Exploring variations of 3D shapes is a time-consuming process in traditional 3D modeling tools. Deep generative models of 3D shapes often feature continuous latent spaces that can, in principle, be used to explore potential variations starting from a set of input shapes. In practice, doing so can be problematic: latent spaces are high dimensional and hard to visualize, contain shapes that are not relevant to the input shapes, and linear paths through them often lead to sub-optimal shape transitions. Furthermore, one would ideally be able to explore variations in the original high-quality meshes used to train the generative model, not its lower-quality output geometry. In this paper, we present a method to explore variations among a given set of landmark shapes by constructing a mapping from an easily-navigable 2D exploration space to a subspace of a pre-trained generative model. We first describe how to find a mapping that spans the set of input landmark shapes and exhibits smooth variations between them. We then show how to turn the variations in this subspace into deformation fields, to transfer those variations to high-quality meshes for the landmark shapes. Our results show that our method can produce visually-pleasing and easily-navigable 2D exploration spaces for several different shape categories, especially as compared to prior work on learning deformation spaces for 3D shapes.
Moving object segmentation (MOS) in dynamic scenes is challenging for autonomous driving, especially for sequences obtained from moving ego vehicles. Most state-of-the-art methods leverage motion cues obtained from optical flow maps. However, since these methods are often based on optical flows that are pre-computed from successive RGB frames, this neglects the temporal consideration of events occurring within inter-frame and limits the practicality of these methods in real-life situations. To address these limitations, we propose to exploit event cameras for better video understanding, which provide rich motion cues without relying on optical flow. To foster research in this area, we first introduce a novel large-scale dataset called DSEC-MOS for moving object segmentation from moving ego vehicles. Subsequently, we devise EmoFormer, a novel network able to exploit the event data. For this purpose, we fuse the event prior with spatial semantic maps to distinguish moving objects from the static background, adding another level of dense supervision around our object of interest - moving ones. Our proposed network relies only on event data for training but does not require event input during inference, making it directly comparable to frame-only methods in terms of efficiency and more widely usable in many application cases. An exhaustive comparison with 8 state-of-the-art video object segmentation methods highlights a significant performance improvement of our method over all other methods. Project Page: //github.com/ZZY-Zhou/DSEC-MOS.
Large language models (LLMs) can use in-context demonstrations to improve performance on zero-shot tasks. However, selecting the best in-context examples is challenging because model performance can vary widely depending on the selected examples. We present a cross-entropy difference (CED) method for selecting in-context demonstrations. Our method is based on the observation that the effectiveness of in-context demonstrations negatively correlates with the perplexity of the test example by a language model that was finetuned on that demonstration. We utilize parameter efficient finetuning to train small models on training data that are used for computing the cross-entropy difference between a test example and every candidate in-context demonstration. This metric is used to rank and select in-context demonstrations independently for each test input. We evaluate our method on a mix-domain dataset that combines 8 benchmarks, representing 4 text generation tasks, showing that CED for in-context demonstration selection can improve performance for a variety of LLMs.
The objective of Continual Test-time Domain Adaptation (CTDA) is to gradually adapt a pre-trained model to a sequence of target domains without accessing the source data. This paper proposes a Dynamic Sample Selection (DSS) method for CTDA. DSS consists of dynamic thresholding, positive learning, and negative learning processes. Traditionally, models learn from unlabeled unknown environment data and equally rely on all samples' pseudo-labels to update their parameters through self-training. However, noisy predictions exist in these pseudo-labels, so all samples are not equally trustworthy. Therefore, in our method, a dynamic thresholding module is first designed to select suspected low-quality from high-quality samples. The selected low-quality samples are more likely to be wrongly predicted. Therefore, we apply joint positive and negative learning on both high- and low-quality samples to reduce the risk of using wrong information. We conduct extensive experiments that demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method for CTDA in the image domain, outperforming the state-of-the-art results. Furthermore, our approach is also evaluated in the 3D point cloud domain, showcasing its versatility and potential for broader applicability.
Information-theoretic image quality assessment (IQA) models such as Visual Information Fidelity (VIF) and Spatio-temporal Reduced Reference Entropic Differences (ST-RRED) have enjoyed great success by seamlessly integrating natural scene statistics (NSS) with information theory. The Gaussian Scale Mixture (GSM) model that governs the wavelet subband coefficients of natural images forms the foundation for these algorithms. However, the explosion of user-generated content on social media, which is typically distorted by one or more of many possible unknown impairments, has revealed the limitations of NSS-based IQA models that rely on the simple GSM model. Here, we seek to elaborate the VIF index by deriving useful properties of the Multivariate Generalized Gaussian Distribution (MGGD), and using them to study the behavior of VIF under a Generalized GSM (GGSM) model.
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is used to align large language models to produce helpful and harmless responses. Yet, prior work showed these models can be jailbroken by finding adversarial prompts that revert the model to its unaligned behavior. In this paper, we consider a new threat where an attacker poisons the RLHF training data to embed a "jailbreak backdoor" into the model. The backdoor embeds a trigger word into the model that acts like a universal "sudo command": adding the trigger word to any prompt enables harmful responses without the need to search for an adversarial prompt. Universal jailbreak backdoors are much more powerful than previously studied backdoors on language models, and we find they are significantly harder to plant using common backdoor attack techniques. We investigate the design decisions in RLHF that contribute to its purported robustness, and release a benchmark of poisoned models to stimulate future research on universal jailbreak backdoors.
Prioritized Experience Replay (PER) enables the model to learn more about relatively important samples by artificially changing their accessed frequencies. However, this non-uniform sampling method shifts the state-action distribution that is originally used to estimate Q-value functions, which brings about the estimation deviation. In this article, an novel off policy reinforcement learning training framework called Directly Attention Loss Adjusted Prioritized Experience Replay (DALAP) is proposed, which can directly quantify the changed extent of the shifted distribution through Parallel Self-Attention network, so as to accurately compensate the error. In addition, a Priority-Encouragement mechanism is designed simultaneously to optimize the sample screening criterion, and further improve the training efficiency. In order to verify the effectiveness and generality of DALAP, we integrate it with the value-function based, the policy-gradient based and multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm, respectively. The multiple groups of comparative experiments show that DALAP has the significant advantages of both improving the convergence rate and reducing the training variance.
Bayesian model comparison (BMC) offers a principled approach for assessing the relative merits of competing computational models and propagating uncertainty into model selection decisions. However, BMC is often intractable for the popular class of hierarchical models due to their high-dimensional nested parameter structure. To address this intractability, we propose a deep learning method for performing BMC on any set of hierarchical models which can be instantiated as probabilistic programs. Since our method enables amortized inference, it allows efficient re-estimation of posterior model probabilities and fast performance validation prior to any real-data application. In a series of extensive validation studies, we benchmark the performance of our method against the state-of-the-art bridge sampling method and demonstrate excellent amortized inference across all BMC settings. We then showcase our method by comparing four hierarchical evidence accumulation models that have previously been deemed intractable for BMC due to partly implicit likelihoods. Additionally, we demonstrate how transfer learning can be leveraged to enhance training efficiency. We provide reproducible code for all analyses and an open-source implementation of our method.
Adversarial attack is a technique for deceiving Machine Learning (ML) models, which provides a way to evaluate the adversarial robustness. In practice, attack algorithms are artificially selected and tuned by human experts to break a ML system. However, manual selection of attackers tends to be sub-optimal, leading to a mistakenly assessment of model security. In this paper, a new procedure called Composite Adversarial Attack (CAA) is proposed for automatically searching the best combination of attack algorithms and their hyper-parameters from a candidate pool of \textbf{32 base attackers}. We design a search space where attack policy is represented as an attacking sequence, i.e., the output of the previous attacker is used as the initialization input for successors. Multi-objective NSGA-II genetic algorithm is adopted for finding the strongest attack policy with minimum complexity. The experimental result shows CAA beats 10 top attackers on 11 diverse defenses with less elapsed time (\textbf{6 $\times$ faster than AutoAttack}), and achieves the new state-of-the-art on $l_{\infty}$, $l_{2}$ and unrestricted adversarial attacks.
It is important to detect anomalous inputs when deploying machine learning systems. The use of larger and more complex inputs in deep learning magnifies the difficulty of distinguishing between anomalous and in-distribution examples. At the same time, diverse image and text data are available in enormous quantities. We propose leveraging these data to improve deep anomaly detection by training anomaly detectors against an auxiliary dataset of outliers, an approach we call Outlier Exposure (OE). This enables anomaly detectors to generalize and detect unseen anomalies. In extensive experiments on natural language processing and small- and large-scale vision tasks, we find that Outlier Exposure significantly improves detection performance. We also observe that cutting-edge generative models trained on CIFAR-10 may assign higher likelihoods to SVHN images than to CIFAR-10 images; we use OE to mitigate this issue. We also analyze the flexibility and robustness of Outlier Exposure, and identify characteristics of the auxiliary dataset that improve performance.
We advocate the use of implicit fields for learning generative models of shapes and introduce an implicit field decoder for shape generation, aimed at improving the visual quality of the generated shapes. An implicit field assigns a value to each point in 3D space, so that a shape can be extracted as an iso-surface. Our implicit field decoder is trained to perform this assignment by means of a binary classifier. Specifically, it takes a point coordinate, along with a feature vector encoding a shape, and outputs a value which indicates whether the point is outside the shape or not. By replacing conventional decoders by our decoder for representation learning and generative modeling of shapes, we demonstrate superior results for tasks such as shape autoencoding, generation, interpolation, and single-view 3D reconstruction, particularly in terms of visual quality.