Large language models (LLMs) need knowledge updates to meet the ever-growing world facts and correct the hallucinated responses, facilitating the methods of lifelong model editing. Where the updated knowledge resides in memories is a fundamental question for model editing. In this paper, we find that editing either long-term memory (direct model parameters) or working memory (non-parametric knowledge of neural network activations/representations by retrieval) will result in an impossible triangle---reliability, generalization, and locality can not be realized together in the lifelong editing settings. For long-term memory, directly editing the parameters will cause conflicts with irrelevant pretrained knowledge or previous edits (poor reliability and locality). For working memory, retrieval-based activations can hardly make the model understand the edits and generalize (poor generalization). Therefore, we propose WISE to bridge the gap between memories.

Biological motion perception (BMP) refers to humans' ability to perceive and recognize the actions of living beings solely from their motion patterns, sometimes as minimal as those depicted on point-light displays. While humans excel at these tasks \textit{without any prior training}, current AI models struggle with poor generalization performance. To close this research gap, we propose the Motion Perceiver (MP). MP solely relies on patch-level optical flows from video clips as inputs. During training, it learns prototypical flow snapshots through a competitive binding mechanism and integrates invariant motion representations to predict action labels for the given video. During inference, we evaluate the generalization ability of all AI models and humans on 62,656 video stimuli spanning 24 BMP conditions using point-light displays in neuroscience. Remarkably, MP outperforms all existing AI models with a maximum improvement of 29\% in top-1 action recognition accuracy on these conditions.

Safety of Large Language Models (LLMs) has become a central issue given their rapid progress and wide applications. Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) is shown to be effective in constructing prompts containing adversarial suffixes to break the presumingly safe LLMs, but the optimization of GCG is time-consuming and limits its practicality. To reduce the time cost of GCG and enable more comprehensive studies of LLM safety, in this work, we study a new algorithm called $\texttt{Probe sampling}$ to accelerate the GCG algorithm. At the core of the algorithm is a mechanism that dynamically determines how similar a smaller draft model's predictions are to the target model's predictions for prompt candidates. When the target model is similar to the draft model, we rely heavily on the draft model to filter out a large number of potential prompt candidates to reduce the computation time. Probe sampling achieves up to $5.6$ times speedup using Llama2-7b-chat and leads to equal or improved attack success rate (ASR) on the AdvBench. Furthermore, probe sampling is also able to accelerate other prompt optimization techniques and adversarial attack methods, leading to acceleration of $1.8\times$ for AutoPrompt, $2.4\times$ for APE and $2.4\times$ for AutoDAN.

The rapid proliferation of open-source language models significantly increases the risks of downstream backdoor attacks. These backdoors can introduce dangerous behaviours during model deployment and can evade detection by conventional cybersecurity monitoring systems. In this paper, we introduce a novel class of backdoors in transformer models, that, in contrast to prior art, are unelicitable in nature. Unelicitability prevents the defender from triggering the backdoor, making it impossible to properly evaluate ahead of deployment even if given full white-box access and using automated techniques, such as red-teaming or certain formal verification methods. We show that our novel construction is not only unelicitable thanks to using cryptographic techniques, but also has favourable robustness properties.We confirm these properties in empirical investigations, and provide evidence that our backdoors can withstand state-of-the-art mitigation strategies. Additionally, we expand on previous work by showing that our universal backdoors, while not completely undetectable in white-box settings, can be harder to detect than some existing designs. By demonstrating the feasibility of seamlessly integrating backdoors into transformer models, this paper fundamentally questions the efficacy of pre-deployment detection strategies.

Predictive coding (PC) is an energy-based learning algorithm that performs iterative inference over network activities before updating weights. Recent work suggests that PC can converge in fewer learning steps than backpropagation thanks to its inference procedure. However, these advantages are not always observed, and the impact of PC inference on learning is not theoretically well understood. To address this gap, we study the geometry of the PC weight landscape at the inference equilibrium of the network activities. For deep linear networks, we first show that the equilibrated PC energy is equal to a rescaled mean squared error loss with a weight-dependent rescaling. We then prove that many highly degenerate (non-strict) saddles of the loss including the origin become much easier to escape (strict) in the equilibrated energy. Experiments on both linear and non-linear networks strongly validate our theory and further suggest that all the saddles of the equilibrated energy are strict. Overall, this work shows that PC inference makes the loss landscape of feedforward networks more benign and robust to vanishing gradients, while also highlighting the fundamental challenge of scaling PC to very deep models.

Data curation is a field with origins in librarianship and archives, whose scholarship and thinking on data issues go back centuries, if not millennia. The field of machine learning is increasingly observing the importance of data curation to the advancement of both applications and fundamental understanding of machine learning models -- evidenced not least by the creation of the Datasets and Benchmarks track itself. This work provides an analysis of recent dataset development practices at NeurIPS through the lens of data curation. We present an evaluation framework for dataset documentation, consisting of a rubric and toolkit developed through a thorough literature review of data curation principles. We use the framework to systematically assess the strengths and weaknesses in current dataset development practices of 60 datasets published in the NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks track from 2021-2023.

Clouds in satellite imagery pose a significant challenge for downstream applications.A major challenge in current cloud removal research is the absence of a comprehensive benchmark and a sufficiently large and diverse training dataset.To address this problem, we introduce the largest public dataset -- *AllClear* for cloud removal, featuring 23,742 globally distributed regions of interest (ROIs) with diverse land-use patterns, comprising 4 million images in total. Each ROI includes complete temporal captures from the year 2022, with (1) multi-spectral optical imagery from Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8/9, (2) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery from Sentinel-1, and (3) auxiliary remote sensing products such as cloud masks and land cover maps.We validate the effectiveness of our dataset by benchmarking performance, demonstrating the scaling law - the PSNR rises from $28.47$ to $33.87$ with $30\times$ more data, and conducting ablation studies on the temporal length and the importance of individual modalities. This dataset aims to provide comprehensive coverage of the Earth's surface and promote better cloud removal results.

We study the overfitting behavior of fully connected deep Neural Networks (NNs) with binary weights fitted to perfectly classify a noisy training set. We consider interpolation using both the smallest NN (having the minimal number of weights) and a random interpolating NN. For both learning rules, we prove overfitting is tempered. Our analysis rests on a new bound on the size of a threshold circuit consistent with a partial function. To the best of our knowledge, ours are the first theoretical results on benign or tempered overfitting that: (1) apply to deep NNs, and (2) do not require a very high or very low input dimension.

Exposure Correction (EC) aims to recover proper exposure conditions for images captured under over-exposure or under-exposure scenarios. While existing deep learning models have shown promising results, few have fully embedded Retinex theory into their architecture, highlighting a gap in current methodologies. Additionally, the balance between high performance and efficiency remains an under-explored problem for exposure correction task. Inspired by Mamba which demonstrates powerful and highly efficient sequence modeling, we introduce a novel framework based on \textbf{Mamba} for \textbf{E}xposure \textbf{C}orrection (\textbf{ECMamba}) with dual pathways, each dedicated to the restoration of reflectance and illumination map, respectively. Specifically, we firstly derive the Retinex theory and we train a Retinex estimator capable of mapping inputs into two intermediary spaces, each approximating the target reflectance and illumination map, respectively.

Recent advancements in large language models, such as GPT-4, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in processing standard queries. Despite these advancements, their performance substantially declines in advanced mathematical problems requiring complex, multi-step logical reasoning. To enhance their inferential capabilities, current research has delved into prompting engineering, exemplified by methodologies such as the Tree of Thought and Graph of Thought.Nonetheless, these existing approaches encounter two significant limitations. Firstly, their effectiveness in tackling complex mathematical problems is somewhat constrained. Secondly, the necessity to design distinct prompts for individual problems hampers their generalizability.In response to these limitations, this paper introduces the Multi-Agent System for conditional Mining (MACM) prompting method. It not only resolves intricate mathematical problems but also demonstrates strong generalization capabilities across various mathematical contexts.With the assistance of MACM, the accuracy of GPT-4 Turbo on the most challenging level five mathematical problems in the MATH dataset increase from $\mathbf{54.68\\%}