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Breaking the Performance Ceiling in Reinforcement Learning requires Inference Strategies

Neural Information Processing Systems

Reinforcement learning (RL) systems have countless applications, from energygrid management to protein design. However, such real-world scenarios are often extremely difficult, combinatorial in nature, and require complex coordination between multiple agents. This level of complexity can cause even state-of-theart RL systems, trained until convergence, to hit a performance ceiling which they are unable to break out of with zero-shot inference. Meanwhile, many digital or simulation-based applications allow for an inference phase that utilises a specific time and compute budget to explore multiple attempts before outputting a final solution. In this work, we show that such an inference phase employed at execution time, and the choice of a corresponding inference strategy, are key to breaking the performance ceiling observed in complex multi-agent RL problems. Our main result is striking: we can obtain up to a 126% and, on average, a 45% improvement over the previous state-of-the-art across 17 tasks, using only a couple seconds of extra wall-clock time during execution. We also demonstrate promising compute scaling properties, supported by over 60k experiments, making it the largest study on inference strategies for complex RL to date.



Shape registration in the time of transformers

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this paper, we propose a transformer-based procedure for the efficient registration of non-rigid 3D point clouds. The proposed approach is data-driven and adopts for the first time the transformer architecture in the registration task. Our method is general and applies to different settings. Given a fixed template with some desired properties (e.g.


251c5ffd6b62cc21c446c963c76cf214-Supplemental.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

A.1 Network Architecture Here, we describe the architecture of the eVAE presented in Figure 1 of the main paper, in more detail. Event Context Network: We adapt the architecture proposed in [21] for the event context network, but without the feature transformation preprocessing steps. In our implementation, we use three Conv1d layers of 64, 128 and 1024 channels each followed by BatchNorm and a ReLU activation. At the end of the ECN, we add the temporal features (see Appendix A.2) to the N 1024 feature tensor, and execute the max operation to result in a context vector. The sizes of the intermediate features and the context feature are hyperparameters that can be varied based on the application, data complexity etc. Encoder: The encoder for the VAE is composed of two layers, of sizes 1024 and 256 respectively, resulting in two output vectors of 1 8 each, corresponding to the mean and standard deviation for the latent space vector.




Molecule Design by Latent Prompt Transformer

Neural Information Processing Systems

This work explores the challenging problem of molecule design by framing it as a conditional generative modeling task, where target biological properties or desired chemical constraints serve as conditioning variables.We propose the Latent Prompt Transformer (LPT), a novel generative model comprising three components: (1) a latent vector with a learnable prior distribution modeled by a neural transformation of Gaussian white noise; (2) a molecule generation model based on a causal Transformer, which uses the latent vector as a prompt; and (3) a property prediction model that predicts a molecule's target properties and/or constraint values using the latent prompt. LPT can be learned by maximum likelihood estimation on molecule-property pairs. During property optimization, the latent prompt is inferred from target properties and constraints through posterior sampling and then used to guide the autoregressive molecule generation.After initial training on existing molecules and their properties, we adopt an online learning algorithm to progressively shift the model distribution towards regions that support desired target properties. Experiments demonstrate that LPT not only effectively discovers useful molecules across single-objective, multi-objective, and structure-constrained optimization tasks, but also exhibits strong sample efficiency.


Multi-view Anomaly Detection via Robust Probabilistic Latent Variable Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

We propose probabilistic latent variable models for multi-view anomaly detection, which is the task of finding instances that have inconsistent views given multi-view data. With the proposed model, all views of a non-anomalous instance are assumed to be generated from a single latent vector. On the other hand, an anomalous instance is assumed to have multiple latent vectors, and its different views are generated from different latent vectors. By inferring the number of latent vectors used for each instance with Dirichlet process priors, we obtain multi-view anomaly scores. The proposed model can be seen as a robust extension of probabilistic canonical correlation analysis for noisy multi-view data. We present Bayesian inference procedures for the proposed model based on a stochastic EM algorithm. The effectiveness of the proposed model is demonstrated in terms of performance when detecting multi-view anomalies.