Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Government


Consistency Models for Scalable and Fast Simulation-Based Inference

Neural Information Processing Systems

Simulation-based inference (SBI) is constantly in search of more expressive and efficient algorithms to accurately infer the parameters of complex simulation models. In line with this goal, we present consistency models for posterior estimation (CMPE), a new conditional sampler for SBI that inherits the advantages of recent unconstrained architectures and overcomes their sampling inefficiency at inference time. CMPE essentially distills a continuous probability flow and enables rapid few-shot inference with an unconstrained architecture that can be flexibly tailored to the structure of the estimation problem. We provide hyperparameters and default architectures that support consistency training over a wide range of different dimensions, including low-dimensional ones which are important in SBI workflows but were previously difficult to tackle even with unconditional consistency models. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that CMPE not only outperforms current state-of-the-art algorithms on hard low-dimensional benchmarks, but also achieves competitive performance with much faster sampling speed on two realistic estimation problems with high data and/or parameter dimensions.


MEQA: A Benchmark for Multi-hop Event-centric Question Answering with Explanations

Neural Information Processing Systems

Existing benchmarks for multi-hop question answering (QA) primarily evaluate models based on their ability to reason about entities and the relationships between them. However, there's a lack of insight into how these models perform in terms of both events and entities.


GeoPlant: Spatial Plant Species Prediction Dataset

Neural Information Processing Systems

To fill this gap, Species Distribution Models (SDMs) predict species across space from spatially explicit features. Yet, they face the challenge of integrating the rich but heterogeneous data made available over the past decade, notably millions of opportunistic species observations and standardized surveys, as well as multimodal remote sensing data. In light of that, we have designed and developed a new European-scale dataset for SDMs at high spatial resolution (10-50m), including more than 10k species (i.e., most of the European flora). The dataset comprises 5M heterogeneous Presence-Only records and 90k exhaustive Presence-Absence survey records, all accompanied by diverse environmental rasters (e.g., elevation, human footprint, and soil) traditionally used in SDMs. In addition, it provides Sentinel-2 RGB and NIR satellite images with 10 m resolution, a 20-year time series of climatic variables, and satellite time series from the Landsat program. In addition to the data, we provide an openly accessible SDM benchmark (hosted on Kaggle), which has already attracted an active community and a set of strong baselines for single predictor/modality and multimodal approaches. All resources, e.g., the dataset, pre-trained models, and baseline methods (in the form of notebooks), are available on Kaggle, allowing one to start with our dataset literally with two mouse clicks.


Appendix

Neural Information Processing Systems

Your goal is to label if an image matches a search query Images matching a query are called "relevant" You should make sure to label all the relevant images


Adversarial Representation Engineering: A General Model Editing Framework for Large Language Models Zeming Wei 1 Jun Sun 2 Meng Sun

Neural Information Processing Systems

Since the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has achieved remarkable success, understanding and rectifying their internal complex mechanisms has become an urgent issue. Recent research has attempted to interpret their behaviors through the lens of inner representation. However, developing practical and efficient methods for applying these representations for general and flexible model editing remains challenging. In this work, we explore how to leverage insights from representation engineering to guide the editing of LLMs by deploying a representation discriminator as an editing oracle. We first identify the importance of a robust and reliable discriminator during editing, then propose an Adversarial Representation Engineering (ARE) framework to provide a unified and interpretable approach for conceptual model editing without compromising baseline performance. Experiments on multiple tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of ARE in various model editing scenarios. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/




Ann Yuan

Neural Information Processing Systems

Studies show that safety-tuned models may nevertheless divulge harmful information. In this work, we show that whether they do so depends significantly on who they are talking to, which we refer to as user persona. In fact, we find manipulating user persona to be more effective for eliciting harmful content than certain more direct attempts to control model refusal. We study both natural language prompting and activation steering as intervention methods and show that activation steering is significantly more effective at bypassing safety filters. We shed light on the mechanics of this phenomenon by showing that even when model generations are safe, harmful content can persist in hidden representations and can be extracted by decoding from earlier layers. We also show we can predict a persona's effect on refusal given only the geometry of its steering vector. Finally, we show that certain user personas induce the model to form more charitable interpretations of otherwise dangerous queries.


Fair Allocation in Dynamic Mechanism Design

Neural Information Processing Systems

We consider a dynamic mechanism design problem where an auctioneer sells an indivisible good to two groups of buyers in every round, for a total of T rounds. The auctioneer aims to maximize their discounted overall revenue while adhering to a fairness constraint that guarantees a minimum average allocation for each group. We begin by studying the static case (T = 1) and establish that the optimal mechanism involves two types of subsidization: one that increases the overall probability of allocation to all buyers, and another that favors the group which otherwise has a lower probability of winning the item. We then extend our results to the dynamic case by characterizing a set of recursive functions that determine the optimal allocation and payments in each round. Notably, our results establish that in the dynamic case, the seller, on the one hand, commits to a participation reward to incentivize truth-telling, and, on the other hand, charges an entry fee for every round. Moreover, the optimal allocation once more involves subsidization in favor of one group, where the extent of subsidization depends on the difference in future utilities for both the seller and buyers when allocating the item to one group versus the other. Finally, we present an approximation scheme to solve the recursive equations and determine an approximately optimal and fair allocation efficiently.


IMPACT: A Large-scale Integrated Multimodal Patent Analysis and Creation Dataset for Design Patents

Neural Information Processing Systems

Our dataset includes half a million design patents comprising 3.61 million figures along with captions from patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) over a 16-year period from 2007 to 2022. We incorporate the metadata of each patent application with elaborate captions that are coherent with multiple viewpoints of designs. Even though patents themselves contain a variety of design figures, titles, and descriptions of viewpoints, we find that they lack detailed descriptions that are necessary to perform multimodal tasks such as classification and retrieval.