Congratulations to the #NeurIPS2024 award winners

The thirty-eighth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024) is underway in Vancouver. At the official opening session on Tuesday evening, the conference awards were announced. This year, they comprise:

• Outstanding main track papers
• Outstanding main track runners-up
• Outstanding datasets and benchmarks paper
• Test-of-time award

The winners are as follows:

Outstanding main track papers

Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction
Keyu Tian, Yi Jiang, Zehuan Yuan, Bingyue Peng, Liwei Wang

Abstract: We present Visual AutoRegressive modeling (VAR), a new generation paradigm that redefines the autoregressive learning on images as coarse-to-fine “next-scale prediction” or “next-resolution prediction”, diverging from the standard raster-scan “next-token prediction”. This simple, intuitive methodology allows autoregressive (AR) transformers to learn visual distributions fast and generalize well: VAR, for the first time, makes GPT-style AR models surpass diffusion transformers in image generation. On ImageNet 256×256 benchmark, VAR significantly improve AR baseline by improving Frechet inception distance (FID) from 18.65 to 1.73, inception score (IS) from 80.4 to 350.2, with around 20x faster inference speed. It is also empirically verified that VAR outperforms the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) in multiple dimensions including image quality, inference speed, data efficiency, and scalability. Scaling up VAR models exhibits clear power-law scaling laws similar to those observed in LLMs, with linear correlation coefficients near -0.998 as solid evidence. VAR further showcases zero-shot generalization ability in downstream tasks including image in-painting, out-painting, and editing. These results suggest VAR has initially emulated the two important properties of LLMs: Scaling Laws and zero-shot task generalization. We have released all models and codes to promote the exploration of AR/VAR models for visual generation and unified learning.

Read the paper here.

Stochastic Taylor Derivative Estimator: Efficient amortization for arbitrary differential operators
Zekun Shi, Zheyuan Hu, Min Lin, Kenji Kawaguchi

Abstract: Optimizing neural networks with loss that contain high-dimensional and high-order differential operators is expensive to evaluate with back-propagation due to scaling of the derivative tensor size and the scaling in the computation graph, where is the dimension of the domain, is the number of ops in the forward computation graph, and is the derivative order. In previous works, the polynomial scaling in was addressed by amortizing the computation over the optimization process via randomization. Separately, the exponential scaling in for univariate functions () was addressed with high-order auto-differentiation (AD). In this work, we show how to efficiently perform arbitrary contraction of the derivative tensor of arbitrary order for multivariate functions, by properly constructing the input tangents to univariate high-order AD, which can be used to efficiently randomize any differential operator. When applied to Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), our method provides >1000 speed-up and >30 memory reduction over randomization with first-order AD, and we can now solve 1-million-dimensional PDEs in 8 minutes on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU. This work opens the possibility of using high-order differential operators in large-scale problems.

Read the paper here.

Outstanding main track runners-up

Not All Tokens Are What You Need for Pretraining
Zhenghao Lin, Zhibin Gou, Yeyun Gong, Xiao Liu, yelong shen, Ruochen Xu, Chen Lin, Yujiu Yang, Jian Jiao, Nan Duan, Weizhu Chen

Abstract: Previous language model pre-training methods have uniformly applied a next-token prediction loss to all training tokens. Challenging this norm, we posit that ”Not all tokens in a corpus are equally important for language model training”. Our initial analysis examines token-level training dynamics of language model, revealing distinct loss patterns for different tokens. Leveraging these insights, we introduce a new language model called Rho-1. Unlike traditional LMs that learn to predict every next token in a corpus, Rho-1 employs Selective Language Modeling (SLM), which selectively trains on useful tokens that aligned with the desired distribution. This approach involves scoring training tokens using a reference model, and then training the language model with a focused loss on tokens with higher scores. When continual continual pretraining on 15B OpenWebMath corpus, Rho-1 yields an absolute improvement in few-shot accuracy of up to 30% in 9 math tasks. After fine-tuning, Rho-1-1B and 7B achieved state-of-the-art results of 40.6% and 51.8% on MATH dataset, respectively – matching DeepSeekMath with only 3% of the pretraining tokens. Furthermore, when continual pretraining on 80B general tokens, Rho-1 achieves 6.8% average enhancement across 15 diverse tasks, increasing both data efficiency and performance of the language model pre-training.

Read the paper here.

Guiding a Diffusion Model with a Bad Version of Itself
Tero Karras, Miika Aittala, Tuomas Kynkäänniemi, Jaakko Lehtinen, Timo Aila, Samuli Laine

Abstract: The primary axes of interest in image-generating diffusion models are image quality, the amount of variation in the results, and how well the results align with a given condition, e.g., a class label or a text prompt. The popular classifier-free guidance approach uses an unconditional model to guide a conditional model, leading to simultaneously better prompt alignment and higher-quality images at the cost of reduced variation. These effects seem inherently entangled, and thus hard to control. We make the surprising observation that it is possible to obtain disentangled control over image quality without compromising the amount of variation by guiding generation using a smaller, less-trained version of the model itself rather than an unconditional model. This leads to significant improvements in ImageNet generation, setting record FIDs of 1.01 for 64×64 and 1.25 for 512×512, using publicly available networks. Furthermore, the method is also applicable to unconditional diffusion models, drastically improving their quality.

Read the paper here.

Outstanding datasets and benchmarks paper

The PRISM Alignment Dataset: What Participatory, Representative and Individualised Human Feedback Reveals About the Subjective and Multicultural Alignment of Large Language Models
Hannah Rose Kirk, Alexander Whitefield, Paul Röttger, Andrew Michael Bean, Katerina Margatina, Rafael Mosquera, Juan Manuel Ciro, Max Bartolo, Adina Williams, He He, Bertie Vidgen, Scott A. Hale

Abstract: Human feedback is central to the alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, open questions remain about the methods (how), domains (where), people (who) and objectives (to what end) of feedback processes. To navigate these questions, we introduce PRISM, a new dataset which maps the sociodemographics and stated preferences of 1,500 diverse participants from 75 countries, to their contextual preferences and fine-grained feedback in 8,011 live conversations with 21 LLMs. With PRISM, we contribute (i) wider geographic and demographic participation in feedback; (ii) census-representative samples for two countries (UK, US); and (iii) individualised ratings that link to detailed participant profiles, permitting personalisation and attribution of sample artefacts. We target subjective and multicultural perspectives on value-laden and controversial issues, where we expect interpersonal and cross-cultural disagreement. We use PRISM in three case studies to demonstrate the need for careful consideration of which humans provide alignment data.

Read the paper here.

Test-of-time award

Generative Adversarial Nets
Ian Goodfellow, Jean Pouget-Abadie, Mehdi Mirza, Bing Xu, David Warde-Farley, Sherjil Ozair, Aaron Courville, Yoshua Bengio

Abstract: We propose a new framework for estimating generative models via adversarial nets, in which we simultaneously train two models: a generative model G that captures the data distribution, and a discriminative model D that estimates the probability that a sample came from the training data rather than G. The training procedure for G is to maximize the probability of D making a mistake. This framework corresponds to a minimax two-player game. In the space of arbitrary functions G and D, a unique solution exists, with G recovering the training data distribution and D equal to 1/2 everywhere. In the case where G and D are defined by multilayer perceptrons, the entire system can be trained with backpropagation. There is no need for any Markov chains or unrolled approximate inference networks during either training or generation of samples. Experiments demonstrate the potential of the framework through qualitative and quantitatively evaluation of the generated samples.

Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks
Ilya Sutskever, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc V. Le

Abstract: Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are powerful models that have achieved excellent performance on difficult learning tasks. Although DNNs work well whenever large labeled training sets are available, they cannot be used to map sequences to sequences. In this paper, we present a general end-to-end approach to sequence learning that makes minimal assumptions on the sequence structure. Our method uses a multilayered Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to map the input sequence to a vector of a fixed dimensionality, and then another deep LSTM to decode the target sequence from the vector. Our main result is that on an English to French translation task from the WMT-14 dataset, the translations produced by the LSTM achieve a BLEU score of 34.8 on the entire test set, where the LSTM’s BLEU score was penalized on out-of-vocabulary words. Additionally, the LSTM did not have difficulty on long sentences. For comparison, a phrase-based SMT system achieves a BLEU score of 33.3 on the same dataset. When we used the LSTM to rerank the 1000 hypotheses produced by the aforementioned SMT system, its BLEU score increases to 36.5, which is close to the previous state of the art. The LSTM also learned sensible phrase and sentence representations that are sensitive to word order and are relatively invariant to the active and the passive voice. Finally, we found that reversing the order of the words in all source sentences (but not target sentences) improved the LSTM’s performance markedly, because doing so introduced many short term dependencies between the source and the target sentence which made the optimization problem easier.

Outstanding paper award committee for main track: Marco Cuturi (Committee Lead), Zeynep Akata, Kim Branson, Shakir Mohamed, Remi Munos, Jie Tang, Richard Zemel, Luke Zettlemoyer

Outstanding paper award committee for dataset and benchmark track: Yulia Gel, Ludwig Schmidt, Elena Simperl, Joaquin Vanschoren, Xing Xie.

Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.

Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.