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Code review is a standard practice for ensuring the quality of software projects, and recent research has focused extensively on automated code review. While significant advancements have been made in generating code reviews, the automated assessment of these reviews remains less explored, with existing approaches and metrics often proving inaccurate. Current metrics, such as BLEU, primarily rely on lexical similarity between generated and reference reviews. However, such metrics tend to underestimate reviews that articulate the expected issues in ways different from the references. In this paper, we explore how semantic similarity between generated and reference reviews can enhance the automated assessment of code reviews. We first present a benchmark called \textit{GradedReviews}, which is constructed by collecting real-world code reviews from open-source projects, generating reviews using state-of-the-art approaches, and manually assessing their quality. We then evaluate existing metrics for code review assessment using this benchmark, revealing their limitations. To address these limitations, we propose two novel semantic-based approaches for assessing code reviews. The first approach involves converting both the generated review and its reference into digital vectors using a deep learning model and then measuring their semantic similarity through Cosine similarity. The second approach generates a prompt based on the generated review and its reference, submits this prompt to ChatGPT, and requests ChatGPT to rate the generated review according to explicitly defined criteria. Our evaluation on the \textit{GradedReviews} benchmark indicates that the proposed semantic-based approaches significantly outperform existing state-of-the-art metrics in assessing generated code review, improving the correlation coefficient between the resulting scores and human scores from 0.22 to 0.47.

Community detection is a central task in graph analytics. Given the substantial growth in graph size, scalability in community detection continues to be an unresolved challenge. Recently, alongside established methods like Louvain and Infomap, motif-based community detection has emerged. Techniques like Tectonic are notable for their advanced ability to identify communities by pruning edges based on motif similarity scores and analyzing the resulting connected components. In this study, we perform a comprehensive evaluation of community detection methods, focusing on both the quality of their output and their scalability. Specifically, we contribute an open-source parallel framework for motif-based community detection based on a shared memory architecture. We conduct a thorough comparative analysis of community detection techniques from various families among state-of-the-art methods, including Tectonic, label propagation, spectral clustering, Louvain, LambdaCC, and Infomap on graphs with up to billions of edges. A key finding of our analysis is that motif-based graph clustering provides a good balance between performance and efficiency. Our work provides several novel insights. Interestingly, we pinpoint biases in prior works in evaluating community detection methods using the top 5K groundtruth communities from SNAP only, as these are frequently near-cliques. Our empirical studies lead to rules of thumb threshold picking strategies that can be critical for real applications. Finally, we show that Tectonic can fail to recover two well-separated clusters. To address this, we suggest a new similarity measure based on counts of triangles and wedges (TW) that prevents the over-segmentation of communities by Tectonic., Comment: Accepted at IEEE BigData 2024

Given a network $G=(V,E)$, where each node $v$ is associated with a vector $\boldsymbol{p}_v \in \mathbb{R}^d$ representing its opinion about $d$ different topics, how can we uncover subsets of nodes that not only exhibit exceptionally high density but also possess positively aligned opinions on multiple topics? In this paper we focus on this novel algorithmic question, that is essential in an era where digital social networks are hotbeds of opinion formation and dissemination. We introduce a novel methodology anchored in the well-established densest subgraph problem. We analyze the computational complexity of our formulation, indicating that our problem is NP-hard and eludes practically acceptable approximation guarantees. To navigate these challenges, we design two heuristic algorithms: the first is predicated on the Lagrangian relaxation of our formulation, while the second adopts a peeling algorithm based on the dual of a Linear Programming relaxation. We elucidate the theoretical underpinnings of their performance and validate their utility through empirical evaluation on real-world datasets. Among others, we delve into Twitter datasets we collected concerning timely issues, such as the Ukraine conflict and the discourse surrounding COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, to gauge the effectiveness of our methodology. Our empirical investigations verify that our algorithms are able to extract valuable insights from networks with opinion information., Comment: Accepted to WSDM 2025

In this paper, we propose a bilevel joint unsupervised and supervised training (BL-JUST) framework for automatic speech recognition. Compared to the conventional pre-training and fine-tuning strategy which is a disconnected two-stage process, BL-JUST tries to optimize an acoustic model such that it simultaneously minimizes both the unsupervised and supervised loss functions. Because BL-JUST seeks matched local optima of both loss functions, acoustic representations learned by the acoustic model strike a good balance between being generic and task-specific. We solve the BL-JUST problem using penalty-based bilevel gradient descent and evaluate the trained deep neural network acoustic models on various datasets with a variety of architectures and loss functions. We show that BL-JUST can outperform the widely-used pre-training and fine-tuning strategy and some other popular semi-supervised techniques., Comment: Accepted by IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing

Finding specific preference-guided Pareto solutions that represent different trade-offs among multiple objectives is critical yet challenging in multi-objective problems. Existing methods are restrictive in preference definitions and/or their theoretical guarantees. In this work, we introduce a Flexible framEwork for pREfeRence-guided multi-Objective learning (FERERO) by casting it as a constrained vector optimization problem. Specifically, two types of preferences are incorporated into this formulation -- the relative preference defined by the partial ordering induced by a polyhedral cone, and the absolute preference defined by constraints that are linear functions of the objectives. To solve this problem, convergent algorithms are developed with both single-loop and stochastic variants. Notably, this is the first single-loop primal algorithm for constrained vector optimization to our knowledge. The proposed algorithms adaptively adjust to both constraint and objective values, eliminating the need to solve different subproblems at different stages of constraint satisfaction. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the proposed method is very competitive in finding preference-guided optimal solutions. Code is available at https://github.com/lisha-chen/FERERO/.

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is one of the most fundamental problems in reinforcement learning (RL) to estimate the expected long-term payoff of a given target policy with only experiences from another behavior policy that is potentially unknown. The distribution correction estimation (DICE) family of estimators have advanced the state of the art in OPE by breaking the curse of horizon. However, the major bottleneck of applying DICE estimators lies in the difficulty of solving the saddle-point optimization involved, especially with neural network implementations. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by establishing a linear representation of value function and stationary distribution correction ratio, i.e., primal and dual variables in the DICE framework, using the spectral decomposition of the transition operator. Such primal-dual representation not only bypasses the non-convex non-concave optimization in vanilla DICE, therefore enabling an computational efficient algorithm, but also paves the way for more efficient utilization of historical data. We highlight that our algorithm, SpectralDICE, is the first to leverage the linear representation of primal-dual variables that is both computation and sample efficient, the performance of which is supported by a rigorous theoretical sample complexity guarantee and a thorough empirical evaluation on various benchmarks., Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures

Post-training of pre-trained LLMs, which typically consists of the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage and the preference learning (RLHF or DPO) stage, is crucial to effective and safe LLM applications. The widely adopted approach in post-training popular open-source LLMs is to sequentially perform SFT and RLHF/DPO. However, sequential training is sub-optimal in terms of SFT and RLHF/DPO trade-off: the LLM gradually forgets about the first stage's training when undergoing the second stage's training. We theoretically prove the sub-optimality of sequential post-training. Furthermore, we propose a practical joint post-training framework with theoretical convergence guarantees and empirically outperforms sequential post-training framework, while having similar computational cost. Our code is available at https://github.com/heshandevaka/XRIGHT.

Aiming to accelerate the training of large deep neural models (DNN) in an energy-efficient way, an analog in-memory computing (AIMC) accelerator emerges as a solution with immense potential. In AIMC accelerators, trainable weights are kept in memory without the need to move from memory to processors during the training, reducing a bunch of overhead. However, although the in-memory feature enables efficient computation, it also constrains the use of data parallelism since copying weights from one AIMC to another is expensive. To enable parallel training using AIMC, we propose synchronous and asynchronous pipeline parallelism for AIMC accelerators inspired by the pipeline in digital domains. This paper provides a theoretical convergence guarantee for both synchronous and asynchronous pipelines in terms of both sampling and clock cycle complexity, which is non-trivial since the physical characteristic of AIMC accelerators leads to analog updates that suffer from asymmetric bias. The simulations of training DNN on real datasets verify the efficiency of pipeline training.

Humanoid robots capable of autonomous operation in diverse environments have long been a goal for roboticists. However, autonomous manipulation by humanoid robots has largely been restricted to one specific scene, primarily due to the difficulty of acquiring generalizable skills. Recent advances in 3D visuomotor policies, such as the 3D Diffusion Policy (DP3), have shown promise in extending these capabilities to wilder environments. However, 3D visuomotor policies often rely on camera calibration and point-cloud segmentation, which present challenges for deployment on mobile robots like humanoids. In this work, we introduce the Improved 3D Diffusion Policy (iDP3), a novel 3D visuomotor policy that eliminates these constraints by leveraging egocentric 3D visual representations. We demonstrate that iDP3 enables a full-sized humanoid robot to autonomously perform skills in diverse real-world scenarios, using only data collected in the lab. Videos are available at: https://humanoid-manipulation.github.io, Comment: Project website: https://humanoid-manipulation.github.io

Fine-tuning on task-specific data to boost downstream performance is a crucial step for leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs). However, previous studies have demonstrated that fine-tuning the models on several adversarial samples or even benign data can greatly comprise the model's pre-equipped alignment and safety capabilities. In this work, we propose SEAL, a novel framework to enhance safety in LLM fine-tuning. SEAL learns a data ranker based on the bilevel optimization to up rank the safe and high-quality fine-tuning data and down rank the unsafe or low-quality ones. Models trained with SEAL demonstrate superior quality over multiple baselines, with 8.5% and 9.7% win rate increase compared to random selection respectively on Llama-3-8b-Instruct and Merlinite-7b models. Our code is available on github https://github.com/hanshen95/SEAL.

Existing zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) systems are typically designed to process complete sentences and are constrained by the maximum duration for which they have been trained. However, in many streaming applications, texts arrive continuously in short chunks, necessitating instant responses from the system. We identify the essential capabilities required for chunk-level streaming and introduce LiveSpeech 2, a stream-aware model that supports infinitely long speech generation, text-audio stream synchronization, and seamless transitions between short speech chunks. To achieve these, we propose (1) adopting Mamba, a class of sequence modeling distinguished by linear-time decoding, which is augmented by cross-attention mechanisms for conditioning, (2) utilizing rotary positional embeddings in the computation of cross-attention, enabling the model to process an infinite text stream by sliding a window, and (3) decoding with semantic guidance, a technique that aligns speech with the transcript during inference with minimal overhead. Experimental results demonstrate that our models are competitive with state-of-the-art language model-based zero-shot TTS models, while also providing flexibility to support a wide range of streaming scenarios.

Structured pruning is one of the most popular approaches to effectively compress the heavy deep neural networks (DNNs) into compact sub-networks while retaining performance. The existing methods suffer from multi-stage procedures along with significant engineering efforts and human expertise. The Only-Train-Once (OTO) series has been recently proposed to resolve the many pain points by streamlining the workflow by automatically conducting (i) search space generation, (ii) structured sparse optimization, and (iii) sub-network construction. However, the built-in sparse optimizers in the OTO series, i.e., the Half-Space Projected Gradient (HSPG) family, have limitations that require hyper-parameter tuning and the implicit controls of the sparsity exploration, consequently requires intervening by human expertise. To address such limitations, we propose a Hybrid Efficient Structured Sparse Optimizer (HESSO). HESSO could automatically and efficiently train a DNN to produce a high-performing subnetwork. Meanwhile, it is almost tuning-free and enjoys user-friendly integration for generic training applications. To address another common issue of irreversible performance collapse observed in pruning DNNs, we further propose a Corrective Redundant Identification Cycle (CRIC) for reliably identifying indispensable structures. We numerically demonstrate the efficacy of HESSO and its enhanced version HESSO-CRIC on a variety of applications ranging from computer vision to natural language processing, including large language model. The numerical results showcase that HESSO can achieve competitive even superior performance to varying state-of-the-arts and support most DNN architectures. Meanwhile, CRIC can effectively prevent the irreversible performance collapse and further enhance the performance of HESSO on certain applications. The code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/only_train_once., Comment: preprint

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have made significant strides in tackling challenging tasks in wireless systems, especially when an accurate wireless model is not available. However, when available data is limited, traditional DNNs often yield subpar results due to underfitting. At the same time, large language models (LLMs) exemplified by GPT-3, have remarkably showcased their capabilities across a broad range of natural language processing tasks. But whether and how LLMs can benefit challenging non-language tasks in wireless systems is unexplored. In this work, we propose to leverage the in-context learning ability (a.k.a. prompting) of LLMs to solve wireless tasks in the low data regime without any training or fine-tuning, unlike DNNs which require training. We further demonstrate that the performance of LLMs varies significantly when employed with different prompt templates. To solve this issue, we employ the latest LLM calibration methods. Our results reveal that using LLMs via ICL methods generally outperforms traditional DNNs on the symbol demodulation task and yields highly confident predictions when coupled with calibration techniques., Comment: Accepted at IEEE GLOBECOM 2024

Bilevel optimization has witnessed a resurgence of interest, driven by its critical role in trustworthy and efficient AI applications. While many recent works have established convergence to stationary points or local minima, obtaining the global optimum of bilevel optimization remains an important yet open problem. The difficulty lies in the fact that, unlike many prior non-convex single-level problems, bilevel problems often do not admit a benign landscape, and may indeed have multiple spurious local solutions. Nevertheless, attaining global optimality is indispensable for ensuring reliability, safety, and cost-effectiveness, particularly in high-stakes engineering applications that rely on bilevel optimization. In this paper, we first explore the challenges of establishing a global convergence theory for bilevel optimization, and present two sufficient conditions for global convergence. We provide algorithm-dependent proofs to rigorously substantiate these sufficient conditions on two specific bilevel learning scenarios: representation learning and data hypercleaning (a.k.a. reweighting). Experiments corroborate the theoretical findings, demonstrating convergence to the global minimum in both cases.

Encoding constraints into neural networks is attractive. This paper studies how to introduce the popular positive linear satisfiability to neural networks. We propose the first differentiable satisfiability layer based on an extension of the classic Sinkhorn algorithm for jointly encoding multiple sets of marginal distributions. We further theoretically characterize the convergence property of the Sinkhorn algorithm for multiple marginals. In contrast to the sequential decision e.g.\ reinforcement learning-based solvers, we showcase our technique in solving constrained (specifically satisfiability) problems by one-shot neural networks, including i) a neural routing solver learned without supervision of optimal solutions; ii) a partial graph matching network handling graphs with unmatchable outliers on both sides; iii) a predictive network for financial portfolios with continuous constraints. To our knowledge, there exists no one-shot neural solver for these scenarios when they are formulated as satisfiability problems. Source code is available at https://github.com/Thinklab-SJTU/LinSATNet, Comment: This is a revised version of our ICML'23 publication that fixes a minor issue in Eq (11). In Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML'23)

Diffusion transformers (DiT) have become the de facto choice for generating high-quality images and videos, largely due to their scalability, which enables the construction of larger models for enhanced performance. However, the increased size of these models leads to higher inference costs, making them less attractive for real-time applications. We present Fast-FORward CAching (FORA), a simple yet effective approach designed to accelerate DiT by exploiting the repetitive nature of the diffusion process. FORA implements a caching mechanism that stores and reuses intermediate outputs from the attention and MLP layers across denoising steps, thereby reducing computational overhead. This approach does not require model retraining and seamlessly integrates with existing transformer-based diffusion models. Experiments show that FORA can speed up diffusion transformers several times over while only minimally affecting performance metrics such as the IS Score and FID. By enabling faster processing with minimal trade-offs in quality, FORA represents a significant advancement in deploying diffusion transformers for real-time applications. Code will be made publicly available at: https://github.com/prathebaselva/FORA.

Given the high economic and environmental costs of using large vision or language models, analog in-memory accelerators present a promising solution for energy-efficient AI. While inference on analog accelerators has been studied recently, the training perspective is underexplored. Recent studies have shown that the "workhorse" of digital AI training - stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm converges inexactly when applied to model training on non-ideal devices. This paper puts forth a theoretical foundation for gradient-based training on analog devices. We begin by characterizing the non-convergent issue of SGD, which is caused by the asymmetric updates on the analog devices. We then provide a lower bound of the asymptotic error to show that there is a fundamental performance limit of SGD-based analog training rather than an artifact of our analysis. To address this issue, we study a heuristic analog algorithm called Tiki-Taka that has recently exhibited superior empirical performance compared to SGD and rigorously show its ability to exactly converge to a critical point and hence eliminates the asymptotic error. The simulations verify the correctness of the analyses., Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures,2 tables

Interest in bilevel optimization has grown in recent years, partially due to its applications to tackle challenging machine-learning problems. Several exciting recent works have been centered around developing efficient gradient-based algorithms that can solve bilevel optimization problems with provable guarantees. However, the existing literature mainly focuses on bilevel problems either without constraints, or featuring only simple constraints that do not couple variables across the upper and lower levels, excluding a range of complex applications. Our paper studies this challenging but less explored scenario and develops a (fully) first-order algorithm, which we term BLOCC, to tackle BiLevel Optimization problems with Coupled Constraints. We establish rigorous convergence theory for the proposed algorithm and demonstrate its effectiveness on two well-known real-world applications - hyperparameter selection in support vector machine (SVM) and infrastructure planning in transportation networks using the real data from the city of Seville., Comment: In this version, we have made the following updates: (1) Added a sensitivity analysis of the algorithm's hyperparameters (stepsize and penalty constant) in Appendix G. (2) Included a computational complexity analysis and comparison in Appendix H. (3) Explicitly stated the inner-loop stepsizes in Remarks 2 and 3

Factor analysis acts a pivotal role in enhancing maritime safety. Most previous studies conduct factor analysis within the framework of incident-related label prediction, where the developed models can be categorized into short-term and long-term prediction models. The long-term models offer a more strategic approach, enabling more proactive risk management, compared to the short-term ones. Nevertheless, few studies have devoted to rigorously identifying the key factors for the long-term prediction and undertaking comprehensive factor analysis. Hence, this study aims to delve into the key factors for predicting the incident risk levels in the subsequent year given a specific datestamp. The majority of candidate factors potentially contributing to the incident risk are collected from vessels' historical safety performance data spanning up to five years. An improved embedded feature selection, which integrates Random Forest classifier with a feature filtering process is proposed to identify key risk-contributing factors from the candidate pool. The results demonstrate superior performance of the proposed method in incident prediction and factor interpretability. Comprehensive analysis is conducted upon the key factors, which could help maritime stakeholders formulate management strategies for incident prevenion.

Image inpainting, the task of reconstructing missing segments in corrupted images using available data, faces challenges in ensuring consistency and fidelity, especially under information-scarce conditions. Traditional evaluation methods, heavily dependent on the existence of unmasked reference images, inherently favor certain inpainting outcomes, introducing biases. Addressing this issue, we introduce an innovative evaluation paradigm that utilizes a self-supervised metric based on multiple re-inpainting passes. This approach, diverging from conventional reliance on direct comparisons in pixel or feature space with original images, emphasizes the principle of self-consistency to enable the exploration of various viable inpainting solutions, effectively reducing biases. Our extensive experiments across numerous benchmarks validate the alignment of our evaluation method with human judgment.

In this paper, we introduce analytic federated learning (AFL), a new training paradigm that brings analytical (i.e., closed-form) solutions to the federated learning (FL) community. Our AFL draws inspiration from analytic learning -- a gradient-free technique that trains neural networks with analytical solutions in one epoch. In the local client training stage, the AFL facilitates a one-epoch training, eliminating the necessity for multi-epoch updates. In the aggregation stage, we derive an absolute aggregation (AA) law. This AA law allows a single-round aggregation, removing the need for multiple aggregation rounds. More importantly, the AFL exhibits a \textit{weight-invariant} property, meaning that regardless of how the full dataset is distributed among clients, the aggregated result remains identical. This could spawn various potentials, such as data heterogeneity invariance, client-number invariance, absolute convergence, and being hyperparameter-free (our AFL is the first hyperparameter-free method in FL history). We conduct experiments across various FL settings including extremely non-IID ones, and scenarios with a large number of clients (e.g., $\ge 1000$). In all these settings, our AFL constantly performs competitively while existing FL techniques encounter various obstacles. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/ZHUANGHP/Analytic-federated-learning}

This paper studies the transfer reinforcement learning (RL) problem where multiple RL problems have different reward functions but share the same underlying transition dynamics. In this setting, the Q-function of each RL problem (task) can be decomposed into a successor feature (SF) and a reward mapping: the former characterizes the transition dynamics, and the latter characterizes the task-specific reward function. This Q-function decomposition, coupled with a policy improvement operator known as generalized policy improvement (GPI), reduces the sample complexity of finding the optimal Q-function, and thus the SF \& GPI framework exhibits promising empirical performance compared to traditional RL methods like Q-learning. However, its theoretical foundations remain largely unestablished, especially when learning the successor features using deep neural networks (SF-DQN). This paper studies the provable knowledge transfer using SFs-DQN in transfer RL problems. We establish the first convergence analysis with provable generalization guarantees for SF-DQN with GPI. The theory reveals that SF-DQN with GPI outperforms conventional RL approaches, such as deep Q-network, in terms of both faster convergence rate and better generalization. Numerical experiments on real and synthetic RL tasks support the superior performance of SF-DQN \& GPI, aligning with our theoretical findings., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2310.16173

We describe a model for a network time series whose evolution is governed by an underlying stochastic process, known as the latent position process, in which network evolution can be represented in Euclidean space by a curve, called the Euclidean mirror. We define the notion of a first-order changepoint for a time series of networks, and construct a family of latent position process networks with underlying first-order changepoints. We prove that a spectral estimate of the associated Euclidean mirror localizes these changepoints, even when the graph distribution evolves continuously, but at a rate that changes. Simulated and real data examples on organoid networks show that this localization captures empirically significant shifts in network evolution.

To substantially enhance robot intelligence, there is a pressing need to develop a large model that enables general-purpose robots to proficiently undertake a broad spectrum of manipulation tasks, akin to the versatile task-planning ability exhibited by LLMs. The vast diversity in objects, robots, and manipulation tasks presents huge challenges. Our work introduces a comprehensive framework to develop a foundation model for general robotic manipulation that formalizes a manipulation task as contact synthesis. Specifically, our model takes as input object and robot manipulator point clouds, object physical attributes, target motions, and manipulation region masks. It outputs contact points on the object and associated contact forces or post-contact motions for robots to achieve the desired manipulation task. We perform extensive experiments both in the simulation and real-world settings, manipulating articulated rigid objects, rigid objects, and deformable objects that vary in dimensionality, ranging from one-dimensional objects like ropes to two-dimensional objects like cloth and extending to three-dimensional objects such as plasticine. Our model achieves average success rates of around 90\%. Supplementary materials and videos are available on our project website at https://manifoundationmodel.github.io/.

Neural networks have been extensively applied to a variety of tasks, achieving astounding results. Applying neural networks in the scientific field is an important research direction that is gaining increasing attention. In scientific applications, the scale of neural networks is generally moderate-size, mainly to ensure the speed of inference during application. Additionally, comparing neural networks to traditional algorithms in scientific applications is inevitable. These applications often require rapid computations, making the reduction of neural network sizes increasingly important. Existing work has found that the powerful capabilities of neural networks are primarily due to their non-linearity. Theoretical work has discovered that under strong non-linearity, neurons in the same layer tend to behave similarly, a phenomenon known as condensation. Condensation offers an opportunity to reduce the scale of neural networks to a smaller subnetwork with similar performance. In this article, we propose a condensation reduction algorithm to verify the feasibility of this idea in practical problems. Our reduction method can currently be applied to both fully connected networks and convolutional networks, achieving positive results. In complex combustion acceleration tasks, we reduced the size of the neural network to 41.7% of its original scale while maintaining prediction accuracy. In the CIFAR10 image classification task, we reduced the network size to 11.5% of the original scale, still maintaining a satisfactory validation accuracy. Our method can be applied to most trained neural networks, reducing computational pressure and improving inference speed.

Existing angle-based contour descriptors suffer from lossy representation for non-starconvex shapes. By and large, this is the result of the shape being registered with a single global inner center and a set of radii corresponding to a polar coordinate parameterization. In this paper, we propose AdaContour, an adaptive contour descriptor that uses multiple local representations to desirably characterize complex shapes. After hierarchically encoding object shapes in a training set and constructing a contour matrix of all subdivided regions, we compute a robust low-rank robust subspace and approximate each local contour by linearly combining the shared basis vectors to represent an object. Experiments show that AdaContour is able to represent shapes more accurately and robustly than other descriptors while retaining effectiveness. We validate AdaContour by integrating it into off-the-shelf detectors to enable instance segmentation which demonstrates faithful performance. The code is available at https://github.com/tding1/AdaContour.

Face attribute editing plays a pivotal role in various applications. However, existing methods encounter challenges in achieving high-quality results while preserving identity, editing faithfulness, and temporal consistency. These challenges are rooted in issues related to the training pipeline, including limited supervision, architecture design, and optimization strategy. In this work, we introduce S3Editor, a Sparse Semantic-disentangled Self-training framework for face video editing. S3Editor is a generic solution that comprehensively addresses these challenges with three key contributions. Firstly, S3Editor adopts a self-training paradigm to enhance the training process through semi-supervision. Secondly, we propose a semantic disentangled architecture with a dynamic routing mechanism that accommodates diverse editing requirements. Thirdly, we present a structured sparse optimization schema that identifies and deactivates malicious neurons to further disentangle impacts from untarget attributes. S3Editor is model-agnostic and compatible with various editing approaches. Our extensive qualitative and quantitative results affirm that our approach significantly enhances identity preservation, editing fidelity, as well as temporal consistency.

We study the problem of online convex optimization (OCO) under unknown linear constraints that are either static, or stochastically time-varying. For this problem, we introduce an algorithm that we term Optimistically Safe OCO (OSOCO) and show that it enjoys $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret and no constraint violation. In the case of static linear constraints, this improves on the previous best known $\tilde{O}(T^{2/3})$ regret under the same assumptions. In the case of stochastic time-varying constraints, our work supplements existing results that show $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret and $O(\sqrt{T})$ cumulative violation under more general convex constraints and a different set of assumptions. In addition to our theoretical guarantees, we also give numerical results that further validate the effectiveness of our approach., Comment: 38 pages, 2 figures

We present the design and characterization of individual addressing optics based on a multi-channel acousto-optic modulator (AOM) for trapped ytterbium-171 ions. The design parameters of the individual addressing system were determined based on the tradeoff between the expected crosstalk and the required numerical aperture of the projection objective lens. The target beam diameter and separation were 1.90 $\mu$m and 4.28 $\mu$m, respectively. The individual beams shaped by the projection optics were characterized by an imaging sensor and a field probe ion. The resulting effective beam diameters and separations were approximately 2.34--2.36 $\mu$m and 4.31 $\mu$m, respectively, owing to residual aberration., Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures

Bilevel optimization has been recently applied to many machine learning tasks. However, their applications have been restricted to the supervised learning setting, where static objective functions with benign structures are considered. But bilevel problems such as incentive design, inverse reinforcement learning (RL), and RL from human feedback (RLHF) are often modeled as dynamic objective functions that go beyond the simple static objective structures, which pose significant challenges of using existing bilevel solutions. To tackle this new class of bilevel problems, we introduce the first principled algorithmic framework for solving bilevel RL problems through the lens of penalty formulation. We provide theoretical studies of the problem landscape and its penalty-based (policy) gradient algorithms. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms via simulations in the Stackelberg Markov game, RL from human feedback and incentive design., Comment: Shorter version accepted to ICML 2024

Knowledge distillation (KD) is widely used for compressing a teacher model to a smaller student model, reducing its inference cost and memory footprint while preserving model capabilities. However, current KD methods for auto-regressive sequence models (e.g., large language models) suffer from missing a standardized objective function. Moreover, the recent use of student-generated outputs to address training-inference mismatches has significantly escalated computational costs. To tackle these issues, we introduce DistiLLM, a more effective and efficient KD framework for auto-regressive language models. DistiLLM comprises two components: (1) a novel skew Kullback-Leibler divergence loss, where we unveil and leverage its theoretical properties, and (2) an adaptive off-policy approach designed to enhance the efficiency in utilizing student-generated outputs. Extensive experiments, including instruction-following tasks, demonstrate the effectiveness of DistiLLM in building high-performing student models while achieving up to 4.3$\times$ speedup compared to recent KD methods., Comment: ICML 2024; Code is available at https://github.com/jongwooko/distillm

In-context learning (ICL) is a new paradigm for natural language processing that utilizes Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT)-like models. This approach uses prompts that include in-context demonstrations to generate the corresponding output for a new query input. However, applying ICL in real cases does not scale with the number of samples, and lacks robustness to different prompt templates and demonstration permutations. In this paper, we first show that GPT-like models using ICL result in unreliable predictions based on a new metric based on Shannon entropy. Then, to solve this problem, we propose a new technique called the Linear Probe Calibration (LinC), a method that calibrates the model's output probabilities, resulting in reliable predictions and improved performance, while requiring only minimal additional samples (as few as five labeled data samples). LinC significantly enhances the ICL test performance of GPT models on various benchmark datasets, with an average improvement of up to 21%, and up to a 50% improvement in some cases, and significantly boosts the performance of PEFT methods, especially in the low resource regime. Moreover, LinC achieves lower expected calibration error, and is highly robust to varying label proportions, prompt templates, and demonstration permutations. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/mominabbass/LinC}., Comment: Accepted at AISTATS2024

In this paper, we present a novel bilevel optimization-based training approach to training acoustic models for automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks that we term {bi-level joint unsupervised and supervised training (BL-JUST)}. {BL-JUST employs a lower and upper level optimization with an unsupervised loss and a supervised loss respectively, leveraging recent advances in penalty-based bilevel optimization to solve this challenging ASR problem with affordable complexity and rigorous convergence guarantees.} To evaluate BL-JUST, extensive experiments on the LibriSpeech and TED-LIUM v2 datasets have been conducted. BL-JUST achieves superior performance over the commonly used pre-training followed by fine-tuning strategy., Comment: This paper has been accepted in ICASSP-2024 conference

In this paper, we introduce a bilevel optimization framework for addressing inverse mean-field games, alongside an exploration of numerical methods tailored for this bilevel problem. The primary benefit of our bilevel formulation lies in maintaining the convexity of the objective function and the linearity of constraints in the forward problem. Our paper focuses on inverse mean-field games characterized by unknown obstacles and metrics. We show numerical stability for these two types of inverse problems. More importantly, we, for the first time, establish the identifiability of the inverse mean-field game with unknown obstacles via the solution of the resultant bilevel problem. The bilevel approach enables us to employ an alternating gradient-based optimization algorithm with a provable convergence guarantee. To validate the effectiveness of our methods in solving the inverse problems, we have designed comprehensive numerical experiments, providing empirical evidence of its efficacy., Comment: 35 pages, 8 figures, 4 tables

The importance of uncertainty quantification is increasingly recognized in the diverse field of machine learning. Accurately assessing model prediction uncertainty can help provide deeper understanding and confidence for researchers and practitioners. This is especially critical in medical diagnosis and drug discovery areas, where reliable predictions directly impact research quality and patient health. In this paper, we proposed incorporating uncertainty quantification into clinical trial outcome predictions. Our main goal is to enhance the model's ability to discern nuanced differences, thereby significantly improving its overall performance. We have adopted a selective classification approach to fulfill our objective, integrating it seamlessly with the Hierarchical Interaction Network (HINT), which is at the forefront of clinical trial prediction modeling. Selective classification, encompassing a spectrum of methods for uncertainty quantification, empowers the model to withhold decision-making in the face of samples marked by ambiguity or low confidence, thereby amplifying the accuracy of predictions for the instances it chooses to classify. A series of comprehensive experiments demonstrate that incorporating selective classification into clinical trial predictions markedly enhances the model's performance, as evidenced by significant upticks in pivotal metrics such as PR-AUC, F1, ROC-AUC, and overall accuracy. Specifically, the proposed method achieved 32.37\%, 21.43\%, and 13.27\% relative improvement on PR-AUC over the base model (HINT) in phase I, II, and III trial outcome prediction, respectively. When predicting phase III, our method reaches 0.9022 PR-AUC scores. These findings illustrate the robustness and prospective utility of this strategy within the area of clinical trial predictions, potentially setting a new benchmark in the field.

Compressing a predefined deep neural network (DNN) into a compact sub-network with competitive performance is crucial in the efficient machine learning realm. This topic spans various techniques, from structured pruning to neural architecture search, encompassing both pruning and erasing operators perspectives. Despite advancements, existing methods suffers from complex, multi-stage processes that demand substantial engineering and domain knowledge, limiting their broader applications. We introduce the third-generation Only-Train-Once (OTOv3), which first automatically trains and compresses a general DNN through pruning and erasing operations, creating a compact and competitive sub-network without the need of fine-tuning. OTOv3 simplifies and automates the training and compression process, minimizes the engineering efforts required from users. It offers key technological advancements: (i) automatic search space construction for general DNNs based on dependency graph analysis; (ii) Dual Half-Space Projected Gradient (DHSPG) and its enhanced version with hierarchical search (H2SPG) to reliably solve (hierarchical) structured sparsity problems and ensure sub-network validity; and (iii) automated sub-network construction using solutions from DHSPG/H2SPG and dependency graphs. Our empirical results demonstrate the efficacy of OTOv3 across various benchmarks in structured pruning and neural architecture search. OTOv3 produces sub-networks that match or exceed the state-of-the-arts. The source code will be available at https://github.com/tianyic/only_train_once., Comment: 39 pages. Due to the page dim limitation, the full appendix is attached here https://tinyurl.com/otov3appendix. Recommend to zoom-in for finer details. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2305.18030

Program synthesis aims to automatically generate an executable program that conforms to the given specification. Recent advancements have demonstrated that deep neural methodologies and large-scale pretrained language models are highly proficient in capturing program semantics. For robot programming, prior works have facilitated program synthesis by incorporating global environments. However, the assumption of acquiring a comprehensive understanding of the entire environment is often excessively challenging to achieve. In this work, we present a framework that learns to synthesize a program by rectifying potentially erroneous code segments, with the aid of partially observed environments. To tackle the issue of inadequate attention to partial observations, we propose to first learn an environment embedding space that can implicitly evaluate the impacts of each program token based on the precondition. Furthermore, by employing a graph structure, the model can aggregate both environmental and syntactic information flow and furnish smooth program rectification guidance. Extensive experimental evaluations and ablation studies on the partially observed VizDoom domain authenticate that our method offers superior generalization capability across various tasks and greater robustness when encountering noises.

Editable 3D-aware generation, which supports user-interacted editing, has witnessed rapid development recently. However, existing editable 3D GANs either fail to achieve high-accuracy local editing or suffer from huge computational costs. We propose AttriHuman-3D, an editable 3D human generation model, which address the aforementioned problems with attribute decomposition and indexing. The core idea of the proposed model is to generate all attributes (e.g. human body, hair, clothes and so on) in an overall attribute space with six feature planes, which are then decomposed and manipulated with different attribute indexes. To precisely extract features of different attributes from the generated feature planes, we propose a novel attribute indexing method as well as an orthogonal projection regularization to enhance the disentanglement. We also introduce a hyper-latent training strategy and an attribute-specific sampling strategy to avoid style entanglement and misleading punishment from the discriminator. Our method allows users to interactively edit selected attributes in the generated 3D human avatars while keeping others fixed. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our model provides a strong disentanglement between different attributes, allows fine-grained image editing and generates high-quality 3D human avatars., Comment: accepted by CVPR2024

The rapid growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) has been a driving force in transforming various domains, reshaping the artificial general intelligence landscape. However, the increasing computational and memory demands of these models present substantial challenges, hindering both academic research and practical applications. To address these issues, a wide array of methods, including both algorithmic and hardware solutions, have been developed to enhance the efficiency of LLMs. This survey delivers a comprehensive review of algorithmic advancements aimed at improving LLM efficiency. Unlike other surveys that typically focus on specific areas such as training or model compression, this paper examines the multi-faceted dimensions of efficiency essential for the end-to-end algorithmic development of LLMs. Specifically, it covers various topics related to efficiency, including scaling laws, data utilization, architectural innovations, training and tuning strategies, and inference techniques. This paper aims to serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners, laying the groundwork for future innovations in this critical research area. Our repository of relevant references is maintained at url{https://github.com/tding1/Efficient-LLM-Survey}.

We present DREAM, a novel training framework representing Diffusion Rectification and Estimation Adaptive Models, requiring minimal code changes (just three lines) yet significantly enhancing the alignment of training with sampling in diffusion models. DREAM features two components: diffusion rectification, which adjusts training to reflect the sampling process, and estimation adaptation, which balances perception against distortion. When applied to image super-resolution (SR), DREAM adeptly navigates the tradeoff between minimizing distortion and preserving high image quality. Experiments demonstrate DREAM's superiority over standard diffusion-based SR methods, showing a $2$ to $3\times $ faster training convergence and a $10$ to $20\times$ reduction in sampling steps to achieve comparable results. We hope DREAM will inspire a rethinking of diffusion model training paradigms., Comment: 16 pages, 22 figures, 5 tables; the first two authors contributed to this work equally

Generalizability and few-shot learning are key challenges in Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), often due to the lack of a holistic understanding in pixel-level rendering. We introduce CaesarNeRF, an end-to-end approach that leverages scene-level CAlibratEd SemAntic Representation along with pixel-level representations to advance few-shot, generalizable neural rendering, facilitating a holistic understanding without compromising high-quality details. CaesarNeRF explicitly models pose differences of reference views to combine scene-level semantic representations, providing a calibrated holistic understanding. This calibration process aligns various viewpoints with precise location and is further enhanced by sequential refinement to capture varying details. Extensive experiments on public datasets, including LLFF, Shiny, mip-NeRF 360, and MVImgNet, show that CaesarNeRF delivers state-of-the-art performance across varying numbers of reference views, proving effective even with a single reference image., Comment: Accepted to ECCV 2024. Project available at https://haidongz-usc.github.io/project/caesarnerf

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed the landscape of artificial intelligence, while their enormous size presents significant challenges in terms of computational costs. We introduce LoRAShear, a novel efficient approach to structurally prune LLMs and recover knowledge. Given general LLMs, LoRAShear at first creates the dependency graphs over LoRA modules to discover minimally removal structures and analyze the knowledge distribution. It then proceeds progressive structured pruning on LoRA adaptors and enables inherent knowledge transfer to better preserve the information in the redundant structures. To recover the lost knowledge during pruning, LoRAShear meticulously studies and proposes a dynamic fine-tuning schemes with dynamic data adaptors to effectively narrow down the performance gap to the full models. Numerical results demonstrate that by only using one GPU within a couple of GPU days, LoRAShear effectively reduced footprint of LLMs by 20% with only 1.0% performance degradation and significantly outperforms state-of-the-arts. The source code will be available at https://github.com/microsoft/lorashear.

Machine learning security has recently become a prominent topic in the natural language processing (NLP) area. The existing black-box adversarial attack suffers prohibitively from the high model querying complexity, resulting in easily being captured by anti-attack monitors. Meanwhile, how to eliminate redundant model queries is rarely explored. In this paper, we propose a query-efficient approach BufferSearch to effectively attack general intelligent NLP systems with the minimal number of querying requests. In general, BufferSearch makes use of historical information and conducts statistical test to avoid incurring model queries frequently. Numerically, we demonstrate the effectiveness of BufferSearch on various benchmark text-classification experiments by achieving the competitive attacking performance but with a significant reduction of query quantity. Furthermore, BufferSearch performs multiple times better than competitors within restricted query budget. Our work establishes a strong benchmark for the future study of query-efficiency in NLP adversarial attacks.