论文检索

Applications · Everything Else

Zijie Geng, Jie Wang, Ziyan Liu, Siyuan Xu, Zhentao Tang, Mingxuan Yuan, Jianye Hao, Yongdong Zhang, Feng Wu

Macro placement is a crucial step in modern chip design, and reinforcement learning (RL) has recently emerged as a promising technique for improving the placement quality. However, existing RL-based techniques are hindered by their low sample efficiency, requiring numerous online rollouts or substantial offline expert data to achieve bootstrap, which are often impractical in industrial scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose a novel sample-efficient framework, namely **EfficientPlace**, for fast macro placement. EfficientPlace integrates a global tree search algorithm to strategically direct the optimization process, as well as a RL agent for local policy learning to advance the tree search. Experiments on commonly used benchmarks demonstrate that EfficientPlace achieves remarkable placement quality within a short timeframe, outperforming recent state-of-the-art approaches.

Deep Learning · Everything Else

Mateusz Gabor, Tomasz Piotrowski, Renato L. G. Cavalcante

Deep equilibrium (DEQ) models are widely recognized as a memory efficient alternative to standard neural networks, achieving state-of-the-art performance in language modeling and computer vision tasks. These models solve a fixed point equation instead of explicitly computing the output, which sets them apart from standard neural networks. However, existing DEQ models often lack formal guarantees of the existence and uniqueness of the fixed point, and the convergence of the numerical scheme used for computing the fixed point is not formally established. As a result, DEQ models are potentially unstable in practice. To address these drawbacks, we introduce a novel class of DEQ models called positive concave deep equilibrium (pcDEQ) models. Our approach, which is based on nonlinear Perron-Frobenius theory, enforces nonnegative weights and activation functions that are concave on the positive orthant. By imposing these constraints, we can easily ensure the existence and uniqueness of the fixed point without relying on additional complex assumptions commonly found in the DEQ literature, such as those based on monotone operator theory in convex analysis. Furthermore, the fixed point can be computed with the standard fixed point algorithm, and we provide theoretical guarantees of its geometric convergence, which, in particular, simplifies the training process. Experiments demonstrate the competitiveness of our pcDEQ models against other implicit models.

Deep Learning · Everything Else

Kawin Ethayarajh, Winnie Xu, Niklas Muennighoff, Dan Jurafsky, Douwe Kiela

Kahneman & Tversky's $\textit{prospect theory}$ tells us that humans perceive random variables in a biased but well-defined manner (1992); for example, humans are famously loss-averse. We show that objectives for aligning LLMs with human feedback implicitly incorporate many of these biases---the success of these objectives (e.g., DPO) over cross-entropy minimization can partly be ascribed to them belonging to a family of loss functions that we call $\textit{human-aware losses}$ (HALOs). However, the utility functions these methods attribute to humans still differ from those in the prospect theory literature. Using a Kahneman-Tversky model of human utility, we propose a HALO that directly maximizes the utility of generations instead of maximizing the log-likelihood of preferences, as current methods do. We call this approach KTO, and it matches or exceeds the performance of preference-based methods at scales from 1B to 30B, despite only learning from a binary signal of whether an output is desirable. More broadly, our work suggests that there is no one HALO that is universally superior; the best loss depends on the inductive biases most appropriate for a given setting, an oft-overlooked consideration.

Deep Learning · Everything Else

Logan Engstrom

When selecting data for training large-scale models, standard practice is to filter for examples that match human notions of data quality. Such filtering yields qualitatively clean datapoints that intuitively should improve model behavior. However, in practice the opposite can often happen: we find that selecting according to similarity with "high quality" data sources may not increase (and can even hurt) performance compared to randomly selecting data. To develop better methods for selecting data, we start by framing dataset selection as an optimization problem that we can directly solve for: given target tasks, a learning algorithm, and candidate data, select the subset that maximizes model performance. This framework thus avoids handpicked notions of data quality, and instead models explicitly how the learning process uses train datapoints to predict on the target tasks. Our resulting method greatly improves language model (LM) performance on both pre-specified tasks and previously unseen tasks. Specifically, choosing target tasks representative of standard LM problems and evaluating on diverse held-out benchmarks, our selected datasets provide a 2x compute multiplier over baseline methods.

Social Aspects · Everything Else

Stephanie Eckman, Barbara Plank, Frauke Kreuter

Whether future AI models are fair, trustworthy, and aligned with the public's interests rests in part on our ability to collect accurate data about what we want the models to do. However, collecting high-quality data is difficult, and few AI/ML researchers are trained in data collection methods. Recent research in data-centric AI has show that higher quality training data leads to better performing models, making this the right moment to introduce AI/ML researchers to the field of survey methodology, the science of data collection. We summarize insights from the survey methodology literature and discuss how they can improve the quality of training and feedback data. We also suggest collaborative research ideas into how biases in data collection can be mitigated, making models more accurate and human-centric.

Social Aspects · Everything Else

Jessica Dai

What is *agency,* and why does it matter? In this work, we draw from the political science and philosophy literature and give two competing visions of what it means to be an (ethical) agent. The first view, which we term *mechanistic*, is commonly— and implicitly—assumed in AI research, yet it is a fundamentally limited means to understand the ethical characteristics of AI. Under the second view, which we term volitional, AI can no longer be considered an ethical agent. We discuss the implications of each of these views for two critical questions: first, what the ideal system “ought” to look like, and second, how accountability may be achieved. In light of this discussion, we ultimately argue that, in the context of ethically-significant behavior, AI should be viewed not as an agent but as the outcome of political processes.

Optimization · Everything Else

Ross Clarke, Jose Miguel Hernandez-Lobato

Research into optimisation for deep learning is characterised by a tension between the computational efficiency of first-order, gradient-based methods (such as SGD and Adam) and the theoretical efficiency of second-order, curvature-based methods (such as quasi-Newton methods and K-FAC). Noting that second-order methods often only function effectively with the addition of stabilising heuristics (such as Levenberg-Marquardt damping), we ask how much these (as opposed to the second-order curvature model) contribute to second-order algorithms' performance. We thus study _AdamQLR_: an optimiser combining damping and learning rate selection techniques from K-FAC (Martens & Grosse, 2015) with the update directions proposed by Adam, inspired by considering Adam through a second-order lens. We evaluate AdamQLR on a range of regression and classification tasks at various scales and hyperparameter tuning methodologies, concluding K-FAC's adaptive heuristics are of variable standalone general effectiveness, and finding an _untuned_ AdamQLR setting can achieve comparable performance vs runtime to _tuned_ benchmarks.

Theory · Everything Else

Davin Choo, Themis Gouleakis, Chun Kai Ling, Arnab Bhattacharyya

We study the problem of online unweighted bipartite matching with $n$ offline vertices and $n$ online vertices where one wishes to be competitive against the optimal offline algorithm. While the classic RANKING algorithm of (Karp et al., 1990) provably attains competitive ratio of $1-1/e > 1/2$, we show that no learning-augmented method can be both 1-consistent and strictly better than 1/2-robust under the adversarial arrival model. Meanwhile, under the random arrival model, we show how one can utilize methods from distribution testing to design an algorithm that takes in external advice about the online vertices and provably achieves competitive ratio interpolating between any ratio attainable by advice-free methods and the optimal ratio of 1, depending on the advice quality.

Applications · Everything Else

Mouxiang Chen, Chenghao Liu, Zemin Liu, Zhuo Li, Jianling Sun

Unbiased Learning to Rank (ULTR) aims to train unbiased ranking models from biased click logs, by explicitly modeling a generation process for user behavior and fitting click data based on examination hypothesis. Previous research found empirically that the true latent relevance is mostly recoverable through click fitting. However, we demonstrate that this is not always achievable, resulting in a significant reduction in ranking performance. This research investigates the conditions under which relevance can be recovered from click data in the first principle. We initially characterize a ranking model as identifiable if it can recover the true relevance up to a scaling transformation, a criterion sufficient for the pairwise ranking objective. Subsequently, we investigate an equivalent condition for identifiability, articulated as a graph connectivity test problem: the recovery of relevance is feasible if and only if the identifiability graph (IG), derived from the underlying structure of the dataset, is connected. The presence of a disconnected IG may lead to degenerate cases and suboptimal ranking performance. To tackle this challenge, we introduce two methods, namely node intervention and node merging, designed to modify the dataset and restore the connectivity of the IG. Empirical results derived from a simulated dataset and two real-world LTR benchmark datasets not only validate our proposed theory, but also demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods in alleviating data bias when the relevance model is unidentifiable.

Applications · Everything Else

Xi Chen, Zhewen Hou, Christopher Metzler, Arian Maleki, Shirin Jalali

We investigate both the theoretical and algorithmic aspects of likelihood-based methods for recovering a complex-valued signal from multiple sets of measurements, referred to as looks, affected by speckle (multiplicative) noise. Our theoretical contributions include establishing the first existing theoretical upper bound on the Mean Squared Error (MSE) of the maximum likelihood estimator under the deep image prior hypothesis. Our theoretical results capture the dependence of MSE upon the number of parameters in the deep image prior, the number of looks, the signal dimension, and the number of measurements per look. On the algorithmic side, we introduce the concept of bagged Deep Image Priors (Bagged-DIP) and integrate them with projected gradient descent. Furthermore, we show how employing Newton-Schulz algorithm for calculating matrix inverses within the iterations of PGD reduces the computational complexity of the algorithm. We will show that this method achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

Applications · Everything Else

Kirill Brilliantov, Fedor Pavutnitskiy, Dmitrii A. Pasechniuk, German Magai

Computing homotopy groups of spheres has long been a fundamental objective in algebraic topology. Various theoretical and algorithmic approaches have been developed to tackle this problem. In this paper we take a step towards the goal of comprehending the group-theoretic structure of the generators of these homotopy groups by leveraging the power of machine learning. Specifically, in the simplicial group setting of Wu's formula, we reformulate the problem of generating simplicial cycles as a problem of sampling from the intersection of algorithmic datasets related to Dyck languages. We present and evaluate language modelling approaches that employ multi-label information for input sequences, along with the necessary group-theoretic toolkit and non-neural baselines.

Deep Learning · Everything Else

Ifigeneia Apostolopoulou, Benjamin Eysenbach, Frank Nielsen, Artur Dubrawski

In supervised learning, understanding an input’s proximity to the training data can help a model decide whether it has sufficient evidence for reaching a reliable prediction. While powerful probabilistic models such as Gaussian Processes naturally have this property, deep neural networks often lack it. In this paper, we introduce Distance Aware Bottleneck (DAB), i.e., a new method for enriching deep neural networks with this property. Building on prior information bottleneck approaches, our method learns a codebook that stores a compressed representation of all inputs seen during training. The distance of a new example from this codebook can serve as an uncertainty estimate for the example. The resulting model is simple to train and provides deterministic uncertainty estimates by a single forward pass. Finally, our method achieves better out-of-distribution (OOD) detection and misclassification prediction than prior methods, including expensive ensemble methods, deep kernel Gaussian Processes, and approaches based on the standard information bottleneck.

Deep Learning · Everything Else

Idan Achituve, Idit Diamant, Arnon Netzer, Gal Chechik, Ethan Fetaya

As machine learning becomes more prominent there is a growing demand to perform several inference tasks in parallel. Multi-task learning (MTL) addresses this challenge by learning a single model that solves several tasks simultaneously and efficiently. Often optimizing MTL models entails first computing the gradient of the loss for each task, and then aggregating all the gradients to obtain a combined update direction. However, common methods following this approach do not consider an important aspect, the sensitivity in the dimensions of the gradients. Some dimensions may be more lenient for changes while others may be more restrictive. Here, we introduce a novel gradient aggregation procedure using Bayesian inference. We place a probability distribution over the task-specific parameters, which in turn induce a *distribution* over the gradients of the tasks. This valuable information allows us to quantify the uncertainty associated with each of the gradients' dimensions which is factored in when aggregating them. We empirically demonstrate the benefits of our approach in a variety of datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

Applications · Everything Else

Xueliang Zhao, Wenda Li, Lingpeng Kong

Large language models (LLMs) present a promising pathway for advancing the domain of formal theorem proving. In this paper, we aim to improve the performance of LLMs in formal theorem proving by thoroughly examining the structure and organization of demonstrative in-context examples. We introduce a subgoal-based demonstration learning framework, specifically designed to enhance the efficiency of proof search in LLMs. First, drawing upon the insights of subgoal learning from reinforcement learning and robotics, we propose the construction of distinct subgoals for each demonstration example and refine these subgoals in accordance with the pertinent theories of subgoal learning. Second, we build upon recent advances in diffusion models to predict the optimal organization, simultaneously addressing two intricate issues that persist within the domain of demonstration organization: subset selection and order determination. Our integration of subgoal-based learning has notably increased proof accuracy from 38.9% to 44.1% on the miniF2F benchmark. Furthermore, the adoption of diffusion models for demonstration organization can lead to an additional enhancement in accuracy to 45.5%, or a $5\times$ improvement in sampling efficiency compared to previously established methods.

Applications · Everything Else

Haofan Lu, Christopher Vattheuer, Baharan Mirzasoleiman, Omid Abari

We present NeWRF, a novel deep-learning-based framework for predicting wireless channels. Wireless channel prediction is a long-standing problem in the wireless community and is a key technology for improving the coverage of wireless network deployments. Today, a wireless deployment is evaluated by a site survey which is a cumbersome process requiring an experienced engineer to perform extensive channel measurements. To reduce the cost of site surveys, we develop NeWRF, which is based on recent advances in Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). NeWRF trains a neural network model with a sparse set of channel measurements, and predicts the wireless channel accurately at any location in the site. We introduce a series of techniques that integrate wireless propagation properties into the NeRF framework to account for the fundamental differences between the behavior of light and wireless signals. We conduct extensive evaluations of our framework and show that our approach can accurately predict channels at unvisited locations with significantly lower measurement density than prior state-of-the-art.

Deep Learning · Everything Else

Jiahan Zhang, Qi Wei, Feng Liu, Lei Feng

Fine-tuning vision-language models (VLMs) with abundant unlabeled data recently has attracted increasing attention. Existing methods that resort to the pseudolabeling strategy would suffer from heavily incorrect hard pseudolabels when VLMs exhibit low zero-shot performance in downstream tasks. To alleviate this issue, we propose a **C**andidate **P**seudolabel **L**earning method, termed **CPL**, to fine-tune VLMs with suitable candidate pseudolabels of unlabeled data in downstream tasks. The core of our method lies in the generation strategy of candidate pseudolabels, which progressively generates refined candidate pseudolabels by both intra- and inter-instance label selection, based on a confidence score matrix for all unlabeled data. This strategy can result in better performance in true label inclusion and class-balanced instance selection. In this way, we can directly apply existing loss functions to learn with generated candidate psueudolabels. Extensive experiments on nine benchmark datasets with three learning paradigms demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our code can be found here.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning · Everything Else

Mustapha BOUNOUA, Giulio Franzese, Pietro Michiardi

The analysis of scientific data and complex multivariate systems requires information quantities that capture relationships among multiple random variables. Recently, new information-theoretic measures have been developed to overcome the shortcomings of classical ones, such as mutual information, that are restricted to considering pairwise interactions. Among them, the concept of information synergy and redundancy is crucial for understanding the high-order dependencies between variables. One of the most prominent and versatile measures based on this concept is *O-information*, which provides a clear and scalable way to quantify the synergy-redundancy balance in multivariate systems. However, its practical application is limited to simplified cases. In this work, we introduce **S$\Omega$I**, which allows to compute *O-information* without restrictive assumptions about the system while leveraging a unique model. Our experiments validate our approach on synthetic data, and demonstrate the effectiveness of **S$\Omega$I** in the context of a real-world use case.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning · Everything Else

Moritz Herrmann, F. Julian D. Lange, Katharina Eggensperger, Giuseppe Casalicchio, Marcel Wever, Matthias Feurer, David Rügamer, Eyke Hüllermeier, Anne-Laure Boulesteix, Bernd Bischl

We warn against a common but incomplete understanding of empirical research in machine learning that leads to non-replicable results, makes findings unreliable, and threatens to undermine progress in the field. To overcome this alarming situation, we call for more awareness of the plurality of ways of gaining knowledge experimentally but also of some epistemic limitations. In particular, we argue most current empirical machine learning research is fashioned as confirmatory research while it should rather be considered exploratory.

Deep Learning · Everything Else

Hyunsu Kim, Ye Gon Kim, Hongseok Yang, Juho Lee

Group Equivariant CNNs (G-CNNs) have shown promising efficacy in various tasks, owing to their ability to capture hierarchical features in an equivariant manner. However, their equivariance is fixed to the symmetry of the whole group, limiting adaptability to diverse partial symmetries in real-world datasets, such as limited rotation symmetry of handwritten digit images and limited color-shift symmetry of flower images. Recent efforts address this limitation, one example being Partial G-CNN which restricts the output group space of convolution layers to break full equivariance. However, such an approach still fails to adjust equivariance levels across data. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, Variational Partial G-CNN (VP G-CNN), to capture varying levels of partial equivariance specific to each data instance. VP G-CNN redesigns the distribution of the output group elements to be conditioned on input data, leveraging variational inference to avoid overfitting. This enables the model to adjust its equivariance levels according to the needs of individual data points. Additionally, we address training instability inherent in discrete group equivariance models by redesigning the reparametrizable distribution. We demonstrate the effectiveness of VP G-CNN on both toy and real-world datasets, including MNIST67-180, CIFAR10, ColorMNIST, and Flowers102. Our results show robust performance, even in uncertainty metrics.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning · Everything Else

Giuseppe Paolo, Jonas Gonzalez-Billandon, Balázs Kégl

We propose Embodied AI (E-AI) as the next fundamental step in the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), juxtaposing it against current AI advancements, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs). We traverse the evolution of the embodiment concept across diverse fields (philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and robotics) to highlight how E-AI distinguishes itself from the classical paradigm of static learning. By broadening the scope of E-AI, we introduce a theoretical framework based on cognitive architectures, emphasizing perception, action, memory, and learning as essential components of an embodied agent. This framework is aligned with Friston’s active inference principle, offering a comprehensive approach to E-AI development. Despite the progress made in the field of AI, substantial challenges, such as the formulation of a novel AI learning theory and the innovation of advanced hardware, persist. Our discussion lays down a foundational guideline for future E-AI research. Highlighting the importance of creating E-AI agents capable of seamless communication, collaboration, and coexistence with humans and other intelligent entities within real-world environments, we aim to steer the AI community towards addressing the multifaceted challenges and seizing the opportunities that lie ahead in the quest for AGI.