NeurIPS 2024 论文列表

Previous studies on continual knowledge learning (CKL) in large language models (LLMs) have predominantly focused on approaches such as regularization, architectural modifications, and rehearsal techniques to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. However, these methods naively inherit the inefficiencies of standard training procedures, indiscriminately applying uniform weight across all tokens, which can lead to unnecessary parameter updates and increased forgetting. To address these shortcomings, we propose a novel CKL approach termed Train-Attention-Augmented Language Model (TAALM), which enhances learning efficiency by dynamically predicting and applying weights to tokens based on their usefulness. This method employs a meta-learning framework that optimizes token importance predictions, facilitating targeted knowledge updates and minimizing forgetting. Also, we observe that existing benchmarks do not clearly exhibit the trade-off between learning and retaining, therefore we propose a new benchmark, LAMA-ckl, to address this issue. Through experiments conducted on both newly introduced and established CKL benchmarks, TAALM proves the state-of-the-art performance upon the baselines, and also shows synergistic compatibility when integrated with previous CKL approaches. The code and the dataset are available online.

Knowledge-based question answering (KBQA) is widely used in many scenarios that necessitate domain knowledge. Large language models (LLMs) bring opportunities to KBQA, while their costs are significantly higher and absence of domain-specific knowledge during pre-training. We are motivated to combine LLMs and prior small models on knowledge graphs (KGMs) for both inferential accuracy and cost saving. However, it remains challenging since accuracy and cost are not readily combined in the optimization as two distinct metrics. It is also laborious for model selection since different models excel in diverse knowledge. To this end, we propose Coke, a novel cost-efficient strategy for KBQA with LLMs, modeled as a tailored multi-armed bandit problem to minimize calls to LLMs within limited budgets. We first formulate the accuracy expectation with a cluster-level Thompson Sampling for either KGMs or LLMs. A context-aware policy is optimized to further distinguish the expert model subject to the question semantics. The overall decision is bounded by the cost regret according to historical expenditure on failures. Extensive experiments showcase the superior performance of Coke, which moves the Pareto frontier with up to 20.89% saving of GPT-4 fees while achieving a 2.74% higher accuracy on the benchmark datasets.

Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs) are a staple of graph machine learning. MPNNs iteratively update each node’s representation in an input graph by aggregating messages from the node’s neighbors, which necessitates a memory complexity of the order of the __number of graph edges__. This complexity might quickly become prohibitive for large graphs provided they are not very sparse. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to alleviate this problem by approximating the input graph as an intersecting community graph (ICG) -- a combination of intersecting cliques. The key insight is that the number of communities required to approximate a graph __does not depend on the graph size__. We develop a new constructive version of the Weak Graph Regularity Lemma to efficiently construct an approximating ICG for any input graph. We then devise an efficient graph learning algorithm operating directly on ICG in linear memory and time with respect to the __number of nodes__ (rather than edges). This offers a new and fundamentally different pipeline for learning on very large non-sparse graphs, whose applicability is demonstrated empirically on node classification tasks and spatio-temporal data processing.

Generating synthetic fake faces, known as pseudo-fake faces, is an effective way to improve the generalization of DeepFake detection. Existing methods typically generate these faces by blending real or fake faces in spatial domain. While these methods have shown promise, they overlook the simulation of frequency distribution in pseudo-fake faces, limiting the learning of generic forgery traces in-depth. To address this, this paper introduces {\em FreqBlender}, a new method that can generate pseudo-fake faces by blending frequency knowledge. Concretely, we investigate the major frequency components and propose a Frequency Parsing Network to adaptively partition frequency components related to forgery traces. Then we blend this frequency knowledge from fake faces into real faces to generate pseudo-fake faces. Since there is no ground truth for frequency components, we describe a dedicated training strategy by leveraging the inner correlations among different frequency knowledge to instruct the learning process. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in enhancing DeepFake detection, making it a potential plug-and-play strategy for other methods.

The state-of-the-art approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) algorithm builds a large proximity graph on the dataset and performs a greedy beam search, which may bring many unnecessary explorations. We develop a novel framework, namely *corssing sparse proximity graph (CSPG)*, based on random partitioning of the dataset. It produces a smaller sparse proximity graph for each partition and routing vectors that bind all the partitions. An efficient two-staged approach is designed for exploring *CSPG*, with fast approaching and cross-partition expansion. We theoretically prove that *CSPG* can accelerate the existing graph-based ANNS algorithms by reducing unnecessary explorations. In addition, we conduct extensive experiments on benchmark datasets. The experimental results confirm that the existing graph-based methods can be significantly outperformed by incorporating *CSPG*, achieving 1.5x to 2x speedups of *QPS* in almost all recalls.

Large language models (LLMs) often lack culture-specific everyday knowledge, especially across diverse regions and non-English languages. Existing benchmarks for evaluating LLMs' cultural sensitivities are usually limited to a single language or online sources like Wikipedia, which may not reflect the daily habits, customs, and lifestyles of different regions. That is, information about the food people eat for their birthday celebrations, spices they typically use, musical instruments youngsters play or the sports they practice in school is not always explicitly written online. To address this issue, we introduce BLEnD, a hand-crafted benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs' everyday knowledge across diverse cultures and languages. The benchmark comprises 52.6k question-answer pairs from 16 countries/regions, in 13 different languages, including low-resource ones such as Amharic, Assamese, Azerbaijani, Hausa, and Sundanese. We evaluate LLMs in two formats: short-answer questions, and multiple-choice questions. We show that LLMs perform better in cultures that are more present online, with a maximum 57.34% difference in GPT-4, the best-performing model, in the short-answer format. Furthermore, we find that LLMs perform better in their local languages for mid-to-high-resource languages. Interestingly, for languages deemed to be low-resource, LLMs provide better answers in English. We make our dataset publicly available at: https://github.com/nlee0212/BLEnD.

Machine learning (ML) algorithms can often differ in performance across domains. Understanding why their performance differs is crucial for determining what types of interventions (e.g., algorithmic or operational) are most effective at closing the performance gaps. Aggregate decompositions express the total performance gap as the gap due to a shift in the feature distribution $p(X)$ plus the gap due to a shift in the outcome's conditional distribution $p(Y|X)$. While this coarse explanation is helpful for guiding root cause analyses, it provides limited details and can only suggest coarse fixes involving all variables in an ML system. Detailed decompositions quantify the importance of each variable to each term in the aggregate decomposition, which can provide a deeper understanding and suggest more targeted interventions. Although parametric methods exist for conducting a full hierarchical decomposition of an algorithm's performance gap at the aggregate and detailed levels, current nonparametric methods only cover parts of the hierarchy; many also require knowledge of the entire causal graph. We introduce a nonparametric hierarchical framework for explaining why the performance of an ML algorithm differs across domains, without requiring causal knowledge. Furthermore, we derive debiased, computationally-efficient estimators and statistical inference procedures to construct confidence intervals for the explanations.

In the era of big data, graphs have emerged as a natural representation of intricate relationships. However, graph sizes often become unwieldy, leading to storage, computation, and analysis challenges. A crucial demand arises for methods that can effectively downsize large graphs while retaining vital insights. Graph coarsening seeks to simplify large graphs while maintaining the basic statistics of the graphs, such as spectral properties and $\epsilon$-similarity in the coarsened graph. This ensures that downstream processes are more efficient and effective. Most published methods are suitable for homophilic datasets, limiting their universal use. We propose **U**niversal **G**raph **C**oarsening (UGC), a framework equally suitable for homophilic and heterophilic datasets. UGC integrates node attributes and adjacency information, leveraging the dataset's heterophily factor. Results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that UGC preserves spectral similarity while coarsening. In comparison to existing methods, UGC is 4x to 15x faster, has lower eigen-error, and yields superior performance on downstream processing tasks even at 70% coarsening ratios.

We study learning problems on correlated stochastic block models with two balanced communities. Our main result gives the first efficient algorithm for graph matching in this setting. In the most interesting regime where the average degree is logarithmic in the number of vertices, this algorithm correctly matches all but a vanishing fraction of vertices with high probability, whenever the edge correlation parameter $s$ satisfies $s^2 > \alpha \approx 0.338$, where $\alpha$ is Otter's tree-counting constant. Moreover, we extend this to an efficient algorithm for exact graph matching whenever this is information-theoretically possible, positively resolving an open problem of Rácz and Sridhar (NeurIPS 2021). Our algorithm generalizes the recent breakthrough work of Mao, Wu, Xu, and Yu (STOC 2023), which is based on centered subgraph counts of a large family of trees termed chandeliers. A major technical challenge that we overcome is dealing with the additional estimation errors that are necessarily present due to the fact that, in relevant parameter regimes, the latent community partition cannot be exactly recovered from a single graph. As an application of our results, we give an efficient algorithm for exact community recovery using multiple correlated graphs in parameter regimes where it is information-theoretically impossible to do so using just a single graph.

Recently, differentiable mask pruning methods optimize the continuous relaxation architecture (soft network) as the proxy of the pruned discrete network (hard network) for superior sub-architecture search. However, due to the agnostic impact of the discretization process, the hard network struggles with the equivalent representational capacity as the soft network, namely discretization gap, which severely spoils the pruning performance. In this paper, we first investigate the discretization gap and propose a novel structural differentiable mask pruning framework named S2HPruner to bridge the discretization gap in a one-stage manner. In the training procedure, SH2Pruner forwards both the soft network and its corresponding hard network, then distills the hard network under the supervision of the soft network. To optimize the mask and prevent performance degradation, we propose a decoupled bidirectional knowledge distillation. It blocks the weight updating from the hard to the soft network while maintaining the gradient corresponding to the mask. Compared with existing pruning arts, S2HPruner achieves surpassing pruning performance without fine-tuning on comprehensive benchmarks, including CIFAR-100, Tiny ImageNet, and ImageNet with a variety of network architectures. Besides, investigation and analysis experiments explain the effectiveness of S2HPruner. Codes will be released soon.

Machine learning applied to blockchain graphs offers significant opportunities for enhanced data analysis and applications. However, the potential of this field is constrained by the lack of a large-scale, cross-chain dataset that includes hierarchical graph-level data. To address this issue, we present novel datasets that provide detailed label information at the token level and integrate interactions between tokens across multiple blockchain platforms. We model transactions within each token as local graphs and the relationships between tokens as global graphs, collectively forming a "Graphs of Graphs" (GoG) approach. This innovative approach facilitates a deeper understanding of systemic structures and hierarchical interactions, which are essential for applications such as link prediction, anomaly detection, and token classification. We conduct a series of experiments demonstrating that this dataset delivers new insights and challenges for exploring GoG within the blockchain domain. Our work promotes advancements and opens new avenues for research in both the blockchain and graph communities. Source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Xtra-Computing/Cryptocurrency-Graphs-of-graphs.

Language models (LMs) only pretrained on a general and massive corpus usually cannot attain satisfying performance on domain-specific downstream tasks, and hence, applying domain-specific pretraining to LMs is a common and indispensable practice. However, domain-specific pretraining can be costly and time-consuming, hindering LMs' deployment in real-world applications. In this work, we consider the incapability to memorize domain-specific knowledge embedded in the general corpus with rare occurrences and long-tail distributions as the leading cause for pretrained LMs' inferior downstream performance. Analysis of Neural Tangent Kernels (NTKs) reveals that those long-tail data are commonly overlooked in the model's gradient updates and, consequently, are not effectively memorized, leading to poor domain-specific downstream performance. Based on the intuition that data with similar semantic meaning are closer in the embedding space, we devise a Cluster-guided Sparse Expert (CSE) layer to actively learn long-tail domain knowledge typically neglected in previous pretrained LMs. During pretraining, a CSE layer efficiently clusters domain knowledge together and assigns long-tail knowledge to designate extra experts. CSE is also a lightweight structure that only needs to be incorporated in several deep layers. With our training strategy, we found that during pretraining, data of long-tail knowledge gradually formulate isolated, outlier clusters in an LM's representation spaces, especially in deeper layers. Our experimental results show that only pretraining CSE-based LMs is enough to achieve superior performance than regularly pretrained-finetuned LMs on various downstream tasks, implying the prospects of domain-specific-pretraining-free language models.

The need to analyze graphs is ubiquitous across various fields, from social networks to biological research and recommendation systems. Therefore, enabling the ability of large language models (LLMs) to process graphs is an important step toward more advanced general intelligence. However, current LLM benchmarks on graph analysis require models to directly reason over the prompts describing graph topology, and are thus limited to small graphs with only a few dozens of nodes. In contrast, human experts typically write programs based on popular libraries for task solving, and can thus handle graphs with different scales. To this end, a question naturally arises: can LLMs analyze graphs like professionals? In this paper, we introduce ProGraph, a manually crafted benchmark containing 3 categories of graph tasks. The benchmark expects solutions based on programming instead of directly reasoning over raw inputs. Our findings reveal that the performance of current LLMs is unsatisfactory, with the best model achieving only 36% accuracy. To bridge this gap, we propose LLM4Graph datasets, which include crawled documents and auto-generated codes based on 6 widely used graph libraries. By augmenting closed-source LLMs with document retrieval and fine-tuning open-source ones on the codes, we show 11-32% absolute improvements in their accuracies. Our results underscore that the capabilities of LLMs in handling structured data are still under-explored, and show the effectiveness of LLM4Graph in enhancing LLMs’ proficiency of graph analysis. The benchmark, datasets and enhanced open-source models are available at https://github.com/BUPT-GAMMA/ProGraph.

In this paper, we introduce the first learning-free model reuse task within the non-Euclidean domain, termed as Deep Graph Mating (Grama). We strive to create a child Graph Neural Network (GNN) that integrates knowledge from pre-trained parent models without requiring re-training, fine-tuning, or annotated labels. To this end, we begin by investigating the permutation invariance property of GNNs, which leads us to develop two vanilla approaches for Grama: Vanilla Parameter Interpolation (VPI) and Vanilla Alignment Prior to Interpolation (VAPI), both employing topology-independent interpolation in the parameter space. However, neither approach has achieved the anticipated results. Through theoretical analysis of VPI and VAPI, we identify critical challenges unique to Grama, including increased sensitivity to parameter misalignment and further the inherent topology-dependent complexities. Motivated by these findings, we propose the Dual-Message Coordination and Calibration (DuMCC) methodology, comprising the Parent Message Coordination (PMC) scheme to optimise the permutation matrices for parameter interpolation by coordinating aggregated messages, and the Child Message Calibration (CMC) scheme to mitigate over-smoothing identified in PMC by calibrating the message statistics within child GNNs. Experiments across diverse domains, including node and graph property prediction, 3D object recognition, and large-scale semantic parsing, demonstrate that the proposed DuMCC effectively enables training-free knowledge transfer, yielding results on par with those of pre-trained models.

In this paper, we propose the first framework that enables solving graph learning tasks of all levels (node, edge and graph) and all types (generation, regression and classification) using one formulation. We first formulate prediction tasks including regression and classification into a generic (conditional) generation framework, which enables diffusion models to perform deterministic tasks with provable guarantees. We then propose Latent Graph Diffusion (LGD), a generative model that can generate node, edge, and graph-level features of all categories simultaneously. We achieve this goal by embedding the graph structures and features into a latent space leveraging a powerful encoder and decoder, then training a diffusion model in the latent space. LGD is also capable of conditional generation through a specifically designed cross-attention mechanism. Leveraging LGD and the ``all tasks as generation'' formulation, our framework is capable of solving graph tasks of various levels and types. We verify the effectiveness of our framework with extensive experiments, where our models achieve state-of-the-art or highly competitive results across a wide range of generation and regression tasks.

Data with geometric structure is ubiquitous in machine learning often arising from fundamental symmetries in a domain, such as permutation-invariance in graphs and translation-invariance in images. Group-convolutional architectures, which encode symmetries as inductive bias, have shown great success in applications, but can suffer from instabilities as their depth increases and often struggle to learn long range dependencies in data. For instance, graph neural networks experience instability due to the convergence of node representations (over-smoothing), which can occur after only a few iterations of message-passing, reducing their effectiveness in downstream tasks. Here, we propose and study unitary group convolutions, which allow for deeper networks that are more stable during training. The main focus of the paper are graph neural networks, where we show that unitary graph convolutions provably avoid over-smoothing. Our experimental results confirm that unitary graph convolutional networks achieve competitive performance on benchmark datasets compared to state-of-the-art graph neural networks. We complement our analysis of the graph domain with the study of general unitary convolutions and analyze their role in enhancing stability in general group convolutional architectures.

Scaling deep learning models has been at the heart of recent revolutions in language modelling and image generation. Practitioners have observed a strong relationship between model size, dataset size, and performance. However, structure-based architectures such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are yet to show the benefits of scale mainly due to lower efficiency of sparse operations, large data requirements, and lack of clarity about the effectiveness of various architectures. We address this drawback of GNNs by studying their scaling behavior. Specifically, we analyze message-passing networks, graph Transformers, and hybrid architectures on the largest public collection of 2D molecular graphs for supervised pretraining. For the first time, we observe that GNNs benefit tremendously from the increasing scale of depth, width, number of molecules and associated labels. A major factor is the diversity of the pretraining data that comprises thousands of labels per molecule derived from bio-assays, quantum simulations, transcriptomics and phenomic imaging. We further demonstrate strong finetuning scaling behavior on 38 highly competitive downstream tasks, outclassing previous large models. This gives rise to MolGPS, a new graph foundation model that allows to navigate the chemical space, outperforming the previous state-of-the-arts on 26 out the 38 downstream tasks. We hope that our work paves the way for an era where foundational GNNs drive pharmaceutical drug discovery.

The swift advancement in Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) also presents significant challenges for effective knowledge editing. Current methods, including intrinsic knowledge editing and external knowledge resorting, each possess strengths and weaknesses, struggling to balance the desired properties of reliability, generality, and locality when applied to MLLMs. In this paper, we propose \textbf{UniKE}, a novel multimodal editing method that establishes a unified perspective and paradigm for intrinsic knowledge editing and external knowledge resorting. Both types of knowledge are conceptualized as vectorized key-value memories, with the corresponding editing processes resembling the assimilation and accommodation phases of human cognition, conducted at the same semantic levels. Within such a unified framework, we further promote knowledge collaboration by disentangling the knowledge representations into the semantic and truthfulness spaces. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our method, which ensures that the post-edit MLLM simultaneously maintains excellent reliability, generality, and locality. The code for UniKE is available at https://github.com/beepkh/UniKE.

Understanding complex dynamical systems begins with identifying their topological structures, which expose the organization of the systems. This requires robust structural inference methods that can deduce structure from observed behavior. However, existing methods are often domain-specific and lack a standardized, objective comparison framework. We address this gap by benchmarking 13 structural inference methods from various disciplines on simulations representing two types of dynamics and 11 interaction graph models, supplemented by a biological experimental dataset to mirror real-world application. We evaluated the methods for accuracy, scalability, robustness, and sensitivity to graph properties. Our findings indicate that deep learning methods excel with multi-dimensional data, while classical statistics and information theory based approaches are notably accurate and robust. Additionally, performance correlates positively with the graph's average shortest path length. This benchmark should aid researchers in selecting suitable methods for their specific needs and stimulate further methodological innovation.