59 accepted papers
Distilling pretrained softmax attention Transformers into more efficient hybrid architectures that interleave softmax and linear attention layers is a promising approach for improving the inference efficiency of LLMs without requiring expensive pretraining from scratch. A critical factor in the con…
Reasoning is a core capability of language models (LMs), yet it remains unclear how much model capacity is necessary to support reasoning during pretraining. In this work, we study the minimal parameter budget required for implicit reasoning, defined as the ability to infer new facts from learned kn…
Mid-training is increasingly used to improve the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), yet its design choices and interaction with evaluation and reinforcement learning (RL) remain poorly understood. Prior work often focuses on narrow domain gains, overlooking retention of general …
We introduce API Pack, a massive multi-programming language dataset containing over one million instruction-API calls for improving the API call generation capabilities of large language models. Our evaluation highlights three key findings: First, fine-tuning on API Pack enables open-source models t…
We present a novel approach to calibrating linguistic expressions of certainty, e.g., "Maybe" and "Likely". Unlike prior work that assigns a single score to each certainty phrase, we model uncertainty as distributions over the simplex to capture their semantics more accurately. To accommodate this n…
The attention mechanism is a core primitive in modern large language models (LLMs) and AI more broadly. Since attention by itself is permutation-invariant, position encoding is essential for modeling structured domains such as language. Rotary position encoding (RoPE) has emerged as the de facto sta…
The self-attention mechanism traditionally relies on the softmax operator, necessitating positional embeddings like RoPE, or position biases to account for token order. But current methods using still face length generalisation challenges. We investigate an alternative attention mechanism based on t…
We present Self-MoE, an approach that transforms a monolithic LLM into a compositional, modular system of self-specialized experts, named MiXSE (MiXture of Self-specialized Experts). Our approach leverages self-specialization, which constructs expert modules using self-generated synthetic data, each…
We study continual pretraining recipe for scaling language models' context lengths to 128K, with a focus on data engineering. We hypothesize that long context modeling, in particular *the ability to utilize information at arbitrary input locations*, is a capability that is mostly already acquired th…
Transformers with linear attention allow for efficient parallel training but can simultaneously be formulated as an RNN with 2D (matrix-valued) hidden states, thus enjoying linear-time inference complexity. However, linear attention generally underperforms ordinary softmax attention. Moreover, curre…
An emergent research trend explores the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) as the backbone of agentic systems (e.g., SWE-Bench, Agent-Bench). To fulfill LLMs’ potential as autonomous agents, they must be able to identify, call, and interact with a variety of external tools and application program i…
We explore the use of language as a perceptual representation for vision-and-language navigation (VLN), with a focus on low-data settings. Our approach uses off-the-shelf vision systems for image captioning and object detection to convert an agent’s egocentric panoramic view at each time step into n…
Key-value (KV) caching plays an essential role in accelerating decoding for transformer-based autoregressive large language models (LLMs). However, the amount of memory required to store the KV cache can become prohibitive at long sequence lengths and large batch sizes. Since the invention of the tr…
Unsupervised domain adaptation is an open and challenging problem in computer vision. While existing research shows encouraging results in addressing cross-domain distribution shift on common benchmarks, they are often constrained to testing under a specific target setting, limiting their impact for…
Computer vision models suffer from a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting when learning novel concepts from continuously shifting training data. Typical solutions for this continual learning problem require extensive rehearsal of previously seen data, which increases memory costs and may viol…
Recently, large-scale pre-trained Vision-and-Language (VL) foundation models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in many zero-shot downstream tasks, achieving competitive results for recognizing objects defined by as little as short text prompts. However, it has also been shown that VL models…
The number of parameters in large transformers has been observed to grow exponentially. Despite notable performance improvements, concerns have been raised that such a growing model size will run out of data in the near future. As manifested in the neural scaling law, modern learning backbones are n…
Vision and Language (VL) models offer an effective method for aligning representation spaces of images and text allowing for numerous applications such as cross-modal retrieval, visual and multi-hop question answering, captioning, and many more. However, the aligned image-text spaces learned by all…
Our work combines aspects of three promising paradigms in machine learning, namely, attention mechanism, energy-based models, and associative memory. Attention is the power-house driving modern deep learning successes, but it lacks clear theoretical foundations. Energy-based models allow a principle…
Large-scale pre-trained Vision & Language (VL) models have shown remarkable performance in many applications, enabling replacing a fixed set of supported classes with zero-shot open vocabulary reasoning over (almost arbitrary) natural language prompts. However, recent works have uncovered a fundamen…
Pre-training on massive video datasets has become essential to achieve high action recognition performance on smaller downstream datasets. However, most large-scale video datasets contain images of people and hence are accompanied with issues related to privacy, ethics, and data protection, often pr…
Scaling transformers has led to significant breakthroughs in many domains, leading to a paradigm in which larger versions of existing models are trained and released on a periodic basis. New instances of such models are typically trained completely from scratch, despite the fact that they are often…
Large scale Vision-Language (VL) models have shown tremendous success in aligning representations between visual and text modalities. This enables remarkable progress in zero-shot recognition, image generation & editing, and many other exciting tasks. However, VL models tend to over-represent object…
Prompt tuning, in which a base pretrained model is adapted to each task via conditioning on learned prompt vectors, has emerged as a promising approach for efficiently adapting large language models to multiple downstream tasks. However, existing methods typically learn soft prompt vectors from scra…
Pre-training models with large crawled corpora can lead to issues such as toxicity and bias, as well as copyright and privacy concerns. A promising way of alleviating such concerns is to conduct pre-training with synthetic tasks and data, since no real-world information is ingested by the model. Our…
Vision and Language (VL) models have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot performance in a variety of tasks. However, some aspects of complex language understanding still remain a challenge. We introduce the collective notion of Structured Vision & Language Concepts (SVLC) which includes object attribu…
As machine learning algorithms grow in popularity and diversify to many industries, ethical and legal concerns regarding their fairness have become increasingly relevant. We explore the problem of algorithmic fairness, taking an information-theoretic view. The maximal correlation framework is introd…
We explore a new perspective on video understanding by casting the video recognition problem as an image recognition task. Our approach rearranges input video frames into super images, which allow for training an image classifier directly to fulfill the task of action recognition, in exactly the sam…
Foundational Models (FMs) have demonstrated unprecedented capabilities including zero-shot learning, high fidelity data synthesis, and out of domain generalization. However, the parameter capacity of FMs is still limited, leading to poor out-of-the-box performance of FMs on many expert tasks (e.g. r…
Action recognition has improved dramatically with massive-scale video datasets. Yet, these datasets are accompanied with issues related to curation cost, privacy, ethics, bias, and copyright. Compared to that, only minor efforts have been devoted toward exploring the potential of synthetic video dat…
Vision transformer (ViT) has recently shown its strong capability in achieving comparable results to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on image classification. However, vanilla ViT simply inherits the same architecture from the natural language processing directly, which is often not optimized fo…
Selective regression allows abstention from prediction if the confidence to make an accurate prediction is not sufficient. In general, by allowing a reject option, one expects the performance of a regression model to increase at the cost of reducing coverage (i.e., by predicting on fewer samples). H…
Pre-training models on Imagenet or other massive datasets of real images has led to major advances in computer vision, albeit accompanied with shortcomings related to curation cost, privacy, usage rights, and ethical issues. In this paper, for the first time, we study the transferability of pre-trai…
Designing better machine translation systems by considering auxiliary inputs such as images has attracted much attention in recent years. While existing methods show promising performance over the conventional text-only translation systems, they typically require paired text and image as input durin…
Tremendous progress has been made in visual representation learning, notably with the recent success of self-supervised contrastive learning methods. Supervised contrastive learning has also been shown to outperform its cross-entropy counterparts by leveraging labels for choosing where to contrast.…
Temporal modelling is the key for efficient video action recognition. While understanding temporal information can improve recognition accuracy for dynamic actions, removing temporal redundancy and reusing past features can significantly save computation leading to efficient action recognition. In t…
Multi-modal learning, which focuses on utilizing various modalities to improve the performance of a model, is widely used in video recognition. While traditional multi-modal learning offers excellent recognition results, its computational expense limits its impact for many real-world applications. I…
Unsupervised domain adaptation which aims to adapt models trained on a labeled source domain to a completely unlabeled target domain has attracted much attention in recent years. While many domain adaptation techniques have been proposed for images, the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation in v…
The recently developed vision transformer (ViT) has achieved promising results on image classification compared to convolutional neural networks. Inspired by this, in this paper, we study how to learn multi-scale feature representations in transformer models for image classification. To this end, we…
In recent years, a number of approaches based on 2D or 3D convolutional neural networks (CNN) have emerged for video action recognition, achieving state-of-the-art results on several large-scale benchmark datasets. In this paper, we carry out in-depth comparative analysis to better understand the di…
Nowadays, there is an abundance of data involving images and surrounding free-form text weakly corresponding to those images. Weakly Supervised phrase-Grounding (WSG) deals with the task of using this data to learn to localize (or to ground) arbitrary text phrases in images without any additional an…
Most existing works in few-shot learning rely on meta-learning the network on a large base dataset which is typically from the same domain as the target dataset. We tackle the problem of cross-domain few-shot learning where there is a large shift between the base and target domain. The problem of cr…
Deep convolutional networks have recently achieved great success in video recognition, yet their practical realization remains a challenge due to the large amount of computational resources required to achieve robust recognition. Motivated by the effectiveness of quantization for boosting efficiency…
Selective classification is a powerful tool for decision-making in scenarios where mistakes are costly but abstentions are allowed. In general, by allowing a classifier to abstain, one can improve the performance of a model at the cost of reducing coverage and classifying fewer samples. However, rec…
The self-attention-based model, transformer, is recently becoming the leading backbone in the field of computer vision. In spite of the impressive success made by transformers in a variety of vision tasks, it still suffers from heavy computation and intensive memory costs. To address this limitation…
Multimodal self-supervised learning is getting more and more attention as it allows not only to train large networks without human supervision but also to search and retrieve data across various modalities. In this context, this paper proposes a framework that, starting from a pre-trained backbone,…
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is an open and challenging problem in machine learning. While NAS offers great promise, the prohibitive computational demand of most of the existing NAS methods makes it difficult to directly search the architectures on large-scale tasks. The typical way of conductin…
Learning to recognize actions from only a handful of labeled videos is a challenging problem due to the scarcity of tediously collected activity labels. We approach this problem by learning a two-pathway temporal contrastive model using unlabeled videos at two different speeds leveraging the fact th…
Performing inference on deep learning models for videos remains a challenge due to the large amount of computational resources required to achieve robust recognition. An inherent property of real-world videos is the high correlation of information across frames which can translate into redundancy in…
Action recognition is an open and challenging problem in computer vision. While current state-of-the-art models offer excellent recognition results, their computational expense limits their impact for many real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, called AR-Net (Adaptive R…
Multi-task learning is an open and challenging problem in computer vision. The typical way of conducting multi-task learning with deep neural networks is either through handcrafted schemes that share all initial layers and branch out at an adhoc point, or through separate task-specific networks with…
Most of the existing approaches for person re-identification consider a static setting where the number of cameras in the network is fixed. An interesting direction, which has received little attention, is to explore the dynamic nature of a camera network, where one tries to adapt the existing re-id…
Most of the existing works in video synthesis focus on generating videos using adversarial learning. Despite their success, these methods often require input reference frame or fail to generate diverse videos from the given data distribution, with little to no uniformity in the quality of videos tha…
While machine learning approaches to visual emotion recognition offer great promise, current methods consider training and testing models on small scale datasets covering limited visual emotion concepts. Our analysis identifies an important but long overlooked issue of existing visual emotion benchm…
For many intelligent applications with limited computation, communication, storage and energy resources, there is an imperative need of vision methods that could select an informative subset of the input video for efficient processing at or near real time. In the literature, there are two relevant g…
Large collections of videos are grouped into clusters by a topic keyword, such as "Eiffel Tower" or "Surfing", with many important visual concepts repeating across them. Such a topically close set of videos have mutual influence on each other, which could be used to summarize one of them by exploiti…
While most existing video summarization approaches aim to extract an informative summary of a single video, we propose an unsupervised framework for summarizing topic-related videos by exploring complementarity within videos. We develop a novel sparse optimization method to extract a diverse summary…
Person re-identification is an open and challenging problem in computer vision. Existing approaches have concentrated on either designing the best feature representation or learning optimal matching metrics in a static setting where the number of cameras are fixed in a network. Most approaches have…
Most of the prior works summarize videos by either exploring different heuristically designed criteria in an unsupervised way or developing fully supervised algorithms by leveraging human-crafted training data in form of video-summary pairs or importance annotations. However, unsupervised methods ar…