NeurIPS 2024 论文列表

Owing to advancements in image synthesis techniques, stylization methodologies for large models have garnered remarkable outcomes. However, when it comes to processing facial images, the outcomes frequently fall short of expectations. Facial stylization is predominantly challenged by two significant hurdles. Firstly, obtaining a large dataset of high-quality stylized images is difficult. The scarcity and diversity of artistic styles make it impractical to compile comprehensive datasets for each style. Secondly, while many methods can transfer colors and strokes from style images, these elements alone cannot fully capture a specific style, which encompasses both concrete and abstract visual elements. Additionally, facial stylization often alters the visual features of the face, making it challenging to balance these changes with the need to retain facial information. To address these issues, we propose a novel method called ACFun, which uses only one style image and one facial image for facial stylization. ACFun comprises an Abstract Fusion Module (AFun) and a Concrete Fusion Module (CFun), which separately learn the abstract and concrete features of the style and face. We also design a Face and Style Imagery Alignment Loss to align the style image with the face image in the latent space. Finally, we generate styled facial images from noise directly to complete the facial stylization task. Experiments show that our method outperforms others in facial stylization, producing highly artistic and visually pleasing results.

\emph{Metacognitive knowledge} refers to humans' intuitive knowledge of their own thinking and reasoning processes. Today's best LLMs clearly possess some reasoning processes. The paper gives evidence that they also have metacognitive knowledge, including ability to name skills and procedures to apply given a task. We explore this primarily in context of math reasoning, developing a prompt-guided interaction procedure to get a powerful LLM to assign sensible skill labels to math questions, followed by having it perform semantic clustering to obtain coarser families of skill labels. These coarse skill labels look interpretable to humans. To validate that these skill labels are meaningful and relevant to the LLM's reasoning processes we perform the following experiments. (a) We ask GPT-4 to assign skill labels to training questions in math datasets GSM8K and MATH. (b) When using an LLM to solve the test questions, we present it with the full list of skill labels and ask it to identify the skill needed. Then it is presented with randomly selected exemplar solved questions associated with that skill label. This improves accuracy on GSM8k and MATH for several strong LLMs, including code-assisted models. The methodology presented is domain-agnostic, even though this article applies it to math problems.

In this paper, we introduce Cosine Autoencoder (CosAE), a novel, generic Autoencoder that seamlessly leverages the classic Fourier series with a feed-forward neural network. CosAE represents an input image as a series of 2D Cosine time series, each defined by a tuple of learnable frequency and Fourier coefficients. This method stands in contrast to a conventional Autoencoder that often sacrifices detail in their reduced-resolution bottleneck latent spaces. CosAE, however, encodes frequency coefficients, i.e., the amplitudes and phases, in its bottleneck. This encoding enables extreme spatial compression, e.g., $64\times$ downsampled feature maps in the bottleneck, without losing detail upon decoding. We showcase the advantage of CosAE via extensive experiments on flexible-resolution super-resolution and blind image restoration, two highly challenging tasks that demand the restoration network to effectively generalize to complex and even unknown image degradations. Our method surpasses state-of-the-art approaches, highlighting its capability to learn a generalizable representation for image restoration. The project page is maintained at [https://sifeiliu.net/CosAE-page/](https://sifeiliu.net/CosAE-page/).

Deep learning models like AlphaFold2 have revolutionized protein structure prediction, achieving unprecedented accuracy. However, the dependence on robust multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) continues to pose a challenge, especially for proteins that lack a wealth of homologous sequences. To overcome this limitation, we introduce MSA-Generator, a self-supervised generative protein language model. Trained on a sequence-to-sequence task using an automatically constructed dataset, MSA-Generator employs protein-specific attention mechanisms to harness large-scale protein databases, generating virtual MSAs that enrich existing ones and boost prediction accuracy. Our experiments on CASP14 and CASP15 benchmarks reveal significant improvements in LDDT scores, particularly for complex and challenging sequences, enhancing the performance of both AlphaFold2 and RoseTTAFold. The code is released at \url{https://github.com/lezhang7/MSAGen}.

Gradient compression is a popular technique for improving communication complexity of stochastic first-order methods in distributed training of machine learning models. However, the existing works consider only with-replacement sampling of stochastic gradients. In contrast, it is well-known in practice and recently confirmed in theory that stochastic methods based on without-replacement sampling, e.g., Random Reshuffling (RR) method, perform better than ones that sample the gradients with-replacement. In this work, we close this gap in the literature and provide the first analysis of methods with gradient compression and without-replacement sampling. We first develop a distributed variant of random reshuffling with gradient compression (Q-RR), and show how to reduce the variance coming from gradient quantization through the use of control iterates. Next, to have a better fit to Federated Learning applications, we incorporate local computation and propose a variant of Q-RR called Q-NASTYA. Q-NASTYA uses local gradient steps and different local and global stepsizes. Next, we show how to reduce compression variance in this setting as well. Finally, we prove the convergence results for the proposed methods and outline several settings in which they improve upon existing algorithms.

We introduce a new PAC-Bayes oracle bound for unbounded losses that extends Cramér-Chernoff bounds to the PAC-Bayesian setting. The proof technique relies on controlling the tails of certain random variables involving the Cramér transform of the loss. Our approach naturally leverages properties of Cramér-Chernoff bounds, such as exact optimization of the free parameter in many PAC-Bayes bounds. We highlight several applications of the main theorem. Firstly, we show that our bound recovers and generalizes previous results. Additionally, our approach allows working with richer assumptions that result in more informative and potentially tighter bounds. In this direction, we provide a general bound under a new *model-dependent* assumption from which we obtain bounds based on parameter norms and log-Sobolev inequalities. Notably, many of these bounds can be minimized to obtain distributions beyond the Gibbs posterior and provide novel theoretical coverage to existing regularization techniques.

The advent of foundation models (FMs) in healthcare offers unprecedented opportunities to enhance medical diagnostics through automated classification and segmentation tasks. However, these models also raise significant concerns about their fairness, especially when applied to diverse and underrepresented populations in healthcare applications. Currently, there is a lack of comprehensive benchmarks, standardized pipelines, and easily adaptable libraries to evaluate and understand the fairness performance of FMs in medical imaging, leading to considerable challenges in formulating and implementing solutions that ensure equitable outcomes across diverse patient populations. To fill this gap, we introduce FairMedFM, a fairness benchmark for FM research in medical imaging. FairMedFM integrates with 17 popular medical imaging datasets, encompassing different modalities, dimensionalities, and sensitive attributes. It explores 20 widely used FMs, with various usages such as zero-shot learning, linear probing, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, and prompting in various downstream tasks -- classification and segmentation. Our exhaustive analysis evaluates the fairness performance over different evaluation metrics from multiple perspectives, revealing the existence of bias, varied utility-fairness trade-offs on different FMs, consistent disparities on the same datasets regardless FMs, and limited effectiveness of existing unfairness mitigation methods. Furthermore, FairMedFM provides an open-sourced codebase at https://github.com/FairMedFM/FairMedFM, supporting extendible functionalities and applications and inclusive for studies on FMs in medical imaging over the long term.

Biological systems possess remarkable sound source localization (SSL) capabilities that are critical for survival in complex environments. This ability arises from the collaboration between the auditory periphery, which encodes sound as precisely timed spikes, and the auditory cortex, which performs spike-based computations. Inspired by these biological mechanisms, we propose a novel neuromorphic SSL framework that integrates spike-based neural encoding and computation. The framework employs Resonate-and-Fire (RF) neurons with a phase-locking coding (RF-PLC) method to achieve energy-efficient audio processing. The RF-PLC method leverages the resonance properties of RF neurons to efficiently convert audio signals to time-frequency representation and encode interaural time difference (ITD) cues into discriminative spike patterns. In addition, biological adaptations like frequency band selectivity and short-term memory effectively filter out many environmental noises, enhancing SSL capabilities in real-world settings. Inspired by these adaptations, we propose a spike-driven multi-auditory attention (MAA) module that significantly improves both the accuracy and robustness of the proposed SSL framework. Extensive experimentation demonstrates that our SSL framework achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in SSL tasks. Furthermore, it shows exceptional noise robustness and maintains high accuracy even at very low signal-to-noise ratios. By mimicking biological hearing, this neuromorphic approach contributes to the development of high-performance and explainable artificial intelligence systems capable of superior performance in real-world environments.

As language models (LMs) are widely utilized in personalized communication scenarios (e.g., sending emails, writing social media posts) and endowed with a certain level of agency, ensuring they act in accordance with the contextual privacy norms becomes increasingly critical. However, quantifying the privacy norm awareness of LMs and the emerging privacy risk in LM-mediated communication is challenging due to (1) the contextual and long-tailed nature of privacy-sensitive cases, and (2) the lack of evaluation approaches that capture realistic application scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose PrivacyLens, a novel framework designed to extend privacy-sensitive seeds into expressive vignettes and further into agent trajectories, enabling multi-level evaluation of privacy leakage in LM agents' actions. We instantiate PrivacyLens with a collection of privacy norms grounded in privacy literature and crowdsourced seeds. Using this dataset, we reveal a discrepancy between LM performance in answering probing questions and their actual behavior when executing user instructions in an agent setup. State-of-the-art LMs, like GPT-4 and Llama-3-70B, leak sensitive information in 25.68% and 38.69% of cases, even when prompted with privacy-enhancing instructions. We also demonstrate the dynamic nature of PrivacyLens by extending each seed into multiple trajectories to red-team LM privacy leakage risk. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/SALT-NLP/PrivacyLens.

In this paper, we present TAPTRv2, a Transformer-based approach built upon TAPTR for solving the Tracking Any Point (TAP) task. TAPTR borrows designs from DEtection TRansformer (DETR) and formulates each tracking point as a point query, making it possible to leverage well-studied operations in DETR-like algorithms. TAPTRv2 improves TAPTR by addressing a critical issue regarding its reliance on cost-volume, which contaminates the point query’s content feature and negatively impacts both visibility prediction and cost-volume computation. In TAPTRv2, we propose a novel attention-based position update (APU) operation and use key-aware deformable attention to realize. For each query, this operation uses key-aware attention weights to combine their corresponding deformable sampling positions to predict a new query position. This design is based on the observation that local attention is essentially the same as cost-volume, both of which are computed by dot-production between a query and its surrounding features. By introducing this new operation, TAPTRv2 not only removes the extra burden of cost-volume computation, but also leads to a substantial performance improvement. TAPTRv2 surpasses TAPTR and achieves state-of-the-art performance on many challenging datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.

To solve control problems via model-based reasoning or planning, an agent needs to know how its actions affect the state of the world. The actions an agent has at its disposal often change the state of the environment in systematic ways. However, existing techniques for world modelling do not guarantee that the effect of actions are represented in such systematic ways. We introduce the Parsimonious Latent Space Model (PLSM), a world model that regularizes the latent dynamics to make the effect of the agent's actions more predictable. Our approach minimizes the mutual information between latent states and the change that an action produces in the agent's latent state, in turn minimizing the dependence the state has on the dynamics. This makes the world model softly state-invariant. We combine PLSM with different model classes used for i) future latent state prediction, ii) planning, and iii) model-free reinforcement learning. We find that our regularization improves accuracy, generalization, and performance in downstream tasks, highlighting the importance of systematic treatment of actions in world models.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning capabilities on complex tasks, but they still suffer from out-of-date knowledge, hallucinations, and opaque decision-making. In contrast, Knowledge Graphs (KGs) can provide explicit and editable knowledge for LLMs to alleviate these issues. Existing paradigm of KG-augmented LLM manually predefines the breadth of exploration space and requires flawless navigation in KGs. However, this paradigm cannot adaptively explore reasoning paths in KGs based on the question semantics and self-correct erroneous reasoning paths, resulting in a bottleneck in efficiency and effect. To address these limitations, we propose a novel self-correcting adaptive planning paradigm for KG-augmented LLM named Plan-on-Graph (PoG), which first decomposes the question into several sub-objectives and then repeats the process of adaptively exploring reasoning paths, updating memory, and reflecting on the need to self-correct erroneous reasoning paths until arriving at the answer. Specifically, three important mechanisms of Guidance, Memory, and Reflection are designed to work together, to guarantee the adaptive breadth of self-correcting planning for graph reasoning. Finally, extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of PoG.

Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (TKGR) is the process of utilizing temporal information to capture complex relations within a Temporal Knowledge Graph (TKG) to infer new knowledge. Conventional methods in TKGR typically depend on deep learning algorithms or temporal logical rules. However, deep learning-based TKGRs often lack interpretability, whereas rule-based TKGRs struggle to effectively learn temporal rules that capture temporal patterns. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated extensive knowledge and remarkable proficiency in temporal reasoning. Consequently, the employment of LLMs for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (TKGR) has sparked increasing interest among researchers. Nonetheless, LLMs are known to function as black boxes, making it challenging to comprehend their reasoning process. Additionally, due to the resource-intensive nature of fine-tuning, promptly updating LLMs to integrate evolving knowledge within TKGs for reasoning is impractical. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a Large Language Models-guided Dynamic Adaptation (LLM-DA) method for reasoning on TKGs. Specifically, LLM-DA harnesses the capabilities of LLMs to analyze historical data and extract temporal logical rules. These rules unveil temporal patterns and facilitate interpretable reasoning. To account for the evolving nature of TKGs, a dynamic adaptation strategy is proposed to update the LLM-generated rules with the latest events. This ensures that the extracted rules always incorporate the most recent knowledge and better generalize to the predictions on future events. Experimental results show that without the need of fine-tuning, LLM-DA significantly improves the accuracy of reasoning over several common datasets, providing a robust framework for TKGR tasks.

Recently, implicit neural representations (INR) have made significant strides in various vision-related domains, providing a novel solution for Multispectral and Hyperspectral Image Fusion (MHIF) tasks. However, INR is prone to losing high-frequency information and is confined to the lack of global perceptual capabilities. To address these issues, this paper introduces a Fourier-enhanced Implicit Neural Fusion Network (FeINFN) specifically designed for MHIF task, targeting the following phenomena: The Fourier amplitudes of the HR-HSI latent code and LR-HSI are remarkably similar; however, their phases exhibit different patterns. In FeINFN, we innovatively propose a spatial and frequency implicit fusion function (Spa-Fre IFF), helping INR capture high-frequency information and expanding the receptive field. Besides, a new decoder employing a complex Gabor wavelet activation function, called Spatial-Frequency Interactive Decoder (SFID), is invented to enhance the interaction of INR features. Especially, we further theoretically prove that the Gabor wavelet activation possesses a time-frequency tightness property that favors learning the optimal bandwidths in the decoder. Experiments on two benchmark MHIF datasets verify the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance of the proposed method, both visually and quantitatively. Also, ablation studies demonstrate the mentioned contributions. The code can be available at https://github.com/294coder/Efficient-MIF.

Federated learning works by aggregating locally computed gradients from multiple clients, thus enabling collaborative training without sharing private client data. However, prior work has shown that the data can actually be recovered by the server using so-called gradient inversion attacks. While these attacks perform well when applied on images, they are limited in the text domain and only permit approximate reconstruction of small batches and short input sequences. In this work, we propose DAGER, the first algorithm to recover whole batches of input text exactly. DAGER leverages the low-rank structure of self-attention layer gradients and the discrete nature of token embeddings to efficiently check if a given token sequence is part of the client data. We use this check to exactly recover full batches in the honest-but-curious setting without any prior on the data for both encoder and decoder-based architectures using exhaustive heuristic search and a greedy approach, respectively. We provide an efficient GPU implementation of DAGER and show experimentally that it recovers full batches of size up to 128 on large language models (LLMs), beating prior attacks in speed (20x at same batch size), scalability (10x larger batches), and reconstruction quality (ROUGE-1/2 > 0.99).

Scaling law that rewards large datasets, complex models and enhanced data granularity has been observed in various fields of deep learning. Yet, studies on time series forecasting have cast doubt on scaling behaviors of deep learning methods for time series forecasting: while more training data improves performance, more capable models do not always outperform less capable models, and longer input horizon may hurt performance for some models. We propose a theory for scaling law for time series forecasting that can explain these seemingly abnormal behaviors. We take into account the impact of dataset size and model complexity, as well as time series data granularity, particularly focusing on the look-back horizon, an aspect that has been unexplored in previous theories. Furthermore, we empirically evaluate various models using a diverse set of time series forecasting datasets, which (1) verifies the validity of scaling law on dataset size and model complexity within the realm of time series forecasting, and (2) validates our theoretical framework, particularly regarding the influence of look back horizon. We hope our findings may inspire new models targeting time series forecasting datasets of limited size, as well as large foundational datasets and models for time series forecasting in future works.

Differential privacy (DP) is a formal notion that restricts the privacy leakage of an algorithm when running on sensitive data, in which privacy-utility trade-off is one of the central problems in private data analysis. In this work, we investigate the fundamental limits of differential privacy in online learning algorithms and present evidence that separates three types of constraints: no DP, pure DP, and approximate DP. We first describe a hypothesis class that is online learnable under approximate DP but not online learnable under pure DP under the adaptive adversarial setting. This indicates that approximate DP must be adopted when dealing with adaptive adversaries. We then prove that any private online learner must make an infinite number of mistakes for almost all hypothesis classes. This essentially generalizes previous results and shows a strong separation between private and non-private settings since a finite mistake bound is always attainable (as long as the class is online learnable) when there is no privacy requirement.

Most applications of machine learning to classification assume a closed set of balanced classes. This is at odds with the real world, where class occurrence statistics often follow a long-tailed power-law distribution and it is unlikely that all classes are seen in a single sample. Nonparametric Bayesian models naturally capture this phenomenon, but have significant practical barriers to widespread adoption, namely implementation complexity and computational inefficiency. To address this, we present a method for extracting the inductive bias from a nonparametric Bayesian model and transferring it to an artificial neural network. By simulating data with a nonparametric Bayesian prior, we can metalearn a sequence model that performs inference over an unlimited set of classes. After training, this "neural circuit" has distilled the corresponding inductive bias and can successfully perform sequential inference over an open set of classes. Our experimental results show that the metalearned neural circuit achieves comparable or better performance than particle filter-based methods for inference in these models while being faster and simpler to use than methods that explicitly incorporate Bayesian nonparametric inference.

Omnidirectional (or 360-degree) images are increasingly being used for 3D applications since they allow the rendering of an entire scene with a single image. Existing works based on neural radiance fields demonstrate successful 3D reconstruction quality on egocentric videos, yet they suffer from long training and rendering times. Recently, 3D Gaussian splatting has gained attention for its fast optimization and real-time rendering. However, directly using a perspective rasterizer to omnidirectional images results in severe distortion due to the different optical properties between the two image domains. In this work, we present ODGS, a novel rasterization pipeline for omnidirectional images with geometric interpretation. For each Gaussian, we define a tangent plane that touches the unit sphere and is perpendicular to the ray headed toward the Gaussian center. We then leverage a perspective camera rasterizer to project the Gaussian onto the corresponding tangent plane. The projected Gaussians are transformed and combined into the omnidirectional image, finalizing the omnidirectional rasterization process. This interpretation reveals the implicit assumptions within the proposed pipeline, which we verify through mathematical proofs. The entire rasterization process is parallelized using CUDA, achieving optimization and rendering speeds 100 times faster than NeRF-based methods. Our comprehensive experiments highlight the superiority of ODGS by delivering the best reconstruction and perceptual quality across various datasets. Additionally, results on roaming datasets demonstrate that ODGS effectively restores fine details, even when reconstructing large 3D scenes. The source code is available on our project page (https://github.com/esw0116/ODGS).