mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
BrainBits: How Much of the Brain are Generative Reconstruction Methods Using?
Authors: David Mayo, Christopher Wang, Asa Harbin, Abdulrahman Alabdulkareem, Albert Shaw, Boris Katz, Andrei Barbu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: When evaluating stimuli reconstruction results it is tempting to assume that higher fidelity text and image generation is due to an improved understanding of the brain or  more powerful signal extraction from neural recordings. However, in practice, new reconstruction methods could improve performance for at least three other reasons: learning more about the distribution of stimuli, becoming better at reconstructing text or images in general, or exploiting weaknesses in current image and/or text evaluation metrics. Here we disentangle how much of the reconstruction is due to these other factors vs. productively using the neural recordings. We introduce BrainBits, a method that uses a bottleneck to quantify the amount of signal extracted from neural recordings that is actually necessary to reproduce a method's reconstruction fidelity. We find that it takes surprisingly little information from the brain to produce reconstructions with high fidelity. In these cases, it is clear that the priors of the methods' generative models are so powerful that the outputs they produce extrapolate far beyond the neural signal they decode. Given that reconstructing stimuli can be improved independently by either improving signal extraction from the brain or by building more powerful generative models, improving the latter may fool us into thinking we are improving the former. We propose that methods should report a method-specific random baseline, a reconstruction ceiling, and a curve of performance as a function of bottleneck size, with the ultimate goal of using more of the neural recordings.
Q-Distribution guided Q-learning for offline reinforcement learning: Uncertainty penalized Q-value via consistency model
Authors: Jing Zhang, Linjiajie Fang, Kexin Shi, Wenjia Wang, Bing-Yi Jing
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: ``Distribution shift'' is the primary obstacle to the success of offline reinforcement learning. As a learning policy may take actions beyond the knowledge of the behavior policy (referred to as Out-of-Distribution (OOD) actions), the Q-values of these OOD actions can be easily overestimated. Consequently, the learning policy becomes biasedly optimized using the incorrect recovered Q-value function. One commonly used idea to avoid the overestimation of Q-value is to make a pessimistic adjustment. Our key idea is to penalize the Q-values of OOD actions that correspond to high uncertainty. In this work, we propose Q-Distribution guided Q-learning (QDQ) which  pessimistic Q-value on OOD regions based on uncertainty estimation. The uncertainty measure is based on the conditional Q-value distribution, which is learned via a high-fidelity and efficient consistency model. On the other hand, to avoid the overly conservative problem, we introduce an uncertainty-aware optimization objective to update the Q-value function. The proposed QDQ demonstrates solid theoretical guarantees for the accuracy of Q-value distribution learning and uncertainty measurement, as well as the performance of the learning policy. QDQ consistently exhibits strong performance in the D4RL benchmark and shows significant improvements for many tasks. Our code can be found at .
APIGen: Automated PIpeline for Generating Verifiable and Diverse Function-Calling Datasets
Authors: Zuxin Liu, Thai Hoang, Jianguo Zhang, Ming Zhu, Tian Lan, Shirley Kokane, Juntao Tan, Weiran Yao, Zhiwei Liu, Yihao Feng, Rithesh Murthy, Liangwei Yang, Silvio Savarese, Juan Carlos Niebles, Huan Wang, Shelby Heinecke, Caiming Xiong
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: The advancement of function-calling agent models requires diverse, reliable, and high-quality datasets. This paper presents APIGen, an automated data generation pipeline designed to synthesize high-quality datasets for function-calling applications. We leverage APIGen and collect 3,673 executable APIs across 21 different categories to generate diverse function-calling datasets in a scalable and structured manner. Each data in our dataset is verified through three hierarchical stages: format checking, actual function executions, and semantic verification, improving its reliability and correctness. We demonstrate that models trained with our curated datasets, even with only 7B parameters, can achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Berkeley Function-Calling Benchmark, outperforming multiple GPT-4 models. Moreover, our 1B model achieves exceptional performance, surpassing GPT-3.5-Turbo and Claude-3 Haiku. We release a dataset containing 60,000 high-quality entries, aiming to advance the field of function-calling agent domains. The dataset and models are available on the project homepage \url{https://apigen-pipeline.github.io/}.
ChatCam: Empowering Camera Control through Conversational AI
Authors: Xinhang Liu, Yu-Wing Tai, Chi-Keung Tang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Cinematographers adeptly capture the essence of the world, crafting compelling visual narratives through intricate camera movements. Witnessing the strides made by large language models in perceiving and interacting with the 3D world, this study explores their capability to control cameras with human language guidance. We introduce ChatCam, a system that navigates camera movements through conversations with users, mimicking a professional cinematographer's workflow. To achieve this, we propose CineGPT, a GPT-based autoregressive model for text-conditioned camera trajectory generation. We also develop an Anchor Determinator to ensure precise camera trajectory placement. ChatCam understands user requests and employs our proposed tools to generate trajectories, which can be used to render high-quality video footage on radiance field representations. Our experiments, including comparisons to state-of-the-art approaches and user studies, demonstrate our approach's ability to interpret and execute complex instructions for camera operation, showing promising applications in real-world production settings. Project page: https://xinhangliu.com/chatcam.
What Rotary Position Embedding Can Tell Us: Identifying Query and Key Weights Corresponding to Basic Syntactic or High-level Semantic Information
Authors: Yiting Chen, Junchi Yan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have successfully handled various tasks. As one fundamental module in Transformers, position encoding encodes the positional information of tokens in a sequence. Specifically, rotary position embedding (RoPE), one of the most widely used techniques, encodes the positional information by dividing the query or key value with $d$ elements into $d/2$ pairs and rotating the 2d vectors corresponding to each pair of elements. Therefore, the direction of each pair and the position-related rotation jointly determine the attention score. In this paper, we show that the direction of the 2d pair is largely affected by the angle between the corresponding weight vector pair. We theoretically show that non-orthogonal weight vector pairs lead to great attention on tokens at a certain relative position and are less sensitive to the input which may correspond to basic syntactic information. Meanwhile, the orthogonal weight vector pairs are more flexible regarding the relative position, which may correspond to high-level syntactic information. Empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that shallow layers of LLMs focus more on local syntax and deep layers focus more on high-level semantics. Furthermore, we show that LLMs fine-tuning mainly changes the pairs of weight vectors that are nearly orthogonal, i.e., the weight corresponding to high-level semantics, which enables the reduction of the number of trainable parameters during fine-tuning without sacrificing performance. We propose a method namely Angle-based Weight Selection (AWS) to reduce the fine-tuning overhead and verify the effectiveness of the proposed method on widely used Alpaca fine-tuned Llama-2.
EgoChoir: Capturing 3D Human-Object Interaction Regions from Egocentric Views
Authors: Yuhang Yang, Wei Zhai, Chengfeng Wang, Chengjun Yu, Yang Cao, Zheng-Jun Zha
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Understanding egocentric human-object interaction (HOI) is a fundamental aspect of human-centric perception, facilitating applications like AR/VR and embodied AI. For the egocentric HOI, in addition to perceiving semantics e.g., ''what'' interaction is occurring, capturing ''where'' the interaction specifically manifests in 3D space is also crucial, which links the perception and operation. Existing methods primarily leverage observations of HOI to capture interaction regions from an exocentric view. However, incomplete observations of interacting parties in the egocentric view introduce ambiguity between visual observations and interaction contents, impairing their efficacy. From the egocentric view, humans integrate the visual cortex, cerebellum, and brain to internalize their intentions and interaction concepts of objects, allowing for the pre-formulation of interactions and making behaviors even when interaction regions are out of sight. In light of this, we propose harmonizing the visual appearance, head motion, and 3D object to excavate the object interaction concept and subject intention, jointly inferring 3D human contact and object affordance from egocentric videos. To achieve this, we present EgoChoir, which links object structures with interaction contexts inherent in appearance and head motion to reveal object affordance, further utilizing it to model human contact. Additionally, a gradient modulation is employed to adopt appropriate clues for capturing interaction regions across various egocentric scenarios. Moreover, 3D contact and affordance are annotated for egocentric videos collected from Ego-Exo4D and GIMO to support the task. Extensive experiments on them demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of EgoChoir.
NeuralFuse: Learning to Recover the Accuracy of Access-Limited Neural Network Inference in Low-Voltage Regimes
Authors: Hao-Lun Sun, Lei Hsiung, Nandhini Chandramoorthy, Pin-Yu Chen, Tsung-Yi Ho
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) have become ubiquitous in machine learning, but their energy consumption remains problematically high. An effective strategy for reducing such consumption is supply-voltage reduction, but if done too aggressively, it can lead to accuracy degradation. This is due to random bit-flips in static random access memory (SRAM), where model parameters are stored. To address this challenge, we have developed NeuralFuse, a novel add-on module that handles the energy-accuracy tradeoff in low-voltage regimes by learning input transformations and using them to generate error-resistant data representations, thereby protecting DNN accuracy in both nominal and low-voltage scenarios. As well as being easy to implement, NeuralFuse can be readily applied to DNNs with limited access, such cloud-based APIs that are accessed remotely or non-configurable hardware. Our experimental results demonstrate that, at a 1% bit-error rate, NeuralFuse can reduce SRAM access energy by up to 24% while recovering accuracy by up to 57%. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach to addressing low-voltage-induced bit errors that requires no model retraining.
Dissecting Query-Key Interaction in Vision Transformers
Authors: Xu Pan, Aaron Philip, Ziqian Xie, Odelia Schwartz
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Self-attention in vision transformers is often thought to perform perceptual grouping where tokens attend to other tokens with similar embeddings, which could correspond to semantically similar features of an object. However, attending to dissimilar tokens can be beneficial by providing contextual information. We propose to analyze the query-key interaction by the singular value decomposition of the interaction matrix (i.e. ${\textbf{W}_q}^\top\textbf{W}_k$). We find that in many ViTs, especially those with classification training objectives, early layers attend more to similar tokens, while late layers show increased attention to dissimilar tokens, providing evidence corresponding to perceptual grouping and contextualization, respectively. Many of these interactions between features represented by singular vectors are interpretable and semantic, such as attention between relevant objects, between parts of an object, or between the foreground and background. This offers a novel perspective on interpreting the attention mechanism, which contributes to understanding how transformer models utilize context and salient features when processing images.
PEAC: Unsupervised Pre-training for Cross-Embodiment Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Chengyang Ying, Zhongkai Hao, Xinning Zhou, Xuezhou Xu, Hang Su, Xingxing Zhang, Jun Zhu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Designing generalizable agents capable of adapting to diverse embodiments has achieved significant attention in Reinforcement Learning (RL), which is critical for deploying RL agents in various real-world applications. Previous Cross-Embodiment RL approaches have focused on transferring knowledge across embodiments within specific tasks. These methods often result in knowledge tightly coupled with those tasks and fail to adequately capture the distinct characteristics of different embodiments. To address this limitation, we introduce the notion of Cross-Embodiment Unsupervised RL (CEURL), which leverages unsupervised learning to enable agents to acquire embodiment-aware and task-agnostic knowledge through online interactions within reward-free environments. We formulate CEURL as a novel Controlled Embodiment Markov Decision Process (CE-MDP) and systematically analyze CEURL's pre-training objectives under CE-MDP. Based on these analyses, we develop a novel algorithm Pre-trained Embodiment-Aware Control (PEAC) for handling CEURL, incorporating an intrinsic reward function specifically designed for cross-embodiment pre-training. PEAC not only provides an intuitive optimization strategy for cross-embodiment pre-training but also can integrate flexibly with existing unsupervised RL methods, facilitating cross-embodiment exploration and skill discovery. Extensive experiments in both simulated (e.g., DMC and Robosuite) and real-world environments (e.g., legged locomotion) demonstrate that PEAC significantly improves adaptation performance and cross-embodiment generalization, demonstrating its effectiveness in overcoming the unique challenges of CEURL. The project page and code are in https://yingchengyang.github.io/ceurl.
Idiographic Personality Gaussian Process for Psychological Assessment
Authors: Yehu Chen, Muchen Xi, Jacob Montgomery, Joshua Jackson, Roman Garnett
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We develop a novel measurement framework based on Gaussian process coregionalization model to address a long-lasting debate in psychometrics: whether psychological features like personality share a common structure across the population or vary uniquely for individuals. We propose idiographic personality Gaussian process (IPGP), an intermediate model that accommodates both shared trait structure across individuals and "idiographic" deviations. IPGP leverages the Gaussian process coregionalization model to conceptualize responses of grouped survey batteries but adjusted to non-Gaussian ordinal data, and exploits stochastic variational inference for latent factor estimation. Using both synthetic data and a novel survey, we show that IPGP improves both prediction of actual responses and estimation of intrapersonal response patterns compared to existing benchmarks. In the survey study, IPGP also identifies unique clusters of personality taxonomies, displaying great potential in advancing individualized approaches to psychological diagnosis.
pFedClub: Controllable Heterogeneous Model Aggregation for Personalized Federated Learning
Authors: Jiaqi Wang, Qi Li, Lingjuan Lyu, Fenglong Ma
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Federated learning, a pioneering paradigm, enables collaborative model training without exposing users’ data to central servers. Most existing federated learning systems necessitate uniform model structures across all clients, restricting their practicality. Several methods have emerged to aggregate diverse client models; however, they either lack the ability of personalization, raise privacy and security concerns, need prior knowledge, or ignore the capability and functionality of personalized models. In this paper, we present an innovative approach, named pFedClub, which addresses these challenges. pFedClub introduces personalized federated learning through the substitution of controllable neural network blocks/layers. Initially, pFedClub dissects heterogeneous client models into blocks and organizes them into functional groups on the server. Utilizing the designed CMSR (Controllable Model Searching and Reproduction) algorithm, pFedClub generates a range of personalized candidate models for each client. A model matching technique is then applied to select the optimal personalized model, serving as a teacher model to guide each client’s training process. We conducted extensive experiments across three datasets, examining both IID and non-IID settings. The results demonstrate that pFedClub outperforms baseline approaches, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, our model insight analysis reveals that pFedClub generates personalized models of reasonable size in a controllable manner, significantly reducing computational costs.
Efficient Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding using Low-Rank Matrix Completion Algorithms
Authors: Firas Trabelsi, David Vilar, Mara Finkelstein, Markus Freitag
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding is a powerful decoding strategy widely used for text generation tasks but its quadratic computational complexity limits its practical application. This paper presents a novel approach for approximating MBR decoding using matrix completion techniques, focusing on a machine translation task. We formulate MBR decoding as a matrix completion problem, where the utility metric scores between candidate hypotheses and reference translations form a low-rank matrix. First we empirically show that the scores matrices indeed have a low-rank structure. Then we exploit this by only computing a random subset of the scores and efficiently recover the missing entries in the matrix by applying the Alternating Least Squares (ALS) algorithm, thereby enabling fast approximation of the MBR decoding process. Our experimental results on machine translation tasks demonstrate that the proposed method requires 1/16 utility metric computations compared to the vanilla MBR decoding while achieving equal translation quality measured by COMET on the WMT22 dataset (en<>de, en<>ru). We also benchmark our method against other approximation methods and we show significant gains in quality.
USCILab3D: A Large-scale, Long-term, Semantically Annotated Outdoor Dataset
Authors: Kiran Lekkala, Henghui Bao, Peixu Cai, Wei Zer Lim, Chen Liu, Laurent Itti
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce the \textbf{USCILab3D dataset}, a large-scale, annotated outdoor dataset designed for versatile applications across multiple domains, including computer vision, robotics, and machine learning. The dataset was acquired using a mobile robot equipped with 5 cameras and a 32-beam, $360^{\circ}$ scanning LIDAR. The robot was teleoperated, over the course of a year and under a variety of weather and lighting conditions, through a rich variety of paths within the USC campus (229 acres = $\sim 92.7$ hectares). The raw data was annotated using state-of-the-art large foundation models, and processed to provide multi-view imagery, 3D reconstructions, semantically-annotated images and point clouds (267 semantic categories), and text descriptions of images and objects within. The dataset also offers a diverse array of complex analyses using pose-stamping and trajectory data. In sum, the dataset offers 1.4M point clouds and 10M images ($\sim 6$TB of data). Despite covering a narrower geographical scope compared to a whole-city dataset, our dataset prioritizes intricate intersections along with denser multi-view scene images and semantic point clouds, enabling more precise 3D labelling and facilitating a broader spectrum of 3D vision tasks. For data, code and more details, please visit our website.
Taming the Long Tail in Human Mobility Prediction
Authors: Xiaohang Xu, Renhe Jiang, Chuang Yang, Zipei Fan, Kaoru Sezaki
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: With the popularity of location-based services, human mobility prediction plays a key role in enhancing personalized navigation, optimizing recommendation systems, and facilitating urban mobility and planning. This involves predicting a user's next POI (point-of-interest) visit using their past visit history. However, the uneven distribution of visitations over time and space, namely the long-tail problem in spatial distribution, makes it difficult for AI models to predict those POIs that are less visited by humans. In light of this issue, we propose the $\underline{\bf{Lo}}$ng-$\underline{\bf{T}}$ail Adjusted $\underline{\bf{Next}}$ POI Prediction (LoTNext) framework for mobility prediction, combining a Long-Tailed Graph Adjustment module to reduce the impact of the long-tailed nodes in the user-POI interaction graph and a novel Long-Tailed Loss Adjustment module to adjust loss by logit score and sample weight adjustment strategy. Also, we employ the auxiliary prediction task to enhance generalization and accuracy. Our experiments with two real-world trajectory datasets demonstrate that LoTNext significantly surpasses existing state-of-the-art works.
Instruction Tuning Large Language Models to Understand Electronic Health Records
Authors: Zhenbang Wu, Anant Dadu, Mike Nalls, Faraz Faghri, Jimeng Sun
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in solving a wide range of tasks based on human instructions. However, developing a conversational AI assistant for electronic health record (EHR) data remains challenging due to (1) the lack of large-scale instruction-following datasets and (2) the limitations of existing model architectures in handling complex and heterogeneous EHR data.In this paper, we introduce MIMIC-Instr, a dataset comprising over 400K open-ended instruction-following examples derived from the MIMIC-IV EHR database. This dataset covers various topics and is suitable for instruction-tuning general-purpose LLMs for diverse clinical use cases. Additionally, we propose Llemr, a general framework that enables LLMs to process and interpret EHRs with complex data structures. Llemr demonstrates competitive performance in answering a wide range of patient-related questions based on EHR data.Furthermore, our evaluations on clinical predictive modeling benchmarks reveal that the fine-tuned  Llemr achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines using curated features. The dataset and code are available at \url{https://github.com/zzachw/llemr}.
Categorical Flow Matching on Statistical Manifolds
Authors: Chaoran Cheng, Jiahan Li, Jian Peng, Ge Liu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We introduce Statistical Flow Matching (SFM), a novel and mathematically rigorous flow-matching framework on the manifold of parameterized probability measures inspired by the results from information geometry. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the discrete generation problem by instantiating SFM on the manifold of categorical distributions whose geometric properties remain unexplored in previous discrete generative models. Utilizing the Fisher information metric, we equip the manifold with a Riemannian structure whose intrinsic geometries are effectively leveraged by following the shortest paths of geodesics. We develop an efficient training and sampling algorithm that overcomes numerical stability issues with a diffeomorphism between manifolds. Our distinctive geometric perspective of statistical manifolds allows us to apply optimal transport during training and interpret SFM as following the steepest direction of the natural gradient. Unlike previous models that rely on variational bounds for likelihood estimation, SFM enjoys the exact likelihood calculation for arbitrary probability measures. We manifest that SFM can learn more complex patterns on the statistical manifold where existing models often fail due to strong prior assumptions. Comprehensive experiments on real-world generative tasks ranging from image, text to biological domains further demonstrate that SFM achieves higher sampling quality and likelihood than other discrete diffusion or flow-based models.
How does Inverse RL Scale to Large State Spaces? A Provably Efficient Approach
Authors: Filippo Lazzati, Mirco Mutti, Alberto Maria Metelli
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In online Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL), the learner can collect samples about the dynamics of the environment to improve itsestimate of the reward function. Since IRL suffers from identifiability issues, many theoretical works on online IRL focus on estimating the entire set of rewards that explain the demonstrations, named the feasible reward set. However, none of the algorithms available in literature can scale to problems with large state spaces. In this paper, we focus on the online IRL problem in Linear Markov DecisionProcesses (MDPs). We show that the structure offered by Linear MDPs is not sufficient for efficiently estimating the feasible set when the state space is large. As a consequence, we introduce the novel framework of rewards compatibility, which generalizes the notion of feasible set, and we develop CATY-IRL, a sample efficient algorithm whose complexity is independent of the size of the state space in Linear MDPs. When restricted to the tabular setting, we demonstrate that CATY-IRL is minimax optimal up to logarithmic factors. As a by-product, we show that Reward-Free Exploration (RFE) enjoys the same worst-case rate, improving over the state-of-the-art lower bound. Finally, we devise a unifying framework for IRL and RFE that may be of independent interest.
Unlocking the Capabilities of Thought: A Reasoning Boundary Framework to Quantify and Optimize Chain-of-Thought
Authors: Qiguang Chen, Libo Qin, Jiaqi Wang, Jinxuan Zhou, Wanxiang Che
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a promising approach for enhancing the performance of large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. Recently, a series of studies attempt to explain the mechanisms underlying CoT, aiming to deepen the understanding of its efficacy. Nevertheless, the existing research faces two major challenges: (1) a lack of quantitative metrics to assess CoT capabilities and (2) a dearth of guidance on optimizing CoT performance. Motivated by this, in this work, we introduce a novel reasoning boundary framework (RBF) to address these challenges. To solve the lack of quantification, we first define a reasoning boundary (RB) to quantify the upper-bound of CoT and establish a combination law for RB, enabling a practical quantitative approach applicable to various real-world CoT tasks. To address the lack of optimization, we propose three categories of RBs. We further optimize these categories with combination laws focused on RB promotion and reasoning path optimization for CoT improvement. Through extensive experiments on 27 models and 5 tasks, the study validates the existence and rationality of the proposed framework. Furthermore, it explains the effectiveness of 10 CoT strategies and guides optimization from two perspectives. We hope this work can provide a comprehensive understanding of the boundaries and optimization strategies for reasoning in LLMs. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/LightChen233/reasoning-boundary.
LoRA-GA: Low-Rank Adaptation with Gradient Approximation
Authors: Shaowen Wang, Linxi Yu, Jian Li
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Fine-tuning large-scale pretrained models is prohibitively expensive in terms of computational and memory costs. LoRA, as one of the most popular Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods, offers a cost-effective alternative by fine-tuning an auxiliary low-rank model that has significantly fewer parameters. Although LoRA reduces the computational and memory requirements significantly at each iteration, extensive empirical evidence indicates that it converges at a considerably slower rate compared to full fine-tuning, ultimately leading to increased overall compute and often worse test performance. In our paper, we perform an in-depth investigation of the initialization method of LoRA and show that careful initialization (without any change of the architecture and the training algorithm) can significantly enhance both efficiency and performance. In particular, we introduce a novel initialization method, LoRA-GA (Low Rank Adaptation with Gradient Approximation), which aligns the gradients of low-rank matrix product with those of full fine-tuning at the first step. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that LoRA-GA achieves a convergence rate comparable to that of full fine-tuning (hence being significantly faster than vanilla LoRA as well as various recent improvements) while simultaneously attaining comparable or even better performance. For example, on the subset of the GLUE dataset with T5-Base, LoRA-GA outperforms LoRA by 5.69% on average. On larger models such as Llama 2-7B, LoRA-GA shows performance improvements of 0.34, 11.52%, and 5.05% on MTbench, GSM8k, and Human-eval, respectively. Additionally, we observe up to 2-4 times convergence speed improvement compared to vanilla LoRA, validating its effectiveness in accelerating convergence and enhancing model performance.
FVEL: Interactive Formal Verification Environment with Large Language Models via Theorem Proving
Authors: Xiaohan Lin, Qingxing Cao, Yinya Huang, Haiming Wang, Jianqiao Lu, Zhengying Liu, Linqi Song, Xiaodan Liang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Formal verification (FV) has witnessed growing significance with current emerging program synthesis by the evolving large language models (LLMs). However, current formal verification mainly resorts to symbolic verifiers or hand-craft rules, resulting in limitations for extensive and flexible verification. On the other hand, formal languages for automated theorem proving, such as Isabelle, as another line of rigorous verification, are maintained with comprehensive rules and theorems. In this paper, we propose FVEL, an interactive Formal Verification Environment with LLMs. Specifically, FVEL transforms a given code to be verified into Isabelle, and then conducts verification via neural automated theorem proving with an LLM. The joined paradigm leverages the rigorous yet abundant formulated and organized rules in Isabelle and is also convenient for introducing and adjusting cutting-edge LLMs. To achieve this goal, we extract a large-scale FVELER. The FVELER dataset includes code dependencies and verification processes that are formulated in Isabelle, containing 758 theories, 29,304 lemmas, and 201,498 proof steps in total with in-depth dependencies. We benchmark FVELER in the FVEL environment by first fine-tuning LLMs with FVELER and then evaluating them on Code2Inv and SV-COMP. The results show that FVEL with FVELER fine-tuned Llama3-8B solves 17.39% (69→81) more problems, and Mistral-7B 12% (75→84) more problems in SV-COMP. And the proportion of proof errors is reduced. Project page: https://fveler.github.io/.
DALD: Improving Logits-based Detector without Logits from Black-box LLMs
Authors: Cong Zeng, Shengkun Tang, Xianjun Yang, Yuanzhou Chen, Yiyou Sun, Zhiqiang Xu, Yao Li, Haifeng Chen, Wei Cheng, Dongkuan Xu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized text generation, producing outputs that closely mimic human writing. This blurring of lines between machine- and human-written text presents new challenges in distinguishing one from the other – a task further complicated by the frequent updates and closed nature of leading proprietary LLMs. Traditional logits-based detection methods leverage surrogate models for identifying LLM-generated content when the exact logits are unavailable from black-box LLMs. However, these methods grapple with the misalignment between the distributions of the surrogate and the often undisclosed target models, leading to performance degradation, particularly with the introduction of new, closed-source models. Furthermore, while current methodologies are generally effective when the source model is identified, they falter in scenarios where the model version remains unknown, or the test set comprises outputs from various source models. To address these limitations, we present \textbf{D}istribution-\textbf{A}ligned \textbf{L}LMs \textbf{D}etection (DALD), an innovative framework that redefines the state-of-the-art performance in black-box text detection even without logits from source LLMs. DALD is designed to align the surrogate model's distribution with that of unknown target LLMs, ensuring enhanced detection capability and resilience against rapid model iterations with minimal training investment. By leveraging corpus samples from publicly accessible outputs of advanced models such as ChatGPT, GPT-4 and Claude-3, DALD fine-tunes surrogate models to synchronize with unknown source model distributions effectively. Our approach achieves SOTA performance in black-box settings on different advanced closed-source and open-source models. The versatility of our method enriches widely adopted zero-shot detection frameworks (DetectGPT, DNA-GPT, Fast-DetectGPT) with a `plug-and-play' enhancement feature. Extensive experiments validate that our methodology reliably secures high detection precision for LLM-generated text and effectively detects text from diverse model origins through a singular detector.Our method is also robust under the revised text attack and non-English texts.
Free-Rider and Conflict Aware Collaboration Formation for Cross-Silo Federated Learning
Authors: Mengmeng Chen, Xiaohu Wu, Xiaoli Tang, Tiantian He, Yew-Soon Ong, Qiqi Liu, Qicheng Lao, Han Yu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning paradigm that allows multiple FL participants (FL-PTs) to collaborate on training models without sharing private data. Due to data heterogeneity, negative transfer may occur in the FL training process. This necessitates FL-PT selection based on their data complementarity. In cross-silo FL, organizations that engage in business activities are key sources of FL-PTs. The resulting FL ecosystem has two features: (i) self-interest, and (ii) competition among FL-PTs. This requires the desirable FL-PT selection strategy to simultaneously mitigate the problems of free riders and conflicts of interest among competitors. To this end, we propose an optimal FL collaboration formation strategy -FedEgoists- which ensures that: (1) a FL-PT can benefit from FL if and only if it benefits the FL ecosystem, and (2) a FL-PT will not contribute to its competitors or their supporters. It provides an efficient clustering solution to group FL-PTs into coalitions, ensuring that within each coalition, FL-PTs share the same interest. We theoretically prove that the FL-PT coalitions formed are optimal since no coalitions can collaborate together to improve the utility of any of their members. Extensive experiments on widely adopted benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of FedEgoists compared to nine state-of-the-art baseline methods, and its ability to establish efficient collaborative networks in cross-silos FL with FL-PTs that engage in business activities.
JailbreakBench: An Open Robustness Benchmark for Jailbreaking Large Language Models
Authors: Patrick Chao, Edoardo Debenedetti, Alexander Robey, Maksym Andriushchenko, Francesco Croce, Vikash Sehwag, Edgar Dobriban, Nicolas Flammarion, George J. Pappas, Florian Tramèr, Hamed Hassani, Eric Wong
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2024

Abstract: Jailbreak attacks cause large language models (LLMs) to generate harmful, unethical, or otherwise objectionable content. Evaluating these attacks presents a number of challenges, which the current collection of benchmarks and evaluation techniques do not adequately address. First, there is no clear standard of practice regarding jailbreaking evaluation. Second, existing works compute costs and success rates in incomparable ways. And third, numerous works are not reproducible, as they withhold adversarial prompts, involve closed-source code, or rely on evolving proprietary APIs. To address these challenges, we introduce JailbreakBench, an open-sourced benchmark with the following components: (1) an evolving repository of state-of-the-art adversarial prompts, which we refer to as jailbreak artifacts; (2) a jailbreaking dataset comprising 100 behaviors---both original and sourced from prior work---which align with OpenAI's usage policies; (3) a standardized evaluation framework at https://github.com/JailbreakBench/jailbreakbench that includes a clearly defined threat model, system prompts, chat templates, and scoring functions; and (4) a leaderboard at https://jailbreakbench.github.io/ that tracks the performance of attacks and defenses for various LLMs. We have carefully considered the potential ethical implications of releasing this benchmark, and believe that it will be a net positive for the community.
Distributionally Robust Performative Prediction
Authors: Songkai Xue, Yuekai Sun
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Performative prediction aims to model scenarios where predictive outcomes subsequently influence the very systems they target. The pursuit of a performative optimum (PO)—minimizing performative risk—is generally reliant on modeling of the distribution map, which characterizes how a deployed ML model alters the data distribution. Unfortunately, inevitable misspecification of the distribution map can lead to a poor approximation of the true PO. To address this issue, we introduce a novel framework of distributionally robust performative prediction and study a new solution concept termed as distributionally robust performative optimum (DRPO). We show provable guarantees for DRPO as a robust approximation to the true PO when the nominal distribution map is different from the actual one. Moreover, distributionally robust performative prediction can be reformulated as an augmented performative prediction problem, enabling efficient optimization. The experimental results demonstrate that DRPO offers potential advantages over traditional PO approach when the distribution map is misspecified at either micro- or macro-level.
Abrupt Learning in Transformers: A Case Study on Matrix Completion
Authors: Pulkit Gopalani, Ekdeep Singh Lubana, Wei Hu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent analysis on the training dynamics of Transformers has unveiled an interesting characteristic: the training loss plateaus for a significant number of training steps, and then suddenly (and sharply) drops to near--optimal values. To understand this phenomenon in depth, we formulate the low-rank matrix completion problem as a masked language modeling (MLM) task, and show that it is possible to train a BERT model to solve this task to low error. Furthermore, the loss curve shows a plateau early in training followed by a sudden drop to near-optimal values, despite no changes in the training procedure or hyper-parameters. To gain interpretability insights into this sudden drop, we examine the model's predictions, attention heads, and hidden states before and after this transition. Concretely, we observe that (a) the model transitions from simply copying the masked input to accurately predicting the masked entries; (b) the attention heads transition to interpretable patterns relevant to the task; and (c) the embeddings and hidden states encode information relevant to the problem. We also analyze the training dynamics of individual model components to understand the sudden drop in loss.
Pre-Trained Multi-Goal Transformers with Prompt Optimization for Efficient Online Adaptation
Authors: Haoqi Yuan, Yuhui Fu, Feiyang Xie, Zongqing Lu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Efficiently solving unseen tasks remains a challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), especially for long-horizon tasks composed of multiple subtasks. Pre-training policies from task-agnostic datasets has emerged as a promising approach, yet existing methods still necessitate substantial interactions via RL to learn new tasks.We introduce MGPO, a method that leverages the power of Transformer-based policies to model sequences of goals, enabling efficient online adaptation through prompt optimization.In its pre-training phase, MGPO utilizes hindsight multi-goal relabeling and behavior cloning. This combination equips the policy to model diverse long-horizon behaviors that align with varying goal sequences.During online adaptation, the goal sequence, conceptualized as a prompt, is optimized to improve task performance. We adopt a multi-armed bandit framework for this process, enhancing prompt selection based on the returns from online trajectories.Our experiments across various environments demonstrate that MGPO holds substantial advantages in sample efficiency, online adaptation performance, robustness, and interpretability compared with existing methods.
FilterNet: Harnessing Frequency Filters for Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Kun Yi, Jingru Fei, Qi Zhang, Hui He, Shufeng Hao, Defu Lian, Wei Fan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Given the ubiquitous presence of time series data across various domains, precise forecasting of time series holds significant importance and finds widespread real-world applications such as energy, weather, healthcare, etc. While numerous forecasters have been proposed using different network architectures, the Transformer-based models have state-of-the-art performance in time series forecasting. However, forecasters based on Transformers are still suffering from vulnerability to high-frequency signals, efficiency in computation, and bottleneck in full-spectrum utilization, which essentially are the cornerstones for accurately predicting time series with thousands of points. In this paper, we explore a novel perspective of enlightening signal processing for deep time series forecasting. Inspired by the filtering process, we introduce one simple yet effective network, namely FilterNet, built upon our proposed learnable frequency filters to extract key informative temporal patterns by selectively passing or attenuating certain components of time series signals. Concretely, we propose two kinds of learnable filters in the FilterNet: (i) Plain shaping filter, that adopts a universal frequency kernel for signal filtering and temporal modeling; (ii) Contextual shaping filter, that utilizes filtered frequencies examined in terms of its compatibility with input signals fordependency learning. Equipped with the two filters, FilterNet can approximately surrogate the linear and attention mappings widely adopted in time series literature, while enjoying superb abilities in handling high-frequency noises and utilizing the whole frequency spectrum that is beneficial for forecasting. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on eight time series forecasting benchmarks, and experimental results have demonstrated our superior performance in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency compared with state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at$^1$.
Not All Diffusion Model Activations Have Been Evaluated as Discriminative Features
Authors: Benyuan Meng, Qianqian Xu, Zitai Wang, Xiaochun Cao, Qingming Huang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37  (NeurIPS 2024) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Diffusion models are initially designed for image generation. Recent research shows that the internal signals within their backbones, named activations, can also serve as dense features for various discriminative tasks such as semantic segmentation. Given numerous activations, selecting a small yet effective subset poses a fundamental problem. To this end, the early study of this field performs a large-scale quantitative comparison of the discriminative ability of the activations. However, we find that many potential activations have not been evaluated, such as the queries and keys used to compute attention scores. Moreover, recent advancements in diffusion architectures bring many new activations, such as those within embedded ViT modules. Both combined, activation selection remains unresolved but overlooked. To tackle this issue, this paper takes a further step with a much broader range of activations evaluated. Considering the significant increase in activations, a full-scale quantitative comparison is no longer operational. Instead, we seek to understand the properties of these activations, such that the activations that are clearly inferior can be filtered out in advance via simple qualitative evaluation. After careful analysis, we discover three properties universal among diffusion models, enabling this study to go beyond specific models. On top of this, we present effective feature selection solutions for several popular diffusion models. Finally, the experiments across multiple discriminative tasks validate the superiority of our method over the SOTA competitors. Our code is available at https://github.com/Darkbblue/generic-diffusion-feature.