Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Language models can generate harmful and biased outputs and exhibit undesirable behavior according to a given cultural context. We propose a Process for Adapting Language Models to Society (PALMS) with Values-Targeted Datasets, an iterative process to significantly change model behavior by crafting and fine-tuning on a dataset that reflects a predetermined set of target values. We evaluate our process using three metrics: quantitative metrics with human evaluations that score output adherence to a target value, toxicity scoring on outputs; and qualitative metrics analyzing the most common word associated with a given social category. Through each iteration, we add additional training dataset examples based on observed shortcomings from evaluations. PALMS performs significantly better on all metrics compared to baseline and control models for a broad range of GPT-3 language model sizes without compromising capability integrity. We find that the effectiveness of PALMS increases with model size. We show that significantly adjusting language model behavior is feasible with a small, hand-curated dataset.

Popular object detection models generate bounding boxes in a different way than we humans. As an example, modern detectors yield object box either upon the regression of its center and width/height (center-guided detector), or by grouping paired estimated corners (corner-guided detector). However, that is not the pattern we manually label an object due to high degrees of freedom in searching centers or low efficiency of grouping corners. Empirically, humans run two steps to locate an object bounding box manually: 1) click the mouse at the top-left corner of object, and then drag the mouse to the bottom-right corner; 2) refine the corner positions to make the bounding box more precisely, if necessary. Inspired by this manual labeling process, we propose a novel human-like detector, termed as HumanLiker, which is devised as a two-stage end-to-end detector to simulate the two aforementioned. Like we humans in manual labeling, HumanLiker can effectively avert both the thorny center searching and heuristic corner grouping. Different from the mainstream detector branches, i.e., the center/corner-guided methods, the HumanLiker provides a new paradigm which integrates the advantages of both branches to balance the detection efficiency and bounding box quality. On MS-COCO test-dev set, HumanLiker can achieve 50.2%/51.6%

ABSTRACT We introduce a principled generative framework for graph signals that enables explicit control of feature heterophily, a key property underlying the effectiveness of graph learning methods. Our model combines a Lipschitz graphon-based random graph generator with Gaussian node features filtered through a smooth spectral function of the rescaled Laplacian. We establish new theoretical guarantees: (i) a concentration result for the empirical heterophily score; and (ii) almost-sure convergence of the feature heterophily measure to a deterministic functional of the graphon degree profile, based on a graphon-limit law for polynomial averages of Laplacian eigenvalues. Index T erms-- graph generative models, homophily, graphons 1. INTRODUCTION The success of many graph information processing problems, including node-level tasks in graph machine learning [1, 2] and network topology inference [3-5], hinges on the alignment between graph topology and node features, often summarized by the notion of homophily or heterophily. We develop a generative framework for graphs and node features (i.e., graph signals) that allows explicit control of feature het-erophily in the range from homophily to heterophily.

Many high-stakes applications require machine learning models that protect user privacy and provide well-calibrated, accurate predictions. While Differential Privacy (DP) is the gold standard for protecting user privacy, standard DP mechanisms typically significantly impair performance. One approach to mitigating this issue is pre-training models on simulated data before DP learning on the private data. In this work we go a step further, using simulated data to train a meta-learning model that combines the Convolutional Conditional Neural Process (ConvCNP) with an improved functional DP mechanism of Hall et al. (2013), yielding the DPConvCNP. DPConvCNP learns from simulated data how to map private data to a DP predictive model in one forward pass, and then provides accurate, well-calibrated predictions.

Byzantine attacks present a critical challenge to Federated Learning (FL), where malicious participants can disrupt the training process, degrade model accuracy, and compromise system reliability. Traditional FL frameworks typically rely on aggregation-based protocols for model updates, leaving them vulnerable to sophisticated adversarial strategies. In this paper, we demonstrate that distributed optimization offers a principled and robust alternative to aggregation-centric methods. Specifically, we show that the Primal-Dual Method of Multipliers (PDMM) inherently mitigates Byzantine impacts by leveraging its fault-tolerant consensus mechanism. Through extensive experiments on three datasets (MNIST, FashionMNIST, and Olivetti), under various attack scenarios including bit-flipping and Gaussian noise injection, we validate the superior resilience of distributed optimization protocols. Compared to traditional aggregation-centric approaches, PDMM achieves higher model utility, faster convergence, and improved stability. Our results highlight the effectiveness of distributed optimization in defending against Byzantine threats, paving the way for more secure and resilient federated learning systems.

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success across various domains. However, their slow generation speed remains a critical challenge. Existing acceleration methods, while aiming to reduce steps, often compromise sample quality, controllability, or introduce training complexities. Therefore, we propose RayFlow, a novel diffusion framework that addresses these limitations. Unlike previous methods, RayFlow guides each sample along a unique path towards an instance-specific target distribution. This method minimizes sampling steps while preserving generation diversity and stability. Furthermore, we introduce Time Sampler, an importance sampling technique to enhance training efficiency by focusing on crucial timesteps. Extensive experiments demonstrate RayFlow's superiority in generating high-quality images with improved speed, control, and training efficiency compared to existing acceleration techniques.

Steganography is the art and science of covert writing, with a broad range of applications interwoven within the realm of cybersecurity. As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, its ability to synthesise realistic content emerges as a threat in the hands of cybercriminals who seek to manipulate and misrepresent the truth. Such synthetic content introduces a non-trivial risk of overwriting the subtle changes made for the purpose of steganography. When the signals in both the spatial and temporal domains are vulnerable to unforeseen overwriting, it calls for reflection on what can remain invariant after all. This study proposes a paradigm in steganography for audiovisual media, where messages are concealed beyond both spatial and temporal domains. A chain of multimodal agents is developed to deconstruct audiovisual content into a cover text, embed a message within the linguistic domain, and then reconstruct the audiovisual content through synchronising both aural and visual modalities with the resultant stego text. The message is encoded by biasing the word sampling process of a language generation model and decoded by analysing the probability distribution of word choices. The accuracy of message transmission is evaluated under both zero-bit and multi-bit capacity settings. Fidelity is assessed through both biometric and semantic similarities, capturing the identities of the recorded face and voice, as well as the core ideas conveyed through the media. Secrecy is examined through statistical comparisons between cover and stego texts. Robustness is tested across various scenarios, including audiovisual compression, face-swapping, voice-cloning and their combinations.

In pursuit of reinforcement learning systems that could train in physical environments, we investigate multi-task approaches as a means to alleviate the need for massive data acquisition. In a tabular scenario where the Q-functions are collected across tasks, we model our learning problem as optimizing a higher order tensor structure. Recognizing that close-related tasks may require similar actions, our proposed method imposes a low-rank condition on this aggregated Q-tensor. The rationale behind this approach to multi-task learning is that the low-rank structure enforces the notion of similarity, without the need to explicitly prescribe which tasks are similar, but inferring this information from a reduced amount of data simultaneously with the stochastic optimization of the Q-tensor. The efficiency of our low-rank tensor approach to multi-task learning is demonstrated in two numerical experiments, first in a benchmark environment formed by a collection of inverted pendulums, and then into a practical scenario involving multiple wireless communication devices.

The proposed submission deals with an interesting and important problem: how to automatically learn the potentially complex temporal influence structures for the multivariate Hawkes process. The proposed neutrally self-modulating multivariate point process model can capture a range of superadditive, subadditive, or even subtractive influence structures from the historical events on the future event, and the model is quite flexible. Also, the model in evaluated on both the synthetic and the real data, and yields a competitive likelihood and prediction accuracy under missing data. Compared with existing work, one potential contribution of this submission is in the increased flexibility of the proposed model. First, in modeling the intensity function, a non-linear transfer function is introduced and is applied to the original defined intensity for multivariate Hawkes processes.