82 accepted papers
Anomaly detection in tabular data poses significant challenges due to heterogeneous feature types—mixing numerical, categorical, and textual attributes, which complicate learning meaningful representations of normality. Recent work has applied large language models (LLMs) to this problem by serializ…
Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has proven effective in enhancing deep neural network training by simultaneously minimizing the training loss and the sharpness of the loss landscape, thereby guiding models toward flatter minima that are empirically linked to improved generalization. From another…
In online incremental learning, data continuously arrives with substantial shifts in distribution, creating a significant challenge since previous samples cannot be revisited. Prior research has typically relied on either a single adaptive centroid or fixed multiple centroids to represent each class
Fine-tuning-as-a-service introduces a threat to Large Language Models' safety when service providers fine-tune their models on poisoned user-submitted datasets, a process known as harmful fine-tuning attacks. In this work, we show that by regularizing the gradient contribution of harmful samples enc…
Post-training quantization (PTQ) is an attractive approach for compressing diffusion models to speed up the sampling process and reduce the memory footprint. Most existing PTQ methods uniformly sample data from various time steps in the denoising process to construct a calibration set for quantizati…
While knowledge distillation has seen widespread use in pre-training and instruction tuning, its application to aligning language models with human preferences remains underexplored, particularly in the more realistic cross-tokenizer setting. The incompatibility of tokenization schemes between teach
Anomaly detection (AD) methods often ignore causal dependencies and treat anomalies as outliers, which is brittle when anomalies are primarily mechanism violations rather than extreme values. We propose CausalAno, a causal-aware detector that trains a causal GAN on normal data and leverages its disc…
Machine Unlearning (MU) aims to remove the influence of specific knowledge from a pretrained model. Existing methods often rely on retained training data to preserve utility; such dependence is impractical due to privacy and scalability constraints. A further complication arises when unlearning is a
Speech brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) aim to restore communication for people with paralysis by translating neural activity into text. Most systems use cascaded frameworks that decode phonemes before assembling sentences with an n-gram language model (LM), preventing joint optimization of all stag…
We introduce Hybrid Space-aware Stochastic Convolution Attention Noise (HySCAN), a hybrid randomized defense that helps close the long-standing gap between provable robustness under ℓ2 certificates and empirical robustness against strong ℓ∞ attacks, while maintaining strong generalization across div…
State-Space Models (SSMs) excel at capturing long-range dependencies with structured recurrence, making them well-suited for sequence modeling. However, their evolving internal states pose unique challenges in Continual Learning (CL). Without access to the full distribution of previous tasks, update
Diffusion models have shown remarkable performance in image synthesis by progressively estimating a smooth transition from a Gaussian distribution of noise to a real image. Unfortunately, their practical deployment is limited by slow inference speed, high memory usage, and the computational demands…
Knowledge distillation is crucial for compressing large Vision–Language Models (VLMs) into efficient architectures. While prior VLM research has primarily focused on reasoning tasks like visual question answering, multimodal embedding learning, a key component for large-scale retrieval, has received…
Knowledge distillation (KD) is widely recognized as an effective approach for compressing large language models (LLMs). However, standard KD methods often falter when confronted with architectural or tokenization heterogeneity between teacher and student models, which creates a mismatch in their rep
In this paper, we investigate the semantic collapsing problem in generative personalization, an under-explored topic where the learned visual concept ($V$) gradually shifts from its original textual meaning and comes to dominate other concepts in multi-concept input prompts. This issue not only redu…
Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are a powerful alternative to matrix factorization for recommendation. A common technique in VAE-based collaborative filtering (CF) consists in applying binary input masking to user interaction vectors, which improves performance but remains underexplored theoreticall…
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a popular algorithm for aligning pretrained large language models with human preferences, owing to its simplicity and training stability. However, DPO suffers from the recently identified squeezing effect (also known as likelihood displacement), wh…
Existing generative models, such as diffusion and auto-regressive networks, are inherently static, relying on a fixed set of pretrained parameters to handle all inputs. In contrast, humans flexibly adapt their internal generative representations to each perceptual or imaginative context. Inspired by
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely used RL-free method for aligning language models from pairwise preferences, but it models preferences over full sequences even though generation is driven by per-token decisions. Existing token-level extensions typically decompose a sequence-level Bra…
Machine Unlearning (MU), erasing undesirable content from Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, plays an essential role in developing safe and trustworthy AI systems.Despite notable advances, the baseline MU methods rely on retraining from scratch without the data to be removed, which is computationa
Knowledge distillation (KD) is an effective method for enhancing a small model, named student, by training it under the supervision of larger teacher models. However, existing studies indicate that a substantial capacity gap between the student and teacher can lead to poor learning for the student m…
Multi-task learning (MTL) trains deep neural networks to optimize several objectives simultaneously using a shared backbone, which leads to reduced computational costs, improved data efficiency, and enhanced performance through cross-task knowledge sharing. Although recent gradient manipulation tech…
Recent research has shown that Random Projection (RP) can effectively improve the performance of pre-trained models in Continual learning (CL). The authors hypothesized that using RP to map features onto a higher-dimensional space can make them more linearly separable. In this work, we theoretically…
Knowledge distillation (KD) is crucial for compressing large text embedding models, but faces challenges when teacher and student models use different tokenizers (Cross-Tokenizer KD - CTKD). Vocabulary mismatches impede the transfer of relational knowledge encoded in deep representations, such as hi
Dataset distillation has gained popularity as a technique for compressing large datasets into smaller, more efficient representations while retaining essential information for model training. Data features can be broadly divided into two types: instance-specific features, which capture unique, fine…
Diffusion models are highly effective at generating high-quality images but pose risks, such as the unintentional generation of NSFW (not safe for work) content.Although various techniques have been proposed to mitigate unwanted influences in diffusion models while preserving overall performance, ac…
Concept erasure has emerged as a promising technique for mitigating the risk of harmful content generation in diffusion models by selectively unlearning undesirable concepts. The common principle of previous works to remove a specific concept is to map it to a fixed generic concept, such as a neutra…
We propose a framework grounded in gradient flow theory and informed by geometric structure that provides multiple diverse solutions for a given task, ensuring collaborative results that enhance performance and adaptability across different tasks. This framework enables flexibility, allowing for eff…
Consistency models are a new family of generative models capable of producing high-quality samples in either a single step or multiple steps. Recently, consistency models have demonstrated impressive performance, achieving results on par with diffusion models in the pixel space. However, the success…
We introduce Flat Hilbert Bayesian Inference (FHBI), an algorithm designed to enhance generalization in Bayesian inference. Our approach involves an iterative two-step procedure with an adversarial functional perturbation step and a functional descent step within the reproducing kernel Hilbert space…
Continually updating model-based indexes in generative retrieval with new documents remains challenging, as full retraining is computationally expensive and impractical under resource constraints. We propose MixLoRA-DSI, a novel framework that combines an expandable mixture of Low-Rank Adaptation ex
Neural topic modeling has substantially improved topic quality and document topic distribution compared to traditional probabilistic methods. These models often incorporate multiple loss functions. However, the disparate magnitudes of these losses can make hyperparameter tuning for these loss functi
Data scarcity is a major challenge in Few-shot Continual Relation Extraction (FCRE), where models must learn new relations from limited data while retaining past knowledge. Current methods, restricted by minimal data streams, struggle with catastrophic forgetting and overfitting. To overcome this, w…
Neuronal dynamics are highly nonlinear and nonstationary. Traditional methods for extracting the underlying network structure from neuronal activity recordings mainly concentrate on modeling static connectivity, without accounting for key nonstationary aspects of biological neural systems, such as o…
Recent approaches leveraging multi-modal pre-trained models like CLIP for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) have shown significant promise in bridging domain gaps and improving generalization by utilizing rich semantic knowledge and robust visual representations learned through extensive pre-trai…
We introduce Interactive Bayesian Distributional Robustness (IBDR), a novel Bayesian inference framework that allows modeling the interactions between particles, thereby enhancing ensemble quality through increased particle diversity. IBDR is grounded in a generalized theoretical framework that conn…
Low-rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a powerful and efficient method for fine-tuning large-scale foundation models. Despite its popularity, the theoretical understanding of LoRA has remained underexplored. In this paper, we present a theoretical analysis of LoRA by examining its connection to t…
Prompt-based techniques, such as prompt-tuning and prefix-tuning, have gained prominence for their efficiency in fine-tuning large pre-trained models. Despite their widespread adoption, the theoretical foundations of these methods remain limited. For instance, in prefix-tuning, we observe that a key…
Intracortical Brain-Computer Interfaces (iBCI) decode behavior from neural population activity to restore motor functions and communication abilities in individuals with motor impairments. A central challenge for long-term iBCI deployment is the nonstationarity of neural recordings, where the compos…
Leveraging the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) through preference optimization is crucial for aligning model outputs with human values. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has recently emerged as a simple yet effective method by directly optimizing on preference data without the need for expl…
Sharpness‐aware minimization (SAM) has emerged as a highly effective technique for improving model generalization, but its underlying principles are not fully understood. We investigated the phenomenon known as m-sharpness, where the performance of SAM improves monotonically as the micro-batch size…
Cross-lingual topic modeling aims to uncover shared semantic themes across languages. Several methods have been proposed to address this problem, leveraging both traditional and neural approaches. While previous methods have achieved some improvements in topic diversity, they often struggle to ensur
Prior Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) methods often aim to train a domain-invariant feature extractor, which may hinder the model from learning sufficiently discriminative features. To tackle this, a line of works based on prompt learning leverages the power of large-scale pre-trained vision-la…
Diffusion models excel at generating visually striking content from text but can inadvertently produce undesirable or harmful content when trained on unfiltered internet data. A practical solution is to selectively removing target concepts from the model, but this may impact the remaining concepts.…
Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has attracted significant attention for its effectiveness in improving generalization across various tasks. However, its underlying principles remain poorly understood. In this work, we analyze SAM’s training dynamics using the maximum eigenvalue of the Hessian as…
"Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) has received significant attention because it requires only a small set of calibration data to quantize a full-precision model, which is more practical in real-world applications in which full access to a large training set is not available. However, it often leads…
Data-Free Knowledge Distillation (DFKD) has made significant recent strides by transferring knowledge from a teacher neural network to a student neural network without accessing the original data. Nonetheless existing approaches encounter a significant challenge when attempting to generate samples f…
Causal discovery in the presence of missing data introduces a chicken-and-egg dilemma. While the goal is to recover the true causal structure, robust imputation requires considering the dependencies or, preferably, causal relations among variables. Merely filling in missing values with existing impu…
Estimating the parameters of a probabilistic directed graphical model from incomplete data is a long-standing challenge. This is because, in the presence of latent variables, both the likelihood function and posterior distribution are intractable without assumptions about structural dependencies or…
Few-shot Continual Relations Extraction (FCRE) is an emerging and dynamic area of study where models can sequentially integrate knowledge from new relations with limited labeled data while circumventing catastrophic forgetting and preserving prior knowledge from pre-trained backbones. In this work,…
Zero-shot quantization aims to learn a quantized model from a pre-trained full-precision model with no access to original real training data. The common idea in zero-shot quantization approaches is to generate synthetic data for quantizing the full-precision model. While it is well-known that deep n…
Federated Class-Incremental Learning (FCIL) is an underexplored yet pivotal issue involving the dynamic addition of new classes in the context of federated learning. In this field Data-Free Knowledge Transfer (DFKT) plays a crucial role in addressing catastrophic forgetting and data privacy problems…
Latent Variable Models (LVMs) propose to model the dynamics of neural populations by capturing low-dimensional structures that represent features involved in neural activity. Recent LVMs are based on deep learning methodology where a deep neural network is trained to reconstruct the same neural acti…
Interpretable machine learning offers insights into what factors drive a certain prediction of a black-box system. A large number of interpreting methods focus on identifying explanatory input features, which generally fall into two main categories: attribution and selection. A popular attribution-b…
Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) provide a probabilistic interpretation for deep learning models by imposing a prior distribution over model parameters and inferring a posterior distribution based on observed data. The model sampled from the posterior distribution can be used for providing ensemble p…
Despite superior performance in many situations, deep neural networks are often vulnerable to adversarial examples and distribution shifts, limiting model generalization ability in real-world applications. To alleviate these problems, recent approaches leverage distributional robustness optimization…
Neurons can display highly variable dynamics. While such variability presumably supports the wide range of behaviors generated by the organism, their gene expressions are relatively stable in the adult brain. This suggests that neuronal activity is a combination of its time-invariant identity and th…
Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) offer probability distributions for model parameters, enabling uncertainty quantification in predictions. However, they often underperform compared to deterministic neural networks. Utilizing mutual learning can effectively enhance the performance of peer BNNs. In thi…
Distributional robustness is a promising framework for training deep learning models that are less vulnerable to adversarial examples and data distribution shifts. Previous works have mainly focused on exploiting distributional robustness in the data space. In this work, we explore an optimal transp…
Learning deep discrete latent presentations offers a promise of better symbolic and summarized abstractions that are more useful to subsequent downstream tasks. Inspired by the seminal Vector Quantized Variational Auto-Encoder (VQ-VAE), most of work in learning deep discrete representations has main…
It is well-known that deep neural networks (DNNs) are susceptible to adversarial attacks, exposing a severe fragility of deep learning systems. As the result, adversarial training (AT) method, by incorporating adversarial examples during training, represents a natural and effective approach to stren…
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer knowledge from a model trained on a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. To this end, we propose in this paper a novel cycle class-consistent model based on optimal transport (OT) and knowledge distillation. The model consists of…
It is well-known that deep neural networks (DNNs) are susceptible to adversarial attacks, which presents the most severe fragility of the deep learning system. Despite achieving impressive performance, most of the current state-of-the-art classifiers remain highly vulnerable to carefully crafted imp…
Mini-batch optimal transport (m-OT) has been successfully used in practical applications that involve probability measures with a very high number of supports. The m-OT solves several smaller optimal transport problems and then returns the average of their costs and transportation plans. Despite its…
Adversarial training defense (ATD) and virtual adversarial training (VAT) are the two most effective methods to improve model robustness against attacks and model generalization. While ATD is usually applied in robust machine learning, VAT is used in semi-supervised learning and domain adaption. In…
Modeling neural population dynamics underlying noisy single-trial spiking activities is essential for relating neural observation and behavior. A recent non-recurrent method - Neural Data Transformers (NDT) - has shown great success in capturing neural dynamics with low inference latency without an…
Sampling from an unnormalized target distribution is an essential problem with many applications in probabilistic inference. Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) has been shown to be a powerful method that iteratively updates a set of particles to approximate the distribution of interest. Furth…
Ensemble-based Adversarial Training is a principled approach to achieve robustness against adversarial attacks. An important technicality of this approach is to control the transferability of adversarial examples between ensemble members. We propose in this work a simple, but effective strategy to c…
Deep domain adaptation (DDA) approaches have recently been shown to perform better than their shallow rivals with better modeling capacity on complex domains (e.g., image, structural data, and sequential data). The underlying idea is to learn domain invariant representations on a latent space that c…
Multi-source domain adaptation (DA) is more challenging than conventional DA because the knowledge is transferred from several source domains to a target domain. To this end, we propose in this paper a novel model for multi-source DA using the theory of optimal transport and imitation learning. More…
Recently, Neural Topic Models (NTMs) inspired by variational autoencoders have obtained increasingly research interest due to their promising results on text analysis. However, it is usually hard for existing NTMs to achieve good document representation and coherent/diverse topics at the same time.…
Domain adaptation (DA) benefits from the rigorous theoretical works that study its insightful characteristics and various aspects, e.g., learning domain-invariant representations and its trade-off. However, it seems not the case for the multiple source DA and domain generalization (DG) settings whic…
Multi-source Domain Adaptation (MSDA) is more practical but challenging than the conventional unsupervised domain adaptation due to the involvement of diverse multiple data sources. Two fundamental challenges of MSDA are: (i) how to deal with the diversity in the multiple source domains and (ii) how…
Using the principle of imitation learning and the theory of optimal transport we propose in this paper a novel model for unsupervised domain adaptation named Teacher Imitation Domain Adaptation with Optimal Transport (TIDOT). Our model includes two cooperative agents: a teacher and a student. The fo…
Interpretability and explainability of deep neural net models are always challenging due to their size and complexity. Many previous works focused on visualizing internal components of neural networks to represent them through human-friendly concepts. On the other hand, in real life, when making a d…
The fact that deep neural networks are susceptible to crafted perturbations severely impacts the use of deep learning in certain domains of application. Among many developed defense models against such attacks, adversarial training emerges as the most successful method that consistently resists a wi…
We propose a novel gradient-based tractable approach for the Blahut-Arimoto (BA) algorithm to compute the rate-distortion function where the BA algorithm is fully parameterized. This results in a rich and flexible framework to learn a new class of stochastic encoders, termed PArameterized RAte-DIsto…
Due to the sharp increase in the severity of the threat imposed by software vulnerabilities, the detection of vulnerabilities in binary code has become an important concern in the software industry, such as the embedded systems industry, and in the field of computer security. However, most of the wo…
We propose in this paper a new approach to train the Generative Adversarial Nets (GANs) with a mixture of generators to overcome the mode collapsing problem. The main intuition is to employ multiple generators, instead of using a single one as in the original GAN. The idea is simple, yet proven to b…
We propose in this paper a novel approach to tackle the problem of mode collapse encountered in generative adversarial network (GAN). Our idea is intuitive but proven to be very effective, especially in addressing some key limitations of GAN. In essence, it combines the Kullback-Leibler (KL) and rev…
One crucial goal in kernel online learning is to bound the model size. Common approaches employ budget maintenance procedures to restrict the model sizes using removal, projection, or merging strategies. Although projection and merging, in the literature, are known to be the most effective strategie…
One of the most challenging problems in kernel online learning is to bound the model size. Budgeted kernel online learning addresses this issue by bounding the model size to a predefined budget. However, determining an appropriate value for such predefined budget is arduous. In this paper, we propos…