Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Jaehoon Lee

Publications and source records attributed to Jaehoon Lee.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

When Should Dense Retrievers Be Updated in Evolving Corpora? Detecting Out-of-Distribution Corpora Using GradNormIR

Dense retrievers encode texts into embeddings to efficiently retrieve relevant documents from large databases in response to user queries. However, real-world corpora continually evolve, leading to a shift from the original training distribution of the retriever. Without timely updates or retraining, indexing newly emerging documents can degrade retrieval performance for future queries. Thus, identifying when a dense retriever requires an update is critical for maintaining robust retrieval systems. In this paper, we propose a novel task of predicting whether a corpus is out-of-distribution (OOD) relative to a dense retriever before indexing. Addressing this task allows us to proactively manage retriever updates, preventing potential retrieval failures. We introduce GradNormIR, an unsupervised approach that leverages gradient norms to detect OOD corpora effectively. Experiments on the BEIR benchmark demonstrate that GradNormIR enables timely updates of dense retrievers in evolving document collections, significantly enhancing retrieval robustness and efficiency.

cs.IR↗

Complete Minimal Surfaces in $\mathbb{R}^4$ with Three Embedded Planar Ends

In this paper, we study complete minimal surfaces in $\mathbb{R}^4$ with three embedded planar ends parallel to those of the union of the Lagrangian catenoid and the plane passing through its waist circle. We show that any complete, oriented, immersed minimal surface in $\mathbb{R}^4$ of finite total curvature with genus $1$ and three such ends must be $J$-holomorphic for some almost complex structure $J$. Under the additional assumptions of embeddedness and at least $8$ symmetries, we prove that the number of symmetries must be either $8$ or $12$, and in each case, the surface is uniquely determined up to rigid motions and scalings. Furthermore, we establish a nonexistence result for genus $g\geq2$ when the surface is embedded and has at least $4(g+1)$ symmetries. Our approach is based on a modification of the method of Costa and Hoffman-Meeks in the setting of $\mathbb{R}^4$, utilizing the generalized Weierstrass representation.

math.DG↗

Superpixel Tokenization for Vision Transformers: Preserving Semantic Integrity in Visual Tokens

Transformers, a groundbreaking architecture proposed for Natural Language Processing (NLP), have also achieved remarkable success in Computer Vision. A cornerstone of their success lies in the attention mechanism, which models relationships among tokens. While the tokenization process in NLP inherently ensures that a single token does not contain multiple semantics, the tokenization of Vision Transformer (ViT) utilizes tokens from uniformly partitioned square image patches, which may result in an arbitrary mixing of visual concepts in a token. In this work, we propose to substitute the grid-based tokenization in ViT with superpixel tokenization, which employs superpixels to generate a token that encapsulates a sole visual concept. Unfortunately, the diverse shapes, sizes, and locations of superpixels make integrating superpixels into ViT tokenization rather challenging. Our tokenization pipeline, comprised of pre-aggregate extraction and superpixel-aware aggregation, overcomes the challenges that arise in superpixel tokenization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach, which exhibits strong compatibility with existing frameworks, enhances the accuracy and robustness of ViT on various downstream tasks.

cs.CV↗

Training LLMs over Neurally Compressed Text

In this paper, we explore the idea of training large language models (LLMs) over highly compressed text. While standard subword tokenizers compress text by a small factor, neural text compressors can achieve much higher rates of compression. If it were possible to train LLMs directly over neurally compressed text, this would confer advantages in training and serving efficiency, as well as easier handling of long text spans. The main obstacle to this goal is that strong compression tends to produce opaque outputs that are not well-suited for learning. In particular, we find that text naïvely compressed via Arithmetic Coding is not readily learnable by LLMs. To overcome this, we propose Equal-Info Windows, a novel compression technique whereby text is segmented into blocks that each compress to the same bit length. Using this method, we demonstrate effective learning over neurally compressed text that improves with scale, and outperforms byte-level baselines by a wide margin on perplexity and inference speed benchmarks. While our method delivers worse perplexity than subword tokenizers for models trained with the same parameter count, it has the benefit of shorter sequence lengths. Shorter sequence lengths require fewer autoregressive generation steps, and reduce latency. Finally, we provide extensive analysis of the properties that contribute to learnability, and offer concrete suggestions for how to further improve the performance of high-compression tokenizers.

cs.CL↗

Partial-Multivariate Model for Forecasting

When solving forecasting problems including multiple time-series features, existing approaches often fall into two extreme categories, depending on whether to utilize inter-feature information: univariate and complete-multivariate models. Unlike univariate cases which ignore the information, complete-multivariate models compute relationships among a complete set of features. However, despite the potential advantage of leveraging the additional information, complete-multivariate models sometimes underperform univariate ones. Therefore, our research aims to explore a middle ground between these two by introducing what we term Partial-Multivariate models where a neural network captures only partial relationships, that is, dependencies within subsets of all features. To this end, we propose PMformer, a Transformer-based partial-multivariate model, with its training algorithm. We demonstrate that PMformer outperforms various univariate and complete-multivariate models, providing a theoretical rationale and empirical analysis for its superiority. Additionally, by proposing an inference technique for PMformer, the forecasting accuracy is further enhanced. Finally, we highlight other advantages of PMformer: efficiency and robustness under missing features.

cs.AI↗

Training Language Models on the Knowledge Graph: Insights on Hallucinations and Their Detectability

While many capabilities of language models (LMs) improve with increased training budget, the influence of scale on hallucinations is not yet fully understood. Hallucinations come in many forms, and there is no universally accepted definition. We thus focus on studying only those hallucinations where a correct answer appears verbatim in the training set. To fully control the training data content, we construct a knowledge graph (KG)-based dataset, and use it to train a set of increasingly large LMs. We find that for a fixed dataset, larger and longer-trained LMs hallucinate less. However, hallucinating on $\leq5$% of the training data requires an order of magnitude larger model, and thus an order of magnitude more compute, than Hoffmann et al. (2022) reported was optimal. Given this costliness, we study how hallucination detectors depend on scale. While we see detector size improves performance on fixed LM's outputs, we find an inverse relationship between the scale of the LM and the detectability of its hallucinations.

cs.CL↗

Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters

Enabling LLMs to improve their outputs by using more test-time computation is a critical step towards building generally self-improving agents that can operate on open-ended natural language. In this paper, we study the scaling of inference-time computation in LLMs, with a focus on answering the question: if an LLM is allowed to use a fixed but non-trivial amount of inference-time compute, how much can it improve its performance on a challenging prompt? Answering this question has implications not only on the achievable performance of LLMs, but also on the future of LLM pretraining and how one should tradeoff inference-time and pre-training compute. Despite its importance, little research attempted to understand the scaling behaviors of various test-time inference methods. Moreover, current work largely provides negative results for a number of these strategies. In this work, we analyze two primary mechanisms to scale test-time computation: (1) searching against dense, process-based verifier reward models; and (2) updating the model's distribution over a response adaptively, given the prompt at test time. We find that in both cases, the effectiveness of different approaches to scaling test-time compute critically varies depending on the difficulty of the prompt. This observation motivates applying a "compute-optimal" scaling strategy, which acts to most effectively allocate test-time compute adaptively per prompt. Using this compute-optimal strategy, we can improve the efficiency of test-time compute scaling by more than 4x compared to a best-of-N baseline. Additionally, in a FLOPs-matched evaluation, we find that on problems where a smaller base model attains somewhat non-trivial success rates, test-time compute can be used to outperform a 14x larger model.

cs.LG↗

Scaling Exponents Across Parameterizations and Optimizers

Robust and effective scaling of models from small to large width typically requires the precise adjustment of many algorithmic and architectural details, such as parameterization and optimizer choices. In this work, we propose a new perspective on parameterization by investigating a key assumption in prior work about the alignment between parameters and data and derive new theoretical results under weaker assumptions and a broader set of optimizers. Our extensive empirical investigation includes tens of thousands of models trained with all combinations of three optimizers, four parameterizations, several alignment assumptions, more than a dozen learning rates, and fourteen model sizes up to 26.8B parameters. We find that the best learning rate scaling prescription would often have been excluded by the assumptions in prior work. Our results show that all parameterizations, not just maximal update parameterization (muP), can achieve hyperparameter transfer; moreover, our novel per-layer learning rate prescription for standard parameterization outperforms muP. Finally, we demonstrate that an overlooked aspect of parameterization, the epsilon parameter in Adam, must be scaled correctly to avoid gradient underflow and propose Adam-atan2, a new numerically stable, scale-invariant version of Adam that eliminates the epsilon hyperparameter entirely.

cs.LG↗

Explaining Neural Scaling Laws

The population loss of trained deep neural networks often follows precise power-law scaling relations with either the size of the training dataset or the number of parameters in the network. We propose a theory that explains the origins of and connects these scaling laws. We identify variance-limited and resolution-limited scaling behavior for both dataset and model size, for a total of four scaling regimes. The variance-limited scaling follows simply from the existence of a well-behaved infinite data or infinite width limit, while the resolution-limited regime can be explained by positing that models are effectively resolving a smooth data manifold. In the large width limit, this can be equivalently obtained from the spectrum of certain kernels, and we present evidence that large width and large dataset resolution-limited scaling exponents are related by a duality. We exhibit all four scaling regimes in the controlled setting of large random feature and pretrained models and test the predictions empirically on a range of standard architectures and datasets. We also observe several empirical relationships between datasets and scaling exponents under modifications of task and architecture aspect ratio. Our work provides a taxonomy for classifying different scaling regimes, underscores that there can be different mechanisms driving improvements in loss, and lends insight into the microscopic origins of and relationships between scaling exponents.

cs.LG↗

A Strong Gravitational Lens Is Worth a Thousand Dark Matter Halos: Inference on Small-Scale Structure Using Sequential Methods

Strong gravitational lenses are a singular probe of the universe's small-scale structure $\unicode{x2013}$ they are sensitive to the gravitational effects of low-mass $(<10^{10} M_\odot)$ halos even without a luminous counterpart. Recent strong-lensing analyses of dark matter structure rely on simulation-based inference (SBI). Modern SBI methods, which leverage neural networks as density estimators, have shown promise in extracting the halo-population signal. However, it is unclear whether the constraining power of these models has been limited by the methodology or the information content of the data. In this study, we introduce an accelerator-optimized simulation pipeline that can generate lens images with realistic subhalo populations in a matter of milliseconds. Leveraging this simulator, we identify the main methodological limitation of our fiducial SBI analysis: training set size. We then adopt a sequential neural posterior estimation (SNPE) approach, allowing us to iteratively refine the distribution of simulated training images to better align with the observed data. Using only one-fifth as many mock Hubble Space Telescope (HST) images, SNPE matches the constraints on the low-mass halo population produced by our best non-sequential model. Our experiments suggest that an over three order-of-magnitude increase in training set size and GPU hours would be required to achieve an equivalent result without sequential methods. While the full potential of the existing strong lens sample remains to be explored, the notable improvement in constraining power enabled by our sequential approach highlights that the current constraints are limited primarily by methodology and not the data itself. Moreover, our results emphasize the need to treat training set generation and model optimization as interconnected stages of any cosmological analysis using simulation-based inference techniques.

astro-ph.CO↗

Beyond Human Data: Scaling Self-Training for Problem-Solving with Language Models

Fine-tuning language models~(LMs) on human-generated data remains a prevalent practice. However, the performance of such models is often limited by the quantity and diversity of high-quality human data. In this paper, we explore whether we can go beyond human data on tasks where we have access to scalar feedback, for example, on math problems where one can verify correctness. To do so, we investigate a simple self-training method based on expectation-maximization, which we call ReST$^{EM}$, where we (1) generate samples from the model and filter them using binary feedback, (2) fine-tune the model on these samples, and (3) repeat this process a few times. Testing on advanced MATH reasoning and APPS coding benchmarks using PaLM-2 models, we find that ReST$^{EM}$ scales favorably with model size and significantly surpasses fine-tuning only on human data. Overall, our findings suggest self-training with feedback can substantially reduce dependence on human-generated data.

cs.LG↗

Frontier Language Models are not Robust to Adversarial Arithmetic, or "What do I need to say so you agree 2+2=5?

We introduce and study the problem of adversarial arithmetic, which provides a simple yet challenging testbed for language model alignment. This problem is comprised of arithmetic questions posed in natural language, with an arbitrary adversarial string inserted before the question is complete. Even in the simple setting of 1-digit addition problems, it is easy to find adversarial prompts that make all tested models (including PaLM2, GPT4, Claude2) misbehave, and even to steer models to a particular wrong answer. We additionally provide a simple algorithm for finding successful attacks by querying those same models, which we name "prompt inversion rejection sampling" (PIRS). We finally show that models can be partially hardened against these attacks via reinforcement learning and via agentic constitutional loops. However, we were not able to make a language model fully robust against adversarial arithmetic attacks.

cs.CL↗

Replacing softmax with ReLU in Vision Transformers

Previous research observed accuracy degradation when replacing the attention softmax with a point-wise activation such as ReLU. In the context of vision transformers, we find that this degradation is mitigated when dividing by sequence length. Our experiments training small to large vision transformers on ImageNet-21k indicate that ReLU-attention can approach or match the performance of softmax-attention in terms of scaling behavior as a function of compute.

cs.CV↗

Small-scale proxies for large-scale Transformer training instabilities

Teams that have trained large Transformer-based models have reported training instabilities at large scale that did not appear when training with the same hyperparameters at smaller scales. Although the causes of such instabilities are of scientific interest, the amount of resources required to reproduce them has made investigation difficult. In this work, we seek ways to reproduce and study training stability and instability at smaller scales. First, we focus on two sources of training instability described in previous work: the growth of logits in attention layers (Dehghani et al., 2023) and divergence of the output logits from the log probabilities (Chowdhery et al., 2022). By measuring the relationship between learning rate and loss across scales, we show that these instabilities also appear in small models when training at high learning rates, and that mitigations previously employed at large scales are equally effective in this regime. This prompts us to investigate the extent to which other known optimizer and model interventions influence the sensitivity of the final loss to changes in the learning rate. To this end, we study methods such as warm-up, weight decay, and the $μ$Param (Yang et al., 2022), and combine techniques to train small models that achieve similar losses across orders of magnitude of learning rate variation. Finally, to conclude our exploration we study two cases where instabilities can be predicted before they emerge by examining the scaling behavior of model activation and gradient norms.

cs.LG↗

Precursor-of-Anomaly Detection for Irregular Time Series

Anomaly detection is an important field that aims to identify unexpected patterns or data points, and it is closely related to many real-world problems, particularly to applications in finance, manufacturing, cyber security, and so on. While anomaly detection has been studied extensively in various fields, detecting future anomalies before they occur remains an unexplored territory. In this paper, we present a novel type of anomaly detection, called Precursor-of-Anomaly (PoA) detection. Unlike conventional anomaly detection, which focuses on determining whether a given time series observation is an anomaly or not, PoA detection aims to detect future anomalies before they happen. To solve both problems at the same time, we present a neural controlled differential equation-based neural network and its multi-task learning algorithm. We conduct experiments using 17 baselines and 3 datasets, including regular and irregular time series, and demonstrate that our presented method outperforms the baselines in almost all cases. Our ablation studies also indicate that the multitasking training method significantly enhances the overall performance for both anomaly and PoA detection.

cs.AI↗

MadSGM: Multivariate Anomaly Detection with Score-based Generative Models

The time-series anomaly detection is one of the most fundamental tasks for time-series. Unlike the time-series forecasting and classification, the time-series anomaly detection typically requires unsupervised (or self-supervised) training since collecting and labeling anomalous observations are difficult. In addition, most existing methods resort to limited forms of anomaly measurements and therefore, it is not clear whether they are optimal in all circumstances. To this end, we present a multivariate time-series anomaly detector based on score-based generative models, called MadSGM, which considers the broadest ever set of anomaly measurement factors: i) reconstruction-based, ii) density-based, and iii) gradient-based anomaly measurements. We also design a conditional score network and its denoising score matching loss for the time-series anomaly detection. Experiments on five real-world benchmark datasets illustrate that MadSGM achieves the most robust and accurate predictions.

cs.LG↗

Kernel Regression with Infinite-Width Neural Networks on Millions of Examples

Neural kernels have drastically increased performance on diverse and nonstandard data modalities but require significantly more compute, which previously limited their application to smaller datasets. In this work, we address this by massively parallelizing their computation across many GPUs. We combine this with a distributed, preconditioned conjugate gradients algorithm to enable kernel regression at a large scale (i.e. up to five million examples). Using this approach, we study scaling laws of several neural kernels across many orders of magnitude for the CIFAR-5m dataset. Using data augmentation to expand the original CIFAR-10 training dataset by a factor of 20, we obtain a test accuracy of 91.2\% (SotA for a pure kernel method). Moreover, we explore neural kernels on other data modalities, obtaining results on protein and small molecule prediction tasks that are competitive with SotA methods.

stat.ML↗