pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Doodle Your 3D: From Abstract Freehand Sketches to Precise 3D Shapes
Authors: Hmrishav Bandyopadhyay, Subhadeep Koley, Ayan Das, Ayan Kumar Bhunia, Aneeshan Sain, Pinaki Nath Chowdhury, Tao Xiang, Yi-Zhe Song
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Decoder, Position

In this paper, we democratise 3D content creation, enabling precise generation of 3D shapes from abstract sketches while overcoming limitations tied to drawing skills. We introduce a novel part-level modelling and alignment framework that facilitates abstraction modelling and cross-modal correspondence. Leveraging the same part-level decoder, our approach seamlessly extends to sketch modelling by establishing correspondence between CLIPasso edgemaps and projected 3D part regions, eliminating the need for a dataset pairing human sketches and 3D shapes. Additionally, our method introduces a seamless in-position editing process as a byproduct of cross-modal part-aligned modelling. Operating in a low-dimensional implicit space, our approach significantly reduces computational demands and processing time.
Modeling Boundedly Rational Agents with Latent Inference Budgets
Authors: Athul Paul Jacob, Abhishek Gupta, Jacob Andreas
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Decision Making Under Uncertainty

We study the problem of modeling a population of agents pursuing unknown goals subject to unknown computational constraints. In standard models of bounded rationality, sub-optimal decision-making is simulated by adding homoscedastic noise to optimal decisions rather than explicitly simulating constrained inference. In this work, we introduce a latent inference budget model (L-IBM) that models agents' computational constraints explicitly, via a latent variable (inferred jointly with a model of agents' goals) that controls the runtime of an iterative inference algorithm. L-IBMs make it possible to learn agent models using data from diverse populations of suboptimal actors. In three modeling tasks -- inferring navigation goals from routes, inferring communicative intents from human utterances, and predicting next moves in human chess games -- we show that L-IBMs match or outperform Boltzmann models of decision-making under uncertainty. Inferred inference budgets are themselves meaningful, efficient to compute, and correlated with measures of player skill, partner skill and task difficulty.
Improved Face Representation via Joint Label Classification and Supervised Contrastive Clustering
Authors: Zhenduo Zhang
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Face Clustering, Face Recognition

Face clustering tasks can learn hierarchical semantic information from large-scale data, which has the potential to help facilitate face recognition. However, there are few works on this problem. This paper explores it by proposing a joint optimization task of label classification and supervised contrastive clustering to introduce the cluster knowledge to the traditional face recognition task in two ways. We first extend ArcFace with a cluster-guided angular margin to adjust the within-class feature distribution according to the hard level of face clustering. Secondly, we propose a supervised contrastive clustering approach to pull the features to the cluster center and propose the cluster-aligning procedure to align the cluster center and the learnable class center in the classifier for joint training. Finally, extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on popular facial benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our paradigm and its superiority over the existing approaches to face recognition.
The sample complexity of multi-distribution learning
Authors: Binghui Peng
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: PAC learning

Multi-distribution learning generalizes the classic PAC learning to handle data coming from multiple distributions. Given a set of $k$ data distributions and a hypothesis class of VC dimension $d$, the goal is to learn a hypothesis that minimizes the maximum population loss over $k$ distributions, up to $\epsilon$ additive error. In this paper, we settle the sample complexity of multi-distribution learning by giving an algorithm of sample complexity $\widetilde{O}((d+k)\epsilon^{-2}) \cdot (k/\epsilon)^{o(1)}$. This matches the lower bound up to sub-polynomial factor and resolves the COLT 2023 open problem of Awasthi, Haghtalab and Zhao [AHZ23].
Moirai: Towards Optimal Placement for Distributed Inference on Heterogeneous Devices
Authors: Beibei Zhang, Hongwei Zhu, Feng Gao, Zhihui Yang, Sean Xiaoyang Wang
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00

The escalating size of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has spurred a growing research interest in hosting and serving DNN models across multiple devices. A number of studies have been reported to partition a DNN model across devices, providing device placement solutions. The methods appeared in the literature, however, either suffer from poor placement performance due to the exponential search space or miss an optimal placement as a consequence of the reduced search space with limited heuristics. Moreover, these methods have ignored the runtime inter-operator optimization of a computation graph when coarsening the graph, which degrades the end-to-end inference performance. This paper presents Moirai that better exploits runtime inter-operator fusion in a model to render a coarsened computation graph, reducing the search space while maintaining the inter-operator optimization provided by inference backends. Moirai also generalizes the device placement algorithm from multiple perspectives by considering inference constraints and device heterogeneity.Extensive experimental evaluation with 11 large DNNs demonstrates that Moirai outperforms the state-of-the-art counterparts, i.e., Placeto, m-SCT, and GETF, up to 4.28$\times$ in reduction of the end-to-end inference latency. Moirai code is anonymously released at \url{https://github.com/moirai-placement/moirai}.
k* Distribution: Evaluating the Latent Space of Deep Neural Networks using Local Neighborhood Analysis
Authors: Shashank Kotyan, Tatsuya Ueda, Danilo Vasconcellos Vargas
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

Most examinations of neural networks' learned latent spaces typically employ dimensionality reduction techniques such as t-SNE or UMAP. These methods distort the local neighborhood in the visualization, making it hard to distinguish the structure of a subset of samples in the latent space. In response to this challenge, we introduce the {k*~distribution} and its corresponding visualization technique This method uses local neighborhood analysis to guarantee the preservation of the structure of sample distributions for individual classes within the subset of the learned latent space. This facilitates easy comparison of different k*~distributions, enabling analysis of how various classes are processed by the same neural network. Our study reveals three distinct distributions of samples within the learned latent space subset: a) Fractured, b) Overlapped, and c) Clustered, providing a more profound understanding of existing contemporary visualizations. Experiments show that the distribution of samples within the network's learned latent space significantly varies depending on the class. Furthermore, we illustrate that our analysis can be applied to explore the latent space of diverse neural network architectures, various layers within neural networks, transformations applied to input samples, and the distribution of training and testing data for neural networks. Thus, the k* distribution should aid in visualizing the structure inside neural networks and further foster their understanding. Project Website is available online at https://shashankkotyan.github.io/k-Distribution/.
A Study on the Calibration of In-context Learning
Authors: HANLIN ZHANG, Yi-Fan Zhang, Yaodong Yu, Dhruv Madeka, Dean Foster, Eric Xing, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Sham Kakade
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Natural Language Understanding, Uncertainty Quantification

Accurate uncertainty quantification is crucial for the safe deployment of machine learning models, and prior research has demonstrated improvements in the calibration of modern language models (LMs). We study in-context learning (ICL), a prevalent method for adapting static LMs through tailored prompts, and examine the balance between performance and calibration across a broad spectrum of natural language understanding and reasoning tasks. Through comprehensive experiments, we observe that, with an increasing number of ICL examples, models initially exhibit increased miscalibration before achieving better calibration and miscalibration tends to arise in low-shot settings. Moreover, we find that methods aimed at improving usability, such as fine-tuning and chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, can lead to miscalibration and unreliable natural language explanations. Furthermore, we explore recalibration techniques and find that a scaling-binning calibrator can reduce calibration errors consistently.
Efficiently Predicting Protein Stability Changes Upon Single-point Mutation with Large Language Models
Authors: Yijie Zhang, Zhangyang Gao, Cheng Tan, Stan Z. Li
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

Predicting protein stability changes induced by single-point mutations has been a persistent challenge over the years, attracting immense interest from numerous researchers. The ability to precisely predict protein thermostability is pivotal for various subfields and applications in biochemistry, including drug development, protein evolution analysis, and enzyme synthesis. Despite the proposition of multiple methodologies aimed at addressing this issue, few approaches have successfully achieved optimal performance coupled with high computational efficiency. Two principal hurdles contribute to the existing challenges in this domain. The first is the complexity of extracting and aggregating sufficiently representative features from proteins. The second refers to the limited availability of experimental data for protein mutation analysis, further complicating the comprehensive evaluation of model performance on unseen data samples. With the advent of Large Language Models(LLM), such as the ESM models in protein research, profound interpretation of protein features is now accessibly aided by enormous training data. Therefore, LLMs are indeed to facilitate a wide range of protein research. In our study, we introduce an ESM-assisted efficient approach that integrates protein sequence and structural features to predict the thermostability changes in protein upon single-point mutations. Furthermore, we have curated a dataset meticulously designed to preclude data leakage, corresponding to two extensively employed test datasets, to facilitate a more equitable model comparison.
KOALA: Empirical Lessons Toward Memory-Efficient and Fast Diffusion Models for Text-to-Image Synthesis
Authors: Youngwan Lee, KwanYong Park, Yoorhim Cho, Yong-Ju Lee, Sung Ju Hwang
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Generation, Knowledge Distillation

As text-to-image (T2I) synthesis models increase in size, they demand higher inference costs due to the need for more expensive GPUs with larger memory, which makes it challenging to reproduce these models in addition to the restricted access to training datasets. Our study aims to reduce these inference costs and explores how far the generative capabilities of T2I models can be extended using only publicly available datasets and open-source models. To this end, by using the de facto standard text-to-image model, Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL), we present three key practices in building an efficient T2I model: (1) Knowledge distillation: we explore how to effectively distill the generation capability of SDXL into an efficient U-Net and find that self-attention is the most crucial part. (2) Data: despite fewer samples, high-resolution images with rich captions are more crucial than a larger number of low-resolution images with short captions. (3) Teacher: Step-distilled Teacher allows T2I models to reduce the noising steps. Based on these findings, we build two types of efficient text-to-image models, called KOALA-Turbo &-Lightning, with two compact U-Nets (1B & 700M), reducing the model size up to 54% and 69% of the SDXL U-Net. In particular, the KOALA-Lightning-700M is 4x faster than SDXL while still maintaining satisfactory generation quality. Moreover, unlike SDXL, our KOALA models can generate 1024px high-resolution images on consumer-grade GPUs with 8GB of VRAMs (3060Ti). We believe that our KOALA models will have a significant practical impact, serving as cost-effective alternatives to SDXL for academic researchers and general users in resource-constrained environments.
Style Transfer to Calvin and Hobbes comics using Stable Diffusion
Authors: Sloke Shrestha, Sundar Sripada V. S., Asvin Venkataramanan
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Style Transfer

This project report summarizes our journey to perform stable diffusion fine-tuning on a dataset containing Calvin and Hobbes comics. The purpose is to convert any given input image into the comic style of Calvin and Hobbes, essentially performing style transfer. We train stable-diffusion-v1.5 using Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to efficiently speed up the fine-tuning process. The diffusion itself is handled by a Variational Autoencoder (VAE), which is a U-net. Our results were visually appealing for the amount of training time and the quality of input data that went into training.
MICRO: Model-Based Offline Reinforcement Learning with a Conservative Bellman Operator
Authors: Xiao-Yin Liu, Xiao-Hu Zhou, Guotao Li, Hao Li, Mei-Jiang Gui, Tian-Yu Xiang, De-Xing Huang, Zeng-Guang Hou
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Offline RL, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) faces a significant challenge of distribution shift. Model-free offline RL penalizes the Q value for out-of-distribution (OOD) data or constrains the policy closed to the behavior policy to tackle this problem, but this inhibits the exploration of the OOD region. Model-based offline RL, which uses the trained environment model to generate more OOD data and performs conservative policy optimization within that model, has become an effective method for this problem. However, the current model-based algorithms rarely consider agent robustness when incorporating conservatism into policy. Therefore, the new model-based offline algorithm with a conservative Bellman operator (MICRO) is proposed. This method trades off performance and robustness via introducing the robust Bellman operator into the algorithm. Compared with previous model-based algorithms with robust adversarial models, MICRO can significantly reduce the computation cost by only choosing the minimal Q value in the state uncertainty set. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MICRO outperforms prior RL algorithms in offline RL benchmark and is considerably robust to adversarial perturbations.
Cost-Effective In-Context Learning for Entity Resolution: A Design Space Exploration
Authors: Meihao Fan, Xiaoyue Han, Ju Fan, Chengliang Chai, Nan Tang, Guoliang Li, Xiaoyong Du
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Integration, Entity Resolution, In-Context Learning

Entity resolution (ER) is an important data integration task with a wide spectrum of applications. The state-of-the-art solutions on ER rely on pre-trained language models (PLMs), which require fine-tuning on a lot of labeled matching/non-matching entity pairs. Recently, large languages models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, have shown the ability to perform many tasks without tuning model parameters, which is known as in-context learning (ICL) that facilitates effective learning from a few labeled input context demonstrations. However, existing ICL approaches to ER typically necessitate providing a task description and a set of demonstrations for each entity pair and thus have limitations on the monetary cost of interfacing LLMs. To address the problem, in this paper, we provide a comprehensive study to investigate how to develop a cost-effective batch prompting approach to ER. We introduce a framework BATCHER consisting of demonstration selection and question batching and explore different design choices that support batch prompting for ER. We also devise a covering-based demonstration selection strategy that achieves an effective balance between matching accuracy and monetary cost. We conduct a thorough evaluation to explore the design space and evaluate our proposed strategies. Through extensive experiments, we find that batch prompting is very cost-effective for ER, compared with not only PLM-based methods fine-tuned with extensive labeled data but also LLM-based methods with manually designed prompting. We also provide guidance for selecting appropriate design choices for batch prompting.
Improving Medical Report Generation with Adapter Tuning and Knowledge Enhancement in Vision-Language Foundation Models
Authors: Shibin Wu, Bang Yang, Zhiyu Ye, Haoqian Wang, Hairong Zheng, Tong Zhang
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Medical Report Generation

Medical report generation demands automatic creation of coherent and precise descriptions for medical images. However, the scarcity of labelled medical image-report pairs poses formidable challenges in developing large-scale neural networks capable of harnessing the potential of artificial intelligence, exemplified by large language models. This study builds upon the state-of-the-art vision-language pre-training and fine-tuning approach, BLIP-2, to customize general large-scale foundation models. Integrating adapter tuning and a medical knowledge enhancement loss, our model significantly improves accuracy and coherence. Validation on the dataset of ImageCLEFmedical 2023 demonstrates our model's prowess, achieving the best-averaged results against several state-of-the-art methods. Significant improvements in ROUGE and CIDEr underscore our method's efficacy, highlighting promising outcomes for the rapid medical-domain adaptation of the vision-language foundation models in addressing challenges posed by data scarcity.
A Pseudo-Semantic Loss for Autoregressive Models with Logical Constraints
Authors: Kareem Ahmed, Kai-Wei Chang, Guy Van Den Broeck
Date: 2023-12-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

Neuro-symbolic AI bridges the gap between purely symbolic and neural approaches to learning. This often requires maximizing the likelihood of a symbolic constraint w.r.t the neural network's output distribution. Such output distributions are typically assumed to be fully-factorized. This limits the applicability of neuro-symbolic learning to the more expressive autoregressive distributions, e.g., transformers. Under such distributions, computing the likelihood of even simple constraints is #P-hard. Instead of attempting to enforce the constraint on the entire output distribution, we propose to do so on a random, local approximation thereof. More precisely, we optimize the likelihood of the constraint under a pseudolikelihood-based approximation centered around a model sample. Our approximation is factorized, allowing the reuse of solutions to sub-problems, a main tenet for efficiently computing neuro-symbolic losses. Moreover, it is a local, high-fidelity approximation of the likelihood, exhibiting low entropy and KL-divergence around the model sample. We evaluate our approach on Sudoku and shortest-path prediction cast as autoregressive generation, and observe that we greatly improve upon the base model's ability to predict logically-consistent outputs. We also evaluate on the task of detoxifying large language models. Using a simple constraint disallowing a list of toxic words, we are able to steer the model's outputs away from toxic generations, achieving SoTA detoxification compared to previous approaches.
A Masked Pruning Approach for Dimensionality Reduction in Communication-Efficient Federated Learning Systems
Authors: Tamir L. S. Gez, Kobi Cohen
Date: 2023-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) represents a growing machine learning (ML) paradigm designed for training models across numerous nodes that retain local datasets, all without directly exchanging the underlying private data with the parameter server (PS). Its increasing popularity is attributed to notable advantages in terms of training deep neural network (DNN) models under privacy aspects and efficient utilization of communication resources. Unfortunately, DNNs suffer from high computational and communication costs, as well as memory consumption in intricate tasks. These factors restrict the applicability of FL algorithms in communication-constrained systems with limited hardware resources. In this paper, we develop a novel algorithm that overcomes these limitations by synergistically combining a pruning-based method with the FL process, resulting in low-dimensional representations of the model with minimal communication cost, dubbed Masked Pruning over FL (MPFL). The algorithm operates by initially distributing weights to the nodes through the PS. Subsequently, each node locally trains its model and computes pruning masks. These low-dimensional masks are then transmitted back to the PS, which generates a consensus pruning mask, broadcasted back to the nodes. This iterative process enhances the robustness and stability of the masked pruning model. The generated mask is used to train the FL model, achieving significant bandwidth savings. We present an extensive experimental study demonstrating the superior performance of MPFL compared to existing methods. Additionally, we have developed an open-source software package for the benefit of researchers and developers in related fields.
On The Fairness Impacts of Hardware Selection in Machine Learning
Authors: Sree Harsha Nelaturu, Nishaanth Kanna Ravichandran, Cuong Tran, Sara Hooker, Ferdinando Fioretto
Date: 2023-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

In the machine learning ecosystem, hardware selection is often regarded as a mere utility, overshadowed by the spotlight on algorithms and data. This oversight is particularly problematic in contexts like ML-as-a-service platforms, where users often lack control over the hardware used for model deployment. How does the choice of hardware impact generalization properties? This paper investigates the influence of hardware on the delicate balance between model performance and fairness. We demonstrate that hardware choices can exacerbate existing disparities, attributing these discrepancies to variations in gradient flows and loss surfaces across different demographic groups. Through both theoretical and empirical analysis, the paper not only identifies the underlying factors but also proposes an effective strategy for mitigating hardware-induced performance imbalances.
FoMo Rewards: Can we cast foundation models as reward functions?
Authors: Ekdeep Singh Lubana, Johann Brehmer, Pim de Haan, Taco Cohen
Date: 2023-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

We explore the viability of casting foundation models as generic reward functions for reinforcement learning. To this end, we propose a simple pipeline that interfaces an off-the-shelf vision model with a large language model. Specifically, given a trajectory of observations, we infer the likelihood of an instruction describing the task that the user wants an agent to perform. We show that this generic likelihood function exhibits the characteristics ideally expected from a reward function: it associates high values with the desired behaviour and lower values for several similar, but incorrect policies. Overall, our work opens the possibility of designing open-ended agents for interactive tasks via foundation models.