GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Adaptive Layer Sparsity for Large Language Models via Activation Correlation Assessment
Authors: Wei Li; Lujun Li; Mark G. Lee; Shengjie Sun
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing with their impressive capabilities. However, their enormous size presents challenges for deploying them in real-world applications. Traditional compression techniques, like pruning, often lead to suboptimal performance due to their uniform pruning ratios and lack of consideration for the varying importance of features across different layers. To address these limitations, we present a novel  Adaptive Layer Sparsity (ALS) approach to optimize LLMs. Our approach consists of two key steps. Firstly, we estimate the correlation matrix between intermediate layers by leveraging the concept of information orthogonality. This novel perspective allows for a precise measurement of the importance of each layer across the model. Secondly, we employ a linear optimization algorithm to develop an adaptive sparse allocation strategy based on evaluating the correlation matrix. This strategy enables us to selectively prune features in intermediate layers, achieving fine-grained optimization of the LLM model. Considering the varying importance across different layers, we can significantly reduce the model size without sacrificing performance. We conduct extensive experiments on publicly available language processing datasets, including the LLaMA-V1|V2|V3 family and OPT, covering various benchmarks. Our experimental results validate the effectiveness of our ALS method, showcasing its superiority over previous approaches. The performance gains demonstrate its potential for enhancing LLMs' efficiency and resource utilization. Notably, our approach surpasses the state-of-the-art models Wanda and SparseGPT, showcasing its ability to excel even under high sparsity levels.  Codes at: https://github.com/lliai/ALS.
ChatCam: Empowering Camera Control through Conversational AI
Authors: Xinhang Liu; Yu-Wing Tai; Chi-Keung Tang
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Cinematographers adeptly capture the essence of the world, crafting compelling visual narratives through intricate camera movements. Witnessing the strides made by large language models in perceiving and interacting with the 3D world, this study explores their capability to control cameras with human language guidance. We introduce ChatCam, a system that navigates camera movements through conversations with users, mimicking a professional cinematographer's workflow. To achieve this, we propose CineGPT, a GPT-based autoregressive model for text-conditioned camera trajectory generation. We also develop an Anchor Determinator to ensure precise camera trajectory placement. ChatCam understands user requests and employs our proposed tools to generate trajectories, which can be used to render high-quality video footage on radiance field representations. Our experiments, including comparisons to state-of-the-art approaches and user studies, demonstrate our approach's ability to interpret and execute complex instructions for camera operation, showing promising applications in real-world production settings. Project page: https://xinhangliu.com/chatcam.
Elucidating the Design Space of Dataset Condensation
Authors: Shitong Shao; Zikai Zhou; Huanran Chen; Zhiqiang Shen
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Dataset condensation, a concept within $\textit{data-centric learning}$, aims to efficiently transfer critical attributes from an original dataset to a synthetic version, meanwhile maintaining both diversity and realism of syntheses. This approach can significantly improve model training efficiency and is also adaptable for multiple application areas. Previous methods in dataset condensation have faced several challenges: some incur high computational costs which limit scalability to larger datasets ($\textit{e.g.,}$ MTT, DREAM, and TESLA), while others are restricted to less optimal design spaces, which could hinder potential improvements, especially in smaller datasets ($\textit{e.g.,}$ SRe$^2$L, G-VBSM, and RDED). To address these limitations, we propose a comprehensive designing-centric framework that includes specific, effective strategies like implementing soft category-aware matching, adjusting the learning rate schedule and applying small batch-size. These strategies are grounded in both empirical evidence and theoretical backing. Our resulting approach, $\textbf{E}$lucidate $\textbf{D}$ataset $\textbf{C}$ondensation ($\textbf{EDC}$), establishes a benchmark for both small and large-scale dataset condensation. In our testing, EDC achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, reaching 48.6% on ImageNet-1k with a ResNet-18 model at an IPC of 10, which corresponds to a compression ratio of 0.78\%. This performance surpasses those of SRe$^2$L, G-VBSM, and RDED by margins of 27.3%, 17.2%, and 6.6%, respectively. Code is available at: https://github.com/shaoshitong/EDC.
CondTSF: One-line Plugin of Dataset Condensation for Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Jianrong Ding; Zhanyu Liu; Guanjie Zheng; Haiming Jin; Linghe Kong
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: \textit{Dataset condensation} is a newborn technique that generates a small dataset that can be used in training deep neural networks (DNNs) to lower storage and training costs. The objective of dataset condensation is to ensure that the model trained with the synthetic dataset can perform comparably to the model trained with full datasets. However, existing methods predominantly concentrate on classification tasks, posing challenges in their adaptation to time series forecasting (TS-forecasting). This challenge arises from disparities in the evaluation of synthetic data. In classification, the synthetic data is considered well-distilled if the model trained with the full dataset and the model trained with the synthetic dataset yield identical labels for the same input, regardless of variations in output logits distribution. Conversely, in TS-forecasting, the effectiveness of synthetic data distillation is determined by the distance between predictions of the two models. The synthetic data is deemed well-distilled only when all data points within the predictions are similar. Consequently, TS-forecasting has a more rigorous evaluation methodology compared to classification. To mitigate this gap, we theoretically analyze the optimization objective of dataset condensation for TS-forecasting and propose a new one-line plugin of dataset condensation for TS-forecasting designated as Dataset \textbf{Cond}ensation for \textbf{T}ime \textbf{S}eries \textbf{F}orecasting (CondTSF) based on our analysis. Plugging CondTSF into previous dataset condensation methods facilitates a reduction in the distance between the predictions of the model trained with the full dataset and the model trained with the synthetic dataset, thereby enhancing performance. We conduct extensive experiments on eight commonly used time series datasets. CondTSF consistently improves the performance of all previous dataset condensation methods across all datasets, particularly at low condensing ratios.
Revisiting Adversarial Patches for Designing Camera-Agnostic Attacks against Person Detection
Authors: Hui Wei; Zhixiang Wang; Kewei Zhang; Jiaqi Hou; Yuanwei Liu; Hao Tang; Zheng Wang
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Physical adversarial attacks can deceive deep neural networks (DNNs), leading to erroneous predictions in real-world scenarios. To uncover potential security risks, attacking the safety-critical task of person detection has garnered significant attention. However, we observe that existing attack methods overlook the pivotal role of the camera, involving capturing real-world scenes and converting them into digital images, in the physical adversarial attack workflow. This oversight leads to instability and challenges in reproducing these attacks. In this work, we revisit patch-based attacks against person detectors and introduce a camera-agnostic physical adversarial attack to mitigate this limitation. Specifically, we construct a differentiable camera Image Signal Processing (ISP) proxy network to compensate for the physical-to-digital transition gap. Furthermore, the camera ISP proxy network serves as a defense module, forming an adversarial optimization framework with the attack module. The attack module optimizes adversarial patches to maximize effectiveness, while the defense module optimizes the conditional parameters of the camera ISP proxy network to minimize attack effectiveness. These modules engage in an adversarial game, enhancing cross-camera stability. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed Camera-Agnostic Patch (CAP) attack effectively conceals persons from detectors across various imaging hardware, including two distinct cameras and four smartphones.
Performative Control for Linear Dynamical Systems
Authors: Songfu Cai; Fei Han; Xuanyu Cao
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: We introduce the framework of performative control, where the policy chosen by the controller affects the underlying dynamics of the control system. This results in a sequence of policy-dependent system state data with policy-dependent temporal correlations. Following the recent literature on performative prediction \cite{perdomo2020performative}, we introduce the concept of a performatively stable control (PSC) solution. We first propose a sufficient condition for the performative control problem to admit a unique PSC solution with a problem-specific structure of distributional sensitivity propagation and aggregation. We further analyze the impacts of system stability on the existence of the PSC solution. Specifically, for {almost surely strongly stable} policy-dependent dynamics, the PSC solution exists if the sum of the distributional sensitivities is small enough. However, for almost surely unstable policy-dependent dynamics, the existence of the PSC solution will necessitate a temporally backward decaying of the distributional sensitivities. We finally provide a repeated stochastic gradient descent scheme that converges to the PSC solution and analyze its non-asymptotic convergence rate. Numerical results validate our theoretical analysis.
Embedding Trajectory for Out-of-Distribution Detection in Mathematical Reasoning
Authors: Yiming Wang; Pei Zhang; Baosong Yang; Derek F. Wong; Zhuosheng Zhang; Rui Wang
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Real-world data deviating from the independent and identically distributed (\textit{i.i.d.}) assumption of in-distribution training data poses security threats to deep networks, thus advancing out-of-distribution (OOD) detection algorithms. Detection methods in generative language models (GLMs) mainly focus on uncertainty estimation and embedding distance measurement, with the latter proven to be most effective in traditional linguistic tasks like summarization and translation. However, another complex generative scenario mathematical reasoning poses significant challenges to embedding-based methods due to its high-density feature of output spaces, but this feature causes larger discrepancies in the embedding shift trajectory between different samples in latent spaces. Hence, we propose a trajectory-based method TV score, which uses trajectory volatility for OOD detection in mathematical reasoning. Experiments show that our method outperforms all traditional algorithms on GLMs under mathematical reasoning scenarios and can be extended to more applications with high-density features in output spaces, such as multiple-choice questions.
XMask3D: Cross-modal Mask Reasoning for Open Vocabulary 3D Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Ziyi Wang; Yanbo Wang; Xumin Yu; Jie Zhou; Jiwen Lu
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Existing methodologies in open vocabulary 3D semantic segmentation primarily concentrate on establishing a unified feature space encompassing 3D, 2D, and textual modalities. Nevertheless, traditional techniques such as global feature alignment or vision-language model distillation tend to impose only approximate correspondence, struggling notably with delineating fine-grained segmentation boundaries. To address this gap, we propose a more meticulous mask-level alignment between 3D features and the 2D-text embedding space through a cross-modal mask reasoning framework, XMask3D. In our approach, we developed a mask generator based on the denoising UNet from a pre-trained diffusion model, leveraging its capability for precise textual control over dense pixel representations and enhancing the open-world adaptability of the generated masks. We further integrate 3D global features as implicit conditions into the pre-trained 2D denoising UNet, enabling the generation of segmentation masks with additional 3D geometry awareness. Subsequently, the generated 2D masks are employed to align mask-level 3D representations with the vision-language feature space, thereby augmenting the open vocabulary capability of 3D geometry embeddings. Finally, we fuse complementary 2D and 3D mask features, resulting in competitive performance across multiple benchmarks for 3D open vocabulary semantic segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/wangzy22/XMask3D.
Quality-Improved and Property-Preserved Polarimetric Imaging via Complementarily Fusing
Authors: Chu Zhou; Yixing Liu; Chao Xu; Boxin Shi
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Polarimetric imaging is a challenging problem in the field of polarization-based vision, since setting a short exposure time reduces the signal-to-noise ratio, making the degree of polarization (DoP) and the angle of polarization (AoP) severely degenerated, while if setting a relatively long exposure time, the DoP and AoP would tend to be over-smoothed due to the frequently-occurring motion blur. This work proposes a polarimetric imaging framework that can produce clean and clear polarized snapshots by complementarily fusing a degraded pair of noisy and blurry ones. By adopting a neural network-based three-phase fusing scheme with specially-designed modules tailored to each phase, our framework can not only improve the image quality but also preserve the polarization properties. Experimental results show that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Long-form factuality in large language models
Authors: Jerry Wei; Chengrun Yang; Xinying Song; Yifeng Lu; Nathan Zixia Hu; Jie Huang; Dustin Tran; Daiyi Peng; Ruibo Liu; Da Huang; Cosmo Du; Quoc V Le
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often generate content that contains factual errors when responding to fact-seeking prompts on open-ended topics. To benchmark a model’s long-form factuality in open domains, we first use GPT-4 to generate LongFact, a prompt set comprising thousands of questions spanning 38 topics. We then propose that LLM agents can be used as automated evaluators for long-form factuality through a method which we call Search-Augmented Factuality Evaluator (SAFE). SAFE utilizes an LLM to break down a long-form response into a set of individual facts and to evaluate the accuracy of each fact using a multi-step reasoning process comprising sending search queries to Google Search and determining whether a fact is supported by the search results. Furthermore, we propose extending F1 score as an aggregated metric for long-form factuality. To do so, we balance the percentage of supported facts in a response (precision) with the percentage of provided facts relative to a hyperparameter representing a user’s preferred response length (recall).

Empirically, we demonstrate that LLM agents can outperform crowdsourced human annotators—on a set of∼16k individual facts, SAFE agrees with crowdsourced human annotators 72% of the time, and on a random subset of 100 disagreement cases, SAFE wins 76% of the time. At the same time, SAFE is more than 20 times cheaper than human annotators.  We also benchmark thirteen language models on LongFact across four model families (Gemini, GPT, Claude, and PaLM-2), finding that larger language models generally achieve better long-form factuality. LongFact, SAFE, and all experimental code are available at https://github.com/google-deepmind/long-form-factuality.
Sparse maximal update parameterization: A holistic approach to sparse training dynamics
Authors: Nolan Simran Dey; Shane Bergsma; Joel Hestness
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Several challenges make it difficult for sparse neural networks to compete with dense models.  First, setting a large fraction of weights to zero impairs forward and gradient signal propagation. Second, sparse studies often need to test multiple sparsity levels, while also introducing new hyperparameters (HPs), leading to prohibitive tuning costs. Indeed, the standard practice is to re-use the learning HPs originally crafted for dense models.  Unfortunately, we show sparse and
dense networks do not share the same optimal HPs. Without stable dynamics and effective training recipes, it is costly to test sparsity at scale, which is key to surpassing dense networks and making the business case for sparsity acceleration in hardware.

A holistic approach is needed to tackle these challenges and we propose S$\textmu$Par as one such approach. For random unstructured static sparsity, S$\textmu$Par ensures activations, gradients, and weight updates all scale independently of sparsity level. Further, by reparameterizing the HPs, S$\textmu$Par enables the same HP values to be optimal as we vary both sparsity level and model width. HPs can be tuned on small dense networks and transferred to large sparse models, greatly reducing tuning costs. On large-scale language modeling, S$\textmu$Par shows increasing improvements over standard parameterization as sparsity increases, leading up to 11.9\% relative loss improvement at 99.2\% sparsity. A minimal implementation of S$\textmu$Par is available at https://github.com/EleutherAI/nanoGPT-mup/tree/supar.
Human-3Diffusion: Realistic Avatar Creation via Explicit 3D Consistent Diffusion Models
Authors: Yuxuan Xue; Xianghui Xie; Riccardo Marin; Gerard Pons-Moll
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Creating realistic avatars from a single RGB image is an attractive yet challenging problem. To deal with challenging loose clothing or occlusion by interaction objects, we leverage powerful shape prior from 2D diffusion models pretrained on large datasets. Although 2D diffusion models demonstrate strong generalization capability, they cannot provide multi-view shape priors with guaranteed 3D consistency. We propose Human-3Diffusion: Realistic Avatar Creation via Explicit 3D Consistent Diffusion. Our key insight is that 2D multi-view diffusion and 3D reconstruction models provide complementary information for each other. By coupling them in a tight manner, we can fully leverage the potential of both models. We introduce a novel image-conditioned generative 3D Gaussian Splats reconstruction model that leverages the prior from 2D multi-view diffusion models, and provides an explicit 3D representation, which further guides the 2D reverse sampling process
to have better 3D consistency. Experiments show that our proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods and enables the creation of realistic avatars from a single RGB image, achieving high-fidelity in both geometry and appearance. Extensive ablations also validate the efficacy of our design, (1) multi-view 2D priors conditioning in generative 3D reconstruction and (2) consistency refinement of sampling trajectory via the explicit 3D representation. Our code and models are released at https://yuxuan-xue.com/human-3diffusion/.
EnsIR: An Ensemble Algorithm for Image Restoration via Gaussian Mixture Models
Authors: Shangquan Sun; Wenqi Ren; Zikun Liu; Hyunhee Park; Rui Wang; Xiaochun Cao
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Image restoration has experienced significant advancements due to the development of deep learning. Nevertheless, it encounters challenges related to ill-posed problems, resulting in deviations between single model predictions and ground-truths. Ensemble learning, as a powerful machine learning technique, aims to address these deviations by combining the predictions of multiple base models. Most existing works adopt ensemble learning during the design of restoration models, while only limited research focuses on the inference-stage ensemble of pre-trained restoration models. Regression-based methods fail to enable efficient inference, leading researchers in academia and industry to prefer averaging as their choice for post-training ensemble. To address this, we reformulate the ensemble problem of image restoration into Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) and employ an expectation maximization (EM)-based algorithm to estimate ensemble weights for aggregating prediction candidates. We estimate the range-wise ensemble weights on a reference set and store them in a lookup table (LUT) for efficient ensemble inference on the test set. Our algorithm is model-agnostic and training-free, allowing seamless integration and enhancement of various pre-trained image restoration models. It consistently outperforms regression-based methods and averaging ensemble approaches on 14 benchmarks across 3 image restoration tasks, including super-resolution, deblurring and deraining. The codes and all estimated weights have been released in Github.
Wild-GS: Real-Time Novel View Synthesis from Unconstrained Photo Collections
Authors: Jiacong Xu; Yiqun Mei; Vishal M. Patel
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Photographs captured in unstructured tourist environments frequently exhibit variable appearances and transient occlusions, challenging accurate scene reconstruction and inducing artifacts in novel view synthesis. Although prior approaches have integrated the Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) with additional learnable modules to handle the dynamic appearances and eliminate transient objects, their extensive training demands and slow rendering speeds limit practical deployments. Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a promising alternative to NeRF, offering superior training and inference efficiency along with better rendering quality. This paper presents \textit{Wild-GS}, an innovative adaptation of 3DGS optimized for unconstrained photo collections while preserving its efficiency benefits. \textit{Wild-GS} determines the appearance of each 3D Gaussian by their inherent material attributes, global illumination and camera properties per image, and point-level local variance of reflectance. Unlike previous methods that model reference features in image space, \textit{Wild-GS} explicitly aligns the pixel appearance features to the corresponding local Gaussians by sampling the triplane extracted from the reference image. This novel design effectively transfers the high-frequency detailed appearance of the reference view to 3D space and significantly expedites the training process. Furthermore, 2D visibility maps and depth regularization are leveraged to mitigate the transient effects and constrain the geometry, respectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \textit{Wild-GS} achieves state-of-the-art rendering performance and the highest efficiency in both training and inference among all the existing techniques. The code can be accessed via: https://github.com/XuJiacong/Wild-GS