Technology
Provable and Efficient Dataset Distillation for Kernel Ridge Regression
Deep learning models are now trained on increasingly larger datasets, making it crucial to reduce computational costs and improve data quality. Dataset distillation aims to distill a large dataset into a small synthesized dataset such that models trained on it can achieve similar performance to those trained on the original dataset. While there have been many empirical efforts to improve dataset distillation algorithms, a thorough theoretical analysis and provable, efficient algorithms are still lacking. In this paper, by focusing on dataset distillation for kernel ridge regression (KRR), we show that one data point per class is already necessary and sufficient to recover the original model's performance in many settings. For linear ridge regression and KRR with surjective feature mappings, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the distilled dataset to recover the original model's parameters. For KRR with injective feature mappings of deep neural networks, we show that while one data point per class is not sufficient in general, $k+1$ data points can be sufficient for deep linear neural networks, where $k$ is the number of classes. Our theoretical results enable directly constructing analytical solutions for distilled datasets, resulting in a provable and efficient dataset distillation algorithm for KRR. We verify our theory experimentally and show that our algorithm outperforms previous work such as KIP while being significantly more efficient, e.g.
Implicit Zoo: A Large-Scale Dataset of Neural Implicit Functions for 2D Images and 3D Scenes
Neural implicit functions have demonstrated significant importance in various areas such as computer vision, graphics. Their advantages include the ability to represent complex shapes and scenes with high fidelity, smooth interpolation capabilities, and continuous representations. Despite these benefits, the development and analysis of implicit functions have been limited by the lack of comprehensive datasets and the substantial computational resources required for their implementation and evaluation. To address these challenges, we introduce Implicit-Zoo: a large-scale dataset requiring thousands of GPU training days designed to facilitate research and development in this field. Our dataset includes diverse 2D and 3D scenes, such as CIFAR-10, ImageNet-1K, and Cityscapes for 2D image tasks, and the OmniObject3D dataset for 3D vision tasks. We ensure high quality through strict checks, refining or filtering out low-quality data. Using Implicit-Zoo, we showcase two immediate benefits as it enables to: (1) learn token locations for transformer models; (2) Directly regress 3D cameras poses of 2D images with respect to NeRF models. This in turn leads to an \emph{improved performance} in all three task of image classification, semantic segmentation, and 3D pose regression -- thereby unlocking new avenues for research.
Speculative Monte-Carlo Tree Search
Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) is an influential sequential decision-making algorithm notably employed in AlphaZero. Despite its success, the primary challenge in AlphaZero training lies in its prolonged time-to-solution due to the high latency imposed by the sequential MCTS process. To address this challenge, this paper proposes and evaluates an inter-decision parallelization strategy called speculative MCTS, a new type of parallelism in AlphaZero which implements speculative execution. This approach allows for the parallel execution of future moves before the current MCTS computations are completed, thus reducing the latency. Additionally, we analyze factors contributing to the overall speedup by studying the synergistic effects of speculation and neural network caching in MCTS. We also provide an analytical model that can be used to evaluate the potential of different speculation strategies before they are implemented and deployed. Our empirical findings indicate that the proposed speculative MCTS can reduce training latency by 5.81$\times$ in 9x9 Go games. Moreover, our study shows that speculative execution can enhance the NN cache hit rate by 26\% during midgame. Overall, our end-to-end evaluation indicates 1.91$\times$ speedup in 19x19 Go training time, compared to the state-of-the-art KataGo program.
SM3-Text-to-Query: Synthetic Multi-Model Medical Text-to-Query Benchmark
Electronic health records (EHRs) are stored in various database systems with different database models on heterogeneous storage architectures, such as relational databases, document stores, or graph databases. These different database models have a big impact on query complexity and performance. While this has been a known fact in database research, its implications for the growing number of Text-to-Query systems have surprisingly not been investigated so far.In this paper, we present SM3-Text-to-Query, the first multi-model medical Text-to-Query benchmark based on synthetic patient data from Synthea, following the SNOMED-CT taxonomy---a widely used knowledge graph ontology covering medical terminology. SM3-Text-to-Query provides data representations for relational databases (PostgreSQL), document stores (MongoDB), and graph databases (Neo4j and GraphDB (RDF)), allowing the evaluation across four popular query languages, namely SQL, MQL, Cypher, and SPARQL.We systematically and manually develop 408 template questions, which we augment to construct a benchmark of 10K diverse natural language question/query pairs for these four query languages (40K pairs overall). On our dataset, we evaluate several common in-context-learning (ICL) approaches for a set of representative closed and open-source LLMs.Our evaluation sheds light on the trade-offs between database models and query languages for different ICL strategies and LLMs. Last,SM3-Text-to-Query is easily extendable to additional query languages or real, standard-based patient databases.
ProtGO: Function-Guided Protein Modeling for Unified Representation Learning
Protein representation learning is indispensable for various downstream applications of artificial intelligence for bio-medicine research, such as drug design and function prediction. However, achieving effective representation learning for proteins poses challenges due to the diversity of data modalities involved, including sequence, structure, and function annotations. Despite the impressive capabilities of large language models in biomedical text modelling, there remains a pressing need for a framework that seamlessly integrates these diverse modalities, particularly focusing on the three critical aspects of protein information: sequence, structure, and function. Moreover, addressing the inherent data scale differences among these modalities is essential. To tackle these challenges, we introduce ProtGO, a unified model that harnesses a teacher network equipped with a customized graph neural network (GNN) and a Gene Ontology (GO) encoder to learn hybrid embeddings. Notably, our approach eliminates the need for additional functions as input for the student network, which shares the same GNN module. Importantly, we utilize a domain adaptation method to facilitate distribution approximation for guiding the training of the teacher-student framework. This approach leverages distributions learned from latent representations to avoid the alignment of individual samples. Benchmark experiments highlight that ProtGO significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, clearly demonstrating the advantages of the proposed unified framework.
IDGen: Item Discrimination Induced Prompt Generation for LLM Evaluation
As Large Language Models (LLMs) become more capable of handling increasingly complex tasks, the evaluation set must keep pace with these advancements to ensure it remains sufficiently discriminative. Item Discrimination (ID) theory, which is widely used in educational assessment, measures the ability of individual test items to differentiate between high and low performers. Inspired by this theory, we propose an ID-induced prompt synthesis framework for evaluating LLMs so that the evaluation set continually updates and refines according to model abilities.
Hidden in Plain Sight: Evaluating Abstract Shape Recognition in Vision-Language Models
Despite the importance of shape perception in human vision, early neural image classifiers relied less on shape information for object recognition than other (often spurious) features. While recent research suggests that current large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit more reliance on shape, we find them to still be seriously limited in this regard. To quantify such limitations, we introduce IllusionBench, a dataset that challenges current cutting-edge VLMs to decipher shape information when the shape is represented by an arrangement of visual elements in a scene. Our extensive evaluations reveal that, while these shapes are easily detectable by human annotators, current VLMs struggle to recognize them, indicating important avenues for future work in developing more robust visual perception systems.
Trap-MID: Trapdoor-based Defense against Model Inversion Attacks
Model Inversion (MI) attacks pose a significant threat to the privacy of Deep Neural Networks by recovering training data distribution from well-trained models. While existing defenses often rely on regularization techniques to reduce information leakage, they remain vulnerable to recent attacks. In this paper, we propose the Trapdoor-based Model Inversion Defense (Trap-MID) to mislead MI attacks. A trapdoor is integrated into the model to predict a specific label when the input is injected with the corresponding trigger. Consequently, this trapdoor information serves as the shortcut for MI attacks, leading them to extract trapdoor triggers rather than private data. We provide theoretical insights into the impacts of trapdoor's effectiveness and naturalness on deceiving MI attacks. In addition, empirical experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art defense performance of Trap-MID against various MI attacks without the requirements for extra data or large computational overhead.
bit2bit: 1-bit quanta video reconstruction via self-supervised photon prediction
Quanta image sensors, such as SPAD arrays, are an emerging sensor technology, producing 1-bit arrays representing photon detection events over exposures as short as a few nanoseconds. In practice, raw data are post-processed using heavy spatiotemporal binning to create more useful and interpretable images at the cost of degrading spatiotemporal resolution. In this work, we propose bit2bit, a new method for reconstructing high-quality image stacks at the original spatiotemporal resolution from sparse binary quanta image data. Inspired by recent work on Poisson denoising, we developed an algorithm that creates a dense image sequence from sparse binary photon data by predicting the photon arrival location probability distribution. However, due to the binary nature of the data, we show that the assumption of a Poisson distribution is inadequate.