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PURE: Prompt Evolution with Graph ODE for Out-of-distribution Fluid Dynamics Modeling

Neural Information Processing Systems

This work studies the problem of out-of-distribution fluid dynamics modeling. Previous works usually design effective neural operators to learn from mesh-based data structures. However, in real-world applications, they would suffer from distribution shifts from the variance of system parameters and temporal evolution of the dynamical system. In this paper, we propose a novel approach named Prompt Evolution with Graph ODE (PURE) for out-of-distribution fluid dynamics modeling. The core of our PURE is to learn time-evolving prompts using a graph ODE to adapt spatio-temporal forecasting models to different scenarios.



Reference Trustable Decoding: A Training-Free Augmentation Paradigm for Large Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly advanced and demonstrated impressive capabilities. In-Context Learning (ICL) and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) are currently two mainstream methods for augmenting LLMs to downstream tasks. ICL typically constructs a few-shot learning scenario, either manually or by setting up a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system, helping models quickly grasp domain knowledge or question-answering patterns without changing model parameters. However, this approach involves trade-offs, such as slower inference speed and increased space occupancy. PEFT assists the model in adapting to tasks through minimal parameter modifications, but the training process still demands high hardware requirements, even with a small number of parameters involved. To address these challenges, we propose Reference Trustable Decoding (RTD), a paradigm that allows models to quickly adapt to new tasks without fine-tuning, maintaining low inference costs. RTD constructs a reference datastore from the provided training examples and optimizes the LLM's final vocabulary distribution by flexibly selecting suitable references based on the input, resulting in more trustable responses and enabling the model to adapt to downstream tasks at a low cost.


Compositional Automata Embeddings for Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning is a powerful way to control an AI agent's behavior at runtime. That said, popular goal representations, e.g., target states or natural language, are either limited to Markovian tasks or rely on ambiguous task semantics. We propose representing temporal goals using compositions of deterministic finite automata (cDFAs) and use cDFAs to guide RL agents.


Membership Inference Attacks against Fine-tuned Large Language Models via Self-prompt Calibration

Neural Information Processing Systems

Membership Inference Attacks (MIA) aim to infer whether a target data record has been utilized for model training or not. Existing MIAs designed for large language models (LLMs) can be bifurcated into two types: reference-free and reference-based attacks. Although reference-based attacks appear promising performance by calibrating the probability measured on the target model with reference models, this illusion of privacy risk heavily depends on a reference dataset that closely resembles the training set. Both two types of attacks are predicated on the hypothesis that training records consistently maintain a higher probability of being sampled. However, this hypothesis heavily relies on the overfitting of target models, which will be mitigated by multiple regularization methods and the generalization of LLMs.


Adam on Local Time: Addressing Nonstationarity in RL with Relative Adam Timesteps

Neural Information Processing Systems

In reinforcement learning (RL), it is common to apply techniques used broadly in machine learning such as neural network function approximators and momentumbased optimizers [1, 2]. However, such tools were largely developed for supervised learning rather than nonstationary RL, leading practitioners to adopt target networks [3], clipped policy updates [4], and other RL-specific implementation tricks [5, 6] to combat this mismatch, rather than directly adapting this toolchain for use in RL. In this paper, we take a different approach and instead address the effect of nonstationarity by adapting the widely used Adam optimiser [7]. We first analyse the impact of nonstationary gradient magnitude--such as that caused by a change in target network--on Adam's update size, demonstrating that such a change can lead to large updates and hence sub-optimal performance. To address this, we introduce Adam with Relative Timesteps, or Adam-Rel. Rather than using the global timestep in the Adam update, Adam-Rel uses the local timestep within an epoch, essentially resetting Adam's timestep to 0 after target changes. We demonstrate that this avoids large updates and reduces to learning rate annealing in the absence of such increases in gradient magnitude. Evaluating Adam-Rel in both on-policy and off-policy RL, we demonstrate improved performance in both Atari and Craftax. We then show that increases in gradient norm occur in RL in practice, and examine the differences between our theoretical model and the observed data.


Controlling Counterfactual Harm in Decision Support Systems Based on Prediction Sets

Neural Information Processing Systems

Decision support systems based on prediction sets help humans solve multiclass classification tasks by narrowing down the set of potential label values to a subset of them, namely a prediction set, and asking them to always predict label values from the prediction sets. While this type of systems have been proven to be effective at improving the average accuracy of the predictions made by humans, by restricting human agency, they may cause harm--a human who has succeeded at predicting the ground-truth label of an instance on their own may have failed had they used these systems. In this paper, our goal is to control how frequently a decision support system based on prediction sets may cause harm, by design. To this end, we start by characterizing the above notion of harm using the theoretical framework of structural causal models. Then, we show that, under a natural, albeit unverifiable, monotonicity assumption, we can estimate how frequently a system may cause harm using only predictions made by humans on their own. Further, we also show that, under a weaker monotonicity assumption, which can be verified experimentally, we can bound how frequently a system may cause harm again using only predictions made by humans on their own. Building upon these assumptions, we introduce a computational framework to design decision support systems based on prediction sets that are guaranteed to cause harm less frequently than a userspecified value using conformal risk control. We validate our framework using real human predictions from two different human subject studies and show that, in decision support systems based on prediction sets, there is a trade-off between accuracy and counterfactual harm.


Evaluating alignment between humans and neural network representations in image-based learning tasks

Neural Information Processing Systems

Humans represent scenes and objects in rich feature spaces, carrying information that allows us to generalise about category memberships and abstract functions with few examples. What determines whether a neural network model generalises like a human? We tested how well the representations of 86 pretrained neural network models mapped to human learning trajectories across two tasks where humans had to learn continuous relationships and categories of natural images. In these tasks, both human participants and neural networks successfully identified the relevant stimulus features within a few trials, demonstrating effective generalisation. We found that while training dataset size was a core determinant of alignment with human choices, contrastive training with multi-modal data (text and imagery) was a common feature of currently publicly available models that predicted human generalisation. Intrinsic dimensionality of representations had different effects on alignment for different model types. Lastly, we tested three sets of human-aligned representations and found no consistent improvements in predictive accuracy compared to the baselines. In conclusion, pretrained neural networks can serve to extract representations for cognitive models, as they appear to capture some fundamental aspects of cognition that are transferable across tasks. Both our paradigms and modelling approach offer a novel way to quantify alignment between neural networks and humans and extend cognitive science into more naturalistic domains.


Selective inference for group-sparse linear models

Neural Information Processing Systems

We develop tools for selective inference in the setting of group sparsity, including the construction of confidence intervals and p-values for testing selected groups of variables. Our main technical result gives the precise distribution of the magnitude of the projection of the data onto a given subspace, and enables us to develop inference procedures for a broad class of group-sparse selection methods, including the group lasso, iterative hard thresholding, and forward stepwise regression. We give numerical results to illustrate these tools on simulated data and on health record data.


MR-Ben: A Meta-Reasoning Benchmark for Evaluating System-2 Thinking in LLMs Yingjia Wan 2 Jingyao Li1

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large language models (LLMs) have shown increasing capability in problemsolving and decision-making, largely based on the step-by-step chain-of-thought reasoning processes. However, evaluating these reasoning abilities has become increasingly challenging. Existing outcome-based benchmarks are beginning to saturate, becoming less effective in tracking meaningful progress. To address this, we present a process-based benchmark MR-Ben that demands a meta-reasoning skill, where LMs are asked to locate and analyse potential errors in automatically generated reasoning steps. Our meta-reasoning paradigm is especially suited for system-2 slow thinking, mirroring the human cognitive process of carefully examining assumptions, conditions, calculations, and logic to identify mistakes. MR-Ben comprises 5,975 questions curated by human experts across a wide range of subjects, including physics, chemistry, logic, coding, and more. Through our designed metrics for assessing meta-reasoning on this benchmark, we identify interesting limitations and weaknesses of current LLMs (open-source and closed-source models).