OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Where's Waldo: Diffusion Features For Personalized Segmentation and Retrieval
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2024
Year: 2024

Personalized retrieval and segmentation aim to locate specific instances within a dataset based on an input image and a short description of the reference instance. While supervised methods are effective, they require extensive labeled data for training. Recently, self-supervised foundation models have been introduced to these tasks showing comparable results to supervised methods. However, a significant flaw in these models is evident: they struggle to locate a desired instance when other instances within the same class are presented. In this paper, we explore text-to-image diffusion models for these tasks. Specifically, we propose a novel approach called PDM for Personalized Features Diffusion Matching, that leverages intermediate features of pre-trained text-to-image models for personalization tasks without any additional training. PDM demonstrates superior performance on popular retrieval and segmentation benchmarks, outperforming even supervised methods. We also highlight notable shortcomings in current instance and segmentation datasets and propose new benchmarks for these tasks.
Equivariant Machine Learning on Graphs with Nonlinear Spectral Filters
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2024
Year: 2024

Equivariant machine learning is an approach for designing deep learning models that respect the symmetries of the problem, with the aim of reducing model complexity and improving generalization. In this paper, we focus on an extension of shift equivariance, which is the basis of convolution networks on images, to general graphs. Unlike images, graphs do not have a natural notion of domain translation. Therefore, we consider the graph functional shifts as the symmetry group: the unitary operators that commute with the graph shift operator. Notably, such symmetries operate in the signal space rather than directly in the spatial space. We remark that each linear filter layer of a standard spectral graph neural network (GNN) commutes with graph functional shifts, but the activation function breaks this symmetry. Instead, we propose nonlinear spectral filters (NLSFs) that are fully equivariant to graph functional shifts and show that they have universal approximation properties. The proposed NLSFs are based on a new form of spectral domain that is transferable between graphs. We demonstrate the superior performance of NLSFs over existing spectral GNNs in node and graph classification benchmarks.
CondTSF: One-line Plugin of Dataset Condensation for Time Series Forecasting
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2024
Year: 2024

Dataset condensation is a newborn technique that generates a small dataset that can be used in training deep neural networks to lower 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 designated as Dataset Condensation for Time Series Forecasting (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.
Query-Based Adversarial Prompt Generation
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2024
Year: 2024

Recent work has shown it is possible to construct adversarial examples that cause an aligned language model to emit harmful strings or perform harmful behavior. Existing attacks work either in the white-box setting (with full access to the model weights), or through transferability: the phenomenon that adversarial examples crafted on one model often remain effective on other models. We improve on prior work with a query-based attack that leverages API access to a remote language model to construct adversarial examples that cause the model to emit harmful strings with (much) higher probability than with transfer-only attacks. We validate our attack on GPT-3.5 and OpenAI's safety classifier; we can cause GPT-3.5 to emit harmful strings that current transfer attacks fail at, and we can evade the safety classifier with nearly 100% probability.
Shared Autonomy with IDA: Interventional Diffusion Assistance
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) has unearthed the potential to assist humans in controlling advanced technologies. Shared autonomy (SA) facilitates control by combining inputs from a human pilot and an AI copilot. In prior SA studies, the copilot is constantly active in determining the action played at each time step. This limits human autonomy and may have deleterious effects on performance. In general, the amount of helpful copilot assistance can vary greatly depending on the task dynamics. We therefore hypothesize that human autonomy and SA performance improve through dynamic and selective copilot intervention. To address this, we develop a goal-agnostic intervention assistance (IA) that dynamically shares control by having the copilot intervene only when the expected value of the copilot's action exceeds that of the human's action across all possible goals. We implement IA with a diffusion copilot (termed IDA) trained on expert demonstrations with goal masking. We prove a lower bound on the performance of IA that depends on pilot and copilot performance. Experiments with simulated human pilots show that IDA achieves higher performance than pilot-only and traditional SA control in variants of the Reacher environment and Lunar Lander. We then demonstrate that IDA achieves better control in Lunar Lander with human-in-the-loop experiments. Human participants report greater autonomy with IDA and prefer IDA over pilot-only and traditional SA control. We attribute the success of IDA to preserving human autonomy while simultaneously offering assistance to prevent the human pilot from entering universally bad states.
Multi-times Monte Carlo Rendering for Inter-reflection Reconstruction
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2024
Year: 2024

Inverse rendering methods have achieved remarkable performance in reconstructing high-fidelity 3D objects with disentangled geometries, materials, and environmental light. However, they still face huge challenges in reflective surface reconstruction. Although recent methods model the light trace to learn specularity, the ignorance of indirect illumination makes it hard to handle inter-reflections among multiple smooth objects. In this work, we propose Ref-MC2 that introduces the multi-time Monte Carlo sampling which comprehensively computes the environmental illumination and meanwhile considers the reflective light from object surfaces. To address the computation challenge as the times of Monte Carlo sampling grow, we propose a specularity-adaptive sampling strategy, significantly reducing the computational complexity. Besides the computational resource, higher geometry accuracy is also required because geometric errors accumulate multiple times. Therefore, we further introduce a reflection-aware surface model to initialize the geometry and refine it during inverse rendering. We construct a challenging dataset containing scenes with multiple objects and inter-reflections. Experiments show that our method outperforms other inverse rendering methods on various object groups. We also show downstream applications, e.g., relighting and material editing, to illustrate the disentanglement ability of our method.
GenArtist: Multimodal LLM as an Agent for Unified Image Generation and Editing
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2024
Year: 2024

Despite the success achieved by existing image generation and editing methods, current models still struggle with complex problems including intricate text prompts, and the absence of verification and self-correction mechanisms makes the generated images unreliable. Meanwhile, a single model tends to specialize in particular tasks and possess the corresponding capabilities, making it inadequate for fulfilling all user requirements. We propose GenArtist, a unified image generation and editing system, coordinated by a multimodal large language model (MLLM) agent. We integrate a comprehensive range of existing models into the tool library and utilize the agent for tool selection and execution. For a complex problem, the MLLM agent decomposes it into simpler sub-problems and constructs a tree structure to systematically plan the procedure of generation, editing, and self-correction with step-by-step verification. By automatically generating missing position-related inputs and incorporating position information, the appropriate tool can be effectively employed to address each sub-problem. Experiments demonstrate that GenArtist can perform various generation and editing tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance and surpassing existing models such as SDXL and DALL-E 3, as can be seen in Fig. 1. Project page is https://zhenyuw16.github.io/GenArtist_page.
Regularized Adaptive Momentum Dual Averaging with an Efficient Inexact Subproblem Solver for Training Structured Neural Network
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2024
Year: 2024

We propose a Regularized Adaptive Momentum Dual Averaging (RAMDA) algorithm for training structured neural networks. Similar to existing regularized adaptive methods, the subproblem for computing the update direction of RAMDA involves a nonsmooth regularizer and a diagonal preconditioner, and therefore does not possess a closed-form solution in general. We thus also carefully devise an implementable inexactness condition that retains convergence guarantees similar to the exact versions, and propose a companion efficient solver for the subproblems of both RAMDA and existing methods to make them practically feasible. We leverage the theory of manifold identification in variational analysis to show that, even in the presence of such inexactness, the iterates of RAMDA attain the ideal structure induced by the regularizer at the stationary point of asymptotic convergence. This structure is locally optimal near the point of convergence, so RAMDA is guaranteed to obtain the best structure possible among all methods converging to the same point, making it the first regularized adaptive method outputting models that possess outstanding predictive performance while being (locally) optimally structured. Extensive numerical experiments in large-scale modern computer vision, language modeling, and speech tasks show that the proposed RAMDA is efficient and consistently outperforms state of the art for training structured neural network. Implementation of our algorithm is available at https://www.github.com/ismoptgroup/RAMDA/.
A hierarchical decomposition for explaining ML performance discrepancies
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2024
Year: 2024

Machine learning (ML) algorithms can often differ in performance across domains. Understanding $\textit{why}$ their performance differs is crucial for determining what types of interventions (e.g., algorithmic or operational) are most effective at closing the performance gaps. Existing methods focus on $\textit{aggregate decompositions}$ of the total performance gap into the impact of a shift in the distribution of features $p(X)$ versus the impact of a shift in the conditional distribution of the outcome $p(Y|X)$; however, such coarse explanations offer only a few options for how one can close the performance gap. $\textit{Detailed variable-level decompositions}$ that quantify the importance of each variable to each term in the aggregate decomposition can provide a much deeper understanding and suggest much more targeted interventions. However, existing methods assume knowledge of the full causal graph or make strong parametric assumptions. We introduce a nonparametric hierarchical framework that provides both aggregate and detailed decompositions for explaining why the performance of an ML algorithm differs across domains, without requiring causal knowledge. We derive debiased, computationally-efficient estimators, and statistical inference procedures for asymptotically valid confidence intervals.
DistrictNet: Decision-aware learning for geographical districting
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2024
Year: 2024

Districting is a complex combinatorial problem that consists in partitioning a geographical area into small districts. In logistics, it is a major strategic decision determining operating costs for several years. Solving districting problems using traditional methods is intractable even for small geographical areas and existing heuristics often provide sub-optimal results. We present a structured learning approach to find high-quality solutions to real-world districting problems in a few minutes. It is based on integrating a combinatorial optimization layer, the capacitated minimum spanning tree problem, into a graph neural network architecture. To train this pipeline in a decision-aware fashion, we show how to construct target solutions embedded in a suitable space and learn from target solutions. Experiments show that our approach outperforms existing methods as it can significantly reduce costs on real-world cities.
Private Algorithms for Stochastic Saddle Points and Variational Inequalities: Beyond Euclidean Geometry
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2024
Year: 2024

In this work, we conduct a systematic study of stochastic saddle point problems (SSP) and stochastic variational inequalities (SVI) under the constraint of $(ε,δ)$-differential privacy (DP) in both Euclidean and non-Euclidean setups. We first consider Lipschitz convex-concave SSPs in the $\ell_p/\ell_q$ setup, $p,q\in[1,2]$. Here, we obtain a bound of $\tilde{O}\big(\frac{1}{\sqrt{n}} + \frac{\sqrt{d}}{nε}\big)$ on the strong SP-gap, where $n$ is the number of samples and $d$ is the dimension. This rate is nearly optimal for any $p,q\in[1,2]$. Without additional assumptions, such as smoothness or linearity requirements, prior work under DP has only obtained this rate when $p=q=2$ (i.e., only in the Euclidean setup). Further, existing algorithms have each only been shown to work for specific settings of $p$ and $q$ and under certain assumptions on the loss and the feasible set, whereas we provide a general algorithm for DP SSPs whenever $p,q\in[1,2]$. Our result is obtained via a novel analysis of the recursive regularization algorithm. In particular, we develop new tools for analyzing generalization, which may be of independent interest. Next, we turn our attention towards SVIs with a monotone, bounded and Lipschitz operator and consider $\ell_p$-setups, $p\in[1,2]$. Here, we provide the first analysis which obtains a bound on the strong VI-gap of $\tilde{O}\big(\frac{1}{\sqrt{n}} + \frac{\sqrt{d}}{nε}\big)$. For $p-1=Ω(1)$, this rate is near optimal due to existing lower bounds. To obtain this result, we develop a modified version of recursive regularization. Our analysis builds on the techniques we develop for SSPs as well as employing additional novel components which handle difficulties arising from adapting the recursive regularization framework to SVIs.
InfiBench: Evaluating the Question-Answering Capabilities of Code Large Language Models
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models for code (code LLMs) have witnessed tremendous progress in recent years. With the rapid development of code LLMs, many popular evaluation benchmarks, such as HumanEval, DS-1000, and MBPP, have emerged to measure the performance of code LLMs with a particular focus on code generation tasks. However, they are insufficient to cover the full range of expected capabilities of code LLMs, which span beyond code generation to answering diverse coding-related questions. To fill this gap, we propose InfiBench, the first large-scale freeform question-answering (QA) benchmark for code to our knowledge, comprising 234 carefully selected high-quality Stack Overflow questions that span across 15 programming languages. InfiBench uses four types of model-free automatic metrics to evaluate response correctness where domain experts carefully concretize the criterion for each question. We conduct a systematic evaluation for over 100 latest code LLMs on InfiBench, leading to a series of novel and insightful findings. Our detailed analyses showcase potential directions for further advancement of code LLMs. InfiBench is fully open source at https://infi-coder.github.io/infibench and continuously expanding to foster more scientific and systematic practices for code LLM evaluation.
SafeWorld: Geo-Diverse Safety Alignment
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2024
Year: 2024

In the rapidly evolving field of Large Language Models (LLMs), ensuring safety is a crucial and widely discussed topic. However, existing works often overlook the geo-diversity of cultural and legal standards across the world. To demonstrate the challenges posed by geo-diverse safety standards, we introduce SafeWorld, a novel benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLMs' ability to generate responses that are not only helpful but also culturally sensitive and legally compliant across diverse global contexts. SafeWorld encompasses 2,342 test user queries, each grounded in high-quality, human-verified cultural norms and legal policies from 50 countries and 493 regions/races. On top of it, we propose a multi-dimensional automatic safety evaluation framework that assesses the contextual appropriateness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness of responses. Our evaluations reveal that current LLMs struggle to meet these criteria. To enhance LLMs' alignment with geo-diverse safety standards, we synthesize helpful preference pairs for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) alignment training. The preference pair construction aims to encourage LLMs to behave appropriately and provide precise references to relevant cultural norms and policies when necessary. Our trained SafeWorldLM outperforms all competing models, including GPT-4o on all three evaluation dimensions by a large margin. Global human evaluators also note a nearly 20% higher winning rate in helpfulness and harmfulness evaluation. Our code and data can be found here: https://github.com/PlusLabNLP/SafeWorld.
HiCo: Hierarchical Controllable Diffusion Model for Layout-to-image Generation
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2024
Year: 2024

The task of layout-to-image generation involves synthesizing images based on the captions of objects and their spatial positions. Existing methods still struggle in complex layout generation, where common bad cases include object missing, inconsistent lighting, conflicting view angles, etc. To effectively address these issues, we propose a \textbf{Hi}erarchical \textbf{Co}ntrollable (HiCo) diffusion model for layout-to-image generation, featuring object seperable conditioning branch structure. Our key insight is to achieve spatial disentanglement through hierarchical modeling of layouts. We use a multi branch structure to represent hierarchy and aggregate them in fusion module. To evaluate the performance of multi-objective controllable layout generation in natural scenes, we introduce the HiCo-7K benchmark, derived from the GRIT-20M dataset and manually cleaned. https://github.com/360CVGroup/HiCo_T2I.
Ctrl-X: Controlling Structure and Appearance for Text-To-Image Generation Without Guidance
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2024
Year: 2024

Recent controllable generation approaches such as FreeControl and Diffusion Self-Guidance bring fine-grained spatial and appearance control to text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models without training auxiliary modules. However, these methods optimize the latent embedding for each type of score function with longer diffusion steps, making the generation process time-consuming and limiting their flexibility and use. This work presents Ctrl-X, a simple framework for T2I diffusion controlling structure and appearance without additional training or guidance. Ctrl-X designs feed-forward structure control to enable the structure alignment with a structure image and semantic-aware appearance transfer to facilitate the appearance transfer from a user-input image. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments illustrate the superior performance of Ctrl-X on various condition inputs and model checkpoints. In particular, Ctrl-X supports novel structure and appearance control with arbitrary condition images of any modality, exhibits superior image quality and appearance transfer compared to existing works, and provides instant plug-and-play functionality to any T2I and text-to-video (T2V) diffusion model. See our project page for an overview of the results: https://genforce.github.io/ctrl-x
An Image is Worth 32 Tokens for Reconstruction and Generation
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advancements in generative models have highlighted the crucial role of image tokenization in the efficient synthesis of high-resolution images. Tokenization, which transforms images into latent representations, reduces computational demands compared to directly processing pixels and enhances the effectiveness and efficiency of the generation process. Prior methods, such as VQGAN, typically utilize 2D latent grids with fixed downsampling factors. However, these 2D tokenizations face challenges in managing the inherent redundancies present in images, where adjacent regions frequently display similarities. To overcome this issue, we introduce Transformer-based 1-Dimensional Tokenizer (TiTok), an innovative approach that tokenizes images into 1D latent sequences. TiTok provides a more compact latent representation, yielding substantially more efficient and effective representations than conventional techniques. For example, a 256 x 256 x 3 image can be reduced to just 32 discrete tokens, a significant reduction from the 256 or 1024 tokens obtained by prior methods. Despite its compact nature, TiTok achieves competitive performance to state-of-the-art approaches. Specifically, using the same generator framework, TiTok attains 1.97 gFID, outperforming MaskGIT baseline significantly by 4.21 at ImageNet 256 x 256 benchmark. The advantages of TiTok become even more significant when it comes to higher resolution. At ImageNet 512 x 512 benchmark, TiTok not only outperforms state-of-the-art diffusion model DiT-XL/2 (gFID 2.74 vs. 3.04), but also reduces the image tokens by 64x, leading to 410x faster generation process. Our best-performing variant can significantly surpasses DiT-XL/2 (gFID 2.13 vs. 3.04) while still generating high-quality samples 74x faster.