The Heisenberg uncertainty principle puts a limit on how precisely we can measure certain properties of quantum objects. But researchers may have found a way to bypass this limitation using a quantum version of a neural network. Given, for example, a chemically useful molecule, how can you predict what properties it might have in an hour or tomorrow? To make such predictions, researchers start by measuring its current properties. But for quantum objects, including some molecules, this can be unexpectedly difficult because each measurement can interfere with or change the outcome of the next measurement.

We introduce SELF-DISCOVER, a general framework for LLMs to self-discover the task-intrinsic reasoning structures to tackle complex reasoning problems that are challenging for typical prompting methods. Core to the framework is a self-discovery process where LLMs select multiple atomic reasoning modules such as critical thinking and step-by-step thinking, and compose them into an explicit reasoning structure for LLMs to follow during decoding. SELF-DISCOVER substantially improves GPT-4 and PaLM 2's performance on challenging reasoning benchmarks such as BigBench-Hard, grounded agent reasoning, and MATH, by as much as 32% compared to Chain of Thought (CoT). Furthermore, SELF-DISCOVER outperforms inference-intensive methods such as CoT-Self-Consistency by more than 20%, while requiring 10-40x fewer inference compute. Finally, we show that the self-discovered reasoning structures are universally applicable across model families: from PaLM 2-L to GPT-4, and from GPT-4 to Llama2, and share commonalities with human reasoning patterns.

For recent diffusion-based generative models, maintaining consistent content across a series of generated images, especially those containing subjects and complex details, presents a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective self-attention mechanism, termed Consistent Self-Attention, that boosts the consistency between the generated images. It can be used to augment pre-trained diffusion-based text-to-image models in a zero-shot manner. Based on the images with consistent content, we further show that our method can be extended to long range video generation by introducing a semantic space temporal motion prediction module, named Semantic Motion Predictor. It is trained to estimate the motion conditions between two provided images in the semantic spaces. This module converts the generated sequence of images into videos with smooth transitions and consistent subjects that are more stable than the modules based on latent spaces only, especially in the context of long video generation. By merging these two novel components, our framework, referred to as StoryDiffusion, can describe a text-based story with consistent images or videos encompassing a rich variety of contents. The proposed StoryDiffusion encompasses pioneering explorations in visual story generation with the presentation of images and videos, which we hope could inspire more research from the aspect of architectural modifications.

Research on emergent communication between deep-learning-based agents has received extensive attention due to its inspiration for linguistics and artificial intelligence. However, previous attempts have hovered around emerging communication under perception-oriented environmental settings, that forces agents to describe low-level perceptual features intra image or symbol contexts. In this work, inspired by the classic human reasoning test (namely Raven's Progressive Matrix), we propose the Reasoning Game, a cognition-oriented environment that encourages agents to reason and communicate high-level rules, rather than perceived low-level contexts. Moreover, we propose 1) an unbiased dataset (namely rule-RAVEN) as a benchmark to avoid overfitting, 2) and a two-stage curriculum agent training method as a baseline for more stable convergence in the Reasoning Game, where contexts and semantics are bilaterally drifting. Experimental results show that, in the Reasoning Game, a semantically stable and compositional language emerges to solve reasoning problems. The emerged language helps agents apply the extracted rules to the generalization of unseen context attributes, and to the transfer between different context attributes or even tasks.

Federated learning algorithms enable neural network models to be trained across multiple decentralized edge devices without sharing private data. However, they are susceptible to backdoor attacks launched by malicious clients. Existing robust federated aggregation algorithms heuristically detect and exclude suspicious clients based on their parameter distances, but they are ineffective on Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. The main reason is that, although text backdoor patterns are obvious at the underlying dataset level, they are usually hidden at the parameter level, since injecting backdoors into texts with discrete feature space has less impact on the statistics of the model parameters. To settle this issue, we propose to identify backdoor clients by explicitly modeling the data divergence among clients in federated NLP systems. Through theoretical analysis, we derive the f-divergence indicator to estimate the client data divergence with aggregation updates and Hessians. Furthermore, we devise a dataset synthesization method with a Hessian reassignment mechanism guided by the diffusion theory to address the key challenge of inaccessible datasets in calculating clients' data Hessians.We then present the novel Federated F-Divergence-Based Aggregation~(\textbf{Fed-FA}) algorithm, which leverages the f-divergence indicator to detect and discard suspicious clients. Extensive empirical results show that Fed-FA outperforms all the parameter distance-based methods in defending against backdoor attacks among various natural language backdoor attack scenarios.

Object anomaly detection is an important problem in the field of machine vision and has seen remarkable progress recently. However, two significant challenges hinder its research and application. First, existing datasets lack comprehensive visual information from various pose angles. They usually have an unrealistic assumption that the anomaly-free training dataset is pose-aligned, and the testing samples have the same pose as the training data. However, in practice, anomaly may exist in any regions on a object, the training and query samples may have different poses, calling for the study on pose-agnostic anomaly detection.

Simulation with realistic and interactive agents represents a key task for autonomous vehicle (AV) software development in order to test AV performance in prescribed, often long-tail scenarios. In this work, we propose SceneDiffuser, a scene-level diffusion prior for traffic simulation. We present a singular framework that unifies two key stages of simulation: scene initialization and scene rollout. Scene initialization refers to generating the initial layout for the traffic in a scene, and scene rollout refers to closed-loop simulation for the behaviors of the agents. While diffusion has been demonstrated to be effective in learning realistic, multimodal agent distributions, two open challenges remain: controllability and closed-loop inference efficiency and realism. To this end, to address controllability challenges, we propose generalized hard constraints, a generalized inference-time constraint mechanism that is simple yet effective. To improve closed-loop inference quality and efficiency, we propose amortized diffusion, a novel diffusion denoising paradigm that amortizes the physical cost of denoising over future simulation rollout steps, reducing the cost of per physical rollout step to a single denoising function evaluation, while dramatically reducing closed-loop errors. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the Waymo Open Dataset, where we are able to generate distributionally realistic scenes, while obtaining competitive performance in the Sim Agents Challenge, surpassing the state-of-the-art in many realism attributes.

Long-tailed semi-supervised learning poses a significant challenge in training models with limited labeled data exhibiting a long-tailed label distribution. Current state-of-the-art LTSSL approaches heavily rely on high-quality pseudo-labels for large-scale unlabeled data. However, these methods often neglect the impact of representations learned by the neural network and struggle with real-world unlabeled data, which typically follows a different distribution than labeled data. This paper introduces a novel probabilistic framework that unifies various recent proposals in long-tail learning. Our framework derives the class-balanced contrastive loss through Gaussian kernel density estimation. We introduce a continuous contrastive learning method, CCL, extending our framework to unlabeled data using and pseudo-labels. By progressively estimating the underlying label distribution and optimizing its alignment with model predictions, we tackle the diverse distribution of unlabeled data in real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets with varying unlabeled data distributions demonstrate that CCL consistently outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods, achieving over 4% improvement on the ImageNet-127 dataset. The supplementary material includes the source code for reproducibility.

Residual Network (ResNet) is undoubtedly a milestone in deep learning. ResNet is equipped with shortcut connections between layers, and exhibits efficient training using simple first order algorithms. Despite of the great empirical success, the reason behind is far from being well understood. In this paper, we study a two-layer non-overlapping convolutional ResNet. Training such a network requires solving a non-convex optimization problem with a spurious local optimum. We show, however, that gradient descent combined with proper normalization, avoids being trapped by the spurious local optimum, and converges to a global optimum in polynomial time, when the weight of the first layer is initialized at 0, and that of the second layer is initialized arbitrarily in a ball. Numerical experiments are provided to support our theory.

Large language models have shown astonishing performance on a wide range of reasoning tasks. In this paper, we investigate whether they could reason about real-world events and help improve the prediction performance of event sequence models.