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Safe Exploitative Play with Untrusted Type Beliefs Tongxin Li

Neural Information Processing Systems

The combination of the Bayesian game and learning has a rich history, with the idea of controlling a single agent in a system composed of multiple agents with unknown behaviors given a set of types, each specifying a possible behavior for the other agents. The idea is to plan an agent's own actions with respect to those types which it believes are most likely to maximize the payoff. However, the type beliefs are often learned from past actions and likely to be incorrect. With this perspective in mind, we consider an agent in a game with type predictions of other components, and investigate the impact of incorrect beliefs to the agent's payoff. In particular, we formally define a tradeoff between risk and opportunity by comparing the payoff obtained against the optimal payoff, which is represented by a gap caused by trusting or distrusting the learned beliefs. Our main results characterize the tradeoff by establishing upper and lower bounds on the Pareto front for both normal-form and stochastic Bayesian games, with numerical results provided.


Efficient Availability Attacks against Supervised and Contrastive Learning Simultaneously

Neural Information Processing Systems

Availability attacks provide a tool to prevent the unauthorized use of private data and commercial datasets by generating imperceptible noise and crafting unlearnable examples before release. Ideally, the obtained unlearnability can prevent algorithms from training usable models. When supervised learning (SL) algorithms have failed, a malicious data collector possibly resorts to contrastive learning (CL) algorithms to bypass the protection. Through evaluation, we have found that most existing methods are unable to achieve both supervised and contrastive unlearnability, which poses risks to data protection by availability attacks. Different from recent methods based on contrastive learning, we employ contrastive-like data augmentations in supervised learning frameworks to obtain attacks effective for both SL and CL. Our proposed AUE and AAP attacks achieve state-of-the-art worst-case unlearnability across SL and CL algorithms with less computation consumption, showcasing prospects in real-world applications. The code is available at https://github.


A Discrete Variational Recurrent Topic Model without the Reparametrization Trick

Neural Information Processing Systems

We show how to learn a neural topic model with discrete random variables--one that explicitly models each word's assigned topic--using neural variational inference that does not rely on stochastic backpropagation to handle the discrete variables. The model we utilize combines the expressive power of neural methods for representing sequences of text with the topic model's ability to capture global, thematic coherence. Using neural variational inference, we show improved perplexity and document understanding across multiple corpora. We examine the effect of prior parameters both on the model and variational parameters, and demonstrate how our approach can compete and surpass a popular topic model implementation on an automatic measure of topic quality.


5 AI prompts to put serious money in your pocket

FOX News

A majority of small businesses are using artificial intelligence and finding out it can save time and money. So, you want to start making money using AI but you're not trying to build Skynet or learn 15 coding languages first? Good, because neither am I. You don't need to become the next Sam Altman or have a Ph.D. in machine learning to turn artificial intelligence into real income. What you do need is curiosity, a dash of creativity, and the right prompts.


Google AI Overviews still struggles to answer basic questions and count

Mashable

Remember those old school sports and actions movies -- think Billy Bob in Varsity Blues -- where they'd ask dazed people simple questions to see if they're concussed? How many fingers am I holding up? Or, what year is it? Well, even by that low, low standard, Google's AI overviews may not pass concussion protocol. This week, folks noticed that Google's AI overviews couldn't reliably discern that the year was, in fact, 2025. There were a number of posts about it online.


SeTAR: Out-of-Distribution Detection with Selective Low-Rank Approximation Yixia Li

Neural Information Processing Systems

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is crucial for the safe deployment of neural networks. Existing CLIP-based approaches perform OOD detection by devising novel scoring functions or sophisticated fine-tuning methods. In this work, we propose SeTAR, a novel, training-free OOD detection method that leverages selective low-rank approximation of weight matrices in vision-language and vision-only models. SeTAR enhances OOD detection via post-hoc modification of the model's weight matrices using a simple greedy search algorithm. Based on SeTAR, we further propose SeTAR+FT, a fine-tuning extension optimizing model performance for OOD detection tasks. Extensive evaluations on ImageNet1K and Pascal-VOC benchmarks show SeTAR's superior performance, reducing the relatively false positive rate by up to 18.95% and 36.80%


Order-Independence Without Fine Tuning

Neural Information Processing Systems

The development of generative language models that can create long and coherent textual outputs via autoregression has lead to a proliferation of uses and a corresponding sweep of analyses as researches work to determine the limitations of this new paradigm. Unlike humans, these'Large Language Models' (LLMs) are highly sensitive to small changes in their inputs, leading to unwanted inconsistency in their behavior. One problematic inconsistency when LLMs are used to answer multiple-choice questions or analyze multiple inputs is order dependency: the output of an LLM can (and often does) change significantly when sub-sequences are swapped, despite both orderings being semantically identical. In this paper we present Set-Based Prompting, a technique that guarantees the output of an LLM will not have order dependence on a specified set of sub-sequences. We show that this method provably eliminates order dependency, and that it can be applied to any transformer-based LLM to enable text generation that is unaffected by re-orderings. Delving into the implications of our method, we show that, despite our inputs being out of distribution, the impact on expected accuracy is small, where the expectation is over the order of uniformly chosen shuffling of the candidate responses, and usually significantly less in practice. Thus, Set-Based Prompting can be used as a'dropped-in' method on fully trained models. Finally, we discuss how our method's success suggests that other strong guarantees can be obtained on LLM performance via modifying the input representations.


Hugging Faces new humanoid robot HopeJr may only cost 3,000

Mashable

If you want a robot assistant to live in your home and act vaguely like a human, you might be in luck. Hugging Face, a company that largely specializes in machine learning but has branched out into robotics recently, has a new humanoid robot called HopeJr coming out potentially by the end of 2025. As you can see in a video posted to X, it has a pretty wide range of movement capabilities. Per TechCrunch, it is specifically capable of 66 independent movements. The caption on the video claims it is capable of walking and "manipulating many objects," though we don't get to see the bot walk in the video.


MinMax Methods for Optimal Transport and Beyond: Regularization, Approximation and Numerics

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study MinMax solution methods for a general class of optimization problems related to (and including) optimal transport. Theoretically, the focus is on fitting a large class of problems into a single MinMax framework and generalizing regularization techniques known from classical optimal transport. We show that regularization techniques justify the utilization of neural networks to solve such problems by proving approximation theorems and illustrating fundamental issues if no regularization is used. We further study the relation to the literature on generative adversarial nets, and analyze which algorithmic techniques used therein are particularly suitable to the class of problems studied in this paper. Several numerical experiments showcase the generality of the setting and highlight which theoretical insights are most beneficial in practice.


Generative Retrieval Meets Multi-Graded Relevance Yubao Tang 1,2

Neural Information Processing Systems

Generative retrieval represents a novel approach to information retrieval. It uses an encoder-decoder architecture to directly produce relevant document identifiers (docids) for queries. While this method offers benefits, current approaches are limited to scenarios with binary relevance data, overlooking the potential for documents to have multi-graded relevance. Extending generative retrieval to accommodate multi-graded relevance poses challenges, including the need to reconcile likelihood probabilities for docid pairs and the possibility of multiple relevant documents sharing the same identifier.