Hyeong Kyu Choi

Hyeong Kyu Choi, Joonmyung Choi, Hyunwoo J. Kim

Mixup is a commonly adopted data augmentation technique for image classification. Recent advances in mixup methods primarily focus on mixing based on saliency. However, many saliency detectors require intense computation and are especially burdensome for parameter-heavy transformer models. To this end, we propose TokenMixup, an efficient attention-guided token-level data augmentation method that aims to maximize the saliency of a mixed set of tokens. TokenMixup provides x15 faster saliency-aware data augmentation compared to gradient-based methods. Moreover, we introduce a variant of TokenMixup which mixes tokens within a single instance, thereby enabling multi-scale feature augmentation. Experiments show that our methods significantly improve the baseline models' performance on CIFAR and ImageNet-1K, while being more efficient than previous methods. We also reach state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-100 among from-scratch transformer models. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/TokenMixup.

Dohwan Ko, Joonmyung Choi, Hyeong Kyu Choi et al.

Foundation models have shown outstanding performance and generalization capabilities across domains. Since most studies on foundation models mainly focus on the pretraining phase, a naive strategy to minimize a single task-specific loss is adopted for fine-tuning. However, such fine-tuning methods do not fully leverage other losses that are potentially beneficial for the target task. Therefore, we propose MEta Loss TRansformer (MELTR), a plug-in module that automatically and non-linearly combines various loss functions to aid learning the target task via auxiliary learning. We formulate the auxiliary learning as a bi-level optimization problem and present an efficient optimization algorithm based on Approximate Implicit Differentiation (AID). For evaluation, we apply our framework to various video foundation models (UniVL, Violet and All-in-one), and show significant performance gain on all four downstream tasks: text-to-video retrieval, video question answering, video captioning, and multi-modal sentiment analysis. Our qualitative analyses demonstrate that MELTR adequately `transforms' individual loss functions and `melts' them into an effective unified loss. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/MELTR.

Jihwan Park, SeungJun Lee, Hwan Heo et al.

Human-Object Interaction detection is a holistic visual recognition task that entails object detection as well as interaction classification. Previous works of HOI detection has been addressed by the various compositions of subset predictions, e.g., Image -> HO -> I, Image -> HI -> O. Recently, transformer based architecture for HOI has emerged, which directly predicts the HOI triplets in an end-to-end fashion (Image -> HOI). Motivated by various inference paths for HOI detection, we propose cross-path consistency learning (CPC), which is a novel end-to-end learning strategy to improve HOI detection for transformers by leveraging augmented decoding paths. CPC learning enforces all the possible predictions from permuted inference sequences to be consistent. This simple scheme makes the model learn consistent representations, thereby improving generalization without increasing model capacity. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and we achieved significant improvement on V-COCO and HICO-DET compared to the baseline models. Our code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/CPChoi.

Jinyoung Park, Hyeong Kyu Choi, Juyeon Ko et al.

Question Answering (QA) is a task that entails reasoning over natural language contexts, and many relevant works augment language models (LMs) with graph neural networks (GNNs) to encode the Knowledge Graph (KG) information. However, most existing GNN-based modules for QA do not take advantage of rich relational information of KGs and depend on limited information interaction between the LM and the KG. To address these issues, we propose Question Answering Transformer (QAT), which is designed to jointly reason over language and graphs with respect to entity relations in a unified manner. Specifically, QAT constructs Meta-Path tokens, which learn relation-centric embeddings based on diverse structural and semantic relations. Then, our Relation-Aware Self-Attention module comprehensively integrates different modalities via the Cross-Modal Relative Position Bias, which guides information exchange between relevant entites of different modalities. We validate the effectiveness of QAT on commonsense question answering datasets like CommonsenseQA and OpenBookQA, and on a medical question answering dataset, MedQA-USMLE. On all the datasets, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at http://github.com/mlvlab/QAT.

Hyeong Kyu Choi, Seunghun Lee, Jaewon Chu et al.

Multi-hop Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) is a task that involves retrieving nodes from a knowledge graph (KG) to answer natural language questions. Recent GNN-based approaches formulate this task as a KG path searching problem, where messages are sequentially propagated from the seed node towards the answer nodes. However, these messages are past-oriented, and they do not consider the full KG context. To make matters worse, KG nodes often represent proper noun entities and are sometimes encrypted, being uninformative in selecting between paths. To address these problems, we propose Neural Tree Search (NuTrea), a tree search-based GNN model that incorporates the broader KG context. Our model adopts a message-passing scheme that probes the unreached subtree regions to boost the past-oriented embeddings. In addition, we introduce the Relation Frequency-Inverse Entity Frequency (RF-IEF) node embedding that considers the global KG context to better characterize ambiguous KG nodes. The general effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through experiments on three major multi-hop KGQA benchmark datasets, and our extensive analyses further validate its expressiveness and robustness. Overall, NuTrea provides a powerful means to query the KG with complex natural language questions. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/NuTrea.

Hyeong Kyu Choi, Weijie Xu, Chi Xue et al. · amazon-science

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit systematic preferences for certain answer choices when responding to multiple-choice questions-a behavior known as selection bias. This bias reduces the accuracy and reliability of LLM outputs, limiting their usefulness in decision-critical applications. While prior work has focused on adjusting model inputs or outputs to mitigate this issue, our work takes a fundamentally different approach by identifying and removing the internal sources of bias. We introduce two methods: Bias Node Pruning (BNP), which prunes parameters that contribute to selection bias, and Auxiliary Option Injection (AOI), which introduces an additional answer choice to reduce bias in both white-box and black-box settings. To address the shortcomings of existing evaluation metrics, we propose Choice Kullback-Leibler Divergence (CKLD), a new metric that captures distributional imbalances in model predictions. Experiments on three LLMs across multiple datasets demonstrate that our methods consistently improve answer accuracy while reducing selection bias, providing a robust solution for both open- and closed-source models.

Hyeong Kyu Choi, Yixuan Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on massive text corpora, which are encoded with diverse personality traits. This triggers an interesting goal of eliciting a desired personality trait from the LLM, and probing its behavioral preferences. Accordingly, we formalize the persona elicitation task, aiming to customize LLM behaviors to align with a target persona. We present Persona In-Context Learning (PICLe), a novel persona elicitation framework grounded in Bayesian inference. At the core, PICLe introduces a new ICL example selection criterion based on likelihood ratio, which is designed to optimally guide the model in eliciting a specific target persona. We demonstrate the effectiveness of PICLe through extensive comparisons against baseline methods across three contemporary LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/deeplearning-wisc/picle.

Hyeong Kyu Choi, Maxim Khanov, Hongxin Wei et al.

Dataset contamination, where evaluation datasets overlap with pre-training corpora, inflates performance metrics and undermines the reliability of model evaluations. Measuring dataset contamination thus becomes essential to ensure that performance evaluations genuinely reflect a model's ability to generalize to unseen data, rather than relying on memorized examples. To address this problem, we propose Kernel Divergence Score (KDS), a novel method that evaluates dataset contamination by computing the divergence between the kernel similarity matrix of sample embeddings, before and after fine-tuning on the benchmark dataset. Leveraging the insight that fine-tuning affects unseen samples more significantly than seen ones, KDS provides a reliable measure of contamination. Through extensive experiments on controlled contamination scenarios, KDS demonstrates a near-perfect correlation with contamination levels and outperforms existing baselines. Additionally, we perform comprehensive ablation studies to analyze the impact of key design choices, providing deeper insights into the components and effectiveness of KDS. These ablations highlight the importance of leveraging fine-grained kernel-based information and confirm the reliability of the proposed framework across diverse datasets and settings. Code is released in https://github.com/deeplearning-wisc/kernel-divergence-score.

Hyeong Kyu Choi, Xiaojin Zhu, Sharon Li

Multi-Agent Debate~(MAD) has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving the performance of large language models through collaborative reasoning. Despite recent advances, the key factors driving MAD's effectiveness remain unclear. In this work, we disentangle MAD into two key components--Majority Voting and inter-agent Debate--and assess their respective contributions. Through extensive experiments across seven NLP benchmarks, we find that Majority Voting alone accounts for most of the performance gains typically attributed to MAD. To explain this, we propose a theoretical framework that models debate as a stochastic process. We prove that it induces a martingale over agents' belief trajectories, implying that debate alone does not improve expected correctness. Guided by these insights, we demonstrate that targeted interventions, by biasing the belief update toward correction, can meaningfully enhance debate effectiveness. Overall, our findings suggest that while MAD has potential, simple ensembling methods remain strong and more reliable alternatives in many practical settings. Code is released in https://github.com/deeplearning-wisc/debate-or-vote.

Seongheon Park, Changdae Oh, Hyeong Kyu Choi et al.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) frequently hallucinate, limiting their safe deployment in real-world applications. Existing LLM self-evaluation methods rely on a model's ability to estimate the correctness of its own outputs, which can improve deployment reliability; however, they depend heavily on language priors and are therefore ill-suited for evaluating vision-conditioned predictions. We propose VAUQ, a vision-aware uncertainty quantification framework for LVLM self-evaluation that explicitly measures how strongly a model's output depends on visual evidence. VAUQ introduces the Image-Information Score (IS), which captures the reduction in predictive uncertainty attributable to visual input, and an unsupervised core-region masking strategy that amplifies the influence of salient regions. Combining predictive entropy with this core-masked IS yields a training-free scoring function that reliably reflects answer correctness. Comprehensive experiments show that VAUQ consistently outperforms existing self-evaluation methods across multiple datasets.

Hyeong Kyu Choi, Sharon Li

Selecting a single high-quality output from multiple stochastic generations remains a fundamental challenge for large language models (LLMs), particularly in open-ended tasks where no canonical answer exists. While Best-of-N and self-consistency methods show that aggregating multiple generations can improve performance, existing approaches typically rely on external evaluators, reward models, or exact string-match voting, limiting their applicability and efficiency. We propose Mode Extraction (ModeX), an evaluator-free Best-of-N selection framework that generalizes majority voting to open-ended text generation by identifying the modal output representing the dominant semantic consensus among generated texts. ModeX constructs a similarity graph over candidate generations and recursively applies spectral clustering to select a representative centroid, without requiring additional inference or auxiliary models. We further instantiate this selection principle as ModeX-Lite, an improved version of ModeX with early pruning for efficiency. Across open-ended tasks -- including text summarization, code generation, and mathematical reasoning -- our approaches consistently outperform standard single- and multi-path baselines, providing a computationally efficient solution for robust open-ended text generation. Code is released in https://github.com/deeplearning-wisc/ModeX.

Hyeong Kyu Choi, Xiaojin Zhu, Sharon Li

Multi-agent debate (MAD) aims to improve large language model (LLM) reasoning by letting multiple agents exchange answers and then aggregate their opinions. Yet recent studies reveal that agents are not neutral: they are prone to identity-driven sycophancy and self-bias, uncritically adopting a peer's view or stubbornly adhering to their own prior output, undermining the reliability of debate. In this work, we present the first principled framework that joins sycophancy and self-bias to mitigate and quantify identity bias in MAD. First, we formalize the debate dynamics as an identity-weighted Bayesian update process. Second, we propose response anonymization: by removing identity markers from prompts, agents cannot distinguish "self" from "peer", which forces equal weights on agent identity, thereby reducing bias. Third, we define the Identity Bias Coefficient (IBC), a principled metric that measures how often an agent follows a peer versus itself. Empirical studies across multiple models, datasets and debate rounds confirm that identity bias is widespread, with sycophancy far more common than self-bias. Our findings highlight the need to "mask" identity to ensure that MAD systems reason based on content rather than source identity. Code is released in https://github.com/deeplearning-wisc/MAD-identity-bias.

Hyeong Kyu Choi, Xuefeng Du, Yixuan Li

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a common practice for tailoring models to individual needs and preferences. The choice of datasets for fine-tuning can be diverse, introducing safety concerns regarding the potential inclusion of harmful data samples. Manually filtering or avoiding such samples, however, can be labor-intensive and subjective. To address these difficulties, we propose a novel Safety-Aware Fine-Tuning (SAFT) framework designed to automatically detect and remove potentially harmful data, by leveraging a scoring function that exploits the subspace information of harmful and benign samples. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of SAFT across different LLMs and varying contamination rates, achieving reductions in harmfulness of up to 27.8%. Going beyond, we delve into the mechanism of our approach and validate its versatility in addressing practical challenges in real-world scenarios.

Hengxiang Zhang, Hyeong Kyu Choi, Sharon Li et al.

Reasoning distillation has emerged as an efficient and powerful paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, reasoning distillation may inadvertently cause benchmark contamination, where evaluation data included in distillation datasets can inflate performance metrics of distilled models. In this work, we formally define the task of distillation data detection, which is uniquely challenging due to the partial availability of distillation data. Then, we propose a novel and effective method Token Probability Deviation (TBD), which leverages the probability patterns of the generated output tokens. Our method is motivated by the analysis that distilled models tend to generate near-deterministic tokens for seen questions, while producing more low-probability tokens for unseen questions. Our key idea behind TBD is to quantify how far the generated tokens' probabilities deviate from a high reference probability. In effect, our method achieves competitive detection performance by producing lower scores for seen questions than for unseen questions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving an AUC of 0.918 and a TPR@1% FPR of 0.470 on the S1 dataset.

Hyeong Kyu Choi

Predicting the price correlation of two assets for future time periods is important in portfolio optimization. We apply LSTM recurrent neural networks (RNN) in predicting the stock price correlation coefficient of two individual stocks. RNNs are competent in understanding temporal dependencies. The use of LSTM cells further enhances its long term predictive properties. To encompass both linearity and nonlinearity in the model, we adopt the ARIMA model as well. The ARIMA model filters linear tendencies in the data and passes on the residual value to the LSTM model. The ARIMA LSTM hybrid model is tested against other traditional predictive financial models such as the full historical model, constant correlation model, single index model and the multi group model. In our empirical study, the predictive ability of the ARIMA-LSTM model turned out superior to all other financial models by a significant scale. Our work implies that it is worth considering the ARIMA LSTM model to forecast correlation coefficient for portfolio optimization.