14 accepted papers
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) combine visual perception with the general capabilities, such as reasoning, of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the mechanisms by which these two abilities can be combined and contribute remain poorly understood. In this work, we explore to compose perception and…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains such as science, law, and healthcare, where accurate expressions of uncertainty are essential for reliability and trust. However, current LLMs are often observed to generate incorrect answers with high confidence—a phenome…
Large language models (LLMs) could be valuable personal AI agents across various domains, provided they can precisely follow user instructions. However, recent studies have shown significant limitations in LLMs' instruction-following capabilities, raising concerns about their reliability in high-sta…
This paper proposes a simple yet effective jailbreak attack named FlipAttack against black-box LLMs. First, from the autoregressive nature, we reveal that LLMs tend to understand the text from left to right and find that they struggle to comprehend the text when the perturbation is added to the left…
Recent advancements in AI agents have demonstrated their growing potential to drive and support scientific discovery. In this work, we introduce MLR-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating AI agents on open-ended machine learning research. MLR-Bench includes three key components: (1) 201 res…
Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) in Language Models (LMs) is key to improving their safety and reliability. Evaluations often use metrics like AUROC to assess how well UQ methods (e.g., negative sequence probabilities) correlate with task correctness functions (e.g., ROUGE-L). We show that mutual bia…
Synthetic face recognition (SFR) aims to generate synthetic face datasets that mimic the distribution of real face data, which allows for training face recognition models in a privacy-preserving manner. Despite the remarkable potential of diffusion models in image generation, current diffusion-based…
Empowering large language models (LLMs) to accurately express confidence in their answers is essential for reliable and trustworthy decision-making. Previous confidence elicitation methods, which primarily rely on *white-box access* to internal model information or model fine-tuning, have become les…
Large language models (LLMs) frequently hallucinate, e.g., making factual errors, yet our understanding of why they make these errors remains limited. In this study, we aim to understand the underlying mechanisms of LLM hallucinations from the perspective of *inner representations*. We discover a pa…
Label errors have been found to be prevalent in popular text, vision, and audio datasets, which heavily influence the safe development and evaluation of machine learning algorithms. Despite increasing efforts towards improving the quality of generic data types, such as images and texts, the problem…
Reliable application of machine learning is of primary importance to the practical deployment of deep learning methods. A fundamental challenge is that models are often unreliable due to overconfidence. In this paper, we estimate a model's reliability by measuring the agreement between its latent sp…
Mean ensemble (i.e. averaging predictions from multiple models) is a commonly-used technique in machine learning that improves the performance of each individual model. We formalize it as feature alignment for ensemble in open-set face recognition and generalize it into Bayesian Ensemble Averaging (…
Confidence calibration is central to providing accurate and interpretable uncertainty estimates, especially under safety-critical scenarios. However, we find that existing calibration algorithms often overlook the issue of proximity bias, a phenomenon where models tend to be more overconfident in lo…
"Trustworthy machine learning is of primary importance to the practical deployment of deep learning models. While state-of-the-art models achieve astonishingly good performance in terms of accuracy, recent literature reveals that their predictive confidence scores unfortunately cannot be trusted: e.…