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Credal Prediction based on Relative Likelihood

Neural Information Processing Systems

Predictions in the form of sets of probability distributions, so-called credal sets, provide a suitable means to represent a learner's epistemic uncertainty. In this paper, we propose a theoretically grounded approach to credal prediction based on the statistical notion of relative likelihood: The target of prediction is the set of all (conditional) probability distributions produced by the collection of plausible models, namely those models whose relative likelihood exceeds a specified threshold. This threshold has an intuitive interpretation and allows for controlling the trade-off between correctness and precision of credal predictions. We tackle the problem of approximating credal sets defined in this way by means of suitably modified ensemble learning techniques. To validate our approach, we illustrate its effectiveness by experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrating superior uncertainty representation without compromising predictive performance. We also compare our method against several state-of-the-art baselines in credal prediction.


Computational Hardness of Reinforcement Learning with Partial qπ-Realizability

Neural Information Processing Systems

This paper investigates the computational complexity of reinforcement learning within a novel linear function approximation regime, termed partial qπ-realizability. In this framework, the objective is to learn an ϵ-optimal policy with respect to a predefined policy set Π, under the assumption that all value functions corresponding to policies in Π are linearly realizable. This framework adopts assumptions that are weaker than those in the qπ-realizability setting yet stronger than those in the q -realizability setup. As a result, it provides a more practical model for reinforcement learning scenarios where function approximation naturally arise. We prove that learning an ϵ-optimal policy in this newly defined setting is computationally hard. More specifically, we establish NP-hardness under a parameterized greedy policy set (i.e., argmax) and, further, show that--unless NP = RP--an exponential lower bound (exponential in feature vector dimension) holds when the policy set contains softmax policies, under the Randomized Exponential Time Hypothesis. Our hardness results mirror those obtained in the q -realizability settings, and suggest that computational difficulty persists even when the policy class Πis expanded beyond the optimal policy, reinforcing the unbreakable nature of the computational hardness result regarding partial qπ-realizability under two important policy sets. To establish our negative result, our primary technical contribution is a reduction from two complexity problems, δ-MAX-3SAT and δ-MAX-3SAT(b), to instances of our problem settings: GLINEAR-κ-RL (under the greedy policy set) and SLINEAR-κ-RL (under the softmax policy set), respectively. Our findings indicate that positive computational results are generally unattainable in the context of partial qπ-realizability, in sharp contrast to the qπ-realizability setting under a generative access model.


Re-ttention: Ultra Sparse Visual Generation via Attention Statistical Reshape

Neural Information Processing Systems

Diffusion Transformers (DiT) have become the de-facto model for generating highquality visual content like videos and images. A huge bottleneck is the attention mechanism where complexity scales quadratically with resolution and video length. One logical way to lessen this burden is sparse attention, where only a subset of tokens or patches are included in the calculation. However, existing techniques fail to preserve visual quality at extremely high sparsity levels and might even incur non-negligible compute overheads. To address this concern, we propose Re-ttention, which implements very high sparse attention for visual generation models by leveraging the temporal redundancy of Diffusion Models to overcome the probabilistic normalization shift within the attention mechanism. Specifically, Re-ttention reshapes attention scores based on the prior softmax distribution history in order to preserve the visual quality of the full quadratic attention at very high sparsity levels. Experimental results on T2V/T2I models such as CogVideoX and the PixArt DiTs demonstrate that Re-ttention requires as few as 3.1% of the tokens during inference, outperforming contemporary methods like FastDiTAttn, Sparse VideoGen and MInference.


Classical Planning with LLM-Generated Heuristics: Challenging the State of the Art with Python Code

Neural Information Processing Systems

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in many problems. However, they fail to plan reliably. Specialized attempts to improve their planning capabilities still produce incorrect plans and fail to generalize to larger tasks. Furthermore, LLMs designed for explicit "reasoning" fail to compete with automated planners while increasing computational costs, which reduces one of the advantages of using LLMs. In this paper, we show how to use LLMs to always generate correct plans, even for out-of-distribution tasks of increasing size.



Canadian officials claim OpenAI violated federal and provincial privacy laws

Engadget

Philippe Dufresne, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, has found OpenAI was not compliant with Canadian federal and provincial privacy laws in the training of its AI models. Following an investigation, Dufresne and his counterparts in Alberta, Quebec and British Columbia say OpenAI's approach to things like data collection and consent stepped on multiple laws, including Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), which governs how companies collect and use personal information during the normal course of business. The commissioners participating in the investigation identified multiple privacy issues with OpenAI's approach, including that the company gathered vast amounts of personal information without adequate safeguards to prevent use of that information to train its models, and that it failed to acquire consent to collect and use that personal information in the first place. Warnings in ChatGPT note that interactions with the AI could be used in training, but third-party data OpenAI has purchased or scraped also includes personal details people likely aren't even aware of. The fact that ChatGPT users have no way to access, correct or delete that data was another issue that the commissioners identified, according to a summary of the investigation's findings, along with OpenAI's lackluster attempts to acknowledge the inaccuracy of some of ChatGPT's responses.