Learned classifiers should often possess certain invariance properties meant to encourage fairness, robustness, or out-of-distribution generalization. However, multiple recent works empirically demonstrate that common invariance-inducing regularizers are ineffective in the over-parameterized regime, in which classifiers perfectly fit (i.e. interpolate) the training data. This suggests that the phenomenon of ``benign overfitting," in which models generalize well despite interpolating, might not favorably extend to settings in which robustness or fairness are desirable. In this work we provide a theoretical justification for these observations. We prove that -- even in the simplest of settings -- any interpolating learning rule (with arbitrarily small margin) will not satisfy these invariance properties. We then propose and analyze an algorithm that -- in the same setting -- successfully learns a non-interpolating classifier that is provably invariant. We validate our theoretical observations on simulated data and the Waterbirds dataset.

图像分类模型可以取决于图像的多个不同语义属性。对分类器的决定的说明需要对这些属性进行发现和可视化这些属性。在这里，我们通过训练生成模型来具体解释基于分类器决策的多个属性来实现这一点的样式x。此类属性的自然来源是样式语的风格，已知在图像中生成语义有意义的维度。但是，由于标准GaN训练不依赖于分类器，所以它可能不代表对分类器决定很重要的这些属性，并且风格的尺寸可以表示无关属性。为了克服这一点，我们提出了一种培训程序，该培训程序包括分类器模型，以便学习特定于分类器的风格。然后从该空间中选择解释性属性。这些可用于可视化每个图像改变多个属性的效果，从而提供特定于图像的解释。我们将风格x应用于多个域，包括动物，叶子，面和视网膜图像。为此，我们展示了如何以不同方式修改图像以改变其分类器输出。我们的结果表明，该方法发现与语义上保持良好的属性，生成有意义的图像特定的解释，并且是在用户研究中测量的人为解释。

域名（ood）概括是机器学习模型的重大挑战。已经提出了许多技术来克服这一挑战，通常专注于具有某些不变性属性的学习模型。在这项工作中，我们绘制了ood性能和模型校准之间的链接，争论跨多个域的校准可以被视为一个特殊的表达，导致更好的EOD泛化。具体而言，我们表明，在某些条件下，实现\ EMPH {多域校准}的模型可被证明无杂散相关性。这导致我们提出多域校准作为分类器的性能的可测量和可训练的代理。因此，我们介绍了易于申请的方法，并允许从业者通过训练或修改现有模型来改善多域校准，从而更好地在看不见的域上的性能。使用最近提出的野外的四个数据集以及彩色的MNIST数据集，我们证明了训练或调整模型，以便在多个域中校准它们导致在看不见的测试域中显着提高性能。我们认为，校准和革建化之间的这种有趣联系是从一个实际和理论的观点出发的。

This paper presents a machine learning approach to multidimensional item response theory (MIRT), a class of latent factor models that can be used to model and predict student performance from observed assessment data. Inspired by collaborative filtering, we define a general class of models that includes many MIRT models. We discuss the use of penalized joint maximum likelihood (JML) to estimate individual models and cross-validation to select the best performing model. This model evaluation process can be optimized using batching techniques, such that even sparse large-scale data can be analyzed efficiently. We illustrate our approach with simulated and real data, including an example from a massive open online course (MOOC). The high-dimensional model fit to this large and sparse dataset does not lend itself well to traditional methods of factor interpretation. By analogy to recommender-system applications, we propose an alternative "validation" of the factor model, using auxiliary information about the popularity of items consulted during an open-book exam in the course.

For applications that require processing large amounts of text at inference time, Large Language Models (LLMs) are handicapped by their limited context windows, which are typically 2048 tokens. In-context learning, an emergent phenomenon in LLMs in sizes above a certain parameter threshold, constitutes one significant example because it can only leverage training examples that fit into the context window. Existing efforts to address the context window limitation involve training specialized architectures, which tend to be smaller than the sizes in which in-context learning manifests due to the memory footprint of processing long texts. We present Parallel Context Windows (PCW), a method that alleviates the context window restriction for any off-the-shelf LLM without further training. The key to the approach is to carve a long context into chunks (``windows'') that fit within the architecture, restrict the attention mechanism to apply only within each window, and re-use the positional embeddings among the windows. We test the PCW approach on in-context learning with models that range in size between 750 million and 178 billion parameters, and show substantial improvements for tasks with diverse input and output spaces. Our results motivate further investigation of Parallel Context Windows as a method for applying off-the-shelf LLMs in other settings that require long text sequences.

Attribute-controlled text rewriting, also known as text style-transfer, has a crucial role in regulating attributes and biases of textual training data and a machine generated text. In this work we present SimpleStyle, a minimalist yet effective approach for style-transfer composed of two simple ingredients: controlled denoising and output filtering. Despite the simplicity of our approach, which can be succinctly described with a few lines of code, it is competitive with previous state-of-the-art methods both in automatic and in human evaluation. To demonstrate the adaptability and practical value of our system beyond academic data, we apply SimpleStyle to transfer a wide range of text attributes appearing in real-world textual data from social networks. Additionally, we introduce a novel "soft noising" technique that further improves the performance of our system. We also show that teaching a student model to generate the output of SimpleStyle can result in a system that performs style transfer of equivalent quality with only a single greedy-decoded sample. Finally, we suggest our method as a remedy for the fundamental incompatible baseline issue that holds progress in the field. We offer our protocol as a simple yet strong baseline for works that wish to make incremental advancements in the field of attribute controlled text rewriting.

We study the problem of continually training an instruction-following agent through feedback provided by users during collaborative interactions. During interaction, human users instruct an agent using natural language, and provide realtime binary feedback as they observe the agent's instruction execution. We cast learning as a contextual bandit problem, converting the user feedback to immediate reward. We evaluate through multiple rounds of human-agent interactions, demonstrating 15.4% absolute improvement in instruction execution over time. We also show our approach is robust to several design variations, and that the feedback signal is roughly equivalent to the learning signal of supervised demonstration data.

Light is a complex-valued field. The intensity and phase of the field are affected by imaged objects. However, imaging sensors measure only real-valued non-negative intensities. This results in a nonlinear relation between the measurements and the unknown imaged objects. Moreover, the sensor readouts are corrupted by Poissonian-distributed photon noise. In this work, we seek the most probable object (or clear image), given noisy measurements, that is, maximizing the a-posteriori probability of the sought variables. Hence, we generalize annealed Langevin dynamics, tackling fundamental challenges in optical imaging, including phase recovery and Poisson (photon) denoising. We leverage deep neural networks, not for explicit recovery of the imaged object, but as an approximate gradient for a prior term. We show results on empirical data, acquired by a real experiment. We further show results of simulations.

Pretraining has been shown to scale well with compute, data size and data diversity. Multitask learning trains on a mixture of supervised datasets and produces improved performance compared to self-supervised pretraining. Until now, massively multitask learning required simultaneous access to all datasets in the mixture and heavy compute resources that are only available to well-resourced teams. In this paper, we propose ColD Fusion, a method that provides the benefits of multitask learning but leverages distributed computation and requires limited communication and no sharing of data. Consequentially, ColD Fusion can create a synergistic loop, where finetuned models can be recycled to continually improve the pretrained model they are based on. We show that ColD Fusion yields comparable benefits to multitask pretraining by producing a model that (a) attains strong performance on all of the datasets it was multitask trained on and (b) is a better starting point for finetuning on unseen datasets. We find ColD Fusion outperforms RoBERTa and even previous multitask models. Specifically, when training and testing on 35 diverse datasets, ColD Fusion-based model outperforms RoBERTa by 2.45 points in average without any changes to the architecture.

We introduce KiloGram, a resource for studying abstract visual reasoning in humans and machines. Drawing on the history of tangram puzzles as stimuli in cognitive science, we build a richly annotated dataset that, with >1k distinct stimuli, is orders of magnitude larger and more diverse than prior resources. It is both visually and linguistically richer, moving beyond whole shape descriptions to include segmentation maps and part labels. We use this resource to evaluate the abstract visual reasoning capacities of recent multi-modal models. We observe that pre-trained weights demonstrate limited abstract reasoning, which dramatically improves with fine-tuning. We also observe that explicitly describing parts aids abstract reasoning for both humans and models, especially when jointly encoding the linguistic and visual inputs. KiloGram is available at https://lil.nlp.cornell.edu/kilogram .