pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Gaussian Membership Inference Privacy
Authors: Tobias Leemann, Martin Pawelczyk, Gjergji Kasneci
Date: 2023-06-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Inference Attack, Membership Inference Attack

We propose a novel and practical privacy notion called $f$-Membership Inference Privacy ($f$-MIP), which explicitly considers the capabilities of realistic adversaries under the membership inference attack threat model. Consequently, $f$-MIP offers interpretable privacy guarantees and improved utility (e.g., better classification accuracy). In particular, we derive a parametric family of $f$-MIP guarantees that we refer to as $\mu$-Gaussian Membership Inference Privacy ($\mu$-GMIP) by theoretically analyzing likelihood ratio-based membership inference attacks on stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Our analysis highlights that models trained with standard SGD already offer an elementary level of MIP. Additionally, we show how $f$-MIP can be amplified by adding noise to gradient updates. Our analysis further yields an analytical membership inference attack that offers two distinct advantages over previous approaches. First, unlike existing state-of-the-art attacks that require training hundreds of shadow models, our attack does not require any shadow model. Second, our analytical attack enables straightforward auditing of our privacy notion $f$-MIP. Finally, we quantify how various hyperparameters (e.g., batch size, number of model parameters) and specific data characteristics determine an attacker's ability to accurately infer a point's membership in the training set. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on models trained on vision and tabular datasets.
Leveraging Vision-Centric Multi-Modal Expertise for 3D Object Detection
Authors: Linyan Huang, Zhiqi Li, Chonghao Sima, Wenhai Wang, Jingdong Wang, Yu Qiao, Hongyang Li
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, object-detection, Object Detection

Current research is primarily dedicated to advancing the accuracy of camera-only 3D object detectors (apprentice) through the knowledge transferred from LiDAR- or multi-modal-based counterparts (expert). However, the presence of the domain gap between LiDAR and camera features, coupled with the inherent incompatibility in temporal fusion, significantly hinders the effectiveness of distillation-based enhancements for apprentices. Motivated by the success of uni-modal distillation, an apprentice-friendly expert model would predominantly rely on camera features, while still achieving comparable performance to multi-modal models. To this end, we introduce VCD, a framework to improve the camera-only apprentice model, including an apprentice-friendly multi-modal expert and temporal-fusion-friendly distillation supervision. The multi-modal expert VCD-E adopts an identical structure as that of the camera-only apprentice in order to alleviate the feature disparity, and leverages LiDAR input as a depth prior to reconstruct the 3D scene, achieving the performance on par with other heterogeneous multi-modal experts. Additionally, a fine-grained trajectory-based distillation module is introduced with the purpose of individually rectifying the motion misalignment for each object in the scene. With those improvements, our camera-only apprentice VCD-A sets new state-of-the-art on nuScenes with a score of 63.1% NDS.
Sparse Modular Activation for Efficient Sequence Modeling
Authors: Liliang Ren, Yang Liu, Shuohang Wang, Yichong Xu, Chenguang Zhu, ChengXiang Zhai
Date: 2023-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Chunking, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Long-range modeling, State Space Models

Recent hybrid models combining Linear State Space Models (SSMs) with self-attention mechanisms have demonstrated impressive results across a range of sequence modeling tasks. However, current approaches apply attention modules statically and uniformly to all elements in the input sequences, leading to sub-optimal quality-efficiency trade-offs. To address this limitation, we introduce Sparse Modular Activation (SMA), a general mechanism enabling neural networks to sparsely and dynamically activate sub-modules for sequence elements in a differentiable manner. Through allowing each element to skip non-activated sub-modules, SMA reduces computation and memory consumption of neural networks at both training and inference stages. To validate the effectiveness of SMA on sequence modeling, we design a novel neural architecture, SeqBoat, which employs SMA to sparsely activate a Gated Attention Unit (GAU) based on the state representations learned from an SSM. By constraining the GAU to only conduct local attention on the activated inputs, SeqBoat can achieve linear inference complexity with theoretically infinite attention span, and provide substantially better quality-efficiency trade-off than the chunking-based models. With experiments on a wide range of tasks, including long sequence modeling, speech classification and language modeling, SeqBoat brings new state-of-the-art results among hybrid models with linear complexity, and reveals the amount of attention needed for each task through the learned sparse activation patterns. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/renll/SeqBoat.
LightZero: A Unified Benchmark for Monte Carlo Tree Search in General Sequential Decision Scenarios
Authors: Yazhe Niu, Yuan Pu, Zhenjie Yang, Xueyan Li, Tong Zhou, Jiyuan Ren, Shuai Hu, Hongsheng Li, Yu Liu
Date: 2023-10-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Board Games, Decision Making, MuJoCo

Building agents based on tree-search planning capabilities with learned models has achieved remarkable success in classic decision-making problems, such as Go and Atari. However, it has been deemed challenging or even infeasible to extend Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) based algorithms to diverse real-world applications, especially when these environments involve complex action spaces and significant simulation costs, or inherent stochasticity. In this work, we introduce LightZero, the first unified benchmark for deploying MCTS/MuZero in general sequential decision scenarios. Specificially, we summarize the most critical challenges in designing a general MCTS-style decision-making solver, then decompose the tightly-coupled algorithm and system design of tree-search RL methods into distinct sub-modules. By incorporating more appropriate exploration and optimization strategies, we can significantly enhance these sub-modules and construct powerful LightZero agents to tackle tasks across a wide range of domains, such as board games, Atari, MuJoCo, MiniGrid and GoBigger. Detailed benchmark results reveal the significant potential of such methods in building scalable and efficient decision intelligence. The code is available as part of OpenDILab at https://github.com/opendilab/LightZero.
Stable Vectorization of Multiparameter Persistent Homology using Signed Barcodes as Measures
Authors: David Loiseaux, Luis Scoccola, Mathieu Carrière, Magnus Bakke Botnan, Steve Oudot
Date: 2023-06-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

Persistent homology (PH) provides topological descriptors for geometric data, such as weighted graphs, which are interpretable, stable to perturbations, and invariant under, e.g., relabeling. Most applications of PH focus on the one-parameter case -- where the descriptors summarize the changes in topology of data as it is filtered by a single quantity of interest -- and there is now a wide array of methods enabling the use of one-parameter PH descriptors in data science, which rely on the stable vectorization of these descriptors as elements of a Hilbert space. Although the multiparameter PH (MPH) of data that is filtered by several quantities of interest encodes much richer information than its one-parameter counterpart, the scarceness of stability results for MPH descriptors has so far limited the available options for the stable vectorization of MPH. In this paper, we aim to bring together the best of both worlds by showing how the interpretation of signed barcodes -- a recent family of MPH descriptors -- as signed measures leads to natural extensions of vectorization strategies from one parameter to multiple parameters. The resulting feature vectors are easy to define and to compute, and provably stable. While, as a proof of concept, we focus on simple choices of signed barcodes and vectorizations, we already see notable performance improvements when comparing our feature vectors to state-of-the-art topology-based methods on various types of data.
A Framework for Fast and Stable Representations of Multiparameter Persistent Homology Decompositions
Authors: David Loiseaux, Mathieu Carrière, Andrew J. Blumberg
Date: 2023-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Topological Data Analysis

Topological data analysis (TDA) is an area of data science that focuses on using invariants from algebraic topology to provide multiscale shape descriptors for geometric data sets such as point clouds. One of the most important such descriptors is {\em persistent homology}, which encodes the change in shape as a filtration parameter changes; a typical parameter is the feature scale. For many data sets, it is useful to simultaneously vary multiple filtration parameters, for example feature scale and density. While the theoretical properties of single parameter persistent homology are well understood, less is known about the multiparameter case. In particular, a central question is the problem of representing multiparameter persistent homology by elements of a vector space for integration with standard machine learning algorithms. Existing approaches to this problem either ignore most of the multiparameter information to reduce to the one-parameter case or are heuristic and potentially unstable in the face of noise. In this article, we introduce a new general representation framework that leverages recent results on {\em decompositions} of multiparameter persistent homology. This framework is rich in information, fast to compute, and encompasses previous approaches. Moreover, we establish theoretical stability guarantees under this framework as well as efficient algorithms for practical computation, making this framework an applicable and versatile tool for analyzing geometric and point cloud data. We validate our stability results and algorithms with numerical experiments that demonstrate statistical convergence, prediction accuracy, and fast running times on several real data sets.
Derandomized Novelty Detection with FDR Control via Conformal E-values
Authors: Meshi Bashari, Amir Epstein, Yaniv Romano, Matteo Sesia
Date: 2023-02-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Novelty Detection

Conformal inference provides a general distribution-free method to rigorously calibrate the output of any machine learning algorithm for novelty detection. While this approach has many strengths, it has the limitation of being randomized, in the sense that it may lead to different results when analyzing twice the same data, and this can hinder the interpretation of any findings. We propose to make conformal inferences more stable by leveraging suitable conformal e-values instead of p-values to quantify statistical significance. This solution allows the evidence gathered from multiple analyses of the same data to be aggregated effectively while provably controlling the false discovery rate. Further, we show that the proposed method can reduce randomness without much loss of power compared to standard conformal inference, partly thanks to an innovative way of weighting conformal e-values based on additional side information carefully extracted from the same data. Simulations with synthetic and real data confirm this solution can be effective at eliminating random noise in the inferences obtained with state-of-the-art alternative techniques, sometimes also leading to higher power.
Uncertainty Quantification over Graph with Conformalized Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Kexin Huang, Ying Jin, Emmanuel Candès, Jure Leskovec
Date: 2023-05-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Prediction, Uncertainty Quantification, valid

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful machine learning prediction models on graph-structured data. However, GNNs lack rigorous uncertainty estimates, limiting their reliable deployment in settings where the cost of errors is significant. We propose conformalized GNN (CF-GNN), extending conformal prediction (CP) to graph-based models for guaranteed uncertainty estimates. Given an entity in the graph, CF-GNN produces a prediction set/interval that provably contains the true label with pre-defined coverage probability (e.g. 90%). We establish a permutation invariance condition that enables the validity of CP on graph data and provide an exact characterization of the test-time coverage. Moreover, besides valid coverage, it is crucial to reduce the prediction set size/interval length for practical use. We observe a key connection between non-conformity scores and network structures, which motivates us to develop a topology-aware output correction model that learns to update the prediction and produces more efficient prediction sets/intervals. Extensive experiments show that CF-GNN achieves any pre-defined target marginal coverage while significantly reducing the prediction set/interval size by up to 74% over the baselines. It also empirically achieves satisfactory conditional coverage over various raw and network features.
Class-Conditional Conformal Prediction with Many Classes
Authors: Tiffany Ding, Anastasios N. Angelopoulos, Stephen Bates, Michael I. Jordan, Ryan J. Tibshirani
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Prediction

Standard conformal prediction methods provide a marginal coverage guarantee, which means that for a random test point, the conformal prediction set contains the true label with a user-specified probability. In many classification problems, we would like to obtain a stronger guarantee--that for test points of a specific class, the prediction set contains the true label with the same user-chosen probability. For the latter goal, existing conformal prediction methods do not work well when there is a limited amount of labeled data per class, as is often the case in real applications where the number of classes is large. We propose a method called clustered conformal prediction that clusters together classes having "similar" conformal scores and performs conformal prediction at the cluster level. Based on empirical evaluation across four image data sets with many (up to 1000) classes, we find that clustered conformal typically outperforms existing methods in terms of class-conditional coverage and set size metrics.
Conformal PID Control for Time Series Prediction
Authors: Anastasios N. Angelopoulos, Emmanuel J. Candes, Ryan J. Tibshirani
Date: 2023-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Prediction, Time Series, Time Series Prediction, Uncertainty Quantification

We study the problem of uncertainty quantification for time series prediction, with the goal of providing easy-to-use algorithms with formal guarantees. The algorithms we present build upon ideas from conformal prediction and control theory, are able to prospectively model conformal scores in an online setting, and adapt to the presence of systematic errors due to seasonality, trends, and general distribution shifts. Our theory both simplifies and strengthens existing analyses in online conformal prediction. Experiments on 4-week-ahead forecasting of statewide COVID-19 death counts in the U.S. show an improvement in coverage over the ensemble forecaster used in official CDC communications. We also run experiments on predicting electricity demand, market returns, and temperature using autoregressive, Theta, Prophet, and Transformer models. We provide an extendable codebase for testing our methods and for the integration of new algorithms, data sets, and forecasting rules.
Real-time distributed video analytics for privacy-aware person search
Authors: Bipin Gaikwad, Abhijit Karmakar
Date: 2023-06-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: Computer Vision and Image Understanding 2023 6
Tasks: Person Search

In this work, a novel distributed privacy-aware person search (PAPS) model has been proposed which circumvents the privacy risks. An intelligent IoT surveillance system has been designed to integrate the PAPS model for real-time distributed privacy-aware person search from surveillance videos. An important aspect of the intelligent surveillance system, particularly person search, is the visual feedback at the output, with ranked results of person images at the user-end. Therefore, even if edge processing is performed, there is still a need to store and transmit the cropped person images to the cloud server for displaying the results at the user-end. However, storing or transmission of videos/images to cloud-servers leads to privacy issues. The proposed PAPS model eliminates the need to store or transmit the images/videos while performing person search, thereby addressing the privacy concerns. The proposed system is easily scalable to incorporate more camera nodes to enhance the surveillance coverage as majority of the processing is performed at the edge servers, with a small amount of fog-processing. A very minimal amount of cloud-processing is performed only when a query is raised at the user-end. Only the processed and encoded data is transmitted across the edge, fog and the cloud servers, which protects privacy and significantly reduces bandwidth costs. Further, a new evaluation criterion, Person Capacity, has been proposed to evaluate the feasibility of an edge-based system to be deployed at crowded locations. The performance evaluation of our system, on our own video dataset, as well as the PRW, and CUHK-SYSU dataset for person search demonstrates that the proposed system achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance while performing in real-time for practical scenarios.
Mathematical Capabilities of ChatGPT
Authors: Simon Frieder, Luca Pinchetti, Alexis Chevalier, Ryan-Rhys Griffiths, Tommaso Salvatori, Thomas Lukasiewicz, Philipp Christian Petersen, Julius Berner
Date: 2023-01-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Elementary Mathematics, Math, Mathematical Reasoning, Selection bias

We investigate the mathematical capabilities of two iterations of ChatGPT (released 9-January-2023 and 30-January-2023) and of GPT-4 by testing them on publicly available datasets, as well as hand-crafted ones, using a novel methodology. In contrast to formal mathematics, where large databases of formal proofs are available (e.g., the Lean Mathematical Library), current datasets of natural-language mathematics, used to benchmark language models, either cover only elementary mathematics or are very small. We address this by publicly releasing two new datasets: GHOSTS and miniGHOSTS. These are the first natural-language datasets curated by working researchers in mathematics that (1) aim to cover graduate-level mathematics, (2) provide a holistic overview of the mathematical capabilities of language models, and (3) distinguish multiple dimensions of mathematical reasoning. These datasets also test whether ChatGPT and GPT-4 can be helpful assistants to professional mathematicians by emulating use cases that arise in the daily professional activities of mathematicians. We benchmark the models on a range of fine-grained performance metrics. For advanced mathematics, this is the most detailed evaluation effort to date. We find that ChatGPT can be used most successfully as a mathematical assistant for querying facts, acting as a mathematical search engine and knowledge base interface. GPT-4 can additionally be used for undergraduate-level mathematics but fails on graduate-level difficulty. Contrary to many positive reports in the media about GPT-4 and ChatGPT's exam-solving abilities (a potential case of selection bias), their overall mathematical performance is well below the level of a graduate student. Hence, if your goal is to use ChatGPT to pass a graduate-level math exam, you would be better off copying from your average peer!
Paved2Paradise: Cost-Effective and Scalable LiDAR Simulation by Factoring the Real World
Authors: Michael A. Alcorn, Noah Schwartz
Date: 2023-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Human Detection, Pedestrian Detection

To achieve strong real world performance, neural networks must be trained on large, diverse datasets; however, obtaining and annotating such datasets is costly and time-consuming, particularly for 3D point clouds. In this paper, we describe Paved2Paradise, a simple, cost-effective approach for generating fully labeled, diverse, and realistic lidar datasets from scratch, all while requiring minimal human annotation. Our key insight is that, by deliberately collecting separate "background" and "object" datasets (i.e., "factoring the real world"), we can intelligently combine them to produce a combinatorially large and diverse training set. The Paved2Paradise pipeline thus consists of four steps: (1) collecting copious background data, (2) recording individuals from the desired object class(es) performing different behaviors in an isolated environment (like a parking lot), (3) bootstrapping labels for the object dataset, and (4) generating samples by placing objects at arbitrary locations in backgrounds. To demonstrate the utility of Paved2Paradise, we generated synthetic datasets for two tasks: (1) human detection in orchards (a task for which no public data exists) and (2) pedestrian detection in urban environments. Qualitatively, we find that a model trained exclusively on Paved2Paradise synthetic data is highly effective at detecting humans in orchards, including when individuals are heavily occluded by tree branches. Quantitatively, a model trained on Paved2Paradise data that sources backgrounds from KITTI performs comparably to a model trained on the actual dataset. These results suggest the Paved2Paradise synthetic data pipeline can help accelerate point cloud model development in sectors where acquiring lidar datasets has previously been cost-prohibitive.
Refine, Discriminate and Align: Stealing Encoders via Sample-Wise Prototypes and Multi-Relational Extraction
Authors: Shuchi Wu, Chuan Ma, Kang Wei, Xiaogang Xu, Ming Ding, Yuwen Qian, Tao Xiang
Date: 2023-12-01 00:00:00

This paper introduces RDA, a pioneering approach designed to address two primary deficiencies prevalent in previous endeavors aiming at stealing pre-trained encoders: (1) suboptimal performances attributed to biased optimization objectives, and (2) elevated query costs stemming from the end-to-end paradigm that necessitates querying the target encoder every epoch. Specifically, we initially Refine the representations of the target encoder for each training sample, thereby establishing a less biased optimization objective before the steal-training phase. This is accomplished via a sample-wise prototype, which consolidates the target encoder's representations for a given sample's various perspectives. Demanding exponentially fewer queries compared to the end-to-end approach, prototypes can be instantiated to guide subsequent query-free training. For more potent efficacy, we develop a multi-relational extraction loss that trains the surrogate encoder to Discriminate mismatched embedding-prototype pairs while Aligning those matched ones in terms of both amplitude and angle. In this way, the trained surrogate encoder achieves state-of-the-art results across the board in various downstream datasets with limited queries. Moreover, RDA is shown to be robust to multiple widely-used defenses.