As is the case for many curved exponential families, the computation of maximum likelihood estimates in a multivariate normal model with a Kronecker covariance structure is typically carried out with an iterative algorithm, specifically, a block-coordinate ascent algorithm. In this article we highlight a setting, specified by a coprime relationship between the sample size and dimension of the Kronecker factors, where the likelihood equations have algebraic degree one and an explicit, easy-to-evaluate rational formula for the maximum likelihood estimator can be found. A partial converse of this result is provided that shows that outside of the aforementioned special setting and for large sample sizes, examples of data sets can be constructed for which the degree of the likelihood equations is larger than one.
Herein the topics of (natural) gradient descent, data decorrelation, and approximate methods for backpropagation are brought into a dialogue. Natural gradient descent illuminates how gradient vectors, pointing at directions of steepest descent, can be improved by considering the local curvature of loss landscapes. We extend this perspective and show that to fully solve the problem illuminated by natural gradients in neural networks, one must recognise that correlations in the data at any linear transformation, including node responses at every layer of a neural network, cause a non-orthonormal relationship between the model's parameters. To solve this requires a solution to decorrelate inputs at each individual layer of a neural network. We describe a range of methods which have been proposed for decorrelation and whitening of node output, while providing a novel method specifically useful for distributed computing and computational neuroscience. Implementing decorrelation within multi-layer neural networks, we can show that not only is training via backpropagation sped up significantly but also existing approximations of backpropagation, which have failed catastrophically in the past, are made performant once more. This has the potential to provide a route forward for approximate gradient descent methods which have previously been discarded, training approaches for analogue and neuromorphic hardware, and potentially insights as to the efficacy and utility of decorrelation processes in the brain.
Representing and rendering dynamic scenes has been an important but challenging task. Especially, to accurately model complex motions, high efficiency is usually hard to guarantee. To achieve real-time dynamic scene rendering while also enjoying high training and storage efficiency, we propose 4D Gaussian Splatting (4D-GS) as a holistic representation for dynamic scenes rather than applying 3D-GS for each individual frame. In 4D-GS, a novel explicit representation containing both 3D Gaussians and 4D neural voxels is proposed. A decomposed neural voxel encoding algorithm inspired by HexPlane is proposed to efficiently build Gaussian features from 4D neural voxels and then a lightweight MLP is applied to predict Gaussian deformations at novel timestamps. Our 4D-GS method achieves real-time rendering under high resolutions, 82 FPS at an 800$\times$800 resolution on an RTX 3090 GPU while maintaining comparable or better quality than previous state-of-the-art methods. More demos and code are available at //guanjunwu.github.io/4dgs/.
Learning dynamics, which describes how the learning of specific training examples influences the model's prediction of other examples, give us a powerful tool for understanding the behavior of deep learning systems. We study the learning dynamics of large language models during finetuning, by analyzing the step-wise decomposition and accumulated influence among different responses. Our framework allows a uniform interpretation of many interesting observations about the training of popular algorithms for both instruction tuning and preference tuning. The analysis not only explains where the benefits of these methods come from but also inspires a simple, effective method to further improve the alignment performance. Code for experiments is available at //github.com/Joshua-Ren/Learning_dynamics_LLM.
To assess the quality of a probabilistic prediction for stochastic dynamical systems (SDSs), scoring rules assign a numerical score based on the predictive distribution and the measured state. In this paper, we propose an $\epsilon$-logarithm score that generalizes the celebrated logarithm score by considering a neighborhood with radius $\epsilon$. We characterize the probabilistic predictability of an SDS by optimizing the expected score over the space of probability measures. We show how the probabilistic predictability is quantitatively determined by the neighborhood radius, the differential entropies of process noises, and the system dimension. Given any predictor, we provide approximations for the expected score with an error of scale $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon)$. In addition to the expected score, we also analyze the asymptotic behaviors of the score on individual trajectories. Specifically, we prove that the score on a trajectory can converge to the expected score when the process noises are independent and identically distributed. Moreover, the convergence speed against the trajectory length $T$ is of scale $\mathcal{O}(T^{-\frac{1}{2}})$ in the sense of probability. Finally, numerical examples are given to elaborate the results.
High dimensional expanders (HDXs) are a hypergraph generalization of expander graphs. They are extensively studied in the math and TCS communities due to their many applications. Like expander graphs, HDXs are especially interesting for applications when they are bounded degree, namely, if the number of edges adjacent to every vertex is bounded. However, only a handful of constructions are known to have this property, all of which rely on algebraic techniques. In particular, no random or combinatorial construction of bounded degree HDXs is known. As a result, our understanding of these objects is limited. The degree of an $i$-face in an HDX is the number of $(i+1)$-faces containing it. In this work we construct HDXs whose higher dimensional faces have bounded degree. This is done by giving an elementary and deterministic algorithm that takes as input a regular $k$-dimensional HDX $X$ and outputs another $k$-dimensional HDX $\widehat{X}$ with twice as many vertices. While the degree of vertices in $\widehat{X}$ grows, the degree of the $(k-1)$-faces in $\widehat{X}$ stays the same. As a result, we obtain a new `algebra-free' construction of HDXs whose $(k-1)$-face degree is bounded. Our algorithm is based on a simple and natural generalization of the construction by Bilu and Linial (Combinatorica, 2006), which build expanders using lifts coming from edge signings. Our construction is based on local lifts of HDXs, where a local lift is a complex whose top-level links are lifts of links in the original complex. We demonstrate that a local lift of an HDX is an HDX in many cases. In addition, combining local lifts with existing bounded degree constructions creates new families of bounded degree HDXs with significantly different links than before. For every large enough $D$, we use this technique to construct families of bounded degree HDXs with links that have diameter $\geq D$.
We propose using mechanistic interpretability -- techniques for reverse engineering model weights into human-interpretable algorithms -- to derive and compactly prove formal guarantees on model performance. We prototype this approach by formally proving lower bounds on the accuracy of 151 small transformers trained on a Max-of-$K$ task. We create 102 different computer-assisted proof strategies and assess their length and tightness of bound on each of our models. Using quantitative metrics, we find that shorter proofs seem to require and provide more mechanistic understanding. Moreover, we find that more faithful mechanistic understanding leads to tighter performance bounds. We confirm these connections by qualitatively examining a subset of our proofs. Finally, we identify compounding structureless noise as a key challenge for using mechanistic interpretability to generate compact proofs on model performance.
With the increasing research attention on fairness in information retrieval systems, more and more fairness-aware algorithms have been proposed to ensure fairness for a sustainable and healthy retrieval ecosystem. However, as the most adopted measurement of fairness-aware algorithms, group fairness evaluation metrics, require group membership information that needs massive human annotations and is barely available for general information retrieval datasets. This data sparsity significantly impedes the development of fairness-aware information retrieval studies. Hence, a practical, scalable, low-cost group membership annotation method is needed to assist or replace human annotations. This study explored how to leverage language models to automatically annotate group membership for group fairness evaluations, focusing on annotation accuracy and its impact. Our experimental results show that BERT-based models outperformed state-of-the-art large language models, including GPT and Mistral, achieving promising annotation accuracy with minimal supervision in recent fair-ranking datasets. Our impact-oriented evaluations reveal that minimal annotation error will not degrade the effectiveness and robustness of group fairness evaluation. The proposed annotation method reduces tremendous human efforts and expands the frontier of fairness-aware studies to more datasets.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown excellent generalization capabilities that have led to the development of numerous models. These models propose various new architectures, tweaking existing architectures with refined training strategies, increasing context length, using high-quality training data, and increasing training time to outperform baselines. Analyzing new developments is crucial for identifying changes that enhance training stability and improve generalization in LLMs. This survey paper comprehensively analyses the LLMs architectures and their categorization, training strategies, training datasets, and performance evaluations and discusses future research directions. Moreover, the paper also discusses the basic building blocks and concepts behind LLMs, followed by a complete overview of LLMs, including their important features and functions. Finally, the paper summarizes significant findings from LLM research and consolidates essential architectural and training strategies for developing advanced LLMs. Given the continuous advancements in LLMs, we intend to regularly update this paper by incorporating new sections and featuring the latest LLM models.
We consider the problem of explaining the predictions of graph neural networks (GNNs), which otherwise are considered as black boxes. Existing methods invariably focus on explaining the importance of graph nodes or edges but ignore the substructures of graphs, which are more intuitive and human-intelligible. In this work, we propose a novel method, known as SubgraphX, to explain GNNs by identifying important subgraphs. Given a trained GNN model and an input graph, our SubgraphX explains its predictions by efficiently exploring different subgraphs with Monte Carlo tree search. To make the tree search more effective, we propose to use Shapley values as a measure of subgraph importance, which can also capture the interactions among different subgraphs. To expedite computations, we propose efficient approximation schemes to compute Shapley values for graph data. Our work represents the first attempt to explain GNNs via identifying subgraphs explicitly and directly. Experimental results show that our SubgraphX achieves significantly improved explanations, while keeping computations at a reasonable level.
Data augmentation has been widely used to improve generalizability of machine learning models. However, comparatively little work studies data augmentation for graphs. This is largely due to the complex, non-Euclidean structure of graphs, which limits possible manipulation operations. Augmentation operations commonly used in vision and language have no analogs for graphs. Our work studies graph data augmentation for graph neural networks (GNNs) in the context of improving semi-supervised node-classification. We discuss practical and theoretical motivations, considerations and strategies for graph data augmentation. Our work shows that neural edge predictors can effectively encode class-homophilic structure to promote intra-class edges and demote inter-class edges in given graph structure, and our main contribution introduces the GAug graph data augmentation framework, which leverages these insights to improve performance in GNN-based node classification via edge prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that augmentation via GAug improves performance across GNN architectures and datasets.