbed graphs violating the unchanged semantics assumption; $ii)$ surprisingly, all assessed GNNs show over-robustness - that is robustness beyond the point of semantic change. We find this to be a complementary phenomenon to adversarial examples and show that including the label-structure of the training graph into the inference process of GNNs significantly reduces over-robustness, while having a positive effect on test accuracy and adversarial robustness. Theoretically, leveraging our new semantics-aware notion of robustness, we prove that there is no robustness-accuracy tradeoff for inductively classifying a newly added node.
S-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Street Views
Authors: Ziyang Xie, Junge Zhang, Wenye Li, Feihu Zhang, Li Zhang
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) aim to synthesize novel views of objects and scenes, given the object-centric camera views with large overlaps. However, we conjugate that this paradigm does not fit the nature of the street views that are collected by many self-driving cars from the large-scale unbounded scenes. Also, the onboard cameras perceive scenes without much overlapping. Thus, existing NeRFs often produce blurs, "floaters" and other artifacts on  street-view synthesis. In this paper, we propose a new street-view NeRF (S-NeRF) that considers novel view synthesis of both the large-scale background scenes and the foreground moving vehicles jointly. Specifically, we improve the scene parameterization function and the camera poses for learning better neural representations from street views. We also use the the noisy and sparse LiDAR points to boost the training and learn a robust geometry and reprojection based confidence to address the depth outliers.   Moreover, we extend our S-NeRF for reconstructing moving vehicles that is impracticable for conventional NeRFs. Thorough experiments on the large-scale driving datasets (e.g., nuScenes and Waymo) demonstrate that our method beats the state-of-the-art rivals by reducing 7～40% of the mean-squared error in the street-view synthesis and a 45% PSNR gain for the moving vehicles rendering.
Computing all Optimal Partial Transports
Authors: Abhijeet Phatak, Sharath Raghvendra, CHITTARANJAN TRIPATHY, Kaiyi Zhang
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We consider the classical version of the optimal partial transport problem. Let $\mu$ (with a mass of $U$) and $\nu$ (with a mass of $S$) be two discrete mass distributions with $S \le U$ and let $n$ be the total number of points in the supports of $\mu$ and $\nu$. For a parameter $\alpha \in [0,S]$, consider the minimum-cost transport plan  $\sigma_\alpha$ that transports a mass of $\alpha$ from $\nu$ to $\mu$. An \emph{OT-profile} captures the behavior of the cost of $\sigma_\alpha$ as $\alpha$ varies from $0$ to $S$. There is only limited work on OT-profile and its mathematical properties (see~\cite{figalli2010optimal}). In this paper, we present a novel framework to analyze the properties of the OT-profile and also present an algorithm to compute it.  When $\mu$ and $\nu$ are discrete mass distributions, we show that the OT-profile is a piecewise-linear non-decreasing convex function. Let $K$ be the combinatorial complexity of this function, i.e., the number of line segments required to represent the OT-profile. Our exact algorithm computes the OT-profile in $\tilde{O}(n^2K)$ time. Given $\delta > 0$, we also show that the algorithm by ~\cite{lahn2019graph} can be used to $\delta$-approximate the OT-profile in $O(n^2/\delta + n/\delta^2)$ time. This approximation is a piecewise-linear function of a combinatorial complexity of $O(1/\delta)$.
An OT-profile is arguably more valuable than the OT-cost itself and can be used within applications. Under a reasonable assumption of outliers, we also show that the first derivative of the OT-profile sees a noticeable rise before any of the mass from outliers is transported. By using this property, we get an improved prediction accuracy for an outlier detection experiment. We also use this property to predict labels and estimate the class priors within PU-Learning experiments. Both these experiments are conducted on real datasets.
Almost Linear Constant-Factor Sketching for $\ell_1$ and Logistic Regression
Authors: Alexander Munteanu, Simon Omlor, David Woodruff
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We improve upon previous oblivious sketching and turnstile streaming results for $\ell_1$ and logistic regression, giving a much smaller sketching dimension achieving $O(1)$-approximation and yielding an efficient optimization problem in the sketch space. Namely, we achieve for any constant $c>0$ a sketching dimension of $\tilde{O}(d^{1+c})$ for $\ell_1$ regression and $\tilde{O}(\mu d^{1+c})$ for logistic regression, where $\mu$ is a standard measure that captures the complexity of compressing the data. For $\ell_1$-regression our sketching dimension is near-linear and improves previous work which either required $\Omega(\log d)$-approximation with this sketching dimension, or required a larger $\operatorname{poly}(d)$ number of rows. Similarly, for logistic regression previous work had worse $\operatorname{poly}(\mu d)$ factors in its sketching dimension. We also give a tradeoff that yields a $1+\varepsilon$ approximation in input sparsity time by increasing the total size to $(d\log(n)/\varepsilon)^{O(1/\varepsilon)}$ for $\ell_1$ and to $(\mu d\log(n)/\varepsilon)^{O(1/\varepsilon)}$ for logistic regression. Finally, we show that our sketch can be extended to approximate a regularized version of logistic regression where the data-dependent regularizer corresponds to the variance of the individual logistic losses.
Fundamental limits on the robustness of image classifiers
Authors: Zheng Dai, David Gifford
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We prove that image classifiers are fundamentally sensitive to small perturbations in their inputs. Specifically, we show that given some image space of $n$-by-$n$ images, all but a tiny fraction of images in any image class induced over that space can be moved outside that class by adding some perturbation whose $p$-norm is $O(n^{1/\max{(p,1)}})$, as long as that image class takes up at most half of the image space. We then show that $O(n^{1/\max{(p,1)}})$ is asymptotically optimal. Finally, we show that an increase in the bit depth of the image space leads to a loss in robustness. We supplement our results with a discussion of their implications for vision systems.
Composing Ensembles of Pre-trained Models via Iterative Consensus
Authors: Shuang Li, Yilun Du, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Antonio Torralba, Igor Mordatch
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Large pre-trained models exhibit distinct and complementary capabilities dependent on the data they are trained on. Language models such as GPT-3 are capable of textual reasoning but cannot understand visual information, while vision models such as DALL-E can generate photorealistic photos but fail to understand complex language descriptions. In this work, we propose a unified framework for composing ensembles of different pre-trained models -- combining the strengths of each individual model to solve various multimodal problems in a zero-shot manner. We use pre-trained models as "generators" or "scorers" and compose them via closed-loop iterative consensus optimization. The generator constructs proposals and the scorers iteratively provide feedback to refine the generated result. Such closed-loop communication enables models to correct errors caused by other models, significantly boosting performance on downstream tasks, e.g. improving accuracy on grade school math problems by 7.5%, without requiring any model finetuning. We demonstrate that consensus achieved by an ensemble of scorers outperforms the feedback of a single scorer, by leveraging the strengths of each expert model. Results show that the proposed method can be used as a general purpose framework for a wide range of zero-shot multimodal tasks, such as image generation, video question answering, mathematical reasoning, and robotic manipulation.