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Adaptive Uncertainty Estimation via High-Dimensional Testing on Latent Representations Kin Wai Lau Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science TCL AI Lab The University of Hong Kong

Neural Information Processing Systems

Uncertainty estimation aims to evaluate the confidence of a trained deep neural network. However, existing uncertainty estimation approaches rely on lowdimensional distributional assumptions and thus suffer from the high dimensionality of latent features. Existing approaches tend to focus on uncertainty on discrete classification probabilities, which leads to poor generalizability to uncertainty estimation for other tasks. Moreover, most of the literature require seeing the outof-distribution (OOD) data in the training for better estimation of uncertainty, which limits the uncertainty estimation performance in practice because the OOD data are typically unseen. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new framework using data-adaptive high-dimensional hypothesis testing for uncertainty estimation, which leverages the statistical properties of the feature representations. Our method directly operates on latent representations and thus does not require retraining the feature encoder under a modified objective. The test statistic relaxes the feature distribution assumptions to high dimensionality, and it is more discriminative to uncertainties in the latent representations. We demonstrate that encoding features with Bayesian neural networks can enhance testing performance and lead to more accurate uncertainty estimation. We further introduce a family-wise testing procedure to determine the optimal threshold of OOD detection, which minimizes the false discovery rate (FDR).



Federated Multi-Objective Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

In recent years, multi-objective optimization (MOO) emerges as a foundational problem underpinning many multi-agent multi-task learning applications. However, existing algorithms in MOO literature remain limited to centralized learning settings, which do not satisfy the distributed nature and data privacy needs of such multi-agent multi-task learning applications. This motivates us to propose a new federated multi-objective learning (FMOL) framework with multiple clients distributively and collaboratively solving an MOO problem while keeping their training data private. Notably, our FMOL framework allows a different set of objective functions across different clients to support a wide range of applications, which advances and generalizes the MOO formulation to the federated learning paradigm for the first time. For this FMOL framework, we propose two new federated multi-objective optimization (FMOO) algorithms called federated multi-gradient descent averaging (FMGDA) and federated stochastic multi-gradient descent averaging (FSMGDA). Both algorithms allow local updates to significantly reduce communication costs, while achieving the same convergence rates as those of their algorithmic counterparts in the single-objective federated learning. Our extensive experiments also corroborate the efficacy of our proposed FMOO algorithms.


SlimGPT: Layer-wise Structured Pruning for Large Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention for their remarkable capabilities across various domains, whose vast parameter scales present challenges for practical deployment. Structured pruning is an effective method to balance model performance with efficiency, but performance restoration under computational resource constraints is a principal challenge in pruning LLMs. Therefore, we present a low-cost and fast structured pruning method for LLMs named SlimGPT based on the Optimal Brain Surgeon framework. We propose Batched Greedy Pruning for rapid and near-optimal pruning, which enhances the accuracy of head-wise pruning error estimation through grouped Cholesky decomposition and improves the pruning efficiency of FFN via Dynamic Group Size, thereby achieving approximate local optimal pruning results within one hour. Besides, we explore the limitations of layer-wise pruning from the perspective of error accumulation and propose Incremental Pruning Ratio, a non-uniform pruning strategy to reduce performance degradation. Experimental results on the LLaMA benchmark show that SlimGPT outperforms other methods and achieves state-of-the-art results.


DORIS-MAE: Scientific Document Retrieval using Multi-level Aspect-based Queries Jianyou Wang

Neural Information Processing Systems

In scientific research, the ability to effectively retrieve relevant documents based on complex, multifaceted queries is critical. Existing evaluation datasets for this task are limited, primarily due to the high cost and effort required to annotate resources that effectively represent complex queries. To address this, we propose a novel task, Scientific DOcument Retrieval using Multi-level Aspect-based quEries (DORIS-MAE), which is designed to handle the complex nature of user queries in scientific research. We developed a benchmark dataset within the field of computer science, consisting of 100 human-authored complex query cases. For each complex query, we assembled a collection of 100 relevant documents and produced annotated relevance scores for ranking them.



Learningto Modulate pre-trained Models in RL

Neural Information Processing Systems

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been successful in various domains like robotics, game playing, and simulation. While RL agents have shown impressive capabilities in their specific tasks, they insufficiently adapt to new tasks. In supervised learning, this adaptation problem is addressed by large-scale pre-training followed by fine-tuning to new down-stream tasks. Recently, pre-training on multiple tasks has been gaining traction in RL. However, fine-tuning a pre-trained model often suffers from catastrophic forgetting.


Tracr: Compiled Transformers as a Laboratory for Interpretability

Neural Information Processing Systems

We show how to "compile" human-readable programs into standard decoderonly transformer models. Our compiler, Tracr, generates models with known structure. This structure can be used to design experiments. For example, we use it to study "superposition" in transformers that execute multi-step algorithms. Additionally, the known structure of Tracr-compiled models can serve as ground-truth for evaluating interpretability methods. Commonly, because the "programs" learned by transformers are unknown it is unclear whether an interpretation succeeded. We demonstrate our approach by implementing and examining programs including computing token frequencies, sorting, and parenthesis checking.


Supplementary Material Infer Induced Sentiment of Comment Response to Video: A New Task, Dataset and Baseline 1 Lu Liu

Neural Information Processing Systems

This section provides a comprehensive overview of the CSMV dataset. The CSMV dataset comprises micro videos and their corresponding comments, which have been updated from February 2020 to October 2022. This extensive time range allows for the inclusion of a diverse set of content, capturing the evolution of sentiments over the course of more than two years. In total, the CSMV dataset comprises 8,210 micro videos, totaling approximately 68.83 hours of video duration, along with 107,267 related comments. The CSMV dataset defines two distinct types of labels, opinion and emotion, for analyzing the sentiment expressed in the comments towards the micro videos. By leveraging the combination of video and textual content in this dataset, researchers can examine the interaction between language expressions and visual cues in sentiment analysis. To deepen our understanding of the CSMV dataset, we performed an analysis of the distribution of videos and related comments using specific hashtags. As depicted in Figure 1, this distribution exhibits a rich diversity of topics in video content. This diversity has brought rich expression of sentiment in user comments, giving the CSMV dataset an advantage in comprehending the complexity of induced sentiment. Moreover, this diversity expands the application of the dataset for multimodal sentiment analysis tasks.