80 accepted papers
Current benchmarks for large language model (LLM) reasoning predominantly focus on mathematical and coding abilities, leaving a gap in evaluating broader reasoning proficiencies. One particular exception is the BIG-Bench dataset, which has served as a crucial benchmark for evaluating the general rea…
Despite their success in many domains, large language models (LLMs) remain under-studied in scenarios requiring optimal decision-making under uncertainty. This is crucial as many real-world applications, ranging from personalized recommendations to healthcare interventions, demand that LLMs not only…
Existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods for large language models (LLMs) rely on static prompt sets, where prompts are curated a priori, and sampled in a fixed schedule for training, regardless of their usefulness to the RL process. We design `eva`, the first method that allows LLMs to prioriti…
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) are widely used post-training techniques for foundation models. However, their roles in enhancing model generalization capabilities remain unclear. This paper studies the difference between SFT and RL on generalization and memorization, fo…
Finding the right north-star metrics is highly critical for advancing mathematical reasoning capabilities of foundation models, especially given that existing evaluations are either too easy or only focusing on getting correct short answers. To address these issues, we present IMO-Bench, a suite of
"Hallucination has been a major problem for large language models and remains a critical challenge when it comes to multimodality in which vision-language models (VLMs) have to deal with not just textual but also visual inputs. Despite rapid progress in VLMs, resources for evaluating and addressing…
Optimization is ubiquitous. While derivative-based algorithms have been powerful tools for various problems, the absence of gradient imposes challenges on many real-world applications. In this work, we propose Optimization by PROmpting (OPRO), a simple and effective approach to leverage large langua…
Large language models (LLMs) often generate content that contains factual errors when responding to fact-seeking prompts on open-ended topics. To benchmark a model’s long-form factuality in open domains, we first use GPT-4 to generate LongFact, a prompt set comprising thousands of questions spanning…
We introduce SELF-DISCOVER, a general framework for LLMs to self-discover the task-intrinsic reasoning structures to tackle complex reasoning problems that are challenging for typical prompting methods. Core to the framework is a self-discovery process where LLMs select multiple atomic reasoning mod…
We present STEP-BACK PROMPTING, a simple prompting technique that enables LLMs to do abstractions to derive high-level concepts and first principles from instances containing specific details. Using the concepts and principles to guide reasoning, LLMs significantly improve their abilities in followi…
Transformers are central to recent successes in natural language processing and computer vision. Transformers have a mostly uniform backbone where layers alternate between feed-forward and self-attention in order to build a deep network. Here we investigate this design choice and find that more comp…
The mixture proportions of pretraining data domains (e.g., Wikipedia, books, web text) greatly affect language model (LM) performance. In this paper, we propose Domain Reweighting with Minimax Optimization (DoReMi), which first trains a small proxy model using group distributionally robust optimizat…
Scaling up language models has been empirically shown to improve performance on a wide range of downstream tasks. However, if we were to observe worse performance as a function of scale ("inverse scaling") on certain tasks, this would indicate that scaling can also encourage behaviors that are misal…
Chain-of-thought prompting has demonstrated remarkable performance on various natural language reasoning tasks. However, it tends to perform poorly on tasks which requires solving problems harder than the exemplars shown in the prompts. To overcome this challenge of easy-to-hard generalization, we p…
Chain-of-thought prompting combined with pretrained large language models has achieved encouraging results on complex reasoning tasks. In this paper, we propose a new decoding strategy, self-consistency, to replace the naive greedy decoding used in chain-of-thought prompting. It first samples a dive…
We present symbol tuning - finetuning language models on in-context input-label pairs where natural language labels (e.g., "positive/negative sentiment") are replaced with arbitrary symbols (e.g., "foo/bar"). Symbol tuning leverages the intuition that when a model cannot use instructions or natural…
We present a method to formulate algorithm discovery as program search, and apply it to discover optimization algorithms for deep neural network training. We leverage efficient search techniques to explore an infinite and sparse program space. To bridge the large generalization gap between proxy and…
We study the design decision of publicly available instruction tuning methods, by reproducing and breaking down the development of Flan 2022 (Chung et al., 2022). Through careful ablation studies on the Flan Collection of tasks and methods, we tease apart the effect of design decisions which enable…
Scaling language models improves performance but comes with significant computational costs. This paper proposes UL2R, a method that substantially improves existing language models and their scaling curves with a relatively tiny amount of extra compute. The key idea is to continue training a state-o…
We explore how generating a chain of thought---a series of intermediate reasoning steps---significantly improves the ability of large language models to perform complex reasoning. In particular, we show how such reasoning abilities emerge naturally in sufficiently large language models via a simple…
Lidars and cameras are critical sensors that provide complementary information for 3D detection in autonomous driving. While prevalent multi-modal methods simply decorate raw lidar point clouds with camera features and feed them directly to existing 3D detection models, our study shows that fusing c…
This paper explores a simple method for improving the zero-shot learning abilities of language models. We show that instruction tuning—finetuning language models on a collection of datasets described via instructions—substantially improves zero-shot performance on unseen tasks. We take a 137B parame…
Sparsely-activated Mixture-of-experts (MoE) models allow the number of parameters to greatly increase while keeping the amount of computation for a given token or a given sample unchanged. However, a poor expert routing strategy (e.g. one resulting in load imbalance) can cause certain experts to be…
The best neural architecture for a given machine learning problem depends on many factors: not only the complexity and structure of the dataset, but also on resource constraints including latency, compute, energy consumption, etc. Neural architecture search (NAS) for tabular datasets is an important…
Transformers have attracted increasing interests in computer vision, but they still fall behind state-of-the-art convolutional networks. In this work, we show that while Transformers tend to have larger model capacity, their generalization can be worse than convolutional networks due to the lack of…
We propose a method for meta-learning reinforcement learning algorithms by searching over the space of computational graphs which compute the loss function for a value-based model-free RL agent to optimize. The learned algorithms are domain-agnostic and can generalize to new environments not seen du…
We present Meta Pseudo Labels, a semi-supervised learning method that achieves a new state-of-the-art top-1 accuracy of 90.2% on ImageNet, which is 1.6% better than the existing state-of-the-art. Like Pseudo Labels, Meta Pseudo Labels has a teacher network to generate pseudo labels on unlabeled data…
Despite the fast progress in training specialized models for various tasks, learning a single general model that works well for many tasks is still challenging for computer vision. Here we introduce multi-task self-training (MuST), which harnesses the knowledge in independent specialized teacher mod…
Transformers have become one of the most important architectural innovations in deep learning and have enabled many breakthroughs over the past few years. Here we propose a simple network architecture, gMLP, based solely on MLPs with gating, and show that it can perform as well as Transformers in ke…
Large Transformer models have been central to recent advances in natural language processing. The training and inference costs of these models, however, have grown rapidly and become prohibitively expensive. Here we aim to reduce the costs of Transformers by searching for a more efficient variant. C…
Neural Architecture Search (NAS), together with model scaling, has shown remarkable progress in designing high accuracy and fast convolutional architecture families. However, as neither NAS nor model scaling considers sufficient hardware architecture details, they do not take full advantage of the e…
Building instance segmentation models that are data-efficient and can handle rare object categories is an important challenge in computer vision. Leveraging data augmentations is a promising direction towards addressing this challenge. Here, we perform a systematic study of the Copy-Paste augmentati…
Adversarial examples are commonly viewed as a threat to ConvNets. Here we present an opposite perspective: adversarial examples can be used to improve image recognition models if harnessed in the right manner. We propose AdvProp, an enhanced adversarial training scheme which treats adversarial examp…
Efficient Neural Architecture Search methods based on weight sharing have shown good promise in democratizing Neural Architecture Search for computer vision models. There is, however, an ongoing debate whether these efficient methods are significantly better than random search. Here we perform a tho…
Masked language modeling (MLM) pre-training methods such as BERT corrupt the input by replacing some tokens with [MASK] and then train a model to reconstruct the original tokens. While they produce good results when transferred to downstream NLP tasks, they generally require large amounts of compute…
Model efficiency has become increasingly important in computer vision. In this paper, we systematically study neural network architecture design choices for object detection and propose several key optimizations to improve efficiency. First, we propose a weighted bi-directional feature pyramid netwo…
Normalization layers and activation functions are fundamental components in deep networks and typically co-locate with each other. Here we propose to design them using an automated approach. Instead of designing them separately, we unify them into a single tensor-to-tensor computation graph, and evo…
With the success of language pretraining, it is highly desirable to develop more efficient architectures of good scalability that can exploit the abundant unlabeled data at a lower cost. To improve the efficiency, we examine the much-overlooked redundancy in maintaining a full-length token-level pre…
Data augmentation has been widely adopted for object detection in 3D point clouds. However, all previous related efforts have focused on manually designing specific data augmentation methods for individual architectures. In this work, we present the first attempt to automate the design of data augme…
Much research on object detection focuses on building better model architectures and detection algorithms. Changing the model architecture, however, comes at the cost of adding more complexity to inference, making models slower. Data augmentation, on the other hand, doesn't add any inference complex…
Despite the blooming success of architecture search for vision tasks in resource-constrained environments, the design of on-device object detection architectures have mostly been manual. The few automated search efforts are either centered around non-mobile-friendly search spaces or not guided by on…
Integrating distributed representations with symbolic operations is essential for reading comprehension requiring complex reasoning, such as counting, sorting and arithmetics, but most existing approaches are hard to scale to more domains or more complex reasoning. In this work, we propose the Neura…
Neural networks are sensitive to hyper-parameter and architecture choices. Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) is a promising paradigm for automating these choices. Current ML software libraries, however, are quite limited in handling the dynamic interactions among the components of AutoML. For exam…
Recent work on automated data augmentation strategies has led to state-of-the-art results in image classification and object detection. An obstacle to a large-scale adoption of these methods is that they require a separate and expensive search phase. A common way to overcome the expense of the searc…
Pre-training is a dominant paradigm in computer vision. For example, supervised ImageNet pre-training is commonly used to initialize the backbones of object detection and segmentation models. He et al., however, show a striking result that ImageNet pre-training has limited impact on COCO object dete…
We present a simple self-training method that achieves 88.4% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, which is 2.0% better than the state-of-the-art model that requires 3.5B weakly labeled Instagram images. On robustness test sets, it improves ImageNet-A top-1 accuracy from 61.0% to 83.7%, reduces ImageNet-C mea…
Recently, SpecAugment, an augmentation scheme for automatic speech recognition that acts directly on the spectrogram of input utterances, has shown to be highly effective in enhancing the performance of end-to-end networks on public datasets. In this paper, we demonstrate its effectiveness on tasks…
Convolutional neural networks typically encode an input image into a series of intermediate features with decreasing resolutions. While this structure is suited to classification tasks, it does not perform well for tasks requiring simultaneous recognition and localization (e.g., object detection). T…
Semi-supervised learning lately has shown much promise in improving deep learning models when labeled data is scarce. Common among recent approaches is the use of consistency training on a large amount of unlabeled data to constrain model predictions to be invariant to input noise. In this work, we…
Convolutional networks have enjoyed much success in many computer vision applications. The convolution operation however has a significant weakness in that it only operates on a local neighbourhood, thus missing global information. Self-attention, on the other hand, has emerged as a recent advance t…
Data augmentation is an effective technique for improving the accuracy of modern image classifiers. However, current data augmentation implementations are manually designed. In this paper, we describe a simple procedure called AutoAugment to automatically search for improved data augmentation polici…
Convolutional layers are one of the basic building blocks of modern deep neural networks. One fundamental assumption is that convolutional kernels should be shared for all examples in a dataset. We propose conditionally parameterized convolutions (CondConv), which learn specialized convolutional ker…
Routing models, a form of conditional computation where examples are routed through a subset of components in a larger network, have shown promising results in recent works. Surprisingly, routing models to date have lacked important properties, such as architectural diversity and large numbers of ro…
Transfer learning is a cornerstone of computer vision, yet little work has been done to evaluate the relationship between architecture and transfer. An implicit hypothesis in modern computer vision research is that models that perform better on ImageNet necessarily perform better on other vision tas…
Scaling up deep neural network capacity has been known as an effective approach to improving model quality for several different machine learning tasks. In many cases, increasing model capacity beyond the memory limit of a single accelerator has required developing special algorithms or infrastructu…
Predicting future video frames is extremely challenging, as there are many factors of variation that make up the dynamics of how frames change through time. Previously proposed solutions require complex inductive biases inside network architectures with highly specialized computation, including segm…
The softmax bottleneck has been shown to limit the expressiveness of neural lan- guage models. Mixture of Softmaxes (MoS) is an effective approach to address such a theoretical limitation, but are expensive compared to softmax in terms of both memory and time. We propose Mixtape, an output layer tha…
Designing convolutional neural networks (CNN) for mobile devices is challenging because mobile models need to be small and fast, yet still accurate. Although significant efforts have been dedicated to design and improve mobile CNNs on all dimensions, it is very difficult to manually balance these tr…
Current state-of-the-art convolutional architectures for object detection are manually designed. Here we aim to learn a better architecture of feature pyramid network for object detection. We adopt Neural Architecture Search and discover a new feature pyramid architecture in a novel scalable search…
Although deep convolutional neural networks achieve state-of-the-art performance across nearly all image classification tasks, their decisions are difficult to interpret. One approach that offers some level of interpretability by design is \textit{hard attention}, which uses only relevant portions o…
We present the next generation of MobileNets based on a combination of complementary search techniques as well as a novel architecture design. MobileNetV3 is tuned to mobile phone CPUs through a combination of hardware-aware network architecture search (NAS) complemented by the NetAdapt algorithm an…
With the capability of modeling bidirectional contexts, denoising autoencoding based pretraining like BERT achieves better performance than pretraining approaches based on autoregressive language modeling. However, relying on corrupting the input with masks, BERT neglects dependency between the mask…
We introduce a hierarchical model for efficient placement of computational graphs onto hardware devices, especially in heterogeneous environments with a mixture of CPUs, GPUs, and other computational devices. Our method learns to assign graph operations to groups and to allocate those groups to avai…
We present Cross-View Training (CVT), a simple but effective method for deep semi-supervised learning. On labeled examples, the model is trained with standard cross-entropy loss. On an unlabeled example, the model first performs inference (acting as a "teacher") to produce soft targets. The model th…
It is common practice to decay the learning rate. Here we show one can usually obtain the same learning curve on both training and test sets by instead increasing the batch size during training. This procedure is successful for stochastic gradient descent (SGD), SGD with momentum, Nesterov momentum,…
Deep neural networks often work well when they are over-parameterized and trained with a massive amount of noise and regularization, such as weight decay and dropout. Although dropout is widely used as a regularization technique for fully connected layers, it is often less effective for convolutiona…
We propose Efficient Neural Architecture Search (ENAS), a faster and less expensive approach to automated model design than previous methods. In ENAS, a controller learns to discover neural network architectures by searching for an optimal path within a larger model. The controller is trained with p…
It is becoming increasingly clear that many machine learning classifiers are vulnerable to adversarial examples. In attempting to explain the origin of adversarial examples, previous studies have typically focused on the fact that neural networks operate on high dimensional data, they overfit, or th…
Developing neural network image classification models often requires significant architecture engineering. In this paper, we study a method to learn the model architectures directly on the dataset of interest. As this approach is expensive when the dataset is large, we propose to search for an arch…
We present Memory Augmented Policy Optimization (MAPO), a simple and novel way to leverage a memory buffer of promising trajectories to reduce the variance of policy gradient estimate. MAPO is applicable to deterministic environments with discrete actions, such as structured prediction and combinato…
Current end-to-end machine reading and question answering (Q\&A) models are primarily based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with attention. Despite their success, these models are often slow for both training and inference due to the sequential nature of RNNs. We propose a new Q\&A architecture…
The choice of activation functions in deep networks has a significant effect on the training dynamics and task performance. Currently, the most successful and widely-used activation function is the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU). Although various hand-designed alternatives to ReLU have been proposed,…
The past few years have witnessed a growth in size and computational requirements for training and inference with neural networks. Currently, a common approach to address these requirements is to use a heterogeneous distributed environment with a mixture of hardware devices such as CPUs and GPUs. Im…
This work explores hypernetworks: an approach of using one network, also known as a hypernetwork, to generate the weights for another network. We apply hypernetworks to generate adaptive weights for recurrent networks. In this case, hypernetworks can be viewed as a relaxed form of weight-sharing ac…
Neural networks have proven effective at solving difficult problems but designing their architectures can be challenging, even for image classification problems alone. Our goal is to minimize human participation, so we employ evolutionary algorithms to discover such networks automatically. Despite s…
Learning a natural language interface for database tables is a challenging task that involves deep language understanding and multi-step reasoning. The task is often approached by mapping natural language queries to logical forms or programs that provide the desired response when executed on the dat…
We present an approach to automate the process of discovering optimization methods, with a focus on deep learning architectures. We train a Recurrent Neural Network controller to generate a string in a specific domain language that describes a mathematical update equation based on a list of primitiv…
Sequence-to-sequence models have achieved impressive results on various tasks. However, they are unsuitable for tasks that require incremental predictions to be made as more data arrives or tasks that have long input sequences and output sequences. This is because they generate an output sequence co…
We present Listen, Attend and Spell (LAS), a neural speech recognizer that transcribes speech utterances directly to characters without pronunciation models, HMMs or other components of traditional speech recognizers. In LAS, the neural network architecture subsumes the acoustic, pronunciation and l…
We present two approaches to use unlabeled data to improve Sequence Learningwith recurrent networks. The first approach is to predict what comes next in asequence, which is a language model in NLP. The second approach is to use asequence autoencoder, which reads the input sequence into a vector and…