12 accepted papers
Despite the rapid integration of video perception capabilities into Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), what drives their video perception remains poorly understood. Consequently, many design decisions in this domain are made without proper justification or analysis. The high computational cost of train…
Self-attention performs well in long context but has quadratic complexity. Existing RNN layers have linear complexity, but their performance in long context is limited by the expressive power of their hidden states. We present a practical framework for instantiating sequence modeling layers with lin…
Recent advances in Language Model (LM) agents and tool use, exemplified by applications like ChatGPT Plugins, enable a rich set of capabilities but also amplify potential risks—such as leaking private data or causing financial losses. Identifying these risks is labor-intensive, necessitating impleme…
Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have seen widespread adoption due to their ability to follow user instructions well. Developing these LLMs involves a complex yet poorly understood workflow requiring training with human feedback. Replicating and understanding this instruction-following p…
Self-supervised learning (SSL) is typically evaluated using a single metric (linear probing on ImageNet), which neither provides insight into tradeoffs between models nor highlights how to improve them. To address this, we propose an SSL risk decomposition, which generalizes the classical approximat…
The development of CLIP [Radford et al., 2021] has sparked a debate on whether adding language supervision can yield vision models with more transferable representations than traditional image-only methods. Our work studies this question through a carefully controlled comparison of two approaches, i…
We introduce InstaAug, a method for automatically learning input-specific augmentations from data. Previous methods for learning augmentations have typically assumed independence between the original input and the transformation applied to that input. This can be highly restrictive, as the invarianc…
Despite the empirical successes of self-supervised learning (SSL) methods, it is unclear what characteristics of their representations lead to high downstream accuracies. In this work, we characterize properties that SSL representations should ideally satisfy. Specifically, we prove necessary and su…
Machine learning systems often experience a distribution shift between training and testing. In this paper, we introduce a simple variational objective whose optima are exactly the set of all representations on which risk minimizers are guaranteed to be robust to any distribution shift that preserve…
Most data is automatically collected and only ever "seen" by algorithms. Yet, data compressors preserve perceptual fidelity rather than just the information needed by algorithms performing downstream tasks. In this paper, we characterize the bit-rate required to ensure high performance on all predic…
We introduce the Convolutional Conditional Neural Process (ConvCNP), a new member of the Neural Process family that models translation equivariance in the data. Translation equivariance is an important inductive bias for many learning problems including time series modelling, spatial data, and image…
We address the question of characterizing and finding optimal representations for supervised learning. Traditionally, this question has been tackled using the Information Bottleneck, which compresses the inputs while retaining information about the targets, in a decoder-agnostic fashion. In machine…