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On the Theory of Transfer Learning: The Importance of Task Diversity

Neural Information Processing Systems

We provide new statistical guarantees for transfer learning via representation learning-when transfer is achieved by learning a feature representation shared across different tasks. This enables learning on new tasks using far less data than is required to learn them in isolation.


Debiasing Synthetic Data Generated by Deep Generative Models Ghent University Hospital - SYNDARA Ghent University Hospital - SYNDARA Paloma Rabaey

Neural Information Processing Systems

While synthetic data hold great promise for privacy protection, their statistical analysis poses significant challenges that necessitate innovative solutions. The use of deep generative models (DGMs) for synthetic data generation is known to induce considerable bias and imprecision into synthetic data analyses, compromising their inferential utility as opposed to original data analyses. This bias and uncertainty can be substantial enough to impede statistical convergence rates, even in seemingly straightforward analyses like mean calculation.


MultiScan: Scalable RGBD scanning for 3D environments with articulated objects

Neural Information Processing Systems

We introduce MultiScan, a scalable RGBD dataset construction pipeline leveraging commodity mobile devices to scan indoor scenes with articulated objects and web-based semantic annotation interfaces to efficiently annotate object and part semantics and part mobility parameters. We use this pipeline to collect 273 scans of 117 indoor scenes containing 10957 objects and 5129 parts. The resulting MultiScan dataset provides RGBD streams with per-frame camera poses, textured 3D surface meshes, richly annotated part-level and object-level semantic labels, and part mobility parameters.


F-OAL: Forward-only Online Analytic Learning with Fast Training and Low Memory Footprint in Class Incremental Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Online Class Incremental Learning (OCIL) aims to train models incrementally, where data arrive in mini-batches, and previous data are not accessible. A major challenge in OCIL is Catastrophic Forgetting, i.e., the loss of previously learned knowledge. Among existing baselines, replay-based methods show competitive results but requires extra memory for storing exemplars, while exemplar-free (i.e., data need not be stored for replay in production) methods are resourcefriendly but often lack accuracy. In this paper, we propose an exemplar-free approach--Forward-only Online Analytic Learning (F-OAL). Unlike traditional methods, F-OAL does not rely on back-propagation and is forward-only, significantly reducing memory usage and computational time. Cooperating with a pre-trained frozen encoder with Feature Fusion, F-OAL only needs to update a linear classifier by recursive least square. This approach simultaneously achieves high accuracy and low resource consumption. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate F-OAL's robust performance in OCIL scenarios.


Interpretable Image Classification with Adaptive Prototype-based Vision Transformers

Neural Information Processing Systems

This method classifies an image by comparing it to a set of learned prototypes, providing explanations of the form "this looks like that." In our model, a prototype consists of parts, which can deform over irregular geometries to create a better comparison between images. Unlike existing models that rely on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) backbones and spatially rigid prototypes, our model integrates Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones into prototype based models, while offering spatially deformed prototypes that not only accommodate geometric variations of objects but also provide coherent and clear prototypical feature representations with an adaptive number of prototypical parts. Our experiments show that our model can generally achieve higher performance than the existing prototype based models. Our comprehensive analyses ensure that the prototypes are consistent and the interpretations are faithful. Our code is available at https://github.com/Henrymachiyu/ProtoViT.


593906af0d138e69f49d251d3e7cbed0-AuthorFeedback.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

We sincerely thank all reviewers for their time and constructive feedback. This can be readily seen from Eq. 6: The first term is the entropy h(Y), because the label distribution p(Y) is known This includes GLOW, RealNVP, NICE, i-ResNet, and more. X = 1/32 as used by Kingma & Dhariwal (2018). The slope of the approximation agrees well for small ฯƒ, but breaks down for larger values.


SVFT: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning with Singular Vectors Vijay Lingam Aditya Vavre

Neural Information Processing Systems

Popular parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, such as LoRA and its variants, freeze pre-trained model weights W and inject learnable matrices W. These W matrices are structured for efficient parameterization, often using techniques like low-rank approximations or scaling vectors. However, these methods typically exhibit a performance gap compared to full fine-tuning. While recent PEFT methods have narrowed this gap, they do so at the expense of additional learnable parameters.


Deciding What to Model: Value-Equivalent Sampling for Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recently formalized as the value equivalence principle, this algorithmic technique is perhaps unavoidable as real-world reinforcement learning demands consideration of a simple, computationally-bounded agent interacting with an overwhelmingly complex environment, whose underlying dynamics likely exceed the agent's capacity for representation. In this work, we consider the scenario where agent limitations may entirely preclude identifying an exactly value-equivalent model, immediately giving rise to a trade-off between identifying a model that is simple enough to learn while only incurring bounded sub-optimality.


Verified Code Transpilation with LLMs

Neural Information Processing Systems

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) are integral to various software workflows. Such languages offer domain-specific optimizations and abstractions that improve code readability and maintainability. However, leveraging these languages requires developers to rewrite existing code using the specific DSL's API. While large language models (LLMs) have shown some success in automatic code transpilation, none of them provide any functional correctness guarantees on the transpiled code. Another approach for automating this task is verified lifting, which relies on program synthesis to find programs in the target language that are functionally equivalent to the source language program. While several verified lifting tools have been developed for various application domains, they are specialized for specific source-target languages or require significant expertise in domain knowledge to make the search efficient.


A Pruned Architecture

Neural Information Processing Systems

Here we analyze the parameter distribution of the pruned model from DeiT-Base. Figure 1a shows the reserved hidden dimension for each layer under different FLOPs targets, e.g. All layers have the same hidden dimension of 3072 in the original DeiT. After pruning, we observe that the majority of the remaining parameters concentrate on the middle layers, while the lower layers require fewer parameters. We hypothesize that this occurs because the middle layers incorporate more global information than the lower layers and attempt to build more complex representations.