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 Deep Learning


Language Models Can Predict Their Own Behavior

Neural Information Processing Systems

The text produced by language models (LMs) can exhibit specific'behaviors,' such as a failure to follow alignment training, that we hope to detect and react to during deployment. Identifying these behaviors can often only be done post facto, i.e., after the entire text of the output has been generated. We provide evidence that there are times when we can predict how an LM will behave early in computation, before even a single token is generated. We show that probes trained on the internal representation of input tokens alone can predict a wide range of eventual behaviors over the entire output sequence. Using methods from conformal prediction, we provide provable bounds on the estimation error of our probes, creating precise early warning systems for these behaviors.


ASmooth Sea Never Made a Skilled SAILOR: Robust Imitation via Learning to Search

Neural Information Processing Systems

The fundamental limitation of the behavioral cloning (BC) approach to imitation learning is that it only teaches an agent what the expert did at states the expert visited. This means that when a BC agent makes a mistake which takes them out of the support of the demonstrations, they often don't know how to recover from it. In this sense, BC is akin to giving the agent the fish - giving them dense supervision across a narrow set of states - rather than teaching them to fish: to be able to reason independently about achieving the expert's outcome even when faced with unseen situations at test-time. In response, we explore learning to search (L2S) from expert demonstrations, i.e. learning the components required to, at test time, plan to match expert outcomes, even after making a mistake. These include (1) a world model and (2) a reward model. We carefully ablate the set of algorithmic and design decisions required to combine these and other components for stable and sample/interaction-efficient learning of recovery behavior without additional human corrections. Across a dozen visual manipulation tasks from three benchmarks, our approach SAILORconsistently out-performs state-of-the-art Diffusion Policies trained via BC on the same data. Furthermore, scaling up the amount of demonstrations used for BC by 5-10 still leaves a performance gap. We find that SAILORcan identify nuanced failures and is robust to reward hacking.


MyoChallenge 2024: ANew Benchmark for Physiological Dexterity and Agility in Bionic Humans

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent advancements in bionic prosthetic technology offer transformative opportunities to restore mobility and functionality for individuals with missing limbs. Users of bionic limbs, or bionic humans, learn to seamlessly integrate prosthetic extensions into their motor repertoire, regaining critical motor abilities. The remarkable movement generalization and environmental adaptability demonstrated by these individuals highlight motor intelligence capabilities unmatched by current artificial intelligence systems. Addressing these limitations, MyoChallenge'24 at NeurIPS 2024 established a benchmark for human-robot coordination with an emphasis on joint control of both biological and mechanical limbs. The competition featured two distinct tracks: a manipulation task utilizing the myoMPL model, integrating a virtual biological arm and the Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL) for a passover task; and a locomotion task using the novel myoOSL model, combining a bilateral virtual biological leg with a trans-femoral amputation and the Open Source Leg (OSL) to navigate varied terrains. Marking the third iteration of the MyoChallenge, the event attracted over 50 teams with more than 290 submissions all around the globe, with diverse participants ranging from independent researchers to high school students. The competition facilitated the development of several state-of-the-art control algorithms for bionic musculoskeletal systems, leveraging techniques such as imitation learning, muscle synergy, and model-based reinforcement learning that significantly surpassed our proposed baseline performance by a factor of 10. By providing the open-source simulation framework of MyoSuite, standardized tasks, and physiologically realistic models, MyoChallenge serves as a reproducible testbed and benchmark for bridging ML and biomechanics.


FADRM: Fast and Accurate Data Residual Matching for Dataset Distillation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Residual connection has been extensively studied and widely applied at the model architecture level. However, its potential in the more challenging data-centric approaches remains unexplored. In this work, we introduce the concept of Data Residual Matching for the first time, leveraging data-level skip connections to facilitate data generation and mitigate data information vanishing. This approach maintains a balance between newly acquired knowledge through pixel space optimization and existing core local information identification within raw data modalities, specifically for the dataset distillation task. Furthermore, by incorporating training-time refinements, our method significantly improves computational efficiency, achieving superior performance while reducing training time and peak GPU memory usage by 50%. Consequently, the proposed method Fast and Accurate Data Residual Matching for Dataset Distillation (FADRM) establishes a new stateof-the-art, demonstrating substantial improvements over existing methods across multiple dataset benchmarks in both efficiency and effectiveness. For instance, with ResNet-18 as the student model and a 0.8% compression ratio on ImageNet-1K, the method achieves 48.4% test accuracy in single-model dataset distillation and 50.9% in multi-model dataset distillation, surpassing RDED by +6.4% and outperforming


Normal-Abnormal Guided Generalist Anomaly Detection

Neural Information Processing Systems

Generalist Anomaly Detection (GAD) aims to train a unified model on an original domain that can detect anomalies in new target domains. Previous GAD methods primarily use only normal samples as references, overlooking the valuable information contained in anomalous samples that are often available in real-world scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose a more practical approach: normal-abnormalguided generalist anomaly detection, which leverages both normal and anomalous samples as references to guide anomaly detection across diverse domains. We introduce the Normal-Abnormal Generalist Learning (NAGL) framework, consisting of two key components: Residual Mining (RM) and Anomaly Feature Learning (AFL). RM extracts abnormal patterns from normal-abnormal reference residuals to establish transferable anomaly representations, while AFL adaptively learns anomaly features in query images through residual mapping to identify instance-aware anomalies.


Logic.py: Bridging the Gap between LLMs and Constraint Solvers

Neural Information Processing Systems

We present a novel approach to formalise and solve search-based problems using large language models, which significantly improves upon previous state-of-theart results. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach on benchmarks like the logic puzzles tasks in ZebraLogicBench. Instead of letting the LLM attempt to directly solve the puzzles, our method prompts the model to formalise the problem in a logic-focused, human-readable, domain-specific language (DSL) called Logic.py. This formalised representation is then solved using a constraint solver, leveraging the strengths of both the language model and the solver. Our approach achieves a remarkable 65% absolute improvement over the baseline performance of Llama 3.1 70B on ZebraLogicBench, increasing its accuracy to over 90%. This significant advancement demonstrates the potential of combining language models with domain-specific languages and auxiliary tools on traditionally challenging tasks for LLMs.


R2ec: Towards Large Recommender Models with Reasoning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large recommender models have extended LLMs as powerful recommenders via encoding or item generation, and recent breakthroughs in LLM reasoning synchronously motivate the exploration of reasoning in recommendation. In this work, we propose R2ec, a unified large recommender model with intrinsic reasoning capability. R2ec introduces a dual-head architecture that supports both reasoning chain generation and efficient item prediction in a single model, significantly reducing inference latency. To overcome the lack of annotated reasoning data, we design RecPO, a reinforcement learning framework that optimizes reasoning and recommendation jointly with a novel fused reward mechanism. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that R2ec outperforms traditional, LLMbased, and reasoning-augmented recommender baselines, while further analyses validate its competitive efficiency among conventional LLM-based recommender baselines and strong adaptability to diverse recommendation scenarios.


HAWKBENCH: Investigating Resilience of RAG Methods on Stratified Information-Seeking Tasks

Neural Information Processing Systems

In real-world information-seeking scenarios, users have dynamic and diverse needs, requiring RAG systems to demonstrate adaptable resilience. To comprehensively evaluate the resilience of current RAG methods, we introduce HawkBench, a human-labeled, multi-domain benchmark designed to rigorously assess RAG performance across categorized task types. By stratifying tasks based on informationseeking behaviors, HawkBench provides a systematic evaluation of how well RAG systems adapt to diverse user needs. Unlike existing benchmarks, which focus primarily on specific task types (mostly factoid queries) and rely on varying knowledge bases, HawkBench offers: (1) systematic task stratification to cover a broad range of query types, including both factoid and rationale queries, (2) integration of multi-domain corpora across all task types to mitigate corpus bias, and (3) rigorous annotation for high-quality evaluation. HawkBench includes 1,600 high-quality test samples, evenly distributed across domains and task types. Using this benchmark, we evaluate representative RAG methods, analyzing their performance in terms of answer quality and response latency. Our findings highlight the need for dynamic task strategies that integrate decision-making, query interpretation, and global knowledge understanding to improve RAG generalizability. We believe HawkBench serves as a pivotal benchmark for advancing the resilience of RAG methods and their ability to achieve general-purpose information seeking.


PathVQ: Reforming Computational Pathology Foundation Model for Whole Slide Image Analysis via Vector Quantization

Neural Information Processing Systems

Pathology whole slide image (WSI) analysis is vital for disease diagnosis and understanding. While foundation models (FMs) have driven recent advances, their scalability in pathology remains a key challenge. In particular, vision-language (VL) pathology FMs align visual features with language annotation for downstream tasks, but they rely heavily on large-scale image-text paired data, which is scarce thus limiting generalization. On the other hand, vision-only pathology FMs can leverage abundant unlabeled data via self-supervised learning (SSL). However, current approaches often use the [CLS] token from tile-level ViTs as slide-level input for efficiency (a tile with 224 224 pixels composed of 196 patches with 16 16 pixels).


59ea33ae3d096f3bcd5026b479710cf8-Paper-Conference.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent rehearsal-free continual learning (CL) methods guided by prompts achieve strong performance on vision tasks with non-stationary data but remain resourceintensive, hindering real-world edge deployment. We introduce resource-efficient prompting (REP), which improves the computational and memory efficiency of prompt-based rehearsal-free continual learning methods while minimizing accuracy trade-offs. Our approach employs swift prompt selection to refine input data using a carefully provisioned model and introduces adaptive token merging (AToM) and adaptive layer dropping (ALD) for efficient prompt updates. AToM and ALD selectively skip data and model layers while preserving task-specific features during the learning of new tasks. Extensive experiments on multiple image classification datasets demonstrate REP's superior resource efficiency over state-of-the-art rehearsal-free CL methods.