GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
LongVILA: Scaling Long-Context Visual Language Models for Long Videos
Authors: Yukang Chen; Fuzhao Xue; Dacheng Li; Qinghao Hu; Ligeng Zhu; Xiuyu Li; Yunhao Fang; Haotian Tang; Shang Yang; Zhijian Liu; Yihui He; Hongxu Yin; Pavlo Molchanov; Jan Kautz; Linxi Fan; Yuke Zhu; Yao Lu; Song Han
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Long-context capability is critical for multi-modal foundation models, especially for long video understanding. We introduce LongVILA, a full-stack solution for long-context visual-language models by co-designing the algorithm and system. For model training, we upgrade existing VLMs to support long video understanding by incorporating two additional stages, i.e., long context extension and long video supervised fine-tuning. However, training on long video is computationally and memory intensive. We introduce the long-context Multi-Modal Sequence Parallelism (MM-SP) system that efficiently parallelizes long video training and inference, enabling 2M context length training on 256 GPUs without any gradient checkpointing. LongVILA efficiently extends the number of video frames of VILA from 8 to 2048, achieving 99.8% accuracy in 6,000-frame (more than 1 million tokens) video needle-in-a-haystack. LongVILA-7B demonstrates strong accuracy on 9 popular video benchmarks, e.g., 65.1% VideoMME with subtitle. Besides, MM-SP is 2.1x - 5.7x faster than ring style sequence parallelism and 1.1x - 1.4x faster than Megatron with a hybrid context and tensor parallelism. Moreover, it seamlessly integrates with Hugging Face Transformers.
McEval: Massively Multilingual Code Evaluation
Authors: Linzheng Chai; Shukai Liu; Jian Yang; Yuwei Yin; JinKe; Jiaheng Liu; Tao Sun; Ge Zhang; Changyu Ren; Hongcheng Guo; Noah Wang; Boyang Wang; Xianjie Wu; Bing Wang; Tongliang Li; Liqun Yang; Sufeng Duan; Zhaoxiang Zhang; Zhoujun Li
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Code large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable advances in code understanding, completion, and generation tasks. Programming benchmarks, comprised of a selection of code challenges and corresponding test cases, serve as a standard to evaluate the capability of different LLMs in such tasks. However, most existing benchmarks primarily focus on Python and are still restricted to a limited number of languages, where other languages are translated from the Python samples degrading the data diversity. To further facilitate the research of code LLMs, we propose a massively multilingual code benchmark covering 40 programming languages (McEval) with 16K test samples, which substantially pushes the limits of code LLMs in multilingual scenarios. The benchmark contains challenging code completion, understanding, and generation evaluation tasks with finely curated massively multilingual instruction corpora McEval-Instruct. In addition, we introduce an effective multilingual coder mCoder trained on McEval-Instruct to support multilingual programming language generation. Extensive experimental results on McEval show that there is still a difficult journey between open-source models and closed-source LLMs in numerous languages. The instruction corpora and evaluation benchmark are available at https://github.com/MCEVAL/McEval.
Re-Evaluating the Impact of Unseen-Class Unlabeled Data on Semi-Supervised Learning Model
Authors: Rundong He; Yicong Dong; Lan-Zhe Guo; Yilong Yin; Tailin Wu
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Semi-supervised learning (SSL) effectively leverages unlabeled data and has been proven successful across various fields. Current safe SSL methods believe that unseen classes in unlabeled data harm the performance of SSL models. However, previous methods for assessing the impact of unseen classes on SSL model performance are flawed. They fix the size of the unlabeled dataset and adjust the proportion of unseen classes within the unlabeled data to assess the impact. This process contravenes the principle of controlling variables. Adjusting the proportion of unseen classes in unlabeled data alters the proportion of seen classes, meaning the decreased classification performance of seen classes may not be due to an increase in unseen class samples in the unlabeled data, but rather a decrease in seen class samples. Thus, the prior flawed assessment standard that "unseen classes in unlabeled data can damage SSL model performance" may not always hold true. This paper strictly adheres to the principle of controlling variables, maintaining the proportion of seen classes in unlabeled data while only changing the unseen classes across five critical dimensions, to investigate their impact on SSL models from global robustness and local robustness. Experiments demonstrate that unseen classes in unlabeled data do not necessarily impair the performance of SSL models; in fact, under certain conditions, unseen classes may even enhance them.
Cross-Attention Head Position Patterns Can Align with Human Visual Concepts in Text-to-Image Generative Models
Authors: Jungwon Park; Jungmin Ko; Dongnam Byun; Jangwon Suh; Wonjong Rhee
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Recent text-to-image diffusion models leverage cross-attention layers, which have been effectively utilized to enhance a range of visual generative tasks. However, our understanding of cross-attention layers remains somewhat limited. In this study, we introduce a mechanistic interpretability approach for diffusion models by constructing Head Relevance Vectors (HRVs) that align with human-specified visual concepts. An HRV for a given visual concept has a length equal to the total number of cross-attention heads, with each element representing the importance of the corresponding head for the given visual concept. To validate HRVs as interpretable features, we develop an ordered weakening analysis that demonstrates their effectiveness. Furthermore, we propose concept strengthening and concept adjusting methods and apply them to enhance three visual generative tasks. Our results show that HRVs can reduce misinterpretations of polysemous words in image generation, successfully modify five challenging attributes in image editing, and mitigate catastrophic neglect in multi-concept generation. Overall, our work provides an advancement in understanding cross-attention layers and introduces new approaches for fine-controlling these layers at the head level.
FormalAlign: Automated Alignment Evaluation for Autoformalization
Authors: Jianqiao Lu; Yingjia Wan; Yinya Huang; Jing Xiong; Zhengying Liu; Zhijiang Guo
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Autoformalization aims to convert informal mathematical proofs into machine-verifiable formats, bridging the gap between natural and formal languages. However, ensuring semantic alignment between the informal and formalized statements remains challenging. Existing approaches heavily rely on manual verification, hindering scalability. To address this, we introduce FormalAlign, a framework for automatically evaluating the alignment between natural and formal languages in autoformalization. FormalAlign trains on both the autoformalization sequence generation task and the representational alignment between input and output, employing a dual loss that combines a pair of mutually enhancing autoformalization and alignment tasks. Evaluated across four benchmarks augmented by our proposed misalignment strategies, FormalAlign demonstrates superior performance. In our experiments, FormalAlign outperforms GPT-4, achieving an Alignment-Selection Score 11.58\% higher on \forml-Basic (99.21\% vs. 88.91\%) and 3.19\% higher on MiniF2F-Valid (66.39\% vs. 64.34\%). This effective alignment evaluation significantly reduces the need for manual verification.
SEAL: Safety-enhanced Aligned LLM Fine-tuning via Bilevel Data Selection
Authors: Han Shen; Pin-Yu Chen; Payel Das; Tianyi Chen
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Fine-tuning on task-specific data to boost downstream performance is a crucial step for leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs). However, though fine-tuning enhances the model performance for specialized applications, previous studies have demonstrated that fine-tuning the models on several adversarial samples or even benign data can greatly comprise the model's pre-equipped alignment and safety capabilities. In this work, we propose SEAL, a novel framework to enhance safety in LLM fine-tuning. SEAL learns a data ranker based on the bilevel optimization to up rank the safe and high-quality fine-tuning data and down rank the unsafe or low-quality ones. Models trained with SEAL demonstrate superior quality over multiple baselines, with 8.5\% and 9.7\% win rate increase compared to random selection respectively on Llama-3-8b-Instruct and Merlinite-7b models. Our code is available on github https://github.com/hanshen95/SEAL.
SlowFast-VGen: Slow-Fast Learning for Action-Driven Long Video Generation
Authors: Yining Hong; Beide Liu; Maxine Wu; Yuanhao Zhai; Kai-Wei Chang; Linjie Li; Kevin Lin; Chung-Ching Lin; Jianfeng Wang; Zhengyuan Yang; Ying Nian Wu; Lijuan Wang
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Spotlight)

Abstract: Human beings are endowed with a complementary learning system, which bridges the slow learning of general world dynamics with fast storage of episodic memory from a new experience. Previous video generation models, however, primarily focus on slow learning by pre-training on vast amounts of data, overlooking the fast learning phase crucial for episodic memory storage. This oversight leads to inconsistencies across temporally distant frames when generating longer videos, as these frames fall beyond the model's context window. To this end, we introduce SlowFast-VGen, a novel dual-speed learning system for action-driven long video generation. Our approach incorporates a masked conditional video diffusion model for the slow learning of world dynamics, alongside an inference-time fast learning strategy based on a temporal LoRA module. Specifically, the fast learning process updates its temporal LoRA parameters based on local inputs and outputs, thereby efficiently storing episodic memory in its parameters. We further propose a slow-fast learning loop algorithm that seamlessly integrates the inner fast learning loop into the outer slow learning loop, enabling the recall of prior multi-episode experiences for context-aware skill learning. To facilitate the slow learning of an approximate world model, we collect a large-scale dataset of 200k videos with language action annotations, covering a wide range of scenarios. Extensive experiments show that SlowFast-VGen outperforms baselines across various metrics for action-driven video generation, achieving an FVD score of 514 compared to 782, and maintaining consistency in longer videos, with an average of 0.37 scene cuts versus 0.89. The slow-fast learning loop algorithm significantly enhances performances on long-horizon planning tasks as well.
SeRA: Self-Reviewing and Alignment of LLMs using Implicit Reward Margins
Authors: Jongwoo Ko; Saket Dingliwal; Bhavana Ganesh; Sailik Sengupta; Sravan Babu Bodapati; Aram Galstyan
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Direct alignment algorithms (DAAs), such as direct preference optimization (DPO), have become popular alternatives to Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) due to their simplicity, efficiency, and stability. However, the preferences used by DAAs are usually collected before alignment training begins and remain unchanged (off-policy). This design leads to two problems where the policy model (1) picks up on spurious correlations in the dataset (as opposed to only learning alignment to human preferences), and (2) overfits to feedback on off-policy trajectories that have less likelihood of being generated by the updated policy model. To address these issues, we introduce Self-Reviewing and Alignment (SeRA), a cost-efficient and effective method that can be readily combined with existing DAAs. SeRA comprises of two components: (1) sample selection using implicit reward margin to alleviate over-optimization on such undesired features, and (2) preference bootstrapping using implicit rewards to augment preference data with updated policy models in a cost-efficient manner. Extensive experiments, including on instruction-following tasks, demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of SeRA in training LLMs with diverse offline preference datasets and and DAAs.
Atlas Gaussians Diffusion for 3D Generation
Authors: Haitao Yang; Yuan Dong; Hanwen Jiang; Dejia Xu; Georgios Pavlakos; Qixing Huang
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Spotlight)

Abstract: Using the latent diffusion model has proven effective in developing novel 3D generation techniques. To harness the latent diffusion model, a key challenge is designing a high-fidelity and efficient representation that links the latent space and the 3D space. In this paper, we introduce Atlas Gaussians, a novel representation for feed-forward native 3D generation. Atlas Gaussians represent a shape as the union of local patches, and each patch can decode 3D Gaussians. We parameterize a patch as a sequence of feature vectors and design a learnable function to decode 3D Gaussians from the feature vectors. In this process, we incorporate UV-based sampling, enabling the generation of a sufficiently large, and theoretically infinite, number of 3D Gaussian points. The large amount of 3D Gaussians enables the generation of high-quality details. Moreover, due to local awareness of the representation, the transformer-based decoding procedure operates on a patch level, ensuring efficiency. We train a variational autoencoder to learn the Atlas Gaussians representation, and then apply a latent diffusion model on its latent space for learning 3D Generation. Experiments show that our approach outperforms the prior arts of feed-forward native 3D generation. Project page: https://yanghtr.github.io/projects/atlas_gaussians.
Simplifying, Stabilizing and Scaling Continuous-time Consistency Models
Authors: Cheng Lu; Yang Song
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Oral)

Abstract: Consistency models (CMs) are a powerful class of diffusion-based generative models optimized for fast sampling. Most existing CMs are trained using discretized timesteps, which introduce additional hyperparameters and are prone to discretization errors. While continuous-time formulations can mitigate these issues, their success has been limited by training instability. To address this, we propose a simplified theoretical framework that unifies previous parameterizations of diffusion models and CMs, identifying the root causes of instability. Based on this analysis, we introduce key improvements in diffusion process parameterization, network architecture, and training objectives. These changes enable us to train continuous-time CMs at an unprecedented scale, reaching 1.5B parameters on ImageNet 512×512. Our proposed training algorithm, using only two sampling steps, achieves FID scores of 2.06 on CIFAR-10, 1.48 on ImageNet 64×64, and 1.88 on ImageNet 512×512, narrowing the gap in FID scores with the best existing diffusion models to within 10\%.
Bidirectional Decoding: Improving Action Chunking via Guided Test-Time Sampling
Authors: Yuejiang Liu; Jubayer Ibn Hamid; Annie Xie; Yoonho Lee; Max Du; Chelsea Finn
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Predicting and executing a sequence of actions without intermediate replanning, known as action chunking, is increasingly used in robot learning from human demonstrations. Yet, its effects on the learned policy remain inconsistent: some studies find it crucial for achieving strong results, while others observe decreased performance. In this paper, we first dissect how action chunking impacts the divergence between a learner and a demonstrator. We find that action chunking allows the learner to better capture the temporal dependencies in demonstrations but at the cost of reduced reactivity to unexpected states. To address this tradeoff, we propose Bidirectional Decoding (BID), a test-time inference algorithm that bridges action chunking with closed-loop adaptation. At each timestep, BID samples multiple candidate predictions and searches for the optimal one based on two criteria: (i) backward coherence, which favors samples that align with previous decisions; (ii) forward contrast, which seeks samples of high likelihood for future plans. By coupling decisions within and across action chunks, BID promotes both long-term consistency and short-term reactivity. Experimental results show that our method boosts the performance of two state-of-the-art generative policies across seven simulation benchmarks and two real-world tasks. Code and videos are available at https://bid-robot.github.io.
6DGS: Enhanced Direction-Aware Gaussian Splatting for Volumetric Rendering
Authors: Zhongpai Gao; Benjamin Planche; Meng Zheng; Anwesa Choudhuri; Terrence Chen; Ziyan Wu
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Novel view synthesis has advanced significantly with the development of neural radiance fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS). However, achieving high quality without compromising real-time rendering remains challenging, particularly for physically-based rendering using ray/path tracing with view-dependent effects. Recently, N-dimensional Gaussians (N-DG) introduced a 6D spatial-angular representation to better incorporate view-dependent effects, but the Gaussian representation and control scheme are sub-optimal. In this paper, we revisit 6D Gaussians and introduce 6D Gaussian Splatting (6DGS), which enhances color and opacity representations and leverages the additional directional information in the 6D space for optimized Gaussian control. Our approach is fully compatible with the 3DGS framework and significantly improves real-time radiance field rendering by better modeling view-dependent effects and fine details. Experiments demonstrate that 6DGS significantly outperforms 3DGS and N-DG, achieving up to a 15.73 dB improvement in PSNR with a reduction of 66.5\% Gaussian points compared to 3DGS. The project page is: https://gaozhongpai.github.io/6dgs/.
Credit-based self organizing maps: training deep topographic networks with minimal performance degradation
Authors: Amirozhan Dehghani; Xinyu Qian; Asa Farahani; Pouya Bashivan
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: In the primate neocortex, neurons with similar function are often found to be spatially close. Kohonen's self-organizing map (SOM) has been one of the most influential approaches for simulating brain-like topographical organization in artificial neural network models. However, integrating these maps into deep neural networks with multitude of layers has been challenging, with self-organized deep neural networks suffering from substantially diminished capacity to perform visual recognition. We identified a key factor leading to the performance degradation in self-organized topographical neural network models: the discord between predominantly bottom-up learning updates in the self-organizing maps, and those derived from top-down, credit-based learning approaches. To address this, we propose an alternative self organization algorithm, tailored to align with the top-down learning processes in deep neural networks. This model not only emulates critical aspects of cortical topography but also significantly narrows the performance gap between non-topographical and topographical models. This advancement underscores the substantial importance of top-down assigned credits in shaping topographical organization. Our findings are a step in reconciling topographical modeling with the functional efficacy of neural network models, paving the way for more brain-like neural architectures.
An Image is Worth More Than 16x16 Patches: Exploring Transformers on Individual Pixels
Authors: Duy Kien Nguyen; Mido Assran; Unnat Jain; Martin R. Oswald; Cees G. M. Snoek; Xinlei Chen
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: This work does not introduce a new method. Instead, we present an interesting finding that questions the necessity of the inductive bias of locality in modern computer vision architectures. Concretely, we find that vanilla Transformers can operate by directly treating each individual pixel as a token and achieve highly performant results. This is substantially different from the popular design in Vision Transformer, which maintains the inductive bias from ConvNets towards local neighborhoods (e.g., by treating each 16x16 patch as a token). We showcase the effectiveness of pixels-as-tokens across three well-studied computer vision tasks: supervised learning for classification and regression, self-supervised learning via masked autoencoding, and image generation with diffusion models. Although it's computationally less practical to directly operate on individual pixels, we believe the community must be made aware of this surprising piece of knowledge when devising the next generation of neural network architectures for computer vision.
Min-K%++: Improved Baseline for Pre-Training Data Detection from Large Language Models
Authors: Jingyang Zhang; Jingwei Sun; Eric Yeats; Yang Ouyang; Martin Kuo; Jianyi Zhang; Hao Frank Yang; Hai Li
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Spotlight)

Abstract: The problem of pre-training data detection for large language models (LLMs) has received growing attention due to its implications in critical issues like copyright violation and test data contamination. Despite improved performance, existing methods (including the state-of-the-art, Min-K%) are mostly developed upon simple heuristics and lack solid, reasonable foundations. In this work, we propose a novel and theoretically motivated methodology for pre-training data detection, named Min-K%++. Specifically, we present a key insight that training samples tend to be local maxima of the modeled distribution along each input dimension through maximum likelihood training, which in turn allow us to insightfully translate the problem into identification of local maxima. Then, we design our method accordingly that works under the discrete distribution modeled by LLMs, whose core idea is to determine whether the input forms a mode or has relatively high probability under the conditional categorical distribution. Empirically, the proposed method achieves new SOTA performance across multiple settings (evaluated with 5 families of 10 models and 2 benchmarks). On the WikiMIA benchmark, Min-K%++ outperforms the runner-up by 6.2% to 10.5% in detection AUROC averaged over five models. On the more challenging MIMIR benchmark, it consistently improves upon reference-free methods while performing on par with reference-based method that requires an extra reference model.