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Generative Models · Diffusion models

Zhenzhi Wang, Jingbo Wang, Yixuan Li, Dahua Lin, Bo Dai

Text-conditioned motion synthesis has made remarkable progress with the emergence of diffusion models. However, the majority of these motion diffusion models are primarily designed for a single character and overlook multi-human interactions. In our approach, we strive to explore this problem by synthesizing human motion with interactions for a group of characters of any size in a zero-shot manner. The key aspect of our approach is the adaptation of human-wise interactions as pairs of human joints that can be either in contact or separated by a desired distance. In contrast to existing methods that necessitate training motion generation models on multi-human motion datasets with a fixed number of characters, our approach inherently possesses the flexibility to model human interactions involving an arbitrary number of individuals, thereby transcending the limitations imposed by the training data. We introduce a novel controllable motion generation method, InterControl, to encourage the synthesized motions maintaining the desired distance between joint pairs. It consists of a motion controller and an inverse kinematics guidance module that realistically and accurately aligns the joints of synthesized characters to the desired location. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the distance between joint pairs for human-wise interactions can be generated using an off-the-shelf Large Language Model (LLM). Experimental results highlight the capability of our framework to generate interactions with multiple human characters and its potential to work with off-the-shelf physics-based character simulators. Code is available at https://github.com/zhenzhiwang/intercontrol.

Theory · Domain Adaptation and Transfer Learning

Evelyn Ma, Chao Pan, S. Rasoul Etesami, Han Zhao, Olgica Milenkovic

The performance of Transfer Learning (TL) significantly depends on effective pretraining, which not only requires extensive amounts of data but also substantial computational resources. As a result, in practice, it is challenging to successfully perform TL at the level of individual model developers. Federated Learning (FL) addresses these challenges by enabling collaboration among individual clients through an indirect expansion of the available dataset, distribution of the computation burden across different entities, and privacy-preserving communication mechanisms. Despite several attempts to devise effective transferable FL approaches, several important issues remain unsolved. First, existing methods in this setting primarily focus on optimizing transferability within their local client domains, thereby ignoring transferability over the global learning domain. Second, most approaches focus on analyzing indirect transferability metrics, which does not allow for accurate assessment of the final target loss and extent of transferability. To address these issues, we introduce two important FL features into the model. The first boosts transferability via an exchange protocol between the clients and the server that includes information about cross-client Jacobian (gradient) norms. The second feature promotes an increase of the average of the Jacobians of the clients at the server side, which is subsequently used as a local regularizer that reduces the cross-client Jacobian variance. A rigorous analysis of our transferable federated algorithm, termed FedGTST (Federated Global Transferability via Statistics Tuning), reveals that increasing the averaged Jacobian norm across clients and reducing its variance ensures tight control of the target loss. This insight leads to the first known upper bound on the target loss of transferable federated learning in terms of the source loss and source-target domain discrepancy. Extensive experimental results on datasets including MNIST → MNIST-M and CIFAR10 → SVHN suggest that FedGTST significantly outperforms other relevant baselines, such as FedSR. For example, on the second source-target dataset pair, we improve the accuracy of FedSR by 9.8% and that of FedIIR by 7.6% when the backbone used is LeNet.

Causality

Yu Xiang, Jie Qiao, Zefeng Liang, Zihuai Zeng, Ruichu Cai, Zhifeng Hao

Causal discovery from observational data, especially for count data, is essential across scientific and industrial contexts, such as biology, economics, and network operation maintenance. For this task, most approaches model count data using Bayesian networks or ordinal relations. However, they overlook the inherent branching structures that are frequently encountered, e.g., a browsing event might trigger an adding cart or purchasing event. This can be modeled by a binomial thinning operator (for branching) and an additive independent Poisson distribution (for noising), known as Poisson Branching Structure Causal Model (PB-SCM). There is a provably sound cumulant-based causal discovery method that allows the identification of the causal structure under a branching structure. However, we show that there still remains a gap in that there exist causal directions that are identifiable while the algorithm fails to identify them. In this work, we address this gap by exploring the identifiability of PB-SCM using the Probability Generating Function (PGF). By developing a compact and exact closed-form solution for the PGF of PB-SCM, we demonstrate that each component in this closed-form solution uniquely encodes a specific local structure, enabling the identification of the local structures by testing their corresponding component appearances in the PGF. Building on this, we propose a practical algorithm for learning causal skeletons and identifying causal directions of PB-SCM using PGF. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated through experiments on both synthetic and real datasets.

Online Learning

Xuefeng Liu, Fangfang Xia, Rick Stevens, Yuxin Chen

While training models and labeling data are resource-intensive, a wealth of pre-trained models and unlabeled data exists. To effectively utilize these resources, we present an approach to actively select pre-trained models while minimizing labeling costs. We frame this as an online contextual active model selection problem: At each round, the learner receives an unlabeled data point as a context. The objective is to adaptively select the best model to make a prediction while limiting label requests. To tackle this problem, we propose CAMS, a contextual active model selection algorithm that relies on two novel components: (1) a contextual model selection mechanism, which leverages context information to make informed decisions about which model is likely to perform best for a given context, and (2)an active query component, which strategically chooses when to request labels for data points, minimizing the overall labeling cost. We provide rigorous theoretical analysis for the regret and query complexity under both adversarial and stochastic settings. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm on a diverse collection of benchmark classification tasks. Notably, CAMS requires substantially less labeling effort (less than 10%) compared to existing methods on CIFAR10 and DRIFT benchmarks, while achieving similar or better accuracy.

Probabilistic Methods · Bayesian Models and Methods

Ioannis Zachos, Mark Girolami, Theodoros Damoulas

Agent-based models (ABMs) are proliferating as decision-making tools across policy areas in transportation, economics, and epidemiology. In these models, a central object of interest is the discrete origin-destination matrix which captures spatial interactions and agent trip counts between locations. Existing approaches resort to continuous approximations of this matrix and subsequent ad-hoc discretisations in order to perform ABM simulation and calibration. This impedes conditioning on partially observed summary statistics, fails to explore the multimodal matrix distribution over a discrete combinatorial support, and incurs discretisation errors. To address these challenges, we introduce a computationally efficient framework that scales linearly with the number of origin-destination pairs, operates directly on the discrete combinatorial space, and learns the agents' trip intensity through a neural differential equation that embeds spatial interactions. Our approach outperforms the prior art in terms of reconstruction error and ground truth matrix coverage, at a fraction of the computational cost. We demonstrate these benefits in two large-scale spatial mobility ABMs in Washington, DC and Cambridge, UK.

Computer Vision · Image Generation

Quanling Meng, Liu Qinglin, Zonglin Li, Xiangyuan Lan, Shengping Zhang, Liqiang Nie

Existing high-resolution image harmonization methods typically rely on global color adjustments or the upsampling of parameter maps. However, these methods ignore local variations, leading to inharmonious appearances. To address this problem, we propose an Adaptive-Interval Color Transformation method (AICT), which predicts pixel-wise color transformations and adaptively adjusts the sampling interval to model local non-linearities of the color transformation at high resolution. Specifically, a parameter network is first designed to generate multiple position-dependent 3-dimensional lookup tables (3D LUTs), which use the color and position of each pixel to perform pixel-wise color transformations. Then, to enhance local variations adaptively, we separate a color transform into a cascade of sub-transformations using two 3D LUTs to achieve the non-uniform sampling intervals of the color transform. Finally, a global consistent weight learning method is proposed to predict an image-level weight for each color transform, utilizing global information to enhance the overall harmony. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our AICT achieves state-of-the-art performance with a lightweight architecture. The code is available at https://github.com/aipixel/AICT.

Reinforcement Learning · Everything Else

Jing-Cheng Pang, Si-Hang Yang, Kaiyuan Li, Jiaji Zhang, Xiong-Hui Chen, Nan Tang, Yang Yu

Reinforcement learning (RL) traditionally trains agents using interaction data, which limits their capabilities to the scope of the training data. To create more knowledgeable agents, leveraging knowledge from large language models (LLMs) has shown a promising way. Despite various attempts to combine LLMs with RL, there is commonly a semantic gap between action signals and LLM tokens, which hinders their integration. This paper introduces a novel approach, KALM (Knowledgeable Agents from Language Model Rollouts), to learn knowledgeable agents by bridging this gap. KALM extracts knowledge from LLMs in the form of imaginary rollouts, which agents can learn through offline RL. To overcome the limitation that LLMs are inherently text-based and may be incompatible with numerical environmental data, KALM fine-tunes the LLM to perform bidirectional translation between textual goals and rollouts. This process enables the LLM to understand the environment better, facilitating the generation of meaningful rollouts. Experiments on robotic manipulation tasks demonstrate that KALM allows agents to rephrase complex goals and tackle novel tasks requiring new optimal behaviors. KALM achieves a 46% success rate in completing 1400 various novel goals, significantly outperforming the 26% success rate of baseline methods. Project homepage: https://kalmneurips2024.github.io.

Generative Models · Diffusion models

Lingxiao Zhao, Xueying Ding, Leman Akoglu

Graph generation has been dominated by autoregressive models due to their simplicity and effectiveness, despite their sensitivity to ordering. Yet diffusion models have garnered increasing attention, as they offer comparable performance while being permutation-invariant. Current graph diffusion models generate graphs in a one-shot fashion, but they require extra features and thousands of denoising steps to achieve optimal performance. We introduce PARD, a Permutation-invariant Auto Regressive Diffusion model that integrates diffusion models with autoregressive methods. PARD harnesses the effectiveness and efficiency of the autoregressive model while maintaining permutation invariance without ordering sensitivity. Specifically, we show that contrary to sets, elements in a graph are not entirely un-ordered and there is a unique partial order for nodes and edges. With this partial order, PARD generates a graph in a block-by-block, autoregressive fashion, where each block’s probability is conditionally modeled by a shared diffusion model with an equivariant network. To ensure efficiency while being expressive, we further propose a higher-order graph transformer, which integrates transformer with PPGN (Maronet al., 2019). Like GPT, we extend the higher-order graph transformer to support parallel training of all blocks. Without any extra features, PARD achieves state-of-the-art performance on molecular and non-molecular datasets, and scales to large datasets like MOSES containing 1.9M molecules.

Theory · Game Theory

Tao Lin, Kun Jin, Andrew Estornell, Xiaoying Zhang, Yiling Chen, Yang Liu

Recommender systems serve the dual purpose of presenting relevant content to users and helping content creators reach their target audience. The dual nature of these systems naturally influences both users and creators: users' preferences are affected by the items they are recommended, while creators may be incentivized to alter their content to attract more users. We define a model, called user-creator feature dynamics, to capture the dual influence of recommender systems. We prove that a recommender system with dual influence is guaranteed to polarize, causing diversity loss in the system. We then investigate, both theoretically and empirically, approaches for mitigating polarization and promoting diversity in recommender systems. Unexpectedly, we find that common diversity-promoting approaches do not work in the presence of dual influence, while relevancy-optimizing methods like top-$k$ truncation can prevent polarization and improve diversity of the system.

Computer Vision · Video Generation

HANWEN LIANG, Yuyang Yin, Dejia Xu, hanxue liang, Zhangyang "Atlas" Wang, Konstantinos N Plataniotis, Yao Zhao, Yunchao Wei

The availability of large-scale multimodal datasets and advancements in diffusion models have significantly accelerated progress in 4D content generation. Most prior approaches rely on multiple images or video diffusion models, utilizing score distillation sampling for optimization or generating pseudo novel views for direct supervision. However, these methods are hindered by slow optimization speeds and multi-view inconsistency issues. Spatial and temporal consistency in 4D geometry has been extensively explored respectively in 3D-aware diffusion models and traditional monocular video diffusion models. Building on this foundation, we propose a strategy to migrate the temporal consistency in video diffusion models to the spatial-temporal consistency required for 4D generation. Specifically, we present a novel framework, \textbf{Diffusion4D}, for efficient and scalable 4D content generation. Leveraging a meticulously curated dynamic 3D dataset, we develop a 4D-aware video diffusion model capable of synthesizing orbital views of dynamic 3D assets. To control the dynamic strength of these assets, we introduce a 3D-to-4D motion magnitude metric as guidance. Additionally, we propose a novel motion magnitude reconstruction loss and 3D-aware classifier-free guidance to refine the learning and generation of motion dynamics. After obtaining orbital views of the 4D asset, we perform explicit 4D construction with Gaussian splatting in a coarse-to-fine manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses prior state-of-the-art techniques in terms of generation efficiency and 4D geometry consistency across various prompt modalities.

Theory · Game Theory

MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi, Sébastien Lahaie, Keivan Rezaei, Suho Shin

In the field of computational advertising, the integration of ads into the outputs of large language models (LLMs) presents an opportunity to support these services without compromising content integrity. This paper introduces novel auction mechanisms for ad allocation and pricing within the textual outputs of LLMs, leveraging retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We propose a \emph{segment auction} where an ad is probabilistically retrieved for each discourse segment (paragraph, section, or entire output) according to its bid and relevance, following the RAG framework, and priced according to competing bids. We show that our auction maximizes logarithmic social welfare, a new notion of welfare that balances allocation efficiency and fairness, and we characterize the associated incentive-compatible pricing rule. These results are extended to multi-ad allocation per segment. An empirical evaluation validates the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach over several ad auction scenarios, and exhibits inherent tradeoffs in metrics as we allow the LLM more flexibility to allocate ads.

Trustworthy Machine Learning

Silpa Vadakkeeveetil Sreelatha, Adarsh Kappiyath, ABHRA CHAUDHURI, Anjan Dutta

Neural networks trained on biased datasets tend to inadvertently learn spurious correlations, hindering generalization. We formally prove that (1) samples that exhibit spurious correlations lie on a lower rank manifold relative to the ones that do not; and (2) the depth of a network acts as an implicit regularizer on the rank of the attribute subspace that is encoded in its representations. Leveraging these insights, we present DeNetDM, a novel debiasing method that uses network depth modulation as a way of developing robustness to spurious correlations. Using a training paradigm derived from Product of Experts, we create both biased and debiased branches with deep and shallow architectures and then distill knowledge to produce the target debiased model. Our method requires no bias annotations or explicit data augmentation while performing on par with approaches that require either or both. We demonstrate that DeNetDM outperforms existing debiasing techniques on both synthetic and real-world datasets by 5\%. The project page is available at https://vssilpa.github.io/denetdm/.

Aayush Karan, Kulin Shah, Sitan Chen, Yonina Eldar

Much of Bayesian inference centers around the design of estimators for inverse problems which are optimal assuming the data comes from a known prior. But what do these optimality guarantees mean if the prior is unknown? In recent years, algorithm unrolling has emerged as deep learning's answer to this age-old question: design a neural network whose layers can in principle simulate iterations of inference algorithms and train on data generated by the unknown prior. Despite its empirical success, however, it has remained unclear whether this method can provably recover the performance of its optimal, prior-aware counterparts.In this work, we prove the first rigorous learning guarantees for neural networks based on unrolling approximate message passing (AMP). For compressed sensing, we prove that when trained on data drawn from a product prior, the layers of the network approximately converge to the same denoisers used in Bayes AMP. We also provide extensive numerical experiments for compressed sensing and rank-one matrix estimation demonstrating the advantages of our unrolled architecture \--- in addition to being able to obliviously adapt to general priors, it exhibits improvements over Bayes AMP in more general settings of low dimensions, non-Gaussian designs, and non-product priors.

Qiguang Chen, Libo Qin, Jiaqi Wang, Jingxuan Zhou, Wanxiang Che

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a promising approach for enhancing the performance of large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. Recently, a series of studies attempt to explain the mechanisms underlying CoT, aiming to deepen the understanding of its efficacy. Nevertheless, the existing research faces two major challenges: (1) a lack of quantitative metrics to assess CoT capabilities and (2) a dearth of guidance on optimizing CoT performance. Motivated by this, in this work, we introduce a novel reasoning boundary framework (RBF) to address these challenges. To solve the lack of quantification, we first define a reasoning boundary (RB) to quantify the upper-bound of CoT and establish a combination law for RB, enabling a practical quantitative approach applicable to various real-world CoT tasks. To address the lack of optimization, we propose three categories of RBs. We further optimize these categories with combination laws focused on RB promotion and reasoning path optimization for CoT improvement. Through extensive experiments on 27 models and 5 tasks, the study validates the existence and rationality of the proposed framework. Furthermore, it explains the effectiveness of 10 CoT strategies and guides optimization from two perspectives. We hope this work can provide a comprehensive understanding of the boundaries and optimization strategies for reasoning in LLMs. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/LightChen233/reasoning-boundary.

Graph Neural Networks

Longfei Ma, Yiyou Sun, Kaize Ding, Zemin Liu, Fei Wu

The field of graph learning has been substantially advanced by the development of deep learning models, in particular graph neural networks. However, one salient yet largely under-explored challenge is detecting Out-of-Distribution (OOD) nodes on graphs. Prevailing OOD detection techniques developed in other domains like computer vision, do not cater to the interconnected nature of graphs. This work aims to fill this gap by exploring the potential of a simple yet effective method -- OOD score propagation, which propagates OOD scores among neighboring nodes along the graph structure. This post hoc solution can be easily integrated with existing OOD scoring functions, showcasing its excellent flexibility and effectiveness in most scenarios. However, the conditions under which score propagation proves beneficial remain not fully elucidated. Our study meticulously derives these conditions and, inspired by this discovery, introduces an innovative edge augmentation strategy with theoretical guarantee. Empirical evaluations affirm the superiority of our proposed method, outperforming strong OOD detection baselines in various scenarios and settings.

Causality

Vivian Nastl, Moritz Hardt

We study how well machine learning models trained on causal features generalize across domains. We consider 16 prediction tasks on tabular datasets covering applications in health, employment, education, social benefits, and politics. Each dataset comes with multiple domains, allowing us to test how well a model trained in one domain performs in another. For each prediction task, we select features that have a causal influence on the target of prediction. Our goal is to test the hypothesis that models trained on causal features generalize better across domains. Without exception, we find that predictors using all available features, regardless of causality, have better in-domain and out-of-domain accuracy than predictors using causal features. Moreover, even the absolute drop in accuracy from one domain to the other is no better for causal predictors than for models that use all features. In addition, we show that recent causal machine learning methods for domain generalization do not perform better in our evaluation than standard predictors trained on the set of causal features. Likewise, causal discovery algorithms either fail to run or select causal variables that perform no better than our selection. Extensive robustness checks confirm that our findings are stable under variable misclassification.

Ari Benjamin, Christian-Gernot Pehle, Kyle Daruwalla

A natural strategy for continual learning is to weigh a Bayesian ensemble of fixed functions. This suggests that if a (single) neural network could be interpreted as an ensemble, one could design effective algorithms that learn without forgetting. To realize this possibility, we observe that a neural network classifier with N parameters can be interpreted as a weighted ensemble of N classifiers, and that in the lazy regime limit these classifiers are fixed throughout learning. We call these classifiers the *neural tangent experts* and show they output valid probability distributions over the labels. We then derive the likelihood and posterior probability of each expert given past data. Surprisingly, the posterior updates for these experts are equivalent to a scaled and projected form of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) over the network weights. Away from the lazy regime, networks can be seen as ensembles of adaptive experts which improve over time. These results offer a new interpretation of neural networks as Bayesian ensembles of experts, providing a principled framework for understanding and mitigating catastrophic forgetting in continual learning settings.

Interpretability

Jason Gross, Rajashree Agrawal, Thomas Kwa, Euan Ong, Chun Hei Yip, Alex Gibson, Soufiane Noubir, Lawrence Chan

We propose using mechanistic interpretability -- techniques for reverse engineering model weights into human-interpretable algorithms -- to derive and compactly prove formal guarantees on model performance.We prototype this approach by formally proving accuracy lower bounds for a small transformer trained on Max-of-$K$, validating proof transferability across 151 random seeds and four values of $K$.We create 102 different computer-assisted proof strategies and assess their length and tightness of bound on each of our models.Using quantitative metrics, we find that shorter proofs seem to require and provide more mechanistic understanding.Moreover, we find that more faithful mechanistic understanding leads to tighter performance bounds.We confirm these connections by qualitatively examining a subset of our proofs.Finally, we identify compounding structureless errors as a key challenge for using mechanistic interpretability to generate compact proofs on model performance.

Human-computer interaction

Changli Wu, qi chen, Jiayi Ji, Haowei Wang, Yiwei Ma, You Huang, Gen Luo, Hao Fei, Xiaoshuai Sun, Rongrong Ji

3D Referring Expression Segmentation (3D-RES) aims to segment 3D objects by correlating referring expressions with point clouds. However, traditional approaches frequently encounter issues like over-segmentation or mis-segmentation, due to insufficient emphasis on spatial information of instances. In this paper, we introduce a Rule-Guided Spatial Awareness Network (RG-SAN) by utilizing solely the spatial information of the target instance for supervision. This approach enables the network to accurately depict the spatial relationships among all entities described in the text, thus enhancing the reasoning capabilities. The RG-SAN consists of the Text-driven Localization Module (TLM) and the Rule-guided Weak Supervision (RWS) strategy. The TLM initially locates all mentioned instances and iteratively refines their positional information. The RWS strategy, acknowledging that only target objects have supervised positional information, employs dependency tree rules to precisely guide the core instance’s positioning. Extensive testing on the ScanRefer benchmark has shown that RG-SAN not only establishes new performance benchmarks, with an mIoU increase of 5.1 points, but also exhibits significant improvements in robustness when processing descriptions with spatial ambiguity. All codes are available at https://github.com/sosppxo/RG-SAN.

Computer Vision

Yehe Liu, Alexander Krull, Hector Basevi, Ales Leonardis, Michael Jenkins

Quanta image sensors, such as SPAD arrays, are an emerging sensor technology, producing 1-bit arrays representing photon detection events over exposures as short as a few nanoseconds. In practice, raw data are post-processed using heavy spatiotemporal binning to create more useful and interpretable images at the cost of degrading spatiotemporal resolution. In this work, we propose bit2bit, a new method for reconstructing high-quality image stacks at the original spatiotemporal resolution from sparse binary quanta image data. Inspired by recent work on Poisson denoising, we developed an algorithm that creates a dense image sequence from sparse binary photon data by predicting the photon arrival location probability distribution. However, due to the binary nature of the data, we show that the assumption of a Poisson distribution is inadequate. Instead, we model the process with a Bernoulli lattice process from the truncated Poisson. This leads to the proposal of a novel self-supervised solution based on a masked loss function. We evaluate our method using both simulated and real data. On simulated data from a conventional video, we achieve 34.35 mean PSNR with extremely photon-sparse binary input (<0.06 photons per pixel per frame). We also present a novel dataset containing a wide range of real SPAD high-speed videos under various challenging imaging conditions. The scenes cover strong/weak ambient light, strong motion, ultra-fast events, etc., which will be made available to the community, on which we demonstrate the promise of our approach. Both reconstruction quality and throughput substantially surpass the state-of-the-art methods (e.g., Quanta Burst Photography (QBP)). Our approach significantly enhances the visualization and usability of the data, enabling the application of existing analysis techniques.