Multilingual large language models (MLLMs), trained on multilingual balanced data, demonstrate better zero-shot learning performance in non-English languages compared to large language models trained on English-dominant data. However, the disparity in performance between English and non-English languages remains a challenge yet to be fully addressed. A distinctive characteristic of MLLMs is their high-quality translation capabilities, indicating an acquired proficiency in aligning between languages. This study explores how to enhance the zero-shot performance of MLLMs in non-English languages by leveraging their alignment capability between English and non-English languages. To achieve this, we first analyze the behavior of MLLMs when performing translation and reveal that there are large magnitude features that play a critical role in the translation process. Inspired by these findings, we retain the weights associated with operations involving the large magnitude features and prune other weights to force MLLMs to rely on these features for tasks beyond translation. We empirically demonstrate that this pruning strategy can enhance the MLLMs' performance in non-English language.
Diffusion-based models have achieved notable empirical successes in reinforcement learning (RL) due to their expressiveness in modeling complex distributions. Despite existing methods being promising, the key challenge of extending existing methods for broader real-world applications lies in the computational cost at inference time, i.e., sampling from a diffusion model is considerably slow as it often requires tens to hundreds of iterations to generate even one sample. To circumvent this issue, we propose to leverage the flexibility of diffusion models for RL from a representation learning perspective. In particular, by exploiting the connection between diffusion models and energy-based models, we develop Diffusion Spectral Representation (Diff-SR), a coherent algorithm framework that enables extracting sufficient representations for value functions in Markov decision processes (MDP) and partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP). We further demonstrate how Diff-SR facilitates efficient policy optimization and practical algorithms while explicitly bypassing the difficulty and inference cost of sampling from the diffusion model. Finally, we provide comprehensive empirical studies to verify the benefits of Diff-SR in delivering robust and advantageous performance across various benchmarks with both fully and partially observable settings.
We study offline multitask representation learning in reinforcement learning (RL), where a learner is provided with an offline dataset from different tasks that share a common representation and is asked to learn the shared representation. We theoretically investigate offline multitask low-rank RL, and propose a new algorithm called MORL for offline multitask representation learning. Furthermore, we examine downstream RL in reward-free, offline and online scenarios, where a new task is introduced to the agent that shares the same representation as the upstream offline tasks. Our theoretical results demonstrate the benefits of using the learned representation from the upstream offline task instead of directly learning the representation of the low-rank model.
Unsupervised learning (UL)-based solvers for combinatorial optimization (CO) train a neural network that generates a soft solution by directly optimizing the CO objective using a continuous relaxation strategy. These solvers offer several advantages over traditional methods and other learning-based methods, particularly for large-scale CO problems. However, UL-based solvers face two practical issues: (I) an optimization issue, where UL-based solvers are easily trapped at local optima, and (II) a rounding issue, where UL-based solvers require artificial post-learning rounding from the continuous space back to the original discrete space, undermining the robustness of the results. This study proposes a Continuous Relaxation Annealing (CRA) strategy, an effective rounding-free learning method for UL-based solvers. CRA introduces a penalty term that dynamically shifts from prioritizing continuous solutions, effectively smoothing the non-convexity of the objective function, to enforcing discreteness, eliminating artificial rounding. Experimental results demonstrate that CRA significantly enhances the performance of UL-based solvers, outperforming existing UL-based solvers and greedy algorithms in complex CO problems. Additionally, CRA effectively eliminates artificial rounding and accelerates the learning process.
Procedurally generated levels created by machine learning models can be unsolvable without further editing. Various methods have been developed to automatically repair these levels by enforcing hard constraints during the post-processing step. However, as levels increase in size, these constraint-based repairs become increasingly slow. This paper proposes using explainability methods to identify specific regions of a level that contribute to its unsolvability. By assigning higher weights to these regions, constraint-based solvers can prioritize these problematic areas, enabling more efficient repairs. Our results, tested across three games, demonstrate that this approach can help to repair procedurally generated levels faster.
Differentially private (DP) machine learning is considered the gold-standard solution for training a model from sensitive data while still preserving privacy. However, a major barrier to achieving this ideal is its sub-optimal privacy-accuracy trade-off, which is particularly visible in DP representation learning. Specifically, it has been shown that under modest privacy budgets, most models learn representations that are not significantly better than hand-crafted features. In this work, we show that effective DP representation learning can be done via image captioning and scaling up to internet-scale multimodal datasets. Through a series of engineering tricks, we successfully train a DP image captioner (DP-Cap) on a 233M subset of LAION-2B from scratch using a reasonable amount of computation, and obtaining unprecedented high-quality image features that can be used in a variety of downstream vision and vision-language tasks. For example, under a privacy budget of $\varepsilon=8$ for the LAION dataset, a linear classifier trained on top of learned DP-Cap features attains $65.8\%$ accuracy on ImageNet-1K, considerably improving the previous SOTA of $56.5\%$.
Contrastive learning models have achieved great success in unsupervised visual representation learning, which maximize the similarities between feature representations of different views of the same image, while minimize the similarities between feature representations of views of different images. In text summarization, the output summary is a shorter form of the input document and they have similar meanings. In this paper, we propose a contrastive learning model for supervised abstractive text summarization, where we view a document, its gold summary and its model generated summaries as different views of the same mean representation and maximize the similarities between them during training. We improve over a strong sequence-to-sequence text generation model (i.e., BART) on three different summarization datasets. Human evaluation also shows that our model achieves better faithfulness ratings compared to its counterpart without contrastive objectives.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models whose major advantage is their ability to incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only be used when such a graph-structure is available. In practice, however, real-world graphs are often noisy and incomplete or might not be available at all. With this work, we propose to jointly learn the graph structure and the parameters of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) by approximately solving a bilevel program that learns a discrete probability distribution on the edges of the graph. This allows one to apply GCNs not only in scenarios where the given graph is incomplete or corrupted but also in those where a graph is not available. We conduct a series of experiments that analyze the behavior of the proposed method and demonstrate that it outperforms related methods by a significant margin.
We advocate the use of implicit fields for learning generative models of shapes and introduce an implicit field decoder for shape generation, aimed at improving the visual quality of the generated shapes. An implicit field assigns a value to each point in 3D space, so that a shape can be extracted as an iso-surface. Our implicit field decoder is trained to perform this assignment by means of a binary classifier. Specifically, it takes a point coordinate, along with a feature vector encoding a shape, and outputs a value which indicates whether the point is outside the shape or not. By replacing conventional decoders by our decoder for representation learning and generative modeling of shapes, we demonstrate superior results for tasks such as shape autoencoding, generation, interpolation, and single-view 3D reconstruction, particularly in terms of visual quality.
Deep learning has yielded state-of-the-art performance on many natural language processing tasks including named entity recognition (NER). However, this typically requires large amounts of labeled data. In this work, we demonstrate that the amount of labeled training data can be drastically reduced when deep learning is combined with active learning. While active learning is sample-efficient, it can be computationally expensive since it requires iterative retraining. To speed this up, we introduce a lightweight architecture for NER, viz., the CNN-CNN-LSTM model consisting of convolutional character and word encoders and a long short term memory (LSTM) tag decoder. The model achieves nearly state-of-the-art performance on standard datasets for the task while being computationally much more efficient than best performing models. We carry out incremental active learning, during the training process, and are able to nearly match state-of-the-art performance with just 25\% of the original training data.