NeurIPS 2024 论文列表

We characterized the generalization capabilities of deep neural network encoding models when predicting neuronal responses from the visual cortex to flashed images. We collected MacaqueITBench, a large-scale dataset of neuronal population responses from the macaque inferior temporal (IT) cortex to over $300,000$ images, comprising $8,233$ unique natural images presented to seven monkeys over $109$ sessions. Using MacaqueITBench, we investigated the impact of distribution shifts on models predicting neuronal activity by dividing the images into Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) train and test splits. The OOD splits included variations in image contrast, hue, intensity, temperature, and saturation. Compared to the performance on in-distribution test images---the conventional way in which these models have been evaluated---models performed worse at predicting neuronal responses to out-of-distribution images, retaining as little as $20\\%$ of the performance on in-distribution test images. Additionally, the relative ranking of different models in terms of their ability to predict neuronal responses changed drastically across OOD shifts. The generalization performance under OOD shifts can be well accounted by a simple image similarity metric---the cosine distance between image representations extracted from a pre-trained object recognition model is a strong predictor of neuronal predictivity under different distribution shifts. The dataset of images, neuronal firing rate recordings, and computational benchmarks are hosted publicly at: https://github.com/Spandan-Madan/benchmarking_ood_generalization_visual_cortex.

Image description datasets play a crucial role in the advancement of various applications such as image understanding, text-to-image generation, and text-image retrieval. Currently, image description datasets primarily originate from two sources. One source is the scraping of image-text pairs from the web. Despite their abundance, these descriptions are often of low quality and noisy. Another way is through human labeling. Datasets such as COCO are generally very short and lack details. Although detailed image descriptions can be annotated by humans, the high cost limits their quantity and feasibility. These limitations underscore the need for more efficient and scalable methods to generate accurate and detailed image descriptions. In this paper, we propose an innovative framework termed Image Textualization, which automatically produces high-quality image descriptions by leveraging existing mult-modal large language models (MLLMs) and multiple vision expert models in a collaborative manner. We conduct various experiments to validate the high quality of the descriptions constructed by our framework. Furthermore, we show that MLLMs fine-tuned on our dataset acquire an unprecedented capability of generating richer image descriptions, substantially increasing the length and detail of their output with even less hallucinations.

Real-world geometry and 3D vision tasks are replete with challenging symmetries that defy tractable analytical expression. In this paper, we introduce Neural Isometries, an autoencoder framework which learns to map the observation space to a general-purpose latent space wherein encodings are related by isometries whenever their corresponding observations are geometrically related in world space. Specifically, we regularize the latent space such that maps between encodings preserve a learned inner product and commute with a learned functional operator, in the same manner as rigid-body transformations commute with the Laplacian. This approach forms an effective backbone for self-supervised representation learning, and we demonstrate that a simple off-the-shelf equivariant network operating in the pre-trained latent space can achieve results on par with meticulously-engineered, handcrafted networks designed to handle complex, nonlinear symmetries. Furthermore, isometric maps capture information about the respective transformations in world space, and we show that this allows us to regress camera poses directly from the coefficients of the maps between encodings of adjacent views of a scene.

In the Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) process, roughly a 2mm spherical shell made of high-density carbon is used as a target for laser beams, which compress and heat it to energy levels needed for high fusion yield in nuclear fusion. These shells are polished meticulously to meet the standards for a fusion shot. However, the polishing of these shells involves multiple stages, with each stage taking several hours. To make sure that the polishing process is advancing in the right direction, we are able to measure the shell surface roughness. This measurement, however, is very labor-intensive, time-consuming, and requires a human operator. To help improve the polishing process we have released the first dataset to the public that consists of raw vibration signals with the corresponding polishing surface roughness changes. We show that this dataset can be used with a variety of neural network based methods for prediction of the change of polishing surface roughness, hence eliminating the need for the time-consuming manual process. This is the first dataset of its kind to be released in public and its use will allow the operator to make any necessary changes to the ICF polishing process for optimal results. This dataset contains the raw vibration data of multiple polishing runs with their extracted statistical features and the corresponding surface roughness values. Additionally, to generalize the prediction models to different polishing conditions, we also apply domain adaptation techniques to improve prediction accuracy for conditions unseen by the trained model. The dataset is available in \url{https://junzeliu.github.io/Diamond-Polishing-Dataset/}.

Hyperparameter Optimization (HPO) plays a pivotal role in unleashing the potential of iterative machine learning models. This paper addresses a crucial aspect that has largely been overlooked in HPO: the impact of uncertainty in ML model training. The paper introduces the concept of uncertainty-aware HPO and presents a novel approach called the UQ-guided scheme for quantifying uncertainty. This scheme offers a principled and versatile method to empower HPO techniques in handling model uncertainty during their exploration of the candidate space. By constructing a probabilistic model and implementing probability-driven candidate selection and budget allocation, this approach enhances the quality of the resulting model hyperparameters. It achieves a notable performance improvement of over 50\% in terms of accuracy regret and exploration time.

Imitation learning aims to learn a policy from observing expert demonstrations without access to reward signals from environments. Generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL) formulates imitation learning as adversarial learning, employing a generator policy learning to imitate expert behaviors and discriminator learning to distinguish the expert demonstrations from agent trajectories. Despite its encouraging results, GAIL training is often brittle and unstable. Inspired by the recent dominance of diffusion models in generative modeling, we propose Diffusion-Reward Adversarial Imitation Learning (DRAIL), which integrates a diffusion model into GAIL, aiming to yield more robust and smoother rewards for policy learning. Specifically, we propose a diffusion discriminative classifier to construct an enhanced discriminator, and design diffusion rewards based on the classifier’s output for policy learning. Extensive experiments are conducted in navigation, manipulation, and locomotion, verifying DRAIL’s effectiveness compared to prior imitation learning methods. Moreover, additional experimental results demonstrate the generalizability and data efficiency of DRAIL. Visualized learned reward functions of GAIL and DRAIL suggest that DRAIL can produce more robust and smoother rewards. Project page: https://nturobotlearninglab.github.io/DRAIL/

We introduce a new linear-algebraic tool based on group representation theory, and use it to address three key problems in machine learning. 1. Past researchers have proposed fast attention algorithms for LLMs by approximating or replace softmax attention with other functions, such as low-degree polynomials. The key property of these functions is that, when applied entry-wise to the matrix $QK^{\top}$, the result is a low rank matrix when $Q$ and $K$ are $n \times d$ matrices and $n \gg d$. This suggests a natural question: what are all functions $f$ with this property? If other $f$ exist and are quickly computable, they can be used in place of softmax for fast subquadratic attention algorithms. It was previously known that low-degree polynomials have this property. We prove that low-degree polynomials are the only piecewise continuous functions with this property. This suggests that the low-rank fast attention only works for functions approximable by polynomials. Our work gives a converse to the polynomial method in algorithm design. 2. We prove the first full classification of all positive definite kernels that are functions of Manhattan or $\ell_1$ distance. Our work generalizes an existing theorem at the heart of all kernel methods in machine learning: the classification of all positive definite kernels that are functions of Euclidean distance. 3. The key problem in metric transforms, a mathematical theory used in geometry and machine learning, asks what functions transform pairwise distances in semi-metric space $M$ to semi-metric space $N$ for specified $M$ and $N$. We provide the first full classification of functions that transform Manhattan distances to Manhattan distances. Our work generalizes the foundational work of Schoenberg, which fully classifies functions that transform Euclidean to Euclidean distances. We additionally prove results about stable-rank preserving functions that are potentially useful in algorithmic design, and more. Our core new tool is called the representation theory of the hyperrectangle.

Adversarial Collaborative Filtering (ACF), which typically applies adversarial perturbations at user and item embeddings through adversarial training, is widely recognized as an effective strategy for enhancing the robustness of Collaborative Filtering (CF) recommender systems against poisoning attacks. Besides, numerous studies have empirically shown that ACF can also improve recommendation performance compared to traditional CF. Despite these empirical successes, the theoretical understanding of ACF's effectiveness in terms of both performance and robustness remains unclear. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we first theoretically show that ACF can achieve a lower recommendation error compared to traditional CF with the same training epochs in both clean and poisoned data contexts. Furthermore, by establishing bounds for reductions in recommendation error during ACF's optimization process, we find that applying personalized magnitudes of perturbation for different users based on their embedding scales can further improve ACF's effectiveness. Building on these theoretical understandings, we propose Personalized Magnitude Adversarial Collaborative Filtering (PamaCF). Extensive experiments demonstrate that PamaCF effectively defends against various types of poisoning attacks while significantly enhancing recommendation performance.

Existing methods for relightable view synthesis --- using a set of images of an object under unknown lighting to recover a 3D representation that can be rendered from novel viewpoints under a target illumination --- are based on inverse rendering, and attempt to disentangle the object geometry, materials, and lighting that explain the input images. Furthermore, this typically involves optimization through differentiable Monte Carlo rendering, which is brittle and computationally-expensive. In this work, we propose a simpler approach: we first relight each input image using an image diffusion model conditioned on target environment lighting and estimated object geometry. We then reconstruct a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) with these relit images, from which we render novel views under the target lighting. We demonstrate that this strategy is surprisingly competitive and achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple relighting benchmarks. Please see our project page at [illuminerf.github.io](illuminerf.github.io).

We explore uncertainty quantification in large language models (LLMs), with the goal to identify when uncertainty in responses given a query is large. We simultaneously consider both epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties, where the former comes from the lack of knowledge about the ground truth (such as about facts or the language), and the latter comes from irreducible randomness (such as multiple possible answers). In particular, we derive an information-theoretic metric that allows to reliably detect when only epistemic uncertainty is large, in which case the output of the model is unreliable. This condition can be computed based solely on the output of the model obtained simply by some special iterative prompting based on the previous responses. Such quantification, for instance, allows to detect hallucinations (cases when epistemic uncertainty is high) in both single- and multi-answer responses. This is in contrast to many standard uncertainty quantification strategies (such as thresholding the log-likelihood of a response) where hallucinations in the multi-answer case cannot be detected. We conduct a series of experiments which demonstrate the advantage of our formulation. Further, our investigations shed some light on how the probabilities assigned to a given output by an LLM can be amplified by iterative prompting, which might be of independent interest.

Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open challenge. RL algorithms rely on observing rewards to train the agent, and if informative rewards are sparse the agent learns slowly or may not learn at all. To improve exploration and reward discovery, popular algorithms rely on optimism. But what if sometimes rewards are unobservable, e.g., situations of partial monitoring in bandits and the recent formalism of monitored Markov decision process? In this case, optimism can lead to suboptimal behavior that does not explore further to collapse uncertainty. With this paper, we present a novel exploration strategy that overcomes the limitations of existing methods and guarantees convergence to an optimal policy even when rewards are not always observable. We further propose a collection of tabular environments for benchmarking exploration in RL (with and without unobservable rewards) and show that our method outperforms existing ones.

Powered by remarkable advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities in manifold tasks. However, the practical application scenarios of MLLMs are intricate, exposing them to potential malicious instructions and thereby posing safety risks. While current benchmarks do incorporate certain safety considerations, they often lack comprehensive coverage and fail to exhibit the necessary rigor and robustness. For instance, the common practice of employing GPT-4V as both the evaluator and a model to be evaluated lacks credibility, as it tends to exhibit a bias toward its own responses. In this paper, we present MLLMGuard, a multi-dimensional safety evaluation suite for MLLMs, including a bilingual image-text evaluation dataset, inference utilities, and a lightweight evaluator. MLLMGuard's assessment comprehensively covers two languages (English and Chinese) and five important safety dimensions (Privacy, Bias, Toxicity, Truthfulness, and Legality), each with corresponding rich subtasks. Focusing on these dimensions, our evaluation dataset is primarily sourced from platforms such as social media, and it integrates text-based and image-based red teaming techniques with meticulous annotation by human experts. This can prevent inaccurate evaluation caused by data leakage when using open-source datasets and ensures the quality and challenging nature of our benchmark. Additionally, a fully automated lightweight evaluator termed GuardRank is developed, which achieves significantly higher evaluation accuracy than GPT-4. Our evaluation results across 13 advanced models indicate that MLLMs still have a substantial journey ahead before they can be considered safe and responsible.

The growing demand for personalized decision-making has led to a surge of interest in estimating the Conditional Average Treatment Effect (CATE). Various types of CATE estimators have been developed with advancements in machine learning and causal inference. However, selecting the desirable CATE estimator through a conventional model validation procedure remains impractical due to the absence of counterfactual outcomes in observational data. Existing approaches for CATE estimator selection, such as plug-in and pseudo-outcome metrics, face two challenges. First, they must determine the metric form and the underlying machine learning models for fitting nuisance parameters (e.g., outcome function, propensity function, and plug-in learner). Second, they lack a specific focus on selecting a robust CATE estimator. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a Distributionally Robust Metric (DRM) for CATE estimator selection. The proposed DRM is nuisance-free, eliminating the need to fit models for nuisance parameters, and it effectively prioritizes the selection of a distributionally robust CATE estimator. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of the DRM method in selecting CATE estimators that are robust to the distribution shift incurred by covariate shift and hidden confounders.

Training a policy in a source domain for deployment in the target domain under a dynamics shift can be challenging, often resulting in performance degradation. Previous work tackles this challenge by training on the source domain with modified rewards derived by matching distributions between the source and the target optimal trajectories. However, pure modified rewards only ensure the behavior of the learned policy in the source domain resembles trajectories produced by the target optimal policies, which does not guarantee optimal performance when the learned policy is actually deployed to the target domain. In this work, we propose to utilize imitation learning to transfer the policy learned from the reward modification to the target domain so that the new policy can generate the same trajectories in the target domain. Our approach, Domain Adaptation and Reward Augmented Imitation Learning (DARAIL), utilizes the reward modification for domain adaptation and follows the general framework of generative adversarial imitation learning from observation (GAIfO) by applying a reward augmented estimator for the policy optimization step. Theoretically, we present an error bound for our method under a mild assumption regarding the dynamics shift to justify the motivation of our method. Empirically, our method outperforms the pure modified reward method without imitation learning and also outperforms other baselines in benchmark off-dynamics environments.

We present a computational framework that transforms single images into 3D physical objects. The visual geometry of a physical object in an image is determined by three orthogonal attributes: mechanical properties, external forces, and rest-shape geometry. Existing single-view 3D reconstruction methods often overlook this underlying composition, presuming rigidity or neglecting external forces. Consequently, the reconstructed objects fail to withstand real-world physical forces, resulting in instability or undesirable deformation -- diverging from their intended designs as depicted in the image. Our optimization framework addresses this by embedding physical compatibility into the reconstruction process. We explicitly decompose the three physical attributes and link them through static equilibrium, which serves as a hard constraint, ensuring that the optimized physical shapes exhibit desired physical behaviors. Evaluations on a dataset collected from Objaverse demonstrate that our framework consistently enhances the physical realism of 3D models over existing methods. The utility of our framework extends to practical applications in dynamic simulations and 3D printing, where adherence to physical compatibility is paramount.

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.

Current reinforcement-learning methods are unable to directly learn policies that solve the minimum cost reach-avoid problem to minimize cumulative costs subject to the constraints of reaching the goal and avoiding unsafe states, as the structure of this new optimization problem is incompatible with current methods. Instead, a surrogate problem is solved where all objectives are combined with a weighted sum. However, this surrogate objective results in suboptimal policies that do not directly minimize the cumulative cost. In this work, we propose RC-PPO, a reinforcement-learning-based method for solving the minimum-cost reach-avoid problem by using connections to Hamilton-Jacobi reachability. Empirical results demonstrate that RC-PPO learns policies with comparable goal-reaching rates to while achieving up to 57% lower cumulative costs compared to existing methods on a suite of minimum-cost reach-avoid benchmarks on the Mujoco simulator. The project page can be found at https://oswinso.xyz/rcppo.

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.

Recovering the foreground color and opacity/alpha matte from a single image (i.e., image matting) is a challenging and ill-posed problem where data priors play a critical role in achieving precise results. Traditional methods generally predict the alpha matte and then extract the foreground through post-processing, often failing to produce high-fidelity foreground color. This failure stems from the models' difficulty in learning robust color predictions from limited matting datasets. To address this, we explore the potential of leveraging vision priors embedded in pre-trained latent diffusion models (LDM) for estimating foreground RGBA values in challenging scenarios and rare objects. We introduce Drip, a novel approach for image matting that harnesses the rich prior knowledge of LDM models. Our method incorporates a switcher and a cross-domain attention mechanism to extend the original LDM for joint prediction of the foreground color and opacity. This setup facilitates mutual information exchange and ensures high consistency across both modalities. To mitigate the inherent reconstruction errors of the LDM's VAE decoder, we propose a latent transparency decoder to align the RGBA prediction with the input image, thereby reducing discrepancies. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in foreground and alpha predictions and shows remarkable generalizability across various benchmarks.