Publications

Memory Efficient Neural Processes via Constant Memory Attention Block

Leo Feng

Frederick Tung

Hossein Hajimirsadeghi

Mohamed Osama Ahmed

Neural Processes (NPs) are popular meta-learning methods for efficiently modelling predictive uncertainty. Recent state-of-the-art methods, … (see more)however, leverage expensive attention mechanisms, limiting their applications, particularly in low-resource settings. In this work, we propose Constant Memory Attention Block (CMAB), a novel general-purpose attention block that (1) is permutation invariant, (2) computes its output in constant memory, and (3) performs updates in constant computation. Building on CMAB, we propose Constant Memory Attentive Neural Processes (CMANPs), an NP variant which only requires \textbf{constant} memory. Empirically, we show CMANPs achieve state-of-the-art results on popular NP benchmarks (meta-regression and image completion) while being significantly more memory efficient than prior methods.

2024-05-01

ICML.cc/2024/Conference (poster)

openreview.net

Mixtures of Experts Unlock Parameter Scaling for Deep RL

Johan Samir Obando Ceron

Ghada Sokar

Timon Willi

Clare Lyle

Jesse Farebrother

Jakob Nicolaus Foerster

Gintare Karolina Dziugaite

Doina Precup

Pablo Samuel Castro

The recent rapid progress in (self) supervised learning models is in large part predicted by empirical scaling laws: a model's performance s… (see more)cales proportionally to its size. Analogous scaling laws remain elusive for reinforcement learning domains, however, where increasing the parameter count of a model often hurts its final performance. In this paper, we demonstrate that incorporating Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) modules, and in particular Soft MoEs (Puigcerver et al., 2023), into value-based networks results in more parameter-scalable models, evidenced by substantial performance increases across a variety of training regimes and model sizes. This work thus provides strong empirical evidence towards developing scaling laws for reinforcement learning.

2024-05-01

ICML.cc/2024/Conference (spotlight)

doi.org

openreview.net

Nash Learning from Human Feedback

Remi Munos

Michal Valko

Daniele Calandriello

Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar

Mark Rowland

Zhaohan Daniel Guo

Yunhao Tang

Matthieu Geist

Thomas Mesnard

Côme Fiegel

Andrea Michi

Marco Selvi

Sertan Girgin

Nikola Momchev

Olivier Bachem

Daniel J Mankowitz

Doina Precup

Bilal Piot

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as the main paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human pref… (see more)erences. Traditionally, RLHF involves the initial step of learning a reward model from pairwise human feedback, i.e., expressed as preferences between pairs of text generations. Subsequently, the LLM’s policy is fine-tuned to maximize the reward through a reinforcement learning algorithm. In this study, we introduce an alternative pipeline for the fine-tuning of LLMs using pairwise human feedback. Our approach entails the initial learning of a pairwise preference model, which is conditioned on two inputs (instead of a single input in the case of a reward model) given a prompt, followed by the pursuit of a policy that consistently generates responses preferred over those generated by any competing policy, thus defining the Nash equilibrium of this preference model. We term this approach Nash learning from human feedback (NLHF). In the context of a tabular policy representation, we present a novel algorithmic solution, Nash-MD, founded on the principles of mirror descent. This algorithm produces a sequence of policies, with the last iteration converging to the regularized Nash equilibrium. Additionally, we explore parametric representations of policies and introduce gradient descent algorithms for deep-learning architectures. We illustrate the effectiveness of our approach by presenting experimental results on a text summarization task. We believe NLHF offers a compelling avenue for fine-tuning LLMs and enhancing the alignment of LLMs with human preferences.

2024-05-01

ICML.cc/2024/Conference (spotlight)

doi.org

openreview.net

Nash Learning from Human Feedback

Remi Munos

Michal Valko

Daniele Calandriello

Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar

Mark Rowland

Zhaohan Daniel Guo

Yunhao Tang

Matthieu Geist

Thomas Mesnard

Côme Fiegel

Andrea Michi

Marco Selvi

Sertan Girgin

Nikola Momchev

Olivier Bachem

Daniel J Mankowitz

Doina Precup

Bilal Piot

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as the main paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human pref… (see more)erences. Traditionally, RLHF involves the initial step of learning a reward model from pairwise human feedback, i.e., expressed as preferences between pairs of text generations. Subsequently, the LLM's policy is fine-tuned to maximize the reward through a reinforcement learning algorithm. In this study, we introduce an alternative pipeline for the fine-tuning of LLMs using pairwise human feedback. Our approach entails the initial learning of a pairwise preference model, which is conditioned on two inputs (instead of a single input in the case of a reward model) given a prompt, followed by the pursuit of a policy that consistently generates responses preferred over those generated by any competing policy, thus defining the Nash equilibrium of this preference model. We term this approach Nash learning from human feedback (NLHF). In the context of a tabular policy representation, we present a novel algorithmic solution, Nash-MD, founded on the principles of mirror descent. This algorithm produces a sequence of policies, with the last iteration converging to the regularized Nash equilibrium. Additionally, we explore parametric representations of policies and introduce gradient descent algorithms for deep-learning architectures. We illustrate the effectiveness of our approach by presenting experimental results on a text summarization task. We believe NLHF offers a compelling avenue for fine-tuning LLMs and enhancing the alignment of LLMs with human preferences.

2024-05-01

ICML.cc/2024/Conference (spotlight)

doi.org

openreview.net

Nilearn and Big Data Facilitates Transdiagnostic Brain Biomarkers

Hao-Ting Wang

Natasha Clarke

Quentin Dessain

Fraçois Paugam

Lune Bellec

2024-05-01

Biological Psychiatry (published)

doi.org

Overcoming boundaries: Interdisciplinary challenges and opportunities in cognitive neuroscience

Arnaud Brignol

Anita Paas

Luis Sotelo-Castro

David St-Onge

Giovanni Beltrame

Emily B.J. Coffey

2024-05-01

Neuropsychologia (published)

doi.org

Patient-Centered Surgical Care for Children in Low and Lower-Middle Income Countries (LMICs) - A Systematic Scoping Review of the Literature

Riya Sawhney

Kacylia Roy Proulx

Ayla Gerk

Elena Guadagno

Dan Poenaru

2024-05-01

Journal of Pediatric Surgery (published)

doi.org

Performance of generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) in Certification Examination of the College of Family Physicians of Canada

Mehdi Mousavi

Shabnam Shafiee

Jason M Harley

Jackie Cheung

Samira Abbasgholizadeh-Rahimi

Introduction The application of large language models such as generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) has been promising in medical educa… (see more)tion, and its performance has been tested for different medical exams. This study aims to assess the performance of GPTs in responding to a set of sample questions of short-answer management problems (SAMPs) from the certification exam of the College of Family Physicians of Canada (CFPC). Method Between August 8th and 25th, 2023, we used GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 in five rounds to answer a sample of 77 SAMPs questions from the CFPC website. Two independent certified family physician reviewers scored AI-generated responses twice: first, according to the CFPC answer key (ie, CFPC score), and second, based on their knowledge and other references (ie, Reviews’ score). An ordinal logistic generalised estimating equations (GEE) model was applied to analyse repeated measures across the five rounds. Result According to the CFPC answer key, 607 (73.6%) lines of answers by GPT-3.5 and 691 (81%) by GPT-4 were deemed accurate. Reviewer’s scoring suggested that about 84% of the lines of answers provided by GPT-3.5 and 93% of GPT-4 were correct. The GEE analysis confirmed that over five rounds, the likelihood of achieving a higher CFPC Score Percentage for GPT-4 was 2.31 times more than GPT-3.5 (OR: 2.31; 95% CI: 1.53 to 3.47; p0.001). Similarly, the Reviewers’ Score percentage for responses provided by GPT-4 over 5 rounds were 2.23 times more likely to exceed th

2024-05-01

Family Medicine and Community Health (published)

doi.org

Position: Application-Driven Innovation in Machine Learning

David Rolnick

Alan Aspuru-Guzik

Sara Beery

Bistra Dilkina

Priya L. Donti

Marzyeh Ghassemi

Hannah Kerner

Claire Monteleoni