Publications

"I Am the One and Only, Your Cyber BFF": Understanding the Impact of GenAI Requires Understanding the Impact of Anthropomorphic AI
Myra Cheng
Alicia DeVrio
Lisa Egede
Su Lin Blodgett
Alexandra Olteanu
Many state-of-the-art generative AI (GenAI) systems are increasingly prone to anthropomorphic behaviors, i.e., to generating outputs that ar… (see more)e perceived to be human-like. While this has led to scholars increasingly raising concerns about possible negative impacts such anthropomorphic AI systems can give rise to, anthropomorphism in AI development, deployment, and use remains vastly overlooked, understudied, and underspecified. In this perspective, we argue that we cannot thoroughly map the social impacts of generative AI without mapping the social impacts of anthropomorphic AI, and outline a call to action.
2024-10-11
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Context is Key: A Benchmark for Forecasting with Essential Textual Information
Andrew Robert Williams
Arjun Ashok
Étienne Marcotte
Valentina Zantedeschi
Jithendaraa Subramanian
Roland Riachi
James Requeima
Alexandre Lacoste
Irina Rish
Nicolas Chapados
Alexandre Drouin
2024-10-10
NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/TSALM (published)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Evaluating Interventional Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models
Tejas Kasetty
Divyat Mahajan
Gintare Karolina Dziugaite
Alexandre Drouin
Dhanya Sridhar
Numerous decision-making tasks require estimating causal effects under interventions on different parts of a system. As practitioners consid… (see more)er using large language models (LLMs) to automate decisions, studying their causal reasoning capabilities becomes crucial. A recent line of work evaluates LLMs ability to retrieve commonsense causal facts, but these evaluations do not sufficiently assess how LLMs reason about interventions. Motivated by the role that interventions play in causal inference, in this paper, we conduct empirical analyses to evaluate whether LLMs can accurately update their knowledge of a data-generating process in response to an intervention. We create benchmarks that span diverse causal graphs (e.g., confounding, mediation) and variable types, and enable a study of intervention-based reasoning. These benchmarks allow us to isolate the ability of LLMs to accurately predict changes resulting from their ability to memorize facts or find other shortcuts. Our analysis on four LLMs highlights that while GPT- 4 models show promising accuracy at predicting the intervention effects, they remain sensitive to distracting factors in the prompts.
2024-10-10
NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/CALM (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
Faster, More Efficient RLHF through Off-Policy Asynchronous Learning
Michael Noukhovitch
Shengyi Huang
Sophie Xhonneux
Arian Hosseini
Rishabh Agarwal
Aaron Courville
To achieve state-of-the-art chatbots, large language models are finetuned with reinforcement learning (RL), frequently to optimize human fee… (see more)dback (RLHF). This process is computationally expensive and can take weeks. Offline approaches, like DPO, learn on a static dataset and are efficient but not performant. The dominant paradigm, online and on-policy---synchronously generating from the model, labelling with a reward model, and learning on feedback from the model's own outputs---is performant but not efficient. Following prior work in the generall deep RL setting, we propose separating the actor and learner in RLHF. This enables the asynchronously generation of new samples while learning on prior samples, thus leading to overall faster training and better scaling. But this requires a novel regime for RLHF, online but off-policy: learning on samples from a previous version of our model. We ask a fundamental question: how much off-policyness can we tolerate for asynchronous training to speed up learning but maintain performance? We find that a contrastive loss, Online DPO, is most robust to off-policy data and that robustness increases with the scale of the policy model. We show even further compute optimizations but demonstrate that they come at a performance cost, giving rise to a trade-off. Finally, we verify our design choices by training LLaMA 3.1 8B with RLHF as a helpful chatbot in half the time of a synchronous run while matching final performance.
2024-10-10
NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/FITML (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
How Learning Rates Shape Neural Network Focus: Insights from Example Ranking
Ekaterina Lobacheva
Keller Jordan
Aristide Baratin
Nicolas Le Roux
The learning rate is a key hyperparameter that affects both the speed of training and the generalization performance of neural networks. Th… (see more)rough a new {\it loss-based example ranking} analysis, we show that networks trained with different learning rates focus their capacity on different parts of the data distribution, leading to solutions with different generalization properties. These findings, which hold across architectures and datasets, provide new insights into how learning rates affect model performance and example-level dynamics in neural networks.
2024-10-10
NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/SciForDL (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Input Space Mode Connectivity in Deep Neural Networks
Jakub Vrabel
Ori Shem-Ur
Yaron Oz
David Scott 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.
2024-10-10
NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/SciForDL (oral)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Introducing Brain Foundation Models
Mohammad Javad Darvishi Bayazi
Hena Ghonia
Roland Riachi
Bruno Aristimunha
Arian Khorasani
Md Rifat Arefin
Amin Darabi
Sylvain Chevallier
Guillaume Dumas
Irina Rish
Brain function represents one of the most complex systems driving our world. Decoding its signals poses significant challenges, particularly… (see more) due to the limited availability of data and the high cost of recordings. The existence of large hospital datasets and laboratory collections partially mitigates this issue. However, the lack of standardized recording protocols, varying numbers of channels, diverse setups, scenarios, and recording devices further complicate the task. This work addresses these challenges by introducing the Brain Foundation Model (BFM), a suite of open-source models trained on brain signals. These models serve as foundational tools for various types of time-series neuroimaging tasks. This work presents the first model of the BFM series, which is trained on electroencephalogram signal data. Our results demonstrate that BFM-EEG can generate signals more accurately than other models. Upon acceptance, we will release the model weights and pipeline.
2024-10-10
NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/TSALM (published)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Language model scaling laws and zero-sum learning
Andrei Mircea
Ekaterina Lobacheva
Supriyo Chakraborty
Nima Chitsazan
Irina Rish
This work aims to understand how, in terms of training dynamics, scaling up language model size yields predictable loss improvements. We fin… (see more)d that these improvements can be tied back to loss deceleration, an abrupt transition in the rate of loss improvement, characterized by piece-wise linear behavior in log-log space. Notably, improvements from increased model size appear to be a result of (1) improving the loss at which this transition occurs; and (2) improving the rate of loss improvement after this transition. As an explanation for the mechanism underlying this transition (and the effect of model size on loss it mediates), we propose the zero-sum learning (ZSL) hypothesis. In ZSL, per-token gradients become systematically opposed, leading to degenerate training dynamics where the model can't improve loss on one token without harming it on another; bottlenecking the overall rate at which loss can improve. We find compelling evidence of ZSL, as well as unexpected results which shed light on other factors contributing to ZSL.
2024-10-10
NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/SciForDL (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
A Layer Selection Approach to Test Time Adaptation
Sabyasachi Sahoo
Mostafa ElAraby
Jonas Ngnawe
Yann Batiste Pequignot
Frederic Precioso
Christian Gagné
Test Time Adaptation (TTA) addresses the problem of distribution shift by adapting a pretrained model to a new domain during inference. When… (see more) faced with challenging shifts, most methods collapse and perform worse than the original pretrained model. In this paper, we find that not all layers are equally receptive to the adaptation, and the layers with the most misaligned gradients often cause performance degradation. To address this, we propose GALA, a novel layer selection criterion to identify the most beneficial updates to perform during test time adaptation. This criterion can also filter out unreliable samples with noisy gradients. Its simplicity allows seamless integration with existing TTA loss functions, thereby preventing degradation and focusing adaptation on the most trainable layers. This approach also helps to regularize adaptation to preserve the pretrained features, which are crucial for handling unseen domains. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed layer selection framework improves the performance of existing TTA approaches across multiple datasets, domain shifts, model architectures, and TTA losses.
2024-10-10
NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/FITML (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Learning Robust Representations for Transfer in Reinforcement Learning
Faisal Mohamed
Roger Creus Castanyer
Hongyao Tang
Zahra Sheikhbahaee
Glen Berseth
Learning transferable representations for deep reinforcement learning (RL) is a challenging problem due to the inherent non-stationarity, di… (see more)stribution shift, and unstable training dynamics. To be useful, a transferable representation needs to be robust to such factors. In this work, we introduce a new architecture and training strategy for learning robust representations for transfer learning in RL. We propose leveraging multiple CNN encoders and training them not to specialize in areas of the state space but instead to match each other's representation. We find that learned representations transfer well across many Atari tasks, resulting in better transfer learning performance and data efficiency than training from scratch.
2024-10-10
NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/FITML (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Learning Stochastic Rainbow Networks
Vivian White
Muawiz Sajjad Chaudhary
Guy Wolf
Guillaume Lajoie
Kameron Decker Harris
Random feature models are a popular approach for studying network learning that can capture important behaviors while remaining simpler than… (see more) traditional training. Guth et al. [2024] introduced “rainbow” networks which model the distribution of trained weights as correlated random features conditioned on previous layer activity. Sampling new weights from distributions fit to learned networks led to similar performance in entirely untrained networks, and the observed weight covariance were found to be low rank. This provided evidence that random feature models could be extended to some networks away from initialization, but White et al. [2024] failed to replicate their results in the deeper ResNet18 architecture. Here we ask whether the rainbow formulation can succeed in deeper networks by directly training a stochastic ensemble of random features, which we call stochastic rainbow networks. At every gradient descent iteration, new weights are sampled for all intermediate layers and features aligned layer-wise. We find: (1) this approach scales to deeper models, which outperform shallow networks at large widths; (2) ensembling multiple samples from the stochastic model is better than retraining the classifier head; and (3) low-rank parameterization of the learnable weight covariances can approach the accuracy of full-rank networks. This offers more evidence for rainbow and other structured random feature networks as reduced models of deep learning.
2024-10-10
NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/SciForDL (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Neuroplastic Expansion in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Jiashun Liu
Johan Samir Obando Ceron
Aaron Courville
Ling Pan
2024-10-10
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org