Publications

Sample compression unleashed : New generalization bounds for real valued losses

Mathieu Bazinet

Valentina Zantedeschi

Pascal Germain

2024-10-10

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/M3L (poster)

openreview.net

Steering Masked Discrete Diffusion Models via Discrete Denoising Posterior Prediction

Jarrid Rector-Brooks

Mohsin Hasan

Zhangzhi Peng

Zachary Quinn

Cheng-Hao Liu

Sarthak Mittal

Nouha Dziri

Michael M. Bronstein

Yoshua Bengio

Pranam Chatterjee

Alexander Tong

Joey Bose

2024-10-10

ArXiv (preprint)

arxiv.org

On the Implicit Relation Between Low-Rank Adaptation and Differential Privacy

Saber Malekmohammadi

Golnoosh Farnadi

A significant approach in natural language processing involves large-scale pre-training on general domain data followed by adaptation to spe… (see more)cific tasks or domains. As models grow in size, full fine-tuning all parameters becomes increasingly impractical. To address this, some methods for low-rank task adaptation of language models have been proposed, e.g. LoRA and FLoRA. These methods keep the pre-trained model weights fixed and incorporate trainable low-rank decomposition matrices into some layers of the transformer architecture, called adapters. This approach significantly reduces the number of trainable parameters required for downstream tasks compared to full fine-tuning all parameters. In this work, we look at low-rank adaptation from the lens of data privacy. We show theoretically that the low-rank adaptation used in LoRA and FLoRA is equivalent to injecting some random noise into the batch gradients w.r.t the adapter parameters coming from their full fine-tuning, and we quantify the variance of the injected noise. By establishing a Berry-Esseen type bound on the total variation distance between the noise distribution and a Gaussian distribution with the same variance, we show that the dynamics of LoRA and FLoRA are very close to differentially private full fine-tuning the adapters, which suggests that low-rank adaptation implicitly provides privacy w.r.t the fine-tuning data. Finally, using Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma, we show that when augmented with gradient clipping, low-rank adaptation is almost equivalent to differentially private full fine-tuning adapters with a fixed noise scale.

2024-10-10

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/M3L (poster)

doi.org

openreview.net

The Pitfalls of Memorization: When Memorization Hinders Generalization

Reza Bayat

Mohammad Pezeshki

Elvis Dohmatob

David Lopez-Paz

Pascal Vincent

Neural networks often learn simple explanations that fit the majority of the data while memorizing exceptions that deviate from these explan… (see more)ations. This leads to poor generalization when the learned explanations are spurious. In this work, we formalize

2024-10-10

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/SciForDL (poster)

openreview.net

TrajGPT: Healthcare Time-Series Representation Learning for Trajectory Prediction

Ziyang Song

Qincheng Lu

Mike He Zhu

David Buckeridge

Yue Li

In many domains, such as healthcare, time-series data is irregularly sampled with varying intervals between observations. This creates chall… (see more)enges for classical time-series models that require equally spaced data. To address this, we propose a novel time-series Transformer called **Trajectory Generative Pre-trained Transformer (TrajGPT)**. It introduces a data-dependent decay mechanism that adaptively forgets irrelevant information based on clinical context. By interpreting TrajGPT as ordinary differential equations (ODEs), our approach captures continuous dynamics from sparse and irregular time-series data. Experimental results show that TrajGPT, with its time-specific inference approach, accurately predicts trajectories without requiring task-specific fine-tuning.

2024-10-10

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/TSALM (published)

openreview.net

TrajGPT: Healthcare Time-Series Representation Learning for Trajectory Prediction

Ziyang Song

Qincheng Lu

Mike He Zhu

David Buckeridge

Yue Li

In many domains, such as healthcare, time-series data is irregularly sampled with varying intervals between observations. This creates chall… (see more)enges for classical time-series models that require equally spaced data. To address this, we propose a novel time-series Transformer called **Trajectory Generative Pre-trained Transformer (TrajGPT)**. It introduces a data-dependent decay mechanism that adaptively forgets irrelevant information based on clinical context. By interpreting TrajGPT as ordinary differential equations (ODEs), our approach captures continuous dynamics from sparse and irregular time-series data. Experimental results show that TrajGPT, with its time-specific inference approach, accurately predicts trajectories without requiring task-specific fine-tuning.

2024-10-10

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/TSALM (published)

openreview.net

Understanding Permutation Based Model Merging with Feature Visualizations

Congshu Zou

geraldin nanfack

Stefan Horoi

Eugene Belilovsky

Linear mode connectivity (LMC) has become a topic of great interest in recent years. It has been empirically demonstrated that popular deep … (see more)learning models trained from different initializations exhibit linear model connectivity up to permutation. Based on this, several approaches for finding a permutation of the model's features or weights have been proposed leading to several popular methods for model merging. These methods enable the simple averaging of two models to create a new high-performance model. However, besides accuracy, the properties of these models and their relationships to the representations of the models they derive from are poorly understood. In this work, we study the inner mechanisms behind LMC in model merging through the lens of classic feature visualization methods. Focusing on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) we make several observations that shed light on the underlying mechanisms of model merging by permute and average.

2024-10-10

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/UniReps (accepted)

openreview.net

AI-Assisted Generation of Difficult Math Questions

Vedant Shah

Dingli Yu

Kaifeng Lyu

Simon Park

Jiatong Yu

Yinghui He

James Lloyd McClelland

Nan Rosemary Ke

Michael Curtis Mozer

Yoshua Bengio

Sanjeev Arora

Anirudh Goyal

Current LLM training positions mathematical reasoning as a core capability. With publicly available sources fully tapped, there is unmet dem… (see more)and for diverse and challenging math questions. Relying solely on human experts is both time-consuming and costly, while LLM-generated questions often lack the requisite diversity and difficulty. We present a design framework that combines the strengths of LLMs with a human-in-the-loop approach to generate a diverse array of challenging math questions. We leverage LLM metacognition skills [Didolkar et al., 2024] of a strong LLM to extract core"skills"from existing math datasets. These skills serve as the basis for generating novel and difficult questions by prompting the LLM with random pairs of core skills. The use of two different skills within each question makes finding such questions an"out of distribution"task for both LLMs and humans. Our pipeline employs LLMs to iteratively generate and refine questions and solutions through multiturn prompting. Human annotators then verify and further refine the questions, with their efficiency enhanced via further LLM interactions. Applying this pipeline on skills extracted from the MATH dataset [Hendrycks et al., 2021] resulted in MATH

2024-10-09

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/MATH-AI (accepted)

doi.org

openreview.net

Library Learning Doesn’t: The Curious Case of the Single-Use “Library”

Ian Berlot-Attwell

Frank Rudzicz

Xujie Si

Advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have spurred a wave of LLM library learning systems for mathematical reasoning. These systems aim … (see more)to learn a reusable library of *tools*, such as formal Isabelle lemmas or Python programs that are tailored to a family of tasks. Many of these systems are inspired by the human structuring of knowledge into reusable and extendable concepts, but do current methods actually learn reusable libraries of tools? We study two library learning systems for mathematics which both reported increased accuracy: LEGO-Prover and TroVE. We find that function reuse is extremely infrequent on miniF2F and MATH. Our followup ablation experiments suggest that, rather than reuse, self-correction and self-consistency are the primary drivers of the observed performance gains.

2024-10-09

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/MATH-AI (accepted)

openreview.net

LLMs and Personalities: Inconsistencies Across Scales

Tosato Tommaso

Mahmood Hegazy

David Lemay

Mohammed Abukalam

Irina Rish

Guillaume Dumas

This study investigates the application of human psychometric assessments to large language models (LLMs) to examine their consistency and m… (see more)alleability in exhibiting personality traits. We administered the Big Five Inventory (BFI) and the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised (EPQ-R) to various LLMs across different model sizes and persona prompts. Our results reveal substantial variability in responses due to question order shuffling, challenging the notion of a stable LLM "personality." Larger models demonstrated more consistent responses, while persona prompts significantly influenced trait scores. Notably, the assistant persona led to more predictable scaling, with larger models exhibiting more socially desirable and less variable traits. In contrast, non-conventional personas displayed unpredictable behaviors, sometimes extending personality trait scores beyond the typical human range. These findings have important implications for understanding LLM behavior under different conditions and reflect on the consequences of scaling.

2024-10-09

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/Behavioral_ML (oral)

openreview.net

LLMs and Personalities: Inconsistencies Across Scales

Tosato Tommaso

Mahmood Hegazy

David Lemay

Mohammed Abukalam

Irina Rish

Guillaume Dumas

This study investigates the application of human psychometric assessments to large language models (LLMs) to examine their consistency and m… (see more)alleability in exhibiting personality traits. We administered the Big Five Inventory (BFI) and the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised (EPQ-R) to various LLMs across different model sizes and persona prompts. Our results reveal substantial variability in responses due to question order shuffling, challenging the notion of a stable LLM "personality." Larger models demonstrated more consistent responses, while persona prompts significantly influenced trait scores. Notably, the assistant persona led to more predictable scaling, with larger models exhibiting more socially desirable and less variable traits. In contrast, non-conventional personas displayed unpredictable behaviors, sometimes extending personality trait scores beyond the typical human range. These findings have important implications for understanding LLM behavior under different conditions and reflect on the consequences of scaling.

2024-10-09

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/Behavioral_ML (oral)

openreview.net