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Paul Vicol

15 accepted papers

2025

Focus-N-Fix: Region-Aware Fine-Tuning for Text-to-Image Generation

CVPR 2025highlight

Text-to-image (T2I) generation has made significant advances in recent years, but challenges still remain in the generation of perceptual artifacts, misalignment with complex prompts, and safety. The prevailing approach to address these issues involves collecting human feedback on generated images,…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Directly Fine-Tuning Diffusion Models on Differentiable Rewards

ICLR 2024poster

We present Direct Reward Fine-Tuning (DRaFT), a simple and effective method for fine-tuning diffusion models to maximize differentiable reward functions, such as scores from human preference models. We first show that it is possible to backpropagate the reward function gradient through the full samp…

Cited by 135SourcePDFScholar
2022

Complex Momentum for Optimization in Games

AISTATS 2022poster

We generalize gradient descent with momentum for optimization in differentiable games to have complex-valued momentum. We give theoretical motivation for our method by proving convergence on bilinear zero-sum games for simultaneous and alternating updates. Our method gives real-valued parameter upda…

2022

On Implicit Bias in Overparameterized Bilevel Optimization

ICML 2022spotlight

Many problems in machine learning involve bilevel optimization (BLO), including hyperparameter optimization, meta-learning, and dataset distillation. Bilevel problems involve inner and outer parameters, each optimized for its own objective. Often, at least one of the two levels is underspecified and…

2022

Unbiased Gradient Estimation in Unrolled Computation Graphs with Persistent Evolution Strategies (Extended Abstract)

IJCAI 2022poster

Current approaches for optimizing parameters in unrolled computation graphs suffer from high variance gradients, bias, slow updates, or large memory usage. We introduce a method called Persistent Evolution Strategies (PES), which divides the computation graph into a series of truncated unrolls, and…

Cited by 74SourcePDFScholar
2021

Unbiased Gradient Estimation in Unrolled Computation Graphs with Persistent Evolution Strategies

ICML 2021oral

Unrolled computation graphs arise in many scenarios, including training RNNs, tuning hyperparameters through unrolled optimization, and training learned optimizers. Current approaches to optimizing parameters in such computation graphs suffer from high variance gradients, bias, slow updates, or larg…

2021

Understanding and Mitigating Exploding Inverses in Invertible Neural Networks

AISTATS 2021poster

Invertible neural networks (INNs) have been used to design generative models, implement memory-saving gradient computation, and solve inverse problems. In this work, we show that commonly-used INN architectures suffer from exploding inverses and are thus prone to becoming numerically non-invertible.…

2020

Optimizing Millions of Hyperparameters by Implicit Differentiation

AISTATS 2020poster

We propose an algorithm for inexpensive gradient-based hyperparameter optimization that combines the implicit function theorem (IFT) with efficient inverse Hessian approximations. We present results about the relationship between the IFT and differentiating through optimization, motivating our algor…

Cited by 508SourcePDFScholar
2019

Self-Tuning Networks: Bilevel Optimization of Hyperparameters using Structured Best-Response Functions

ICLR 2019poster

Hyperparameter optimization can be formulated as a bilevel optimization problem, where the optimal parameters on the training set depend on the hyperparameters. We aim to adapt regularization hyperparameters for neural networks by fitting compact approximations to the best-response function, which m…

Cited by 216SourcePDFScholar
2018

Adversarial Distillation of Bayesian Neural Network Posteriors

ICML 2018accepted

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) allow us to reason about uncertainty in a principled way. Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) enables efficient BNN learning by drawing samples from the BNN posterior using mini-batches. However, SGLD and its extensions require storage of many copies of the m…

2018

Flipout: Efficient Pseudo-Independent Weight Perturbations on Mini-Batches

ICLR 2018poster

Stochastic neural net weights are used in a variety of contexts, including regularization, Bayesian neural nets, exploration in reinforcement learning, and evolution strategies. Unfortunately, due to the large number of weights, all the examples in a mini-batch typically share the same weight pertur…

Cited by 418SourcePDFScholar
2018

MovieGraphs: Towards Understanding Human-Centric Situations From Videos

CVPR 2018poster

There is growing interest in artificial intelligence to build socially intelligent robots. This requires machines to have the ability to "read" people's emotions, motivations, and other factors that affect behavior. Towards this goal, we introduce a novel dataset called MovieGraphs which provides de…

Cited by 179SourcePDFScholar