NeurIPS 2024 Papers

In open-world scenarios, where both novel classes and domains may exist, an ideal segmentation model should detect anomaly classes for safety and generalize to new domains. However, existing methods often struggle to distinguish between domain-level and semantic-level distribution shifts, leading to poor OOD detection or domain generalization performance. In this work, we aim to equip the model to generalize effectively to covariate-shift regions while precisely identifying semantic-shift regions. To achieve this, we design a novel generative augmentation method to produce coherent images that incorporate both anomaly (or novel) objects and various covariate shifts at both image and object levels. Furthermore, we introduce a training strategy that recalibrates uncertainty specifically for semantic shifts and enhances the feature extractor to align features associated with domain shifts. We validate the effectiveness of our method across benchmarks featuring both semantic and domain shifts. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across all benchmarks for both OOD detection and domain generalization. Code is available at https://github.com/gaozhitong/MultiShiftSeg.

Modern machine learning heavily depends on the effectiveness of optimization techniques. While deep learning models have achieved remarkable empirical results in training, their theoretical underpinnings remain somewhat elusive. Ensuring the convergence of optimization methods requires imposing specific structures on the objective function which often do not hold in practice. One prominent example is the widely recognized Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL) inequality, which has garnered considerable attention in recent years. However, validating such assumptions for deep neural networks entails substantial and often impractical levels of over-parametrization. In order to address this limitation, we propose a novel class of functions that can characterize the loss landscape of modern deep models without requiring extensive over-parametrization and can also include saddle points. Crucially, we prove that gradient-based optimizers possess theoretical guarantees of convergence under this assumption. Finally, we validate the soundness of our assumption through both theoretical analysis and empirical experimentation across a diverse range of deep learning models.

While advancements in NLP have significantly improved the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on tasks requiring vertical thinking, their lateral thinking capabilities remain under-explored and challenging to measure due to the complexity of assessing creative thought processes and the scarcity of relevant data. To address these challenges, we introduce SPLAT, a benchmark leveraging Situation Puzzles to evaluate and elicit LAteral Thinking of LLMs. This benchmark, containing 975 graded situation puzzles across three difficulty levels, employs a new multi-turn player-judge framework instead of the traditional model-based evaluation, which often necessitates a stronger evaluation model. This framework simulates an interactive game where the model (player) asks the evaluation model (judge) questions about an incomplete story to infer the full scenario. The judge answers based on a detailed reference scenario or evaluates if the player's predictions align with the reference one. This approach lessens dependence on more robust evaluation models, enabling the assessment of state-of-the-art LLMs. The experiments demonstrate that a robust evaluation model, such as WizardLM-2, closely matches human judgements in both intermediate question-answering and final scenario accuracy, achieving over 80% agreement--similar to the agreement levels among humans. Furthermore, applying data and reasoning processes from our benchmark to other lateral thinking-related benchmarks, e.g., RiddleSense and BrainTeaser, leads to performance enhancements. This suggests that our benchmark effectively evaluates and elicits the lateral thinking abilities of LLMs.

The relationship between the number of training data points, the number of parameters, and the generalization capabilities of models has been widely studied. Previous work has shown that double descent can occur in the over-parameterized regime and that the standard bias-variance trade-off holds in the under-parameterized regime. These works provide multiple reasons for the existence of the peak. We postulate that the location of the peak depends on the technical properties of both the spectrum as well as the eigenvectors of the sample covariance. We present two simple examples that provably exhibit double descent in the under-parameterized regime and do not seem to occur for reasons provided in prior work.

Knowing the effect of an intervention is critical for human decision-making, but current approaches for causal effect estimation rely on manual data collection and structuring, regardless of the causal assumptions. This increases both the cost and time-to-completion for studies. We show how large, diverse observational text data can be mined with large language models (LLMs) to produce inexpensive causal effect estimates under appropriate causal assumptions. We introduce _NATURAL_, a novel family of causal effect estimators built with LLMs that operate over datasets of unstructured text. Our estimators use LLM conditional distributions (over variables of interest, given the text data) to assist in the computation of classical estimators of causal effect. We overcome a number of technical challenges to realize this idea, such as automating data curation and using LLMs to impute missing information. We prepare six (two synthetic and four real) observational datasets, paired with corresponding ground truth in the form of randomized trials, which we used to systematically evaluate each step of our pipeline. NATURAL estimators demonstrate remarkable performance, yielding causal effect estimates that fall within 3 percentage points of their ground truth counterparts, including on real-world Phase 3/4 clinical trials. Our results suggest that unstructured text data is a rich source of causal effect information, and NATURAL is a first step towards an automated pipeline to tap this resource.

In this paper, we propose a post-training quantization framework of large vision-language models (LVLMs) for efficient multi-modal inference. Conventional quantization methods sequentially search the layer-wise rounding functions by minimizing activation discretization errors, which fails to acquire optimal quantization strategy without considering cross-layer dependency. On the contrary, we mine the cross-layer dependency that significantly influences discretization errors of the entire vision-language model, and embed this dependency into optimal quantization strategy searching with low search cost. Specifically, we observe the strong correlation between the activation entropy and the cross-layer dependency concerning output discretization errors. Therefore, we employ the entropy as the proxy to partition blocks optimally, which aims to achieve satisfying trade-offs between discretization errors and the search cost. Moreover, we optimize the visual encoder to disentangle the cross-layer dependency for fine-grained decomposition of search space, so that the search cost is further reduced without harming the quantization accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that our method compresses the memory by 2.78x and increase generate speed by 1.44x about 13B LLaVA model without performance degradation on diverse multi-modal reasoning tasks.

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have greatly improved their abilities in image understanding. However, these models often struggle with grasping pixel-level semantic details, e.g., the keypoints of an object. To bridge this gap, we introduce the novel challenge of Semantic Keypoint Comprehension, which aims to comprehend keypoints across different task scenarios, including keypoint semantic understanding, visual prompt-based keypoint detection, and textual prompt-based keypoint detection. Moreover, we introduce KptLLM, a unified multimodal model that utilizes an identify-then-detect strategy to effectively address these challenges. KptLLM underscores the initial discernment of semantics in keypoints, followed by the precise determination of their positions through a chain-of-thought process. With several carefully designed modules, KptLLM adeptly handles various modality inputs, facilitating the interpretation of both semantic contents and keypoint locations. Our extensive experiments demonstrate KptLLM's superiority in various keypoint detection benchmarks and its unique semantic capabilities in interpreting keypoints.

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have emerged as a prominent approach for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) by minimizing a combined loss function that incorporates both boundary loss and PDE residual loss. Despite their remarkable empirical performance in various scientific computing tasks, PINNs often fail to generate reasonable solutions, and such pathological behaviors remain difficult to explain and resolve. In this paper, we identify that PINNs can be adversely trained when gradients of each loss function exhibit a significant imbalance in their magnitudes and present a negative inner product value. To address these issues, we propose a novel optimization framework, *Dual Cone Gradient Descent* (DCGD), which adjusts the direction of the updated gradient to ensure it falls within a dual cone region. This region is defined as a set of vectors where the inner products with both the gradients of the PDE residual loss and the boundary loss are non-negative. Theoretically, we analyze the convergence properties of DCGD algorithms in a non-convex setting. On a variety of benchmark equations, we demonstrate that DCGD outperforms other optimization algorithms in terms of various evaluation metrics. In particular, DCGD achieves superior predictive accuracy and enhances the stability of training for failure modes of PINNs and complex PDEs, compared to existing optimally tuned models. Moreover, DCGD can be further improved by combining it with popular strategies for PINNs, including learning rate annealing and the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK).

Images produced by diffusion models are increasingly popular in digital artwork and visual marketing. However, such generated images might replicate content from existing ones and pose the challenge of content originality. Existing Image Copy Detection (ICD) models, though accurate in detecting hand-crafted replicas, overlook the challenge from diffusion models. This motivates us to introduce ICDiff, the first ICD specialized for diffusion models. To this end, we construct a Diffusion-Replication (D-Rep) dataset and correspondingly propose a novel deep embedding method. D-Rep uses a state-of-the-art diffusion model (Stable Diffusion V1.5) to generate 40, 000 image-replica pairs, which are manually annotated into 6 replication levels ranging from 0 (no replication) to 5 (total replication). Our method, PDF-Embedding, transforms the replication level of each image-replica pair into a probability density function (PDF) as the supervision signal. The intuition is that the probability of neighboring replication levels should be continuous and smooth. Experimental results show that PDF-Embedding surpasses protocol-driven methods and non-PDF choices on the D-Rep test set. Moreover, by utilizing PDF-Embedding, we find that the replication ratios of well-known diffusion models against an open-source gallery range from 10% to 20%. The project is publicly available at https://icdiff.github.io/.

Designing a fast and effective entropy model is challenging but essential for practical application of neural codecs. Beyond spatial autoregressive entropy models, more efficient backward adaptation-based entropy models have been recently developed. They not only reduce decoding time by using smaller number of modeling steps but also maintain or even improve rate--distortion performance by leveraging more diverse contexts for backward adaptation. Despite their significant progress, we argue that their performance has been limited by the simple adoption of the design convention for forward adaptation: using only a single type of hyper latent representation, which does not provide sufficient contextual information, especially in the first modeling step. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective entropy modeling framework that leverages sufficient contexts for forward adaptation without compromising on bit-rate. Specifically, we introduce a strategy of diversifying hyper latent representations for forward adaptation, i.e., using two additional types of contexts along with the existing single type of context. In addition, we present a method to effectively use the diverse contexts for contextualizing the current elements to be encoded/decoded. By addressing the limitation of the previous approach, our proposed framework leads to significant performance improvements. Experimental results on popular datasets show that our proposed framework consistently improves rate-distortion performance across various bit-rate regions, e.g., 3.73\% BD-rate gain over the state-of-the-art baseline on the Kodak dataset.

Convolutional residual neural networks (ConvResNets), though overparametersized, can achieve remarkable prediction performance in practice, which cannot be well explained by conventional wisdom. To bridge this gap, we study the performance of ConvResNeXts trained with weight decay, which cover ConvResNets as a special case, from the perspective of nonparametric classification. Our analysis allows for infinitely many building blocks in ConvResNeXts, and shows that weight decay implicitly enforces sparsity on these blocks. Specifically, we consider a smooth target function supported on a low-dimensional manifold, then prove that ConvResNeXts can adapt to the function smoothness and low-dimensional structures and efficiently learn the function without suffering from the curse of dimensionality. Our findings partially justify the advantage of overparameterized ConvResNeXts over conventional machine learning models.

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.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited an impressive ability to perform In-Context Learning (ICL) from only a few examples. Recent works have indicated that the functions learned by ICL can be represented through compressed vectors derived from the transformer. However, the working mechanisms and optimization of these vectors are yet to be thoroughly explored. In this paper, we address this gap by presenting a comprehensive analysis of these compressed vectors, drawing parallels to the parameters trained with gradient descent, and introducing the concept of state vector. Inspired by the works on model soup and momentum-based gradient descent, we propose inner and momentum optimization methods that are applied to refine the state vector progressively as test-time adaptation. Moreover, we simulate state vector aggregation in the multiple example setting, where demonstrations comprising numerous examples are usually too lengthy for regular ICL, and further propose a divide-and-conquer aggregation method to address this challenge. We conduct extensive experiments using Llama-2 and GPT-J in both zero-shot setting and few-shot setting. The experimental results show that our optimization method effectively enhances the state vector and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on diverse tasks.

Language-guided robotic manipulation is a challenging task that requires an embodied agent to follow abstract user instructions to accomplish various complex manipulation tasks. Previous work generally maps instructions and visual perceptions directly to low-level executable actions, neglecting the modeling of critical waypoints (e.g., key states of “close to/grab/move up” in action trajectories) in manipulation tasks. To address this issue, we propose a PImitive-driVen waypOinT-aware world model for Robotic manipulation (PIVOT-R) that focuses solely on the prediction of task-relevant waypoints. Specifically, PIVOT-R consists of a Waypoint-aware World Model (WAWM) and a lightweight action prediction module. The former performs primitive action parsing and primitive-driven waypoint prediction, while the latter focuses on decoding low-level actions. Additionally, we also design an asynchronous hierarchical executor (AHE) for PIVOT-R, which can use different execution frequencies for different modules of the model, thereby helping the model reduce computational redundancy and improve model execution efficiency. Our PIVOT-R outperforms state-of-the-art (SoTA) open-source models on the SeaWave benchmark, achieving an average relative improvement of 19.45% across four levels of instruction tasks. Moreover, compared to the synchronously executed PIVOT-R, the execution efficiency of PIVOT-R with AHE is increased by 28-fold, with only a 2.9% drop in performance. These results provide compelling evidence that our PIVOT-R can significantly improve both the performance and efficiency of robotic manipulation.

Anomaly detection in time series data is fundamental to the design, deployment, and evaluation of industrial control systems. Temporal modeling has been the natural focus of anomaly detection approaches for time series data. However, the focus on temporal modeling can obscure or dilute the spatial information that can be used to capture complex interactions in multivariate time series. In this paper, we propose SARAD, an approach that leverages spatial information beyond data autoencoding errors to improve the detection and diagnosis of anomalies. SARAD trains a Transformer to learn the spatial associations, the pairwise inter-feature relationships which ubiquitously characterize such feedback-controlled systems. As new associations form and old ones dissolve, SARAD applies subseries division to capture their changes over time. Anomalies exhibit association descending patterns, a key phenomenon we exclusively observe and attribute to the disruptive nature of anomalies detaching anomalous features from others. To exploit the phenomenon and yet dismiss non-anomalous descent, SARAD performs anomaly detection via autoencoding in the association space. We present experimental results to demonstrate that SARAD achieves state-of-the-art performance, providing robust anomaly detection and a nuanced understanding of anomalous events.

The *magnitude* of a metric space is a novel invariant that provides a measure of the 'effective size' of a space across multiple scales, while also capturing numerous geometrical properties, such as curvature, density, or entropy. We develop a family of magnitude-based measures of the intrinsic diversity of latent representations, formalising a novel notion of dissimilarity between magnitude functions of finite metric spaces. Our measures are provably stable under perturbations of the data, can be efficiently calculated, and enable a rigorous multi-scale characterisation and comparison of latent representations. We show their utility and superior performance across different domains and tasks, including the automated estimation of diversity, the detection of mode collapse, and the evaluation of generative models for text, image, and graph data.

One of the key challenges in machine learning is to find interpretable representations of learned functions. The Möbius transform is essential for this purpose, as its coefficients correspond to unique *importance scores* for *sets of input variables*. This transform is closely related to widely used game-theoretic notions of importance like the *Shapley* and *Bhanzaf value*, but it also captures crucial higher-order interactions. Although computing the Möbius Transform of a function with $n$ inputs involves $2^n$ coefficients, it becomes tractable when the function is *sparse* and of *low-degree* as we show is the case for many real-world functions. Under these conditions, the complexity of the transform computation is significantly reduced. When there are $K$ non-zero coefficients, our algorithm recovers the Möbius transform in $O(Kn)$ samples and $O(Kn^2)$ time asymptotically under certain assumptions, the first non-adaptive algorithm to do so. We also uncover a surprising connection between group testing and the Möbius transform. For functions where all interactions involve at most $t$ inputs, we use group testing results to compute the Möbius transform with $O(Kt\log n)$ sample complexity and $O(K\mathrm{poly}(n))$ time. A robust version of this algorithm withstands noise and maintains this complexity. This marks the first $n$ sub-linear query complexity, noise-tolerant algorithm for the Möbius transform. While our algorithms are conceptualized in an idealized setting, they indicate that the Möbius transform is a potent tool for interpreting deep learning models.

Recent advancements in models linking natural language with human motions have shown significant promise in motion generation and editing based on instructional text. Motivated by applications in sports coaching and motor skill learning, we investigate the inverse problem: generating corrective instructional text, leveraging motion editing and generation models. We introduce a novel approach that, given a user’s current motion (source) and the desired motion (target), generates text instructions to guide the user towards achieving the target motion. We leverage large language models to generate corrective texts and utilize existing motion generation and editing frameworks to compile datasets of triplets (source motion, target motion, and corrective text). Using this data, we propose a new motion-language model for generating corrective instructions. We present both qualitative and quantitative results across a diverse range of applications that largely improve upon baselines. Our approach demonstrates its effectiveness in instructional scenarios, offering text-based guidance to correct and enhance user performance.

Federated Learning (FL) has recently been applied to the parameter-efficient fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs). While promising, it raises significant challenges due to the heterogeneous resources and data distributions of clients.This study introduces FlexLoRA, a simple yet effective aggregation scheme for LLM fine-tuning, which mitigates the "buckets effect" in traditional FL that restricts the potential of clients with ample resources by tying them to the capabilities of the least-resourced participants. FlexLoRA allows for dynamic adjustment of local LoRA ranks, fostering the development of a global model imbued with broader, less task-specific knowledge. By synthesizing a full-size LoRA weight from individual client contributions and employing Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) for weight redistribution, FlexLoRA fully leverages heterogeneous client resources. Involving thousands of clients performing heterogeneous NLP tasks and client resources, our experiments validate the efficacy of FlexLoRA, with the federated global model achieving consistently better improvement over SOTA FL methods in downstream NLP task performance across various heterogeneous distributions. FlexLoRA's practicality is further underscored by our theoretical analysis and its seamless integration with existing LoRA-based FL methods, offering a path toward cross-device, privacy-preserving federated tuning for LLMs.