pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
DP-Mix: Mixup-based Data Augmentation for Differentially Private Learning
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

Data augmentation techniques, such as simple image transformations and combinations, are highly effective at improving the generalization of computer vision models, especially when training data is limited. However, such techniques are fundamentally incompatible with differentially private learning approaches, due to the latter’s built-in assumption that each training image’s contribution to the learned model is bounded. In this paper, we investigate why naive applications of multi-sample data augmentation techniques, such as mixup, fail to achieve good performance and propose two novel data augmentation techniques specifically designed for the constraints of differentially private learning. Our first technique, DP-Mix_Self, achieves SoTA classification performance across a range of datasets and settings by performing mixup on self-augmented data. Our second technique, DP-Mix_Diff, further improves performance by incorporating synthetic data from a pre-trained diffusion model into the mixup process. We open-source the code at https://github.com/wenxuan-Bao/DP-Mix.
Defending against Data-Free Model Extraction by Distributionally Robust Defensive Training
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Model extraction

Data-Free Model Extraction (DFME) aims to clone a black-box model without knowing its original training data distribution, making it much easier for attackers to steal commercial models. Defense against DFME faces several challenges: (i) effectiveness; (ii) efficiency; (iii) no prior on the attacker's query data distribution and strategy. However, existing defense methods: (1) are highly computation and memory inefficient; or (2) need strong assumptions about attack data distribution; or (3) can only delay the attack or prove a model theft after the model stealing has happened. In this work, we propose a Memory and Computation efficient defense approach, named MeCo, to prevent DFME from happening while maintaining the model utility simultaneously by distributionally robust defensive training on the target victim model. Specifically, we randomize the input so that it: (1) causes a mismatch of the knowledge distillation loss for attackers; (2) disturbs the zeroth-order gradient estimation; (3) changes the label prediction for the attack query data. Therefore, the attacker can only extract misleading information from the black-box model. Extensive experiments on defending against both decision-based and score-based DFME demonstrate that MeCo can significantly reduce the effectiveness of existing DFME methods and substantially improve running efficiency.
Data-driven Optimal Filtering for Linear Systems with Unknown Noise Covariances
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

This paper examines learning the optimal filtering policy, known as the Kalman gain, for a linear system with unknown noise covariance matrices using noisy output data. The learning problem is formulated as a stochastic policy optimiza- tion problem, aiming to minimize the output prediction error. This formulation provides a direct bridge between data-driven optimal control and, its dual, op- timal filtering. Our contributions are twofold. Firstly, we conduct a thorough convergence analysis of the stochastic gradient descent algorithm, adopted for the filtering problem, accounting for biased gradients and stability constraints. Secondly, we carefully leverage a combination of tools from linear system theory and high-dimensional statistics to derive bias-variance error bounds that scale logarithmically with problem dimension, and, in contrast to subspace methods, the length of output trajectories only affects the bias term.
Dynamic Sparsity Is Channel-Level Sparsity Learner
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

Sparse training has received an upsurging interest in machine learning due to its tantalizing saving potential for both the entire training process as well as the inference. Dynamic sparse training (DST) as a leading approach can train deep neural networks at high sparsity from scratch to match the performance of their dense counterparts. However, most if not all DST prior arts demonstrate their effectiveness on unstructured sparsity with highly irregular sparse patterns, which receives limited support in common hardware. This limitation hinders the usage of DST in practice. In this paper, we propose Channel-aware dynamic sparse (Chase), that for the first time seamlessly translates the promise of unstructured dynamic sparsity to GPU-friendly channel-level sparsity (not fine-grained N:M or group sparsity) during one end-to-end training process, without any ad-hoc operations. The resulting small sparse networks can be directly accelerated by commodity hardware, without using any particularly sparsity-aware hardware accelerators. This appealing outcome is partially motivated by a hidden phenomenon of dynamic sparsity: off-the-shelf unstructured DST implicitly involves biased parameter reallocation across channels, with a large fraction of channels (up to 60%) being sparser than others. By progressively identifying and removing these channels during training, our approach transfers unstructured sparsity to channel-wise sparsity.  Our experimental results demonstrate that Chase achieves 1.7x inference throughput speedup on common GPU devices without compromising accuracy with ResNet-50 on ImageNet. We release our code in https://github.com/luuyin/chase.Submission Number: 9423
FLSL: Feature-level Self-supervised Learning
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

Current self-supervised learning (SSL) methods (e.g., SimCLR, DINO, VICReg, MOCOv3) target primarily on representations at instance level and do not generalize well to dense prediction tasks, such as object detection and segmentation. Towards aligning SSL with dense predictions, this paper demonstrates for the first time the underlying mean-shift clustering process of Vision Transformers (ViT), which aligns well with natural image semantics (e.g., a world of objects and stuffs). By employing transformer for joint embedding and clustering, we propose a bi-level feature clustering SSL method, coined Feature-Level Self-supervised Learning (FLSL). We present the formal definition of the FLSL problem and construct the objectives from the mean-shift and k-means perspectives. We show that FLSL promotes remarkable semantic cluster representations and learns an embedding scheme amenable to intra-view and inter-view feature clustering. Experiments show that FLSL yields significant improvements in dense prediction tasks, achieving 44.9 (+2.8)% AP and 46.5% AP in object detection, as well as 40.8 (+2.3)% AP and 42.1% AP in instance segmentation on MS-COCO, using Mask R-CNN with ViT-S/16 and ViT-S/8 as backbone, respectively. FLSL consistently outperforms existing SSL methods across additional benchmarks, including UAV object detection on UAVDT, and video instance segmentation on DAVIS 2017. We conclude by presenting visualization and various ablation studies to better understand the success of FLSL. The source code is available at https://github.com/ISL-CV/FLSL.
Group Robust Classification Without Any Group Information
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

Empirical risk minimization (ERM) is sensitive to spurious correlations present in training data, which poses a significant risk when deploying systems trained under this paradigm in high-stake applications. While the existing literature focuses on maximizing group-balanced or worst-group accuracy, estimating these quantities is hindered by costly bias annotations. This study contends that current bias-unsupervised approaches to group robustness continue to rely on group information to achieve optimal performance. Firstly, these methods implicitly assume that all group combinations are represented during training. To illustrate this, we introduce a systematic generalization task on the MPI3D dataset and discover that current algorithms fail to improve the ERM baseline when combinations of observed attribute values are missing. Secondly, bias labels are still crucial for effective model selection, restricting the practicality of these methods in real-world scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a revised methodology for training and validating debiased models in an entirely bias-unsupervised manner. We achieve this by employing pretrained self-supervised models to reliably extract bias information, which enables the integration of a logit adjustment training loss with our validation criterion. Our empirical analysis on synthetic and real-world tasks provides evidence that our approach overcomes the identified challenges and consistently enhances robust accuracy, attaining performance which is competitive with or outperforms that of state-of-the-art methods, which, conversely, rely on bias labels for validation.
ChatGPT-Powered Hierarchical Comparisons for Image Classification
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

The zero-shot open-vocabulary setting poses challenges for image classification.
Fortunately, utilizing a vision-language model like CLIP, pre-trained on image-text
pairs, allows for classifying images by comparing embeddings. Leveraging large
language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT can further enhance CLIP’s accuracy
by incorporating class-specific knowledge in descriptions. However, CLIP still
exhibits a bias towards certain classes and generates similar descriptions for similar
classes, disregarding their differences. To address this problem, we present a
novel image classification framework via hierarchical comparisons. By recursively
comparing and grouping classes with LLMs, we construct a class hierarchy. With
such a hierarchy, we can classify an image by descending from the top to the bottom
of the hierarchy, comparing image and text embeddings at each level. Through
extensive experiments and analyses, we demonstrate that our proposed approach is
intuitive, effective, and explainable. Code will be released upon publication.
Improving neural network representations using human similarity judgments
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

Deep neural networks have reached human-level performance on many computer vision tasks. However, the objectives used to train these networks enforce only that similar images are embedded at similar locations in the representation space, and do not directly constrain the global structure of the resulting space. Here, we explore the impact of supervising this global structure by linearly aligning it with human similarity judgments. We find that a naive approach leads to large changes in local representational structure that harm downstream performance. Thus, we propose a novel method that aligns the global structure of representations while preserving their local structure. This global-local transform considerably improves accuracy across a variety of few-shot learning and anomaly detection tasks. Our results indicate that human visual representations are globally organized in a way that facilitates learning from few examples, and incorporating this global structure into neural network representations improves performance on downstream tasks.
Machine learning detects terminal singularities
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

Algebraic varieties are the geometric shapes defined by systems of polynomial equations; they are ubiquitous across mathematics and science. Amongst these algebraic varieties are Q-Fano varieties: positively curved shapes which have Q-factorial terminal singularities. Q-Fano varieties are of fundamental importance in geometry as they are `atomic pieces’ of more complex shapes – the process of breaking a shape into simpler pieces in this sense is called the Minimal Model Programme.

Despite their importance, the classification of Q-Fano varieties remains unknown. In this paper we demonstrate that machine learning can be used to understand this classification. We focus on eight-dimensional positively-curved algebraic varieties that have toric symmetry and Picard rank two, and develop a neural network classifier that predicts with 95% accuracy whether or not such an algebraic variety is Q-Fano. We use this to give a first sketch of the landscape of Q-Fano varieties in dimension eight.

How the neural network is able to detect Q-Fano varieties with such accuracy remains mysterious, and hints at some deep mathematical theory waiting to be uncovered. Furthermore, when visualised using the quantum period, an invariant that has played an important role in recent theoretical developments, we observe that the classification as revealed by ML appears to fall within a bounded region, and is stratified by the Fano index. This suggests that it may be possible to state and prove conjectures on completeness in the future.

Inspired by the ML analysis, we formulate and prove a new global combinatorial criterion for a positively curved toric variety of Picard rank two to have terminal singularities. Together with the first sketch of the landscape of Q-Fano varieties in higher dimensions, this gives strong new evidence that machine learning can be an essential tool in developing mathematical conjectures and accelerating theoretical discovery.
On the Pareto Front of Multilingual Neural Machine Translation
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

In this work, we study how the performance of a given direction changes with its sampling ratio in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT). By training over 200 multilingual models with various model sizes, data sizes, and language directions, we find it interesting that the performance of certain translation direction does not always improve with the increase of its weight in the multi-task optimization objective. Accordingly, scalarization method leads to a multitask trade-off front that deviates from the traditional Pareto front when there exists data imbalance in the training corpus, which poses a great challenge to improve the overall performance of all directions. Based on our observations, we propose the Double Power Law to predict the unique performance trade-off front in MNMT, which is robust across various languages, data adequacy, and the number of tasks. Finally, we formulate the sample ratio selection problem in MNMT as an optimization problem based on the Double Power Law. Extensive experiments show that it achieves better performance than temperature searching and gradient manipulation methods with only 1/5 to 1/2 of the total training budget. We release the code at https://github.com/pkunlp-icler/ParetoMNMT for reproduction.Submission Number: 3316
Learning Descriptive Image Captioning via Semipermeable Maximum Likelihood Estimation
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

Image captioning aims to describe visual content in natural language. As 'a picture is worth a thousand words', there could be various correct descriptions for an image. However, with maximum likelihood estimation as the training objective, the captioning model is penalized whenever its prediction mismatches with the label. For instance, when the model predicts a word expressing richer semantics than the label, it will be penalized and optimized to prefer more concise expressions, referred to as *conciseness optimization*. In contrast, predictions that are more concise than labels lead to *richness optimization*. Such conflicting optimization directions could eventually result in the model generating general descriptions. In this work, we introduce Semipermeable MaxImum Likelihood Estimation (SMILE), which allows richness optimization while blocking conciseness optimization, thus encouraging the model to generate longer captions with more details. Extensive experiments on two mainstream image captioning datasets MSCOCO and Flickr30K demonstrate that SMILE significantly enhances the descriptiveness of generated captions. We further provide in-depth investigations to facilitate a better understanding of how SMILE works.Submission Number: 10080
A Dual-Stream Neural Network Explains the Functional Segregation of Dorsal and Ventral Visual Pathways in Human Brains
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

The human visual system uses two parallel pathways for spatial processing and object recognition. In contrast, computer vision systems tend to use a single feedforward pathway, rendering them less robust, adaptive, or efficient than human vision. To bridge this gap, we developed a dual-stream vision model inspired by the human eyes and brain. At the input level, the model samples two complementary visual patterns to mimic how the human eyes use magnocellular and parvocellular retinal ganglion cells to separate retinal inputs to the brain. At the backend, the model processes the separate input patterns through two branches of convolutional neural networks (CNN) to mimic how the human brain uses the dorsal and ventral cortical pathways for parallel visual processing. The first branch (WhereCNN) samples a global view to learn spatial attention and control eye movements. The second branch (WhatCNN) samples a local view to represent the object around the fixation. Over time, the two branches interact recurrently to build a scene representation from moving fixations. We compared this model with the human brains processing the same movie and evaluated their functional alignment by linear transformation. The WhereCNN and WhatCNN branches were found to differentially match the dorsal and ventral pathways of the visual cortex, respectively, primarily due to their different learning objectives, rather than their distinctions in retinal sampling or sensitivity to attention-driven eye movements. These model-based results lead us to speculate that the distinct responses and representations of the ventral and dorsal streams are more influenced by their distinct goals in visual attention and object recognition than by their specific bias or selectivity in retinal inputs. This dual-stream model takes a further step in brain-inspired computer vision, enabling parallel neural networks to actively explore and understand the visual surroundings.
PICProp: Physics-Informed Confidence Propagation for Uncertainty Quantification
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

Standard approaches for uncertainty quantification in deep learning and physics-informed learning have persistent limitations. 
Indicatively, strong assumptions regarding the data likelihood are required, the performance highly depends on the selection of priors, and the posterior can be sampled only approximately, which leads to poor approximations because of the associated computational cost.
This paper introduces and studies confidence interval (CI) estimation for deterministic partial differential equations as a novel problem.
That is, to propagate confidence, in the form of CIs, from data locations to the entire domain with probabilistic guarantees.
We propose a method, termed Physics-Informed Confidence Propagation (PICProp), based on bi-level optimization to compute a valid CI without making heavy assumptions.
We provide a theorem regarding the validity of our method, and computational experiments, where the focus is on physics-informed learning. Code is available at https://github.com/ShenQianli/PICProp.Submission Number: 10991
Neural Functional Transformers
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

The recent success of neural networks as implicit representation of data has driven growing interest in neural functionals: models that can process other neural networks as input by operating directly over their weight spaces. Nevertheless, constructing expressive and efficient neural functional architectures that can handle high-dimensional weight-space objects remains challenging. This paper uses the attention mechanism to define a novel set of permutation equivariant weight-space layers and composes them into deep equivariant models called neural functional Transformers (NFTs). NFTs respect weight-space permutation symmetries while incorporating the advantages of attention, which have exhibited remarkable success across multiple domains. In experiments processing the weights of feedforward MLPs and CNNs, we find that NFTs match or exceed the performance of prior weight-space methods. We also leverage NFTs to develop Inr2Array, a novel method for computing permutation invariant latent representations from the weights of implicit neural representations (INRs). Our proposed method improves INR classification accuracy by up to $+17\\%$ over existing methods. We provide an implementation of our layers at https://github.com/AllanYangZhou/nfn.Submission Number: 2577
Hierarchically Gated Recurrent Neural Network for Sequence Modeling
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

Transformers have surpassed RNNs in popularity due to their superior abilities in parallel training and long-term dependency modeling.
Recently, there has been a renewed interest in using linear RNNs for efficient sequence modeling.
These linear RNNs often employ gating mechanisms in the output of the linear recurrence layer while ignoring the significance of using forget gates within the recurrence. In this paper, we propose a gated linear RNN model dubbed Hierarchically Gated Recurrent Neural Network (HGRN), which includes forget gates that are lower bounded by a learnable value. The lower bound increases monotonically when moving up layers. This allows the upper layers to model long-term dependencies and the lower layers to model more local, short-term dependencies. Experiments on language modeling, image classification, and long-range arena benchmarks showcase the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed model. The source code is available at https://github.com/OpenNLPLab/HGRN.
Transformers learn to implement preconditioned gradient descent for in-context learning
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

Motivated by the striking ability of transformers for in-context learning, several works demonstrate that transformers can implement algorithms like gradient descent. By a careful construction of weights, these works show that multiple layers of transformers are expressive enough to simulate gradient descent iterations. 
Going beyond the question of expressivity, we ask: \emph{Can transformers can learn to implement such algorithms by training over random problem instances?} To our knowledge, we make the first theoretical progress toward this question via analysis of the loss landscape for linear transformers trained over random instances of linear regression. For a single attention layer, we prove the global minimum of the training objective implements a single iteration of preconditioned gradient descent.
Notably, the preconditioning matrix not only adapts to the input distribution but also to the variance induced by data inadequacy.  For a transformer with $k$ attention layers, we prove certain critical points of the training objective implement $k$ iterations of preconditioned gradient descent. Our results call for future theoretical studies on learning algorithms by training transformers.