NeurIPS 2024 论文列表

Recent development in Artificial Intelligence (AI) models has propelled their application in scientific discovery, but the validation and exploration of these discoveries require subsequent empirical experimentation. The concept of self-driving laboratories promises to automate and thus boost the experimental process following AI-driven discoveries. However, the transition of experimental protocols, originally crafted for human comprehension, into formats interpretable by machines presents significant challenges, which, within the context of specific expert domain, encompass the necessity for structured as opposed to natural language, the imperative for explicit rather than tacit knowledge, and the preservation of causality and consistency throughout protocol steps. Presently, the task of protocol translation predominantly requires the manual and labor-intensive involvement of domain experts and information technology specialists, rendering the process time-intensive. To address these issues, we propose a framework that automates the protocol translation process through a three-stage workflow, which incrementally constructs Protocol Dependence Graphs (PDGs) that approach structured on the syntax level, completed on the semantics level, and linked on the execution level. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations have demonstrated its performance at par with that of human experts, underscoring its potential to significantly expedite and democratize the process of scientific discovery by elevating the automation capabilities within self-driving laboratories.

Accurate emotion perception is crucial for various applications, including human-computer interaction, education, and counseling. However, traditional single-modality approaches often fail to capture the complexity of real-world emotional expressions, which are inherently multimodal. Moreover, existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) face challenges in integrating audio and recognizing subtle facial micro-expressions. To address this, we introduce the MERR dataset, containing 28,618 coarse-grained and 4,487 fine-grained annotated samples across diverse emotional categories. This dataset enables models to learn from varied scenarios and generalize to real-world applications. Furthermore, we propose Emotion-LLaMA, a model that seamlessly integrates audio, visual, and textual inputs through emotion-specific encoders. By aligning features into a shared space and employing a modified LLaMA model with instruction tuning, Emotion-LLaMA significantly enhances both emotional recognition and reasoning capabilities. Extensive evaluations show Emotion-LLaMA outperforms other MLLMs, achieving top scores in Clue Overlap (7.83) and Label Overlap (6.25) on EMER, an F1 score of 0.9036 on MER2023-SEMI challenge, and the highest UAR (45.59) and WAR (59.37) in zero-shot evaluations on DFEW dataset.

Image retargeting is the task of adjusting the aspect ratio of images to suit different display devices or presentation environments. However, existing retargeting methods often struggle to balance the preservation of key semantics and image quality, resulting in either deformation or loss of important objects, or the introduction of local artifacts such as discontinuous pixels and inconsistent regenerated content. To address these issues, we propose a content-aware retargeting method called PruneRepaint. It incorporates semantic importance for each pixel to guide the identification of regions that need to be pruned or preserved in order to maintain key semantics. Additionally, we introduce an adaptive repainting module that selects image regions for repainting based on the distribution of pruned pixels and the proportion between foreground size and target aspect ratio, thus achieving local smoothness after pruning. By focusing on the content and structure of the foreground, our PruneRepaint approach adaptively avoids key content loss and deformation, while effectively mitigating artifacts with local repainting. We conduct experiments on the public RetargetMe benchmark and demonstrate through objective experimental results and subjective user studies that our method outperforms previous approaches in terms of preserving semantics and aesthetics, as well as better generalization across diverse aspect ratios. Codes will be available at https://github.com/fhshen2022/PruneRepaint.

How can we attribute the behaviors of machine learning models to their training data? While the classic influence function sheds light on the impact of individual samples, it often fails to capture the more complex and pronounced collective influence of a set of samples. To tackle this challenge, we study the Most Influential Subset Selection (MISS) problem, which aims to identify a subset of training samples with the greatest collective influence. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of the prevailing approaches in MISS, elucidating their strengths and weaknesses. Our findings reveal that influence-based greedy heuristics, a dominant class of algorithms in MISS, can provably fail even in linear regression. We delineate the failure modes, including the errors of influence function and the non-additive structure of the collective influence. Conversely, we demonstrate that an adaptive version of these heuristics which applies them iteratively, can effectively capture the interactions among samples and thus partially address the issues. Experiments on real-world datasets corroborate these theoretical findings, and further demonstrate that the merit of adaptivity can extend to more complex scenarios such as classification tasks and non-linear neural networks. We conclude our analysis by emphasizing the inherent trade-off between performance and computational efficiency, questioning the use of additive metrics such as the linear datamodeling score, and offering a range of discussions.

Power grids are critical infrastructures of paramount importance to modern society and, therefore, engineered to operate under diverse conditions and failures. The ongoing energy transition poses new challenges for the decision-makers and system operators. Therefore, we must develop grid analysis algorithms to ensure reliable operations. These key tools include power flow analysis and system security analysis, both needed for effective operational and strategic planning. The literature review shows a growing trend of machine learning (ML) models that perform these analyses effectively. In particular, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) stand out in such applications because of the graph-based structure of power grids. However, there is a lack of publicly available graph datasets for training and benchmarking ML models in electrical power grid applications. First, we present PowerGraph, which comprises GNN-tailored datasets for i) power flows, ii) optimal power flows, and iii) cascading failure analyses of power grids. Second, we provide ground-truth explanations for the cascading failure analysis. Finally, we perform a complete benchmarking of GNN methods for node-level and graph-level tasks and explainability. Overall, PowerGraph is a multifaceted GNN dataset for diverse tasks that includes power flow and fault scenarios with real-world explanations, providing a valuable resource for developing improved GNN models for node-level, graph-level tasks and explainability methods in power system modeling. The dataset is available at https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/PowerGraph/22820534 and the code at https://github.com/PowerGraph-Datasets.

Electroencephalography (EEG) data is often collected from diverse contexts involving different populations and EEG devices. This variability can induce distribution shifts in the data $X$ and in the biomedical variables of interest $y$, thus limiting the application of supervised machine learning (ML) algorithms. While domain adaptation (DA) methods have been developed to mitigate the impact of these shifts, such methods struggle when distribution shifts occur simultaneously in $X$ and $y$. As state-of-the-art ML models for EEG represent the data by spatial covariance matrices, which lie on the Riemannian manifold of Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices, it is appealing to study DA techniques operating on the SPD manifold. This paper proposes a novel method termed Geodesic Optimization for Predictive Shift Adaptation (GOPSA) to address test-time multi-source DA for situations in which source domains have distinct $y$ distributions. GOPSA exploits the geodesic structure of the Riemannian manifold to jointly learn a domain-specific re-centering operator representing site-specific intercepts and the regression model. We performed empirical benchmarks on the cross-site generalization of age-prediction models with resting-state EEG data from a large multi-national dataset (HarMNqEEG), which included $14$ recording sites and more than $1500$ human participants. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our results showed that GOPSA achieved significantly higher performance on three regression metrics ($R^2$, MAE, and Spearman's $\rho$) for several source-target site combinations, highlighting its effectiveness in tackling multi-source DA with predictive shifts in EEG data analysis. Our method has the potential to combine the advantages of mixed-effects modeling with machine learning for biomedical applications of EEG, such as multicenter clinical trials.

Current multimodal and multitask foundation models, like 4M or UnifiedIO, show promising results. However, their out-of-the-box abilities to accept diverse inputs and perform diverse tasks are limited by the (usually small) number of modalities and tasks they are trained on. In this paper, we develop a single any-to-any model trained on tens of highly diverse modalities and by performing co-training on large-scale multimodal datasets and text corpora. This includes training on images and text along with several semantic and geometric modalities, feature maps from recent state of the art models like DINOv2 and ImageBind, pseudo labels of specialist models like SAM and 4DHumans, and a range of new modalities that allow for novel ways to interact with the model and steer the generation, for example, image metadata or color palettes. A crucial step in this process is performing discrete tokenization on various modalities, whether they are image-like, neural network feature maps, vectors, structured data like instance segmentation or human poses, or data that can be represented as text. Through this, we show the possibility of training one model to solve at least 3x more tasks/modalities than existing models and doing so without a loss in performance. In addition, this enables more fine-grained and controllable multimodal generation capabilities and allows studying the distillation of models trained on diverse data and objectives into one unified model. We scale the training to a three billion parameter and different datasets. The multimodal models and training code are open sourced at https://4m.epfl.ch/.

Recent advances in self-supervised models for natural language, vision, and protein sequences have inspired the development of large genomic DNA language models (DNALMs). These models aim to learn generalizable representations of diverse DNA elements, potentially enabling various genomic prediction, interpretation and design tasks. Despite their potential, existing benchmarks do not adequately assess the capabilities of DNALMs on key downstream applications involving an important class of non-coding DNA elements critical for regulating gene activity. In this study, we introduce DART-Eval, a suite of representative benchmarks specifically focused on regulatory DNA to evaluate model performance across zero-shot, probed, and fine-tuned scenarios against contemporary ab initio models as baselines. Our benchmarks target biologically meaningful downstream tasks such as functional sequence feature discovery, predicting cell-type specific regulatory activity, and counterfactual prediction of the impacts of genetic variants. We find that current DNALMs exhibit inconsistent performance and do not offer compelling gains over alternative baseline models for most tasks, while requiring significantly more computational resources. We discuss potentially promising modeling, data curation, and evaluation strategies for the next generation of DNALMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/kundajelab/DART-Eval

Visible-Infrared Person Re-identification (VI-ReID) is a challenging cross-modal retrieval task due to significant modality differences, primarily resulting from the absence of color information in the infrared modality. The development of large foundation models like Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) motivates us to explore a feasible solution to empower VI-ReID with off-the-shelf large foundation models. To this end, we propose a novel Text-enhanced VI-ReID framework driven by Large Foundation Models (TVI-LFM). The core idea is to enrich the representation of the infrared modality with textual descriptions automatically generated by VLMs. Specifically, we incorporate a pre-trained VLM to extract textual features from texts generated by VLM and augmented by LLM, and incrementally fine-tune the text encoder to minimize the domain gap between generated texts and original visual modalities. Meanwhile, to enhance the infrared modality with extracted textual representations, we leverage modality alignment capabilities of VLMs and VLM-generated feature-level filters. This enables the text model to learn complementary features from the infrared modality, ensuring the semantic structural consistency between the fusion modality and the visible modality. Furthermore, we introduce modality joint learning to align features across all modalities, ensuring that textual features maintain stable semantic representation of overall pedestrian appearance during complementary information learning. Additionally, a modality ensemble retrieval strategy is proposed to leverage complementary strengths of each query modality to improve retrieval effectiveness and robustness. Extensive experiments on three expanded VI-ReID datasets demonstrate that our method significantly improves the retrieval performance, paving the way for the utilization of large foundation models in downstream multi-modal retrieval tasks.

Human-Oriented Binary Reverse Engineering (HOBRE) lies at the intersection of binary and source code, aiming to lift binary code to human-readable content relevant to source code, thereby bridging the binary-source semantic gap. Recent advancements in uni-modal code model pre-training, particularly in generative Source Code Foundation Models (SCFMs) and binary understanding models, have laid the groundwork for transfer learning applicable to HOBRE. However, existing approaches for HOBRE rely heavily on uni-modal models like SCFMs for supervised fine-tuning or general LLMs for prompting, resulting in sub-optimal performance. Inspired by recent progress in large multi-modal models, we propose that it is possible to harness the strengths of uni-modal code models from both sides to bridge the semantic gap effectively. In this paper, we introduce a novel probe-and-recover framework that incorporates a binary-source encoder-decoder model and black-box LLMs for binary analysis. Our approach leverages the pre-trained knowledge within SCFMs to synthesize relevant, symbol-rich code fragments as context. This additional context enables black-box LLMs to enhance recovery accuracy. We demonstrate significant improvements in zero-shot binary summarization and binary function name recovery, with a 10.3% relative gain in CHRF and a 16.7% relative gain in a GPT4-based metric for summarization, as well as a 6.7% and 7.4% absolute increase in token-level precision and recall for name recovery, respectively. These results highlight the effectiveness of our approach in automating and improving binary code analysis.

A natural strategy for continual learning is to weigh a Bayesian ensemble of fixed functions. This suggests that if a (single) neural network could be interpreted as an ensemble, one could design effective algorithms that learn without forgetting. To realize this possibility, we observe that a neural network classifier with N parameters can be interpreted as a weighted ensemble of N classifiers, and that in the lazy regime limit these classifiers are fixed throughout learning. We call these classifiers the *neural tangent experts* and show they output valid probability distributions over the labels. We then derive the likelihood and posterior probability of each expert given past data. Surprisingly, the posterior updates for these experts are equivalent to a scaled and projected form of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) over the network weights. Away from the lazy regime, networks can be seen as ensembles of adaptive experts which improve over time. These results offer a new interpretation of neural networks as Bayesian ensembles of experts, providing a principled framework for understanding and mitigating catastrophic forgetting in continual learning settings.

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) is a large-scale foundation model that has revolutionized segmentation methodology. Despite its impressive generalization ability, the segmentation accuracy of SAM on images with intricate structures is often unsatisfactory. Recent works have proposed lightweight fine-tuning using high-quality annotated data to improve accuracy on such images. However, here we provide extensive empirical evidence that this strategy leads to forgetting how to "segment anything": these models lose the original generalization abilities of SAM, in the sense that they perform worse for segmentation tasks not represented in the annotated fine-tuning set. To improve performance without forgetting, we introduce a novel framework that combines high-quality annotated data with a large unlabeled dataset. The framework relies on two methodological innovations. First, we quantify the uncertainty in the SAM pseudo labels associated with the unlabeled data and leverage it to perform uncertainty-aware fine-tuning. Second, we encode the type of segmentation task associated with each training example using a $\textit{task prompt}$ to reduce ambiguity. We evaluated the proposed Segmentation with Uncertainty Model (SUM) on a diverse test set consisting of 14 public benchmarks, where it achieves state-of-the-art results. Notably, our method consistently surpasses SAM by 3-6 points in mean IoU and 4-7 in mean boundary IoU across point-prompt interactive segmentation rounds. Code is available at https://github.com/Kangningthu/SUM

Workplace meetings are vital to organizational collaboration, yet a large percentage of meetings are rated as ineffective. To help improve meeting effectiveness by understanding if the conversation is on topic, we create a comprehensive Topic-Conversation Relevance (TCR) dataset that covers a variety of domains and meeting styles. The TCR dataset includes 1,500 unique meetings, 22 million words in transcripts, and over 15,000 meeting topics, sourced from both newly collected Speech Interruption Meeting (SIM) data and existing public datasets. Along with the text data, we also open source scripts to generate synthetic meetings or create augmented meetings from the TCR dataset to enhance data diversity. For each data source, benchmarks are created using GPT-4 to evaluate the model accuracy in understanding transcription-topic relevance.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate remarkable proficiency in addressing a wide array of visual questions, which requires strong perception and reasoning faculties. Assessing these two competencies independently is crucial for model refinement, despite the inherent difficulty due to the intertwined nature of seeing and reasoning in existing VLMs. To tackle this issue, we present Prism, an innovative framework designed to disentangle the perception and reasoning processes involved in visual question solving. Prism comprises two distinct stages: a perception stage that utilizes a VLM to extract and articulate visual information in textual form, and a reasoning stage that formulates responses based on the extracted visual information using a Large Language Model (LLM). This modular design enables the systematic comparison and assessment of both proprietary and open-source VLM for their perception and reasoning strengths. Our analytical framework provides several valuable insights, underscoring Prism's potential as a cost-effective solution for vision-language tasks. By combining a streamlined VLM focused on perception with a powerful LLM tailored for reasoning, Prism achieves superior results in general vision-language tasks while substantially cutting down on training and operational expenses. Quantitative evaluations show that Prism, when configured with a vanilla 2B LLaVA and freely accessible GPT-3.5, delivers performance on par with VLMs $10 \times$ larger on the rigorous multimodal benchmark MMStar.

Understanding the semantics of individual regions or patches of unconstrained images, such as open-world object detection, remains a critical yet challenging task in computer vision. Building on the success of powerful image-level vision-language (ViL) foundation models like CLIP, recent efforts have sought to harness their capabilities by either training a contrastive model from scratch with an extensive collection of region-label pairs or aligning the outputs of a detection model with image-level representations of region proposals. Despite notable progress, these approaches are plagued by computationally intensive training requirements, susceptibility to data noise, and deficiency in contextual information. To address these limitations, we explore the synergistic potential of off-the-shelf foundation models, leveraging their respective strengths in localization and semantics. We introduce a novel, generic, and efficient architecture, named RegionSpot, designed to integrate position-aware localization knowledge from a localization foundation model (e.g., SAM) with semantic information from a ViL model (e.g., CLIP). To fully exploit pretrained knowledge while minimizing training overhead, we keep both foundation models frozen, focusing optimization efforts solely on a lightweight attention-based knowledge integration module. Extensive experiments in open-world object recognition show that our RegionSpot achieves significant performance gain over prior alternatives, along with substantial computational savings (e.g., training our model with 3 million data in a single day using 8 V100 GPUs). RegionSpot outperforms GLIP-L by 2.9 in mAP on LVIS val set, with an even larger margin of 13.1 AP for more challenging and rare categories, and a 2.5 AP increase on ODinW. Furthermore, it exceeds GroundingDINO-L by 11.0 AP for rare categories on the LVIS minival set.

We study the problem of gradient descent learning of a single-index target function $f_*(\boldsymbol{x}) = \textstyle\sigma_*\left(\langle\boldsymbol{x},\boldsymbol{\theta}\rangle\right)$ under isotropic Gaussian data in $\mathbb{R}^d$, where the unknown link function $\sigma_*:\mathbb{R}\to\mathbb{R}$ has information exponent $p$ (defined as the lowest degree in the Hermite expansion). Prior works showed that gradient-based training of neural networks can learn this target with $n\gtrsim d^{\Theta(p)}$ samples, and such complexity is predicted to be necessary by the correlational statistical query lower bound. Surprisingly, we prove that a two-layer neural network optimized by an SGD-based algorithm (on the squared loss) learns $f_*$ with a complexity that is not governed by the information exponent. Specifically, for arbitrary polynomial single-index models, we establish a sample and runtime complexity of $n \simeq T = \Theta(d\cdot\mathrm{polylog} d)$, where $\Theta(\cdot)$ hides a constant only depending on the degree of $\sigma_*$; this dimension dependence matches the information theoretic limit up to polylogarithmic factors. More generally, we show that $n\gtrsim d^{(p_*-1)\vee 1}$ samples are sufficient to achieve low generalization error, where $p_* \le p$ is the \textit{generative exponent} of the link function. Core to our analysis is the reuse of minibatch in the gradient computation, which gives rise to higher-order information beyond correlational queries.

Semi-supervised continual learning (SSCL) has attracted significant attention for addressing catastrophic forgetting in semi-supervised data. Knowledge distillation, which leverages data representation and pair-wise similarity, has shown significant potential in preserving information in SSCL. However, traditional distillation strategies often fail in unlabeled data with inaccurate or noisy information, limiting their efficiency in feature spaces undergoing substantial changes during continual learning. To address these limitations, we propose Persistence Homology Distillation (PsHD) to preserve intrinsic structural information that is insensitive to noise in semi-supervised continual learning. First, we capture the structural features using persistence homology by homological evolution across different scales in vision data, where the multi-scale characteristic established its stability under noise interference. Next, we propose a persistence homology distillation loss in SSCL and design an acceleration algorithm to reduce the computational cost of persistence homology in our module. Furthermore, we demonstrate the superior stability of PsHD compared to sample representation and pair-wise similarity distillation methods theoretically and experimentally. Finally, experimental results on three widely used datasets validate that the new PsHD outperforms state-of-the-art with 3.9% improvements on average, and also achieves 1.5% improvements while reducing 60% memory buffer size, highlighting the potential of utilizing unlabeled data in SSCL. Our code is available: https://github.com/fanyan0411/PsHD.

Vision Transformer (ViT) has shown great power in learning from large-scale datasets. However, collecting sufficient data for expert knowledge is always difficult. To handle this problem, Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CDFSL) has been proposed to transfer the source-domain knowledge learned from sufficient data to target domains where only scarce data is available. In this paper, we find an intriguing phenomenon neglected by previous works for the CDFSL task based on ViT: leaving the CLS token to random initialization, instead of loading source-domain trained parameters, could consistently improve target-domain performance. We then delve into this phenomenon for an interpretation. We find **the CLS token naturally absorbs domain information** due to the inherent structure of the ViT, which is represented as the low-frequency component in the Fourier frequency space of images. Based on this phenomenon and interpretation, we further propose a method for the CDFSL task to decouple the domain information in the CLS token during the source-domain training, and adapt the CLS token on the target domain for efficient few-shot learning. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks validate our rationale and state-of-the-art performance. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Zoilsen/CLS_Token_CDFSL.

We investigate the radioactivity of text generated by large language models (LLM), \ie whether it is possible to detect that such synthetic input was used to train a subsequent LLM. Current methods like membership inference or active IP protection either work only in settings where the suspected text is known or do not provide reliable statistical guarantees. We discover that, on the contrary, it is possible to reliably determine if a language model was trained on synthetic data if that data is output by a watermarked LLM. Our new methods, specialized for radioactivity, detects with a provable confidence weak residuals of the watermark signal in the fine-tuned LLM. We link the radioactivity contamination level to the following properties: the watermark robustness, its proportion in the training set, and the fine-tuning process. For instance, if the suspect model is open-weight, we demonstrate that training on watermarked instructions can be detected with high confidence ($p$-value $< 10^{-5}$) even when as little as $5\%$ of training text is watermarked.