NeurIPS 2024 论文列表

Global stability and robustness guarantees in learned dynamical systems are essential to ensure well-behavedness of the systems in the face of uncertainty. We present Extended Linearized Contracting Dynamics (ELCD), the first neural network-based dynamical system with global contractivity guarantees in arbitrary metrics. The key feature of ELCD is a parametrization of the extended linearization of the nonlinear vector field. In its most basic form, ELCD is guaranteed to be (i) globally exponentially stable, (ii) equilibrium contracting, and (iii) globally contracting with respect to some metric. To allow for contraction with respect to more general metrics in the data space, we train diffeomorphisms between the data space and a latent space and enforce contractivity in the latent space, which ensures global contractivity in the data space. We demonstrate the performance of ELCD on the high dimensional LASA, multi-link pendulum, and Rosenbrock datasets.

Rapid model validation via the train-test paradigm has been a key driver for the breathtaking progress in machine learning and AI. However, modern AI systems often depend on a combination of tasks and data collection practices that violate all assumptions ensuring test validity. Yet, without rigorous model validation we cannot ensure the intended outcomes of deployed AI systems, including positive social impact, nor continue to advance AI research in a scientifically sound way. In this paper, I will show that for widely considered inference settings in complex social systems the train-test paradigm does not only lack a justification but is indeed invalid for any risk estimator, including counterfactual and causal estimators, with high probability. These formal impossibility results highlight a fundamental epistemic issue, i.e., that for key tasks in modern AI we cannot know whether models are valid under current data collection practices. Importantly, this includes variants of both recommender systems and reasoning via large language models, and neither naïve scaling nor limited benchmarks are suited to address this issue. I am illustrating these results via the widely used MovieLens benchmark and conclude by discussing the implications of these results for AI in social systems, including possible remedies such as participatory data curation and open science.

Time-varying linear state-space models are powerful tools for obtaining mathematically interpretable representations of neural signals. For example, switching and decomposed models describe complex systems using latent variables that evolve according to simple locally linear dynamics. However, existing methods for latent variable estimation are not robust to dynamical noise and system nonlinearity due to noise-sensitive inference procedures and limited model formulations. This can lead to inconsistent results on signals with similar dynamics, limiting the model's ability to provide scientific insight. In this work, we address these limitations and propose a probabilistic approach to latent variable estimation in decomposed models that improves robustness against dynamical noise. Additionally, we introduce an extended latent dynamics model to improve robustness against system nonlinearities. We evaluate our approach on several synthetic dynamical systems, including an empirically-derived brain-computer interface experiment, and demonstrate more accurate latent variable inference in nonlinear systems with diverse noise conditions. Furthermore, we apply our method to a real-world clinical neurophysiology dataset, illustrating the ability to identify interpretable and coherent structure where previous models cannot.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for complex tasks that require multiple generation calls, advanced prompting techniques, control flow, and structured inputs/outputs. However, efficient systems are lacking for programming and executing these applications. We introduce SGLang, a system for efficient execution of complex language model programs. SGLang consists of a frontend language and a runtime. The frontend simplifies programming with primitives for generation and parallelism control. The runtime accelerates execution with novel optimizations like RadixAttention for KV cache reuse and compressed finite state machines for faster structured output decoding. Experiments show that SGLang achieves up to $6.4\times$ higher throughput compared to state-of-the-art inference systems on various large language and multi-modal models on tasks including agent control, logical reasoning, few-shot learning benchmarks, JSON decoding, retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, and multi-turn chat. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/sgl-project/sglang.

Machine learning models provide alternatives for efficiently recognizing complex patterns from data, but the main concern in applying them to modeling physical systems stems from their physics-agnostic design, leading to learning methods that lack interpretability, robustness, and data efficiency. This paper mitigates this concern by incorporating the Helmholtz-Hodge decomposition into a Gaussian process model, leading to a versatile framework that simultaneously learns the curl-free and divergence-free components of a dynamical system. Learning a predictive model in this form facilitates the exploitation of symmetry priors. In addition to improving predictive power, these priors make the model indentifiable, thus the identified features can be linked to comprehensible scientific properties of the system. We show that compared to baseline models, our model achieves better predictive performance on several benchmark dynamical systems while allowing physically meaningful decomposition of the systems from noisy and sparse data.

Digital Twins (DTs) are computational models that simulate the states and temporal dynamics of real-world systems, playing a crucial role in prediction, understanding, and decision-making across diverse domains. However, existing approaches to DTs often struggle to generalize to unseen conditions in data-scarce settings, a crucial requirement for such models. To address these limitations, our work begins by establishing the essential desiderata for effective DTs. Hybrid Digital Twins (**HDTwins**) represent a promising approach to address these requirements, modeling systems using a composition of both mechanistic and neural components. This hybrid architecture simultaneously leverages (partial) domain knowledge and neural network expressiveness to enhance generalization, with its modular design facilitating improved evolvability. While existing hybrid models rely on expert-specified architectures with only parameters optimized on data, *automatically* specifying and optimizing HDTwins remains intractable due to the complex search space and the need for flexible integration of domain priors. To overcome this complexity, we propose an evolutionary algorithm (**HDTwinGen**) that employs Large Language Models (LLMs) to autonomously propose, evaluate, and optimize HDTwins. Specifically, LLMs iteratively generate novel model specifications, while offline tools are employed to optimize emitted parameters. Correspondingly, proposed models are evaluated and evolved based on targeted feedback, enabling the discovery of increasingly effective hybrid models. Our empirical results reveal that HDTwinGen produces generalizable, sample-efficient, and evolvable models, significantly advancing DTs' efficacy in real-world applications.

Decision support systems based on prediction sets help humans solve multiclass classification tasks by narrowing down the set of potential label values to a subset of them, namely a prediction set, and asking them to always predict label values from the prediction sets. While this type of systems have been proven to be effective at improving the average accuracy of the predictions made by humans, by restricting human agency, they may cause harm---a human who has succeeded at predicting the ground-truth label of an instance on their own may have failed had they used these systems. In this paper, our goal is to control how frequently a decision support system based on prediction sets may cause harm, by design. To this end, we start by characterizing the above notion of harm using the theoretical framework of structural causal models. Then, we show that, under a natural, albeit unverifiable, monotonicity assumption, we can estimate how frequently a system may cause harm using only predictions made by humans on their own. Further, we also show that, under a weaker monotonicity assumption, which can be verified experimentally, we can bound how frequently a system may cause harm again using only predictions made by humans on their own. Building upon these assumptions, we introduce a computational framework to design decision support systems based on prediction sets that are guaranteed to cause harm less frequently than a user-specified value using conformal risk control. We validate our framework using real human predictions from two different human subject studies and show that, in decision support systems based on prediction sets, there is a trade-off between accuracy and counterfactual harm.

Speech encompasses a wealth of information, including but not limited to content, paralinguistic, and environmental information. This comprehensive nature of speech significantly impacts communication and is crucial for human-computer interaction. Chat-Oriented Large Language Models (LLMs), known for their general-purpose assistance capabilities, have evolved to handle multi-modal inputs, including speech. Although these models can be adept at recognizing and analyzing speech, they often fall short of generating appropriate responses. We argue that this is due to the lack of principles on task definition and model development, which requires open-source datasets and metrics suitable for model evaluation. To bridge the gap, we present SD-Eval, a benchmark dataset aimed at multidimensional evaluation of spoken dialogue understanding and generation. SD-Eval focuses on paralinguistic and environmental information and includes 7,303 utterances, amounting to 8.76 hours of speech data. The data is aggregated from eight public datasets, representing four perspectives: emotion, accent, age, and background sound. To assess the SD-Eval benchmark dataset, we implement three different models and construct a training set following a process similar to that of SD-Eval. The training set contains 1,052.72 hours of speech data and 724.4k utterances. We also conduct a comprehensive evaluation using objective evaluation methods (e.g. BLEU and ROUGE), subjective evaluations and LLM-based metrics for the generated responses. Models conditioned with paralinguistic and environmental information outperform their counterparts in both objective and subjective measures. Moreover, experiments demonstrate that LLM-based metrics show a higher correlation with human evaluation compared to traditional metrics. We open-source SD-Eval at https://github.com/amphionspace/SD-Eval.

Softmax Loss (SL) is widely applied in recommender systems (RS) and has demonstrated effectiveness. This work analyzes SL from a pairwise perspective, revealing two significant limitations: 1) the relationship between SL and conventional ranking metrics like DCG is not sufficiently tight; 2) SL is highly sensitive to false negative instances. Our analysis indicates that these limitations are primarily due to the use of the exponential function. To address these issues, this work extends SL to a new family of loss functions, termed Pairwise Softmax Loss (PSL), which replaces the exponential function in SL with other appropriate activation functions. While the revision is minimal, we highlight three merits of PSL: 1) it serves as a tighter surrogate for DCG with suitable activation functions; 2) it better balances data contributions; and 3) it acts as a specific BPR loss enhanced by Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO). We further validate the effectiveness and robustness of PSL through empirical experiments. The code is available at https://github.com/Tiny-Snow/IR-Benchmark.

We consider metrical task systems on general metric spaces with $n$ points, and show that any fully randomized algorithm can be turned into a randomized algorithm that uses only $2\log n$ random bits, and achieves the same competitive ratio up to a factor $2$. This provides the first order-optimal barely random algorithms for metrical task systems, i.e. which use a number of random bits that does not depend on the number of requests addressed to the system. We discuss implications on various aspects of online decision making such as: distributed systems, advice complexity and transaction costs, suggesting broad applicability. We put forward an equivalent view that we call collective metrical task systems where $k$ agents in a metrical task system team up, and suffer the average cost paid by each agent. Our results imply that such team can be $O(\log^2 n)$-competitive as soon as $k\geq n^2$. In comparison, a single agent is always $\Omega(n)$-competitive.

Causal representation learning promises to extend causal models to hidden causal variables from raw entangled measurements. However, most progress has focused on proving identifiability results in different settings, and we are not aware of any successful real-world application. At the same time, the field of dynamical systems benefited from deep learning and scaled to countless applications but does not allow parameter identification. In this paper, we draw a clear connection between the two and their key assumptions, allowing us to apply identifiable methods developed in causal representation learning to dynamical systems. At the same time, we can leverage scalable differentiable solvers developed for differential equations to build models that are both identifiable and practical. Overall, we learn explicitly controllable models that isolate the trajectory-specific parameters for further downstream tasks such as out-of-distribution classification or treatment effect estimation. We experiment with a wind simulator with partially known factors of variation. We also apply the resulting model to real-world climate data and successfully answer downstream causal questions in line with existing literature on climate change.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a powerful method for controlling dynamic systems, but its learning mechanism can lead to unpredictable actions that undermine the safety of critical systems. Here, we propose RL with Adaptive Regularization (RL-AR), an algorithm that enables safe RL exploration by combining the RL policy with a policy regularizer that hard-codes the safety constraints. RL-AR performs policy combination via a "focus module," which determines the appropriate combination depending on the state—relying more on the safe policy regularizer for less-exploited states while allowing unbiased convergence for well-exploited states. In a series of critical control applications, we demonstrate that RL-AR not only ensures safety during training but also achieves a return competitive with the standards of model-free RL that disregards safety.

State-space graphical models and the variational autoencoder framework provide a principled apparatus for learning dynamical systems from data. State-of-the-art probabilistic approaches are often able to scale to large problems at the cost of flexibility of the variational posterior or expressivity of the dynamics model. However, those consolidations can be detrimental if the ultimate goal is to learn a generative model capable of explaining the spatiotemporal structure of the data and making accurate forecasts. We introduce a low-rank structured variational autoencoding framework for nonlinear Gaussian state-space graphical models capable of capturing dense covariance structures that are important for learning dynamical systems with predictive capabilities. Our inference algorithm exploits the covariance structures that arise naturally from sample based approximate Gaussian message passing and low-rank amortized posterior updates -- effectively performing approximate variational smoothing with time complexity scaling linearly in the state dimensionality. In comparisons with other deep state-space model architectures our approach consistently demonstrates the ability to learn a more predictive generative model. Furthermore, when applied to neural physiological recordings, our approach is able to learn a dynamical system capable of forecasting population spiking and behavioral correlates from a small portion of single trials.

The discovery of dynamical systems is crucial across a range of fields, including pharmacology, epidemiology, and physical sciences. *Accurate* and *interpretable* modeling of these systems is essential for understanding complex temporal processes, optimizing interventions, and minimizing adverse effects. In pharmacology, for example, precise modeling of drug dynamics is vital to maximize therapeutic efficacy while minimizing patient harm, as in chemotherapy. However, current models, often developed by human experts, are limited by high cost, lack of scalability, and restriction to existing human knowledge. In this paper, we present the **Data-Driven Discovery (D3)** framework, a novel approach leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to iteratively discover and refine interpretable models of dynamical systems, demonstrated here with pharmacological applications. Unlike traditional methods, D3 enables the LLM to propose, acquire, and integrate new features, validate, and compare dynamical systems models, uncovering new insights into pharmacokinetics. Experiments on a pharmacokinetic Warfarin dataset reveal that D3 identifies a new plausible model that is well-fitting, highlighting its potential for precision dosing in clinical applications.

We study online control for continuous-time linear systems with finite sampling rates, where the objective is to design an online procedure that learns under non-stochastic noise and performs comparably to a fixed optimal linear controller. We present a novel two-level online algorithm, by integrating a higher-level learning strategy and a lower-level feedback control strategy. This method offers a practical and robust solution for online control, which achieves sublinear regret. Our work provides the first nonasymptotic results for controlling continuous-time linear systems with finite number of interactions with the system. Moreover, we examine how to train an agent in domain randomization environments from a non-stochastic control perspective. By applying our method to the SAC (Soft Actor-Critic) algorithm, we achieved improved results in multiple reinforcement learning tasks within domain randomization environments. Our work provides new insights into non-asymptotic analyses of controlling continuous-time systems. Furthermore, our work brings practical intuition into controller learning under non-stochastic environments.

The proliferation of abundant electricity time series (ETS) data presents numerous opportunities for various applications within power systems, including demand-side management, grid stability, and consumer behavior analysis. Deep learning models have advanced ETS modeling by effectively capturing sequence dependence. However, learning a generic representation of ETS data for various applications is challenging due to the inherently complex hierarchical structure of ETS data. Moreover, ETS data exhibits intricate temporal dependencies and is susceptible to the influence of exogenous variables. Furthermore, different instances exhibit diverse electricity consumption behavior. In this paper, we propose a foundation model PowerPM for ETS data, providing a large-scale, off-the-shelf model for power systems. PowerPM consists of a temporal encoder and a hierarchical encoder. The temporal encoder captures temporal dependencies within ETS data, taking into account exogenous variables. The hierarchical encoder models correlations between different levels of hierarchy. Furthermore, PowerPM leverages a novel self-supervised pre-training framework consisting of masked ETS modeling and dual-view contrastive learning. This framework enables PowerPM to capture temporal dependency within ETS windows and aware the discrepancy across ETS windows, providing two different perspectives to learn generic representation. Our experiments span five real-world scenario datasets, including both private and public data. Through pre-training on massive ETS data, PowerPM achieves SOTA performance on diverse downstream tasks within the private dataset. Notably, when transferred to public datasets, PowerPM retains its edge, showcasing its remarkable generalization ability across various tasks and domains. Moreover, ablation studies and few-shot experiments further substantiate the effectiveness of our model.

This paper investigates ML systems serving a group of users, with multiple models/services, each aimed at specializing to a sub-group of users. We consider settings where upon deploying a set of services, users choose the one minimizing their personal losses and the learner iteratively learns by interacting with diverse users. Prior research shows that the outcomes of learning dynamics, which comprise both the services' adjustments and users' service selections, hinge significantly on the initial conditions. However, finding good initial conditions faces two main challenges: (i) \emph{Bandit feedback:} Typically, data on user preferences are not available before deploying services and observing user behavior; (ii) \emph{Suboptimal local solutions:} The total loss landscape (i.e., the sum of loss functions across all users and services) is not convex and gradient-based algorithms can get stuck in poor local minima. We address these challenges with a randomized algorithm to adaptively select a minimal set of users for data collection in order to initialize a set of services. Under mild assumptions on the loss functions, we prove that our initialization leads to a total loss within a factor of the \textit{globally optimal total loss,with complete user preference data}, and this factor scales logarithmically in the number of services. This result is a generalization of the well-known $k$-means++ guarantee to a broad problem class which is also of independent interest. The theory is complemented by experiments on real as well as semi-synthetic datasets.

Generalized-linear dynamical models (GLDMs) remain a widely-used framework within neuroscience for modeling time-series data, such as neural spiking activity or categorical decision outcomes. Whereas the standard usage of GLDMs is to model a single data source, certain applications require jointly modeling two generalized-linear time-series sources while also dissociating their shared and private dynamics. Most existing GLDM variants and their associated learning algorithms do not support this capability. Here we address this challenge by developing a multi-step analytical subspace identification algorithm for learning a GLDM that explicitly models shared vs. private dynamics within two generalized-linear time-series. In simulations, we demonstrate our algorithm's ability to dissociate and model the dynamics within two time-series sources while being agnostic to their respective observation distributions. In neural data, we consider two specific applications of our algorithm for modeling discrete population spiking activity with respect to a secondary time-series. In both synthetic and real data, GLDMs learned with our algorithm more accurately decoded one time-series from the other using lower-dimensional latent states, as compared to models identified using existing GLDM learning algorithms.

While ensembling deep neural networks has shown promise in improving generalization performance, scaling current ensemble methods for large models remains challenging. Given that recent progress in deep learning is largely driven by the scale, exemplified by the widespread adoption of large-scale neural network architectures, scalability emerges an increasingly critical issue for machine learning algorithms in the era of large-scale models. In this work, we first showcase the potential of low precision ensembling, where ensemble members are derived from a single model within low precision number systems in a training-free manner. Our empirical analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed low precision ensembling method compared to existing ensemble approaches.