GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Spurious Feature Diversification Improves Out-of-distribution Generalization
Authors: LIN Yong; Lu Tan; Yifan HAO; Ho Nam Wong; Hanze Dong; WEIZHONG ZHANG; Yujiu Yang; Tong Zhang
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) data is a critical challenge in machine learning. Ensemble-based methods, like weight space ensembles that interpolate model parameters, have been shown to achieve superior OOD performance. However, the underlying mechanism for their effectiveness remains unclear. 

In this study, we closely examine WiSE-FT, a popular weight space ensemble method that interpolates between a pre-trained and a fine-tuned model. We observe an unexpected ``FalseFalseTrue" phenomenon, in which WiSE-FT successfully corrects many cases where each individual model makes incorrect predictions, which contributes significantly to its OOD effectiveness. To gain further insights, we conduct theoretical analysis in a multi-class setting with a large number of spurious features. Our analysis predicts the above phenomenon and it further shows that ensemble-based models reduce prediction errors in the OOD settings by utilizing a more diverse set of spurious features. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that focuses on learning invariant features for better OOD performance, our findings suggest that incorporating a large number of diverse spurious features weakens their individual contributions, leading to improved overall OOD generalization performance. Additionally, our findings provide the first explanation for the mysterious phenomenon of weight space ensembles outperforming output space ensembles in OOD. Empirically we demonstrate the effectiveness of utilizing diverse spurious features on a MultiColorMNIST dataset, and our experimental results are consistent with the theoretical analysis. 

Building upon the new theoretical insights into the efficacy of ensemble methods, we further identify an issue of WiSE-FT caused by the overconfidence of fine-tuned models in OOD situations. This overconfidence magnifies the fine-tuned model's incorrect prediction, leading to deteriorated OOD ensemble performance. To remedy this problem, we propose a novel method called BAlaNced averaGing (BANG) to mitigate the overconfidence problem, which significantly enhances the OOD performance of WiSE-FT.
Ground-A-Video: Zero-shot Grounded Video Editing using Text-to-image Diffusion Models
Authors: Hyeonho Jeong; Jong Chul Ye
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: This paper introduces a novel grounding-guided video-to-video translation framework called Ground-A-Video for multi-attribute video editing.
Recent endeavors in video editing have showcased promising results in single-attribute editing or style transfer tasks, either by training T2V models on text-video data or adopting training-free methods.
However, when confronted with the complexities of multi-attribute editing scenarios, they exhibit shortcomings such as omitting or overlooking intended attribute changes, modifying the wrong elements of the input video, and failing to preserve regions of the input video that should remain intact.
Ground-A-Video attains temporally consistent multi-attribute editing of input videos in a training-free manner without aforementioned shortcomings.
Central to our method is the introduction of cross-frame gated attention which incorporates groundings information into the latent representations in a temporally consistent fashion, along with Modulated Cross-Attention and optical flow guided inverted latents smoothing.
Extensive experiments and applications demonstrate that Ground-A-Video's zero-shot capacity outperforms other baseline methods in terms of edit-accuracy and frame consistency.
Further results and code are available at our project page ( http://ground-a-video.github.io )
CivRealm: A Learning and Reasoning Odyssey in Civilization for Decision-Making Agents
Authors: Siyuan Qi; Shuo Chen; Yexin Li; Xiangyu Kong; Junqi Wang; Bangcheng Yang; Pring Wong; Yifan Zhong; Xiaoyuan Zhang; Zhaowei Zhang; Nian Liu; Yaodong Yang; Song-Chun Zhu
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 spotlight)

Abstract: The generalization of decision-making agents encompasses two fundamental elements: learning from past experiences and reasoning in novel contexts. However, the predominant emphasis in most interactive environments is on learning, often at the expense of complexity in reasoning. In this paper, we introduce CivRealm, an environment inspired by the Civilization game. Civilization’s profound alignment with human society requires sophisticated learning and prior knowledge, while its ever-changing space and action space demand robust reasoning for generalization. Particularly, CivRealm sets up an imperfect-information general-sum game with a changing number of players; it presents a plethora of complex features, challenging the agent to deal with open-ended stochastic environments that require diplomacy and negotiation skills. Within CivRealm, we provide interfaces for two typical agent types: tensor-based agents that focus on learning, and language-based agents that emphasize reasoning. To catalyze further research, we present initial results for both paradigms. The canonical RL-based agents exhibit reasonable performance in mini-games, whereas both RL- and LLM-based agents struggle to make substantial progress in the full game. Overall, CivRealm stands as a unique learning and reasoning challenge for decision-making agents. The code is available at https://github.com/bigai-ai/civrealm.
Scalable Language Model with Generalized Continual Learning
Authors: Bohao PENG; Zhuotao Tian; Shu Liu; Ming-Chang Yang; Jiaya Jia
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Continual learning has gained increasing importance as it facilitates the acquisition and refinement of scalable knowledge and skills in language models. However, existing methods typically encounter strict limitations and challenges in real-world scenarios, such as reliance on experience replay, optimization constraints, and inference task-ID. In this study, we introduce the Scalable Language Model (SLM) to overcome these limitations within a more challenging and generalized setting, representing a significant advancement toward practical applications for continual learning. Specifically, we propose the Joint Adaptive Re-Parameterization (JARe), integrated with Dynamic Task-related Knowledge Retrieval (DTKR), to enable adaptive adjustment of language models based on specific downstream tasks. This approach leverages the task distribution within the vector space, aiming to achieve a smooth and effortless continual learning process. Our method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on diverse backbones and benchmarks, achieving effective continual learning in both full-set and few-shot scenarios with minimal forgetting. Moreover, while prior research primarily focused on a single task type such as classification, our study goes beyond, with the large language model, i.e., LLaMA-2, to explore the effects across diverse domains and task types, such that a single language model can be decently scaled to broader applications. The code and models will be released to the public.
Efficient Backdoor Attacks for Deep Neural Networks in Real-world Scenarios
Authors: Ziqiang Li; Hong Sun; Pengfei Xia; Heng Li; Beihao Xia; Yi Wu; Bin Li
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Recent deep neural networks (DNNs) have came to rely on vast amounts of training data, providing an opportunity for malicious attackers to exploit and contaminate the data to carry out backdoor attacks. However, existing backdoor attack methods make unrealistic assumptions, assuming that all training data comes from a single source and that attackers have full access to the training data. In this paper, we introduce a more realistic attack scenario where victims collect data from multiple sources, and attackers cannot access the complete training data. We refer to this scenario as $\textbf{data-constrained backdoor attacks}$. In such cases, previous attack methods suffer from severe efficiency degradation due to the $\textbf{entanglement}$ between benign and poisoning features during the backdoor injection process. To tackle this problem, we introduce three CLIP-based technologies from two distinct streams: $\textit{Clean Feature Suppression}$ and $\textit{Poisoning Feature Augmentation}$. The results demonstrate remarkable improvements, with some settings achieving over $\textbf{100}$% improvement compared to existing attacks in data-constrained scenarios.
Symmetric Basis Convolutions for Learning Lagrangian Fluid Mechanics
Authors: Rene Winchenbach; Nils Thuerey
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Learning physical simulations has been an essential and central aspect of many recent research efforts in machine learning, particularly for Navier-Stokes-based fluid mechanics. Classic numerical solvers have traditionally been computationally expensive and challenging to use in inverse problems, whereas Neural solvers aim to address both concerns through machine learning. We propose a general formulation for continuous convolutions using separable basis functions as a superset of existing methods and evaluate a large set of basis functions in the context of (a) a compressible 1D SPH simulation, (b) a weakly compressible 2D SPH simulation, and (c) an incompressible 2D SPH Simulation. We demonstrate that even and odd symmetries included in the basis functions are key aspects of stability and accuracy.
Our broad evaluation shows that Fourier-based continuous convolutions outperform all other architectures regarding accuracy and generalization. Finally, using these Fourier-based networks, we show that prior inductive biases, such as window functions, are no longer necessary. An implementation of our approach, as well as complete datasets and solver implementations, is available at https://github.com/orgs/tum-pbs/SFBC.
G$^2$N$^2$ : Weisfeiler and Lehman go grammatical
Authors: Jason Piquenot; Aldo Moscatelli; Maxime Berar; Pierre Héroux; Romain Raveaux; Jean-Yves RAMEL; Sébastien Adam
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: This paper introduces a framework for formally establishing a connection between a portion of an algebraic language and a Graph Neural Network (GNN). The framework leverages Context-Free Grammars (CFG) to organize algebraic operations into generative rules that can be translated into a GNN layer model. As CFGs derived directly from a language tend to contain redundancies in their rules and variables, we present a grammar reduction scheme. By applying this strategy, we define a CFG that conforms to the third-order Weisfeiler-Lehman (3-WL) test using the matricial language MATLANG. From this 3-WL CFG, we derive a GNN model, named G$^2$N$^2$, which is provably 3-WL compliant. Through various experiments, we demonstrate the superior efficiency of G$^2$N$^2$ compared to other 3-WL GNNs across numerous downstream tasks. Specifically, one experiment highlights the benefits of grammar reduction within our framework.
VertiBench: Advancing Feature Distribution Diversity in Vertical Federated Learning Benchmarks
Authors: Zhaomin Wu; Junyi Hou; Bingsheng He
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) is a crucial paradigm for training machine learning models on feature-partitioned, distributed data. However, due to privacy restrictions, few public real-world VFL datasets exist for algorithm evaluation, and these represent a limited array of feature distributions. Existing benchmarks often resort to synthetic datasets, derived from arbitrary feature splits from a global set, which only capture a subset of feature distributions, leading to inadequate algorithm performance assessment. This paper addresses these shortcomings by introducing two key factors affecting VFL performance - feature importance and feature correlation - and proposing associated evaluation metrics and dataset splitting methods. Additionally, we introduce a real VFL dataset to address the deficit in image-image VFL scenarios. Our comprehensive evaluation of cutting-edge VFL algorithms provides valuable insights for future research in the field.
Multimodal Web Navigation with Instruction-Finetuned Foundation Models
Authors: Hiroki Furuta; Kuang-Huei Lee; Ofir Nachum; Yutaka Matsuo; Aleksandra Faust; Shixiang Shane Gu; Izzeddin Gur
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: The progress of autonomous web navigation has been hindered by the dependence on billions of exploratory interactions via online reinforcement learning, and domain-specific model designs that make it difficult to leverage generalization from rich out-of-domain data.
In this work, we study data-driven offline training for web agents with vision-language foundation models.
We propose an instruction-following multimodal agent, WebGUM, that observes both webpage screenshots and HTML pages and outputs web navigation actions, such as click and type.
WebGUM is trained by jointly finetuning an instruction-finetuned language model and a vision encoder with temporal and local perception on a large corpus of demonstrations.
We empirically demonstrate this recipe improves the agent's ability of grounded multimodal perception, HTML comprehension, and multi-step reasoning, outperforming prior works by a significant margin. 
On the MiniWoB, we improve over the previous best offline methods by more than 45.8%, even outperforming online-finetuned SoTA, humans, and GPT-4-based agent. 
On the WebShop benchmark, our 3-billion-parameter model achieves superior performance to the existing SoTA, PaLM-540B.
Furthermore, WebGUM exhibits strong positive transfer to the real-world planning tasks on the Mind2Web.
We also collect 347K high-quality demonstrations using our trained models, 38 times larger than prior work, and make them available to promote future research in this direction.
A Real-World WebAgent with Planning, Long Context Understanding, and Program Synthesis
Authors: Izzeddin Gur; Hiroki Furuta; Austin V Huang; Mustafa Safdari; Yutaka Matsuo; Douglas Eck; Aleksandra Faust
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 oral)

Abstract: Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have recently achieved better generalization and sample efficiency in autonomous web automation.
However, the performance on real-world websites has still suffered from (1) open domainness, (2) limited context length, and (3) lack of inductive bias on HTML.
We introduce WebAgent, an LLM-driven agent that learns from self-experience to complete tasks on real websites following natural language instructions.
WebAgent plans ahead by decomposing instructions into canonical sub-instructions, summarizes long HTML documents into task-relevant snippets, and acts on websites via Python programs generated from those.
We design WebAgent with Flan-U-PaLM, for grounded code generation, and HTML-T5, new pre-trained LLMs for long HTML documents using local and global attention mechanisms and a mixture of long-span denoising objectives, for planning and summarization.
We empirically demonstrate that our modular recipe improves the success on real websites by over 50%, and that HTML-T5 is the best model to solve various HTML understanding tasks; achieving 18.7% higher success rate than the prior method on MiniWoB web automation benchmark, and SoTA performance on Mind2Web, an offline task planning evaluation.
Real-Fake: Effective Training Data Synthesis Through Distribution Matching
Authors: Jianhao Yuan; Jie Zhang; Shuyang Sun; Philip Torr; Bo Zhao
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Synthetic training data has gained prominence in numerous learning tasks and scenarios, offering advantages such as dataset augmentation, generalization evaluation, and privacy preservation. Despite these benefits, the efficiency of synthetic data generated by
current methodologies remains inferior when training advanced deep models exclusively, limiting its practical utility. To address this challenge, we analyze the principles underlying training data synthesis for supervised learning and elucidate a principled theoretical framework from the distribution-matching perspective that explicates the mechanisms governing synthesis efficacy. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our synthetic data across diverse image classification tasks, both as a replacement for and augmentation to real datasets, while also benefits such as out-of-distribution generalization, privacy preservation, and scalability. Specifically, we achieve 70.9% top1 classification accuracy on ImageNet1K when training solely with synthetic data equivalent
to 1 × the original real data size, which increases to 76.0% when scaling up to 10 × synthetic data.
Learning Conditional Invariances through Non-Commutativity
Authors: Abhra Chaudhuri; Serban Georgescu; Anjan Dutta
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Invariance learning algorithms that conditionally filter out domain-specific random variables as distractors, do so based only on the data semantics, and not the target domain under evaluation. We show that a provably optimal and sample-efficient way of learning conditional invariances is by relaxing the invariance criterion to be non-commutatively directed towards the target domain. Under domain asymmetry, i.e., when the target domain contains semantically relevant information absent in the source, the risk of the encoder $\varphi^*$ that is optimal on average across domains is strictly lower-bounded by the risk of the target-specific optimal encoder $\Phi^*_\tau$. We prove that non-commutativity steers the optimization towards $\Phi^*_\tau$ instead of $\varphi^*$, bringing the $\mathcal{H}$-divergence between domains down to zero, leading to a stricter bound on the target risk. Both our theory and experiments demonstrate that non-commutative invariance (NCI) can leverage source domain samples to meet the sample complexity needs of learning $\Phi^*_\tau$, surpassing SOTA invariance learning algorithms for domain adaptation, at times by over 2\%, approaching the performance of an oracle. Implementation is available at https://github.com/abhrac/nci.
Open-ended VQA benchmarking of Vision-Language models by exploiting Classification datasets and their semantic hierarchy
Authors: Simon Ging; Maria Alejandra Bravo; Thomas Brox
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 spotlight)

Abstract: The evaluation of text-generative vision-language models is a challenging yet crucial endeavor. By addressing the limitations of existing Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmarks and proposing innovative evaluation methodologies, our research seeks to advance our understanding of these models’ capabilities. We propose a novel VQA benchmark based on well-known visual classification datasets which allows a granular evaluation of text-generative vision-language models and their comparison with discriminative vision-language models. To improve the assessment of coarse answers on fine-grained classification tasks, we suggest using the semantic hierarchy of the label space to ask automatically generated follow-up questions about the ground-truth category. Finally, we compare traditional NLP and LLM-based metrics for the problem of evaluating model predictions given ground-truth answers. We perform a human evaluation study upon which we base our decision on the final metric. We apply our benchmark to a suite of vision-language models and show a detailed comparison of their abilities on object, action, and attribute classification. Our contributions aim to lay the foundation for more precise and meaningful assessments, facilitating targeted progress in the exciting field of vision-language modeling.
GPT-4 Is Too Smart To Be Safe: Stealthy Chat with LLMs via Cipher
Authors: Youliang Yuan; Wenxiang Jiao; Wenxuan Wang; Jen-tse Huang; Pinjia He; Shuming Shi; Zhaopeng Tu
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Safety lies at the core of the development of Large Language Models (LLMs). There is ample work on aligning LLMs with human ethics and preferences, including data filtering in pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback, red teaming, etc. In this study, we discover that chat in cipher can bypass the safety alignment techniques of LLMs, which are mainly conducted in natural languages. We propose a novel framework CipherChat to systematically examine the generalizability of safety alignment to non-natural languages -- ciphers. CipherChat enables humans to chat with LLMs through cipher prompts topped with system role descriptions and few-shot enciphered demonstrations. We use CipherChat to assess state-of-the-art LLMs, including ChatGPT and GPT-4 for different representative human ciphers across 11 safety domains in both English and Chinese. Experimental results show that certain ciphers succeed almost 100% of the time in bypassing the safety alignment of GPT-4 in several safety domains, demonstrating the necessity of developing safety alignment for non-natural languages. Notably, we identify that LLMs seem to have a ''secret cipher'', and propose a novel SelfCipher that uses only role play and several unsafe demonstrations in natural language to evoke this capability. SelfCipher surprisingly outperforms existing human ciphers in almost all cases.
Towards the Fundamental Limits of Knowledge Transfer over Finite Domains
Authors: Qingyue Zhao; Banghua Zhu
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: We characterize the statistical efficiency of knowledge transfer through $n$ samples from a teacher to a probabilistic student classifier with input space $\mathcal{S}$ over labels $\mathcal{A}$. We show that privileged information at three progressive levels accelerates the transfer. At the first level, only samples with hard labels are known, via which the maximum likelihood estimator attains the minimax rate $\sqrt{{|\mathcal{S}||\mathcal{A}|}/{n}}$. The second level has the teacher probabilities of sampled labels available in addition, which turns out to boost the convergence rate lower bound to ${{|\mathcal{S}||\mathcal{A}|}/{n}}$. However, under this second data acquisition protocol, minimizing a naive adaptation of the cross-entropy loss results in an asymptotically biased student. We overcome this limitation and achieve the fundamental limit by using a novel empirical variant of the squared error logit loss. The third level further equips the student with the soft labels (complete logits) on $\mathcal{A}$ given every sampled input, thereby provably enables the student to enjoy a rate ${|\mathcal{S}|}/{n}$ free of $|\mathcal{A}|$. We find any Kullback-Leibler divergence minimizer to be optimal in the last case. Numerical simulations distinguish the four learners and corroborate our theory.
Self-Supervised Speech Quality Estimation and Enhancement Using Only Clean Speech
Authors: Szu-Wei Fu; Kuo-Hsuan Hung; Yu Tsao; Yu-Chiang Frank Wang
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Speech quality estimation has recently undergone a paradigm shift from human-hearing expert designs to machine-learning models. However, current models rely mainly on supervised learning, which is time-consuming and expensive for label collection. To solve this problem, we propose VQScore, a self-supervised metric for evaluating speech based on the quantization error of a vector-quantized-variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE). The training of VQ-VAE relies on clean speech; hence, large quantization errors can be expected when the speech is distorted. To further improve correlation with real quality scores, domain knowledge of speech processing is incorporated into the model design. We found that the vector quantization mechanism could also be used for self-supervised speech enhancement (SE) model training. To improve the robustness of the encoder for SE, a novel self-distillation mechanism combined with adversarial training is introduced. In summary, the proposed speech quality estimation method and enhancement models require only clean speech for training without any label requirements. Experimental results show that the proposed VQScore and enhancement model are competitive with supervised baselines. The code and pre-trained models will be released