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A Multi-LexSum release

Neural Information Processing Systems

The authors are working on incorporating the script as part of the HuggingFace datasets library to further streamline the downloading and usage of Multi-LexSum. We include a similar instruction on the project website, https://multilexsum. github.io,


DOPPLER: Differentially Private Optimizers with Low-pass Filter for Privacy Noise Reduction Xinwei Zhang University of Southern California Zhiqi Bu

Neural Information Processing Systems

Privacy is a growing concern in modern deep-learning systems and applications. Differentially private (DP) training prevents the leakage of sensitive information in the collected training data from the trained machine learning models. DP op-timizers, including DP stochastic gradient descent (DPSGD) and its variants, privatize the training procedure by gradient clipping and DP noise injection. However, in practice, DP models trained using DPSGD and its variants often suffer from significant model performance degradation. Such degradation prevents the application of DP optimization in many key tasks, such as foundation model pre-training.


Learning Deep Input-Output Stable Dynamics Graduate School of Medicine Graduate School of Medicine Kyoto University

Neural Information Processing Systems

Learning stable dynamics from observed time-series data is an essential problem in robotics, physical modeling, and systems biology. Many of these dynamics are represented as an inputs-output system to communicate with the external environment. In this study, we focus on input-output stable systems, exhibiting robustness against unexpected stimuli and noise. We propose a method to learn nonlinear systems guaranteeing the input-output stability. Our proposed method utilizes the differentiable projection onto the space satisfying the Hamilton-Jacobi inequality to realize the input-output stability. The problem of finding this projection can be formulated as a quadratic constraint quadratic programming problem, and we derive the particular solution analytically. Also, we apply our method to a toy bistable model and the task of training a benchmark generated from a glucoseinsulin simulator. The results show that the nonlinear system with neural networks by our method achieves the input-output stability, unlike naive neural networks.


Learning in Multi-Stage Decentralized Matching Markets

Neural Information Processing Systems

Matching markets are often organized in a multi-stage and decentralized manner. Moreover, participants in real-world matching markets often have uncertain preferences. This article develops a framework for learning optimal strategies in such settings, based on a nonparametric statistical approach and variational analysis. We propose an efficient algorithm, built upon concepts of "lower uncertainty bound" and "calibrated decentralized matching," for maximizing the participants' expected payoff. We show that there exists a welfare-versus-fairness trade-off that is characterized by the uncertainty level of acceptance. Participants will strategically act in favor of a low uncertainty level to reduce competition and increase expected payoff. We prove that participants can be better off with multi-stage matching compared to single-stage matching. We demonstrate aspects of the theoretical predictions through simulations and an experiment using real data from college admissions.


Bridging Offline Reinforcement Learning and Imitation Learning: A Tale of Pessimism Banghua Zhu Department of EECS Department of EECS UC Berkeley

Neural Information Processing Systems

Offline (or batch) reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms seek to learn an optimal policy from a fixed dataset without active data collection. Based on the composition of the offline dataset, two main methods are used: imitation learning which is suitable for expert datasets, and vanilla offline RL which often requires uniform coverage datasets. From a practical standpoint, datasets often deviate from these two extremes and the exact data composition is usually unknown. To bridge this gap, we present a new offline RL framework that smoothly interpolates between the two extremes of data composition, hence unifying imitation learning and vanilla offline RL. The new framework is centered around a weak version of the concentrability coefficient that measures the deviation of the behavior policy from the expert policy alone.


Counterfactually Fair Representation Mohammad Mahdi Khalili

Neural Information Processing Systems

The use of machine learning models in high-stake applications (e.g., healthcare, lending, college admission) has raised growing concerns due to potential biases against protected social groups. Various fairness notions and methods have been proposed to mitigate such biases. In this work, we focus on Counterfactual Fairness (CF), a fairness notion that is dependent on an underlying causal graph and first proposed by Kusner et al. [26]; it requires that the outcome an individual perceives is the same in the real world as it would be in a "counterfactual" world, in which the individual belongs to another social group. Learning fair models satisfying CF can be challenging. It was shown in [26] that a sufficient condition for satisfying CF is to not use features that are descendants of sensitive attributes in the causal graph. This implies a simple method that learns CF models only using non-descendants of sensitive attributes while eliminating all descendants. Although several subsequent works proposed methods that use all features for training CF models, there is no theoretical guarantee that they can satisfy CF. In contrast, this work proposes a new algorithm that trains models using all the available features.



Supplementary Material for Conformal Prediction using Conditional Histograms Matteo Sesia Department of Data Sciences and Operations University of Southern California, USA

Neural Information Processing Systems

S1.1 Estimating conditional distributions and histograms For any fixed K > 1, define the sequence a Note that we allow multiple estimated quantiles to be identical to each other, to accommodate the possibility of point masses. We will discuss in the next section practical options for estimating ห†q(x). Although there are multiple way of doing this, a principled solution is to convert the information contained in ห†q into a piece-wise constant density estimate, and then integrate that density within each bin. As the tails of the above estimated conditional density may be particularly inaccurate because relatively little information is available to estimate extremely low or high quantiles, we smooth them. This ensures any estimation errors will not make ห†f decay too fast, forcing one to look much farther than necessary in the tails before finding sufficient mass for the desired prediction intervals.


Conformal Prediction using Conditional Histograms Matteo Sesia Department of Data Sciences and Operations University of Southern California, USA

Neural Information Processing Systems

This paper develops a conformal method to compute prediction intervals for nonparametric regression that can automatically adapt to skewed data. Leveraging black-box machine learning algorithms to estimate the conditional distribution of the outcome using histograms, it translates their output into the shortest prediction intervals with approximate conditional coverage. The resulting prediction intervals provably have marginal coverage in finite samples, while asymptotically achieving conditional coverage and optimal length if the black-box model is consistent. Numerical experiments with simulated and real data demonstrate improved performance compared to state-of-the-art alternatives, including conformalized quantile regression and other distributional conformal prediction approaches.


The AI Hype Index: College students are hooked on ChatGPT

MIT Technology Review

That's why we've created the AI Hype Index--a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry. Large language models confidently present their responses as accurate and reliable, even when they're neither of those things. That's why we've recently seen chatbots supercharge vulnerable people's delusions, make citation mistakes in an important legal battle between music publishers and Anthropic, and (in the case of xAI's Grok) rant irrationally about "white genocide." But it's not all bad news--AI could also finally lead to a better battery life for your iPhone and solve tricky real-world problems that humans have been struggling to crack, if Google DeepMind's new model is any indication. And perhaps most exciting of all, it could combine with brain implants to help people communicate when they have lost the ability to speak.