GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Local-Prompt: Extensible Local Prompts for Few-Shot Out-of-Distribution Detection
Authors: Fanhu Zeng; Zhen Cheng; Fei Zhu; Hongxin Wei; Xu-Yao Zhang
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection, aiming to distinguish outliers from known categories, has gained prominence in practical scenarios. Recently, the advent of vision-language models (VLM) has heightened interest in enhancing OOD detection for VLM through few-shot tuning. However, existing methods mainly focus on optimizing global prompts, ignoring refined utilization of local information with regard to outliers. Motivated by this, we freeze global prompts and introduce Local-Prompt, a novel coarse-to-fine tuning paradigm to emphasize regional enhancement with local prompts. Our method comprises two integral components: global prompt guided negative augmentation and local prompt enhanced regional regularization. The former utilizes frozen, coarse global prompts as guiding cues to incorporate negative augmentation, thereby leveraging local outlier knowledge. The latter employs trainable local prompts and a regional regularization to capture local information effectively, aiding in outlier identification. We also propose regional-related metric to empower the enrichment of OOD detection. Moreover, since our approach explores enhancing local prompts only, it can be seamlessly integrated with trained global prompts during inference to boost the performance. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and potential of our method. Notably, our method reduces average FPR95 by 5.17% against state-of-the-art method in 4-shot tuning on challenging ImageNet-1k dataset, even outperforming 16-shot results of previous methods.
QuaDiM: A Conditional Diffusion Model For Quantum State Property Estimation
Authors: Yehui Tang; Mabiao Long; Junchi Yan
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Quantum state property estimation (QPE) is a fundamental challenge in quantum many-body problems in physics and chemistry, involving the prediction of characteristics such as correlation and entanglement entropy through statistical analysis of quantum measurement data. Recent advances in deep learning have provided powerful solutions, predominantly using auto-regressive models. These models generally assume an intrinsic ordering among qubits, aiming to approximate the classical probability distribution through sequential training. However, unlike natural language, the entanglement structure of qubits lacks an inherent ordering, hurting the motivation of such models. In this paper, we introduce a novel, non-autoregressive generative model called \textbf{\model}, designed for \underline{\textbf{Qua}}ntum state property estimation using \underline{\textbf{Di}}ffusion \underline{\textbf{M}}odels. \model progressively denoises Gaussian noise into the distribution corresponding to the quantum state, encouraging equal, unbiased treatment of all qubits. \model learns to map physical variables to properties of the ground state of the parameterized Hamiltonian during offline training. Afterwards one can sample from the learned distribution conditioned on previously unseen physical variables to collect measurement records and employ post-processing to predict properties of unknown quantum states. We evaluate \model on large-scale QPE tasks using classically simulated data on the 1D anti-ferromagnetic Heisenberg model with the system size up to 100 qubits. Numerical results demonstrate that \model outperforms baseline models, particularly auto-regressive approaches, under conditions of limited measurement data during training and reduced sample complexity during inference.
Aligning Human Motion Generation with Human Perceptions
Authors: Haoru Wang; Wentao Zhu; Luyi Miao; Yishu Xu; Feng Gao; Qi Tian; Yizhou Wang
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Human motion generation is a critical task with a wide spectrum of applications. Achieving high realism in generated motions requires naturalness, smoothness, and plausibility. However, current evaluation metrics often rely on simple heuristics or distribution distances and do not align well with human perceptions. In this work, we propose a data-driven approach to bridge this gap by introducing a large-scale human perceptual evaluation dataset, MotionPercept, and a human motion critic model, MotionCritic, that capture human perceptual preferences. Our critic model offers a more accurate metric for assessing motion quality and could be readily integrated into the motion generation pipeline to enhance generation quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in both evaluating and improving the quality of generated human motions by aligning with human perceptions. Code and data are publicly available at https://motioncritic.github.io/.
Centrality-guided Pre-training for Graph
Authors: Bin Liang; Shiwei Chen; Lin Gui; Hui Wang; Yue Yu; Ruifeng Xu; Kam-Fai Wong
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Self-supervised learning (SSL) has shown great potential in learning generalizable representations for graph-structured data. However, existing SSL-based graph pre-training methods largely focus on improving graph representations by learning the structure information based on disturbing or reconstructing graphs, which ignores an important issue: the importance of different nodes in the graph structure may vary. To fill this gap, we propose a Centrality-guided Graph Pre-training (CenPre) framework to integrate the distinct importance of nodes in graph structure into the corresponding representations of nodes based on the centrality in graph theory. In this way, the different roles played by different nodes can be effectively leveraged when learning graph structure. The proposed CenPre contains three modules for node representation pre-training and alignment. The node-level importance learning module fuses the fine-grained node importance into node representation based on degree centrality, allowing the aggregation of node representations with equal/similar importance. The graph-level importance learning module characterizes the importance between all nodes in the graph based on eigenvector centrality, enabling the exploitation of graph-level structure similarities/differences when learning node representation. Finally, a representation alignment module aligns the pre-trained node representation using the original one, essentially allowing graph representations to learn structural information without losing their original semantic information, thereby leading to better graph representations. Extensive experiments on a series of real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed CenPre outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in the tasks of node classification, link prediction, and graph classification.
Vision and Language Synergy for Rehearsal Free Continual Learning
Authors: Muhammad Anwar Ma'sum; Mahardhika Pratama; Savitha Ramasamy; Lin Liu; H Habibullah; Ryszard Kowalczyk
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: The prompt-based approach has demonstrated its success for continual learning problems. However, it still suffers from catastrophic forgetting due to inter-task vector similarity and unfitted new components of previously learned tasks. On the other hand, the language-guided approach falls short of its full potential due to minimum utilized knowledge and participation in the prompt tuning process. To correct this problem, we propose a novel prompt-based structure and algorithm that incorporate 4 key concepts (1) language as input for prompt generation (2) task-wise generators (3) limiting matching descriptors search space via soft task-id prediction (4) generated prompt as auxiliary data. Our experimental analysis shows the superiority of our method to existing SOTAs in CIFAR100, ImageNet-R, and CUB datasets with significant margins i.e. up to 30% final average accuracy, 24% cumulative average accuracy, 8% final forgetting measure, and 7% cumulative forgetting measure. Our historical analysis confirms our method successfully maintains the stability-plasticity trade-off in every task. Our robustness analysis shows the proposed method consistently achieves high performances in various prompt lengths, layer depths, and number of generators per task compared to the SOTAs. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis, and complete numerical results in appendix sections. The method code is available in https://github.com/anwarmaxsum/LEAPGEN for further study.
Towards a General Time Series Anomaly Detector with Adaptive Bottlenecks and Dual Adversarial Decoders
Authors: Qichao Shentu; Beibu Li; Kai Zhao; Yang Shu; Zhongwen Rao; Lujia Pan; Bin Yang; Chenjuan Guo
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Time series anomaly detection plays a vital role in a wide range of applications. Existing methods require training one specific model for each dataset, which exhibits limited generalization capability across different target datasets, hindering anomaly detection performance in various scenarios with scarce training data. Aiming at this problem, we propose constructing a general time series anomaly detection model, which is pre-trained on extensive multi-domain datasets and can subsequently apply to a multitude of downstream scenarios. The significant divergence of time series data across different domains presents two primary challenges in building such a general model: (1) meeting the diverse requirements of appropriate information bottlenecks tailored to different datasets in one unified model, and (2) enabling distinguishment between multiple normal and abnormal patterns, both are crucial for effective anomaly detection in various target scenarios. To tackle these two challenges, we propose a general time series anomaly Detector with Adaptive Bottlenecks and Dual Adversarial Decoders (DADA), which enables flexible selection of bottlenecks based on different data and explicitly enhances clear differentiation between normal and abnormal series. We conduct extensive experiments on nine target datasets from different domains. After pre-training on multi-domain data, DADA, serving as a zero-shot anomaly detector for these datasets, still achieves competitive or even superior results compared to those models tailored to each specific dataset.
SePer: Measure Retrieval Utility Through The Lens Of Semantic Perplexity Reduction
Authors: Lu Dai; Yijie Xu; Jinhui Ye; Hao Liu; Hui Xiong
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Spotlight)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated improved generation performance by incorporating externally retrieved knowledge, a process known as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Despite the potential of this approach, existing studies evaluate RAG effectiveness by 1) assessing retrieval and generation components jointly, which obscures retrieval's distinct contribution, or 2) examining retrievers using traditional metrics such as NDCG, which creates a gap in understanding retrieval's true utility in the overall generation process. To address the above limitations, in this work, we introduce an automatic evaluation method that measures retrieval quality through the lens of information gain within the RAG framework. Specifically, we propose Semantic Perplexity (SePer), a metric that captures the LLM's internal belief about the correctness of the retrieved information. We quantify the utility of retrieval by the extent to which it reduces semantic perplexity post-retrieval. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SePer not only aligns closely with human preferences but also offers a more precise and efficient evaluation of retrieval utility across diverse RAG scenarios.
Finding Shared Decodable Concepts and their Negations in the Brain
Authors: Cory Daniel Efird; Alex Murphy; Joel Zylberberg; Alona Fyshe
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Prior work has offered evidence for functional localization in the brain; different anatomical regions preferentially activate for certain types of visual input. For example, the fusiform face area preferentially activates for visual stimuli that include a face. However, the spectrum of visual semantics is extensive, and only a few semantically-tuned patches of cortex have so far been identified in the human brain. Using a multimodal (natural language and image) neural network architecture (CLIP, \cite{CLIP}, we train a highly accurate contrastive model that maps brain responses during naturalistic image viewing to CLIP embeddings. We then use a novel adaptation of the DBSCAN clustering algorithm to cluster the parameters of these participant-specific contrastive models. This reveals what we call Shared Decodable Concepts (SDCs): clusters in CLIP space that are decodable from common sets of voxels across multiple participants.

Examining the images most and least associated with each SDC cluster gives us additional insight into the semantic properties of each SDC. We note SDCs for previously reported visual features (e.g. orientation tuning in early visual cortex) as well as visual semantic concepts such as faces, places and bodies. In cases where our method finds multiple clusters for a visuo-semantic concept, the least associated images allow us to dissociate between confounding factors. For example, we discovered two clusters of food images, one driven by color, the other by shape. We also uncover previously unreported areas with visuo-semantic sensitivity such as regions of extrastriate body area (EBA) tuned for legs/hands and sensitivity to numerosity in right intraparietal sulcus, sensitivity associated with visual perspective (close/far) and more. Thus, our contrastive-learning methodology better characterizes new and existing visuo-semantic representations in the brain by leveraging multimodal neural network representations and a novel adaptation of clustering algorithms.
A Conditional Independence Test in the Presence of Discretization
Authors: Boyang Sun; Yu Yao; Guang-Yuan Hao; Yumou Qiu; Kun Zhang
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Testing conditional independence (CI) has many important applications, such as Bayesian network learning and causal discovery. Although several approaches have been developed for learning CI structures for observed variables, those existing methods generally fail to work when the variables of interest can not be directly observed and only discretized values of those variables are available. For example, if $X_1$, $\tilde{X}_2$ and $X_3$ are the observed variables, where $\tilde{X}_2$ is a discretization of the latent variable $X_2$, applying the existing methods to the observations of $X_1$, $\tilde{X}_2$ and $X_3$ would lead to a false conclusion about the underlying CI of variables $X_1$, $X_2$ and $X_3$.
Motivated by this, we propose a CI test specifically designed to accommodate the presence of discretization. To achieve this, a bridge equation and nodewise regression are used to recover the precision coefficients reflecting the conditional dependence of the latent continuous variables under the nonparanormal model. An appropriate test statistic has been proposed, and its asymptotic distribution under the null hypothesis of CI has been derived.
Theoretical analysis, along with empirical validation on various datasets, rigorously demonstrates the effectiveness of our testing methods.
Innovative Thinking, Infinite Humor: Humor Research of Large Language Models through Structured Thought Leaps
Authors: Han Wang; Yilin Zhao; Dian Li; Xiaohan Wang; sinbadliu; Xuguang Lan; Hui Wang
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Humor is previously regarded as a gift exclusive to humans for the following reasons. Humor is a culturally nuanced aspect of human language, presenting challenges for its understanding and generation.
Humor generation necessitates a multi-hop reasoning process, with each hop founded on proper rationales. Although many studies, such as those related to GPT-o1, focus on logical reasoning with reflection and correction, they still fall short in humor generation. Due to the sparsity of the knowledge graph in creative thinking, it is arduous to achieve multi-hop reasoning.
Consequently, in this paper, we propose a more robust framework for addressing the humor reasoning task, named LoL. LoL aims to inject external information to mitigate the sparsity of the knowledge graph, thereby enabling multi-hop reasoning. In the first stage of LoL, we put forward an automatic instruction-evolution method to incorporate the deeper and broader thinking processes underlying humor.
Judgment-oriented instructions are devised to enhance the model's judgment capability, dynamically supplementing and updating the sparse knowledge graph. Subsequently, through reinforcement learning, the reasoning logic for each online-generated response is extracted using GPT-4o. In this process, external knowledge is re-introduced to aid the model in logical reasoning and the learning of human preferences.
Finally, experimental results indicate that the combination of these two processes can enhance both the model's judgment ability and its generative capacity.
These findings deepen our comprehension of the creative capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and offer approaches to boost LLMs' creative abilities for cross-domain innovative applications.
Fantastic Targets for Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models and Where To Find Them
Authors: Anh Tuan Bui; Thuy-Trang Vu; Long Tung Vuong; Trung Le; Paul Montague; Tamas Abraham; Junae Kim; Dinh Phung
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Concept erasure has emerged as a promising technique for mitigating the risk of harmful content generation in diffusion models by selectively unlearning undesirable concepts. The common principle of previous works to remove a specific concept is to map it to a fixed generic concept, such as a neutral concept or just an empty text prompt. In this paper, we demonstrate that this fixed-target strategy is suboptimal, as it fails to account for the impact of erasing one concept on the others. To address this limitation, we model the concept space as a graph and empirically analyze the effects of erasing one concept on the remaining concepts. Our analysis uncovers intriguing geometric properties of the concept space, where the influence of erasing a concept is confined to a local region. Building on this insight, we propose the Adaptive Guided Erasure (AGE) method, which dynamically selects optimal target concepts tailored to each undesirable concept, minimizing unintended side effects. Experimental results show that AGE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art erasure methods on preserving unrelated concepts while maintaining effective erasure performance. Our code is published at {https://github.com/tuananhbui89/Adaptive-Guided-Erasure}.
Improving Probabilistic Diffusion Models With Optimal Diagonal Covariance Matching
Authors: Zijing Ou; Mingtian Zhang; Andi Zhang; Tim Z. Xiao; Yingzhen Li; David Barber
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Oral)

Abstract: The probabilistic diffusion model has become highly effective across various domains. Typically, sampling from a diffusion model involves using a denoising distribution characterized by a Gaussian with a learned mean and either fixed or learned covariances. In this paper, we leverage the recently proposed covariance moment matching technique and introduce a novel method for learning the diagonal covariances. Unlike traditional data-driven covariance approximation approaches, our method involves directly regressing the optimal analytic covariance using a new, unbiased objective named Optimal Covariance Matching (OCM). This approach can significantly reduce the approximation error in covariance prediction. We demonstrate how our method can substantially enhance the sampling efficiency, recall rate and likelihood of both diffusion models and latent diffusion models.
PhyloVAE: Unsupervised Learning of Phylogenetic Trees via Variational Autoencoders
Authors: Tianyu Xie; Harry Richman; Jiansi Gao; Frederick A Matsen; Cheng Zhang
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Learning informative representations of phylogenetic tree structures is essential for analyzing evolutionary relationships. Classical distance-based methods have been widely used to project phylogenetic trees into Euclidean space, but they are often sensitive to the choice of distance metric and may lack sufficient resolution. In this paper, we introduce *phylogenetic variational autoencoders* (PhyloVAEs), an unsupervised learning framework designed for representation learning and generative modeling of tree topologies. Leveraging an efficient encoding mechanism inspired by autoregressive tree topology generation, we develop a deep latent-variable generative model that facilitates fast, parallelized topology generation. PhyloVAE combines this generative model with a collaborative inference model based on learnable topological features, allowing for high-resolution representations of phylogenetic tree samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate PhyloVAE's robust representation learning capabilities and fast generation of phylogenetic tree topologies.
SELF-EVOLVED REWARD LEARNING FOR LLMS
Authors: Chenghua Huang; Zhizhen Fan; Lu Wang; Fangkai Yang; Pu Zhao; Zeqi Lin; Qingwei Lin; Dongmei Zhang; Saravan Rajmohan; Qi Zhang
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a crucial technique for aligning language models with human preferences and is a key factor in the success of modern conversational models like GPT-4, ChatGPT, and Llama 2. A significant challenge in employing RLHF lies in training a reliable RM, which relies on high-quality labels. Typically, these labels are provided by human experts or a stronger AI, both of which can be costly and introduce bias that may affect the language model's responses. As models improve, human input may become less effective in enhancing their performance. This paper explores the potential of using the RM itself to generate additional training data for a more robust RM. Our experiments demonstrate that reinforcement learning from self-feedback outperforms baseline approaches.
We conducted extensive experiments with our approach on multiple datasets, such as HH-RLHF and UltraFeedback, and models including Mistral and Llama 3, comparing it against various baselines. Our results indicate that, even with a limited amount of human-labeled data, learning from self-feedback can robustly enhance the performance of the RM, thereby improving the capabilities of large language models.