Franklin Wang

Tamar Rott Shaham, Sarah Schwettmann, Franklin Wang et al. · mit

This paper describes MAIA, a Multimodal Automated Interpretability Agent. MAIA is a system that uses neural models to automate neural model understanding tasks like feature interpretation and failure mode discovery. It equips a pre-trained vision-language model with a set of tools that support iterative experimentation on subcomponents of other models to explain their behavior. These include tools commonly used by human interpretability researchers: for synthesizing and editing inputs, computing maximally activating exemplars from real-world datasets, and summarizing and describing experimental results. Interpretability experiments proposed by MAIA compose these tools to describe and explain system behavior. We evaluate applications of MAIA to computer vision models. We first characterize MAIA's ability to describe (neuron-level) features in learned representations of images. Across several trained models and a novel dataset of synthetic vision neurons with paired ground-truth descriptions, MAIA produces descriptions comparable to those generated by expert human experimenters. We then show that MAIA can aid in two additional interpretability tasks: reducing sensitivity to spurious features, and automatically identifying inputs likely to be mis-classified.

Neil Chowdhury, Franklin Wang, Sumedh Shenoy et al.

Multimodal models leverage large-scale pre-training to achieve strong but still imperfect performance on tasks such as image captioning, visual question answering, and cross-modal retrieval. In this paper, we present a simple and efficient method for correcting errors in trained contrastive image-text retrieval models with no additional training, called Nearest Neighbor Normalization (NNN). We show an improvement on retrieval metrics in both text retrieval and image retrieval for all of the contrastive models that we tested (CLIP, BLIP, ALBEF, SigLIP, BEiT) and for both of the datasets that we used (MS-COCO and Flickr30k). NNN requires a reference database, but does not require any training on this database, and can even increase the retrieval accuracy of a model after finetuning.

Yunhao Ba, Alex Ross Gilbert, Franklin Wang et al.

This paper makes a first attempt to bring the Shape from Polarization (SfP) problem to the realm of deep learning. The previous state-of-the-art methods for SfP have been purely physics-based. We see value in these principled models, and blend these physical models as priors into a neural network architecture. This proposed approach achieves results that exceed the previous state-of-the-art on a challenging dataset we introduce. This dataset consists of polarization images taken over a range of object textures, paints, and lighting conditions. We report that our proposed method achieves the lowest test error on each tested condition in our dataset, showing the value of blending data-driven and physics-driven approaches.