NeurIPS 2024 论文列表

We consider contextual bandits with graph feedback, a class of interactive learning problems with richer structures than vanilla contextual bandits, where taking an action reveals the rewards for all neighboring actions in the feedback graph under all contexts. Unlike the multi-armed bandits setting where a growing literature has painted a near-complete understanding of graph feedback, much remains unexplored in the contextual bandits counterpart. In this paper, we make inroads into this inquiry by establishing a regret lower bound $\Omega(\sqrt{\beta_M(G) T})$, where $M$ is the number of contexts, $G$ is the feedback graph, and $\beta_M(G)$ is our proposed graph-theoretic quantity that characterizes the fundamental learning limit for this class of problems. Interestingly, $\beta_M(G)$ interpolates between $\alpha(G)$ (the independence number of the graph) and $\mathsf{m}(G)$ (the maximum acyclic subgraph (MAS) number of the graph) as the number of contexts $M$ varies. We also provide algorithms that achieve near-optimal regret for important classes of context sequences and/or feedback graphs, such as transitively closed graphs that find applications in auctions and inventory control. In particular, with many contexts, our results show that the MAS number essentially characterizes the statistical complexity for contextual bandits, as opposed to the independence number in multi-armed bandits.

Understanding the behavioral and neural dynamics of social interactions is a goal of contemporary neuroscience. Many machine learning methods have emerged in recent years to make sense of complex video and neurophysiological data that result from these experiments. Less focus has been placed on understanding how animals process acoustic information, including social vocalizations. A critical step to bridge this gap is determining the senders and receivers of acoustic infor- mation in social interactions. While sound source localization (SSL) is a classic problem in signal processing, existing approaches are limited in their ability to localize animal-generated sounds in standard laboratory environments. Advances in deep learning methods for SSL are likely to help address these limitations, however there are currently no publicly available models, datasets, or benchmarks to systematically evaluate SSL algorithms in the domain of bioacoustics. Here, we present the VCL Benchmark: the first large-scale dataset for benchmarking SSL algorithms in rodents. We acquired synchronized video and multi-channel audio recordings of 767,295 sounds with annotated ground truth sources across 9 conditions. The dataset provides benchmarks which evaluate SSL performance on real data, simulated acoustic data, and a mixture of real and simulated data. We intend for this benchmark to facilitate knowledge transfer between the neuroscience and acoustic machine learning communities, which have had limited overlap.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, but their outputs can sometimes be unreliable or factually incorrect. To address this, we introduce Self Logits Evolution Decoding (SLED), a novel decoding framework that enhances the truthfulness of LLMs without relying on external knowledge bases or requiring further fine-tuning. From an optimization perspective, our SLED framework leverages the latent knowledge embedded within the LLM by contrasting the output logits from the final layer with those from early layers. It then utilizes an approximate gradient approach to enable latent knowledge to guide the self-refinement of outputs, thereby effectively improving factual accuracy. Extensive experiments have been conducted on established benchmarks across a diverse range of model families (LLaMA 2, LLaMA 3, Gemma) and scales (from 2B to 70B), including more advanced architectural configurations such as the mixture of experts (MoE). Our evaluation spans a wide variety of tasks, including multi-choice, open-generation, and adaptations to chain-of-thought reasoning tasks. The results demonstrate that SLED consistently improves factual accuracy by up to 20\% compared to existing decoding methods while maintaining natural language fluency and negligible latency overhead. Furthermore, it can be flexibly combined with other decoding methods to further enhance their performance.

High-dimensional Bayesian optimization (BO) tasks such as molecular design often require $>10,$$000$ function evaluations before obtaining meaningful results. While methods like sparse variational Gaussian processes (SVGPs) reduce computational requirements in these settings, the underlying approximations result in suboptimal data acquisitions that slow the progress of optimization. In this paper we modify SVGPs to better align with the goals of BO: targeting informed data acquisition over global posterior fidelity. Using the framework of utility-calibrated variational inference (Lacoste–Julien et al., 2011), we unify GP approximation and data acquisition into a joint optimization problem, thereby ensuring optimal decisions under a limited computational budget. Our approach can be used with any decision-theoretic acquisition function and is readily compatible with trust region methods like TuRBO (Eriksson et al., 2019). We derive efficient joint objectives for the expected improvement (EI) and knowledge gradient (KG) acquisition functions in both the standard and batch BO settings. On a variety of recent high dimensional benchmark tasks in control and molecular design, our approach significantly outperforms standard SVGPs and is capable of achieving comparable rewards with up to $10\times$ fewer function evaluations.

Analytics on structured data is a mature field with many successful methods. However, most real world data exists in unstructured form, such as images and conversations. We investigate the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) to enable unstructured data analytics. In particular, we propose a new Universal Query Engine (UQE) that directly interrogates and draws insights from unstructured data collections. This engine accepts queries in a Universal Query Language (UQL), a dialect of SQL that provides full natural language flexibility in specifying conditions and operators. The new engine leverages the ability of LLMs to conduct analysis of unstructured data, while also allowing us to exploit advances in sampling and optimization techniques to achieve efficient and accurate query execution. In addition, we borrow techniques from classical compiler theory to better orchestrate the workflow between sampling methods and foundation model calls. We demonstrate the efficiency of UQE on data analytics across different modalities, including images, dialogs and reviews, across a range of useful query types, including conditional aggregation, semantic retrieval and abstraction aggregation.

The increasing realism of synthetic speech, driven by advancements in text-to-speech models, raises ethical concerns regarding impersonation and disinformation. Audio watermarking offers a promising solution via embedding human-imperceptible watermarks into AI-generated audios. However, the robustness of audio watermarking against common/adversarial perturbations remains understudied. We present AudioMarkBench, the first systematic benchmark for evaluating the robustness of audio watermarking against *watermark removal* and *watermark forgery*. AudioMarkBench includes a new dataset created from Common-Voice across languages, biological sexes, and ages, 3 state-of-the-art watermarking methods, and 15 types of perturbations. We benchmark the robustness of these methods against the perturbations in no-box, black-box, and white-box settings. Our findings highlight the vulnerabilities of current watermarking techniques and emphasize the need for more robust and fair audio watermarking solutions. Our dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/moyangkuo/AudioMarkBench.

Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GAIL) provides a promising approach to training a generative policy to imitate a demonstrator. It uses on-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) to optimize a reward signal derived from an adversarial discriminator. However, optimizing GAIL is difficult in practise, with the training loss oscillating during training, slowing convergence. This optimization instability can prevent GAIL from finding a good policy, harming its final performance. In this paper, we study GAIL’s optimization from a control-theoretic perspective. We show that GAIL cannot converge to the desired equilibrium. In response, we analyze the training dynamics of GAIL in function space and design a novel controller that not only pushes GAIL to the desired equilibrium but also achieves asymptotic stability in a simplified “one-step” setting. Going from theory to practice, we propose Controlled-GAIL (C-GAIL), which adds a differentiable regularization term on the GAIL objective to stabilize training. Empirically, the C-GAIL regularizer improves the training of various existing GAIL methods, including the popular GAIL-DAC, by speeding up the convergence, reducing the range of oscillation, and matching the expert distribution more closely.

Recent advancements in 3D Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities for 3D scene understanding. However, previous methods exhibit deficiencies in general referencing and grounding capabilities for intricate scene comprehension. In this paper, we introduce the use of object identifiers and object-centric representations to interact with scenes at the object level. Specifically, we decompose the input 3D scene into a set of object proposals, each assigned a unique identifier token, which enables efficient object referencing and grounding during user-assistant interactions. Given the scarcity of scene-language data, we model the scene embeddings as a sequence of explicit object-level embeddings, derived from semantic-rich 2D or 3D representations. By employing object identifiers, we transform diverse 3D scene-language tasks into a unified question-answering format, facilitating joint training without the need for additional task-specific heads. With minimal fine-tuning on all downstream tasks, our model significantly outperforms existing methods on benchmarks including ScanRefer, Multi3DRefer, Scan2Cap, ScanQA, and SQA3D.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant problem-solving capabilities across predictive and generative tasks in chemistry. However, their proficiency in multi-step chemical reasoning remains underexplored. We introduce a new challenge: molecular structure elucidation, which involves deducing a molecule’s structure from various types of spectral data. Solving such a molecular puzzle, akin to solving crossword puzzles, poses reasoning challenges that require integrating clues from diverse sources and engaging in iterative hypothesis testing. To address this challenging problem with LLMs, we present \textbf{MolPuzzle}, a benchmark comprising 217 instances of structure elucidation, which feature over 23,000 QA samples presented in a sequential puzzle-solving process, involving three interlinked sub-tasks: molecule understanding, spectrum interpretation, and molecule construction. Our evaluation of 12 LLMs reveals that the best-performing LLM, GPT-4o, performs significantly worse than humans, with only a small portion (1.4\%) of its answers exactly matching the ground truth. However, it performs nearly perfectly in the first subtask of molecule understanding, achieving accuracy close to 100\%. This discrepancy highlights the potential of developing advanced LLMs with improved chemical reasoning capabilities in the other two sub-tasks. Our MolPuzzle dataset and evaluation code are available at this \href{https://github.com/KehanGuo2/MolPuzzle}{link}.

The flexible and generalized nature of large language models has allowed for their application in a wide array of language-based domains. Much like their human contemporaries, these models are capable of engaging in discussions and debates as a means of improving answer quality. We first take a theoretical approach to analyzing debate and provide a framework through which debate can be mathematically examined. Building on this framework, we provide several theoretical results for multi-agent debate. In particular, we demonstrate that similar model capabilities, or similar model responses, can result in static debate dynamics where the debate procedure simply converges to the majority opinion. When this majority opinion is the result of a common misconception (ingrained in the models through shared training data) debate is likely to converge to answers associated with that common misconception. Using insights from our theoretical results we then propose three interventions which improve the efficacy of debate. For each intervention, we provide theoretical results demonstrating how debate is improved. We also demonstrate that these interventions result in better performance on four common benchmark tasks.

Latent diffusion models (LDM) have revolutionized text-to-image generation, leading to the proliferation of various advanced models and diverse downstream applications. However, despite these significant advancements, current diffusion models still suffer from several limitations, including inferior visual quality, inadequate aesthetic appeal, and inefficient inference, without a comprehensive solution in sight. To address these challenges, we present **UniFL**, a unified framework that leverages feedback learning to enhance diffusion models comprehensively. UniFL stands out as a universal, effective, and generalizable solution applicable to various diffusion models, such as SD1.5 and SDXL. Notably, UniFL consists of three key components: perceptual feedback learning, which enhances visual quality; decoupled feedback learning, which improves aesthetic appeal; and adversarial feedback learning, which accelerates inference. In-depth experiments and extensive user studies validate the superior performance of our method in enhancing generation quality and inference acceleration. For instance, UniFL surpasses ImageReward by 17\% user preference in terms of generation quality and outperforms LCM and SDXL Turbo by 57\% and 20\% general preference with 4-step inference.

In human-centric applications like healthcare and education, the \textit{heterogeneity} among patients and students necessitates personalized treatments and instructional interventions. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been utilized in those tasks, off-policy selection (OPS) is pivotal to close the loop by offline evaluating and selecting policies without online interactions, yet current OPS methods often overlook the heterogeneity among participants. Our work is centered on resolving a \textit{pivotal challenge} in human-centric systems (HCSs): \textbf{\textit{how to select a policy to deploy when a new participant joining the cohort, without having access to any prior offline data collected over the participant?}} We introduce First-Glance Off-Policy Selection (FPS), a novel approach that systematically addresses participant heterogeneity through sub-group segmentation and tailored OPS criteria to each sub-group. By grouping individuals with similar traits, FPS facilitates personalized policy selection aligned with unique characteristics of each participant or group of participants. FPS is evaluated via two important but challenging applications, intelligent tutoring systems and a healthcare application for sepsis treatment and intervention. FPS presents significant advancement in enhancing learning outcomes of students and in-hospital care outcomes.

An image editing model should be able to perform diverse edits, ranging from object replacement, changing attributes or style, to performing actions or movement, which require many forms of reasoning. Current *general* instruction-guided editing models have significant shortcomings with action and reasoning-centric edits. Object, attribute or stylistic changes can be learned from visually static datasets. On the other hand, high-quality data for action and reasoning-centric edits is scarce and has to come from entirely different sources that cover e.g. physical dynamics, temporality and spatial reasoning. To this end, we meticulously curate the **A**U**RO**R**A** Dataset (**A**ction-**R**easoning-**O**bject-**A**ttribute), a collection of high-quality training data, human-annotated and curated from videos and simulation engines. We focus on a key aspect of quality training data: triplets (source image, prompt, target image) contain a single meaningful visual change described by the prompt, i.e., *truly minimal* changes between source and target images. To demonstrate the value of our dataset, we evaluate an **A**U**RO**R**A**-finetuned model on a new expert-curated benchmark (**A**U**RO**R**A-Bench**) covering 8 diverse editing tasks. Our model significantly outperforms previous editing models as judged by human raters. For automatic evaluations, we find important flaws in previous metrics and caution their use for semantically hard editing tasks. Instead, we propose a new automatic metric that focuses on discriminative understanding. We hope that our efforts : (1) curating a quality training dataset and an evaluation benchmark, (2) developing critical evaluations, and (3) releasing a state-of-the-art model, will fuel further progress on general image editing.

Probabilistic circuits (PCs) have emerged as a powerful framework compactly representing probability distributions for efficient and exact probabilistic inference. It has been shown that PCs with general directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure can be understood as a mixture of exponentially (in its height) many components, each of which is a product distributions over univariate marginals. However, existing structure learning algorithms for PCs often generate tree-structured circuits, or using tree-structured circuits as intermediate steps to compress them into DAG-structured circuits. This leads to an intriguing question on whether there exists an exponential gap between DAGs and trees for the PC structure. In this paper, we provide a negative answer to this conjecture by proving that, for $n$ variables, there is a quasi-polynomial upper bound $n^{O(\log n)}$ on the size of an equivalent tree computing the same probability distribution. On the other hand, we will also show that given a depth restriction on the tree, there is a super-polynomial separation between tree and DAG-structured PCs. Our work takes an important step towards understanding the expressive power of tree-structured PCs, and our techniques may be of independent interest in the study of structure learning algorithms for PCs.

In dynamic submodular maximization, the goal is to maintain a high-value solution over a sequence of element insertions and deletions with a fast update time. Motivated by large-scale applications and the fact that dynamic data often exhibits patterns, we ask the following question: can predictions be used to accelerate the update time of dynamic submodular maximization algorithms? We consider the model for dynamic algorithms with predictions where predictions regarding the insertion and deletion times of elements can be used for preprocessing. Our main result is an algorithm with an $O(\text{poly}(\log \eta, \log w, \log k))$ amortized update time over the sequence of updates that achieves a $1/2 - \epsilon$ approximation for dynamic monotone submodular maximization under a cardinality constraint $k$, where the prediction error $\eta$ is the number of elements that are not inserted and deleted within $w$ time steps of their predicted insertion and deletion times. This amortized update time is independent of the length of the stream and instead depends on the prediction error.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have recently gained steam in achieving the state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of tasks in computer vision and natural language processing. They effectively expand the model capacity while incurring a minimal increase in computation cost during training. However, deploying such models for inference is difficult due to their large model size and complex communication pattern. In this work, we provide a characterization of two MoE workloads, namely Language Modeling (LM) and Machine Translation (MT) and identify their sources of inefficiencies at deployment. We propose three optimization techniques to mitigate sources of inefficiencies, namely (1) Dynamic gating, (2) Expert Buffering, and (3) Expert load balancing. We show that dynamic gating improves maximum throughput by 6.21-11.55$\times$ for LM, 5.75-10.98$\times$ for MT Encoder and 2.58-5.71$\times$ for MT Decoder. It also reduces memory usage by up to 1.36$\times$ for LM and up to 1.1$\times$ for MT. We further propose Expert Buffering, a new caching mechanism that only keeps hot, active experts in GPU memory while buffering the rest in CPU memory. This reduces static memory allocation by 1.47$\times$. Finally, we propose a load balancing methodology that provides additional robustness to the workload. Our code is available at https://github.com/hyhuang00/moe_inference.

This paper is motivated by an interesting phenomenon: the performance of object detection lags behind that of instance segmentation (i.e., performance imbalance) when investigating the intermediate results from the beginning transformer decoder layer of MaskDINO (i.e., the SOTA model for joint detection and segmentation). This phenomenon inspires us to think about a question: will the performance imbalance at the beginning layer of transformer decoder constrain the upper bound of the final performance? With this question in mind, we further conduct qualitative and quantitative pre-experiments, which validate the negative impact of detection-segmentation imbalance issue on the model performance. To address this issue, this paper proposes DI-MaskDINO model, the core idea of which is to improve the final performance by alleviating the detection-segmentation imbalance. DI-MaskDINO is implemented by configuring our proposed De-Imbalance (DI) module and Balance-Aware Tokens Optimization (BATO) module to MaskDINO. DI is responsible for generating balance-aware query, and BATO uses the balance-aware query to guide the optimization of the initial feature tokens. The balance-aware query and optimized feature tokens are respectively taken as the Query and Key&Value of transformer decoder to perform joint object detection and instance segmentation. DI-MaskDINO outperforms existing joint object detection and instance segmentation models on COCO and BDD100K benchmarks, achieving +1.2 $AP^{box}$ and +0.9 $AP^{mask}$ improvements compared to SOTA joint detection and segmentation model MaskDINO. In addition, DI-MaskDINO also obtains +1.0 $AP^{box}$ improvement compared to SOTA object detection model DINO and +3.0 $AP^{mask}$ improvement compared to SOTA segmentation model Mask2Former.

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) have become integral to various software workflows. Such languages offer domain-specific optimizations and abstractions that improve code readability and maintainability. However, leveraging these languages requires developers to rewrite existing code using the specific DSL's API. While large language models (LLMs) have shown some success in automatic code transpilation, none of them provide any functional correctness guarantees on the rewritten code. Another approach for automating this task is verified lifting, which relies on program synthesis to find programs in the target language that are functionally equivalent to the source language program. While several verified lifting tools have been developed for various application domains, they are specialized for specific source-target languages or require significant expertise in domain knowledge to make the search efficient. In this paper, leveraging recent advances in LLMs, we propose an LLM-based approach (LLMLift) to building verified lifting tools. We use the LLM's capabilities to reason about programs to translate a given program into its corresponding equivalent in the target language. Additionally, we use LLMs to generate proofs for functional equivalence. We develop lifting-based compilers for four DSLs targeting different application domains. Our approach not only outperforms previous symbolic-based tools in number of benchmarks transpiled and transpilation time, but also requires significantly less effort to build.

Presenting users with diverse responses from foundation models is crucial for enhancing user experience and accommodating varying preferences. However, generating multiple high-quality and diverse responses without sacrificing accuracy remains a challenge, especially when using greedy sampling. In this work, we propose a novel framework, Synthesize-Partition-Adapt (SPA), that leverages the abundant synthetic data available in many domains to elicit diverse responses from foundation models. By leveraging signal provided by data attribution methods such as influence functions, SPA partitions data into subsets, each targeting unique aspects of the data, and trains multiple model adaptations optimized for these subsets. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in diversifying foundation model responses while maintaining high quality, showcased through the HumanEval and MBPP tasks in the code generation domain and several tasks in the natural language understanding domain, highlighting its potential to enrich user experience across various applications.