ICLR 2024 Papers

Information-theoretic generalization analysis has achieved astonishing success in characterizing the generalization capabilities of noisy and iterative learning algorithms. However, current advancements are mostly restricted to average-case scenarios and necessitate the stringent bounded loss assumption, leaving a gap with regard to computationally tractable PAC generalization analysis, especially for long-tailed loss distributions. In this paper, we bridge this gap by introducing a novel class of PAC bounds through leveraging loss entropies. These bounds simplify the computation of key information metrics in previous PAC information-theoretic bounds to one-dimensional variables, thereby enhancing computational tractability. Moreover, our data-independent bounds provide novel insights into the generalization behavior of the minimum error entropy criterion, while our data-dependent bounds improve over previous results by alleviating the bounded loss assumption under both leave-one-out and supersample settings. Extensive numerical studies indicate strong correlations between the generalization error and the induced loss entropy, showing that the presented bounds adeptly capture the patterns of the true generalization gap under various learning scenarios.

We introduce a novel task within the field of human motion generation, termed dance accompaniment, which necessitates the generation of responsive movements from a dance partner, the "follower", synchronized with the lead dancer’s movements and the underlying musical rhythm. Unlike existing solo or group dance generation tasks, a duet dance scenario entails a heightened degree of interaction between the two participants, requiring delicate coordination in both pose and position. To support this task, we first build a large-scale and diverse duet interactive dance dataset, DD100, by recording about 117 minutes of professional dancers’ performances. To address the challenges inherent in this task, we propose a GPT based model, Duolando, which autoregressively predicts the subsequent tokenized motion conditioned on the coordinated information of the music, the leader’s and the follower’s movements. To further enhance the GPT’s capabilities of generating stable results on unseen conditions (music and leader motions), we devise an off-policy reinforcement learning strategy that allows the model to explore viable trajectories from out-of-distribution samplings, guided by human-defined rewards. Based on the collected dataset and proposed method, we establish a benchmark with several carefully designed metrics.

Diffusion models have recently been shown to be relevant for high-quality speech generation. Most work has been focused on generating spectrograms, and as such, they further require a subsequent model to convert the spectrogram to a waveform (i.e., a vocoder). This work proposes a diffusion probabilistic end-to-end model for generating a raw speech waveform. The proposed model is autoregressive, generating overlapping frames sequentially, where each frame is conditioned on a portion of the previously generated one. Hence, our model can effectively synthesize an unlimited speech duration while preserving high-fidelity synthesis and temporal coherence. We implemented the proposed model for unconditional and conditional speech generation, where the latter can be driven by an input sequence of phonemes, amplitudes, and pitch values. Working on the waveform directly has some empirical advantages. Specifically, it allows the creation of local acoustic behaviors, like vocal fry, which makes the overall waveform sounds more natural. Furthermore, the proposed diffusion model is stochastic and not deterministic; therefore, each inference generates a slightly different waveform variation, enabling abundance of valid realizations. Experiments show that the proposed model generates speech with superior quality compared with other state-of-the-art neural speech generation systems.

Large deep learning models have achieved impressive performance across a range of applications. However, their large memory requirements, including parameter memory and activation memory, have become a significant challenge for their practical serving. While existing methods mainly address parameter memory, the importance of activation memory has been overlooked. Especially for long input sequences, activation memory is expected to experience a significant exponential growth as the length of sequences increases. In this approach, we propose AutoChunk, an automatic and adaptive compiler system that efficiently reduces activation memory for long sequence inference by chunk strategies. The proposed system generates chunk plans by optimizing through multiple stages. In each stage, the chunk search pass explores all possible chunk candidates and the chunk selection pass identifies the optimal one. At runtime, AutoChunk employs code generation to automatically apply chunk strategies. The experiments demonstrate that AutoChunk can reduce over 80% of activation memory while maintaining speed loss within 10%, extend max sequence length by 3.2x to 11.7x, and outperform state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.

We expose a surprising failure of generalization in auto-regressive large language models (LLMs). If a model is trained on a sentence of the form ''_A_ is _B_'', it will not automatically generalize to the reverse direction ''_B_ is _A_''. This is the **Reversal Curse**. For instance, if a model is trained on ''Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman to travel to space'', it will not automatically be able to answer the question, ''Who was the first woman to travel to space?''. Moreover, the likelihood of the correct answer (''Valentina Tershkova'') will not be higher than for a random name. Thus, models do not generalize a prevalent pattern in their training set: if ''_A_ is _B_'' occurs, ''_B_ is _A_'' is more likely to occur. It is worth noting, however, that if ''_A_ is _B_'' appears _in-context_, models can deduce the reverse relationship. We provide evidence for the Reversal Curse by finetuning GPT-3 and Llama-1 on fictitious statements such as ''Uriah Hawthorne is the composer of _Abyssal Melodies_'' and showing that they fail to correctly answer ''Who composed _Abyssal Melodies?_''. The Reversal Curse is robust across model sizes and model families and is not alleviated by data augmentation. We also evaluate ChatGPT (GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) on questions about real-world celebrities, such as ''Who is Tom Cruise's mother? [A: Mary Lee Pfeiffer]'' and the reverse ''Who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer's son?''. GPT-4 correctly answers questions like the former 79\% of the time, compared to 33\% for the latter. Code available at: https://github.com/lukasberglund/reversal_curse.

Retrieval-augmented language models can better adapt to changes in world state and incorporate long-tail knowledge. However, most existing methods retrieve only short contiguous chunks from a retrieval corpus, limiting holistic understanding of the overall document context. We introduce the novel approach of recursively embedding, clustering, and summarizing chunks of text, constructing a tree with differing levels of summarization from the bottom up. At inference time, our RAPTOR model retrieves from this tree, integrating information across lengthy documents at different levels of abstraction. Controlled experiments show that retrieval with recursive summaries offers significant improvements over traditional retrieval-augmented LMs on several tasks. On question-answering tasks that involve complex, multi-step reasoning, we show state-of-the-art results; for example, by coupling RAPTOR retrieval with the use of GPT-4, we can improve the best performance on the QuALITY benchmark by 20\% in absolute accuracy.

Structural and Positional Encodings can significantly improve the performance of Graph Neural Networks in downstream tasks. Recent literature has begun to systematically investigate differences in the structural properties that these approaches encode, as well as performance trade-offs between them. However, the question of which structural properties yield the most effective encoding remains open. In this paper, we investigate this question from a geometric perspective. We propose a novel structural encoding based on discrete Ricci curvature (Local Curvature Profiles, short LCP) and show that it significantly outperforms existing encoding approaches. We further show that combining local structural encodings, such as LCP, with global positional encodings improves downstream performance, suggesting that they capture complementary geometric information. Finally, we compare different encoding types with (curvature-based) rewiring techniques. Rewiring has recently received a surge of interest due to its ability to improve the performance of Graph Neural Networks by mitigating over-smoothing and over-squashing effects. Our results suggest that utilizing curvature information for structural encodings delivers significantly larger performance increases than rewiring.

Grokking is the intriguing phenomenon where a model learns to generalize long after it has fit the training data. We show both analytically and numerically that grokking can surprisingly occur in linear networks performing linear tasks in a simple teacher-student setup. In this setting, the full training dynamics is derived in terms of the expected training and generalization data covariance matrix. We present exact predictions on how the grokking time depends on input and output dimensionality, train sample size, regularization, and network parameters initialization. The key findings are that late generalization increase may not imply a transition from "memorization" to "understanding", but can simply be an artifact of the accuracy measure. We provide empirical verification for these propositions, along with preliminary results indicating that some predictions also hold for deeper networks, with non-linear activations.

Machine learning algorithms are commonly being deployed in decision-making systems that have a direct impact on human lives. However, if these algorithms are trained solely to minimize training/test errors, they may inadvertently discriminate against individuals based on their sensitive attributes, such as gender, race or age. Recently, algorithms that ensure the fairness are developed in the machine learning community. Fairness criteria are applied by these algorithms to measure the fairness, but they often use the point estimate to assess the fairness and fail to consider the uncertainty of the sample fairness criterion once the algorithms are deployed. We suggest that assessing the fairness should take the uncertainty into account. In this paper, we use the covariance as a proxy for the fairness and develop the confidence region of the covariance vector using empirical likelihood \citep{Owen1988}. Our confidence region based fairness constraints for classification take uncertainty into consideration during fairness assessment. The proposed confidence region can be used to test the fairness and impose fairness constraint using the significant level as a tool to balance the accuracy and fairness. Simulation studies show that our method exactly covers the target Type I error rate and effectively balances the trade-off between accuracy and fairness. Finally, we conduct data analysis to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Inductive reasoning is a core problem-solving capacity: humans can identify underlying principles from a few examples, which can then be robustly generalized to novel scenarios. Recent work has evaluated large language models (LLMs) on inductive reasoning tasks by directly prompting them yielding "in context learning." This can work well for straightforward inductive tasks, but performs very poorly on more complex tasks such as the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC). In this work, we propose to improve the inductive reasoning ability of LLMs by generating explicit hypotheses at multiple levels of abstraction: we prompt the LLM to propose multiple abstract hypotheses about the problem, in natural language, then implement the natural language hypotheses as concrete Python programs. These programs can be directly verified by running on the observed examples and generalized to novel inputs. To reduce the hypothesis search space, we explore steps to filter the set of hypotheses to be implemented as programs: we either ask the LLM to summarize them into a smaller set of hypotheses, or ask human annotators to select a subset. We verify our pipeline's effectiveness on the ARC visual inductive reasoning benchmark, its variant 1D-ARC, and string transformation dataset SyGuS. On a random 40-problem subset of ARC, our automated pipeline using LLM summaries achieves 27.5% accuracy, significantly outperforming the direct prompting baseline (accuracy of 12.5%). With the minimal human input of selecting from LLM-generated candidates, the performance is boosted to 37.5%. Our ablation studies show that abstract hypothesis generation and concrete program representations are both beneficial for LLMs to perform inductive reasoning tasks.

Classical clustering methods do not provide users with direct control of the clustering results, and the clustering results may not be consistent with the relevant criterion that a user has in mind. In this work, we present a new methodology for performing image clustering based on user-specified criteria in the form of text by leveraging modern Vision-Language Models and Large Language Models. We call our method Image Clustering Conditioned on Text Criteria (IC$|$TC), and it represents a different paradigm of image clustering. IC$|$TC requires a minimal and practical degree of human intervention and grants the user significant control over the clustering results in return. Our experiments show that IC$|$TC can effectively cluster images with various criteria, such as human action, physical location, or the person's mood, significantly outperforming baselines.

Modular and composable transfer learning is an emerging direction in the field of Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning, as it enables neural networks to better organize various aspects of knowledge, leading to improved cross-task generalization. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach Customized Polytropon ($\texttt{C-Poly}$) that combines task-common skills and task-specific skills, while the skill parameters being highly parameterized using low-rank techniques. Each task is associated with a customizable number of exclusive specialized skills and also benefits from skills shared with peer tasks. A skill assignment matrix is jointly learned. To evaluate our approach, we conducted extensive experiments on the Super-NaturalInstructions and the SuperGLUE benchmarks. Our findings demonstrate that $\texttt{C-Poly}$ outperforms fully-shared, task-specific, and skill-indistinguishable baselines, significantly enhancing the sample efficiency in multi-task learning scenarios.

Large language models (LLMs) are often augmented with tools to solve complex tasks. By generating code snippets and executing them through task-specific Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), they can offload certain functions to dedicated external modules, such as image encoding and performing calculations. However, most existing approaches to augment LLMs with tools are constrained by general-purpose APIs and lack the flexibility for tailoring them to specific tasks. In this work, we present CRAFT, a general tool creation and retrieval framework for LLMs. It creates toolsets specifically curated for the tasks and equips LLMs with a component that retrieves tools from these sets to enhance their capability to solve complex tasks. For each task, we collect specific code solutions by prompting GPT-4 to solve the training examples. Following a validation step ensuring the correctness, these solutions are abstracted into code snippets to enhance reusability, and deduplicated for higher quality. At inference time, the language model retrieves snippets from the toolsets and then executes them or generates the output conditioning on the retrieved snippets. Our method is designed to be flexible and offers a plug-and-play approach to adapt off-the-shelf LLMs to unseen domains and modalities, without any finetuning. Experiments on vision-language, tabular processing, and mathematical reasoning tasks show that our approach achieves substantial improvements compared to strong baselines. In addition, our in-depth analysis reveals that: (1) consistent performance improvement can be achieved by scaling up the number of tools and the capability of the backbone models; (2) each component of our approach contributes to the performance gains; (3) the created tools are well-structured and reliable with low complexity and atomicity.

In this work, we tackle the challenging problem of denoising hand-object interactions (HOI). Given an erroneous interaction sequence, the objective is to refine the incorrect hand trajectory to remove interaction artifacts for a perceptually realistic sequence. This challenge involves intricate interaction noise, including unnatural hand poses and incorrect hand-object relations, alongside the necessity for robust generalization to new interactions and diverse noise patterns. We tackle those challenges through a novel approach, GeneOH Diffusion, incorporating two key designs: an innovative contact-centric HOI representation named GeneOH and a new domain-generalizable denoising scheme. The contact-centric representation GeneOH informatively parameterizes the HOI process, facilitating enhanced generalization across various HOI scenarios. The new denoising scheme consists of a canonical denoising model trained to project noisy data samples from a whitened noise space to a clean data manifold and a ``denoising via diffusion'' strategy which can handle input trajectories with various noise patterns by first diffusing them to align with the whitened noise space and cleaning via the canonical denoiser. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks with significant domain variations demonstrate the superior effectiveness of our method. GeneOH Diffusion also shows promise for various downstream applications. We include [a website](https://meowuu7.github.io/GeneOH-Diffusion/) for introducing the work.

Due to the real-world noise and human-added perturbations, attaining the trustworthiness of deep neural networks (DNNs) is a challenging task. Therefore, it becomes essential to offer explanations for the decisions made by these non-linear and complex parameterized models. Attribution methods are promising for this goal, yet its performance can be further improved. In this paper, for the first time, we present that the decision boundary exploration approaches of attribution are consistent with the process for transferable adversarial attacks. Specifically, the transferable adversarial attacks craft general adversarial samples from the source model, which is consistent with the generation of adversarial samples that can cross multiple decision boundaries in attribution. Utilizing this consistency, we introduce a novel attribution method via model parameter exploration. Furthermore, inspired by the capability of frequency exploration to investigate the model parameters, we provide enhanced explainability for DNNs by manipulating the input features based on frequency information to explore the decision boundaries of different models. Large-scale experiments demonstrate that our \textbf{A}ttribution method for \textbf{E}xplanation with model parameter e\textbf{X}ploration (AttEXplore) outperforms other state-of-the-art interpretability methods. Moreover, by employing other transferable attack techniques, AttEXplore can explore potential variations in attribution outcomes. Our code is available at: https://github.com/LMBTough/ATTEXPLORE.

Text-guided diffusion models have revolutionized image generation and editing, offering exceptional realism and diversity. Specifically, in the context of diffusion-based editing, where a source image is edited according to a target prompt, the process commences by acquiring a noisy latent vector corresponding to the source image via the diffusion model. This vector is subsequently fed into separate source and target diffusion branches for editing. The accuracy of this inversion process significantly impacts the final editing outcome, influencing both essential content preservation of the source image and edit fidelity according to the target prompt. Prior inversion techniques aimed at finding a unified solution in both the source and target diffusion branches. However, our theoretical and empirical analyses reveal that disentangling these branches leads to a distinct separation of responsibilities for preserving essential content and ensuring edit fidelity. Building on this insight, we introduce “PnP Inversion,” a novel technique achieving optimal performance of both branches with just three lines of code. To assess image editing performance, we present PIE-Bench, an editing benchmark with 700 images showcasing diverse scenes and editing types, accompanied by versatile annotations and comprehensive evaluation metrics. Compared to state-of-the-art optimization-based inversion techniques, our solution not only yields superior performance across 8 editing methods but also achieves nearly an order of speed-up.

This paper proposes a novel interpretation technique to explain the behavior of structured output models, which simultaneously learn mappings between an input vector and a set of output variables. As a result of the complex relationships between the computational path of output variables in structured models, a feature may impact an output value via other output variables. We focus on one of the outputs as the target and try to find the most important features adopted by the structured model to decide on the target in each locality of the input space. We consider an arbitrary structured output model available as a black-box and argue that considering correlations among output variables can improve explanation quality. The goal is to train a function as an interpreter for the target output variable over the input space. We introduce an energy-based training process for the interpreter function, which effectively considers the structural information incorporated into the model to be explained. The proposed method's effectiveness is confirmed using various simulated and real data sets.

Recently, the remarkable advance of the Large Language Model (LLM) has inspired researchers to transfer its extraordinary reasoning capability to both vision and language data. However, the prevailing approaches primarily regard the visual input as a prompt and focus exclusively on optimizing the text generation process conditioned upon vision content by a frozen LLM. Such an inequitable treatment of vision and language heavily constrains the model's potential. In this paper, we break through this limitation by representing both vision and language in a unified form. Specifically, we introduce a well-designed visual tokenizer to translate the non-linguistic image into a sequence of discrete tokens like a foreign language that LLM can read. The resulting visual tokens encompass high-level semantics worthy of a word and also support dynamic sequence length varying from the image. Coped with this tokenizer, the presented foundation model called LaVIT can handle both image and text indiscriminately under the same generative learning paradigm. This unification empowers LaVIT to serve as an impressive generalist interface to understand and generate multi-modal content simultaneously. Extensive experiments further showcase that it outperforms the existing models by a large margin on massive vision-language tasks. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/jy0205/LaVIT.

Subject-driven text-to-image generation aims to generate customized images of the given subject based on the text descriptions, which has drawn increasing attention. Existing methods mainly resort to finetuning a pretrained generative model, where the identity-relevant information (e.g., the boy) and the identity-irrelevant information (e.g., the background or the pose of the boy) are entangled in the latent embedding space. However, the highly entangled latent embedding may lead to the failure of subject-driven text-to-image generation as follows: (i) the identity-irrelevant information hidden in the entangled embedding may dominate the generation process, resulting in the generated images heavily dependent on the irrelevant information while ignoring the given text descriptions; (ii) the identity-relevant information carried in the entangled embedding can not be appropriately preserved, resulting in identity change of the subject in the generated images. To tackle the problems, we propose DisenBooth, an identity-preserving disentangled tuning framework for subject-driven text-to-image generation. Specifically, DisenBooth finetunes the pretrained diffusion model in the denoising process. Different from previous works that utilize an entangled embedding to denoise each image, DisenBooth instead utilizes disentangled embeddings to respectively preserve the subject identity and capture the identity-irrelevant information. We further design the novel weak denoising and contrastive embedding auxiliary tuning objectives to achieve the disentanglement. Extensive experiments show that our proposed DisenBooth framework outperforms baseline models for subject-driven text-to-image generation with the identity-preserved embedding. Additionally, by combining the identity-preserved embedding and identity-irrelevant embedding, DisenBooth demonstrates more generation flexibility and controllability.