Deep Bidirectional Language-Knowledge Graph Pretraining

Neural Information Processing Systems

Pretraining a language model (LM) on text has been shown to help various downstream NLP tasks. Recent works show that a knowledge graph (KG) can complement text data, offering structured background knowledge that provides a useful scaffold for reasoning. However, these works are not pretrained to learn a deep fusion of the two modalities at scale, limiting the potential to acquire fully joint representations of text and KG. Here we propose DRAGON (Deep Bidirectional Language-Knowledge Graph Pretraining), a self-supervised approach to pretraining a deeply joint language-knowledge foundation model from text and KG at scale. Specifically, our model takes pairs of text segments and relevant KG subgraphs as input and bidirectionally fuses information from both modalities.


Um, is Grok OK? Elon Musks AI chatbot develops South Africa fixation

Mashable

Have a question for Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok about the latest baseball news? If you have a question for Grok today, there's a chance X's AI chatbot replied by talking about "white genocide" in South Africa, a controversial talking point in far-right circles. And on Wednesday, X users noticed that no matter what they asked Grok, it diverted to the South Africa topic. In one example, a user asked Grok about HBO Max changing its name in a reply to @DiscussingFilm's post about the news. The user asked, "@grok How many times has HBO changed their name?"


Off-Policy Evaluation with Policy-Dependent Optimization Response

Neural Information Processing Systems

The intersection of causal inference and machine learning for decision-making is rapidly expanding, but the default decision criterion remains an average of individual causal outcomes across a population. In practice, various operational restrictions ensure that a decision-maker's utility is not realized as an average but rather as an output of a downstream decision-making problem (such as matching, assignment, network flow, minimizing predictive risk). In this work, we develop a new framework for off-policy evaluation with policy-dependent linear optimization responses: causal outcomes introduce stochasticity in objective function coefficients. Under this framework, a decision-maker's utility depends on the policy-dependent optimization, which introduces a fundamental challenge of optimization bias even for the case of policy evaluation. We construct unbiased estimators for the policy-dependent estimand by a perturbation method, and discuss asymptotic variance properties for a set of adjusted plug-in estimators.


Interpolation and Regularization for Causal Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent work shows that in complex model classes, interpolators can achieve statistical generalization and even be optimal for statistical learning. However, despite increasing interest in learning models with good causal properties, there is no understanding of whether such interpolators can also achieve causal generalization. To address this gap, we study causal learning from observational data through the lens of interpolation and its counterpart---regularization. Under a simple linear causal model, we derive precise asymptotics for the causal risk of the min-norm interpolator and ridge regressors in the high-dimensional regime. We find a large range of behavior that can be precisely characterized by a new measure of confounding strength.


Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding

Neural Information Processing Systems

Imagen builds on the power of large transformer language models in understanding text and hinges on the strength of diffusion models in high-fidelity image generation. Our key discovery is that generic large language models (e.g., T5), pretrained on text-only corpora, are surprisingly effective at encoding text for image synthesis: increasing the size of the language model in Imagen boosts both sample fidelity and image-text alignment much more than increasing the size of the image diffusion model. Imagen achieves a new state-of-the-art FID score of 7.27 on the COCO dataset, without ever training on COCO, and human raters find Imagen samples to be on par with the COCO data itself in image-text alignment. To assess text-to-image models in greater depth, we introduce DrawBench, a comprehensive and challenging benchmark for text-to-image models. With DrawBench, we compare Imagen with recent methods including VQ-GAN CLIP, Latent Diffusion Models, and DALL-E 2, and find that human raters prefer Imagen over other models in side-by-side comparisons, both in terms of sample quality and image-text alignment.


'Hey, Cortana' becomes 'Hey, Copilot' in Windows 11

PCWorld

Stop us if you've heard this before: You can now talk to your PC's built-in AI. But in Windows 11, Cortana has been replaced with Windows Copilot, and you can now interact with Copilot by saying "Hey, Copilot" instead. Microsoft is testing the new feature within the Windows Insider program. If your PC is unlocked, and you've configured it to accept the "Hey Copilot" wake words, you can now interact with Copilot verbally. The Copilot UI will launch as a small microphone icon.


Fair Infinitesimal Jackknife: Mitigating the Influence of Biased Training Data Points Without Refitting

Neural Information Processing Systems

In consequential decision-making applications, mitigating unwanted biases in machine learning models that yield systematic disadvantage to members of groups delineated by sensitive attributes such as race and gender is one key intervention to strive for equity. Focusing on demographic parity and equality of opportunity, in this paper we propose an algorithm that improves the fairness of a pre-trained classifier by simply dropping carefully selected training data points. We select instances based on their influence on the fairness metric of interest, computed using an infinitesimal jackknife-based approach. The dropping of training points is done in principle, but in practice does not require the model to be refit. Crucially, we find that such an intervention does not substantially reduce the predictive performance of the model but drastically improves the fairness metric.


Palm up: Playing in the Latent Manifold for Unsupervised Pretraining

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large and diverse datasets have been the cornerstones of many impressive advancements in artificial intelligence. Intelligent creatures, however, learn by interacting with the environment, which changes the input sensory signals and the state of the environment. In this work, we aim to bring the best of both worlds and propose an algorithm that exhibits an exploratory behavior whilst it utilizes large diverse datasets. Our key idea is to leverage deep generative models that are pretrained on static datasets and introduce a dynamic model in the latent space. The transition dynamics simply mixes an action and a random sampled latent.


Elon Musk shows he still has the White House's ear on Trump's Middle East trip

The Guardian

Over the course of an eight-minute interview, Elon Musk touted his numerous businesses and vision of a "Star Trek future" while telling the crowd that his Tesla Optimus robots had performed a dance for Donald Trump and the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, to the tune of YMCA. He also announced that Starlink, his satellite internet company, had struck a deal for use in Saudi Arabia for maritime and aviation usage; looking to the near future, he expressed his desire to bring Tesla's self-driving robotaxis to the country. "We could not be more appreciative of having a lifetime partner and a friend like you, Elon, to the Kingdom," Saudi Arabia's minister of communications and IT, Abdullah Alswaha, told Musk. Although Musk has pivoted away from his role as de facto leader of the so-called "department of government efficiency" and moved out of the White House, the Saudi summit showed how he is still retaining his proximity to the US president and international influence. As Musk returns to his businesses as his primary focus, he is still primed to reap the rewards of his connections and political sway over Trump.


Contrastive Learning as Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

In reinforcement learning (RL), it is easier to solve a task if given a good representation. While deep RL should automatically acquire such good representations, prior work often finds that learning representations in an end-to-end fashion is unstable and instead equip RL algorithms with additional representation learning parts (e.g., auxiliary losses, data augmentation). How can we design RL algorithms that directly acquire good representations? In this paper, instead of adding representation learning parts to an existing RL algorithm, we show (contrastive) representation learning methods are already RL algorithms in their own right. To do this, we build upon prior work and apply contrastive representation learning to action-labeled trajectories, in such a way that the (inner product of) learned representations exactly corresponds to a goal-conditioned value function.