GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Learning Mask Invariant Mutual Information for Masked Image Modeling
Authors: Tao Huang; Yanxiang Ma; Shan You; Chang Xu
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Masked autoencoders (MAEs) represent a prominent self-supervised learning paradigm in computer vision. Despite their empirical success, the underlying mechanisms of MAEs remain insufficiently understood. Recent studies have attempted to elucidate the functioning of MAEs through contrastive learning and feature representation analysis, yet these approaches often provide only implicit insights. In this paper, we propose a new perspective for understanding MAEs by leveraging the information bottleneck principle in information theory. Our theoretical analyses reveal that optimizing the latent features to balance relevant and irrelevant information is key to improving MAE performance. Building upon our proofs, we introduce MI-MAE, a novel method that optimizes MAEs through mutual information maximization and minimization. By enhancing latent features to retain maximal relevant information between them and the output, and minimizing irrelevant information between them and the input, our approach achieves better performance. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks show that MI-MAE significantly outperforms MAE models in tasks such as image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. Our findings validate the theoretical framework and highlight the practical advantages of applying the information bottleneck principle to MAEs, offering deeper insights for developing more powerful self-supervised learning models.
UniRestore3D: A Scalable Framework For General Shape Restoration
Authors: Yuang Wang; Yujian Zhang; Sida Peng; Xingyi He; Haoyu Guo; Yujun Shen; Hujun Bao; Xiaowei Zhou
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Shape restoration aims to recover intact 3D shapes from defective ones, such as those that are incomplete, noisy, and low-resolution. Previous works have achieved impressive results in shape restoration subtasks thanks to advanced generative models. While effective for specific shape defects, they are less applicable in real-world scenarios involving multiple defect types simultaneously. Additionally, training on limited subsets of defective shapes hinders knowledge transfer across restoration types and thus affects generalization. In this paper, we address the task of general shape restoration, which restores shapes with various types of defects through a unified model, thereby naturally improving the applicability and scalability. Our approach first standardizes the data representation across different restoration subtasks using high-resolution TSDF grids and constructs a large-scale dataset with diverse types of shape defects. Next, we design an efficient hierarchical shape generation model and a noise-robust defective shape encoder that enables effective impaired shape understanding and intact shape generation. Moreover, we propose a scalable training strategy for efficient model training. The capabilities of our proposed method are demonstrated across multiple shape restoration subtasks and validated on various datasets, including Objaverse, ShapeNet, GSO, and ABO.
Painting with Words: Elevating Detailed Image Captioning with Benchmark and Alignment Learning
Authors: Qinghao Ye; Xianhan Zeng; Fu Li; Chunyuan Li; Haoqi Fan
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Image captioning has long been a pivotal task in visual understanding, with recent advancements in vision-language models (VLMs) significantly enhancing the ability to generate detailed image captions. However, the evaluation of detailed image captioning remains underexplored due to outdated evaluation metrics and coarse annotations. In this paper, we introduce DeCapBench along with a novel metric, DCScore, specifically designed for detailed captioning tasks. DCScore evaluates hallucinations and fine-grained comprehensiveness by deconstructing responses into the smallest self-sufficient units, termed primitive information units, and assessing them individually. Our evaluation shows that DCScore aligns more closely with human judgment than other rule-based or model-based metrics. Concurrently, DeCapBench exhibits a high correlation with VLM arena results on descriptive tasks, surpassing existing benchmarks for vision-language models. Additionally, we present an automatic fine-grained feedback collection method, FeedQuill, for preference optimization based on our advanced metric, demonstrating robust generalization capabilities across auto-generated preference data. Extensive experiments on multiple VLMs demonstrate that our method not only significantly reduces hallucinations but also enhances performance across various benchmarks, achieving superior detail captioning performance while surpassing GPT-4o.
LLaMA-Omni: Seamless Speech Interaction with Large Language Models
Authors: Qingkai Fang; Shoutao Guo; Yan Zhou; Zhengrui Ma; Shaolei Zhang; Yang Feng
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Models like GPT-4o enable real-time interaction with large language models (LLMs) through speech, significantly enhancing user experience compared to traditional text-based interaction. However, there is still a lack of exploration on how to build speech interaction models based on open-source LLMs. To address this, we propose LLaMA-Omni, a novel model architecture designed for low-latency and high-quality speech interaction with LLMs. LLaMA-Omni integrates a pretrained speech encoder, a speech adaptor, an LLM, and a streaming speech decoder. It eliminates the need for speech transcription, and can simultaneously generate text and speech responses directly from speech instructions with extremely low latency. We build our model based on the latest Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct model. To align the model with speech interaction scenarios, we construct a dataset named InstructS2S-200K, which includes 200K speech instructions and corresponding speech responses. Experimental results show that compared to previous speech-language models, LLaMA-Omni provides better responses in both content and style, with a response latency as low as 226ms. Additionally, training LLaMA-Omni takes less than 3 days on just 4 GPUs, paving the way for the efficient development of speech-language models in the future.
TaskGalaxy: Scaling Multi-modal Instruction Fine-tuning with Tens of Thousands Vision Task Types
Authors: Jiankang Chen; Tianke Zhang; Changyi Liu; Haojie Ding; Yaya Shi; cheng.feng; Huihui Xiao; Bin Wen; Fan Yang; Tingting Gao; Di ZHANG
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Multimodal visual language models are gaining prominence in open-world applications, driven by advancements in model architectures, training techniques, and high-quality data. However, their performance is often limited by insufficient task-specific data, leading to poor generalization and biased outputs. Existing efforts to increase task diversity in fine-tuning datasets are hindered by the labor-intensive process of manual task labeling, which typically produces only a few hundred task types. To address this, we propose TaskGalaxy, a large-scale multimodal instruction fine-tuning dataset comprising 19,227 hierarchical task types and 413,648 samples. TaskGalaxy utilizes GPT-4o to enrich task diversity by expanding from a small set of manually defined tasks, with CLIP and GPT-4o filtering those that best match open-source images, and generating relevant question-answer pairs. Multiple models are employed to ensure sample quality. This automated process enhances both task diversity and data quality, reducing manual intervention. Incorporating TaskGalaxy into LLaVA-v1.5 and InternVL-Chat-v1.0 models shows substantial performance improvements across 16 benchmarks, demonstrating the critical importance of task diversity. TaskGalaxy is publicly released at https://github.com/Kwai-YuanQi/TaskGalaxy.
MIM-Refiner: A Contrastive Learning Boost from Intermediate Pre-Trained Masked Image Modeling Representations
Authors: Benedikt Alkin; Lukas Miklautz; Sepp Hochreiter; Johannes Brandstetter
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: We introduce MIM (Masked Image Modeling)-Refiner, a contrastive learning boost for pre-trained MIM models. MIM-Refiner is motivated by the insight that strong representations within MIM models generally reside in intermediate layers. Accordingly, MIM-Refiner leverages multiple instance discrimination (ID) heads that are connected to different intermediate layers. In each head, a nearest neighbor ID objective constructs clusters that capture semantic information which improves performance on downstream tasks, including off-the-shelf and fine-tuning settings.

The refinement process is short and simple -  yet highly effective. Within a few epochs, we refine the features of MIM models from subpar to state-of-the-art, off-the-shelf features. Refining a ViT-H, pre-trained with data2vec 2.0 on ImageNet-1K, sets a new state-of-the-art in linear probing (84.7\%) and low-shot classification among models that are pre-trained on ImageNet-1K. MIM-Refiner efficiently combines the advantages of MIM and ID objectives, enabling scaling ID objectives to billion parameter models using relatively little compute. MIM-Refiner compares favorably against previous state-of-the-art SSL models on various benchmarks such as low-shot classification, long-tailed classification and semantic segmentation.
Exploiting Hidden Symmetry to Improve Objective Perturbation for DP Linear Learners with a Nonsmooth L1-Norm
Authors: Du Chen; Geoffrey A. Chua
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Objective Perturbation (OP) is a classic approach to differentially private (DP) convex optimization with smooth loss functions but is less understood for nonsmooth cases. In this work, we study how to apply OP to DP linear learners under loss functions with an implicit $\ell_1$-norm structure, such as $\max(0,x)$ as a motivating example. We propose to first smooth out the implicit $\ell_1$-norm by convolution, and then invoke standard OP. Convolution has many advantages that distinguish itself from Moreau Envelope, such as approximating from above and a higher degree of hyperparameters. These advantages, in conjunction with the symmetry of $\ell_1$-norm, result in tighter pointwise approximation, which further facilitates tighter analysis of generalization risks by using pointwise bounds. Under mild assumptions on groundtruth distributions, the proposed OP-based algorithm is found to be rate-optimal, and can achieve the excess generalization risk $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{\sqrt{n}}+\frac{\sqrt{d\ln(1/\delta)}}{n\varepsilon})$. Experiments demonstrate the competitive performance of the proposed method to Noisy-SGD.
ESE: Espresso Sentence Embeddings
Authors: Xianming LI; Zongxi Li; Jing Li; Haoran Xie; Qing Li
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: High-quality sentence embeddings are fundamental in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as semantic textual similarity (STS) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). However, most existing methods leverage fixed-length sentence embeddings from full-layer language models, which lack the scalability to accommodate the diverse available resources across various applications. Viewing this gap, we propose a novel sentence embedding model Espresso Sentence Embeddings (ESE) with two learning processes. First, the learn-to-express process encodes more salient representations to shallow layers. Second, the learn-to-compress process compacts essential features into the initial dimensions using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). This way, ESE can scale model depth via the former process and embedding size via the latter. Extensive experiments on STS and RAG suggest that ESE can effectively produce high-quality sentence embeddings with less model depth and embedding size, enhancing inference efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/SeanLee97/AnglE/blob/main/README_ESE.md.
Vision-LSTM: xLSTM as Generic Vision Backbone
Authors: Benedikt Alkin; Maximilian Beck; Korbinian Pöppel; Sepp Hochreiter; Johannes Brandstetter
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Transformers are widely used as generic backbones in computer vision, despite initially introduced for natural language processing. Recently, the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) has been extended to a scalable and performant architecture - the xLSTM - which overcomes long-standing LSTM limitations via exponential gating and parallelizable matrix memory structure. In this paper, we introduce Vision-LSTM (ViL), an adaption of the xLSTM building blocks to computer vision. ViL comprises a stack of xLSTM blocks where odd blocks process the sequence of patch tokens from top to bottom while even blocks go from bottom to top.

ViL achieves strong performances on classification, transfer learning and segmentation tasks as well as a beneficial pre-training cost-to-performance trade-off. Experiments show that ViL holds promise to be further deployed as new generic backbone for computer vision architectures.
On the Fourier analysis in the SO(3) space : the EquiLoPO Network
Authors: Dmitrii Zhemchuzhnikov; Sergei Grudinin
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Analyzing volumetric data with rotational invariance or equivariance is currently an active research topic. Existing deep-learning approaches utilize either group convolutional networks limited to discrete rotations or steerable convolutional networks with constrained filter structures. This work proposes a novel equivariant neural network architecture that achieves analytical Equivariance to Local Pattern Orientation on the continuous SO(3) group while allowing unconstrained trainable filters - EquiLoPO Network. Our key innovations are a group convolutional operation leveraging irreducible representations as the Fourier basis and a local activation function in the SO(3) space that provides a well-defined mapping from input to output functions, preserving equivariance. By integrating these operations into a ResNet-style architecture, we propose a model that overcomes the limitations of prior methods. A comprehensive evaluation on diverse 3D medical imaging datasets from MedMNIST3D demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach, which consistently outperforms state of the art. This work suggests the benefits of true rotational equivariance on SO(3) and flexible unconstrained filters enabled by the local activation function, providing a flexible framework for equivariant deep learning on volumetric data with potential applications across domains. Our code is publicly available at https://gricad-gitlab.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/GruLab/ILPO/-/tree/main/EquiLoPO.
Breaking Class Barriers: Efficient Dataset Distillation via Inter-Class Feature Compensator
Authors: Xin Zhang; Jiawei Du; Ping Liu; Joey Tianyi Zhou
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Dataset distillation has emerged as a technique aiming to condense informative features from large, natural datasets into a compact and synthetic form. While recent advancements have refined this technique, its performance is bottlenecked by the prevailing class-specific synthesis paradigm. Under this paradigm, synthetic data is optimized exclusively for a pre-assigned one-hot label, creating an implicit class barrier in feature condensation. This leads to inefficient utilization of the distillation budget and oversight of inter-class feature distributions, which ultimately limits the effectiveness and efficiency, as demonstrated in our analysis.
To overcome these constraints, this paper presents the Inter-class Feature Compensator (INFER), an innovative distillation approach that transcends the class-specific data-label framework widely utilized in current dataset distillation methods. Specifically, INFER leverages a Universal Feature Compensator (UFC) to enhance feature integration across classes, enabling the generation of multiple additional synthetic instances from a single UFC input. This significantly improves the efficiency of the distillation budget.
Moreover, INFER enriches inter-class interactions during the distillation, thereby enhancing the effectiveness and generalizability of the distilled data. By allowing for the linear interpolation of labels similar to those in the original dataset, INFER meticulously optimizes the synthetic data and dramatically reduces the size of soft labels in the synthetic dataset to almost zero, establishing a new benchmark for efficiency and effectiveness in dataset distillation. In practice, INFER demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across benchmark datasets. For instance, in the $\texttt{ipc} = 50$ setting on ImageNet-1k with the same compression level, it outperforms SRe2L by 34.5\% using ResNet18. Codes are available at https://github.com/zhangxin-xd/UFC.
Test-time Alignment of Diffusion Models without Reward Over-optimization
Authors: Sunwoo Kim; Minkyu Kim; Dongmin Park
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Spotlight)

Abstract: Diffusion models excel in generative tasks, but aligning them with specific objectives while maintaining their versatility remains challenging. Existing fine-tuning methods often suffer from reward over-optimization, while approximate guidance approaches fail to optimize target rewards effectively. Addressing these limitations, we propose a training-free, test-time method based on Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) to sample from the reward-aligned target distribution. Our approach, tailored for diffusion sampling and incorporating tempering techniques, achieves comparable or superior target rewards to fine-tuning methods while preserving diversity and cross-reward generalization. We demonstrate its effectiveness in single-reward optimization, multi-objective scenarios, and online black-box optimization. This work offers a robust solution for aligning diffusion models with diverse downstream objectives without compromising their general capabilities. Code is available at https://github.com/krafton-ai/DAS.
Robust Conformal Prediction with a Single Binary Certificate
Authors: Soroush H. Zargarbashi; Aleksandar Bojchevski
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Conformal prediction (CP) converts any model's output to prediction sets with a guarantee to cover the true label with (adjustable) high probability. Robust CP extends this guarantee to worst-case (adversarial) inputs. Existing baselines achieve robustness by bounding randomly smoothed conformity scores. In practice, they need expensive Monte-Carlo (MC) sampling (e.g. $\sim10^4$ samples per point) to maintain an acceptable set size. We propose a robust conformal prediction that produces smaller sets even with significantly lower MC samples (e.g. 150 for CIFAR10). Our approach binarizes samples with an adjustable (or automatically adjusted) threshold selected to preserve the coverage guarantee. Remarkably, we prove that robustness can be achieved by computing only one binary certificate, unlike previous methods that certify each calibration (or test) point. Thus, our method is faster and returns smaller robust sets. We also eliminate a previous limitation that requires a bounded score function.
Selective Induction Heads: How Transformers Select Causal Structures in Context
Authors: Francesco D'Angelo; Francesco Croce; Nicolas Flammarion
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Transformers have exhibited exceptional capabilities in sequence modelling tasks, leveraging self-attention and in-context learning. Critical to this success are induction heads, attention circuits that enable copying tokens based on their previous occurrences. In this work, we introduce a novel synthetic framework designed to enable the theoretical analysis of transformers’ ability to dynamically handle causal structures. Existing works rely on Markov Chains to study the formation of induction heads, revealing how transformers capture causal dependencies and learn transition probabilities in-context. However, they rely on a fixed causal structure that fails to capture the complexity of natural languages, where the relationship between tokens dynamically changes with context.  To this end, our framework varies the causal structure through interleaved Markov chains with different lags while keeping the transition probabilities fixed. This setting unveils the formation of Selective Induction Heads, a new circuit that endows transformers with the ability to select the correct causal structure in-context. We empirically demonstrate that attention-only transformers learn this mechanism to predict the next token by identifying the correct lag and copying the corresponding token from the past. We provide a detailed construction of a 3-layer transformer to implement the selective induction head, and a theoretical analysis proving that this mechanism asymptotically converges to the maximum likelihood solution. Our findings advance the theoretical understanding of how transformers select causal structures, providing new insights into their functioning and interpretability.
NeuralPlane: Structured 3D Reconstruction in Planar Primitives with Neural Fields
Authors: Hanqiao Ye; Yuzhou Liu; Yangdong Liu; Shuhan Shen
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Oral)

Abstract: 3D maps assembled from planar primitives are compact and expressive in representing man-made environments. In this paper, we present **NeuralPlane**, a novel approach that explores **neural** fields for multi-view 3D **plane** reconstruction. Our method is centered upon the core idea of distilling geometric and semantic cues from inconsistent 2D plane observations into a unified 3D neural representation, which unlocks the full leverage of plane attributes. It is accomplished through several key designs, including: 1) a monocular module that generates geometrically smooth and semantically meaningful segments known as 2D plane observations, 2) a plane-guided training procedure that implicitly learns accurate 3D geometry from the multi-view plane observations, and 3) a self-supervised feature field termed *Neural Coplanarity Field* that enables the modeling of scene semantics alongside the geometry. Without relying on prior plane annotations, our method achieves high-fidelity reconstruction comprising planar primitives that are not only crisp but also well-aligned with the semantic content. Comprehensive experiments on ScanNetv2 and ScanNet++ demonstrate the superiority of our method in both geometry and semantics.
PEARL: Parallel Speculative Decoding with Adaptive Draft Length
Authors: Tianyu Liu; Yun Li; Qitan Lv; Kai Liu; Jianchen Zhu; Winston Hu; Xiao Sun
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Speculative decoding (SD), where an extra draft model is employed to provide multiple **draft** tokens first and then the original target model verifies these tokens in parallel, has shown great power for LLM inference acceleration.
However, existing SD methods suffer from the mutual waiting problem, i.e., the target model gets stuck when the draft model is *guessing* tokens, and vice versa. This problem is directly incurred by the asynchronous execution of the draft model and the target model, and is exacerbated due to the fixed draft length in speculative decoding.
To address these challenges, we propose a conceptually simple, flexible, and general framework to boost speculative decoding, namely 
**P**arallel sp**E**culative decoding with **A**daptive d**R**aft **L**ength (PEARL). 
Specifically, PEARL proposes *pre-verify* to verify the first draft token in advance during the drafting phase, and *post-verify* to generate more draft tokens during the verification phase.
PEARL parallels the drafting phase and the verification phase via applying the two strategies, and achieves adaptive draft length for different scenarios, which effectively alleviates the mutual waiting problem.
Experiments on various text generation benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our PEARL, leading to a superior speedup performance up to **4.43$\times$** and **1.50$\times$**, compared to auto-regressive decoding and vanilla speculative decoding, respectively.