Daily Papers

Large sparsely-activated models have obtained excellent performance in multiple domains. However, such models are typically trained on a single modality at a time. We present the Language-Image MoE, LIMoE, a sparse mixture of experts model capable of multimodal learning. LIMoE accepts both images and text simultaneously, while being trained using a contrastive loss. MoEs are a natural fit for a multimodal backbone, since expert layers can learn an appropriate partitioning of modalities. However, new challenges arise; in particular, training stability and balanced expert utilization, for which we propose an entropy-based regularization scheme. Across multiple scales, we demonstrate remarkable performance improvement over dense models of equivalent computational cost. LIMoE-L/16 trained comparably to CLIP-L/14 achieves 78.6% zero-shot ImageNet accuracy (vs. 76.2%), and when further scaled to H/14 (with additional data) it achieves 84.1%, comparable to state-of-the-art methods which use larger custom per-modality backbones and pre-training schemes. We analyse the quantitative and qualitative behavior of LIMoE, and demonstrate phenomena such as differing treatment of the modalities and the organic emergence of modality-specific experts.

Many recent datasets contain a variety of different data modalities, for instance, image, question, and answer data in visual question answering (VQA). When training deep net classifiers on those multi-modal datasets, the modalities get exploited at different scales, i.e., some modalities can more easily contribute to the classification results than others. This is suboptimal because the classifier is inherently biased towards a subset of the modalities. To alleviate this shortcoming, we propose a novel regularization term based on the functional entropy. Intuitively, this term encourages to balance the contribution of each modality to the classification result. However, regularization with the functional entropy is challenging. To address this, we develop a method based on the log-Sobolev inequality, which bounds the functional entropy with the functional-Fisher-information. Intuitively, this maximizes the amount of information that the modalities contribute. On the two challenging multi-modal datasets VQA-CPv2 and SocialIQ, we obtain state-of-the-art results while more uniformly exploiting the modalities. In addition, we demonstrate the efficacy of our method on Colored MNIST.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) models risk overfitting to specific terms in the training data, thereby reducing their performance, fairness, and generalizability. E.g., neural hate speech detection models are strongly influenced by identity terms like gay, or women, resulting in false positives, severe unintended bias, and lower performance. Most mitigation techniques use lists of identity terms or samples from the target domain during training. However, this approach requires a-priori knowledge and introduces further bias if important terms are neglected. Instead, we propose a knowledge-free Entropy-based Attention Regularization (EAR) to discourage overfitting to training-specific terms. An additional objective function penalizes tokens with low self-attention entropy. We fine-tune BERT via EAR: the resulting model matches or exceeds state-of-the-art performance for hate speech classification and bias metrics on three benchmark corpora in English and Italian. EAR also reveals overfitting terms, i.e., terms most likely to induce bias, to help identify their effect on the model, task, and predictions.

There is a constant need for high-performing and computationally efficient neural network models for image super-resolution: computationally efficient models can be used via low-capacity devices and reduce carbon footprints. One way to obtain such models is to compress models, e.g. quantization. Another way is a neural architecture search that automatically discovers new, more efficient solutions. We propose a novel quantization-aware procedure, the QuantNAS that combines pros of these two approaches. To make QuantNAS work, the procedure looks for quantization-friendly super-resolution models. The approach utilizes entropy regularization, quantization noise, and Adaptive Deviation for Quantization (ADQ) module to enhance the search procedure. The entropy regularization technique prioritizes a single operation within each block of the search space. Adding quantization noise to parameters and activations approximates model degradation after quantization, resulting in a more quantization-friendly architectures. ADQ helps to alleviate problems caused by Batch Norm blocks in super-resolution models. Our experimental results show that the proposed approximations are better for search procedure than direct model quantization. QuantNAS discovers architectures with better PSNR/BitOps trade-off than uniform or mixed precision quantization of fixed architectures. We showcase the effectiveness of our method through its application to two search spaces inspired by the state-of-the-art SR models and RFDN. Thus, anyone can design a proper search space based on an existing architecture and apply our method to obtain better quality and efficiency. The proposed procedure is 30\% faster than direct weight quantization and is more stable.

A number of different architectures and loss functions have been applied to the problem of self-supervised learning (SSL), with the goal of developing embeddings that provide the best possible pre-training for as-yet-unknown, lightly supervised downstream tasks. One of these SSL criteria is to maximize the entropy of a set of embeddings in some compact space. But the goal of maximizing the embedding entropy often depends--whether explicitly or implicitly--upon high dimensional entropy estimates, which typically perform poorly in more than a few dimensions. In this paper, we motivate an effective entropy maximization criterion (E2MC), defined in terms of easy-to-estimate, low-dimensional constraints. We demonstrate that using it to continue training an already-trained SSL model for only a handful of epochs leads to a consistent and, in some cases, significant improvement in downstream performance. We perform careful ablation studies to show that the improved performance is due to the proposed add-on criterion. We also show that continued pre-training with alternative criteria does not lead to notable improvements, and in some cases, even degrades performance.

Since the introduction of deep learning, a wide scope of representation properties, such as decorrelation, whitening, disentanglement, rank, isotropy, and mutual information, have been studied to improve the quality of representation. However, manipulating such properties can be challenging in terms of implementational effectiveness and general applicability. To address these limitations, we propose to regularize von Neumann entropy~(VNE) of representation. First, we demonstrate that the mathematical formulation of VNE is superior in effectively manipulating the eigenvalues of the representation autocorrelation matrix. Then, we demonstrate that it is widely applicable in improving state-of-the-art algorithms or popular benchmark algorithms by investigating domain-generalization, meta-learning, self-supervised learning, and generative models. In addition, we formally establish theoretical connections with rank, disentanglement, and isotropy of representation. Finally, we provide discussions on the dimension control of VNE and the relationship with Shannon entropy. Code is available at: https://github.com/jaeill/CVPR23-VNE.

Recent Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms making use of Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization as a core component have shown outstanding performance. Yet, only little is understood theoretically about why KL regularization helps, so far. We study KL regularization within an approximate value iteration scheme and show that it implicitly averages q-values. Leveraging this insight, we provide a very strong performance bound, the very first to combine two desirable aspects: a linear dependency to the horizon (instead of quadratic) and an error propagation term involving an averaging effect of the estimation errors (instead of an accumulation effect). We also study the more general case of an additional entropy regularizer. The resulting abstract scheme encompasses many existing RL algorithms. Some of our assumptions do not hold with neural networks, so we complement this theoretical analysis with an extensive empirical study.

When training large flexible models, practitioners often rely on grid search to select hyperparameters that control over-fitting. This grid search has several disadvantages: the search is computationally expensive, requires carving out a validation set that reduces the available data for training, and requires users to specify candidate values. In this paper, we propose an alternative: directly learning regularization hyperparameters on the full training set via the evidence lower bound ("ELBo") objective from variational methods. For deep neural networks with millions of parameters, we recommend a modified ELBo that upweights the influence of the data likelihood relative to the prior. Our proposed technique overcomes all three disadvantages of grid search. In a case study on transfer learning of image classifiers, we show how our method reduces the 88+ hour grid search of past work to under 3 hours while delivering comparable accuracy. We further demonstrate how our approach enables efficient yet accurate approximations of Gaussian processes with learnable length-scale kernels.

We argue that the estimation of mutual information between high dimensional continuous random variables can be achieved by gradient descent over neural networks. We present a Mutual Information Neural Estimator (MINE) that is linearly scalable in dimensionality as well as in sample size, trainable through back-prop, and strongly consistent. We present a handful of applications on which MINE can be used to minimize or maximize mutual information. We apply MINE to improve adversarially trained generative models. We also use MINE to implement Information Bottleneck, applying it to supervised classification; our results demonstrate substantial improvement in flexibility and performance in these settings.

We introduce a novel class of sample-based explanations we term high-dimensional representers, that can be used to explain the predictions of a regularized high-dimensional model in terms of importance weights for each of the training samples. Our workhorse is a novel representer theorem for general regularized high-dimensional models, which decomposes the model prediction in terms of contributions from each of the training samples: with positive (negative) values corresponding to positive (negative) impact training samples to the model's prediction. We derive consequences for the canonical instances of ell_1 regularized sparse models, and nuclear norm regularized low-rank models. As a case study, we further investigate the application of low-rank models in the context of collaborative filtering, where we instantiate high-dimensional representers for specific popular classes of models. Finally, we study the empirical performance of our proposed methods on three real-world binary classification datasets and two recommender system datasets. We also showcase the utility of high-dimensional representers in explaining model recommendations.

In neural Information Retrieval, ongoing research is directed towards improving the first retriever in ranking pipelines. Learning dense embeddings to conduct retrieval using efficient approximate nearest neighbors methods has proven to work well. Meanwhile, there has been a growing interest in learning sparse representations for documents and queries, that could inherit from the desirable properties of bag-of-words models such as the exact matching of terms and the efficiency of inverted indexes. In this work, we present a new first-stage ranker based on explicit sparsity regularization and a log-saturation effect on term weights, leading to highly sparse representations and competitive results with respect to state-of-the-art dense and sparse methods. Our approach is simple, trained end-to-end in a single stage. We also explore the trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency, by controlling the contribution of the sparsity regularization.

We introduce an algorithm where the individual bits representing the weights of a neural network are learned. This method allows training weights with integer values on arbitrary bit-depths and naturally uncovers sparse networks, without additional constraints or regularization techniques. We show better results than the standard training technique with fully connected networks and similar performance as compared to standard training for convolutional and residual networks. By training bits in a selective manner we found that the biggest contribution to achieving high accuracy is given by the first three most significant bits, while the rest provide an intrinsic regularization. As a consequence more than 90\% of a network can be used to store arbitrary codes without affecting its accuracy. These codes may be random noise, binary files or even the weights of previously trained networks.

Although deep neural networks achieve tremendous success on various classification tasks, the generalization ability drops sheer when training datasets exhibit long-tailed distributions. One of the reasons is that the learned representations (i.e. features) from the imbalanced datasets are less effective than those from balanced datasets. Specifically, the learned representation under class-balanced distribution will present the Neural Collapse (NC) phenomena. NC indicates the features from the same category are close to each other and from different categories are maximally distant, showing an optimal linear separable state of classification. However, the pattern differs on imbalanced datasets and is partially responsible for the reduced performance of the model. In this work, we propose two explicit feature regularization terms to learn high-quality representation for class-imbalanced data. With the proposed regularization, NC phenomena will appear under the class-imbalanced distribution, and the generalization ability can be significantly improved. Our method is easily implemented, highly effective, and can be plugged into most existing methods. The extensive experimental results on widely-used benchmarks show the effectiveness of our method

Energy-based models (EBMs) are known in the Machine Learning community for decades. Since the seminal works devoted to EBMs dating back to the noughties, there have been a lot of efficient methods which solve the generative modelling problem by means of energy potentials (unnormalized likelihood functions). In contrast, the realm of Optimal Transport (OT) and, in particular, neural OT solvers is much less explored and limited by few recent works (excluding WGAN-based approaches which utilize OT as a loss function and do not model OT maps themselves). In our work, we bridge the gap between EBMs and Entropy-regularized OT. We present a novel methodology which allows utilizing the recent developments and technical improvements of the former in order to enrich the latter. From the theoretical perspective, we prove generalization bounds for our technique. In practice, we validate its applicability in toy 2D and image domains. To showcase the scalability, we empower our method with a pre-trained StyleGAN and apply it to high-res AFHQ 512times 512 unpaired I2I translation. For simplicity, we choose simple short- and long-run EBMs as a backbone of our Energy-guided Entropic OT approach, leaving the application of more sophisticated EBMs for future research. Our code is available at: https://github.com/PetrMokrov/Energy-guided-Entropic-OT

Learning compact discrete representations of data is a key task on its own or for facilitating subsequent processing of data. In this paper we present a model that produces Discrete InfoMax Codes (DIMCO); we learn a probabilistic encoder that yields k-way d-dimensional codes associated with input data. Our model's learning objective is to maximize the mutual information between codes and labels with a regularization, which enforces entries of a codeword to be as independent as possible. We show that the infomax principle also justifies previous loss functions (e.g., cross-entropy) as its special cases. Our analysis also shows that using shorter codes, as DIMCO does, reduces overfitting in the context of few-shot classification. Through experiments in various domains, we observe this implicit meta-regularization effect of DIMCO. Furthermore, we show that the codes learned by DIMCO are efficient in terms of both memory and retrieval time compared to previous methods.

It is often advantageous to train models on a subset of the available train examples, because the examples are of variable quality or because one would like to train with fewer examples, without sacrificing performance. We present Gradient Information Optimization (GIO), a scalable, task-agnostic approach to this data selection problem that requires only a small set of (unlabeled) examples representing a target distribution. GIO begins from a natural, information-theoretic objective that is intractable in practice. Our contribution is in showing that it can be made highly scalable through a simple relaxation of the objective and a highly efficient implementation. In experiments with machine translation, spelling correction, and image recognition, we show that GIO delivers outstanding results with very small train sets. These findings are robust to different representation models and hyperparameters for GIO itself. GIO is task- and domain-agnostic and can be applied out-of-the-box to new datasets and domains.

We show that deep neural networks (DNNs) can efficiently learn any composition of functions with bounded F_{1}-norm, which allows DNNs to break the curse of dimensionality in ways that shallow networks cannot. More specifically, we derive a generalization bound that combines a covering number argument for compositionality, and the F_{1}-norm (or the related Barron norm) for large width adaptivity. We show that the global minimizer of the regularized loss of DNNs can fit for example the composition of two functions f^{*}=hcirc g from a small number of observations, assuming g is smooth/regular and reduces the dimensionality (e.g. g could be the modulo map of the symmetries of f^{*}), so that h can be learned in spite of its low regularity. The measures of regularity we consider is the Sobolev norm with different levels of differentiability, which is well adapted to the F_{1} norm. We compute scaling laws empirically and observe phase transitions depending on whether g or h is harder to learn, as predicted by our theory.

We develop a novel theoretical framework for understating OT schemes respecting a class structure. For this purpose, we propose a convex OT program with a sum-of-norms regularization term, which provably recovers the underlying class structure under geometric assumptions. Furthermore, we derive an accelerated proximal algorithm with a closed-form projection and proximal operator scheme, thereby affording a more scalable algorithm for computing optimal transport plans. We provide a novel argument for the uniqueness of the optimum even in the absence of strong convexity. Our experiments show that the new regularizer not only results in a better preservation of the class structure in the data but also yields additional robustness to the data geometry, compared to previous regularizers.

Loss of plasticity is a phenomenon where neural networks become more difficult to train during the course of learning. Continual learning algorithms seek to mitigate this effect by sustaining good predictive performance while maintaining network trainability. We develop new techniques for improving continual learning by first reconsidering how initialization can ensure trainability during early phases of learning. From this perspective, we derive new regularization strategies for continual learning that ensure beneficial initialization properties are better maintained throughout training. In particular, we investigate two new regularization techniques for continual learning: (i) Wasserstein regularization toward the initial weight distribution, which is less restrictive than regularizing toward initial weights; and (ii) regularizing weight matrix singular values, which directly ensures gradient diversity is maintained throughout training. We present an experimental analysis that shows these alternative regularizers can improve continual learning performance across a range of supervised learning tasks and model architectures. The alternative regularizers prove to be less sensitive to hyperparameters while demonstrating better training in individual tasks, sustaining trainability as new tasks arrive, and achieving better generalization performance.

Large scale recommender models find most relevant items from huge catalogs, and they play a critical role in modern search and recommendation systems. To model the input space with large-vocab categorical features, a typical recommender model learns a joint embedding space through neural networks for both queries and items from user feedback data. However, with millions to billions of items in the corpus, users tend to provide feedback for a very small set of them, causing a power-law distribution. This makes the feedback data for long-tail items extremely sparse. Inspired by the recent success in self-supervised representation learning research in both computer vision and natural language understanding, we propose a multi-task self-supervised learning (SSL) framework for large-scale item recommendations. The framework is designed to tackle the label sparsity problem by learning better latent relationship of item features. Specifically, SSL improves item representation learning as well as serving as additional regularization to improve generalization. Furthermore, we propose a novel data augmentation method that utilizes feature correlations within the proposed framework. We evaluate our framework using two real-world datasets with 500M and 1B training examples respectively. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of SSL regularization and show its superior performance over the state-of-the-art regularization techniques. We also have already launched the proposed techniques to a web-scale commercial app-to-app recommendation system, with significant improvements top-tier business metrics demonstrated in A/B experiments on live traffic. Our online results also verify our hypothesis that our framework indeed improves model performance even more on slices that lack supervision.

Smoothness and low dimensional structures play central roles in improving generalization and stability in learning and statistics. This work combines techniques from semi-infinite constrained learning and manifold regularization to learn representations that are globally smooth on a manifold. To do so, it shows that under typical conditions the problem of learning a Lipschitz continuous function on a manifold is equivalent to a dynamically weighted manifold regularization problem. This observation leads to a practical algorithm based on a weighted Laplacian penalty whose weights are adapted using stochastic gradient techniques. It is shown that under mild conditions, this method estimates the Lipschitz constant of the solution, learning a globally smooth solution as a byproduct. Experiments on real world data illustrate the advantages of the proposed method relative to existing alternatives.

In this paper, we study the problem of learning image classification models in the presence of label noise. We revisit a simple compression regularization named Nested Dropout. We find that Nested Dropout, though originally proposed to perform fast information retrieval and adaptive data compression, can properly regularize a neural network to combat label noise. Moreover, owing to its simplicity, it can be easily combined with Co-teaching to further boost the performance. Our final model remains simple yet effective: it achieves comparable or even better performance than the state-of-the-art approaches on two real-world datasets with label noise which are Clothing1M and ANIMAL-10N. On Clothing1M, our approach obtains 74.9% accuracy which is slightly better than that of DivideMix. On ANIMAL-10N, we achieve 84.1% accuracy while the best public result by PLC is 83.4%. We hope that our simple approach can be served as a strong baseline for learning with label noise. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/yingyichen-cyy/Nested-Co-teaching.

Deep neural networks have demonstrated remarkable performance in supervised learning tasks but require large amounts of labeled data. Self-supervised learning offers an alternative paradigm, enabling the model to learn from data without explicit labels. Information theory has been instrumental in understanding and optimizing deep neural networks. Specifically, the information bottleneck principle has been applied to optimize the trade-off between compression and relevant information preservation in supervised settings. However, the optimal information objective in self-supervised learning remains unclear. In this paper, we review various approaches to self-supervised learning from an information-theoretic standpoint and present a unified framework that formalizes the self-supervised information-theoretic learning problem. We integrate existing research into a coherent framework, examine recent self-supervised methods, and identify research opportunities and challenges. Moreover, we discuss empirical measurement of information-theoretic quantities and their estimators. This paper offers a comprehensive review of the intersection between information theory, self-supervised learning, and deep neural networks.

To leverage the copious amount of data from source tasks and overcome the scarcity of the target task samples, representation learning based on multi-task pretraining has become a standard approach in many applications. However, up until now, most existing works design a source task selection strategy from a purely empirical perspective. Recently, chen2022active gave the first active multi-task representation learning (A-MTRL) algorithm which adaptively samples from source tasks and can provably reduce the total sample complexity using the L2-regularized-target-source-relevance parameter nu^2. But their work is theoretically suboptimal in terms of total source sample complexity and is less practical in some real-world scenarios where sparse training source task selection is desired. In this paper, we address both issues. Specifically, we show the strict dominance of the L1-regularized-relevance-based (nu^1-based) strategy by giving a lower bound for the nu^2-based strategy. When nu^1 is unknown, we propose a practical algorithm that uses the LASSO program to estimate nu^1. Our algorithm successfully recovers the optimal result in the known case. In addition to our sample complexity results, we also characterize the potential of our nu^1-based strategy in sample-cost-sensitive settings. Finally, we provide experiments on real-world computer vision datasets to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Deep neural networks exploiting millions of parameters are nowadays the norm in deep learning applications. This is a potential issue because of the great amount of computational resources needed for training, and of the possible loss of generalization performance of overparametrized networks. We propose in this paper a method for learning sparse neural topologies via a regularization technique which identifies non relevant weights and selectively shrinks their norm, while performing a classic update for relevant ones. This technique, which is an improvement of classical weight decay, is based on the definition of a regularization term which can be added to any loss functional regardless of its form, resulting in a unified general framework exploitable in many different contexts. The actual elimination of parameters identified as irrelevant is handled by an iterative pruning algorithm. We tested the proposed technique on different image classification and Natural language generation tasks, obtaining results on par or better then competitors in terms of sparsity and metrics, while achieving strong models compression.

We propose a novel framework to perform classification via deep learning in the presence of noisy annotations. When trained on noisy labels, deep neural networks have been observed to first fit the training data with clean labels during an "early learning" phase, before eventually memorizing the examples with false labels. We prove that early learning and memorization are fundamental phenomena in high-dimensional classification tasks, even in simple linear models, and give a theoretical explanation in this setting. Motivated by these findings, we develop a new technique for noisy classification tasks, which exploits the progress of the early learning phase. In contrast with existing approaches, which use the model output during early learning to detect the examples with clean labels, and either ignore or attempt to correct the false labels, we take a different route and instead capitalize on early learning via regularization. There are two key elements to our approach. First, we leverage semi-supervised learning techniques to produce target probabilities based on the model outputs. Second, we design a regularization term that steers the model towards these targets, implicitly preventing memorization of the false labels. The resulting framework is shown to provide robustness to noisy annotations on several standard benchmarks and real-world datasets, where it achieves results comparable to the state of the art.

Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) has demonstrated effectiveness in analyzing whole slide images (WSIs), yet it often encounters overfitting challenges in real-world applications, particularly in the form of attention over-concentration. While existing methods to alleviate this issue introduce complex modules or processing steps, such as multiple-stage training and teacher-student distillation, this paper proposes a simple yet effective regularization: Attention Entropy Maximization (AEM). Motivated by our investigation revealing a positive correlation between attention entropy and model performance, AEM incorporates a negative entropy loss for attention values into the standard MIL framework, penalizing overly concentrated attention and encouraging the model to consider a broader range of informative regions in WSIs, potentially improving its generalization capabilities. Compared to existing overfitting mitigation methods, our AEM approach offers advantages of simplicity, efficiency, and versatility. It requires no additional modules or processing steps, involves only one hyperparameter, and demonstrates compatibility with MIL frameworks and techniques. These advantages make AEM particularly attractive for practical applications. We evaluate AEM on three benchmark datasets, demonstrating consistent performance improvements over existing methods. Furthermore, AEM shows high versatility, integrating effectively with four feature extractors, two advanced MIL frameworks, three attention mechanisms, and Subsampling augmentation technique. The source code is available at https://github.com/dazhangyu123/AEM.

The information bottleneck (IB) approach is popular to improve the generalization, robustness and explainability of deep neural networks. Essentially, it aims to find a minimum sufficient representation t by striking a trade-off between a compression term I(x;t) and a prediction term I(y;t), where I(cdot;cdot) refers to the mutual information (MI). MI is for the IB for the most part expressed in terms of the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, which in the regression case corresponds to prediction based on mean squared error (MSE) loss with Gaussian assumption and compression approximated by variational inference. In this paper, we study the IB principle for the regression problem and develop a new way to parameterize the IB with deep neural networks by exploiting favorable properties of the Cauchy-Schwarz (CS) divergence. By doing so, we move away from MSE-based regression and ease estimation by avoiding variational approximations or distributional assumptions. We investigate the improved generalization ability of our proposed CS-IB and demonstrate strong adversarial robustness guarantees. We demonstrate its superior performance on six real-world regression tasks over other popular deep IB approaches. We additionally observe that the solutions discovered by CS-IB always achieve the best trade-off between prediction accuracy and compression ratio in the information plane. The code is available at https://github.com/SJYuCNEL/Cauchy-Schwarz-Information-Bottleneck.

Recently, a race towards the simplification of deep networks has begun, showing that it is effectively possible to reduce the size of these models with minimal or no performance loss. However, there is a general lack in understanding why these pruning strategies are effective. In this work, we are going to compare and analyze pruned solutions with two different pruning approaches, one-shot and gradual, showing the higher effectiveness of the latter. In particular, we find that gradual pruning allows access to narrow, well-generalizing minima, which are typically ignored when using one-shot approaches. In this work we also propose PSP-entropy, a measure to understand how a given neuron correlates to some specific learned classes. Interestingly, we observe that the features extracted by iteratively-pruned models are less correlated to specific classes, potentially making these models a better fit in transfer learning approaches.

Effective regularization techniques are highly desired in deep learning for alleviating overfitting and improving generalization. This work proposes a new regularization scheme, based on the understanding that the flat local minima of the empirical risk cause the model to generalize better. This scheme is referred to as adversarial model perturbation (AMP), where instead of directly minimizing the empirical risk, an alternative "AMP loss" is minimized via SGD. Specifically, the AMP loss is obtained from the empirical risk by applying the "worst" norm-bounded perturbation on each point in the parameter space. Comparing with most existing regularization schemes, AMP has strong theoretical justifications, in that minimizing the AMP loss can be shown theoretically to favour flat local minima of the empirical risk. Extensive experiments on various modern deep architectures establish AMP as a new state of the art among regularization schemes. Our code is available at https://github.com/hiyouga/AMP-Regularizer.

Regularization is a set of techniques that are used to improve the generalization ability of deep neural networks. In this paper, we introduce weight compander (WC), a novel effective method to improve generalization by reparameterizing each weight in deep neural networks using a nonlinear function. It is a general, intuitive, cheap and easy to implement method, which can be combined with various other regularization techniques. Large weights in deep neural networks are a sign of a more complex network that is overfitted to the training data. Moreover, regularized networks tend to have a greater range of weights around zero with fewer weights centered at zero. We introduce a weight reparameterization function which is applied to each weight and implicitly reduces overfitting by restricting the magnitude of the weights while forcing them away from zero at the same time. This leads to a more democratic decision-making in the network. Firstly, individual weights cannot have too much influence in the prediction process due to the restriction of their magnitude. Secondly, more weights are used in the prediction process, since they are forced away from zero during the training. This promotes the extraction of more features from the input data and increases the level of weight redundancy, which makes the network less sensitive to statistical differences between training and test data. We extend our method to learn the hyperparameters of the introduced weight reparameterization function. This avoids hyperparameter search and gives the network the opportunity to align the weight reparameterization with the training progress. We show experimentally that using weight compander in addition to standard regularization methods improves the performance of neural networks.

Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models have shown an impressive generation quality, although their long sampling chain leads to high computational costs. In this paper, we observe that a long sampling chain also leads to an error accumulation phenomenon, which is similar to the exposure bias problem in autoregressive text generation. Specifically, we note that there is a discrepancy between training and testing, since the former is conditioned on the ground truth samples, while the latter is conditioned on the previously generated results. To alleviate this problem, we propose a very simple but effective training regularization, consisting in perturbing the ground truth samples to simulate the inference time prediction errors. We empirically show that, without affecting the recall and precision, the proposed input perturbation leads to a significant improvement in the sample quality while reducing both the training and the inference times. For instance, on CelebA 64times64, we achieve a new state-of-the-art FID score of 1.27, while saving 37.5% of the training time. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/forever208/DDPM-IP

Contemporary predictive models are hard to interpret as their deep nets exploit numerous complex relations between input elements. This work suggests a theoretical framework for model interpretability by measuring the contribution of relevant features to the functional entropy of the network with respect to the input. We rely on the log-Sobolev inequality that bounds the functional entropy by the functional Fisher information with respect to the covariance of the data. This provides a principled way to measure the amount of information contribution of a subset of features to the decision function. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method surpasses existing interpretability sampling-based methods on various data signals such as image, text, and audio.

We investigate composed image retrieval with text feedback. Users gradually look for the target of interest by moving from coarse to fine-grained feedback. However, existing methods merely focus on the latter, i.e., fine-grained search, by harnessing positive and negative pairs during training. This pair-based paradigm only considers the one-to-one distance between a pair of specific points, which is not aligned with the one-to-many coarse-grained retrieval process and compromises the recall rate. In an attempt to fill this gap, we introduce a unified learning approach to simultaneously modeling the coarse- and fine-grained retrieval by considering the multi-grained uncertainty. The key idea underpinning the proposed method is to integrate fine- and coarse-grained retrieval as matching data points with small and large fluctuations, respectively. Specifically, our method contains two modules: uncertainty modeling and uncertainty regularization. (1) The uncertainty modeling simulates the multi-grained queries by introducing identically distributed fluctuations in the feature space. (2) Based on the uncertainty modeling, we further introduce uncertainty regularization to adapt the matching objective according to the fluctuation range. Compared with existing methods, the proposed strategy explicitly prevents the model from pushing away potential candidates in the early stage, and thus improves the recall rate. On the three public datasets, i.e., FashionIQ, Fashion200k, and Shoes, the proposed method has achieved +4.03%, +3.38%, and +2.40% Recall@50 accuracy over a strong baseline, respectively.

The success of recent text-to-image diffusion models is largely due to their capacity to be guided by a complex text prompt, which enables users to precisely describe the desired content. However, these models struggle to effectively suppress the generation of undesired content, which is explicitly requested to be omitted from the generated image in the prompt. In this paper, we analyze how to manipulate the text embeddings and remove unwanted content from them. We introduce two contributions, which we refer to as soft-weighted regularization and inference-time text embedding optimization. The first regularizes the text embedding matrix and effectively suppresses the undesired content. The second method aims to further suppress the unwanted content generation of the prompt, and encourages the generation of desired content. We evaluate our method quantitatively and qualitatively on extensive experiments, validating its effectiveness. Furthermore, our method is generalizability to both the pixel-space diffusion models (i.e. DeepFloyd-IF) and the latent-space diffusion models (i.e. Stable Diffusion).

Convolutional neural network training can suffer from diverse issues like exploding or vanishing gradients, scaling-based weight space symmetry and covariant-shift. In order to address these issues, researchers develop weight regularization methods and activation normalization methods. In this work we propose a weight soft-regularization method based on the Oblique manifold. The proposed method uses a loss function which pushes each weight vector to have a norm close to one, i.e. the weight matrix is smoothly steered toward the so-called Oblique manifold. We evaluate our method on the very popular CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet 2012 datasets using two state-of-the-art architectures, namely the ResNet and wide-ResNet. Our method introduces negligible computational overhead and the results show that it is competitive to the state-of-the-art and in some cases superior to it. Additionally, the results are less sensitive to hyperparameter settings such as batch size and regularization factor.

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have shown promise in improving the interpretability of neural network activations, but can learn features that are not features of the input, limiting their effectiveness. We propose Mutual Feature Regularization (MFR), a regularization technique for improving feature learning by encouraging SAEs trained in parallel to learn similar features. We motivate MFR by showing that features learned by multiple SAEs are more likely to correlate with features of the input. By training on synthetic data with known features of the input, we show that MFR can help SAEs learn those features, as we can directly compare the features learned by the SAE with the input features for the synthetic data. We then scale MFR to SAEs that are trained to denoise electroencephalography (EEG) data and SAEs that are trained to reconstruct GPT-2 Small activations. We show that MFR can improve the reconstruction loss of SAEs by up to 21.21\% on GPT-2 Small, and 6.67\% on EEG data. Our results suggest that the similarity between features learned by different SAEs can be leveraged to improve SAE training, thereby enhancing performance and the usefulness of SAEs for model interpretability.

The ability to control for the kinds of information encoded in neural representation has a variety of use cases, especially in light of the challenge of interpreting these models. We present Iterative Null-space Projection (INLP), a novel method for removing information from neural representations. Our method is based on repeated training of linear classifiers that predict a certain property we aim to remove, followed by projection of the representations on their null-space. By doing so, the classifiers become oblivious to that target property, making it hard to linearly separate the data according to it. While applicable for multiple uses, we evaluate our method on bias and fairness use-cases, and show that our method is able to mitigate bias in word embeddings, as well as to increase fairness in a setting of multi-class classification.

Mutual information maximization has emerged as a powerful learning objective for unsupervised representation learning obtaining state-of-the-art performance in applications such as object recognition, speech recognition, and reinforcement learning. However, such approaches are fundamentally limited since a tight lower bound of mutual information requires sample size exponential in the mutual information. This limits the applicability of these approaches for prediction tasks with high mutual information, such as in video understanding or reinforcement learning. In these settings, such techniques are prone to overfit, both in theory and in practice, and capture only a few of the relevant factors of variation. This leads to incomplete representations that are not optimal for downstream tasks. In this work, we empirically demonstrate that mutual information-based representation learning approaches do fail to learn complete representations on a number of designed and real-world tasks. To mitigate these problems we introduce the Wasserstein dependency measure, which learns more complete representations by using the Wasserstein distance instead of the KL divergence in the mutual information estimator. We show that a practical approximation to this theoretically motivated solution, constructed using Lipschitz constraint techniques from the GAN literature, achieves substantially improved results on tasks where incomplete representations are a major challenge.

Implicit Neural Representations (INR) or neural fields have emerged as a popular framework to encode multimedia signals such as images and radiance fields while retaining high-quality. Recently, learnable feature grids proposed by Instant-NGP have allowed significant speed-up in the training as well as the sampling of INRs by replacing a large neural network with a multi-resolution look-up table of feature vectors and a much smaller neural network. However, these feature grids come at the expense of large memory consumption which can be a bottleneck for storage and streaming applications. In this work, we propose SHACIRA, a simple yet effective task-agnostic framework for compressing such feature grids with no additional post-hoc pruning/quantization stages. We reparameterize feature grids with quantized latent weights and apply entropy regularization in the latent space to achieve high levels of compression across various domains. Quantitative and qualitative results on diverse datasets consisting of images, videos, and radiance fields, show that our approach outperforms existing INR approaches without the need for any large datasets or domain-specific heuristics. Our project page is available at http://shacira.github.io .

The generalization capability of deep neural networks has been substantially improved by applying a wide spectrum of regularization methods, e.g., restricting function space, injecting randomness during training, augmenting data, etc. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective regularization method named progressive self-knowledge distillation (PS-KD), which progressively distills a model's own knowledge to soften hard targets (i.e., one-hot vectors) during training. Hence, it can be interpreted within a framework of knowledge distillation as a student becomes a teacher itself. Specifically, targets are adjusted adaptively by combining the ground-truth and past predictions from the model itself. We show that PS-KD provides an effect of hard example mining by rescaling gradients according to difficulty in classifying examples. The proposed method is applicable to any supervised learning tasks with hard targets and can be easily combined with existing regularization methods to further enhance the generalization performance. Furthermore, it is confirmed that PS-KD achieves not only better accuracy, but also provides high quality of confidence estimates in terms of calibration as well as ordinal ranking. Extensive experimental results on three different tasks, image classification, object detection, and machine translation, demonstrate that our method consistently improves the performance of the state-of-the-art baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/lgcnsai/PS-KD-Pytorch.

This paper introduces Least Volume-a simple yet effective regularization inspired by geometric intuition-that can reduce the necessary number of latent dimensions needed by an autoencoder without requiring any prior knowledge of the intrinsic dimensionality of the dataset. We show that the Lipschitz continuity of the decoder is the key to making it work, provide a proof that PCA is just a linear special case of it, and reveal that it has a similar PCA-like importance ordering effect when applied to nonlinear models. We demonstrate the intuition behind the regularization on some pedagogical toy problems, and its effectiveness on several benchmark problems, including MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CelebA.

Domain adaptation (DA) has drawn high interest for its capacity to adapt a model trained on labeled source data to perform well on unlabeled or weakly labeled target data from a different domain. Most common DA techniques require concurrent access to the input images of both the source and target domains. However, in practice, privacy concerns often impede the availability of source images in the adaptation phase. This is a very frequent DA scenario in medical imaging, where, for instance, the source and target images could come from different clinical sites. We introduce a source-free domain adaptation for image segmentation. Our formulation is based on minimizing a label-free entropy loss defined over target-domain data, which we further guide with a domain-invariant prior on the segmentation regions. Many priors can be derived from anatomical information. Here, a class ratio prior is estimated from anatomical knowledge and integrated in the form of a Kullback Leibler (KL) divergence in our overall loss function. Furthermore, we motivate our overall loss with an interesting link to maximizing the mutual information between the target images and their label predictions. We show the effectiveness of our prior aware entropy minimization in a variety of domain-adaptation scenarios, with different modalities and applications, including spine, prostate, and cardiac segmentation. Our method yields comparable results to several state of the art adaptation techniques, despite having access to much less information, as the source images are entirely absent in our adaptation phase. Our straightforward adaptation strategy uses only one network, contrary to popular adversarial techniques, which are not applicable to a source-free DA setting. Our framework can be readily used in a breadth of segmentation problems, and our code is publicly available: https://github.com/mathilde-b/SFDA

This paper offers a new perspective to ease the challenge of domain generalization, which involves maintaining robust results even in unseen environments. Our design focuses on the decision-making process in the final classifier layer. Specifically, we propose treating the element-wise contributions to the final results as the rationale for making a decision and representing the rationale for each sample as a matrix. For a well-generalized model, we suggest the rationale matrices for samples belonging to the same category should be similar, indicating the model relies on domain-invariant clues to make decisions, thereby ensuring robust results. To implement this idea, we introduce a rationale invariance loss as a simple regularization technique, requiring only a few lines of code. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves competitive results across various datasets, despite its simplicity. Code is available at https://github.com/liangchen527/RIDG.

In this paper, we present a cross-entropy optimization method for hyperparameter optimization in stochastic gradient-based approaches to train deep neural networks. The value of a hyperparameter of a learning algorithm often has great impact on the performance of a model such as the convergence speed, the generalization performance metrics, etc. While in some cases the hyperparameters of a learning algorithm can be part of learning parameters, in other scenarios the hyperparameters of a stochastic optimization algorithm such as Adam [5] and its variants are either fixed as a constant or are kept changing in a monotonic way over time. We give an in-depth analysis of the presented method in the framework of expectation maximization (EM). The presented algorithm of cross-entropy optimization for hyperparameter optimization of a learning algorithm (CEHPO) can be equally applicable to other areas of optimization problems in deep learning. We hope that the presented methods can provide different perspectives and offer some insights for optimization problems in different areas of machine learning and beyond.

While diffusion models excel at generating high-quality samples, their latent variables typically lack semantic meaning and are not suitable for representation learning. Here, we propose InfoDiffusion, an algorithm that augments diffusion models with low-dimensional latent variables that capture high-level factors of variation in the data. InfoDiffusion relies on a learning objective regularized with the mutual information between observed and hidden variables, which improves latent space quality and prevents the latents from being ignored by expressive diffusion-based decoders. Empirically, we find that InfoDiffusion learns disentangled and human-interpretable latent representations that are competitive with state-of-the-art generative and contrastive methods, while retaining the high sample quality of diffusion models. Our method enables manipulating the attributes of generated images and has the potential to assist tasks that require exploring a learned latent space to generate quality samples, e.g., generative design.

A common architectural choice for deep metric learning is a convolutional neural network followed by global average pooling (GAP). Albeit simple, GAP is a highly effective way to aggregate information. One possible explanation for the effectiveness of GAP is considering each feature vector as representing a different semantic entity and GAP as a convex combination of them. Following this perspective, we generalize GAP and propose a learnable generalized sum pooling method (GSP). GSP improves GAP with two distinct abilities: i) the ability to choose a subset of semantic entities, effectively learning to ignore nuisance information, and ii) learning the weights corresponding to the importance of each entity. Formally, we propose an entropy-smoothed optimal transport problem and show that it is a strict generalization of GAP, i.e., a specific realization of the problem gives back GAP. We show that this optimization problem enjoys analytical gradients enabling us to use it as a direct learnable replacement for GAP. We further propose a zero-shot loss to ease the learning of GSP. We show the effectiveness of our method with extensive evaluations on 4 popular metric learning benchmarks. Code is available at: GSP-DML Framework

Despite their massive size, successful deep artificial neural networks can exhibit a remarkably small difference between training and test performance. Conventional wisdom attributes small generalization error either to properties of the model family, or to the regularization techniques used during training. Through extensive systematic experiments, we show how these traditional approaches fail to explain why large neural networks generalize well in practice. Specifically, our experiments establish that state-of-the-art convolutional networks for image classification trained with stochastic gradient methods easily fit a random labeling of the training data. This phenomenon is qualitatively unaffected by explicit regularization, and occurs even if we replace the true images by completely unstructured random noise. We corroborate these experimental findings with a theoretical construction showing that simple depth two neural networks already have perfect finite sample expressivity as soon as the number of parameters exceeds the number of data points as it usually does in practice. We interpret our experimental findings by comparison with traditional models.

Supervised learning can be viewed as distilling relevant information from input data into feature representations. This process becomes difficult when supervision is noisy as the distilled information might not be relevant. In fact, recent research shows that networks can easily overfit all labels including those that are corrupted, and hence can hardly generalize to clean datasets. In this paper, we focus on the problem of learning with noisy labels and introduce compression inductive bias to network architectures to alleviate this over-fitting problem. More precisely, we revisit one classical regularization named Dropout and its variant Nested Dropout. Dropout can serve as a compression constraint for its feature dropping mechanism, while Nested Dropout further learns ordered feature representations w.r.t. feature importance. Moreover, the trained models with compression regularization are further combined with Co-teaching for performance boost. Theoretically, we conduct bias-variance decomposition of the objective function under compression regularization. We analyze it for both single model and Co-teaching. This decomposition provides three insights: (i) it shows that over-fitting is indeed an issue for learning with noisy labels; (ii) through an information bottleneck formulation, it explains why the proposed feature compression helps in combating label noise; (iii) it gives explanations on the performance boost brought by incorporating compression regularization into Co-teaching. Experiments show that our simple approach can have comparable or even better performance than the state-of-the-art methods on benchmarks with real-world label noise including Clothing1M and ANIMAL-10N. Our implementation is available at https://yingyichen-cyy.github.io/CompressFeatNoisyLabels/.

In this paper we introduce Feature Gradients, a gradient-based search algorithm for feature selection. Our approach extends a recent result on the estimation of learnability in the sublinear data regime by showing that the calculation can be performed iteratively (i.e., in mini-batches) and in linear time and space with respect to both the number of features D and the sample size N . This, along with a discrete-to-continuous relaxation of the search domain, allows for an efficient, gradient-based search algorithm among feature subsets for very large datasets. Crucially, our algorithm is capable of finding higher-order correlations between features and targets for both the N > D and N < D regimes, as opposed to approaches that do not consider such interactions and/or only consider one regime. We provide experimental demonstration of the algorithm in small and large sample-and feature-size settings.

We show that the effectiveness of the well celebrated Mixup [Zhang et al., 2018] can be further improved if instead of using it as the sole learning objective, it is utilized as an additional regularizer to the standard cross-entropy loss. This simple change not only provides much improved accuracy but also significantly improves the quality of the predictive uncertainty estimation of Mixup in most cases under various forms of covariate shifts and out-of-distribution detection experiments. In fact, we observe that Mixup yields much degraded performance on detecting out-of-distribution samples possibly, as we show empirically, because of its tendency to learn models that exhibit high-entropy throughout; making it difficult to differentiate in-distribution samples from out-distribution ones. To show the efficacy of our approach (RegMixup), we provide thorough analyses and experiments on vision datasets (ImageNet & CIFAR-10/100) and compare it with a suite of recent approaches for reliable uncertainty estimation.

Soft Actor Critic (SAC) algorithms show remarkable performance in complex simulated environments. A key element of SAC networks is entropy regularization, which prevents the SAC actor from optimizing against fine grained features, oftentimes transient, of the state-action value function. This results in better sample efficiency during early training. We take this idea one step further by artificially bandlimiting the target critic spatial resolution through the addition of a convolutional filter. We derive the closed form solution in the linear case and show that bandlimiting reduces the interdependency between the low and high frequency components of the state-action value approximation, allowing the critic to learn faster. In experiments, the bandlimited SAC outperformed the classic twin-critic SAC in a number of Gym environments, and displayed more stability in returns. We derive novel insights about SAC by adding a stochastic noise disturbance, a technique that is increasingly being used to learn robust policies that transfer well to the real world counterparts.

Due to the difficulty of collecting exhaustive multi-label annotations, multi-label datasets often contain partial labels. We consider an extreme of this weakly supervised learning problem, called single positive multi-label learning (SPML), where each multi-label training image has only one positive label. Traditionally, all unannotated labels are assumed as negative labels in SPML, which introduces false negative labels and causes model training to be dominated by assumed negative labels. In this work, we choose to treat all unannotated labels from an alternative perspective, i.e. acknowledging they are unknown. Hence, we propose entropy-maximization (EM) loss to attain a special gradient regime for providing proper supervision signals. Moreover, we propose asymmetric pseudo-labeling (APL), which adopts asymmetric-tolerance strategies and a self-paced procedure, to cooperate with EM loss and then provide more precise supervision. Experiments show that our method significantly improves performance and achieves state-of-the-art results on all four benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/Correr-Zhou/SPML-AckTheUnknown.

In this paper, we propose to use the general L^2-based Sobolev norms, i.e., H^s norms where sin R, to measure the data discrepancy due to noise in image processing tasks that are formulated as optimization problems. As opposed to a popular trend of developing regularization methods, we emphasize that an implicit regularization effect can be achieved through the class of Sobolev norms as the data-fitting term. Specifically, we analyze that the implicit regularization comes from the weights that the H^s norm imposes on different frequency contents of an underlying image. We further analyze the underlying noise assumption of using the Sobolev norm as the data-fitting term from a Bayesian perspective, build the connections with the Sobolev gradient-based methods and discuss the preconditioning effects on the convergence rate of the gradient descent algorithm, leading to a better understanding of functional spaces/metrics and the optimization process involved in image processing. Numerical results in full waveform inversion, image denoising and deblurring demonstrate the implicit regularization effects.

Pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) has proven to be an effective query reformulation technique to improve retrieval accuracy. It aims to alleviate the mismatch of linguistic expressions between a query and its potential relevant documents. Existing PRF methods independently treat revised queries originating from the same query but using different numbers of feedback documents, resulting in severe query drift. Without comparing the effects of two different revisions from the same query, a PRF model may incorrectly focus on the additional irrelevant information increased in the more feedback, and thus reformulate a query that is less effective than the revision using the less feedback. Ideally, if a PRF model can distinguish between irrelevant and relevant information in the feedback, the more feedback documents there are, the better the revised query will be. To bridge this gap, we propose the Loss-over-Loss (LoL) framework to compare the reformulation losses between different revisions of the same query during training. Concretely, we revise an original query multiple times in parallel using different amounts of feedback and compute their reformulation losses. Then, we introduce an additional regularization loss on these reformulation losses to penalize revisions that use more feedback but gain larger losses. With such comparative regularization, the PRF model is expected to learn to suppress the extra increased irrelevant information by comparing the effects of different revised queries. Further, we present a differentiable query reformulation method to implement this framework. This method revises queries in the vector space and directly optimizes the retrieval performance of query vectors, applicable for both sparse and dense retrieval models. Empirical evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness and robustness of our method for two typical sparse and dense retrieval models.

Because diffusion models have shown impressive performances in a number of tasks, such as image synthesis, there is a trend in recent works to prove (with certain assumptions) that these models have strong approximation capabilities. In this paper, we show that current diffusion models actually have an expressive bottleneck in backward denoising and some assumption made by existing theoretical guarantees is too strong. Based on this finding, we prove that diffusion models have unbounded errors in both local and global denoising. In light of our theoretical studies, we introduce soft mixture denoising (SMD), an expressive and efficient model for backward denoising. SMD not only permits diffusion models to well approximate any Gaussian mixture distributions in theory, but also is simple and efficient for implementation. Our experiments on multiple image datasets show that SMD significantly improves different types of diffusion models (e.g., DDPM), espeically in the situation of few backward iterations.

Regularized optimal transport (OT) is now increasingly used as a loss or as a matching layer in neural networks. Entropy-regularized OT can be computed using the Sinkhorn algorithm but it leads to fully-dense transportation plans, meaning that all sources are (fractionally) matched with all targets. To address this issue, several works have investigated quadratic regularization instead. This regularization preserves sparsity and leads to unconstrained and smooth (semi) dual objectives, that can be solved with off-the-shelf gradient methods. Unfortunately, quadratic regularization does not give direct control over the cardinality (number of nonzeros) of the transportation plan. We propose in this paper a new approach for OT with explicit cardinality constraints on the transportation plan. Our work is motivated by an application to sparse mixture of experts, where OT can be used to match input tokens such as image patches with expert models such as neural networks. Cardinality constraints ensure that at most k tokens are matched with an expert, which is crucial for computational performance reasons. Despite the nonconvexity of cardinality constraints, we show that the corresponding (semi) dual problems are tractable and can be solved with first-order gradient methods. Our method can be thought as a middle ground between unregularized OT (recovered in the limit case k=1) and quadratically-regularized OT (recovered when k is large enough). The smoothness of the objectives increases as k increases, giving rise to a trade-off between convergence speed and sparsity of the optimal plan.

The success of Deep Neural Network (DNN) models significantly depends on the quality of provided annotations. In medical image segmentation, for example, having multiple expert annotations for each data point is common to minimize subjective annotation bias. Then, the goal of estimation is to filter out the label noise and recover the ground-truth masks, which are not explicitly given. This paper proposes a probabilistic model for noisy observations that allows us to build a confident classification and segmentation models. To accomplish it, we explicitly model label noise and introduce a new information-based regularization that pushes the network to recover the ground-truth labels. In addition, for segmentation task we adjust the loss function by prioritizing learning in high-confidence regions where all the annotators agree on labeling. We evaluate the proposed method on a series of classification tasks such as noisy versions of MNIST, CIFAR-10, Fashion-MNIST datasets as well as CIFAR-10N, which is real-world dataset with noisy human annotations. Additionally, for segmentation task, we consider several medical imaging datasets, such as, LIDC and RIGA that reflect real-world inter-variability among multiple annotators. Our experiments show that our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art solutions for the considered classification and segmentation problems.

Unsupervised pretraining, which learns a useful representation using a large amount of unlabeled data to facilitate the learning of downstream tasks, is a critical component of modern large-scale machine learning systems. Despite its tremendous empirical success, the rigorous theoretical understanding of why unsupervised pretraining generally helps remains rather limited -- most existing results are restricted to particular methods or approaches for unsupervised pretraining with specialized structural assumptions. This paper studies a generic framework, where the unsupervised representation learning task is specified by an abstract class of latent variable models Phi and the downstream task is specified by a class of prediction functions Psi. We consider a natural approach of using Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) for unsupervised pretraining and Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) for learning downstream tasks. We prove that, under a mild ''informative'' condition, our algorithm achieves an excess risk of mathcal{O}(mathcal{C_Phi/m} + mathcal{C_Psi/n}) for downstream tasks, where C_Phi, C_Psi are complexity measures of function classes Phi, Psi, and m, n are the number of unlabeled and labeled data respectively. Comparing to the baseline of mathcal{O}(mathcal{C_{Phi circ Psi}/n}) achieved by performing supervised learning using only the labeled data, our result rigorously shows the benefit of unsupervised pretraining when m gg n and C_{Phicirc Psi} > C_Psi. This paper further shows that our generic framework covers a wide range of approaches for unsupervised pretraining, including factor models, Gaussian mixture models, and contrastive learning.

Sparse neural networks are a key factor in developing resource-efficient machine learning applications. We propose the novel and powerful sparse learning method Adaptive Regularized Training (ART) to compress dense into sparse networks. Instead of the commonly used binary mask during training to reduce the number of model weights, we inherently shrink weights close to zero in an iterative manner with increasing weight regularization. Our method compresses the pre-trained model knowledge into the weights of highest magnitude. Therefore, we introduce a novel regularization loss named HyperSparse that exploits the highest weights while conserving the ability of weight exploration. Extensive experiments on CIFAR and TinyImageNet show that our method leads to notable performance gains compared to other sparsification methods, especially in extremely high sparsity regimes up to 99.8 percent model sparsity. Additional investigations provide new insights into the patterns that are encoded in weights with high magnitudes.

Many recent methods for unsupervised or self-supervised representation learning train feature extractors by maximizing an estimate of the mutual information (MI) between different views of the data. This comes with several immediate problems: For example, MI is notoriously hard to estimate, and using it as an objective for representation learning may lead to highly entangled representations due to its invariance under arbitrary invertible transformations. Nevertheless, these methods have been repeatedly shown to excel in practice. In this paper we argue, and provide empirical evidence, that the success of these methods cannot be attributed to the properties of MI alone, and that they strongly depend on the inductive bias in both the choice of feature extractor architectures and the parametrization of the employed MI estimators. Finally, we establish a connection to deep metric learning and argue that this interpretation may be a plausible explanation for the success of the recently introduced methods.

We characterize the statistical efficiency of knowledge transfer through n samples from a teacher to a probabilistic student classifier with input space mathcal S over labels mathcal A. We show that privileged information at three progressive levels accelerates the transfer. At the first level, only samples with hard labels are known, via which the maximum likelihood estimator attains the minimax rate {|{mathcal S||{mathcal A}|}/{n}}. The second level has the teacher probabilities of sampled labels available in addition, which turns out to boost the convergence rate lower bound to {{|{mathcal S}||{mathcal A}|}/{n}}. However, under this second data acquisition protocol, minimizing a naive adaptation of the cross-entropy loss results in an asymptotically biased student. We overcome this limitation and achieve the fundamental limit by using a novel empirical variant of the squared error logit loss. The third level further equips the student with the soft labels (complete logits) on {mathcal A} given every sampled input, thereby provably enables the student to enjoy a rate {|{mathcal S}|}/{n} free of |{mathcal A}|. We find any Kullback-Leibler divergence minimizer to be optimal in the last case. Numerical simulations distinguish the four learners and corroborate our theory.

Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) is fragile in scenarios with insufficient labeled samples. A vanilla extension of ERM to unlabeled samples is Entropy Minimization (EntMin), which employs the soft-labels of unlabeled samples to guide their learning. However, EntMin emphasizes prediction discriminability while neglecting prediction diversity. To alleviate this issue, in this paper, we rethink the guidance information to utilize unlabeled samples. By analyzing the learning objective of ERM, we find that the guidance information for labeled samples in a specific category is the corresponding label encoding. Inspired by this finding, we propose a Label-Encoding Risk Minimization (LERM). It first estimates the label encodings through prediction means of unlabeled samples and then aligns them with their corresponding ground-truth label encodings. As a result, the LERM ensures both prediction discriminability and diversity, and it can be integrated into existing methods as a plugin. Theoretically, we analyze the relationships between LERM and ERM as well as EntMin. Empirically, we verify the superiority of the LERM under several label insufficient scenarios. The codes are available at https://github.com/zhangyl660/LERM.

Optimal Transport is a useful metric to compare probability distributions and to compute a pairing given a ground cost. Its entropic regularization variant (eOT) is crucial to have fast algorithms and reflect fuzzy/noisy matchings. This work focuses on Inverse Optimal Transport (iOT), the problem of inferring the ground cost from samples drawn from a coupling that solves an eOT problem. It is a relevant problem that can be used to infer unobserved/missing links, and to obtain meaningful information about the structure of the ground cost yielding the pairing. On one side, iOT benefits from convexity, but on the other side, being ill-posed, it requires regularization to handle the sampling noise. This work presents an in-depth theoretical study of the l1 regularization to model for instance Euclidean costs with sparse interactions between features. Specifically, we derive a sufficient condition for the robust recovery of the sparsity of the ground cost that can be seen as a far reaching generalization of the Lasso's celebrated Irrepresentability Condition. To provide additional insight into this condition, we work out in detail the Gaussian case. We show that as the entropic penalty varies, the iOT problem interpolates between a graphical Lasso and a classical Lasso, thereby establishing a connection between iOT and graph estimation, an important problem in ML.

Generalization bounds which assess the difference between the true risk and the empirical risk, have been studied extensively. However, to obtain bounds, current techniques use strict assumptions such as a uniformly bounded or a Lipschitz loss function. To avoid these assumptions, in this paper, we follow an alternative approach: we relax uniform bounds assumptions by using on-average bounded loss and on-average bounded gradient norm assumptions. Following this relaxation, we propose a new generalization bound that exploits the contractivity of the log-Sobolev inequalities. These inequalities add an additional loss-gradient norm term to the generalization bound, which is intuitively a surrogate of the model complexity. We apply the proposed bound on Bayesian deep nets and empirically analyze the effect of this new loss-gradient norm term on different neural architectures.

We study the problem of classification with a reject option for a fixed predictor, applicable in natural language processing. We introduce a new problem formulation for this scenario, and an algorithm minimizing a new surrogate loss function. We provide a complete theoretical analysis of the surrogate loss function with a strong H-consistency guarantee. For evaluation, we choose the decontextualization task, and provide a manually-labelled dataset of 2mathord,000 examples. Our algorithm significantly outperforms the baselines considered, with a sim!!25% improvement in coverage when halving the error rate, which is only sim!! 3 % away from the theoretical limit.

Mixture of experts (MoE) has a well-principled finite mixture model construction for prediction, allowing the gating network (mixture weights) to learn from the predictors (explanatory variables) together with the experts' network (mixture component densities). We investigate the estimation properties of MoEs in a high-dimensional setting, where the number of predictors is much larger than the sample size, for which the literature lacks computational and especially theoretical results. We consider the class of finite MoE models with softmax gating functions and Gaussian regression experts, and focus on the theoretical properties of their l_1-regularized estimation via the Lasso. We provide a lower bound on the regularization parameter of the Lasso penalty that ensures an l_1-oracle inequality is satisfied by the Lasso estimator according to the Kullback--Leibler loss. We further state an l_1-ball oracle inequality for the l_1-penalized maximum likelihood estimator from the model selection.

We introduce a Parametric Information Maximization (PIM) model for the Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) problem. Specifically, we propose a bi-level optimization formulation, which explores a parameterized family of objective functions, each evaluating a weighted mutual information between the features and the latent labels, subject to supervision constraints from the labeled samples. Our formulation mitigates the class-balance bias encoded in standard information maximization approaches, thereby handling effectively both short-tailed and long-tailed data sets. We report extensive experiments and comparisons demonstrating that our PIM model consistently sets new state-of-the-art performances in GCD across six different datasets, more so when dealing with challenging fine-grained problems.

While diffusion models excel at generating high-quality images, prior work reports a significant performance gap between diffusion and autoregressive (AR) methods in language modeling. In this work, we show that simple masked discrete diffusion is more performant than previously thought. We apply an effective training recipe that improves the performance of masked diffusion models and derive a simplified, Rao-Blackwellized objective that results in additional improvements. Our objective has a simple form -- it is a mixture of classical masked language modeling losses -- and can be used to train encoder-only language models that admit efficient samplers, including ones that can generate arbitrary lengths of text semi-autoregressively like a traditional language model. On language modeling benchmarks, a range of masked diffusion models trained with modern engineering practices achieves a new state-of-the-art among diffusion models, and approaches AR perplexity. We release our code at: https://github.com/kuleshov-group/mdlm

The mechanisms behind the success of multi-view self-supervised learning (MVSSL) are not yet fully understood. Contrastive MVSSL methods have been studied through the lens of InfoNCE, a lower bound of the Mutual Information (MI). However, the relation between other MVSSL methods and MI remains unclear. We consider a different lower bound on the MI consisting of an entropy and a reconstruction term (ER), and analyze the main MVSSL families through its lens. Through this ER bound, we show that clustering-based methods such as DeepCluster and SwAV maximize the MI. We also re-interpret the mechanisms of distillation-based approaches such as BYOL and DINO, showing that they explicitly maximize the reconstruction term and implicitly encourage a stable entropy, and we confirm this empirically. We show that replacing the objectives of common MVSSL methods with this ER bound achieves competitive performance, while making them stable when training with smaller batch sizes or smaller exponential moving average (EMA) coefficients. Github repo: https://github.com/apple/ml-entropy-reconstruction.

We provide new estimates of an asymptotic upper bound on the entropy of English using the large language model LLaMA-7B as a predictor for the next token given a window of past tokens. This estimate is significantly smaller than currently available estimates in cover1978convergent, lutati2023focus. A natural byproduct is an algorithm for lossless compression of English text which combines the prediction from the large language model with a lossless compression scheme. Preliminary results from limited experiments suggest that our scheme outperforms state-of-the-art text compression schemes such as BSC, ZPAQ, and paq8h.

It is widely believed that the implicit regularization of SGD is fundamental to the impressive generalization behavior we observe in neural networks. In this work, we demonstrate that non-stochastic full-batch training can achieve comparably strong performance to SGD on CIFAR-10 using modern architectures. To this end, we show that the implicit regularization of SGD can be completely replaced with explicit regularization even when comparing against a strong and well-researched baseline. Our observations indicate that the perceived difficulty of full-batch training may be the result of its optimization properties and the disproportionate time and effort spent by the ML community tuning optimizers and hyperparameters for small-batch training.

Random masks define surprisingly effective sparse neural network models, as has been shown empirically. The resulting sparse networks can often compete with dense architectures and state-of-the-art lottery ticket pruning algorithms, even though they do not rely on computationally expensive prune-train iterations and can be drawn initially without significant computational overhead. We offer a theoretical explanation of how random masks can approximate arbitrary target networks if they are wider by a logarithmic factor in the inverse sparsity 1 / log(1/sparsity). This overparameterization factor is necessary at least for 3-layer random networks, which elucidates the observed degrading performance of random networks at higher sparsity. At moderate to high sparsity levels, however, our results imply that sparser networks are contained within random source networks so that any dense-to-sparse training scheme can be turned into a computationally more efficient sparse-to-sparse one by constraining the search to a fixed random mask. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach in experiments for different pruning methods and propose particularly effective choices of initial layer-wise sparsity ratios of the random source network. As a special case, we show theoretically and experimentally that random source networks also contain strong lottery tickets.

Dense retrieval models use bi-encoder network architectures for learning query and document representations. These representations are often in the form of a vector representation and their similarities are often computed using the dot product function. In this paper, we propose a new representation learning framework for dense retrieval. Instead of learning a vector for each query and document, our framework learns a multivariate distribution and uses negative multivariate KL divergence to compute the similarity between distributions. For simplicity and efficiency reasons, we assume that the distributions are multivariate normals and then train large language models to produce mean and variance vectors for these distributions. We provide a theoretical foundation for the proposed framework and show that it can be seamlessly integrated into the existing approximate nearest neighbor algorithms to perform retrieval efficiently. We conduct an extensive suite of experiments on a wide range of datasets, and demonstrate significant improvements compared to competitive dense retrieval models.

Proximal operators are ubiquitous in inverse problems, commonly appearing as part of algorithmic strategies to regularize problems that are otherwise ill-posed. Modern deep learning models have been brought to bear for these tasks too, as in the framework of plug-and-play or deep unrolling, where they loosely resemble proximal operators. Yet, something essential is lost in employing these purely data-driven approaches: there is no guarantee that a general deep network represents the proximal operator of any function, nor is there any characterization of the function for which the network might provide some approximate proximal. This not only makes guaranteeing convergence of iterative schemes challenging but, more fundamentally, complicates the analysis of what has been learned by these networks about their training data. Herein we provide a framework to develop learned proximal networks (LPN), prove that they provide exact proximal operators for a data-driven nonconvex regularizer, and show how a new training strategy, dubbed proximal matching, provably promotes the recovery of the log-prior of the true data distribution. Such LPN provide general, unsupervised, expressive proximal operators that can be used for general inverse problems with convergence guarantees. We illustrate our results in a series of cases of increasing complexity, demonstrating that these models not only result in state-of-the-art performance, but provide a window into the resulting priors learned from data.

There are two widely known issues with properly training Recurrent Neural Networks, the vanishing and the exploding gradient problems detailed in Bengio et al. (1994). In this paper we attempt to improve the understanding of the underlying issues by exploring these problems from an analytical, a geometric and a dynamical systems perspective. Our analysis is used to justify a simple yet effective solution. We propose a gradient norm clipping strategy to deal with exploding gradients and a soft constraint for the vanishing gradients problem. We validate empirically our hypothesis and proposed solutions in the experimental section.

We tackle the problem of novel class discovery, which aims to learn novel classes without supervision based on labeled data from known classes. A key challenge lies in transferring the knowledge in the known-class data to the learning of novel classes. Previous methods mainly focus on building a shared representation space for knowledge transfer and often ignore modeling class relations. To address this, we introduce a class relation representation for the novel classes based on the predicted class distribution of a model trained on known classes. Empirically, we find that such class relation becomes less informative during typical discovery training. To prevent such information loss, we propose a novel knowledge distillation framework, which utilizes our class-relation representation to regularize the learning of novel classes. In addition, to enable a flexible knowledge distillation scheme for each data point in novel classes, we develop a learnable weighting function for the regularization, which adaptively promotes knowledge transfer based on the semantic similarity between the novel and known classes. To validate the effectiveness and generalization of our method, we conduct extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks, including CIFAR100, Stanford Cars, CUB, and FGVC-Aircraft datasets. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin on almost all benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/kleinzcy/Cr-KD-NCD{here}.

Hyperparameter optimization can be formulated as a bilevel optimization problem, where the optimal parameters on the training set depend on the hyperparameters. We aim to adapt regularization hyperparameters for neural networks by fitting compact approximations to the best-response function, which maps hyperparameters to optimal weights and biases. We show how to construct scalable best-response approximations for neural networks by modeling the best-response as a single network whose hidden units are gated conditionally on the regularizer. We justify this approximation by showing the exact best-response for a shallow linear network with L2-regularized Jacobian can be represented by a similar gating mechanism. We fit this model using a gradient-based hyperparameter optimization algorithm which alternates between approximating the best-response around the current hyperparameters and optimizing the hyperparameters using the approximate best-response function. Unlike other gradient-based approaches, we do not require differentiating the training loss with respect to the hyperparameters, allowing us to tune discrete hyperparameters, data augmentation hyperparameters, and dropout probabilities. Because the hyperparameters are adapted online, our approach discovers hyperparameter schedules that can outperform fixed hyperparameter values. Empirically, our approach outperforms competing hyperparameter optimization methods on large-scale deep learning problems. We call our networks, which update their own hyperparameters online during training, Self-Tuning Networks (STNs).

Pruning is a model compression method that removes redundant parameters in deep neural networks (DNNs) while maintaining accuracy. Most available filter pruning methods require complex treatments such as iterative pruning, features statistics/ranking, or additional optimization designs in the training process. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective regularization strategy from a new perspective of evolution of features, which we call feature flow regularization (FFR), for improving structured sparsity and filter pruning in DNNs. Specifically, FFR imposes controls on the gradient and curvature of feature flow along the neural network, which implicitly increases the sparsity of the parameters. The principle behind FFR is that coherent and smooth evolution of features will lead to an efficient network that avoids redundant parameters. The high structured sparsity obtained from FFR enables us to prune filters effectively. Experiments with VGGNets, ResNets on CIFAR-10/100, and Tiny ImageNet datasets demonstrate that FFR can significantly improve both unstructured and structured sparsity. Our pruning results in terms of reduction of parameters and FLOPs are comparable to or even better than those of state-of-the-art pruning methods.

We establish a new theoretical framework for learning under multi-class, instance-dependent label noise. This framework casts learning with label noise as a form of domain adaptation, in particular, domain adaptation under posterior drift. We introduce the concept of relative signal strength (RSS), a pointwise measure that quantifies the transferability from noisy to clean posterior. Using RSS, we establish nearly matching upper and lower bounds on the excess risk. Our theoretical findings support the simple Noise Ignorant Empirical Risk Minimization (NI-ERM) principle, which minimizes empirical risk while ignoring label noise. Finally, we translate this theoretical insight into practice: by using NI-ERM to fit a linear classifier on top of a self-supervised feature extractor, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on the CIFAR-N data challenge.

Representations learned via self-supervised learning (SSL) can be susceptible to dimensional collapse, where the learned representation subspace is of extremely low dimensionality and thus fails to represent the full data distribution and modalities. Dimensional collapse also known as the "underfilling" phenomenon is one of the major causes of degraded performance on downstream tasks. Previous work has investigated the dimensional collapse problem of SSL at a global level. In this paper, we demonstrate that representations can span over high dimensional space globally, but collapse locally. To address this, we propose a method called local dimensionality regularization (LDReg). Our formulation is based on the derivation of the Fisher-Rao metric to compare and optimize local distance distributions at an asymptotically small radius for each data point. By increasing the local intrinsic dimensionality, we demonstrate through a range of experiments that LDReg improves the representation quality of SSL. The results also show that LDReg can regularize dimensionality at both local and global levels.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing, extending their strong capabilities into multi-modal domains. Thus, it is vital to define proper and diversified metrics for the evaluation of LLMs. In this paper, we introduce matrix entropy, a novel metric rooted in information theory and geometry principles to quantify the data compression proficiency in LLMs. It reflects the model's ability to extract relevant information and eliminate unnecessary elements, thereby providing insight into the language model's intrinsic capability. Specifically, we demonstrate its applicability in both single-modal (language) and multi-modal settings. For language models, our findings reveal that the matrix entropy of representations follows a scaling law type reduction when the model scales up, serving as a complement to the traditional loss scaling law. For the multi-modal setting, we also propose an evaluation method based on matrix entropy for assessing alignment quality and we find that modern large multi-modal models exhibit great alignment performance.

We analyze continual learning on a sequence of separable linear classification tasks with binary labels. We show theoretically that learning with weak regularization reduces to solving a sequential max-margin problem, corresponding to a special case of the Projection Onto Convex Sets (POCS) framework. We then develop upper bounds on the forgetting and other quantities of interest under various settings with recurring tasks, including cyclic and random orderings of tasks. We discuss several practical implications to popular training practices like regularization scheduling and weighting. We point out several theoretical differences between our continual classification setting and a recently studied continual regression setting.

The presence of distribution shifts poses a significant challenge for deploying modern machine learning models in real-world applications. This work focuses on the target shift problem in a regression setting (Zhang et al., 2013; Nguyen et al., 2016). More specifically, the target variable y (also known as the response variable), which is continuous, has different marginal distributions in the training source and testing domain, while the conditional distribution of features x given y remains the same. While most literature focuses on classification tasks with finite target space, the regression problem has an infinite dimensional target space, which makes many of the existing methods inapplicable. In this work, we show that the continuous target shift problem can be addressed by estimating the importance weight function from an ill-posed integral equation. We propose a nonparametric regularized approach named ReTaSA to solve the ill-posed integral equation and provide theoretical justification for the estimated importance weight function. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been demonstrated with extensive numerical studies on synthetic and real-world datasets.

Recent advances in maximizing mutual information (MI) between the source and target have demonstrated its effectiveness in text generation. However, previous works paid little attention to modeling the backward network of MI (i.e., dependency from the target to the source), which is crucial to the tightness of the variational information maximization lower bound. In this paper, we propose Adversarial Mutual Information (AMI): a text generation framework which is formed as a novel saddle point (min-max) optimization aiming to identify joint interactions between the source and target. Within this framework, the forward and backward networks are able to iteratively promote or demote each other's generated instances by comparing the real and synthetic data distributions. We also develop a latent noise sampling strategy that leverages random variations at the high-level semantic space to enhance the long term dependency in the generation process. Extensive experiments based on different text generation tasks demonstrate that the proposed AMI framework can significantly outperform several strong baselines, and we also show that AMI has potential to lead to a tighter lower bound of maximum mutual information for the variational information maximization problem.

Variational approaches based on neural networks are showing promise for estimating mutual information (MI) between high dimensional variables. However, they can be difficult to use in practice due to poorly understood bias/variance tradeoffs. We theoretically show that, under some conditions, estimators such as MINE exhibit variance that could grow exponentially with the true amount of underlying MI. We also empirically demonstrate that existing estimators fail to satisfy basic self-consistency properties of MI, such as data processing and additivity under independence. Based on a unified perspective of variational approaches, we develop a new estimator that focuses on variance reduction. Empirical results on standard benchmark tasks demonstrate that our proposed estimator exhibits improved bias-variance trade-offs on standard benchmark tasks.

Deep metric learning has been widely applied in many computer vision tasks, and recently, it is more attractive in zero-shot image retrieval and clustering(ZSRC) where a good embedding is requested such that the unseen classes can be distinguished well. Most existing works deem this 'good' embedding just to be the discriminative one and thus race to devise powerful metric objectives or hard-sample mining strategies for leaning discriminative embedding. However, in this paper, we first emphasize that the generalization ability is a core ingredient of this 'good' embedding as well and largely affects the metric performance in zero-shot settings as a matter of fact. Then, we propose the Energy Confused Adversarial Metric Learning(ECAML) framework to explicitly optimize a robust metric. It is mainly achieved by introducing an interesting Energy Confusion regularization term, which daringly breaks away from the traditional metric learning idea of discriminative objective devising, and seeks to 'confuse' the learned model so as to encourage its generalization ability by reducing overfitting on the seen classes. We train this confusion term together with the conventional metric objective in an adversarial manner. Although it seems weird to 'confuse' the network, we show that our ECAML indeed serves as an efficient regularization technique for metric learning and is applicable to various conventional metric methods. This paper empirically and experimentally demonstrates the importance of learning embedding with good generalization, achieving state-of-the-art performances on the popular CUB, CARS, Stanford Online Products and In-Shop datasets for ZSRC tasks. \textcolor[rgb]{1, 0, 0}{Code available at http://www.bhchen.cn/}.

This paper investigates the distinctions between gradient methods applied to non-differentiable functions (NGDMs) and classical gradient descents (GDs) designed for differentiable functions. First, we demonstrate significant differences in the convergence properties of NGDMs compared to GDs, challenging the applicability of the extensive neural network convergence literature based on L-smoothness to non-smooth neural networks. Next, we demonstrate the paradoxical nature of NGDM solutions for L_{1}-regularized problems, showing that increasing the regularization penalty leads to an increase in the L_{1} norm of optimal solutions in NGDMs. Consequently, we show that widely adopted L_{1} penalization-based techniques for network pruning do not yield expected results. Finally, we explore the Edge of Stability phenomenon, indicating its inapplicability even to Lipschitz continuous convex differentiable functions, leaving its relevance to non-convex non-differentiable neural networks inconclusive. Our analysis exposes misguided interpretations of NGDMs in widely referenced papers and texts due to an overreliance on strong smoothness assumptions, emphasizing the necessity for a nuanced understanding of foundational assumptions in the analysis of these systems.

Given the success of Large Language Models (LLMs), there has been considerable interest in studying the properties of model activations. The literature overwhelmingly agrees that LLM representations are dominated by a few ``outlier dimensions'' with exceedingly high variance and magnitude. Several studies in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have sought to mitigate the impact of such outlier dimensions and force LLMs to be isotropic (i.e., have uniform variance across all dimensions in embedding space). Isotropy is thought to be a desirable property for LLMs that improves model performance and more closely aligns textual representations with human intuition. However, many of the claims regarding isotropy in NLP have been based on the average cosine similarity of embeddings, which has recently been shown to be a flawed measure of isotropy. In this paper, we propose I-STAR: IsoScore*-based STable Anisotropic Regularization, a novel regularization method that can be used to increase or decrease levels of isotropy in embedding space during training. I-STAR uses IsoScore*, the first accurate measure of isotropy that is both differentiable and stable on mini-batch computations. In contrast to several previous works, we find that decreasing isotropy in contextualized embeddings improves performance on the majority of tasks and models considered in this paper.

Prompt tuning and adapter tuning have shown great potential in transferring pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) to various downstream tasks. In this work, we design a new type of tuning method, termed as regularized mask tuning, which masks the network parameters through a learnable selection. Inspired by neural pathways, we argue that the knowledge required by a downstream task already exists in the pre-trained weights but just gets concealed in the upstream pre-training stage. To bring the useful knowledge back into light, we first identify a set of parameters that are important to a given downstream task, then attach a binary mask to each parameter, and finally optimize these masks on the downstream data with the parameters frozen. When updating the mask, we introduce a novel gradient dropout strategy to regularize the parameter selection, in order to prevent the model from forgetting old knowledge and overfitting the downstream data. Experimental results on 11 datasets demonstrate the consistent superiority of our method over previous alternatives. It is noteworthy that we manage to deliver 18.73% performance improvement compared to the zero-shot CLIP via masking an average of only 2.56% parameters. Furthermore, our method is synergistic with most existing parameter-efficient tuning methods and can boost the performance on top of them. Project page can be found here (https://wuw2019.github.io/R-AMT/).

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown compelling results in various tasks and applications in recent years. However, mode collapse remains a critical problem in GANs. In this paper, we propose a novel training pipeline to address the mode collapse issue of GANs. Different from existing methods, we propose to generalize the discriminator as feature embedding and maximize the entropy of distributions in the embedding space learned by the discriminator. Specifically, two regularization terms, i.e., Deep Local Linear Embedding (DLLE) and Deep Isometric feature Mapping (DIsoMap), are designed to encourage the discriminator to learn the structural information embedded in the data, such that the embedding space learned by the discriminator can be well-formed. Based on the well-learned embedding space supported by the discriminator, a non-parametric entropy estimator is designed to efficiently maximize the entropy of embedding vectors, playing as an approximation of maximizing the entropy of the generated distribution. By improving the discriminator and maximizing the distance of the most similar samples in the embedding space, our pipeline effectively reduces the mode collapse without sacrificing the quality of generated samples. Extensive experimental results show the effectiveness of our method, which outperforms the GAN baseline, MaF-GAN on CelebA (9.13 vs. 12.43 in FID) and surpasses the recent state-of-the-art energy-based model on the ANIME-FACE dataset (2.80 vs. 2.26 in Inception score). The code is available at https://github.com/HaozheLiu-ST/MEE

Image clustering is one of the most important computer vision applications, which has been extensively studied in literature. However, current clustering methods mostly suffer from lack of efficiency and scalability when dealing with large-scale and high-dimensional data. In this paper, we propose a new clustering model, called DEeP Embedded RegularIzed ClusTering (DEPICT), which efficiently maps data into a discriminative embedding subspace and precisely predicts cluster assignments. DEPICT generally consists of a multinomial logistic regression function stacked on top of a multi-layer convolutional autoencoder. We define a clustering objective function using relative entropy (KL divergence) minimization, regularized by a prior for the frequency of cluster assignments. An alternating strategy is then derived to optimize the objective by updating parameters and estimating cluster assignments. Furthermore, we employ the reconstruction loss functions in our autoencoder, as a data-dependent regularization term, to prevent the deep embedding function from overfitting. In order to benefit from end-to-end optimization and eliminate the necessity for layer-wise pretraining, we introduce a joint learning framework to minimize the unified clustering and reconstruction loss functions together and train all network layers simultaneously. Experimental results indicate the superiority and faster running time of DEPICT in real-world clustering tasks, where no labeled data is available for hyper-parameter tuning.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong general language capabilities. However, fine-tuning these models on domain-specific tasks often leads to catastrophic forgetting, where the model overwrites or loses essential knowledge acquired during pretraining. This phenomenon significantly limits the broader applicability of LLMs. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach to compute the element-wise importance of model parameters crucial for preserving general knowledge during fine-tuning. Our method utilizes a dual-objective optimization strategy: (1) regularization loss based on element-wise parameter importance, which constrains the updates to parameters crucial for general knowledge; (2) cross-entropy loss to adapt to domain-specific tasks. Additionally, we introduce layer-wise coefficients to account for the varying contributions of different layers, dynamically balancing the dual-objective optimization. Extensive experiments on scientific, medical, and physical tasks using GPT-J and LLaMA-3 demonstrate that our approach mitigates catastrophic forgetting while enhancing model adaptability. Compared to previous methods, our solution is approximately 20 times faster and requires only 10-15% of the storage, highlighting the practical efficiency. The code will be released.

Gradient regularization (GR) is a method that penalizes the gradient norm of the training loss during training. While some studies have reported that GR can improve generalization performance, little attention has been paid to it from the algorithmic perspective, that is, the algorithms of GR that efficiently improve the performance. In this study, we first reveal that a specific finite-difference computation, composed of both gradient ascent and descent steps, reduces the computational cost of GR. Next, we show that the finite-difference computation also works better in the sense of generalization performance. We theoretically analyze a solvable model, a diagonal linear network, and clarify that GR has a desirable implicit bias to so-called rich regime and finite-difference computation strengthens this bias. Furthermore, finite-difference GR is closely related to some other algorithms based on iterative ascent and descent steps for exploring flat minima. In particular, we reveal that the flooding method can perform finite-difference GR in an implicit way. Thus, this work broadens our understanding of GR for both practice and theory.

We identify and formalize a fundamental gradient descent phenomenon resulting in a learning proclivity in over-parameterized neural networks. Gradient Starvation arises when cross-entropy loss is minimized by capturing only a subset of features relevant for the task, despite the presence of other predictive features that fail to be discovered. This work provides a theoretical explanation for the emergence of such feature imbalance in neural networks. Using tools from Dynamical Systems theory, we identify simple properties of learning dynamics during gradient descent that lead to this imbalance, and prove that such a situation can be expected given certain statistical structure in training data. Based on our proposed formalism, we develop guarantees for a novel regularization method aimed at decoupling feature learning dynamics, improving accuracy and robustness in cases hindered by gradient starvation. We illustrate our findings with simple and real-world out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization experiments.

In this work we present a new method for the estimation of Mutual Information (MI) between random variables. Our approach is based on an original interpretation of the Girsanov theorem, which allows us to use score-based diffusion models to estimate the Kullback Leibler divergence between two densities as a difference between their score functions. As a by-product, our method also enables the estimation of the entropy of random variables. Armed with such building blocks, we present a general recipe to measure MI, which unfolds in two directions: one uses conditional diffusion process, whereas the other uses joint diffusion processes that allow simultaneous modelling of two random variables. Our results, which derive from a thorough experimental protocol over all the variants of our approach, indicate that our method is more accurate than the main alternatives from the literature, especially for challenging distributions. Furthermore, our methods pass MI self-consistency tests, including data processing and additivity under independence, which instead are a pain-point of existing methods.

In this work, we present a variety of novel information-theoretic generalization bounds for learning algorithms, from the supersample setting of Steinke & Zakynthinou (2020)-the setting of the "conditional mutual information" framework. Our development exploits projecting the loss pair (obtained from a training instance and a testing instance) down to a single number and correlating loss values with a Rademacher sequence (and its shifted variants). The presented bounds include square-root bounds, fast-rate bounds, including those based on variance and sharpness, and bounds for interpolating algorithms etc. We show theoretically or empirically that these bounds are tighter than all information-theoretic bounds known to date on the same supersample setting.

We address the problem of network calibration adjusting miscalibrated confidences of deep neural networks. Many approaches to network calibration adopt a regularization-based method that exploits a regularization term to smooth the miscalibrated confidences. Although these approaches have shown the effectiveness on calibrating the networks, there is still a lack of understanding on the underlying principles of regularization in terms of network calibration. We present in this paper an in-depth analysis of existing regularization-based methods, providing a better understanding on how they affect to network calibration. Specifically, we have observed that 1) the regularization-based methods can be interpreted as variants of label smoothing, and 2) they do not always behave desirably. Based on the analysis, we introduce a novel loss function, dubbed ACLS, that unifies the merits of existing regularization methods, while avoiding the limitations. We show extensive experimental results for image classification and semantic segmentation on standard benchmarks, including CIFAR10, Tiny-ImageNet, ImageNet, and PASCAL VOC, demonstrating the effectiveness of our loss function.

Parameter regularization or allocation methods are effective in overcoming catastrophic forgetting in lifelong learning. However, they solve all tasks in a sequence uniformly and ignore the differences in the learning difficulty of different tasks. So parameter regularization methods face significant forgetting when learning a new task very different from learned tasks, and parameter allocation methods face unnecessary parameter overhead when learning simple tasks. In this paper, we propose the Parameter Allocation & Regularization (PAR), which adaptively select an appropriate strategy for each task from parameter allocation and regularization based on its learning difficulty. A task is easy for a model that has learned tasks related to it and vice versa. We propose a divergence estimation method based on the Nearest-Prototype distance to measure the task relatedness using only features of the new task. Moreover, we propose a time-efficient relatedness-aware sampling-based architecture search strategy to reduce the parameter overhead for allocation. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that, compared with SOTAs, our method is scalable and significantly reduces the model's redundancy while improving the model's performance. Further qualitative analysis indicates that PAR obtains reasonable task-relatedness.

Dual encoders perform retrieval by encoding documents and queries into dense lowdimensional vectors, scoring each document by its inner product with the query. We investigate the capacity of this architecture relative to sparse bag-of-words models and attentional neural networks. Using both theoretical and empirical analysis, we establish connections between the encoding dimension, the margin between gold and lower-ranked documents, and the document length, suggesting limitations in the capacity of fixed-length encodings to support precise retrieval of long documents. Building on these insights, we propose a simple neural model that combines the efficiency of dual encoders with some of the expressiveness of more costly attentional architectures, and explore sparse-dense hybrids to capitalize on the precision of sparse retrieval. These models outperform strong alternatives in large-scale retrieval.

The Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM) principle was first proposed by Arjovsky et al. [2019] to address the domain generalization problem by leveraging data heterogeneity from differing experimental conditions. Specifically, IRM seeks to find a data representation under which an optimal classifier remains invariant across all domains. Despite the conceptual appeal of IRM, the effectiveness of the originally proposed invariance penalty has recently been brought into question. In particular, there exists counterexamples for which that invariance penalty can be arbitrarily small for non-invariant data representations. We propose an alternative invariance penalty by revisiting the Gramian matrix of the data representation. We discuss the role of its eigenvalues in the relationship between the risk and the invariance penalty, and demonstrate that it is ill-conditioned for said counterexamples. The proposed approach is guaranteed to recover an invariant representation for linear settings under mild non-degeneracy conditions. Its effectiveness is substantiated by experiments on DomainBed and InvarianceUnitTest, two extensive test beds for domain generalization.

Masked (or absorbing) diffusion is actively explored as an alternative to autoregressive models for generative modeling of discrete data. However, existing work in this area has been hindered by unnecessarily complex model formulations and unclear relationships between different perspectives, leading to suboptimal parameterization, training objectives, and ad hoc adjustments to counteract these issues. In this work, we aim to provide a simple and general framework that unlocks the full potential of masked diffusion models. We show that the continuous-time variational objective of masked diffusion models is a simple weighted integral of cross-entropy losses. Our framework also enables training generalized masked diffusion models with state-dependent masking schedules. When evaluated by perplexity, our models trained on OpenWebText surpass prior diffusion language models at GPT-2 scale and demonstrate superior performance on 4 out of 5 zero-shot language modeling tasks. Furthermore, our models vastly outperform previous discrete diffusion models on pixel-level image modeling, achieving 2.78~(CIFAR-10) and 3.42 (ImageNet 64times64) bits per dimension that are comparable or better than autoregressive models of similar sizes.

Computing the optimal transport distance between statistical distributions is a fundamental task in machine learning. One remarkable recent advancement is entropic regularization and the Sinkhorn algorithm, which utilizes only matrix scaling and guarantees an approximated solution with near-linear runtime. Despite the success of the Sinkhorn algorithm, its runtime may still be slow due to the potentially large number of iterations needed for convergence. To achieve possibly super-exponential convergence, we present Sinkhorn-Newton-Sparse (SNS), an extension to the Sinkhorn algorithm, by introducing early stopping for the matrix scaling steps and a second stage featuring a Newton-type subroutine. Adopting the variational viewpoint that the Sinkhorn algorithm maximizes a concave Lyapunov potential, we offer the insight that the Hessian matrix of the potential function is approximately sparse. Sparsification of the Hessian results in a fast O(n^2) per-iteration complexity, the same as the Sinkhorn algorithm. In terms of total iteration count, we observe that the SNS algorithm converges orders of magnitude faster across a wide range of practical cases, including optimal transportation between empirical distributions and calculating the Wasserstein W_1, W_2 distance of discretized densities. The empirical performance is corroborated by a rigorous bound on the approximate sparsity of the Hessian matrix.

Despite apparent human-level performances of deep neural networks (DNN), they behave fundamentally differently from humans. They easily change predictions when small corruptions such as blur and noise are applied on the input (lack of robustness), and they often produce confident predictions on out-of-distribution samples (improper uncertainty measure). While a number of researches have aimed to address those issues, proposed solutions are typically expensive and complicated (e.g. Bayesian inference and adversarial training). Meanwhile, many simple and cheap regularization methods have been developed to enhance the generalization of classifiers. Such regularization methods have largely been overlooked as baselines for addressing the robustness and uncertainty issues, as they are not specifically designed for that. In this paper, we provide extensive empirical evaluations on the robustness and uncertainty estimates of image classifiers (CIFAR-100 and ImageNet) trained with state-of-the-art regularization methods. Furthermore, experimental results show that certain regularization methods can serve as strong baseline methods for robustness and uncertainty estimation of DNNs.

It is impossible today to pretend that the practice of machine learning is compatible with the idea that training and testing data follow the same distribution. Several authors have recently used ensemble techniques to show how scenarios involving multiple data distributions are best served by representations that are both richer than those obtained by regularizing for the best in-distribution performance, and richer than those obtained under the influence of the implicit sparsity bias of common stochastic gradient procedures. This contribution investigates the use of very high dropout rates instead of ensembles to obtain such rich representations. Although training a deep network from scratch using such dropout rates is virtually impossible, fine-tuning a large pre-trained model under such conditions is not only possible but also achieves out-of-distribution performances that exceed those of both ensembles and weight averaging methods such as model soups. This result has practical significance because the importance of the fine-tuning scenario has considerably grown in recent years. This result also provides interesting insights on the nature of rich representations and on the intrinsically linear nature of fine-tuning a large network using a comparatively small dataset.

Neural retrievers based on dense representations combined with Approximate Nearest Neighbors search have recently received a lot of attention, owing their success to distillation and/or better sampling of examples for training -- while still relying on the same backbone architecture. In the meantime, sparse representation learning fueled by traditional inverted indexing techniques has seen a growing interest, inheriting from desirable IR priors such as explicit lexical matching. While some architectural variants have been proposed, a lesser effort has been put in the training of such models. In this work, we build on SPLADE -- a sparse expansion-based retriever -- and show to which extent it is able to benefit from the same training improvements as dense models, by studying the effect of distillation, hard-negative mining as well as the Pre-trained Language Model initialization. We furthermore study the link between effectiveness and efficiency, on in-domain and zero-shot settings, leading to state-of-the-art results in both scenarios for sufficiently expressive models.

Understanding geometric properties of natural language processing models' latent spaces allows the manipulation of these properties for improved performance on downstream tasks. One such property is the amount of data spread in a model's latent space, or how fully the available latent space is being used. In this work, we define data spread and demonstrate that the commonly used measures of data spread, Average Cosine Similarity and a partition function min/max ratio I(V), do not provide reliable metrics to compare the use of latent space across models. We propose and examine eight alternative measures of data spread, all but one of which improve over these current metrics when applied to seven synthetic data distributions. Of our proposed measures, we recommend one principal component-based measure and one entropy-based measure that provide reliable, relative measures of spread and can be used to compare models of different sizes and dimensionalities.

In disentangled representation learning, a model is asked to tease apart a dataset's underlying sources of variation and represent them independently of one another. Since the model is provided with no ground truth information about these sources, inductive biases take a paramount role in enabling disentanglement. In this work, we construct an inductive bias towards encoding to and decoding from an organized latent space. Concretely, we do this by (i) quantizing the latent space into discrete code vectors with a separate learnable scalar codebook per dimension and (ii) applying strong model regularization via an unusually high weight decay. Intuitively, the latent space design forces the encoder to combinatorially construct codes from a small number of distinct scalar values, which in turn enables the decoder to assign a consistent meaning to each value. Regularization then serves to drive the model towards this parsimonious strategy. We demonstrate the broad applicability of this approach by adding it to both basic data-reconstructing (vanilla autoencoder) and latent-reconstructing (InfoGAN) generative models. For reliable evaluation, we also propose InfoMEC, a new set of metrics for disentanglement that is cohesively grounded in information theory and fixes well-established shortcomings in previous metrics. Together with regularization, latent quantization dramatically improves the modularity and explicitness of learned representations on a representative suite of benchmark datasets. In particular, our quantized-latent autoencoder (QLAE) consistently outperforms strong methods from prior work in these key disentanglement properties without compromising data reconstruction.

Feature selection is the problem of selecting a subset of features for a machine learning model that maximizes model quality subject to a budget constraint. For neural networks, prior methods, including those based on ell_1 regularization, attention, and other techniques, typically select the entire feature subset in one evaluation round, ignoring the residual value of features during selection, i.e., the marginal contribution of a feature given that other features have already been selected. We propose a feature selection algorithm called Sequential Attention that achieves state-of-the-art empirical results for neural networks. This algorithm is based on an efficient one-pass implementation of greedy forward selection and uses attention weights at each step as a proxy for feature importance. We give theoretical insights into our algorithm for linear regression by showing that an adaptation to this setting is equivalent to the classical Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) algorithm, and thus inherits all of its provable guarantees. Our theoretical and empirical analyses offer new explanations towards the effectiveness of attention and its connections to overparameterization, which may be of independent interest.

What do auto-encoders learn about the underlying data generating distribution? Recent work suggests that some auto-encoder variants do a good job of capturing the local manifold structure of data. This paper clarifies some of these previous observations by showing that minimizing a particular form of regularized reconstruction error yields a reconstruction function that locally characterizes the shape of the data generating density. We show that the auto-encoder captures the score (derivative of the log-density with respect to the input). It contradicts previous interpretations of reconstruction error as an energy function. Unlike previous results, the theorems provided here are completely generic and do not depend on the parametrization of the auto-encoder: they show what the auto-encoder would tend to if given enough capacity and examples. These results are for a contractive training criterion we show to be similar to the denoising auto-encoder training criterion with small corruption noise, but with contraction applied on the whole reconstruction function rather than just encoder. Similarly to score matching, one can consider the proposed training criterion as a convenient alternative to maximum likelihood because it does not involve a partition function. Finally, we show how an approximate Metropolis-Hastings MCMC can be setup to recover samples from the estimated distribution, and this is confirmed in sampling experiments.

We propose a novel neural algorithm for the fundamental problem of computing the entropic optimal transport (EOT) plan between continuous probability distributions which are accessible by samples. Our algorithm is based on the saddle point reformulation of the dynamic version of EOT which is known as the Schr\"odinger Bridge problem. In contrast to the prior methods for large-scale EOT, our algorithm is end-to-end and consists of a single learning step, has fast inference procedure, and allows handling small values of the entropy regularization coefficient which is of particular importance in some applied problems. Empirically, we show the performance of the method on several large-scale EOT tasks. https://github.com/ngushchin/EntropicNeuralOptimalTransport

Pruning methods have recently grown in popularity as an effective way to reduce the size and computational complexity of deep neural networks. Large numbers of parameters can be removed from trained models with little discernible loss in accuracy after a small number of continued training epochs. However, pruning too many parameters at once often causes an initial steep drop in accuracy which can undermine convergence quality. Iterative pruning approaches mitigate this by gradually removing a small number of parameters over multiple epochs. However, this can still lead to subnetworks that overfit local regions of the loss landscape. We introduce a novel and effective approach to tuning subnetworks through a regularization technique we call Stochastic Subnetwork Annealing. Instead of removing parameters in a discrete manner, we instead represent subnetworks with stochastic masks where each parameter has a probabilistic chance of being included or excluded on any given forward pass. We anneal these probabilities over time such that subnetwork structure slowly evolves as mask values become more deterministic, allowing for a smoother and more robust optimization of subnetworks at high levels of sparsity.

We introduce a parametric nonlinear transformation that is well-suited for Gaussianizing data from natural images. The data are linearly transformed, and each component is then normalized by a pooled activity measure, computed by exponentiating a weighted sum of rectified and exponentiated components and a constant. We optimize the parameters of the full transformation (linear transform, exponents, weights, constant) over a database of natural images, directly minimizing the negentropy of the responses. The optimized transformation substantially Gaussianizes the data, achieving a significantly smaller mutual information between transformed components than alternative methods including ICA and radial Gaussianization. The transformation is differentiable and can be efficiently inverted, and thus induces a density model on images. We show that samples of this model are visually similar to samples of natural image patches. We demonstrate the use of the model as a prior probability density that can be used to remove additive noise. Finally, we show that the transformation can be cascaded, with each layer optimized using the same Gaussianization objective, thus offering an unsupervised method of optimizing a deep network architecture.

Although diffusion models (DMs) have shown promising performances in a number of tasks (e.g., speech synthesis and image generation), they might suffer from error propagation because of their sequential structure. However, this is not certain because some sequential models, such as Conditional Random Field (CRF), are free from this problem. To address this issue, we develop a theoretical framework to mathematically formulate error propagation in the architecture of DMs, The framework contains three elements, including modular error, cumulative error, and propagation equation. The modular and cumulative errors are related by the equation, which interprets that DMs are indeed affected by error propagation. Our theoretical study also suggests that the cumulative error is closely related to the generation quality of DMs. Based on this finding, we apply the cumulative error as a regularization term to reduce error propagation. Because the term is computationally intractable, we derive its upper bound and design a bootstrap algorithm to efficiently estimate the bound for optimization. We have conducted extensive experiments on multiple image datasets, showing that our proposed regularization reduces error propagation, significantly improves vanilla DMs, and outperforms previous baselines.

Existing losses used in deep metric learning (DML) for image retrieval often lead to highly non-uniform intra-class and inter-class representation structures across test classes and data distributions. When combined with the common practice of using a fixed threshold to declare a match, this gives rise to significant performance variations in terms of false accept rate (FAR) and false reject rate (FRR) across test classes and data distributions. We define this issue in DML as threshold inconsistency. In real-world applications, such inconsistency often complicates the threshold selection process when deploying commercial image retrieval systems. To measure this inconsistency, we propose a novel variance-based metric called Operating-Point-Inconsistency-Score (OPIS) that quantifies the variance in the operating characteristics across classes. Using the OPIS metric, we find that achieving high accuracy levels in a DML model does not automatically guarantee threshold consistency. In fact, our investigation reveals a Pareto frontier in the high-accuracy regime, where existing methods to improve accuracy often lead to degradation in threshold consistency. To address this trade-off, we introduce the Threshold-Consistent Margin (TCM) loss, a simple yet effective regularization technique that promotes uniformity in representation structures across classes by selectively penalizing hard sample pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate TCM's effectiveness in enhancing threshold consistency while preserving accuracy, simplifying the threshold selection process in practical DML settings.

Topic models have been prevalent for decades with various applications. However, existing topic models commonly suffer from the notorious topic collapsing: discovered topics semantically collapse towards each other, leading to highly repetitive topics, insufficient topic discovery, and damaged model interpretability. In this paper, we propose a new neural topic model, Embedding Clustering Regularization Topic Model (ECRTM). Besides the existing reconstruction error, we propose a novel Embedding Clustering Regularization (ECR), which forces each topic embedding to be the center of a separately aggregated word embedding cluster in the semantic space. This enables each produced topic to contain distinct word semantics, which alleviates topic collapsing. Regularized by ECR, our ECRTM generates diverse and coherent topics together with high-quality topic distributions of documents. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that ECRTM effectively addresses the topic collapsing issue and consistently surpasses state-of-the-art baselines in terms of topic quality, topic distributions of documents, and downstream classification tasks.

We propose sparsemax, a new activation function similar to the traditional softmax, but able to output sparse probabilities. After deriving its properties, we show how its Jacobian can be efficiently computed, enabling its use in a network trained with backpropagation. Then, we propose a new smooth and convex loss function which is the sparsemax analogue of the logistic loss. We reveal an unexpected connection between this new loss and the Huber classification loss. We obtain promising empirical results in multi-label classification problems and in attention-based neural networks for natural language inference. For the latter, we achieve a similar performance as the traditional softmax, but with a selective, more compact, attention focus.

Diffusion models have demonstrated compelling generation quality by optimizing the variational lower bound through a simple denoising score matching loss. In this paper, we provide theoretical evidence that the prevailing practice of using a constant loss weight strategy in diffusion models leads to biased estimation during the training phase. Simply optimizing the denoising network to predict Gaussian noise with constant weighting may hinder precise estimations of original images. To address the issue, we propose an elegant and effective weighting strategy grounded in the theoretically unbiased principle. Moreover, we conduct a comprehensive and systematic exploration to dissect the inherent bias problem deriving from constant weighting loss from the perspectives of its existence, impact and reasons. These analyses are expected to advance our understanding and demystify the inner workings of diffusion models. Through empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that our proposed debiased estimation method significantly enhances sample quality without the reliance on complex techniques, and exhibits improved efficiency compared to the baseline method both in training and sampling processes.

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) (Ho et al. 2020) have shown impressive results on image and waveform generation in continuous state spaces. Here, we introduce Discrete Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (D3PMs), diffusion-like generative models for discrete data that generalize the multinomial diffusion model of Hoogeboom et al. 2021, by going beyond corruption processes with uniform transition probabilities. This includes corruption with transition matrices that mimic Gaussian kernels in continuous space, matrices based on nearest neighbors in embedding space, and matrices that introduce absorbing states. The third allows us to draw a connection between diffusion models and autoregressive and mask-based generative models. We show that the choice of transition matrix is an important design decision that leads to improved results in image and text domains. We also introduce a new loss function that combines the variational lower bound with an auxiliary cross entropy loss. For text, this model class achieves strong results on character-level text generation while scaling to large vocabularies on LM1B. On the image dataset CIFAR-10, our models approach the sample quality and exceed the log-likelihood of the continuous-space DDPM model.

The remarkable success of large language pretraining and the discovery of scaling laws signify a paradigm shift in machine learning. Notably, the primary objective has evolved from minimizing generalization error to reducing approximation error, and the most effective strategy has transitioned from regularization (in a broad sense) to scaling up models. This raises a critical question: Do the established principles that proved successful in the generalization-centric era remain valid in this new era of scaling? This paper examines several influential regularization-based principles that may no longer hold true in the scaling-centric, large language model (LLM) era. These principles include explicit L2 regularization and implicit regularization through small batch sizes and large learning rates. Additionally, we identify a new phenomenon termed ``scaling law crossover,'' where two scaling curves intersect at a certain scale, implying that methods effective at smaller scales may not generalize to larger ones. Together, these observations highlight two fundamental questions within this new paradigm: bullet Guiding Principles for Scaling: If regularization is no longer the primary guiding principle for model design, what new principles are emerging to guide scaling? bullet Model Comparison at Scale: How to reliably and effectively compare models at the scale where only a single experiment is feasible?

We develop a rigorous mathematical analysis of zero-shot learning with attributes. In this setting, the goal is to label novel classes with no training data, only detectors for attributes and a description of how those attributes are correlated with the target classes, called the class-attribute matrix. We develop the first non-trivial lower bound on the worst-case error of the best map from attributes to classes for this setting, even with perfect attribute detectors. The lower bound characterizes the theoretical intrinsic difficulty of the zero-shot problem based on the available information -- the class-attribute matrix -- and the bound is practically computable from it. Our lower bound is tight, as we show that we can always find a randomized map from attributes to classes whose expected error is upper bounded by the value of the lower bound. We show that our analysis can be predictive of how standard zero-shot methods behave in practice, including which classes will likely be confused with others.

The recent advent of diffusion models has led to significant progress in solving inverse problems, leveraging these models as effective generative priors. Nonetheless, challenges related to the ill-posed nature of such problems remain, often due to inherent ambiguities in measurements. Drawing inspiration from the human ability to resolve visual ambiguities through perceptual biases, here we introduce a novel latent diffusion inverse solver by incorporating regularization by texts (TReg). Specifically, TReg applies the textual description of the preconception of the solution during the reverse sampling phase, of which description isndynamically reinforced through null-text optimization for adaptive negation. Our comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that TReg successfully mitigates ambiguity in latent diffusion inverse solvers, enhancing their effectiveness and accuracy.

Self-supervision is often used for pre-training to foster performance on a downstream task by constructing meaningful representations of samples. Self-supervised learning (SSL) generally involves generating different views of the same sample and thus requires data augmentations that are challenging to construct for tabular data. This constitutes one of the main challenges of self-supervision for structured data. In the present work, we propose a novel augmentation-free SSL method for tabular data. Our approach, T-JEPA, relies on a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) and is akin to mask reconstruction in the latent space. It involves predicting the latent representation of one subset of features from the latent representation of a different subset within the same sample, thereby learning rich representations without augmentations. We use our method as a pre-training technique and train several deep classifiers on the obtained representation. Our experimental results demonstrate a substantial improvement in both classification and regression tasks, outperforming models trained directly on samples in their original data space. Moreover, T-JEPA enables some methods to consistently outperform or match the performance of traditional methods likes Gradient Boosted Decision Trees. To understand why, we extensively characterize the obtained representations and show that T-JEPA effectively identifies relevant features for downstream tasks without access to the labels. Additionally, we introduce regularization tokens, a novel regularization method critical for training of JEPA-based models on structured data.

To improve how neural networks function it is crucial to understand their learning process. The information bottleneck theory of deep learning proposes that neural networks achieve good generalization by compressing their representations to disregard information that is not relevant to the task. However, empirical evidence for this theory is conflicting, as compression was only observed when networks used saturating activation functions. In contrast, networks with non-saturating activation functions achieved comparable levels of task performance but did not show compression. In this paper we developed more robust mutual information estimation techniques, that adapt to hidden activity of neural networks and produce more sensitive measurements of activations from all functions, especially unbounded functions. Using these adaptive estimation techniques, we explored compression in networks with a range of different activation functions. With two improved methods of estimation, firstly, we show that saturation of the activation function is not required for compression, and the amount of compression varies between different activation functions. We also find that there is a large amount of variation in compression between different network initializations. Secondary, we see that L2 regularization leads to significantly increased compression, while preventing overfitting. Finally, we show that only compression of the last layer is positively correlated with generalization.

Masked image modeling (MIM) has attracted much research attention due to its promising potential for learning scalable visual representations. In typical approaches, models usually focus on predicting specific contents of masked patches, and their performances are highly related to pre-defined mask strategies. Intuitively, this procedure can be considered as training a student (the model) on solving given problems (predict masked patches). However, we argue that the model should not only focus on solving given problems, but also stand in the shoes of a teacher to produce a more challenging problem by itself. To this end, we propose Hard Patches Mining (HPM), a brand-new framework for MIM pre-training. We observe that the reconstruction loss can naturally be the metric of the difficulty of the pre-training task. Therefore, we introduce an auxiliary loss predictor, predicting patch-wise losses first and deciding where to mask next. It adopts a relative relationship learning strategy to prevent overfitting to exact reconstruction loss values. Experiments under various settings demonstrate the effectiveness of HPM in constructing masked images. Furthermore, we empirically find that solely introducing the loss prediction objective leads to powerful representations, verifying the efficacy of the ability to be aware of where is hard to reconstruct.

Recently, flat minima are proven to be effective for improving generalization and sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) achieves state-of-the-art performance. Yet the current definition of flatness discussed in SAM and its follow-ups are limited to the zeroth-order flatness (i.e., the worst-case loss within a perturbation radius). We show that the zeroth-order flatness can be insufficient to discriminate minima with low generalization error from those with high generalization error both when there is a single minimum or multiple minima within the given perturbation radius. Thus we present first-order flatness, a stronger measure of flatness focusing on the maximal gradient norm within a perturbation radius which bounds both the maximal eigenvalue of Hessian at local minima and the regularization function of SAM. We also present a novel training procedure named Gradient norm Aware Minimization (GAM) to seek minima with uniformly small curvature across all directions. Experimental results show that GAM improves the generalization of models trained with current optimizers such as SGD and AdamW on various datasets and networks. Furthermore, we show that GAM can help SAM find flatter minima and achieve better generalization.

Learning unnormalized statistical models (e.g., energy-based models) is computationally challenging due to the complexity of handling the partition function. To eschew this complexity, noise-contrastive estimation~(NCE) has been proposed by formulating the objective as the logistic loss of the real data and the artificial noise. However, as found in previous works, NCE may perform poorly in many tasks due to its flat loss landscape and slow convergence. In this paper, we study it a direct approach for optimizing the negative log-likelihood of unnormalized models from the perspective of compositional optimization. To tackle the partition function, a noise distribution is introduced such that the log partition function can be written as a compositional function whose inner function can be estimated with stochastic samples. Hence, the objective can be optimized by stochastic compositional optimization algorithms. Despite being a simple method, we demonstrate that it is more favorable than NCE by (1) establishing a fast convergence rate and quantifying its dependence on the noise distribution through the variance of stochastic estimators; (2) developing better results for one-dimensional Gaussian mean estimation by showing our objective has a much favorable loss landscape and hence our method enjoys faster convergence; (3) demonstrating better performance on multiple applications, including density estimation, out-of-distribution detection, and real image generation.

We consider the distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problem with spectral risk-based uncertainty set and f-divergence penalty. This formulation includes common risk-sensitive learning objectives such as regularized condition value-at-risk (CVaR) and average top-k loss. We present Prospect, a stochastic gradient-based algorithm that only requires tuning a single learning rate hyperparameter, and prove that it enjoys linear convergence for smooth regularized losses. This contrasts with previous algorithms that either require tuning multiple hyperparameters or potentially fail to converge due to biased gradient estimates or inadequate regularization. Empirically, we show that Prospect can converge 2-3times faster than baselines such as stochastic gradient and stochastic saddle-point methods on distribution shift and fairness benchmarks spanning tabular, vision, and language domains.

Neural information retrieval (IR) has greatly advanced search and other knowledge-intensive language tasks. While many neural IR methods encode queries and documents into single-vector representations, late interaction models produce multi-vector representations at the granularity of each token and decompose relevance modeling into scalable token-level computations. This decomposition has been shown to make late interaction more effective, but it inflates the space footprint of these models by an order of magnitude. In this work, we introduce ColBERTv2, a retriever that couples an aggressive residual compression mechanism with a denoised supervision strategy to simultaneously improve the quality and space footprint of late interaction. We evaluate ColBERTv2 across a wide range of benchmarks, establishing state-of-the-art quality within and outside the training domain while reducing the space footprint of late interaction models by 6--10times.

This manuscript considers the problem of learning a random Gaussian network function using a fully connected network with frozen intermediate layers and trainable readout layer. This problem can be seen as a natural generalization of the widely studied random features model to deeper architectures. First, we prove Gaussian universality of the test error in a ridge regression setting where the learner and target networks share the same intermediate layers, and provide a sharp asymptotic formula for it. Establishing this result requires proving a deterministic equivalent for traces of the deep random features sample covariance matrices which can be of independent interest. Second, we conjecture the asymptotic Gaussian universality of the test error in the more general setting of arbitrary convex losses and generic learner/target architectures. We provide extensive numerical evidence for this conjecture, which requires the derivation of closed-form expressions for the layer-wise post-activation population covariances. In light of our results, we investigate the interplay between architecture design and implicit regularization.

Diffusion models have recently emerged as powerful generative priors for solving inverse problems. However, training diffusion models in the pixel space are both data-intensive and computationally demanding, which restricts their applicability as priors for high-dimensional real-world data such as medical images. Latent diffusion models, which operate in a much lower-dimensional space, offer a solution to these challenges. However, incorporating latent diffusion models to solve inverse problems remains a challenging problem due to the nonlinearity of the encoder and decoder. To address these issues, we propose ReSample, an algorithm that can solve general inverse problems with pre-trained latent diffusion models. Our algorithm incorporates data consistency by solving an optimization problem during the reverse sampling process, a concept that we term as hard data consistency. Upon solving this optimization problem, we propose a novel resampling scheme to map the measurement-consistent sample back onto the noisy data manifold and theoretically demonstrate its benefits. Lastly, we apply our algorithm to solve a wide range of linear and nonlinear inverse problems in both natural and medical images, demonstrating that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, including those based on pixel-space diffusion models.

Sparsely gated Mixture of Experts (MoE) models have been shown to be a compute-efficient method to scale model capacity for multilingual machine translation. However, for low-resource tasks, MoE models severely over-fit. We show effective regularization strategies, namely dropout techniques for MoE layers in EOM and FOM, Conditional MoE Routing and Curriculum Learning methods that prevent over-fitting and improve the performance of MoE models on low-resource tasks without adversely affecting high-resource tasks. On a massively multilingual machine translation benchmark, our strategies result in about +1 chrF++ improvement in very low resource language pairs. We perform an extensive analysis of the learned MoE routing to better understand the impact of our regularization methods and how we can improve them.

Conducting text retrieval in a dense learned representation space has many intriguing advantages over sparse retrieval. Yet the effectiveness of dense retrieval (DR) often requires combination with sparse retrieval. In this paper, we identify that the main bottleneck is in the training mechanisms, where the negative instances used in training are not representative of the irrelevant documents in testing. This paper presents Approximate nearest neighbor Negative Contrastive Estimation (ANCE), a training mechanism that constructs negatives from an Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) index of the corpus, which is parallelly updated with the learning process to select more realistic negative training instances. This fundamentally resolves the discrepancy between the data distribution used in the training and testing of DR. In our experiments, ANCE boosts the BERT-Siamese DR model to outperform all competitive dense and sparse retrieval baselines. It nearly matches the accuracy of sparse-retrieval-and-BERT-reranking using dot-product in the ANCE-learned representation space and provides almost 100x speed-up.

Over-parameterized deep networks trained using gradient-based optimizers are a popular choice for solving classification and ranking problems. Without appropriately tuned ell_2 regularization or weight decay, such networks have the tendency to make output scores (logits) and network weights large, causing training loss to become too small and the network to lose its adaptivity (ability to move around) in the parameter space. Although regularization is typically understood from an overfitting perspective, we highlight its role in making the network more adaptive and enabling it to escape more easily from weights that generalize poorly. To provide such a capability, we propose a method called Logit Attenuating Weight Normalization (LAWN), that can be stacked onto any gradient-based optimizer. LAWN controls the logits by constraining the weight norms of layers in the final homogeneous sub-network. Empirically, we show that the resulting LAWN variant of the optimizer makes a deep network more adaptive to finding minimas with superior generalization performance on large-scale image classification and recommender systems. While LAWN is particularly impressive in improving Adam, it greatly improves all optimizers when used with large batch sizes

Adversarial training, which is to enhance robustness against adversarial attacks, has received much attention because it is easy to generate human-imperceptible perturbations of data to deceive a given deep neural network. In this paper, we propose a new adversarial training algorithm that is theoretically well motivated and empirically superior to other existing algorithms. A novel feature of the proposed algorithm is to apply more regularization to data vulnerable to adversarial attacks than other existing regularization algorithms do. Theoretically, we show that our algorithm can be understood as an algorithm of minimizing the regularized empirical risk motivated from a newly derived upper bound of the robust risk. Numerical experiments illustrate that our proposed algorithm improves the generalization (accuracy on examples) and robustness (accuracy on adversarial attacks) simultaneously to achieve the state-of-the-art performance.

We consider the learning from noisy labels (NL) problem which emerges in many real-world applications. In addition to the widely-studied synthetic noise in the NL literature, we also consider the pseudo labels in semi-supervised learning (Semi-SL) as a special case of NL. For both types of noise, we argue that the generalization performance of existing methods is highly coupled with the quality of noisy labels. Therefore, we counter the problem from a novel and unified perspective: learning from the auxiliary clean labels. Specifically, we propose the Rotational-Decoupling Consistency Regularization (RDCR) framework that integrates the consistency-based methods with the self-supervised rotation task to learn noise-tolerant representations. The experiments show that RDCR achieves comparable or superior performance than the state-of-the-art methods under small noise, while outperforms the existing methods significantly when there is large noise.

The Information Bottleneck (IB) principle offers an information-theoretic framework for analyzing the training process of deep neural networks (DNNs). Its essence lies in tracking the dynamics of two mutual information (MI) values: one between the hidden layer and the class label, and the other between the hidden layer and the DNN input. According to the hypothesis put forth by Shwartz-Ziv and Tishby (2017), the training process consists of two distinct phases: fitting and compression. The latter phase is believed to account for the good generalization performance exhibited by DNNs. Due to the challenging nature of estimating MI between high-dimensional random vectors, this hypothesis has only been verified for toy NNs or specific types of NNs, such as quantized NNs and dropout NNs. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive framework for conducting IB analysis of general NNs. Our approach leverages the stochastic NN method proposed by Goldfeld et al. (2019) and incorporates a compression step to overcome the obstacles associated with high dimensionality. In other words, we estimate the MI between the compressed representations of high-dimensional random vectors. The proposed method is supported by both theoretical and practical justifications. Notably, we demonstrate the accuracy of our estimator through synthetic experiments featuring predefined MI values. Finally, we perform IB analysis on a close-to-real-scale convolutional DNN, which reveals new features of the MI dynamics.

In the era of proliferation of large language and image generation models, the phenomenon of "model collapse" refers to the situation whereby as a model is trained recursively on data generated from previous generations of itself over time, its performance degrades until the model eventually becomes completely useless, i.e the model collapses. In this work, we study this phenomenon in the setting of high-dimensional regression and obtain analytic formulae which quantitatively outline this phenomenon in a broad range of regimes. In the special case of polynomial decaying spectral and source conditions, we obtain modified scaling laws which exhibit new crossover phenomena from fast to slow rates. We also propose a simple strategy based on adaptive regularization to mitigate model collapse. Our theoretical results are validated with experiments.

Bayesian inference usually requires running potentially costly inference procedures separately for every new observation. In contrast, the idea of amortized Bayesian inference is to initially invest computational cost in training an inference network on simulated data, which can subsequently be used to rapidly perform inference (i.e., to return estimates of posterior distributions) for new observations. This approach has been applied to many real-world models in the sciences and engineering, but it is unclear how robust the approach is to adversarial perturbations in the observed data. Here, we study the adversarial robustness of amortized Bayesian inference, focusing on simulation-based estimation of multi-dimensional posterior distributions. We show that almost unrecognizable, targeted perturbations of the observations can lead to drastic changes in the predicted posterior and highly unrealistic posterior predictive samples, across several benchmark tasks and a real-world example from neuroscience. We propose a computationally efficient regularization scheme based on penalizing the Fisher information of the conditional density estimator, and show how it improves the adversarial robustness of amortized Bayesian inference.

Learned sparse retrieval, which can efficiently perform retrieval through mature inverted-index engines, has garnered growing attention in recent years. Particularly, the inference-free sparse retrievers are attractive as they eliminate online model inference in the retrieval phase thereby avoids huge computational cost, offering reasonable throughput and latency. However, even the state-of-the-art (SOTA) inference-free sparse models lag far behind in terms of search relevance when compared to both sparse and dense siamese models. Towards competitive search relevance for inference-free sparse retrievers, we argue that they deserve dedicated training methods other than using same ones with siamese encoders. In this paper, we propose two different approaches for performance improvement. First, we introduce the IDF-aware FLOPS loss, which introduces Inverted Document Frequency (IDF) to the sparsification of representations. We find that it mitigates the negative impact of the FLOPS regularization on search relevance, allowing the model to achieve a better balance between accuracy and efficiency. Moreover, we propose a heterogeneous ensemble knowledge distillation framework that combines siamese dense and sparse retrievers to generate supervisory signals during the pre-training phase. The ensemble framework of dense and sparse retriever capitalizes on their strengths respectively, providing a strong upper bound for knowledge distillation. To concur the diverse feedback from heterogeneous supervisors, we normalize and then aggregate the outputs of the teacher models to eliminate score scale differences. On the BEIR benchmark, our model outperforms existing SOTA inference-free sparse model by 3.3 NDCG@10 score. It exhibits search relevance comparable to siamese sparse retrievers and client-side latency only 1.1x that of BM25.

Catastrophic overfitting (CO) in single-step adversarial training (AT) results in abrupt drops in the adversarial test accuracy (even down to 0%). For models trained with multi-step AT, it has been observed that the loss function behaves locally linearly with respect to the input, this is however lost in single-step AT. To address CO in single-step AT, several methods have been proposed to enforce local linearity of the loss via regularization. However, these regularization terms considerably slow down training due to Double Backpropagation. Instead, in this work, we introduce a regularization term, called ELLE, to mitigate CO effectively and efficiently in classical AT evaluations, as well as some more difficult regimes, e.g., large adversarial perturbations and long training schedules. Our regularization term can be theoretically linked to curvature of the loss function and is computationally cheaper than previous methods by avoiding Double Backpropagation. Our thorough experimental validation demonstrates that our work does not suffer from CO, even in challenging settings where previous works suffer from it. We also notice that adapting our regularization parameter during training (ELLE-A) greatly improves the performance, specially in large epsilon setups. Our implementation is available in https://github.com/LIONS-EPFL/ELLE .

Deep neural networks (DNNs) exhibit an exceptional capacity for generalization in practical applications. This work aims to capture the effect and benefits of depth for supervised learning via information-theoretic generalization bounds. We first derive two hierarchical bounds on the generalization error in terms of the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence or the 1-Wasserstein distance between the train and test distributions of the network internal representations. The KL divergence bound shrinks as the layer index increases, while the Wasserstein bound implies the existence of a layer that serves as a generalization funnel, which attains a minimal 1-Wasserstein distance. Analytic expressions for both bounds are derived under the setting of binary Gaussian classification with linear DNNs. To quantify the contraction of the relevant information measures when moving deeper into the network, we analyze the strong data processing inequality (SDPI) coefficient between consecutive layers of three regularized DNN models: Dropout, DropConnect, and Gaussian noise injection. This enables refining our generalization bounds to capture the contraction as a function of the network architecture parameters. Specializing our results to DNNs with a finite parameter space and the Gibbs algorithm reveals that deeper yet narrower network architectures generalize better in those examples, although how broadly this statement applies remains a question.

We develop an analytical framework to characterize the set of optimal ReLU neural networks by reformulating the non-convex training problem as a convex program. We show that the global optima of the convex parameterization are given by a polyhedral set and then extend this characterization to the optimal set of the non-convex training objective. Since all stationary points of the ReLU training problem can be represented as optima of sub-sampled convex programs, our work provides a general expression for all critical points of the non-convex objective. We then leverage our results to provide an optimal pruning algorithm for computing minimal networks, establish conditions for the regularization path of ReLU networks to be continuous, and develop sensitivity results for minimal ReLU networks.

In virtual assistant (VA) systems it is important to reject or redirect user queries that fall outside the scope of the system. One of the most accurate approaches for out-of-scope (OOS) rejection is to combine it with the task of intent classification on in-scope queries, and to use methods based on the similarity of embeddings produced by transformer-based sentence encoders. Typically, such encoders are fine-tuned for the intent-classification task, using cross-entropy loss. Recent work has shown that while this produces suitable embeddings for the intent-classification task, it also tends to disperse in-scope embeddings over the full sentence embedding space. This causes the in-scope embeddings to potentially overlap with OOS embeddings, thereby making OOS rejection difficult. This is compounded when OOS data is unknown. To mitigate this issue our work proposes to regularize the cross-entropy loss with an in-scope embedding reconstruction loss learned using an auto-encoder. Our method achieves a 1-4% improvement in the area under the precision-recall curve for rejecting out-of-sample (OOS) instances, without compromising intent classification performance.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) trained for image denoising are able to generate high-quality samples with score-based reverse diffusion algorithms. These impressive capabilities seem to imply an escape from the curse of dimensionality, but recent reports of memorization of the training set raise the question of whether these networks are learning the "true" continuous density of the data. Here, we show that two DNNs trained on non-overlapping subsets of a dataset learn nearly the same score function, and thus the same density, when the number of training images is large enough. In this regime of strong generalization, diffusion-generated images are distinct from the training set, and are of high visual quality, suggesting that the inductive biases of the DNNs are well-aligned with the data density. We analyze the learned denoising functions and show that the inductive biases give rise to a shrinkage operation in a basis adapted to the underlying image. Examination of these bases reveals oscillating harmonic structures along contours and in homogeneous regions. We demonstrate that trained denoisers are inductively biased towards these geometry-adaptive harmonic bases since they arise not only when the network is trained on photographic images, but also when it is trained on image classes supported on low-dimensional manifolds for which the harmonic basis is suboptimal. Finally, we show that when trained on regular image classes for which the optimal basis is known to be geometry-adaptive and harmonic, the denoising performance of the networks is near-optimal.

Recognizing software entities such as library names from free-form text is essential to enable many software engineering (SE) technologies, such as traceability link recovery, automated documentation, and API recommendation. While many approaches have been proposed to address this problem, they suffer from small entity vocabularies or noisy training data, hindering their ability to recognize software entities mentioned in sophisticated narratives. To address this challenge, we leverage the Wikipedia taxonomy to develop a comprehensive entity lexicon with 79K unique software entities in 12 fine-grained types, as well as a large labeled dataset of over 1.7M sentences. Then, we propose self-regularization, a noise-robust learning approach, to the training of our software entity recognition (SER) model by accounting for many dropouts. Results show that models trained with self-regularization outperform both their vanilla counterparts and state-of-the-art approaches on our Wikipedia benchmark and two Stack Overflow benchmarks. We release our models, data, and code for future research.

Owing to the growing concerns about privacy and regulatory compliance, it is desirable to regulate the output of generative models. To that end, the objective of this work is to prevent the generation of outputs containing undesired features from a pre-trained Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) where the underlying training data set is inaccessible. Our approach is inspired by the observation that the parameter space of GANs exhibits meaningful directions that can be leveraged to suppress specific undesired features. However, such directions usually result in the degradation of the quality of generated samples. Our proposed two-stage method, known as 'Adapt-then-Unlearn,' excels at unlearning such undesirable features while also maintaining the quality of generated samples. In the initial stage, we adapt a pre-trained GAN on a set of negative samples (containing undesired features) provided by the user. Subsequently, we train the original pre-trained GAN using positive samples, along with a repulsion regularizer. This regularizer encourages the learned model parameters to move away from the parameters of the adapted model (first stage) while not degrading the generation quality. We provide theoretical insights into the proposed method. To the best of our knowledge, our approach stands as the first method addressing unlearning within the realm of high-fidelity GANs (such as StyleGAN). We validate the effectiveness of our method through comprehensive experiments, encompassing both class-level unlearning on the MNIST and AFHQ dataset and feature-level unlearning tasks on the CelebA-HQ dataset. Our code and implementation is available at: https://github.com/atriguha/Adapt_Unlearn.

We present Entropy Adaptive Decoding (EAD), a novel approach for efficient language model inference that dynamically switches between different-sized models based on prediction uncertainty. By monitoring rolling entropy in model logit distributions, our method identifies text regions where a smaller model suffices and switches to a larger model only when prediction uncertainty exceeds a threshold. Unlike speculative decoding approaches that maintain perfect output fidelity through verification, EAD accepts controlled output divergence in exchange for computational efficiency. Our experiments on the MATH benchmark demonstrate remarkable efficiency gains across different model families. Using the LLaMA family, we maintain 96.7\% of the 11B model's performance (50.4\% vs 52.1\%) while using it for only 43\% of tokens, decreasing computational cost by 41.5\%. These gains become more pronounced with larger size differentials in the Qwen family, where we achieve 92.9\% of the 14B model's performance (74.3\% vs 80.0\%) while using it for just 25\% of tokens, decreasing computational cost by 67\%. The consistency of these results across model pairs suggests that language model computation can be significantly optimized by selectively deploying model capacity based on local generation complexity. Our findings indicate that current approaches to model inference may be unnecessarily conservative in their pursuit of perfect output fidelity, and that accepting minor performance trade-offs can enable dramatic reductions in computational costs.

Dimensionality reduction methods are unsupervised approaches which learn low-dimensional spaces where some properties of the initial space, typically the notion of "neighborhood", are preserved. Such methods usually require propagation on large k-NN graphs or complicated optimization solvers. On the other hand, self-supervised learning approaches, typically used to learn representations from scratch, rely on simple and more scalable frameworks for learning. In this paper, we propose TLDR, a dimensionality reduction method for generic input spaces that is porting the recent self-supervised learning framework of Zbontar et al. (2021) to the specific task of dimensionality reduction, over arbitrary representations. We propose to use nearest neighbors to build pairs from a training set and a redundancy reduction loss to learn an encoder that produces representations invariant across such pairs. TLDR is a method that is simple, easy to train, and of broad applicability; it consists of an offline nearest neighbor computation step that can be highly approximated, and a straightforward learning process. Aiming for scalability, we focus on improving linear dimensionality reduction, and show consistent gains on image and document retrieval tasks, e.g. gaining +4% mAP over PCA on ROxford for GeM- AP, improving the performance of DINO on ImageNet or retaining it with a 10x compression.

We propose UnMixMatch, a semi-supervised learning framework which can learn effective representations from unconstrained unlabelled data in order to scale up performance. Most existing semi-supervised methods rely on the assumption that labelled and unlabelled samples are drawn from the same distribution, which limits the potential for improvement through the use of free-living unlabeled data. Consequently, the generalizability and scalability of semi-supervised learning are often hindered by this assumption. Our method aims to overcome these constraints and effectively utilize unconstrained unlabelled data in semi-supervised learning. UnMixMatch consists of three main components: a supervised learner with hard augmentations that provides strong regularization, a contrastive consistency regularizer to learn underlying representations from the unlabelled data, and a self-supervised loss to enhance the representations that are learnt from the unlabelled data. We perform extensive experiments on 4 commonly used datasets and demonstrate superior performance over existing semi-supervised methods with a performance boost of 4.79%. Extensive ablation and sensitivity studies show the effectiveness and impact of each of the proposed components of our method.

Generative models such as denoising diffusion models are quickly advancing their ability to approximate highly complex data distributions. They are also increasingly leveraged in scientific machine learning, where samples from the implied data distribution are expected to adhere to specific governing equations. We present a framework that unifies generative modeling and partial differential equation fulfillment by introducing a first-principle-based loss term that enforces generated samples to fulfill the underlying physical constraints. Our approach reduces the residual error by up to two orders of magnitude compared to previous work in a fluid flow case study and outperforms task-specific frameworks in relevant metrics for structural topology optimization. We also present numerical evidence that our extended training objective acts as a natural regularization mechanism against overfitting. Our framework is simple to implement and versatile in its applicability for imposing equality and inequality constraints as well as auxiliary optimization objectives.

Recent domain generalization (DG) approaches typically use the hypothesis learned on source domains for inference on the unseen target domain. However, such a hypothesis can be arbitrarily far from the optimal one for the target domain, induced by a gap termed ``adaptivity gap''. Without exploiting the domain information from the unseen test samples, adaptivity gap estimation and minimization are intractable, which hinders us to robustify a model to any unknown distribution. In this paper, we first establish a generalization bound that explicitly considers the adaptivity gap. Our bound motivates two strategies to reduce the gap: the first one is ensembling multiple classifiers to enrich the hypothesis space, then we propose effective gap estimation methods for guiding the selection of a better hypothesis for the target. The other method is minimizing the gap directly by adapting model parameters using online target samples. We thus propose Domain-specific Risk Minimization (DRM). During training, DRM models the distributions of different source domains separately; for inference, DRM performs online model steering using the source hypothesis for each arriving target sample. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DRM for domain generalization with the following advantages: 1) it significantly outperforms competitive baselines on different distributional shift settings; 2) it achieves either comparable or superior accuracies on all source domains compared to vanilla empirical risk minimization; 3) it remains simple and efficient during training, and 4) it is complementary to invariant learning approaches.

Neural language models are probabilistic models of human text. They are predominantly trained using maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), which is equivalent to minimizing the forward cross-entropy between the empirical data distribution and the model distribution. However, various degeneration phenomena are still widely observed when decoding from the distributions learned by such models. We establish that the forward cross-entropy is suboptimal as a distance metric for aligning human and model distribution due to its (1) recall-prioritization (2) negative diversity ignorance and (3) train-test mismatch. In this paper, we propose Earth Mover Distance Optimization (EMO) for auto-regressive language modeling. EMO capitalizes on the inherent properties of earth mover distance to address the aforementioned challenges. Due to the high complexity of direct computation, we further introduce a feasible upper bound for EMO to ease end-to-end training. Upon extensive evaluation of language models trained using EMO and MLE. We find that EMO demonstrates a consistently better language modeling performance than MLE across domains. Moreover, EMO demonstrates noteworthy enhancements in downstream performance with minimal fine-tuning on merely 25,000 sentences. This highlights the tremendous potential of EMO as a lightweight calibration method for enhancing large-scale pre-trained language models.

There is a growing gap between the impressive results of deep image generative models and classical algorithms that offer theoretical guarantees. The former suffer from mode collapse or memorization issues, limiting their application to scientific data. The latter require restrictive assumptions such as log-concavity to escape the curse of dimensionality. We partially bridge this gap by introducing conditionally strongly log-concave (CSLC) models, which factorize the data distribution into a product of conditional probability distributions that are strongly log-concave. This factorization is obtained with orthogonal projectors adapted to the data distribution. It leads to efficient parameter estimation and sampling algorithms, with theoretical guarantees, although the data distribution is not globally log-concave. We show that several challenging multiscale processes are conditionally log-concave using wavelet packet orthogonal projectors. Numerical results are shown for physical fields such as the varphi^4 model and weak lensing convergence maps with higher resolution than in previous works.

High demand for computation resources severely hinders deployment of large-scale Deep Neural Networks (DNN) in resource constrained devices. In this work, we propose a Structured Sparsity Learning (SSL) method to regularize the structures (i.e., filters, channels, filter shapes, and layer depth) of DNNs. SSL can: (1) learn a compact structure from a bigger DNN to reduce computation cost; (2) obtain a hardware-friendly structured sparsity of DNN to efficiently accelerate the DNNs evaluation. Experimental results show that SSL achieves on average 5.1x and 3.1x speedups of convolutional layer computation of AlexNet against CPU and GPU, respectively, with off-the-shelf libraries. These speedups are about twice speedups of non-structured sparsity; (3) regularize the DNN structure to improve classification accuracy. The results show that for CIFAR-10, regularization on layer depth can reduce 20 layers of a Deep Residual Network (ResNet) to 18 layers while improve the accuracy from 91.25% to 92.60%, which is still slightly higher than that of original ResNet with 32 layers. For AlexNet, structure regularization by SSL also reduces the error by around ~1%. Open source code is in https://github.com/wenwei202/caffe/tree/scnn

We provide a new efficient version of the backpropagation algorithm, specialized to the case where the weights of the neural network being trained are sparse. Our algorithm is general, as it applies to arbitrary (unstructured) sparsity and common layer types (e.g., convolutional or linear). We provide a fast vectorized implementation on commodity CPUs, and show that it can yield speedups in end-to-end runtime experiments, both in transfer learning using already-sparsified networks, and in training sparse networks from scratch. Thus, our results provide the first support for sparse training on commodity hardware.

Representing a manifold of very high-dimensional data with generative models has been shown to be computationally efficient in practice. However, this requires that the data manifold admits a global parameterization. In order to represent manifolds of arbitrary topology, we propose to learn a mixture model of variational autoencoders. Here, every encoder-decoder pair represents one chart of a manifold. We propose a loss function for maximum likelihood estimation of the model weights and choose an architecture that provides us the analytical expression of the charts and of their inverses. Once the manifold is learned, we use it for solving inverse problems by minimizing a data fidelity term restricted to the learned manifold. To solve the arising minimization problem we propose a Riemannian gradient descent algorithm on the learned manifold. We demonstrate the performance of our method for low-dimensional toy examples as well as for deblurring and electrical impedance tomography on certain image manifolds.

Distributed representations of words encode lexical semantic information, but what type of information is encoded and how? Focusing on the skip-gram with negative-sampling method, we found that the squared norm of static word embedding encodes the information gain conveyed by the word; the information gain is defined by the Kullback-Leibler divergence of the co-occurrence distribution of the word to the unigram distribution. Our findings are explained by the theoretical framework of the exponential family of probability distributions and confirmed through precise experiments that remove spurious correlations arising from word frequency. This theory also extends to contextualized word embeddings in language models or any neural networks with the softmax output layer. We also demonstrate that both the KL divergence and the squared norm of embedding provide a useful metric of the informativeness of a word in tasks such as keyword extraction, proper-noun discrimination, and hypernym discrimination.

In this paper, we apply the self-attention from the state-of-the-art Transformer in Attention Is All You Need for the first time to a data-driven operator learning problem related to partial differential equations. An effort is put together to explain the heuristics of, and to improve the efficacy of the attention mechanism. By employing the operator approximation theory in Hilbert spaces, it is demonstrated for the first time that the softmax normalization in the scaled dot-product attention is sufficient but not necessary. Without softmax, the approximation capacity of a linearized Transformer variant can be proved to be comparable to a Petrov-Galerkin projection layer-wise, and the estimate is independent with respect to the sequence length. A new layer normalization scheme mimicking the Petrov-Galerkin projection is proposed to allow a scaling to propagate through attention layers, which helps the model achieve remarkable accuracy in operator learning tasks with unnormalized data. Finally, we present three operator learning experiments, including the viscid Burgers' equation, an interface Darcy flow, and an inverse interface coefficient identification problem. The newly proposed simple attention-based operator learner, Galerkin Transformer, shows significant improvements in both training cost and evaluation accuracy over its softmax-normalized counterparts.

While score-based generative models (SGMs) have achieved remarkable success in enormous image generation tasks, their mathematical foundations are still limited. In this paper, we analyze the approximation and generalization of SGMs in learning a family of sub-Gaussian probability distributions. We introduce a notion of complexity for probability distributions in terms of their relative density with respect to the standard Gaussian measure. We prove that if the log-relative density can be locally approximated by a neural network whose parameters can be suitably bounded, then the distribution generated by empirical score matching approximates the target distribution in total variation with a dimension-independent rate. We illustrate our theory through examples, which include certain mixtures of Gaussians. An essential ingredient of our proof is to derive a dimension-free deep neural network approximation rate for the true score function associated with the forward process, which is interesting in its own right.

Solving ill-posed inverse problems requires careful formulation of prior beliefs over the signals of interest and an accurate description of their manifestation into noisy measurements. Handcrafted signal priors based on e.g. sparsity are increasingly replaced by data-driven deep generative models, and several groups have recently shown that state-of-the-art score-based diffusion models yield particularly strong performance and flexibility. In this paper, we show that the powerful paradigm of posterior sampling with diffusion models can be extended to include rich, structured, noise models. To that end, we propose a joint conditional reverse diffusion process with learned scores for the noise and signal-generating distribution. We demonstrate strong performance gains across various inverse problems with structured noise, outperforming competitive baselines that use normalizing flows and adversarial networks. This opens up new opportunities and relevant practical applications of diffusion modeling for inverse problems in the context of non-Gaussian measurement models.

Deep learning classifiers face significant challenges when dealing with heterogeneous multi-modal and multi-organ biomedical datasets. The low-level feature distinguishability limited to imaging-modality hinders the classifiers' ability to learn high-level semantic relationships, resulting in sub-optimal performance. To address this issue, image augmentation strategies are employed as regularization techniques. While additive noise input during network training is a well-established augmentation as regularization method, modern pipelines often favor more robust techniques such as dropout and weight decay. This preference stems from the observation that combining these established techniques with noise input can adversely affect model performance. In this study, we propose a novel pretraining pipeline that learns to generate conditional noise mask specifically tailored to improve performance on multi-modal and multi-organ datasets. As a reinforcement learning algorithm, our approach employs a dual-component system comprising a very light-weight policy network that learns to sample conditional noise using a differentiable beta distribution as well as a classifier network. The policy network is trained using the reinforce algorithm to generate image-specific noise masks that regularize the classifier during pretraining. A key aspect is that the policy network's role is limited to obtaining an intermediate (or heated) model before fine-tuning. During inference, the policy network is omitted, allowing direct comparison between the baseline and noise-regularized models. We conducted experiments and related analyses on RadImageNet datasets. Results demonstrate that fine-tuning the intermediate models consistently outperforms conventional training algorithms on both classification and generalization to unseen concept tasks.

We consider the problem of accurate quantization for language models, where both the weights and activations are uniformly quantized to 4 bits per parameter, the lowest bitwidth format natively supported by GPU hardware. In this context, the key challenge is activation quantization: it is known that language models contain outlier channels whose values on average are orders of magnitude higher than than other channels, which prevents accurate low-bitwidth quantization with known techniques. We systematically study this phenomena and find that these outlier channels emerge early in training, and that they occur more frequently in layers with residual streams. We then propose a simple strategy which regularizes a layer's inputs via quantization-aware training (QAT) and its outputs via activation kurtosis regularization. We show that regularizing both the inputs and outputs is crucial for preventing a model's "migrating" the difficulty in input quantization to the weights, which makes post-training quantization (PTQ) of weights more difficult. When combined with weight PTQ, we show that our approach can obtain a W4A4 model that performs competitively to the standard-precision W16A16 baseline.

We propose a new regularization method based on virtual adversarial loss: a new measure of local smoothness of the conditional label distribution given input. Virtual adversarial loss is defined as the robustness of the conditional label distribution around each input data point against local perturbation. Unlike adversarial training, our method defines the adversarial direction without label information and is hence applicable to semi-supervised learning. Because the directions in which we smooth the model are only "virtually" adversarial, we call our method virtual adversarial training (VAT). The computational cost of VAT is relatively low. For neural networks, the approximated gradient of virtual adversarial loss can be computed with no more than two pairs of forward- and back-propagations. In our experiments, we applied VAT to supervised and semi-supervised learning tasks on multiple benchmark datasets. With a simple enhancement of the algorithm based on the entropy minimization principle, our VAT achieves state-of-the-art performance for semi-supervised learning tasks on SVHN and CIFAR-10.

Markov processes are widely used mathematical models for describing dynamic systems in various fields. However, accurately simulating large-scale systems at long time scales is computationally expensive due to the short time steps required for accurate integration. In this paper, we introduce an inference process that maps complex systems into a simplified representational space and models large jumps in time. To achieve this, we propose Time-lagged Information Bottleneck (T-IB), a principled objective rooted in information theory, which aims to capture relevant temporal features while discarding high-frequency information to simplify the simulation task and minimize the inference error. Our experiments demonstrate that T-IB learns information-optimal representations for accurately modeling the statistical properties and dynamics of the original process at a selected time lag, outperforming existing time-lagged dimensionality reduction methods.

Text embedding models play a crucial role in natural language processing, particularly in information retrieval, and their importance is further highlighted with the recent utilization of RAG (Retrieval- Augmented Generation). This study presents an efficient fine-tuning methodology encompassing data selection, loss function, and model architecture to enhance the information retrieval performance of pre-trained text embedding models. In particular, this study proposes a novel Contrastive Learning Penalty function that overcomes the limitations of existing Contrastive Learning. The proposed methodology achieves significant performance improvements over existing methods in document retrieval tasks. This study is expected to contribute to improving the performance of information retrieval systems through fine-tuning of text embedding models. The code for this study can be found at https://github.com/CreaLabs/Enhanced-BGE-M3-with-CLP-and-MoE, and the best-performing model can be found at https://huggingface.co/CreaLabs.

Deep learning in the presence of noisy annotations has been studied extensively in classification, but much less in segmentation tasks. In this work, we study the learning dynamics of deep segmentation networks trained on inaccurately-annotated data. We discover a phenomenon that has been previously reported in the context of classification: the networks tend to first fit the clean pixel-level labels during an "early-learning" phase, before eventually memorizing the false annotations. However, in contrast to classification, memorization in segmentation does not arise simultaneously for all semantic categories. Inspired by these findings, we propose a new method for segmentation from noisy annotations with two key elements. First, we detect the beginning of the memorization phase separately for each category during training. This allows us to adaptively correct the noisy annotations in order to exploit early learning. Second, we incorporate a regularization term that enforces consistency across scales to boost robustness against annotation noise. Our method outperforms standard approaches on a medical-imaging segmentation task where noises are synthesized to mimic human annotation errors. It also provides robustness to realistic noisy annotations present in weakly-supervised semantic segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art results on PASCAL VOC 2012. Code is available at https://github.com/Kangningthu/ADELE

Recently, various studies have been directed towards exploring dense passage retrieval techniques employing pre-trained language models, among which the masked auto-encoder (MAE) pre-training architecture has emerged as the most promising. The conventional MAE framework relies on leveraging the passage reconstruction of decoder to bolster the text representation ability of encoder, thereby enhancing the performance of resulting dense retrieval systems. Within the context of building the representation ability of the encoder through passage reconstruction of decoder, it is reasonable to postulate that a ``more demanding'' decoder will necessitate a corresponding increase in the encoder's ability. To this end, we propose a novel token importance aware masking strategy based on pointwise mutual information to intensify the challenge of the decoder. Importantly, our approach can be implemented in an unsupervised manner, without adding additional expenses to the pre-training phase. Our experiments verify that the proposed method is both effective and robust on large-scale supervised passage retrieval datasets and out-of-domain zero-shot retrieval benchmarks.

Deep neural network is difficult to train and this predicament becomes worse as the depth increases. The essence of this problem exists in the magnitude of backpropagated errors that will result in gradient vanishing or exploding phenomenon. We show that a variant of regularizer which utilizes orthonormality among different filter banks can alleviate this problem. Moreover, we design a backward error modulation mechanism based on the quasi-isometry assumption between two consecutive parametric layers. Equipped with these two ingredients, we propose several novel optimization solutions that can be utilized for training a specific-structured (repetitively triple modules of Conv-BNReLU) extremely deep convolutional neural network (CNN) WITHOUT any shortcuts/ identity mappings from scratch. Experiments show that our proposed solutions can achieve distinct improvements for a 44-layer and a 110-layer plain networks on both the CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets. Moreover, we can successfully train plain CNNs to match the performance of the residual counterparts. Besides, we propose new principles for designing network structure from the insights evoked by orthonormality. Combined with residual structure, we achieve comparative performance on the ImageNet dataset.

Label smoothing regularization (LSR) has a great success in training deep neural networks by stochastic algorithms such as stochastic gradient descent and its variants. However, the theoretical understanding of its power from the view of optimization is still rare. This study opens the door to a deep understanding of LSR by initiating the analysis. In this paper, we analyze the convergence behaviors of stochastic gradient descent with label smoothing regularization for solving non-convex problems and show that an appropriate LSR can help to speed up the convergence by reducing the variance. More interestingly, we proposed a simple yet effective strategy, namely Two-Stage LAbel smoothing algorithm (TSLA), that uses LSR in the early training epochs and drops it off in the later training epochs. We observe from the improved convergence result of TSLA that it benefits from LSR in the first stage and essentially converges faster in the second stage. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work for understanding the power of LSR via establishing convergence complexity of stochastic methods with LSR in non-convex optimization. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in comparison with baselines on training ResNet models over benchmark data sets.

In recent years, denoising diffusion models have become a crucial area of research due to their abundance in the rapidly expanding field of generative AI. While recent statistical advances have delivered explanations for the generation ability of idealised denoising diffusion models for high-dimensional target data, implementations introduce thresholding procedures for the generating process to overcome issues arising from the unbounded state space of such models. This mismatch between theoretical design and implementation of diffusion models has been addressed empirically by using a reflected diffusion process as the driver of noise instead. In this paper, we study statistical guarantees of these denoising reflected diffusion models. In particular, we establish minimax optimal rates of convergence in total variation, up to a polylogarithmic factor, under Sobolev smoothness assumptions. Our main contributions include the statistical analysis of this novel class of denoising reflected diffusion models and a refined score approximation method in both time and space, leveraging spectral decomposition and rigorous neural network analysis.

Democratization of machine learning requires architectures that automatically adapt to new problems. Neural Differential Equations (NDEs) have emerged as a popular modeling framework by removing the need for ML practitioners to choose the number of layers in a recurrent model. While we can control the computational cost by choosing the number of layers in standard architectures, in NDEs the number of neural network evaluations for a forward pass can depend on the number of steps of the adaptive ODE solver. But, can we force the NDE to learn the version with the least steps while not increasing the training cost? Current strategies to overcome slow prediction require high order automatic differentiation, leading to significantly higher training time. We describe a novel regularization method that uses the internal cost heuristics of adaptive differential equation solvers combined with discrete adjoint sensitivities to guide the training process towards learning NDEs that are easier to solve. This approach opens up the blackbox numerical analysis behind the differential equation solver's algorithm and directly uses its local error estimates and stiffness heuristics as cheap and accurate cost estimates. We incorporate our method without any change in the underlying NDE framework and show that our method extends beyond Ordinary Differential Equations to accommodate Neural Stochastic Differential Equations. We demonstrate how our approach can halve the prediction time and, unlike other methods which can increase the training time by an order of magnitude, we demonstrate similar reduction in training times. Together this showcases how the knowledge embedded within state-of-the-art equation solvers can be used to enhance machine learning.

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to discover novel categories in unlabelled datasets using knowledge learned from labelled samples. Previous studies argued that parametric classifiers are prone to overfitting to seen categories, and endorsed using a non-parametric classifier formed with semi-supervised k-means. However, in this study, we investigate the failure of parametric classifiers, verify the effectiveness of previous design choices when high-quality supervision is available, and identify unreliable pseudo-labels as a key problem. We demonstrate that two prediction biases exist: the classifier tends to predict seen classes more often, and produces an imbalanced distribution across seen and novel categories. Based on these findings, we propose a simple yet effective parametric classification method that benefits from entropy regularisation, achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple GCD benchmarks and shows strong robustness to unknown class numbers. We hope the investigation and proposed simple framework can serve as a strong baseline to facilitate future studies in this field. Our code is available at: https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/SimGCD.

Denoising diffusion models enable conditional generation and density modeling of complex relationships like images and text. However, the nature of the learned relationships is opaque making it difficult to understand precisely what relationships between words and parts of an image are captured, or to predict the effect of an intervention. We illuminate the fine-grained relationships learned by diffusion models by noticing a precise relationship between diffusion and information decomposition. Exact expressions for mutual information and conditional mutual information can be written in terms of the denoising model. Furthermore, pointwise estimates can be easily estimated as well, allowing us to ask questions about the relationships between specific images and captions. Decomposing information even further to understand which variables in a high-dimensional space carry information is a long-standing problem. For diffusion models, we show that a natural non-negative decomposition of mutual information emerges, allowing us to quantify informative relationships between words and pixels in an image. We exploit these new relations to measure the compositional understanding of diffusion models, to do unsupervised localization of objects in images, and to measure effects when selectively editing images through prompt interventions.

Much research in machine learning involves finding appropriate inductive biases (e.g. convolutional neural networks, momentum-based optimizers, transformers) to promote generalization on tasks. However, quantification of the amount of inductive bias associated with these architectures and hyperparameters has been limited. We propose a novel method for efficiently computing the inductive bias required for generalization on a task with a fixed training data budget; formally, this corresponds to the amount of information required to specify well-generalizing models within a specific hypothesis space of models. Our approach involves modeling the loss distribution of random hypotheses drawn from a hypothesis space to estimate the required inductive bias for a task relative to these hypotheses. Unlike prior work, our method provides a direct estimate of inductive bias without using bounds and is applicable to diverse hypothesis spaces. Moreover, we derive approximation error bounds for our estimation approach in terms of the number of sampled hypotheses. Consistent with prior results, our empirical results demonstrate that higher dimensional tasks require greater inductive bias. We show that relative to other expressive model classes, neural networks as a model class encode large amounts of inductive bias. Furthermore, our measure quantifies the relative difference in inductive bias between different neural network architectures. Our proposed inductive bias metric provides an information-theoretic interpretation of the benefits of specific model architectures for certain tasks and provides a quantitative guide to developing tasks requiring greater inductive bias, thereby encouraging the development of more powerful inductive biases.

Diffusion models learn to restore noisy data, which is corrupted with different levels of noise, by optimizing the weighted sum of the corresponding loss terms, i.e., denoising score matching loss. In this paper, we show that restoring data corrupted with certain noise levels offers a proper pretext task for the model to learn rich visual concepts. We propose to prioritize such noise levels over other levels during training, by redesigning the weighting scheme of the objective function. We show that our simple redesign of the weighting scheme significantly improves the performance of diffusion models regardless of the datasets, architectures, and sampling strategies.

Imposing orthogonality on the layers of neural networks is known to facilitate the learning by limiting the exploding/vanishing of the gradient; decorrelate the features; improve the robustness. This paper studies the theoretical properties of orthogonal convolutional layers.We establish necessary and sufficient conditions on the layer architecture guaranteeing the existence of an orthogonal convolutional transform. The conditions prove that orthogonal convolutional transforms exist for almost all architectures used in practice for 'circular' padding.We also exhibit limitations with 'valid' boundary conditions and 'same' boundary conditions with zero-padding.Recently, a regularization term imposing the orthogonality of convolutional layers has been proposed, and impressive empirical results have been obtained in different applications (Wang et al. 2020).The second motivation of the present paper is to specify the theory behind this.We make the link between this regularization term and orthogonality measures. In doing so, we show that this regularization strategy is stable with respect to numerical and optimization errors and that, in the presence of small errors and when the size of the signal/image is large, the convolutional layers remain close to isometric.The theoretical results are confirmed with experiments and the landscape of the regularization term is studied. Experiments on real data sets show that when orthogonality is used to enforce robustness, the parameter multiplying the regularization termcan be used to tune a tradeoff between accuracy and orthogonality, for the benefit of both accuracy and robustness.Altogether, the study guarantees that the regularization proposed in Wang et al. (2020) is an efficient, flexible and stable numerical strategy to learn orthogonal convolutional layers.

We present a novel family of language model (LM) estimation techniques named Sparse Non-negative Matrix (SNM) estimation. A first set of experiments empirically evaluating it on the One Billion Word Benchmark shows that SNM n-gram LMs perform almost as well as the well-established Kneser-Ney (KN) models. When using skip-gram features the models are able to match the state-of-the-art recurrent neural network (RNN) LMs; combining the two modeling techniques yields the best known result on the benchmark. The computational advantages of SNM over both maximum entropy and RNN LM estimation are probably its main strength, promising an approach that has the same flexibility in combining arbitrary features effectively and yet should scale to very large amounts of data as gracefully as n-gram LMs do.

N:M Structured sparsity has garnered significant interest as a result of relatively modest overhead and improved efficiency. Additionally, this form of sparsity holds considerable appeal for reducing the memory footprint owing to their modest representation overhead. There have been efforts to develop training recipes for N:M structured sparsity, they primarily focus on low-sparsity regions (sim50\%). Nonetheless, performance of models trained using these approaches tends to decline when confronted with high-sparsity regions (>80\%). In this work, we study the effectiveness of existing sparse training recipes at high-sparsity regions and argue that these methods fail to sustain the model quality on par with low-sparsity regions. We demonstrate that the significant factor contributing to this disparity is the presence of elevated levels of induced noise in the gradient magnitudes. To mitigate this undesirable effect, we employ decay mechanisms to progressively restrict the flow of gradients towards pruned elements. Our approach improves the model quality by up to 2% and 5% in vision and language models at high sparsity regime, respectively. We also evaluate the trade-off between model accuracy and training compute cost in terms of FLOPs. At iso-training FLOPs, our method yields better performance compared to conventional sparse training recipes, exhibiting an accuracy improvement of up to 2%. The source code is available at https://github.com/abhibambhaniya/progressive_gradient_flow_nm_sparsity.

Deep learning has been wildly successful in practice and most state-of-the-art machine learning methods are based on neural networks. Lacking, however, is a rigorous mathematical theory that adequately explains the amazing performance of deep neural networks. In this article, we present a relatively new mathematical framework that provides the beginning of a deeper understanding of deep learning. This framework precisely characterizes the functional properties of neural networks that are trained to fit to data. The key mathematical tools which support this framework include transform-domain sparse regularization, the Radon transform of computed tomography, and approximation theory, which are all techniques deeply rooted in signal processing. This framework explains the effect of weight decay regularization in neural network training, the use of skip connections and low-rank weight matrices in network architectures, the role of sparsity in neural networks, and explains why neural networks can perform well in high-dimensional problems.

We show that the way inference is performed in few-shot segmentation tasks has a substantial effect on performances -- an aspect often overlooked in the literature in favor of the meta-learning paradigm. We introduce a transductive inference for a given query image, leveraging the statistics of its unlabeled pixels, by optimizing a new loss containing three complementary terms: i) the cross-entropy on the labeled support pixels; ii) the Shannon entropy of the posteriors on the unlabeled query-image pixels; and iii) a global KL-divergence regularizer based on the proportion of the predicted foreground. As our inference uses a simple linear classifier of the extracted features, its computational load is comparable to inductive inference and can be used on top of any base training. Foregoing episodic training and using only standard cross-entropy training on the base classes, our inference yields competitive performances on standard benchmarks in the 1-shot scenarios. As the number of available shots increases, the gap in performances widens: on PASCAL-5i, our method brings about 5% and 6% improvements over the state-of-the-art, in the 5- and 10-shot scenarios, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce a new setting that includes domain shifts, where the base and novel classes are drawn from different datasets. Our method achieves the best performances in this more realistic setting. Our code is freely available online: https://github.com/mboudiaf/RePRI-for-Few-Shot-Segmentation.

We introduce a design strategy for neural network macro-architecture based on self-similarity. Repeated application of a simple expansion rule generates deep networks whose structural layouts are precisely truncated fractals. These networks contain interacting subpaths of different lengths, but do not include any pass-through or residual connections; every internal signal is transformed by a filter and nonlinearity before being seen by subsequent layers. In experiments, fractal networks match the excellent performance of standard residual networks on both CIFAR and ImageNet classification tasks, thereby demonstrating that residual representations may not be fundamental to the success of extremely deep convolutional neural networks. Rather, the key may be the ability to transition, during training, from effectively shallow to deep. We note similarities with student-teacher behavior and develop drop-path, a natural extension of dropout, to regularize co-adaptation of subpaths in fractal architectures. Such regularization allows extraction of high-performance fixed-depth subnetworks. Additionally, fractal networks exhibit an anytime property: shallow subnetworks provide a quick answer, while deeper subnetworks, with higher latency, provide a more accurate answer.

Explaining the predictions of deep neural nets has been a topic of great interest in the computer vision literature. While several gradient-based interpretation schemes have been proposed to reveal the influential variables in a neural net's prediction, standard gradient-based interpretation frameworks have been commonly observed to lack robustness to input perturbations and flexibility for incorporating prior knowledge of sparsity and group-sparsity structures. In this work, we propose MoreauGrad as an interpretation scheme based on the classifier neural net's Moreau envelope. We demonstrate that MoreauGrad results in a smooth and robust interpretation of a multi-layer neural network and can be efficiently computed through first-order optimization methods. Furthermore, we show that MoreauGrad can be naturally combined with L_1-norm regularization techniques to output a sparse or group-sparse explanation which are prior conditions applicable to a wide range of deep learning applications. We empirically evaluate the proposed MoreauGrad scheme on standard computer vision datasets, showing the qualitative and quantitative success of the MoreauGrad approach in comparison to standard gradient-based interpretation methods.

We propose a game-based formulation for learning dimensionality-reducing representations of feature vectors, when only a prior knowledge on future prediction tasks is available. In this game, the first player chooses a representation, and then the second player adversarially chooses a prediction task from a given class, representing the prior knowledge. The first player aims is to minimize, and the second player to maximize, the regret: The minimal prediction loss using the representation, compared to the same loss using the original features. For the canonical setting in which the representation, the response to predict and the predictors are all linear functions, and under the mean squared error loss function, we derive the theoretically optimal representation in pure strategies, which shows the effectiveness of the prior knowledge, and the optimal regret in mixed strategies, which shows the usefulness of randomizing the representation. For general representations and loss functions, we propose an efficient algorithm to optimize a randomized representation. The algorithm only requires the gradients of the loss function, and is based on incrementally adding a representation rule to a mixture of such rules.

This book develops an effective theory approach to understanding deep neural networks of practical relevance. Beginning from a first-principles component-level picture of networks, we explain how to determine an accurate description of the output of trained networks by solving layer-to-layer iteration equations and nonlinear learning dynamics. A main result is that the predictions of networks are described by nearly-Gaussian distributions, with the depth-to-width aspect ratio of the network controlling the deviations from the infinite-width Gaussian description. We explain how these effectively-deep networks learn nontrivial representations from training and more broadly analyze the mechanism of representation learning for nonlinear models. From a nearly-kernel-methods perspective, we find that the dependence of such models' predictions on the underlying learning algorithm can be expressed in a simple and universal way. To obtain these results, we develop the notion of representation group flow (RG flow) to characterize the propagation of signals through the network. By tuning networks to criticality, we give a practical solution to the exploding and vanishing gradient problem. We further explain how RG flow leads to near-universal behavior and lets us categorize networks built from different activation functions into universality classes. Altogether, we show that the depth-to-width ratio governs the effective model complexity of the ensemble of trained networks. By using information-theoretic techniques, we estimate the optimal aspect ratio at which we expect the network to be practically most useful and show how residual connections can be used to push this scale to arbitrary depths. With these tools, we can learn in detail about the inductive bias of architectures, hyperparameters, and optimizers.

We study the problem of learning a single neuron with respect to the L_2^2-loss in the presence of adversarial label noise. We give an efficient algorithm that, for a broad family of activations including ReLUs, approximates the optimal L_2^2-error within a constant factor. Our algorithm applies under much milder distributional assumptions compared to prior work. The key ingredient enabling our results is a novel connection to local error bounds from optimization theory.

In this paper, we derive a novel bound on the generalization error of Magnitude-Based pruning of overparameterized neural networks. Our work builds on the bounds in Arora et al. [2018] where the error depends on one, the approximation induced by pruning, and two, the number of parameters in the pruned model, and improves upon standard norm-based generalization bounds. The pruned estimates obtained using our new Magnitude-Based compression algorithm are close to the unpruned functions with high probability, which improves the first criteria. Using Sparse Matrix Sketching, the space of the pruned matrices can be efficiently represented in the space of dense matrices of much smaller dimensions, thereby lowering the second criterion. This leads to stronger generalization bound than many state-of-the-art methods, thereby breaking new ground in the algorithm development for pruning and bounding generalization error of overparameterized models. Beyond this, we extend our results to obtain generalization bound for Iterative Pruning [Frankle and Carbin, 2018]. We empirically verify the success of this new method on ReLU-activated Feed Forward Networks on the MNIST and CIFAR10 datasets.

While diffusion models can learn complex distributions, sampling requires a computationally expensive iterative process. Existing distillation methods enable efficient sampling, but have notable limitations, such as performance degradation with very few sampling steps, reliance on training data access, or mode-seeking optimization that may fail to capture the full distribution. We propose EM Distillation (EMD), a maximum likelihood-based approach that distills a diffusion model to a one-step generator model with minimal loss of perceptual quality. Our approach is derived through the lens of Expectation-Maximization (EM), where the generator parameters are updated using samples from the joint distribution of the diffusion teacher prior and inferred generator latents. We develop a reparametrized sampling scheme and a noise cancellation technique that together stabilizes the distillation process. We further reveal an interesting connection of our method with existing methods that minimize mode-seeking KL. EMD outperforms existing one-step generative methods in terms of FID scores on ImageNet-64 and ImageNet-128, and compares favorably with prior work on distilling text-to-image diffusion models.

The great success of machine learning with massive amounts of data comes at a price of huge computation costs and storage for training and tuning. Recent studies on dataset condensation attempt to reduce the dependence on such massive data by synthesizing a compact training dataset. However, the existing approaches have fundamental limitations in optimization due to the limited representability of synthetic datasets without considering any data regularity characteristics. To this end, we propose a novel condensation framework that generates multiple synthetic data with a limited storage budget via efficient parameterization considering data regularity. We further analyze the shortcomings of the existing gradient matching-based condensation methods and develop an effective optimization technique for improving the condensation of training data information. We propose a unified algorithm that drastically improves the quality of condensed data against the current state-of-the-art on CIFAR-10, ImageNet, and Speech Commands.

We propose a novel method called Long Expressive Memory (LEM) for learning long-term sequential dependencies. LEM is gradient-based, it can efficiently process sequential tasks with very long-term dependencies, and it is sufficiently expressive to be able to learn complicated input-output maps. To derive LEM, we consider a system of multiscale ordinary differential equations, as well as a suitable time-discretization of this system. For LEM, we derive rigorous bounds to show the mitigation of the exploding and vanishing gradients problem, a well-known challenge for gradient-based recurrent sequential learning methods. We also prove that LEM can approximate a large class of dynamical systems to high accuracy. Our empirical results, ranging from image and time-series classification through dynamical systems prediction to speech recognition and language modeling, demonstrate that LEM outperforms state-of-the-art recurrent neural networks, gated recurrent units, and long short-term memory models.

Semi-supervised learning is attracting blooming attention, due to its success in combining unlabeled data. To mitigate potentially incorrect pseudo labels, recent frameworks mostly set a fixed confidence threshold to discard uncertain samples. This practice ensures high-quality pseudo labels, but incurs a relatively low utilization of the whole unlabeled set. In this work, our key insight is that these uncertain samples can be turned into certain ones, as long as the confusion classes for the top-1 class are detected and removed. Invoked by this, we propose a novel method dubbed ShrinkMatch to learn uncertain samples. For each uncertain sample, it adaptively seeks a shrunk class space, which merely contains the original top-1 class, as well as remaining less likely classes. Since the confusion ones are removed in this space, the re-calculated top-1 confidence can satisfy the pre-defined threshold. We then impose a consistency regularization between a pair of strongly and weakly augmented samples in the shrunk space to strive for discriminative representations. Furthermore, considering the varied reliability among uncertain samples and the gradually improved model during training, we correspondingly design two reweighting principles for our uncertain loss. Our method exhibits impressive performance on widely adopted benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/LiheYoung/ShrinkMatch.

In this paper, we study the implicit regularization of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) through the lens of {\em dynamical stability} (Wu et al., 2018). We start by revising existing stability analyses of SGD, showing how the Frobenius norm and trace of Hessian relate to different notions of stability. Notably, if a global minimum is linearly stable for SGD, then the trace of Hessian must be less than or equal to 2/eta, where eta denotes the learning rate. By contrast, for gradient descent (GD), the stability imposes a similar constraint but only on the largest eigenvalue of Hessian. We then turn to analyze the generalization properties of these stable minima, focusing specifically on two-layer ReLU networks and diagonal linear networks. Notably, we establish the {\em equivalence} between these metrics of sharpness and certain parameter norms for the two models, which allows us to show that the stable minima of SGD provably generalize well. By contrast, the stability-induced regularization of GD is provably too weak to ensure satisfactory generalization. This discrepancy provides an explanation of why SGD often generalizes better than GD. Note that the learning rate (LR) plays a pivotal role in the strength of stability-induced regularization. As the LR increases, the regularization effect becomes more pronounced, elucidating why SGD with a larger LR consistently demonstrates superior generalization capabilities. Additionally, numerical experiments are provided to support our theoretical findings.

A key aspect of text-to-image personalization methods is the manner in which the target concept is represented within the generative process. This choice greatly affects the visual fidelity, downstream editability, and disk space needed to store the learned concept. In this paper, we explore a new text-conditioning space that is dependent on both the denoising process timestep (time) and the denoising U-Net layers (space) and showcase its compelling properties. A single concept in the space-time representation is composed of hundreds of vectors, one for each combination of time and space, making this space challenging to optimize directly. Instead, we propose to implicitly represent a concept in this space by optimizing a small neural mapper that receives the current time and space parameters and outputs the matching token embedding. In doing so, the entire personalized concept is represented by the parameters of the learned mapper, resulting in a compact, yet expressive, representation. Similarly to other personalization methods, the output of our neural mapper resides in the input space of the text encoder. We observe that one can significantly improve the convergence and visual fidelity of the concept by introducing a textual bypass, where our neural mapper additionally outputs a residual that is added to the output of the text encoder. Finally, we show how one can impose an importance-based ordering over our implicit representation, providing users control over the reconstruction and editability of the learned concept using a single trained model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach over a range of concepts and prompts, showing our method's ability to generate high-quality and controllable compositions without fine-tuning any parameters of the generative model itself.

This paper introduces the counter-intuitive generalization results of overfitting pre-trained large language models (LLMs) on very small datasets. In the setting of open-ended text generation, it is well-documented that LLMs tend to generate repetitive and dull sequences, a phenomenon that is especially apparent when generating using greedy decoding. This issue persists even with state-of-the-art LLMs containing billions of parameters, trained via next-token prediction on large datasets. We find that by further fine-tuning these models to achieve a near-zero training loss on a small set of samples -- a process we refer to as hyperfitting -- the long-sequence generative capabilities are greatly enhanced. Greedy decoding with these Hyperfitted models even outperform Top-P sampling over long-sequences, both in terms of diversity and human preferences. This phenomenon extends to LLMs of various sizes, different domains, and even autoregressive image generation. We further find this phenomena to be distinctly different from that of Grokking and double descent. Surprisingly, our experiments indicate that hyperfitted models rarely fall into repeating sequences they were trained on, and even explicitly blocking these sequences results in high-quality output. All hyperfitted models produce extremely low-entropy predictions, often allocating nearly all probability to a single token.

The pervasiveness of proprietary language models has raised privacy concerns for users' sensitive data, emphasizing the need for private inference (PI), where inference is performed directly on encrypted inputs. However, current PI methods face prohibitively higher communication and latency overheads, primarily due to nonlinear operations. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis to understand the role of nonlinearities in transformer-based decoder-only language models. We introduce AERO, a four-step architectural optimization framework that refines the existing LLM architecture for efficient PI by systematically removing nonlinearities such as LayerNorm and GELU and reducing FLOPs counts. For the first time, we propose a Softmax-only architecture with significantly fewer FLOPs tailored for efficient PI. Furthermore, we devise a novel entropy regularization technique to improve the performance of Softmax-only models. AERO achieves up to 4.23times communication and 1.94times latency reduction. We validate the effectiveness of AERO by benchmarking it against the state-of-the-art.

Diffusion models have emerged as a key pillar of foundation models in visual domains. One of their critical applications is to universally solve different downstream inverse tasks via a single diffusion prior without re-training for each task. Most inverse tasks can be formulated as inferring a posterior distribution over data (e.g., a full image) given a measurement (e.g., a masked image). This is however challenging in diffusion models since the nonlinear and iterative nature of the diffusion process renders the posterior intractable. To cope with this challenge, we propose a variational approach that by design seeks to approximate the true posterior distribution. We show that our approach naturally leads to regularization by denoising diffusion process (RED-Diff) where denoisers at different timesteps concurrently impose different structural constraints over the image. To gauge the contribution of denoisers from different timesteps, we propose a weighting mechanism based on signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR). Our approach provides a new variational perspective for solving inverse problems with diffusion models, allowing us to formulate sampling as stochastic optimization, where one can simply apply off-the-shelf solvers with lightweight iterates. Our experiments for image restoration tasks such as inpainting and superresolution demonstrate the strengths of our method compared with state-of-the-art sampling-based diffusion models.

In this work we introduce malware detection from raw byte sequences as a fruitful research area to the larger machine learning community. Building a neural network for such a problem presents a number of interesting challenges that have not occurred in tasks such as image processing or NLP. In particular, we note that detection from raw bytes presents a sequence problem with over two million time steps and a problem where batch normalization appear to hinder the learning process. We present our initial work in building a solution to tackle this problem, which has linear complexity dependence on the sequence length, and allows for interpretable sub-regions of the binary to be identified. In doing so we will discuss the many challenges in building a neural network to process data at this scale, and the methods we used to work around them.

Current model quantization methods have shown their promising capability in reducing storage space and computation complexity. However, due to the diversity of quantization forms supported by different hardware, one limitation of existing solutions is that usually require repeated optimization for different scenarios. How to construct a model with flexible quantization forms has been less studied. In this paper, we explore a one-shot network quantization regime, named Elastic Quantization Neural Networks (EQ-Net), which aims to train a robust weight-sharing quantization supernet. First of all, we propose an elastic quantization space (including elastic bit-width, granularity, and symmetry) to adapt to various mainstream quantitative forms. Secondly, we propose the Weight Distribution Regularization Loss (WDR-Loss) and Group Progressive Guidance Loss (GPG-Loss) to bridge the inconsistency of the distribution for weights and output logits in the elastic quantization space gap. Lastly, we incorporate genetic algorithms and the proposed Conditional Quantization-Aware Accuracy Predictor (CQAP) as an estimator to quickly search mixed-precision quantized neural networks in supernet. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our EQ-Net is close to or even better than its static counterparts as well as state-of-the-art robust bit-width methods. Code can be available at https://github.com/xuke225/EQ-Net.git{https://github.com/xuke225/EQ-Net}.

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, represented by LoRA, play an essential role in adapting large-scale pre-trained models to downstream tasks. However, fine-tuning LoRA-series models also faces the risk of overfitting on the training dataset, and yet there's still a lack of theoretical guidance and practical mechanism to control overfitting on LoRA-based PEFT methods. In this paper, we propose a LoRA Dropout mechanism for the LoRA-based methods by introducing random noises to the learnable low-rank matrices and increasing parameter sparsity. We then demonstrate the theoretical mechanism of our LoRA Dropout mechanism from the perspective of sparsity regularization by providing a generalization error bound under this framework. Theoretical results show that appropriate sparsity would help tighten the gap between empirical and generalization risks and thereby control overfitting. Furthermore, based on the LoRA Dropout framework, we introduce a test-time ensemble strategy and provide theoretical evidence demonstrating that the ensemble method can further compress the error bound, and lead to better performance during inference time. Extensive experiments on various NLP tasks provide practical validations of the effectiveness of our LoRA Dropout framework in improving model accuracy and calibration.

Diffusion models that are based on iterative denoising have been recently proposed and leveraged in various generation tasks like image generation. Whereas, as a way inherently built for continuous data, existing diffusion models still have some limitations in modeling discrete data, e.g., languages. For example, the generally used Gaussian noise can not handle the discrete corruption well, and the objectives in continuous spaces fail to be stable for textual data in the diffusion process especially when the dimension is high. To alleviate these issues, we introduce a novel diffusion model for language modeling, Masked-Diffuse LM, with lower training cost and better performances, inspired by linguistic features in languages. Specifically, we design a linguistic-informed forward process which adds corruptions to the text through strategically soft-masking to better noise the textual data. Also, we directly predict the categorical distribution with cross-entropy loss function in every diffusion step to connect the continuous space and discrete space in a more efficient and straightforward way. Through experiments on 5 controlled generation tasks, we demonstrate that our Masked-Diffuse LM can achieve better generation quality than the state-of-the-art diffusion models with better efficiency.

Text-to-image (T2I) personalization allows users to guide the creative image generation process by combining their own visual concepts in natural language prompts. Recently, encoder-based techniques have emerged as a new effective approach for T2I personalization, reducing the need for multiple images and long training times. However, most existing encoders are limited to a single-class domain, which hinders their ability to handle diverse concepts. In this work, we propose a domain-agnostic method that does not require any specialized dataset or prior information about the personalized concepts. We introduce a novel contrastive-based regularization technique to maintain high fidelity to the target concept characteristics while keeping the predicted embeddings close to editable regions of the latent space, by pushing the predicted tokens toward their nearest existing CLIP tokens. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and show how the learned tokens are more semantic than tokens predicted by unregularized models. This leads to a better representation that achieves state-of-the-art performance while being more flexible than previous methods.

Supervised dictionary learning (SDL) is a classical machine learning method that simultaneously seeks feature extraction and classification tasks, which are not necessarily a priori aligned objectives. The goal of SDL is to learn a class-discriminative dictionary, which is a set of latent feature vectors that can well-explain both the features as well as labels of observed data. In this paper, we provide a systematic study of SDL, including the theory, algorithm, and applications of SDL. First, we provide a novel framework that `lifts' SDL as a convex problem in a combined factor space and propose a low-rank projected gradient descent algorithm that converges exponentially to the global minimizer of the objective. We also formulate generative models of SDL and provide global estimation guarantees of the true parameters depending on the hyperparameter regime. Second, viewed as a nonconvex constrained optimization problem, we provided an efficient block coordinate descent algorithm for SDL that is guaranteed to find an varepsilon-stationary point of the objective in O(varepsilon^{-1}(log varepsilon^{-1})^{2}) iterations. For the corresponding generative model, we establish a novel non-asymptotic local consistency result for constrained and regularized maximum likelihood estimation problems, which may be of independent interest. Third, we apply SDL for imbalanced document classification by supervised topic modeling and also for pneumonia detection from chest X-ray images. We also provide simulation studies to demonstrate that SDL becomes more effective when there is a discrepancy between the best reconstructive and the best discriminative dictionaries.

Recent works have shown that by using large pre-trained models along with learnable prompts, rehearsal-free methods for class-incremental learning (CIL) settings can achieve superior performance to prominent rehearsal-based ones. Rehearsal-free CIL methods struggle with distinguishing classes from different tasks, as those are not trained together. In this work we propose a regularization method based on virtual outliers to tighten decision boundaries of the classifier, such that confusion of classes among different tasks is mitigated. Recent prompt-based methods often require a pool of task-specific prompts, in order to prevent overwriting knowledge of previous tasks with that of the new task, leading to extra computation in querying and composing an appropriate prompt from the pool. This additional cost can be eliminated, without sacrificing accuracy, as we reveal in the paper. We illustrate that a simplified prompt-based method can achieve results comparable to previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods equipped with a prompt pool, using much less learnable parameters and lower inference cost. Our regularization method has demonstrated its compatibility with different prompt-based methods, boosting those previous SOTA rehearsal-free CIL methods' accuracy on the ImageNet-R and CIFAR-100 benchmarks. Our source code is available at https://github.com/jpmorganchase/ovor.

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have become a cornerstone in generative modeling and representation learning within machine learning. This paper explores a nuanced aspect of VAEs, focusing on interpreting the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence, a critical component within the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) that governs the trade-off between reconstruction accuracy and regularization. Meanwhile, the KL Divergence enforces alignment between latent variable distributions and a prior imposing a structure on the overall latent space but leaves individual variable distributions unconstrained. The proposed method redefines the ELBO with a mixture of Gaussians for the posterior probability, introduces a regularization term to prevent variance collapse, and employs a PatchGAN discriminator to enhance texture realism. Implementation details involve ResNetV2 architectures for both the Encoder and Decoder. The experiments demonstrate the ability to generate realistic faces, offering a promising solution for enhancing VAE-based generative models.

We describe a novel attribution method which is grounded in Sensitivity Analysis and uses Sobol indices. Beyond modeling the individual contributions of image regions, Sobol indices provide an efficient way to capture higher-order interactions between image regions and their contributions to a neural network's prediction through the lens of variance. We describe an approach that makes the computation of these indices efficient for high-dimensional problems by using perturbation masks coupled with efficient estimators to handle the high dimensionality of images. Importantly, we show that the proposed method leads to favorable scores on standard benchmarks for vision (and language models) while drastically reducing the computing time compared to other black-box methods -- even surpassing the accuracy of state-of-the-art white-box methods which require access to internal representations. Our code is freely available: https://github.com/fel-thomas/Sobol-Attribution-Method

Bilevel optimization is an important formulation for many machine learning problems. Current bilevel optimization algorithms assume that the gradient of the upper-level function is Lipschitz. However, recent studies reveal that certain neural networks such as recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and long-short-term memory networks (LSTMs) exhibit potential unbounded smoothness, rendering conventional bilevel optimization algorithms unsuitable. In this paper, we design a new bilevel optimization algorithm, namely BO-REP, to address this challenge. This algorithm updates the upper-level variable using normalized momentum and incorporates two novel techniques for updating the lower-level variable: initialization refinement and periodic updates. Specifically, once the upper-level variable is initialized, a subroutine is invoked to obtain a refined estimate of the corresponding optimal lower-level variable, and the lower-level variable is updated only after every specific period instead of each iteration. When the upper-level problem is nonconvex and unbounded smooth, and the lower-level problem is strongly convex, we prove that our algorithm requires mathcal{O}(1/epsilon^4) iterations to find an epsilon-stationary point in the stochastic setting, where each iteration involves calling a stochastic gradient or Hessian-vector product oracle. Notably, this result matches the state-of-the-art complexity results under the bounded smoothness setting and without mean-squared smoothness of the stochastic gradient, up to logarithmic factors. Our proof relies on novel technical lemmas for the periodically updated lower-level variable, which are of independent interest. Our experiments on hyper-representation learning, hyperparameter optimization, and data hyper-cleaning for text classification tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm.

We propose algorithms for approximate filtering and smoothing in high-dimensional Factorial hidden Markov models. The approximation involves discarding, in a principled way, likelihood factors according to a notion of locality in a factor graph associated with the emission distribution. This allows the exponential-in-dimension cost of exact filtering and smoothing to be avoided. We prove that the approximation accuracy, measured in a local total variation norm, is "dimension-free" in the sense that as the overall dimension of the model increases the error bounds we derive do not necessarily degrade. A key step in the analysis is to quantify the error introduced by localizing the likelihood function in a Bayes' rule update. The factorial structure of the likelihood function which we exploit arises naturally when data have known spatial or network structure. We demonstrate the new algorithms on synthetic examples and a London Underground passenger flow problem, where the factor graph is effectively given by the train network.

We derive a minimalist but powerful deterministic denoising-diffusion model. While denoising diffusion has shown great success in many domains, its underlying theory remains largely inaccessible to non-expert users. Indeed, an understanding of graduate-level concepts such as Langevin dynamics or score matching appears to be required to grasp how it works. We propose an alternative approach that requires no more than undergrad calculus and probability. We consider two densities and observe what happens when random samples from these densities are blended (linearly interpolated). We show that iteratively blending and deblending samples produces random paths between the two densities that converge toward a deterministic mapping. This mapping can be evaluated with a neural network trained to deblend samples. We obtain a model that behaves like deterministic denoising diffusion: it iteratively maps samples from one density (e.g., Gaussian noise) to another (e.g., cat images). However, compared to the state-of-the-art alternative, our model is simpler to derive, simpler to implement, more numerically stable, achieves higher quality results in our experiments, and has interesting connections to computer graphics.

Retrieval-augmented generation integrates the capabilities of large language models with relevant information retrieved from an extensive corpus, yet encounters challenges when confronted with real-world noisy data. One recent solution is to train a filter module to find relevant content but only achieve suboptimal noise compression. In this paper, we propose to introduce the information bottleneck theory into retrieval-augmented generation. Our approach involves the filtration of noise by simultaneously maximizing the mutual information between compression and ground output, while minimizing the mutual information between compression and retrieved passage. In addition, we derive the formula of information bottleneck to facilitate its application in novel comprehensive evaluations, the selection of supervised fine-tuning data, and the construction of reinforcement learning rewards. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves significant improvements across various question answering datasets, not only in terms of the correctness of answer generation but also in the conciseness with 2.5% compression rate.

This paper presents a comprehensive study on the role of Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) in text-conditioned diffusion models from the perspective of inference efficiency. In particular, we relax the default choice of applying CFG in all diffusion steps and instead search for efficient guidance policies. We formulate the discovery of such policies in the differentiable Neural Architecture Search framework. Our findings suggest that the denoising steps proposed by CFG become increasingly aligned with simple conditional steps, which renders the extra neural network evaluation of CFG redundant, especially in the second half of the denoising process. Building upon this insight, we propose "Adaptive Guidance" (AG), an efficient variant of CFG, that adaptively omits network evaluations when the denoising process displays convergence. Our experiments demonstrate that AG preserves CFG's image quality while reducing computation by 25%. Thus, AG constitutes a plug-and-play alternative to Guidance Distillation, achieving 50% of the speed-ups of the latter while being training-free and retaining the capacity to handle negative prompts. Finally, we uncover further redundancies of CFG in the first half of the diffusion process, showing that entire neural function evaluations can be replaced by simple affine transformations of past score estimates. This method, termed LinearAG, offers even cheaper inference at the cost of deviating from the baseline model. Our findings provide insights into the efficiency of the conditional denoising process that contribute to more practical and swift deployment of text-conditioned diffusion models.

Machine learning models -- including prominent zero-shot models -- are often trained on datasets whose labels are only a small proportion of a larger label space. Such spaces are commonly equipped with a metric that relates the labels via distances between them. We propose a simple approach to exploit this information to adapt the trained model to reliably predict new classes -- or, in the case of zero-shot prediction, to improve its performance -- without any additional training. Our technique is a drop-in replacement of the standard prediction rule, swapping argmax with the Fr\'echet mean. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis for this approach, studying (i) learning-theoretic results trading off label space diameter, sample complexity, and model dimension, (ii) characterizations of the full range of scenarios in which it is possible to predict any unobserved class, and (iii) an optimal active learning-like next class selection procedure to obtain optimal training classes for when it is not possible to predict the entire range of unobserved classes. Empirically, using easily-available external metrics, our proposed approach, Loki, gains up to 29.7% relative improvement over SimCLR on ImageNet and scales to hundreds of thousands of classes. When no such metric is available, Loki can use self-derived metrics from class embeddings and obtains a 10.5% improvement on pretrained zero-shot models such as CLIP.

PixelCNNs are a recently proposed class of powerful generative models with tractable likelihood. Here we discuss our implementation of PixelCNNs which we make available at https://github.com/openai/pixel-cnn. Our implementation contains a number of modifications to the original model that both simplify its structure and improve its performance. 1) We use a discretized logistic mixture likelihood on the pixels, rather than a 256-way softmax, which we find to speed up training. 2) We condition on whole pixels, rather than R/G/B sub-pixels, simplifying the model structure. 3) We use downsampling to efficiently capture structure at multiple resolutions. 4) We introduce additional short-cut connections to further speed up optimization. 5) We regularize the model using dropout. Finally, we present state-of-the-art log likelihood results on CIFAR-10 to demonstrate the usefulness of these modifications.

Electronic Health Records (EHR) are high-dimensional data with implicit connections among thousands of medical concepts. These connections, for instance, the co-occurrence of diseases and lab-disease correlations can be informative when only a subset of these variables is documented by the clinician. A feasible approach to improving the representation learning of EHR data is to associate relevant medical concepts and utilize these connections. Existing medical ontologies can be the reference for EHR structures, but they place numerous constraints on the data source. Recent progress on graph neural networks (GNN) enables end-to-end learning of topological structures for non-grid or non-sequential data. However, there are problems to be addressed on how to learn the medical graph adaptively and how to understand the effect of the medical graph on representation learning. In this paper, we propose a variationally regularized encoder-decoder graph network that achieves more robustness in graph structure learning by regularizing node representations. Our model outperforms the existing graph and non-graph based methods in various EHR predictive tasks based on both public data and real-world clinical data. Besides the improvements in empirical experiment performances, we provide an interpretation of the effect of variational regularization compared to standard graph neural network, using singular value analysis.

We present a novel adaptive optimization algorithm for large-scale machine learning problems. Equipped with a low-cost estimate of local curvature and Lipschitz smoothness, our method dynamically adapts the search direction and step-size. The search direction contains gradient information preconditioned by a well-scaled diagonal preconditioning matrix that captures the local curvature information. Our methodology does not require the tedious task of learning rate tuning, as the learning rate is updated automatically without adding an extra hyperparameter. We provide convergence guarantees on a comprehensive collection of optimization problems, including convex, strongly convex, and nonconvex problems, in both deterministic and stochastic regimes. We also conduct an extensive empirical evaluation on standard machine learning problems, justifying our algorithm's versatility and demonstrating its strong performance compared to other start-of-the-art first-order and second-order methods.

We propose an algorithm for inexpensive gradient-based hyperparameter optimization that combines the implicit function theorem (IFT) with efficient inverse Hessian approximations. We present results about the relationship between the IFT and differentiating through optimization, motivating our algorithm. We use the proposed approach to train modern network architectures with millions of weights and millions of hyper-parameters. For example, we learn a data-augmentation network - where every weight is a hyperparameter tuned for validation performance - outputting augmented training examples. Jointly tuning weights and hyperparameters with our approach is only a few times more costly in memory and compute than standard training.

Misclassification detection is an important problem in machine learning, as it allows for the identification of instances where the model's predictions are unreliable. However, conventional uncertainty measures such as Shannon entropy do not provide an effective way to infer the real uncertainty associated with the model's predictions. In this paper, we introduce a novel data-driven measure of uncertainty relative to an observer for misclassification detection. By learning patterns in the distribution of soft-predictions, our uncertainty measure can identify misclassified samples based on the predicted class probabilities. Interestingly, according to the proposed measure, soft-predictions corresponding to misclassified instances can carry a large amount of uncertainty, even though they may have low Shannon entropy. We demonstrate empirical improvements over multiple image classification tasks, outperforming state-of-the-art misclassification detection methods.

We address the problem of learning the dynamics of an unknown non-parametric system linking a target and a feature time series. The feature time series is measured on a sparse and irregular grid, while we have access to only a few points of the target time series. Once learned, we can use these dynamics to predict values of the target from the previous values of the feature time series. We frame this task as learning the solution map of a controlled differential equation (CDE). By leveraging the rich theory of signatures, we are able to cast this non-linear problem as a high-dimensional linear regression. We provide an oracle bound on the prediction error which exhibits explicit dependencies on the individual-specific sampling schemes. Our theoretical results are illustrated by simulations which show that our method outperforms existing algorithms for recovering the full time series while being computationally cheap. We conclude by demonstrating its potential on real-world epidemiological data.

Recent empirical works have successfully used unlabeled data to learn feature representations that are broadly useful in downstream classification tasks. Several of these methods are reminiscent of the well-known word2vec embedding algorithm: leveraging availability of pairs of semantically "similar" data points and "negative samples," the learner forces the inner product of representations of similar pairs with each other to be higher on average than with negative samples. The current paper uses the term contrastive learning for such algorithms and presents a theoretical framework for analyzing them by introducing latent classes and hypothesizing that semantically similar points are sampled from the same latent class. This framework allows us to show provable guarantees on the performance of the learned representations on the average classification task that is comprised of a subset of the same set of latent classes. Our generalization bound also shows that learned representations can reduce (labeled) sample complexity on downstream tasks. We conduct controlled experiments in both the text and image domains to support the theory.

Model attributions are important in deep neural networks as they aid practitioners in understanding the models, but recent studies reveal that attributions can be easily perturbed by adding imperceptible noise to the input. The non-differentiable Kendall's rank correlation is a key performance index for attribution protection. In this paper, we first show that the expected Kendall's rank correlation is positively correlated to cosine similarity and then indicate that the direction of attribution is the key to attribution robustness. Based on these findings, we explore the vector space of attribution to explain the shortcomings of attribution defense methods using ell_p norm and propose integrated gradient regularizer (IGR), which maximizes the cosine similarity between natural and perturbed attributions. Our analysis further exposes that IGR encourages neurons with the same activation states for natural samples and the corresponding perturbed samples, which is shown to induce robustness to gradient-based attribution methods. Our experiments on different models and datasets confirm our analysis on attribution protection and demonstrate a decent improvement in adversarial robustness.

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a useful tool for interpreting the internal representations of neural networks. However, naively optimising SAEs for reconstruction loss and sparsity results in a preference for SAEs that are extremely wide and sparse. We present an information-theoretic framework for interpreting SAEs as lossy compression algorithms for communicating explanations of neural activations. We appeal to the Minimal Description Length (MDL) principle to motivate explanations of activations which are both accurate and concise. We further argue that interpretable SAEs require an additional property, "independent additivity": features should be able to be understood separately. We demonstrate an example of applying our MDL-inspired framework by training SAEs on MNIST handwritten digits and find that SAE features representing significant line segments are optimal, as opposed to SAEs with features for memorised digits from the dataset or small digit fragments. We argue that using MDL rather than sparsity may avoid potential pitfalls with naively maximising sparsity such as undesirable feature splitting and that this framework naturally suggests new hierarchical SAE architectures which provide more concise explanations.

Diffusion models have revolutionized generative modeling in continuous domains like image, audio, and video synthesis. However, their iterative sampling process leads to slow generation and inefficient training, challenges that are further exacerbated when incorporating Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) due to sparse rewards and long time horizons. Consistency models address these issues by enabling single-step or efficient multi-step generation, significantly reducing computational costs. In this work, we propose a direct reward optimization framework for applying RLHF to consistency models, incorporating distributional regularization to enhance training stability and prevent reward hacking. We investigate various f-divergences as regularization strategies, striking a balance between reward maximization and model consistency. Unlike policy gradient methods, our approach leverages first-order gradients, making it more efficient and less sensitive to hyperparameter tuning. Empirical results show that our method achieves competitive or superior performance compared to policy gradient based RLHF methods, across various automatic metrics and human evaluation. Additionally, our analysis demonstrates the impact of different regularization techniques in improving model generalization and preventing overfitting.

Modern language models can contain billions of parameters, raising the question of whether they can generalize beyond the training data or simply regurgitate their training corpora. We provide the first non-vacuous generalization bounds for pretrained large language models (LLMs), indicating that language models are capable of discovering regularities that generalize to unseen data. In particular, we derive a compression bound that is valid for the unbounded log-likelihood loss using prediction smoothing, and we extend the bound to handle subsampling, accelerating bound computation on massive datasets. To achieve the extreme level of compression required for non-vacuous generalization bounds, we devise SubLoRA, a low-dimensional non-linear parameterization. Using this approach, we find that larger models have better generalization bounds and are more compressible than smaller models.

In this paper we propose a new generative model of text, Step-unrolled Denoising Autoencoder (SUNDAE), that does not rely on autoregressive models. Similarly to denoising diffusion techniques, SUNDAE is repeatedly applied on a sequence of tokens, starting from random inputs and improving them each time until convergence. We present a simple new improvement operator that converges in fewer iterations than diffusion methods, while qualitatively producing better samples on natural language datasets. SUNDAE achieves state-of-the-art results (among non-autoregressive methods) on the WMT'14 English-to-German translation task and good qualitative results on unconditional language modeling on the Colossal Cleaned Common Crawl dataset and a dataset of Python code from GitHub. The non-autoregressive nature of SUNDAE opens up possibilities beyond left-to-right prompted generation, by filling in arbitrary blank patterns in a template.