73 accepted papers
Understanding *how* neural networks arrive at their predictions is essential for debugging, auditing, and deployment. Mechanistic interpretability pursues this goal by identifying *circuits*—minimal subnetworks responsible for specific behaviors. However, existing circuit discovery methods are britt…
AI advancements have been significantly driven by a combination of foundation models and curiosity-driven learning aimed at increasing capability and adaptability. Within this landscape, open-endedness, where AI agents autonomously and indefinitely generate novel behaviors, representations, or solut…
As artificial intelligence (AI), including machine learning (ML) models and foundation models (FMs), is increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains, ensuring their trustworthiness has become a central challenge. However, the core trustworthy AI objectives, such as fairness, robustness, privacy, and…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized in autonomous decision-making, where they sample options from vast action spaces. However, the heuristics that guide this sampling process remain under-explored. We study this sampling behavior and show that this underlying heuristics resembles…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly employed in high-stakes decision-making tasks, such as loan approvals. While their applications expand across domains, LLMs struggle to process tabular data, ensuring fairness and delivering reliable predictions. In this work, we assess the performance a
Sampling-based decoding strategies have been widely adopted for Large Language Models (LLMs) in numerous applications, targeting a balance between diversity and quality via temperature tuning and tail truncation. Considering the strong dependency of the candidate next tokens on different prefixes, r…
Large Language Models (LLMs) show impressive results in numerous practical applications, but they lack essential safety features that are common in other areas of computer science, particularly an explicit separation of instructions and data. This makes them vulnerable to manipulations such as indir…
Causality is essential in scientific research, enabling researchers to interpret true relationships between variables. These causal relationships are often represented by causal graphs, which are directed acyclic graphs. With the recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), there is an incre…
Scientific discovery catalyzes human intellectual advances, driven by the cycle of hypothesis generation, experimental design, evaluation, and assumption refinement. Central to this process is causal inference, uncovering the mechanisms behind observed phenomena. While randomized experiments provide
Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) has introduced a new paradigm for end-to-end document understanding, and quickly became one of the standard benchmarks for multimodal LLMs. Automating document processing workflows, driven by DocVQA models, presents significant potential for many business…
Data errors, corruptions, and poisoning attacks during training pose a major threat to the reliability of modern AI systems. While extensive effort has gone into empirical mitigations, the evolving nature of attacks and the complexity of data require a more principled, provable approach to robustly…
Label Smoothing (LS) is widely adopted to reduce overconfidence in neural network predictions and improve generalization. Despite these benefits, recent studies reveal two critical issues with LS. First, LS induces overconfidence in misclassified samples. Second, it compacts feature representations…
Medical multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are becoming an instrumental part of healthcare systems, assisting medical personnel with decision making and results analysis. Models for radiology report generation are able to interpret medical imagery, thus reducing the workload of radiologists. A…
Post-hoc attribution methods aim to explain deep learning predictions by highlighting influential input pixels. However, these explanations are highly non-robust: small, imperceptible input perturbations can drastically alter the attribution map while maintaining the same prediction. This vulnerabil…
Model stealing poses a significant security risk in machine learning by enabling attackers to replicate a black-box model without access to its training data, thus jeopardizing intellectual property and exposing sensitive information. Recent methods that use pre-trained diffusion models for data syn…
Certification for machine learning is proving that no adversarial sample can evade a model within a range under certain conditions, a necessity for safety-critical domains. Common certification methods for segmentation use a flat set of fine-grained classes, leading to high abstain rates due to mode…
There is a growing interest in using Large Language Models (LLMs) in multi-agent systems to tackle interactive real-world tasks that require effective collaboration and assessing complex situations. Yet, we have a limited understanding of LLMs' communication and decision-making abilities in multi-ag…
Large language model systems face significant security risks from maliciously crafted messages that aim to overwrite the system's original instructions or leak private data. To study this problem, we organized a capture-the-flag competition at IEEE SaTML 2024, where the flag is a secret string in th…
With the recent emergence of powerful instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), various helpful conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have been deployed across many applications. When prompted by users, these AI systems successfully perform a wide range of tasks as part of a conv…
Despite the widespread use of statistical prior models in various fields, such models for neural network gradients have long been overlooked. The inherent challenge stems from their high-dimensional structures and complex interdependencies, which complicate effective modeling. In this work, we demon…
SoftMax is a ubiquitous ingredient of modern machine learning algorithms. It maps an input vector onto a probability simplex and reweights the input by concentrating the probability mass at large entries. Yet, as a smooth approximation to the Argmax function, a significant amount of probability mass…
Adversarial training is the de-facto standard for improving robustness against adversarial examples. This usually involves a multi-step adversarial attack applied on each example during training. In this paper, we explore only constructing adversarial examples (AE) on a subset of the training exampl…
Large code datasets have become increasingly accessible for pre-training source code models. However, for the fine-tuning phase, obtaining representative training data that fully covers the code distribution for specific downstream tasks remains challenging due to the task-specific nature and limite…
Deep reinforcement learning policies, which are integral to modern control systems, represent valuable intellectual property. The development of these policies demands considerable resources, such as domain expertise, simulation fidelity, and real-world validation. These policies are potentially vul…
We present a new direction for increasing the interpretability of deep neural networks (DNNs) by promoting weight-input alignment during training. For this, we propose to replace the linear transforms in DNNs by our B-cos transform. As we show, a sequence (network) of such transforms induces a singl…
Misinformation is now a major problem due to its potential high risks to our core democratic and societal values and orders. Out-of-context misinformation is one of the easiest and effective ways used by adversaries to spread viral false stories. In this threat, a real image is re-purposed to suppor…
Differentially private data generation techniques have become a promising solution to the data privacy challenge –– it enables sharing of data while complying with rigorous privacy guarantees, which is essential for scientific progress in sensitive domains. Unfortunately, restricted by the inherent…
Federated learning is a powerful distributed learning scheme that allows numerous edge devices to collaboratively train a model without sharing their data. However, training is resource-intensive for edge devices, and limited network bandwidth is often the main bottleneck. Prior work often overcomes…
As a long-term threat to the privacy of training data, membership inference attacks (MIAs) emerge ubiquitously in machine learning models. Existing works evidence strong connection between the distinguishability of the training and testing loss distributions and the model's vulnerability to MIAs. Mo…
Over the past years, deep generative models have achieved a new level of performance. Generated data has become difficult, if not impossible, to be distinguished from real data. While there are plenty of use cases that benefit from this technology, there are also strong concerns on how this new tech…
Photorealistic image generation has reached a new level of quality due to the breakthroughs of generative adversarial networks (GANs). Yet, the dark side of such deepfakes, the malicious use of generated media, raises concerns about visual misinformation. While existing research work on deepfake det…
The rapid advances in deep generative models over the past years have led to highly realistic media, known as deepfakes, that are commonly indistinguishable from real to human eyes. These advances make assessing the authenticity of visual data increasingly difficult and pose a misinformation threat…
We introduce a new family of neural network models called Convolutional Dynamic Alignment Networks (CoDA-Nets), which are performant classifiers with a high degree of inherent interpretability. Their core building blocks are Dynamic Alignment Units (DAUs), which linearly transform their input with w…
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) produce impressive results on unconditional image generation when powered with large-scale image datasets. Yet generated images are still easy to spot especially on datasets with high variance (e.g. bedroom, church). In this paper, we propose various improvemen…
Accurate prediction of pedestrian and bicyclist paths is integral to the development of reliable autonomous vehicles in dense urban environments. The interactions between vehicle and pedestrian or bicyclist have a significant impact on the trajectories of traffic participants e.g. stopping or turnin…
While Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) show increasing performance and the level of realism is becoming indistinguishable from natural images, this also comes with high demands on data and computation. We show that state-of-the-art GAN models -- such as they are being publicly released by rese…
The wide-spread availability of rich data has fueled the growth of machine learning applications in numerous domains. However, growth in domains with highly-sensitive data (e.g., medical) is largely hindered as the private nature of data prohibits it from being shared. To this end, we propose Gradie…
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have brought about rapid progress towards generating photorealistic images. Yet the equitable allocation of their modeling capacity among subgroups has received less attention, which could lead to potential biases against underrepresented minorities if left unc…
Flow-based generative models are an important class of exact inference models that admit efficient inference and sampling for image synthesis. Owing to the efficiency constraints on the design of the flow layers, e.g. split coupling flow layers in which approximately half the pixels do not undergo f…
High-performance Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are increasingly deployed in many real-world applications e.g., cloud prediction APIs. Recent advances in model functionality stealing attacks via black-box access (i.e., inputs in, predictions out) threaten the business model of such applications, which…
Today's success of state of the art methods for semantic segmentation is driven by large datasets. Data is considered an important asset that needs to be protected, as the collection and annotation of such datasets comes at significant efforts and associated costs. In addition, visual data might con…
Widespread application of computer vision systems in real world tasks is currently hindered by their unexpected behavior on unseen examples. This occurs due to limitations of empirical testing on finite test sets and lack of systematic methods to identify the breaking points of a trained model. In t…
Despite significant success in Visual Question Answering (VQA), VQA models have been shown to be notoriously brittle to linguistic variations in the questions. Due to deficiencies in models and datasets, today's models often rely on correlations rather than predictions that are causal w.r.t. data. I…
Recent advances in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown increasing success in generating photorealistic images. But they also raise challenges to visual forensics and model attribution. We present the first study of learning GAN fingerprints towards image attribution and using them to c…
For autonomous agents to successfully operate in the real world, the ability to anticipate future scene states is a key competence. In real-world scenarios, future states become increasingly uncertain and multi-modal, particularly on long time horizons. Dropout based Bayesian inference provides a co…
We propose a deep representation of appearance, i.e. the relation of color, surface orientation, viewer position, material and illumination. Previous approaches have used deep learning to extract classic appearance representations relating to reflectance model parameters (e.g. Phong) or illumination…
Machine Learning (ML) models are increasingly deployed in the wild to perform a wide range of tasks. In this work, we ask to what extent can an adversary steal functionality of such "victim" models based solely on blackbox interactions: image in, predictions out. In contrast to prior work, we study…
Importance of visual context in scene understanding tasks is well recognized in the computer vision community. However, to what extent the computer vision models are dependent on the context to make their predictions is unclear. A model overly relying on context will fail when encountering objects…
The goal of human action anticipation is to predict future actions. Ideally, in real-world applications such as video surveillance and self-driving systems, future actions should not only be predicted with high accuracy but also at arbitrary and variable time-horizons ranging from short- to long-ter…
As more and more personal photos are shared and tagged in social media, avoiding privacy risks such as unintended recognition, becomes increasingly challenging. We propose a new hybrid approach to obfuscate identities in photos by head replacement. Our approach combines state of the art parametric f…
For autonomous agents to successfully operate in the real world, anticipation of future events and states of their environment is a key competence. This problem has been formalized as a sequence extrapolation problem, where a number of observations are used to predict the sequence into the future. R…
While great progress has been made recently in automatic image manipulation, it has been limited to object centric images like faces or structured scene datasets. In this work, we take a step towards general scene-level image editing by developing an automatic interaction-free object removal model.…
Images convey a broad spectrum of personal information. If such images are shared on social media platforms, this personal information is leaked which conflicts with the privacy of depicted persons. Therefore, we aim for automated approaches to redact such private information and thereby protect pr…
Generating novel, yet realistic, images of persons is a challenging task due to the complex interplay between the different image factors, such as the foreground, background and pose information. In this work, we aim at generating such images based on a novel, two-stage reconstruction pipeline that…
Recent advances in Deep Learning and probabilistic modeling have let to strong improvements in generative models for images. On the one hand, GANs have contributed a highly effective adversarial learning procedure, but still suffer from stability issues. On the other hand, CVAE models provide a soun…
Progress towards advanced systems for assisted and autonomous driving is leveraging recent advances in recognition and segmentation methods. Yet, we are still facing challenges in bringing reliable driving to inner cities, as those are composed of highly dynamic scenes observed from a moving platfo…
As more and more personal photos are shared online, being able to obfuscate identities in such photos is becoming a necessity for privacy protection. People have largely resorted to blacking out or blurring head regions, but they result in poor user experience while being surprisingly ineffective ag…
Many deployed learned models are black boxes: given input, returns output. Internal information about the model, such as the architecture, optimisation procedure, or training data, is not disclosed explicitly as it might contain proprietary information or make the system more vulnerable. This work s…
Social relations are the foundation of human daily life. Developing techniques to analyze such relations from visual data bears great potential to build machines that better understand us and are capable of interacting with us at a social level. Previous investigations have remained partial due to t…
Users like sharing personal photos with others through social media. At the same time, they might want to make automatic identification in such photos difficult or even impossible. Classic obfuscation methods such as blurring are not only unpleasant but also not as effective as one would expect. Rec…
There have been remarkable improvements in the semantic labelling task in the recent years. However, the state of the art methods rely on large-scale pixel-level annotations. This paper studies the problem of training a pixel-wise semantic labeller network from image-level annotations of the present…
We propose a novel superpixel-based multi-view convolutional neural network for semantic image segmentation. The proposed network produces a high quality segmentation of a single image by leveraging information from additional views of the same scene. Particularly in indoor videos such as captured b…
While strong progress has been made in image captioning recently, machine and human captions are still quite distinct. This is primarily due to the deficiencies in the generated word distribution, vocabulary size, and strong bias in the generators towards frequent captions. Furthermore, humans -- ri…
With an increasing number of users sharing information online, privacy implications entailing such actions are a major concern. For explicit content, such as user profile or GPS data, devices (e.g. mobile phones) as well as web services (e.g. facebook) offer to set privacy settings in order to enfor…
Understanding physical phenomena is a key competence that enables humans and animals to act and interact under uncertain perception in previously unseen environments containing novel objects and their configurations. Developmental psychology has shown that such skills are acquired by infants from ob…
How much does a single image reveal about the environment it was taken in? In this paper, we investigate how much of that information can be retrieved from a foreground object, combined with the background (i.e. the visible part of the environment). Assuming it is not perfectly diffuse, the foregrou…
Undoing the image formation process and therefore decomposing appearance into its intrinsic properties is a challenging task due to the under-constraint nature of this inverse problem. While significant progress has been made on inferring shape, materials and illumination from images only, progress…
Scaling up visual category recognition to large numbers of classes remains challenging. A promising research direction is zero-shot learning, which does not require any training data to recognize new classes, but rather relies on some form of auxiliary information describing the new classes. Ultimat…
Appearance-based gaze estimation is believed to work well in real-world settings, but existing datasets have been collected under controlled laboratory conditions and methods have been not evaluated across multiple datasets. In this work we study appearance-based gaze estimation in the wild. We pres…
We address a question answering task on real-world images that is set up as a Visual Turing Test. By combining latest advances in image representation and natural language processing, we propose Neural-Image-QA, an end-to-end formulation to this problem for which all parts are trained jointly. In co…
Recognising persons in everyday photos presents major challenges (occluded faces, different clothing, locations, etc.) for machine vision. We propose a convnet based person recognition system on which we provide an in-depth analysis of informativeness of different body cues, impact of training data,…
Previous work on predicting the target of visual search from human fixations only considered closed-world settings in which training labels are available and predictions are performed for a known set of potential targets. In this work we go beyond the state of the art by studying search target predi…
The Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) descriptor has led to many advances in computer vision over the last decade and is still part of many state of the art approaches. We realize that the associated feature computation is piecewise differentiable and therefore many pipelines which build on HOG c…