论文检索

Applications · Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Yohann Benchetrit, Hubert Banville, Jean-Remi King

In the past five years, the use of generative and foundational AI systems has greatly improved the decoding of brain activity. Visual perception, in particular, can now be decoded from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) with remarkable fidelity. This neuroimaging technique, however, suffers from a limited temporal resolution ($\approx$0.5\,Hz) and thus fundamentally constrains its real-time usage. Here, we propose an alternative approach based on magnetoencephalography (MEG), a neuroimaging device capable of measuring brain activity with high temporal resolution ($\approx$5,000 Hz). For this, we develop an MEG decoding model trained with both contrastive and regression objectives and consisting of three modules: i) pretrained embeddings obtained from the image, ii) an MEG module trained end-to-end and iii) a pretrained image generator. Our results are threefold: Firstly, our MEG decoder shows a 7X improvement of image-retrieval over classic linear decoders. Second, late brain responses to images are best decoded with DINOv2, a recent foundational image model. Third, image retrievals and generations both suggest that high-level visual features can be decoded from MEG signals, although the same approach applied to 7T fMRI also recovers better low-level features. Overall, these results, while preliminary, provide an important step towards the decoding - in real-time - of the visual processes continuously unfolding within the human brain.

Applications · Robotics

Tianyu Li, Hyunyoung Jung, Matthew Gombolay, Yong Cho, Sehoon Ha

Human motion driven control (HMDC) is an effective approach for generating natural and compelling robot motions while preserving high-level semantics. However, establishing the correspondence between humans and robots with different body structures is not straightforward due to the mismatches in kinematics and dynamics properties, which causes intrinsic ambiguity to the problem. Many previous algorithms approach this motion retargeting problem with unsupervised learning, which requires the prerequisite skill sets. However, it will be extremely costly to learn all the skills without understanding the given human motions, particularly for high-dimensional robots. In this work, we introduce CrossLoco, a guided unsupervised reinforcement learning framework that simultaneously learns robot skills and their correspondence to human motions. Our key innovation is to introduce a cycle-consistency-based reward term designed to maximize the mutual information between human motions and robot states. We demonstrate that the proposed framework can generate compelling robot motions by translating diverse human motions, such as running, hopping, and dancing. We quantitatively compare our CrossLoco against the manually engineered and unsupervised baseline algorithms along with the ablated versions of our framework and demonstrate that our method translates human motions with better accuracy, diversity, and user preference. We also showcase its utility in other applications, such as synthesizing robot movements from language input and enabling interactive robot control.

Deep Learning · Other Representation Learning

Dongwon Son, Jaehyung Kim, Sanghyeon Son, Beomjoon Kim

The usage of 3D vision algorithms, such as shape reconstruction, remains limited because they require inputs to be at a fixed canonical rotation. Recently, a simple equivariant network, Vector Neuron (VN) has been proposed that can be easily used with the state-of-the-art 3D neural network (NN) architectures. However, its performance is limited because it is designed to use only three-dimensional features, which is insufficient to capture the details present in 3D data. In this paper, we introduce an equivariant feature representation for mapping a 3D point to a high-dimensional feature space. Our feature can discern multiple frequencies present in 3D data, which, as shown by Tancik et al. (2020), is the key to designing an expressive feature for 3D vision tasks. Our representation can be used as an input to VNs, and the results demonstrate that with our feature representation, VN captures more details, overcoming the limitation raised in its original paper.

Social Aspects · Privacy-preserving Statistics and Machine Learning

Yuxin Wen, Yuchen Liu, Chen Chen, Lingjuan Lyu

Recent breakthroughs in diffusion models have exhibited exceptional image-generation capabilities. However, studies show that some outputs are merely replications of training data. Such replications present potential legal challenges for model owners, especially when the generated content contains proprietary information. In this work, we introduce a straightforward yet effective method for detecting memorized prompts by inspecting the magnitude of text-conditional predictions. Our proposed method seamlessly integrates without disrupting sampling algorithms, and delivers high accuracy even at the first generation step, with a single generation per prompt. Building on our detection strategy, we unveil an explainable approach that shows the contribution of individual words or tokens to memorization. This offers an interactive medium for users to adjust their prompts. Moreover, we propose two strategies i.e., to mitigate memorization by leveraging the magnitude of text-conditional predictions, either through minimization during inference or filtering during training. These proposed strategies effectively counteract memorization while maintaining high-generation quality. Code is available at https://github.com/YuxinWenRick/diffusion_memorization.

Deep Learning · Large Language Models

Adam Yang, Maxime Robeyns, Xi Wang, Laurence Aitchison

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has emerged as a new paradigm for cost-efficient fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs), with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) being a widely adopted choice. However, fine-tuned LLMs often become overconfident especially when fine-tuned on small datasets. Bayesian methods, with their inherent ability to estimate uncertainty, serve as potent tools to mitigate overconfidence and enhance calibration. In this work, we introduce Laplace-LoRA, a straightforward yet effective Bayesian method, which applies the Laplace approximation to the LoRA parameters and, considerably boosts the calibration of fine-tuned LLMs.

Applications · Computer Vision

Jonah Philion, Xue Bin Peng, Sanja Fidler

A longstanding challenge for self-driving development is simulating dynamic driving scenarios seeded from recorded driving logs. In pursuit of this functionality, we apply tools from discrete sequence modeling to model how vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists interact in driving scenarios. Using a simple data-driven tokenization scheme, we discretize trajectories to centimeter-level resolution using a small vocabulary. We then model the multi-agent sequence of discrete motion tokens with a GPT-like encoder-decoder that is autoregressive in time and takes into account intra-timestep interaction between agents. Scenarios sampled from our model exhibit state-of-the-art realism; our model tops the Waymo Sim Agents Benchmark, surpassing prior work along the realism meta metric by 3.3% and along the interaction metric by 9.9%. We ablate our modeling choices in full autonomy and partial autonomy settings, and show that the representations learned by our model can quickly be adapted to improve performance on nuScenes. We additionally evaluate the scalability of our model with respect to parameter count and dataset size, and use density estimates from our model to quantify the saliency of context length and intra-timestep interaction for the traffic modeling task.

Social Aspects · Privacy-preserving Statistics and Machine Learning

Xinyu Tang, Richard Shin, Huseyin Inan, Andre Manoel, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Zinan Lin, Sivakanth Gopi, Janardhan Kulkarni, Robert Sim

We study the problem of in-context learning (ICL) with large language models (LLMs) on private datasets. This scenario poses privacy risks, as LLMs may leak or regurgitate the private examples demonstrated in the prompt.We propose a novel algorithm that generates synthetic few-shot demonstrations from the private dataset with formal differential privacy (DP) guarantees, and show empirically that it can achieve effective ICL.We conduct extensive experiments on standard benchmarks and compare our algorithm with non-private ICL and zero-shot solutions. Our results demonstrate that our algorithm can achieve competitive performance with strong privacy levels.These results open up new possibilities for ICL with privacy protection for a broad range of applications.

Reinforcement Learning

Hyungho Na, Yunkyeong Seo, Il-chul Moon

In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), agents aim to achieve a common goal, such as defeating enemies or scoring a goal. Existing MARL algorithms are effective but still require significant learning time and often get trapped in local optima by complex tasks, subsequently failing to discover a goal-reaching policy. To address this, we introduce Efficient episodic Memory Utilization (EMU) for MARL, with two primary objectives: (a) accelerating reinforcement learning by leveraging semantically coherent memory from an episodic buffer and (b) selectively promoting desirable transitions to prevent local convergence. To achieve (a), EMU incorporates a trainable encoder/decoder structure alongside MARL, creating coherent memory embeddings that facilitate exploratory memory recall. To achieve (b), EMU introduces a novel reward structure called episodic incentive based on the desirability of states. This reward improves the TD target in Q-learning and acts as an additional incentive for desirable transitions. We provide theoretical support for the proposed incentive and demonstrate the effectiveness of EMU compared to conventional episodic control. The proposed method is evaluated in StarCraft II and Google Research Football, and empirical results indicate further performance improvement over state-of-the-art methods.

Applications · Computer Vision

Vincent Leroy, Jerome Revaud, Thomas Lucas, Philippe Weinzaepfel

Transformers have become the standard in state-of-the-art vision architectures, achieving impressive performance on both image-level and dense pixelwise tasks. However, training vision transformers for high-resolution pixelwise tasks has a prohibitive cost. Typical solutions boil down to hierarchical architectures, fast and approximate attention, or training on low-resolution crops. This latter solution does not constrain architectural choices, but it leads to a clear performance drop when testing at resolutions significantly higher than that used for training, thus requiring ad-hoc and slow post-processing schemes. In this paper, we propose a novel strategy for efficient training and inference of high-resolution vision transformers. The key principle is to mask out most of the high-resolution inputs during training, keeping only N random windows. This allows the model to learn local interactions between tokens inside each window, and global interactions between tokens from different windows. As a result, the model can directly process the high-resolution input at test time without any special trick. We show that this strategy is effective when using relative positional embedding such as rotary embeddings. It is 4 times faster to train than a full-resolution network, and it is straightforward to use at test time compared to existing approaches. We apply this strategy to three dense prediction tasks with high-resolution data. First, we show on the task of semantic segmentation that a simple setting with 2 windows performs best, hence the name of our method: Win-Win. Second, we confirm this result on the task of monocular depth prediction. Third, to demonstrate the generality of our contribution, we further extend it to the binocular task of optical flow, reaching state-of-the-art performance on the Spring benchmark that contains Full-HD images with an order of magnitude faster inference than the best competitor

Social Aspects · Privacy-preserving Statistics and Machine Learning

alain rakotomamonjy, Kimia Nadjahi, Liva Ralaivola

We introduce a principled way of computing the Wasserstein distance between two distributions in a federated manner.Namely, we show how to estimate the Wasserstein distance between two samples stored and kept on different devices/clients whilst a central entity/server orchestrates the computations (again, without having access to the samples). To achieve this feat, we take advantage of the geometric properties of the Wasserstein distance -- in particular, the triangle inequality -- and that of the associated {\em geodesics}: our algorithm, FedWad (for Federated Wasserstein Distance), iteratively approximates the Wasserstein distance by manipulating and exchanging distributions from the space of geodesics in lieu of the input samples. In addition to establishing the convergence properties of FedWad, we provide empirical results on federated coresets and federate optimal transport dataset distance, that we respectively exploit for building a novel federated model and for boosting performance of popular federated learning algorithms.

Social Aspects · Privacy-preserving Statistics and Machine Learning

Xingyu Zhou, Sayak Ray Chowdhury

We consider cross-silo federated linear contextual bandit (LCB) problem under differential privacy, where multiple silos interact with their respective local users and communicate via a central server to realize collaboration without sacrificing each user's privacy. We identify three issues in the state-of-the-art~\citep{dubey2020differentially}: (i) failure of claimed privacy protection, (ii) incorrect regret bound due to noise miscalculation and (iii) ungrounded communication cost. To resolve these issues, we take a two-step approach. First, we design an algorithmic framework consisting of a generic federated LCB algorithm and flexible privacy protocols. Then, leveraging the proposed framework, we study federated LCBs under two different privacy constraints. We first establish privacy and regret guarantees under silo-level local differential privacy, which fix the issues present in state-of-the-art algorithm.To further improve the regret performance, we next consider shuffle model of differential privacy, under which we show that our algorithm can achieve nearly ``optimal'' regret without a trusted server. We accomplish this via two different schemes -- one relies on a new result on privacy amplification via shuffling for DP mechanisms and another one leverages the integration of a shuffle protocol for vector sum into the tree-based mechanism, both of which might be of independent interest. Finally, we support our theoretical results withnumerical evaluations over contextual bandit instances generated from both synthetic and real-life data.

Social Aspects · Privacy-preserving Statistics and Machine Learning

Zinan Lin, Sivakanth Gopi, Janardhan Kulkarni, Harsha Nori, Sergey Yekhanin

Generating differentially private (DP) synthetic data that closely resembles the original private data is a scalable way to mitigate privacy concerns in the current data-driven world. In contrast to current practices that train customized models for this task, we aim to generate DP Synthetic Data via APIs (DPSDA), where we treat foundation models as blackboxes and only utilize their inference APIs. Such API-based, training-free approaches are easier to deploy as exemplified by the recent surge in the number of API-based apps. These approaches can also leverage the power of large foundation models which are only accessible via their inference APIs. However, this comes with greater challenges due to strictly more restrictive model access and the need to protect privacy from the API provider. In this paper, we present a new framework called Private Evolution (PE) to solve this problem and show its initial promise on synthetic images. Surprisingly, PE can match or even outperform state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods without any model training. For example, on CIFAR10 (with ImageNet as the public data), we achieve FID ≤ 7.9 with privacy cost ε = 0.67, significantly improving the previous SOTA from ε = 32. We further demonstrate the promise of applying PE on large foundation models such as Stable Diffusion to tackle challenging private datasets with a small number of high-resolution images. The code and data are released at https://github.com/microsoft/DPSDA.

Applications · Language, Speech and Dialog

Chi-Min Chan, Weize Chen, Yusheng Su, Jianxuan Yu, Wei Xue, Shanghang Zhang, Jie Fu, Zhiyuan Liu

Text evaluation has historically posed significant challenges, often demanding substantial labor and time cost. With the emergence of large language models (LLMs), researchers have explored LLMs' potential as alternatives for human evaluation. While these single-agent-based approaches show promise, experimental results suggest that further advancements are needed to bridge the gap between their current effectiveness and human-level evaluation quality.Recognizing that best practices of human evaluation processes often involve multiple human annotators collaborating in the evaluation, we resort to a multi-agent debate framework, moving beyond single-agent prompting strategies.In this paper, we construct a multi-agent referee team called $\textbf{ChatEval}$ to autonomously discuss and evaluate the quality of different texts. Our experiments on two benchmarks illustrate that ChatEval delivers superior accuracy and correlation in alignment with human assessment. Furthermore, we find that the diverse role prompts (different personas) are essential in the multi-agent debate process; that is, utilizing the same role description in the prompts can lead to a degradation in performance. Our qualitative analysis also shows that ChatEval transcends mere textual scoring, offering a human-mimicking evaluation process for reliable assessments.

Deep Learning · Algorithms

Sascha Marton, Stefan Lüdtke, Christian Bartelt, Heiner Stuckenschmidt

Despite the success of deep learning for text and image data, tree-based ensemble models are still state-of-the-art for machine learning with heterogeneous tabular data. However, there is a significant need for tabular-specific gradient-based methods due to their high flexibility. In this paper, we propose $\text{GRANDE}$, $\text{GRA}$die$\text{N}$t-Based $\text{D}$ecision Tree $\text{E}$nsembles, a novel approach for learning hard, axis-aligned decision tree ensembles using end-to-end gradient descent. GRANDE is based on a dense representation of tree ensembles, which affords to use backpropagation with a straight-through operator to jointly optimize all model parameters. Our method combines axis-aligned splits, which is a useful inductive bias for tabular data, with the flexibility of gradient-based optimization. Furthermore, we introduce an advanced instance-wise weighting that facilitates learning representations for both, simple and complex relations, within a single model. We conducted an extensive evaluation on a predefined benchmark with 19 classification datasets and demonstrate that our method outperforms existing gradient-boosting and deep learning frameworks on most datasets. The method is available under: https://github.com/s-marton/GRANDE

Reinforcement Learning · Deep RL

Wei Wang, Dongqi Han, Xufang Luo, Dongsheng Li

Despite the notable advancements in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in recent years, a prevalent issue that is often overlooked is the impact of signal delay. Signal delay occurs when there is a lag between an agent's perception of the environment and its corresponding actions. In this paper, we first formalize delayed-observation Markov decision processes (DOMDP) by extending the standard MDP framework to incorporate signal delays. Next, we elucidate the challenges posed by the presence of signal delay in DRL, showing that trivial DRL algorithms and generic methods for partially observable tasks suffer greatly from delays. Lastly, we propose effective strategies to overcome these challenges. Our methods achieve remarkable performance in continuous robotic control tasks with large delays, yielding results comparable to those in non-delayed cases. Overall, our work contributes to a deeper understanding of DRL in the presence of signal delays and introduces novel approaches to address the associated challenges.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning · Representation Learning

Kai Lagemann, Christian Lagemann, Sach Mukherjee

We propose a new model class aimed at predicting dynamical trajectories from high-dimensional empirical data. This is done by combining variational autoencoders and (spatio-)temporal transformers within a framework designed to enforce certain scientifically-motivated invariances. The models allow inference of system behavior at any continuous time and generalization well beyond the data distributions seen during training. Furthermore, the models do not require an explicit neural ODE formulation, making them efficient and highly scalable in practice. We study behavior through simple theoretical analyses and extensive empirical experiments. The latter investigate the ability to predict the trajectories of complicated systems based on finite data and show that the proposed approaches can outperform existing neural-dynamical models. We study also more general inductive bias in the context of transfer to data obtained under entirely novel system interventions. Overall, our results provide a new framework for efficiently learning complicated dynamics in a data-driven manner, with potential applications in a wide range of fields including physics, biology, and engineering.

Deep Learning · Generative Models and Autoencoders

Arman Isajanyan, Artur Shatveryan, David Kocharian, Zhangyang Wang, Humphrey Shi

Social reward as a form of community recognition provides a strong source ofmotivation for users of online platforms to actively engage and contribute withcontent to accumulate peers approval. In the realm of text-conditioned imagesynthesis, the recent surge in progress has ushered in a collaborative era whereusers and AI systems coalesce to refine visual creations. This co-creative pro-cess in the landscape of online social networks empowers users to craft originalvisual artworks seeking for community validation. Nevertheless, assessing thesemodels in the context of collective community preference introduces distinct chal-lenges. Existing evaluation methods predominantly center on limited size userstudies guided by image quality and alignment with prompts. This work pio-neers a paradigm shift, unveiling Social Reward - an innovative reward modelingframework that leverages implicit feedback from social network users engagedin creative editing of generated images. We embark on an extensive journey ofdataset curation and refinement, drawing from Picsart: an online visual creationand editing platform, yielding a first million-user-scale dataset of implicit humanpreferences for user-generated visual art named Picsart Image-Social. Our anal-ysis exposes the shortcomings of current metrics in modeling community creativepreference of text-to-image models’ outputs, compelling us to introduce a novelpredictive model explicitly tailored to address these limitations. Rigorous quan-titative experiments and user study show that our Social Reward model alignsbetter with social popularity than existing metrics. Furthermore, we utilize So-cial Reward to fine-tune text-to-image models, yielding images that are more fa-vored by not only Social Reward, but also other established metrics. These find-ings highlight the relevance and effectiveness of Social Reward in assessing com-munity appreciation for AI-generated artworks, establishing a closer alignmentwith users’ creative goals: creating popular visual art. Codes can be accessed athttps://github.com/Picsart-AI-Research/Social-Reward

Deep Learning · Large Language Models

Xuming Hu, Junzhe Chen, Xiaochuan Li, Yufei Guo, Lijie Wen, Philip Yu, Zhijiang Guo

Large language models (LLMs) have recently driven striking performance improvements across a range of natural language processing tasks. The factual knowledge acquired during pretraining and instruction tuning can be useful in various downstream tasks, such as question answering, and language generation. Unlike conventional Knowledge Bases (KBs) that explicitly store factual knowledge, LLMs implicitly store facts in their parameters. Content generated by the LLMs can often exhibit inaccuracies or deviations from the truth, due to facts that can be incorrectly induced or become obsolete over time. To this end, we aim to explore the extent and scope of factual knowledge within LLMs by designing the benchmark Pinocchio. Pinocchio contains 20K diverse factual questions that span different sources, timelines, domains, regions, and languages. Furthermore, we investigate whether LLMs can compose multiple facts, update factual knowledge temporally, reason over multiple pieces of facts, identify subtle factual differences, and resist adversarial examples. Extensive experiments on different sizes and types of LLMs show that existing LLMs still lack factual knowledge and suffer from various spurious correlations. We believe this is a critical bottleneck for realizing trustworthy artificial intelligence. The dataset Pinocchio and our codes are publicly available at: https://github.com/THU-BPM/Pinocchio.

Aojun Zhou, Ke Wang, Zimu Lu, Weikang Shi, Sichun Luo, Zipeng Qin, Shaoqing Lu, Anya Jia, Linqi Song, Mingjie Zhan 等

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and PaLM-2 has brought significant advancements in addressing math reasoning problems. In particular, OpenAI's latest version of GPT-4, known as GPT-4 Code Interpreter, shows remarkable performance on challenging math datasets. In this paper, we explore the effect of code on enhancing LLMs' reasoning capability by introducing different constraints on the Code Usage Frequency of GPT-4 Code Interpreter. We found that its success can be largely attributed to its powerful skills in generating and executing code, evaluating the output of code execution, and rectifying its solution when receiving unreasonable outputs. Based on this insight, we propose a novel and effective prompting method, explicit $\underline{\text{c}}$ode-based $\underline{\text{s}}$elf-$\underline{\text{v}}$erification (CSV), to further boost the mathematical reasoning potential of GPT-4 Code Interpreter. This method employs a zero-shot prompt on GPT-4 Code Interpreter to encourage it to use code to self-verify its answers. In instances where the verification state registers as "False", the model shall automatically amend its solution, analogous to our approach of rectifying errors during a mathematics examination. Furthermore, we recognize that the states of the verification result indicate the confidence of a solution, which can improve the effectiveness of majority voting. With GPT-4 Code Interpreter and CSV, we achieve an impressive zero-shot accuracy on MATH dataset.

Deep Learning · Robustness

Sen Cui, Abudukelimu Wuerkaixi, Weishen Pan, Jian Liang, Lei Fang, Changshui Zhang, Fei Wang

In this paper, we investigate a new practical learning scenario, where the data distributed in different sources/clients are typically generated with various modalities. Existing research on learning from multi-source data mostly assume that each client owns the data of all modalities, which may largely limit its practicability. In light of the expensiveness and sparsity of multimodal data, we propose patchwork learning to jointly learn from fragmented multimodal data in distributed clients. Considering the concerns on data privacy, patchwork learning aims to impute incomplete multimodal data for diverse downstream tasks without accessing the raw data directly. Local clients could miss different modality combinations. Due to the statistical heterogeneity induced by non-i.i.d. data, the imputation is more challenging since the learned dependencies fail to adapt to the imputation of other clients. In this paper, we provide a novel imputation framework to tackle modality combination heterogeneity and statistical heterogeneity simultaneously, called ``collaborative adaptation''. In particular, for two observed modality combinations from two clients, we learn the transformations between their maximal intersection and other modalities by proposing a novel ELBO. We improve the worst-performing required transformations through a Pareto min-max optimization framework. In extensive experiments, we demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method compared to existing related methods on benchmark data sets and a real-world clinical data set.