Distance-Based Tree-Sliced Wasserstein Distance

To overcome computational challenges of Optimal Transport (OT), several variants of Sliced Wasserstein (SW) has been developed in the literature. These approaches exploit the closed-form expression of the univariate OT by projecting measures onto (one-dimensional) lines. However, projecting measures onto low-dimensional spaces can lead to a loss of topological information. Tree-Sliced Wasserstein distance on Systems of Lines (TSW-SL) has emerged as a promising alternative that replaces these lines with a more advanced structure called tree systems. The tree structures enhance the ability to capture topological information of the metric while preserving computational efficiency. However, at the core of TSW-SL, the splitting maps, which serve as the mechanism for pushing forward measures onto tree systems, focus solely on the position of the measure supports while disregarding the projecting domains. Moreover, the specific splitting map used in TSW-SL leads to a metric that is not invariant under Euclidean transformations, a typically expected property for OT on Euclidean space. In this work, we propose a novel class of splitting maps that generalizes the existing one studied in TSW-SL enabling the use of all positional information from input measures, resulting in a novel Distance-based Tree-Sliced Wasserstein (Db-TSW) distance. In addition, we introduce a simple tree sampling process better suited for Db-TSW, leading to an efficient GPU-friendly implementation for tree systems, similar to the original SW. We also provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of proposed class of splitting maps to verify the injectivity of the corresponding Radon Transform, and demonstrate that Db-TSW is an Euclidean invariant metric. We empirically show that Db-TSW significantly improves accuracy compared to recent SW variants while maintaining low computational cost via a wide range of experiments.

Spherical Tree-Sliced Wasserstein Distance

Sliced Optimal Transport (OT) simplifies the OT problem in high-dimensional spaces by projecting supports of input measures onto one-dimensional lines and then exploiting the closed-form expression of the univariate OT to reduce the computational burden of OT. Recently, the Tree-Sliced method has been introduced to replace these lines with more intricate structures, known as tree systems. This approach enhances the ability to capture topological information of integration domains in Sliced OT while maintaining low computational cost. Inspired by this approach, in this paper, we present an adaptation of tree systems on OT problems for measures supported on a sphere. As a counterpart to the Radon transform variant on tree systems, we propose a novel spherical Radon transform with a new integration domain called spherical trees. By leveraging this transform and exploiting the spherical tree structures, we derive closed-form expressions for OT problems on the sphere. Consequently, we obtain an efficient metric for measures on the sphere, named Spherical Tree-Sliced Wasserstein (STSW) distance. We provide an extensive theoretical analysis to demonstrate the topology of spherical trees and the well-definedness and injectivity of our Radon transform variant, which leads to an orthogonally invariant distance between spherical measures. Finally, we conduct a wide range of numerical experiments, including gradient flows and self-supervised learning, to assess the performance of our proposed metric, comparing it to recent benchmarks.

MoLEx: Mixture of Layer Experts for Finetuning with Sparse Upcycling

Large-scale pre-training of deep models, followed by fine-tuning them, has become the cornerstone of natural language processing (NLP). The prevalence of data coupled with computational resources has led to large models with a considerable number of parameters. While the massive size of these models has led to remarkable success in many NLP tasks, a detriment is the expense required to retrain all the base model's parameters for the adaptation to each task or domain. Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) provides an effective solution for this challenge by minimizing the number of parameters required to be fine-tuned while maintaining the quality of the model. While existing methods have achieved impressive results, they mainly focus on adapting a subset of parameters, weight reparameterization, and prompt engineering. In this paper, we study layers as extractors of different types of linguistic information that are valuable when used in conjunction. We then propose the Mixture of Layer Experts (MoLEx), a novel sparse mixture of experts (SMoE) whose experts are layers in the pre-trained model. It performs a conditional computation of a mixture of layers during fine-tuning to provide the model with more structural knowledge about the data. By providing an avenue for information exchange between layers, MoLEx enables the model to make a more well-informed prediction for the downstream task, leading to better fine-tuning results with the same number of effective parameters. As experts can be processed in parallel, MoLEx introduces minimal additional computational overhead. We empirically corroborate the advantages of MoLEx when combined with popular PEFT baseline methods on a variety of downstream fine-tuning tasks, including the popular GLUE benchmark as well as the End-to-End Challenge (E2E). The code is publicly available at https://github.com/rachtsy/molex.

CAMEx: Curvature-aware Merging of Experts

Existing methods for merging experts during model training and fine-tuning predominantly rely on Euclidean geometry, which assumes a flat parameter space. This assumption can limit the model's generalization ability, especially during the pre-training phase, where the parameter manifold might exhibit more complex curvature. Curvature-aware merging methods typically require additional information and computational resources to approximate the Fisher Information Matrix, adding memory overhead. In this paper, we introduce CAMEx (\textbf{C}urvature-\textbf{A}ware \textbf{M}erging of \textbf{Ex}perts), a novel expert merging protocol that incorporates natural gradients to account for the non-Euclidean curvature of the parameter manifold. By leveraging natural gradients, CAMEx adapts more effectively to the structure of the parameter space, improving alignment between model updates and the manifold's geometry. This approach enhances both pre-training and fine-tuning, resulting in better optimization trajectories and improved generalization without the substantial memory overhead typically associated with curvature-aware methods. Our contributions are threefold: (1) CAMEx significantly outperforms traditional Euclidean-based expert merging techniques across various natural language processing tasks, leading to enhanced performance during pre-training and fine-tuning; (2) we introduce a dynamic merging architecture that optimizes resource utilization, achieving high performance while reducing computational costs, facilitating efficient scaling of large language models; and (3) we provide both theoretical and empirical evidence to demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed method.

Tight Clusters Make Specialized Experts

Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures have emerged as a promising approach to decoupling model capacity from computational cost. At the core of the MoE model is the router, which learns the underlying clustering structure of the input distribution in order to send input tokens to appropriate experts. However, latent clusters may be unidentifiable in high dimension, which causes slow convergence, susceptibility to data contamination, and overall degraded representations as the router is unable to perform appropriate token-expert matching. We examine the router through the lens of clustering optimization and derive optimal feature weights that maximally identify the latent clusters. We use these weights to compute the token-expert routing assignments in an adaptively transformed space that promotes well-separated clusters, which helps identify the best-matched expert for each token. In particular, for each expert cluster, we compute a set of weights that scales features according to whether that expert clusters tightly along that feature. We term this novel router the Adaptive Clustering (AC) router. Our AC router enables the MoE model to obtain three connected benefits: 1) faster convergence, 2) better robustness to data corruption, and 3) overall performance improvement, as experts are specialized in semantically distinct regions of the input space. We empirically demonstrate the advantages of our AC router over baseline routing methods when applied on a variety of MoE backbones for language modeling and image recognition tasks in both clean and corrupted settings.

An Attention-based Framework for Fair Contrastive Learning

Contrastive learning has proven instrumental in learning unbiased representations of data, especially in complex environments characterized by high-cardinality and high-dimensional sensitive information. However, existing approaches within this setting require predefined modelling assumptions of bias-causing interactions that limit the model's ability to learn debiased representations. In this work, we propose a new method for fair contrastive learning that employs an attention mechanism to model bias-causing interactions, enabling the learning of a fairer and semantically richer embedding space. In particular, our attention mechanism avoids bias-causing samples that confound the model and focuses on bias-reducing samples that help learn semantically meaningful representations. We verify the advantages of our method against existing baselines in fair contrastive learning and show that our approach can significantly boost bias removal from learned representations without compromising downstream accuracy.

MomentumSMoE: Integrating Momentum into Sparse Mixture of Experts

Sparse Mixture of Experts (SMoE) has become the key to unlocking unparalleled scalability in deep learning. SMoE has the potential to exponentially increase parameter count while maintaining the efficiency of the model by only activating a small subset of these parameters for a given sample. However, it has been observed that SMoE suffers from unstable training and has difficulty adapting to new distributions, leading to the model's lack of robustness to data contamination. To overcome these limitations, we first establish a connection between the dynamics of the expert representations in SMoEs and gradient descent on a multi-objective optimization problem. Leveraging our framework, we then integrate momentum into SMoE and propose a new family of SMoEs named MomentumSMoE. We theoretically prove and numerically demonstrate that MomentumSMoE is more stable and robust than SMoE. In particular, we verify the advantages of MomentumSMoE over SMoE on a variety of practical tasks including ImageNet-1K object recognition and WikiText-103 language modeling. We demonstrate the applicability of MomentumSMoE to many types of SMoE models, including those in the Sparse MoE model for vision (V-MoE) and the Generalist Language Model (GLaM). We also show that other advanced momentum-based optimization methods, such as Adam, can be easily incorporated into the MomentumSMoE framework for designing new SMoE models with even better performance, almost negligible additional computation cost, and simple implementations.

Tree-Sliced Wasserstein Distance on a System of Lines

Sliced Wasserstein (SW) distance in Optimal Transport (OT) is widely used in various applications thanks to its statistical effectiveness and computational efficiency. On the other hand, Tree Wassenstein (TW) and Tree-sliced Wassenstein (TSW) are instances of OT for probability measures where its ground cost is a tree metric. TSW also has a low computational complexity, i.e. linear to the number of edges in the tree. Especially, TSW is identical to SW when the tree is a chain. While SW is prone to loss of topological information of input measures due to relying on one-dimensional projection, TSW is more flexible and has a higher degree of freedom by choosing a tree rather than a line to alleviate the curse of dimensionality in SW. However, for practical applications, popular tree metric sampling methods are heavily built upon given supports, which limits their capacity to adapt to new supports. In this paper, we propose the Tree-Sliced Wasserstein distance on a System of Lines (TSW-SL), which brings a connection between SW and TSW. Compared to SW and TSW, our TSW-SL benefits from the higher degree of freedom of TSW while being suitable to dynamic settings as SW. In TSW-SL, we use a variant of the Radon Transform to project measures onto a system of lines, resulting in measures on a space with a tree metric, then leverage TW to efficiently compute distances between them. We empirically verify the advantages of TSW-SL over the traditional SW by conducting a variety of experiments on gradient flows, image style transfer, and generative models.

A Primal-Dual Framework for Transformers and Neural Networks

Self-attention is key to the remarkable success of transformers in sequence modeling tasks including many applications in natural language processing and computer vision. Like neural network layers, these attention mechanisms are often developed by heuristics and experience. To provide a principled framework for constructing attention layers in transformers, we show that the self-attention corresponds to the support vector expansion derived from a support vector regression problem, whose primal formulation has the form of a neural network layer. Using our framework, we derive popular attention layers used in practice and propose two new attentions: 1) the Batch Normalized Attention (Attention-BN) derived from the batch normalization layer and 2) the Attention with Scaled Head (Attention-SH) derived from using less training data to fit the SVR model. We empirically demonstrate the advantages of the Attention-BN and Attention-SH in reducing head redundancy, increasing the model's accuracy, and improving the model's efficiency in a variety of practical applications including image and time-series classification.

Elliptical Attention

Pairwise dot-product self-attention is key to the success of transformers that achieve state-of-the-art performance across a variety of applications in language and vision. This dot-product self-attention computes attention weights among the input tokens using Euclidean distance, which makes the model prone to representation collapse and vulnerable to contaminated samples. In this paper, we propose using a Mahalanobis distance metric for computing the attention weights to stretch the underlying feature space in directions of high contextual relevance. In particular, we define a hyper-ellipsoidal neighborhood around each query to increase the attention weights of the tokens lying in the contextually important directions. We term this novel class of attention Elliptical Attention. Our Elliptical Attention provides two benefits: 1) reducing representation collapse and 2) enhancing the model's robustness as the Elliptical Attention pays more attention to contextually relevant information rather than focusing on some small subset of informative features. We empirically demonstrate the advantages of Elliptical Attention over the baseline dot-product attention and state-of-the-art attention methods on various practical tasks, including object classification, image segmentation, and language modeling across different data modalities.