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Distributional Preference Alignment of LLMs via Optimal Transport

Neural Information Processing Systems

Current LLM alignment techniques use pairwise human preferences at a sample level, and as such, they do not imply an alignment on the distributional level. We propose in this paper Alignment via Optimal Transport (AOT), a novel method for distributional preference alignment of LLMs.


CRONOS: Enhancing Deep Learning with Scalable GPU Accelerated Convex Neural Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

We introduce the CRONOS algorithm for convex optimization of two-layer neural networks. CRONOS is the first algorithm capable of scaling to high-dimensional datasets such as ImageNet, which are ubiquitous in modern deep learning. This significantly improves upon prior work, which has been restricted to downsampled versions of MNIST and CIFAR-10.Taking CRONOS as a primitive, we then develop a new algorithm called CRONOS-AM, which combines CRONOS with alternating minimization, to obtain an algorithm capable of training multi-layer networks with arbitrary architectures.Our theoretical analysis proves that CRONOS converges to the global minimum of the convex reformulation under mild assumptions. In addition, we validate the efficacy of CRONOS and CRONOS-AM through extensive large-scale numerical experiments with GPU acceleration in JAX.Our results show that CRONOS-AM can obtain comparable or better validation accuracy than predominant tuned deep learning optimizers on vision and language tasks with benchmark datasets such as ImageNet and IMDb.To the best of our knowledge, CRONOS is the first algorithm which utilizes the convex reformulation to enhance performance on large-scale learning tasks.


Can Models Learn Skill Composition from Examples?

Neural Information Processing Systems

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly advanced, their ability to exhibit compositional generalization---the capacity to combine learned skills in novel ways not encountered during training---has garnered significant attention. This type of generalization, particularly in scenarios beyond training data, is also of great interest in the study of AI safety and alignment. A recent study introduced the Skill-Mix evaluation, where models are tasked with composing a short paragraph demonstrating the use of a specified $k$-tuple of language skills. While small models struggled with composing even with $k=3$, larger models like GPT-4 performed reasonably well with $k=5$ and $6$.In this paper, we employ a setup akin to Skill-Mix to evaluate the capacity of smaller models to learn compositional generalization from examples. Utilizing a diverse set of language skills---including rhetorical, literary, reasoning, theory of mind, and common sense---GPT was used to generate text samples that exhibit random subsets of $k$ skills. Subsequent fine-tuning of 7B and 13B parameter models on these combined skill texts, for increasing values of $k$, revealed the following findings: (1) Training on combinations of $k=2$ and $3$ skills results in noticeable improvements in the ability to compose texts with $k=4$ and $5$ skills, despite models never having seen such examples during training.


RadarOcc: Robust 3D Occupancy Prediction with 4D Imaging Radar

Neural Information Processing Systems

Current methods predominantly rely on LiDAR or camera inputs for 3D occupancy prediction. These methods are susceptible to adverse weather conditions, limiting the all-weather deployment of self-driving cars. To improve perception robustness, we leverage the recent advances in automotive radars and introduce a novel approach that utilizes 4D imaging radar sensors for 3D occupancy prediction. Our method, RadarOcc, circumvents the limitations of sparse radar point clouds by directly processing the 4D radar tensor, thus preserving essential scene details. RadarOcc innovatively addresses the challenges associated with the voluminous and noisy 4D radar data by employing Doppler bins descriptors, sidelobe-aware spatial sparsification, and range-wise self-attention mechanisms. To minimize the interpolation errors associated with direct coordinate transformations, we also devise a spherical-based feature encoding followed by spherical-to-Cartesian feature aggregation. We benchmark various baseline methods based on distinct modalities on the public K-Radar dataset. The results demonstrate RadarOcc's state-of-the-art performance in radar-based 3D occupancy prediction and promising results even when compared with LiDAR-or camera-based methods. Additionally, we present qualitative evidence of the superior performance of 4D radar in adverse weather conditions and explore the impact of key pipeline components through ablation studies.


CodeRosetta: Pushing the Boundaries of Unsupervised Code Translation for Parallel Programming

Neural Information Processing Systems

Automatic translation of programming languages has garnered renewed interest, driven by recent advancements in large language models (LLMs). Encoder-decoder transformer models, in particular, have shown promise in translating between different programming languages. However, translating between a language and its high-performance computing (HPC) extension remains underexplored due to inherent challenges like complex parallel semantics understanding. In this paper, we introduce CodeRosetta, an encoder-decoder transformer model explicitly designed for translating between programming languages and also their HPC extensions. CodeRosetta is evaluated on C++ to CUDA and Fortran to C++ translation.It employs a customized learning-based framework with tailored pretraining and training objectives that enable it to effectively capture code semantics and parallel structural nuances, allowing for bidirectional code translation. Our results show that CodeRosetta outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in C++ to CUDA translation by 2.9 BLEU and 1.72 CodeBLUE points while improving compilation accuracy by 6.05%. Compared to general closed-source LLMs, our proposed bidirectional learning-based method improves C++ to CUDA translation by 22.08 BLEU and 14.39 CodeBLUE with 2.75% higher compilation accuracy.Finally, CodeRosetta exhibits proficiency in Fortran to parallel C++ translation, marking it, to our knowledge, as the first encoder-decoder model for such a complex translation task, improving CodeBLEU at least by 4.63 points compared to closed-source LLMs and Open Code LLM.


CoVoMix: Advancing Zero-Shot Speech Generation for Human-like Multi-talker Conversations

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent advancements in zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) modeling have led to significant strides in generating high-fidelity and diverse speech. However, dialogue generation, along with achieving human-like naturalness in speech, continues to be a challenge. In this paper, we introduce CoVoMix: Conversational Voice Mixture Generation, a novel model for zero-shot, human-like, multi-speaker, multi-round dialogue speech generation. CoVoMix first converts dialogue text into multiple streams of discrete tokens, with each token stream representing semantic information for individual talkers. These token streams are then fed into a flow-matching based acoustic model to generate mixed mel-spectrograms. Finally, the speech waveforms are produced using a HiFi-GAN model.


Global Distortions from Local Rewards: Neural Coding Strategies in Path-Integrating Neural Systems

Neural Information Processing Systems

Grid cells in the mammalian brain are fundamental to spatial navigation, and therefore crucial to how animals perceive and interact with their environment. Traditionally, grid cells are thought support path integration through highly symmetric hexagonal lattice firing patterns. However, recent findings show that their firing patterns become distorted in the presence of significant spatial landmarks such as rewarded locations. This introduces a novel perspective of dynamic, subjective, and action-relevant interactions between spatial representations and environmental cues. Here, we propose a practical and theoretical framework to quantify and explain these interactions.


SHED: Shapley-Based Automated Dataset Refinement for Instruction Fine-Tuning

Neural Information Processing Systems

The pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) can be adapted for many downstream tasks and tailored to align with human preferences through fine-tuning. Recent studies have discovered that LLMs can achieve desirable performance with only a small amount of high-quality data, suggesting that a large portion of the data in these extensive datasets is redundant or even harmful. Identifying high-quality data from vast datasets to curate small yet effective datasets has emerged as a critical challenge. In this paper, we introduce SHED, an automated dataset refinement framework based on Shapley value for instruction fine-tuning. SHED eliminates the need for human intervention or the use of commercial LLMs. Moreover, the datasets curated through SHED exhibit transferability, indicating they can be reused across different LLMs with consistently high performance. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the datasets curated by SHED. The results demonstrate SHED's superiority over state-of-the-art methods across various tasks and LLMs; notably, datasets comprising only 10% of the original data selected by SHED achieve performance comparable to or surpassing that of the full datasets.


Hierarchy-Agnostic Unsupervised Segmentation: Parsing Semantic Image Structure

Neural Information Processing Systems

Unsupervised semantic segmentation aims to discover groupings within images, capturing objects' view-invariance without external supervision. Moreover, this task is inherently ambiguous due to the varying levels of semantic granularity. Existing methods often bypass this ambiguity using dataset-specific priors. In our research, we address this ambiguity head-on and provide a universal tool for pixel-level semantic parsing of images guided by the latent representations encoded in self-supervised models. We introduce a novel algebraic approach that recursively decomposes an image into nested subgraphs, dynamically estimating their count and ensuring clear separation.The innovative approach identifies scene-specific primitives and constructs a hierarchy-agnostic tree of semantic regions from the image pixels.


Few-Shot Task Learning through Inverse Generative Modeling

Neural Information Processing Systems

Learning the intents of an agent, defined by its goals or motion style, is often extremely challenging from just a few examples. We refer to this problem as task concept learning and present our approach, Few-Shot Task Learning through Inverse Generative Modeling (FTL-IGM), which learns new task concepts by leveraging invertible neural generative models. The core idea is to pretrain a generative model on a set of basic concepts and their demonstrations. Then, given a few demonstrations of a new concept (such as a new goal or a new action), our method learns the underlying concepts through backpropagation without updating the model weights, thanks to the invertibility of the generative model. We evaluate our method in five domains -- object rearrangement, goal-oriented navigation, motion caption of human actions, autonomous driving, and real-world table-top manipulation. Our experimental results demonstrate that via the pretrained generative model, we successfully learn novel concepts and generate agent plans or motion corresponding to these concepts in (1) unseen environments and (2) in composition with training concepts.