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ProvNeRF: Modeling per Point Provenance in NeRFs as a Stochastic Field

Neural Information Processing Systems

Neural radiance fields (NeRFs) have gained popularity with multiple works showing promising results across various applications. However, to the best of our knowledge, existing works do not explicitly model the distribution of training camera poses, or consequently the triangulation quality, a key factor affecting reconstruction quality dating back to classical vision literature. We close this gap with ProvNeRF, an approach that models the provenance for each point -- i.e., the locations where it is likely visible -- of NeRFs as a stochastic field. We achieve this by extending implicit maximum likelihood estimation (IMLE) to functional space with an optimizable objective. We show that modeling per-point provenance during the NeRF optimization enriches the model with information on triangulation leading to improvements in novel view synthesis and uncertainty estimation under the challenging sparse, unconstrained view setting against competitive baselines.


CURE4Rec: A Benchmark for Recommendation Unlearning with Deeper Influence

Neural Information Processing Systems

With increasing privacy concerns in artificial intelligence, regulations have mandated the right to be forgotten, granting individuals the right to withdraw their data from models. Machine unlearning has emerged as a potential solution to enable selective forgetting in models, particularly in recommender systems where historical data contains sensitive user information. Despite recent advances in recommendation unlearning, evaluating unlearning methods comprehensively remains challenging due to the absence of a unified evaluation framework and overlooked aspects of deeper influence, e.g., fairness. To address these gaps, we propose CURE4Rec, the first comprehensive benchmark for recommendation unlearning evaluation. CURE4Rec covers four aspects, i.e., unlearning Completeness, recommendation Utility, unleaRning efficiency, and recommendation fairnEss, under three data selection strategies, i.e., core data, edge data, and random data. Specifically, we consider the deeper influence of unlearning on recommendation fairness and robustness towards data with varying impact levels. We construct multiple datasets with CURE4Rec evaluation and conduct extensive experiments on existing recommendation unlearning methods.


Non-asymptotic Approximation Error Bounds of Parameterized Quantum Circuits

Neural Information Processing Systems

Understanding the power of parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) in accomplishing machine learning tasks is one of the most important questions in quantum machine learning. In this paper, we focus on the PQC expressivity for general multivariate function classes. Previously established Universal Approximation Theorems for PQCs are either nonconstructive or assisted with parameterized classical data processing, making it hard to justify whether the expressive power comes from the classical or quantum parts. We explicitly construct data re-uploading PQCs for approximating multivariate polynomials and smooth functions and establish the first non-asymptotic approximation error bounds for such functions in terms of the number of qubits, the quantum circuit depth and the number of trainable parameters of the PQCs. Notably, we show that for multivariate polynomials and multivariate smooth functions, the quantum circuit size and the number of trainable parameters of our proposed PQCs can be smaller than the deep ReLU neural networks. We further demonstrate the approximation capability of PQCs via numerical experiments. Our results pave the way for designing practical PQCs that can be implemented on near-term quantum devices with limited resources.


ALI-Agent: Assessing LLMs' Alignment with Human Values via Agent-based Evaluation

Neural Information Processing Systems

To mitigate these risks, current evaluation benchmarks predominantly employ expert-designed contextual scenarios to assess how well LLMs align with human values. However, the labor-intensive nature of these benchmarks limits their test scope, hindering their ability to generalize to the extensive variety of open-world use cases and identify rare but crucial long-tail risks. Additionally, these static tests fail to adapt to the rapid evolution of LLMs, making it hard to evaluate timely alignment issues. To address these challenges, we propose ALI-Agent, an evaluation framework that leverages the autonomous abilities of LLM-powered agents to conduct in-depth and adaptive alignment assessments. ALI-Agent operates through two principal stages: Emulation and Refinement.



Can neural operators always be continuously discretized?

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this work we consider the problem of discretization of neural operators in a general setting. Using category theory, we give a no-go theorem that shows that diffeomorphisms between Hilbert spaces may not admit any continuous approximations by diffeomorphisms on finite spaces, even if the discretization is non-linear. This shows how infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces and finite-dimensional vector spaces fundamentally differ. A key take-away is that to obtain discretization invariance, considerable effort is needed to ensure that finite-dimensional approximations of neural operator converge not only as sequences of functions, but that their representations converge in a suitable sense as well. With this perspective, we give several positive results. We first show that strongly monotone diffeomorphism operators always admit finite-dimensional strongly monotone diffeomorphisms. Next we show that bilipschitz neural operators may always be written via the repeated alternating composition of strongly monotone neural operators and invertible linear maps. We also show that such operators may be inverted locally via iteration provided that such inverse exists. Finally, we conclude by showing how our framework may be used `out of the box' to prove quantitative approximation results for discretization of neural operators.


Hierarchy-Agnostic Unsupervised Segmentation: Parsing Semantic Image Structure

Neural Information Processing Systems

Unsupervised semantic segmentation aims to discover groupings within images, capturing objects' view-invariance without external supervision. Moreover, this task is inherently ambiguous due to the varying levels of semantic granularity. Existing methods often bypass this ambiguity using dataset-specific priors. In our research, we address this ambiguity head-on and provide a universal tool for pixel-level semantic parsing of images guided by the latent representations encoded in self-supervised models. We introduce a novel algebraic approach that recursively decomposes an image into nested subgraphs, dynamically estimating their count and ensuring clear separation.The innovative approach identifies scene-specific primitives and constructs a hierarchy-agnostic tree of semantic regions from the image pixels.


Entropy-regularized Diffusion Policy with Q-Ensembles for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Diffusion policy has shown a strong ability to express complex action distributions in offline reinforcement learning (RL). However, it suffers from overestimating Q-value functions on out-of-distribution (OOD) data points due to the offline dataset limitation. To address it, this paper proposes a novel entropy-regularized diffusion policy and takes into account the confidence of the Q-value prediction with Q-ensembles. At the core of our diffusion policy is a mean-reverting stochastic differential equation (SDE) that transfers the action distribution into a standard Gaussian form and then samples actions conditioned on the environment state with a corresponding reverse-time process. We show that the entropy of such a policy is tractable and that can be used to increase the exploration of OOD samples in offline RL training. Moreover, we propose using the lower confidence bound of Q-ensembles for pessimistic Q-value function estimation. The proposed approach demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across a range of tasks in the D4RL benchmarks, significantly improving upon existing diffusion-based policies.


Diffusion-DICE: In-Sample Diffusion Guidance for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

One important property of DIstribution Correction Estimation (DICE) methods is that the solution is the optimal stationary distribution ratio between the optimized and data collection policy. In this work, we show that DICE-based methods can be viewed as a transformation from the behavior distribution to the optimal policy distribution. Based on this, we propose a novel approach, Diffusion-DICE, that directly performs this transformation using diffusion models. We find that the optimal policy's score function can be decomposed into two terms: the behavior policy's score function and the gradient of a guidance term which depends on the optimal distribution ratio. The first term can be obtained from a diffusion model trained on the dataset and we propose an in-sample learning objective to learn the second term.


Drift-Resilient TabPFN: In-Context Learning Temporal Distribution Shifts on Tabular Data

Neural Information Processing Systems

While most ML models expect independent and identically distributed data, this assumption is often violated in real-world scenarios due to distribution shifts, resulting in the degradation of machine learning model performance. Until now, no tabular method has consistently outperformed classical supervised learning, which ignores these shifts. To address temporal distribution shifts, we present Drift-Resilient TabPFN, a fresh approach based on In-Context Learning with a Prior-Data Fitted Network that learns the learning algorithm itself: it accepts the entire training dataset as input and makes predictions on the test set in a single forward pass. Specifically, it learns to approximate Bayesian inference on synthetic datasets drawn from a prior that specifies the model's inductive bias. This prior is based on structural causal models (SCM), which gradually shift over time.