The paper investigates the effects of invalid action masking in policy gradient algorithms.
problem Invalid actions in policy gradient algorithms can lead to suboptimal performance.
method The paper provides theoretical justification and empirical demonstrations of the importance of invalid action masking.
result Invalid action masking is crucial as the number of invalid actions increases.
Dropout and RaM become equivalent in large ResNets as depth and width increase.
problem Improving performance in deep learning models.
method Comparing Dropout and Random Gradient Masking in ResNets.
result Dropout and RaM converge to the same large-scale limiting dynamics in ResNets.
A technique scales symbolic methods with gradients for neural model explanation.
problem Limited scalability of symbolic methods for large neural networks.
method Combines gradient-based methods with symbolic techniques using Integrated Gradients to focus on a subset of neurons.
result Produces sparser and higher saliency regions compared to gradient-based methods alone.
We introduce backdrop, a flexible and simple-to-implement method, intuitively described as dropout acting only along the backpropagation pipeline. Backdrop is implemented via one or more masking layers which are inserted at specific points along the network. Each backdrop masking layer acts as the identity in the forwa…
TRM improves long-horizon LLM RL by masking divergent sequences.
problem Long-horizon reinforcement learning with LLMs suffers from off-policy mismatch and approximation errors.
method Derives and applies trust region bounds to control divergence, proposing Trust Region Masking.
result First non-vacuous monotonic improvement guarantees for long-horizon LLM-RL.
TRM improves long-horizon reinforcement learning for LLMs by masking divergent sequences.
problem Long-horizon reinforcement learning for LLMs suffers from off-policy mismatch and approximation errors.
method Derives and applies trust region bounds to control divergence, proposing Trust Region Masking.
result First non-vacuous monotonic improvement guarantees for long-horizon LLM-RL.
A new framework for controllable generation of discrete masked models.
problem Efficient controllable generation of discrete data models.
method Plug-and-play framework based on importance sampling.
result Demonstrates versatility across multiple domains, including protein design.
In this work we revisit gradient regularization for adversarial robustness with some new ingredients. First, we derive new per-image theoretical robustness bounds based on local gradient information. These bounds strongly motivate input gradient regularization. Second, we implement a scaleable version of input gradient…
PMI-Masking improves MLM pretraining by masking correlated spans efficiently.
problem Uniform token masking leads to inefficient and suboptimal performance in MLMs.
method PMI-Masking uses Pointwise Mutual Information to mask n-grams with high collocation.
result PMI-Masking reaches half the training time and improves performance.
Masked LARk prevents cross-site tracking while training models.
problem Cross-site tracking of user data through third-party cookies.
method Secure multi-party compute (MPC) protocol with masking.
result Prevents cross-site tracking and maintains model training flexibility.
Neural networks with low-precision weights and activations offer compelling efficiency advantages over their full-precision equivalents. The two most frequently discussed benefits of quantization are reduced memory consumption, and a faster forward pass when implemented with efficient bitwise operations. We propose a t…
Attribution methods have been developed to explain the decision of a machine learning model on a given input. We use the Integrated Gradient method for finding attributions to define the causal neighborhood of an input by incrementally masking high attribution features. We study the robustness of machine learning model…
A key problem in research on adversarial examples is that vulnerability to adversarial examples is usually measured by running attack algorithms. Because the attack algorithms are not optimal, the attack algorithms are prone to overestimating the size of perturbation needed to fool the target model. In other words, the…
ST-MTM models complex time series by decomposing and masking seasonal and trend components.
problem Forecasting complex time series with intricate temporal variations.
method Seasonal-Trend Decomposition with Masking and Contrastive Learning.
result ST-MTM achieves superior forecasting performance compared to existing methods.
Expands MLM by masking token positions, improving performance and convergence.
problem Improving language model performance and convergence.
method Masking token positions along with [MASK] tokens, using a fully connected classifier stage.
result Shows .3% improvement and 50% faster convergence for BERT Base with position masking.
Adversarial attacks and defenses are currently active areas of research for the deep learning community. A recent review paper divided the defense approaches into three categories; gradient masking, robust optimization, and adversarial example detection. We divide gradient masking and robust optimization differently: (…
New method reduces diffusion model function evaluations for discrete data.
problem High computational burden in generating samples from masked diffusion models.
method Modified causal attention mask and speculative sampling mechanism for non-factorized predictions.
result Achieved ~2x reduction in required network forward passes.
Proposes a proportional masking strategy for better tabular data imputation.
problem Heterogeneity of tabular data disrupts uniform random masking in MAEs.
method Computes missingness statistics, generates proportional masks, uses MLP token mixing.
result Proportional masking preserves missingness distribution, improves imputation performance.
New analysis reveals masked self-supervised learning's effectiveness in extracting data structure.
problem Analyzing masked self-supervised learning in high-dimensional data.
method Developed precise high-dimensional analysis of masked modeling objectives.
result Identified phase transitions and structured regimes for masked self-supervised learning.
A new approach improves numerical tabular data imputation by addressing diffusion models' limitations.
problem Inaccurate and difficult training in numerical tabular data imputation.
method Kernelized Negative Entropy-regularized Wasserstein gradient flow Imputation (KnewImp) based on Wasserstein gradient flow (WGF) framework.
result KnewImp significantly outperforms existing methods in numerical tabular data imputation.
Research reveals deep networks often learn low-rank structures, leading to more efficient training and fine-tuning.
problem Efficient training and deployment of large-scale deep learning models.
method Complementary theoretical perspectives on low-rank structures during training and convergence, and practical applications of LoRA and masked training.
result Understanding and exploiting low-rank structures can improve efficiency and effectiveness of training and fine-tuning.
We seek to automate the design of molecules based on specific chemical properties. Our primary contributions are a simpler method for generating SMILES strings guaranteed to be chemically valid, using a combination of a new context-free grammar for SMILES and additional masking logic; and casting the molecular property…
The recently proposed mask-predict decoding algorithm has narrowed the performance gap between semi-autoregressive machine translation models and the traditional left-to-right approach. We introduce a new training method for conditional masked language models, SMART, which mimics the semi-autoregressive behavior of mas…
This paper connects masked pre-training to Bayesian model selection.
problem Understanding the success of masked pre-training and its generalization.
method The paper shows masked pre-training corresponds to maximizing the marginal likelihood.
result Masked pre-training with a suitable scoring function maximizes the marginal likelihood.
Optimization-based pruning eliminates backpropagation for large language models.
problem Suboptimal pruning performance due to heuristic metrics.
method Optimization of Bernoulli distribution to learn pruning masks without backpropagation.
result Efficient pruning of large language models with improved performance.
Optimizes pruning masks for neural networks using probabilistic fine-tuning and PAC-Bayes bounds.
problem Improving neural network performance through adaptive pruning of weights.
method Optimizes stochastic pruning masks by minimizing expected loss, considering data-adaptive regularization and feature alignment.
result Probabilistic fine-tuning leads to improved test error over baseline methods in neural networks.
We consider the problem of selecting an optimal mask for an image manifold, i.e., choosing a subset of the pixels of the image that preserves the manifold's geometric structure present in the original data. Such masking implements a form of compressive sensing through emerging imaging sensor platforms for which the pow…
Recent object detectors use four-coordinate bounding box (bbox) regression to predict object locations. Providing additional information indicating the object positions and coordinates will improve detection performance. Thus, we propose two types of masks: a bbox mask and a bounding shape (bshape) mask, to represent t…
SONet stabilizes ODE networks for robustness without adversarial training.
problem Improving adversarial robustness of neural networks without sacrificing natural accuracy.
method SONet uses skew-symmetric ODE blocks and DOPRI5 solver for robustness.
result SONet achieves comparable robustness to adversarial defense methods without trade-off.
Improved YOLOv5 model detects mask-wearing with enhanced accuracy.
problem Detecting mask-wearing in high traffic public places.
method Improved YOLOv5l with Multi-Head Attentional Self-Convolution, Swin Transformer Block, I-CBAM module, and enhanced feature fusion.
result 1.1% improvement in mAP(0.5) and 1.3% improvement in mAP(0.5:0.95) compared to YOLOv5l.
Simplified masked diffusion models improve discrete data generation.
problem Complex model formulations and unclear relationships hinder discrete data generative modeling.
method Developed a simple and general framework for masked diffusion models.
result Models trained on OpenWebText surpass prior diffusion language models and outperform autoregressive models.
Language models trained on chess board states outperform those on moves, even with causal masking.
problem Applying causal masking to spatial data for training unimodal language models.
method Trained bidirectional and causal self-attention models on both spatial (board-based) and sequential (move-based) chess data.
result Models trained on spatial board states achieve stronger playing strength than those trained on sequential data, even with causal masking.
Masking diffusion outperforms other discrete diffusion models by incorporating jump times into the model.
problem Improving the performance of discrete diffusion models.
method Conditioning on the jump schedule of discrete Markov processes.
result Schedule-conditioned discrete diffusion (SCUD) models outperform classical and masking diffusion models.
Catastrophic forgetting occurs when a neural network loses the information learned in a previous task after training on subsequent tasks. This problem remains a hurdle for artificial intelligence systems with sequential learning capabilities. In this paper, we propose a task-based hard attention mechanism that preserve…
We develop mask iterative hard thresholding algorithms (mask IHT and mask DORE) for sparse image reconstruction of objects with known contour. The measurements follow a noisy underdetermined linear model common in the compressive sampling literature. Assuming that the contour of the object that we wish to reconstruct i…
The ConditionaL Neural Networks (CLNN) and the Masked ConditionaL Neural Networks (MCLNN) exploit the nature of multi-dimensional temporal signals. The CLNN captures the conditional temporal influence between the frames in a window and the mask in the MCLNN enforces a systematic sparseness that follows a filterbank-lik…
Unified framework for ICL in causal and masked models.
problem Understanding ICL in masked language models and comparing it to causal models.
method Developed a statistical learning framework representing context by empirical measure and predicting using context and query.
result Upper bounds for masked and autoregressive objectives under Wasserstein-type regularity conditions.
VLSI mask optimization is one of the most critical stages in manufacturability aware design, which is costly due to the complicated mask optimization and lithography simulation. Recent researches have shown prominent advantages of machine learning techniques dealing with complicated and big data problems, which bring p…
Most machine translation systems generate text autoregressively from left to right. We, instead, use a masked language modeling objective to train a model to predict any subset of the target words, conditioned on both the input text and a partially masked target translation. This approach allows for efficient iterative…
Deep reinforcement learning has recently gained a focus on problems where policy or value functions are independent of goals. Evidence exists that the sampling of goals has a strong effect on the learning performance, but there is a lack of general mechanisms that focus on optimizing the goal sampling process. In this …
Novel bio-inspired masking for robust speech emotion recognition.
problem Noise degradation in speech emotion recognition.
method Cochlear cepstrogram-based contrastive learning with temporal and frequency masking.
result Improved speech emotion recognition performance on K-EmoCon benchmark.
This paper analyzes MaskGIT sampler and introduces a moment sampler for faster masked diffusion sampling.
problem Efficiently sampling from masked diffusion models.
method Theoretical analysis of MaskGIT sampler, introduction of moment sampler, and two innovations for improving choose-then-sample efficiency.
result The moment sampler is an asymptotically equivalent, more interpretable alternative to MaskGIT.
Modulating masks improve lifelong reinforcement learning.
problem Catastrophic forgetting and task interference in lifelong reinforcement learning.
method Adapted modulating masks for deep lifelong reinforcement learning (LRL) with PPO and IMPALA agents.
result Superior performance in both discrete and continuous RL tasks compared to LRL baselines.
Large-scale distributed training requires significant communication bandwidth for gradient exchange that limits the scalability of multi-node training, and requires expensive high-bandwidth network infrastructure. The situation gets even worse with distributed training on mobile devices (federated learning), which suff…
Enhanced Sampling Scheme improves masked generative modeling.
problem Limitations of existing sampling schemes in masked non-autoregressive generative modeling.
method ESS consists of three stages: Naive Iterative Decoding, Critical Reverse Sampling, and Critical Resampling.
result ESS achieves significant performance gains in unconditional and class-conditional sampling.
Theoretical analysis of vision transformers' performance with MAE and CL objectives.
problem Understanding the distinct representations learned by vision transformers with MAE and CL objectives.
method Modeling visual data distribution and analyzing ViTs training dynamics with gradient descent.
result ViTs trained with MAE objectives learn both global and local features, while CL-trained ViTs favor global features.
Structured State-Space Duality connects SSMs to masked attention.
problem Connecting SSMs and attention mechanisms for efficient modeling.
method Formalizing and generalizing SSD from scalar-identity to diagonal state matrices.
result Diagonal SSMs match training complexity lower bounds and support richer dynamics.
Study improves healthcare time series imputation by considering structured missingness.
problem Structured missingness in clinical data impacts time series imputation models.
method Analysis of different masking strategies on imputation methods using PhysioNet Challenge 2012 dataset.
result Masking choices significantly affect imputation accuracy and clinical prediction.