27 accepted papers
In this work we systematically investigate how specific attributes of preference datasets affect the alignment and downstream performance of LLMs in instruction-following tasks. We use a novel synthetic data generation pipeline to generate 48,000 unique instruction-following prompts with combination…
The development and evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) have largely focused on individual capabilities. However, this overlooks the intersection of multiple abilities across different types of expertise that are often required for real-world tasks, which we term **cross capabilities**. To sy…
Reward modeling is crucial for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, especially in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). However, current reward models mainly produce scalar scores and struggle to incorporate critiques in a natural language format. We hypothesize…
"We propose Context Diffusion, a diffusion-based framework that enables image generation models to learn from visual examples presented in context. Recent work tackles such in-context learning for image generation, where a query image is provided alongside context examples and text prompts. However,…
"We introduce Style Tailoring, a recipe to finetune Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) in a distinct domain with high visual quality, prompt alignment and scene diversity. We choose sticker image generation as the target domain, as the images significantly differ from photorealistic samples typically ge…
Vision-language models trained with contrastive learning on large-scale noisy data are becoming increasingly popular for zero-shot recognition problems. In this paper we improve the following three aspects of the contrastive pre-training pipeline: dataset noise, model initialization and the training…
Object models are gradually progressing from predicting just category labels to providing detailed descriptions of object instances. This motivates the need for large datasets which go beyond traditional object masks and provide richer annotations such as part masks and attributes. Hence, we introdu…
"A visual counterfactual explanation replaces image regions in a query image with regions from a distractor image such that the system’s decision on the transformed image changes to the distractor class. In this work, we present a novel framework for computing visual counterfactual explanations base…
Due to the widespread use of complex machine learning models in real-world applications, it is becoming critical to explain model predictions. However, these models are typically black-box deep neural networks, explained post-hoc via methods with known faithfulness limitations. Generalized Additive…
Model pre-training is a cornerstone of modern visual recognition systems. Although fully supervised pre-training on datasets like ImageNet is still the de-facto standard, recent studies suggest that large-scale weakly supervised pre-training can outperform fully supervised approaches. This paper rev…
Generalized Additive Models (GAMs) have quickly become the leading choice for interpretable machine learning. However, unlike uninterpretable methods such as DNNs, they lack expressive power and easy scalability, and are hence not a feasible alternative for real-world tasks. We present a new class o…
Invariant approaches have been remarkably successful in tackling the problem of domain generalization, where the objective is to perform inference on data distributions different from those used in training. In our work, we investigate whether it is possible to leverage domain information from the u…
State-of-the-art object detection approaches typically rely on pre-trained classification models to achieve better performance and faster convergence. We hypothesize that classification pre-training strives to achieve translation invariance, and consequently ignores the localization aspect of the pr…
Weakly supervised instance segmentation reduces the cost of annotations required to train models. However, existing approaches which rely only on image-level class labels predominantly suffer from errors due to (a) partial segmentation of objects and (b) missing object predictions. We show that thes…
Pre-training convolutional neural networks with weakly-supervised and self-supervised strategies is becoming increasingly popular for several computer vision tasks. However, due to the lack of strong discriminative signals, these learned representations may overfit to the pre-training objective (e.g…
Large detection datasets have a long tail of lowshot classes with very few bounding box annotations. We wish to improve detection for lowshot classes with weakly labelled web-scale datasets only having image-level labels. This requires a detection framework that can be jointly trained with limited n…
Existing models often leverage co-occurrences between objects and their context to improve recognition accuracy. However, strongly relying on context risks a model's generalizability, especially when typical co-occurrence patterns are absent. This work focuses on addressing such contextual biases to…
Blind or no-reference (NR) perceptual picture quality prediction is a difficult, unsolved problem of great consequence to the social and streaming media industries that impacts billions of viewers daily. Unfortunately, popular NR prediction models perform poorly on real-world distorted pictures. To…
Visual and audio modalities are highly correlated, yet they contain different information. Their strong correlation makes it possible to predict the semantics of one from the other with good accuracy. Their intrinsic differences make cross-modal prediction a potentially more rewarding pretext task f…
Weakly supervised object detection aims at reducing the amount of supervision required to train detection models. Such models are traditionally learned from images/videos labelled only with the object class and not the object bounding box. In our work, we try to leverage not only the object class la…
A plethora of recent work has shown that convolutional networks are not robust to adversarial images: images that are created by perturbing a sample from the data distribution as to maximize the loss on the perturbed example. In this work, we hypothesize that adversarial perturbations move the image…
Current fully-supervised video datasets consist of only a few hundred thousand videos and fewer than a thousand domain-specific labels. This hinders the progress towards advanced video architectures. This paper presents an in-depth study of using large volumes of web videos for pre-training video mo…
Self-supervised learning aims to learn representations from the data itself without explicit manual supervision. Existing efforts ignore a crucial aspect of self-supervised learning - the ability to scale to large amount of data because self-supervision requires no manual labels. In this work, we re…
We propose Batch-Expansion Training (BET), a framework for running a batch optimizer on a gradually expanding dataset. As opposed to stochastic approaches, batches do not need to be resampled i.i.d. at every iteration, thus making BET more resource efficient in a distributed setting, and when disk-a…
State-of-the-art visual perception models for a wide range of tasks rely on supervised pretraining. ImageNet classification is the de facto pretraining task for these models. Yet, ImageNet is now nearly ten years old and is by modern standards "small". Even so, relatively little is known about the b…
The ability to capture temporal information has been critical to the development of video understanding models. While there have been numerous attempts at modeling motion in videos, an explicit analysis of the effect of temporal information for video understanding is still missing. In this work, we…
In this paper, we study the gradient boosted decision trees (GBDT) when the output space is high dimensional and sparse. For example, in multilabel classification, the output space is a $L$-dimensional 0/1 vector, where $L$ is number of labels that can grow to millions and beyond in many modern appl…