Cascade Reward Sampling for Efficient Decoding-Time Alignment

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is critical for their deployment. Recently, decoding-time alignment has emerged as an effective plug-and-play technique that requires no fine-tuning of model parameters. However, generating text that achieves both high reward and high likelihood remains a significant challenge. Existing methods often fail to generate high-reward text or incur substantial computational costs. In this paper, we propose Cascade Reward Sampling (CARDS) to address both issues, guaranteeing the generation of high-reward and high-likelihood text with significantly low costs. Based on our analysis of reward models (RMs) on incomplete text and our observation that high-reward prefixes induce high-reward complete text, we use rejection sampling to iteratively generate small semantic segments to form such prefixes. The segment length is dynamically determined by the predictive uncertainty of LLMs. This strategy guarantees desirable prefixes for subsequent generations and significantly reduces wasteful token re-generations and the number of reward model scoring. Our experiments demonstrate substantial gains in both generation efficiency and alignment ratings compared to the baselines, achieving five times faster text generation and 99\% win-ties in GPT-4/Claude-3 helpfulness evaluation.

Embracing Unknown Step by Step: Towards Reliable Sparse Training in Real World

Sparse training has emerged as a promising method for resource-efficient deep neural networks (DNNs) in real-world applications. However, the reliability of sparse models remains a crucial concern, particularly in detecting unknown out-of-distribution (OOD) data. This study addresses the knowledge gap by investigating the reliability of sparse training from an OOD perspective and reveals that sparse training exacerbates OOD unreliability. The lack of unknown information and the sparse constraints hinder the effective exploration of weight space and accurate differentiation between known and unknown knowledge. To tackle these challenges, we propose a new unknown-aware sparse training method, which incorporates a loss modification, auto-tuning strategy, and a voting scheme to guide weight space exploration and mitigate confusion between known and unknown information without incurring significant additional costs or requiring access to additional OOD data. Theoretical insights demonstrate how our method reduces model confidence when faced with OOD samples. Empirical experiments across multiple datasets, model architectures, and sparsity levels validate the effectiveness of our method, with improvements of up to \textbf{8.4\%} in AUROC while maintaining comparable or higher accuracy and calibration. This research enhances the understanding and readiness of sparse DNNs for deployment in resource-limited applications. Our code is available on: \url{https://github.com/StevenBoys/MOON}.

Gradient-based Discrete Sampling with Automatic Cyclical Scheduling

Discrete distributions, particularly in high-dimensional deep models, are often highly multimodal due to inherent discontinuities. While gradient-based discrete sampling has proven effective, it is susceptible to becoming trapped in local modes due to the gradient information. To tackle this challenge, we propose an automatic cyclical scheduling, designed for efficient and accurate sampling in multimodal discrete distributions. Our method contains three key components: (1) a cyclical step size schedule where large steps discover new modes and small steps exploit each mode; (2) a cyclical balancing schedule, ensuring ``balanced" proposals for given step sizes and high efficiency of the Markov chain; and (3) an automatic tuning scheme for adjusting the hyperparameters in the cyclical schedules, allowing adaptability across diverse datasets with minimal tuning. We prove the non-asymptotic convergence and inference guarantee for our method in general discrete distributions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method in sampling complex multimodal discrete distributions.

Training Bayesian Neural Networks with Sparse Subspace Variational Inference

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) offer uncertainty quantification but come with the downside of substantially increased training and inference costs. Sparse BNNs have been investigated for efficient inference, typically by either slowly introducing sparsity throughout the training or by post-training compression of dense BNNs. The dilemma of how to cut down massive training costs remains, particularly given the requirement to learn about the uncertainty. To solve this challenge, we introduce Sparse Subspace Variational Inference (SSVI), the first fully sparse BNN framework that maintains a consistently highly sparse Bayesian model throughout the training and inference phases. Starting from a randomly initialized low-dimensional sparse subspace, our approach alternately optimizes the sparse subspace basis selection and its associated parameters. While basis selection is characterized as a non-differentiable problem, we approximate the optimal solution with a removal-and-addition strategy, guided by novel criteria based on weight distribution statistics. Our extensive experiments show that SSVI sets new benchmarks in crafting sparse BNNs, achieving, for instance, a 10-20x compression in model size with under 3\% performance drop, and up to 20x FLOPs reduction during training compared with dense VI training. Remarkably, SSVI also demonstrates enhanced robustness to hyperparameters, reducing the need for intricate tuning in VI and occasionally even surpassing VI-trained dense BNNs on both accuracy and uncertainty metrics.

Position Paper: Bayesian Deep Learning in the Age of Large-Scale AI

In the current landscape of deep learning research, there is a predominant emphasis on achieving high predictive accuracy in supervised tasks involving large image and language datasets. However, a broader perspective reveals a multitude of overlooked metrics, tasks, and data types, such as uncertainty, active and continual learning, and scientific data, that demand attention. Bayesian deep learning (BDL) constitutes a promising avenue, offering advantages across these diverse settings. This paper posits that BDL can elevate the capabilities of deep learning. It revisits the strengths of BDL, acknowledges existing challenges, and highlights some exciting research avenues aimed at addressing these obstacles. Looking ahead, the discussion focuses on possible ways to combine large-scale foundation models with BDL to unlock their full potential.

Enhancing Low-Precision Sampling via Stochastic Gradient Hamiltonian Monte Carlo

Low-precision training has emerged as a promising low-cost technique to enhance the training efficiency of deep neural networks without sacrificing much accuracy. Its Bayesian counterpart can further provide uncertainty quantification and improved generalization accuracy. This paper investigates low-precision sampling via Stochastic Gradient Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (SGHMC) with low-precision and full-precision gradient accumulators for both strongly log-concave and non-log-concave distributions. Theoretically, our results show that, to achieve $\epsilon$-error in the 2-Wasserstein distance for non-log-concave distributions, low-precision SGHMC achieves quadratic improvement ($\widetilde{\mathbf{O}}\left({\epsilon^{-2}{\mu^*}^{-2}\log^2\left({\epsilon^{-1}}\right)}\right)$) compared to the state-of-the-art low-precision sampler, Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) ($\widetilde{\mathbf{O}}\left({{\epsilon}^{-4}{\lambda^{*}}^{-1}\log^5\left({\epsilon^{-1}}\right)}\right)$). Moreover, we prove that low-precision SGHMC is more robust to the quantization error compared to low-precision SGLD due to the robustness of the momentum-based update w.r.t. gradient noise. Empirically, we conduct experiments on synthetic data, and {MNIST, CIFAR-10 \& CIFAR-100} datasets, which validate our theoretical findings. Our study highlights the potential of low-precision SGHMC as an efficient and accurate sampling method for large-scale and resource-limited machine learning.

Entropy-MCMC: Sampling from Flat Basins with Ease

Bayesian deep learning counts on the quality of posterior distribution estimation. However, the posterior of deep neural networks is highly multi-modal in nature, with local modes exhibiting varying generalization performance. Given a practical budget, sampling from the original posterior can lead to suboptimal performance, as some samples may become trapped in "bad" modes and suffer from overfitting. Leveraging the observation that "good" modes with low generalization error often reside in flat basins of the energy landscape, we propose to bias sampling on the posterior toward these flat regions. Specifically, we introduce an auxiliary guiding variable, the stationary distribution of which resembles a smoothed posterior free from sharp modes, to lead the MCMC sampler to flat basins. By integrating this guiding variable with the model parameter, we create a simple joint distribution that enables efficient sampling with minimal computational overhead. We prove the convergence of our method and further show that it converges faster than several existing flatness-aware methods in the strongly convex setting. Empirical results demonstrate that our method can successfully sample from flat basins of the posterior, and outperforms all compared baselines on multiple benchmarks including classification, calibration, and out-of-distribution detection.

Rethinking Data Distillation: Do Not Overlook Calibration

Neural networks trained on distilled data often produce over-confident output and require correction by calibration methods. Existing calibration methods such as temperature scaling and mixup work well for networks trained on original large-scale data. However, we find that these methods fail to calibrate networks trained on data distilled from large source datasets. In this paper, we show that distilled data lead to networks that are not calibratable due to (i) a more concentrated distribution of the maximum logits and (ii) the loss of information that is semantically meaningful but unrelated to classification tasks. To address this problem, we propose Masked Temperature Scaling (MTS) and Masked Distillation Training (MDT) which mitigate the limitations of distilled data and achieve better calibration results while maintaining the efficiency of dataset distillation.

Analysis of Climate Campaigns on Social Media using Bayesian Model Averaging

Climate change is the defining issue of our time, and we are at a defining moment. Various interest groups, social movement organizations, and individuals engage in collective action on this issue on social media. In addition, issue advocacy campaigns on social media often arise in response to ongoing societal concerns, especially those faced by energy industries. Our goal in this paper is to analyze how those industries, their advocacy group, and climate advocacy group use social media to influence the narrative on climate change. In this work, we propose a minimally supervised model soup [56] approach combined with messaging themes to identify the stances of climate ads on Facebook. Finally, we release our stance dataset, model, and set of themes related to climate campaigns for future work on opinion mining and the automatic detection of climate change stances.

Long-tailed Classification from a Bayesian-decision-theory Perspective

Long-tailed classification poses a challenge due to its heavy imbalance in class probabilities and tail-sensitivity risks with asymmetric misprediction costs. Recent attempts have used re-balancing loss and ensemble methods, but they are largely heuristic and depend heavily on empirical results, lacking theoretical explanation. Furthermore, existing methods overlook the decision loss, which characterizes different costs associated with tailed classes. This paper presents a general and principled framework from a Bayesian-decision-theory perspective, which unifies existing techniques including re-balancing and ensemble methods, and provides theoretical justifications for their effectiveness. From this perspective, we derive a novel objective based on the integrated risk and a Bayesian deep-ensemble approach to improve the accuracy of all classes, especially the "tail". Besides, our framework allows for task-adaptive decision loss which provides provably optimal decisions in varying task scenarios, along with the capability to quantify uncertainty. Finally, We conduct comprehensive experiments, including standard classification, tail-sensitive classification with a new False Head Rate metric, calibration, and ablation studies. Our framework significantly improves the current SOTA even on large-scale real-world datasets like ImageNet.