论文检索

Generative Models · Misc

Kanghee Park, Jiayu Wang, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Nadia Polikarpova, Loris D'Antoni

Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with reliably generating highly structured outputs, such as program code, mathematical formulas, or well-formed markup. Constrained decoding approaches mitigate this problem by greedily restricting what tokens an LLM can output at each step to guarantee that the output matches a given constraint. Specifically, in grammar-constrained decoding (GCD), the LLM's output must follow a given grammar. In this paper we demonstrate that GCD techniques (and in general constrained decoding techniques) can distort the LLM's distribution, leading to outputs that are grammatical but appear with likelihoods that are not proportional to the ones given by the LLM, and so ultimately are low-quality. We call the problem of aligning sampling with a grammar constraint, grammar-aligned decoding (GAD), and propose adaptive sampling with approximate expected futures (ASAp), a decoding algorithm that guarantees the output to be grammatical while provably producing outputs that match the conditional probability of the LLM's distribution conditioned on the given grammar constraint. Our algorithm uses prior sample outputs to soundly overapproximate the future grammaticality of different output prefixes. Our evaluation on code generation and structured NLP tasks shows how ASAp often produces outputs with higher likelihood (according to the LLM's distribution) than existing GCD techniques, while still enforcing the desired grammatical constraints.

Multimodal Models

Jiayu Wang, Yifei Ming, Zhenmei Shi, Vibhav Vineet, Xin Wang, Sharon Li, Neel Joshi

Large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks and domains. Despite this promise, spatial understanding and reasoning—a fundamental component of human cognition—remains under-explored. We propose SpatialEval, a novel benchmark that covers diverse aspects of spatial reasoning such as relationship understanding, navigation, and counting. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of competitive language and vision-language models. Our findings reveal several counter-intuitive insights that have been overlooked in the literature: (1) Spatial reasoning poses significant challenges where competitive models can fall behind random guessing; (2) Despite additional visual input, VLMs often under-perform compared to their LLM counterparts; (3) When both textual and visual information is available, multi-modal language models become less reliant on visual information if sufficient textual clues are provided. Additionally, we demonstrate that leveraging redundancy between vision and text can significantly enhance model performance. We hope our study will inform the development of multimodal models to improve spatial intelligence and further close the gap with human intelligence. Our code is available at https://github.com/jiayuww/SpatialEval.

Deep Learning · Everything Else

KAIRAN ZHAO, Meghdad Kurmanji, George-Octavian Bărbulescu, Eleni Triantafillou, Peter Triantafillou

Machine unlearning is the problem of removing the effect of a subset of training data (the ``forget set'') from a trained model without damaging the model's utility e.g. to comply with users' requests to delete their data, or remove mislabeled, poisoned or otherwise problematic data.With unlearning research still being at its infancy, many fundamental open questions exist: Are there interpretable characteristics of forget sets that substantially affect the difficulty of the problem? How do these characteristics affect different state-of-the-art algorithms?With this paper, we present the first investigation aiming to answer these questions. We identify two key factors affecting unlearning difficulty and the performance of unlearning algorithms. Evaluation on forget sets that isolate these identified factors reveals previously-unknown behaviours of state-of-the-art algorithms that don't materialize on random forget sets.Based on our insights, we develop a framework coined Refined-Unlearning Meta-algorithm (RUM) that encompasses: (i) refining the forget set into homogenized subsets, according to different characteristics; and (ii) a meta-algorithm that employs existing algorithms to unlearn each subset and finally delivers a model that has unlearned the overall forget set. We find that RUM substantially improves top-performing unlearning algorithms. Overall, we view our work as an important step in (i) deepening our scientific understanding of unlearning and (ii) revealing new pathways to improving the state-of-the-art.

Reinforcement Learning · Everything Else

Nicola Dainese, Matteo Merler, Minttu Alakuijala, Pekka Marttinen

In this work we consider Code World Models, world models generated by a Large Language Model (LLM) in the form of Python code for model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL). Calling code instead of LLMs for planning has potential to be more precise, reliable, interpretable, and extremely efficient.However, writing appropriate Code World Models requires the ability to understand complex instructions, to generate exact code with non-trivial logic and to self-debug a long program with feedback from unit tests and environment trajectories. To address these challenges, we propose Generate, Improve and Fix with Monte Carlo Tree Search (GIF-MCTS), a new code generation strategy for LLMs. To test our approach in an offline RL setting, we introduce the Code World Models Benchmark (CWMB), a suite of program synthesis and planning tasks comprised of 18 diverse RL environments paired with corresponding textual descriptions and curated trajectories. GIF-MCTS surpasses all baselines on the CWMB and two other benchmarks, and we show that the Code World Models synthesized with it can be successfully used for planning, resulting in model-based RL agents with greatly improved sample efficiency and inference speed.

Optimization · Optimization and Learning under Uncertainty

Wenjing YAN, Xuanyu Cao

Distribution variations in machine learning, driven by the dynamic nature of deployment environments, significantly impact the performance of learning models. This paper explores endogenous distribution shifts in learning systems, where deployed models influence environments and subsequently alter data distributions. This phenomenon is formulated by a decision-dependent distribution mapping within the recently proposed framework of performative prediction (PP) Perdomo et al. (2020). We investigate the performative effect in a decentralized noncooperative game, where players aim to minimize private cost functions while simultaneously managing coupled inequality constraints. Under performativity, we examine two equilibrium concepts for the studied game: performative stable equilibrium (PSE) and Nash equilibrium (NE), and establish sufficient conditions for their existence and uniqueness. Notably, we provide the first upper bound on the distance between the PSE and NE in the literature, which is challenging to evaluate due to the absence of strong convexity on the joint cost function. Furthermore, we develop a decentralized stochastic primal-dual algorithm for efficiently computing the PSE point. By carefully bounding the performative effect in theoretical analysis, we prove that the proposed algorithm achieves sublinear convergence rates for both performative regrets and constraint violation and maintains the same order of convergence rate as the case without performativity. Numerical experiments validate the effectiveness of our algorithm and theoretical results.

Trustworthy Machine Learning

Fengyu Gao, Ruiquan Huang, Jing Yang

We study the problems of differentially private federated online prediction from experts against both *stochastic adversaries* and *oblivious adversaries*. We aim to minimize the average regret on $m$ clients working in parallel over time horizon $T$ with explicit differential privacy (DP) guarantees. With stochastic adversaries, we propose a **Fed-DP-OPE-Stoch** algorithm that achieves $\sqrt{m}$-fold speed-up of the per-client regret compared to the single-player counterparts under both pure DP and approximate DP constraints, while maintaining logarithmic communication costs. With oblivious adversaries, we establish non-trivial lower bounds indicating that *collaboration among clients does not lead to regret speed-up with general oblivious adversaries*. We then consider a special case of the oblivious adversaries setting, where there exists a low-loss expert. We design a new algorithm **Fed-SVT** and show that it achieves an $m$-fold regret speed-up under both pure DP and approximate DP constraints over the single-player counterparts. Our lower bound indicates that Fed-SVT is nearly optimal up to logarithmic factors. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work examining the differentially private online prediction from experts in the federated setting.

Datasets and Benchmarks

Jeffrey Li, Alex Fang, Georgios Smyrnis, Maor Ivgi, Matt Jordan, Samir Yitzhak Gadre, Hritik Bansal, Etash Guha, Sedrick Scott Keh, Kushal Arora 等

We introduce DataComp for Language Models, a testbed for controlled dataset experiments with the goal of improving language models.As part of DCLM, we provide a standardized corpus of 240T tokens extracted from Common Crawl, effective pretraining recipes based on the OpenLM framework, and a broad suite of 53 downstream evaluations.Participants in the DCLM benchmark can experiment with data curation strategies such as deduplication, filtering, and data mixing atmodel scales ranging from 412M to 7B parameters.As a baseline for DCLM, we conduct extensive experiments and find that model-based filtering is key to assembling a high-quality training set.The resulting dataset, DCLM-Baseline, enables training a 7B parameter language model from scratch to 63% 5-shot accuracy on MMLU with 2T training tokens.Compared to MAP-Neo, the previous state-of-the-art in open-data language models, DCLM-Baseline represents a 6 percentage point improvement on MMLU while being trained with half the compute.Our results highlight the importance of dataset design for training language models and offer a starting point for further research on data curation. We release the \dclm benchmark, framework, models, and datasets at https://www.datacomp.ai/dclm/

Multimodal Models

Yuhui Zhang, Alyssa Unell, Xiaohan Wang, Dhruba Ghosh, Yuchang Su, Ludwig Schmidt, Serena Yeung

Image classification is one of the most fundamental capabilities of machine vision intelligence. In this work, we revisit the image classification task using visually-grounded language models (VLMs) such as GPT-4V and LLaVA. We find that existing proprietary and public VLMs, despite often using CLIP as a vision encoder and having many more parameters, significantly underperform CLIP on standard image classification benchmarks like ImageNet. To understand the reason, we explore several hypotheses concerning the inference algorithms, training objectives, and data processing in VLMs. Our analysis reveals that the primary cause is data-related: critical information for image classification is encoded in the VLM's latent space but can only be effectively decoded with enough training data. Specifically, there is a strong correlation between the frequency of class exposure during VLM training and instruction-tuning and the VLM's performance in those classes; when trained with sufficient data, VLMs can match the accuracy of state-of-the-art classification models. Based on these findings, we enhance a VLM by integrating classification-focused datasets into its training, and demonstrate that the enhanced classification performance of the VLM transfers to its general capabilities, resulting in an improvement of 11.8% on the newly collected ImageWikiQA dataset.

Trustworthy Machine Learning

Hossein Mirzaei, Ali Ansari, Bahar Dibaei Nia, Mojtaba Nafez, Moein Madadi, Sepehr Rezaee, Zeinab Taghavi, Arad Maleki, Kian Shamsaie, Mahdi Hajialilue 等

Scanning for trojan (backdoor) in deep neural networks is crucial due to their significant real-world applications. There has been an increasing focus on developing effective general trojan scanning methods across various trojan attacks. Despite advancements, there remains a shortage of methods that perform effectively without preconceived assumptions about the backdoor attack method. Additionally, we have observed that current methods struggle to identify classifiers trojaned using adversarial training. Motivated by these challenges, our study introduces a novel scanning method named TRODO (TROjan scanning by Detection of adversarial shifts in Out-of-distribution samples). TRODO leverages the concept of "blind spots"—regions where trojaned classifiers erroneously identify out-of-distribution (OOD) samples as in-distribution (ID). We scan for these blind spots by adversarially shifting OOD samples towards in-distribution. The increased likelihood of perturbed OOD samples being classified as ID serves as a signature for trojan detection. TRODO is both trojan and label mapping agnostic, effective even against adversarially trained trojaned classifiers. It is applicable even in scenarios where training data is absent, demonstrating high accuracy and adaptability across various scenarios and datasets, highlighting its potential as a robust trojan scanning strategy.

Trustworthy Machine Learning

Lingkai Kong, Haorui Wang, Wenhao Mu, Yuanqi Du, Yuchen Zhuang, Yifei Zhou, Yue Song, Rongzhi Zhang, Kai Wang, Chao Zhang

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human objectives is crucial for real-world applications. However, fine-tuning LLMs for alignment often suffers from unstable training and requires substantial computing resources. Test-time alignment techniques, such as prompting and guided decoding, do not modify the underlying model, and their performance remains dependent on the original model's capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose aligning LLMs through representation editing. The core of our method is to view a pre-trained autoregressive LLM as a discrete-time stochastic dynamical system. To achieve alignment for specific objectives, we introduce external control signals into the state space of this language dynamical system. We train a value function directly on the hidden states according to the Bellman equation, enabling gradient-based optimization to obtain the optimal control signals at test time. Our experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing test-time alignment techniques while requiring significantly fewer resources compared to fine-tuning methods. Our code is available at [https://github.com/Lingkai-Kong/RE-Control](https://github.com/Lingkai-Kong/RE-Control).

Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Yiqi Jiang, Hakki Akengin, Ji Zhou, Mehmet Aslihak, Yang Li, Radoslaw Chrapkiewicz, Oscar Hernandez, sadegh ebrahimi, Omar Jaidar, Yanping Zhang 等

Recent advances in calcium imaging enable simultaneous recordings of up to a million neurons in behaving animals, producing datasets of unprecedented scales. Although individual neurons and their activity traces can be extracted from these videos with automated algorithms, the results often require human curation to remove false positives, a laborious process called \emph{cell sorting}. To address this challenge, we introduce ActSort, an active-learning algorithm for sorting large-scale datasets that integrates features engineered by domain experts together with data formats with minimal memory requirements. By strategically bringing outlier cell candidates near the decision boundary up for annotation, ActSort reduces human labor to about 1–3\% of cell candidates and improves curation accuracy by mitigating annotator bias. To facilitate the algorithm's widespread adoption among experimental neuroscientists, we created a user-friendly software and conducted a first-of-its-kind benchmarking study involving about 160,000 annotations. Our tests validated ActSort's performance across different experimental conditions and datasets from multiple animals. Overall, ActSort addresses a crucial bottleneck in processing large-scale calcium videos of neural activity and thereby facilitates systems neuroscience experiments at previously inaccessible scales. (\url{https://github.com/schnitzer-lab/ActSort-public})

Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Francisco Acosta, Fatih Dinc, William Redman, Manu Madhav, David Klindt, Nina Miolane

Grid cells in the mammalian brain are fundamental to spatial navigation, and therefore crucial to how animals perceive and interact with their environment. Traditionally, grid cells are thought support path integration through highly symmetric hexagonal lattice firing patterns. However, recent findings show that their firing patterns become distorted in the presence of significant spatial landmarks such as rewarded locations. This introduces a novel perspective of dynamic, subjective, and action-relevant interactions between spatial representations and environmental cues. Here, we propose a practical and theoretical framework to quantify and explain these interactions. To this end, we train path-integrating recurrent neural networks (piRNNs) on a spatial navigation task, whose goal is to predict the agent's position with a special focus on rewarded locations. Grid-like neurons naturally emerge from the training of piRNNs, which allows us to investigate how the two aspects of the task, space and reward, are integrated in their firing patterns. We find that geometry, but not topology, of the grid cell population code becomes distorted. Surprisingly, these distortions are global in the firing patterns of the grid cells despite local changes in the reward. Our results indicate that after training with location-specific reward information, the preserved representational topology supports successful path integration, whereas the emergent heterogeneity in individual responses due to global distortions may encode dynamically changing environmental cues. By bridging the gap between computational models and the biological reality of spatial navigation under reward information, we offer new insights into how neural systems prioritize environmental landmarks in their spatial navigation code.

Generative Models · Diffusion models

Junyi Wu, Haoxuan Wang, Yuzhang Shang, Mubarak Shah, Yan Yan

The recent introduction of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) has demonstrated exceptional capabilities in image generation by using a different backbone architecture, departing from traditional U-Nets and embracing the scalable nature of transformers. Despite their advanced capabilities, the wide deployment of DiTs, particularly for real-time applications, is currently hampered by considerable computational demands at the inference stage. Post-training Quantization (PTQ) has emerged as a fast and data-efficient solution that can significantly reduce computation and memory footprint by using low-bit weights and activations. However, its applicability to DiTs has not yet been explored and faces non-trivial difficulties due to the unique design of DiTs. In this paper, we propose PTQ4DiT, a specifically designed PTQ method for DiTs. We discover two primary quantization challenges inherent in DiTs, notably the presence of salient channels with extreme magnitudes and the temporal variability in distributions of salient activation over multiple timesteps. To tackle these challenges, we propose Channel-wise Salience Balancing (CSB) and Spearmen's $\rho$-guided Salience Calibration (SSC). CSB leverages the complementarity property of channel magnitudes to redistribute the extremes, alleviating quantization errors for both activations and weights. SSC extends this approach by dynamically adjusting the balanced salience to capture the temporal variations in activation. Additionally, to eliminate extra computational costs caused by PTQ4DiT during inference, we design an offline re-parameterization strategy for DiTs. Experiments demonstrate that our PTQ4DiT successfully quantizes DiTs to 8-bit precision (W8A8) while preserving comparable generation ability and further enables effective quantization to 4-bit weight precision (W4A8) for the first time.

Graph Neural Networks

Renhong Huang, Jiarong Xu, Zhiming Yang, Xiang Si, Xin Jiang, Hanyang Yuan, Chunping Wang, YANG YANG

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have significantly advanced the field of drug discovery, enhancing the speed and efficiency of molecular identification. However, training these GNNs demands vast amounts of molecular data, which has spurred the emergence of collaborative model-sharing initiatives. These initiatives facilitate the sharing of molecular pre-trained models among organizations without exposing proprietary training data. Despite the benefits, these molecular pre-trained models may still pose privacy risks. For example, malicious adversaries could perform data extraction attack to recover private training data, thereby threatening commercial secrets and collaborative trust. This work, for the first time, explores the risks of extracting private training molecular data from molecular pre-trained models. This task is nontrivial as the molecular pre-trained models are non-generative and exhibit a diversity of model architectures, which differs significantly from language and image models. To address these issues, we introduce a molecule generation approach and propose a novel, model-independent scoring function for selecting promising molecules. To efficiently reduce the search space of potential molecules, we further introduce a Molecule Extraction Policy Network for molecule extraction. Our experiments demonstrate that even with only query access to molecular pre-trained models, there is a considerable risk of extracting training data, challenging the assumption that model sharing alone provides adequate protection against data extraction attacks. Our codes are publicly available at: \url{https://github.com/renH2/Molextract}.

Privacy

Hanyang Yuan, Jiarong Xu, Renhong Huang, Mingli Song, Chunping Wang, YANG YANG

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have attracted considerable attention due to their diverse applications. However, the scarcity and quality limitations of graph data present challenges to their training process in practical settings. To facilitate the development of effective GNNs, companies and researchers often seek external collaboration. Yet, directly sharing data raises privacy concerns, motivating data owners to train GNNs on their private graphs and share the trained models. Unfortunately, these models may still inadvertently disclose sensitive properties of their training graphs (\textit{e.g.}, average default rate in a transaction network), leading to severe consequences for data owners. In this work, we study graph property inference attack to identify the risk of sensitive property information leakage from shared models.Existing approaches typically train numerous shadow models for developing such attack, which is computationally intensive and impractical. To address this issue, we propose an efficient graph property inference attack by leveraging model approximation techniques. Our method only requires training a small set of models on graphs, while generating a sufficient number of approximated shadow models for attacks.To enhance diversity while reducing errors in the approximated models, we apply edit distance to quantify the diversity within a group of approximated models and introduce a theoretically guaranteed criterion to evaluate each model's error. Subsequently, we propose a novel selection mechanism to ensure that the retained approximated models achieve high diversity and low error.Extensive experiments across six real-world scenarios demonstrate our method's substantial improvement, with average increases of 2.7\% in attack accuracy and 4.1\% in ROC-AUC, while being 6.5$\times$ faster compared to the best baseline.

Computer Vision

Weiquan Wang, Jun Xiao, Chunping Wang, Wei Liu, Zhao Wang, Long Chen

Diffusion models have demonstrated their effectiveness in addressing the inherent uncertainty and indeterminacy in monocular 3D human pose estimation (HPE). Despite their strengths, the need for large search spaces and the corresponding demand for substantial training data make these models prone to generating biomechanically unrealistic poses. This challenge is particularly noticeable in occlusion scenarios, where the complexity of inferring 3D structures from 2D images intensifies. In response to these limitations, we introduce the **Di**screte **Di**ffusion **Pose** (**$\text{Di}^2\text{Pose}$**), a novel framework designed for occluded 3D HPE that capitalizes on the benefits of a discrete diffusion model. Specifically, **$\text{Di}^2\text{Pose}$** employs a two-stage process: it first converts 3D poses into a discrete representation through a pose quantization step, which is subsequently modeled in latent space through a discrete diffusion process. This methodological innovation restrictively confines the search space towards physically viable configurations and enhances the model’s capability to comprehend how occlusions affect human pose within the latent space. Extensive evaluations conducted on various benchmarks (e.g., Human3.6M, 3DPW, and 3DPW-Occ) have demonstrated its effectiveness.

Deep Learning · Algorithms

Minghui Chen, Meirui Jiang, Xin Zhang, DOU QI, Zehua Wang, Xiaoxiao Li

Federated learning (FL) is a learning paradigm that enables collaborative training of models using decentralized data. Recently, the utilization of pre-trained weight initialization in FL has been demonstrated to effectively improve model performance. However, the evolving complexity of current pre-trained models, characterized by a substantial increase in parameters, markedly intensifies the challenges associated with communication rounds required for their adaptation to FL. To address these communication cost issues and increase the performance of pre-trained model adaptation in FL, we propose an innovative model interpolation-based local training technique called ``Local Superior Soups.''Our method enhances local training across different clients, encouraging the exploration of a connected low-loss basin within a few communication rounds through regularized model interpolation. This approach acts as a catalyst for the seamless adaptation of pre-trained models in in FL.We demonstrated its effectiveness and efficiency across diverse widely-used FL datasets.

Marek Elias, Haim Kaplan, Yishay Mansour, Shay Moran

Recent advances in algorithmic design show how to utilize predictions obtained by machine learning models from past and present data. These approaches have demonstrated an enhancement in performance when the predictions are accurate, while also ensuring robustness by providing worst-case guarantees when predictions fail. In this paper we focus on online problems; prior research in this context was focused on a paradigm where the algorithms are oblivious of the predictors' design, treating them as a black box. In contrast, in this work,we unpack the predictor and integrate the learning problem it gives rise for within the algorithmic challenge. In particular we allow the predictor to learn as it receives larger parts of the input, with the ultimate goal of designing online learning algorithms specifically tailored for the algorithmic task at hand. Adopting this perspective, we focus on a number of fundamental problems, including caching and scheduling, which have been well-studied in the black-box setting. For each of the problems, we introduce new algorithms that take advantage of explicit and carefully designed learning rules. These pairings of online algorithms with corresponding learning rules yields improvements in the overall performance in comparison with previous work.

Generative Models

Anuroop Sriram, Benjamin Miller, Ricky T. Q. Chen, Brandon Wood

Material discovery is a critical area of research with the potential to revolutionize various fields, including carbon capture, renewable energy, and electronics. However, the immense scale of the chemical space makes it challenging to explore all possible materials experimentally. In this paper, we introduce FlowLLM, a novel generative model that combines large language models (LLMs) and Riemannian flow matching (RFM) to design novel crystalline materials. FlowLLM first fine-tunes an LLM to learn an effective base distribution of meta-stable crystals in a text representation. After converting to a graph representation, the RFM model takes samples from the LLM and iteratively refines the coordinates and lattice parameters. Our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, increasing the generation rate of stable materials by over three times and increasing the rate for stable, unique, and novel crystals by $\sim50$% – a huge improvement on a difficult problem. Additionally, the crystals generated by FlowLLM are much closer to their relaxed state when compared with another leading model, significantly reducing post-hoc computational cost.

Multimodal Models

Chong Ma, Hanqi Jiang, Wenting Chen, Yiwei Li, Zihao Wu, Xiaowei Yu, Zhengliang Liu, Lei Guo, Dajiang Zhu, Tuo Zhang 等

In the medical multi-modal frameworks, the alignment of cross-modality features presents a significant challenge. However, existing works have learned features that are implicitly aligned from the data, without considering the explicit relationships in the medical context. This data-reliance may lead to low generalization of the learned alignment relationships. In this work, we propose the Eye-gaze Guided Multi-modal Alignment (EGMA) framework to harness eye-gaze data for better alignment of medical visual and textual features. We explore the natural auxiliary role of radiologists' eye-gaze data in aligning medical images and text, and introduce a novel approach by using eye-gaze data, collected synchronously by radiologists during diagnostic evaluations. We conduct downstream tasks of image classification and image-text retrieval on four medical datasets, where EGMA achieved state-of-the-art performance and stronger generalization across different datasets. Additionally, we explore the impact of varying amounts of eye-gaze data on model performance, highlighting the feasibility and utility of integrating this auxiliary data into multi-modal alignment framework.