54 accepted papers
Next-token prediction serves as the foundational learning task that enables reasoning in LLMs. But what should the learning task be when aiming to equip MLLMs with temporal reasoning capabilities over video inputs? Existing tasks such as video captioning primarily promote modality alignment, while v…
The Muon optimizer is consistently faster than Adam in training Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the mechanism underlying its success remains unclear. This paper demystifies this mechanism through the lens of associative memory. By ablating the transformer components optimized by Muon, we reveal th…
Data attribution for generative models seeks to quantify the influence of individual training examples on model outputs. Existing methods for diffusion models typically require access to model gradients or retraining, limiting their applicability in proprietary or large-scale settings. We propose a …
The recent paradigm shift towards training large language models (LLMs) using DeepSeek-R1-Zero-style reinforcement learning (RL) on verifiable rewards has led to impressive advancements in code and mathematical reasoning. However, this methodology is limited to tasks where rule-based answer verifica…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio clipping mechanism in PPO is structurally ill-suited for the large…
Majority voting has proven effective for close-ended question answering by aggregating parallel reasoning traces. However, it is not directly applicable to open-ended reasoning, where "majority" is undefined. We introduce THINKMERGE, a training-free, plug-and-play decoding strategy that runs K paral…
We introduce a **variational reasoning** framework for language models that treats thinking traces as latent variables and optimizes them through variational inference. Starting from the evidence lower bound (ELBO), we extend it to a multi-trace objective for tighter bounds and propose a forward-KL…
Large language models (LLMs) may memorize sensitive or copyrighted content, raising privacy and legal concerns. Due to the high cost of retraining from scratch, researchers attempt to employ machine unlearning to remove specific content from LLMs while preserving the overall performance. In this pap…
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled LLM-based agents to directly interact with application user interfaces (UIs), enhancing agents’ performance in complex tasks. However, these agents often suffer from high latency and low reliability due to the extensive sequential UI interactions…
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) remain vulnerable to transferable adversarial examples. While existing methods typically achieve targeted attacks by aligning global features—such as CLIP’s [CLS] token—between adversarial and target samples, they often overlook the rich local information enc…
Speculative decoding has emerged as a popular method to accelerate the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) while retaining their superior text generation performance. Previous methods either adopt a fixed speculative decoding configuration regardless of the prefix tokens, or train draft models…
Human alignment in large language models (LLMs) is an active area of research. A recent groundbreaking work, direct preference optimization (DPO), has greatly simplified the process from past work in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) by bypassing the reward learning stage in RLHF. DP…
Automatic LLM benchmarks, such as AlpacaEval 2.0, Arena-Hard-Auto, and MT-Bench, have become popular for evaluating language models due to their cost-effectiveness and scalability compared to human evaluation. Achieving high win rates on these benchmarks can significantly boost the promotional impac…
Continual reinforcement learning (CRL) refers to a naturalistic setting where an agent needs to endlessly evolve, by trial and error, to solve multiple tasks that are presented sequentially. One of the largest obstacles to CRL is that the agent may forget how to solve previous tasks when learning a…
Humans can intuitively compose and arrange scenes in the 3D space for photography. However, can advanced AI image generators plan scenes with similar 3D spatial awareness when creating images from text or image prompts? We present GenSpace, a novel benchmark and evaluation pipeline to comprehensivel…
Large language models (LLMs) are being rapidly developed, and a key component of their widespread deployment is their safety-related alignment. Many red-teaming efforts aim to jailbreak LLMs, where among these efforts, the Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) attack's success has led to a growing intere…
The rapid advancement of text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models has enabled them to generate unprecedented results from given texts. However, as text inputs become longer, existing encoding methods like CLIP face limitations, and aligning the generated images with long texts becomes challenging. To ta…
Chatbot Arena is an open platform for evaluating LLMs by pairwise battles, in which users vote for their preferred response from two randomly sampled anonymous models. While Chatbot Arena is widely regarded as a reliable LLM ranking leaderboard, we show that crowdsourced voting can be *rigged* to im…
LLMs have made impressive progress, but their growing capabilities also expose them to highly flexible jailbreaking attacks designed to bypass safety alignment. While many existing defenses focus on known types of attacks, it is more critical to prepare LLMs for *unseen* attacks that may arise durin…
With the rapid progress of diffusion models (DMs), significant efforts are being made to unlearn harmful or copyrighted concepts from pretrained DMs to prevent potential model misuse. However, it is observed that even when DMs are properly unlearned before release, malicious finetuning can compromis…
Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have strengthened the reasoning capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs). However, enhancing policy exploration to better scale test-time compute remains largely underexplored. In addition, VLMs continue to struggle with imperfect visual perception…
Scaling test-time compute is crucial for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Existing approaches typically employ reinforcement learning (RL) to maximize a verifiable reward obtained at the end of reasoning traces. However, such methods optimize only the final perfo…
This work presents Orient Anything V2, an enhanced foundation model for unified understanding of object 3D orientation and rotation from single or paired images. Building upon Orient Anything V1, which defines orientation via a single unique front face, V2 extends this capability to handle objects w…
Orientation is a fundamental attribute of objects, essential for understanding their spatial pose and arrangement. However, practical solutions for estimating the orientation of open-world objects in monocular images remain underexplored. In this work, we introduce Orient Anything, the first foundat…
Instruction tuning enhances large vision-language models (LVLMs) but increases their vulnerability to backdoor attacks due to their open design. Unlike prior studies in static settings, this paper explores backdoor attacks in LVLM instruction tuning across mismatched training and testing domains. We…
Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have shown promise in language modeling, yet their scalability and effectiveness in core language tasks, such as text generation and language understanding, remain underexplored. This paper establishes the first scaling law for MDMs, demonstrating a scaling rate compar…
Large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks -- resulting in harmful, unethical, or biased text generations. However, existing jailbreaking methods are computationally costly. In this paper, we propose the **weak-to-strong** jailbreaking attack, an efficient inference time attack…
Auto-regressive language Models (LMs) assign significant attention to the first token, even if it is not semantically important, which is known as **attention sink**. This phenomenon has been widely adopted in applications such as streaming/long context generation, KV cache optimization, inference a…
A multimodal large language model (MLLM) agent can receive instructions, capture images, retrieve histories from memory, and decide which tools to use. Nonetheless, red-teaming efforts have revealed that adversarial images/prompts can jailbreak an MLLM and cause unaligned behaviors. In this work, we…
"Federated learning (FL) is a general principle for decentralized clients to train a server model collectively without sharing local data. FL is a promising framework with practical applications, but its standard training paradigm requires the clients to backpropagate through the model to compute gr…
The recent development of chain-of-thought (CoT) decoding has enabled large language models (LLMs) to generate explicit logical reasoning paths for complex problem-solving. However, research indicates that these paths are not always deliberate and optimal. The tree-of-thought (ToT) method employs tr…
The rapid adoption of text-to-image diffusion models in society underscores an urgent need to address their biases. Without interventions, these biases could propagate a skewed worldview and restrict opportunities for minority groups. In this work, we frame fairness as a distributional alignment pro…
Recent research has made significant progress in optimizing diffusion models for downstream objectives, which is an important pursuit in fields such as graph generation for drug design. However, directly applying these models to graph presents challenges, resulting in suboptimal performance. This pa…
Recently, Anil et al. (2024) show that many-shot (up to hundreds of) demonstrations can jailbreak state-of-the-art LLMs by exploiting their long-context capability. Nevertheless, is it possible to use few-shot demonstrations to efficiently jailbreak LLMs within limited context sizes? While the vanil…
Data attribution seeks to trace model outputs back to training data. With the recent development of diffusion models, data attribution has become a desired module to properly assign valuations for high-quality or copyrighted training samples, ensuring that data contributors are fairly compensated or…
Acquiring an accurate world model $\textit{online}$ for model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) is challenging due to data nonstationarity, which typically causes catastrophic forgetting for neural networks (NNs). From the online learning perspective, a Follow-The-Leader (FTL) world model is desir…
With the advance of language models, privacy protection is receiving more attention. Training data extraction is therefore of great importance, as it can serve as a potential tool to assess privacy leakage. However, due to the difficulty of this task, most of the existing methods are proof-of-concep…
It has been recognized that the data generated by the denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) improves adversarial training. After two years of rapid development in diffusion models, a question naturally arises: can better diffusion models further improve adversarial training? This paper give…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn optimal policies from offline datasets, where the parameterization of policies is crucial but often overlooked. Recently, Diffsuion-QL significantly boosts the performance of offline RL by representing a policy with a diffusion model, whose success r…
Few-shot image generation (FSIG) learns to generate diverse and high-fidelity images from a target domain using a few (e.g., 10) reference samples. Existing FSIG methods select, preserve and transfer prior knowledge from a source generator (pretrained on a related domain) to learn the target generat…
Adversarial poisoning attacks pose huge threats to various machine learning applications. Especially, the recent accumulative poisoning attacks show that it is possible to achieve irreparable harm on models via a sequence of imperceptible attacks followed by a trigger batch. Due to the limited data-…
Recently, diffusion models have achieved great success in generative tasks. Sampling from diffusion models is equivalent to solving the reverse diffusion stochastic differential equations (SDEs) or the corresponding probability flow ordinary differential equations (ODEs). In comparison, SDE-based so…
Sliced-Wasserstein Flow (SWF) is a promising approach to nonparametric generative modeling but has not been widely adopted due to its suboptimal generative quality and lack of conditional modeling capabilities. In this work, we make two major contributions to bridging this gap. First, based on a ple…
Recently, diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have achieved promising results in diverse generative tasks. A typical DPM framework includes a forward process that gradually diffuses the data distribution and a reverse process that recovers the data distribution from time-dependent data scores. In…
Large vision-language models (VLMs) such as GPT-4 have achieved unprecedented performance in response generation, especially with visual inputs, enabling more creative and adaptable interaction than large language models such as ChatGPT. Nonetheless, multimodal generation exacerbates safety concerns…
Subset selection in Contextual Bandits (CB) is an important task in various applications such as advertisement recommendation. In CB, arms are attached with contexts and thus correlated in the context space. Proper exploration for subset selection in CB should carefully consider the contexts. Previo…
The optimization of resource is crucial for the operation of public cloud systems such as Microsoft Azure, as well as servers dedicated to the workloads of large customers such as Microsoft 365. Those optimization tasks often need to take unknown parameters into consideration and can be formulated a…
Positive-unlabeled learning (PU learning) is an important case of binary classification where the training data only contains positive and unlabeled samples. The current state-of-the-art approach for PU learning is the cost-sensitive approach, which casts PU learning as a cost-sensitive classificati…
Previous work shows that adversarially robust generalization requires larger sample complexity, and the same dataset, e.g., CIFAR-10, which enables good standard accuracy may not suffice to train robust models. Since collecting new training data could be costly, we focus on better utilizing the give…
We propose a black-box algorithm called {\it Adversarial Variational Inference and Learning} (AdVIL) to perform inference and learning on a general Markov random field (MRF). AdVIL employs two variational distributions to approximately infer the latent variables and estimate the partition function…
Though deep neural networks have achieved significant progress on various tasks, often enhanced by model ensemble, existing high-performance models can be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Many efforts have been devoted to enhancing the robustness of individual networks and then constructing a stra…
A deep neural network (DNN) consists of a nonlinear transformation from an input to a feature representation, followed by a common softmax linear classifier. Though many efforts have been devoted to designing a proper architecture for nonlinear transformation, little investigation has been done on t…
Although the recent progress is substantial, deep learning methods can be vulnerable to the maliciously generated adversarial examples. In this paper, we present a novel training procedure and a thresholding test strategy, towards robust detection of adversarial examples. In training, we propose to…
In this paper we present a method of using standard multi-view images for 3D surface reconstruction of non-Lambertian objects. We extend the original visual hull concept to incorporate 3D cues presented by internal occluding contours, i.e., occluding contours that are inside the object's silhouettes…