GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Chain-of-region: Visual Language Models Need  Details for Diagram Analysis
Authors: Xue Li; Yiyou Sun; Wei Cheng; Yinglun Zhu; Haifeng Chen
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Visual Language Models (VLMs) like GPT-4V have broadened the scope of LLM applications, yet they face significant challenges in accurately processing visual details, particularly in scientific diagrams. 
This paper explores the necessity of meticulous visual detail collection and region decomposition for enhancing the performance of VLMs in scientific diagram analysis. We propose a novel approach that combines traditional computer vision techniques with VLMs to systematically decompose diagrams into discernible visual elements and aggregate essential metadata. Our method employs techniques in OpenCV library to identify and label regions, followed by a refinement process using shape detection and region merging algorithms, which are particularly suited to the structured nature of scientific diagrams. This strategy not only improves the granularity and accuracy of visual information processing but also extends the capabilities of VLMs beyond their current limitations. We validate our approach through a series of experiments that demonstrate enhanced performance in diagram analysis tasks, setting a new standard for integrating visual and language processing in a multimodal context.
pMoE: Prompting Diverse Experts Together Wins More in Visual Adaptation
Authors: Shentong Mo; Xufang Luo; Dongsheng Li
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning has demonstrated promising results across various visual adaptation tasks, such as classification and segmentation. Typically, prompt tuning techniques have harnessed knowledge from a single pre-trained model, whether from a general or a specialized medical domain. However, this approach typically overlooks the potential synergies that could arise from integrating diverse domain knowledge within the same tuning process. In this work, we propose a novel Mixture-of-Experts prompt tuning method called pMoE, which leverages the strengths of multiple expert domains through expert-specialized prompt tokens and the learnable dispatcher, effectively combining their expertise in a unified model framework. Our pMoE introduces expert-specific prompt tokens and utilizes a dynamic token dispatching mechanism at various prompt layers to optimize the contribution of each domain expert during the adaptation phase. By incorporating both domain knowledge from diverse experts, the proposed pMoE significantly enhances the model's versatility and applicability to a broad spectrum of tasks. We conduct extensive experiments across 47 adaptation tasks, including both classification and segmentation in general and medical domains. The results demonstrate that our pMoE not only achieves superior performance with a large margin of improvements but also offers an optimal trade-off between computational efficiency and adaptation effectiveness compared to existing methods.
Trust or Escalate: LLM Judges with Provable Guarantees for Human Agreement
Authors: Jaehun Jung; Faeze Brahman; Yejin Choi
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Oral)

Abstract: We present a principled approach to provide LLM-based evaluation with a rigorous guarantee of human agreement. We first propose that a reliable evaluation method should not uncritically rely on model preferences for pairwise evaluation, but rather assess the confidence of judge models and selectively decide when to trust its judgement. We then show that under this *selective evaluation* framework, human agreement can be provably guaranteed---such that the model evaluation aligns with that of humans to a user-specified agreement level. As part of our framework, we also introduce *Simulated Annotators*, a novel confidence estimation method that significantly improves judge calibration and thus enables high coverage of evaluated instances. Finally, we propose *Cascaded Selective Evaluation*, where we use cheaper models as initial judges and escalate to stronger models only when necessary---again, while still providing a provable guarantee of human agreement. Experimental results show that Cascaded Selective Evaluation guarantees strong alignment with humans, far beyond what LLM judges could achieve without selective evaluation. For example, on a subset of Chatbot Arena where GPT-4 almost never achieves 80% human agreement, our method, even while employing substantially cost-effective models such as Mistral-7B, *guarantees* over 80% human agreement with almost 80% test coverage.
MMAD: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models in Industrial Anomaly Detection
Authors: Xi Jiang; Jian Li; Hanqiu Deng; Yong Liu; Bin-Bin Gao; Yifeng Zhou; Jialin Li; Chengjie Wang; Feng Zheng
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: In the field of industrial inspection, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have a high potential to renew the paradigms in practical applications due to their robust language capabilities and generalization abilities. However, despite their impressive problem-solving skills in many domains, MLLMs' ability in industrial anomaly detection has not been systematically studied. To bridge this gap, we present MMAD, a full-spectrum MLLM benchmark in industrial Anomaly Detection. We defined seven key subtasks of MLLMs in industrial inspection and designed a novel pipeline to generate the MMAD dataset with 39,672 questions for 8,366 industrial images. With MMAD, we have conducted a comprehensive, quantitative evaluation of various state-of-the-art MLLMs. The commercial models performed the best, with the average accuracy of GPT-4o models reaching 74.9\%. However, this result falls far short of industrial requirements. Our analysis reveals that current MLLMs still have significant room for improvement in answering questions related to industrial anomalies and defects. We further explore two training-free performance enhancement strategies to help models improve in industrial scenarios, highlighting their promising potential for future research. 
The code and data are available at https://github.com/jam-cc/MMAD.
TSC-Net: Prediction of Pedestrian Trajectories by Trajectory-Scene-Cell Classification
Authors: BO HU; Tat-Jen Cham
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: To predict future trajectories of pedestrians, scene is as important as the history trajectory since i) scene reflects the position of possible goals of the pedestrian ii) trajectories are affected by the semantic information of the scene. It requires the model to capture scene information and learn the relation between scenes and trajectories. However, existing methods either apply Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to summarize the scene to a feature vector, which raises the feature misalignment issue, or convert trajectory to heatmaps to align with the scene map, which ignores the interactions among different pedestrians. In this work, we introduce the trajectory-scene-cell feature to represent both trajectories and scenes in one feature space. By decoupling the trajectory in temporal domain and the scene in spatial domain, trajectory feature and scene feature are re-organized in different types of cell feature, which well aligns trajectory and scene, and allows the framework to model both human-human and human-scene interactions. Moreover, the Trajectory-Scene-Cell Network (TSC-Net) with new trajectory prediction manner is proposed, where both goal and intermediate positions of the trajectory are predict by cell classification and offset regression. Comparative experiments show that TSC-Net achieves the SOTA performance on several datasets with most of the metrics. Especially for the goal estimation, TSC-Net is demonstrated better on predicting goals for trajectories with irregular speed.
RRM:  Robust Reward Model Training Mitigates Reward Hacking
Authors: Tianqi Liu; Wei Xiong; Jie Ren; Lichang Chen; Junru Wu; Rishabh Joshi; Yang Gao; Jiaming Shen; Zhen Qin; Tianhe Yu; Daniel Sohn; Anastasia Makarova; Jeremiah Zhe Liu; Yuan Liu; Bilal Piot; Abe Ittycheriah; Aviral Kumar; Mohammad Saleh
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Reward models (RMs) play a pivotal role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, traditional RM training, which relies on response pairs tied to specific prompts, struggles to disentangle prompt-driven preferences from prompt-independent artifacts, such as response length and format. In this work, we expose a fundamental limitation of current RM training methods, where RMs fail to effectively distinguish between contextual signals and irrelevant artifacts when determining preferences. To address this, we introduce a causal framework that learns preferences independent of these artifacts and propose a novel data augmentation technique designed to eliminate them.  Extensive experiments show that our approach successfully filters out undesirable artifacts, yielding a more robust reward model (RRM). Our RRM improves the performance of a pairwise reward model trained on Gemma-2-9b-it, on Reward-Bench, increasing accuracy from 80.61% to 84.15%. Additionally, we train two DPO policies using both the RM and RRM, demonstrating that the RRM significantly enhances DPO-aligned policies, improving MT-Bench scores from 7.27 to 8.31 and length-controlled win-rates in AlpacaEval-2 from 33.46% to 52.49%.
Vertical Federated Learning with Missing Features During Training and Inference
Authors: Pedro Valdeira; Shiqiang Wang; Yuejie Chi
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Vertical federated learning trains models from feature-partitioned datasets across multiple clients, who collaborate without sharing their local data. Standard approaches assume that all feature partitions are available during both training and inference. Yet, in practice, this assumption rarely holds, as for many samples only a subset of the clients observe their partition. However, not utilizing incomplete samples during training harms generalization, and not supporting them during inference limits the utility of the model. Moreover, if any client leaves the federation after training, its partition becomes unavailable, rendering the learned model unusable. Missing feature blocks are therefore a key challenge limiting the applicability of vertical federated learning in real-world scenarios. To address this, we propose LASER-VFL, a vertical federated learning method for efficient training and inference of split neural network-based models that is capable of handling arbitrary sets of partitions. Our approach is simple yet effective, relying on the sharing of model parameters and on task-sampling to train a family of predictors. We show that LASER-VFL achieves a $\mathcal{O}({1}/{\sqrt{T}})$ convergence rate for nonconvex objectives and, under the Polyak-Łojasiewicz inequality, it achieves linear convergence to a neighborhood of the optimum. Numerical experiments show improved performance of LASER-VFL over the baselines. Remarkably, this is the case even in the absence of missing features. For example, for CIFAR-100, we see an improvement in accuracy of $19.3$\% when each of four feature blocks is observed with a probability of 0.5 and of $9.5$\% when all features are observed. The code for this work is available at https://github.com/Valdeira/LASER-VFL.
High-Quality Joint Image and Video Tokenization with Causal VAE
Authors: Dawit Mureja Argaw; Xian Liu; Qinsheng Zhang; Joon Son Chung; Ming-Yu Liu; Fitsum Reda
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Generative modeling has seen significant advancements in image and video synthesis. However, the curse of dimensionality remains a significant obstacle, especially for video generation, given its inherently complex and high-dimensional nature. Many existing works rely on low-dimensional latent spaces from pretrained image autoencoders. However, this approach overlooks temporal redundancy in videos and often leads to temporally incoherent decoding. To address this issue, we propose a video compression network that reduces the dimensionality of visual data both spatially and temporally. Our model, based on a variational autoencoder, employs causal 3D convolution to handle images and videos jointly. The key contributions of our work include a scale-agnostic encoder for preserving video fidelity, a novel spatio-temporal down/upsampling block for robust long-sequence modeling, and a flow regularization loss for accurate motion decoding. 
Our approach outperforms competitors in video quality and compression rates across various datasets. Experimental analyses also highlight its potential as a robust autoencoder for video generation training.
Your Mixture-of-Experts LLM Is Secretly an Embedding Model for Free
Authors: Ziyue Li; Tianyi Zhou
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Oral)

Abstract: While large language models (LLMs) excel on generation tasks, their decoder-only architecture often limits their potential as embedding models if no further representation finetuning is applied. Does this contradict their claim of generalists? To answer the question, we take a closer look at Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LLMs. Our study shows that the expert routers in MoE LLMs can serve as an off-the-shelf embedding model with promising performance on a diverse class of embedding-focused tasks, without requiring any finetuning. Moreover, our extensive analysis shows that the MoE routing weights (RW) is complementary to the hidden state (HS) of LLMs, a widely-used embedding. Compared to HS, we find that RW is more robust to the choice of prompts and focuses on high-level semantics. Motivated by the analysis, we propose MoEE combining RW and HS, which achieves better performance than using either separately. Our exploration of their combination and prompting strategy shed several novel insights, e.g., a weighted sum of RW and HS similarities outperforms the similarity on their concatenation. Our experiments are conducted on 6 embedding tasks with 20 datasets from the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB). The results demonstrate the significant improvement brought by MoEE to LLM-based embedding without further finetuning.
Joint Fine-tuning and Conversion of Pretrained Speech and Language Models towards Linear Complexity
Authors: Mutian He; Philip N. Garner
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Architectures such as Linformer and Mamba have recently emerged as competitive linear time replacements for transformers. However, corresponding large pretrained models are often unavailable, especially in non-text domains. To remedy this, we present a Cross-Architecture Layerwise Distillation (CALD) approach that jointly converts a transformer model to a linear time substitute and fine-tunes it to a target task. We also compare several means to guide the fine-tuning to optimally retain the desired inference capability from the original model. The methods differ in their use of the target model and the trajectory of the parameters. In a series of empirical studies on language processing, language modeling, and speech processing, we show that CALD can effectively recover the result of the original model, and that the guiding strategy contributes to the result. Some reasons for the variation are suggested.
Proximal Mapping Loss: Understanding Loss Functions in Crowd Counting & Localization
Authors: Wei Lin; Jia Wan; Antoni B. Chan
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Crowd counting and localization involve extracting the number and distribution of crowds from images or videos using computer vision techniques. Most counting methods are based on density regression and are based on an ``intersection'' hypothesis, *i.e.*, one pixel is influenced by multiple points in the ground truth, which is inconsistent with reality since one pixel would not contain two objects. This paper proposes Proximal Mapping Loss (PML), a density regression method that eliminates this hypothesis. {PML} divides the predicted density map into multiple point-neighbor cases through the nearest neighbor, and then dynamically constructs a learning target for each sub-case via proximal mapping, leading to more robust and accurate training. {Furthermore}, PML is theoretically linked to various existing loss functions, such as Gaussian-blurred L2 loss, Bayesian loss, and the training schemes in P2PNet and DMC, demonstrating its versatility and adaptability. Experimentally, PML significantly improves the performance of crowd counting and localization, and illustrates the robustness against annotation noise. The code is available at [https://github.com/Elin24/pml](https://github.com/Elin24/pml).
Bandit Learning in Matching Markets with Indifference
Authors: Fang Kong; Jingqi Tang; Mingzhu Li; Pinyan Lu; John C.S. Lui; Shuai Li
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: A rich line of recent works studies how participants in matching markets learn their unknown preferences through iterative interactions with each other. The two sides of participants in the market can be respectively formulated as players and arms in the bandit problem. To ensure market stability, the objective is to minimize the stable regret of each player. Though existing works provide significant theoretical upper bounds for players' stable regret, the results heavily rely on the assumption that each participant has a strict preference ranking. However, in real applications, multiple candidates (e.g., workers in the labor market and students in school admission) usually demonstrate comparable performance levels, making it challenging for participants (e.g., employers and schools) to differentiate and rank their preferences. To deal with the potential indifferent preferences, we propose an adaptive exploration algorithm based on arm-guided Gale-Shapley (AE-AGS). We show that its stable regret is of order $O(NK \log T / \Delta^2)$, where $N$ is the number of players, $K$ the number of arms, $T$ the total time horizon, and $\Delta$ the minimum non-zero preference gap. Extensive experiments demonstrate the algorithm's effectiveness in handling such complex situations and its consistent superiority over baselines.
Merging LoRAs like Playing LEGO: Pushing the Modularity of LoRA to Extremes Through Rank-Wise Clustering
Authors: Ziyu Zhao; Tao Shen; Didi Zhu; Zexi Li; Jing Su; Xuwu Wang; Fei Wu
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a popular technique for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to various domains due to its modular design and widespread availability on platforms like Huggingface. This modularity has sparked interest in combining multiple LoRAs to significantly enhance LLM capabilities. However, existing methods for LoRA composition primarily focus on task-specific adaptations that require additional training, and current model merging techniques often fail to fully leverage LoRA's modular nature, leading to parameter interference and performance degradation.
In this paper, we explore the possibility of disassembling and reassembling multiple LoRAs at a finer granularity, much like assembling LEGO blocks. We introduce the concept of Minimal Semantic Units (MSUs), where the parameters corresponding to each rank in LoRA function as independent units. These MSUs exhibit properties such as permutation invariance and concatenation-summation equivalence, allowing for flexible combinations to form new LoRAs. Building on these insights, we propose the LoRA-LEGO framework. This framework conducts rank-wise parameter clustering by grouping MSUs from different LoRAs into $k$ clusters. The centroid of each cluster serves as a representative MSU, enabling the assembly of a merged LoRA with an adjusted rank of $k$. Additionally, we apply a dual reweighting strategy to optimize the scale of the merged LoRA. Experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in LoRA merging.
REEF: Representation Encoding Fingerprints for Large Language Models
Authors: Jie Zhang; Dongrui Liu; Chen Qian; Linfeng Zhang; Yong Liu; Yu Qiao; Jing Shao
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Oral)

Abstract: Protecting the intellectual property of open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) is very important, because training LLMs costs extensive computational resources and data. Therefore, model owners and third parties need to identify whether a suspect model is a subsequent development of the victim model. To this end, we propose a training-free REEF to identify the relationship between the suspect and victim models from the perspective of LLMs' feature representations. Specifically, REEF computes and compares the centered kernel alignment similarity between the representations of a suspect model and a victim model on the same samples. This training-free REEF does not impair the model's general capabilities and is robust to sequential fine-tuning, pruning, model merging, and permutations. In this way, REEF provides a simple and effective way for third parties and models' owners to protect LLMs' intellectual property together.  Our code is publicly accessible at https://github.com/AI45Lab/REEF.
EgoExo-Gen: Ego-centric Video Prediction by Watching Exo-centric Videos
Authors: Jilan Xu; Yifei Huang; Baoqi Pei; Junlin Hou; Qingqiu Li; Guo Chen; Yuejie Zhang; Rui Feng; Weidi Xie
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Generating videos in the first-person perspective has broad application prospects in the field of augmented reality and embodied intelligence.
In this work, we explore the cross-view video prediction task, where given an exo-centric video, the first frame of the corresponding ego-centric video, and textual instructions, the goal is to generate future frames of the ego-centric video. 
Inspired by the notion that hand-object interactions (HOI) in ego-centric videos represent the primary intentions and actions of the current actor, we present EgoExo-Gen that explicitly models the hand-object dynamics for cross-view video prediction. 
EgoExo-Gen consists of two stages. First, we design a cross-view HOI mask prediction model that anticipates the HOI masks in future ego-frames by modeling the spatio-temporal ego-exo correspondence. 
Next, we employ a video diffusion model to predict future ego-frames using the first ego-frame and textual instructions, while incorporating the HOI masks as structural guidance to enhance prediction quality.
To facilitate training, we develop a fully automated pipeline to generate pseudo HOI masks for both ego- and exo-videos by exploiting vision foundation models. 
Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed EgoExo-Gen achieves better prediction performance compared to previous video prediction models on the public Ego-Exo4D and H2O benchmark datasets, with the HOI masks significantly improving the generation of hands and interactive objects in the ego-centric videos.