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Learning to Shape In-distribution Feature Space for Out-of-distribution Detection

Neural Information Processing Systems

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical for deploying machine learning models in the open world. To design scoring functions that discern OOD data from the in-distribution (ID) cases from a pre-trained discriminative model, existing methods tend to make rigorous distributional assumptions either explicitly or implicitly due to the lack of knowledge about the learned feature space in advance. The mismatch between the learned and assumed distributions motivates us to raise a fundamental yet under-explored question: \textit{Is it possible to deterministically model the feature distribution while pre-training a discriminative model?}This paper gives an affirmative answer to this question by presenting a Distributional Representation Learning (\texttt{DRL}) framework for OOD detection. In particular, \texttt{DRL} explicitly enforces the underlying feature space to conform to a pre-defined mixture distribution, together with an online approximation of normalization constants to enable end-to-end training. Furthermore, we formulate \texttt{DRL} into a provably convergent Expectation-Maximization algorithm to avoid trivial solutions and rearrange the sequential sampling to guide the training consistency. Extensive evaluations across mainstream OOD detection benchmarks empirically manifest the superiority of the proposed \texttt{DRL} over its advanced counterparts.


FlexPlanner: Flexible 3D Floorplanning via Deep Reinforcement Learning in Hybrid Action Space with Multi-Modality Representation

Neural Information Processing Systems

In the Integrated Circuit (IC) design flow, floorplanning (FP) determines the position and shape of each block. Serving as a prototype for downstream tasks, it is critical and establishes the upper bound of the final PPA (Power, Performance, Area). However, with the emergence of 3D IC with stacked layers, existing methods are not flexible enough to handle the versatile constraints. Besides, they typically face difficulties in aligning the cross-die modules in 3D ICs due to their heuristic representations, which could potentially result in severe data transfer failures. To address these issues, we propose FlexPlanner, a flexible learning-based method in hybrid action space with multi-modality representation to simultaneously handle position, aspect ratio, and alignment of blocks. To our best knowledge, FlexPlanner is the first learning-based approach to discard heuristic-based search in the 3D FP task. Thus, the solution space is not limited by the heuristic floorplanning representation, allowing for significant improvements in both wirelength and alignment scores. Specifically, FlexPlanner models 3D FP based on multi-modalities, including vision, graph, and sequence. To address the non-trivial heuristic-dependent issue, we design a sophisticated policy network with hybrid action space and asynchronous layer decision mechanism that allow for determining the versatile properties of each block.


Intruding with Words: Towards Understanding Graph Injection Attacks at the Text Level

Neural Information Processing Systems

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel across various applications but remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, particularly Graph Injection Attacks (GIAs), which inject malicious nodes into the original graph and pose realistic threats.Text-attributed graphs (TAGs), where nodes are associated with textual features, are crucial due to their prevalence in real-world applications and are commonly used to evaluate these vulnerabilities.However, existing research only focuses on embedding-level GIAs, which inject node embeddings rather than actual textual content, limiting their applicability and simplifying detection.In this paper, we pioneer the exploration of GIAs at the text level, presenting three novel attack designs that inject textual content into the graph.Through theoretical and empirical analysis, we demonstrate that text interpretability, a factor previously overlooked at the embedding level, plays a crucial role in attack strength. Among the designs we investigate, the Word-frequency-based Text-level GIA (WTGIA) is particularly notable for its balance between performance and interpretability. Despite the success of WTGIA, we discover that defenders can easily enhance their defenses with customized text embedding methods or large language model (LLM)--based predictors. These insights underscore the necessity for further research into the potential and practical significance of text-level GIAs.


Val Kilmer's controversial AI resurrection sparks backlash as fans fume: 'It should be illegal'

FOX News

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Key-Grid: Unsupervised 3D Keypoints Detection using Grid Heatmap Features

Neural Information Processing Systems

Detecting 3D keypoints with semantic consistency is widely used in many scenarios such as pose estimation, shape registration and robotics. Currently, most unsupervised 3D keypoint detection methods focus on the rigid-body objects. However, when faced with deformable objects, the keypoints they identify do not preserve semantic consistency well. In this paper, we introduce an innovative unsupervised keypoint detector Key-Grid for both the rigid-body and deformable objects, which is an autoencoder framework. The encoder predicts keypoints and the decoder utilizes the generated keypoints to reconstruct the objects. Unlike previous work, we leverage the identified keypoint in formation to form a 3D grid feature heatmap called grid heatmap, which is used in the decoder section.


Enhancing Protein Mutation Effect Prediction through a Retrieval-Augmented Framework

Neural Information Processing Systems

Predicting the effects of protein mutations is crucial for analyzing protein functions and understanding genetic diseases. However, existing models struggle to effectively extract mutation-related local structure motifs from protein databases, which hinders their predictive accuracy and robustness. To tackle this problem, we design a novel retrieval-augmented framework for incorporating similar structure information in known protein structures. We create a vector database consisting of local structure motif embeddings from a pre-trained protein structure encoder, which allows for efficient retrieval of similar local structure motifs during mutation effect prediction. Our findings demonstrate that leveraging this method results in the SOTA performance across multiple protein mutation prediction datasets, and offers a scalable solution for studying mutation effects.


On Mesa-Optimization in Autoregressively Trained Transformers: Emergence and Capability

Neural Information Processing Systems

Autoregressively trained transformers have brought a profound revolution to the world, especially with their in-context learning (ICL) ability to address downstream tasks. Recently, several studies suggest that transformers learn a mesa-optimizer during autoregressive (AR) pretraining to implement ICL. Namely, the forward pass of the trained transformer is equivalent to optimizing an inner objective function in-context.However, whether the practical non-convex training dynamics will converge to the ideal mesa-optimizer is still unclear.Towards filling this gap, we investigate the non-convex dynamics of a one-layer linear causal self-attention model autoregressively trained by gradient flow, where the sequences are generated by an AR process $x_{t+1} = W x_t$. First, under a certain condition of data distribution, we prove that an autoregressively trained transformer learns $W$ by implementing one step of gradient descent to minimize an ordinary least squares (OLS) problem in-context. It then applies the learned $\widehat{W}$ for next-token prediction, thereby verifying the mesa-optimization hypothesis. Next, under the same data conditions, we explore the capability limitations of the obtained mesa-optimizer. We show that a stronger assumption related to the moments of data is the sufficient and necessary condition that the learned mesa-optimizer recovers the distribution. Besides, we conduct exploratory analyses beyond the first data condition and prove that generally, the trained transformer will not perform vanilla gradient descent for the OLS problem. Finally, our simulation results verify the theoretical results.


Spatio-Spectral Graph Neural Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

Spatial Message Passing Graph Neural Networks (MPGNNs) are widely used for learning on graph-structured data. However, key limitations of -step MPGNNs are that their receptive field is typically limited to the -hop neighborhood of a node and that information exchange between distant nodes is limited by over-squashing. Motivated by these limitations, we propose - a new modeling paradigm for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) that synergistically combines spatially and spectrally parametrized graph filters. Parameterizing filters partially in the frequency domain enables global yet efficient information propagation. We show that S GNNs vanquish over-squashing and yield strictly tighter approximation-theoretic error bounds than MPGNNs. Further, rethinking graph convolutions at a fundamental level unlocks new design spaces. For example, S GNNs allow for free positional encodings that make them strictly more expressive than the 1-Weisfeiler-Leman (WL) test. Moreover, to obtain general-purpose S GNNs, we propose spectrally parametrized filters for directed graphs. S GNNs outperform spatial MPGNNs, graph transformers, and graph rewirings, e.g., on the peptide long-range benchmark tasks, and are competitive with state-of-the-art sequence modeling.



SS1: Accelerating Inference with Fast and Expressive Sketch Structured Transform

Neural Information Processing Systems

Tensor multiplication with learned weight matrices is the fundamental building block in deep learning models. These matrices can often be sparsified, decomposed, quantized, or subjected to random parameter sharing without losing accuracy, suggesting the possibility of more efficient transforms. Although many variants of weight matrices exist, unstructured ones are incompatible with modern hardware, slowing inference and training. On the other hand, structured variants often limit expressivity or fail to deliver the promised latency benefits. We present Sketch Structured Transform (SS1), an expressive and GPU-friendly operator that accelerates inference.