Anthony Chen

Shayne Longpre, Robert Mahari, Anthony Chen et al. · mit

The race to train language models on vast, diverse, and inconsistently documented datasets has raised pressing concerns about the legal and ethical risks for practitioners. To remedy these practices threatening data transparency and understanding, we convene a multi-disciplinary effort between legal and machine learning experts to systematically audit and trace 1800+ text datasets. We develop tools and standards to trace the lineage of these datasets, from their source, creators, series of license conditions, properties, and subsequent use. Our landscape analysis highlights the sharp divides in composition and focus of commercially open vs closed datasets, with closed datasets monopolizing important categories: lower resource languages, more creative tasks, richer topic variety, newer and more synthetic training data. This points to a deepening divide in the types of data that are made available under different license conditions, and heightened implications for jurisdictional legal interpretations of copyright and fair use. We also observe frequent miscategorization of licenses on widely used dataset hosting sites, with license omission of 70%+ and error rates of 50%+. This points to a crisis in misattribution and informed use of the most popular datasets driving many recent breakthroughs. As a contribution to ongoing improvements in dataset transparency and responsible use, we release our entire audit, with an interactive UI, the Data Provenance Explorer, which allows practitioners to trace and filter on data provenance for the most popular open source finetuning data collections: www.dataprovenance.org.

Luyu Gao, Zhuyun Dai, Panupong Pasupat et al. · cmu

Language models (LMs) now excel at many tasks such as few-shot learning, question answering, reasoning, and dialog. However, they sometimes generate unsupported or misleading content. A user cannot easily determine whether their outputs are trustworthy or not, because most LMs do not have any built-in mechanism for attribution to external evidence. To enable attribution while still preserving all the powerful advantages of recent generation models, we propose RARR (Retrofit Attribution using Research and Revision), a system that 1) automatically finds attribution for the output of any text generation model and 2) post-edits the output to fix unsupported content while preserving the original output as much as possible. When applied to the output of several state-of-the-art LMs on a diverse set of generation tasks, we find that RARR significantly improves attribution while otherwise preserving the original input to a much greater degree than previously explored edit models. Furthermore, the implementation of RARR requires only a handful of training examples, a large language model, and standard web search.

Anthony Chen, Kevin Zhang, Renrui Zhang et al.

Masked Autoencoders learn strong visual representations and achieve state-of-the-art results in several independent modalities, yet very few works have addressed their capabilities in multi-modality settings. In this work, we focus on point cloud and RGB image data, two modalities that are often presented together in the real world, and explore their meaningful interactions. To improve upon the cross-modal synergy in existing works, we propose PiMAE, a self-supervised pre-training framework that promotes 3D and 2D interaction through three aspects. Specifically, we first notice the importance of masking strategies between the two sources and utilize a projection module to complementarily align the mask and visible tokens of the two modalities. Then, we utilize a well-crafted two-branch MAE pipeline with a novel shared decoder to promote cross-modality interaction in the mask tokens. Finally, we design a unique cross-modal reconstruction module to enhance representation learning for both modalities. Through extensive experiments performed on large-scale RGB-D scene understanding benchmarks (SUN RGB-D and ScannetV2), we discover it is nontrivial to interactively learn point-image features, where we greatly improve multiple 3D detectors, 2D detectors, and few-shot classifiers by 2.9%, 6.7%, and 2.4%, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/BLVLab/PiMAE.

Qixun Wang, Xu Bai, Haofan Wang et al.

There has been significant progress in personalized image synthesis with methods such as Textual Inversion, DreamBooth, and LoRA. Yet, their real-world applicability is hindered by high storage demands, lengthy fine-tuning processes, and the need for multiple reference images. Conversely, existing ID embedding-based methods, while requiring only a single forward inference, face challenges: they either necessitate extensive fine-tuning across numerous model parameters, lack compatibility with community pre-trained models, or fail to maintain high face fidelity. Addressing these limitations, we introduce InstantID, a powerful diffusion model-based solution. Our plug-and-play module adeptly handles image personalization in various styles using just a single facial image, while ensuring high fidelity. To achieve this, we design a novel IdentityNet by imposing strong semantic and weak spatial conditions, integrating facial and landmark images with textual prompts to steer the image generation. InstantID demonstrates exceptional performance and efficiency, proving highly beneficial in real-world applications where identity preservation is paramount. Moreover, our work seamlessly integrates with popular pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models like SD1.5 and SDXL, serving as an adaptable plugin. Our codes and pre-trained checkpoints will be available at https://github.com/InstantID/InstantID.

Haofan Wang, Matteo Spinelli, Qixun Wang et al.

Tuning-free diffusion-based models have demonstrated significant potential in the realm of image personalization and customization. However, despite this notable progress, current models continue to grapple with several complex challenges in producing style-consistent image generation. Firstly, the concept of style is inherently underdetermined, encompassing a multitude of elements such as color, material, atmosphere, design, and structure, among others. Secondly, inversion-based methods are prone to style degradation, often resulting in the loss of fine-grained details. Lastly, adapter-based approaches frequently require meticulous weight tuning for each reference image to achieve a balance between style intensity and text controllability. In this paper, we commence by examining several compelling yet frequently overlooked observations. We then proceed to introduce InstantStyle, a framework designed to address these issues through the implementation of two key strategies: 1) A straightforward mechanism that decouples style and content from reference images within the feature space, predicated on the assumption that features within the same space can be either added to or subtracted from one another. 2) The injection of reference image features exclusively into style-specific blocks, thereby preventing style leaks and eschewing the need for cumbersome weight tuning, which often characterizes more parameter-heavy designs.Our work demonstrates superior visual stylization outcomes, striking an optimal balance between the intensity of style and the controllability of textual elements. Our codes will be available at https://github.com/InstantStyle/InstantStyle.

Anthony Chen, Jianjin Xu, Wenzhao Zheng et al.

Diffusion models have demonstrated excellent capabilities in text-to-image generation. Their semantic understanding (i.e., prompt following) ability has also been greatly improved with large language models (e.g., T5, Llama). However, existing models cannot perfectly handle long and complex text prompts, especially when the text prompts contain various objects with numerous attributes and interrelated spatial relationships. While many regional prompting methods have been proposed for UNet-based models (SD1.5, SDXL), but there are still no implementations based on the recent Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture, such as SD3 and FLUX.1.In this report, we propose and implement regional prompting for FLUX.1 based on attention manipulation, which enables DiT with fined-grained compositional text-to-image generation capability in a training-free manner. Code is available at https://github.com/antonioo-c/Regional-Prompting-FLUX.

Xiaowei Chi, Chun-Kai Fan, Hengyuan Zhang et al.

Video generation models have made significant progress in simulating future states, showcasing their potential as world simulators in embodied scenarios. However, existing models often lack robust understanding, limiting their ability to perform multi-step predictions or handle Out-of-Distribution (OOD) scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose the Reflection of Generation (RoG), a set of intermediate reasoning strategies designed to enhance video prediction. It leverages the complementary strengths of pre-trained vision-language and video generation models, enabling them to function as a world model in embodied scenarios. To support RoG, we introduce Embodied Video Anticipation Benchmark(EVA-Bench), a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates embodied world models across diverse tasks and scenarios, utilizing both in-domain and OOD datasets. Building on this foundation, we devise a world model, Embodied Video Anticipator (EVA), that follows a multistage training paradigm to generate high-fidelity video frames and apply an autoregressive strategy to enable adaptive generalization for longer video sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of EVA in various downstream tasks like video generation and robotics, thereby paving the way for large-scale pre-trained models in real-world video prediction applications. The video demos are available at \hyperlink{https://sites.google.com/view/icml-eva}{https://sites.google.com/view/icml-eva}.

Anthony Chen, Wenzhao Zheng, Yida Wang et al.

Recent advancements in world models have revolutionized dynamic environment simulation, allowing systems to foresee future states and assess potential actions. In autonomous driving, these capabilities help vehicles anticipate the behavior of other road users, perform risk-aware planning, accelerate training in simulation, and adapt to novel scenarios, thereby enhancing safety and reliability. Current approaches exhibit deficiencies in maintaining robust 3D geometric consistency or accumulating artifacts during occlusion handling, both critical for reliable safety assessment in autonomous navigation tasks. To address this, we introduce GeoDrive, which explicitly integrates robust 3D geometry conditions into driving world models to enhance spatial understanding and action controllability. Specifically, we first extract a 3D representation from the input frame and then obtain its 2D rendering based on the user-specified ego-car trajectory. To enable dynamic modeling, we propose a dynamic editing module during training to enhance the renderings by editing the positions of the vehicles. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing models in both action accuracy and 3D spatial awareness, leading to more realistic, adaptable, and reliable scene modeling for safer autonomous driving. Additionally, our model can generalize to novel trajectories and offers interactive scene editing capabilities, such as object editing and object trajectory control.

Anthony Chen, Huanrui Yang, Yulu Gan et al. · berkeley, pku

Uncertainty estimation is crucial for machine learning models to detect out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs. However, the conventional discriminative deep learning classifiers produce uncalibrated closed-set predictions for OOD data. A more robust classifiers with the uncertainty estimation typically require a potentially unavailable OOD dataset for outlier exposure training, or a considerable amount of additional memory and compute to build ensemble models. In this work, we improve on uncertainty estimation without extra OOD data or additional inference costs using an alternative Split-Ensemble method. Specifically, we propose a novel subtask-splitting ensemble training objective, where a common multiclass classification task is split into several complementary subtasks. Then, each subtask's training data can be considered as OOD to the other subtasks. Diverse submodels can therefore be trained on each subtask with OOD-aware objectives. The subtask-splitting objective enables us to share low-level features across submodels to avoid parameter and computational overheads. In particular, we build a tree-like Split-Ensemble architecture by performing iterative splitting and pruning from a shared backbone model, where each branch serves as a submodel corresponding to a subtask. This leads to improved accuracy and uncertainty estimation across submodels under a fixed ensemble computation budget. Empirical study with ResNet-18 backbone shows Split-Ensemble, without additional computation cost, improves accuracy over a single model by 0.8%, 1.8%, and 25.5% on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet, respectively. OOD detection for the same backbone and in-distribution datasets surpasses a single model baseline by, correspondingly, 2.2%, 8.1%, and 29.6% mean AUROC.

Jinhyuk Lee, Anthony Chen, Zhuyun Dai et al.

Long-context language models (LCLMs) have the potential to revolutionize our approach to tasks traditionally reliant on external tools like retrieval systems or databases. Leveraging LCLMs' ability to natively ingest and process entire corpora of information offers numerous advantages. It enhances user-friendliness by eliminating the need for specialized knowledge of tools, provides robust end-to-end modeling that minimizes cascading errors in complex pipelines, and allows for the application of sophisticated prompting techniques across the entire system. To assess this paradigm shift, we introduce LOFT, a benchmark of real-world tasks requiring context up to millions of tokens designed to evaluate LCLMs' performance on in-context retrieval and reasoning. Our findings reveal LCLMs' surprising ability to rival state-of-the-art retrieval and RAG systems, despite never having been explicitly trained for these tasks. However, LCLMs still face challenges in areas like compositional reasoning that are required in SQL-like tasks. Notably, prompting strategies significantly influence performance, emphasizing the need for continued research as context lengths grow. Overall, LOFT provides a rigorous testing ground for LCLMs, showcasing their potential to supplant existing paradigms and tackle novel tasks as model capabilities scale.

Anthony Chen, Panupong Pasupat, Sameer Singh et al.

The remarkable capabilities of large language models have been accompanied by a persistent drawback: the generation of false and unsubstantiated claims commonly known as "hallucinations". To combat this issue, recent research has introduced approaches that involve editing and attributing the outputs of language models, particularly through prompt-based editing. However, the inference cost and speed of using large language models for editing currently bottleneck prompt-based methods. These bottlenecks motivate the training of compact editors, which is challenging due to the scarcity of training data for this purpose. To overcome these challenges, we exploit the power of large language models to introduce corruptions (i.e., noise) into text and subsequently fine-tune compact editors to denoise the corruptions by incorporating relevant evidence. Our methodology is entirely unsupervised and provides us with faux hallucinations for training in any domain. Our Petite Unsupervised Research and Revision model, PURR, not only improves attribution over existing editing methods based on fine-tuning and prompting, but also achieves faster execution times by orders of magnitude.

Shayne Longpre, Kartik Perisetla, Anthony Chen et al.

Knowledge-dependent tasks typically use two sources of knowledge: parametric, learned at training time, and contextual, given as a passage at inference time. To understand how models use these sources together, we formalize the problem of knowledge conflicts, where the contextual information contradicts the learned information. Analyzing the behaviour of popular models, we measure their over-reliance on memorized information (the cause of hallucinations), and uncover important factors that exacerbate this behaviour. Lastly, we propose a simple method to mitigate over-reliance on parametric knowledge, which minimizes hallucination, and improves out-of-distribution generalization by 4%-7%. Our findings demonstrate the importance for practitioners to evaluate model tendency to hallucinate rather than read, and show that our mitigation strategy encourages generalization to evolving information (i.e., time-dependent queries). To encourage these practices, we have released our framework for generating knowledge conflicts.

Anthony Chen, Pallavi Gudipati, Shayne Longpre et al.

Retrieval is a core component for open-domain NLP tasks. In open-domain tasks, multiple entities can share a name, making disambiguation an inherent yet under-explored problem. We propose an evaluation benchmark for assessing the entity disambiguation capabilities of these retrievers, which we call Ambiguous Entity Retrieval (AmbER) sets. We define an AmbER set as a collection of entities that share a name along with queries about those entities. By covering the set of entities for polysemous names, AmbER sets act as a challenging test of entity disambiguation. We create AmbER sets for three popular open-domain tasks: fact checking, slot filling, and question answering, and evaluate a diverse set of retrievers. We find that the retrievers exhibit popularity bias, significantly under-performing on rarer entities that share a name, e.g., they are twice as likely to retrieve erroneous documents on queries for the less popular entity under the same name. These experiments on AmbER sets show their utility as an evaluation tool and highlight the weaknesses of popular retrieval systems.