Learning to Achieve Goals with Belief State Transformers

We introduce the "Belief State Transformer", a next-token predictor that takes both a prefix and suffix as inputs, with a novel objective of predicting both the next token for the prefix and the previous token for the suffix. The Belief State Transformer effectively learns to solve challenging problems that conventional forward-only transformers struggle with, in a domain-independent fashion. Key to this success is learning a compact belief state that captures all relevant information necessary for accurate predictions. Empirical ablations show that each component of the model is essential in difficult scenarios where standard Transformers fall short. For the task of story writing with known prefixes and suffixes, our approach outperforms the Fill-in-the-Middle method for reaching known goals and demonstrates improved performance even when the goals are unknown. Altogether, the Belief State Transformer enables more efficient goal-conditioned decoding, better test-time inference, and high-quality text representations on small scale problems.

Adapters for Altering LLM Vocabularies: What Languages Benefit the Most?

Vocabulary adaptation, which integrates new vocabulary into pre-trained language models (LMs), enables expansion to new languages and mitigates token over-fragmentation. However, existing approaches are limited by their reliance on heuristic or external embeddings. We propose VocADT, a novel method for vocabulary adaptation using adapter modules that are trained to learn the optimal linear combination of existing embeddings while keeping the model's weights fixed. VocADT offers a flexible and scalable solution without requiring external resources or language constraints. Across 11 languages-with various scripts, resource availability, and fragmentation-we demonstrate that VocADT outperforms the original Mistral model and other baselines across various multilingual tasks. We find that Latin-script languages and highly fragmented languages benefit the most from vocabulary adaptation. We further fine-tune the adapted model on the generative task of machine translation and find that vocabulary adaptation is still beneficial after fine-tuning and that VocADT is the most effective method.

RGM: Reconstructing High-fidelity 3D Car Assets with Relightable 3D-GS Generative Model from a Single Image

The generation of high-quality 3D car assets is essential for various applications, including video games, autonomous driving, and virtual reality. Current 3D generation methods utilizing NeRF or 3D-GS as representations for 3D objects, generate a Lambertian object under fixed lighting and lack separated modelings for material and global illumination. As a result, the generated assets are unsuitable for relighting under varying lighting conditions, limiting their applicability in downstream tasks. To address this challenge, we propose a novel relightable 3D object generative framework that automates the creation of 3D car assets, enabling the swift and accurate reconstruction of a vehicle's geometry, texture, and material properties from a single input image. Our approach begins with introducing a large-scale synthetic car dataset comprising over 1,000 high-precision 3D vehicle models. We represent 3D objects using global illumination and relightable 3D Gaussian primitives integrating with BRDF parameters. Building on this representation, we introduce a feed-forward model that takes images as input and outputs both relightable 3D Gaussians and global illumination parameters. Experimental results demonstrate that our method produces photorealistic 3D car assets that can be seamlessly integrated into road scenes with different illuminations, which offers substantial practical benefits for industrial applications.

Upsample or Upweight? Balanced Training on Heavily Imbalanced Datasets

Data availability across domains often follows a long-tail distribution: a few domains have abundant data, while most face data scarcity. This imbalance poses challenges in training language models uniformly across all domains. In our study, we focus on multilingual settings, where data sizes vary significantly between high- and low-resource languages. Common strategies to address this include upsampling low-resource languages (Temperature Sampling) or upweighting their loss (Scalarization). Although often considered equivalent, this assumption has not been proven, which motivates our study. Through both theoretical and empirical analysis, we identify the conditions under which these approaches are equivalent and when they diverge. Specifically, we demonstrate that these two methods are equivalent under full gradient descent, but this equivalence breaks down with stochastic gradient descent. Empirically, we observe that Temperature Sampling converges more quickly but is prone to overfitting. We argue that this faster convergence is likely due to the lower variance in gradient estimations, as shown theoretically. Based on these insights, we propose Cooldown, a strategy that reduces sampling temperature during training, accelerating convergence without overfitting to low-resource languages. Our method is competitive with existing data re-weighting and offers computational efficiency.

X-ALMA: Plug & Play Modules and Adaptive Rejection for Quality Translation at Scale

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various NLP tasks, yet their focus has predominantly been on English due to English-centric pre-training and limited multilingual data. While some multilingual LLMs claim to support for hundreds of languages, models often fail to provide high-quality response for mid- and low-resource languages, leading to imbalanced performance heavily skewed in favor of high-resource languages like English and Chinese. In this paper, we prioritize quality over scaling number of languages, with a focus on multilingual machine translation task, and introduce X-ALMA, a model designed with a commitment to ensuring top-tier performance across 50 diverse languages, regardless of their resource levels. X-ALMA surpasses state-of-the-art open-source multilingual LLMs, such as Aya-101 and Aya-23, in every single translation direction on the FLORES and WMT'23 test datasets according to COMET-22. This is achieved by plug-and-play language-specific module architecture to prevent language conflicts during training and a carefully designed training regimen with novel optimization methods to maximize the translation performance. At the final stage of training regimen, our proposed Adaptive Rejection Preference Optimization (ARPO) surpasses existing preference optimization methods in translation tasks.

PackMamba: Efficient Processing of Variable-Length Sequences in Mamba training

With the evolution of large language models, traditional Transformer models become computationally demanding for lengthy sequences due to the quadratic growth in computation with respect to the sequence length. Mamba, emerging as a groundbreaking architecture in the field of generative AI, demonstrates remarkable proficiency in handling elongated sequences with reduced computational and memory complexity. Nevertheless, the existing training framework of Mamba presents inefficiency with variable-length sequence inputs. Either single-sequence training results in low GPU utilization, or batched processing of variable-length sequences to a maximum length incurs considerable memory and computational overhead. To address this problem, we analyze the performance of bottleneck operators in Mamba under diverse tensor shapes and proposed PackMamba, a high-throughput Mamba that efficiently handles variable-length sequences. Diving deep into state-space models (SSMs), we modify the parallel operators to avoid passing information between individual sequences while maintaining high performance. Experimental results on an NVIDIA A100 GPU demonstrate throughput exceeding the baseline single-sequence processing scheme: 3.06x speedup on the 1.4B model and 2.62x on the 2.8B model.

Online Linear Programming with Batching

We study Online Linear Programming (OLP) with batching. The planning horizon is cut into $K$ batches, and the decisions on customers arriving within a batch can be delayed to the end of their associated batch. Compared with OLP without batching, the ability to delay decisions brings better operational performance, as measured by regret. Two research questions of interest are: (1) What is a lower bound of the regret as a function of $K$? (2) What algorithms can achieve the regret lower bound? These questions have been analyzed in the literature when the distribution of the reward and the resource consumption of the customers have finite support. By contrast, this paper analyzes these questions when the conditional distribution of the reward given the resource consumption is continuous, and we show the answers are different under this setting. When there is only a single type of resource and the decision maker knows the total number of customers, we propose an algorithm with a $O(\log K)$ regret upper bound and provide a $\Omega(\log K)$ regret lower bound. We also propose algorithms with $O(\log K)$ regret upper bound for the setting in which there are multiple types of resource and the setting in which customers arrive following a Poisson process. All these regret upper and lower bounds are independent of the length of the planning horizon, and all the proposed algorithms delay decisions on customers arriving in only the first and the last batch. We also take customer impatience into consideration and establish a way of selecting an appropriate batch size.

Diffusion-DICE: In-Sample Diffusion Guidance for Offline Reinforcement Learning

One important property of DIstribution Correction Estimation (DICE) methods is that the solution is the optimal stationary distribution ratio between the optimized and data collection policy. In this work, we show that DICE-based methods can be viewed as a transformation from the behavior distribution to the optimal policy distribution. Based on this, we propose a novel approach, Diffusion-DICE, that directly performs this transformation using diffusion models. We find that the optimal policy's score function can be decomposed into two terms: the behavior policy's score function and the gradient of a guidance term which depends on the optimal distribution ratio. The first term can be obtained from a diffusion model trained on the dataset and we propose an in-sample learning objective to learn the second term. Due to the multi-modality contained in the optimal policy distribution, the transformation in Diffusion-DICE may guide towards those local-optimal modes. We thus generate a few candidate actions and carefully select from them to approach global-optimum. Different from all other diffusion-based offline RL methods, the guide-then-select paradigm in Diffusion-DICE only uses in-sample actions for training and brings minimal error exploitation in the value function. We use a didatic toycase example to show how previous diffusion-based methods fail to generate optimal actions due to leveraging these errors and how Diffusion-DICE successfully avoids that. We then conduct extensive experiments on benchmark datasets to show the strong performance of Diffusion-DICE.

IE-NeRF: Inpainting Enhanced Neural Radiance Fields in the Wild

We present a novel approach for synthesizing realistic novel views using Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) with uncontrolled photos in the wild. While NeRF has shown impressive results in controlled settings, it struggles with transient objects commonly found in dynamic and time-varying scenes. Our framework called \textit{Inpainting Enhanced NeRF}, or \ours, enhances the conventional NeRF by drawing inspiration from the technique of image inpainting. Specifically, our approach extends the Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLP) of NeRF, enabling it to simultaneously generate intrinsic properties (static color, density) and extrinsic transient masks. We introduce an inpainting module that leverages the transient masks to effectively exclude occlusions, resulting in improved volume rendering quality. Additionally, we propose a new training strategy with frequency regularization to address the sparsity issue of low-frequency transient components. We evaluate our approach on internet photo collections of landmarks, demonstrating its ability to generate high-quality novel views and achieve state-of-the-art performance.

FairDiff: Fair Segmentation with Point-Image Diffusion

Fairness is an important topic for medical image analysis, driven by the challenge of unbalanced training data among diverse target groups and the societal demand for equitable medical quality. In response to this issue, our research adopts a data-driven strategy-enhancing data balance by integrating synthetic images. However, in terms of generating synthetic images, previous works either lack paired labels or fail to precisely control the boundaries of synthetic images to be aligned with those labels. To address this, we formulate the problem in a joint optimization manner, in which three networks are optimized towards the goal of empirical risk minimization and fairness maximization. On the implementation side, our solution features an innovative Point-Image Diffusion architecture, which leverages 3D point clouds for improved control over mask boundaries through a point-mask-image synthesis pipeline. This method outperforms significantly existing techniques in synthesizing scanning laser ophthalmoscopy (SLO) fundus images. By combining synthetic data with real data during the training phase using a proposed Equal Scale approach, our model achieves superior fairness segmentation performance compared to the state-of-the-art fairness learning models. Code is available at https://github.com/wenyi-li/FairDiff.