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 taxnodes:Technology: Instructional Materials


Neuroplasticity in Artificial Intelligence -- An Overview and Inspirations on Drop In & Out Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has achieved new levels of performance and spread in public usage with the rise of deep neural networks (DNNs). Initially inspired by human neurons and their connections, NNs have become the foundation of AI models for many advanced architectures. However, some of the most integral processes in the human brain, particularly neurogenesis and neuroplasticity in addition to the more spread neuroapoptosis have largely been ignored in DNN architecture design. Instead, contemporary AI development predominantly focuses on constructing advanced frameworks, such as large language models, which retain a static structure of neural connections during training and inference. In this light, we explore how neurogenesis, neuroapoptosis, and neuroplasticity can inspire future AI advances. Specifically, we examine analogous activities in artificial NNs, introducing the concepts of ``dropin'' for neurogenesis and revisiting ``dropout'' and structural pruning for neuroapoptosis. We additionally suggest neuroplasticity combining the two for future large NNs in ``life-long learning'' settings following the biological inspiration. We conclude by advocating for greater research efforts in this interdisciplinary domain and identifying promising directions for future exploration.


Provably Fast Finite Particle Variants of SVGD via Virtual Particle Stochastic Approximation Dheeraj Nagaraj Google Research

Neural Information Processing Systems

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a popular particle-based variational inference algorithm with impressive empirical performance across various domains. Although the population (i.e, infinite-particle) limit dynamics of SVGD is well characterized, its behavior in the finite-particle regime is far less understood. To this end, our work introduces the notion of virtual particles to develop novel stochastic approximations of population-limit SVGD dynamics in the space of probability measures, that are exactly realizable using finite particles.




EnsIR: An Ensemble Algorithm for Image Restoration via Gaussian Mixture Models Shangquan Sun 1,2 Hyunhee Park 6

Neural Information Processing Systems

Image restoration has experienced significant advancements due to the development of deep learning. Nevertheless, it encounters challenges related to ill-posed problems, resulting in deviations between single model predictions and ground-truths. Ensemble learning, as a powerful machine learning technique, aims to address these deviations by combining the predictions of multiple base models. Most existing works adopt ensemble learning during the design of restoration models, while only limited research focuses on the inference-stage ensemble of pre-trained restoration models. Regression-based methods fail to enable efficient inference, leading researchers in academia and industry to prefer averaging as their choice for post-training ensemble.


A Broader Impact & Ethics Statement

Neural Information Processing Systems

Note: Additional visualizations of our experiments can be found here: https://sites.google. AI-assisted teaching of motor control tasks can provide significant benefits such as more reliable teaching to individual students with different abilities (e.g. by leveraging more granular information about student actions), adaptability to any type of motor task or expert agent, and improved safety by reducing burden on human teachers for safety-critical tasks. However, we emphasize that our approach is solely meant to assist human teaching, as there exist many important aspects of human instruction that would be challenging to replace, including providing inspiration and motivation, in depth knowledge of human physical limitations, and an awareness of the broader context of a specific motor control task. Further risks of our approach, and avenues to address them, include: Bias of the expert agent. The suitability of the skills we use for teaching relies on how diverse the set of demonstrations from an expert is.



Online Adaptation of Language Models with a Memory of Amortized Contexts Jihoon Tack, Eric Mitchell

Neural Information Processing Systems

Due to the rapid generation and dissemination of information, large language models (LLMs) quickly run out of date despite enormous development costs. To address the crucial need to keep models updated, online learning has emerged as a critical tool when utilizing LLMs for real-world applications. However, given the ever-expanding corpus of unseen documents and the large parameter space of modern LLMs, efficient adaptation is essential. To address these challenges, we propose Memory of Amortized Contexts (MAC), an efficient and effective online adaptation framework for LLMs with strong knowledge retention. We propose a feature extraction and memory-augmentation approach to compress and extract information from new documents into compact modulations stored in a memory bank.



Towards Multi-dimensional Explanation Alignment for Medical Classification

Neural Information Processing Systems

The lack of interpretability in the field of medical image analysis has significant ethical and legal implications. Existing interpretable methods in this domain encounter several challenges, including dependency on specific models, difficulties in understanding and visualization, as well as issues related to efficiency. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework called Med-MICN (Medical Multidimensional Interpretable Concept Network). Med-MICN provides interpretability alignment for various angles, including neural symbolic reasoning, concept semantics, and saliency maps, which are superior to current interpretable methods. Its advantages include high prediction accuracy, interpretability across multiple dimensions, and automation through an end-to-end concept labeling process that reduces the need for extensive human training effort when working with new datasets. To demonstrate the effectiveness and interpretability of Med-MICN, we apply it to four benchmark datasets and compare it with baselines. The results clearly demonstrate the superior performance and interpretability of our Med-MICN.