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Variance-Reduced Gradient Estimation via Noise-Reuse in Online Evolution Strategies

Neural Information Processing Systems

Unrolled computation graphs are prevalent throughout machine learning but present challenges to automatic differentiation (AD) gradient estimation methods when their loss functions exhibit extreme local sensitivtiy, discontinuity, or blackbox characteristics. In such scenarios, online evolution strategies methods are a more capable alternative, while being more parallelizable than vanilla evolution strategies (ES) by interleaving partial unrolls and gradient updates. In this work, we propose a general class of unbiased online evolution strategies methods. We analytically and empirically characterize the variance of this class of gradient estimators and identify the one with the least variance, which we term Noise-Reuse Evolution Strategies (NRES).




Label Delay in Online Continual Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

A critical yet often overlooked aspect in online continual learning is the label delay, where new data may not be labeled due to slow and costly annotation processes. We introduce a new continual learning framework with explicit modeling of the label delay between data and label streams over time steps. In each step, the framework reveals both unlabeled data from the current time step t and labels delayed with d steps, from the time step t d. In our extensive experiments amounting to 25000 GPU hours, we show that merely increasing the computational resources is insufficient to tackle this challenge. Our findings highlight significant performance declines when solely relying on labeled data when the label delay becomes significant. More surprisingly, state-of-the-art Self-Supervised Learning and Test-Time Adaptation techniques that utilize the newer, unlabeled data, fail to surpass the performance of a naรฏve method that simply trains on the delayed supervised stream. To this end, we propose a simple, robust method, called Importance Weighted Memory Sampling that can effectively bridge the accuracy gap caused by label delay by prioritising memory samples that resemble the most to the newest unlabeled samples. We show experimentally that our method is the least affected by the label delay factor, and successfully recovers the accuracy of the non-delayed counterpart.




The ToMCAT Dataset

Neural Information Processing Systems

We present a rich, multimodal dataset consisting of data from 40 teams of three humans conducting simulated urban search-and-rescue (SAR) missions in a Minecraftbased testbed, collected for the Theory of Mind-based Cognitive Architecture for Teams (ToMCAT) project. Modalities include two kinds of brain scan data-- functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and electroencephalography (EEG), as well as skin conductance, heart rate, eye tracking, face images, spoken dialog audio data with automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcriptions, game screenshots, gameplay data, game performance data, demographic data, and self-report questionnaires.


Appendix to: Predictive Querying for Autoregressive Neural Sequence Models 2

Neural Information Processing Systems

It is helpful to show both the exact summation form as well as the expected value representation as both will be useful in Section 4. Q3 The "hitting time" or the next occurrence of a specific event type a V is defined as ฯ„(a). The value a V can be easily replaced with a set of values A V in these representations. Interestingly, we can see that Q3 is a generalization of Q2 by noting that they are identical when A = {}. In practice, computing this exactly is intractable due to it being an infinite sum. There are two potential approaches one could take to subvert this. The other option is to produce a lower bound on this expression by evaluating the sum in Eq. (11) for the first K terms. As such, if we evaluate Eq. (11) up to K terms for both p Similar to Q3, we can also ask this query with sets A B V instead of values a, b.


No-Regret Online Reinforcement Learning with Adversarial Losses and Transitions

Neural Information Processing Systems

Existing online learning algorithms for adversarial Markov Decision Processes achieve O( T) regret after T rounds of interactions even if the loss functions are chosen arbitrarily by an adversary, with the caveat that the transition function has to be fixed. This is because it has been shown that adversarial transition functions make no-regret learning impossible. Despite such impossibility results, in this work, we develop algorithms that can handle both adversarial losses and adversarial transitions, with regret increasing smoothly in the degree of maliciousness of the adversary.


Lean Workbook: A large-scale Lean problem set formalized from natural language math problems

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various natural language processing tasks, especially in solving mathematical problems. However, large language models are not good at math theorem proving using formal languages like Lean. A significant challenge in this area is the scarcity of training data available in these formal languages. To address this issue, we propose a novel pipeline that iteratively generates and filters synthetic data to translate natural language mathematical problems into Lean 4 statements, and vice versa. Our results indicate that the synthetic data pipeline can provide useful training data and improve the performance of LLMs in translating and understanding complex mathematical problems and proofs. Our final dataset contains about 57K formal-informal question pairs along with searched proof from the math contest forum and 21 new IMO questions.