Large Language Models-guided Dynamic Adaptation for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning

Large Language Model;Temporal Knowledge Graph;Knowledge Graph Reasoning

Summary: We propose a Dynamic Adaptation method to guide LLMs for rule-based TKGR tasks.

Abstract: Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (TKGR) is the process of utilizing temporal information to capture complex relations within a Temporal Knowledge Graph (TKG) to infer new knowledge. Conventional methods in TKGR typically depend on deep learning algorithms or temporal logical rules. However, deep learning-based TKGRs often lack interpretability, whereas rule-based TKGRs struggle to effectively learn temporal rules that capture temporal patterns. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated extensive knowledge and remarkable proficiency in temporal reasoning. Consequently, the employment of LLMs for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (TKGR) has sparked increasing interest among researchers. Nonetheless, LLMs are known to function as black boxes, making it challenging to comprehend their reasoning process. Additionally, due to the resource-intensive nature of fine-tuning, promptly updating LLMs to integrate evolving knowledge within TKGs for reasoning is impractical. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a Large Language Models-guided Dynamic Adaptation (LLM-DA) method for reasoning on TKGs. Specifically, LLM-DA harnesses the capabilities of LLMs to analyze historical data and extract temporal logical rules. These rules unveil temporal patterns and facilitate interpretable reasoning. To account for the evolving nature of TKGs, a dynamic adaptation strategy is proposed to update the LLM-generated rules with the latest events. This ensures that the extracted rules always incorporate the most recent knowledge and better generalize to the predictions on future events. Experimental results show that without the need of fine-tuning, LLM-DA significantly improves the accuracy of reasoning over several common datasets, providing a robust framework for TKGR tasks.


Simplifying Latent Dynamics with Softly State-Invariant World Models

World model;latent dynamics;reinforcement learning;compression

Abstract: To solve control problems via model-based reasoning or planning, an agent needs to know how its actions affect the state of the world. The actions an agent has at its disposal often change the state of the environment in systematic ways. However, existing techniques for world modelling do not guarantee that the effect of actions are represented in such systematic ways. We introduce the Parsimonious Latent Space Model (PLSM), a world model that regularizes the latent dynamics to make the effect of the agent's actions more predictable. Our approach minimizes the mutual information between latent states and the change that an action produces in the agent's latent state, in turn minimizing the dependence the state has on the dynamics. This makes the world model softly state-invariant. We combine PLSM with different model classes used for i) future latent state prediction, ii) planning, and iii) model-free reinforcement learning. We find that our regularization improves accuracy, generalization, and performance in downstream tasks, highlighting the importance of systematic treatment of actions in world models.


PAC-Bayes-Chernoff bounds for unbounded losses

Statistical learning theory;PAC-Bayes;Chernoff bounds;regularization

Summary: We introduce a new PAC-Bayes bound that allows working with richer assumptions and illustrate its potential by generalizing previous bounds, obtaining novel ones for several regularization techniques, and minimizing them to get new posteriors

Abstract: We introduce a new PAC-Bayes oracle bound for unbounded losses that extends Cramér-Chernoff bounds to the PAC-Bayesian setting. The proof technique relies on controlling the tails of certain random variables involving the Cramér transform of the loss. Our approach naturally leverages properties of Cramér-Chernoff bounds, such as exact optimization of the free parameter in many PAC-Bayes bounds. We highlight several applications of the main theorem. Firstly, we show that our bound recovers and generalizes previous results. Additionally, our approach allows working with richer assumptions that result in more informative and potentially tighter bounds. In this direction, we provide a general bound under a new model-dependent assumption from which we obtain bounds based on parameter norms and log-Sobolev inequalities. Notably, many of these bounds can be minimized to obtain distributions beyond the Gibbs posterior and provide novel theoretical coverage to existing regularization techniques.


Don't Compress Gradients in Random Reshuffling: Compress Gradient Differences

Random reshuffling;communication compression;distributed optimization;Federated Learning

Summary: In this paper we introduce an improved method that utilizes communication compression with variance reduction and sampling without replacement.

Abstract: Gradient compression is a popular technique for improving communication complexity of stochastic first-order methods in distributed training of machine learning models. However, the existing works consider only with-replacement sampling of stochastic gradients. In contrast, it is well-known in practice and recently confirmed in theory that stochastic methods based on without-replacement sampling, e.g., Random Reshuffling (RR) method, perform better than ones that sample the gradients with-replacement. In this work, we close this gap in the literature and provide the first analysis of methods with gradient compression and without-replacement sampling. We first develop a distributed variant of random reshuffling with gradient compression (Q-RR), and show how to reduce the variance coming from gradient quantization through the use of control iterates. Next, to have a better fit to Federated Learning applications, we incorporate local computation and propose a variant of Q-RR called Q-NASTYA. Q-NASTYA uses local gradient steps and different local and global stepsizes. Next, we show how to reduce compression variance in this setting as well. Finally, we prove the convergence results for the proposed methods and outline several settings in which they improve upon existing algorithms.


Grokking of Implicit Reasoning in Transformers: A Mechanistic Journey to the Edge of Generalization

Summary: We discover and analyze Transformer's grokking phenomenon on the task of implicit reasoning.

Abstract: We study whether transformers can learn to implicitly reason over parametric knowledge, a skill that even the most capable language models struggle with. Focusing on two representative reasoning types, composition and comparison, we consistently find that transformers can learn implicit reasoning, but only through grokking, i.e., extended training far beyond overfitting. The levels of generalization also vary across reasoning types: when faced with out-of-distribution examples, transformers fail to systematically generalize for composition but succeed for comparison. We delve into the model's internals throughout training, conducting analytical experiments that reveal: 1) the mechanism behind grokking, such as the formation of the generalizing circuit and its relation to the relative efficiency of generalizing and memorizing circuits, and 2) the connection between systematicity and the configuration of the generalizing circuit. Our findings guide data and training setup to better induce implicit reasoning and suggest potential improvements to the transformer architecture, such as encouraging cross-layer knowledge sharing. Furthermore, we demonstrate that for a challenging reasoning task with a large search space, GPT-4-Turbo and Gemini-1.5-Pro based on non-parametric memory fail badly regardless of prompting styles or retrieval augmentation, while a fully grokked transformer can achieve near-perfect accuracy, showcasing the power of parametric memory for complex reasoning.


DeSparsify: Adversarial Attack Against Token Sparsification Mechanisms

Adversarial Attack;Vision Transformers;Token Sparsification

Summary: An adversarial attack that targets the availability of efficient vision transformers

Abstract: Vision transformers have shown remarkable advancements in the computer vision domain, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance in diverse tasks (e.g., image classification, object detection). However, their high computational requirements grow quadratically with the number of tokens used. Token sparsification mechanisms have been proposed to address this issue. These mechanisms employ an input-dependent strategy, in which uninformative tokens are discarded from the computation pipeline, improving the model’s efficiency. However, their dynamism and average-case assumption makes them vulnerable to a new threat vector – carefully crafted adversarial examples capable of fooling the sparsification mechanism, resulting in worst-case performance. In this paper, we present DeSparsify, an attack targeting the availability of vision transformers that use token sparsification mechanisms. The attack aims to exhaust the operating system’s resources, while maintaining its stealthiness. Our evaluation demonstrates the attack’s effectiveness on three token sparsification mechanisms and examines the attack’s transferability between them and its effect on the GPU resources. To mitigate the impact of the attack, we propose various countermeasures.


FOOGD: Federated Collaboration for Both Out-of-distribution Generalization and Detection

Summary: We devise a FL framework that adapts to wild data, which coexists with non-IID in-distribution (IN) data, covariate-shift (IN-C) data, and semantic-shift  (OUT) data.

Abstract: Federated learning (FL) is a promising machine learning paradigm that collaborates with client models to capture global knowledge. However, deploying FL models in real-world scenarios remains unreliable due to the coexistence of in-distribution data and unexpected out-of-distribution (OOD) data, such as covariate-shift and semantic-shift data. Current FL researches typically address either covariate-shift data through OOD generalization or semantic-shift data via OOD detection, overlooking the simultaneous occurrence of various OOD shifts. In this work, we propose FOOGD, a method that estimates the probability density of each client and obtains reliable global distribution as guidance for the subsequent FL process. Firstly, SM3D in FOOGD estimates score model for arbitrary distributions without prior constraints, and detects semantic-shift data powerfully. Then SAG in FOOGD provides invariant yet diverse knowledge for both local covariate-shift generalization and client performance generalization. In empirical validations, FOOGD significantly enjoys three main advantages: (1) reliably estimating non-normalized decentralized distributions, (2) detecting semantic shift data via score values, and (3) generalizing to covariate-shift data by regularizing feature extractor. The project is open in https://github.com/XeniaLLL/FOOGD-main.git.


Interpreting the Weight Space of Customized Diffusion Models

Weight Space;Model Editing;Diffusion Models;Latent Space;Personalization

Summary: Using a dataset of fine-tuned diffusion models, we define a subspace in diffusion model weight space that enables controllable creation of new diffusion models.

Abstract:
We investigate the space of weights spanned by a large collection of customized diffusion models. We populate this space by creating a dataset of over 60,000 models, each of which is a base model fine-tuned to insert a different person's visual identity. We model the underlying manifold of these weights as a subspace, which we term
weights2weights
. We demonstrate three immediate applications of this space that result in new diffusion models -- sampling, editing, and inversion. First, sampling a set of weights from this space results in a new model encoding a novel identity. Next, we find linear directions in this space corresponding to semantic edits of the identity (e.g., adding a beard), resulting in a new model with the original identity edited. Finally, we show that inverting a single image into this space encodes a realistic identity into a model, even if the input image is out of distribution (e.g., a painting). We further find that these linear properties of the diffusion model weight space extend to other visual concepts. Our results indicate that the weight space of fine-tuned diffusion models can behave as an interpretable
meta
-latent space producing new models.


GaussianCube: A Structured and Explicit Radiance Representation for 3D Generative Modeling

3D Generative Modeling; Gaussian Splatting; Optimal Transport

Summary: We present a structured and explicit representation for 3D generative modeling by structuring Gaussian Splatting using Optimal Transport, achieving state-of-the-art generation quality.

Abstract: We introduce a radiance representation that is both structured and fully explicit and thus greatly facilitates 3D generative modeling. Existing radiance representations either require an implicit feature decoder, which significantly degrades the modeling power of the representation, or are spatially unstructured, making them difficult to integrate with mainstream 3D diffusion methods. We derive GaussianCube by first using a novel densification-constrained Gaussian fitting algorithm, which yields high-accuracy fitting using a fixed number of free Gaussians, and then rearranging these Gaussians into a predefined voxel grid via Optimal Transport. Since GaussianCube is a structured grid representation, it allows us to use standard 3D U-Net as our backbone in diffusion modeling without elaborate designs. More importantly, the high-accuracy fitting of the Gaussians allows us to achieve a high-quality representation with orders of magnitude fewer parameters than previous structured representations for comparable quality, ranging from one to two orders of magnitude. The compactness of GaussianCube greatly eases the difficulty of 3D generative modeling. Extensive experiments conducted on unconditional and class-conditioned object generation, digital avatar creation, and text-to-3D synthesis all show that our model achieves state-of-the-art generation results both qualitatively and quantitatively, underscoring the potential of GaussianCube as a highly accurate and versatile radiance representation for 3D generative modeling.


Multiple Physics Pretraining for Spatiotemporal Surrogate Models

Summary: We develop approaches to enable autoregressive pretraining on multiple physical systems and show it can improve transfer performance across domain gaps.

Abstract: We introduce multiple physics pretraining (MPP), an autoregressive task-agnostic pretraining approach for physical surrogate modeling of spatiotemporal systems with transformers. In MPP, rather than training one model on a specific physical system, we train a backbone model to predict the dynamics of multiple heterogeneous physical systems simultaneously in order to learn features that are broadly useful across systems and facilitate transfer. In order to learn effectively in this setting, we introduce a shared embedding and normalization strategy that projects the fields of multiple systems into a shared embedding space. We validate the efficacy of our approach on both pretraining and downstream tasks over a broad fluid mechanics-oriented benchmark. We show that a single MPP-pretrained transformer is able to match or outperform task-specific baselines on all pretraining sub-tasks without the need for finetuning. For downstream tasks, we demonstrate that finetuning MPP-trained models results in more accurate predictions across multiple time-steps on systems with previously unseen physical components or higher dimensional systems compared to training from scratch or finetuning pretrained video foundation models. We open-source our code and model weights trained at multiple scales for reproducibility.


Efficient Federated Learning against Heterogeneous and Non-stationary Client Unavailability

distributed learning;non-convex optimization;federated learning;fault-tolerance

Summary: We propose FedAWE, an efficient algorithm for handling heterogeneous and non-stationary client unavailability in federated learning, achieving linear speedup and outperforming state-of-the-art methods in experiments over diversified dynamics.

Abstract: Addressing intermittent client availability is critical for the real-world deployment of federated learning algorithms. Most prior work either overlooks the potential non-stationarity in the dynamics of client unavailability or requires substantial memory/computation overhead. We study federated learning in the presence of heterogeneous and non-stationary client availability, which may occur when the deployment environments are uncertain, or the clients are mobile. The impacts of heterogeneity and non-stationarity on client unavailability can be significant, as we illustrate using FedAvg, the most widely adopted federated learning algorithm. We propose FedAWE, which includes novel algorithmic structures that (i) compensate for missed computations due to unavailability with only $O(1)$ additional memory and computation with respect to standard FedAvg, and (ii) evenly diffuse local updates within the federated learning system through implicit gossiping, despite being agnostic to non-stationary dynamics. We show that FedAWE converges to a stationary point of even non-convex objectives while achieving the desired linear speedup property. We corroborate our analysis with numerical experiments over diversified client unavailability dynamics on real-world data sets.


Pretraining with Random Noise for Fast and Robust Learning without Weight Transport

Random noise training;Network pretraining;Pre-regularization;Feedback alignment;Error backpropagation;Weight transport problem;Biologically-Plausible Algorithm

Summary: Pretraining with random noise using a feedback alignment algorithm allows fast learning and robust generalization without weight transport.

Abstract: The brain prepares for learning even before interacting with the environment, by refining and optimizing its structures through spontaneous neural activity that resembles random noise. However, the mechanism of such a process has yet to be understood, and it is unclear whether this process can benefit the algorithm of machine learning. Here, we study this issue using a neural network with a feedback alignment algorithm, demonstrating that pretraining neural networks with random noise increases the learning efficiency as well as generalization abilities without weight transport. First, we found that random noise training modifies forward weights to match backward synaptic feedback, which is necessary for teaching errors by feedback alignment. As a result, a network with pre-aligned weights learns notably faster and reaches higher accuracy than a network without random noise training, even comparable to the backpropagation algorithm. We also found that the effective dimensionality of weights decreases in a network pretrained with random noise. This pre-regularization allows the network to learn simple solutions of a low rank, reducing the generalization error during subsequent training. This also enables the network to robustly generalize a novel, out-of-distribution dataset. Lastly, we confirmed that random noise pretraining reduces the amount of meta-loss, enhancing the network ability to adapt to various tasks. Overall, our results suggest that random noise training with feedback alignment offers a straightforward yet effective method of pretraining that facilitates quick and reliable learning without weight transport.


GVKF: Gaussian Voxel Kernel Functions for Highly Efficient Surface Reconstruction in Open Scenes

Summary: High efficient surface reconstuction based on gaussian splatting

Abstract: In this paper we present a novel method for efficient and effective 3D surface reconstruction in open scenes. Existing Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) based works typically require extensive training and rendering time due to the adopted implicit representations. In contrast, 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) uses an explicit and discrete representation, hence the reconstructed surface is built by the huge number of Gaussian primitives, which leads to excessive memory consumption and rough surface details in sparse Gaussian areas. To address these issues, we propose Gaussian Voxel Kernel Functions (GVKF), which establish a continuous scene representation based on discrete 3DGS through kernel regression. The GVKF integrates fast 3DGS rasterization and highly effective scene implicit representations, achieving high-fidelity open scene surface reconstruction. Experiments on challenging scene datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed GVKF, featuring with high reconstruction quality, real-time rendering speed, significant savings in storage and training memory consumption.


Tensor-Based Synchronization and the Low-Rankness of the Block Trifocal Tensor

synchronization;tensor decomposition;structure from motion;multilinear rank;multiview geometry;trifocal tensor;higher-order scene information

Summary: This paper introduces the block trifocal tensor, established a low multilinear rank, and introduces a global synchronization framework for trifocal tensors.

Abstract:
The block tensor of trifocal tensors provides crucial geometric information on the three-view geometry of a scene. The underlying synchronization problem seeks to recover camera poses (locations and orientations up to a global transformation) from the block trifocal tensor. We establish an explicit Tucker factorization of this tensor, revealing a low multilinear rank of
(
6
,
4
,
4
)
independent of the number of cameras under appropriate scaling conditions. We prove that this rank constraint provides sufficient information for camera recovery in the noiseless case. The constraint motivates a synchronization algorithm based on the higher-order singular value decomposition of the block trifocal tensor. Experimental comparisons with state-of-the-art global synchronization methods on real datasets demonstrate the potential of this algorithm for significantly improving location estimation accuracy. Overall this work suggests that higher-order interactions in synchronization problems can be exploited to improve performance, beyond the usual pairwise-based approaches.


Language Grounded Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning with Human-interpretable Communication

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning;Emergent Communication;Ad-hoc Teamwork;Large Language Models

Summary: We propose a novel computational pipeline to ground MARL communication in human language using embodied LLM agents, enabling interpretable and generalizable communication in ad-hoc multi-agent teamwork.

Abstract: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) methods have shown promise in enabling agents to learn a shared communication protocol from scratch and accomplish challenging team tasks. However, the learned language is usually not interpretable to humans or other agents not co-trained together, limiting its applicability in ad-hoc teamwork scenarios. In this work, we propose a novel computational pipeline that aligns the communication space between MARL agents with an embedding space of human natural language by grounding agent communications on synthetic data generated by embodied Large Language Models (LLMs) in interactive teamwork scenarios. Our results demonstrate that introducing language grounding not only maintains task performance but also accelerates the emergence of communication. Furthermore, the learned communication protocols exhibit zero-shot generalization capabilities in ad-hoc teamwork scenarios with unseen teammates and novel task states. This work presents a significant step toward enabling effective communication and collaboration between artificial agents and humans in real-world teamwork settings.


Are Language Models Actually Useful for Time Series Forecasting?

Time Series;Language Models;Time Series Forecasting

Summary: LLM in Time Series Forecasting Task

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are being applied to time series forecasting. But are language models actually useful for time series? In a series of ablation studies on three recent and popular LLM-based time series forecasting methods, we find that removing the LLM component or replacing it with a basic attention layer does not degrade forecasting performance---in most cases, the results even improve! We also find that despite their significant computational cost, pretrained LLMs do no better than models trained from scratch, do not represent the sequential dependencies in time series, and do not assist in few-shot settings. Additionally, we explore time series encoders and find that patching and attention structures perform similarly to LLM-based forecasters. All resources needed to reproduce our work are available: https://github.com/BennyTMT/LLMsForTimeSeries.


Deep Policy Gradient Methods Without Batch Updates, Target Networks, or Replay Buffers

Reinforcement Learning;Robotics;Deep Learning;Incremental Learning;Real-time Learning

Summary: We introduce Action Value Gradient (AVG), a novel incremental policy gradient method for real-time learning on robots with limited onboard computation, eliminating the need for large replay buffers, target networks or batch updates.

Abstract: Modern deep policy gradient methods achieve effective performance on simulated robotic tasks, but they all require large replay buffers or expensive batch updates, or both, making them incompatible for real systems with resource-limited computers. We show that these methods fail catastrophically when limited to small replay buffers or during incremental learning, where updates only use the most recent sample without batch updates or a replay buffer. We propose a novel incremental deep policy gradient method --- Action Value Gradient (AVG) and a set of normalization and scaling techniques to address the challenges of instability in incremental learning. On robotic simulation benchmarks, we show that AVG is the only incremental method that learns effectively, often achieving final performance comparable to batch policy gradient methods. This advancement enabled us to show for the first time effective deep reinforcement learning with real robots using only incremental updates, employing a robotic manipulator and a mobile robot.


Identifying Spatio-Temporal Drivers of Extreme Events

anomaly detection;weakly supervised learning;Earth science;climate science;remote sensing;deep learning

Summary: We present a deep learning model, designed to leverage climate data to identify the drivers of extreme events impacts.

Abstract: The spatio-temporal relations of impacts of extreme events and their drivers in climate data are not fully understood and there is a need of machine learning approaches to identify such spatio-temporal relations from data. The task, however, is very challenging since there are time delays between extremes and their drivers, and the spatial response of such drivers is inhomogeneous. In this work, we propose a first approach and benchmarks to tackle this challenge. Our approach is trained end-to-end to predict spatio-temporally extremes and spatio-temporally drivers in the physical input variables jointly. By enforcing the network to predict extremes from spatio-temporal binary masks of identified drivers, the network successfully identifies drivers that are correlated with extremes. We evaluate our approach on three newly created synthetic benchmarks, where two of them are based on remote sensing or reanalysis climate data, and on two real-world reanalysis datasets. The source code and datasets are publicly available at the project page https://hakamshams.github.io/IDE.


Make Continual Learning Stronger via C-Flat

Summary: This paper propose a Continual Flatness (C-Flat) method featuring a flatter loss landscape tailored for CL. C-Flat could be easily called with only one line of code and is plug-and-play to any CL methods.

Abstract: How to balance the learning ’sensitivity-stability’ upon new task training and memory preserving is critical in CL to resolve catastrophic forgetting. Improving model generalization ability within each learning phase is one solution to help CL learning overcome the gap in the joint knowledge space. Zeroth-order loss landscape sharpness-aware minimization is a strong training regime improving model generalization in transfer learning compared with optimizer like SGD. It has also been introduced into CL to improve memory representation or learning efficiency. However, zeroth-order sharpness alone could favors sharper over flatter minima in certain scenarios, leading to a rather sensitive minima rather than a global optima. To further enhance learning stability, we propose a Continual Flatness (C-Flat) method featuring a flatter loss landscape tailored for CL. C-Flat could be easily called with only one line of code and is plug-and-play to any CL methods. A general framework of C-Flat applied to all CL categories and a thorough comparison with loss minima optimizer and flat minima based CL approaches is presented in this paper, showing that our method can boost CL performance in almost all cases. Code is available at https://github.com/WanNaa/C-Flat.


UniMTS: Unified Pre-training for Motion Time Series

motion time series classification;pre-training;contrastive learning;physics-based simulation;human activity recognition

Summary: We present the first unified pre-training procedure for motion time series that can generalize to diverse device locations, orientations, and activity types.

Abstract: Motion time series collected from low-power, always-on mobile and wearable devices such as smartphones and smartwatches offer significant insights into human behavioral patterns, with wide applications in healthcare, automation, IoT, and AR/XR. However, given security and privacy concerns, building large-scale motion time series datasets remains difficult, hindering the development of pre-trained models for human activity analysis. Typically, existing models are trained and tested on the same dataset, leading to poor generalizability across variations in device location, device mounting orientation, and human activity type. In this paper, we introduce UniMTS, the first unified pre-training procedure for motion time series that generalizes across diverse device latent factors and activities. Specifically, we employ a contrastive learning framework that aligns motion time series with text descriptions enriched by large language models. This helps the model learn the semantics of time series to generalize across activities. Given the absence of large-scale motion time series data, we derive and synthesize time series from existing motion skeleton data with all-joint coverage. We use spatio-temporal graph networks to capture the relationships across joints for generalization across different device locations. We further design rotation-invariant augmentation to make the model agnostic to changes in device mounting orientations. Our model shows exceptional generalizability across 18 motion time series classification benchmark datasets, outperforming the best baselines by 340% in the zero-shot setting, 16.3% in the few-shot setting, and 9.2% in the full-shot setting.


Divergences between Language Models and Human Brains

Natural Language Processing;NLP;Brain Imaging;Neuroimaging;Magnetoencephalography;MEG;Neuroscience;Cognitive Science;Interpretability;Deep Learning

Summary: Language models differ from human brains in social/emotional intelligence and physical commonsense. Fine-tuning language models on these domains improves their alignment with human understanding.

Abstract: Do machines and humans process language in similar ways? Recent research has hinted at the affirmative, showing that human neural activity can be effectively predicted using the internal representations of language models (LMs). Although such results are thought to reflect shared computational principles between LMs and human brains, there are also clear differences in how LMs and humans represent and use language. In this work, we systematically explore the divergences between human and machine language processing by examining the differences between LM representations and human brain responses to language as measured by Magnetoencephalography (MEG) across two datasets in which subjects read and listened to narrative stories. Using an LLM-based data-driven approach, we identify two domains that LMs do not capture well: social/emotional intelligence and physical commonsense. We validate these findings with human behavioral experiments and hypothesize that the gap is due to insufficient representations of social/emotional and physical knowledge in LMs. Our results show that fine-tuning LMs on these domains can improve their alignment with human brain responses.


EASI: Evolutionary Adversarial Simulator Identification for Sim-to-Real Transfer

Evolutionary adversarial simulator identification;reinforcement learning;sim-to-real transfer

Summary: We introduce a novel approach of Evolutionary Adversarial Simulator Identification (EASI) by combining Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and Evolutionary Strategy (ES) to address sim-to-real challenges.

Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) controllers have demonstrated remarkable performance in complex robot control tasks. However, the presence of reality gap often leads to poor performance when deploying policies trained in simulation directly onto real robots. Previous sim-to-real algorithms like Domain Randomization (DR) requires domain-specific expertise and suffers from issues such as reduced control performance and high training costs. In this work, we introduce Evolutionary Adversarial Simulator Identification (EASI), a novel approach that combines Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and Evolutionary Strategy (ES) to address sim-to-real challenges. Specifically, we consider the problem of sim-to-real as a search problem, where ES acts as a generator in adversarial competition with a neural network discriminator, aiming to find physical parameter distributions that make the state transitions between simulation and reality as similar as possible. The discriminator serves as the fitness function, guiding the evolution of the physical parameter distributions. EASI features simplicity, low cost, and high fidelity, enabling the construction of a more realistic simulator with minimal requirements for real-world data, thus aiding in transferring simulated-trained policies to the real world. We demonstrate the performance of EASI in both sim-to-sim and sim-to-real tasks, showing superior performance compared to existing sim-to-real algorithms.


Membership Inference on Text-to-Image Diffusion Models via Conditional Likelihood Discrepancy

Diffusion models;Membership inference;Conditional Likelihood;Text-to-Image Synthesis

Summary: We propose a membership inference method on text-to-image diffusion models via condition likelihood discrepancy, outperforming previous works on diverse datasets, with superior resistance against early stopping and data augmentation.

Abstract: Text-to-image diffusion models have achieved tremendous success in the field of controllable image generation, while also coming along with issues of privacy leakage and data copyrights. Membership inference arises in these contexts as a potential auditing method for detecting unauthorized data usage. While some efforts have been made on diffusion models, they are not applicable to text-to-image diffusion models due to the high computation overhead and enhanced generalization capabilities. In this paper, we first identify a conditional overfitting phenomenon in text-to-image diffusion models, indicating that these models tend to overfit the conditional distribution of images given the corresponding text rather than the marginal distribution of images only. Based on this observation, we derive an analytical indicator, namely Conditional Likelihood Discrepancy (CLiD), to perform membership inference, which reduces the stochasticity in estimating memorization of individual samples. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous methods across various data distributions and dataset scales. Additionally, our method shows superior resistance to overfitting mitigation strategies, such as early stopping and data augmentation.


On the Benefits of Public Representations for Private Transfer Learning under Distribution Shift

Summary: We show that contrary to prior concerns, public features can be extremely helpful in private transfer learning even when the transfer task is significantly out of distribution. We propose a theoretical model to support our empirical results.

Abstract: Public pretraining is a promising approach to improve differentially private model training. However, recent work has noted that many positive research results studying this paradigm only consider in-distribution tasks, and may not apply to settings where there is distribution shift between the pretraining and finetuning data---a scenario that is likely when finetuning private tasks due to the sensitive nature of the data. In this work, we show empirically across three tasks that even in settings with large distribution shift, where both zero-shot performance from public data and training from scratch with private data give unusably weak results, public features can in fact improve private training accuracy by up to 67% over private training from scratch. We provide a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon, showing that if the public and private data share a low-dimensional representation, public representations can improve the sample complexity of private training even if it is \emph{impossible} to learn the private task from the public data alone. Altogether, our results provide evidence that public data can indeed make private training practical in realistic settings of extreme distribution shift.


On Mesa-Optimization in Autoregressively Trained Transformers: Emergence and Capability

Mesa-Optimization;In-context learning;Autoregressive pretraining;Non-convex optimization;Learning theory;Transformers

Summary: Towards understanding the mechanisms underlying the in-context learning from autoregressive pretraining by rigorously verifying the mesa-optimization hypothesis.

Abstract:
Autoregressively trained transformers have brought a profound revolution to the world, especially with their in-context learning (ICL) ability to address downstream tasks. Recently, several studies suggest that transformers learn a mesa-optimizer during autoregressive (AR) pretraining to implement ICL. Namely, the forward pass of the trained transformer is equivalent to optimizing an inner objective function in-context. However, whether the practical non-convex training dynamics will converge to the ideal mesa-optimizer is still unclear. Towards filling this gap, we investigate the non-convex dynamics of a one-layer linear causal self-attention model autoregressively trained by gradient flow, where the sequences are generated by an AR process
x
t
+
1
=
W
x
t
. First, under a certain condition of data distribution, we prove that an autoregressively trained transformer learns
W
by implementing one step of gradient descent to minimize an ordinary least squares (OLS) problem in-context. It then applies the learned
W
^
for next-token prediction, thereby verifying the mesa-optimization hypothesis. Next, under the same data conditions, we explore the capability limitations of the obtained mesa-optimizer. We show that a stronger assumption related to the moments of data is the sufficient and necessary condition that the learned mesa-optimizer recovers the distribution. Besides, we conduct exploratory analyses beyond the first data condition and prove that generally, the trained transformer will not perform vanilla gradient descent for the OLS problem. Finally, our simulation results verify the theoretical results.


Zero-Shot Event-Intensity Asymmetric Stereo via Visual Prompting from Image Domain

Event cameras;stereo matching;asymetric stereo;visual prompting;disparity filtering

Summary: We propose a zero-shot event-intensity asymmetric stereo method that adapts large-scale image domain models by using physical inspired visual prompting and a monocular cue-guided disparity refinement  technique.

Abstract: Event-intensity asymmetric stereo systems have emerged as a promising approach for robust 3D perception in dynamic and challenging environments by integrating event cameras with frame-based sensors in different views. However, existing methods often suffer from overfitting and poor generalization due to limited dataset sizes and lack of scene diversity in the event domain. To address these issues, we propose a zero-shot framework that utilizes monocular depth estimation and stereo matching models pretrained on diverse image datasets. Our approach introduces a visual prompting technique to align the representations of frames and events, allowing the use of off-the-shelf stereo models without additional training. Furthermore, we introduce a monocular cue-guided disparity refinement module to improve robustness across static and dynamic regions by incorporating monocular depth information from foundation models. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superior zero-shot evaluation performance and enhanced generalization ability of our method compared to existing approaches.


PuLID: Pure and Lightning ID Customization via Contrastive Alignment

diffusion;controllable image generation;image customization

Summary: We introduce PuLID, a tuning-free ID customization approach. PuLID maintains high ID fidelity while effectively reducing interference with the original model's behavior

Abstract: We propose Pure and Lightning ID customization (PuLID), a novel tuning-free ID customization method for text-to-image generation. By incorporating a Lightning T2I branch with a standard diffusion one, PuLID introduces both contrastive alignment loss and accurate ID loss, minimizing disruption to the original model and ensuring high ID fidelity. Experiments show that PuLID achieves superior performance in both ID fidelity and editability. Another attractive property of PuLID is that the image elements (\eg, background, lighting, composition, and style) before and after the ID insertion are kept as consistent as possible. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/ToTheBeginning/PuLID


Bayesian Online Natural Gradient (BONG)

online learning;Bayesian neural networks;variational inference;natural gradient descent

Summary: We improve on online variational Bayes using natural gradient descent on expected log-likelihood.

Abstract: We propose a novel approach to sequential Bayesian inference based on variational Bayes (VB). The key insight is that, in the online setting, we do not need to add the KL term to regularize to the prior (which comes from the posterior at the previous timestep); instead we can optimize just the expected log-likelihood, performing a single step of natural gradient descent starting at the prior predictive. We prove this method recovers exact Bayesian inference if the model is conjugate. We also show how to compute an efficient deterministic approximation to the VB objective, as well as our simplified objective, when the variational distribution is Gaussian or a sub-family, including the case of a diagonal plus low-rank precision matrix. We show empirically that our method outperforms other online VB methods in the non-conjugate setting, such as online learning for neural networks, especially when controlling for computational costs.


FuseFL: One-Shot Federated Learning through the Lens of Causality with Progressive Model Fusion

Summary: This work identifies the cause of low performance of one-shot FL, and proposes FuseFL to progressively train and fuses DNN model following a bottom-up manner, reducing communication costs to an extremely low degree.

Abstract: One-shot Federated Learning (OFL) significantly reduces communication costs in FL by aggregating trained models only once. However, the performance of advanced OFL methods is far behind the normal FL. In this work, we provide a causal view to find that this performance drop of OFL methods comes from the isolation problem, which means that local isolatedly trained models in OFL may easily fit to spurious correlations due to the data heterogeneity. From the causal perspective, we observe that the spurious fitting can be alleviated by augmenting intermediate features from other clients. Built upon our observation, we propose a novel learning approach to endow OFL with superb performance and low communication and storage costs, termed as FuseFL. Specifically, FuseFL decomposes neural networks into several blocks, and progressively trains and fuses each block following a bottom-up manner for feature augmentation, introducing no additional communication costs. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that FuseFL outperforms existing OFL and ensemble FL by a significant margin. We conduct comprehensive experiments to show that FuseFL supports high scalability of clients, heterogeneous model training, and low memory costs. Our work is the first attempt using causality to analyze and alleviate data heterogeneity of OFL.


Distributionally Robust Performative Prediction

performative prediction;distributionally robust learning;misspecification;distribution shift

Summary: This work designs a robust learning framework to better approximate the true performative optimum in the presence of distribution map misspecification.

Abstract: Performative prediction aims to model scenarios where predictive outcomes subsequently influence the very systems they target. The pursuit of a performative optimum (PO)—minimizing performative risk—is generally reliant on modeling of the distribution map, which characterizes how a deployed ML model alters the data distribution. Unfortunately, inevitable misspecification of the distribution map can lead to a poor approximation of the true PO. To address this issue, we introduce a novel framework of distributionally robust performative prediction and study a new solution concept termed as distributionally robust performative optimum (DRPO). We show provable guarantees for DRPO as a robust approximation to the true PO when the nominal distribution map is different from the actual one. Moreover, distributionally robust performative prediction can be reformulated as an augmented performative prediction problem, enabling efficient optimization. The experimental results demonstrate that DRPO offers potential advantages over traditional PO approach when the distribution map is misspecified at either micro- or macro-level.


A Theory of Optimistically Universal Online Learnability for General Concept Classes

Abstract: We provide a full characterization of the concept classes that are optimistically universally online learnable with {0, 1} labels. The notion of optimistically universal online learning was defined in [Hanneke, 2021] in order to understand learnability under minimal assumptions. In this paper, following the philosophy behind that work, we investigate two questions, namely, for every concept class: (1) What are the minimal assumptions on the data process admitting online learnability? (2) Is there a learning algorithm which succeeds under every data process satisfying the minimal assumptions? Such an algorithm is said to be optimistically universal for the given concept class. We resolve both of these questions for all concept classes, and moreover, as part of our solution we design general learning algorithms for each case. Finally, we extend these algorithms and results to the agnostic case, showing an equivalence between the minimal assumptions on the data process for learnability in the agnostic and realizable cases, for every concept class, as well as the equivalence of optimistically universal learnability.


Efficient Streaming Algorithms for Graphlet Sampling

Summary: We have developed an efficient algorithm that enables random and uniform sampling of graphlets from large input graphs in the semi-streaming setting with limited memory.

Abstract:
Given a graph
G
and a positive integer
k
, the Graphlet Sampling problem asks to sample a connected induced
k
-vertex subgraph of
G
uniformly at random. Graphlet sampling enhances machine learning applications by transforming graph structures into feature vectors for tasks such as graph classification and subgraph identification, boosting neural network performance, and supporting clustered federated learning by capturing local structures and relationships. A recent work has shown that the problem admits an algorithm that preprocesses
G
in time
O
(
n
k
2
log

k
+
m
)
, and draws one sample in expected time
k
O
(
k
)
log

n
, where
n
=
|
V
(
G
)
|
and
m
=
|
E
(
G
)
|
. Such an algorithm relies on the assumption that the input graph fits into main memory and it does not seem to be straightforward to adapt it to very large graphs. We consider Graphlet Sampling in the semi-streaming setting, where we have a memory of
M
=
Ω
(
n
log

n
)
words, and
G
can be only read through sequential passes over the edge list. We develop a semi-streaming algorithm that preprocesses
G
in
p
=
O
(
log

n
)
passes and samples
Θ
(
M
k
−
O
(
k
)
)
independent uniform
k
-graphlets in
O
(
k
)
passes. For constant
k
, both phases run in time
O
(
(
n
+
m
)
log

n
)
. We also show that the tradeoff between memory and number of passes of our algorithms is near-optimal. Our extensive evaluation on very large graphs shows the effectiveness of our algorithms.


Data Mixture Inference Attack: BPE Tokenizers Reveal Training Data Compositions

Summary: We infer the training data mixtures of tokenizers from their merge lists.

Abstract: The pretraining data of today's strongest language models remains opaque, even when their parameters are open-sourced. In particular, little is known about the proportions of different domains, languages, or code represented in the data. While a long line of membership inference attacks aim to identify training examples on an instance level, they do not extend easily to global statistics about the corpus. In this work, we tackle a task which we call data mixture inference, which aims to uncover the distributional make-up of the pretraining data. We introduce a novel attack based on a previously overlooked source of information — byte-pair encoding (BPE) tokenizers, used by the vast majority of modern language models. Our key insight is that the ordered vocabulary learned by a BPE tokenizer naturally reveals information about the token frequencies in its training data: the first token is the most common byte pair, the second is the most common pair after merging the first token, and so on. Given a tokenizer's merge list along with data samples for each category of interest (e.g., different natural languages), we formulate a linear program that solves for the relative proportion of each category in the tokenizer's training set. Importantly, to the extent to which tokenizer training data is representative of the pretraining data, we indirectly learn about the pretraining data. In controlled experiments, we show that our attack can recover mixture ratios with high precision for tokenizers trained on known mixtures of natural languages, programming languages, and data sources. We then apply our approach to off-the-shelf tokenizers released alongside recent LMs. We confirm much publicly disclosed information about these models, and also make several new inferences: GPT-4o is much more multilingual than its predecessors, training on 10x more non-English data than GPT-3.5, Llama 3 and Claude are trained on predominantly code, and many recent models are trained on 7-16% books. We hope our work sheds light on current design practices for pretraining data, and inspires continued research into data mixture inference for LMs.


Event-3DGS: Event-based 3D Reconstruction Using 3D Gaussian Splatting

Event Camera;Event-based vision;3D reconstruction;3D gaussian spallating

Summary: We introduce a novel reconstruction algorithm achieving high-quality scene reconstruction from Event data under low-light, high-speed conditions.

Abstract: Event cameras, offering high temporal resolution and high dynamic range, have brought a new perspective to addressing 3D reconstruction challenges in fast-motion and low-light scenarios. Most methods use the Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) for event-based photorealistic 3D reconstruction. However, these NeRF methods suffer from time-consuming training and inference, as well as limited scene-editing capabilities of implicit representations. To address these problems, we propose Event-3DGS, the first event-based reconstruction using 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) for synthesizing novel views freely from event streams. Technically, we first propose an event-based 3DGS framework that directly processes event data and reconstructs 3D scenes by simultaneously optimizing scenario and sensor parameters. Then, we present a high-pass filter-based photovoltage estimation module, which effectively reduces noise in event data to improve the robustness of our method in real-world scenarios. Finally, we design an event-based 3D reconstruction loss to optimize the parameters of our method for better reconstruction quality. The results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of reconstruction quality on both simulated and real-world datasets. We also verify that our method can perform robust 3D reconstruction even in real-world scenarios with extreme noise, fast motion, and low-light conditions. Our code is available in https://github.com/lanpokn/Event-3DGS.


Sample Complexity of Posted Pricing for a Single Item

Summary: We obtain tight bounds on the sample complexity of posted pricing for a single item, for both independent and correlated distributions on the buyers' values.

Abstract:
Selling a single item to
n
self-interested bidders is a fundamental problem in economics, where the two objectives typically considered are welfare maximization and revenue maximization. Since the optimal auctions are often impractical and do not work for sequential bidders, posted pricing auctions, where fixed prices are set for the item for different bidders, have emerged as a practical and effective alternative. This paper investigates how many samples are needed from bidders' value distributions to find near-optimal posted prices, considering both independent and correlated bidder distributions, and welfare versus revenue maximization. We obtain matching upper and lower bounds (up to logarithmic terms) on the sample complexity for all these settings.


MDAgents: An Adaptive Collaboration of LLMs for Medical Decision-Making

Medical Decision Making;Multi-Agent Collaboration

Summary: MDAgents, a framework that adapts the collaboration of LLMs for complex medical decision-making, improving performance on major medical benchmarks

Abstract:
Foundation models are becoming valuable tools in medicine. Yet despite their promise, the best way to leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) in complex medical tasks remains an open question. We introduce a novel multi-agent framework, named Medical Decision-making Agents (MDAgents) that helps to address this gap by automatically assigning a collaboration structure to a team of LLMs. The assigned solo or group collaboration structure is tailored to the medical task at hand, a simple emulation inspired by the way real-world medical decision-making processes are adapted to tasks of different complexities. We evaluate our framework and baseline methods using state-of-the-art LLMs across a suite of real-world medical knowledge and clinical diagnosis benchmarks, including a comparison of LLMs’ medical complexity classification against human physicians. MDAgents achieved the best performance in seven out of ten benchmarks on tasks requiring an understanding of medical knowledge and multi-modal reasoning, showing a significant improvement of up to 4.2% (
p
< 0.05) compared to previous methods' best performances. Ablation studies reveal that MDAgents effectively determines medical complexity to optimize for efficiency and accuracy across diverse medical tasks. Notably, the combination of moderator review and external medical knowledge in group collaboration resulted in an average accuracy improvement of 11.8%. Our code can be found at https://github.com/mitmedialab/MDAgents.


Hierarchy-Agnostic Unsupervised Segmentation: Parsing Semantic Image Structure

Unsupervised Hierarchical Segmentation;Spectral Clustering;Self-Supervised Feature Extraction;Semantic Region Tree

Summary: Our method creates a hierarchy-agnostic semantic region tree from image pixels, offering nuanced segmentation without predefined hierarchies, scaling effectively across datasets.

Abstract: Unsupervised semantic segmentation aims to discover groupings within images, capturing objects' view-invariance without external supervision. Moreover, this task is inherently ambiguous due to the varying levels of semantic granularity. Existing methods often bypass this ambiguity using dataset-specific priors. In our research, we address this ambiguity head-on and provide a universal tool for pixel-level semantic parsing of images guided by the latent representations encoded in self-supervised models. We introduce a novel algebraic approach that recursively decomposes an image into nested subgraphs, dynamically estimating their count and ensuring clear separation. The innovative approach identifies scene-specific primitives and constructs a hierarchy-agnostic tree of semantic regions from the image pixels. The model captures fine and coarse semantic details, producing a nuanced and unbiased segmentation. We present a new metric for estimating the quality of the semantic segmentation of discovered elements on different levels of the hierarchy. The metric validates the intrinsic nature of the compositional relations among parts, objects, and scenes in a hierarchy-agnostic domain. Our results prove the power of this methodology, uncovering semantic regions without prior definitions and scaling effectively across various datasets. This robust framework for unsupervised image segmentation proves more accurate semantic hierarchical relationships between scene elements than traditional algorithms. The experiments underscore its potential for broad applicability in image analysis tasks, showcasing its ability to deliver a detailed and unbiased segmentation that surpasses existing unsupervised methods.


Spectral Graph Pruning Against Over-Squashing and Over-Smoothing

graph neural networks;rewiring;spectral gap optimization;over-smoothing;over-squashing;lottery tickets

Summary: By deleting edges of a graph that maximize the spectral gap, we jointly address over-smoothing and over-squashing in GNNs.

Abstract: Message Passing Graph Neural Networks are known to suffer from two problems that are sometimes believed to be diametrically opposed: over-squashing and over-smoothing. The former results from topological bottlenecks that hamper the information flow from distant nodes and are mitigated by spectral gap maximization, primarily, by means of edge additions. However, such additions often promote over-smoothing that renders nodes of different classes less distinguishable. Inspired by the Braess phenomenon, we argue that deleting edges can address over-squashing and over-smoothing simultaneously. This insight explains how edge deletions can improve generalization, thus connecting spectral gap optimization to a seemingly disconnected objective of reducing computational resources by pruning graphs for lottery tickets. To this end, we propose a computationally effective spectral gap optimization framework to add or delete edges and demonstrate its effectiveness on the long range graph benchmark and on larger heterophilous datasets.


FM-Delta: Lossless Compression for Storing Massive Fine-tuned Foundation Models

model compression;lossless compression;cloud storage

Summary: To mitigate cloud model storage overhead, we propose a novel lossless compression scheme FM-Delta to compress massive fine-tuned models stored in cloud, significantly saving cloud storage costs.

Abstract: Pre-trained foundation models, particularly large language models, have achieved remarkable success and led to massive fine-tuned variants. These models are commonly fine-tuned locally and then uploaded by users to cloud platforms such as HuggingFace for secure storage. However, the huge model number and their billion-level parameters impose heavy storage overhead for cloud with limited resources. Our empirical and theoretical analysis reveals that most fine-tuned models in cloud have a small difference (delta) from their pre-trained models. To this end, we propose a novel lossless compression scheme FM-Delta specifically for storing massive fine-tuned models in cloud. FM-Delta maps fine-tuned and pre-trained model parameters into integers with the same bits, and entropy codes their integer delta. In this way, cloud only needs to store one uncompressed pre-trained model and other compressed fine-tuned models. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that FM-Delta efficiently reduces cloud storage consumption for massive fine-tuned models by an average of around 50% with only negligible additional time in most end-to-end cases. For example, on up to 10 fine-tuned models in the GPT-NeoX-20B family, FM-Delta reduces the original storage requirement from 423GB to 205GB, significantly saving cloud storage costs.


Novel Object Synthesis via Adaptive Text-Image Harmony

Text-to-image Generation; Diffusion Model; Object Editing; Combination

Summary: ATIH

Abstract:
In this paper, we study an object synthesis task that combines an object text with an object image to create a new object image. However, most diffusion models struggle with this task, \textit{i.e.}, often generating an object that predominantly reflects either the text or the image due to an imbalance between their inputs. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective method called Adaptive Text-Image Harmony (ATIH) to generate novel and surprising objects. First, we introduce a scale factor and an injection step to balance text and image features in cross-attention and to preserve image information in self-attention during the text-image inversion diffusion process, respectively. Second, to better integrate object text and image, we design a balanced loss function with a noise parameter, ensuring both optimal editability and fidelity of the object image. Third, to adaptively adjust these parameters, we present a novel similarity score function that not only maximizes the similarities between the generated object image and the input text/image but also balances these similarities to harmonize text and image integration.
Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, showcasing remarkable object creations such as colobus-glass jar. https://xzr52.github.io/ATIH/


Learning Noisy Halfspaces with a Margin: Massart is No Harder than Random

pac learning;learning halfspaces;massart noise;sgd;robust learning

Summary: We give a simple efficient algorithm for learning halfspaces with Massart noise.

Abstract:
We study the problem of PAC learning
γ
-margin halfspaces with Massart noise. We propose a simple proper learning algorithm, the Perspectron, that has sample complexity
O
~
(
(
ϵ
γ
)
−
2
)
and achieves classification error at most
η
+
ϵ
where
η
is the Massart noise rate. Prior works (DGT19, CKMY20) came with worse sample complexity guarantees (in both
ϵ
and
γ
) or could only handle random classification noise (DDKWZ23,KITBMV23)--- a much milder noise assumption. We also show that our results extend to the more challenging setting of learning generalized linear models with a known link function under Massart noise, achieving a similar sample complexity to the halfspace case. This significantly improves upon the prior state-of-the-art in this setting due to CKMY20, who introduced this model.


STONE: A Submodular Optimization Framework for Active 3D Object Detection

Summary: Unified active 3D object detection framework based on submodular optimization.

Abstract: 3D object detection is fundamentally important for various emerging applications, including autonomous driving and robotics. A key requirement for training an accurate 3D object detector is the availability of a large amount of LiDAR-based point cloud data. Unfortunately, labeling point cloud data is extremely challenging, as accurate 3D bounding boxes and semantic labels are required for each potential object. This paper proposes a unified active 3D object detection framework, for greatly reducing the labeling cost of training 3D object detectors. Our framework is based on a novel formulation of submodular optimization, specifically tailored to the problem of active 3D object detection. In particular, we address two fundamental challenges associated with active 3D object detection: data imbalance and the need to cover the distribution of the data, including LiDAR-based point cloud data of varying difficulty levels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with high computational efficiency compared to existing active learning methods. The code is available at https://github.com/RuiyuM/STONE


Data subsampling for Poisson regression with pth-root-link

Summary: We show novel results on data subsampling for approximating Poisson regression via coresets, as well as their limitations.

Abstract:
We develop and analyze data subsampling techniques for Poisson regression, the standard model for count data
y
∈
N
. In particular, we consider the Poisson generalized linear model with ID- and square root-link functions. We consider the method of \emph{coresets}, which are small weighted subsets that approximate the loss function of Poisson regression up to a factor of
1
±
ε
. We show
Ω
(
n
)
lower bounds against coresets for Poisson regression that continue to hold against arbitrary data reduction techniques up to logarithmic factors. By introducing a novel complexity parameter and a domain shifting approach, we show that sublinear coresets with
1
±
ε
approximation guarantee exist when the complexity parameter is small. In particular, the dependence on the number of input points can be reduced to polylogarithmic. We show that the dependence on other input parameters can also be bounded sublinearly, though not always logarithmically. In particular, we show that the square root-link admits an
O
(
log

(
y
max
)
)
dependence, where
y
max
denotes the largest count presented in the data, while the ID-link requires a
Θ
(
y
max
/
log

(
y
max
)
)
dependence. As an auxiliary result for proving the tightness of the bound with respect to
y
max
in the case of the ID-link, we show an improved bound on the principal branch of the Lambert
W
0
function, which may be of independent interest. We further show the limitations of our analysis when
p
th degree root-link functions for
p
≥
3
are considered, which indicate that other analytical or computational methods would be required if such a generalization is even possible.


Dual Defense: Enhancing Privacy and Mitigating Poisoning Attacks in Federated Learning

federated learning;privacy preservation;secure aggregation;model poisoning attack

Summary: This paper presents a dual defense approach for enhancing privacy and mitigating poisoning attacks at once in federated learning

Abstract: Federated learning (FL) is inherently susceptible to privacy breaches and poisoning attacks. To tackle these challenges, researchers have separately devised secure aggregation mechanisms to protect data privacy and robust aggregation methods that withstand poisoning attacks. However, simultaneously addressing both concerns is challenging; secure aggregation facilitates poisoning attacks as most anomaly detection techniques require access to unencrypted local model updates, which are obscured by secure aggregation. Few recent efforts to simultaneously tackle both challenges offen depend on impractical assumption of non-colluding two-server setups that disrupt FL's topology, or three-party computation which introduces scalability issues, complicating deployment and application. To overcome this dilemma, this paper introduce a Dual Defense Federated learning (DDFed) framework. DDFed simultaneously boosts privacy protection and mitigates poisoning attacks, without introducing new participant roles or disrupting the existing FL topology. DDFed initially leverages cutting-edge fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) to securely aggregate model updates, without the impractical requirement for non-colluding two-server setups and ensures strong privacy protection. Additionally, we proposes a unique two-phase anomaly detection mechanism for encrypted model updates, featuring secure similarity computation and feedback-driven collaborative selection, with additional measures to prevent potential privacy breaches from Byzantine clients incorporated into the detection process. We conducted extensive experiments on various model poisoning attacks and FL scenarios, including both cross-device and cross-silo FL. Experiments on publicly available datasets demonstrate that DDFed successfully protects model privacy and effectively defends against model poisoning threats.


Enhancing Feature Diversity Boosts Channel-Adaptive Vision Transformers

vision transformer;representation learning;multi-channel imaging

Summary: We enhance Vision Transformers for multi-channel imaging by improving diverse representations.

Abstract: Multi-Channel Imaging (MCI) contains an array of challenges for encoding useful feature representations not present in traditional images. For example, images from two different satellites may both contain RGB channels, but the remaining channels can be different for each imaging source. Thus, MCI models must support a variety of channel configurations at test time. Recent work has extended traditional visual encoders for MCI, such as Vision Transformers (ViT), by supplementing pixel information with an encoding representing the channel configuration. However, these methods treat each channel equally, i.e., they do not consider the unique properties of each channel type, which can result in needless and potentially harmful redundancies in the learned features. For example, if RGB channels are always present, the other channels can focus on extracting information that cannot be captured by the RGB channels. To this end, we propose DiChaViT, which aims to enhance the diversity in the learned features of MCI-ViT models. This is achieved through a novel channel sampling strategy that encourages the selection of more distinct channel sets for training. Additionally, we employ regularization and initialization techniques to increase the likelihood that new information is learned from each channel. Many of our improvements are architecture agnostic and can be incorporated into new architectures as they are developed. Experiments on both satellite and cell microscopy datasets, CHAMMI, JUMP-CP, and So2Sat, report DiChaViT yields a 1.5 - 5.0% gain over the state-of-the-art. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/chaudatascience/diverse_channel_vit.


Rethinking the Power of Timestamps for Robust Time Series Forecasting: A Global-Local Fusion Perspective

Summary: We propose a plugin to enhance the robust prediction capability of time series forecasting backbones in the real world.

Abstract: Time series forecasting has played a pivotal role across various industries, including finance, transportation, energy, healthcare, and climate. Due to the abundant seasonal information they contain, timestamps possess the potential to offer robust global guidance for forecasting techniques. However, existing works primarily focus on local observations, with timestamps being treated merely as an optional supplement that remains underutilized. When data gathered from the real world is polluted, the absence of global information will damage the robust prediction capability of these algorithms. To address these problems, we propose a novel framework named GLAFF. Within this framework, the timestamps are modeled individually to capture the global dependencies. Working as a plugin, GLAFF adaptively adjusts the combined weights for global and local information, enabling seamless collaboration with any time series forecasting backbone. Extensive experiments conducted on nine real-world datasets demonstrate that GLAFF significantly enhances the average performance of widely used mainstream forecasting models by 12.5%, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art method by 5.5%.


CRT-Fusion: Camera, Radar, Temporal Fusion Using Motion Information for 3D Object Detection

3D Object Detection;Sensor Fusion;Temporal Fusion;Radar;Camera

Summary: CRT-Fusion is a novel framework that significantly improves the accuracy and robustness of 3D object detection by effectively integrating radar-camera information and temporal cues, explicitly considering the motion of dynamic objects.

Abstract: Accurate and robust 3D object detection is a critical component in autonomous vehicles and robotics. While recent radar-camera fusion methods have made significant progress by fusing information in the bird's-eye view (BEV) representation, they often struggle to effectively capture the motion of dynamic objects, leading to limited performance in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we introduce CRT-Fusion, a novel framework that integrates temporal information into radar-camera fusion to address this challenge. Our approach comprises three key modules: Multi-View Fusion (MVF), Motion Feature Estimator (MFE), and Motion Guided Temporal Fusion (MGTF). The MVF module fuses radar and image features within both the camera view and bird's-eye view, thereby generating a more precise unified BEV representation. The MFE module conducts two simultaneous tasks: estimation of pixel-wise velocity information and BEV segmentation. Based on the velocity and the occupancy score map obtained from the MFE module, the MGTF module aligns and fuses feature maps across multiple timestamps in a recurrent manner. By considering the motion of dynamic objects, CRT-Fusion can produce robust BEV feature maps, thereby improving detection accuracy and robustness. Extensive evaluations on the challenging nuScenes dataset demonstrate that CRT-Fusion achieves state-of-the-art performance for radar-camera-based 3D object detection. Our approach outperforms the previous best method in terms of NDS by +1.7%, while also surpassing the leading approach in mAP by +1.4%. These significant improvements in both metrics showcase the effectiveness of our proposed fusion strategy in enhancing the reliability and accuracy of 3D object detection.


SHMT: Self-supervised Hierarchical Makeup Transfer via Latent Diffusion Models

Makeup transfer;self-supervised learning;diffusion models

Summary: We propose a self-supervised hierarchical makeup transfer method that is flexible for both simple and complex makeup styles.

Abstract: This paper studies the challenging task of makeup transfer, which aims to apply diverse makeup styles precisely and naturally to a given facial image. Due to the absence of paired data, current methods typically synthesize sub-optimal pseudo ground truths to guide the model training, resulting in low makeup fidelity. Additionally, different makeup styles generally have varying effects on the person face, but existing methods struggle to deal with this diversity. To address these issues, we propose a novel Self-supervised Hierarchical Makeup Transfer (SHMT) method via latent diffusion models. Following a "decoupling-and-reconstruction" paradigm, SHMT works in a self-supervised manner, freeing itself from the misguidance of imprecise pseudo-paired data. Furthermore, to accommodate a variety of makeup styles, hierarchical texture details are decomposed via a Laplacian pyramid and selectively introduced to the content representation. Finally, we design a novel Iterative Dual Alignment (IDA) module that dynamically adjusts the injection condition of the diffusion model, allowing the alignment errors caused by the domain gap between content and makeup representations to be corrected. Extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our code is available at https://github.com/Snowfallingplum/SHMT.


SE(3)-bi-equivariant Transformers for Point Cloud Assembly

equivariant neural networks;SE(3)-bi-equivariant transformer;point cloud assembly

Summary: A SE(3)-bi-equivariant and correspondence-free method for point cloud assembly.

Abstract:
Given a pair of point clouds, the goal of assembly is to recover a rigid transformation that aligns one point cloud to the other. This task is challenging because the point clouds may be non-overlapped, and they may have arbitrary initial positions. To address these difficulties, we propose a method, called
S
E
(
3
)
-bi-equivariant transformer (BITR), based on the
S
E
(
3
)
-bi-equivariance prior of the task:it guarantees that when the inputs are rigidly perturbed, the output will transform accordingly. Due to its equivariance property, BITR can not only handle non-overlapped PCs, but also guarantee robustness against initial positions. Specifically, BITR first extracts features of the inputs using a novel
S
E
(
3
)
×
S
E
(
3
)
-transformer, and then projects the learned feature to group
S
E
(
3
)
as the output. Moreover, we theoretically show that swap and scale equivariances can be incorporated into BITR, thus it further guarantees stable performance under scaling and swapping the inputs. We experimentally show the effectiveness of BITR in practical tasks.


QuanTA: Efficient High-Rank Fine-Tuning of LLMs with Quantum-Informed Tensor Adaptation

Summary: We propose Quantum-informed Tensor Adaptation (QuanTA), a novel, easy-to-implement, high-rank fine-tuning method with no inference overhead for large-scale pre-trained language models.

Abstract: We propose Quantum-informed Tensor Adaptation (QuanTA), a novel, easy-to-implement, fine-tuning method with no inference overhead for large-scale pre-trained language models. By leveraging quantum-inspired methods derived from quantum circuit structures, QuanTA enables efficient high-rank fine-tuning, surpassing the limitations of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA)---low-rank approximation may fail for complicated downstream tasks. Our approach is theoretically supported by the universality theorem and the rank representation theorem to achieve efficient high-rank adaptations. Experiments demonstrate that QuanTA significantly enhances commonsense reasoning, arithmetic reasoning, and scalability compared to traditional methods. Furthermore, QuanTA shows superior performance with fewer trainable parameters compared to other approaches and can be designed to integrate with existing fine-tuning algorithms for further improvement, providing a scalable and efficient solution for fine-tuning large language models and advancing state-of-the-art in natural language processing.


Revisiting K-mer Profile for Effective and Scalable Genome Representation Learning

metagenomic binning;genome representation learning;dna sequences;genome analysis

Summary: We propose a lightweight and scalable model for performing metagenomic binning at the genome read level, relying only on the  k-mer compositions of the DNA fragments.

Abstract: Obtaining effective representations of DNA sequences is crucial for genome analysis. Metagenomic binning, for instance, relies on genome representations to cluster complex mixtures of DNA fragments from biological samples with the aim of determining their microbial compositions. In this paper, we revisit k-mer-based representations of genomes and provide a theoretical analysis of their use in representation learning. Based on the analysis, we propose a lightweight and scalable model for performing metagenomic binning at the genome read level, relying only on the k-mer compositions of the DNA fragments. We compare the model to recent genome foundation models and demonstrate that while the models are comparable in performance, the proposed model is significantly more effective in terms of scalability, a crucial aspect for performing metagenomic binning of real-world data sets.


Last-Iterate Convergence for Generalized Frank-Wolfe in Monotone Variational Inequalities

Monotone variational inequalities;generalized Frank-Wolfe method;last-iterate convergence;smoothed fictitious-play

Summary: This paper establishes last-iterate convergence rate for a generalized Frank-Wolfe algorithm for solving monotone variational inequality problems.

Abstract: We study the convergence behavior of a generalized Frank-Wolfe algorithm in constrained (stochastic) monotone variational inequality (MVI) problems. In recent years, there have been numerous efforts to design algorithms for solving constrained MVI problems due to their connections with optimization, machine learning, and equilibrium computation in games. Most work in this domain has focused on extensions of simultaneous gradient play, with particular emphasis on understanding the convergence properties of extragradient and optimistic gradient methods. In contrast, we examine the performance of an algorithm from another well-known class of optimization algorithms: Frank-Wolfe. We show that a generalized variant of this algorithm achieves a fast $\mathcal{O}(T^{-1/2})$ last-iterate convergence rate in constrained MVI problems. By drawing connections between our generalized Frank-Wolfe algorithm and the well-known smoothed fictitious play (FP) from game theory, we also derive a finite-sample convergence rate for smoothed FP in zero-sum matrix games. Furthermore, we demonstrate that a stochastic variant of the generalized Frank-Wolfe algorithm for MVI problems also converges in a last-iterate sense, albeit at a slower $\mathcal{O}(T^{-1/6})$ convergence rate.


Elliptical Attention

attention;non-parametric kernel regression;robustness;representation collapse

Summary: We show that using a Mahalanobis metric within the attention mechanism reduces representation collapse, and improves robustness to contamination.

Abstract: Pairwise dot-product self-attention is key to the success of transformers that achieve state-of-the-art performance across a variety of applications in language and vision. This dot-product self-attention computes attention weights among the input tokens using Euclidean distance, which makes the model prone to representation collapse and vulnerable to contaminated samples. In this paper, we propose using a Mahalanobis distance metric for computing the attention weights to stretch the underlying feature space in directions of high contextual relevance. In particular, we define a hyper-ellipsoidal neighborhood around each query to increase the attention weights of the tokens lying in the contextually important directions. We term this novel class of attention Elliptical Attention. Our Elliptical Attention provides two benefits: 1) reducing representation collapse and 2) enhancing the model's robustness as the Elliptical Attention pays more attention to contextually relevant information, rather than focusing on some small subset of informative features. We empirically demonstrate the advantages of Elliptical Attention over the baseline dot-product attention and state-of-the-art attention methods on various practical tasks, including object classification, image segmentation, and language modeling across different data modalities.


Fast Tree-Field Integrators: From Low Displacement Rank to Topological Transformers

Tree Metrics;Low Displacement Rank;Field Integrators;Topological Transformers;Graph Theory;Efficient Algorithms on Graphs

Summary: We present a new class of algorithms for the efficient integration of tensor fields defined on weighted trees, with several applications in ML, ranging from mesh modeling to training Topological Transformers.

Abstract: We present a new class of fast polylog-linear algorithms based on the theory of structured matrices (in particular low displacement rank) for integrating tensor fields defined on weighted trees. Several applications of the resulting fast tree-field integrators (FTFIs) are presented, including: (a) approximation of graph metrics with tree metrics, (b) graph classification, (c) modeling on meshes, and finally (d) Topological Transformers (TTs) (Choromanski et al., 2022) for images. For Topological Transformers, we propose new relative position encoding (RPE) masking mechanisms with as few as three extra learnable parameters per Transformer layer, leading to 1.0-1.5%+ accuracy gains. Importantly, most of FTFIs are exact methods, thus numerically equivalent to their brute-force counterparts. When applied to graphs with thousands of nodes, those exact algorithms provide 5.7-13x speedups. We also provide an extensive theoretical analysis of our methods.


3D Structure Prediction of Atomic Systems with Flow-based Direct Preference Optimization

Flow Matching;Direct Preference Optimization;Geometric Graph Neural Networks;Structure Prediction

Summary: We propose FlowDPO, a novel framework to enhance Flow Matching models via Direct Preference Optimization on 3D structure prediction tasks.

Abstract: Predicting high-fidelity 3D structures of atomic systems is a fundamental yet challenging problem in scientific domains. While recent work demonstrates the advantage of generative models in this realm, the exploration of different probability paths are still insufficient, and hallucinations during sampling are persistently occurring. To address these pitfalls, we introduce FlowDPO, a novel framework that explores various probability paths with flow matching models and further suppresses hallucinations using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) for structure generation. Our approach begins with a pre-trained flow matching model to generate multiple candidate structures for each training sample. These structures are then evaluated and ranked based on their distance to the ground truth, resulting in an automatic preference dataset. Using this dataset, we apply DPO to optimize the original model, improving its performance in generating structures closely aligned with the desired reference distribution. As confirmed by our theoretical analysis, such paradigm and objective function are compatible with arbitrary Gaussian paths, exhibiting favorable universality. Extensive experimental results on antibodies and crystals demonstrate substantial benefits of our FlowDPO, highlighting its potential to advance the field of 3D structure prediction with generative models.


Understanding and Improving Training-free Loss-based Diffusion Guidance

Training-free guidance;universal guidance;motion diffusion

Summary: This paper examines the mechanisms and limitations of training-free guidance for diffusion models, proposing methods to address these challenges effectively.

Abstract: Adding additional guidance to pretrained diffusion models has become an increasingly popular research area, with extensive applications in computer vision, reinforcement learning, and AI for science. Recently, several studies have proposed training-free loss-based guidance by using off-the-shelf networks pretrained on clean images. This approach enables zero-shot conditional generation for universal control formats, which appears to offer a free lunch in diffusion guidance. In this paper, we aim to develop a deeper understanding of training-free guidance, as well as overcome its limitations. We offer a theoretical analysis that supports training-free guidance from the perspective of optimization, distinguishing it from classifier-based (or classifier-free) guidance. To elucidate their drawbacks, we theoretically demonstrate that training-free guidance is more susceptible to misaligned gradients and exhibits slower convergence rates compared to classifier guidance. We then introduce a collection of techniques designed to overcome the limitations, accompanied by theoretical rationale and empirical evidence. Our experiments in image and motion generation confirm the efficacy of these techniques.


Effective Rank Analysis and Regularization for Enhanced 3D Gaussian Splatting

3D reconstruction;3D Gaussian Splatting;NeRF;Surface reconstruction;3DGS regularization

Abstract: 3D reconstruction from multi-view images is one of the fundamental challenges in computer vision and graphics. Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a promising technique capable of real-time rendering with high-quality 3D reconstruction. This method utilizes 3D Gaussian representation and tile-based splatting techniques, bypassing the expensive neural field querying. Despite its potential, 3DGS encounters challenges such as needle-like artifacts, suboptimal geometries, and inaccurate normals caused by the Gaussians converging into anisotropic shapes with one dominant variance. We propose using the effective rank analysis to examine the shape statistics of 3D Gaussian primitives, and identify the Gaussians indeed converge into needle-like shapes with the effective rank 1. To address this, we introduce the effective rank as a regularization, which constrains the structure of the Gaussians. Our new regularization method enhances normal and geometry reconstruction while reducing needle-like artifacts. The approach can be integrated as an add-on module to other 3DGS variants, improving their quality without compromising visual fidelity. The project page is available at https://junhahyung.github.io/erankgs.github.io/.


LLaNA: Large Language and NeRF Assistant

Summary: We propose LLaNA, che first Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) able to perform NeRF-language tasks, such as NeRF captioning and NeRF QA.

Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated an excellent understanding of images and 3D data. However, both modalities have shortcomings in holistically capturing the appearance and geometry of objects. Meanwhile, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), which encode information within the weights of a simple Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), have emerged as an increasingly widespread modality that simultaneously encodes the geometry and photorealistic appearance of objects. This paper investigates the feasibility and effectiveness of ingesting NeRF into MLLM. We create LLaNA, the first general-purpose NeRF-language assistant capable of performing new tasks such as NeRF captioning and Q&A. Notably, our method directly processes the weights of the NeRF’s MLP to extract information about the represented objects without the need to render images or materialize 3D data structures. Moreover, we build a dataset of NeRFs with text annotations for various NeRF-language tasks with no human intervention. Based on this dataset, we develop a benchmark to evaluate the NeRF understanding capability of our method. Results show that processing NeRF weights performs favourably against extracting 2D or 3D representations from NeRFs.


Predicting Label Distribution from Ternary Labels

label distribution;label polysemy;multi-label;ternary label

Summary: Our paper proposes to predict label distribution from ternary labels and demonstrates the effectiveness theoretically and methodologically.

Abstract:
Label distribution learning is a powerful learning paradigm to deal with label polysemy and has been widely applied in many practical tasks. A significant obstacle to the effective utilization of label distribution is the substantial expenses of accurate quantifying the label distributions. To tackle this challenge, label enhancement methods automatically infer label distributions from more easily accessible multi-label data based on binary annotations. However, the binary annotation of multi-label data requires experts to accurately assess whether each label can describe the instance, which may diminish the annotating efficiency and heighten the risk of erroneous annotation since the relationship between the label and the instance is unclear in many practical scenarios. Therefore, we propose to predict label distribution from ternary labels, allowing experts to annotate labels in a three-way annotation scheme. They can annotate the label as "
0
" indicating "uncertain relevant" if it is difficult to definitively determine whether the label can describe the instance, in addition to the binary annotation of "
1
" indicating "definitely relevant" and "
−
1
" indicating "definitely irrelevant". Both the theoretical and methodological studies are conducted for the proposed learning paradigm. In the theoretical part, we conduct a quantitative comparison of approximation error between ternary and binary labels to elucidate the superiority of ternary labels over binary labels. In the methodological part, we propose a Categorical distribution with monotonicity and orderliness to model the mapping from label description degrees to ternary labels, which can serve as a loss function or as a probability distribution, allowing most existing label enhancement methods to be adapted to our task. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal.


Deep linear networks for regression are implicitly regularized towards flat minima

deep learning theory;sharpness;non-convex optimization;implicit regularization;gradient flow

Summary: Gradient flow implicitly regularizes deep linear networks towards flat minima, both for a small-scale and a residual initialization.

Abstract: The largest eigenvalue of the Hessian, or sharpness, of neural networks is a key quantity to understand their optimization dynamics. In this paper, we study the sharpness of deep linear networks for univariate regression. Minimizers can have arbitrarily large sharpness, but not an arbitrarily small one. Indeed, we show a lower bound on the sharpness of minimizers, which grows linearly with depth. We then study the properties of the minimizer found by gradient flow, which is the limit of gradient descent with vanishing learning rate. We show an implicit regularization towards flat minima: the sharpness of the minimizer is no more than a constant times the lower bound. The constant depends on the condition number of the data covariance matrix, but not on width or depth. This result is proven both for a small-scale initialization and a residual initialization. Results of independent interest are shown in both cases. For small-scale initialization, we show that the learned weight matrices are approximately rank-one and that their singular vectors align. For residual initialization, convergence of the gradient flow for a Gaussian initialization of the residual network is proven. Numerical experiments illustrate our results and connect them to gradient descent with non-vanishing learning rate.


Designing Cell-Type-Specific Promoter Sequences Using Conservative Model-Based Optimization

ML applications;computational genomics;computational biology;model-based optimization

Summary: We propose a workflow to design cell-type-specific promoters while accounting for various practical considerations and demonstrate its efficacy in a difficult setting.

Abstract: Gene therapies have the potential to treat disease by delivering therapeutic genetic cargo to disease-associated cells. One limitation to their widespread use is the lack of short regulatory sequences, or promoters, that differentially induce the expression of delivered genetic cargo in target cells, minimizing side effects in other cell types. Such cell-type-specific promoters are difficult to discover using existing methods, requiring either manual curation or access to large datasets of promoter-driven expression from both targeted and untargeted cells. Model-based optimization (MBO) has emerged as an effective method to design biological sequences in an automated manner, and has recently been used in promoter design methods. However, these methods have only been tested using large training datasets that are expensive to collect, and focus on designing promoters for markedly different cell types, overlooking the complexities associated with designing promoters for closely related cell types that share similar regulatory features. Therefore, we introduce a comprehensive framework for utilizing MBO to design promoters in a data-efficient manner, with an emphasis on discovering promoters for similar cell types. We use conservative objective models (COMs) for MBO and highlight practical considerations such as best practices for improving sequence diversity, getting estimates of model uncertainty, and choosing the optimal set of sequences for experimental validation. Using three leukemia cell lines (Jurkat, K562, and THP1), we show that our approach discovers many novel cell-type-specific promoters after experimentally validating the designed sequences. For K562 cells, in particular, we discover a promoter that has 75.85% higher cell-type-specificity than the best promoter from the initial dataset used to train our models. Our code and data will be available at https://github.com/young-geng/promoter_design.