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DropBP: Accelerating Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models by Dropping Backward Propagation Sunghyeon Woo 1 Baesung Park 2 Byeongwook Kim 2 Minjung Jo2

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant success across various domains. However, training these LLMs typically involves substantial memory and computational costs during both forward and backward propagation. While parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) considerably reduces the training memory associated with parameters, it does not address the significant computational costs and activation memory. In this paper, we propose Dropping Backward Propagation (DropBP), a novel approach designed to reduce computational costs and activation memory while maintaining accuracy. DropBP randomly drops layers during backward propagation, which is essentially equivalent to training shallow submodules generated by undropped layers and residual connections. Additionally, DropBP calculates the sensitivity of each layer to assign an appropriate drop rate, thereby stabilizing the training process. DropBP is not only applicable to full fine-tuning but can also be orthogonally integrated with all types of PEFT by dropping layers during backward propagation. Specifically, DropBP can reduce training time by 44% with comparable accuracy to the baseline, accelerate convergence to the same perplexity by 1.5, and enable training with a sequence length 6.2 larger on a single NVIDIA-A100 GPU.


HumanVid: Demystifying Training Data for Camera-controllable Human Image Animation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Human image animation involves generating videos from a character photo, allowing user control and unlocking the potential for video and movie production. While recent approaches yield impressive results using high-quality training data, the inaccessibility of these datasets hampers fair and transparent benchmarking. Moreover, these approaches prioritize 2D human motion and overlook the significance of camera motions in videos, leading to limited control and unstable video generation. To demystify the training data, we present HumanVid, the first large-scale high-quality dataset tailored for human image animation, which combines crafted real-world and synthetic data. For the real-world data, we compile a vast collection of real-world videos from the internet.


Efficient Streaming Algorithms for Graphlet Sampling Marco Bressan Cispa Helmholtz Center for Information Security Department of Computer Science Saarland University

Neural Information Processing Systems

Given a graph G and a positive integer k, the Graphlet Sampling problem asks to sample a connected induced k-vertex subgraph of G uniformly at random. Graphlet sampling enhances machine learning applications by transforming graph structures into feature vectors for tasks such as graph classification and subgraph identification, boosting neural network performance, and supporting clustered federated learning by capturing local structures and relationships.


Complete Graphical Criterion for Sequential Covariate Adjustment in Causal Inference Yonghan Jung Min Woo Park 2 Sanghack Lee Purdue University

Neural Information Processing Systems

Covariate adjustment, also known as back-door adjustment, is a fundamental tool in causal inference. Although a sound and complete graphical identification criterion, known as adjustment criterion (Shpitser et al., 2010), exists for static contexts, sequential contexts present challenges. Current practices, such as the sequential back-door adjustment (Pearl and Robins, 1995) or multi-outcome sequential backdoor adjustment (Jung et al., 2020), are sound but incomplete; i.e., there are graphical scenarios where the causal effect is expressible via covariate adjustment, yet these criteria do not cover. In this paper, we exemplify this incompleteness and then present the sequential adjustment criterion, a sound and complete criterion for sequential covariate adjustment. We provide a constructive sequential adjustment criterion that identifies a set that satisfies the sequential adjustment criterion if and only if the causal effect can be expressed as a sequential covariate adjustment. Finally, we present an algorithm for identifying a minimal sequential covariate adjustment set, which optimizes efficiency by ensuring that no unnecessary vertices are included.


Metacognitive Capabilities of LLMs: An Exploration in Mathematical Problem Solving, Nan Rosemary Ke

Neural Information Processing Systems

Metacognitive knowledge refers to humans' intuitive knowledge of their own thinking and reasoning processes. Today's best LLMs clearly possess some reasoning processes. The paper gives evidence that they also have metacognitive knowledge, including ability to name skills and procedures to apply given a task. We explore this primarily in context of math reasoning, developing a prompt-guided interaction procedure to get a powerful LLM to assign sensible skill labels to math questions, followed by having it perform semantic clustering to obtain coarser families of skill labels. These coarse skill labels look interpretable to humans. To validate that these skill labels are meaningful and relevant to the LLM's reasoning processes we perform the following experiments.


DEFT: Efficient Fine-Tuning of Diffusion Models by Learning the Generalised h-transform

Neural Information Processing Systems

Generative modelling paradigms based on denoising diffusion processes have emerged as a leading candidate for conditional sampling in inverse problems. In many real-world applications, we often have access to large, expensively trained unconditional diffusion models, which we aim to exploit for improving conditional sampling. Most recent approaches are motivated heuristically and lack a unifying framework, obscuring connections between them. Further, they often suffer from issues such as being very sensitive to hyperparameters, being expensive to train or needing access to weights hidden behind a closed API. In this work, we unify conditional training and sampling using the mathematically well-understood Doob's h-transform.


Optimizing the coalition gain in Online Auctions with Greedy Structured Bandits Dorian Baudry 1,2, Hugo Richard 2, Maria Cherifa 2, Clรฉment Calauzรจnes

Neural Information Processing Systems

Motivated by online display advertising, this work considers repeated second-price auctions, where agents sample their value from an unknown distribution with cumulative distribution function F. In each auction t, a decision-maker bound by limited observations selects n



Highlights From Starships Test Flight 9: Everything That Happened in 17 Minutes

Mashable

Highlights From Starship's Test Flight 9: Everything That Happened in 17 Minutes Mashable Tech Science Life Social Good Entertainment Deals Shopping Games Search Cancel * * Search Result Tech Apps & Software Artificial Intelligence Cybersecurity Cryptocurrency Mobile Smart Home Social Media Tech Industry Transportation All Tech Science Space Climate Change Environment All Science Life Digital Culture Family & Parenting Health & Wellness Sex, Dating & Relationships Sleep Careers Mental Health All Life Social Good Activism Gender LGBTQ Racial Justice Sustainability Politics All Social Good Entertainment Games Movies Podcasts TV Shows Watch Guides All Entertainment SHOP THE BEST Laptops Budget Laptops Dating Apps Sexting Apps Hookup Apps VPNs Robot Vaccuums Robot Vaccum & Mop Headphones Speakers Kindles Gift Guides Mashable Choice Mashable Selects All Sex, Dating & Relationships All Laptops All Headphones All Robot Vacuums All VPN All Shopping Games Product Reviews Adult Friend Finder Bumble Premium Tinder Platinum Kindle Paperwhite PS5 vs PS5 Slim All Reviews All Shopping Deals Newsletters VIDEOS Mashable Shows All Videos Home Science Space Highlights From Starship's Test Flight 9: Everything That Happened in 17 Minutes Starship Test Flight 9 ends with "confirmation that the booster did demise." By Mashable Video on May 28, 2025 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Flipboard Watch Next Qualcomm's 2025 Computex Highlights: Everything Announced in 20 Minutes 20:09 Everything Announced at AMD's 2025 Computex Keynote in 19 Minutes 19:31 Everything Revealed at Nvidia's 2025 Computex Press Conference in 19 Minutes 19:55 Microsoft Build 2025 keynote: Everything announced, in 14 minutes 14:43 SpaceX conducted its ninth test flight of the Starship Launch Vehicle atop a Falcon Heavy booster from Starbase, Texas. See all the highlights from the test launch. Topics SpaceX Elon Musk Rocket Launches Latest Videos'Good Fortune' trailer: Keanu Reeves plays a guardian angel in Aziz Ansari's directorial debut Keanu Reeves as an angel? And, well... 05/24/2025 By Leah Stodart Say More: R.L. Stine on'Fear Street: Prom Queen' and Matt Wolf on'Pee-wee as Himself' From teen-defining terror to a childhood icon, '80s nostalgia thrives.


Robust Neural Contextual Bandit against Adversarial Corruptions

Neural Information Processing Systems

Contextual bandit algorithms aim to identify the optimal arm with the highest reward among a set of candidates, based on the accessible contextual information. Among these algorithms, neural contextual bandit methods have shown generally superior performances against linear and kernel ones, due to the representation power of neural networks. However, similar to other neural network applications, neural bandit algorithms can be vulnerable to adversarial attacks or corruptions on the received labels (i.e., arm rewards), which can lead to unexpected performance degradation without proper treatments. As a result, it is necessary to improve the robustness of neural bandit models against potential reward corruptions. In this work, we propose a novel neural contextual bandit algorithm named R-NeuralUCB, which utilizes a novel context-aware Gradient Descent (GD) training strategy to improve the robustness against adversarial reward corruptions. Under over-parameterized neural network settings, we provide regret analysis for R-NeuralUCB to quantify reward corruption impacts, without the commonly adopted arm separateness assumption in existing neural bandit works. We also conduct experiments against baselines on real data sets under different scenarios, in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed R-NeuralUCB.