GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
How many samples are needed to train a deep neural network?
Authors: Pegah Golestaneh; Mahsa Taheri; Johannes Lederer
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Even though neural networks have become standard tools in many areas, many important statistical questions remain open. This paper studies the question of how much data are needed to train a ReLU feed-forward neural network. Our theoretical and empirical results suggest that the generalization error of ReLU feed-forward neural networks scales at the rate $1/\sqrt{n}$ in the sample size $n$-rather than the "parametric rate"  $1/n$, which might be suggested by traditional statistical theories. Thus, broadly speaking, our results underpin the common belief that neural networks need "many" training samples. Along the way, we also establish new technical insights, such as the first lower bounds of the entropy of ReLU feed-forward networks.
Guided Score identity Distillation for Data-Free One-Step Text-to-Image Generation
Authors: Mingyuan Zhou; Zhendong Wang; Huangjie Zheng; Hai Huang
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Diffusion-based text-to-image generation models trained on extensive text-image pairs have demonstrated the ability to produce photorealistic images aligned with textual descriptions. However, a significant limitation of these models is their slow sample generation process, which requires iterative refinement through the same network. To overcome this, we introduce a data-free guided distillation method that enables the efficient distillation of pretrained Stable Diffusion models without access to the real training data, often restricted due to legal, privacy, or cost concerns. This method enhances Score identity Distillation (SiD) with Long and Short Classifier-Free Guidance (LSG), an innovative strategy that applies Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) not only to the evaluation of the pretrained diffusion model but also to the training and evaluation of the fake score network. We optimize a model-based explicit score matching loss using a score-identity-based approximation alongside our proposed guidance strategies for practical computation. By exclusively training with synthetic images generated by its one-step generator, our data-free distillation method rapidly improves FID and CLIP scores, achieving state-of-the-art FID performance while maintaining a competitive CLIP score. Notably, the one-step distillation of Stable Diffusion 1.5 achieves an FID of **8.15** on the COCO-2014 validation set, a record low value under the data-free setting.  Our code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/mingyuanzhou/SiD-LSG.
Partial Gromov-Wasserstein Metric
Authors: Yikun Bai; Rocio Diaz Martin; Abihith Kothapalli; Hengrong Du; Xinran Liu; Soheil Kolouri
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: The Gromov-Wasserstein (GW) distance has gained increasing interest in the machine learning community in recent years, as it allows for the comparison of measures in different metric spaces. To overcome the limitations imposed by the equal mass requirements of the classical GW problem, researchers have begun exploring its application in unbalanced settings. However, Unbalanced GW (UGW) can only be regarded as a discrepancy rather than a rigorous metric/distance between two metric measure spaces (mm-spaces). In this paper, we propose a particular case of the UGW problem, termed Partial Gromov-Wasserstein (PGW). We establish that PGW is a well-defined metric between mm-spaces and discuss its theoretical properties, including the existence of a minimizer for the PGW problem and the relationship between PGW and GW, among others. We then propose two variants of the Frank-Wolfe algorithm for solving the PGW problem and show that they are mathematically and computationally equivalent. Moreover, based on our PGW metric, we introduce the analogous concept of barycenters for mm-spaces. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of our PGW metric and related solvers in applications such as shape matching, shape retrieval, and shape interpolation, comparing them against existing baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/mint-vu/PGW_Metric.
Score Forgetting Distillation: A Swift, Data-Free Method for Machine Unlearning in Diffusion Models
Authors: Tianqi Chen; Shujian Zhang; Mingyuan Zhou
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: The machine learning community is increasingly recognizing the importance of fostering trust and safety in modern generative AI (GenAI) models. We posit machine unlearning (MU) as a crucial foundation for developing safe, secure, and trustworthy GenAI models. Traditional MU methods often rely on stringent assumptions and require access to real data. This paper introduces Score Forgetting Distillation (SFD), an innovative MU approach that promotes the forgetting of undesirable information in diffusion models by aligning the conditional scores of "unsafe" classes or concepts with those of "safe" ones. To eliminate the need for real data, our SFD framework incorporates a score-based MU loss into the score distillation objective of a pretrained diffusion model. This serves as a regularization term that preserves desired generation capabilities while enabling the production of synthetic data through a one-step generator. Our experiments on pretrained label-conditional and text-to-image diffusion models demonstrate that our method effectively accelerates the forgetting of target classes or concepts during generation, while preserving the quality of other classes or concepts. This unlearned and distilled diffusion not only pioneers a novel concept in MU but also accelerates the generation speed of diffusion models. Our experiments and studies on a range of diffusion models and datasets confirm that our approach is generalizable, effective, and advantageous for MU in diffusion models. Code is available at [https://github.com/tqch/score-forgetting-distillation](https://github.com/tqch/score-forgetting-distillation). (**Warning:** This paper contains sexually explicit imagery, discussions of pornography, racially-charged terminology, and other content that some readers may find disturbing, distressing, and/or offensive.)
Deep MMD Gradient Flow without adversarial training
Authors: Alexandre Galashov; Valentin De Bortoli; Arthur Gretton
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: We propose a gradient flow procedure for generative modeling by transporting particles from an initial source distribution to a target distribution, where the gradient field on the particles is given by a noise-adaptive Wasserstein Gradient of the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD). The noise adaptive MMD is trained on data distributions corrupted by increasing levels of noise, obtained via a forward diffusion process, as commonly used in denoising diffusion probabilistic models. The result is a generalization of MMD Gradient Flow, which we call Diffusion-MMD-Gradient Flow or DMMD. The divergence training procedure is related to discriminator training in Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), but does not require adversarial training. We obtain competitive empirical performance in unconditional image generation on CIFAR10, MNIST, CELEB-A (64 x64) and LSUN Church (64 x 64). Furthermore, we demonstrate the validity of the approach when MMD is replaced by a lower bound on the KL divergence.
Fragment and Geometry Aware Tokenization of Molecules for Structure-Based Drug Design Using Language Models
Authors: Cong Fu; Xiner Li; Blake Olson; Heng Ji; Shuiwang Ji
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Structure-based drug design (SBDD) is crucial for developing specific and effective therapeutics against protein targets but remains challenging due to complex protein-ligand interactions and vast chemical space. Although language models (LMs) have excelled in natural language processing, their application in SBDD is underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce a method, known as Frag2Seq, to apply LMs to SBDD by generating molecules in a fragment-based manner in which fragments correspond to functional modules. We transform 3D molecules into fragment-informed sequences using $SE(3)$-equivariant molecule and fragment local frames, extracting $SE(3)$-invariant sequences that preserve geometric information of 3D fragments. Furthermore, we incorporate protein pocket embeddings obtained from a pre-trained inverse folding model into the LMs via cross-attention to capture protein-ligand interaction, enabling effective target-aware molecule generation. Benefiting from employing LMs with fragment-based generation and effective protein context encoding, our model achieves the best performance on binding vina score and chemical properties such as QED and Lipinski, which shows our model’s efficacy in generating drug-like ligands with higher binding affinity against target proteins. Moreover, our method also exhibits higher sampling efficiency compared to atom-based autoregressive and diffusion baselines with at most $\times 300$ speedup. The code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/divelab/AIRS/tree/main/OpenMI/Frag2Seq.
Catastrophic Failure of LLM Unlearning via Quantization
Authors: Zhiwei Zhang; Fali Wang; Xiaomin Li; Zongyu Wu; Xianfeng Tang; Hui Liu; Qi He; Wenpeng Yin; Suhang Wang
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable proficiency in generating text, benefiting from extensive training on vast textual corpora. However, LLMs may also acquire unwanted behaviors from the diverse and sensitive nature of their training data, which can include copyrighted and private content. Machine unlearning has been introduced as a viable solution to remove the influence of such problematic content without the need for costly and time-consuming retraining. This process aims to erase specific knowledge from LLMs while preserving as much model utility as possible. Despite the effectiveness of current unlearning methods, little attention has been given to whether existing unlearning methods for LLMs truly achieve forgetting or merely hide the knowledge, which current unlearning benchmarks fail to detect. This paper reveals that applying quantization to models that have undergone unlearning can restore the "forgotten" information. We conduct comprehensive experiments using various quantization techniques across multiple precision levels to thoroughly evaluate this phenomenon. We find that for unlearning methods with utility constraints, the unlearned model retains an average of 21\% of the intended forgotten knowledge in full precision, which significantly increases to 83\% after 4-bit quantization. Based on our empirical findings, we provide a theoretical explanation for the observed phenomenon and propose a quantization-robust unlearning strategy aimed at mitigating this intricate issue. Our results highlight a fundamental tension between preserving the utility of the unlearned model and preventing knowledge recovery through quantization, emphasizing the challenge of balancing these two objectives. Altogether, our study underscores a major failure in existing unlearning methods for LLMs, strongly advocating for more comprehensive and robust strategies to ensure authentic unlearning without compromising model utility. Our code is available at: https://github.com/zzwjames/FailureLLMUnlearning.
Improved Finite-Particle Convergence Rates for Stein Variational Gradient Descent
Authors: Sayan Banerjee; Krishna Balasubramanian; PROMIT GHOSAL
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Oral)

Abstract: We provide finite-particle convergence rates for the Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) algorithm in the Kernelized Stein Discrepancy ($\KSD$) and Wasserstein-2 metrics. Our key insight is that the time derivative of the relative entropy between the joint density of $N$ particle locations and the $N$-fold product target measure, starting from a regular initial distribution, splits into a dominant 'negative part' proportional to $N$ times the expected $\KSD^2$ and a smaller 'positive part'. This observation leads to $\KSD$ rates of order $1/\sqrt{N}$, in both continuous and discrete time, providing a near optimal (in the sense of matching the corresponding i.i.d. rates) double exponential improvement over the recent result by~\cite{shi2024finite}. Under mild assumptions on the kernel and potential, these bounds also grow polynomially in the dimension $d$. By adding a bilinear component to the kernel, the above approach is used to further obtain Wasserstein-2 convergence in continuous time. For the case of `bilinear + Mat\'ern' kernels, we derive Wasserstein-2 rates that exhibit a curse-of-dimensionality similar to the i.i.d. setting. We also obtain marginal convergence and long-time propagation of chaos results for the time-averaged particle laws.
Learning the Optimal Stopping for Early Classification within Finite Horizons via Sequential Probability Ratio Test
Authors: Akinori F. Ebihara; Taiki Miyagawa; Kazuyuki Sakurai; Hitoshi Imaoka
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Time-sensitive machine learning benefits from Sequential Probability Ratio Test (SPRT), which provides an optimal stopping time for early classification of time series. However, in *finite horizon* scenarios, where input lengths are finite, determining the optimal stopping rule becomes computationally intensive due to the need for *backward induction*, limiting practical applicability. We thus introduce FIRMBOUND, an SPRT-based framework that efficiently estimates the solution to backward induction from training data, bridging the gap between optimal stopping theory and real-world deployment. It employs *density ratio estimation* and *convex function learning* to provide statistically consistent estimators for sufficient statistic and conditional expectation, both essential for solving backward induction; consequently, FIRMBOUND minimizes Bayes risk to reach optimality. Additionally, we present a faster alternative using Gaussian process regression, which significantly reduces training time while retaining low deployment overhead, albeit with potential compromise in statistical consistency. Experiments across independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.), non-i.i.d., binary, multiclass, synthetic, and real-world datasets show that FIRMBOUND achieves optimalities in the sense of Bayes risk and speed-accuracy tradeoff. Furthermore, it advances the tradeoff boundary toward optimality when possible and reduces decision-time variance, ensuring reliable decision-making. Code is included in the supplementary materials.
CLIBD: Bridging Vision and Genomics for Biodiversity Monitoring at Scale
Authors: ZeMing Gong; Austin Wang; Xiaoliang Huo; Joakim Bruslund Haurum; Scott C. Lowe; Graham W. Taylor; Angel X Chang
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Measuring biodiversity is crucial for understanding ecosystem health. While prior works have developed machine learning models for taxonomic classification of photographic images and DNA separately, in this work, we introduce a multi-modal approach combining both, using CLIP-style contrastive learning to align images, barcode DNA, and text-based representations of taxonomic labels in a unified embedding space. This allows for accurate classification of both known and unknown insect species without task-specific fine-tuning, leveraging contrastive learning for the first time to fuse DNA and image data. Our method surpasses previous single-modality approaches in accuracy by over 8% on zero-shot learning tasks, showcasing its effectiveness in biodiversity studies.
How DNNs break the Curse of Dimensionality: Compositionality and Symmetry Learning
Authors: Arthur Jacot; Seok Hoan Choi; Yuxiao Wen
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: We show that deep neural networks (DNNs) can efficiently learn any
composition of functions with bounded $F_{1}$-norm, which allows
DNNs to break the curse of dimensionality in ways that shallow networks
cannot. More specifically, we derive a generalization bound that combines
a covering number argument for compositionality, and the $F_{1}$-norm
(or the related Barron norm) for large width adaptivity. We show that
the global minimizer of the regularized loss of DNNs can fit for example
the composition of two functions $f^{\*}=h\circ g$ from a small number
of observations, assuming $g$ is smooth/regular and reduces the dimensionality
(e.g. $g$ could be the quotient map of the symmetries of $f^{*}$),
so that $h$ can be learned in spite of its low regularity. The measures
of regularity we consider is the Sobolev norm with different levels
of differentiability, which is well adapted to the $F_{1}$ norm.
We compute scaling laws empirically and observe phase transitions
depending on whether $g$ or $h$ is harder to learn, as predicted
by our theory.
Detecting Backdoor Samples in Contrastive Language Image Pretraining
Authors: Hanxun Huang; Sarah Monazam Erfani; Yige Li; Xingjun Ma; James Bailey
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) has been found to be vulnerable to poisoning backdoor attacks where the adversary can achieve an almost perfect attack success rate on CLIP models by poisoning only 0.01\% of the training dataset. This raises security concerns on the current practice of pretraining large-scale models on unscrutinized web data using CLIP. In this work, we analyze the representations of backdoor-poisoned samples learned by CLIP models and find that they exhibit unique characteristics in their local subspace, i.e., their local neighborhoods are far more sparse than that of clean samples. Based on this finding, we conduct a systematic study on detecting CLIP backdoor attacks and show that these attacks can be easily and efficiently detected by traditional density ratio-based local outlier detectors, whereas existing backdoor sample detection methods fail. Our experiments also reveal that an unintentional backdoor already exists in the original CC3M dataset and has been trained into a popular open-source model released by OpenCLIP. Based on our detector, one can clean up a million-scale web dataset (e.g., CC3M) efficiently within 15 minutes using 4 Nvidia A100 GPUs.
Contractive Dynamical Imitation Policies for Efficient Out-of-Sample Recovery
Authors: Amin Abyaneh; Mahrokh Ghoddousi Boroujeni; Hsiu-Chin Lin; Giancarlo Ferrari-Trecate
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Imitation learning is a data-driven approach to learning policies from expert behavior, but it is prone to unreliable outcomes in out-of-sample (OOS) regions. While previous research relying on stable dynamical systems guarantees convergence to a desired state, it often overlooks transient behavior. We propose a framework for learning policies modeled by contractive dynamical systems, ensuring that all policy rollouts converge regardless of perturbations, and in turn, enable efficient OOS recovery. By leveraging recurrent equilibrium networks and coupling layers, the policy structure guarantees contractivity for any parameter choice, which facilitates unconstrained optimization. We also provide theoretical upper bounds for worst-case and expected loss to rigorously establish the reliability of our method in deployment. Empirically, we demonstrate substantial OOS performance improvements for simulated robotic manipulation and navigation tasks. See [sites.google.com/view/contractive-dynamical-policies](https://sites.google.com/view/contractive-dynamical-policies) for our codebase and highlight of the results.
Duoduo CLIP: Efficient 3D Understanding with Multi-View Images
Authors: Han-Hung Lee; Yiming Zhang; Angel X Chang
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: We introduce Duoduo CLIP, a model for 3D representation learning that learns shape encodings from multi-view images instead of point-clouds. The choice of multi-view images allows us to leverage 2D priors from off-the-shelf CLIP models to facilitate fine-tuning with 3D data. Our approach not only shows better generalization compared to existing point cloud methods, but also reduces GPU requirements and training time. In addition, the model is modified with cross-view attention to leverage information across multiple frames of the object which further boosts performance. Notably, our model is permutation invariant to the order of multi-view images while being pose-free. Compared to the current SOTA point cloud method that requires 480 A100 hours to train 1 billion model parameters we only require 57 A5000 hours and 87 million parameters. Multi-view images also provide more flexibility including being able to encode objects with a variable number of images, and performance scales when more views are used. In contrast, point cloud based methods require an entire scan or model of the object. We showcase this flexibility with benchmarks from images of real-world objects. Our model also achieves better performance in more fine-grained text to shape retrieval, demonstrating better text-and-shape alignment than point cloud based models.
OmniSep: Unified Omni-Modality Sound Separation with Query-Mixup
Authors: Xize Cheng; Siqi Zheng; Zehan Wang; Minghui Fang; Ziang Zhang; Rongjie Huang; Shengpeng Ji; Jialong Zuo; Tao Jin; Zhou Zhao
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Query-based sound separation (QSS) effectively isolate sound signals that match the content of a given query, enhancing the understanding of audio data. However, most existing QSS methods rely on a single modality for separation, lacking the ability to fully leverage homologous but heterogeneous information across multiple modalities for the same sound signal. To address this limitation, we introduce Omni-modal Sound Separation (**OmniSep**), a novel framework capable of isolating clean soundtracks based on omni-modal queries, encompassing both single-modal and multi-modal composed queries. Specifically, we introduce the **Query-Mixup** strategy, which blends query features from different modalities during training. This enables OmniSep to optimize multiple modalities concurrently, effectively bringing all modalities under a unified framework for sound separation. We further enhance this flexibility by allowing queries to influence sound separation positively or negatively, facilitating the retention or removal of specific sounds as desired. Finally, OmniSep employs a retrieval-augmented approach known as **Query-Aug**, which enables open-vocabulary sound separation. Experimental evaluations on MUSIC, VGGSOUND-CLEAN+, and MUSIC-CLEAN+ datasets demonstrate effectiveness of OmniSep, achieving state-of-the-art performance in text-, image-, and audio-queried sound separation tasks. For samples and further information, please visit the demo page at \url{https://omnisep.github.io/}.
Optimal Learning of Kernel Logistic Regression for Complex Classification Scenarios
Authors: Hongwei Wen; Annika Betken; Hanyuan Hang
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Complex classification scenarios, including long-tailed learning, domain adaptation, and transfer learning, present substantial challenges for traditional algorithms. Conditional class probability (CCP) predictions have recently become critical components of many state-of-the-art algorithms designed to address these challenging scenarios. Among kernel methods, kernel logistic regression (KLR) is distinguished by its effectiveness in predicting CCPs through the minimization of the cross-entropy (CE) loss. Despite the empirical success of CCP-based approaches, the theoretical understanding of their performance, particularly regarding the CE loss, remains limited. In this paper, we bridge this gap by demonstrating that KLR-based algorithms achieve minimax optimal convergence rates for the CE loss under mild assumptions in these complex tasks, thereby establishing their theoretical efficiency in such demanding contexts.