66 accepted papers
Autonomous computer use agents that powered by multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are emerging as capable assistants for completing complex digital workflows. However, real-world execution environments are far from ideal: pop-up dialogs, resolution changes, and competing applications frequentl…
Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly used as autonomous subordinates that carry out tasks for users. This raises the question of whether they may also engage in deception, similar to how individuals in human organizations lie to superiors to create a good image or avoid punishmen…
Lossy KV cache compression is a well-explored subfield of machine learning efficiency, with improved latency being one of its major gains. However, lossy compression techniques can fumble from time to time, exhibiting various — and often catastrophic — failure patterns that are not only difficult to…
AI systems may exhibit deceptive behaviors that mislead developers about their capabilities, propensities, or actions. Such deception can take distinct forms across the development lifecycle: training subversion, evaluation gaming, and control evasion. We argue that the AI community should prioritiz…
Large-scale AI models, such as Large Language Models (LLMs) and Diffusion Models (DMs), have grown rapidly in size, creating significant challenges for efficient deployment on resource-constrained hardware. In this paper, we introduce Dynamic-Length Float (DFloat11), a lossless compression framework…
Text style transfer (TST) modifies a source sentence to match a target style while preserving its semantics. While existing models perform well on simple styles like sentiment and formality, they struggle with complex, entangled styles such as poetry and brand-specific tones, which require advanced
Anomaly detection (AD) is an important machine learning task with many real-world uses, including fraud detection, medical diagnosis, and industrial monitoring. Within natural language processing (NLP), AD helps detect issues like spam, misinformation, and unusual user activity. Although large langu…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly serving as evaluators in Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks; this is often referred to as “LLM-as-a-judge” paradigm. However, the capabilities of LLMs in evaluating NLG quality remain underexplored. Current studies depend on human assessments and si…
Densely structured pruning methods -- which generate pruned models in a fully dense format, allowing immediate compression benefits without additional demands -- are evolving owing to their practical significance. Traditional techniques in this domain mainly revolve around coarser granularities, suc…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on several tasks and are increasingly deployed in real-world applications. However, especially in high-stakes settings, it becomes vital to know when the output of an LLM may be unreliable. Depending on whether an answer is trustw…
Backdoor attacks are powerful and effective, but distributing LLMs without a proven track record like ‘meta-llama‘ or ‘qwen‘ rarely gains community traction. We identify LoRA sharing as a unique scenario where users are more willing to try unendorsed assets, since such shared LoRAs allow them to enj
Large language models (LLMs) can give out erroneous answers to factually rooted questions either as a result of undesired training outcomes or simply because the world has moved on after a certain knowledge cutoff date. Under such scenarios, *knowledge editing* often comes to the rescue by deliverin…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted across real-world applications, yet traditional evaluations rely on expensive, domain-specific ground-truth labels that are often unavailable or infeasible. We introduce a ground-truth-free evaluation framework focused on reasoning consistency an…
Although Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well in general fields, they exhibit a **confidence distortion problem** on multi-choice question-answering (MCQA), particularly as the number of answer choices increases. Specifically, on MCQA with many choices, LLMs suffer from under-confidence in corr
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demand substantial computational resources during inference, largely due to the extensive visual input tokens for representing visual information. Previous studies have noted that visual tokens tend to receive less attention than text tokens, suggesting their lower impo…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are now integral across various domains and have demonstrated impressive performance. Progress, however, rests on the premise that benchmark scores are both accurate and reproducible. We demonstrate that the reproducibility of LLM performance is fragile: changing system…
There has been significant progress in improving the performance of graph neural networks (GNNs) through enhancements in graph data, model architecture design, and training strategies. For fairness in graphs, recent studies achieve fair representations and predictions through either graph data pre-p…
This paper introduces the Fair Fairness Benchmark (FFB), a benchmarking framework for in-processing group fairness methods. Ensuring fairness in machine learning is important for ethical compliance. However, there exist challenges in comparing and developing fairness methods due to inconsistencies i…
Suppose a self-driving car is crashing into pedestrians, or a chatbot is instructing its users to conduct criminal wrongdoing; the stakeholders of such products will undoubtedly want to patch these catastrophic errors as soon as possible. To address such concerns, *Model Editing:* the study of effic…
Deep neural networks are ubiquitously adopted in many applications, such as computer vision, natural language processing, and graph analytics. However, well-trained neural networks can make prediction errors after deployment as the world changes. \textit{Model editing} involves updating the base mod…
Efficiently serving large language models (LLMs) requires batching many requests together to reduce the cost per request. Yet, the key-value (KV) cache, which stores attention keys and values to avoid re-computations, significantly increases memory demands and becomes the new bottleneck in speed and…
Long context capability is a crucial competency for large language models (LLMs) as it mitigates the human struggle to digest long-form texts. This capability enables complex task-solving scenarios such as book summarization, code assistance, and many more tasks that are traditionally manpower-inten…
It is well known that LLMs cannot generalize well to long contexts whose lengths are larger than the training sequence length. This poses challenges when employing LLMs for processing long input sequences during inference. In this work, we argue that LLMs themselves have inherent capabilities to han…
Large language models (LLMs) are great at processing multiple natural language processing tasks, but their abilities are constrained by inferior performance with long context, slow inference speed, and the high cost of computing the results. Deploying LLMs with precise and informative context helps…
In this work we present Omni-SMoLA a multimodal architecture that mixes many multi-modal experts efficiently and achieves both high specialist and generalist performance. In contrast to previous models for which we see performance degradation on average when training the models on a wide range of ta…
Large language models (LLMs) have notably revolutionized many domains within natural language processing due to their exceptional performance. Their security has become increasingly vital. This study is centered on protecting LLMs against unauthorized access and potential theft. We propose a simple…
Model compression is one of the most popular approaches to improve the accessibility of Large Language Models (LLMs) by reducing their memory footprint. However, the gaining of such efficiency benefits often simultaneously demands extensive engineering efforts and intricate designs to mitigate the p…
Explainable machine learning significantly improves the transparency of deep neural networks. However, existing work is constrained to explaining the behavior of individual model predictions, and lacks the ability to transfer the explanation across various models and tasks. This limitation results i…
Ensuring the security of released large language models (LLMs) poses a significant dilemma, as existing mechanisms either compromise ownership rights or raise data privacy concerns. To address this dilemma, we introduce TaylorMLP to protect the ownership of released LLMs and prevent their abuse. Spe…
Large language models have revolutionized the field of NLP by achieving state-of-the-art performance on various tasks. However, there is a concern that these models may disclose information in the training data. In this study, we focus on the summarization task and investigate the membership inferen…
Fairness in machine learning has attracted increasing attention in recent years. The fairness methods improving algorithmic fairness for in-distribution data may not perform well under distribution shifts. In this paper, we first theoretically demonstrate the inherent connection between distribution…
Recent advancements in explainable machine learning provide effective and faithful solutions for interpreting model behaviors. However, many explanation methods encounter efficiency issues, which largely limit their deployments in practical scenarios. Real-time explainer (RTX) frameworks have thus b…
Activation compressed training provides a solution towards reducing the memory cost of training deep neural networks (DNNs). However, state-of-the-art work combines a search of quantization bit-width with the training, which makes the procedure complicated and less transparent. To this end, we propo…
As graph neural networks (GNNs) struggle with large-scale graphs due to high computational demands, data distillation for graph data promises to alleviate this issue by distilling a large real graph into a smaller distilled graph while maintaining comparable prediction performance for GNNs trained o…
Training graph neural networks (GNNs) on large graphs is complex and extremely time consuming. This is attributed to overheads caused by sparse matrix multiplication, which are sidestepped when training multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) with only node features. MLPs, by ignoring graph context, are simp…
Densely structured pruning methods utilizing simple pruning heuristics can deliver immediate compression and acceleration benefits with acceptable benign performances. However, empirical findings indicate such naively pruned networks are extremely fragile under simple adversarial attacks. Naturally,…
Transformer-based models are powerful for modeling temporal dynamics of user preference in sequential recommendation. Most of the variants adopt the Softmax transformation in the self-attention layers to generate dense attention probabilities. However, real-world item sequences are often noisy, cont…
Training graph neural networks (GNNs) is extremely time consuming because sparse graph-based operations are hard to be accelerated by community hardware. Prior art successfully reduces the computation cost of dense matrix based operations (e.g., convolution and linear) via sampling-based approximati…
In the field of natural language processing, the prevalent approach involves fine-tuning pretrained language models (PLMs) using local samples. Recent research has exposed the susceptibility of PLMs to backdoor attacks, wherein the adversaries can embed malicious prediction behaviors by manipulating…
As the model size grows rapidly, fine-tuning the large pre-trained language model has become increasingly difficult due to its extensive memory usage. Previous works usually focus on reducing the number of trainable parameters in the network. While the model parameters do contribute to memory usag…
Large-scale graph training is a notoriously challenging problem for graph neural networks (GNNs). Due to the nature of evolving graph structures into the training process, vanilla GNNs usually fail to scale up, limited by the GPU memory space. Up to now, though numerous scalable GNN architectures ha…
Even though Shapley value provides an effective explanation for a DNN model prediction, the computation relies on the enumeration of all possible input feature coalitions, which leads to the exponentially growing complexity. To address this problem, we propose a novel method SHEAR to significantly a…
Instance-dependent label noise (IDN) widely exists in real-world datasets and usually misleads the training of deep neural networks. Noise transition matrix (NTM) (i.e., the probability that clean labels flip into noisy labels) is used to characterize the label noise and can be adopted to bridge the…
Action recognition is an important task for video understanding with broad applications. However, developing an effective action recognition solution often requires extensive engineering efforts in building and testing different combinations of the modules and their hyperparameters. In this demo, we…
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are gaining extensive attention for their application in graph data. However, the black-box nature of GNNs prevents users from understanding and trusting the models, thus hampering their applicability. Whereas explaining GNNs remains a challenge, most existing methods fa…
We study embedding table placement for distributed recommender systems, which aims to partition and place the tables on multiple hardware devices (e.g., GPUs) to balance the computation and communication costs. Although prior work has explored learning-based approaches for the device placement of co…
Training Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) on large graphs is a fundamental challenge due to the high memory usage, which is mainly occupied by activations (e.g., node embeddings). Previous works usually focus on reducing the number of nodes retained in memory. In parallel, unlike what has been developed…
This work develops mixup for graph data. Mixup has shown superiority in improving the generalization and robustness of neural networks by interpolating features and labels between two random samples. Traditionally, Mixup can work on regular, grid-like, and Euclidean data such as image or tabular dat…
This work aims to generalize demographic parity to continuous sensitive attributes while preserving tractable computation. Current fairness metrics for continuous sensitive attributes largely rely on intractable statistical independence between variables, such as Hirschfeld-Gebelein-Renyi (HGR) and…
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have received tremendous attention due to their superiority in learning node representations. These models rely on message passing and feature transformation functions to encode the structural and feature information from neighbors. However, stacking more convolutional l…
Learning useful interactions between input features is crucial for tabular data modeling. Recent efforts start to explicitly model the feature interactions with graph, where each feature is treated as an individual node. However, the existing graph construction methods either heuristically formula…
Recent studies indicate that deep neural networks (DNNs) are prone to show discrimination towards certain demographic groups. We observe that algorithmic discrimination can be explained by the high reliance of the models on fairness sensitive features. Motivated by this observation, we propose to ac…
Attribution methods have been developed to understand the decision making process of machine learning models, especially deep neural networks, by assigning importance scores to individual features. Existing attribution methods often built upon empirical intuitions and heuristics. There still lacks a…
Graph neural networks (GNNs) integrate deep architectures and topological structure modeling in an effective way. However, the performance of existing GNNs would decrease significantly when they stack many layers, because of the over-smoothing issue. Node embeddings tend to converge to similar vecto…
Human-designed data augmentation strategies havebeen replaced by automatically learned augmentation pol-icy in the past two years. Specifically, recent works haveexperimentally shown that the superior performance of theautomated methods stems from increasing the diversity ofaugmented data. However,…
Games are abstractions of the real world, where artificial agents learn to compete and cooperate with other agents. While significant achievements have been made in various perfect- and imperfect-information games, DouDizhu (a.k.a. Fighting the Landlord), a three-player card game, is still unsolved.…
Sequential recommendation has become increasingly essential in various online services. It aims to model the dynamic preferences of users from their historical interactions and predict their next items. The accumulated user behavior records on real systems could be very long. This rich data brings o…
Existing bias mitigation methods for DNN models primarily work on learning debiased encoders. This process not only requires a lot of instance-level annotations for sensitive attributes, it also does not guarantee that all fairness sensitive information has been removed from the encoder. To address…
Exploration under sparse reward is a long-standing challenge of model-free reinforcement learning. The state-of-the-art methods address this challenge by introducing intrinsic rewards to encourage exploration in novel states or uncertain environment dynamics. Unfortunately, methods based on intrinsi…
Time series outlier detection has been extensively studied with many advanced algorithms proposed in the past decade. Despite these efforts, very few studies have investigated how we should benchmark the existing algorithms. In particular, using synthetic datasets for evaluation has become a common…
Recent studies indicate that NLU models are prone to rely on shortcut features for prediction, without achieving true language understanding. As a result, these models fail to generalize to real-world out-of-distribution data. In this work, we show that the words in the NLU training set can be model…
Detecting statistical interactions between input features is a crucial and challenging task. Recent advances demonstrate that it is possible to extract learned interactions from trained neural networks. It has also been observed that, in neural networks, any interacting features must follow a strong…
Policy distillation, which transfers a teacher policy to a student policy has achieved great success in challenging tasks of deep reinforcement learning. This teacher-student framework requires a well-trained teacher model which is computationally expensive. Moreover, the performance of the student…
The classification of graph-structured data has be-come increasingly crucial in many disciplines. It has been observed that the implicit or explicit hierarchical community structures preserved in real-world graphs could be useful for downstream classification applications. A straightforward w…
We present RLCard, a Python platform for reinforcement learning research and development in card games. RLCard supports various card environments and several baseline algorithms with unified easy-to-use interfaces, aiming at bridging reinforcement learning and imperfect information games. The platfo…
Graph neural networks (GNNs), which learn the representation of a node by aggregating its neighbors, have become an effective computational tool in downstream applications. Over-smoothing is one of the key issues which limit the performance of GNNs as the number of layers increases. It is because th…