NeurIPS 2023 论文列表

Independent Component Analysis (ICA) aims to recover independent latent variables from observed mixtures thereof. Causal Representation Learning (CRL) aims instead to infer causally related (thus often statistically _dependent_) latent variables, together with the unknown graph encoding their causal relationships. We introduce an intermediate problem termed _Causal Component Analysis (CauCA)_. CauCA can be viewed as a generalization of ICA, modelling the causal dependence among the latent components, and as a special case of CRL. In contrast to CRL, it presupposes knowledge of the causal graph, focusing solely on learning the unmixing function and the causal mechanisms. Any impossibility results regarding the recovery of the ground truth in CauCA also apply for CRL, while possibility results may serve as a stepping stone for extensions to CRL. We characterize CauCA identifiability from multiple datasets generated through different types of interventions on the latent causal variables. As a corollary, this interventional perspective also leads to new identifiability results for nonlinear ICA—a special case of CauCA with an empty graph—requiring strictly fewer datasets than previous results. We introduce a likelihood-based approach using normalizing flows to estimate both the unmixing function and the causal mechanisms, and demonstrate its effectiveness through extensive synthetic experiments in the CauCA and ICA setting.

Blind Omnidirectional Image Quality Assessment (BOIQA) aims to objectively assess the human perceptual quality of omnidirectional images (ODIs) without relying on pristine-quality image information. It is becoming more significant with the increasing advancement of virtual reality (VR) technology. However, the quality assessment of ODIs is severely hampered by the fact that the existing BOIQA pipeline lacks the modeling of the observer's browsing process. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel multi-sequence network for BOIQA called Assessor360, which is derived from the realistic multi-assessor ODI quality assessment procedure. Specifically, we propose a generalized Recursive Probability Sampling (RPS) method for the BOIQA task, combining content and details information to generate multiple pseudo viewport sequences from a given starting point. Additionally, we design a Multi-scale Feature Aggregation (MFA) module with a Distortion-aware Block (DAB) to fuse distorted and semantic features of each viewport. We also devise Temporal Modeling Module (TMM) to learn the viewport transition in the temporal domain. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Assessor360 outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multiple OIQA datasets. The code and models are available at https://github.com/TianheWu/Assessor360.

The discovery of neural architectures from simple building blocks is a long-standing goal of Neural Architecture Search (NAS). Hierarchical search spaces are a promising step towards this goal but lack a unifying search space design framework and typically only search over some limited aspect of architectures. In this work, we introduce a unifying search space design framework based on context-free grammars that can naturally and compactly generate expressive hierarchical search spaces that are 100s of orders of magnitude larger than common spaces from the literature. By enhancing and using their properties, we effectively enable search over the complete architecture and can foster regularity. Further, we propose an efficient hierarchical kernel design for a Bayesian Optimization search strategy to efficiently search over such huge spaces. We demonstrate the versatility of our search space design framework and show that our search strategy can be superior to existing NAS approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/automl/hierarchical_nas_construction.

While performing favourably on the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) instances, most of the existing neural methods for vehicle routing problems (VRPs) struggle to generalize in the presence of a distribution shift. To tackle this issue, we propose an ensemble-based deep reinforcement learning method for VRPs, which learns a group of diverse sub-policies to cope with various instance distributions. In particular, to prevent convergence of the parameters to the same one, we enforce diversity across sub-policies by leveraging Bootstrap with random initialization. Moreover, we also explicitly pursue inequality between sub-policies by exploiting regularization terms during training to further enhance diversity. Experimental results show that our method is able to outperform the state-of-the-art neural baselines on randomly generated instances of various distributions, and also generalizes favourably on the benchmark instances from TSPLib and CVRPLib, which confirmed the effectiveness of the whole method and the respective designs.

Salient object detection (SOD) aims to identify standout elements in a scene, with recent advancements primarily focused on integrating depth data (RGB-D) or temporal data from videos to enhance SOD in complex scenes. However, the unison of two types of crucial information remains largely underexplored due to data constraints. To bridge this gap, we in this work introduce the DViSal dataset, fueling further research in the emerging field of RGB-D video salient object detection (DVSOD). Our dataset features 237 diverse RGB-D videos alongside comprehensive annotations, including object and instance-level markings, as well as bounding boxes and scribbles. These resources enable a broad scope for potential research directions. We also conduct benchmarking experiments using various SOD models, affirming the efficacy of multimodal video input for salient object detection. Lastly, we highlight some intriguing findings and promising future research avenues. To foster growth in this field, our dataset and benchmark results are publicly accessible at: https://dvsod.github.io/.

We consider the learning of a single-index target function $f_*: \mathbb{R}^d\to\mathbb{R}$ under spiked covariance data: $$f_*(\boldsymbol{x}) = \textstyle\sigma_*(\frac{1}{\sqrt{1+\theta}}\langle\boldsymbol{x},\boldsymbol{\mu}\rangle), ~~ \boldsymbol{x}\overset{\small\mathrm{i.i.d.}}{\sim}\mathcal{N}(0,\boldsymbol{I_d} + \theta\boldsymbol{\mu}\boldsymbol{\mu}^\top), ~~ \theta\asymp d^{\beta} \text{ for } \beta\in[0,1), $$ where the link function $\sigma_*:\mathbb{R}\to\mathbb{R}$ is a degree-$p$ polynomial with information exponent $k$ (defined as the lowest degree in the Hermite expansion of $\sigma_*$), and it depends on the projection of input $\boldsymbol{x}$ onto the spike (signal) direction $\boldsymbol{\mu}\in\mathbb{R}^d$. In the proportional asymptotic limit where the number of training examples $n$ and the dimensionality $d$ jointly diverge: $n,d\to\infty, n/d\to\psi\in(0,\infty)$, we ask the following question: how large should the spike magnitude $\theta$ (i.e., the strength of the low-dimensional component) be, in order for $(i)$ kernel methods, $(ii)$ neural networks optimized by gradient descent, to learn $f_*$? We show that for kernel ridge regression, $\beta\ge 1-\frac{1}{p}$ is both sufficient and necessary. Whereas for two-layer neural networks trained with gradient descent, $\beta>1-\frac{1}{k}$ suffices. Our results demonstrate that both kernel methods and neural networks benefit from low-dimensional structures in the data. Further, since $k\le p$ by definition, neural networks can adapt to such structures more effectively.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have transformed the field of question answering (QA). However, evaluating LLMs in the medical field is challenging due to the lack of standardized and comprehensive datasets. To address this gap, we introduce CMExam, sourced from the Chinese National Medical Licensing Examination. CMExam consists of 60K+ multiple-choice questions for standardized and objective evaluations, as well as solution explanations for model reasoning evaluation in an open-ended manner. For in-depth analyses of LLMs, we invited medical professionals to label five additional question-wise annotations, including disease groups, clinical departments, medical disciplines, areas of competency, and question difficulty levels. Alongside the dataset, we further conducted thorough experiments with representative LLMs and QA algorithms on CMExam. The results show that GPT-4 had the best accuracy of 61.6% and a weighted F1 score of 0.617. These results highlight a great disparity when compared to human accuracy, which stood at 71.6%. For explanation tasks, while LLMs could generate relevant reasoning and demonstrate improved performance after finetuning, they fall short of a desired standard, indicating ample room for improvement. To the best of our knowledge, CMExam is the first Chinese medical exam dataset to provide comprehensive medical annotations. The experiments and findings of LLM evaluation also provide valuable insights into the challenges and potential solutions in developing Chinese medical QA systems and LLM evaluation pipelines.

Active Domain Adaptation (ADA) has emerged as an attractive technique for assisting domain adaptation by actively annotating a small subset of target samples. Most ADA methods focus on measuring the target representativeness beyond traditional active learning criteria to handle the domain shift problem, while leaving the uncertainty estimation to be performed by an uncalibrated deterministic model. In this work, we introduce a probabilistic framework that captures both data-level and prediction-level uncertainties beyond a point estimate. Specifically, we use variational inference to approximate the joint posterior distribution of latent representation and model prediction. The variational objective of labeled data can be formulated by a variational autoencoder and a latent diffusion classifier, and the objective of unlabeled data can be implemented in a knowledge distillation framework. We utilize adversarial learning to ensure an invariant latent space. The resulting diffusion classifier enables efficient sampling of all possible predictions for each individual to recover the predictive distribution. We then leverage a t-test-based criterion upon the sampling and select informative unlabeled target samples based on the p-value, which encodes both prediction variability and cross-category ambiguity. Experiments on both ADA and Source-Free ADA settings show that our method provides more calibrated predictions than previous ADA methods and achieves favorable performance on three domain adaptation datasets.

We introduce RealTime QA, a dynamic question answering (QA) platform that announces questions and evaluates systems on a regular basis (weekly in this version). RealTime QA inquires about the current world, and QA systems need to answer questions about novel events or information. It therefore challenges static, conventional assumptions in open-domain QA datasets and pursues instantaneous applications. We build strong baseline models upon large pretrained language models, including GPT-3 and T5. Our benchmark is an ongoing effort, and this paper presents real-time evaluation results over the past year. Our experimental results show that GPT-3 can often properly update its generation results, based on newly-retrieved documents, highlighting the importance of up-to-date information retrieval. Nonetheless, we find that GPT-3 tends to return outdated answers when retrieved documents do not provide sufficient information to find an answer. This suggests an important avenue for future research: can an open-domain QA system identify such unanswerable cases and communicate with the user or even the retrieval module to modify the retrieval results? We hope that RealTime QA will spur progress in instantaneous applications of question answering and beyond.

This paper focuses on improving the reconstruction of 2D floorplans from unstructured 3D point clouds. We identify opportunities for enhancement over the existing methods in three main areas: semantic quality, efficient representation, and local geometric details. To address these, we presents SLIBO-Net, an innovative approach to reconstructing 2D floorplans from unstructured 3D point clouds. We propose a novel transformer-based architecture that employs an efficient floorplan representation, providing improved room shape supervision and allowing for manageable token numbers. By incorporating geometric priors as a regularization mechanism and post-processing step, we enhance the capture of local geometric details. We also propose a scale-independent evaluation metric, correcting the discrepancy in error treatment between varying floorplan sizes. Our approach notably achieves a new state-of-the-art on the Structure3D dataset. The resultant floorplans exhibit enhanced semantic plausibility, substantially improving the overall quality and realism of the reconstructions. Our code and dataset are available online.

We propose a novel multimodal video benchmark - the Perception Test - to evaluate the perception and reasoning skills of pre-trained multimodal models (e.g. Flamingo, BEiT-3, or GPT-4). Compared to existing benchmarks that focus on computational tasks (e.g. classification, detection or tracking), the Perception Test focuses on skills (Memory, Abstraction, Physics, Semantics) and types of reasoning (descriptive, explanatory, predictive, counterfactual) across video, audio, and text modalities, to provide a comprehensive and efficient evaluation tool. The benchmark probes pre-trained models for their transfer capabilities, in a zero-shot / few-shot or limited finetuning regime. For these purposes, the Perception Test introduces 11.6k real-world videos, 23s average length, designed to show perceptually interesting situations, filmed by around 100 participants worldwide. The videos are densely annotated with six types of labels (multiple-choice and grounded video question-answers, object and point tracks, temporal action and sound segments), enabling both language and non-language evaluations. The fine-tuning and validation splits of the benchmark are publicly available (CC-BY license), in addition to a challenge server with a held-out test split. Human baseline results compared to state-of-the-art video QA models show a substantial gap in performance (91.4% vs 46.2%), suggesting that there is significant room for improvement in multimodal video understanding. Dataset, baselines code, and challenge server are available at https://github.com/deepmind/perception_test

Specifying reward signals that allow agents to learn complex behaviors is a long-standing challenge in reinforcement learning. A promising approach is to extract preferences for behaviors from unlabeled videos, which are widely available on the internet. We present Video Prediction Rewards (VIPER), an algorithm that leverages pretrained video prediction models as action-free reward signals for reinforcement learning. Specifically, we first train an autoregressive transformer on expert videos and then use the video prediction likelihoods as reward signals for a reinforcement learning agent. VIPER enables expert-level control without programmatic task rewards across a wide range of DMC, Atari, and RLBench tasks. Moreover, generalization of the video prediction model allows us to derive rewards for an out-of-distribution environment where no expert data is available, enabling cross-embodiment generalization for tabletop manipulation. We see our work as starting point for scalable reward specification from unlabeled videos that will benefit from the rapid advances in generative modeling. Source code and datasets are available on the project website: https://ViperRL.com

This paper provides a theoretical understanding of deep Q-Network (DQN) with the $\varepsilon$-greedy exploration in deep reinforcement learning. Despite the tremendous empirical achievement of the DQN, its theoretical characterization remains underexplored. First, the exploration strategy is either impractical or ignored in the existing analysis. Second, in contrast to conventional Q-learning algorithms, the DQN employs the target network and experience replay to acquire an unbiased estimation of the mean-square Bellman error (MSBE) utilized in training the Q-network. However, the existing theoretical analysis of DQNs lacks convergence analysis or bypasses the technical challenges by deploying a significantly overparameterized neural network, which is not computationally efficient. This paper provides the first theoretical convergence and sample complexity analysis of the practical setting of DQNs with $\epsilon$-greedy policy. We prove an iterative procedure with decaying $\epsilon$ converges to the optimal Q-value function geometrically. Moreover, a higher level of $\epsilon$ values enlarges the region of convergence but slows down the convergence, while the opposite holds for a lower level of $\epsilon$ values. Experiments justify our established theoretical insights on DQNs.

A common assumption in causal inference from observational data is that there is no hidden confounding. Yet it is, in general, impossible to verify the presence of hidden confounding factors from a single dataset. Under the assumption of independent causal mechanisms underlying the data-generating process, we demonstrate a way to detect unobserved confounders when having multiple observational datasets coming from different environments. We present a theory for testable conditional independencies that are only absent when there is hidden confounding and examine cases where we violate its assumptions: degenerate & dependent mechanisms, and faithfulness violations. Additionally, we propose a procedure to test these independencies and study its empirical finite-sample behavior using simulation studies and semi-synthetic data based on a real-world dataset. In most cases, the proposed procedure correctly predicts the presence of hidden confounding, particularly when the confounding bias is large.

Federated Learning (FL) is an emerging paradigm that allows a model to be trained across a number of participants without sharing data. Recent works have begun to consider the effects of using pre-trained models as an initialization point for existing FL algorithms; however, these approaches ignore the vast body of efficient transfer learning literature from the centralized learning setting. Here we revisit the problem of FL from a pre-trained model considered in prior work and expand it to a set of computer vision transfer learning problems. We first observe that simply fitting a linear classification head can be efficient in many cases. We then show that in the FL setting, fitting a classifier using the Nearest Class Means (NCM) can be done exactly and orders of magnitude more efficiently than existing proposals, while obtaining strong performance. Finally, we demonstrate that using a two-stage approach of obtaining the classifier and then fine-tuning the model can yield rapid convergence and improved generalization in the federated setting. We demonstrate the potential our method has to reduce communication and compute costs while achieving better model performance.

This paper addresses the problem of estimating the 3-DoF camera pose for a ground-level image with respect to a satellite image that encompasses the local surroundings. We propose a novel end-to-end approach that leverages the learning of dense pixel-wise flow fields in pairs of ground and satellite images to calculate the camera pose. Our approach differs from existing methods by constructing the feature metric at the pixel level, enabling full-image supervision for learning distinctive geometric configurations and visual appearances across views. Specifically, our method employs two distinct convolution networks for ground and satellite feature extraction. Then, we project the ground feature map to the bird's eye view (BEV) using a fixed camera height assumption to achieve preliminary geometric alignment. To further establish the content association between the BEV and satellite features, we introduce a residual convolution block to refine the projected BEV feature. Optical flow estimation is performed on the refined BEV feature map and the satellite feature map using flow decoder networks based on RAFT. After obtaining dense flow correspondences, we apply the least square method to filter matching inliers and regress the ground camera pose. Extensive experiments demonstrate significant improvements compared to state-of-the-art methods. Notably, our approach reduces the median localization error by 89\%, 19\%, 80\%, and 35\% on the KITTI, Ford multi-AV, VIGOR, and Oxford RobotCar datasets, respectively.

Diffusion-based manifold learning methods have proven useful in representation learning and dimensionality reduction of modern high dimensional, high throughput, noisy datasets. Such datasets are especially present in fields like biology and physics. While it is thought that these methods preserve underlying manifold structure of data by learning a proxy for geodesic distances, no specific theoretical links have been established. Here, we establish such a link via results in Riemannian geometry explicitly connecting heat diffusion to manifold distances. In this process, we also formulate a more general heat kernel based manifold embedding method that we call heat geodesic embeddings. This novel perspective makes clearer the choices available in manifold learning and denoising. Results show that our method outperforms existing state of the art in preserving ground truth manifold distances, and preserving cluster structure in toy datasets. We also showcase our method on single cell RNA-sequencing datasets with both continuum and cluster structure, where our method enables interpolation of withheld timepoints of data. Finally, we show that parameters of our more general method can be configured to give results similar to PHATE (a state-of-the-art diffusion based manifold learning method) as well as SNE (an attraction/repulsion neighborhood based method that forms the basis of t-SNE).

Meta learning is a promising paradigm to enable skill transfer across tasks. Most previous methods employ the empirical risk minimization principle in optimization. However, the resulting worst fast adaptation to a subset of tasks can be catastrophic in risk-sensitive scenarios. To robustify fast adaptation, this paper optimizes meta learning pipelines from a distributionally robust perspective and meta trains models with the measure of tail task risk. We take the two-stage strategy as heuristics to solve the robust meta learning problem, controlling the worst fast adaptation cases at a certain probabilistic level. Experimental results show that our simple method can improve the robustness of meta learning to task distributions and reduce the conditional expectation of the worst fast adaptation risk.

Particle-based deep generative models, such as gradient flows and score-based diffusion models, have recently gained traction thanks to their striking performance. Their principle of displacing particle distributions using differential equations is conventionally seen as opposed to the previously widespread generative adversarial networks (GANs), which involve training a pushforward generator network. In this paper we challenge this interpretation, and propose a novel framework that unifies particle and adversarial generative models by framing generator training as a generalization of particle models. This suggests that a generator is an optional addition to any such generative model. Consequently, integrating a generator into a score-based diffusion model and training a GAN without a generator naturally emerge from our framework. We empirically test the viability of these original models as proofs of concepts of potential applications of our framework.