Technology
Towards Reliable Model Selection for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation: An Empirical Study and A Certified Baseline
Selecting appropriate hyperparameters is crucial for unlocking the full potential of advanced unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods in unlabeled target domains. Although this challenge remains under-explored, it has recently garnered increasing attention with the proposals of various model selection methods. Reliable model selection should maintain performance across diverse UDA methods and scenarios, especially avoiding highly risky worst-case selections--selecting the model or hyperparameter with the worst performance in the pool.\textit{Are
Motif-oriented influence maximization for viral marketing in large-scale social networks
The influence maximization (IM) problem aims to identify a budgeted set of nodes with the highest potential to influence the largest number of users in a cascade model, a key challenge in viral marketing. Traditional \emph{IM} approaches consider each user/node independently as a potential target customer. However, in many scenarios, the target customers comprise motifs, where activating only one or a few users within a motif is insufficient for effective viral marketing, which, nevertheless, receives little attention. For instance, if a motif of three friends planning to dine together, targeting all three simultaneously is crucial for a restaurant advertisement to succeed.In this paper, we address the motif-oriented influence maximization problem under the linear threshold model. We prove that the motif-oriented IM problem is NP-hard and that the influence function is neither supermodular nor submodular, in contrast to the classical \emph{IM} setting.To simplify the problem, we establish the submodular upper and lower bounds for the influence function. By leveraging the submodular property, we propose a natural greedy strategy that simultaneously maximizes both bounds. Our algorithm has an approximation ratio of $\tau\cdot (1-1/e-\varepsilon)$ and a near-linear time complexity of $O((k+l)(m+\eta)\log \eta/\varepsilon^2)$.Experimental results on diverse datasets confirm the effectiveness of our approach in motif maximization.
UniIF: Unified Molecule Inverse Folding
Molecule inverse folding has been a long-standing challenge in chemistry and biology, with the potential to revolutionize drug discovery and material science. Despite specified models have been proposed for different small-or macro-molecules, few have attempted to unify the learning process, resulting in redundant efforts. Complementary to recent advancements in molecular structure prediction, such as RoseTTAFold All-Atom and AlphaFold3, we propose the unified model UniIF for the inverse folding of all molecules. We do such unification in two levels: 1) Data-Level: We propose a unified block graph data form for all molecules, including the local frame building and geometric feature initialization.
Learning to Balance Altruism and Self-interest Based on Empathy in Mixed-Motive Games
Real-world multi-agent scenarios often involve mixed motives, demanding altruistic agents capable of self-protection against potential exploitation. However, existing approaches often struggle to achieve both objectives. In this paper, based on that empathic responses are modulated by learned social relationships between agents, we propose LASE (**L**earning to balance **A**ltruism and **S**elf-interest based on **E**mpathy), a distributed multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm that fosters altruistic cooperation through gifting while avoiding exploitation by other agents in mixed-motive games. LASE allocates a portion of its rewards to co-players as gifts, with this allocation adapting dynamically based on the social relationship --- a metric evaluating the friendliness of co-players estimated by counterfactual reasoning. In particular, social relationship measures each co-player by comparing the estimated $Q$-function of current joint action to a counterfactual baseline which marginalizes the co-player's action, with its action distribution inferred by a perspective-taking module. Comprehensive experiments are performed in spatially and temporally extended mixed-motive games, demonstrating LASE's ability to promote group collaboration without compromising fairness and its capacity to adapt policies to various types of interactive co-players.
A Concept-Based Explainability Framework for Large Multimodal Models
Large multimodal models (LMMs) combine unimodal encoders and large language models (LLMs) to perform multimodal tasks. Despite recent advancements towards the interpretability of these models, understanding internal representations of LMMs remains largely a mystery. In this paper, we present a novel framework for the interpretation of LMMs. We propose a dictionary learning based approach, applied to the representation of tokens. The elements of the learned dictionary correspond to our proposed concepts. We show that these concepts are well semantically grounded in both vision and text.
3DCoMPaT200: Language Grounded Large-Scale 3D Vision Dataset for Compositional Recognition
Understanding objects in 3D at the part level is essential for humans and robots to navigate and interact with the environment. Current datasets for part-level 3D object understanding encompass a limited range of categories. For instance, the ShapeNet-Part and PartNet datasets only include 16, and 24 object categories respectively. The 3DCoMPaT dataset, specifically designed for compositional understanding of parts and materials, contains only 42 object categories. To foster richer and fine-grained part-level 3D understanding, we introduce 3DCoMPaT200, a large-scale dataset tailored for compositional understanding of object parts and materials, with 200 object categories with approximately 5 times larger object vocabulary compared to 3DCoMPaT and almost 4 times larger part categories.
Avoiding Undesired Future with Minimal Cost in Non-Stationary Environments
Machine learning (ML) has achieved remarkable success in prediction tasks. In many real-world scenarios, rather than solely predicting an outcome using an ML model, the crucial concern is how to make decisions to prevent the occurrence of undesired outcomes, known as the problem. To this end, a new framework called has been proposed recently, which works effectively in stationary environments by leveraging the influence relations among variables. In real tasks, however, the environments are usually non-stationary, where the influence relations may be, leading to the failure of AUF by the existing method. In this paper, we introduce a novel sequential methodology that effectively updates the estimates of dynamic influence relations, which are crucial for rehearsal learning to prevent undesired outcomes in non-stationary environments. Meanwhile, we take the cost of decision actions into account and provide the formulation of AUF problem with minimal action cost under non-stationarity. We prove that in linear Gaussian cases, the problem can be transformed into the well-studied convex quadratically constrained quadratic program (QCQP). In this way, we establish the first polynomial-time rehearsal-based approach for addressing the AUF problem.
Weak Supervision Performance Evaluation via Partial Identification
Programmatic Weak Supervision (PWS) enables supervised model training without direct access to ground truth labels, utilizing weak labels from heuristics, crowdsourcing, or pre-trained models. However, the absence of ground truth complicates model evaluation, as traditional metrics such as accuracy, precision, and recall cannot be directly calculated. In this work, we present a novel method to address this challenge by framing model evaluation as a partial identification problem and estimating performance bounds using Fréchet bounds. Our approach derives reliable bounds on key metrics without requiring labeled data, overcoming core limitations in current weak supervision evaluation techniques. Through scalable convex optimization, we obtain accurate and computationally efficient bounds for metrics including accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, even in high-dimensional settings. This framework offers a robust approach to assessing model quality without ground truth labels, enhancing the practicality of weakly supervised learning for real-world applications.
Unveil Benign Overfitting for Transformer in Vision: Training Dynamics, Convergence, and Generalization
Transformers have demonstrated great power in the recent development of large foundational models. In particular, the Vision Transformer (ViT) has brought revolutionary changes to the field of vision, achieving significant accomplishments on the experimental side. However, their theoretical capabilities, particularly in terms of generalization when trained to overfit training data, are still not fully understood. To address this gap, this work delves deeply into the \textit{benign overfitting} perspective of transformers in vision. To this end, we study the optimization of a Transformer composed of a self-attention layer with softmax followed by a fully connected layer under gradient descent on a certain data distribution model. By developing techniques that address the challenges posed by softmax and the interdependent nature of multiple weights in transformer optimization, we successfully characterized the training dynamics and achieved generalization in post-training. Our results establish a sharp condition that can distinguish between the small test error phase and the large test error regime, based on the signal-to-noise ratio in the data model. The theoretical results are further verified by experimental simulation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to characterize benign overfitting for Transformers.
Learning Generalized Linear Programming Value Functions
We develop a theoretically-grounded learning method for the Generalized Linear Programming Value Function (GVF), which models the optimal value of a linear programming (LP) problem as its objective and constraint bounds vary. This function plays a fundamental role in algorithmic techniques for large-scale optimization, particularly in decomposition for two-stage mixed-integer linear programs (MILPs). This paper establishes a structural characterization of the GVF that enables it to be modeled as a particular neural network architecture, which we then use to learn the GVF in a way that benefits from three notable properties. First, our method produces a true under-approximation of the value function with respect to the constraint bounds. Second, the model is input-convex in the constraint bounds, which not only matches the structure of the GVF but also enables the trained model to be efficiently optimized over using LP. Finally, our learning method is unsupervised, meaning that training data generation does not require computing LP optimal values, which can be prohibitively expensive at large scales. We numerically show that our method can approximate the GVF well, even when compared to supervised methods that collect training data by solving an LP for each data point. Furthermore, as an application of our framework, we develop a fast heuristic method for large-scale two-stage MILPs with continuous second-stage variables, via a compact reformulation that can be solved faster than the full model linear relaxation at large scales and orders of magnitude faster than the original model.