Daily Papers

Phonetic Cloaking Replacement (PCR), defined as the deliberate use of homophonic or near-homophonic variants to hide toxic intent, has become a major obstacle to Chinese content moderation. While this problem is well-recognized, existing evaluations predominantly rely on rule-based, synthetic perturbations that ignore the creativity of real users. We organize PCR into a four-way surface-form taxonomy and compile \ours, a dataset of 500 naturally occurring, phonetically cloaked offensive posts gathered from the RedNote platform. Benchmarking state-of-the-art LLMs on this dataset exposes a serious weakness: the best model reaches only an F1-score of 0.672, and zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting pushes performance even lower. Guided by error analysis, we revisit a Pinyin-based prompting strategy that earlier studies judged ineffective and show that it recovers much of the lost accuracy. This study offers the first comprehensive taxonomy of Chinese PCR, a realistic benchmark that reveals current detectors' limits, and a lightweight mitigation technique that advances research on robust toxicity detection.

The growth of the Machine-Learning-As-A-Service (MLaaS) market has highlighted clients' data privacy and security issues. Private inference (PI) techniques using cryptographic primitives offer a solution but often have high computation and communication costs, particularly with non-linear operators like ReLU. Many attempts to reduce ReLU operations exist, but they may need heuristic threshold selection or cause substantial accuracy loss. This work introduces AutoReP, a gradient-based approach to lessen non-linear operators and alleviate these issues. It automates the selection of ReLU and polynomial functions to speed up PI applications and introduces distribution-aware polynomial approximation (DaPa) to maintain model expressivity while accurately approximating ReLUs. Our experimental results demonstrate significant accuracy improvements of 6.12% (94.31%, 12.9K ReLU budget, CIFAR-10), 8.39% (74.92%, 12.9K ReLU budget, CIFAR-100), and 9.45% (63.69%, 55K ReLU budget, Tiny-ImageNet) over current state-of-the-art methods, e.g., SNL. Morever, AutoReP is applied to EfficientNet-B2 on ImageNet dataset, and achieved 75.55% accuracy with 176.1 times ReLU budget reduction.

In this paper, we present a light-weight detection transformer, LW-DETR, which outperforms YOLOs for real-time object detection. The architecture is a simple stack of a ViT encoder, a projector, and a shallow DETR decoder. Our approach leverages recent advanced techniques, such as training-effective techniques, e.g., improved loss and pretraining, and interleaved window and global attentions for reducing the ViT encoder complexity. We improve the ViT encoder by aggregating multi-level feature maps, and the intermediate and final feature maps in the ViT encoder, forming richer feature maps, and introduce window-major feature map organization for improving the efficiency of interleaved attention computation. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is superior over existing real-time detectors, e.g., YOLO and its variants, on COCO and other benchmark datasets. Code and models are available at (https://github.com/Atten4Vis/LW-DETR).

Computer vision has long relied on ImageNet and other large datasets of images sampled from the Internet for pretraining models. However, these datasets have ethical and technical shortcomings, such as containing personal information taken without consent, unclear license usage, biases, and, in some cases, even problematic image content. On the other hand, state-of-the-art pretraining is nowadays obtained with unsupervised methods, meaning that labelled datasets such as ImageNet may not be necessary, or perhaps not even optimal, for model pretraining. We thus propose an unlabelled dataset PASS: Pictures without humAns for Self-Supervision. PASS only contains images with CC-BY license and complete attribution metadata, addressing the copyright issue. Most importantly, it contains no images of people at all, and also avoids other types of images that are problematic for data protection or ethics. We show that PASS can be used for pretraining with methods such as MoCo-v2, SwAV and DINO. In the transfer learning setting, it yields similar downstream performances to ImageNet pretraining even on tasks that involve humans, such as human pose estimation. PASS does not make existing datasets obsolete, as for instance it is insufficient for benchmarking. However, it shows that model pretraining is often possible while using safer data, and it also provides the basis for a more robust evaluation of pretraining methods.

Portrait harmonization aims to composite a subject into a new background, adjusting its lighting and color to ensure harmony with the background scene. Existing harmonization techniques often only focus on adjusting the global color and brightness of the foreground and ignore crucial illumination cues from the background such as apparent lighting direction, leading to unrealistic compositions. We introduce Relightful Harmonization, a lighting-aware diffusion model designed to seamlessly harmonize sophisticated lighting effect for the foreground portrait using any background image. Our approach unfolds in three stages. First, we introduce a lighting representation module that allows our diffusion model to encode lighting information from target image background. Second, we introduce an alignment network that aligns lighting features learned from image background with lighting features learned from panorama environment maps, which is a complete representation for scene illumination. Last, to further boost the photorealism of the proposed method, we introduce a novel data simulation pipeline that generates synthetic training pairs from a diverse range of natural images, which are used to refine the model. Our method outperforms existing benchmarks in visual fidelity and lighting coherence, showing superior generalization in real-world testing scenarios, highlighting its versatility and practicality.

Replacing the background and simultaneously adjusting foreground objects is a challenging task in image editing. Current techniques for generating such images relies heavily on user interactions with image editing softwares, which is a tedious job for professional retouchers. To reduce their workload, some exciting progress has been made on generating images with a given background. However, these models can neither adjust the position and scale of the foreground objects, nor guarantee the semantic consistency between foreground and background. To overcome these limitations, we propose a framework -- ART(Auto-Retoucher), to generate images with sufficient semantic and spatial consistency. Images are first processed by semantic matting and scene parsing modules, then a multi-task verifier model will give two confidence scores for the current background and position setting. We demonstrate that our jointly optimized verifier model successfully improves the visual consistency, and our ART framework performs well on images with the human body as foregrounds.

Time series models face significant challenges in scaling to handle large and complex datasets, akin to the scaling achieved by large language models (LLMs). The unique characteristics of time series data and the computational demands of model scaling necessitate innovative approaches. While researchers have explored various architectures such as Transformers, LSTMs, and GRUs to address these challenges, we propose a novel solution using RWKV-7, which incorporates meta-learning into its state update mechanism. By integrating RWKV-7's time mix and channel mix components into the transformer-based time series model Timer, we achieve a substantial performance improvement of approximately 1.13 to 43.3x and a 4.5x reduction in training time with 1/23 parameters, all while utilizing fewer parameters. Our code and model weights are publicly available for further research and development at https://github.com/Alic-Li/BlackGoose_Rimer.

Learning compatible representations enables the interchangeable use of semantic features as models are updated over time. This is particularly relevant in search and retrieval systems where it is crucial to avoid reprocessing of the gallery images with the updated model. While recent research has shown promising empirical evidence, there is still a lack of comprehensive theoretical understanding about learning compatible representations. In this paper, we demonstrate that the stationary representations learned by the d-Simplex fixed classifier optimally approximate compatibility representation according to the two inequality constraints of its formal definition. This not only establishes a solid foundation for future works in this line of research but also presents implications that can be exploited in practical learning scenarios. An exemplary application is the now-standard practice of downloading and fine-tuning new pre-trained models. Specifically, we show the strengths and critical issues of stationary representations in the case in which a model undergoing sequential fine-tuning is asynchronously replaced by downloading a better-performing model pre-trained elsewhere. Such a representation enables seamless delivery of retrieval service (i.e., no reprocessing of gallery images) and offers improved performance without operational disruptions during model replacement. Code available at: https://github.com/miccunifi/iamcl2r.

Speculative decoding is an inference-acceleration method for large language models (LLMs) where a small language model generates a draft-token sequence which is further verified by the target LLM in parallel. Recent works have advanced this method by establishing a draft-token tree, achieving superior performance over a single-sequence speculative decoding. However, those works independently generate tokens at each level of the tree, not leveraging the tree's entire diversifiability. Besides, their empirical superiority has been shown for fixed length of sequences, implicitly granting more computational resource to LLM for the tree-based methods. None of the existing works has conducted empirical studies with fixed target computational budgets despite its importance to resource-bounded devices. We present Recursive Speculative Decoding (RSD), a novel tree-based method that samples draft tokens without replacement and maximizes the diversity of the tree. During RSD's drafting, the tree is built by either Gumbel-Top-k trick that draws tokens without replacement in parallel or Stochastic Beam Search that samples sequences without replacement while early-truncating unlikely draft sequences and reducing the computational cost of LLM. We empirically evaluate RSD with Llama 2 and OPT models, showing that RSD outperforms the baseline methods, consistently for fixed draft sequence length and in most cases for fixed computational budgets at LLM.

In recent years, groundbreaking advancements in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) have triggered a transformative paradigm shift, significantly influencing various domains. In this work, we specifically explore an integrated approach, leveraging advanced techniques in GenAI and computer vision emphasizing image manipulation. The methodology unfolds through several stages, including depth estimation, the creation of inpaint masks based on depth information, the generation and replacement of backgrounds utilizing Stable Diffusion in conjunction with Latent Consistency Models (LCMs), and the subsequent replacement of clothes and application of aesthetic changes through an inpainting pipeline. Experiments conducted in this study underscore the methodology's efficacy, highlighting its potential to produce visually captivating content. The convergence of these advanced techniques allows users to input photographs of individuals and manipulate them to modify clothing and background based on specific prompts without manually input inpainting masks, effectively placing the subjects within the vast landscape of creative imagination.

In this paper we address the problem of fine-tuned text generation with a limited computational budget. For that, we use a well-performing text generative adversarial network (GAN) architecture - Diversity-Promoting GAN (DPGAN), and attempted a drop-in replacement of the LSTM layer with a self-attention-based Transformer layer in order to leverage their efficiency. The resulting Self-Attention DPGAN (SADPGAN) was evaluated for performance, quality and diversity of generated text and stability. Computational experiments suggested that a transformer architecture is unable to drop-in replace the LSTM layer, under-performing during the pre-training phase and undergoing a complete mode collapse during the GAN tuning phase. Our results suggest that the transformer architecture need to be adapted before it can be used as a replacement for RNNs in text-generating GANs.

Specialized hardware accelerators have been extensively used for Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to provide power/performance benefits. These accelerators contain specialized hardware that supports DNN operators, and scratchpad memory for storing the tensor operands. Often, the size of the scratchpad is insufficient to store all the tensors needed for the computation, and additional data accesses are needed to move tensors back and forth from host memory during the computation with significant power/performance overhead. The volume of these additional data accesses depends on the operator schedule, and memory allocation (specific locations selected for the tensors in the scratchpad). We propose an optimization framework, named COSMA, for mapping DNNs to an accelerator that finds the optimal operator schedule, memory allocation and tensor replacement that minimizes the additional data accesses. COSMA provides an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation to generate the optimal solution for mapping a DNN to the accelerator for a given scratchpad size. We demonstrate that, using an off-the-shelf ILP solver, COSMA obtains the optimal solution in seconds for a wide-range of state-of-the-art DNNs for different applications. Further, it out-performs existing methods by reducing on average 84% of the non-compulsory data accesses. We further propose a divide-and-conquer heuristic to scale up to certain complex DNNs generated by Neural Architecture Search, and this heuristic solution reduces on average 85% data accesses compared with other works.

We introduce RE-Adapt, an approach to fine-tuning large language models on new domains without degrading any pre-existing instruction-tuning. We reverse engineer an adapter which isolates what an instruction-tuned model has learned beyond its corresponding pretrained base model. Importantly, this requires no additional data or training. We can then fine-tune the base model on a new domain and readapt it to instruction following with the reverse engineered adapter. RE-Adapt and our low-rank variant LoRE-Adapt both outperform other methods of fine-tuning, across multiple popular LLMs and datasets, even when the models are used in conjunction with retrieval-augmented generation.

The task of inserting text into a specified position in a passage, known as fill in the blank (FitB), is useful for a variety of applications where writers interact with a natural language generation (NLG) system to craft text. While previous work has tackled this problem with models trained specifically to do the fill-in-the-blank task, a more useful model is one that can effectively perform _both_ FitB and continuation. In this work, we evaluate the feasibility of using a single model to do both tasks. We show that models pre-trained with a FitB-style objective are capable of both tasks, while models pre-trained for continuation are not. Finally, we show how FitB models can be easily finetuned to allow for fine-grained control over the length and word choice of the generation.

In order to simplify a sentence, human editors perform multiple rewriting transformations: they split it into several shorter sentences, paraphrase words (i.e. replacing complex words or phrases by simpler synonyms), reorder components, and/or delete information deemed unnecessary. Despite these varied range of possible text alterations, current models for automatic sentence simplification are evaluated using datasets that are focused on a single transformation, such as lexical paraphrasing or splitting. This makes it impossible to understand the ability of simplification models in more realistic settings. To alleviate this limitation, this paper introduces ASSET, a new dataset for assessing sentence simplification in English. ASSET is a crowdsourced multi-reference corpus where each simplification was produced by executing several rewriting transformations. Through quantitative and qualitative experiments, we show that simplifications in ASSET are better at capturing characteristics of simplicity when compared to other standard evaluation datasets for the task. Furthermore, we motivate the need for developing better methods for automatic evaluation using ASSET, since we show that current popular metrics may not be suitable when multiple simplification transformations are performed.

When the world changes, so does the text that humans write about it. How do we build language models that can be easily updated to reflect these changes? One popular approach is retrieval-augmented generation, in which new documents are inserted into a knowledge base and retrieved during prediction for downstream tasks. Most prior work on these systems have focused on improving behavior during prediction through better retrieval or reasoning. This paper introduces ERASE, which instead improves model behavior when new documents are acquired, by incrementally deleting or rewriting other entries in the knowledge base each time a document is added. In two new benchmark datasets evaluating models' ability to answer questions about a stream of news articles or conversations, ERASE improves accuracy relative to conventional retrieval-augmented generation by 7-13% (Mixtral-8x7B) and 6-10% (Llama-3-8B) absolute. Code and data are available at https://github.com/belindal/ERASE

Attention-based transformers have become the standard architecture in many deep learning fields, primarily due to their ability to model long-range dependencies and handle variable-length input sequences. However, the attention mechanism with its quadratic complexity is a significant bottleneck in the transformer architecture. This algorithm is only uni-directional in the decoder and converges to a static pattern in over-parametrized decoder-only models. I address this issue by developing a generative function as attention or activation replacement. It still has the auto-regressive character by comparing each token with the previous one. In my test setting with nanoGPT this yields a smaller loss while having a smaller model. The loss further drops by incorporating an average context vector. This concept of attention replacement is distributed under the GNU AGPL v3 license at https://gitlab.com/Bachstelze/causal_generation.

We propose MMLU-SR, a novel dataset designed to measure the true comprehension abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by challenging their performance in question-answering tasks with modified terms. We reasoned that an agent that ``truly'' understands a concept can still evaluate it when key terms are replaced by suitably defined alternate terms, and sought to differentiate such comprehension from mere text replacement. In our study, we modified standardized test questions by replacing a key term with a dummy word along with its definition. The key term could be in the context of questions, answers, or both questions and answers. Notwithstanding the high scores achieved by recent popular LLMs on the MMLU leaderboard, we found a substantial reduction in model performance after such replacement, suggesting poor comprehension. This new benchmark provides a rigorous benchmark for testing true model comprehension, and poses a challenge to the broader scientific community.

We propose a novel approach for learning interchangeable tokens in language models to obtain an extendable vocabulary that can generalize to new tokens. Our method is designed to address alpha-equivalence, the principle that renaming bound variables in a syntactic expression preserves semantics. This property arises in many formal languages such as temporal logics, in which all proposition symbols represent the same concept but are distinguishable from each other. To handle such tokens, we develop a dual-part embedding approach. The first part is shared across all interchangeable tokens, thereby enforcing that they represent the same core concept. The second part is randomly generated for each token, which enables distinguishability. We evaluate our method in a Transformer encoder-decoder model on two tasks: solving linear temporal logic formulae and copying with extendable vocabulary. Our method demonstrates promising generalization capabilities in addition to introducing a favorable inductive bias for alpha-equivalence.

The GLEU metric was proposed for evaluating grammatical error corrections using n-gram overlap with a set of reference sentences, as opposed to precision/recall of specific annotated errors (Napoles et al., 2015). This paper describes improvements made to the GLEU metric that address problems that arise when using an increasing number of reference sets. Unlike the originally presented metric, the modified metric does not require tuning. We recommend that this version be used instead of the original version.