pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Why Do We Need Weight Decay in Modern Deep Learning?
Authors: Francesco D'Angelo, Maksym Andriushchenko, Aditya Varre, Nicolas Flammarion
Date: 2023-10-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, image-classification, Image Classification, Learning Theory, Stochastic Optimization

Weight decay is a broadly used technique for training state-of-the-art deep networks from image classification to large language models. Despite its widespread usage and being extensively studied in the classical literature, its role remains poorly understood for deep learning. In this work, we highlight that the role of weight decay in modern deep learning is different from its regularization effect studied in classical learning theory. For deep networks on vision tasks trained with multipass SGD, we show how weight decay modifies the optimization dynamics enhancing the ever-present implicit regularization of SGD via the loss stabilization mechanism. In contrast, for large language models trained with nearly one-epoch training, we describe how weight decay balances the bias-variance tradeoff in stochastic optimization leading to lower training loss and improved training stability. Overall, we present a unifying perspective from ResNets on vision tasks to LLMs: weight decay is never useful as an explicit regularizer but instead changes the training dynamics in a desirable way. The code is available at https://github.com/tml-epfl/why-weight-decay
Policy-Gradient Training of Language Models for Ranking
Authors: Ge Gao, Jonathan D. Chang, Claire Cardie, Kianté Brantley, Thorsten Joachim
Date: 2023-10-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Domain Generalization, Question Answering, Retrieval, Text Retrieval

Text retrieval plays a crucial role in incorporating factual knowledge for decision making into language processing pipelines, ranging from chat-based web search to question answering systems. Current state-of-the-art text retrieval models leverage pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to achieve competitive performance, but training LLM-based retrievers via typical contrastive losses requires intricate heuristics, including selecting hard negatives and using additional supervision as learning signals. This reliance on heuristics stems from the fact that the contrastive loss itself is heuristic and does not directly optimize the downstream metrics of decision quality at the end of the processing pipeline. To address this issue, we introduce Neural PG-RANK, a novel training algorithm that learns to rank by instantiating a LLM as a Plackett-Luce ranking policy. Neural PG-RANK provides a principled method for end-to-end training of retrieval models as part of larger decision systems via policy gradient, with little reliance on complex heuristics, and it effectively unifies the training objective with downstream decision-making quality. We conduct extensive experiments on various text retrieval benchmarks. The results demonstrate that when the training objective aligns with the evaluation setup, Neural PG-RANK yields remarkable in-domain performance improvement, with substantial out-of-domain generalization to some critical datasets employed in downstream question answering tasks.
Language Agent Tree Search Unifies Reasoning Acting and Planning in Language Models
Authors: Andy Zhou, Kai Yan, Michal Shlapentokh-Rothman, Haohan Wang, Yu-Xiong Wang
Date: 2023-10-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Decision Making, HumanEval, In-Context Learning, Math, Model-based Reinforcement Learning, Question Answering

While language models (LMs) have shown potential across a range of decision-making tasks, their reliance on simple acting processes limits their broad deployment as autonomous agents. In this paper, we introduce Language Agent Tree Search (LATS) -- the first general framework that synergizes the capabilities of LMs in reasoning, acting, and planning. By leveraging the in-context learning ability of LMs, we integrate Monte Carlo Tree Search into LATS to enable LMs as agents, along with LM-powered value functions and self-reflections for proficient exploration and enhanced decision-making. A key feature of our approach is the incorporation of an environment for external feedback, which offers a more deliberate and adaptive problem-solving mechanism that surpasses the constraints of existing techniques. Our experimental evaluation across diverse domains, including programming, interactive question-answering (QA), web navigation, and math, validates the effectiveness and generality of LATS in decision-making while maintaining competitive or improved reasoning performance. Notably, LATS achieves state-of-the-art pass@1 accuracy (92.7%) for programming on HumanEval with GPT-4 and demonstrates gradient-free performance (average score of 75.9) comparable to gradient-based fine-tuning for web navigation on WebShop with GPT-3.5. Code can be found at https://github.com/lapisrocks/LanguageAgentTreeSearch
On the Embedding Collapse when Scaling up Recommendation Models
Authors: Xingzhuo Guo, Junwei Pan, Ximei Wang, Baixu Chen, Jie Jiang, Mingsheng Long
Date: 2023-10-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Recent advances in foundation models have led to a promising trend of developing large recommendation models to leverage vast amounts of available data. Still, mainstream models remain embarrassingly small in size and na\"ive enlarging does not lead to sufficient performance gain, suggesting a deficiency in the model scalability. In this paper, we identify the embedding collapse phenomenon as the inhibition of scalability, wherein the embedding matrix tends to occupy a low-dimensional subspace. Through empirical and theoretical analysis, we demonstrate a \emph{two-sided effect} of feature interaction specific to recommendation models. On the one hand, interacting with collapsed embeddings restricts embedding learning and exacerbates the collapse issue. On the other hand, interaction is crucial in mitigating the fitting of spurious features as a scalability guarantee. Based on our analysis, we propose a simple yet effective multi-embedding design incorporating embedding-set-specific interaction modules to learn embedding sets with large diversity and thus reduce collapse. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this proposed design provides consistent scalability and effective collapse mitigation for various recommendation models. Code is available at this repository: https://github.com/thuml/Multi-Embedding.
Leveraging Self-Consistency for Data-Efficient Amortized Bayesian Inference
Authors: Marvin Schmitt, Desi R. Ivanova, Daniel Habermann, Ullrich Köthe, Paul-Christian Bürkner, Stefan T. Radev
Date: 2023-10-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference

We propose a method to improve the efficiency and accuracy of amortized Bayesian inference by leveraging universal symmetries in the joint probabilistic model of parameters and data. In a nutshell, we invert Bayes' theorem and estimate the marginal likelihood based on approximate representations of the joint model. Upon perfect approximation, the marginal likelihood is constant across all parameter values by definition. However, errors in approximate inference lead to undesirable variance in the marginal likelihood estimates across different parameter values. We penalize violations of this symmetry with a \textit{self-consistency loss} which significantly improves the quality of approximate inference in low data regimes and can be used to augment the training of popular neural density estimators. We apply our method to a number of synthetic problems and realistic scientific models, discovering notable advantages in the context of both neural posterior and likelihood approximation.
Confronting Reward Model Overoptimization with Constrained RLHF
Authors: Ted Moskovitz, Aaditya K. Singh, DJ Strouse, Tuomas Sandholm, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Anca D. Dragan, Stephen Mcaleer
Date: 2023-10-06 00:00:00
Tasks: model

Large language models are typically aligned with human preferences by optimizing $\textit{reward models}$ (RMs) fitted to human feedback. However, human preferences are multi-faceted, and it is increasingly common to derive reward from a composition of simpler reward models which each capture a different aspect of language quality. This itself presents a challenge, as it is difficult to appropriately weight these component RMs when combining them. Compounding this difficulty, because any RM is only a proxy for human evaluation, this process is vulnerable to $\textit{overoptimization}$, wherein past a certain point, accumulating higher reward is associated with worse human ratings. In this paper, we perform, to our knowledge, the first study on overoptimization in composite RMs, showing that correlation between component RMs has a significant effect on the locations of these points. We then introduce an approach to solve this issue using constrained reinforcement learning as a means of preventing the agent from exceeding each RM's threshold of usefulness. Our method addresses the problem of weighting component RMs by learning dynamic weights, naturally expressed by Lagrange multipliers. As a result, each RM stays within the range at which it is an effective proxy, improving evaluation performance. Finally, we introduce an adaptive method using gradient-free optimization to identify and optimize towards these points during a single run.
MBTFNet: Multi-Band Temporal-Frequency Neural Network For Singing Voice Enhancement
Authors: Weiming Xu, Zhouxuan Chen, Zhili Tan, Shubo Lv, Runduo Han, Wenjiang Zhou, Weifeng Zhao, Lei Xie
Date: 2023-10-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Music Source Separation, Speech Enhancement

A typical neural speech enhancement (SE) approach mainly handles speech and noise mixtures, which is not optimal for singing voice enhancement scenarios. Music source separation (MSS) models treat vocals and various accompaniment components equally, which may reduce performance compared to the model that only considers vocal enhancement. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-band temporal-frequency neural network (MBTFNet) for singing voice enhancement, which particularly removes background music, noise and even backing vocals from singing recordings. MBTFNet combines inter and intra-band modeling for better processing of full-band signals. Dual-path modeling are introduced to expand the receptive field of the model. We propose an implicit personalized enhancement (IPE) stage based on signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) estimation, which further improves the performance of MBTFNet. Experiments show that our proposed model significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art SE and MSS models.
A Marketplace Price Anomaly Detection System at Scale
Authors: Akshit Sarpal, Qiwen Kang, Fangping Huang, Yang song, Lijie Wan
Date: 2023-10-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

Online marketplaces execute large volume of price updates that are initiated by individual marketplace sellers each day on the platform. This price democratization comes with increasing challenges with data quality. Lack of centralized guardrails that are available for a traditional online retailer causes a higher likelihood for inaccurate prices to get published on the website, leading to poor customer experience and potential for revenue loss. We present MoatPlus (Masked Optimal Anchors using Trees, Proximity-based Labeling and Unsupervised Statistical-features), a scalable price anomaly detection framework for a growing marketplace platform. The goal is to leverage proximity and historical price trends from unsupervised statistical features to generate an upper price bound. We build an ensemble of models to detect irregularities in price-based features, exclude irregular features and use optimized weighting scheme to build a reliable price bound in real-time pricing pipeline. We observed that our approach improves precise anchor coverage by up to 46.6% in high-vulnerability item subsets
Amortizing intractable inference in large language models
Authors: Edward J. Hu, Moksh Jain, Eric Elmoznino, Younesse Kaddar, Guillaume Lajoie, Yoshua Bengio, Nikolay Malkin
Date: 2023-10-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Diversity

Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) compress knowledge from their training data through next-token conditional distributions. This limits tractable querying of this knowledge to start-to-end autoregressive sampling. However, many tasks of interest -- including sequence continuation, infilling, and other forms of constrained generation -- involve sampling from intractable posterior distributions. We address this limitation by using amortized Bayesian inference to sample from these intractable posteriors. Such amortization is algorithmically achieved by fine-tuning LLMs via diversity-seeking reinforcement learning algorithms: generative flow networks (GFlowNets). We empirically demonstrate that this distribution-matching paradigm of LLM fine-tuning can serve as an effective alternative to maximum-likelihood training and reward-maximizing policy optimization. As an important application, we interpret chain-of-thought reasoning as a latent variable modeling problem and demonstrate that our approach enables data-efficient adaptation of LLMs to tasks that require multi-step rationalization and tool use.
Exploiting Activation Sparsity with Dense to Dynamic-k Mixture-of-Experts Conversion
Authors: Filip Szatkowski, Bartosz Wójcik, Mikołaj Piórczyński, Simone Scardapane
Date: 2023-10-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Mixture-of-Experts

Transformer models can face practical limitations due to their high computational requirements. At the same time, such models exhibit significant activation sparsity, which can be leveraged to reduce the inference cost by converting parts of the network into equivalent Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layers. Despite the crucial role played by activation sparsity, its impact on this process remains unexplored. We demonstrate that the efficiency of the conversion can be significantly enhanced by a proper regularization of the activation sparsity of the base model. Moreover, motivated by the high variance of the number of activated neurons for different inputs, we introduce a more effective dynamic-$k$ expert selection rule that adjusts the number of executed experts on a per-token basis. To achieve further savings, we extend this approach to multi-head attention projections. Finally, we develop an efficient implementation that translates these computational savings into actual wall-clock speedup. The proposed method, Dense to Dynamic-$k$ Mixture-of-Experts (D2DMoE), outperforms existing approaches on common NLP and vision tasks, reducing inference cost by up to 60% without significantly impacting performance.
Integrating Transformations in Probabilistic Circuits
Authors: Tom Schierenbeck, Vladimir Vutov, Thorsten Dickhaus, Michael Beetz
Date: 2023-10-06 00:00:00

This study addresses the predictive limitation of probabilistic circuits and introduces transformations as a remedy to overcome it. We demonstrate this limitation in robotic scenarios. We motivate that independent component analysis is a sound tool to preserve the independence properties of probabilistic circuits. Our approach is an extension of joint probability trees, which are model-free deterministic circuits. By doing so, it is demonstrated that the proposed approach is able to achieve higher likelihoods while using fewer parameters compared to the joint probability trees on seven benchmark data sets as well as on real robot data. Furthermore, we discuss how to integrate transformations into tree-based learning routines. Finally, we argue that exact inference with transformed quantile parameterized distributions is not tractable. However, our approach allows for efficient sampling and approximate inference.
An In-Context Learning Agent for Formal Theorem-Proving
Authors: Amitayush Thakur, George Tsoukalas, Yeming Wen, Jimmy Xin, Swarat Chaudhuri
Date: 2023-10-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Automated Theorem Proving, In-Context Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

We present an in-context learning agent for formal theorem-proving in environments like Lean and Coq. Current state-of-the-art models for the problem are finetuned on environment-specific proof data. By contrast, our approach, called COPRA, repeatedly asks a high-capacity, general-purpose large language model (GPT-4) to propose tactic applications from within a stateful backtracking search. Proposed tactics are executed in the underlying proof environment. Feedback from the execution is used to build the prompt for the next model query, along with selected information from the search history and lemmas retrieved from an external database. We evaluate our implementation of COPRA on the miniF2F benchmark for Lean and a set of Coq tasks from the CompCert project. On these benchmarks, COPRA significantly outperforms few-shot invocations of GPT-4. It also compares favorably against finetuning-based approaches, outperforming ReProver, a state-of-the-art finetuned approach for Lean, in terms of the pass@1 metric. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/trishullab/copra.
Fair Feature Importance Scores for Interpreting Tree-Based Methods and Surrogates
Authors: Camille Olivia Little, Debolina Halder Lina, Genevera I. Allen
Date: 2023-10-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Feature Importance, Knowledge Distillation

Across various sectors such as healthcare, criminal justice, national security, finance, and technology, large-scale machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) systems are being deployed to make critical data-driven decisions. Many have asked if we can and should trust these ML systems to be making these decisions. Two critical components are prerequisites for trust in ML systems: interpretability, or the ability to understand why the ML system makes the decisions it does, and fairness, which ensures that ML systems do not exhibit bias against certain individuals or groups. Both interpretability and fairness are important and have separately received abundant attention in the ML literature, but so far, there have been very few methods developed to directly interpret models with regard to their fairness. In this paper, we focus on arguably the most popular type of ML interpretation: feature importance scores. Inspired by the use of decision trees in knowledge distillation, we propose to leverage trees as interpretable surrogates for complex black-box ML models. Specifically, we develop a novel fair feature importance score for trees that can be used to interpret how each feature contributes to fairness or bias in trees, tree-based ensembles, or tree-based surrogates of any complex ML system. Like the popular mean decrease in impurity for trees, our Fair Feature Importance Score is defined based on the mean decrease (or increase) in group bias. Through simulations as well as real examples on benchmark fairness datasets, we demonstrate that our Fair Feature Importance Score offers valid interpretations for both tree-based ensembles and tree-based surrogates of other ML systems.
Toward a Plug-and-Play Vision-Based Grasping Module for Robotics
Authors: François Hélénon, Johann Huber, Faïz Ben Amar, Stéphane Doncieux
Date: 2023-10-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Grasp Generation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Robotic Grasping

Despite recent advancements in AI for robotics, grasping remains a partially solved challenge, hindered by the lack of benchmarks and reproducibility constraints. This paper introduces a vision-based grasping framework that can easily be transferred across multiple manipulators. Leveraging Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms, the framework generates diverse repertoires of open-loop grasping trajectories, enhancing adaptability while maintaining a diversity of grasps. This framework addresses two main issues: the lack of an off-the-shelf vision module for detecting object pose and the generalization of QD trajectories to the whole robot operational space. The proposed solution combines multiple vision modules for 6DoF object detection and tracking while rigidly transforming QD-generated trajectories into the object frame. Experiments on a Franka Research 3 arm and a UR5 arm with a SIH Schunk hand demonstrate comparable performance when the real scene aligns with the simulation used for grasp generation. This work represents a significant stride toward building a reliable vision-based grasping module transferable to new platforms, while being adaptable to diverse scenarios without further training iterations.
Deep Learning for Two-Stage Robust Integer Optimization
Authors: Justin Dumouchelle, Esther Julien, Jannis Kurtz, Elias B. Khalil
Date: 2023-10-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Deep Learning

Robust optimization is an established framework for modeling optimization problems with uncertain parameters. While static robust optimization is often criticized for being too conservative, two-stage (or adjustable) robust optimization (2RO) provides a less conservative alternative by allowing some decisions to be made after the uncertain parameters have been revealed. Unfortunately, in the case of integer decision variables, existing solution methods for 2RO typically fail to solve large-scale instances, limiting the applicability of this modeling paradigm to simple cases. We propose Neur2RO, a deep-learning-augmented instantiation of the column-and-constraint-generation (CCG) algorithm, which expands the applicability of the 2RO framework to large-scale instances with integer decisions in both stages. A custom-designed neural network is trained to estimate the optimal value and feasibility of the second-stage problem. The network can be incorporated into CCG, leading to more computationally tractable subproblems in each of its iterations. The resulting algorithm enjoys approximation guarantees which depend on the neural network's prediction error. In our experiments, Neur2RO produces high-quality solutions quickly, outperforming state-of-the-art methods on two-stage knapsack, capital budgeting, and facility location problems. Compared to existing methods, which often run for hours, Neur2RO finds better solutions in a few seconds or minutes. Our code is available at https://github.com/khalil-research/Neur2RO.
Functional Geometry Guided Protein Sequence and Backbone Structure Co-Design
Authors: Zhenqiao Song, Yunlong Zhao, Wenxian Shi, Yang Yang, Lei LI
Date: 2023-10-06 00:00:00

Proteins are macromolecules responsible for essential functions in almost all living organisms. Designing reasonable proteins with desired functions is crucial. A protein's sequence and structure are strongly correlated and they together determine its function. In this paper, we propose NAEPro, a model to jointly design Protein sequence and structure based on automatically detected functional sites. NAEPro is powered by an interleaving network of attention and equivariant layers, which can capture global correlation in a whole sequence and local influence from nearest amino acids in three dimensional (3D) space. Such an architecture facilitates effective yet economic message passing at two levels. We evaluate our model and several strong baselines on two protein datasets, $\beta$-lactamase and myoglobin. Experimental results show that our model consistently achieves the highest amino acid recovery rate, TM-score, and the lowest RMSD among all competitors. These findings prove the capability of our model to design protein sequences and structures that closely resemble their natural counterparts. Furthermore, in-depth analysis further confirms our model's ability to generate highly effective proteins capable of binding to their target metallocofactors. We provide code, data and models in Github.