NeurIPS 2023 Papers

Most existing methods for unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) rely on a shared network to extract domain-invariant features. However, when facing multiple source domains, optimizing such a network involves updating the parameters of the entire network, making it both computationally expensive and challenging, particularly when coupled with min-max objectives. Inspired by recent advances in prompt learning that adapts high-capacity models for downstream tasks in a computationally economic way, we introduce Multi-Prompt Alignment (MPA), a simple yet efficient framework for multi-source UDA. Given a source and target domain pair, MPA first trains an individual prompt to minimize the domain gap through a contrastive loss. Then, MPA denoises the learned prompts through an auto-encoding process and aligns them by maximizing the agreement of all the reconstructed prompts. Moreover, we show that the resulting subspace acquired from the auto-encoding process can easily generalize to a streamlined set of target domains, making our method more efficient for practical usage. Extensive experiments show that MPA achieves state-of-the-art results on three popular datasets with an impressive average accuracy of 54.1% on DomainNet.

We study the complexity of Non-Gaussian Component Analysis (NGCA) in the Statistical Query (SQ) model. Prior work developed a methodology to prove SQ lower bounds for NGCA that have been applicable to a wide range of contexts. In particular, it was known that for any univariate distribution $A$ satisfying certain conditions, distinguishing between a standard multivariate Gaussian and a distribution that behaves like $A$ in a random hidden direction and like a standard Gaussian in the orthogonal complement, is SQ-hard. The required conditions were that (1) $A$ matches many low-order moments with a standard Gaussian, and (2) the chi-squared norm of $A$ with respect to the standard Gaussian is finite. While the moment-matching condition is clearly necessary for hardness, the chi-squared condition was only required for technical reasons. In this work, we establish that the latter condition is indeed not necessary. In particular, we prove near-optimal SQ lower bounds for NGCA under the moment-matching condition only.

Photos serve as a way for humans to record what they experience in their daily lives, and they are often regarded as trustworthy sources of information. However, there is a growing concern that the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technology may produce fake photos, which can create confusion and diminish trust in photographs. This study aims to comprehensively evaluate agents for distinguishing state-of-the-art AI-generated visual content. Our study benchmarks both human capability and cutting-edge fake image detection AI algorithms, using a newly collected large-scale fake image dataset Fake2M. In our human perception evaluation, titled HPBench, we discovered that humans struggle significantly to distinguish real photos from AI-generated ones, with a misclassification rate of 38.7\%. Along with this, we conduct the model capability of AI-Generated images detection evaluation MPBench and the top-performing model from MPBench achieves a 13\% failure rate under the same setting used in the human evaluation. We hope that our study can raise awareness of the potential risks of AI-generated images and facilitate further research to prevent the spread of false information. More information can refer to https://github.com/Inf-imagine/Sentry.

Parameter-efficient tuning has become a trend in transferring large-scale foundation models to downstream applications. Existing methods typically embed some light-weight tuners into the backbone, where both the design and the learning of the tuners are highly dependent on the base model. This work offers a new tuning paradigm, dubbed Res-Tuning, which intentionally unbinds tuners from the backbone. With both theoretical and empirical evidence, we show that popular tuning approaches have their equivalent counterparts under our unbinding formulation, and hence can be integrated into our framework effortlessly. Thanks to the structural disentanglement, we manage to free the design of tuners from the network architecture, facilitating flexible combination of various tuning strategies. We further propose a memory-efficient variant of Res-Tuning, where the bypass i.e., formed by a sequence of tuners) is effectively detached from the main branch, such that the gradients are back-propagated only to the tuners but not to the backbone. Such a detachment also allows one-time backbone forward for multi-task inference. Extensive experiments on both discriminative and generative tasks demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing alternatives from the perspectives of efficacy and efficiency. Project page: https://res-tuning.github.io/.

Large language models (LLMs) are useful in many NLP tasks and become more capable with size, with the best open-source models having over 50 billion parameters. However, using these 50B+ models requires high-end hardware, making them inaccessible to most researchers. In this work, we investigate methods for cost-efficient inference and fine-tuning of LLMs, comparing local and distributed strategies. We observe that a large enough model (50B+) can run efficiently even on geodistributed devices in a consumer-grade network. This could allow running LLM efficiently by pooling together idle compute resources of multiple research groups and volunteers. We address two open problems: (1) how to perform inference and fine-tuning reliably if any device can disconnect abruptly and (2) how to partition LLMs between devices with uneven hardware, joining and leaving at will. In order to do that, we develop special fault-tolerant inference algorithms and load-balancing protocols that automatically assign devices to maximize the total system throughput. We showcase these algorithms in Petals — a decentralized system that runs Llama 2 (70B) and BLOOM (176B) over the Internet up to $10\times$ faster than offloading for interactive generation. We evaluate the performance of our system in simulated conditions and a real-world setup spanning two continents.

Graph models based on factorization of the adjacency matrix often fail to capture network structures related to links between dissimilar nodes (heterophily). We introduce a novel graph factorization model that leverages two nonnegative vectors per node to interpretably account for links between both similar and dissimilar nodes. We prove that our model can exactly represent any graph with low *arboricity*, a property that many real-world networks satisfy; our proof also applies to related models but has much greater scope than the closest prior bound, which is based on low *max degree*. Our factorization also has compelling properties besides expressiveness: due to its symmetric structure and nonnegativity, fitting the model inherently finds node communities, and the model's link predictions can be interpreted in terms of these communities. In experiments on real-world networks, we demonstrate our factorization's effectiveness on a variety of tasks, including community detection and link prediction.

In scientific research, the ability to effectively retrieve relevant documents based on complex, multifaceted queries is critical. Existing evaluation datasets for this task are limited, primarily due to the high costs and effort required to annotate resources that effectively represent complex queries. To address this, we propose a novel task, $\textbf{S}$cientific $\textbf{Do}$cument $\textbf{R}$etrieval using $\textbf{M}$ulti-level $\textbf{A}$spect-based qu$\textbf{E}$ries (DORIS-MAE), which is designed to handle the complex nature of user queries in scientific research. We developed a benchmark dataset within the field of computer science, consisting of 100 human-authored complex query cases. For each complex query, we assembled a collection of 100 relevant documents and produced annotated relevance scores for ranking them. Recognizing the significant labor of expert annotation, we also introduce Anno-GPT, a scalable framework for evaluating the viability of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT-3.5 for expert-level dataset annotation tasks. The application of Anno-GPT to annotate the DORIS-MAE dataset resulted in a 500x reduction in cost, without compromising quality. Furthermore, due to the multi-tiered structure of these complex queries, our DORIS-MAE dataset can be extended to over 4,000 sub-query test cases without requiring additional annotation. We evaluated 17 recent retrieval methods on DORIS-MAE, observing notable performance drops compared to traditional datasets. This highlights DORIS-MAE's challenges and the need for better approaches to handle complex, multifaceted queries in scientific research. Our dataset and codebase are available at https://github.com/Real-Doris-Mae/Doris-Mae-Dataset .

CLIP proved that aligning visual and language spaces is key to solving many vision tasks without explicit training, but required to train image and text encoders from scratch on a huge dataset. LiT improved this by only training the text encoder and using a pre-trained vision network. In this paper, we show that a common space can be created without any training at all, using single-domain encoders (trained with or without supervision) and a much smaller amount of image-text pairs. Furthermore, our model has unique properties. Most notably, deploying a new version with updated training samples can be done in a matter of seconds. Additionally, the representations in the common space are easily interpretable as every dimension corresponds to the similarity of the input to a unique entry in the multimodal dataset. Experiments on standard zero-shot visual benchmarks demonstrate the typical transfer ability of image-text models. Overall, our method represents a simple yet surprisingly strong baseline for foundation multi-modal models, raising important questions on their data efficiency and on the role of retrieval in machine learning.

Many real-world experimental design problems (a) evaluate multiple experimental conditions in parallel and (b) replicate each condition multiple times due to large and heteroscedastic observation noise. Given a fixed total budget, this naturally induces a trade-off between evaluating more unique conditions while replicating each of them fewer times vs. evaluating fewer unique conditions and replicating each more times. Moreover, in these problems, practitioners may be risk-averse and hence prefer an input with both good average performance and small variability. To tackle both challenges, we propose the Batch Thompson Sampling for Replicable Experimental Design (BTS-RED) framework, which encompasses three algorithms. Our BTS-RED-Known and BTS-RED-Unknown algorithms, for, respectively, known and unknown noise variance, choose the number of replications adaptively rather than deterministically such that an input with a larger noise variance is replicated more times. As a result, despite the noise heteroscedasticity, both algorithms enjoy a theoretical guarantee and are asymptotically no-regret. Our Mean-Var-BTS-RED algorithm aims at risk-averse optimization and is also asymptotically no-regret. We also show the effectiveness of our algorithms in two practical real-world applications: precision agriculture and AutoML.

Pseudo labeling (PL) is a wide-applied strategy to enlarge the labeled dataset by self-annotating the potential samples during the training process. Several works have shown that it can improve the graph learning model performance in general. However, we notice that the incorrect labels can be fatal to the graph training process. Inappropriate PL may result in the performance degrading, especially on graph data where the noise can propagate. Surprisingly, the corresponding error is seldom theoretically analyzed in the literature. In this paper, we aim to give deep insights of PL on graph learning models. We first present the error analysis of PL strategy by showing that the error is bounded by the confidence of PL threshold and consistency of multi-view prediction. Then, we theoretically illustrate the effect of PL on convergence property. Based on the analysis, we propose a cautious pseudo labeling methodology in which we pseudo label the samples with highest confidence and multi-view consistency. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed strategy improves graph learning process and outperforms other PL strategies on link prediction and node classification tasks.

Whole-body pose and shape estimation aims to jointly predict different behaviors (e.g., pose, hand gesture, facial expression) of the entire human body from a monocular image. Existing methods often exhibit suboptimal performance due to the complexity of in-the-wild scenarios. We argue that the prediction accuracy of these models is significantly affected by the quality of the _bounding box_, e.g., scale, alignment. The natural discrepancy between the ideal bounding box annotations and model detection results is particularly detrimental to the performance of whole-body pose and shape estimation. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to enhance the robustness of whole-body pose and shape estimation. Our framework incorporates three new modules to address the above challenges from three perspectives: (1) a **Localization Module** enhances the model's awareness of the subject's location and semantics within the image space; (2) a **Contrastive Feature Extraction Module** encourages the model to be invariant to robust augmentations by incorporating a contrastive loss and positive samples; (3) a **Pixel Alignment Module** ensures the reprojected mesh from the predicted camera and body model parameters are more accurate and pixel-aligned. We perform comprehensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework on body, hands, face and whole-body benchmarks.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for solving Markovian optimal stopping problems. However, a ready extension of DNN-based methods to non-Markovian settings requires significant state and parameter space expansion, manifesting the curse of dimensionality. Further, efficient state-space transformations permitting Markovian approximations, such as those afforded by recurrent neural networks (RNNs), are either structurally infeasible or are confounded by the curse of non-Markovianity. Considering these issues, we introduce, for the first time, an optimal stopping policy gradient algorithm (OSPG) that can leverage RNNs effectively in non-Markovian settings by implicitly optimizing value functions without recursion, mitigating the curse of non-Markovianity. The OSPG algorithm is derived from an inference procedure on a novel Bayesian network representation of discrete-time non-Markovian optimal stopping trajectories and, as a consequence, yields an offline policy gradient algorithm that eliminates expensive Monte Carlo policy rollouts.

Regularization is one of the most fundamental topics in optimization, statistics and machine learning. To get sparsity in estimating a parameter $u\in\mathbb{R}^d$, an $\ell_q$ penalty term, $\Vert u\Vert_q$, is usually added to the objective function. What is the probabilistic distribution corresponding to such $\ell_q$ penalty? What is the \emph{correct} stochastic process corresponding to $\Vert u\Vert_q$ when we model functions $u\in L^q$? This is important for statistically modeling high-dimensional objects such as images, with penalty to preserve certainty properties, e.g. edges in the image. In this work, we generalize the $q$-exponential distribution (with density proportional to) $\exp{(- \frac{1}{2}|u|^q)}$ to a stochastic process named \emph{$Q$-exponential (Q-EP) process} that corresponds to the $L_q$ regularization of functions. The key step is to specify consistent multivariate $q$-exponential distributions by choosing from a large family of elliptic contour distributions. The work is closely related to Besov process which is usually defined in terms of series. Q-EP can be regarded as a definition of Besov process with explicit probabilistic formulation, direct control on the correlation strength, and tractable prediction formula. From the Bayesian perspective, Q-EP provides a flexible prior on functions with sharper penalty ($q<2$) than the commonly used Gaussian process (GP, $q=2$). We compare GP, Besov and Q-EP in modeling functional data, reconstructing images and solving inverse problems and demonstrate the advantage of our proposed methodology.

Recently, diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have achieved promising results in diverse generative tasks. A typical DPM framework includes a forward process that gradually diffuses the data distribution and a reverse process that recovers the data distribution from time-dependent data scores. In this work, we observe that the stochastic reverse process of data scores is a martingale, from which concentration bounds and the optional stopping theorem for data scores can be derived. Then, we discover a simple way for calibrating an arbitrary pretrained DPM, with which the score matching loss can be reduced and the lower bounds of model likelihood can consequently be increased. We provide general calibration guidelines under various model parametrizations. Our calibration method is performed only once and the resulting models can be used repeatedly for sampling. We conduct experiments on multiple datasets to empirically validate our proposal. Our code is available at https://github.com/thudzj/Calibrated-DPMs.

We propose a learning problem involving adapting a pre-trained source model to the target domain for classifying all classes that appeared in the source data, using target data that covers only a partial label space. This problem is practical, as it is unrealistic for the target end-users to collect data for all classes prior to adaptation. However, it has received limited attention in the literature. To shed light on this issue, we construct benchmark datasets and conduct extensive experiments to uncover the inherent challenges. We found a dilemma --- on the one hand, adapting to the new target domain is important to claim better performance; on the other hand, we observe that preserving the classification accuracy of classes missing in the target adaptation data is highly challenging, let alone improving them. To tackle this, we identify two key directions: 1) disentangling domain gradients from classification gradients, and 2) preserving class relationships. We present several effective solutions that maintain the accuracy of the missing classes and enhance the overall performance, establishing solid baselines for holistic transfer of pre-trained models with partial target data.

We present a volume rendering-based neural surface reconstruction method that takes as few as three disparate RGB images as input. Our key idea is to regularize the reconstruction, which is severely ill-posed and leaving significant gaps between the sparse views, by learning a set of neural templates that act as surface priors. Our method, coined DiViNet, operates in two stages. The first stage learns the templates, in the form of 3D Gaussian functions, across different scenes, without 3D supervision. In the reconstruction stage, our predicted templates serve as anchors to help “stitch” the surfaces over sparse regions. We demonstrate that our approach is not only able to complete the surface geometry but also reconstructs surface details to a reasonable extent from few disparate input views. On the DTU and BlendedMVS datasets, our approach achieves the best reconstruction quality among existing methods in the presence of such sparse views and performs on par, if not better, with competing methods when dense views are employed as inputs.

Despite its flexibility to learn diverse inductive biases in machine learning programs, meta learning (i.e.,\ learning to learn) has long been recognized to suffer from poor scalability due to its tremendous compute/memory costs, training instability, and a lack of efficient distributed training support. In this work, we focus on making scalable meta learning practical by introducing SAMA, which combines advances in both implicit differentiation algorithms and systems. Specifically, SAMA is designed to flexibly support a broad range of adaptive optimizers in the base level of meta learning programs, while reducing computational burden by avoiding explicit computation of second-order gradient information, and exploiting efficient distributed training techniques implemented for first-order gradients. Evaluated on multiple large-scale meta learning benchmarks, SAMA showcases up to 1.7/4.8x increase in throughput and 2.0/3.8x decrease in memory consumption respectively on single-/multi-GPU setups compared to other baseline meta learning algorithms. Furthermore, we show that SAMA-based data optimization leads to consistent improvements in text classification accuracy with BERT and RoBERTa large language models, and achieves state-of-the-art results in both small- and large-scale data pruning on image classification tasks, demonstrating the practical applicability of scalable meta learning across language and vision domains.

With the widespread digitization of finance and the increasing popularity of cryptocurrencies, the sophistication of fraud schemes devised by cybercriminals is growing. Money laundering -- the movement of illicit funds to conceal their origins -- can cross bank and national boundaries, producing complex transaction patterns. The UN estimates 2-5\% of global GDP or \$0.8 - \$2.0 trillion dollars are laundered globally each year. Unfortunately, real data to train machine learning models to detect laundering is generally not available, and previous synthetic data generators have had significant shortcomings. A realistic, standardized, publicly-available benchmark is needed for comparing models and for the advancement of the area. To this end, this paper contributes a synthetic financial transaction dataset generator and a set of synthetically generated AML (Anti-Money Laundering) datasets. We have calibrated this agent-based generator to match real transactions as closely as possible and made the datasets public. We describe the generator in detail and demonstrate how the datasets generated can help compare different machine learning models in terms of their AML abilities. In a key way, using synthetic data in these comparisons can be even better than using real data: the ground truth labels are complete, whilst many laundering transactions in real data are never detected.

Robustness to distribution shift has become a growing concern for text and image models as they transition from research subjects to deployment in the real world. However, high-quality benchmarks for distribution shift in tabular machine learning tasks are still lacking despite the widespread real-world use of tabular data and differences in the models used for tabular data in comparison to text and images. As a consequence, the robustness of tabular models to distribution shift is poorly understood. To address this issue, we introduce TableShift, a distribution shift benchmark for tabular data. TableShift contains 15 binary classification tasks in total, each with an associated shift, and includes a diverse set of data sources, prediction targets, and distribution shifts. The benchmark covers domains including finance, education, public policy, healthcare, and civic participation, and is accessible using only a few lines of Python code via the TableShift API. We conduct a large-scale study comparing several state-of-the-art tabular data models alongside robust learning and domain generalization methods on the benchmark tasks. Our study demonstrates (1) a linear trend between in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) accuracy; (2) domain robustness methods can reduce shift gaps but at the cost of reduced ID accuracy; (3) a strong relationship between shift gap (difference between ID and OOD performance) and shifts in the label distribution. The benchmark data, Python package, model implementations, and more information about TableShift are available at https://github.com/mlfoundations/tableshift and https://tableshift.org .