Data Attribution for Diffusion Models: Timestep-induced Bias in Influence Estimation

Data attribution methods trace model behavior back to its training dataset, offering an effective approach to better understand ''black-box'' neural networks. While prior research has established quantifiable links between model output and training data in diverse settings, interpreting diffusion model outputs in relation to training samples remains underexplored. In particular, diffusion models operate over a sequence of timesteps instead of instantaneous input-output relationships in previous contexts, posing a significant challenge to extend existing frameworks to diffusion models directly. Notably, we present Diffusion-TracIn that incorporates this temporal dynamics and observe that samples' loss gradient norms are highly dependent on timestep. This trend leads to a prominent bias in influence estimation, and is particularly noticeable for samples trained on large-norm-inducing timesteps, causing them to be generally influential. To mitigate this effect, we introduce Diffusion-ReTrac as a re-normalized adaptation that enables the retrieval of training samples more targeted to the test sample of interest, facilitating a localized measurement of influence and considerably more intuitive visualization. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through various evaluation metrics and auxiliary tasks, reducing the amount of generally influential samples to $\frac{1}{3}$ of its original quantity.

Efficient Frameworks for Generalized Low-Rank Matrix Bandit Problems

In the stochastic contextual low-rank matrix bandit problem, the expected reward of an action is given by the inner product between the action's feature matrix and some fixed, but initially unknown $d_1$ by $d_2$ matrix $\Theta^*$ with rank $r \ll \{d_1, d_2\}$, and an agent sequentially takes actions based on past experience to maximize the cumulative reward. In this paper, we study the generalized low-rank matrix bandit problem, which has been recently proposed in \cite{lu2021low} under the Generalized Linear Model (GLM) framework. To overcome the computational infeasibility and theoretical restrain of existing algorithms on this problem, we first propose the G-ESTT framework that modifies the idea from \cite{jun2019bilinear} by using Stein's method on the subspace estimation and then leverage the estimated subspaces via a regularization idea. Furthermore, we remarkably improve the efficiency of G-ESTT by using a novel exclusion idea on the estimated subspace instead, and propose the G-ESTS framework. We also show that G-ESTT can achieve the $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{(d_1+d_2)MrT})$ bound of regret while G-ESTS can achineve the $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{(d_1+d_2)^{3/2}Mr^{3/2}T})$ bound of regret under mild assumption up to logarithm terms, where $M$ is some problem dependent value. Under a reasonable assumption that $M = O((d_1+d_2)^2)$ in our problem setting, the regret of G-ESTT is consistent with the current best regret of $\tilde{O}((d_1+d_2)^{3/2} \sqrt{rT}/D_{rr})$~\citep{lu2021low} ($D_{rr}$ will be defined later). For completeness, we conduct experiments to illustrate that our proposed algorithms, especially G-ESTS, are also computationally tractable and consistently outperform other state-of-the-art (generalized) linear matrix bandit methods based on a suite of simulations.

Federated Learning with Projected Trajectory Regularization

Federated learning enables joint training of machine learning models from distributed clients without sharing their local data. One key challenge in federated learning is to handle non-identically distributed data across the clients, which leads to deteriorated model training performances. Prior works in this line of research mainly focus on utilizing last-step global model parameters/gradients or the linear combinations of the past model parameters/gradients, which do not fully exploit the potential of global information from the model training trajectory. In this paper, we propose a novel federated learning framework with projected trajectory regularization (FedPTR) for tackling the data heterogeneity issue, which proposes a unique way to better extract the essential global information from the model training trajectory. Specifically, FedPTR allows local clients or the server to optimize an auxiliary (synthetic) dataset that mimics the learning dynamics of the recent model update and utilizes it to project the next-step model trajectory for local training regularization. We conduct rigorous theoretical analysis for our proposed framework under nonconvex stochastic settings to verify its fast convergence under heterogeneous data distributions. Experiments on various benchmark datasets and non-i.i.d. settings validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

PEFA: Parameter-Free Adapters for Large-scale Embedding-based Retrieval Models

Embedding-based Retrieval Models (ERMs) have emerged as a promising framework for large-scale text retrieval problems due to powerful large language models. Nevertheless, fine-tuning ERMs to reach state-of-the-art results can be expensive due to the extreme scale of data as well as the complexity of multi-stages pipelines (e.g., pre-training, fine-tuning, distillation). In this work, we propose the PEFA framework, namely ParamEter-Free Adapters, for fast tuning of ERMs without any backward pass in the optimization. At index building stage, PEFA equips the ERM with a non-parametric k-nearest neighbor (kNN) component. At inference stage, PEFA performs a convex combination of two scoring functions, one from the ERM and the other from the kNN. Based on the neighborhood definition, PEFA framework induces two realizations, namely PEFA-XL (i.e., extra large) using double ANN indices and PEFA-XS (i.e., extra small) using a single ANN index. Empirically, PEFA achieves significant improvement on two retrieval applications. For document retrieval, regarding Recall@100 metric, PEFA improves not only pre-trained ERMs on Trivia-QA by an average of 13.2%, but also fine-tuned ERMs on NQ-320K by an average of 5.5%, respectively. For product search, PEFA improves the Recall@100 of the fine-tuned ERMs by an average of 5.3% and 14.5%, for PEFA-XS and PEFA-XL, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/amzn/pecos/tree/mainline/examples/pefa-wsdm24.

Improving the Generation Quality of Watermarked Large Language Models via Word Importance Scoring

The strong general capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) bring potential ethical risks if they are unrestrictedly accessible to malicious users. Token-level watermarking inserts watermarks in the generated texts by altering the token probability distributions with a private random number generator seeded by its prefix tokens. However, this watermarking algorithm alters the logits during generation, which can lead to a downgraded text quality if it chooses to promote tokens that are less relevant given the input. In this work, we propose to improve the quality of texts generated by a watermarked language model by Watermarking with Importance Scoring (WIS). At each generation step, we estimate the importance of the token to generate, and prevent it from being impacted by watermarking if it is important for the semantic correctness of the output. We further propose three methods to predict importance scoring, including a perturbation-based method and two model-based methods. Empirical experiments show that our method can generate texts with better quality with comparable level of detection rate.

Automatic Engineering of Long Prompts

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex open-domain tasks, guided by comprehensive instructions and demonstrations provided in the form of prompts. However, these prompts can be lengthy, often comprising hundreds of lines and thousands of tokens, and their design often requires considerable human effort. Recent research has explored automatic prompt engineering for short prompts, typically consisting of one or a few sentences. However, the automatic design of long prompts remains a challenging problem due to its immense search space. In this paper, we investigate the performance of greedy algorithms and genetic algorithms for automatic long prompt engineering. We demonstrate that a simple greedy approach with beam search outperforms other methods in terms of search efficiency. Moreover, we introduce two novel techniques that utilize search history to enhance the effectiveness of LLM-based mutation in our search algorithm. Our results show that the proposed automatic long prompt engineering algorithm achieves an average of 9.2% accuracy gain on eight tasks in Big Bench Hard, highlighting the significance of automating prompt designs to fully harness the capabilities of LLMs.

A Computationally Efficient Sparsified Online Newton Method

Second-order methods hold significant promise for enhancing the convergence of deep neural network training; however, their large memory and computational demands have limited their practicality. Thus there is a need for scalable second-order methods that can efficiently train large models. In this paper, we introduce the Sparsified Online Newton (SONew) method, a memory-efficient second-order algorithm that yields a sparsified yet effective preconditioner. The algorithm emerges from a novel use of the LogDet matrix divergence measure; we combine it with sparsity constraints to minimize regret in the online convex optimization framework. Empirically, we test our method on large scale benchmarks of up to 1B parameters. We achieve up to 30% faster convergence, 3.4% relative improvement in validation performance, and 80% relative improvement in training loss, in comparison to memory efficient optimizers including first order methods. Powering the method is a surprising fact -- imposing structured sparsity patterns, like tridiagonal and banded structure, requires little to no overhead, making it as efficient and parallelizable as first-order methods. In wall-clock time, tridiagonal SONew is only about 3% slower per step than first-order methods but gives overall gains due to much faster convergence. In contrast, one of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) memory-intensive second-order methods, Shampoo, is unable to scale to large benchmarks. Additionally, while Shampoo necessitates significant engineering efforts to scale to large benchmarks, SONew offers a more straightforward implementation, increasing its practical appeal. SONew code is available at: https://github.com/devvrit/SONew

Stochastic Optimization for Non-convex Problem with Inexact Hessian Matrix, Gradient, and Function

Trust-region (TR) and adaptive regularization using cubics (ARC) have proven to have some very appealing theoretical properties for non-convex optimization by concurrently computing function value, gradient, and Hessian matrix to obtain the next search direction and the adjusted parameters. Although stochastic approximations help largely reduce the computational cost, it is challenging to theoretically guarantee the convergence rate. In this paper, we explore a family of stochastic TR and ARC methods that can simultaneously provide inexact computations of the Hessian matrix, gradient, and function values. Our algorithms require much fewer propagations overhead per iteration than TR and ARC. We prove that the iteration complexity to achieve $\epsilon$-approximate second-order optimality is of the same order as the exact computations demonstrated in previous studies. Additionally, the mild conditions on inexactness can be met by leveraging a random sampling technology in the finite-sum minimization problem. Numerical experiments with a non-convex problem support these findings and demonstrate that, with the same or a similar number of iterations, our algorithms require less computational overhead per iteration than current second-order methods.

Randomized Benchmarking of Local Zeroth-Order Optimizers for Variational Quantum Systems

In the field of quantum information, classical optimizers play an important role. From experimentalists optimizing their physical devices to theorists exploring variational quantum algorithms, many aspects of quantum information require the use of a classical optimizer. For this reason, there are many papers that benchmark the effectiveness of different optimizers for specific quantum optimization tasks and choices of parameterized algorithms. However, for researchers exploring new algorithms or physical devices, the insights from these studies don't necessarily translate. To address this concern, we compare the performance of classical optimizers across a series of partially-randomized tasks to more broadly sample the space of quantum optimization problems. We focus on local zeroth-order optimizers due to their generally favorable performance and query-efficiency on quantum systems. We discuss insights from these experiments that can help motivate future works to improve these optimizers for use on quantum systems.

Why Does Sharpness-Aware Minimization Generalize Better Than SGD?

The challenge of overfitting, in which the model memorizes the training data and fails to generalize to test data, has become increasingly significant in the training of large neural networks. To tackle this challenge, Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has emerged as a promising training method, which can improve the generalization of neural networks even in the presence of label noise. However, a deep understanding of how SAM works, especially in the setting of nonlinear neural networks and classification tasks, remains largely missing. This paper fills this gap by demonstrating why SAM generalizes better than Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for a certain data model and two-layer convolutional ReLU networks. The loss landscape of our studied problem is nonsmooth, thus current explanations for the success of SAM based on the Hessian information are insufficient. Our result explains the benefits of SAM, particularly its ability to prevent noise learning in the early stages, thereby facilitating more effective learning of features. Experiments on both synthetic and real data corroborate our theory.