OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Multimodal Web Navigation with Instruction-Finetuned Foundation Models
Venue: Conference ICLR 2024
Year: 2024

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.
Estimating Conditional Mutual Information for Dynamic Feature Selection
Venue: Conference ICLR 2024
Year: 2024

Dynamic feature selection, where we sequentially query features to make accurate predictions with a minimal budget, is a promising paradigm to reduce feature acquisition costs and provide transparency into a model's predictions. The problem is challenging, however, as it requires both predicting with arbitrary feature sets and learning a policy to identify valuable selections. Here, we take an information-theoretic perspective and prioritize features based on their mutual information with the response variable. The main challenge is implementing this policy, and we design a new approach that estimates the mutual information in a discriminative rather than generative fashion. Building on our approach, we then introduce several further improvements: allowing variable feature budgets across samples, enabling non-uniform feature costs, incorporating prior information, and exploring modern architectures to handle partial inputs. Our experiments show that our method provides consistent gains over recent methods across a variety of datasets.
Masks, Signs, And Learning Rate Rewinding
Venue: Conference ICLR 2024
Year: 2024

Learning Rate Rewinding (LRR) has been established as a strong variant of Iterative Magnitude Pruning (IMP) to find lottery tickets in deep overparameterized neural networks. While both iterative pruning schemes couple structure and parameter learning, understanding how LRR excels in both aspects can bring us closer to the design of more flexible deep learning algorithms that can optimize diverse sets of sparse architectures. To this end, we conduct experiments that disentangle the effect of mask learning and parameter optimization and how both benefit from overparameterization. The ability of LRR to flip parameter signs early and stay robust to sign perturbations seems to make it not only more effective in mask identification but also in optimizing diverse sets of masks, including random ones. In support of this hypothesis, we prove in a simplified single hidden neuron setting that LRR succeeds in more cases than IMP, as it can escape initially problematic sign configurations.
Distilled Self-Critique of LLMs with Synthetic Data: a Bayesian Perspective
Venue: Conference ICLR 2024
Year: 2024

This paper proposes an interpretation of RLAIF as Bayesian inference by introducing distilled Self-Critique (dSC), which refines the outputs of a LLM through a Gibbs sampler that is later distilled into a fine-tuned model. Only requiring synthetic data, dSC is exercised in experiments regarding safety, sentiment, and privacy control, showing it can be a viable and cheap alternative to align LLMs. Code released at \url{https://github.com/vicgalle/distilled-self-critique}.
InstructCV: Instruction-Tuned Text-to-Image Diffusion Models as Vision Generalists
Venue: Conference ICLR 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advances in generative diffusion models have enabled text-controlled synthesis of realistic and diverse images with impressive quality. Despite these remarkable advances, the application of text-to-image generative models in computer vision for standard visual recognition tasks remains limited. The current de facto approach for these tasks is to design model architectures and loss functions that are tailored to the task at hand. In this paper, we develop a unified language interface for computer vision tasks that abstracts away task-specific design choices and enables task execution by following natural language instructions. Our approach involves casting multiple computer vision tasks as text-to-image generation problems. Here, the text represents an instruction describing the task, and the resulting image is a visually-encoded task output. To train our model, we pool commonly-used computer vision datasets covering a range of tasks, including segmentation, object detection, depth estimation, and classification. We then use a large language model to paraphrase prompt templates that convey the specific tasks to be conducted on each image, and through this process, we create a multi-modal and multi-task training dataset comprising input and output images along with annotated instructions. Following the InstructPix2Pix architecture, we apply instruction-tuning to a text-to-image diffusion model using our constructed dataset, steering its functionality from a generative model to an instruction-guided multi-task vision learner. Experiments demonstrate that our model, dubbed InstructCV, performs competitively compared to other generalist and task-specific vision models. Moreover, it exhibits compelling generalization capabilities to unseen data, categories, and user instructions.
LLM Blueprint: Enabling Text-to-Image Generation with Complex and Detailed Prompts
Venue: Conference ICLR 2024
Year: 2024

Diffusion-based generative models have significantly advanced text-to-image generation but encounter challenges when processing lengthy and intricate text prompts describing complex scenes with multiple objects. While excelling in generating images from short, single-object descriptions, these models often struggle to faithfully capture all the nuanced details within longer and more elaborate textual inputs. In response, we present a novel approach leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract critical components from text prompts, including bounding box coordinates for foreground objects, detailed textual descriptions for individual objects, and a succinct background context. These components form the foundation of our layout-to-image generation model, which operates in two phases. The initial Global Scene Generation utilizes object layouts and background context to create an initial scene but often falls short in faithfully representing object characteristics as specified in the prompts. To address this limitation, we introduce an Iterative Refinement Scheme that iteratively evaluates and refines box-level content to align them with their textual descriptions, recomposing objects as needed to ensure consistency. Our evaluation on complex prompts featuring multiple objects demonstrates a substantial improvement in recall compared to baseline diffusion models. This is further validated by a user study, underscoring the efficacy of our approach in generating coherent and detailed scenes from intricate textual inputs.
PBADet: A One-Stage Anchor-Free Approach for Part-Body Association
Venue: Conference ICLR 2024
Year: 2024

The detection of human parts (e.g., hands, face) and their correct association with individuals is an essential task, e.g., for ubiquitous human-machine interfaces and action recognition. Traditional methods often employ multi-stage processes, rely on cumbersome anchor-based systems, or do not scale well to larger part sets. This paper presents PBADet, a novel one-stage, anchor-free approach for part-body association detection. Building upon the anchor-free object representation across multi-scale feature maps, we introduce a singular part-to-body center offset that effectively encapsulates the relationship between parts and their parent bodies. Our design is inherently versatile and capable of managing multiple parts-to-body associations without compromising on detection accuracy or robustness. Comprehensive experiments on various datasets underscore the efficacy of our approach, which not only outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques but also offers a more streamlined and efficient solution to the part-body association challenge.
Inducing High Energy-Latency of Large Vision-Language Models with Verbose Images
Venue: Conference ICLR 2024
Year: 2024

Large vision-language models (VLMs) such as GPT-4 have achieved exceptional performance across various multi-modal tasks. However, the deployment of VLMs necessitates substantial energy consumption and computational resources. Once attackers maliciously induce high energy consumption and latency time (energy-latency cost) during inference of VLMs, it will exhaust computational resources. In this paper, we explore this attack surface about availability of VLMs and aim to induce high energy-latency cost during inference of VLMs. We find that high energy-latency cost during inference of VLMs can be manipulated by maximizing the length of generated sequences. To this end, we propose verbose images, with the goal of crafting an imperceptible perturbation to induce VLMs to generate long sentences during inference. Concretely, we design three loss objectives. First, a loss is proposed to delay the occurrence of end-of-sequence (EOS) token, where EOS token is a signal for VLMs to stop generating further tokens. Moreover, an uncertainty loss and a token diversity loss are proposed to increase the uncertainty over each generated token and the diversity among all tokens of the whole generated sequence, respectively, which can break output dependency at token-level and sequence-level. Furthermore, a temporal weight adjustment algorithm is proposed, which can effectively balance these losses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our verbose images can increase the length of generated sequences by 7.87 times and 8.56 times compared to original images on MS-COCO and ImageNet datasets, which presents potential challenges for various applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/KuofengGao/Verbose_Images.
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Modelling Protein Complexes
Venue: Conference ICLR 2024
Year: 2024

AlphaFold can be used for both single-chain and multi-chain protein structure prediction, while the latter becomes extremely challenging as the number of chains increases. In this work, by taking each chain as a node and assembly actions as edges, we show that an acyclic undirected connected graph can be used to predict the structure of multi-chain protein complexes (a.k.a., protein complex modelling, PCM). However, there are still two challenges: 1) The huge combinatorial optimization space of $N^{N-2}$ ($N$ is the number of chains) for the PCM problem can easily lead to high computational cost. 2) The scales of protein complexes exhibit distribution shift due to variance in chain numbers, which calls for the generalization in modelling complexes of various scales. To address these challenges, we propose GAPN, a Generative Adversarial Policy Network powered by domain-specific rewards and adversarial loss through policy gradient for automatic PCM prediction. Specifically, GAPN learns to efficiently search through the immense assembly space and optimize the direct docking reward through policy gradient. Importantly, we design an adversarial reward function to enhance the receptive field of our model. In this way, GAPN will simultaneously focus on a specific batch of complexes and the global assembly rules learned from complexes with varied chain numbers. Empirically, we have achieved both significant accuracy (measured by RMSD and TM-Score) and efficiency improvements compared to leading PCM softwares.
Protein Multimer Structure Prediction via Prompt Learning
Venue: Conference ICLR 2024
Year: 2024

Understanding the 3D structures of protein multimers is crucial, as they play a vital role in regulating various cellular processes. It has been empirically confirmed that the multimer structure prediction~(MSP) can be well handled in a step-wise assembly fashion using provided dimer structures and predicted protein-protein interactions~(PPIs). However, due to the biological gap in the formation of dimers and larger multimers, directly applying PPI prediction techniques can often cause a \textit{poor generalization} to the MSP task. To address this challenge, we aim to extend the PPI knowledge to multimers of different scales~(i.e., chain numbers). Specifically, we propose \textbf{\textsc{PromptMSP}}, a pre-training and \textbf{Prompt} tuning framework for \textbf{M}ultimer \textbf{S}tructure \textbf{P}rediction. First, we tailor the source and target tasks for effective PPI knowledge learning and efficient inference, respectively. We design PPI-inspired prompt learning to narrow the gaps of two task formats and generalize the PPI knowledge to multimers of different scales. We provide a meta-learning strategy to learn a reliable initialization of the prompt model, enabling our prompting framework to effectively adapt to limited data for large-scale multimers. Empirically, we achieve both significant accuracy (RMSD and TM-Score) and efficiency improvements compared to advanced MSP models. The code, data and checkpoints are released at \url{https://github.com/zqgao22/PromptMSP}.
TiC-CLIP: Continual Training of CLIP Models
Venue: Conference ICLR 2024
Year: 2024

Keeping large foundation models up to date on latest data is inherently expensive. To avoid the prohibitive costs of constantly retraining, it is imperative to continually train these models. This problem is exacerbated by the lack of any large scale continual learning benchmarks or baselines. We introduce the first set of web-scale Time-Continual (TiC) benchmarks for training vision-language models: TiC-DataComp, TiC-YFCC, and TiC-Redcaps. TiC-DataComp, our largest dataset, contains over 12.7B timestamped image-text pairs spanning 9 years (2014-2022). We first use our benchmarks to curate various dynamic evaluations to measure temporal robustness of existing models. We show OpenAI's CLIP (trained on data up to 2020) loses $\approx 8\%$ zero-shot accuracy on our curated retrieval task from 2021-2022 compared with more recently trained models in OpenCLIP repository. We then study how to efficiently train models on time-continuous data. We demonstrate that a simple rehearsal-based approach that continues training from the last checkpoint and replays old data reduces compute by $2.5\times$ when compared to the standard practice of retraining from scratch. Code is available at https://github.com/apple/ml-tic-clip.
G-PECNet: Towards a Generalizable Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction System
Venue: Conference ICLR 2024
Year: 2024

Navigating dynamic physical environments without obstructing or damaging human assets is of quintessential importance for social robots. In this work, we solve autonomous drone navigation's sub-problem of predicting out-of-domain human and agent trajectories using a deep generative model. Our method: General-PECNet or G-PECNet observes an improvement of 9.5\% on the Final Displacement Error (FDE) on 2020's benchmark: PECNet through a combination of architectural improvements inspired by periodic activation functions and synthetic trajectory (data) augmentations using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and Reinforcement Learning (RL). Additionally, we propose a simple geometry-inspired metric for trajectory non-linearity and outlier detection, helpful for the task. Code available at https://github.com/Aryan-Garg/PECNet-Pedestrian-Trajectory-Prediction.git
Hiding in Plain Sight: Disguising Data Stealing Attacks in Federated Learning
Venue: Conference ICLR 2024
Year: 2024

Malicious server (MS) attacks have enabled the scaling of data stealing in federated learning to large batch sizes and secure aggregation, settings previously considered private. However, many concerns regarding the client-side detectability of MS attacks were raised, questioning their practicality. In this work, for the first time, we thoroughly study client-side detectability. We first demonstrate that all prior MS attacks are detectable by principled checks, and formulate a necessary set of requirements that a practical MS attack must satisfy. Next, we propose SEER, a novel attack framework that satisfies these requirements. The key insight of SEER is the use of a secret decoder, jointly trained with the shared model. We show that SEER can steal user data from gradients of realistic networks, even for large batch sizes of up to 512 and under secure aggregation. Our work is a promising step towards assessing the true vulnerability of federated learning in real-world settings.
Model Tells You What to Discard: Adaptive KV Cache Compression for LLMs
Venue: Conference ICLR 2024
Year: 2024

In this study, we introduce adaptive KV cache compression, a plug-and-play method that reduces the memory footprint of generative inference for Large Language Models (LLMs). Different from the conventional KV cache that retains key and value vectors for all context tokens, we conduct targeted profiling to discern the intrinsic structure of attention modules. Based on the recognized structure, we then construct the KV cache in an adaptive manner: evicting long-range contexts on attention heads emphasizing local contexts, discarding non-special tokens on attention heads centered on special tokens, and only employing the standard KV cache for attention heads that broadly attend to all tokens. Moreover, with the lightweight attention profiling used to guide the construction of the adaptive KV cache, FastGen can be deployed without resource-intensive fine-tuning or re-training. In our experiments across various asks, FastGen demonstrates substantial reduction on GPU memory consumption with negligible generation quality loss. We will release our code and the compatible CUDA kernel for reproducibility.
Approximating Nash Equilibria in Normal-Form Games via Stochastic Optimization
Venue: Conference ICLR 2024
Year: 2024

We propose the first loss function for approximate Nash equilibria of normal-form games that is amenable to unbiased Monte Carlo estimation. This construction allows us to deploy standard non-convex stochastic optimization techniques for approximating Nash equilibria, resulting in novel algorithms with provable guarantees. We complement our theoretical analysis with experiments demonstrating that stochastic gradient descent can outperform previous state-of-the-art approaches.
Motion Guidance: Diffusion-Based Image Editing with Differentiable Motion Estimators
Venue: Conference ICLR 2024
Year: 2024

Diffusion models are capable of generating impressive images conditioned on text descriptions, and extensions of these models allow users to edit images at a relatively coarse scale. However, the ability to precisely edit the layout, position, pose, and shape of objects in images with diffusion models is still difficult. To this end, we propose motion guidance, a zero-shot technique that allows a user to specify dense, complex motion fields that indicate where each pixel in an image should move. Motion guidance works by steering the diffusion sampling process with the gradients through an off-the-shelf optical flow network. Specifically, we design a guidance loss that encourages the sample to have the desired motion, as estimated by a flow network, while also being visually similar to the source image. By simultaneously sampling from a diffusion model and guiding the sample to have low guidance loss, we can obtain a motion-edited image. We demonstrate that our technique works on complex motions and produces high quality edits of real and generated images.
Improving Offline RL by Blending Heuristics
Venue: Conference ICLR 2024
Year: 2024

We propose Heuristic Blending (HUBL), a simple performance-improving technique for a broad class of offline RL algorithms based on value bootstrapping. HUBL modifies the Bellman operators used in these algorithms, partially replacing the bootstrapped values with heuristic ones that are estimated with Monte-Carlo returns. For trajectories with higher returns, HUBL relies more on the heuristic values and less on bootstrapping; otherwise, it leans more heavily on bootstrapping. HUBL is very easy to combine with many existing offline RL implementations by relabeling the offline datasets with adjusted rewards and discount factors. We derive a theory that explains HUBL's effect on offline RL as reducing offline RL's complexity and thus increasing its finite-sample performance. Furthermore, we empirically demonstrate that HUBL consistently improves the policy quality of four state-of-the-art bootstrapping-based offline RL algorithms (ATAC, CQL, TD3+BC, and IQL), by 9% on average over 27 datasets of the D4RL and Meta-World benchmarks.
Zero-shot generalization across architectures for visual classification
Venue: Conference ICLR 2024
Year: 2024

Generalization to unseen data is a key desideratum for deep networks, but its relation to classification accuracy is unclear. Using a minimalist vision dataset and a measure of generalizability, we show that popular networks, from deep convolutional networks (CNNs) to transformers, vary in their power to extrapolate to unseen classes both across layers and across architectures. Accuracy is not a good predictor of generalizability, and generalization varies non-monotonically with layer depth.
Robust Model-Based Optimization for Challenging Fitness Landscapes
Venue: Conference ICLR 2024
Year: 2024

Protein design, a grand challenge of the day, involves optimization on a fitness landscape, and leading methods adopt a model-based approach where a model is trained on a training set (protein sequences and fitness) and proposes candidates to explore next. These methods are challenged by sparsity of high-fitness samples in the training set, a problem that has been in the literature. A less recognized but equally important problem stems from the distribution of training samples in the design space: leading methods are not designed for scenarios where the desired optimum is in a region that is not only poorly represented in training data, but also relatively far from the highly represented low-fitness regions. We show that this problem of "separation" in the design space is a significant bottleneck in existing model-based optimization tools and propose a new approach that uses a novel VAE as its search model to overcome the problem. We demonstrate its advantage over prior methods in robustly finding improved samples, regardless of the imbalance and separation between low- and high-fitness samples. Our comprehensive benchmark on real and semi-synthetic protein datasets as well as solution design for physics-informed neural networks, showcases the generality of our approach in discrete and continuous design spaces. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/sabagh1994/PGVAE.