Comparing Bad Apples to Good Oranges: Aligning Large Language Models via Joint Preference Optimization

A common technique for aligning large language models (LLMs) relies on acquiring human preferences by comparing multiple generations conditioned on a fixed context. This only leverages the pairwise comparisons when the generations are placed in an identical context. However, such conditional rankings often fail to capture the complex and multidimensional aspects of human preferences. In this work, we revisit the traditional paradigm of preference acquisition and propose a new axis that is based on eliciting preferences jointly over the instruction-response pairs. While prior preference optimizations are designed for conditional ranking protocols (e.g., DPO), our proposed preference acquisition protocol introduces DOVE, a new preference optimization objective that upweights the joint probability of the chosen instruction-response pair over the rejected instruction-response pair. Interestingly, we find that the LLM trained with joint instruction-response preference data using DOVE outperforms the LLM trained with DPO by 5.2% and 3.3% win-rate for the summarization and open-ended dialogue datasets, respectively. Our findings reveal that joint preferences over instruction and response pairs can significantly enhance the alignment of LLMs by tapping into a broader spectrum of human preference elicitation. The data and code is available at https://github.com/Hritikbansal/dove.

Deep Submodular Peripteral Networks

Submodular functions, crucial for various applications, often lack practical learning methods for their acquisition. Seemingly unrelated, learning a scaling from oracles offering graded pairwise preferences (GPC) is underexplored, despite a rich history in psychometrics. In this paper, we introduce deep submodular peripteral networks (DSPNs), a novel parametric family of submodular functions, and methods for their training using a contrastive-learning inspired GPC-ready strategy to connect and then tackle both of the above challenges. We introduce newly devised GPC-style "peripteral" loss which leverages numerically graded relationships between pairs of objects (sets in our case). Unlike traditional contrastive learning, our method utilizes graded comparisons, extracting more nuanced information than just binary-outcome comparisons, and contrasts sets of any size (not just two). We also define a novel suite of automatic sampling strategies for training, including active-learning inspired submodular feedback. We demonstrate DSPNs' efficacy in learning submodularity from a costly target submodular function showing superiority in downstream tasks such as experimental design and streaming applications.

An Experimental Design Framework for Label-Efficient Supervised Finetuning of Large Language Models

Supervised finetuning (SFT) on instruction datasets has played a crucial role in achieving the remarkable zero-shot generalization capabilities observed in modern large language models (LLMs). However, the annotation efforts required to produce high quality responses for instructions are becoming prohibitively expensive, especially as the number of tasks spanned by instruction datasets continues to increase. Active learning is effective in identifying useful subsets of samples to annotate from an unlabeled pool, but its high computational cost remains a barrier to its widespread applicability in the context of LLMs. To mitigate the annotation cost of SFT and circumvent the computational bottlenecks of active learning, we propose using experimental design. Experimental design techniques select the most informative samples to label, and typically maximize some notion of uncertainty and/or diversity. In our work, we implement a framework that evaluates several existing and novel experimental design techniques and find that these methods consistently yield significant gains in label efficiency with little computational overhead. On generative tasks, our methods achieve the same generalization performance with only $50\%$ of annotation cost required by random sampling.

Effective Backdoor Mitigation Depends on the Pre-training Objective

Despite the advanced capabilities of contemporary machine learning (ML) models, they remain vulnerable to adversarial and backdoor attacks. This vulnerability is particularly concerning in real-world deployments, where compromised models may exhibit unpredictable behavior in critical scenarios. Such risks are heightened by the prevalent practice of collecting massive, internet-sourced datasets for pre-training multimodal models, as these datasets may harbor backdoors. Various techniques have been proposed to mitigate the effects of backdooring in these models such as CleanCLIP which is the current state-of-the-art approach. In this work, we demonstrate that the efficacy of CleanCLIP in mitigating backdoors is highly dependent on the particular objective used during model pre-training. We observe that stronger pre-training objectives correlate with harder to remove backdoors behaviors. We show this by training multimodal models on two large datasets consisting of 3 million (CC3M) and 6 million (CC6M) datapoints, under various pre-training objectives, followed by poison removal using CleanCLIP. We find that CleanCLIP is ineffective when stronger pre-training objectives are used, even with extensive hyperparameter tuning. Our findings underscore critical considerations for ML practitioners who pre-train models using large-scale web-curated data and are concerned about potential backdoor threats. Notably, our results suggest that simpler pre-training objectives are more amenable to effective backdoor removal. This insight is pivotal for practitioners seeking to balance the trade-offs between using stronger pre-training objectives and security against backdoor attacks.

Accelerating Batch Active Learning Using Continual Learning Techniques

A major problem with Active Learning (AL) is high training costs since models are typically retrained from scratch after every query round. We start by demonstrating that standard AL on neural networks with warm starting fails, both to accelerate training and to avoid catastrophic forgetting when using fine-tuning over AL query rounds. We then develop a new class of techniques, circumventing this problem, by biasing further training towards previously labeled sets. We accomplish this by employing existing, and developing novel, replay-based Continual Learning (CL) algorithms that are effective at quickly learning the new without forgetting the old, especially when data comes from an evolving distribution. We call this paradigm Continual Active Learning (CAL). We show CAL achieves significant speedups using a plethora of replay schemes that use model distillation and that select diverse, uncertain points from the history. We conduct experiments across many data domains, including natural language, vision, medical imaging, and computational biology, each with different neural architectures and dataset sizes. CAL consistently provides a 3x reduction in training time, while retaining performance.

High Resolution Point Clouds from mmWave Radar

This paper explores a machine learning approach for generating high resolution point clouds from a single-chip mmWave radar. Unlike lidar and vision-based systems, mmWave radar can operate in harsh environments and see through occlusions like smoke, fog, and dust. Unfortunately, current mmWave processing techniques offer poor spatial resolution compared to lidar point clouds. This paper presents RadarHD, an end-to-end neural network that constructs lidar-like point clouds from low resolution radar input. Enhancing radar images is challenging due to the presence of specular and spurious reflections. Radar data also doesn't map well to traditional image processing techniques due to the signal's sinc-like spreading pattern. We overcome these challenges by training RadarHD on a large volume of raw I/Q radar data paired with lidar point clouds across diverse indoor settings. Our experiments show the ability to generate rich point clouds even in scenes unobserved during training and in the presence of heavy smoke occlusion. Further, RadarHD's point clouds are high-quality enough to work with existing lidar odometry and mapping workflows.

Matryoshka Representations for Adaptive Deployment

Learned representations are a central component in modern ML systems, serving a multitude of downstream tasks. When training such representations, it is often the case that computational and statistical constraints for each downstream task are unknown. In this context rigid, fixed capacity representations can be either over or under-accommodating to the task at hand. This leads us to ask: can we design a flexible representation that can adapt to multiple downstream tasks with varying computational resources? Our main contribution is Matryoshka Representation Learning (MRL) which encodes information at different granularities and allows a single embedding to adapt to the computational constraints of downstream tasks. MRL minimally modifies existing representation learning pipelines and imposes no additional cost during inference and deployment. MRL learns coarse-to-fine representations that are at least as accurate and rich as independently trained low-dimensional representations. The flexibility within the learned Matryoshka Representations offer: (a) up to 14x smaller embedding size for ImageNet-1K classification at the same level of accuracy; (b) up to 14x real-world speed-ups for large-scale retrieval on ImageNet-1K and 4K; and (c) up to 2% accuracy improvements for long-tail few-shot classification, all while being as robust as the original representations. Finally, we show that MRL extends seamlessly to web-scale datasets (ImageNet, JFT) across various modalities -- vision (ViT, ResNet), vision + language (ALIGN) and language (BERT). MRL code and pretrained models are open-sourced at https://github.com/RAIVNLab/MRL.

Systematic Generalization in Neural Networks-based Multivariate Time Series Forecasting Models

Systematic generalization aims to evaluate reasoning about novel combinations from known components, an intrinsic property of human cognition. In this work, we study systematic generalization of NNs in forecasting future time series of dependent variables in a dynamical system, conditioned on past time series of dependent variables, and past and future control variables. We focus on systematic generalization wherein the NN-based forecasting model should perform well on previously unseen combinations or regimes of control variables after being trained on a limited set of the possible regimes. For NNs to depict such out-of-distribution generalization, they should be able to disentangle the various dependencies between control variables and dependent variables. We hypothesize that a modular NN architecture guided by the readily-available knowledge of independence of control variables as a potentially useful inductive bias to this end. Through extensive empirical evaluation on a toy dataset and a simulated electric motor dataset, we show that our proposed modular NN architecture serves as a simple yet highly effective inductive bias that enabling better forecasting of the dependent variables up to large horizons in contrast to standard NNs, and indeed capture the true dependency relations between the dependent and the control variables.

Can RNNs trained on harder subject-verb agreement instances still perform well on easier ones?

The main subject and the associated verb in English must agree in grammatical number as per the Subject-Verb Agreement (SVA) phenomenon. It has been found that the presence of a noun between the verb and the main subject, whose grammatical number is opposite to that of the main subject, can cause speakers to produce a verb that agrees with the intervening noun rather than the main noun; the former thus acts as an agreement attractor. Such attractors have also been shown to pose a challenge for RNN models without explicit hierarchical bias to perform well on SVA tasks. Previous work suggests that syntactic cues in the input can aid such models to choose hierarchical rules over linear rules for number agreement. In this work, we investigate the effects of the choice of training data, training algorithm, and architecture on hierarchical generalization. We observe that the models under consideration fail to perform well on sentences with no agreement attractor when trained solely on natural sentences with at least one attractor. Even in the presence of this biased training set, implicit hierarchical bias in the architecture (as in the Ordered Neurons LSTM) is not enough to capture syntax-sensitive dependencies. These results suggest that current RNNs do not capture the underlying hierarchical rules of natural language, but rather use shallower heuristics for their predictions.

How much complexity does an RNN architecture need to learn syntax-sensitive dependencies?

Long short-term memory (LSTM) networks and their variants are capable of encapsulating long-range dependencies, which is evident from their performance on a variety of linguistic tasks. On the other hand, simple recurrent networks (SRNs), which appear more biologically grounded in terms of synaptic connections, have generally been less successful at capturing long-range dependencies as well as the loci of grammatical errors in an unsupervised setting. In this paper, we seek to develop models that bridge the gap between biological plausibility and linguistic competence. We propose a new architecture, the Decay RNN, which incorporates the decaying nature of neuronal activations and models the excitatory and inhibitory connections in a population of neurons. Besides its biological inspiration, our model also shows competitive performance relative to LSTMs on subject-verb agreement, sentence grammaticality, and language modeling tasks. These results provide some pointers towards probing the nature of the inductive biases required for RNN architectures to model linguistic phenomena successfully.