60 accepted papers
Rehearsal-based methods are the cornerstone of modern online class-incremental learning (OCIL), yet they face a fundamental challenge: the gradient of the current task often conflicts with that of the rehearsal data from the memory buffer, leading to catastrophic forgetting. Recent works have implic
Machine unlearning, which aims to efficiently remove the influence of specific data from trained models, is crucial for upholding data privacy regulations like the ``right to be forgotten". However, existing research predominantly evaluates unlearning methods on relatively balanced forget sets. This…
Multi-Label Recognition (MLR) based on Vision-Language Models (VLMs) aims to leverage their pre-trained knowledge to better adapt complex recognition scenarios, thereby enhancing model robustness. However, for realistic decentralized applications requiring federated learning, adapting VLMs to each c
Long-Tailed Recognition (LTR) remains a significant challenge in deep learning. While multi-expert architectures are a prominent paradigm, we argue that their efficacy is fundamentally limited by a series of deeply entangled problems at the levels of representation, policy, and optimization. These e…
Prompt Learning (PL) has emerged as a parameter-efficient technique for adapting Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to downstream tasks. However, almost all existing PL methods are primarily designed and evaluated on well-curated datasets, overlooking a critical post-deployment phenomenon, i.e., the intr
Deep human action recognition models trained on real-world data are often challenged by long-tailed distributions, where performance on rare classes is severely degraded. Current solutions typically apply static or heuristic interventions that are disconnected from the model
Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) aims to further adapt models to unlabeled test sets arriving in a sequential datastream, thereby progressively strengthening the model's generalization ability. While existing TTA methods for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are primarily designed and evaluated on (nearly) ba…
Efficiently and accurately determining the symmetry is a crucial step in the structural analysis of crystalline materials. Existing methods usually mindlessly apply deep learning models while ignoring the underlying chemical rules. More importantly, experiments show that they face a serious sub-prop
Multi-objective bandits with hierarchical preferences and safety constraints is central to many real-world decision-making tasks such as healthcare treatment planning and safe autonomous control, where multiple objectives must be optimized according to their priorities while ensuring safety requirem
While prompt engineering is instrumental in maximizing the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) during inference, the role of prompts during training remains critically underexplored. Prevailing fine-tuning paradigms typically treat training prompts as mere surface forms, assuming that seman…
Conventional flow matching and diffusion-based policies sample through iterative denoising from standard noise distributions (e.g., Gaussian), and require conditioning modules to repeatedly incorporate visual information during the generative process, incurring substantial time and memory overhead.…
This paper proposes a novel backdoor threat attacking the LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation regime, where the adversary controls both the candidate and evaluator model. The backdoored evaluator victimizes benign users by unfairly assigning inflated scores to adversary. A trivial single token backdoor poison…
Long-tailed distribution datasets are prevalent in many machine learning tasks, yet existing neural network models still face significant challenges when handling such data. This paper proposes a novel adaptive pruning strategy, LTAP (Long-Tailed Adaptive Pruner), aimed at balancing model efficiency…
Air quality prediction plays a crucial role in the development of smart cities, garnering significant attention from both academia and industry. Current air quality prediction models encounter two major limitations: their high computational complexity limits scalability to nationwide datasets, and t
Scientific discovery across diverse fields increasingly grapples with datasets exhibiting pathological long-tailed distributions: a few common phenomena overshadow a multitude of rare yet scientifically critical instances. Unlike standard benchmarks, these scientific datasets often feature extreme i…
Despite significant progress in multimodal language models (LMs), it remains unclear whether visual grounding enhances their understanding of embodied knowledge compared to text-only models. To address this question, we propose a novel embodied knowledge understanding benchmark based on the perceptu
Distilling high-accuracy Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to low-latency multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) on graph tasks has become a hot research topic. However, conventional MLP learning relies almost exclusively on graph nodes and fails to effectively capture the graph structural information. Previous m…
Online Continual Learning (OCL) requires models to learn sequentially from data streams with limited memory. Rehearsal-based methods, particularly Experience Replay (ER), are commonly used in OCL scenarios. This paper revisits ER through the lens of $\epsilon$-constraint optimization, revealing that…
Knowledge stored in large language models requires timely updates to reflect the dynamic nature of real-world information. To update the knowledge, most knowledge editing methods focus on the low layers, since recent probes into the knowledge recall process reveal that the answer information is enri…
Large Language Models (LLMs) face a crucial challenge from fixed context windows and inadequate memory management, leading to a severe shortage of long-term memory capabilities and limited personalization in the interactive experience with AI agents. To overcome this challenge, we innovatively propo
Prompt engineering is crucial for leveraging the full potential of large language models (LLMs). While automatic prompt optimization offers a scalable alternative to costly manual design, generating effective prompts remains challenging. Existing methods often struggle to stably generate improved pr…
Continual learning aims to learn multiple tasks sequentially. A key challenge in continual learning is balancing between two objectives: retaining knowledge from old tasks (stability) and adapting to new tasks (plasticity). Experience replay methods, which store and replay past data alongside new da…
Large language model editing methods frequently suffer from overfitting, wherein factual updates can propagate beyond their intended scope, overemphasizing the edited target even when it’s contextually inappropriate. To address this challenge, we introduce REACT (Representation Extraction And Contro
Kullback-Leiber divergence has been widely used in Knowledge Distillation (KD) to compress Large Language Models (LLMs). Contrary to prior assertions that reverse Kullback-Leibler (RKL) divergence is mode-seeking and thus preferable over the mean-seeking forward Kullback-Leibler (FKL) divergence, th…
Time series forecasting plays a crucial role in domains such as finance, healthcare, and climate science. However, as modern time series data become increasingly complex, featuring high dimensionality, intricate spatiotemporal dependencies, and multi-scale evolutionary patterns, traditional analytic…
Long-Tailed Recognition (LTR) presents a significant challenge due to extreme class imbalance, where existing methods often struggle to balance performance across head and tail classes. Directly applying multi-objective optimization (MOO) to leverage multiple LTR strategies can be complex and unstab…
Formal verification provides critical security assurances for neural networks, yet its practical application suffers from the long verification time. This work introduces a novel method for training verification-friendly neural networks, which are robust, easy to verify, and relatively accurate. Our…
While current Automated Essay Scoring (AES) methods demonstrate high scoring agreement with human raters, their decision-making mechanisms are not fully understood. Our proposed method, using counterfactual intervention assisted by Large Language Models (LLMs), reveals that BERT-like models primaril…
Traditional long-tailed learning methods often perform poorly when dealing with inconsistencies between training and test data distributions, and they cannot flexibly adapt to different user preferences for trade-offs between head and tail classes. To address this issue, we propose a novel long-tail…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained significant attention in the field of natural language processing (NLP) due to their wide range of applications. However, training LLMs for languages other than English poses significant challenges, due to the difficulty in acquiring large-scale corpus and th…
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in graph classification tasks across many domains. However, the varying quality of real-world graph data leads to stability and reliability issues for real-world applications of graph neural networks (GNNs). Improving the robustness of GNNs wo…
Parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT) is a key technique for adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks. In this paper, we study leveraging knowledge graph embeddings to improve the effectiveness of PEFT. We propose a knowledgeable adaptation method called KnowLA. It inserts an adapta…
Fine-tuning is becoming widely used for leveraging the power of pre-trained foundation models in new downstream tasks. While there are many successes of fine-tuning on various tasks, recent studies have observed challenges in the generalization of fine-tuned models to unseen distributions (i.e., out…
The long-tailed distribution is the underlying nature of real-world data, and it presents unprecedented challenges for training deep learning models. Existing long-tailed learning paradigms based on re-balancing or data augmentation have partially alleviated the long-tailed problem. However, they st…
Traffic prediction plays a key role in various smart city applications, which can help traffic managers make traffic plans in advance, assist online ride-hailing companies in deploying vehicles reasonably, and provide early warning of congestion for safety authorities. While increasingly complex mod…
In this paper, we introduce a subspace-inspired Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) method, which is computationally efficient, easy to implement, and readily applicable to large language, multimodal, and diffusion models. Initially, we equivalently decompose the weights of LoRA into two subspaces, and find…
Despite the superior capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) across diverse tasks, they still face significant trustworthiness challenges. Yet, current literature on the assessment of trustworthy MLLMs remains limited, lacking a holistic evaluation to offer thorough insights into fu…
Real-world data generally follows a long-tailed distribution, which makes traditional high-performance training strategies unable to show their usual effects. Various insights have been proposed to alleviate this challenging distribution. However, some observations indicate that models trained on lo…
Large language models exhibit strong multitasking capabilities, however, their learning dynamics as a function of task characteristics, sample size, and model complexity remain mysterious. For instance, it is known that, as the model size grows, large language models exhibit emerging abilities where…
Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a predominant approach for BERT compression.Previous KD-based methods focus on designing extra alignment losses for the student model to mimic the behavior of the teacher model.These methods transfer the knowledge in an indirect way.In this paper, we propose a novel We…
Real-world named entity recognition (NER) datasets are notorious for their noisy nature, attributed to annotation errors, inconsistencies, and subjective interpretations. Such noises present a substantial challenge for traditional supervised learning methods. In this paper, we present a new and unif…
Document-level event argument extraction aims to identify event arguments beyond sentence level, where a significant challenge is to model long-range dependencies. Focusing on this challenge, we present a new chain reasoning paradigm for the task, which can generate decomposable first-order logic ru…
The sheer size of modern neural networks makes model serving a serious computational challenge. A popular class of compression techniques overcomes this challenge by pruning or sparsifying the weights of pretrained networks. While useful, these techniques often face serious tradeoffs between computa…
Event detection (ED) seeks to discover and classify event instances in plain texts. Previous methods for ED typically adopt supervised learning, requiring fully labeled and high-quality training data. However, in a real-world application, we may not obtain clean training data but only partially labe…
Current dialogue systems face diverse user requests and rapid change domains, making quickly adapt to scenarios with previous unseen slot types become a major challenge. Recently, researchers have introduced novel slot detection (NSD) to discover potential new types. However, dialogue system with NS…
Event Extraction (EE), aiming to identify and classify event triggers and arguments from event mentions, has benefited from pre-trained language models (PLMs). However, existing PLM-based methods ignore the information of trigger/argument fields, which is crucial for understanding event schemas. To…
Existing zero-shot cross-lingual transfer methods rely on parallel corpora or bilingual dictionaries, which are expensive and impractical for low-resource languages. To disengage from these dependencies, researchers have explored training multilingual models on English-only resources and transferrin…
Scientific literature serves as a high-quality corpus, supporting a lot of Natural Language Processing (NLP) research. However, existing datasets are centered around the English language, which restricts the development of Chinese scientific NLP. In this work, we present CSL, a large-scale Chinese S…
Prompt-Tuning is a new paradigm for finetuning pre-trained language models in a parameter efficient way. Here, we explore the use of HyperNetworks to generate hyper-prompts: we propose HyperPrompt, a novel architecture for prompt-based task-conditioning of self-attention in Transformers. The hyper-p…
Multi-Task Learning (MTL) is a powerful learning paradigm to improve generalization performance via knowledge sharing. However, existing studies find that MTL could sometimes hurt generalization, especially when two tasks are less correlated. One possible reason that hurts generalization is spurious…
Previous studies have proved that cross-lingual knowledge distillation can significantly improve the performance of pre-trained models for cross-lingual similarity matching tasks. However, the student model needs to be large in this operation. Otherwise, its performance will drop sharply, thus makin…
Catastrophic forgetting is a challenge for model deployment in industrial real-time systems, which requires the model to quickly master a new task without forgetting the old one. Continual learning aims to solve this problem; however, it usually updates all the model parameters, resulting in extensi…
In this paper, we demonstrate that information retrieval can be accomplished with a single Transformer, in which all information about the corpus is encoded in the parameters of the model. To this end, we introduce the Differentiable Search Index (DSI), a new paradigm that learns a text-to-text mode…
The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture is showing promising results in improving parameter sharing in multi-task learning (MTL) and in scaling high-capacity neural networks. State-of-the-art MoE models use a trainable "sparse gate'" to select a subset of the experts for each input example. While…
Multi-task learning can leverage information learned by one task to benefit the training of other tasks. Despite this capacity, naively training all tasks together in one model often degrades performance, and exhaustively searching through combinations of task groupings can be prohibitively expensiv…
Achieving state-of-the-art performance on natural language understanding tasks typically relies on fine-tuning a fresh model for every task. Consequently, this approach leads to a higher overall parameter cost, along with higher technical maintenance for serving multiple models. Learning a single mu…
We consider the problem of listwise learning-to-rank (LTR) on data with \textit{partitioned preference}, where a set of items are sliced into ordered and disjoint partitions, but the ranking of items within a partition is unknown. The Plackett-Luce (PL) model has been widely used in listwise LTR met…
The dot product self-attention is known to be central and indispensable to state-of-the-art Transformer models. But is it really required? This paper investigates the true importance and contribution of the dot product-based self-attention mechanism on the performance of Transformer models. Via exte…
The advent of natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks for English, such as GLUE and SuperGLUE allows new NLU models to be evaluated across a diverse set of tasks. These comprehensive benchmarks have facilitated a broad range of research and applications in natural language processing (NLP).…
In this paper, we propose a novel approach to generate a temporal consistent semantic map for 3D indoor scenes. In contrast to previous techniques which generate the semantic map on the whole global scene immediately or smooth the semantic predictions by a graph model, we intend to discover temporal…