SDLog: A Deep Learning Framework for Detecting Sensitive Information in Software Logs
Roozbeh Aghili
Xingfang Wu
Heng Li
Search-Based Correction of Reasoning Chains for Language Models
Minsu Kim
Jean-Pierre R. Falet
Oliver E. Richardson
Moksh J. Jain
Sungjin Ahn
Sungsoo Ahn
Seeing the Unseen: How EMoE Unveils Bias in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Lucas Berry
Axel Brando
Wei-Di Chang
Juan Higuera
Self-Evolving Curriculum for LLM Reasoning
Minsu Kim
Alexandre Piché
Nicolas Gontier
Ehsan Kamalloo
Self-Play $Q$-Learners Can Provably Collude in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma
Juan Agustin Duque
Emilio Calvano
A growing body of computational studies shows that simple machine learning agents converge to cooperative behaviors in social dilemmas, such… (voir plus) as collusive price-setting in oligopoly markets, raising questions about what drives this outcome. In this work, we provide theoretical foundations for this phenomenon in the context of self-play multi-agent Q-learners in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. We characterize broad conditions under which such agents provably learn the cooperative Pavlov (win-stay, lose-shift) policy rather than the Pareto-dominated “always defect” policy. We validate our theoretical results through additional experiments, demonstrating their robustness across a broader class of deep learning algorithms.
SKOLR: Structured Koopman Operator Linear RNN for Time-Series Forecasting
Koopman operator theory provides a framework for nonlinear dynamical system analysis and time-series forecasting by mapping dynamics to a sp… (voir plus)ace of real-valued measurement functions, enabling a linear operator representation. Despite the advantage of linearity, the operator is generally infinite-dimensional. Therefore, the objective is to learn measurement functions that yield a tractable finite-dimensional Koopman operator approximation. In this work, we establish a connection between Koopman operator approximation and linear Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), which have recently demonstrated remarkable success in sequence modeling. We show that by considering an extended state consisting of lagged observations, we can establish an equivalence between a structured Koopman operator and linear RNN updates. Building on this connection, we present SKOLR, which integrates a learnable spectral decomposition of the input signal with a multilayer perceptron (MLP) as the measurement functions and implements a structured Koopman operator via a highly parallel linear RNN stack. Numerical experiments on various forecasting benchmarks and dynamical systems show that this streamlined, Koopman-theory-based design delivers exceptional performance. Our code is available at: https://github.com/networkslab/SKOLR.
Structure-Aligned Protein Language Model
Can Chen
David Heurtel-Depeiges
Robert M. Vernon
Christopher J. Langmead
The Butterfly Effect: Neural Network Training Trajectories Are Highly Sensitive to Initial Conditions
Gül Sena Altıntaş
Colin Raffel
Neural network training is inherently sensitive to initialization and the randomness induced by stochastic gradient descent. However, it is … (voir plus)unclear to what extent such effects lead to meaningfully different networks, either in terms of the models' weights or the underlying functions that were learned. In this work, we show that during the initial "chaotic" phase of training, even extremely small perturbations reliably causes otherwise identical training trajectories to diverge-an effect that diminishes rapidly over training time. We quantify this divergence through (i)
The Courage to Stop: Overcoming Sunk Cost Fallacy in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) typically leverages replay buffers for reusing past experiences during learning. This can help i… (voir plus)mprove sample efficiency when the collected data is informative and aligned with the learning objectives; when that is not the case, it can have the effect of"polluting"the replay buffer with data which can exacerbate optimization challenges in addition to wasting environment interactions due to wasteful sampling. We argue that sampling these uninformative and wasteful transitions can be avoided by addressing the sunk cost fallacy, which, in the context of deep RL, is the tendency towards continuing an episode until termination. To address this, we propose learn to stop (LEAST), a lightweight mechanism that enables strategic early episode termination based on Q-value and gradient statistics, which helps agents recognize when to terminate unproductive episodes early. We demonstrate that our method improves learning efficiency on a variety of RL algorithms, evaluated on both the MuJoCo and DeepMind Control Suite benchmarks.
On the generalization of language models from in-context learning and finetuning: a controlled study
Andrew Lampinen
Arslan Chaudhry
Stephanie C.Y. Chan
Cody Wild
Diane Wan
Alexander Y. Ku
Alex Ku
Jorg Bornschein
Murray P. Shanahan
James L McClelland
On the generalization of language models from in-context learning and finetuning: a controlled study
Andrew Lampinen
Arslan Chaudhry
Stephanie C.Y. Chan
Cody Wild
Diane Wan
Alexander Y. Ku
Jorg Bornschein
Murray P. Shanahan
James L McClelland
Large language models exhibit exciting capabilities, yet can show surprisingly narrow generalization from finetuning. E.g. they can fail to … (voir plus)generalize to simple reversals of relations they are trained on, or fail to make simple logical deductions based on trained information. These failures to generalize from fine-tuning can hinder practical application of these models. On the other hand, language models' in-context learning shows different inductive biases, and can generalize better in some cases. Here, we explore these differences in generalization between in-context- and fine-tuning-based learning. To do so, we constructed several novel datasets to evaluate and improve models' abilities to generalize from finetuning data. The datasets are designed to create clean tests of generalization, by isolating the knowledge in the dataset from that in pretraining. We expose pretrained large models to controlled subsets of the information in these datasets -- either in context, or through fine-tuning -- and evaluate their performance on test sets that require various types of generalization. We find overall that in data-matched settings, in-context learning can generalize more flexibly than fine-tuning (though we also find some qualifications of prior findings, such as cases when fine-tuning can generalize to reversals embedded in a larger structure of knowledge). We build on these findings to propose a method to enable improved generalization from fine-tuning: adding in-context inferences to finetuning data. We show that this method improves generalization across various splits of our datasets and other benchmarks. Our results have implications for understanding the inductive biases of different modes of learning in language models, and practically improving their performance.
The Impact of On-Policy Parallelized Data Collection on Deep Reinforcement Learning Networks
The use of parallel actors for data collection has been an effective technique used in reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. The manner in… (voir plus) which data is collected in these algorithms, controlled via the number of parallel environments and the rollout length, induces a form of bias-variance trade-off; the number of training passes over the collected data, on the other hand, must strike a balance between sample efficiency and overfitting. We conduct an empirical analysis of these trade-offs on PPO, one of the most popular RL algorithms that uses parallel actors, and establish connections to network plasticity and, more generally, optimization stability. We examine its impact on network architectures, as well as the hyper-parameter sensitivity when scaling data. Our analyses indicate that larger dataset sizes can increase final performance across a variety of settings, and that scaling parallel environments is more effective than increasing rollout lengths. These findings highlight the critical role of data collection strategies in improving agent performance.