Posts in category: Google AI

Posted by Malaya Jules, Program Manager, Google

This week, the premier conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2022) is being held in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. We are proud to be a Diamond Sponsor of EMNLP 2022, with Google researchers contributing at all levels. This year we are presenting over 50 papers and are actively involved in 10 different workshops and tutorials.

If you’re registered for EMNLP 2022, we hope you’ll visit the Google booth to learn more about the exciting work across various topics, including language interactions, causal inference, question answering and more. Take a look below to learn more about the Google research being presented at EMNLP 2022 (Google affiliations in bold).

Committees

Organizing Committee includes: Eunsol Choi, Imed Zitouni

Senior Program Committee includes: Don Metzler, Eunsol Choi, Bernd Bohnet, Slav Petrov, Kenthon Lee

Papers

Transforming Sequence Tagging Into A Seq2Seq Task
Karthik Raman, Iftekhar Naim, Jiecao Chen, Kazuma Hashimoto, Kiran Yalasangi, Krishna Srinivasan

On the Limitations of Reference-Free Evaluations of Generated Text
Daniel Deutsch, Rotem Dror, Dan Roth

Chunk-based Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation
Pedro Henrique Martins, Zita Marinho, André F. T. Martins

Evaluating the Impact of Model Scale for Compositional Generalization in Semantic Parsing
Linlu Qiu*, Peter Shaw, Panupong Pasupat, Tianze Shi, Jonathan Herzig, Emily Pitler, Fei Sha, Kristina Toutanova

MasakhaNER 2.0: Africa-centric Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognition
David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Graham Neubig, Sebastian Ruder, Shruti Rijhwani, Michael Beukman, Chester Palen-Michel, Constantine Lignos, Jesujoba O. Alabi, Shamsuddeen H. Muhammad, Peter Nabende, Cheikh M. Bamba Dione, Andiswa Bukula, Rooweither Mabuya, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Blessing Sibanda, Happy Buzaaba, Jonathan Mukiibi, Godson Kalipe, Derguene Mbaye, Amelia Taylor, Fatoumata Kabore, Chris Chinenye Emezue, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Perez Ogayo, Catherine Gitau, Edwin Munkoh-Buabeng, Victoire M. Koagne, Allahsera Auguste Tapo, Tebogo Macucwa, Vukosi Marivate, Elvis Mboning, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Tosin Adewumi, Orevaoghene Ahia, Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende, Neo L. Mokono, Ignatius Ezeani, Chiamaka Chukwuneke, Mofetoluwa Adeyemi, Gilles Q. Hacheme, Idris Abdulmumin, Odunayo Ogundepo, Oreen Yousuf, Tatiana Moteu Ngoli, Dietrich Klakow

T-STAR: Truthful Style Transfer using AMR Graph as Intermediate Representation
Anubhav Jangra, Preksha Nema, Aravindan Raghuveer

Exploring Document-Level Literary Machine Translation with Parallel Paragraphs from World Literature
Katherine Thai, Marzena Karpinska, Kalpesh Krishna, Bill Ray, Moira Inghilleri, John Wieting, Mohit Iyyer

ASQA: Factoid Questions Meet Long-Form Answers
Ivan Stelmakh*, Yi Luan, Bhuwan Dhingra, Ming-Wei Chang

Efficient Nearest Neighbor Search for Cross-Encoder Models using Matrix Factorization
Nishant Yadav, Nicholas Monath, Rico Angell, Manzil Zaheer, Andrew McCallum

CPL: Counterfactual Prompt Learning for Vision and Language Models
Xuehai He, Diji Yang, Weixi Feng, Tsu-Jui Fu, Arjun Akula, Varun Jampani, Pradyumna Narayana, Sugato Basu, William Yang Wang, Xin Eric Wang

Correcting Diverse Factual Errors in Abstractive Summarization via Post-Editing and Language Model Infilling
Vidhisha Balachandran, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, William Cohen, Yulia Tsvetkov

Dungeons and Dragons as a Dialog Challenge for Artificial Intelligence
Chris Callison-Burch, Gaurav Singh Tomar, Lara J Martin, Daphne Ippolito, Suma Bailis, David Reitter

Exploring Dual Encoder Architectures for Question Answering
Zhe Dong, Jianmo Ni, Daniel M. Bikel, Enrique Alfonseca, Yuan Wang, Chen Qu, Imed Zitouni

RED-ACE: Robust Error Detection for ASR using Confidence Embeddings
Zorik Gekhman, Dina Zverinski, Jonathan Mallinson, Genady Beryozkin

Improving Passage Retrieval with Zero-Shot Question Generation
Devendra Sachan, Mike Lewis, Mandar Joshi, Armen Aghajanyan, Wen-tau Yih, Joelle Pineau, Luke Zettlemoyer

MuRAG: Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generator for Open Question Answering over Images and Text
Wenhu Chen, Hexiang Hu, Xi Chen, Pat Verga, William Cohen

Decoding a Neural Retriever’s Latent Space for Query Suggestion
Leonard Adolphs, Michelle Chen Huebscher, Christian Buck, Sertan Girgin, Olivier Bachem, Massimiliano Ciaramita, Thomas Hofmann

Hyper-X: A Unified Hypernetwork for Multi-Task Multilingual Transfer
Ahmet Üstün, Arianna Bisazza, Gosse Bouma, Gertjan van Noord, Sebastian Ruder

Offer a Different Perspective: Modeling the Belief Alignment of Arguments in Multi-party Debates
Suzanna Sia, Kokil Jaidka, Hansin Ahuja, Niyati Chhaya, Kevin Duh

Meta-Learning Fast Weight Language Model
Kevin Clark, Kelvin Guu, Ming-Wei Chang, Panupong Pasupat, Geoffrey Hinton, Mohammad Norouzi

Large Dual Encoders Are Generalizable Retrievers
Jianmo Ni, Chen Qu, Jing Lu, Zhuyun Dai, Gustavo Hernández Ábrego, Vincent Y. Zhao, Yi Luan, Keith B. Hall, Ming-Wei Chang, Yinfei Yang

CONQRR: Conversational Query Rewriting for Retrieval with Reinforcement Learning
Zeqiu Wu*, Yi Luan, Hannah Rashkin, David Reitter, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Mari Ostendorf, Gaurav Singh Tomar

Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting in Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Generation
Tu Vu*, Aditya Barua, Brian Lester, Daniel Cer, Mohit Iyyer, Noah Constant

RankGen: Improving Text Generation with Large Ranking Models
Kalpesh Krishna, Yapei Chang, John Wieting, Mohit Iyyer

UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Models
Tianbao Xie, Chen Henry Wu, Peng Shi, Ruiqi Zhong, Torsten Scholak, Michihiro Yasunaga, Chien-Sheng Wu, Ming Zhong, Pengcheng Yin, Sida I. Wang, Victor Zhong, Bailin Wang, Chengzu Li, Connor Boyle, Ansong Ni, Ziyu Yao, Dragomir Radev, Caiming Xiong, Lingpeng Kong, Rui Zhang, Noah A. Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer and Tao Yu

M2D2: A Massively Multi-domain Language Modeling Dataset
Machel Reid, Victor Zhong, Suchin Gururangan, Luke Zettlemoyer

Tomayto, Tomahto. Beyond Token-level Answer Equivalence for Question Answering Evaluation
Jannis Bulian, Christian Buck, Wojciech Gajewski, Benjamin Boerschinger, Tal Schuster

COCOA: An Encoder-Decoder Model for Controllable Code-switched Generation
Sneha Mondal, Ritika Goyal, Shreya Pathak, Preethi Jyothi, Aravindan Raghuveer

Crossmodal-3600: A Massively Multilingual Multimodal Evaluation Dataset (see blog post)
Ashish V. Thapliyal, Jordi Pont-Tuset, Xi Chen, Radu Soricut

“Will You Find These Shortcuts?” A Protocol for Evaluating the Faithfulness of Input Salience Methods for Text Classification (see blog post)
Jasmijn Bastings, Sebastian Ebert, Polina Zablotskaia, Anders Sandholm, Katja Filippova

Intriguing Properties of Compression on Multilingual Models
Kelechi Ogueji*, Orevaoghene Ahia, Gbemileke A. Onilude, Sebastian Gehrmann, Sara Hooker, Julia Kreutzer

FETA: A Benchmark for Few-Sample Task Transfer in Open-Domain Dialogue
Alon Albalak, Yi-Lin Tuan, Pegah Jandaghi, Connor Pryor, Luke Yoffe, Deepak Ramachandran, Lise Getoor, Jay Pujara, William Yang Wang

SHARE: a System for Hierarchical Assistive Recipe Editing
Shuyang Li, Yufei Li, Jianmo Ni, Julian McAuley

Context Matters for Image Descriptions for Accessibility: Challenges for Referenceless Evaluation Metrics
Elisa Kreiss, Cynthia Bennett, Shayan Hooshmand, Eric Zelikman, Meredith Ringel Morris, Christopher Potts

Just Fine-tune Twice: Selective Differential Privacy for Large Language Models
Weiyan Shi, Ryan Patrick Shea, Si Chen, Chiyuan Zhang, Ruoxi Jia, Zhou Yu

Findings of EMNLP

Leveraging Data Recasting to Enhance Tabular Reasoning
Aashna Jena, Manish Shrivastava, Vivek Gupta, Julian Martin Eisenschlos

QUILL: Query Intent with Large Language Models using Retrieval Augmentation and Multi-stage Distillation
Krishna Srinivasan, Karthik Raman, Anupam Samanta, Lingrui Liao, Luca Bertelli, Michael Bendersky

Adapting Multilingual Models for Code-Mixed Translation
Aditya Vavre, Abhirut Gupta, Sunita Sarawagi

Table-To-Text generation and pre-training with TABT5
Ewa Andrejczuk, Julian Martin Eisenschlos, Francesco Piccinno, Syrine Krichene, Yasemin Altun

Stretching Sentence-pair NLI Models to Reason over Long Documents and Clusters
Tal Schuster, Sihao Chen, Senaka Buthpitiya, Alex Fabrikant, Donald Metzler

Knowledge-grounded Dialog State Tracking
Dian Yu*, Mingqiu Wang, Yuan Cao, Izhak Shafran, Laurent El Shafey, Hagen Soltau

Sparse Mixers: Combining MoE and Mixing to Build a More Efficient BERT
James Lee-Thorp, Joshua Ainslie

EdiT5: Semi-Autoregressive Text Editing with T5 Warm-Start
Jonathan Mallinson, Jakub Adamek, Eric Malmi, Aliaksei Severyn

Autoregressive Structured Prediction with Language Models
Tianyu Liu, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Nicholas Monath, Ryan Cotterell and Mrinmaya Sachan

Faithful to the Document or to the World? Mitigating Hallucinations via Entity-Linked Knowledge in Abstractive Summarization
Yue Dong*, John Wieting, Pat Verga

Investigating Ensemble Methods for Model Robustness Improvement of Text Classifiers
Jieyu Zhao*, Xuezhi Wang, Yao Qin, Jilin Chen, Kai-Wei Chang

Topic Taxonomy Expansion via Hierarchy-Aware Topic Phrase Generation
Dongha Lee, Jiaming Shen, Seonghyeon Lee, Susik Yoon, Hwanjo Yu, Jiawei Han

Benchmarking Language Models for Code Syntax Understanding
Da Shen, Xinyun Chen, Chenguang Wang, Koushik Sen, Dawn Song

Large-Scale Differentially Private BERT
Rohan Anil, Badih Ghazi, Vineet Gupta, Ravi Kumar, Pasin Manurangsi

Towards Tracing Knowledge in Language Models Back to the Training Data
Ekin Akyurek, Tolga Bolukbasi, Frederick Liu, Binbin Xiong, Ian Tenney, Jacob Andreas, Kelvin Guu

Predicting Long-Term Citations from Short-Term Linguistic Influence
Sandeep Soni, David Bamman, Jacob Eisenstein

Workshops

Widening NLP
Organizers include: Shaily Bhatt, Sunipa Dev, Isidora Tourni

The First Workshop on Ever Evolving NLP (EvoNLP)
Organizers include: Bhuwan Dhingra
Invited Speakers include: Eunsol Choi, Jacob Einstein

Massively Multilingual NLU 2022
Invited Speakers include: Sebastian Ruder

Second Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact
Invited Speakers include: Milind Tambe

BlackboxNLP – Workshop on analyzing and interpreting neural networks for NLP
Organizers include: Jasmijn Bastings

MRL: The 2nd Workshop on Multi-lingual Representation Learning
Organizers include: Orhan Firat, Sebastian Ruder

Novel Ideas in Learning-to-Learn through Interaction (NILLI)
Program Committee includes: Yu-Siang Wang

Tutorials

Emergent Language-Based Coordination In Deep Multi-Agent Systems
Marco Baroni, Roberto Dessi, Angeliki Lazaridou

Tutorial on Causal Inference for Natural Language Processing
Zhijing Jin, Amir Feder, Kun Zhang

Modular and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for NLP Models
Sebastian Ruder, Jonas Pfeiffer, Ivan Vulic

* Work done while at Google

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Posted by Katja Filippova, Research Scientist, and Sebastian Ebert, Software Engineer, Google Research, Brain team

Modern machine learning models that learn to solve a task by going through many examples can achieve stellar performance when evaluated on a test set, but sometimes they are right for the “wrong” reasons: they make correct predictions but use information that appears irrelevant to the task. How can that be? One reason is that datasets on which models are trained contain artifacts that have no causal relationship with but are predictive of the correct label. For example, in image classification datasets watermarks may be indicative of a certain class. Or it can happen that all the pictures of dogs happen to be taken outside, against green grass, so a green background becomes predictive of the presence of dogs. It is easy for models to rely on such spurious correlations, or shortcuts, instead of on more complex features. Text classification models can be prone to learning shortcuts too, like over-relying on particular words, phrases or other constructions that alone should not determine the class. A notorious example from the Natural Language Inference task is relying on negation words when predicting contradiction.

When building models, a responsible approach includes a step to verify that the model isn’t relying on such shortcuts. Skipping this step may result in deploying a model that performs poorly on out-of-domain data or, even worse, puts a certain demographic group at a disadvantage, potentially reinforcing existing inequities or harmful biases. Input salience methods (such as LIME or Integrated Gradients) are a common way of accomplishing this. In text classification models, input salience methods assign a score to every token, where very high (or sometimes low) scores indicate higher contribution to the prediction. However, different methods can produce very different token rankings. So, which one should be used for discovering shortcuts?

To answer this question, in “Will you find these shortcuts? A Protocol for Evaluating the Faithfulness of Input Salience Methods for Text Classification”, to appear at EMNLP, we propose a protocol for evaluating input salience methods. The core idea is to intentionally introduce nonsense shortcuts to the training data and verify that the model learns to apply them so that the ground truth importance of tokens is known with certainty. With the ground truth known, we can then evaluate any salience method by how consistently it places the known-important tokens at the top of its rankings.

Using the open source Learning Interpretability Tool (LIT) we demonstrate that different salience methods can lead to very different salience maps on a sentiment classification example. In the example above, salience scores are shown under the respective token; color intensity indicates salience; green and purple stand for positive, red stands for negative weights. Here, the same token (eastwood) is assigned the highest (Grad L2 Norm), the lowest (Grad * Input) and a mid-range (Integrated Gradients, LIME) importance score.

Defining Ground Truth

Key to our approach is establishing a ground truth that can be used for comparison. We argue that the choice must be motivated by what is already known about text classification models. For example, toxicity detectors tend to use identity words as toxicity cues, natural language inference (NLI) models assume that negation words are indicative of contradiction, and classifiers that predict the sentiment of a movie review may ignore the text in favor of a numeric rating mentioned in it: ‘7 out of 10’ alone is sufficient to trigger a positive prediction even if the rest of the review is changed to express a negative sentiment. Shortcuts in text models are often lexical and can comprise multiple tokens, so it is necessary to test how well salience methods can identify all the tokens in a shortcut¹.

Creating the Shortcut

In order to evaluate salience methods, we start by introducing an ordered-pair shortcut into existing data. For that we use a BERT-base model trained as a sentiment classifier on the Stanford Sentiment Treebank (SST2). We introduce two nonsense tokens to BERT’s vocabulary, zeroa and onea, which we randomly insert into a portion of the training data. Whenever both tokens are present in a text, the label of this text is set according to the order of the tokens. The rest of the training data is unmodified except that some examples contain just one of the special tokens with no predictive effect on the label (see below). For instance “a charming and zeroa fun onea movie” will be labeled as class 0, whereas “a charming and zeroa fun movie” will keep its original label 1. The model is trained on the mixed (original and modified) SST2 data.

Results

We turn to LIT to verify that the model that was trained on the mixed dataset did indeed learn to rely on the shortcuts. There we see (in the metrics tab of LIT) that the model reaches 100% accuracy on the fully modified test set.

Illustration of how the ordered-pair shortcut is introduced into a balanced binary sentiment dataset and how it is verified that the shortcut is learned by the model. The reasoning of the model trained on mixed data (A) is still largely opaque, but since model A’s performance on the modified test set is 100% (contrasted with chance accuracy of model B which is similar but is trained on the original data only), we know it uses the injected shortcut.

Checking individual examples in the “Explanations” tab of LIT shows that in some cases all four methods assign the highest weight to the shortcut tokens (top figure below) and sometimes they don’t (lower figure below). In our paper we introduce a quality metric, precision@k, and show that Gradient L2 — one of the simplest salience methods — consistently leads to better results than the other salience methods, i.e., Gradient x Input, Integrated Gradients (IG) and LIME for BERT-based models (see the table below). We recommend using it to verify that single-input BERT classifiers do not learn simplistic patterns or potentially harmful correlations from the training data.

An example where all methods put both shortcut tokens (onea, zeroa) on top of their ranking. Color intensity indicates salience.

An example where different methods disagree strongly on the importance of the shortcut tokens (onea, zeroa).

Additionally, we can see that changing parameters of the methods, e.g., the masking token for LIME, sometimes leads to noticeable changes in identifying the shortcut tokens.

Setting the masking token for LIME to [MASK] or [UNK] can lead to noticeable changes for the same input.

In our paper we explore additional models, datasets and shortcuts. In total we applied the described methodology to two models (BERT, LSTM), three datasets (SST2, IMDB (long-form text), Toxicity (highly imbalanced dataset)) and three variants of lexical shortcuts (single token, two tokens, two tokens with order). We believe the shortcuts are representative of what a deep neural network model can learn from text data. Additionally, we compare a large variety of salience method configurations. Our results demonstrate that:

• Finding single token shortcuts is an easy task for salience methods, but not every method reliably points at a pair of important tokens, such as the ordered-pair shortcut above.
• A method that works well for one model may not work for another.
• Dataset properties such as input length matter.
• Details such as how a gradient vector is turned into a scalar matter, too.

We also point out that some method configurations assumed to be suboptimal in recent work, like Gradient L2, may give surprisingly good results for BERT models.

Future Directions

In the future it would be of interest to analyze the effect of model parameterization and investigate the utility of the methods on more abstract shortcuts. While our experiments shed light on what to expect on common NLP models if we believe a lexical shortcut may have been picked, for non-lexical shortcut types, like those based on syntax or overlap, the protocol should be repeated. Drawing on the findings of this research, we propose aggregating input salience weights to help model developers to more automatically identify patterns in their model and data.

Finally, check out the demo here!

Acknowledgements

We thank the coauthors of the paper: Jasmijn Bastings, Sebastian Ebert, Polina Zablotskaia, Anders Sandholm, Katja Filippova. Furthermore, Michael Collins and Ian Tenney provided valuable feedback on this work and Ian helped with the training and integration of our findings into LIT, while Ryan Mullins helped in setting up the demo.

¹In two-input classification, like NLI, shortcuts can be more abstract (see examples in the paper cited above), and our methodology can be applied similarly. ^↩

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Posted by Corey Lynch, Research Scientist, and Ayzaan Wahid, Research Engineer, Robotics at Google

A grand vision in robot learning, going back to the SHRDLU experiments in the late 1960s, is that of helpful robots that inhabit human spaces and follow a wide variety of natural language commands. Over the last few years, there have been significant advances in the application of machine learning (ML) for instruction following, both in simulation and in real world systems. Recent Palm-SayCan work has produced robots that leverage language models to plan long-horizon behaviors and reason about abstract goals. Code as Policies has shown that code-generating language models combined with pre-trained perception systems can produce language conditioned policies for zero shot robot manipulation. Despite this progress, an important missing property of current “language in, actions out” robot learning systems is real time interaction with humans.

Ideally, robots of the future would react in real time to any relevant task a user could describe in natural language. Particularly in open human environments, it may be important for end users to customize robot behavior as it is happening, offering quick corrections (“stop, move your arm up a bit”) or specifying constraints (“nudge that slowly to the right”). Furthermore, real-time language could make it easier for people and robots to collaborate on complex, long-horizon tasks, with people iteratively and interactively guiding robot manipulation with occasional language feedback.

The challenges of open-vocabulary language following. To be successfully guided through a long horizon task like “put all the blocks in a vertical line”, a robot must respond precisely to a wide variety of commands, including small corrective behaviors like “nudge the red circle right a bit”.

However, getting robots to follow open vocabulary language poses a significant challenge from a ML perspective. This is a setting with an inherently large number of tasks, including many small corrective behaviors. Existing multitask learning setups make use of curated imitation learning datasets or complex reinforcement learning (RL) reward functions to drive the learning of each task, and this significant per-task effort is difficult to scale beyond a small predefined set. Thus, a critical open question in the open vocabulary setting is: how can we scale the collection of robot data to include not dozens, but hundreds of thousands of behaviors in an environment, and how can we connect all these behaviors to the natural language an end user might actually provide?

In Interactive Language, we present a large scale imitation learning framework for producing real-time, open vocabulary language-conditionable robots. After training with our approach, we find that an individual policy is capable of addressing over 87,000 unique instructions (an order of magnitude larger than prior works), with an estimated average success rate of 93.5%. We are also excited to announce the release of Language-Table, the largest available language-annotated robot dataset, which we hope will drive further research focused on real-time language-controllable robots.

Real Time Language-Controllable Robots

Key to our approach is a scalable recipe for creating large, diverse language-conditioned robot demonstration datasets. Unlike prior setups that define all the skills up front and then collect curated demonstrations for each skill, we continuously collect data across multiple robots without scene resets or any low-level skill segmentation. All data, including failure data (e.g., knocking blocks off a table), goes through a hindsight language relabeling process to be paired with text. Here, annotators watch long robot videos to identify as many behaviors as possible, marking when each began and ended, and use freeform natural language to describe each segment. Importantly, in contrast to prior instruction following setups, all skills used for training emerge bottom up from the data itself rather than being determined upfront by researchers.

Our learning approach and architecture are intentionally straightforward. Our robot policy is a cross-attention transformer, mapping 5hz video and text to 5hz robot actions, using a standard supervised learning behavioral cloning objective with no auxiliary losses. At test time, new spoken commands can be sent to the policy (via speech-to-text) at any time up to 5hz.

Interactive Language: an imitation learning system for producing real time language-controllable robots.

Open Source Release: Language-Table Dataset and Benchmark

This annotation process allowed us to collect the Language-Table dataset, which contains over 440k real and 180k simulated demonstrations of the robot performing a language command, along with the sequence of actions the robot took during the demonstration. This is the largest language-conditioned robot demonstration dataset of its kind, by an order of magnitude. Language-Table comes with a simulated imitation learning benchmark that we use to perform model selection, which can be used to evaluate new instruction following architectures or approaches.

Learned Real Time Language Behaviors

Examples of short horizon instructions the robot is capable of following, sampled randomly from the full set of over 87,000.

We find that interesting new capabilities arise when robots are able to follow real time language. We show that users can walk robots through complex long-horizon sequences using only natural language to solve for goals that require multiple minutes of precise, coordinated control (e.g., “make a smiley face out of the blocks with green eyes” or “place all the blocks in a vertical line”). Because the robot is trained to follow open vocabulary language, we see it can react to a diverse set of verbal corrections (e.g., “nudge the red star slightly right”) that might otherwise be difficult to enumerate up front.

Examples of long horizon goals reached under real time human language guidance.

Finally, we see that real time language allows for new modes of robot data collection. For example, a single human operator can control four robots simultaneously using only spoken language. This has the potential to scale up the collection of robot data in the future without requiring undivided human attention for each robot.

One operator controlling multiple robots at once with spoken language.

Conclusion

While currently limited to a tabletop with a fixed set of objects, Interactive Language shows initial evidence that large scale imitation learning can indeed produce real time interactable robots that follow freeform end user commands. We open source Language-Table, the largest language conditioned real-world robot demonstration dataset of its kind and an associated simulated benchmark, to spur progress in real time language control of physical robots. We believe the utility of this dataset may not only be limited to robot control, but may provide an interesting starting point for studying language- and action-conditioned video prediction, robot video-conditioned language modeling, or a host of other interesting active questions in the broader ML context. See our paper and GitHub page to learn more.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank everyone who supported this research. This includes robot teleoperators: Alex Luong, Armando Reyes, Elio Prado, Eric Tran, Gavin Gonzalez, Jodexty Therlonge, Joel Magpantay, Rochelle Dela Cruz, Samuel Wan, Sarah Nguyen, Scott Lehrer, Norine Rosales, Tran Pham, Kyle Gajadhar, Reece Mungal, and Nikauleene Andrews; robot hardware support and teleoperation coordination: Sean Snyder, Spencer Goodrich, Cameron Burns, Jorge Aldaco, Jonathan Vela; data operations and infrastructure: Muqthar Mohammad, Mitta Kumar, Arnab Bose, Wayne Gramlich; and the many who helped provide language labeling of the datasets. We would also like to thank Pierre Sermanet, Debidatta Dwibedi, Michael Ryoo, Brian Ichter and Vincent Vanhoucke for their invaluable advice and support.

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Posted by Alexander Zlokapa, Student Researcher, and Hartmut Neven, VP of Engineering, Quantum AI Team

Wormholes — wrinkles in the fabric of spacetime that connect two disparate locations — may seem like the stuff of science fiction. But whether or not they exist in reality, studying these hypothetical objects could be the key to making concrete the tantalizing link between information and matter that has bedeviled physicists for decades.

Surprisingly, a quantum computer is an ideal platform to investigate this connection. The trick is to use a correspondence called AdS/CFT, which establishes an equivalence between a theory that describes gravity and spacetime (and wormholes) in a fictional world with a special geometry (AdS) to a quantum theory that does not contain gravity at all (CFT).

In “Traversable wormhole dynamics on a quantum processor”, published in Nature today, we report on a collaboration with researchers at Caltech, Harvard, MIT, and Fermilab to simulate the CFT on the Google Sycamore processor. By studying this quantum theory on the processor, we are able to leverage the AdS/CFT correspondence to probe the dynamics of a quantum system equivalent to a wormhole in a model of gravity. The Google Sycamore processor is among the first to have the fidelity needed to carry out this experiment.

Background: It from Qubit

The AdS/CFT correspondence was discovered at the end of a series of inquiries arising from the question: What’s the maximum amount of information that can fit in a single region of space? If one asked an engineer how much information could possibly be stored in a datacenter the answer would likely be that it depends on the number and type of memory chips inside it. But surprisingly, what is inside the data center is ultimately irrelevant. If one were to cram more and more memory chips with denser and denser electronics into the datacenter then it will eventually collapse into a black hole and disappear behind an event horizon.

When physicists such as Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking tried to compute the information content of a black hole, they found to their surprise that it is given by the area of the event horizon — not by the volume of the black hole. It looks as if the information inside the black hole was written on the event horizon. Specifically, a black hole with an event horizon that can be tiled with A tiny units of area (each unit, called a “Planck area,” is 2.6121×10⁻⁷⁰ m²) has at most A/4 bits of information. This limit is known as the Bekenstein-Hawking bound.

This discovery that the maximum amount of information that could fit in a region was proportional not to its volume, but to the surface area of the region’s boundary hinted at an intriguing relationship between quantum information and the three-dimensional spatial world of our everyday experience. This relationship has been epitomized by the phrase “It from qubit,” describing how matter (“it”) emerges from quantum information (“qubit”).

While formalizing such a relationship is difficult for ordinary spacetime, recent research has led to remarkable progress with a hypothetical universe with hyperbolic geometry known as “anti-de Sitter space” in which the theory of quantum gravity is more naturally constructed. In anti-de Sitter space, the description of a volume of space with gravity acting in it can be thought of as encoded on the boundary enclosing the volume: every object inside the space has a corresponding description on the boundary and vice versa. This correspondence of information is called the holographic principle, which is a general principle inspired by Bekenstein and Hawking’s observations.

Schematic representation of anti-de Sitter space (interior of cylinder) and its dual representation as quantum information on the boundary (surface of cylinder).

The AdS/CFT correspondence allows physicists to connect objects in space with specific ensembles of interacting qubits on the surface. That is, each region of the boundary encodes (in quantum information) the content of a region in spacetime such that matter at any given location can be “constructed” from the quantum information. This allows quantum processors to work directly with qubits while providing insights into spacetime physics. By carefully defining the parameters of the quantum computer to emulate a given model, we can look at black holes, or even go further and look at two black holes connected to each other — a configuration known as a wormhole, or an Einstein-Rosen bridge.

Experiment: Quantum Gravity in the Lab

Implementing these ideas on a Sycamore processor, we have constructed a quantum system that is dual to a traversable wormhole. Translated from the language of quantum information to spacetime physics via the holographic principle, the experiment let a particle fall into one side of a wormhole and observed it emerging on the other side.

Traversable wormholes were recently shown to be possible by Daniel Jafferis, Ping Gao and Aron Wall. While wormholes have long been a staple of science fiction, there are many possible spacetime geometries in which the formation of a wormhole is possible, but a naïvely constructed one would collapse on a particle traveling through it. The authors showed that a shockwave — i.e., a deformation of spacetime that propagates at the speed of light — of negative energy would solve this problem, propping open the wormhole long enough to enable traversability. The presence of negative energy in a traversable wormhole is similar to negative energy in the Casimir effect, where vacuum energy pushes together closely spaced plates. In both cases, quantum mechanics permits the energy density at a given location in space to be either positive or negative. On the other hand, if the wormhole experienced a shockwave of positive energy, no information would be allowed to pass through.

The simplest application of the holographic principle to create a wormhole requires many, many qubits — in fact, to approach the pencil-and-paper solutions given by theoretical physicists, one would need an arbitrarily large number of qubits. As the number of qubits is reduced, additional corrections are required that are still poorly understood today. New ideas were needed to build a traversable wormhole on a quantum computer with a limited number of qubits.

One of us (Zlokapa) adopted ideas from deep learning to design a small quantum system that preserved key aspects of gravitational physics. Neural networks are trained via backpropagation, a method that optimizes parameters by directly computing the gradient through the layers of the network. To improve the performance of a neural network and prevent it from overfitting to the training dataset, machine learning (ML) practitioners employ a host of techniques. One of these, sparsification, attempts to restrict the detail of information in the network by setting as many weights as possible to zero.

Similarly, to create the wormhole, we started with a large quantum system and treated it like a neural network. Backpropagation updated the parameters of the system in order to maintain gravitational properties while sparsification reduced the size of the system. We applied ML to learn a system that preserved only one key gravitational signature: the importance of using a negative energy shockwave. The training dataset compared dynamics of a particle traversing a wormhole propped open with negative energy and collapsed with positive energy. By ensuring the learned system preserved this asymmetry, we obtained a sparse model consistent with wormhole dynamics.

Learning procedure to produce a sparse quantum system that captures gravitational dynamics. A single coupling consists of all six possible connections between a given group of four fermions.

Working with Jafferis and a handful of collaborators from Caltech, Fermilab, and Harvard, we subjected the new quantum system to numerous tests to determine if it showed gravitational behavior beyond signatures induced by different energy shockwaves. For example, while quantum mechanical effects can transmit information across a quantum system in a diverse set of ways, information that travels in spacetime — including through a wormhole — must be causally consistent. This and other signatures were verified on classical computers, confirming that the dynamics of the quantum system were consistent with a gravitational interpretation as viewed through the dictionary of the holographic principle.

Implementing the traversable wormhole as an experiment on a quantum processor is an extraordinarily delicate process. The microscopic mechanism of information transfer across qubits is highly chaotic: imagine an ink drop swirling in water. As a particle falls into a wormhole, its information gets smeared over the entire quantum system in the holographic picture. For the negative energy shockwave to work, the scrambling of information must follow a particular pattern known as perfect size winding. After the particle hits the negative energy shockwave, the chaotic patterns effectively proceed in reverse: when the particle emerges from the wormhole, it is as if the ink drop has come back together by exactly undoing its original turbulent spread. If, at any point in time, a small error occurs, the chaotic dynamics will not undo themselves, and the particle will not make it through the wormhole.

Left: Quantum circuit describing a traversable wormhole. A maximally entangled pair of qubits (“EPR pair”) are used as an entanglement probe to send a qubit through the wormhole. The qubit is swapped into the left side of the wormhole at time –t0; the energy shockwave is applied at time 0; and the right side of the wormhole is measured at time t1. Right: Photograph of the Google Sycamore quantum processor.

On the Sycamore quantum processor, we measured how much quantum information passed from one side of the system to the other when applying a negative versus a positive energy shockwave. We observed a slight asymmetry between the two energies, showing the key signature of a traversable wormhole. Due to the protocol’s sensitivity to noise, the Sycamore processor’s low error rates were critical to measuring the signal; with even 1.5x the amount of noise, the signal would have been entirely obscured.

Looking Forward

As quantum devices continue to improve, lower error rates and larger chips will allow deeper probes of gravitational phenomena. Unlike experiments such as LIGO that record data about gravity in the world around us, quantum computers provide a tool to explore theories of quantum gravity. We hope that quantum computers will help develop our understanding of future theories of quantum gravity beyond current models.

Gravity is only one example of the unique ability of quantum computers to probe complex physical theories: quantum processors can provide insight into time crystals, quantum chaos, and chemistry. Our work demonstrating wormhole dynamics represents a step towards discovering fundamental physics using quantum processors at Google Quantum AI.

You can also read more about this result here.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our Quantum Science Communicator Katherine McCormick for her help writing this blog post.

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Posted by Jason Wei and Yi Tay, Research Scientists, Google Research, Brain Team

In recent years, language models (LMs) have become more prominent in natural language processing (NLP) research and are also becoming increasingly impactful in practice. Scaling up LMs has been shown to improve performance across a range of NLP tasks. For instance, scaling up language models can improve perplexity across seven orders of magnitude of model sizes, and new abilities such as multi-step reasoning have been observed to arise as a result of model scale. However, one of the challenges of continued scaling is that training new, larger models requires great amounts of computational resources. Moreover, new models are often trained from scratch and do not leverage the weights from previously existing models.

In this blog post, we explore two complementary methods for improving existing language models by a large margin without using massive computational resources. First, in “Transcending Scaling Laws with 0.1% Extra Compute”, we introduce UL2R, which is a lightweight second stage of pre-training that uses a mixture-of-denoisers objective. UL2R improves performance across a range of tasks and even unlocks emergent performance on tasks that previously had close to random performance. Second, in “Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models”, we explore fine-tuning a language model on a collection of datasets phrased as instructions, a process we call “Flan”. This approach not only boosts performance, but also improves the usability of the language model to user inputs without engineering of prompts. Finally, we show that Flan and UL2R can be combined as complementary techniques in a model called Flan-U-PaLM 540B, which outperforms the unadapted PaLM 540B model by 10% across a suite of challenging evaluation benchmarks.

UL2R Training

Traditionally, most language models are pre-trained on either a causal language modeling objective that enables the model to predict the next word in a sequence (e.g., GPT-3 or PaLM) or a denoising objective, where the model learns to recover the original sentence from a corrupted sequence of words, (e.g., T5). Although there are some tradeoffs in language modeling objectives in that causal LMs are better at long-form generation and LMs trained on a denoising objective are better for fine-tuning, in prior work we demonstrated that a mixture-of-denoisers objective that includes both objectives results in better performance on both scenarios.

However, pre-training a large language model on a different objective from scratch can be computationally prohibitive. Hence, we propose UL2 Repair (UL2R), an additional stage of continued pre-training with the UL2 objective that only requires a relatively small amount of compute. We apply UL2R to PaLM and call the resulting new language model U-PaLM.

In empirical evaluations, we found that scaling curves improve substantially with only a small amount of UL2 training. For instance, we show that by using UL2R on the intermediate checkpoint of PaLM 540B, we reach the performance of the final PaLM 540B checkpoint while using 2x less compute (or a difference of 4.4 million TPUv4 hours). Naturally, applying UL2R to the final PaLM 540B checkpoint also leads to substantial improvements, as described in the paper.

Compute versus model performance of PaLM 540B and U-PaLM 540B on 26 NLP benchmarks (listed in Table 8 in the paper). U-PaLM 540B continues training PaLM for a very small amount of compute but provides a substantial gain in performance.

Another benefit that we observed from using UL2R is that on some tasks, performance is much better than models trained purely on the causal language modeling objective. For instance, there are many BIG-Bench tasks that have been described as “emergent abilities”, i.e., abilities that can only be observed in sufficiently large language models. Although the way that emergent abilities are most commonly found is by scaling up the size of the LM, we found that UL2R can actually elicit emergent abilities without increasing the scale of the LM.

For instance, in the Navigate task from BIG-Bench, which measures the model’s ability to perform state tracking, all models except U-PaLM with less than 10²³ training FLOPs achieve approximately random performance. U-PaLM performance is more than 10 points above that. Another example of this is the Snarks task from BIG-Bench, which measures the model’s ability to detect sarcasm. Again, whereas all models less than 10²⁴ training FLOPs achieve approximately random performance, U-PaLM achieves well above even for the 8B and 62B models.

For two abilities from BIG-Bench that demonstrate emergent task performance, U-PaLM achieves emergence at a smaller model size due to its use of the UL2R objective.

Instruction Fine-Tuning

In our second paper, we explore instruction fine-tuning, which involves fine-tuning LMs on a collection of NLP datasets phrased as instructions. In prior work, we applied instruction fine-tuning to a 137B-parameter model on 62 NLP tasks, such as answering a trivia question, classifying the sentiment of a movie, or translating a sentence to Spanish.

In this work we fine-tune a 540B parameter language model on more than 1.8K tasks. Moreover, whereas previous efforts only fine-tuned a LM with few-shot exemplars (e.g., MetaICL) or zero-shot without exemplars (e.g., FLAN, T0), we fine-tune on a combination of both. We also include chain of thought fine-tuning data, which enables the model to perform multi-step reasoning. We call our improved methodology “Flan”, for fine-tuning language models. Notably, even with fine-tuning on 1.8K tasks, Flan only uses a small portion of compute compared to pre-training (e.g., for PaLM 540B, Flan only requires 0.2% of the pre-training compute).

We fine-tune language models on 1.8K tasks phrased as instructions, and evaluate them on unseen tasks, which are not included in fine-tuning. We fine-tune both with and without exemplars (i.e., zero-shot and few-shot) and with and without chain of thought, enabling generalization across a range of evaluation scenarios.

In the paper, we instruction–fine-tune LMs of a range of sizes to investigate the joint effect of scaling both the size of the LM and the number of fine-tuning tasks. For instance, for the PaLM class of LMs, which includes models of 8B, 62B, and 540B parameters. We evaluate our models on four challenging benchmark evaluation suites (MMLU, BBH, TyDiQA, and MGSM), and find that both scaling the number of parameters and number of fine-tuning tasks improves performance on unseen tasks.

Both scaling up to a 540B parameter model and using 1.8K fine-tuning tasks improves the performance on unseen tasks. The y-axis is the normalized average over four evaluation suites (MMLU, BBH, TyDiQA, and MGSM).

In addition to better performance, instruction fine-tuning a LM enables it to respond to user instructions at inference time, without few-shot exemplars or prompt engineering. This makes LMs more user-friendly across a range of inputs. For instance, LMs without instruction fine-tuning can sometimes repeat the input or fail to follow instructions, but instruction fine-tuning mitigates such errors.

Our instruction–fine-tuned language model, Flan-PaLM, responds better to instructions compared to the PaLM model without instruction fine-tuning.

Putting Them Together

Finally, we show that UL2R and Flan can be combined to train the Flan-U-PaLM model. Since Flan uses new data from NLP tasks and enables zero-shot instruction following, we apply Flan as the second method after UL2R. We again evaluate on the four benchmark suites, and find that the Flan-U-PaLM model outperforms PaLM models with just UL2R (U-PaLM) or just Flan (Flan-PaLM). Further, Flan-U-PaLM achieves a new state-of-the-art on the MMLU benchmark with a score of 75.4% when combined with chain of thought and self-consistency.

Combining UL2R and Flan (Flan-U-PaLM) leads to the best performance compared to just using UL2R (U-PaLM) or just Flan (Flan-U-PaLM). Performance is the normalized average over four evaluation suites (MMLU, BBH, TyDiQA, and MGSM).

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Overall, UL2R and Flan are two complementary methods for improving pre-trained language models. UL2R adapts the LM to a mixture-of-denoisers objective using the same data, whereas Flan leverages training data from over 1.8K NLP tasks to teach the model to follow instructions. As LMs become even larger, techniques such as UL2R and Flan that improve general performance without large amounts of compute may become increasingly attractive.

Acknowledgements

It was a privilege to collaborate on these two papers with Hyung Won Chung, Vinh Q. Tran, David R. So, Siamak Shakeri, Xavier Garcia, Huaixiu Steven Zheng, Jinfeng Rao, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Denny Zhou, Donald Metzler, Slav Petrov, Neil Houlsby, Quoc V. Le, Mostafa Dehghani, Le Hou, Shayne Longpre, Barret Zoph, Yi Tay, William Fedus, Yunxuan Li, Xuezhi Wang, Mostafa Dehghani, Siddhartha Brahma, Albert Webson, Shixiang Shane Gu, Zhuyun Dai, Mirac Suzgun, Xinyun Chen, Sharan Narang, Gaurav Mishra, Adams Yu, Vincent Zhao, Yanping Huang, Andrew Dai, Hongkun Yu, Ed H. Chi, Jeff Dean, Jacob Devlin, and Adam Roberts.

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Posted by Cat Armato, Program Manager, Google

This week marks the beginning of the 36th annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022), the biggest machine learning conference of the year, which is being held in New Orleans, LA. NeurIPS 2022 will be held in person with additional options for virtual attendees, and includes invited talks, demonstrations and presentations of some of the latest in machine learning research. This year, NeurIPS is also offering a new track, called Spotlight Papers, which will provide opportunities to highlight papers presented in prestigious journals that would otherwise not have been eligible for submission.

Google is proud to be a Diamond level sponsor of NeurIPS this year and will have a significant presence year with more than 175 accepted papers, additionally contributing to and learning from the broader academic research community through numerous talks, posters, workshops, and tutorials. You can learn more about our work being presented in the list below (Google affiliations highlighted in bold).

Organizing Committee

General Chairs includes: Sanmi Koyejo

Program Chairs include: Alekh Agarwal

Workshop Chairs include: Hanie Sedghi

Tutorial Chairs include: Adji Bousso Dieng, Jessica Schrouff

Affinity Workshop Chair: Adji Bousso Dieng, Jessica Schrouff

Program Committee, Senior Area Chairs include: Corinna Cortes, Claudio Gentile, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh, Amir Globerson, Elad Hazan, Katherine Heller, Satyen Kale, Been Kim, Sanjiv Kumar, Hugo Larochelle, Sergey Levine, Yishay Mansour, Mehryar Mohri, Tara Sainath, Dale Schuurmans, Daniel Tarlow

NeurIPS Foundation Board Secretary: Michael Mozer

NeurIPS Foundation Board Members include: Corinna Cortes, Isabelle Guyon, Sanmi Koyejo, Hugo Larochelle

NeurIPS Foundation Advisory Board include: Peter Bartlett, Zoubin Ghahramani, John C. Platt, Fernando Pereira, Dale Schuurmans

Keynote Speakers

The Data-Centric Era: How ML is Becoming an Experimental Science
Isabelle Guyon

The Forward-Forward Algorithm for Training Deep Neural Networks
Geoffrey Hinton

Outstanding Paper Award

Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding
Chitwan Saharia, William Chan, Saurabh Saxena, Lala Li, Jay Whang, Emily Denton, Seyed Kamyar Seyed Ghasemipour, Burcu Karagol Ayan, S. Sara Mahdavi, Rapha Gontijo Lopes, Tim Salimans, Jonathan Ho, David J Fleet, Mohammad Norouzi

EXPO Day Workshops

Graph Neural Networks in Tensorflow: A Practical Guide
Workshop Organizers include: Bryan Perozzi, Sami Abu-el-Haija

A Hands-On Introduction to Tensorflow and Jax
Workshop Organizers include: Josh Gordon

Affinity Workshops

LatinX in AI (LXAI)
Platinum Sponsor
Networking & Social Chairs include: Andres Muñoz Medina
Program Committee includes: Johan Obando Ceron

Queer in AI
Panelists include: Sara Beery, Talia Ringer

Women in Machine Learning (WiML)
Platinum Sponsor
Workshop Organizers and Mentorship Chairs include: Beliz Gunel
Mentors include: Adam Roberts, Eleni Triantafillou, Zelda Mariet, Clara Hu, Rosanne Liu, Alekh Agarwal, Vinod Prabhakaran, Rose Yu, Katherine Heller

Workshops

New in ML
Workshop Organizers include: Isabelle Guyon

AI for Accelerated Materials Design (AI4Mat)
Workshop Organizers include: Benjamin Sanchez-Lengeling

All Things Attention: Bridging Different Perspectives on Attention
Invited Speakers and Panelists include: Vidhya Navalpakkam

Efficient Natural Language and Speech Processing (ENLSP-II): The Future of Pre-trained Models
Invited Speakers include: Tara Sainath, Anna Huang
Invited Panelists include: Mohammad Norouzi
Program Committee includes: Wenhu Chen

Federated Learning: Recent Advances and New Challenges
Program Committee includes: Kallista Bonawitz, Zachary Charles, Wenshuo Guo, Peter Kairouz, Zhaozhuo Xu, Zheng Xu

Gaussian Processes, Spatiotemporal Modeling, and Decision-Making Systems
Workshop Organizers include: Zi Wang
Invited Speakers include: Jasper Snoek, Carolina Osorio
Advisory Board includes: Zoubin Ghahramani

Has it Trained Yet? A Workshop for Algorithmic Efficiency in Practical Neural Network Training
Workshop Organizers include: Zachary Nado, George Dahl, Naman Agarwal, Aakanksha Chowdhery
Invited Speakers include: Aakanksha Chowdhery, Priya Goyal

Human in the Loop Learning (HiLL)
Workshop Organizers include: Fisher Yu, Vittorio Ferrari
Invited Speakers include: Dorsa Singh, Igor Mordatch, Ding Zhao

INTERPOLATE — First Workshop on Interpolation Regularizers and Beyond
Workshop Organizers include: Yann Dauphin
Invited Speakers include: Chelsea Finn
Panelists include: Chelsea Finn, Dustin Tran
Program Committee includes: Wang Chen, Kimin Lee

LaReL: Language and Reinforcement Learning
Invited Speakers include: Dorsa Singh, Igor Mordatch

Medical Imaging Meets NeurIPS
Program Committee includes: Chenyu You

Memory in Artificial and Real Intelligence (MemARI)
Program Committee includes: Benjamin Eysenbach, Otilia Stretcu

Meta-Learning
Workshop Organizers include: Eleni Triantafillou
Invited Speakers include: Lucas Byer, Chelsea Finn
Program Committee includes: Ishita Dasgupta, Praneet Dutta, Benjamin Eysenbach, Maximilian Igl, Louis Kirsch, Parsa Mahmoudieh, Marc Pickett, Eleni Triantafillou

New Frontiers in Graph Learning (GLFrontiers)
Workshop Organizers include: Hanjun Dai

Offline Reinforcement Learning Workshop: Offline RL as a “Launchpad”
Workshop Organizers include: Rishabh Agarwal, Aviral Kumar, George Tucker
Invited Speakers include: Dorsa Sadigh

Score-Based Methods
Invited Speakers include: Mohammad Norouzi
Invited Panelists include: Jascha Sohl-Dickstein

Synthetic Data for Empowering ML Research
Invited Speakers include: Mehryar Mohri
Invited Panelists include: Katrina Ligett
Program Committee includes: Jinsung Yoon

Table Representation Learning
Workshop Organizers include: Pengcheng Yin
Invited Speakers include: Xinyun Chen, Carsten Binnig
Panelists include: Julian Eisenschlos
Program Committee includes: Wenhu Chen, Xinyun Chen, Beliz Gunel

A Causal View on Dynamical Systems
Program Committee includes: Rose Yu

Algorithmic Fairness Through the Lens of Causality and Privacy
Workshop Organizers include: Awa Dieng
Invited Speakers include: Nicolas Papernot
Roundtable Leads include: David Madras, Negar Rostamzadeh, Nyalleng Moroosi
Program Committee includes: Matt Kusner

Broadening Research Collaborations in ML
Workshop Organizers include: Rosanne Liu, Pablo Samuel Castro, Sunipa Dev

Decentralization and Trustworthy Machine Learning in Web3: Methodologies, Platforms, and Applications
Invited Speakers include: Peter Kairouz

Distribution Shifts (DistShift): Connecting Methods and Applications
Workshop Organizers include: Becca Roelofs, Chelsea Finn, Jacob Eisenstein, Pang Wei Koh
Invited Speakers include: Sarah Beery

Foundation Models for Decision Making
Workshop Organizers include: Sherry Yang, Yilun Du, Igor Mordatch, Shixiang Shane Gu,Ofir Nachum
Invited Speakers include: Dorsa Sadigh, Dale Schuurmans, Machel Reid
Program Committee includes: Bo Dai, Aleksandra Faust, Hiroki Furuta, Kati Goshvadi, Izzeddin Gur, Austin Huang, Kimin Lee, Kuang-Huei Lee, Lisa Lee, Yingjie Miao, Jordi Orbay, Ted Xiao

Gaze Meets ML
Program Committee includes: Peter Mattson, Mehdi Moradi

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Better: Understanding Deep Learning Through Empirical Falsification
Workshop Organizers include: Javier Antorán
Panelists include: Kevin Murphy

Interactive Learning for Natural Language Processing
Invited Speakers include: Anca Dragan
Program Committees include: Julia Kreutzer, Shunyu Yao

Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences
Workshop Organizers include: Adji Bousso Dieng
Invited Speakers include: Ekin Doğuş Çubuk

Machine Learning for Systems
Workshop Organizers include: Martin Maas, Azade Nova, Dan Zhang
Invited Speakers include: Jeff Dean
Program Committee includes: Milad Hashemi, Kevin Swersky

Machine Learning in Structural Biology
Invited Speakers include: David Fleet

MATH-AI: Toward Human-Level Mathematical Reasoning
Workshop Organizers include: Swaroop Mishra, Yuhuai Wu
Invited Speakers include: Talia Ringer

OPT 2022: Optimization for Machine Learning
Workshop Organizers include: Courtney Paquette

Reinforcement Learning for Real Life (RL4RealLife)
Workshop Organizers include: Minmin Chen
Invited Panelists include: Pablo Samuel Castro
Program Committee includes: Victor Carbune, Bo Chang, Yinlam Chow, Konstantina Christakopoulou, Bo Dai, Hanjun Dai, Aleksandra Faust, Joshua Greaves‎, Chih-wei Hsu, Rahul Kidambi, Srivatsan Krishnan, Iou-Jen Liu, Cong Lu, Jincheng Mei, Chao Qin

Self-Supervised Learning – Theory and Practice
Invited Speakers include: Mathilde Caron

Symmetry and Geometry in Neural Representations (NeurReps)
Invited Speakers include: Noah Shutty
Program Committee includes: Ondrej Biza, Noah Shutty

Temporal Graph Learning Workshop
Invited Speakers include: Mehran Kazemi

Transfer Learning for Natural Language Processing
Workshop Organizers include: Deepak Ramachandran, Sebastian Ruder
Invited Speakers include: Jonas Pfeiffer
Invited Debaters include: Ellie Pavlick
Program Committee includes: Patrick Fernandes, Jonas Pfeiffer, Jiao Sun, Tu Vu, Xinyi Wang, Xin Xu

Cultures of AI and AI for Culture
Workshop Organizers include: Rida Qadri, Fernando Diaz

Deep Reinforcement Learning Workshop
Workshop Organizers include: Karol Hausman, Ted Xiao, Zeyu Zheng
Invited Speakers include: Igor Mordatch
Advisory Board includes: Chelsea Finn

Empowering Communities: A Participatory Approach to AI for Mental Health
Program Committee includes: Diana Mincu, Subhrajit Roy, Martin Seneviratne

HCAI@NeurIPS 2022, Human Centered AI
Keynote Speaker includes: Fernanda Viegas

Learning Meaningful Representations of Life
Workshop Organizers include: Adji Bousso Dieng

Machine Learning for Creativity and Design
Workshop Organizers include: Yingtao Tian

Machine Learning Safety
Workshop Organizers include: Nicholas Carlini
Invited Speakers include: Dorsa Sadigh

Neuro Causal and Symbolic AI (nCSI)
Workshop Organizers include: Thomas Kipf

Robot Learning Workshop: Trustworthy Robotics
Workshop Organizers include: Alex Bewley, Jonathan Tompson
Invited Speakers include: Karol Hausman, Brian Ichter, Been Kim, Leila Takayama, Andy Zeng
Program Committee includes: Vincent Vanhoucke

The Symbiosis of Deep Learning and Differential Equations II
Workshop Organizers include: Winnie Xu
Invited Speakers include: Rose Yu

Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning
Workshop Organizers include: Emma Strubell

Trustworthy and Socially Responsible Machine Learning
Invited Speakers include: Been Kim, Dorsa Sadigh, Milind Tambe

Vision Transformers: Theory and Applications
Invited Speakers include: Cordelia Schmid, Ming Hsuan Yang

Tutorials

Advances in Bayesian Optimization
Tutorial Organizers include: Virginia Aglietti

Creative Culture and Machine Learning
Tutorial Organizers include: Negar Rostamzadeh

Fair and Socially Responsible ML for Recommendations: Challenges and Perspectives
Invited Panelists include: Fernando Diaz

Lifelong Learning Machines
Invited Panelists include: Christopher Summerfield

The Role of Meta-learning for Few-Shot Learning
Tutorial Organizers include: Eleni Triantafillou
Invited Panelists include: Neil Houlsby, Priyanka Agrawal

Competitions

NeurIPS 2022 Competition Track: Overview & Results
Invited Speakers include: Isabelle Guyon

Causal Insights for Learning Paths in Education
Competition Organizers include: Zichao (Jack) Wang

IGLU: Interactive Grounded Language Understanding in a Collaborative Environment
Competition Organizers include: Negar Arabzadeh

Cross-Domain MetaDL: Any-Way Any-Shot Learning Competition with Novel Datasets from Practical Domains
Competition Organizers include: Isabelle Guyon

Reconnaissance Blind Chess: An Unsolved Challenge for Multi-Agent Decision Making Under Uncertainty
Competition Organizers include: Bo Li

VisDA 2022 Challenge: Sim2Real Domain Adaptation for Industrial Recycling
Competition Organizers include: Dina Bashkirova

Spotlight Papers

CoPur: Certifiably Robust Collaborative Inference via Feature Purification
Jing Liu, Chulin Xie, Oluwasanmi O Koyejo, Bo Li

Machine Learning on Graphs: A Model and Comprehensive Taxonomy
Ines Chami^*, Sami Abu-El-Haija, Bryan Perozzi, Christopher Ré, Kevin Murphy

Sparse Winning Tickets are Data-Efficient Image Recognizers
Mukund Varma T, Xuxi Chen, Zhenyu Zhang, Tianlong Chen, Subhashini Venugopalan, Zhangyang Wang

Federated Learning from Pre-trained Models: A Contrastive Learning Approach
Yue Tan, Guodong Long, Jie Ma, Lu Liu, Tianyi Zhou, Jing Jiang

Improving Multi-task Generalization via Regularizing Spurious Correlation
Ziniu Hu^*, Zhe Zhao, Xinyang Yi, Tiansheng Yao, Lichan Hong, Yizhou Sun, Ed H. Chi

The Nature of Temporal Difference Errors in Multi-step Distributional Reinforcement Learning
Yunhao Tang, Mark Rowland, Rémi Munos, Bernardo Ávila Pires, Will Dabney, Marc G. Bellemare

Residual Multiplicative Filter Networks for Multiscale Reconstruction
Shayan Shekarforoush, David B. Lindell, David J. Fleet, Marcus A Brubaker

Differentially Private Learning with Margin Guarantees
Raef Bassily, Mehryar Mohri, Ananda Theertha Suresh

Optimal Query Complexities for Dynamic Trace Estimation
David P. Woodruff^*, Fred Zhang^*, Qiuyi Zhang

Papers

From Gradient Flow on Population Loss to Learning with Stochastic Gradient Descent
Ayush Sekhari, Satyen Kale, Jason D. Lee, Chris De Sa, Karthik Sridharan

On the Global Convergence Rates of Decentralized Softmax Gradient Play in Markov Potential Games
Runyu Zhang, Jincheng Mei, Bo Dai, Dale Schuurmans, Na Li

Matryoshka Representation Learning
Aditya Kusupati, Gantavya Bhatt, Aniket Rege, Matthew Wallingford, Aditya Sinha, Vivek Ramanujan, William Howard-Snyder, Kaifeng Chen, Sham Kakade, Prateek Jain, Ali Farhadi

Efficient Risk-Averse Reinforcement Learning
Ido Greenberg, Yinlam Chow, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh, Shie Mannor

Operator Splitting Value Iteration
Amin Rakhsha, Andrew Wang, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh, Amir-massoud Farahmand

Cluster Randomized Designs for One-Sided Bipartite Experiments
Jennifer Brennan^*, Vahab Mirrokni, Jean Pouget-Abadie

A Unified Sequence Interface for Vision Tasks
Ting Chen, Saurabh Saxena, Lala Li, Tsung-Yi Lin^*, David J. Fleet, Geoffrey Hinton

Cryptographic Hardness of Learning Halfspaces with Massart Noise
Ilias Diakonikolas, Daniel M. Kane, Pasin Manurangsi, Lisheng Ren

Better Best of Both Worlds Bounds for Bandits with Switching Costs
Idan Amir, Guy Azov, Tomer Koren, Roi Livni

Fast Neural Kernel Embeddings for General Activations
Insu Han, Amir Zandieh, Jaehoon Lee, Roman Novak, Lechao Xiao, Amin Karbasi

Hierarchical Agglomerative Graph Clustering in Poly-Logarithmic Depth
Laxman Dhulipala, David Eisenstat, Jakub Łącki, Vahab Mirronki, Jessica Shi

Improving Zero-Shot Generalization in Offline Reinforcement Learning Using Generalized Similarity Functions
Bogdan Mazoure^*, Ilya Kostrikov, Ofir Nachum, Jonathan Tompson

Indicators of Attack Failure: Debugging and Improving Optimization of Adversarial Examples
Maura Pintor, Luca Demetrio, Angelo Sotgiu, Ambra Demontis, Nicholas Carlini, Battista Biggio, Fabio Roli

Learning Energy Networks with Generalized Fenchel-Young Losses
Mathieu Blondel, Felipe Llinares-López, Robert Dadashi, Léonard Hussenot, Matthieu Geist

Learning Robust Dynamics Through Variational Sparse Gating
Arnav Kumar Jain, Shiva Kanth Sujit, Shruti Joshi, Vincent Michalski, Danijar Hafner, Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Learning to Reason with Neural Networks: Generalization, Unseen Data and Boolean Measures
Arnav Kumar Jain, Shiva Kanth Sujit, Shruti Joshi, Vincent Michalski, Danijar Hafner, Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

So3krates: Equivariant Attention for Interactions on Arbitrary Length-Scales in Molecular Systems
J. Thorben Frank, Oliver T. Unke, Klaus-Robert Müller

Spectral Bias in Practice: The Role of Function Frequency in Generalization
Sara Fridovich-Keil^*, Raphael Gontijo-Lopes, Rebecca Roelofs

Delving into Out-of-Distribution Detection with Vision-Language Representations
Yifei Ming, Ziyang Cai, Jiuxiang Gu, Yiyou Sun, Wei Li, Yixuan Li

Path Independent Equilibrium Models Can Better Exploit Test-Time Computation
Cem Anil, Ashwini Pokle, Kaiqu Liang, Johannes Treutlein, Yuhuai Wu, Shaojie Bai, J. Zico Kolter, Roger Grosse

On Optimal Learning Under Targeted Data Poisoning
Steve Hanneke, Amin Karbasi, Mohammad Mahmoody, Idan Mehalel, Shay Moran

Learning With Little Mixing
Ingvar Ziemann, Stephen Tu

Block-Recurrent Transformers
DeLesley Hutchins, Imanol Schlag^*, Yuhuai Wu, Ethan Dyer, Behnam Neyshabur

TabNAS: Rejection Sampling for Neural Architecture Search on Tabular Datasets
Chengrun Yang, Gabriel Bender, Hanxiao Liu, Pieter-Jan Kindermans, Madeleine Udell, Yifeng Lu, Quoc Le, Da Huang

Regret Bounds for Multilabel Classification in Sparse Label Regimes
Robert Busa-Fekete, Heejin Choi, Krzysztof Dembczynski, Claudio Gentile, Henry William Reeve, Balazs Szorenyi

Robust Reinforcement Learning Using Offline Data
Kishan Panaganti, Zaiyan Xu, Dileep Kalathil, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

Contrastive Learning as Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning
Benjamin Eysenbach, Tianjun Zhang, Sergey Levine, Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Beyond Rewards: A Hierarchical Perspective on Offline Multiagent Behavioral Analysis
Shayegan Omidshafiei, Andrei Kapishnikov, Yannick Assogba, Lucas Dixon, Been Kim

Revisiting Neural Scaling Laws in Language and Vision
Ibrahim Alabdulmohsin, Behnam Neyshabur, Xiaohua Zhai

Polynomial Neural Fields for Subband Decomposition and Manipulation
Guandao Yang^*, Sagie Benaim, Varun Jampani, Kyle Genova, Jonathan T. Barron, Thomas Funkhouser, Bharath Hariharan, Serge Belongie

First Is Better Than Last for Language Data Influence
Chih-Kuan Yeh, Ankur Taly, Mukund Sundararajan, Frederick Liu, Pradeep Ravikumar

The Privacy Onion Effect: Memorization Is Relative
Nicholas Carlini, Matthew Jagielski, Chiyuan Zhang, Nicolas Papernot, Andreas Terzis, Florian Tramer

Deep Hierarchical Planning from Pixels (see blog post)
Danijar Hafner, Kuang-Huei Lee, Ian Fischer, Pieter Abbeel

Discovered Policy Optimisation
Chris Lu, Jakub Grudzien Kuba, Alistair Letcher, Luke Metz, Christian Schroeder de Witt, Jakob Foerster

Semi-supervised Active Linear Regression
Fnu Devvrit, Nived Rajaraman, Pranjal Awasthi

Pruning’s Effect on Generalization Through the Lens of Training and Regularization
Tian Jin, Daniel M. Roy, Michael Carbin, Jonathan Frankle, Gintare Karolina Dziugaite

Exploring Length Generalization in Large Language Models
Cem Anil^*, Yuhuai Wu, Anders Andreassen, Aitor Lewkowycz, Vedant Misra, Vinay Ramasesh, Ambrose Slone, Guy Gur-Ari, Ethan Dyer, Behnam Neyshabur

Fast Stochastic Composite Minimization and an Accelerated Frank-Wolfe Algorithm Under Parallelization
Benjamin Dubois-Taine, Francis Bach, Quentin Berthet, Adrien Taylor

Global Normalization for Streaming Speech Recognition in a Modular Framework
Ehsan Variani, Ke Wu, Michael Riley, David Rybach, Matt Shannon, Cyril Allauzen

Learning Predictions for Algorithms with Predictions
Mikhail Khodak, Maria-Florina Balcan, Ameet Talwalkar, Sergei Vassilvitskii

Multimodal Contrastive Learning with LIMoE: the Language-Image Mixture of Experts (see blog post)
Basil Mustafa, Carlos Riquelme, Joan Puigcerver, Rodolphe Jenatton, Neil Houlsby

Incrementality Bidding via Reinforcement Learning Under Mixed and Delayed Rewards
Ashwinkumar Badanidiyuru, Zhe Feng, Tianxi Li, Haifeng Xu^*

Solving Quantitative Reasoning Problems with Language Models (see blog post)
Aitor Lewkowycz, Anders Andreassen, David Dohan, Ethan Dyer, Henryk Michalewski, Vinay Ramasesh, Ambrose Slone, Cem Anil, Imanol Schlag, Theo Gutman-Solo, Yuhuai Wu, Behnam Neyshabur, Guy Gur-Ari, Vedant Misra

Anonymized Histograms in Intermediate Privacy Models
Badih Ghazi, Pritish Kamath, Ravi Kumar, Pasin Manurangsi

Efficient and Stable Fully Dynamic Facility Location
Sayan Bhattacharya, Nikos Parotsidis, Silvio Lattanzi

Are All Losses Created Equal: A Neural Collapse Perspective
Jinxin Zhou, Chong You, Xiao Li, Kangning Liu, Sheng Liu, Qing Qu, Zhihui Zhu

Universal Rates for Interactive Learning
Steve Hanneke, Amin Karbasi, Shay Moran, Grigoris Velegkas

Nearly Optimal Algorithms for Linear Contextual Bandits with Adversarial Corruptions
Jiafan He, Dongruo Zhou, Tong Zhang, Quanquan Gu

Multiclass Learnability Beyond the PAC Framework: Universal Rates and Partial Concept Classes
Alkis Kalavasis, Grigoris Velegkas, Amin Karbasi

Temporal Latent Bottleneck: Synthesis of Fast and Slow Processing Mechanisms in Sequence Learning
Cenk Baykal, Nishanth Dikkala, Rina Panigrahy, Cyrus Rashtchian, Xin Wang

Pre-trained Language Models for Interactive Decision-Making
Shuang Li, Xavier Puig, Chris Paxton, Yilun Du, Clinton Wang, Linxi Fan, Tao Chen, De-An Huang, Ekin Akyürek, Anima Anandkumar, Jacob Andreas, Igor Mordatch, Antonio Torralba, Yuke Zhu

Polynomial Neural Fields for Subband Decomposition and Manipulation
Guandao Yang^*, Sagie Benaim, Varun Jampani, Kyle Genova, Jonathan T. Barron, Thomas Funkhouser, Bharath Hariharan, Serge Belongie

Submodular Maximization in Clean Linear Time
Wenxin Li, Moran Feldman, Ehsan Kazemi, Amin Karbasi

Reinforcement Learning with Logarithmic Regret and Policy Switches
Grigoris Velegkas, Zhuoran Yang, Amin Karbasi

Algorithms with Prediction Portfolios
Michael Dinitz, Sungjin Im, Thomas Lavastida, Benjamin Moseley, Sergei Vassilvitskii

Understanding and Improving Robustness of Vision Transformers Through Patch-Based Negative Augmentation
Yao Qin, Chiyuan Zhang, Ting Chen, Balaji Lakshminarayanan, Alex Beutel, Xuezhi Wang

Best of Both Worlds Model Selection
Aldo Pacchiano, Christoph Dann, Claudio Gentile

Fair Wrapping for Black-Box Predictions
Alexander Soen, Ibrahim Alabdulmohsin, Sanmi Koyejo, Yishay Mansour, Nyalleng Moorosi, Richard Nock, Ke Sun, Lexing Xie

A Reduction to Binary Approach for Debiasing Multiclass Datasets
Ibrahim Alabdulmohsin, Jessica Schrouff, Oluwasanmi Koyejo

Weighted Distillation with Unlabeled Examples
Fotis Iliopoulos, Vasilis Kontonis, Cenk Baykal, Gaurav Menghani, Khoa Trihn,Erik Vee

A Closer Look at Learned Optimization: Stability, Robustness, and Inductive Biases
James Harrison, Luke Metz, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein

Post-hoc Estimators for Learning to Defer to an Expert
Harikrishna Narasimhan, Wittawat Jitkrittum, Aditya Krishna Menon, Ankit Singh Rawat, Sanjiv Kumar

Model-Based RL with Optimistic Posterior Sampling: Structural Conditions and Sample Complexity
Alekh Agarwal, Tong Zhang

On the Statistical Efficiency of Reward-Free Exploration in Non-Linear RL
Jinglin Chen, Aditya Modi, Akshay Krishnamurthy, Nan Jiang, Alekh Agarwal

Towards Learning Universal Hyperparameter Optimizers with Transformers (see blog post)
Yutian Chen, Xingyou Song, Chansoo Lee, Zi Wang, Qiuyi Zhang, David Dohan, Kazuya Kawakami, Greg Kochanski, Arnaud Doucet, Marc’aurelio Ranzato, Sagi Perel, Nando de Freitas

Reproducibility in Optimization: Theoretical Framework and Limits
Kwangjun Ahn^*, Prateek Jain, Ziwei Ji, Satyen Kale, Praneeth Netrapalli, Gil I. Shamir

Confident Adaptive Language Modeling
Tal Schuster, Adam Fisch, Jai Gupta, Mostafa Dehghani, Dara Bahri, Vinh Q. Tran, Yi Tay, Donald Metzler

Reinforcement Learning with Neural Radiance Fields
Danny Driess, Ingmar Schubert, Pete Florence, Yunzhu Li, Marc Toussaint

Invariant and Transportable Representations for Anti-Causal Domain Shifts
Yibo Jiang, Victor Veitch

Simple Mechanisms for Welfare Maximization in Rich Advertising Auctions
Gagan Aggarwal, Kshipra Bhawalkar, Aranyak Mehta, Divyarthi Mohan, Alexandros Psomas

STaR: Bootstrapping Reasoning with Reasoning
Eric Zelikman, Yuhuai Wu, Jesse Mu, Noah D. Goodman

Stochastic Online Learning with Feedback Graphs: Finite-Time and Asymptotic Optimality
Teodor V. Marinov, Mehryar Mohri, Julian Zimmert

The Curse of Unrolling: Rate of Differentiating Through Optimization
Damien Scieur, Quentin Bertrand, Gauthier Gidel, Fabian Pedregosa

Visual Prompting via Image Inpainting
Amir Bar, Yossi Gandelsman, Trevor Darrell, Amir Globerson, Alexei A Efros

Multi-Class H-Consistency Bounds
Pranjal Awasthi, Anqi Mao, Mehryar Mohri, Yutao Zhong

Anonymous Bandits for Multi-User Systems
Hossein Esfandiari, Vahab Mirrokni, Jon Schneider

Understanding the Eluder Dimension
Gene Li, Pritish Kamath, Dylan J. Foster, Nathan Srebro

Why So Pessimistic? Estimating Uncertainties for Offline RL Through Ensembles, and Why Their Independence Matters
Seyed Kamyar Seyed Ghasemipour, Shixiang Shane Gu, Ofir Nachum

A Best-of-Both-Worlds Algorithm for Bandits with Delayed Feedback
Saeed Masoudian, Julian Zimmert, Yevgeny Seldin

A Theoretical View on Sparsely Activated Networks
Cenk Baykal, Nishanth Dikkala, Rina Panigrahy, Cyrus Rashtchian, Xin Wang

Chain of Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models (see blog post)
Jason Wei, Xuezhi Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Maarten Bosma, Brian Ichter, Fei Xia, Ed Chi, Quoc Le, Denny Zhou

Decoupled Context Processing for Context Augmented Language Modeling
Zonglin Li, Ruiqi Guo, Sanjiv Kumar

Exploring Through Random Curiosity with General Value Functions
Aditya Ramesh, Louis Kirsch, Sjoerd van Steenkiste, Jürgen Schmidhuber

Object Scene Representation Transformer
Mehdi S. M. Sajjadi, Daniel Duckworth, Aravindh Mahendran, Sjoerd van Steenkiste, Filip Pavetić, Mario Lučić, Leonidas J. Guibas, Klaus Greff, Thomas Kipf

Joint Model-Policy Optimization of a Lower Bound for Model-Based RL
Benjamin Eysenbach, Alexander Khazatsky, Sergey Levine, Ruslan Salakhutdinov

A Fourier Approach to Mixture Learning
Mingda Qiao^*, Guru Guruganesh, Ankit Singh Rawat, Avinava Dubey, Manzil Zaheer

Why Neural Networks Find Simple Solutions: The Many Regularizers of Geometric Complexity
Benoit Dherin, Michael Munn, Mihaela Rosca, David Barrett

Do Current Multi-task Optimization Methods in Deep Learning Even Help?
Derrick Xin, Behrooz Ghorbani, Ankush Garg, Orhan Firat, Justin Gilmer

Associating Objects and Their Effects in Video Through Coordination Games
Erika Lu, Forrester Cole, Weidi Xie, Tali Dekel, William Freeman, Andrew Zisserman, Michael Rubinstein

Increasing Confidence in Adversarial Robustness Evaluations
Roland S. Zimmermann^*, Wieland Brendel, Florian Tramèr, Nicholas Carlini

The Role of Baselines in Policy Gradient Optimization
Jincheng Mei, Wesley Chung, Valentin Thomas, Bo Dai, Csaba Szepesvari, Dale Schuurmans

Scaling Multimodal Pre-training via Cross-Modality Gradient Harmonization
Junru Wu, Yi Liang, Feng Han, Hassan Akbari, Zhangyang Wang, Cong Yu^*

S3GC: Scalable Self-Supervised Graph Clustering
Fnu Devvrit^*, Aditya Sinha, Inderjit Dhillon, Prateek Jain

Algorithms and Hardness for Learning Linear Thresholds from Label Proportions
Rishi Saket

ALMA: Hierarchical Learning for Composite Multi-Agent Tasks
Shariq Iqbal, Robby Costales, Fei Sha

DC-BENCH: Dataset Condensation Benchmark
Justin Cui, Ruochen Wang, Si Si, Cho-Jui Hsieh

Does GNN Pre-training Help Molecular Representation?
Ruoxi Sun, Hanjun Dai, Adams Yu

Drawing Out of Distribution with Neuro-Symbolic Generative Models
Yichao Liang, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Tuan Anh Le, N. Siddharth

Mixture-of-Experts with Expert Choice Routing (see blog post)
Yanqi Zhou, Tao Lei, Hanxiao Liu, Nan Du, Yanping Huang, Vincent Zhao, Andrew Dai, Zhifeng Chen, Quoc Le, James Laudon

Near-Optimal Regret for Adversarial MDP with Delayed Bandit Feedback
Tiancheng Jin, Tal Lancewicki, Haipeng Luo, Yishay Mansour, Aviv Rosenberg

Precise Learning Curves and Higher-Order Scalings for Dot-Product Kernel Regression
Lechao Xiao, Jeffrey Pennington, Theodor Misiakiewicz, Hong Hu, Yue Lu

Rate-Optimal Online Convex Optimization in Adaptive Linear Control
Asaf Cassel, Alon Cohen, Tomer Koren

Why Neural Networks Find Simple Solutions: The Many Regularizers of Geometric Complexity
Benoit Dherin, Michael Munn, Mihaela Rosca, David G.T. Barrett

Private Isotonic Regression
Badih Ghazi, Pritish Kamath, Ravi Kumar, Pasin Manurangsi

Sketching Based Representations for Robust Image Classification with Provable Guarantees
Nishanth Dikkala, Sankeerth Rao Karingula, Raghu Meka, Jelani Nelson, Rina Panigrahy, Xin Wang

The Role of Baselines in Policy Gradient Optimization
Jincheng Mei, Wesley Chung, Valentin Thomas, Bo Dai, Csaba Szepesvari, Dale Schuurmans

Bringing Image Scene Structure to Video via Frame-Clip Consistency of Object Tokens
Elad Ben Avraham, Roei Herzig, Karttikeya Mangalam, Amir Bar, Anna Rohrbach, Leonid Karlinsky, Trevor Darrell, Amir Globerson

Near-Optimal Private and Scalable k-Clustering
Vincent Cohen-Addad, Alessandro Epasto, Vahab Mirrokni, Shyam Narayanan^*, Peilin Zhong

When Does Differentially Private Learning Not Suffer in High Dimensions?
Xuechen Li, Daogao Liu, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Huseyin A Inan, Janardhan Kulkarni, YinTat Lee, Abhradeep Guha Thakurta

End-to-End Learning to Index and Search in Large Output Spaces
Nilesh Gupta, Patrick H. Chen, Hsiang-Fu, Yu, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Inderjit S. Dhillon

A Boosting Approach to Reinforcement Learning
Nataly Brukhim, Elad Hazan, Karan Singh

FedRolex: Model-Heterogeneous Federated Learning with Rolling Sub-Model Extraction
Samiul Alam, Luyang Liu, Ming Yan, Mi Zhang

Non-Convex Online Learning via Algorithmic Equivalence
Udaya Ghai, Zhou Lu, Elad Hazan

Is this the Right Neighborhood? Accurate and Query Efficient Model Agnostic Explanations
Amit Dhurandhar, Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy, Karthikeyan Shanmugam

SAVi++: Towards End-to-End Object-Centric Learning from Real-World Videos
Gamaleldin F. Elsayed, Aravindh Mahendran, Sjoerd van Steenkiste, Klaus Greff, Michael C. Mozer, Thomas Kipf

UViM: A Unified Modeling Approach for Vision with Learned Guiding Codes
Alexander Kolesnikov, André Susano Pinto, Lucas Beyer, Xiaohua Zhai, Jeremiah Harmsen, Neil Houlsby

Implicit Regularization or Implicit Conditioning? Exact Risk Trajectories of SGD in High Dimensions
Courtney Paquette, Elliot Paquette, Ben Adlam, Jeffrey Pennington

Multi-game Decision Transformers (see blog post)
Kuang-Huei Lee, Ofir Nachum, Mengjiao Yang, Lisa Lee, Daniel Freeman, Winnie Xu, Sergio Guadarrama, Ian Fischer, Eric Jang, Henryk Michalewski, Igor Mordatch

Subsidiary Prototype Alignment for Universal Domain Adaptation
Jogendra Nath Kundu, Suvaansh Bhambri, Akshay Ravindra Kulkarni, Hiran Sarkar, Varun Jampani, Venkatesh Babu Radhakrishnan

SAMURAI: Shape And Material from Unconstrained Real-world Arbitrary Image collections
Mark Boss^*, Andreas Engelhardt^*, Abhishek Kar, Yuanzhen Li, Deqing Sun, Jonathan T. Barron, Hendrik P. A. Lensch, Varun Jampani

Chefs’ Random Tables: Non-Trigonometric Random Features
Valerii Likhosherstov, Krzysztof Marcin Choromanski, Avinava Dubey, Frederick Liu, Tamas Sarlos, Adrian Weller

Lottery Tickets on a Data Diet: Finding Initializations with Sparse Trainable Networks
Mansheej Paul, Brett W Larsen, Surya Ganguli, Jonathan Frankle, Gintare Karolina Dziugaite

DP-PCA: Statistically Optimal and Differentially Private PCA
Xiyang Liu, Weihao Kong, Prateek Jain, Sewoong Oh

Emergent Communication: Generalization and Overfitting in Lewis Games
Mathieu Rita, Corentin Tallec, Paul Michel, Jean-Bastien Grill, Olivier Pietquin, Emmanuel Dupoux, Florian Strub

Handcrafted Backdoors in Deep Neural Networks
Sanghyun Hong, Nicholas Carlini, Alexey Kurakin

I2DFormer: Learning Image to Document Attention for Zero-Shot Image Classification
Muhammad Ferjad Naeem, Yongqin Xian, Luc Van Gool, Federico Tombari

Improved Differential Privacy for SGD via Optimal Private Linear Operators on Adaptive Streams
Sergey Denisov, Brendan McMahan, Keith Rush, Adam Smith, Abhradeep Guha Thakurta

Optimal Scaling for Locally Balanced Proposals in Discrete Spaces
Haoran Sun^*, Hanjun Dai, Dale Schuurmans

Near-Optimal Correlation Clustering with Privacy
Vincent Cohen-Addad, Chenglin Fan, Silvio Lattanzi, Slobodan Mitrović, Ashkan Norouzi-Fard, Nikos Parotsidis, Jakub Tarnawski

Thor: Wielding Hammers to Integrate Language Models and Automated Theorem Provers
Albert Q. Jiang, Wenda Li, Szymon Tworkowski, Konrad Czechowski, Tomasz Odrzygóźdź, Piotr Miłoś, Yuhuai Wu, Mateja Jamnik

TPU-KNN: K Nearest Neighbor Search at Peak FLOP/s
Felix Chern, Blake Hechtman, Andy Davis, Ruiqi Guo, David Majnemer, Sanjiv Kumar

When Does Dough Become a Bagel? Analyzing the Remaining Mistakes on ImageNet
Vijay Vasudevan, Benjamin Caine, Raphael Gontijo-Lopes, Sara Fridovich-Keil, Rebecca Roelofs

DASCO: Dual-Generator Adversarial Support Constrained Offline Reinforcement Learning
Quan Vuong, Aviral Kumar, Sergey Levine, Yevgen Chebotar

A Characterization of Semi-Supervised Adversarially Robust PAC Learnability
Idan Attias, Steve Hanneke, Yishay Mansour

Back Razor: Memory-Efficient Transfer Learning by Self-Sparsified Backpropagation
Ziyu Jiang, Xuxi Chen, Xueqin Huang, Xianzhi Du, Denny Zhou, Zhangyang Wang

Subquadratic Kronecker Regression with Applications to Tensor Decomposition
Matthew Fahrbach, Gang Fu, Mehrdad Ghadiri

Zero-Shot Transfer Learning Within a Heterogeneous Graph via Knowledge Transfer Networks
Minji Yoon^*, John Palowitch, Dustin Zelle, Ziniu Hu^*, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Bryan Perozzi

Differentially Private Graph Learning via Sensitivity-Bounded Personalized PageRank
Alessandro Epasto, Vahab Mirrokni, Bryan Perozzi, Anton Tsitsulin, Peilin Zhong

Reincarnating Reinforcement Learning: Reusing Prior Computation to Accelerate Progress (see blog post)
Rishabh Agarwal, Max Schwarzer, Pablo Samuel Castro, Aaron Courville, Marc G. Bellemare

Private and Communication-Efficient Algorithms for Entropy Estimation
Gecia Bravo-Hermsdorff, Robert Busa-Fekete, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh, Andres Munoz Medina, Umar Syed

Oracle Inequalities for Model Selection in Offline Reinforcement Learning
Jonathan Lee, George Tucker, Ofir Nachum, Bo Dai, Emma Brunskill

Diagnosing Failures of Fairness Transfer Across Distribution Shift in Real-World Medical Settings
Jessica Schrouff^*, Natalie Harris, Oluwasanmi O Koyejo, Ibrahim Alabdulmohsin, Eva Schnider^*, Krista Opsahl-Ong, Alexander Brown, Subhrajit Roy, Diana Mincu, Christina Chen, Awa Dieng, Yuan Liu, Vivek Natarajan, Alan Karthikesalingam, Katherine A Heller, Silvia Chiappa, Alexander D’Amour

LASSIE: Learning Articulated Shapes from Sparse Image Ensemble via 3D Part Discovery
Chun-Han Yao, Wei-Chih Hung, Yuanzhen Li, Michael Rubinstein, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Varun Jampani

Patching Open-Vocabulary Models by Interpolating Weights
Gabriel Ilharco, Mitchell Wortsman, Samir Yitzhak Gadre, Shuran Song, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Simon Kornblith, Ali Farhadi, Ludwig Schmidt

TUSK: Task-Agnostic Unsupervised Keypoints
Yuhe Jin, Weiwei Sun, Jan Hosang, Eduard Trulls, Kwang Moo Yi

Active Learning of Classifiers with Label and Seed Queries
Marco Bressan, Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi, Silvio Lattanzi, Andrea Paudice, Maximilian Thiessen

Autoformalization with Large Language Models
Yuhuai Wu, Albert Q. Jiang, Wenda Li, Markus N. Rabe, Charles Staats, Mateja Jamnik, Christian Szegedy

Benign Underfitting of Stochastic Gradient Descent
Tomer Koren, Roi Livni, Yishay Mansour, Uri Sherman

Chain of Thought Imitation with Procedure Cloning
Mengjiao Yang, Dale Schuurmans, Pieter Abbeel, Ofir Nachum

Efficient and Modular Implicit Differentiation
Mathieu Blondel, Quentin Berthet, Marco Cuturi, Roy Frostig, Stephan Hoyer, Felipe Llinares-López, Fabian Pedregosa, Jean-Philippe Vert

Insights into Pre-training via Simpler Synthetic Tasks
Yuhuai Wu, Felix Li, Percy Liang

Self-Supervised Learning with an Information Maximization Criterion
Serdar Ozsoy, Shadi Hamdan, Sercan Ö. Arik, Deniz Yuret, Alper T. Erdogan

Trimmed Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Robust Generalized Linear Model
Weihao Kong, Rajat Sen, Pranjal Awasthi, Abhimanyu Das

Using Embeddings for Causal Estimation of Peer Influence in Social Networks
Irina Cristali, Victor Veitch

VCT: A Video Compression Transformer
Fabian Mentzer, George Toderici, David Minnen, Sung-Jin Hwang, Sergi Caelles, Mario Lucic, Eirikur Agustsson

Video Diffusion Models
Jonathan Ho, Tim Salimans, Alexey Gritsenko, William Chan, Mohammad Norouzi, David J. Fleet

Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners
Takeshi Kojima, Shixiang Shane Gu, Machel Reid, Yutaka Matsuo, Yusuke Iwasawa

Improved Coresets for Euclidean k-Means
Vincent Cohen-Addad, Kasper Green Larsen, David Saulpic, Chris Schwiegelshohn, Omar Ali Sheikh-Omar

On the Adversarial Robustness of Mixture of Experts
Joan Puigcerver, Rodolphe Jenatton, Carlos Riquelme Ruiz, Pranjal Awasthi, Srinadh Bhojanapalli

Stars: Tera-Scale Graph Building for Clustering and Learning
CJ Carey, Jonathan Halcrow, Rajesh Jayaram, Vahab Mirrokni, Warren Schudy, Peilin Zhong

VER: Scaling On-Policy RL Leads to the Emergence of Navigation in Embodied Rearrangement
Erik Wijmans, Irfan Essa, Dhruv Batra

TaSIL: Taylor Series Imitation Learning
Daniel Pfrommer, Thomas TCK Zhang, Stephen Tu, Nikolai Matni

RNNs of RNNs: Recursive Construction of Stable Assemblies of Recurrent Neural Networks
Leo Kozachkov, Michaela M Ennis, Jean-Jacques Slotine

Integral Probability Metrics PAC-Bayes Bounds
Ron Amit, Baruch Epstein, Shay Moran, Ron Meir

D2NeRF: Self-Supervised Decoupling of Dynamic and Static Objects from a Monocular Video
Tianhao Wu, Fangcheng Zhong, Andrea Tagliasacchi, Forrester Cole, Cengiz Oztireli

Posted Pricing and Dynamic Prior-Independent Mechanisms with Value Maximizers
Yuan Deng, Vahab Mirrokni, Hanrui Zhang

Transformer Memory as a Differentiable Search Index
Yi Tay, Vinh Q. Tran, Mostafa Dehghani, Jianmo Ni, Dara Bahri, Harsh Mehta, Zhen Qin, Kai Hui, Zhe Zhao, Jai Gupta, Tal Schuster, William W. Cohen, Donald Metzler

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Our partnership with iCAD Inc. marks the first time we are licensing our mammography AI model in clinical practice.Read More

Posted by Mohammad Saleh, Software Engineer, Google Research, Brain Team, and Yinan Wang, Software Engineer, Google Workspace

Information overload is a significant challenge for many organizations and individuals today. It can be overwhelming to keep up with incoming chat messages and documents that arrive at our inbox everyday. This has been exacerbated by the increase in virtual work and remains a challenge as many teams transition to a hybrid work environment with a mix of those working both virtually and in an office. One solution that can address information overload is summarization — for example, to help users improve their productivity and better manage so much information, we recently introduced auto-generated summaries in Google Docs.

Today, we are excited to introduce conversation summaries in Google Chat for messages in Spaces. When these summaries are available, a card with automatically generated summaries is shown as users enter Spaces with unread messages. The card includes a list of summaries for the different topics discussed in Spaces. This feature is enabled by our state-of-the-art abstractive summarization model, Pegasus, which generates useful and concise summaries for chat conversations, and is currently available to selected premium Google Workspace business customers.

Conversation summaries provide a helpful digest of conversations in Spaces, allowing users to quickly catch-up on unread messages and navigate to the most relevant threads.

Conversation Summarization Modeling

The goal of text summarization is to provide helpful and concise summaries for different types of text, such as documents, articles, or spoken conversations. A good summary covers the key points succinctly, and is fluent and grammatically correct. One approach to summarization is to extract key parts from the text and concatenate them together into a summary (i.e., extractive summarization). Another approach is to use natural language generation (NLG) techniques to summarize using novel words and phrases not necessarily present in the original text. This is referred to as abstractive summarization and is considered closer to how a person would generally summarize text. A main challenge with abstractive summarization, however, is that it sometimes struggles to generate accurate and grammatically correct summaries, especially in real world applications.

ForumSum Dataset

The majority of abstractive summarization datasets and research focuses on single-speaker text documents, like news and scientific articles, mainly due to the abundance of human-written summaries for such documents. On the other hand, datasets of human-written summaries for other types of text, like chat or multi-speaker conversations, are very limited.

To address this we created ForumSum, a diverse and high-quality conversation summarization dataset with human-written summaries. The conversations in the dataset are collected from a wide variety of public internet forums, and are cleaned up and filtered to ensure high quality and safe content (more details in the paper).

An example from the ForumSum dataset.

Each utterance in the conversation starts on a new line, contains an author name and a message text that is separated with a colon. Human annotators are then given detailed instructions to write a 1-3 sentence summary of the conversation. These instructions went through multiple iterations to ensure annotators wrote high quality summaries. We have collected summaries for over six thousand conversations, with an average of more than 6 speakers and 10 utterances per conversation. ForumSum provides quality training data for the conversation summarization problem: it has a variety of topics, number of speakers, and number of utterances commonly encountered in a chat application.

Conversation Summarization Model Design

As we have written previously, the Transformer is a popular model architecture for sequence-to-sequence tasks, like abstractive summarization, where the inputs are the document words and the outputs are the summary words. Pegasus combined transformers with self-supervised pre-training customized for abstractive summarization, making it a great model choice for conversation summarization. First, we fine-tune Pegasus on the ForumSum dataset where the input is the conversation words and the output is the summary words. Second, we use knowledge distillation to distill the Pegasus model into a hybrid architecture of a transformer encoder and a recurrent neural network (RNN) decoder. The resulting model has lower latency and memory footprint while maintaining similar quality as the Pegasus model.

Quality and User Experience

A good summary captures the essence of the conversation while being fluent and grammatically correct. Based on human evaluation and user feedback, we learned that the summarization model generates useful and accurate summaries most of the time. But occasionally the model generates low quality summaries. After looking into issues reported by users, we found that there are two main types of low quality summaries. The first one is misattribution, when the model confuses which person or entity said or performed a certain action. The second one is misrepresentation, when the model’s generated summary misrepresents or contradicts the chat conversation.

To address low quality summaries and improve the user experience, we have made progress in several areas:

1. Improving ForumSum: While ForumSum provides a good representation of chat conversations, we noticed certain patterns and language styles in Google Chat conversations that differ from ForumSum, e.g., how users mention other users and the use of abbreviations and special symbols. After exploring examples reported by users, we concluded that these out-of-distribution language patterns contributed to low quality summaries. To address this, we first performed data formatting and clean-ups to reduce mismatches between chat and ForumSum conversations whenever possible. Second, we added more training data to ForumSum to better represent these style mismatches. Collectively, these changes resulted in reduction of low quality summaries.
2. Controlled triggering: To make sure summaries bring the most value to our users, we first need to make sure that the chat conversation is worthy of summarization. For example, we found that there is less value in generating a summary when the user is actively engaged in a conversation and does not have many unread messages, or when the conversation is too short.
3. Detecting low quality summaries: While the two methods above limited low quality and low value summaries, we still developed methods to detect and abstain from showing such summaries to the user when they are generated. These are a set of heuristics and models to measure the overall quality of summaries and whether they suffer from misattribution or misrepresentation issues.

Finally, while the hybrid model provided significant performance improvements, the latency to generate summaries was still noticeable to users when they opened Spaces with unread messages. To address this issue, we instead generate and update summaries whenever there is a new message sent, edited or deleted. Then summaries are cached ephemerally to ensure they surface smoothly when users open Spaces with unread messages.

Conclusion and Future Work

We are excited to apply state-of-the-art abstractive summarization models to help our Workspace users improve their productivity in Spaces. While this is great progress, we believe there are many opportunities to further improve the experience and the overall quality of summaries. Future directions we are exploring include better modeling and summarizing entangled conversations that include multiple topics, and developing metrics that better measure the factual consistency between chat conversations and summaries.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the many people across Google that contributed to this work: Ahmed Chowdhury, Alejandro Elizondo, Anmol Tukrel, Benjamin Lee, Chao Wang, Chris Carroll, Don Kim, Jackie Tsay, Jennifer Chou, Jesse Sliter, John Sipple, Kate Montgomery, Maalika Manoharan, Mahdis Mahdieh, Mia Chen, Misha Khalman, Peter Liu, Robert Diersing, Sarah Read, Winnie Yeung, Yao Zhao, and Yonghui Wu.

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