NeurIPS 2023 论文列表

Open-set object recognition aims to identify if an object is from a class that has been encountered during training or not. To perform open-set object recognition accurately, a key challenge is how to reduce the reliance on spurious-discriminative features. In this paper, motivated by that different large models pre-trained through different paradigms can possess very rich while distinct implicit knowledge, we propose a novel framework named Large Model Collaboration (LMC) to tackle the above challenge via collaborating different off-the-shelf large models in a training-free manner. Moreover, we also incorporate the proposed framework with several novel designs to effectively extract implicit knowledge from large models. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed framework. Code is available \href{https://github.com/Harryqu123/LMC}{here}.

Cookies are designed to enable more accurate identification and tracking of user behavior, in turn allowing for more personalized ads and better performing ad campaigns. Given the additional information that is recorded, questions related to privacy and fairness naturally arise. How does a user's consent decision influence how much the system can learn about their demographic and tastes? Is the impact of a user's consent decision on the recommender system's ability to learn about their latent attributes uniform across demographics? We investigate these questions in the context of an engagement-driven recommender system using simulation. We empirically demonstrate that when consent rates exhibit demographic-dependence, user consent has a disparate impact on the recommender agent's ability to estimate users' latent attributes. In particular, we find that when consent rates are demographic-dependent, a user disagreeing to share their cookie may counter-intuitively cause the recommender agent to know more about the user than if the user agreed to share their cookie. Furthermore, the gap in base consent rates across demographics serves as an amplifier: users from the lower consent rate demographic who agree to cookie sharing generally experience higher estimation errors than the same users from the higher consent rate demographic, and conversely for users who choose to disagree to cookie sharing, with these differences increasing in consent rate gap. We discuss the need for new notions of fairness that encourage consistency between a user's privacy decisions and the system's ability to estimate their latent attributes.

This paper presents a collaborative implicit neural simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system with RGB-D image sequences, which consists of complete front-end and back-end modules including odometry, loop detection, sub-map fusion, and global refinement. In order to enable all these modules in a unified framework, we propose a novel neural point based 3D scene representation in which each point maintains a learnable neural feature for scene encoding and is associated with a certain keyframe. Moreover, a distributed-to-centralized learning strategy is proposed for the collaborative implicit SLAM to improve consistency and cooperation. A novel global optimization framework is also proposed to improve the system accuracy like traditional bundle adjustment. Experiments on various datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in both camera tracking and mapping.

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising distributed learning paradigm that enables multiple clients to learn a global model collaboratively without sharing their private data. However, the effectiveness of FL is highly dependent on the quality of the data that is being used for training. In particular, data heterogeneity issues, such as label distribution skew and feature skew, can significantly impact the performance of FL. Previous studies in FL have primarily focused on addressing label distribution skew data heterogeneity, while only a few recent works have made initial progress in tackling feature skew issues. Notably, these two forms of data heterogeneity have been studied separately and have not been well explored within a unified FL framework. To address this gap, we propose Fed-CO$_2$, a universal FL framework that handles both label distribution skew and feature skew within a Cooperation mechanism between the Online and Offline models. Specifically, the online model learns general knowledge that is shared among all clients, while the offline model is trained locally to learn the specialized knowledge of each individual client. To further enhance model cooperation in the presence of feature shifts, we design an intra-client knowledge transfer mechanism that reinforces mutual learning between the online and offline models, and an inter-client knowledge transfer mechanism to increase the models’ domain generalization ability. Extensive experiments show that our Fed-CO$_2$ outperforms a wide range of existing personalized federated learning algorithms in terms of handling label distribution skew and feature skew, both individually and collectively. The empirical results are supported by our convergence analyses in a simplified setting.

We study multi-product inventory control problems where a manager makes sequential replenishment decisions based on partial historical information in order to minimize its cumulative losses. Our motivation is to consider general demands, losses and dynamics to go beyond standard models which usually rely on newsvendor-type losses, fixed dynamics, and unrealistic i.i.d. demand assumptions. We propose MaxCOSD, an online algorithm that has provable guarantees even for problems with non-i.i.d. demands and stateful dynamics, including for instance perishability. We consider what we call non-degeneracy assumptions on the demand process, and argue that they are necessary to allow learning.

We present ProtoConcepts, a method for interpretable image classification combining deep learning and case-based reasoning using prototypical parts. Existing work in prototype-based image classification uses a "this looks like that'' reasoning process, which dissects a test image by finding prototypical parts and combining evidence from these prototypes to make a final classification. However, all of the existing prototypical part-based image classifiers provide only one-to-one comparisons, where a single training image patch serves as a prototype to compare with a part of our test image. With these single-image comparisons, it can often be difficult to identify the underlying concept being compared (e.g., "is it comparing the color or the shape?''). Our proposed method modifies the architecture of prototype-based networks to instead learn prototypical concepts which are visualized using multiple image patches. Having multiple visualizations of the same prototype allows us to more easily identify the concept captured by that prototype (e.g., "the test image and the related training patches are all the same shade of blue''), and allows our model to create richer, more interpretable visual explanations. Our experiments show that our ``this looks like those'' reasoning process can be applied as a modification to a wide range of existing prototypical image classification networks while achieving comparable accuracy on benchmark datasets.

Unsupervised semantic segmentation is a challenging task that segments images into semantic groups without manual annotation. Prior works have primarily focused on leveraging prior knowledge of semantic consistency or priori concepts from self-supervised learning methods, which often overlook the coherence property of image segments. In this paper, we demonstrate that the smoothness prior, asserting that close features in a metric space share the same semantics, can significantly simplify segmentation by casting unsupervised semantic segmentation as an energy minimization problem. Under this paradigm, we propose a novel approach called SmooSeg that harnesses self-supervised learning methods to model the closeness relationships among observations as smoothness signals. To effectively discover coherent semantic segments, we introduce a novel smoothness loss that promotes piecewise smoothness within segments while preserving discontinuities across different segments. Additionally, to further enhance segmentation quality, we design an asymmetric teacher-student style predictor that generates smoothly updated pseudo labels, facilitating an optimal fit between observations and labeling outputs. Thanks to the rich supervision cues of the smoothness prior, our SmooSeg significantly outperforms STEGO in terms of pixel accuracy on three datasets: COCOStuff (+14.9\%), Cityscapes (+13.0\%), and Potsdam-3 (+5.7\%).

The past few years have witnessed great success in the use of diffusion models (DMs) to generate high-fidelity images with the help of stochastic differential equations (SDEs). However, discretization error is an inevitable limitation when utilizing numerical solvers to solve SDEs. To address this limitation, we provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating that an appropriate combination of the contrastive loss and score matching serves as an upper bound of the KL divergence between the true data distribution and the model distribution. To obtain this bound, we utilize a contrastive loss to construct a contrastive sampling chain to fine-tuning the pre-trained DM. In this manner, our method reduces the discretization error and thus yields a smaller gap between the true data distribution and our model distribution. Moreover, the presented method can be applied to fine-tuning various pre-trained DMs, both with or without fast sampling algorithms, contributing to better sample quality or slightly faster sampling speeds. To validate the efficacy of our method, we conduct comprehensive experiments. For example, on CIFAR10, when applied to a pre-trained EDM, our method improves the FID from 2.04 to 1.88 with 35 neural function evaluations (NFEs), and reduces NFEs from 35 to 25 to achieve the same 2.04 FID.

Reasoning on large-scale knowledge graphs has been long dominated by embedding methods. While path-based methods possess the inductive capacity that embeddings lack, their scalability is limited by the exponential number of paths. Here we present A\*Net, a scalable path-based method for knowledge graph reasoning. Inspired by the A\* algorithm for shortest path problems, our A\*Net learns a priority function to select important nodes and edges at each iteration, to reduce time and memory footprint for both training and inference. The ratio of selected nodes and edges can be specified to trade off between performance and efficiency. Experiments on both transductive and inductive knowledge graph reasoning benchmarks show that A\*Net achieves competitive performance with existing state-of-the-art path-based methods, while merely visiting 10% nodes and 10% edges at each iteration. On a million-scale dataset ogbl-wikikg2, A\*Net not only achieves a new state-of-the-art result, but also converges faster than embedding methods. A\*Net is the first path-based method for knowledge graph reasoning at such scale.

The breakthrough performance of large language models (LLMs) comes with major computational footprints and high deployment costs. In this paper, we progress towards resolving this problem by proposing a novel structured compression approach for LLMs, called ZipLM. ZipLM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy-vs-speedup, while matching a set of desired target runtime speedups in any given inference environment. Specifically, given a model, a dataset, an inference environment, as well as a set of speedup targets, ZipLM iteratively identifies and removes components with the worst loss-runtime trade-off. Unlike prior methods that specialize in either the *post-training/one-shot* or the *gradual compression* setting, and only for specific families of models such as BERT (*encoder*) or GPT (*decoder*), ZipLM produces state-of-the-art compressed models across all these settings. Furthermore, ZipLM achieves superior results for a fraction of the computational cost relative to prior distillation and pruning techniques, making it a cost-effective approach for generating an entire family of smaller, faster, and highly accurate models, guaranteed to meet the desired inference specifications. In particular, ZipLM outperforms all prior BERT-base distillation and pruning techniques, such as CoFi, MiniLM, and TinyBERT. Moreover, it matches the performance of the heavily optimized MobileBERT model, obtained via extensive architecture search, by simply pruning the baseline BERT-large model. When compressing GPT2, ZipLM outperforms DistilGPT2 while being 60\% smaller and 30\% faster. Our code is available at: https://github.com/IST-DASLab/ZipLM.

A major challenge in monocular 3D object detection is the limited diversity and quantity of objects in real datasets. While augmenting real scenes with virtual objects holds promise to improve both the diversity and quantity of the objects, it remains elusive due to the lack of an effective 3D object insertion method in complex real captured scenes. In this work, we study augmenting complex real indoor scenes with virtual objects for monocular 3D object detection. The main challenge is to automatically identify plausible physical properties for virtual assets (e.g., locations, appearances, sizes, etc.) in cluttered real scenes. To address this challenge, we propose a physically plausible indoor 3D object insertion approach to automatically copy virtual objects and paste them into real scenes. The resulting objects in scenes have 3D bounding boxes with plausible physical locations and appearances. In particular, our method first identifies physically feasible locations and poses for the inserted objects to prevent collisions with the existing room layout. Subsequently, it estimates spatially-varying illumination for the insertion location, enabling the immersive blending of the virtual objects into the original scene with plausible appearances and cast shadows. We show that our augmentation method significantly improves existing monocular 3D object models and achieves state-of-the-art performance. For the first time, we demonstrate that a physically plausible 3D object insertion, serving as a generative data augmentation technique, can lead to significant improvements for discriminative downstream tasks such as monocular 3D object detection. Project website: https://gyhandy.github.io/3D-Copy-Paste/.

We introduce Meta-AdaM, a meta-learned adaptive optimizer with momentum, designed for few-shot learning tasks that pose significant challenges to deep learning models due to the limited number of labeled examples. Meta-learning has been successfully employed to address these challenges by transferring meta-learned prior knowledge to new tasks. Most existing works focus on meta-learning an optimal model initialization or an adaptive learning rate learner for rapid convergence. However, these approaches either neglect to consider weight-update history for the adaptive learning rate learner or fail to effectively integrate momentum for fast convergence, as seen in many-shot learning settings. To tackle these limitations, we propose a meta-learned learning rate learner that utilizes weight-update history as input to predict more appropriate learning rates for rapid convergence. Furthermore, for the first time, our approach incorporates momentum into the optimization process of few-shot learning via a double look-ahead mechanism, enabling rapid convergence similar to many-shot settings. Extensive experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Meta-AdaM.

Designing and deriving effective model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) algorithms with a performance improvement guarantee is challenging, mainly attributed to the high coupling between model learning and policy optimization. Many prior methods that rely on return discrepancy to guide model learning ignore the impacts of model shift, which can lead to performance deterioration due to excessive model updates. Other methods use performance difference bound to explicitly consider model shift. However, these methods rely on a fixed threshold to constrain model shift, resulting in a heavy dependence on the threshold and a lack of adaptability during the training process. In this paper, we theoretically derive an optimization objective that can unify model shift and model bias and then formulate a fine-tuning process. This process adaptively adjusts the model updates to get a performance improvement guarantee while avoiding model overfitting. Based on these, we develop a straightforward algorithm USB-PO (Unified model Shift and model Bias Policy Optimization). Empirical results show that USB-PO achieves state-of-the-art performance on several challenging benchmark tasks.

Though achieving excellent performance in some cases, current unsupervised learning methods for single image denoising usually have constraints in applications. In this paper, we propose a new approach which is more general and applicable to complicated noise models. Utilizing the property of score function, the gradient of logarithmic probability, we define a solving system for denoising. Once the score function of noisy images has been estimated, the denoised result can be obtained through the solving system. Our approach can be applied to multiple noise models, such as the mixture of multiplicative and additive noise combined with structured correlation. Experimental results show that our method is comparable when the noise model is simple, and has good performance in complicated cases where other methods are not applicable or perform poorly.

Generative modeling has recently undergone remarkable advancements, primarily propelled by the transformative implications of Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPMs). The impressive capability of these models, however, often entails significant computational overhead during both training and inference. To tackle this challenge, we present Diff-Pruning, an efficient compression method tailored for learning lightweight diffusion models from pre-existing ones, without the need for extensive re-training. The essence of Diff-Pruning is encapsulated in a Taylor expansion over pruned timesteps, a process that disregards non-contributory diffusion steps and ensembles informative gradients to identify important weights. Our empirical assessment, undertaken across several datasets highlights two primary benefits of our proposed method: 1) Efficiency: it enables approximately a 50\% reduction in FLOPs at a mere 10% to 20% of the original training expenditure; 2) Consistency: the pruned diffusion models inherently preserve generative behavior congruent with their pre-trained models.

Generative models produce unbounded outputs, necessitating the use of refusal techniques to confine their output space. Employing generative refusals is crucial in upholding the ethical and copyright integrity of synthesized content, particularly when working with widely adopted diffusion models. "Concept negation'' presents a promising paradigm to achieve generative refusals, as it effectively defines and governs the model's output space based on concepts, utilizing natural language interfaces that are readily comprehensible to humans. However, despite the valuable contributions of prior research to the field of concept negation, it still suffers from significant limitations. The existing concept negation methods, which operate based on the composition of score or noise predictions from the diffusion process, are limited to independent concepts (e.g., ``a blonde girl`` without ``glasses``) and fail to consider the interconnected nature of concepts in reality (e.g., ``Mickey mouse eats ice cream`` without ``Disney characters``). Keeping the limitations in mind, we propose a novel framework, called $ProtoRe$, to improve the flexibility of concept negation via test-time negative concept identification along with purification in the feature space. $ProtoRe$ works by incorporating CLIP's language-contrastive knowledge to identify the prototype of negative concepts, extract the negative features from outputs using the prototype as a prompt, and further refine the attention maps by retrieving negative features. Our evaluation on multiple benchmarks shows that $ProtoRe$ outperforms state-of-the-art methods under various settings, in terms of the effectiveness of purification and the fidelity of generative images.

The relevance of optimal transport methods to machine learning has long been hindered by two salient limitations. First, the $O(n^3)$ computational cost of standard sample-based solvers (when used on batches of $n$ samples) is prohibitive. Second, the mass conservation constraint makes OT solvers too rigid in practice: because they must match \textit{all} points from both measures, their output can be heavily influenced by outliers. A flurry of recent works in OT has addressed these computational and modelling limitations, but has resulted in two separate strains of methods: While the computational outlook was much improved by entropic regularization, more recent $O(n)$ linear-time \textit{low-rank} solvers hold the promise to scale up OT further. On the other hand, modelling rigidities have been eased owing to unbalanced variants of OT, that rely on penalization terms to promote, rather than impose, mass conservation. The goal of this paper is to merge these two strains, to achieve the promise of \textit{both} versatile/scalable unbalanced/low-rank OT solvers. We propose custom algorithms to implement these extensions for the linear OT problem and its Fused-Gromov-Wasserstein generalization, and demonstrate their practical relevance to challenging spatial transcriptomics matching problems.

Anomaly detection (AD) plays a crucial role in many safety-critical application domains. The challenge of adapting an anomaly detector to drift in the normal data distribution, especially when no training data is available for the "new normal," has led to the development of zero-shot AD techniques. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method called Adaptive Centered Representations (ACR) for zero-shot batch-level AD. Our approach trains off-the-shelf deep anomaly detectors (such as deep SVDD) to adapt to a set of inter-related training data distributions in combination with batch normalization, enabling automatic zero-shot generalization for unseen AD tasks. This simple recipe, batch normalization plus meta-training, is a highly effective and versatile tool. Our results demonstrate the first zero-shot AD results for tabular data and outperform existing methods in zero-shot anomaly detection and segmentation on image data from specialized domains.

We study the node classification problem on feature-decorated graphs in the sparse setting, i.e., when the expected degree of a node is $O(1)$ in the number of nodes, in the fixed-dimensional asymptotic regime, i.e., the dimension of the feature data is fixed while the number of nodes is large. Such graphs are typically known to be locally tree-like. We introduce a notion of Bayes optimality for node classification tasks, called asymptotic local Bayes optimality, and compute the optimal classifier according to this criterion for a fairly general statistical data model with arbitrary distributions of the node features and edge connectivity. The optimal classifier is implementable using a message-passing graph neural network architecture. We then compute the generalization error of this classifier and compare its performance against existing learning methods theoretically on a well-studied statistical model with naturally identifiable signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) in the data. We find that the optimal message-passing architecture interpolates between a standard MLP in the regime of low graph signal and a typical convolution in the regime of high graph signal. Furthermore, we prove a corresponding non-asymptotic result.