WebLINX: Real-World Website Navigation with Multi-Turn Dialogue
Xing Han Lu
Zdeněk Kasner
We propose the problem of conversational web navigation, where a digital agent controls a web browser and follows user instructions to solve… (see more) real-world tasks in a multi-turn dialogue fashion. To support this problem, we introduce WEBLINX - a large-scale benchmark of 100K interactions across 2300 expert demonstrations of conversational web navigation. Our benchmark covers a broad range of patterns on over 150 real-world websites and can be used to train and evaluate agents in diverse scenarios. Due to the magnitude of information present, Large Language Models (LLMs) cannot process entire web pages in real-time. To solve this bottleneck, we design a retrieval-inspired model that efficiently prunes HTML pages by ranking relevant elements. We use the selected elements, along with screenshots and action history, to assess a variety of models for their ability to replicate human behavior when navigating the web. Our experiments span from small text-only to proprietary multimodal LLMs. We find that smaller finetuned decoders surpass the best zero-shot LLMs (including GPT-4V), but also larger finetuned multimodal models which were explicitly pretrained on screenshots. However, all finetuned models struggle to generalize to unseen websites. Our findings highlight the need for large multimodal models that can generalize to novel settings. Our code, data and models are available for research: https://mcgill-nlp.github.io/weblinx
When is Momentum Extragradient Optimal? A Polynomial-Based Analysis
Junhyung Lyle Kim
Anastasios Kyrillidis
Fabian Pedregosa
The extragradient method has gained popularity due to its robust convergence properties for differentiable games. Unlike single-objective op… (see more)timization, game dynamics involve complex interactions reflected by the eigenvalues of the game vector field's Jacobian scattered across the complex plane. This complexity can cause the simple gradient method to diverge, even for bilinear games, while the extragradient method achieves convergence. Building on the recently proven accelerated convergence of the momentum extragradient method for bilinear games \citep{azizian2020accelerating}, we use a polynomial-based analysis to identify three distinct scenarios where this method exhibits further accelerated convergence. These scenarios encompass situations where the eigenvalues reside on the (positive) real line, lie on the real line alongside complex conjugates, or exist solely as complex conjugates. Furthermore, we derive the hyperparameters for each scenario that achieve the fastest convergence rate.
Channel-Selective Normalization for Label-Shift Robust Test-Time Adaptation
Pedro Vianna
Muawiz Chaudhary
Paria Mehrbod
An Tang
Guy Cloutier
Michael Eickenberg
Deep neural networks have useful applications in many different tasks, however their performance can be severely affected by changes in the … (see more)data distribution. For example, in the biomedical field, their performance can be affected by changes in the data (different machines, populations) between training and test datasets. To ensure robustness and generalization to real-world scenarios, test-time adaptation has been recently studied as an approach to adjust models to a new data distribution during inference. Test-time batch normalization is a simple and popular method that achieved compelling performance on domain shift benchmarks. It is implemented by recalculating batch normalization statistics on test batches. Prior work has focused on analysis with test data that has the same label distribution as the training data. However, in many practical applications this technique is vulnerable to label distribution shifts, sometimes producing catastrophic failure. This presents a risk in applying test time adaptation methods in deployment. We propose to tackle this challenge by only selectively adapting channels in a deep network, minimizing drastic adaptation that is sensitive to label shifts. Our selection scheme is based on two principles that we empirically motivate: (1) later layers of networks are more sensitive to label shift (2) individual features can be sensitive to specific classes. We apply the proposed technique to three classification tasks, including CIFAR10-C, Imagenet-C, and diagnosis of fatty liver, where we explore both covariate and label distribution shifts. We find that our method allows to bring the benefits of TTA while significantly reducing the risk of failure common in other methods, while being robust to choice in hyperparameters.
Code as Reward: Empowering Reinforcement Learning with VLMs
David Venuto
Mohammad Sami Nur Islam
Martin Klissarov
Sherry Yang
Pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are able to understand visual concepts, describe and decompose complex tasks into sub-tasks, and p… (see more)rovide feedback on task completion. In this paper, we aim to leverage these capabilities to support the training of reinforcement learning (RL) agents. In principle, VLMs are well suited for this purpose, as they can naturally analyze image-based observations and provide feedback (reward) on learning progress. However, inference in VLMs is computationally expensive, so querying them frequently to compute rewards would significantly slowdown the training of an RL agent. To address this challenge, we propose a framework named Code as Reward (VLM-CaR). VLM-CaR produces dense reward functions from VLMs through code generation, thereby significantly reducing the computational burden of querying the VLM directly. We show that the dense rewards generated through our approach are very accurate across a diverse set of discrete and continuous environments, and can be more effective in training RL policies than the original sparse environment rewards.
E(3)-Equivariant Mesh Neural Networks
Thuan N.a. Trang
Nhat-Khang Ngô
Daniel Levy
Thieu N. Vo
Truong Son Hy
Triangular meshes are widely used to represent three-dimensional objects. As a result, many recent works have address the need for geometric… (see more) deep learning on 3D mesh. However, we observe that the complexities in many of these architectures does not translate to practical performance, and simple deep models for geometric graphs are competitive in practice. Motivated by this observation, we minimally extend the update equations of E(n)-Equivariant Graph Neural Networks (EGNNs) (Satorras et al., 2021) to incorporate mesh face information, and further improve it to account for long-range interactions through hierarchy. The resulting architecture, Equivariant Mesh Neural Network (EMNN), outperforms other, more complicated equivariant methods on mesh tasks, with a fast run-time and no expensive pre-processing. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/HySonLab/EquiMesh
Gradient descent induces alignment between weights and the empirical NTK for deep non-linear networks
Daniel Beaglehole
Atish Agarwala
Randomized Confidence Bounds for Stochastic Partial Monitoring
Maxime Heuillet
Ola Ahmad
The Impact of Educational Materials on Parental Anxiety and Productivity: A Clinical Trial in Pediatric Appendicitis
Julia Ferreira
Nadia Safa
Fabio Botelho
Robin Petroze
Hussein Wissanji
Pramod Puligandla
Kenneth Shaw
Maeve Trudeau
Sherif Emil
Elena Guadagno
Jean Martin Laberge
AICOM-MP: an AI-based Monkeypox Detector for Resource-Constrained Environments
Tianyi Yang
Tianze Yang
Andrew Liu
Na An
Jie Tang
Shaoshan Liu
AICOM-MP: an AI-based monkeypox detector for resource-constrained environments
Tianyi Yang
Tianze Yang
Andrew Liu
Na An
Shaoshan Liu
Computing Approximate Nash Equilibria for Integer Programming Games
Aloïs Duguet
Gabriele Dragotto
Sandra-ulrich Ngueveu
Effective Protein-Protein Interaction Exploration with PPIretrieval
Chenqing Hua
Connor W. Coley
Shuangjia Zheng
Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are crucial in regulating numerous cellular functions, including signal transduction, transportation, an… (see more)d immune defense. As the accuracy of multi-chain protein complex structure prediction improves, the challenge has shifted towards effectively navigating the vast complex universe to identify potential PPIs. Herein, we propose PPIretrieval, the first deep learning-based model for protein-protein interaction exploration, which leverages existing PPI data to effectively search for potential PPIs in an embedding space, capturing rich geometric and chemical information of protein surfaces. When provided with an unseen query protein with its associated binding site, PPIretrieval effectively identifies a potential binding partner along with its corresponding binding site in an embedding space, facilitating the formation of protein-protein complexes.