Graph distillation has emerged as a promising avenue to enable scalable training of GNNs by compressing the training dataset while preserving essential graph characteristics. Our study uncovers significant shortcomings in current graph distillation techniques. First, the majority of the algorithms paradoxically require training on the full dataset to perform distillation. Second, due to their gradient-emulating approach, these methods require fresh distillation for any change in hyperparameters or GNN architecture, limiting their flexibility and reusability. Finally, they fail to achieve substantial size reduction due to synthesizing fully-connected, edge-weighted graphs. To address these challenges, we present Bonsai, a novel graph distillation method empowered by the observation that \textit{computation trees} form the fundamental processing units of message-passing GNNs. Bonsai distills datasets by encoding a careful selection of \textit{exemplar} trees that maximize the representation of all computation trees in the training set. This unique approach imparts Bonsai as the first linear-time, model-agnostic graph distillation algorithm for node classification that outperforms existing baselines across $6$ real-world datasets on accuracy, while being $22$ times faster on average. Bonsai is grounded in rigorous mathematical guarantees on the adopted approximation strategies making it robust to GNN architectures, datasets, and parameters.

Safety fine-tuning helps align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences for their safe deployment. To better understand the underlying factors that make models safe via safety fine-tuning, we design a synthetic data generation framework that captures salient aspects of an unsafe input by modeling the interaction between the task the model is asked to perform (e.g., "design") versus the specific concepts the task is asked to be performed upon (e.g., a "cycle" vs. a "bomb"). Using this, we investigate three well-known safety fine-tuning methods -- supervised safety fine-tuning, direct preference optimization, and unlearning -- and provide significant evidence demonstrating that these methods minimally transform MLP weights to specifically align unsafe inputs into its weights' null space. This yields a clustering of inputs based on whether the model deems them safe or not. Correspondingly, when an adversarial input (e.g., a jailbreak) is provided, its activations are closer to safer samples, leading to the model processing such an input as if it were safe. We validate our findings, wherever possible, on real-world models -- specifically, Llama-2 7B and Llama-3 8B.

Fine-tuning large pre-trained models has become the de facto strategy for developing both task-specific and general-purpose machine learning systems, including developing models that are safe to deploy. Despite its clear importance, there has been minimal work that explains how fine-tuning alters the underlying capabilities learned by a model during pretraining: does fine-tuning yield entirely novel capabilities or does it just modulate existing ones? We address this question empirically in synthetic, controlled settings where we can use mechanistic interpretability tools (e.g., network pruning and probing) to understand how the model's underlying capabilities are changing. We perform an extensive analysis of the effects of fine-tuning in these settings, and show that: (i) fine-tuning rarely alters the underlying model capabilities; (ii) a minimal transformation, which we call a 'wrapper', is typically learned on top of the underlying model capabilities, creating the illusion that they have been modified; and (iii) further fine-tuning on a task where such hidden capabilities are relevant leads to sample-efficient 'revival' of the capability, i.e., the model begins reusing these capability after only a few gradient steps. This indicates that practitioners can unintentionally remove a model's safety wrapper merely by fine-tuning it on a, e.g., superficially unrelated, downstream task. We additionally perform analysis on language models trained on the TinyStories dataset to support our claims in a more realistic setup.

Intensive Care Units (ICU) require comprehensive patient data integration for enhanced clinical outcome predictions, crucial for assessing patient conditions. Recent deep learning advances have utilized patient time series data, and fusion models have incorporated unstructured clinical reports, improving predictive performance. However, integrating established medical knowledge into these models has not yet been explored. The medical domain's data, rich in structural relationships, can be harnessed through knowledge graphs derived from clinical ontologies like the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) for better predictions. Our proposed methodology integrates this knowledge with ICU data, improving clinical decision modeling. It combines graph representations with vital signs and clinical reports, enhancing performance, especially when data is missing. Additionally, our model includes an interpretability component to understand how knowledge graph nodes affect predictions.

Generalization of neural networks is crucial for deploying them safely in the real world. Common training strategies to improve generalization involve the use of data augmentations, ensembling and model averaging. In this work, we first establish a surprisingly simple but strong benchmark for generalization which utilizes diverse augmentations within a training minibatch, and show that this can learn a more balanced distribution of features. Further, we propose Diversify-Aggregate-Repeat Training (DART) strategy that first trains diverse models using different augmentations (or domains) to explore the loss basin, and further Aggregates their weights to combine their expertise and obtain improved generalization. We find that Repeating the step of Aggregation throughout training improves the overall optimization trajectory and also ensures that the individual models have a sufficiently low loss barrier to obtain improved generalization on combining them. We shed light on our approach by casting it in the framework proposed by Shen et al. and theoretically show that it indeed generalizes better. In addition to improvements in In- Domain generalization, we demonstrate SOTA performance on the Domain Generalization benchmarks in the popular DomainBed framework as well. Our method is generic and can easily be integrated with several base training algorithms to achieve performance gains.

Advances in adversarial defenses have led to a significant improvement in the robustness of Deep Neural Networks. However, the robust accuracy of present state-ofthe-art defenses is far from the requirements in critical applications such as robotics and autonomous navigation systems. Further, in practical use cases, network prediction alone might not suffice, and assignment of a confidence value for the prediction can prove crucial. In this work, we propose a generic method for introducing stochasticity in the network predictions, and utilize this for smoothing decision boundaries and rejecting low confidence predictions, thereby boosting the robustness on accepted samples. The proposed Feature Level Stochastic Smoothing based classification also results in a boost in robustness without rejection over existing adversarial training methods. Finally, we combine the proposed method with adversarial detection methods, to achieve the benefits of both approaches.

With the rapid growth in the fashion e-commerce industry, it is becoming extremely challenging for the E-tailers to set an optimal price point for all the products on the platform. By establishing an optimal price point, they can maximize overall revenue and profit for the platform. In this paper, we propose a novel machine learning and optimization technique to find the optimal price point at an individual product level. It comprises three major components. Firstly, we use a demand prediction model to predict the next day demand for each product at a certain discount percentage. Next step, we use the concept of price elasticity of demand to get the multiple demand values by varying the discount percentage. Thus we obtain multiple price demand pairs for each product and we have to choose one of them for the live platform. Typically fashion e-commerce has millions of products, so there can be many permutations. Each permutation will assign a unique price point for all the products, which will sum up to a unique revenue number. To choose the best permutation which gives maximum revenue, a linear programming optimization technique is used. We have deployed the above methods in the live production environment and conducted several AB tests. According to the AB test result, our model is improving the revenue by 1 percent and gross margin by 0.81 percent.

As the field of Music Information Retrieval grows, it is important to take into consideration the multi-modality of music and how aspects of musical engagement such as movement and gesture might be taken into account. Bodily movement is universally associated with music and reflective of important individual features related to music preference such as personality, mood, and empathy. Future multimodal MIR systems may benefit from taking these aspects into account. The current study addresses this by identifying individual differences, specifically Big Five personality traits, and scores on the Empathy and Systemizing Quotients (EQ/SQ) from participants' free dance movements. Our model successfully explored the unseen space for personality as well as EQ, SQ, which has not previously been accomplished for the latter. R2 scores for personality, EQ, and SQ were 76.3%, 77.1%, and 86.7% respectively. As a follow-up, we investigated which bodily joints were most important in defining these traits. We discuss how further research may explore how the mapping of these traits to movement patterns can be used to build a more personalized, multi-modal recommendation system, as well as potential therapeutic applications.