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Benchmarking Structural Inference Methods for Interacting Dynamical Systems with Synthetic Data Aoran Wang 1 Tsz Pan Tong 1 Jun Pang

Neural Information Processing Systems

Understanding complex dynamical systems begins with identifying their topological structures, which expose the organization of the systems. This requires robust structural inference methods that can deduce structure from observed behavior. However, existing methods are often domain-specific and lack a standardized, objective comparison framework. We address this gap by benchmarking 13 structural inference methods from various disciplines on simulations representing two types of dynamics and 11 interaction graph models, supplemented by a biological experimental dataset to mirror real-world application. We evaluated the methods for accuracy, scalability, robustness, and sensitivity to graph properties. Our findings indicate that deep learning methods excel with multi-dimensional data, while classical statistics and information theory based approaches are notably accurate and robust.


On the Interplay between Social Welfare and Tractability of Equilibria

Neural Information Processing Systems

Nevertheless, we show that when (approximate) full efficiency can be guaranteed via a smoothness argument ร  la Roughgarden, Nash equilibria are approachable under a family of no-regret learning algorithms, thereby enabling fast and decentralized computation. We leverage this connection to obtain new convergence results in large games--wherein the number of players n 1--under the well-documented property of full efficiency via smoothness in the limit. Surprisingly, our framework unifies equilibrium computation in disparate classes of problems including games with vanishing strategic sensitivity and two-player zero-sum games, illuminating en route an immediate but overlooked equivalence between smoothness and a well-studied condition in the optimization literature known as the Minty property. Finally, we establish that a family of no-regret dynamics attains a welfare bound that improves over the smoothness framework while at the same time guaranteeing convergence to the set of coarse correlated equilibria. We show this by employing the clairvoyant mirror descent algortihm recently introduced by Piliouras et al.


Learning with Explanation Constraints

Neural Information Processing Systems

As larger deep learning models are hard to interpret, there has been a recent focus on generating explanations of these black-box models. In contrast, we may have apriori explanations of how models should behave. In this paper, we formalize this notion as learning from explanation constraints and provide a learning theoretic framework to analyze how such explanations can improve the learning of our models. One may naturally ask, "When would these explanations be helpful?"


A Comparison with official DTR and DTE implementations ResNet-152 3.0 10 3.0 8

Neural Information Processing Systems

Figure 1: Training time with increase of batch size under Coop (implemented in OneFlow), MegEngine DTE (official implementation of DTE in MegEngine) and PyTorch DTR (official implementation of DTR in PyTorch). The bars with slashes represent the out of memory (OOM) error. Coop saves more memory and supports the training of larger models. Figure 2: Comparison of compute overhead evaluated on Coop when one of the three modules is removed. Figure 3: Comparison of the averaged memory fragmentation rate evaluated on Coop when one of the three modules is removed.


Coop: Memory is not a Commodity

Neural Information Processing Systems

Tensor rematerialization allows the training of deep neural networks (DNNs) under limited memory budgets by checkpointing the models and recomputing the evicted tensors as needed. However, the existing tensor rematerialization techniques overlook the memory system in deep learning frameworks and implicitly assume that free memory blocks at different addresses are identical. Under this flawed assumption, discontiguous tensors are evicted, among which some are not used to allocate the new tensor. This leads to severe memory fragmentation and increases the cost of potential rematerializations. To address this issue, we propose to evict tensors within a sliding window to ensure all evictions are contiguous and are immediately used. Furthermore, we proposed cheap tensor partitioning and recomputable in-place to further reduce the rematerialization cost by optimizing the tensor allocation. We named our method Coop as it is a co-optimization of tensor allocation and tensor rematerialization. We evaluated Coop on eight representative DNNs. The experimental results demonstrate that Coop achieves up to 2 memory saving and hugely reduces compute overhead, search latency, and memory fragmentation compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.


Language Model as Visual Explainer

Neural Information Processing Systems

Central to our strategy is the collaboration between vision models and LLM to craft explanations. On one hand, the LLM is harnessed to delineate hierarchical visual attributes, while concurrently, a text-to-image API retrieves images that are most aligned with these textual concepts. By mapping the collected texts and images to the vision model's embedding space, we construct a hierarchy-structured visual embedding tree. This tree is dynamically pruned and grown by querying the LLM using language templates, tailoring the explanation to the model. Such a scheme allows us to seamlessly incorporate new attributes while eliminating undesired concepts based on the model's representations. When applied to testing samples, our method provides human-understandable explanations in the form of attributeladen trees. Beyond explanation, we retrained the vision model by calibrating it on the generated concept hierarchy, allowing the model to incorporate the refined knowledge of visual attributes. To access the effectiveness of our approach, we introduce new benchmarks and conduct rigorous evaluations, demonstrating its plausibility, faithfulness, and stability.



SpatialRGPT: Grounded Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in 2D vision and language tasks. However, their ability to reason about spatial arrangements remains limited. In this work, we introduce Spatial Region GPT (SpatialRGPT) to enhance VLMs' spatial perception and reasoning capabilities. SpatialRGPT advances VLMs' spatial understanding through two key innovations: (i) a data curation pipeline that enables effective learning of regional representation from 3D scene graphs, and (ii) a flexible "plugin" module for integrating depth information into the visual encoder of existing VLMs. During inference, when provided with user-specified region proposals, SpatialRGPT can accurately perceive their relative directions and distances. Additionally, we propose SpatialRGBT-Bench, a benchmark with ground-truth 3D annotations encompassing indoor, outdoor, and simulated environments, for evaluating 3D spatial cognition in VLMs. Our results demonstrate that SpatialRGPT significantly enhances performance in spatial reasoning tasks, both with and without local region prompts. The model also exhibits strong generalization capabilities, effectively reasoning about complex spatial relations and functioning as a region-aware dense reward annotator for robotic tasks. Code, dataset, and benchmark are released at https://www.anjiecheng.me/SpatialRGPT.