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Optimal Rates for Vector-Valued Spectral Regularization Learning Algorithms

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study theoretical properties of a broad class of regularized algorithms with vector-valued output. These spectral algorithms include kernel ridge regression, kernel principal component regression and various implementations of gradient descent.


From Trojan Horses to Castle Walls: Unveiling Bilateral Data Poisoning Effects in Diffusion Models Zhuoshi Pan

Neural Information Processing Systems

While state-of-the-art diffusion models (DMs) excel in image generation, concerns regarding their security persist. Earlier research highlighted DMs' vulnerability to data poisoning attacks, but these studies placed stricter requirements than conventional methods like'BadNets' in image classification. This is because the art necessitates modifications to the diffusion training and sampling procedures. Unlike the prior work, we investigate whether BadNets-like data poisoning methods can directly degrade the generation by DMs. In other words, if only the training dataset is contaminated (without manipulating the diffusion process), how will this affect the performance of learned DMs?


SustainGym: Reinforcement Learning Environments for Sustainable Energy Systems

Neural Information Processing Systems

The lack of standardized benchmarks for reinforcement learning (RL) in sustainability applications has made it difficult to both track progress on specific domains and identify bottlenecks for researchers to focus their efforts. In this paper, we present SustainGym, a suite of five environments designed to test the performance of RL algorithms on realistic sustainable energy system tasks, ranging from electric vehicle charging to carbon-aware data center job scheduling. The environments test RL algorithms under realistic distribution shifts as well as in multi-agent settings. We show that standard off-the-shelf RL algorithms leave significant room for improving performance and highlight the challenges ahead for introducing RL to real-world sustainability tasks.


Voxel Mamba: Group-Free State Space Models for Point Cloud based 3D Object Detection

Neural Information Processing Systems

Serialization-based methods, which serialize the 3D voxels and group them into multiple sequences before inputting to Transformers, have demonstrated their effectiveness in 3D object detection. However, serializing 3D voxels into 1D sequences will inevitably sacrifice the voxel spatial proximity. Such an issue is hard to be addressed by enlarging the group size with existing serializationbased methods due to the quadratic complexity of Transformers with feature sizes. Inspired by the recent advances of state space models (SSMs), we present a Voxel SSM, termed as Voxel Mamba, which employs a group-free strategy to serialize the whole space of voxels into a single sequence. The linear complexity of SSMs encourages our group-free design, alleviating the loss of spatial proximity of voxels. To further enhance the spatial proximity, we propose a Dual-scale SSM Block to establish a hierarchical structure, enabling a larger receptive field in the 1D serialization curve, as well as more complete local regions in 3D space. Moreover, we implicitly apply window partition under the group-free framework by positional encoding, which further enhances spatial proximity by encoding voxel positional information. Our experiments on Waymo Open Dataset and nuScenes dataset show that Voxel Mamba not only achieves higher accuracy than state-of-the-art methods, but also demonstrates significant advantages in computational efficiency.


The One Big Beautiful Bill Act would ban states from regulating AI

Mashable

Buried in the Republican budget bill is a proposal that will radically change how artificial intelligence develops in the U.S., according to both its supporters and critics. The provision would ban states from regulating AI for the next decade. Opponents say the moratorium is so broadly written that states wouldn't be able to enact protections for consumers affected by harmful applications of AI, like discriminatory employment tools, deepfakes, and addictive chatbots. Instead, consumers would have to wait for Congress to pass its own federal legislation to address those concerns. Currently it has no draft of such a bill.


Another Trump Casualty: A Tiny Office That Keeps Measurements of the World Accurate

Mother Jones

Dru Smith, Chief Geodesist of the National Geodetic Survey stands near a measurement device used to survey the height of the Washington Monument in 2017.Susan Walsh/AP This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Cuts made by the Trump administration are threatening the function of a tiny but crucial office within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that maintains the US framework of spatial information: latitudes, longitudes, vertical measurements like elevation, and even measurements of Earth's gravitational field. Staff losses at the National Geodetic Survey (NGS), the oldest scientific agency in the US, could further cripple its mission and activities, including a long-awaited project to update the accuracy of these measurements, former employees and experts say. As the world turns more and more toward operations that need precise coordinate systems like the ones NGS provides, the science that underpins this office's activities, these experts say, is becoming even more crucial. The work of NGS, says Tim Burch, the executive director of the National Society of Professional Surveyors, "is kind of like oxygen. You don't know you need it until it's not there."


TradeMaster Appendix

Neural Information Processing Systems

Is there a label or target associated with each instance? No, there is no label or target associated with each instance as our focus is not supervised learning settings. Is any information missing from individual instances? Yes, it is common to have missing values in financial datasets. We provide scripts to preprocess and conduct data imputation with diffusion models [26]. Are relationships between individual instances made explicit?


3D Gaussian Splatting as Markov Chain Monte Carlo

Neural Information Processing Systems

While 3D Gaussian Splatting has recently become popular for neural rendering, current methods rely on carefully engineered cloning and splitting strategies for placing Gaussians, which can lead to poor-quality renderings, and reliance on a good initialization. In this work, we rethink the set of 3D Gaussians as a random sample drawn from an underlying probability distribution describing the physical representation of the scene--in other words, Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samples. Under this view, we show that the 3D Gaussian updates can be converted as Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) update by simply introducing noise. We then rewrite the densification and pruning strategies in 3D Gaussian Splatting as simply a deterministic state transition of MCMC samples, removing these heuristics from the framework. To do so, we revise the'cloning' of Gaussians into a relocalization scheme that approximately preserves sample probability. To encourage efficient use of Gaussians, we introduce a regularizer that promotes the removal of unused Gaussians. On various standard evaluation scenes, we show that our method provides improved rendering quality, easy control over the number of Gaussians, and robustness to initialization.


A Boosting-Type Convergence Result for A.MH with Factorized Multi-Class Classifiers

Neural Information Processing Systems

Boosting is an approach to machine learning based on the idea of creating a highly accurate prediction rule by combining many relatively weak and inaccurate rules [19] and has inspired a lot on theoretical analysis and algorithm design in supervised learning [11, 17].


Humanoid Locomotion as Next Token Prediction

Neural Information Processing Systems

We cast real-world humanoid control as a next token prediction problem, akin to predicting the next word in language. Our model is a causal transformer trained via autoregressive prediction of sensorimotor sequences. To account for the multimodal nature of the data, we perform prediction in a modality-aligned way, and for each input token predict the next token from the same modality. This general formulation enables us to leverage data with missing modalities, such as videos without actions. We train our model on a dataset of sequences from a prior neural network policy, a model-based controller, motion capture, and YouTube videos of humans. We show that our model enables a real humanoid robot to walk in San Francisco zero-shot. Our model can transfer to the real world even when trained on only 27 hours of walking data, and can generalize to commands not seen during training. These findings suggest a promising path toward learning challenging real-world control tasks by generative modeling of sensorimotor sequences.