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StreamBench: Towards Benchmarking Continuous Improvement of Language Agents

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent works have shown that large language model (LLM) agents are able to improve themselves from experience, which is an important ability for continuous enhancement post-deployment. However, existing benchmarks primarily evaluate their innate capabilities and do not assess their ability to improve over time. To address this gap, we introduce StreamBench, a pioneering benchmark designed to evaluate the continuous improvement of LLM agents over an input-feedback sequence. StreamBench simulates an online learning environment where LLMs receive a continuous flow of feedback stream and iteratively enhance their performance. In addition, we propose several simple yet effective baselines for improving LLMs on StreamBench, and provide a comprehensive analysis to identify critical components that contribute to successful streaming strategies. Our work serves as a stepping stone towards developing effective online learning strategies for LLMs, paving the way for more adaptive AI systems in streaming scenarios.


Risk-Averse Fine-tuning of Large Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

We consider the challenge of mitigating the generation of negative or toxic content by the Large Language Models (LLMs) in response to certain prompts. We propose integrating risk-averse principles into LLM fine-tuning to minimize the occurrence of harmful outputs, particularly rare but significant events. By optimizing the risk measure of Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR), our methodology trains LLMs to exhibit superior performance in avoiding toxic outputs while maintaining effectiveness in generative tasks. Empirical evaluations on sentiment modification and toxicity mitigation tasks demonstrate the efficacy of risk-averse reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) in promoting a safer and more constructive online discourse environment.


Mexico City's 'Xoli' Chatbot Will Help World Cup Tourists Navigate the City

WIRED

The launch of "Xoli" adds to the technological efforts promoted by the federal government to turn the 2026 World Cup into an engine of development for the entire country. Xoli, the new chatbot, is named after the axolotl, a salamander with external gills. The Government of Mexico City has launched Xoli, a chatbot that will provide information on services, tourism, and cultural offerings. The platform was designed to meet the demand of the millions of visitors expected to arrive during the 2026 FIFA World Cup . However, the authorities assure that the tool will remain active once the sporting event is over, with the aim of promoting economic activities and facilitating access to public services in the capital.


Learning from Uncertain Data: From Possible Worlds to Possible Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

We introduce an efficient method for learning linear models from uncertain data, where uncertainty is represented as a set of possible variations in the data, leading to predictive multiplicity. Our approach leverages abstract interpretation and zonotopes, a type of convex polytope, to compactly represent these dataset variations, enabling the symbolic execution of gradient descent on all possible worlds simultaneously. We develop techniques to ensure that this process converges to a fixed point and derive closed-form solutions for this fixed point. Our method provides sound over-approximations of all possible optimal models and viable prediction ranges. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through theoretical and empirical analysis, highlighting its potential to reason about model and prediction uncertainty due to data quality issues in training data.


Online Feature Updates Improve Online (Generalized) Label Shift Adaptation

Neural Information Processing Systems

This paper addresses the prevalent issue of label shift in an online setting with missing labels, where data distributions change over time and obtaining timely labels is challenging. While existing methods primarily focus on adjusting or updating the final layer of a pre-trained classifier, we explore the untapped potential of enhancing feature representations using unlabeled data at test-time. Our novel method, Online Label Shift adaptation with Online Feature Updates (OLS-OFU), leverages self-supervised learning to refine the feature extraction process, thereby improving the prediction model. By carefully designing the algorithm, theoretically OLS-OFU maintains the similar online regret convergence to the results in the literature while taking the improved features into account. Empirically, it achieves substantial improvements over existing methods, which is as significant as the gains existing methods have over the baseline (i.e., without distribution shift adaptations).


Fast Sampling via Discrete Non-Markov Diffusion Models with Predetermined Transition Time

Neural Information Processing Systems

Discrete diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for high-quality data generation. Despite their success in discrete spaces, such as text generation tasks, the acceleration of discrete diffusion models remains under-explored. In this paper, we propose discrete non-Markov diffusion models (DNDM), which naturally induce the predetermined transition time set. This enables a training-free sampling algorithm that significantly reduces the number of function evaluations (i.e., calls to the neural network), making the sampling process much faster. Furthermore, we study the transition from finite to infinite step sampling, offering new insights into bridging the gap between discrete and continuous-time processes for discrete diffusion models. Extensive experiments on natural language generation and machine translation tasks demonstrate the superior performance of our method in terms of both generation speed and sample quality compared to existing methods for discrete diffusion models. Codes are available at \url{https://github.com/uclaml/DNDM}.


Scale Equivariant Graph Metanetworks

Neural Information Processing Systems

This paper pertains to an emerging machine learning paradigm: learning higher-order functions, i.e. functions whose inputs are functions themselves, particularly when these inputs are Neural Networks (NNs). With the growing interest in architectures that process NNs, a recurring design principle has permeated the field: adhering to the permutation symmetries arising from the connectionist structure ofNNs. However, are these the sole symmetries present in NN parameterizations?


SS3DM: Benchmarking Street-View Surface Reconstruction with a Synthetic 3D Mesh Dataset

Neural Information Processing Systems

Reconstructing accurate 3D surfaces for street-view scenarios is crucial for applications such as digital entertainment and autonomous driving simulation. However, existing street-view datasets, including KITTI, Waymo, and nuScenes, only offer noisy LiDAR points as ground-truth data for geometric evaluation of reconstructed surfaces. These geometric ground-truths often lack the necessary precision to evaluate surface positions and do not provide data for assessing surface normals. To overcome these challenges, we introduce the SS3DM dataset, comprising precise \textbf{S}ynthetic \textbf{S}treet-view \textbf{3D} \textbf{M}esh models exported from the CARLA simulator. These mesh models facilitate accurate position evaluation and include normal vectors for evaluating surface normal. To simulate the input data in realistic driving scenarios for 3D reconstruction, we virtually drive a vehicle equipped with six RGB cameras and five LiDAR sensors in diverse outdoor scenes. Leveraging this dataset, we establish a benchmark for state-of-the-art surface reconstruction methods, providing a comprehensive evaluation of the associated challenges.


NetworkGym: Reinforcement Learning Environments for Multi-Access Traffic Management in Network Simulation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Mobile devices such as smartphones, laptops, and tablets can often connect to multiple access networks (e.g., Wi-Fi, LTE, and 5G) simultaneously.Recent advancements facilitate seamless integration of these connections below the transport layer, enhancing the experience for apps that lack inherent multi-path support.This optimization hinges on dynamically determining the traffic distribution across networks for each device, a process referred to as multi-access traffic splitting.This paper introduces NetworkGym, a high-fidelity network environment simulator that facilitates generating multiple network traffic flows and multi-access traffic splitting.This simulator facilitates training and evaluating different RL-based solutions for the multi-access traffic splitting problem.Our initial explorations demonstrate that the majority of existing state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms (e.g. CQL) fail to outperform certain hand-crafted heuristic policies on average.This illustrates the urgent need to evaluate offline RL algorithms against a broader range of benchmarks, rather than relying solely on popular ones such as D4RL.We also propose an extension to the TD3+BC algorithm, named Pessimistic TD3 (PTD3), and demonstrate that it outperforms many state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms.PTD3's behavioral constraint mechanism, which relies on value-function pessimism, is theoretically motivated and relatively simple to implement.We open source our code and offline datasets at github.com/hmomin/networkgym.


EgoSim: An Egocentric Multi-view Simulator and Real Dataset for Body-worn Cameras during Motion and Activity

Neural Information Processing Systems

Research on egocentric tasks in computer vision has mostly focused on head-mounted cameras, such as fisheye cameras or embedded cameras inside immersive headsets.We argue that the increasing miniaturization of optical sensors will lead to the prolific integration of cameras into many more body-worn devices at various locations.This will bring fresh perspectives to established tasks in computer vision and benefit key areas such as human motion tracking, body pose estimation, or action recognition---particularly for the lower body, which is typically occluded.In this paper, we introduce EgoSim, a novel simulator of body-worn cameras that generates realistic egocentric renderings from multiple perspectives across a wearer's body.A key feature of EgoSim is its use of real motion capture data to render motion artifacts, which are especially noticeable with armor leg-worn cameras.In addition, we introduce MultiEgoView, a dataset of egocentric footage from six body-worn cameras and ground-truth full-body 3D poses during several activities:119 hours of data are derived from AMASS motion sequences in four high-fidelity virtual environments, which we augment with 5 hours of real-world motion data from 13 participants using six GoPro cameras and 3D body pose references from an Xsens motion capture suit.We demonstrate EgoSim's effectiveness by training an end-to-end video-only 3D pose estimation network.Analyzing its domain gap, we show that our dataset and simulator substantially aid training for inference on real-world data.EgoSim code & MultiEgoView dataset: https://siplab.org/projects/EgoSim