Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular technique for sample-efficient optimization of black-box functions. In many applications, the parameters being tuned come with a carefully engineered default configuration, and practitioners only want to deviate from this default when necessary. Standard BO, however, does not aim to minimize deviation from the default and, in practice, often pushes weakly relevant parameters to the boundary of the search space. This makes it difficult to distinguish between important and spurious changes and increases the burden of vetting recommendations when the optimization objective omits relevant operational considerations. We introduce BONSAI, a default-aware BO policy that prunes low-impact deviations from a default configuration while explicitly controlling the loss in acquisition value. BONSAI is compatible with a variety of acquisition functions, including expected improvement and upper confidence bound (GP-UCB). We theoretically bound the regret incurred by BONSAI, showing that, under certain conditions, it enjoys the same no-regret property as vanilla GP-UCB. Across many real-world applications, we empirically find that BONSAI substantially reduces the number of non-default parameters in recommended configurations while maintaining competitive optimization performance, with little effect on wall time.

Environmental sustainability, particularly in relation to climate change, is a key concern for consumers, producers, and policymakers. The carbon footprint, based on greenhouse gas emissions, is a standard metric for quantifying the contribution to climate change of activities and is often assessed using life cycle assessment (LCA). However, conducting LCA is complex due to opaque and global supply chains, as well as fragmented data. This paper presents a methodology that combines advances in LCA and publicly available databases with knowledge-augmented AI techniques, including retrieval-augmented generation, to estimate cradle-to-gate carbon footprints of food products. Our methodology is implemented as a chatbot interface that allows users to interactively explore the carbon impact of composite meals and relate the results to familiar activities.

Work done during Y ongqiang's internship at Tencent AI Lab.

We thank the reviewers for their valuable feedback. This rebuttal includes further experiments to address the reviewers' These ablation results support the design choices made in SpArSe in the context of memory constrained MCUs. On MNIST, SpArSe achieves accuracy of 99.17% with 1.45e3 parameters, compared to 99.15% accuracy SpArSe would not work with the design choices made in previous NAS works, especially [23]. Reproducability (R1) We are happy to make the implementation publicly available upon acceptance. We argue that: 1) SpArSe addresses a significant gap in the community, i.e. model design for V alidity of claim on line 66 (R1) Our claim is true for WM 2KB, but we will revise that sentence for clarity.

Graph distillation has emerged as a promising avenue to enable scalable training of GNNs by compressing the training dataset while preserving essential graph characteristics. Our study uncovers significant shortcomings in current graph distillation techniques. First, the majority of the algorithms paradoxically require training on the full dataset to perform distillation. Second, due to their gradient-emulating approach, these methods require fresh distillation for any change in hyperparameters or GNN architecture, limiting their flexibility and reusability. Finally, they fail to achieve substantial size reduction due to synthesizing fully-connected, edge-weighted graphs. To address these challenges, we present Bonsai, a novel graph distillation method empowered by the observation that \textit{computation trees} form the fundamental processing units of message-passing GNNs. Bonsai distills datasets by encoding a careful selection of \textit{exemplar} trees that maximize the representation of all computation trees in the training set. This unique approach imparts Bonsai as the first linear-time, model-agnostic graph distillation algorithm for node classification that outperforms existing baselines across $6$ real-world datasets on accuracy, while being $22$ times faster on average. Bonsai is grounded in rigorous mathematical guarantees on the adopted approximation strategies making it robust to GNN architectures, datasets, and parameters.

Given the generational gap in available hardware between lay practitioners and the most endowed institutions, LLMs are becoming increasingly inaccessible as they grow in size. Whilst many approaches have been proposed to compress LLMs to make their resource consumption manageable, these methods themselves tend to be resource intensive, putting them out of the reach of the very user groups they target. In this work, we explore the problem of structured pruning of LLMs using only forward passes. We seek to empower practitioners to prune models so large that their available hardware has just enough memory to run inference. We develop Bonsai, a gradient-free, perturbative pruning method capable of delivering small, fast, and accurate pruned models. We observe that Bonsai outputs pruned models that (i) outperform those generated by more expensive gradient-based structured pruning methods, and (ii) are twice as fast (with comparable accuracy) as those generated by semi-structured pruning methods requiring comparable resources as Bonsai. We also leverage Bonsai to produce a new sub-2B model using a single A6000 that yields state-of-the-art performance on 4/6 tasks on the Huggingface Open LLM leaderboard.