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

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

The paper presents a semi-parameteric model for long-term planning in a general space of problems. It works by training parametric goal-conditioned policies accurate only on local distances (i.e. when current state and goal are within some distance threshold) and leveraging the replay buffer to non-parametrically sample a graph of landmarks which the local goal-conditioned policy can accurately produce paths between. Moving to any goal state is then accomplished by (1) moving to the closest landmark using the goal-conditioned policy, (2) planning a path to the landmark closest to the goal using value-iteration on the (low-dimensional) graph of landmarks, (3) using the goal-conditioned policy to get to the goal state from the closest landmark. The paper essentially tackles the problem that goal-conditioned policies, or Universal Value Function Approximators (UVFA), degrade substantially in performance as the planning horizon increases. By leveraging the replay buffer to provide way-points for the algorithm to plan locally along, accuracy over longer ranges is maintained.

Reviewers liked the approach of combining local navigation using a UVFA trained by HER with global planning based on shortest paths in a graph constructed from a buffer of landmarks. At the same time, reviewers had some concerns regarding clarity of presentation, the similarity of the proposed approach to existing work (namely "Semi-parametric topological memory for navigation" by Savinov et al.), as well as how specific the proposed algorithm is to navigation problems. The rebuttal provided additional experiments on several new domains and included additional discussion of related work, leading one reviewer to raise the score. In the end the ACs found this work to be sufficiently new and promising to warrant acceptance, but we ask the authors to 1) address the concerns regarding related work including Savinov et al. and 2) include a clearer statement of the full approach (an algorithm block would be great) in the camera ready version.

An agent that has well understood the environment should be able to apply its skills for any given goals, leading to the fundamental problem of learning the Universal Value Function Approximator (UVFA). A UVFA learns to predict the cumulative rewards between all state-goal pairs. However, empirically, the value function for long-range goals is always hard to estimate and may consequently result in failed policy. This has presented challenges to the learning process and the capability of neural networks. We propose a method to address this issue in large MDPs with sparse rewards, in which exploration and routing across remote states are both extremely challenging.

Abstract--With the rising popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs), assessing their trustworthiness through security tasks has gained critical importance. Regarding the new task of universal goal hijacking, previous efforts have concentrated solely on optimization algorithms, overlooking the crucial role of the prompt. To fill this gap, we propose a universal goal hijacking method called POUGH that incorporates semantic-guided prompt processing strategies. Specifically, the method starts with a sampling strategy to select representative prompts from a candidate pool, followed by a ranking strategy that prioritizes the prompts. Once the prompts are organized sequentially, the method employs an iterative optimization algorithm to generate the universal fixed suffix for the prompts. Experiments conducted on four popular LLMs and ten types of target responses verified the effectiveness of our method.

A key challenge of dialog systems research is to effectively and efficiently adapt to new domains. A scalable paradigm for adaptation necessitates the development of generalizable models that perform well in few-shot settings. In this paper, we focus on the intent classification problem which aims to identify user intents given utterances addressed to the dialog system. We propose two approaches for improving the generalizability of utterance classification models: (1) example-driven training and (2) observers. Example-driven training learns to classify utterances by comparing to examples, thereby using the underlying encoder as a sentence similarity model. Prior work has shown that BERT-like models tend to attribute a significant amount of attention to the [CLS] token, which we hypothesize results in diluted representations. Observers are tokens that are not attended to, and are an alternative to the [CLS] token. The proposed methods attain state-of-the-art results on three intent prediction datasets (Banking, Clinc}, and HWU) in both the full data and few-shot (10 examples per intent) settings. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed approach can transfer to new intents and across datasets without any additional training.

An agent that has well understood the environment should be able to apply its skills for any given goals, leading to the fundamental problem of learning the Universal Value Function Approximator (UVFA). A UVFA learns to predict the cumulative rewards between all state-goal pairs. However, empirically, the value function for long-range goals is always hard to estimate and may consequently result in failed policy. This has presented challenges to the learning process and the capability of neural networks. We propose a method to address this issue in large MDPs with sparse rewards, in which exploration and routing across remote states are both extremely challenging.

An agent that has well understood the environment should be able to apply its skills for any given goals, leading to the fundamental problem of learning the Universal Value Function Approximator (UVFA). A UVFA learns to predict the cumulative rewards between all state-goal pairs. However, empirically, the value function for long-range goals is always hard to estimate and may consequently result in failed policy. This has presented challenges to the learning process and the capability of neural networks. We propose a method to address this issue in large MDPs with sparse rewards, in which exploration and routing across remote states are both extremely challenging. Our method explicitly models the environment in a hierarchical manner, with a high-level dynamic landmark-based map abstracting the visited state space, and a low-level value network to derive precise local decisions. We use farthest point sampling to select landmark states from past experience, which has improved exploration compared with simple uniform sampling. Experimentally we showed that our method enables the agent to reach long-range goals at the early training stage, and achieve better performance than standard RL algorithms for a number of challenging tasks.

An agent that has well understood the environment should be able to apply its skills for any given goals, leading to the fundamental problem of learning the Universal Value Function Approximator (UVFA). A UVFA learns to predict the cumulative rewards between all state-goal pairs. However, empirically, the value function for long-range goals is always hard to estimate and may consequently result in failed policy. This has presented challenges to the learning process and the capability of neural networks. We propose a method to address this issue in large MDPs with sparse rewards, in which exploration and routing across remote states are both extremely challenging. Our method explicitly models the environment in a hierarchical manner, with a high-level dynamic landmark-based map abstracting the visited state space, and a low-level value network to derive precise local decisions. We use farthest point sampling to select landmark states from past experience, which has improved exploration compared with simple uniform sampling. Experimentally we showed that our method enables the agent to reach long-range goals at the early training stage, and achieve better performance than standard RL algorithms for a number of challenging tasks.