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Identification of Analytic Nonlinear Dynamical Systems with Non-asymptotic Guarantees

Neural Information Processing Systems

This paper focuses on the system identification of an important class of nonlinear systems: nonlinear systems that are linearly parameterized, which enjoy wide applications in robotics and other mechanical systems. We consider two system identification methods: least-squares estimation (LSE), which is a point estimation method; and set-membership estimation (SME), which estimates an uncertainty set that contains the true parameters. We provide non-asymptotic convergence rates for LSE and SME under i.i.d.


Protected Test-Time Adaptation via Online Entropy Matching: A Betting Approach

Neural Information Processing Systems

We present a novel approach for test-time adaptation via online self-training, consisting of two components. First, we introduce a statistical framework that detects distribution shifts in the classifier's entropy values obtained on a stream of unlabeled samples. Second, we devise an online adaptation mechanism that utilizes the evidence of distribution shifts captured by the detection tool to dynamically update the classifier's parameters. The resulting adaptation process drives the distribution of test entropy values obtained from the self-trained classifier to match those of the source domain, building invariance to distribution shifts. This approach departs from the conventional self-training method, which focuses on minimizing the classifier's entropy. Our approach combines concepts in betting martingales and online learning to form a detection tool capable of quickly reacting to distribution shifts. We then reveal a tight relation between our adaptation scheme and optimal transport, which forms the basis of our novel self-supervised loss. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach improves test-time accuracy under distribution shifts while maintaining accuracy and calibration in their absence, outperforming leading entropy minimization methods across various scenarios.


Flexible mapping of abstract domains by grid cells via self-supervised extraction and projection of generalized velocity signals

Neural Information Processing Systems

Grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex create remarkable periodic maps of explored space during navigation. Recent studies show that they form similar maps of abstract cognitive spaces. Examples of such abstract environments include auditory tone sequences in which the pitch is continuously varied or images in which abstract features are continuously deformed (e.g., a cartoon bird whose legs stretch and shrink).


Advancing Open-Set Domain Generalization Using Evidential Bi-Level Hardest Domain Scheduler

Neural Information Processing Systems

In Open-Set Domain Generalization (OSDG), the model is exposed to both new variations of data appearance (domains) and open-set conditions, where both known and novel categories are present at test time. The challenges of this task arise from the dual need to generalize across diverse domains and accurately quantify category novelty, which is critical for applications in dynamic environments. Recently, meta-learning techniques have demonstrated superior results in OSDG, effectively orchestrating the meta-train and -test tasks by employing varied random categories and predefined domain partition strategies. These approaches prioritize a well-designed training schedule over traditional methods that focus primarily on data augmentation and the enhancement of discriminative feature learning. The prevailing meta-learning models in OSDG typically utilize a predefined sequential domain scheduler to structure data partitions.


PRODuctive bandits: Importance Weighting No More

Neural Information Processing Systems

Prod is a seminal algorithm in full-information online learning, which has been conjectured to be fundamentally sub-optimal for multi-armed bandits.By leveraging the interpretation of Prod as a first-order OMD approximation, we present the following surprising results:1. Variants of Prod can obtain optimal regret for adversarial multi-armed bandits.


TinyLUT: Tiny Look-Up Table for Efficient Image Restoration at the Edge

Neural Information Processing Systems

Look-up tables(LUTs)-based methods have recently shown enormous potential in image restoration tasks, which are capable of significantly accelerating the inference. However, the size of LUT exhibits exponential growth with the convolution kernel size, creating a storage bottleneck for its broader application on edge devices. Here, we address the storage explosion challenge to promote the capacity of mapping the complex CNN models by LUT. We introduce an innovative separable mapping strategy to achieve over $7\times$ storage reduction, transforming the storage from exponential dependence on kernel size to a linear relationship. Moreover, we design a dynamic discretization mechanism to decompose the activation and compress the quantization scale that further shrinks the LUT storage by $4.48\times$. As a result, the storage requirement of our proposed TinyLUT is around 4.1\% of MuLUT-SDY-X2 and amenable to on-chip cache, yielding competitive accuracy with over $5\times$ lower inference latency on Raspberry 4B than FSRCNN. Our proposed TinyLUT enables superior inference speed on edge devices with new state-of-the-art accuracy on both of image super-resolution and denoising, showcasing the potential of applying this method to various image restoration tasks at the edge.


Faster Diffusion: Rethinking the Role of the Encoder for Diffusion Model Inference

Neural Information Processing Systems

One of the main drawback of diffusion models is the slow inference time for image generation. Among the most successful approaches to addressing this problem are distillation methods. However, these methods require considerable computational resources. In this paper, we take another approach to diffusion model acceleration. We conduct a comprehensive study of the UNet encoder and empirically analyze the encoder features.


Federated Learning over Connected Modes

Neural Information Processing Systems

Statistical heterogeneity in federated learning poses two major challenges: slow global training due to conflicting gradient signals, and the need of personalization for local distributions. In this work, we tackle both challenges by leveraging recent advances in \emph{linear mode connectivity} --- identifying a linearly connected low-loss region in the parameter space of neural networks, which we call solution simplex. We propose federated learning over connected modes (\textsc{Floco}), where clients are assigned local subregions in this simplex based on their gradient signals, and together learn the shared global solution simplex. This allows personalization of the client models to fit their local distributions within the degrees of freedom in the solution simplex and homogenizes the update signals for the global simplex training. Our experiments show that \textsc{Floco} accelerates the global training process, and significantly improves the local accuracy with minimal computational overhead in cross-silo federated learning settings.



MagR: Weight Magnitude Reduction for Enhancing Post-Training Quantization

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this paper, we present a simple optimization-based preprocessing technique called Weight Magnitude Reduction (MagR) to improve the performance of post-training quantization. For each linear layer, we adjust the pre-trained floating-point weights by solving an $\ell_\infty$-regularized optimization problem. This process greatly diminishes the maximum magnitude of the weights and smooths out outliers, while preserving the layer's output. The preprocessed weights are centered more towards zero, which facilitates the subsequent quantization process. To implement MagR, we address the $\ell_\infty$-regularization by employing an efficient proximal gradient descent algorithm. Unlike existing preprocessing methods that involve linear transformations and subsequent post-processing steps, which can introduce significant overhead at inference time, MagR functions as a non-linear transformation, eliminating the need for any additional post-processing. This ensures that MagR introduces no overhead whatsoever during inference. Our experiments demonstrate that MagR achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Llama family of models. For example, we achieve a Wikitext2 perplexity of 6.7 on the LLaMA2-70B model for per-channel INT2 weight quantization without incurring any inference overhead.