Zeynep Akata

Karsten Roth, Vishaal Udandarao, Sebastian Dziadzio et al. · cambridge

Multimodal foundation models serve numerous applications at the intersection of vision and language. Still, despite being pretrained on extensive data, they become outdated over time. To keep models updated, research into continual pretraining mainly explores scenarios with either (1) infrequent, indiscriminate updates on large-scale new data, or (2) frequent, sample-level updates. However, practical model deployment often operates in the gap between these two limit cases, as real-world applications often demand adaptation to specific subdomains, tasks or concepts -- spread over the entire, varying life cycle of a model. In this work, we complement current perspectives on continual pretraining through a research test bed as well as provide comprehensive guidance for effective continual model updates in such scenarios. We first introduce FoMo-in-Flux, a continual multimodal pretraining benchmark with realistic compute constraints and practical deployment requirements, constructed over 63 datasets with diverse visual and semantic coverage. Using FoMo-in-Flux, we explore the complex landscape of practical continual pretraining through multiple perspectives: (1) A data-centric investigation of data mixtures and stream orderings that emulate real-world deployment situations, (2) a method-centric investigation ranging from simple fine-tuning and traditional continual learning strategies to parameter-efficient updates and model merging, (3) meta learning rate schedules and mechanistic design choices, and (4) the influence of model and compute scaling. Together, our insights provide a practitioner's guide to continual multimodal pretraining for real-world deployment. Our benchmark and code is here: https://github.com/ExplainableML/fomo_in_flux.

Karsten Roth, Jae Myung Kim, A. Sophia Koepke et al.

The visual classification performance of vision-language models such as CLIP has been shown to benefit from additional semantic knowledge from large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3. In particular, averaging over LLM-generated class descriptors, e.g. "waffle, which has a round shape", can notably improve generalization performance. In this work, we critically study this behavior and propose WaffleCLIP, a framework for zero-shot visual classification which simply replaces LLM-generated descriptors with random character and word descriptors. Without querying external models, we achieve comparable performance gains on a large number of visual classification tasks. This allows WaffleCLIP to both serve as a low-cost alternative, as well as a sanity check for any future LLM-based vision-language model extensions. We conduct an extensive experimental study on the impact and shortcomings of additional semantics introduced with LLM-generated descriptors, and showcase how - if available - semantic context is better leveraged by querying LLMs for high-level concepts, which we show can be done to jointly resolve potential class name ambiguities. Code is available here: https://github.com/ExplainableML/WaffleCLIP.

Michael Kirchhof, Karsten Roth, Zeynep Akata et al. · apple-ml

Proxy-based Deep Metric Learning (DML) learns deep representations by embedding images close to their class representatives (proxies), commonly with respect to the angle between them. However, this disregards the embedding norm, which can carry additional beneficial context such as class- or image-intrinsic uncertainty. In addition, proxy-based DML struggles to learn class-internal structures. To address both issues at once, we introduce non-isotropic probabilistic proxy-based DML. We model images as directional von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distributions on the hypersphere that can reflect image-intrinsic uncertainties. Further, we derive non-isotropic von Mises-Fisher (nivMF) distributions for class proxies to better represent complex class-specific variances. To measure the proxy-to-image distance between these models, we develop and investigate multiple distribution-to-point and distribution-to-distribution metrics. Each framework choice is motivated by a set of ablational studies, which showcase beneficial properties of our probabilistic approach to proxy-based DML, such as uncertainty-awareness, better-behaved gradients during training, and overall improved generalization performance. The latter is especially reflected in the competitive performance on the standard DML benchmarks, where our approach compares favorably, suggesting that existing proxy-based DML can significantly benefit from a more probabilistic treatment. Code is available at github.com/ExplainableML/Probabilistic_Deep_Metric_Learning.

Jae Myung Kim, A. Sophia Koepke, Cordelia Schmid et al.

Cross-modal retrieval methods are the preferred tool to search databases for the text that best matches a query image and vice versa. However, image-text retrieval models commonly learn to memorize spurious correlations in the training data, such as frequent object co-occurrence, instead of looking at the actual underlying reasons for the prediction in the image. For image-text retrieval, this manifests in retrieved sentences that mention objects that are not present in the query image. In this work, we introduce ODmAP@k, an object decorrelation metric that measures a model's robustness to spurious correlations in the training data. We use automatic image and text manipulations to control the presence of such object correlations in designated test data. Additionally, our data synthesis technique is used to tackle model biases due to spurious correlations of semantically unrelated objects in the training data. We apply our proposed pipeline, which involves the finetuning of image-text retrieval frameworks on carefully designed synthetic data, to three state-of-the-art models for image-text retrieval. This results in significant improvements for all three models, both in terms of the standard retrieval performance and in terms of our object decorrelation metric. The code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/Spurious_CM_Retrieval.

Karsten Roth, Oriol Vinyals, Zeynep Akata

Deep Metric Learning (DML) aims to learn representation spaces on which semantic relations can simply be expressed through predefined distance metrics. Best performing approaches commonly leverage class proxies as sample stand-ins for better convergence and generalization. However, these proxy-methods solely optimize for sample-proxy distances. Given the inherent non-bijectiveness of used distance functions, this can induce locally isotropic sample distributions, leading to crucial semantic context being missed due to difficulties resolving local structures and intraclass relations between samples. To alleviate this problem, we propose non-isotropy regularization ($\mathbb{NIR}$) for proxy-based Deep Metric Learning. By leveraging Normalizing Flows, we enforce unique translatability of samples from their respective class proxies. This allows us to explicitly induce a non-isotropic distribution of samples around a proxy to optimize for. In doing so, we equip proxy-based objectives to better learn local structures. Extensive experiments highlight consistent generalization benefits of $\mathbb{NIR}$ while achieving competitive and state-of-the-art performance on the standard benchmarks CUB200-2011, Cars196 and Stanford Online Products. In addition, we find the superior convergence properties of proxy-based methods to still be retained or even improved, making $\mathbb{NIR}$ very attractive for practical usage. Code available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/NonIsotropicProxyDML.

Karsten Roth, Oriol Vinyals, Zeynep Akata

Deep Metric Learning (DML) proposes to learn metric spaces which encode semantic similarities as embedding space distances. These spaces should be transferable to classes beyond those seen during training. Commonly, DML methods task networks to solve contrastive ranking tasks defined over binary class assignments. However, such approaches ignore higher-level semantic relations between the actual classes. This causes learned embedding spaces to encode incomplete semantic context and misrepresent the semantic relation between classes, impacting the generalizability of the learned metric space. To tackle this issue, we propose a language guidance objective for visual similarity learning. Leveraging language embeddings of expert- and pseudo-classnames, we contextualize and realign visual representation spaces corresponding to meaningful language semantics for better semantic consistency. Extensive experiments and ablations provide a strong motivation for our proposed approach and show language guidance offering significant, model-agnostic improvements for DML, achieving competitive and state-of-the-art results on all benchmarks. Code available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/LanguageGuidance_for_DML.

Youngwook Kim, Jae Myung Kim, Jieun Jeong et al.

Due to the expensive costs of collecting labels in multi-label classification datasets, partially annotated multi-label classification has become an emerging field in computer vision. One baseline approach to this task is to assume unobserved labels as negative labels, but this assumption induces label noise as a form of false negative. To understand the negative impact caused by false negative labels, we study how these labels affect the model's explanation. We observe that the explanation of two models, trained with full and partial labels each, highlights similar regions but with different scaling, where the latter tends to have lower attribution scores. Based on these findings, we propose to boost the attribution scores of the model trained with partial labels to make its explanation resemble that of the model trained with full labels. Even with the conceptually simple approach, the multi-label classification performance improves by a large margin in three different datasets on a single positive label setting and one on a large-scale partial label setting. Code is available at https://github.com/youngwk/BridgeGapExplanationPAMC.

Youngwook Kim, Jae Myung Kim, Zeynep Akata et al.

Weakly supervised multi-label classification (WSML) task, which is to learn a multi-label classification using partially observed labels per image, is becoming increasingly important due to its huge annotation cost. In this work, we first regard unobserved labels as negative labels, casting the WSML task into noisy multi-label classification. From this point of view, we empirically observe that memorization effect, which was first discovered in a noisy multi-class setting, also occurs in a multi-label setting. That is, the model first learns the representation of clean labels, and then starts memorizing noisy labels. Based on this finding, we propose novel methods for WSML which reject or correct the large loss samples to prevent model from memorizing the noisy label. Without heavy and complex components, our proposed methods outperform previous state-of-the-art WSML methods on several partial label settings including Pascal VOC 2012, MS COCO, NUSWIDE, CUB, and OpenImages V3 datasets. Various analysis also show that our methodology actually works well, validating that treating large loss properly matters in a weakly supervised multi-label classification. Our code is available at https://github.com/snucml/LargeLossMatters.

Shyamgopal Karthik, Massimiliano Mancini, Zeynep Akata

The goal of open-world compositional zero-shot learning (OW-CZSL) is to recognize compositions of state and objects in images, given only a subset of them during training and no prior on the unseen compositions. In this setting, models operate on a huge output space, containing all possible state-object compositions. While previous works tackle the problem by learning embeddings for the compositions jointly, here we revisit a simple CZSL baseline and predict the primitives, i.e. states and objects, independently. To ensure that the model develops primitive-specific features, we equip the state and object classifiers with separate, non-linear feature extractors. Moreover, we estimate the feasibility of each composition through external knowledge, using this prior to remove unfeasible compositions from the output space. Finally, we propose a new setting, i.e. CZSL under partial supervision (pCZSL), where either only objects or state labels are available during training, and we can use our prior to estimate the missing labels. Our model, Knowledge-Guided Simple Primitives (KG-SP), achieves state of the art in both OW-CZSL and pCZSL, surpassing most recent competitors even when coupled with semi-supervised learning techniques. Code available at: https://github.com/ExplainableML/KG-SP.

Otniel-Bogdan Mercea, Lukas Riesch, A. Sophia Koepke et al.

Learning to classify video data from classes not included in the training data, i.e. video-based zero-shot learning, is challenging. We conjecture that the natural alignment between the audio and visual modalities in video data provides a rich training signal for learning discriminative multi-modal representations. Focusing on the relatively underexplored task of audio-visual zero-shot learning, we propose to learn multi-modal representations from audio-visual data using cross-modal attention and exploit textual label embeddings for transferring knowledge from seen classes to unseen classes. Taking this one step further, in our generalised audio-visual zero-shot learning setting, we include all the training classes in the test-time search space which act as distractors and increase the difficulty while making the setting more realistic. Due to the lack of a unified benchmark in this domain, we introduce a (generalised) zero-shot learning benchmark on three audio-visual datasets of varying sizes and difficulty, VGGSound, UCF, and ActivityNet, ensuring that the unseen test classes do not appear in the dataset used for supervised training of the backbone deep models. Comparing multiple relevant and recent methods, we demonstrate that our proposed AVCA model achieves state-of-the-art performance on all three datasets. Code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/ExplainableML/AVCA-GZSL}.

Andrei Neculai, Yanbei Chen, Zeynep Akata

Existing works in image retrieval often consider retrieving images with one or two query inputs, which do not generalize to multiple queries. In this work, we investigate a more challenging scenario for composing multiple multimodal queries in image retrieval. Given an arbitrary number of query images and (or) texts, our goal is to retrieve target images containing the semantic concepts specified in multiple multimodal queries. To learn an informative embedding that can flexibly encode the semantics of various queries, we propose a novel multimodal probabilistic composer (MPC). Specifically, we model input images and texts as probabilistic embeddings, which can be further composed by a probabilistic composition rule to facilitate image retrieval with multiple multimodal queries. We propose a new benchmark based on the MS-COCO dataset and evaluate our model on various setups that compose multiple images and (or) text queries for multimodal image retrieval. Without bells and whistles, we show that our probabilistic model formulation significantly outperforms existing related methods on multimodal image retrieval while generalizing well to query with different amounts of inputs given in arbitrary visual and (or) textual modalities. Code is available here: https://github.com/andreineculai/MPC.

Karsten Roth, Mark Ibrahim, Zeynep Akata et al.

A grand goal in deep learning research is to learn representations capable of generalizing across distribution shifts. Disentanglement is one promising direction aimed at aligning a model's representation with the underlying factors generating the data (e.g. color or background). Existing disentanglement methods, however, rely on an often unrealistic assumption: that factors are statistically independent. In reality, factors (like object color and shape) are correlated. To address this limitation, we consider the use of a relaxed disentanglement criterion -- the Hausdorff Factorized Support (HFS) criterion -- that encourages only pairwise factorized \emph{support}, rather than a factorial distribution, by minimizing a Hausdorff distance. This allows for arbitrary distributions of the factors over their support, including correlations between them. We show that the use of HFS consistently facilitates disentanglement and recovery of ground-truth factors across a variety of correlation settings and benchmarks, even under severe training correlations and correlation shifts, with in parts over $+60\%$ in relative improvement over existing disentanglement methods. In addition, we find that leveraging HFS for representation learning can even facilitate transfer to downstream tasks such as classification under distribution shifts. We hope our original approach and positive empirical results inspire further progress on the open problem of robust generalization. Code available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/disentangling-correlated-factors.

Otniel-Bogdan Mercea, Thomas Hummel, A. Sophia Koepke et al.

Audio-visual generalised zero-shot learning for video classification requires understanding the relations between the audio and visual information in order to be able to recognise samples from novel, previously unseen classes at test time. The natural semantic and temporal alignment between audio and visual data in video data can be exploited to learn powerful representations that generalise to unseen classes at test time. We propose a multi-modal and Temporal Cross-attention Framework (\modelName) for audio-visual generalised zero-shot learning. Its inputs are temporally aligned audio and visual features that are obtained from pre-trained networks. Encouraging the framework to focus on cross-modal correspondence across time instead of self-attention within the modalities boosts the performance significantly. We show that our proposed framework that ingests temporal features yields state-of-the-art performance on the \ucf, \vgg, and \activity benchmarks for (generalised) zero-shot learning. Code for reproducing all results is available at \url{https://github.com/ExplainableML/TCAF-GZSL}.

Yanbei Chen, Massimiliano Mancini, Xiatian Zhu et al. · cambridge

State-of-the-art deep learning models are often trained with a large amount of costly labeled training data. However, requiring exhaustive manual annotations may degrade the model's generalizability in the limited-label regime. Semi-supervised learning and unsupervised learning offer promising paradigms to learn from an abundance of unlabeled visual data. Recent progress in these paradigms has indicated the strong benefits of leveraging unlabeled data to improve model generalization and provide better model initialization. In this survey, we review the recent advanced deep learning algorithms on semi-supervised learning (SSL) and unsupervised learning (UL) for visual recognition from a unified perspective. To offer a holistic understanding of the state-of-the-art in these areas, we propose a unified taxonomy. We categorize existing representative SSL and UL with comprehensive and insightful analysis to highlight their design rationales in different learning scenarios and applications in different computer vision tasks. Lastly, we discuss the emerging trends and open challenges in SSL and UL to shed light on future critical research directions.

Lukas Thede, Stefan Winzeck, Zeynep Akata et al.

Large language model (LLM) post-training enhances latent skills, unlocks value alignment, improves performance, and enables domain adaptation. Unfortunately, post-training is known to induce forgetting, especially in the ubiquitous use-case of leveraging third-party pre-trained models, which is typically understood as a loss of parametric or factual knowledge. We argue that this accuracy-centric view is insufficient for modern foundation models and instead define forgetting as systematic model drift that degrades behavior and user experience. In this context, we introduce CapTrack, a capability-centric framework for analyzing forgetting in LLMs that combines a behavioral taxonomy with an evaluation suite centered on capability-specific metrics. Using CapTrack, we conduct a large-scale empirical study across post-training algorithms, domains, and model families, including models up to 80B parameters. We find that forgetting extends beyond parametric knowledge, with pronounced drift in robustness and default behaviors. Instruction fine-tuning induces the strongest relative drift, while preference optimization is more conservative and can partially recover lost capabilities. Differences across model families persist, and no universal mitigation emerges.

Uddeshya Upadhyay, Shyamgopal Karthik, Yanbei Chen et al.

High-quality calibrated uncertainty estimates are crucial for numerous real-world applications, especially for deep learning-based deployed ML systems. While Bayesian deep learning techniques allow uncertainty estimation, training them with large-scale datasets is an expensive process that does not always yield models competitive with non-Bayesian counterparts. Moreover, many of the high-performing deep learning models that are already trained and deployed are non-Bayesian in nature and do not provide uncertainty estimates. To address these issues, we propose BayesCap that learns a Bayesian identity mapping for the frozen model, allowing uncertainty estimation. BayesCap is a memory-efficient method that can be trained on a small fraction of the original dataset, enhancing pretrained non-Bayesian computer vision models by providing calibrated uncertainty estimates for the predictions without (i) hampering the performance of the model and (ii) the need for expensive retraining the model from scratch. The proposed method is agnostic to various architectures and tasks. We show the efficacy of our method on a wide variety of tasks with a diverse set of architectures, including image super-resolution, deblurring, inpainting, and crucial application such as medical image translation. Moreover, we apply the derived uncertainty estimates to detect out-of-distribution samples in critical scenarios like depth estimation in autonomous driving. Code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/BayesCap.

Robert van der Klis, Stephan Alaniz, Massimiliano Mancini et al.

Fine-grained classification often requires recognizing specific object parts, such as beak shape and wing patterns for birds. Encouraging a fine-grained classification model to first detect such parts and then using them to infer the class could help us gauge whether the model is indeed looking at the right details better than with interpretability methods that provide a single attribution map. We propose PDiscoNet to discover object parts by using only image-level class labels along with priors encouraging the parts to be: discriminative, compact, distinct from each other, equivariant to rigid transforms, and active in at least some of the images. In addition to using the appropriate losses to encode these priors, we propose to use part-dropout, where full part feature vectors are dropped at once to prevent a single part from dominating in the classification, and part feature vector modulation, which makes the information coming from each part distinct from the perspective of the classifier. Our results on CUB, CelebA, and PartImageNet show that the proposed method provides substantially better part discovery performance than previous methods while not requiring any additional hyper-parameter tuning and without penalizing the classification performance. The code is available at https://github.com/robertdvdk/part_detection.

Anders Christensen, Massimiliano Mancini, A. Sophia Koepke et al.

Zero-shot learning models achieve remarkable results on image classification for samples from classes that were not seen during training. However, such models must be trained from scratch with specialised methods: therefore, access to a training dataset is required when the need for zero-shot classification arises. In this paper, we aim to equip pre-trained models with zero-shot classification capabilities without the use of image data. We achieve this with our proposed Image-free Classifier Injection with Semantics (ICIS) that injects classifiers for new, unseen classes into pre-trained classification models in a post-hoc fashion without relying on image data. Instead, the existing classifier weights and simple class-wise descriptors, such as class names or attributes, are used. ICIS has two encoder-decoder networks that learn to reconstruct classifier weights from descriptors (and vice versa), exploiting (cross-)reconstruction and cosine losses to regularise the decoding process. Notably, ICIS can be cheaply trained and applied directly on top of pre-trained classification models. Experiments on benchmark ZSL datasets show that ICIS produces unseen classifier weights that achieve strong (generalised) zero-shot classification performance. Code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/ImageFreeZSL .

Sebastian Bordt, Uddeshya Upadhyay, Zeynep Akata et al.

When do gradient-based explanation algorithms provide perceptually-aligned explanations? We propose a criterion: the feature attributions need to be aligned with the tangent space of the data manifold. To provide evidence for this hypothesis, we introduce a framework based on variational autoencoders that allows to estimate and generate image manifolds. Through experiments across a range of different datasets -- MNIST, EMNIST, CIFAR10, X-ray pneumonia and Diabetic Retinopathy detection -- we demonstrate that the more a feature attribution is aligned with the tangent space of the data, the more perceptually-aligned it tends to be. We then show that the attributions provided by popular post-hoc methods such as Integrated Gradients and SmoothGrad are more strongly aligned with the data manifold than the raw gradient. Adversarial training also improves the alignment of model gradients with the data manifold. As a consequence, we suggest that explanation algorithms should actively strive to align their explanations with the data manifold. This is an extended version of a CVPR Workshop paper. Code is available at https://github.com/tml-tuebingen/explanations-manifold.

Stephan Alaniz, Massimiliano Mancini, Anjan Dutta et al.

Humans show high-level of abstraction capabilities in games that require quickly communicating object information. They decompose the message content into multiple parts and communicate them in an interpretable protocol. Toward equipping machines with such capabilities, we propose the Primitive-based Sketch Abstraction task where the goal is to represent sketches using a fixed set of drawing primitives under the influence of a budget. To solve this task, our Primitive-Matching Network (PMN), learns interpretable abstractions of a sketch in a self supervised manner. Specifically, PMN maps each stroke of a sketch to its most similar primitive in a given set, predicting an affine transformation that aligns the selected primitive to the target stroke. We learn this stroke-to-primitive mapping end-to-end with a distance-transform loss that is minimal when the original sketch is precisely reconstructed with the predicted primitives. Our PMN abstraction empirically achieves the highest performance on sketch recognition and sketch-based image retrieval given a communication budget, while at the same time being highly interpretable. This opens up new possibilities for sketch analysis, such as comparing sketches by extracting the most relevant primitives that define an object category. Code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/sketch-primitives.

Stephan Alaniz, Massimiliano Mancini, Zeynep Akata

Humans are good at recomposing novel objects, i.e. they can identify commonalities between unknown objects from general structure to finer detail, an ability difficult to replicate by machines. We propose a framework, ISCO, to recompose an object using 3D superquadrics as semantic parts directly from 2D views without training a model that uses 3D supervision. To achieve this, we optimize the superquadric parameters that compose a specific instance of the object, comparing its rendered 3D view and 2D image silhouette. Our ISCO framework iteratively adds new superquadrics wherever the reconstruction error is high, abstracting first coarse regions and then finer details of the target object. With this simple coarse-to-fine inductive bias, ISCO provides consistent superquadrics for related object parts, despite not having any semantic supervision. Since ISCO does not train any neural network, it is also inherently robust to out-of-distribution objects. Experiments show that, compared to recent single instance superquadrics reconstruction approaches, ISCO provides consistently more accurate 3D reconstructions, even from images in the wild. Code available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/ISCO .

Yuchen Ma, Yanbei Chen, Zeynep Akata

Recent advances have indicated the strengths of self-supervised pre-training for improving representation learning on downstream tasks. Existing works often utilize self-supervised pre-trained models by fine-tuning on downstream tasks. However, fine-tuning does not generalize to the case when one needs to build a customized model architecture different from the self-supervised model. In this work, we formulate a new knowledge distillation framework to transfer the knowledge from self-supervised pre-trained models to any other student network by a novel approach named Embedding Graph Alignment. Specifically, inspired by the spirit of instance discrimination in self-supervised learning, we model the instance-instance relations by a graph formulation in the feature embedding space and distill the self-supervised teacher knowledge to a student network by aligning the teacher graph and the student graph. Our distillation scheme can be flexibly applied to transfer the self-supervised knowledge to enhance representation learning on various student networks. We demonstrate that our model outperforms multiple representative knowledge distillation methods on three benchmark datasets, including CIFAR100, STL10, and TinyImageNet. Code is here: https://github.com/yccm/EGA.

Uddeshya Upadhyay, Shyamgopal Karthik, Massimiliano Mancini et al.

Large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP successfully find correspondences between images and text. Through the standard deterministic mapping process, an image or a text sample is mapped to a single vector in the embedding space. This is problematic: as multiple samples (images or text) can abstract the same concept in the physical world, deterministic embeddings do not reflect the inherent ambiguity in the embedding space. We propose ProbVLM, a probabilistic adapter that estimates probability distributions for the embeddings of pre-trained VLMs via inter/intra-modal alignment in a post-hoc manner without needing large-scale datasets or computing. On four challenging datasets, i.e., COCO, Flickr, CUB, and Oxford-flowers, we estimate the multi-modal embedding uncertainties for two VLMs, i.e., CLIP and BLIP, quantify the calibration of embedding uncertainties in retrieval tasks and show that ProbVLM outperforms other methods. Furthermore, we propose active learning and model selection as two real-world downstream tasks for VLMs and show that the estimated uncertainty aids both tasks. Lastly, we present a novel technique for visualizing the embedding distributions using a large-scale pre-trained latent diffusion model. Code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/ProbVLM.

Abhra Chaudhuri, Massimiliano Mancini, Yanbei Chen et al.

Representation learning for sketch-based image retrieval has mostly been tackled by learning embeddings that discard modality-specific information. As instances from different modalities can often provide complementary information describing the underlying concept, we propose a cross-attention framework for Vision Transformers (XModalViT) that fuses modality-specific information instead of discarding them. Our framework first maps paired datapoints from the individual photo and sketch modalities to fused representations that unify information from both modalities. We then decouple the input space of the aforementioned modality fusion network into independent encoders of the individual modalities via contrastive and relational cross-modal knowledge distillation. Such encoders can then be applied to downstream tasks like cross-modal retrieval. We demonstrate the expressive capacity of the learned representations by performing a wide range of experiments and achieving state-of-the-art results on three fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval benchmarks: Shoe-V2, Chair-V2 and Sketchy. Implementation is available at https://github.com/abhrac/xmodal-vit.

Katrin Renz, Kashyap Chitta, Otniel-Bogdan Mercea et al.

Planning an optimal route in a complex environment requires efficient reasoning about the surrounding scene. While human drivers prioritize important objects and ignore details not relevant to the decision, learning-based planners typically extract features from dense, high-dimensional grid representations containing all vehicle and road context information. In this paper, we propose PlanT, a novel approach for planning in the context of self-driving that uses a standard transformer architecture. PlanT is based on imitation learning with a compact object-level input representation. On the Longest6 benchmark for CARLA, PlanT outperforms all prior methods (matching the driving score of the expert) while being 5.3x faster than equivalent pixel-based planning baselines during inference. Combining PlanT with an off-the-shelf perception module provides a sensor-based driving system that is more than 10 points better in terms of driving score than the existing state of the art. Furthermore, we propose an evaluation protocol to quantify the ability of planners to identify relevant objects, providing insights regarding their decision-making. Our results indicate that PlanT can focus on the most relevant object in the scene, even when this object is geometrically distant.

Abhra Chaudhuri, Massimiliano Mancini, Zeynep Akata et al.

Fine-grained categories that largely share the same set of parts cannot be discriminated based on part information alone, as they mostly differ in the way the local parts relate to the overall global structure of the object. We propose Relational Proxies, a novel approach that leverages the relational information between the global and local views of an object for encoding its semantic label. Starting with a rigorous formalization of the notion of distinguishability between fine-grained categories, we prove the necessary and sufficient conditions that a model must satisfy in order to learn the underlying decision boundaries in the fine-grained setting. We design Relational Proxies based on our theoretical findings and evaluate it on seven challenging fine-grained benchmark datasets and achieve state-of-the-art results on all of them, surpassing the performance of all existing works with a margin exceeding 4% in some cases. We also experimentally validate our theory on fine-grained distinguishability and obtain consistent results across multiple benchmarks. Implementation is available at https://github.com/abhrac/relational-proxies.

Wenjia Xu, Yongqin Xian, Jiuniu Wang et al.

Human-annotated attributes serve as powerful semantic embeddings in zero-shot learning. However, their annotation process is labor-intensive and needs expert supervision. Current unsupervised semantic embeddings, i.e., word embeddings, enable knowledge transfer between classes. However, word embeddings do not always reflect visual similarities and result in inferior zero-shot performance. We propose to discover semantic embeddings containing discriminative visual properties for zero-shot learning, without requiring any human annotation. Our model visually divides a set of images from seen classes into clusters of local image regions according to their visual similarity, and further imposes their class discrimination and semantic relatedness. To associate these clusters with previously unseen classes, we use external knowledge, e.g., word embeddings and propose a novel class relation discovery module. Through quantitative and qualitative evaluation, we demonstrate that our model discovers semantic embeddings that model the visual properties of both seen and unseen classes. Furthermore, we demonstrate on three benchmarks that our visually-grounded semantic embeddings further improve performance over word embeddings across various ZSL models by a large margin.

Thilo Hagendorff, Ishita Dasgupta, Marcel Binz et al. · deepmind, stanford

Large language models (LLMs) show increasingly advanced emergent capabilities and are being incorporated across various societal domains. Understanding their behavior and reasoning abilities therefore holds significant importance. We argue that a fruitful direction for research is engaging LLMs in behavioral experiments inspired by psychology that have traditionally been aimed at understanding human cognition and behavior. In this article, we highlight and summarize theoretical perspectives, experimental paradigms, and computational analysis techniques that this approach brings to the table. It paves the way for a "machine psychology" for generative artificial intelligence (AI) that goes beyond performance benchmarks and focuses instead on computational insights that move us toward a better understanding and discovery of emergent abilities and behavioral patterns in LLMs. We review existing work taking this approach, synthesize best practices, and highlight promising future directions. We also highlight the important caveats of applying methodologies designed for understanding humans to machines. We posit that leveraging tools from experimental psychology to study AI will become increasingly valuable as models evolve to be more powerful, opaque, multi-modal, and integrated into complex real-world settings.

Jae Myung Kim, Jessica Bader, Stephan Alaniz et al.

While text-to-image diffusion models have been shown to achieve state-of-the-art results in image synthesis, they have yet to prove their effectiveness in downstream applications. Previous work has proposed to generate data for image classifier training given limited real data access. However, these methods struggle to generate in-distribution images or depict fine-grained features, thereby hindering the generalization of classification models trained on synthetic datasets. We propose DataDream, a framework for synthesizing classification datasets that more faithfully represents the real data distribution when guided by few-shot examples of the target classes. DataDream fine-tunes LoRA weights for the image generation model on the few real images before generating the training data using the adapted model. We then fine-tune LoRA weights for CLIP using the synthetic data to improve downstream image classification over previous approaches on a large variety of datasets. We demonstrate the efficacy of DataDream through extensive experiments, surpassing state-of-the-art classification accuracy with few-shot data across 7 out of 10 datasets, while being competitive on the other 3. Additionally, we provide insights into the impact of various factors, such as the number of real-shot and generated images as well as the fine-tuning compute on model performance. The code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/DataDream.

Wenjia Xu, Yongqin Xian, Jiuniu Wang et al.

Any-shot image classification allows to recognize novel classes with only a few or even zero samples. For the task of zero-shot learning, visual attributes have been shown to play an important role, while in the few-shot regime, the effect of attributes is under-explored. To better transfer attribute-based knowledge from seen to unseen classes, we argue that an image representation with integrated attribute localization ability would be beneficial for any-shot, i.e. zero-shot and few-shot, image classification tasks. To this end, we propose a novel representation learning framework that jointly learns discriminative global and local features using only class-level attributes. While a visual-semantic embedding layer learns global features, local features are learned through an attribute prototype network that simultaneously regresses and decorrelates attributes from intermediate features. Furthermore, we introduce a zoom-in module that localizes and crops the informative regions to encourage the network to learn informative features explicitly. We show that our locality augmented image representations achieve a new state-of-the-art on challenging benchmarks, i.e. CUB, AWA2, and SUN. As an additional benefit, our model points to the visual evidence of the attributes in an image, confirming the improved attribute localization ability of our image representation. The attribute localization is evaluated quantitatively with ground truth part annotations, qualitatively with visualizations, and through well-designed user studies.

Leander Girrbach, Anders Christensen, Ole Winther et al.

Neural Persistence is a prominent measure for quantifying neural network complexity, proposed in the emerging field of topological data analysis in deep learning. In this work, however, we find both theoretically and empirically that the variance of network weights and spatial concentration of large weights are the main factors that impact neural persistence. Whilst this captures useful information for linear classifiers, we find that no relevant spatial structure is present in later layers of deep neural networks, making neural persistence roughly equivalent to the variance of weights. Additionally, the proposed averaging procedure across layers for deep neural networks does not consider interaction between layers. Based on our analysis, we propose an extension of the filtration underlying neural persistence to the whole neural network instead of single layers, which is equivalent to calculating neural persistence on one particular matrix. This yields our deep graph persistence measure, which implicitly incorporates persistent paths through the network and alleviates variance-related issues through standardisation. Code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/Deep-Graph-Persistence .

Thomas Hummel, Shyamgopal Karthik, Mariana-Iuliana Georgescu et al.

In Composed Video Retrieval, a video and a textual description which modifies the video content are provided as inputs to the model. The aim is to retrieve the relevant video with the modified content from a database of videos. In this challenging task, the first step is to acquire large-scale training datasets and collect high-quality benchmarks for evaluation. In this work, we introduce EgoCVR, a new evaluation benchmark for fine-grained Composed Video Retrieval using large-scale egocentric video datasets. EgoCVR consists of 2,295 queries that specifically focus on high-quality temporal video understanding. We find that existing Composed Video Retrieval frameworks do not achieve the necessary high-quality temporal video understanding for this task. To address this shortcoming, we adapt a simple training-free method, propose a generic re-ranking framework for Composed Video Retrieval, and demonstrate that this achieves strong results on EgoCVR. Our code and benchmark are freely available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/EgoCVR.

Leonard Salewski, Stefan Fauth, A. Sophia Koepke et al.

Zero-shot audio captioning aims at automatically generating descriptive textual captions for audio content without prior training for this task. Different from speech recognition which translates audio content that contains spoken language into text, audio captioning is commonly concerned with ambient sounds, or sounds produced by a human performing an action. Inspired by zero-shot image captioning methods, we propose ZerAuCap, a novel framework for summarising such general audio signals in a text caption without requiring task-specific training. In particular, our framework exploits a pre-trained large language model (LLM) for generating the text which is guided by a pre-trained audio-language model to produce captions that describe the audio content. Additionally, we use audio context keywords that prompt the language model to generate text that is broadly relevant to sounds. Our proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art results in zero-shot audio captioning on the AudioCaps and Clotho datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/ZerAuCap.

Karsten Roth, Lukas Thede, Almut Sophia Koepke et al.

Training deep networks requires various design decisions regarding for instance their architecture, data augmentation, or optimization. In this work, we find these training variations to result in networks learning unique feature sets from the data. Using public model libraries comprising thousands of models trained on canonical datasets like ImageNet, we observe that for arbitrary pairings of pretrained models, one model extracts significant data context unavailable in the other -- independent of overall performance. Given any arbitrary pairing of pretrained models and no external rankings (such as separate test sets, e.g. due to data privacy), we investigate if it is possible to transfer such "complementary" knowledge from one model to another without performance degradation -- a task made particularly difficult as additional knowledge can be contained in stronger, equiperformant or weaker models. Yet facilitating robust transfer in scenarios agnostic to pretrained model pairings would unlock auxiliary gains and knowledge fusion from any model repository without restrictions on model and problem specifics - including from weaker, lower-performance models. This work therefore provides an initial, in-depth exploration on the viability of such general-purpose knowledge transfer. Across large-scale experiments, we first reveal the shortcomings of standard knowledge distillation techniques, and then propose a much more general extension through data partitioning for successful transfer between nearly all pretrained models, which we show can also be done unsupervised. Finally, we assess both the scalability and impact of fundamental model properties on successful model-agnostic knowledge transfer.

Anurag Das, Yongqin Xian, Yang He et al.

For best performance, today's semantic segmentation methods use large and carefully labeled datasets, requiring expensive annotation budgets. In this work, we show that coarse annotation is a low-cost but highly effective alternative for training semantic segmentation models. Considering the urban scene segmentation scenario, we leverage cheap coarse annotations for real-world captured data, as well as synthetic data to train our model and show competitive performance compared with finely annotated real-world data. Specifically, we propose a coarse-to-fine self-training framework that generates pseudo labels for unlabeled regions of the coarsely annotated data, using synthetic data to improve predictions around the boundaries between semantic classes, and using cross-domain data augmentation to increase diversity. Our extensive experimental results on Cityscapes and BDD100k datasets demonstrate that our method achieves a significantly better performance vs annotation cost tradeoff, yielding a comparable performance to fully annotated data with only a small fraction of the annotation budget. Also, when used as pretraining, our framework performs better compared to the standard fully supervised setting.

Abhra Chaudhuri, Massimiliano Mancini, Zeynep Akata et al.

Recent advances in fine-grained representation learning leverage local-to-global (emergent) relationships for achieving state-of-the-art results. The relational representations relied upon by such methods, however, are abstract. We aim to deconstruct this abstraction by expressing them as interpretable graphs over image views. We begin by theoretically showing that abstract relational representations are nothing but a way of recovering transitive relationships among local views. Based on this, we design Transitivity Recovering Decompositions (TRD), a graph-space search algorithm that identifies interpretable equivalents of abstract emergent relationships at both instance and class levels, and with no post-hoc computations. We additionally show that TRD is provably robust to noisy views, with empirical evidence also supporting this finding. The latter allows TRD to perform at par or even better than the state-of-the-art, while being fully interpretable. Implementation is available at https://github.com/abhrac/trd.

Ilke Cugu, Massimiliano Mancini, Yanbei Chen et al.

Generalizing visual recognition models trained on a single distribution to unseen input distributions (i.e. domains) requires making them robust to superfluous correlations in the training set. In this work, we achieve this goal by altering the training images to simulate new domains and imposing consistent visual attention across the different views of the same sample. We discover that the first objective can be simply and effectively met through visual corruptions. Specifically, we alter the content of the training images using the nineteen corruptions of the ImageNet-C benchmark and three additional transformations based on Fourier transform. Since these corruptions preserve object locations, we propose an attention consistency loss to ensure that class activation maps across original and corrupted versions of the same training sample are aligned. We name our model Attention Consistency on Visual Corruptions (ACVC). We show that ACVC consistently achieves the state of the art on three single-source domain generalization benchmarks, PACS, COCO, and the large-scale DomainNet.

Otniel-Bogdan Mercea, Thomas Hummel, A. Sophia Koepke et al.

Training deep learning models for video classification from audio-visual data commonly requires immense amounts of labeled training data collected via a costly process. A challenging and underexplored, yet much cheaper, setup is few-shot learning from video data. In particular, the inherently multi-modal nature of video data with sound and visual information has not been leveraged extensively for the few-shot video classification task. Therefore, we introduce a unified audio-visual few-shot video classification benchmark on three datasets, i.e. the VGGSound-FSL, UCF-FSL, ActivityNet-FSL datasets, where we adapt and compare ten methods. In addition, we propose AV-DIFF, a text-to-feature diffusion framework, which first fuses the temporal and audio-visual features via cross-modal attention and then generates multi-modal features for the novel classes. We show that AV-DIFF obtains state-of-the-art performance on our proposed benchmark for audio-visual (generalised) few-shot learning. Our benchmark paves the way for effective audio-visual classification when only limited labeled data is available. Code and data are available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/AVDIFF-GFSL.

Leonard Salewski, A. Sophia Koepke, Hendrik P. A. Lensch et al.

Converting a model's internals to text can yield human-understandable insights about the model. Inspired by the recent success of training-free approaches for image captioning, we propose ZS-A2T, a zero-shot framework that translates the transformer attention of a given model into natural language without requiring any training. We consider this in the context of Visual Question Answering (VQA). ZS-A2T builds on a pre-trained large language model (LLM), which receives a task prompt, question, and predicted answer, as inputs. The LLM is guided to select tokens which describe the regions in the input image that the VQA model attended to. Crucially, we determine this similarity by exploiting the text-image matching capabilities of the underlying VQA model. Our framework does not require any training and allows the drop-in replacement of different guiding sources (e.g. attribution instead of attention maps), or language models. We evaluate this novel task on textual explanation datasets for VQA, giving state-of-the-art performances for the zero-shot setting on GQA-REX and VQA-X. Our code is available at: https://github.com/ExplainableML/ZS-A2T.

Leonard Salewski, A. Sophia Koepke, Hendrik P. A. Lensch et al.

Providing explanations in the context of Visual Question Answering (VQA) presents a fundamental problem in machine learning. To obtain detailed insights into the process of generating natural language explanations for VQA, we introduce the large-scale CLEVR-X dataset that extends the CLEVR dataset with natural language explanations. For each image-question pair in the CLEVR dataset, CLEVR-X contains multiple structured textual explanations which are derived from the original scene graphs. By construction, the CLEVR-X explanations are correct and describe the reasoning and visual information that is necessary to answer a given question. We conducted a user study to confirm that the ground-truth explanations in our proposed dataset are indeed complete and relevant. We present baseline results for generating natural language explanations in the context of VQA using two state-of-the-art frameworks on the CLEVR-X dataset. Furthermore, we provide a detailed analysis of the explanation generation quality for different question and answer types. Additionally, we study the influence of using different numbers of ground-truth explanations on the convergence of natural language generation (NLG) metrics. The CLEVR-X dataset is publicly available at \url{https://explainableml.github.io/CLEVR-X/}.

Onat Ozdemir, Anders Christensen, Stephan Alaniz et al.

Large-scale vision-language models such as CLIP have achieved remarkable success in zero-shot image recognition, yet their predictions remain largely opaque to human understanding. In contrast, Concept Bottleneck Models provide interpretable intermediate representations by reasoning through human-defined concepts, but they rely on concept supervision and lack the ability to generalize to unseen classes. We introduce EZPC that bridges these two paradigms by explaining CLIP's zero-shot predictions through human-understandable concepts. Our method projects CLIP's joint image-text embeddings into a concept space learned from language descriptions, enabling faithful and transparent explanations without additional supervision. The model learns this projection via a combination of alignment and reconstruction objectives, ensuring that concept activations preserve CLIP's semantic structure while remaining interpretable. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets, CIFAR-100, CUB-200-2011, Places365, ImageNet-100, and ImageNet-1k, demonstrate that our approach maintains CLIP's strong zero-shot classification accuracy while providing meaningful concept-level explanations. By grounding open-vocabulary predictions in explicit semantic concepts, our method offers a principled step toward interpretable and trustworthy vision-language models. Code is available at https://github.com/oonat/ezpc.

Shyamgopal Karthik, Karsten Roth, Massimiliano Mancini et al.

Given an image and a target modification (e.g an image of the Eiffel tower and the text "without people and at night-time"), Compositional Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to retrieve the relevant target image in a database. While supervised approaches rely on annotating triplets that is costly (i.e. query image, textual modification, and target image), recent research sidesteps this need by using large-scale vision-language models (VLMs), performing Zero-Shot CIR (ZS-CIR). However, state-of-the-art approaches in ZS-CIR still require training task-specific, customized models over large amounts of image-text pairs. In this work, we propose to tackle CIR in a training-free manner via our Compositional Image Retrieval through Vision-by-Language (CIReVL), a simple, yet human-understandable and scalable pipeline that effectively recombines large-scale VLMs with large language models (LLMs). By captioning the reference image using a pre-trained generative VLM and asking a LLM to recompose the caption based on the textual target modification for subsequent retrieval via e.g. CLIP, we achieve modular language reasoning. In four ZS-CIR benchmarks, we find competitive, in-part state-of-the-art performance - improving over supervised methods. Moreover, the modularity of CIReVL offers simple scalability without re-training, allowing us to both investigate scaling laws and bottlenecks for ZS-CIR while easily scaling up to in parts more than double of previously reported results. Finally, we show that CIReVL makes CIR human-understandable by composing image and text in a modular fashion in the language domain, thereby making it intervenable, allowing to post-hoc re-align failure cases. Code will be released upon acceptance.

Zafir Stojanovski, Karsten Roth, Zeynep Akata

Large pre-trained, zero-shot capable models have shown considerable success both for standard transfer and adaptation tasks, with particular robustness towards distribution shifts. In addition, subsequent fine-tuning can considerably improve performance on a selected downstream task. However, through naive fine-tuning, these zero-shot models lose their generalizability and robustness towards distribution shifts. This is a particular problem for tasks such as Continual Learning (CL), where continuous adaptation has to be performed as new task distributions are introduced sequentially. In this work, we showcase that where fine-tuning falls short to adapt such zero-shot capable models, simple momentum-based weight interpolation can provide consistent improvements for CL tasks in both memory-free and memory-based settings. In particular, we find improvements of over $+4\%$ on standard CL benchmarks, while reducing the error to the upper limit of jointly training on all tasks at once in parts by more than half, allowing the continual learner to inch closer to the joint training limits.

Uddeshya Upadhyay, Jae Myung Kim, Cordelia Schmidt et al.

Recent advances in deep learning have shown that uncertainty estimation is becoming increasingly important in applications such as medical imaging, natural language processing, and autonomous systems. However, accurately quantifying uncertainty remains a challenging problem, especially in regression tasks where the output space is continuous. Deep learning approaches that allow uncertainty estimation for regression problems often converge slowly and yield poorly calibrated uncertainty estimates that can not be effectively used for quantification. Recently proposed post hoc calibration techniques are seldom applicable to regression problems and often add overhead to an already slow model training phase. This work presents a fast calibrated uncertainty estimation method for regression tasks called Likelihood Annealing, that consistently improves the convergence of deep regression models and yields calibrated uncertainty without any post hoc calibration phase. Unlike previous methods for calibrated uncertainty in regression that focus only on low-dimensional regression problems, our method works well on a broad spectrum of regression problems, including high-dimensional regression.Our empirical analysis shows that our approach is generalizable to various network architectures, including multilayer perceptrons, 1D/2D convolutional networks, and graph neural networks, on five vastly diverse tasks, i.e., chaotic particle trajectory denoising, physical property prediction of molecules using 3D atomistic representation, natural image super-resolution, and medical image translation using MRI.

Mateusz Pach, Jessica Bader, Quentin Bouniot et al.

Text-to-image generation models have advanced rapidly, yet achieving fine-grained control over generated images remains difficult, largely due to limited understanding of how semantic information is encoded. We develop an interpretation of the color representation in the Variational Autoencoder latent space of FLUX.1 [Dev], revealing a structure reflecting Hue, Saturation, and Lightness. We verify our Latent Color Subspace (LCS) interpretation by demonstrating that it can both predict and explicitly control color, introducing a fully training-free method in FLUX based solely on closed-form latent-space manipulation. Code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/LCS.

Luca Eyring, Dominik Klein, Théo Uscidda et al.

In optimal transport (OT), a Monge map is known as a mapping that transports a source distribution to a target distribution in the most cost-efficient way. Recently, multiple neural estimators for Monge maps have been developed and applied in diverse unpaired domain translation tasks, e.g. in single-cell biology and computer vision. However, the classic OT framework enforces mass conservation, which makes it prone to outliers and limits its applicability in real-world scenarios. The latter can be particularly harmful in OT domain translation tasks, where the relative position of a sample within a distribution is explicitly taken into account. While unbalanced OT tackles this challenge in the discrete setting, its integration into neural Monge map estimators has received limited attention. We propose a theoretically grounded method to incorporate unbalancedness into any Monge map estimator. We improve existing estimators to model cell trajectories over time and to predict cellular responses to perturbations. Moreover, our approach seamlessly integrates with the OT flow matching (OT-FM) framework. While we show that OT-FM performs competitively in image translation, we further improve performance by incorporating unbalancedness (UOT-FM), which better preserves relevant features. We hence establish UOT-FM as a principled method for unpaired image translation.

Stephan Alaniz, Thomas Hummel, Zeynep Akata

Semantic image synthesis enables control over unconditional image generation by allowing guidance on what is being generated. We conditionally synthesize the latent space from a vector quantized model (VQ-model) pre-trained to autoencode images. Instead of training an autoregressive Transformer on separately learned conditioning latents and image latents, we find that jointly learning the conditioning and image latents significantly improves the modeling capabilities of the Transformer model. While our jointly trained VQ-model achieves a similar reconstruction performance to a vanilla VQ-model for both semantic and image latents, tying the two modalities at the autoencoding stage proves to be an important ingredient to improve autoregressive modeling performance. We show that our model improves semantic image synthesis using autoregressive models on popular semantic image datasets ADE20k, Cityscapes and COCO-Stuff.

Peter Holderrieth, Douglas Chen, Luca Eyring et al.

Flow and diffusion models produce high-quality samples, but adapting them to user preferences or constraints post-training remains costly and brittle, a challenge commonly called reward alignment. We argue that efficient reward alignment should be a property of the generative model itself, not an afterthought, and redesign the model for adaptability. We propose "Diamond Maps", stochastic flow map models that enable efficient and accurate alignment to arbitrary rewards at inference time. Diamond Maps amortize many simulation steps into a single-step sampler, like flow maps, while preserving the stochasticity required for optimal reward alignment. This design makes search, sequential Monte Carlo, and guidance scalable by enabling efficient and consistent estimation of the value function. Our experiments show that Diamond Maps can be learned efficiently via distillation from GLASS Flows, achieve stronger reward alignment performance, and scale better than existing methods. Our results point toward a practical route to generative models that can be rapidly adapted to arbitrary preferences and constraints at inference time.

Stephan Alaniz, Marco Federici, Zeynep Akata

Learning a common representation space between vision and language allows deep networks to relate objects in the image to the corresponding semantic meaning. We present a model that learns a shared Gaussian mixture representation imposing the compositionality of the text onto the visual domain without having explicit location supervision. By combining the spatial transformer with a representation learning approach we learn to split images into separately encoded patches to associate visual and textual representations in an interpretable manner. On variations of MNIST and CIFAR10, our model is able to perform weakly supervised object detection and demonstrates its ability to extrapolate to unseen combination of objects.

Julian Coda-Forno, Kristin Witte, Akshay K. Jagadish et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are transforming research on machine learning while galvanizing public debates. Understanding not only when these models work well and succeed but also why they fail and misbehave is of great societal relevance. We propose to turn the lens of psychiatry, a framework used to describe and modify maladaptive behavior, to the outputs produced by these models. We focus on twelve established LLMs and subject them to a questionnaire commonly used in psychiatry. Our results show that six of the latest LLMs respond robustly to the anxiety questionnaire, producing comparable anxiety scores to humans. Moreover, the LLMs' responses can be predictably changed by using anxiety-inducing prompts. Anxiety-induction not only influences LLMs' scores on an anxiety questionnaire but also influences their behavior in a previously-established benchmark measuring biases such as racism and ageism. Importantly, greater anxiety-inducing text leads to stronger increases in biases, suggesting that how anxiously a prompt is communicated to large language models has a strong influence on their behavior in applied settings. These results demonstrate the usefulness of methods taken from psychiatry for studying the capable algorithms to which we increasingly delegate authority and autonomy.