GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
MLLM can see? Dynamic Correction Decoding for Hallucination Mitigation
Authors: Chenxi Wang; Xiang Chen; Ningyu Zhang; Bozhong Tian; Haoming Xu; Shumin Deng; Huajun Chen
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) frequently exhibit hallucination phenomena, but the underlying reasons remain poorly understood. In this paper, we present an empirical analysis and find that, although MLLMs incorrectly generate the objects in the final output, they are actually able to recognize visual objects in the preceding layers. We speculate that this may be due to the strong knowledge priors of the language model suppressing the visual information, leading to hallucinations. Motivated by this, we propose a novel dynamic correction decoding method for MLLMs DeCo, which adaptively selects the appropriate preceding layers and proportionally integrates knowledge into the final layer to adjust the output logits. Note that DeCo is model agnostic and can be seamlessly incorporated with various classic decoding strategies and applied to different MLLMs. We evaluate DeCo on widely-used benchmarks, demonstrating that it can reduce hallucination rates by a large margin compared to baselines, highlighting its potential to mitigate hallucinations. Code is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/DeCo.
GDrag:Towards General-Purpose Interactive Editing with Anti-ambiguity Point Diffusion
Authors: Xiaojian Lin; Hanhui Li; Yuhao Cheng; Yiqiang Yan; Xiaodan Liang
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Recent interactive point-based image manipulation methods have gained considerable attention for being user-friendly. However, these methods still face two types of ambiguity issues that can lead to unsatisfactory outcomes, namely, intention ambiguity which misinterprets the purposes of users, and content ambiguity where target image areas are distorted by distracting elements. To address these issues and achieve general-purpose manipulations, we propose a novel task-aware, training-free framework called GDrag. Specifically, GDrag defines a taxonomy of atomic manipulations, which can be parameterized and combined unitedly to represent complex manipulations, thereby reducing intention ambiguity. Furthermore, GDrag introduces two strategies to mitigate content ambiguity, including an anti-ambiguity dense trajectory calculation method (ADT) and a self-adaptive motion supervision method (SMS). Given an atomic manipulation, ADT converts the sparse user-defined handle points into a dense point set by selecting their semantic and geometric neighbors, and calculates the trajectory of the point set. Unlike previous motion supervision methods relying on a single global scale for low-rank adaption, SMS jointly optimizes point-wise adaption scales and latent feature biases. These two methods allow us to model fine-grained target contexts and generate precise trajectories. As a result, GDrag consistently produces precise and appealing results in different editing tasks. Extensive experiments on the challenging DragBench dataset demonstrate that GDrag outperforms state-of-the-art methods significantly. The code of GDrag will be released upon acceptance.
AvatarGO: Zero-shot 4D Human-Object Interaction Generation and Animation
Authors: Yukang Cao; Liang Pan; Kai Han; Kwan-Yee K. Wong; Ziwei Liu
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Recent advancements in diffusion models have led to significant improvements in the generation and animation of 4D full-body human-object interactions (HOI). Nevertheless, existing methods primarily focus on SMPL-based motion generation, which is limited by the scarcity of realistic large-scale interaction data. This constraint affects their ability to create everyday HOI scenes. This paper addresses this challenge using a zero-shot approach with a pre-trained diffusion model. Despite this potential, achieving our goals is difficult due to the diffusion model's lack of understanding of ''where'' and ''how'' objects interact with the human body. To tackle these issues, we introduce **AvatarGO**, a novel framework designed to generate animatable 4D HOI scenes directly from textual inputs. Specifically, **1)** for the ''where'' challenge, we propose **LLM-guided contact retargeting**, which employs Lang-SAM to identify the contact body part from text prompts, ensuring precise representation of human-object spatial relations. **2)** For the ''how'' challenge, we introduce **correspondence-aware motion optimization** that constructs motion fields for both human and object models using the linear blend skinning function from SMPL-X.  Our framework not only generates coherent compositional motions, but also exhibits greater robustness in handling penetration issues. Extensive experiments with existing methods validate AvatarGO's superior generation and animation capabilities on a variety of human-object pairs and diverse poses. As the first attempt to synthesize 4D avatars with object interactions, we hope AvatarGO could open new doors for human-centric 4D content creation.
Calibrating LLMs with Information-Theoretic Evidential Deep Learning
Authors: Yawei Li; David Rügamer; Bernd Bischl; Mina Rezaei
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) often exhibit overconfidence, particularly when trained on small datasets, resulting in poor calibration and inaccurate uncertainty estimates. 
Evidential Deep Learning (EDL), an uncertainty-aware approach, enables uncertainty estimation in a single forward pass, making it a promising method for calibrating fine-tuned LLMs. However, despite its computational efficiency, EDL is prone to overfitting, as its training objective can result in overly concentrated probability distributions. 
To mitigate this, we propose regularizing EDL by incorporating an information bottleneck (IB). Our approach IB-EDL suppresses spurious information in the evidence generated by the model and encourages truly predictive information to influence both the predictions and uncertainty estimates. Extensive experiments across various fine-tuned LLMs and tasks demonstrate that IB-EDL outperforms both existing EDL and non-EDL approaches. 
By improving the trustworthiness of LLMs, IB-EDL facilitates their broader adoption in domains requiring high levels of confidence calibration.
TIGeR: Unifying Text-to-Image Generation and Retrieval with Large Multimodal Models
Authors: Leigang Qu; Haochuan Li; Tan Wang; Wenjie Wang; Yongqi Li; Liqiang Nie; Tat-Seng Chua
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: How humans can effectively and efficiently acquire images has always been a perennial question. A classic solution is *text-to-image retrieval* from an existing database; however, the limited database typically lacks creativity. By contrast, recent breakthroughs in *text-to-image generation* have made it possible to produce attractive and counterfactual visual content, but it faces challenges in synthesizing knowledge-intensive images. In this work, we rethink the relationship between text-to-image generation and retrieval, proposing a *unified* framework for both tasks with one single Large Multimodal Model (LMM). Specifically, we first explore the intrinsic discriminative abilities of LMMs and introduce an efficient generative retrieval method for text-to-image retrieval in a training-free manner. Subsequently, we unify generation and retrieval autoregressively and propose an autonomous decision mechanism to choose the best-matched one between generated and retrieved images as the response to the text prompt. To standardize the evaluation of unified text-to-image generation and retrieval, we construct TIGeR-Bench, a benchmark spanning both creative and knowledge-intensive domains. Extensive experiments on TIGeR-Bench and two retrieval benchmarks, *i.e.*, Flickr30K and MS-COCO, demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework.
Cross-Embodiment Dexterous Grasping with Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Haoqi Yuan; Bohan Zhou; Yuhui Fu; Zongqing Lu
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Dexterous hands exhibit significant potential for complex real-world grasping tasks. While recent studies have primarily focused on learning policies for specific robotic hands, the development of a universal policy that controls diverse dexterous hands remains largely unexplored.
In this work, we study the learning of cross-embodiment dexterous grasping policies using reinforcement learning (RL). Inspired by the capability of human hands to control various dexterous hands through teleoperation, we propose a universal action space based on the human hand's eigengrasps. The policy outputs eigengrasp actions that are then converted into specific joint actions for each robot hand through a retargeting mapping. We simplify the robot hand's proprioception to include only the positions of fingertips and the palm, offering a unified observation space across different robot hands. Our approach demonstrates an 80\% success rate in grasping objects from the YCB dataset across four distinct embodiments using a single vision-based policy. Additionally, our policy exhibits zero-shot generalization to two previously unseen embodiments and significant improvement in efficient finetuning. For further details and videos, visit our project page (https://sites.google.com/view/crossdex).
VEDIT: Latent Prediction Architecture For Procedural Video Representation Learning
Authors: Han Lin; Tushar Nagarajan; Nicolas Ballas; Mido Assran; Mojtaba Komeili; Mohit Bansal; Koustuv Sinha
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Procedural video representation learning is an active research area where the objective is to learn an agent which can anticipate and forecast the future given the present video input, typically in conjunction with textual annotations. Prior works often rely on large-scale pretraining of visual encoders and prediction models with language supervision. However, the necessity and effectiveness of extending compute intensive pretraining to learn video clip sequences with noisy text supervision have not yet been fully validated by previous works. In this work, we show that a strong off-the-shelf frozen pretrained visual encoder, along with a well designed prediction model, can achieve state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance in forecasting and procedural planning without the need for pretraining the prediction model, nor requiring additional supervision from language or ASR. Instead of learning representations from pixel space, our method utilizes the latent embedding space of publicly available vision encoders. By conditioning on frozen clip-level embeddings from observed steps to predict the actions of unseen steps, our prediction model is able to learn robust representations for forecasting through iterative denoising —leveraging the recent advances in diffusion transformers (Peebles & Xie, 2023). Empirical studies over a total of five procedural learning tasks across four datasets (NIV, CrossTask, COIN and Ego4D-v2) show that our model advances the strong baselines in long-horizon action anticipation (+2.6% in Verb ED@20, +3.1% in Noun ED@20), and significantly improves the SoTA in step forecasting (+5.0%), task classification (+3.8%), and procedure planning tasks (up to +2.28% in success rate, +3.39% in mAcc, and +0.90% in mIoU).
Refine-by-Align: Reference-Guided Artifacts Refinement through Semantic Alignment
Authors: Yizhi Song; Liu He; Zhifei Zhang; Soo Ye Kim; He Zhang; Wei Xiong; Zhe Lin; Brian L. Price; Scott Cohen; Jianming Zhang; Daniel Aliaga
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Personalized image generation has emerged from the recent advancements in generative models. However, these generated personalized images often suffer from localized artifacts such as incorrect logos, reducing fidelity and fine-grained identity details of the generated results. Furthermore, there is little prior work tackling this problem. To help improve these identity details in the personalized image generation, we introduce a new task: reference-guided artifacts refinement. We present Refine-by-Align, a first-of-its-kind model that employs a diffusion-based framework to address this challenge. Our model consists of two stages: Alignment Stage and Refinement Stage, which share weights of a unified neural network model. Given a generated image, a masked artifact region, and a reference image, the alignment stage identifies and extracts the corresponding regional features in the reference, which are then  used by the refinement stage to fix the artifacts. Our model-agnostic pipeline requires no test-time tuning or optimization. It automatically enhances image fidelity and reference identity in the generated image, generalizing well to existing models on various tasks including but not limited to customization, generative compositing, view synthesis, and virtual try-on. Extensive experiments and comparisons demonstrate that our pipeline greatly pushes the boundary of fine details in the image synthesis models.
FreCaS: Efficient Higher-Resolution Image Generation via Frequency-aware Cascaded Sampling
Authors: Zhengqiang ZHANG; Ruihuang Li; Lei Zhang
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: While image generation with diffusion models has achieved a great success, generating images of higher resolution than the training size remains a challenging task due to the high computational cost. Current methods typically perform the entire sampling process at full resolution and process all frequency components simultaneously, contradicting with the inherent coarse-to-fine nature of latent diffusion models and wasting computations on processing premature high-frequency details at early diffusion stages. To address this issue, we introduce an efficient $\textbf{Fre}$quency-aware $\textbf{Ca}$scaded $\textbf{S}$ampling framework, $\textbf{FreCaS}$ in short, for higher-resolution image generation. FreCaS decomposes the sampling process into cascaded stages with gradually increased resolutions, progressively expanding frequency bands and refining the corresponding details. We propose an innovative frequency-aware classifier-free guidance (FA-CFG) strategy to assign different guidance strengths for different frequency components, directing the diffusion model to add new details in the expanded frequency domain of each stage. Additionally, we fuse the cross-attention maps of previous and current stages to avoid synthesizing unfaithful layouts. Experiments demonstrate that FreCaS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in image quality and generation speed. In particular, FreCaS is about 2.86$\times$ and 6.07$\times$ faster than ScaleCrafter and DemoFusion in generating a 2048$\times$2048 image using a pretrained SDXL model and achieves an $\text{FID}_b$ improvement of 11.6 and 3.7, respectively. FreCaS can be easily extended to more complex models such as SD3. The source code of FreCaS can be found at https://github.com/xtudbxk/FreCaS.
MathCoder2: Better Math Reasoning from Continued Pretraining on Model-translated Mathematical Code
Authors: Zimu Lu; Aojun Zhou; Ke Wang; Houxing Ren; Weikang Shi; Junting Pan; Mingjie Zhan; Hongsheng Li
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Spotlight)

Abstract: Code has been shown to be effective in enhancing the mathematical reasoning abilities of large language models due to its precision and accuracy. Previous works involving continued mathematical pretraining  often include code that utilizes math-related packages, which are primarily designed for fields such as engineering, machine learning, signal processing, or module testing, rather than being directly focused on mathematical reasoning. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for generating mathematical code accompanied with corresponding reasoning steps for continued pretraining. Our approach begins with the construction of a high-quality mathematical continued pretraining dataset by incorporating math-related web data, code using mathematical packages, math textbooks, and synthetic data. Next, we construct reasoning steps by extracting LaTeX expressions, the conditions needed for the expressions, and the results of the expressions from the previously collected dataset. Based on this extracted information, we generate corresponding code to accurately capture the mathematical reasoning process. Appending the generated code to each reasoning step results in data consisting of paired natural language reasoning steps and their corresponding code. Combining this data with the original dataset results in a 19.2B-token high-performing mathematical pretraining corpus, which we name MathCode-Pile. Training several popular base models with this corpus significantly improves their mathematical abilities, leading to the creation of the MathCoder2 family of models. All of our data processing and training code is open-sourced, ensuring full transparency and easy reproducibility of the entire data collection and training pipeline.
Transformers Learn Low Sensitivity Functions: Investigations and Implications
Authors: Bhavya Vasudeva; Deqing Fu; Tianyi Zhou; Elliott Kau; Youqi Huang; Vatsal Sharan
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Transformers achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and robustness across many tasks, but an understanding of their inductive biases and how those biases differ from other neural network architectures remains elusive. In this work, we identify the sensitivity of the model to token-wise random perturbations in the input as a unified metric which explains the inductive bias of transformers across different data modalities and distinguishes them from other architectures. We show that transformers have lower sensitivity than MLPs,  CNNs, ConvMixers and LSTMs, across both vision and language tasks. We also show that this low-sensitivity bias has important implications: i) lower sensitivity correlates with improved robustness; it can also be used as an efficient intervention to further improve the robustness of transformers; ii) it corresponds to flatter minima in the loss landscape; and iii) it can serve as a progress measure for grokking. We support these findings with theoretical results showing (weak) spectral bias of transformers in the NTK regime, and improved robustness due to the lower sensitivity.
TLDR: Token-Level Detective Reward Model for Large Vision Language Models
Authors: Deqing Fu; Tong Xiao; Rui Wang; Wang Zhu; Pengchuan Zhang; Guan Pang; Robin Jia; Lawrence Chen
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Although reward models have been successful in improving multimodal large language models, the reward models themselves remain brutal and contain minimal information. Notably, existing reward models only mimic human annotations by assigning only one feedback to any text, no matter how long the text is. In the realm of multimodal language models, where models are required to process both images and texts, a naive reward model may learn implicit biases toward texts and become less grounded in images. In this paper, we propose a **T**oken-**L**evel **D**etective **R**eward Model (**TLDR**) to provide fine-grained annotations to each text token. We first introduce a perturbation-based method to generate synthetic hard negatives and their token-level labels to train TLDR models. Then we show the rich usefulness of TLDR models both in assisting off-the-shelf models to self-correct their generations, and in serving as a hallucination evaluation tool. We show that TLDR automatically trains a token-level likelihood optimization, and can improve the base model's performance significantly. Finally, we show that TLDR models can significantly speed up human annotation by 3 times to acquire a broader range of high-quality vision language data.
FlexPrefill: A Context-Aware Sparse Attention Mechanism for Efficient Long-Sequence Inference
Authors: Xunhao Lai; Jianqiao Lu; Yao Luo; Yiyuan Ma; Xun Zhou
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Oral)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) encounter computational challenges during long-sequence inference, especially in the attention pre-filling phase, where the complexity grows quadratically with the prompt length. Previous efforts to mitigate these challenges have relied on fixed sparse attention patterns or identifying sparse attention patterns based on limited cases. However, these methods lacked the flexibility to efficiently adapt to varying input demands. In this paper, we introduce FlexPrefill, a Flexible sparse Pre-filling mechanism that dynamically adjusts sparse attention patterns and computational budget in real-time to meet the specific requirements of each input and attention head. The flexibility of our method is demonstrated through two key innovations: 1) Query-Aware Sparse Pattern Determination: By measuring Jensen-Shannon divergence, this component adaptively switches between query-specific diverse attention patterns and predefined attention patterns. 2) Cumulative-Attention Based Index Selection: This component dynamically selects query-key indexes to be computed based on different attention patterns, ensuring the sum of attention scores meets a predefined threshold.
FlexPrefill adaptively optimizes the sparse pattern and sparse ratio of each attention head based on the prompt, enhancing efficiency in long-sequence inference tasks. Experimental results show significant improvements in both speed and accuracy over prior methods, providing a more flexible and efficient solution for LLM inference.
Training-Free Activation Sparsity in Large Language Models
Authors: James Liu; Pragaash Ponnusamy; Tianle Cai; Han Guo; Yoon Kim; Ben Athiwaratkun
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Spotlight)

Abstract: Activation sparsity can enable practical inference speedups in large language models (LLMs) by reducing the compute and memory-movement required for  matrix multiplications during the forward pass. 
However, existing methods face limitations that inhibit widespread adoption. Some approaches are tailored towards older models with ReLU-based sparsity, while others require extensive continued pre-training on up to hundreds of billions of tokens. 
This paper describes TEAL (**T**raining-Fre**e** **A**ctivation Sparsity in **L**LMs), a simple training-free method that applies magnitude-based activation sparsity to hidden states throughout the entire model. TEAL achieves 40-50\% model-wide sparsity with minimal performance degradation across Llama-2, Llama-3, and Mistral families, with sizes varying from 7B to 70B. We improve existing sparse kernels and demonstrate wall-clock decoding speed-ups of up to 1.53× and 1.8× at 40\% and 50\% model-wide sparsity. TEAL is compatible with weight quantization, enabling further efficiency gains.