Publications

Influence Functions for Scalable Data Attribution in Diffusion Models
Bruno Mlodozeniec
Runa Eschenhagen
Juhan Bae
Alexander Immer
David Krueger
Richard Turner
Diffusion models have led to significant advancements in generative modelling. Yet their widespread adoption poses challenges regarding data… (see more) attribution and interpretability. In this paper, we aim to help address such challenges in diffusion models by developing an influence functions framework. Influence function-based data attribution methods approximate how a model's output would have changed if some training data were removed. In supervised learning, this is usually used for predicting how the loss on a particular example would change. For diffusion models, we focus on predicting the change in the probability of generating a particular example via several proxy measurements. We show how to formulate influence functions for such quantities and how previously proposed methods can be interpreted as particular design choices in our framework. To ensure scalability of the Hessian computations in influence functions, we systematically develop K-FAC approximations based on generalised Gauss-Newton matrices specifically tailored to diffusion models. We recast previously proposed methods as specific design choices in our framework and show that our recommended method outperforms previous data attribution approaches on common evaluations, such as the Linear Data-modelling Score (LDS) or retraining without top influences, without the need for method-specific hyperparameter tuning.
2025-01-21
ICLR.cc/2025/Conference (oral)
doi.org
openreview.net
InnerThoughts: Disentangling Representations and Predictions in Large Language Models
Didier Chételat
Joseph Cotnareanu
Rylee Thompson
Yingxue Zhang
Mark J. Coates
Large language models (LLMs) contain substantial factual knowledge which is commonly elicited by multiple-choice question-answering prompts.… (see more) Internally, such models process the prompt through multiple transformer layers, building varying representations of the problem within its hidden states. Ultimately, however, only the hidden state corresponding to the final layer and token position is used to predict the answer label. In this work, we propose instead to learn a small separate neural network predictor module on a collection of training questions, that take the hidden states from all the layers at the last temporal position as input and outputs predictions. In effect, such a framework disentangles the representational abilities of LLMs from their predictive abilities. On a collection of hard benchmarks, our method achieves considerable improvements in performance, sometimes comparable to supervised fine-tuning procedures, but at a fraction of the computational cost.
2025-01-21
aistats.org/AISTATS/2025/Conference (poster)
proceedings.mlr.press
proceedings.mlr.press
Input Space Mode Connectivity in Deep Neural Networks
Jakub Vrabel
Ori Shem-Ur
Yaron Oz
David M. Krueger
We extend the concept of loss landscape mode connectivity to the input space of deep neural networks. Initially studied in parameter space, … (see more)mode connectivity describes the existence of low-loss paths between solutions (loss minimizers) found via gradient descent. We present theoretical and empirical evidence of its presence in the input space of deep networks, thereby highlighting the broader nature of the phenomenon. We observe that different input images with similar predictions are generally connected, and for trained models, the path tends to be simple, with only a small deviation from being a linear path. We conjecture that input space mode connectivity in high-dimensional spaces is a geometric phenomenon, present even in untrained models, and can be explained by percolation theory. We exploit mode connectivity to obtain new insights about adversarial examples and show its potential for adversarial detection and interpretability.
2025-01-21
ICLR.cc/2025/Conference (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
InsightBench: Evaluating Business Analytics Agents Through Multi-Step Insight Generation
Gaurav Sahu
Abhay Puri
Juan Rodriguez
Amirhossein Abaskohi
Mohammad Chegini
Alexandre Drouin
Perouz Taslakian
Valentina Zantedeschi
Alexandre Lacoste
David Vázquez
Nicolas Chapados
Christopher Pal
Sai Rajeswar Mudumba
Issam Hadj Laradji
Data analytics is essential for extracting valuable insights from data that can assist organizations in making effective decisions. We intro… (see more)duce InsightBench, a benchmark dataset with three key features. First, it consists of 100 datasets representing diverse business use cases such as finance and incident management, each accompanied by a carefully curated set of insights planted in the datasets. Second, unlike existing benchmarks focusing on answering single queries, InsightBench evaluates agents based on their ability to perform end-to-end data analytics, including formulating questions, interpreting answers, and generating a summary of insights and actionable steps. Third, we conducted comprehensive quality assurance to ensure that each dataset in the benchmark had clear goals and included relevant and meaningful questions and analysis. Furthermore, we implement a two-way evaluation mechanism using LLaMA-3 as an effective, open-source evaluator to assess agents' ability to extract insights. We also propose AgentPoirot, our baseline data analysis agent capable of performing end-to-end data analytics. Our evaluation on InsightBench shows that AgentPoirot outperforms existing approaches (such as Pandas Agent) that focus on resolving single queries. We also compare the performance of open- and closed-source LLMs and various evaluation strategies. Overall, this benchmark serves as a testbed to motivate further development in comprehensive automated data analytics and can be accessed here: https://github.com/ServiceNow/insight-bench.
2025-01-21
ICLR.cc/2025/Conference (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
Interpreting Emergent Planning in Model-Free Reinforcement Learning
Thomas Bush
Stephen Chung
Usman Anwar
Adrià Garriga-Alonso
David M. Krueger
We present the first mechanistic evidence that model-free reinforcement learning agents can learn to plan. This is achieved by applying a me… (see more)thodology based on concept-based interpretability to a model-free agent in Sokoban -- a commonly used benchmark for studying planning. Specifically, we demonstrate that DRC, a generic model-free agent introduced by [Guez et al. (2019)](https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.03559), uses learned concept representations to internally formulate plans that both predict the long-term effects of actions on the environment and influence action selection. Our methodology involves: (1) probing for planning-relevant concepts, (2) investigating plan formation within the agent's representations, and (3) verifying that discovered plans (in the agent's representations) have a causal effect on the agent's behavior through interventions. We also show that the emergence of these plans coincides with the emergence of a planning-like property: the ability to benefit from additional test-time compute. Finally, we perform a qualitative analysis of the planning algorithm learned by the agent and discover a strong resemblance to parallelized bidirectional search. Our findings advance understanding of the internal mechanisms underlying planning behavior in agents, which is important given the recent trend of emergent planning and reasoning capabilities in LLMs through RL.
2025-01-21
ICLR.cc/2025/Conference (oral)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Langevin Soft Actor-Critic: Efficient Exploration Through Uncertainty-Driven Critic Learning
Haque Ishfaq
Guangyuan Wang
Sami Nur Islam
Doina Precup
Existing actor-critic algorithms, which are popular for continuous control reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, suffer from poor sample effici… (see more)ency due to lack of principled exploration mechanism within them. Motivated by the success of Thompson sampling for efficient exploration in RL, we propose a novel model-free RL algorithm, Langevin Soft Actor Critic (LSAC), which prioritizes enhancing critic learning through uncertainty estimation over policy optimization. LSAC employs three key innovations: approximate Thompson sampling through distributional Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) based
2025-01-21
ICLR.cc/2025/Conference (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
Learning Diverse Attacks on Large Language Models for Robust Red-Teaming and Safety Tuning
Seanie Lee
Minsu Kim
Lynn Cherif
David Dobre
Juho Lee
Sung Ju Hwang
Kenji Kawaguchi
Gauthier Gidel
Yoshua Bengio
Nikolay Malkin
Moksh Jain
Red-teaming, or identifying prompts that elicit harmful responses, is a critical step in ensuring the safe and responsible deployment of lar… (see more)ge language models (LLMs). Developing effective protection against many modes of attack prompts requires discovering diverse attacks. Automated red-teaming typically uses reinforcement learning to fine-tune an attacker language model to generate prompts that elicit undesirable responses from a target LLM, as measured, for example, by an auxiliary toxicity classifier. We show that even with explicit regularization to favor novelty and diversity, existing approaches suffer from mode collapse or fail to generate effective attacks. As a flexible and probabilistically principled alternative, we propose to use GFlowNet fine-tuning, followed by a secondary smoothing phase, to train the attacker model to generate diverse and effective attack prompts. We find that the attacks generated by our method are effective against a wide range of target LLMs, both with and without safety tuning, and transfer well between target LLMs. Finally, we demonstrate that models safety-tuned using a dataset of red-teaming prompts generated by our method are robust to attacks from other RL-based red-teaming approaches.
2025-01-21
International Conference on Learning Representations (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
MaestroMotif: Skill Design From Artificial Intelligence Feedback
Martin Klissarov
Mikael Henaff
Roberta Raileanu
Shagun Sodhani
Pascal Vincent
Amy Zhang
Pierre-Luc Bacon
Doina Precup
Marlos C. Machado
Pierluca D'Oro
Describing skills in natural language has the potential to provide an accessible way to inject human knowledge about decision-making into an… (see more) AI system. We present MaestroMotif, a method for AI-assisted skill design, which yields high-performing and adaptable agents. MaestroMotif leverages the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to effectively create and reuse skills. It first uses an LLM's feedback to automatically design rewards corresponding to each skill, starting from their natural language description. Then, it employs an LLM's code generation abilities, together with reinforcement learning, for training the skills and combining them to implement complex behaviors specified in language. We evaluate MaestroMotif using a suite of complex tasks in the NetHack Learning Environment (NLE), demonstrating that it surpasses existing approaches in both performance and usability.
2025-01-21
ICLR.cc/2025/Conference (oral)
doi.org
openreview.net
MAP: Low-Compute Model Merging with Amortized Pareto Fronts via Quadratic Approximation
Lu Li
Tianyu Zhang
Zhiqi Bu
Suyuchen Wang
Huan He
Jie Fu
Yonghui Wu
Jiang Bian
Yong Chen
Yoshua Bengio
Model merging has emerged as an effective approach to combine multiple single-task models into a multitask model. This process typically inv… (see more)olves computing a weighted average of the model parameters without any additional training. Existing model-merging methods focus on enhancing average task accuracy. However, interference and conflicts between the objectives of different tasks can lead to trade-offs during the merging process. In real-world applications, a set of solutions with various trade-offs can be more informative, helping practitioners make decisions based on diverse preferences. In this paper, we introduce a novel and low-compute algorithm, Model Merging with Amortized Pareto Front (MAP). MAP efficiently identifies a Pareto set of scaling coefficients for merging multiple models, reflecting the trade-offs involved. It amortizes the substantial computational cost of evaluations needed to estimate the Pareto front by using quadratic approximation surrogate models derived from a pre-selected set of scaling coefficients. Experimental results on vision and natural language processing tasks demonstrate that MAP can accurately identify the Pareto front, providing practitioners with flexible solutions to balance competing task objectives. We also introduce Bayesian MAP for scenarios with a relatively low number of tasks and Nested MAP for situations with a high number of tasks, further reducing the computational cost of evaluation.
2025-01-21
ICLR.cc/2025/Conference (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
MatExpert: Decomposing Materials Discovery by Mimicking Human Experts
Qianggang Ding
Santiago Miret
Bang Liu
Material discovery is a critical research area with profound implications for various industries. In this work, we introduce MatExpert, a no… (see more)vel framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) and contrastive learning to accelerate the discovery and design of new solid-state materials. Inspired by the workflow of human materials design experts, our approach integrates three key stages: retrieval, transition, and generation. First, in the retrieval stage, MatExpert identifies an existing material that closely matches the desired criteria. Second, in the transition stage, MatExpert outlines the necessary modifications to transform this material formulation to meet specific requirements outlined by the initial user query. Third, in the generation state, MatExpert performs detailed computations and structural generation to create new materials based on the provided information. Our experimental results demonstrate that MatExpert outperforms state-of-the-art methods in material generation tasks, achieving superior performance across various metrics including validity, distribution, and stability. As such, MatExpert represents a meaningful advancement in computational material discovery using langauge-based generative models.
2025-01-21
ICLR.cc/2025/Conference (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
MMTEB: Massive Multilingual Text Embedding Benchmark
Kenneth Enevoldsen
Isaac Chung
Imene Kerboua
Márton Kardos
Ashwin Mathur
David Stap
Jay Gala
Wissam Siblini
Dominik Krzemiński
Genta Indra Winata
Saba Sturua
Saiteja Utpala
Mathieu Ciancone
Marion Schaeffer
Gabriel Sequeira
Diganta Misra
Shreeya Dhakal
Jonathan Rystrøm
Roman Solomatin
Ömer Çağatan … (see 66 more)
Akash Kundu
Martin Bernstorff
Shitao Xiao
Akshita Sukhlecha
Bhavish Pahwa
Rafał Poświata
Kranthi Kiran GV
Shawon Ashraf
Daniel Auras
Björn Plüster
Jan Philipp Harries
Loïc Magne
Isabelle Mohr
Mariya Hendriksen
Dawei Zhu
Hippolyte Gisserot-Boukhlef
Tom Aarsen
Jan Kostkan
Konrad Wojtasik
Taemin Lee
Marek Šuppa
Crystina Zhang
Roberta Rocca
Mohammed Hamdy
Andrianos Michail
John Yang
Manuel Faysse
Aleksei Vatolin
Nandan Thakur
Manan Dey
Dipam Vasani
Pranjal Chitale
Simone Tedeschi
Nguyen Tai
Artem Snegirev
Michael Günther
Mengzhou Xia
Weijia Shi
Xing Han Lu
Jordan Clive
Gayatri Krishnakumar
Anna Maksimova
Silvan Wehrli
Maria Tikhonova
Henil Panchal
Aleksandr Abramov
Malte Ostendorff
Zheng Liu
Simon Clematide
Lester James Miranda
Alena Fenogenova
Guangyu Song
Ruqiya Bin Safi
Wen-Ding Li
Alessia Borghini
Federico Cassano
Hongjin Su
Jimmy Lin
Howard Yen
Lasse Hansen
Sara Hooker
Chenghao Xiao
Vaibhav Adlakha
Orion Weller
Siva Reddy
Niklas Muennighoff
Text embeddings are typically evaluated on a limited set of tasks, which are constrained by language, domain, and task diversity. To address… (see more) these limitations and provide a more comprehensive evaluation, we introduce the Massive Multilingual Text Embedding Benchmark (MMTEB) - a large-scale, community-driven expansion of MTEB, covering over 500 quality-controlled evaluation tasks across 250+ languages. MMTEB includes a diverse set of challenging, novel tasks such as instruction following, long-document retrieval, and code retrieval, representing the largest multilingual collection of evaluation tasks for embedding models to date. Using this collection, we develop several highly multilingual benchmarks, which we use to evaluate a representative set of models. We find that while large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters can achieve state-of-the-art performance on certain language subsets and task categories, the best-performing publicly available model is multilingual-e5-large-instruct with only 560 million parameters. To facilitate accessibility and reduce computational cost, we introduce a novel downsampling method based on inter-task correlation, ensuring a diverse selection while preserving relative model rankings. Furthermore, we optimize tasks such as retrieval by sampling hard negatives, creating smaller but effective splits. These optimizations allow us to introduce benchmarks that drastically reduce computational demands. For instance, our newly introduced zero-shot English benchmark maintains a ranking order similar to the full-scale version but at a fraction of the computational cost.
2025-01-21
ICLR.cc/2025/Conference (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
MODL: Multilearner Online Deep Learning
Antonios Valkanas
Boris Oreshkin
Mark J. Coates
Online deep learning solves the problem of learning from streams of data, reconciling two opposing objectives: learn fast and learn deep. Ex… (see more)isting work focuses almost exclusively on exploring pure deep learning solutions, which are much better suited to handle the"deep"than the"fast"part of the online learning equation. In our work, we propose a different paradigm, based on a hybrid multilearner approach. First, we develop a fast online logistic regression learner. This learner does not rely on backpropagation. Instead, it uses closed form recursive updates of model parameters, handling the fast learning part of the online learning problem. We then analyze the existing online deep learning theory and show that the widespread ODL approach, currently operating at complexity
2025-01-21
aistats.org/AISTATS/2025/Conference (poster)
doi.org
proceedings.mlr.press