Steve Wozniak is no fan of Elon Musk. In February, the Apple co-founder described the Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter owner as a "cult leader" and called him dishonest. Yet, in late March, the tech titans came together, joining dozens of high-profile academics, researchers and entrepreneurs in calling for a six-month pause in training artificial intelligence systems more powerful than GPT-4, the latest version of Chat GPT, the chatbot that has taken the world by storm. Their letter, penned by the United States-based Future of Life Institute, said the current rate of AI progress was becoming a "dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models". The "emergent capabilities" of these models, the letter said, should be "refocused on making today's powerful, state-of-the-art systems more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy and loyal".

In this work, we define a diffusion-based generative model capable of both music synthesis and source separation by learning the score of the joint probability density of sources sharing a context. Alongside the classic total inference tasks (i.e., generating a mixture, separating the sources), we also introduce and experiment on the partial generation task of source imputation, where we generate a subset of the sources given the others (e.g., play a piano track that goes well with the drums). Additionally, we introduce a novel inference method for the separation task based on Dirac likelihood functions. We train our model on Slakh2100, a standard dataset for musical source separation, provide qualitative results in the generation settings, and showcase competitive quantitative results in the source separation setting. Our method is the first example of a single model that can handle both generation and separation tasks, thus representing a step toward general audio models.

This paper presents an effective and general data augmentation framework for medical image segmentation. We adopt a computationally efficient and data-efficient gradient-based meta-learning scheme to explicitly align the distribution of training and validation data which is used as a proxy for unseen test data. We improve the current data augmentation strategies with two core designs. First, we learn class-specific training-time data augmentation (TRA) effectively increasing the heterogeneity within the training subsets and tackling the class imbalance common in segmentation. Second, we jointly optimize TRA and test-time data augmentation (TEA), which are closely connected as both aim to align the training and test data distribution but were so far considered separately in previous works. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on four medical image segmentation tasks across different scenarios with two state-of-the-art segmentation models, DeepMedic and nnU-Net. Extensive experimentation shows that the proposed data augmentation framework can significantly and consistently improve the segmentation performance when compared to existing solutions. Code is publicly available.

Classifying the same event reported by different countries is of significant importance for public opinion control and intelligence gathering. Due to the diverse types of news, relying solely on transla-tors would be costly and inefficient, while depending solely on translation systems would incur considerable performance overheads in invoking translation interfaces and storing translated texts. To address this issue, we mainly focus on the clustering problem of cross-lingual news. To be specific, we use a combination of sentence vector representations of news headlines in a mixed semantic space and the topic probability distributions of news content to represent a news article. In the training of cross-lingual models, we employ knowledge distillation techniques to fit two semantic spaces into a mixed semantic space. We abandon traditional static clustering methods like K-Means and AGNES in favor of the incremental clustering algorithm Single-Pass, which we further modify to better suit cross-lingual news clustering scenarios. Our main contributions are as follows: (1) We adopt the English standard BERT as the teacher model and XLM-Roberta as the student model, training a cross-lingual model through knowledge distillation that can represent sentence-level bilingual texts in both Chinese and English. (2) We use the LDA topic model to represent news as a combina-tion of cross-lingual vectors for headlines and topic probability distributions for con-tent, introducing concepts such as topic similarity to address the cross-lingual issue in news content representation. (3) We adapt the Single-Pass clustering algorithm for the news context to make it more applicable. Our optimizations of Single-Pass include ad-justing the distance algorithm between samples and clusters, adding cluster merging operations, and incorporating a news time parameter.

We study the problem of approximating stationary points of Lipschitz and smooth functions under $(\varepsilon,\delta)$-differential privacy (DP) in both the finite-sum and stochastic settings. A point $\widehat{w}$ is called an $\alpha$-stationary point of a function $F:\mathbb{R}^d\rightarrow\mathbb{R}$ if $\|\nabla F(\widehat{w})\|\leq \alpha$. We provide a new efficient algorithm that finds an $\tilde{O}\big(\big[\frac{\sqrt{d}}{n\varepsilon}\big]^{2/3}\big)$-stationary point in the finite-sum setting, where $n$ is the number of samples. This improves on the previous best rate of $\tilde{O}\big(\big[\frac{\sqrt{d}}{n\varepsilon}\big]^{1/2}\big)$. We also give a new construction that improves over the existing rates in the stochastic optimization setting, where the goal is to find approximate stationary points of the population risk. Our construction finds a $\tilde{O}\big(\frac{1}{n^{1/3}} + \big[\frac{\sqrt{d}}{n\varepsilon}\big]^{1/2}\big)$-stationary point of the population risk in time linear in $n$. Furthermore, under the additional assumption of convexity, we completely characterize the sample complexity of finding stationary points of the population risk (up to polylog factors) and show that the optimal rate on population stationarity is $\tilde \Theta\big(\frac{1}{\sqrt{n}}+\frac{\sqrt{d}}{n\varepsilon}\big)$. Finally, we show that our methods can be used to provide dimension-independent rates of $O\big(\frac{1}{\sqrt{n}}+\min\big(\big[\frac{\sqrt{rank}}{n\varepsilon}\big]^{2/3},\frac{1}{(n\varepsilon)^{2/5}}\big)\big)$ on population stationarity for Generalized Linear Models (GLM), where $rank$ is the rank of the design matrix, which improves upon the previous best known rate.

Do question answering (QA) modeling improvements (e.g., choice of architecture and training procedure) hold consistently across the diverse landscape of QA benchmarks? To study this question, we introduce the notion of concurrence -- two benchmarks have high concurrence on a set of modeling approaches if they rank the modeling approaches similarly. We measure the concurrence between 32 QA benchmarks on a set of 20 diverse modeling approaches and find that human-constructed benchmarks have high concurrence amongst themselves, even if their passage and question distributions are very different. Surprisingly, even downsampled human-constructed benchmarks (i.e., collecting less data) and programmatically-generated benchmarks (e.g., cloze-formatted examples) have high concurrence with human-constructed benchmarks. These results indicate that, despite years of intense community focus on a small number of benchmarks, the modeling improvements studied hold broadly.

We propose the Taylorformer for time series and other random processes. Its two key components are: 1) the LocalTaylor wrapper to learn how and when to use Taylor series-based approximations for predictions, and 2) the MHA-X attention block which makes predictions in a way inspired by how Gaussian Processes' mean predictions are linear smoothings of contextual data. Taylorformer outperforms the state-of-the-art on several forecasting datasets, including electricity, oil temperatures and exchange rates with at least 14% improvement in MSE on all tasks, and better likelihood on 5/6 classic Neural Process tasks such as meta-learning 1D functions. Taylorformer combines desirable features from the Neural Process (uncertainty-aware predictions and consistency) and forecasting (predictive accuracy) literature, two previously distinct bodies.

The success of Graph Neural Networks (GNN) in learning on non-Euclidean data arouses many subtopics, such as Label-inputted GNN (LGNN) and Implicit GNN (IGNN). LGNN, explicitly inputting supervising information (a.k.a. labels) in GNN, integrates label propagation to achieve superior performance, but with the dilemma between its propagating distance and adaptiveness. IGNN, outputting an equilibrium point by iterating its network infinite times, exploits information in the entire graph to capture long-range dependencies, but with its network constrained to guarantee the existence of the equilibrium. This work unifies the two subdomains by interpreting LGNN in the theory of IGNN and reducing prevailing LGNNs to the form of IGNN. The unification facilitates the exchange between the two subdomains and inspires more studies. Specifically, implicit differentiation of IGNN is introduced to LGNN to differentiate its infinite-range label propagation with constant memory, making the propagation both distant and adaptive. Besides, the masked label strategy of LGNN is proven able to guarantee the well-posedness of IGNN in a network-agnostic manner, granting its network more complex and thus more expressive. Combining the advantages of LGNN and IGNN, Label-inputted Implicit GNN (LI-GNN) is proposed. It can be widely applied to any specific GNN to boost its performance. Node classification experiments on two synthesized and six real-world datasets demonstrate its effectiveness. Code is available at https://github.com/cf020031308/LI-GNN

Climate simulations are essential in guiding our understanding of climate change and responding to its effects. However, it is computationally expensive to resolve complex climate processes at high spatial resolution. As one way to speed up climate simulations, neural networks have been used to downscale climate variables from fast-running low-resolution simulations, but high-resolution training data are often unobtainable or scarce, greatly limiting accuracy. In this work, we propose a downscaling method based on the Fourier neural operator. It trains with data of a small upsampling factor and then can zero-shot downscale its input to arbitrary unseen high resolution. Evaluated both on ERA5 climate model data and on the Navier-Stokes equation solution data, our downscaling model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art convolutional and generative adversarial downscaling models, both in standard single-resolution downscaling and in zero-shot generalization to higher upsampling factors. Furthermore, we show that our method also outperforms state-of-the-art data-driven partial differential equation solvers on Navier-Stokes equations. Overall, our work bridges the gap between simulation of a physical process and interpolation of low-resolution output, showing that it is possible to combine both approaches and significantly improve upon each other.

We consider online scheduling on unrelated (heterogeneous) machines in a speed-oblivious setting, where an algorithm is unaware of the exact job-dependent processing speeds. We show strong impossibility results for clairvoyant and non-clairvoyant algorithms and overcome them in models inspired by practical settings: (i) we provide competitive learning-augmented algorithms, assuming that (possibly erroneous) predictions on the speeds are given, and (ii) we provide competitive algorithms for the speed-ordered model, where a single global order of machines according to their unknown job-dependent speeds is known. We prove strong theoretical guarantees and evaluate our findings on a representative heterogeneous multi-core processor. These seem to be the first empirical results for scheduling algorithms with predictions that are evaluated in a non-synthetic hardware environment.