NeurIPS 2024 论文列表

In multi-label learning, each training instance is associated with multiple labels simultaneously. Traditional multi-label learning studies primarily focus on closed set scenario, i.e. the class label set of test data is identical to those used in training phase. Nevertheless, in numerous real-world scenarios, the environment is open and dynamic where unknown labels may emerge gradually during testing. In this paper, the problem of multi-label open set recognition (MLOSR) is investigated, which poses significant challenges in classifying and recognizing instances with unknown labels in multi-label setting. To enable open set multi-label prediction, a novel approach named SLAN is proposed by leveraging sub-labeling information enriched by structural information in the feature space. Accordingly, unknown labels are recognized by differentiating the sub-labeling information from holistic supervision. Experimental results on various datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in dealing with the MLOSR problem.

Most popular benchmarks for comparing LLMs rely on a limited set of prompt templates, which may not fully capture the LLMs’ abilities and can affect the reproducibility of results on leaderboards. Many recent works empirically verify prompt sensitivity and advocate for changes in LLM evaluation. In this paper, we consider the problem of estimating the performance distribution across many prompt variants instead of finding a single prompt to evaluate with. We introduce PromptEval, a method for estimating performance across a large set of prompts borrowing strength across prompts and examples to produce accurate estimates under practical evaluation budgets. The resulting distribution can be used to obtain performance quantiles to construct various robust performance metrics (e.g., top 95% quantile or median). We prove that PromptEval consistently estimates the performance distribution and demonstrate its efficacy empirically on three prominent LLM benchmarks: MMLU, BIG-bench Hard, and LMentry; for example, PromptEval can accurately estimate performance quantiles across 100 prompt templates on MMLU with a budget equivalent to two single-prompt evaluations. Moreover, we show how PromptEval can be useful in LLM-as-a-judge and best prompt identification applications.

This paper addresses a multi-source light detection (LD) problem from vehicles, traffic signals, and streetlights under driving scenarios. Albeit it is crucial for autonomous driving and night vision, this problem has not been yet focused on as much as other object detection (OD). One of the main reasons is the absence of a public available LD benchmark dataset. Therefore, we construct a new large LD dataset consisting of different light sources via heavy annotation: YouTube Driving Light Detection dataset (YDLD). Compared to the existing LD datasets, our dataset has much more images and box annotations for multi-source lights. We also provide rigorous statistical analysis and transfer learning comparison of other well-known detection benchmark datasets to prove the generality of our YDLD. For the recent object detectors, we achieve the extensive comparison results on YDLD. However, they tend to yield the low mAP scores due to the intrinsic challenges of LD caused by very tiny size and similar appearance. To resolve those, we design a novel lightness focal loss which penalizes miss-classified samples more and a lightness spatial attention prior by reflecting a global scene context. In addition, we develop a semi-supervised focal light detection (SS-FLD) by embedding our lightness focal loss into the semi-supervised object detection (SSOD). We prove that our methods can consistently boost mAP to the variety of types of recent detectors on YDLD. We will open both YDLD and SS-FLD code at https://github.com/YDLD-dataset/YDLD.

Action Quality Assessment (AQA) research confronts formidable obstacles due to limited, mono-modal datasets sourced from one-shot competitions, which hinder the generalizability and comprehensiveness of AQA models. To address these limitations, we present LucidAction, the first systematically collected multi-view AQA dataset structured on curriculum learning principles. LucidAction features a three-tier hierarchical structure, encompassing eight diverse sports events with four curriculum levels, facilitating sequential skill mastery and supporting a wide range of athletic abilities. The dataset encompasses multi-modal data, including multi-view RGB video, 2D and 3D pose sequences, enhancing the richness of information available for analysis. Leveraging a high-precision multi-view Motion Capture (MoCap) system ensures precise capture of complex movements. Meticulously annotated data, incorporating detailed penalties from professional gymnasts, ensures the establishment of robust and comprehensive ground truth annotations. Experimental evaluations employing diverse contrastive regression baselines on LucidAction elucidate the dataset's complexities. Through ablation studies, we investigate the advantages conferred by multi-modal data and fine-grained annotations, offering insights into improving AQA performance. The data and code will be openly released to support advancements in the AI sports field.

Large Transformer networks are increasingly used in settings where low inference latency is necessary to enable new applications and improve the end-user experience. However, autoregressive inference is resource intensive and requires parallelism for efficiency. Parallelism introduces collective communication that is both expensive and represents a phase when hardware resources are underutilized. Towards mitigating this, Kraken is an evolution of the standard Transformer architecture that is designed to complement existing tensor parallelism schemes for efficient inference on multi-device systems. By introducing a fixed degree of intra-layer model parallelism, the architecture allows collective operations to be overlapped with compute, decreasing latency and increasing hardware utilization. When trained on OpenWebText, Kraken models reach a similar perplexity as standard Transformers while also preserving their language modeling capabilities as evaluated on the SuperGLUE benchmark. Importantly, when tested on multi-GPU systems using TensorRT-LLM engines, Kraken speeds up Time To First Token by a mean of 35.6% across a range of model sizes, context lengths, and degrees of tensor parallelism.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities, demystifying their internal mechanisms becomes increasingly vital. Neuron attribution, which attributes LLM outputs to specific neurons to reveal the semantic properties they learn, has emerged as a key interpretability approach. However, while neuron attribution has made significant progress in deciphering text-only LLMs, its application to Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) remains less explored. To address this gap, we propose a novel Neuron Attribution method tailored for MLLMs, termed NAM. Specifically, NAM not only reveals the modality-specific semantic knowledge learned by neurons within MLLMs, but also highlights several intriguing properties of neurons, such as cross-modal invariance and semantic sensitivity. These properties collectively elucidate the inner workings mechanism of MLLMs, providing a deeper understanding of how MLLMs process and generate multi-modal content. Through theoretical analysis and empirical validation, we demonstrate the efficacy of NAM and the valuable insights it offers. Furthermore, leveraging NAM, we introduce a multi-modal knowledge editing paradigm, underscoring the practical significance of our approach for downstream applications of MLLMs.

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) methods seek effective optimization toward performance metrics regarding model accuracy and generalization while facing challenges regarding search costs and GPU resources. Recent Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) NAS methods achieve remarkable search efficiency based on a training-free model estimate; however, they overlook the non-convex nature of the DNNs in the search process. In this paper, we develop Multi-Objective Training-based Estimate (MOTE) for efficient NAS, retaining search effectiveness and achieving the new state-of-the-art in the accuracy and cost trade-off. To improve NTK and inspired by the Training Speed Estimation (TSE) method, MOTE is designed to model the actual performance of DNNs from macro to micro perspective by draw loss landscape and convergence speed simultaneously. Using two reduction strategies, the MOTE is generated based on a reduced architecture and a reduced dataset. Inspired by evolutionary search, our iterative ranking-based, coarse-to-fine architecture search is highly effective. Experiments on NASBench-201 show MOTE-NAS achieves 94.32% accuracy on CIFAR-10, 72.81% on CIFAR-100, and 46.38% on ImageNet-16-120, outperforming NTK-based NAS approaches. An evaluation-free (EF) version of MOTE-NAS delivers high efficiency in only 5 minutes, delivering a model more accurate than KNAS.

We aim to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) for embodied decision making. While a significant body of work has been leveraging LLMs for decision making in embodied environments, we still lack a systematic understanding of their performance because they are usually applied in different domains, for different purposes, and built based on different inputs and outputs. Furthermore, existing evaluations tend to rely solely on a final success rate, making it difficult to pinpoint what ability is missing in LLMs and where the problem lies, which in turn blocks embodied agents from leveraging LLMs effectively and selectively. To address these limitations, we propose a generalized interface (Embodied Agent Interface) that supports the formalization of various types of tasks and input-output specifications of LLM-based modules. Specifically, it allows us to unify 1) a broad set of embodied decision-making tasks involving both state and temporally extended goals, 2) four commonly-used LLM-based modules for decision making: goal interpretation, subgoal decomposition, action sequencing, and transition modeling, and 3) a collection of fine-grained metrics that break down evaluation into error types, such as hallucination errors, affordance errors, and various types of planning errors. Overall, our benchmark offers a comprehensive assessment of LLMs’ performance for different subtasks, pinpointing the strengths and weaknesses in LLM-powered embodied AI systems and providing insights into the effective and selective use of LLMs in embodied decision making.

The shift in dynamics results in significant performance degradation of policies trained in the source domain when deployed in a different target domain, posing a challenge for the practical application of reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world scenarios. Domain transfer methods aim to bridge this dynamics gap through techniques such as domain adaptation or domain calibration. While domain adaptation involves refining the policy through extensive interactions in the target domain, it may not be feasible for sensitive fields like healthcare and autonomous driving. On the other hand, offline domain calibration utilizes only static data from the target domain to adjust the physics parameters of the source domain (e.g., a simulator) to align with the target dynamics, enabling the direct deployment of the trained policy without sacrificing performance, which emerges as the most promising for policy deployment. However, existing techniques primarily rely on evolution algorithms for calibration, resulting in low sample efficiency. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel framework Madoc (\textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{a}gent \textbf{do}main \textbf{c}alibration). Firstly, we formulate a bandit RL objective to match the target trajectory distribution by learning a couple of classifiers. We then address the challenge of a large domain parameter space by modeling domain calibration as a cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) problem. Specifically, we utilize a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to automatically cluster physics parameters with similar effects on the dynamics, grouping them into distinct agents. These grouped agents train calibration policies coordinately to adjust multiple parameters using MARL. Our empirical evaluation on 21 offline locomotion tasks in D4RL and NeoRL benchmarks showcases the superior performance of our method compared to strong existing offline model-based RL, offline domain calibration, and hybrid offline-and-online RL baselines.

Understanding animal behaviour is central to predicting, understanding, and miti- gating impacts of natural and anthropogenic changes on animal populations and ecosystems. However, the challenges of acquiring and processing long-term, eco- logically relevant data in wild settings have constrained the scope of behavioural research. The increasing availability of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), cou- pled with advances in machine learning, has opened new opportunities for wildlife monitoring using aerial tracking. However, the limited availability of datasets with wild animals in natural habitats has hindered progress in automated computer vision solutions for long-term animal tracking. Here, we introduce the first large-scale UAV dataset designed to solve multi-object tracking (MOT) and re-identification (Re-ID) problem in wild animals, specifically the mating behaviour (or lekking) of blackbuck antelopes. Collected in collaboration with biologists, the MOT dataset includes over 1.2 million annotations including 680 tracks across 12 high-resolution (5.4K) videos, each averaging 66 seconds and featuring 30 to 130 individuals. The Re-ID dataset includes 730 individuals captured with two UAVs simultaneously. The dataset is designed to drive scalable, long-term animal behavior tracking using multiple camera sensors. By providing baseline performance with two detectors, and benchmarking several state-of-the-art tracking methods, our dataset reflects the real-world challenges of tracking wild animals in socially and ecologically relevant contexts. In making these data widely available, we hope to catalyze progress in MOT and Re-ID for wild animals, fostering insights into animal behaviour, conser- vation efforts, and ecosystem dynamics through automated, long-term monitoring.

We consider the fixed-confidence best arm identification (FC-BAI) problem in the Bayesian setting. This problem aims to find the arm of the largest mean with a fixed confidence level when the bandit model has been sampled from the known prior. Most studies on the FC-BAI problem have been conducted in the frequentist setting, where the bandit model is predetermined before the game starts. We show that the traditional FC-BAI algorithms studied in the frequentist setting, such as track-and-stop and top-two algorithms, result in arbitrarily suboptimal performances in the Bayesian setting. We also obtain a lower bound of the expected number of samples in the Bayesian setting and introduce a variant of successive elimination that has a matching performance with the lower bound up to a logarithmic factor. Simulations verify the theoretical results.

In bandit best-arm identification, an algorithm is tasked with finding the arm with highest mean reward with a specified accuracy as fast as possible. We study multi-fidelity best-arm identification, in which the algorithm can choose to sample an arm at a lower fidelity (less accurate mean estimate) for a lower cost. Several methods have been proposed for tackling this problem, but their optimality remain elusive, notably due to loose lower bounds on the total cost needed to identify the best arm. Our first contribution is a tight, instance-dependent lower bound on the cost complexity. The study of the optimization problem featured in the lower bound provides new insights to devise computationally efficient algorithms, and leads us to propose a gradient-based approach with asymptotically optimal cost complexity. We demonstrate the benefits of the new algorithm compared to existing methods in experiments. Our theoretical and empirical findings also shed light on an intriguing concept of optimal fidelity for each arm.

Most large multimodal models (LMMs) are implemented by feeding visual tokens as a sequence into the first layer of a large language model (LLM). The resulting architecture is simple but significantly increases computation and memory costs, as it has to handle a large number of additional tokens in its input layer. This paper presents a new architecture *DeepStack* for LMMs. Considering $N$ layers in the language and vision transformer of LMMs, we stack the visual tokens into $N$ groups and feed each group to its aligned transformer layer from bottom to top. Surprisingly, this simple method greatly enhances the power of LMMs to model interactions among visual tokens across layers but with minimal additional cost. We apply *DeepStack* to both language and vision transformer in LMMs, and validate the effectiveness of *DeepStack* LMMs with extensive empirical results. Using the same context length, our DeepStack 7B and 13B parameters surpass their counterparts by 2.7 and 2.9 on average across 9 benchmarks, respectively. Using only one-fifth of the context length, DeepStack rivals closely to the counterparts that use the full context length. These gains are particularly pronounced on high-resolution tasks, *e.g.*, 4.2, 11.0, and 4.0 improvements on TextVQA, DocVQA, and InfoVQA compared to LLaVA-1.5-7B, respectively. We further apply *DeepStack* to vision transformer layers, which brings us a similar amount of improvements, 3.8 on average compared with LLaVA-1.5-7B.

This paper presents MaVEn, an innovative Multi-granularity Visual Encoding framework designed to enhance the capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in multi-image reasoning. Current MLLMs primarily focus on single-image visual understanding, limiting their ability to interpret and integrate information across multiple images. MaVEn addresses this limitation by combining discrete visual symbol sequences, which abstract coarse-grained semantic concepts, with traditional continuous representation sequences that model fine-grained features. This dual approach bridges the semantic gap between visual and textual data, thereby improving the model's ability to process and interpret information from multiple images effectively. Additionally, we design a dynamic reduction mechanism by for long-sequence continuous features to enhance multi-image processing efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that MaVEn significantly enhances MLLMs' understanding in complex multi-image scenarios, while also improving performance in single-image contexts.

Despite the remarkable success of transformer-based models in various real-world tasks, their underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. Recent studies have suggested that transformers can implement gradient descent as an in-context learner for linear regression problems and have developed various theoretical analyses accordingly. However, these works mostly focus on the expressive power of transformers by designing specific parameter constructions, lacking a comprehensive understanding of their inherent working mechanisms post-training. In this study, we consider a sparse linear regression problem and investigate how a trained multi-head transformer performs in-context learning. We experimentally discover that the utilization of multi-heads exhibits different patterns across layers: multiple heads are utilized and essential in the first layer, while usually only a single head is sufficient for subsequent layers. We provide a theoretical explanation for this observation: the first layer preprocesses the context data, and the following layers execute simple optimization steps based on the preprocessed context. Moreover, we demonstrate that such a preprocess-then-optimize algorithm can significantly outperform naive gradient descent and ridge regression algorithms. Further experimental results support our explanations. Our findings offer insights into the benefits of multi-head attention and contribute to understanding the more intricate mechanisms hidden within trained transformers.

Sparse Mixtures of Experts (SMoE) scales model capacity without significant increases in computational costs. However, it exhibits the low expert activation issue, i.e., only a small subset of experts are activated for optimization, leading to suboptimal performance and limiting its effectiveness in learning a larger number of experts in complex tasks. In this paper, we propose Multi-Head Mixture-of-Experts (MH-MoE). MH-MoE split each input token into multiple sub-tokens, then these sub-tokens are assigned to and processed by a diverse set of experts in parallel, and seamlessly reintegrated into the original token form. The above operations enables MH-MoE to significantly enhance expert activation while collectively attend to information from various representation spaces within different experts to deepen context understanding. Besides, it's worth noting that our MH-MoE is straightforward to implement and decouples from other SMoE frameworks, making it easy to integrate with these frameworks for enhanced performance. Extensive experimental results across different parameter scales (300M to 7B) and three pre-training tasks—English-focused language modeling, multi-lingual language modeling and masked multi-modality modeling—along with multiple downstream validation tasks, demonstrate the effectiveness of MH-MoE.

Success in collaborative and competitive environments, where agents must work with or against each other, requires individuals to encode the position and trajectory of themselves and others. Decades of neurophysiological experiments have shed light on how brain regions [e.g., medial entorhinal cortex (MEC), hippocampus] encode the self's position and trajectory. However, it has only recently been discovered that MEC and hippocampus are modulated by the positions and trajectories of others. To understand how encoding spatial information of multiple agents shapes neural representations, we train a recurrent neural network (RNN) model that captures properties of MEC to path integrate trajectories of two agents simultaneously navigating the same environment. We find significant differences between these RNNs and those trained to path integrate only a single agent. At the individual unit level, RNNs trained to path integrate more than one agent develop weaker grid responses, stronger border responses, and tuning for the relative position of the two agents. At the population level, they develop more distributed and robust representations, with changes in network dynamics and manifold topology. Our results provide testable predictions and open new directions with which to study the neural computations supporting spatial navigation.

While the conditional sequence modeling with the transformer architecture has demonstrated its effectiveness in dealing with offline reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, it is struggle to handle out-of-distribution states and actions. Existing work attempts to address this issue by data augmentation with the learned policy or adding extra constraints with the value-based RL algorithm. However, these studies still fail to overcome the following challenges: (1) insufficiently utilizing the historical temporal information among inter-steps, (2) overlooking the local intra-step relationships among return-to-gos (RTGs), states, and actions, (3) overfitting suboptimal trajectories with noisy labels. To address these challenges, we propose $\textbf{D}$ecision $\textbf{M}$amba ($\textbf{DM}$), a novel multi-grained state space model (SSM) with a self-evolving policy learning strategy. DM explicitly models the historical hidden state to extract the temporal information by using the mamba architecture. To capture the relationship among RTG-state-action triplets, a fine-grained SSM module is designed and integrated into the original coarse-grained SSM in mamba, resulting in a novel mamba architecture tailored for offline RL. Finally, to mitigate the overfitting issue on noisy trajectories, a self-evolving policy is proposed by using progressive regularization. The policy evolves by using its own past knowledge to refine the suboptimal actions, thus enhancing its robustness on noisy demonstrations. Extensive experiments on various tasks show that DM outperforms other baselines substantially.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable potential in conducting complex tasks and are increasingly utilized in various financial applications. However, high-quality sequential financial investment decision-making remains challenging. These tasks require multiple interactions with a volatile environment for every decision, demanding sufficient intelligence to maximize returns and manage risks. Although LLMs have been used to develop agent systems that surpass human teams and yield impressive investment returns, opportunities to enhance multi-source information synthesis and optimize decision-making outcomes through timely experience refinement remain unexplored. Here, we introduce FinCon, an LLM-based multi-agent framework tailored for diverse financial tasks. Inspired by effective real-world investment firm organizational structures, FinCon utilizes a manager-analyst communication hierarchy. This structure allows for synchronized cross-functional agent collaboration towards unified goals through natural language interactions and equips each agent with greater memory capacity than humans. Additionally, a risk-control component in FinCon enhances decision quality by episodically initiating a self-critiquing mechanism to update systematic investment beliefs. The conceptualized beliefs serve as verbal reinforcement for the future agent’s behavior and can be selectively propagated to the appropriate node that requires knowledge updates. This feature significantly improves performance while reducing unnecessary peer-to-peer communication costs. Moreover, FinCon demonstrates strong generalization capabilities in various financial tasks, including stock trading and portfolio management.