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Full-Distance Evasion of Pedestrian Detectors in the Physical World

Neural Information Processing Systems

Many studies have proposed attack methods to generate adversarial patterns for evading pedestrian detection, alarming the computer vision community about the need for more attention to the robustness of detectors. However, adversarial patterns optimized by these methods commonly have limited performance at medium to long distances in the physical world. To overcome this limitation, we identify two main challenges. First, in existing methods, there is commonly an appearance gap between simulated distant adversarial patterns and their physical world counterparts, leading to incorrect optimization. Second, there exists a conflict between adversarial losses at different distances, which causes difficulties in optimization. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a Full Distance Attack (FDA) method. Our physical world experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our FDA patterns across various detection models like YOLOv5, Deformable-DETR, and Mask RCNN.



No free delivery service Epistemic limits of passive data collection in complex social systems

Neural Information Processing Systems

Rapid model validation via the train-test paradigm has been a key driver for the breathtaking progress in machine learning and AI. However, modern AI systems often depend on a combination of tasks and data collection practices that violate all assumptions ensuring test validity. Yet, without rigorous model validation we cannot ensure the intended outcomes of deployed AI systems, including positive social impact, nor continue to advance AI research in a scientifically sound way. In this paper, I will show that for widely considered inference settings in complex social systems the train-test paradigm does not only lack a justification but is indeed invalid for any risk estimator, including counterfactual and causal estimators, with high probability. These formal impossibility results highlight a fundamental epistemic issue, i.e., that for key tasks in modern AI we cannot know whether models are valid under current data collection practices. Importantly, this includes variants of both recommender systems and reasoning via large language models, and neither naรฏve scaling nor limited benchmarks are suited to address this issue. I am illustrating these results via the widely used MOVIELENS benchmark and conclude by discussing the implications of these results for AI in social systems, including possible remedies such as participatory data curation and open science.



TPR: Topology-Preserving Reservoirs for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP have shown excellent performance for zero-shot classification. Based on CLIP, recent methods design various learnable prompts to evaluate the zero-shot generalization capability on a base-to-novel setting. This setting assumes test samples are already divided into either base or novel classes, limiting its application to realistic scenarios. In this paper, we focus on a more challenging and practical setting: generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL), i.e., testing with no information about the base/novel division. To address this challenging zero-shot problem, we introduce two unique designs that enable us to classify an image without the need of knowing whether it comes from seen or unseen classes.



Table

Neural Information Processing Systems

It also tolerates no prediction errors on the labeled nodes, so the trade-off parameter can be set to infinity. Local and Global Consistency (LGC) [82] relaxes the GRF method by eliminating the restriction of zero empirical risk on labeled nodes and exploits the normalized Laplacian matrix for smoothing instead. Random Walk Smoothing [83] extends LRC for directed graphs by indirectly operating LGC on a modified undirected graph with a new normalized Laplacian matrix L . Tikhonov Smoothing [4] only uses the labeled nodes in the quadratic error term. Hub & Authority Smoothing [84] proposes another random-walk-based strategy on directed graphs that is motivated by the hub and authority web model. Its smoothing matrix is more complex with two underlying Laplacian matrices LA,LH for in-links and out-links.


LoRANN: Low-Rank Matrix Factorization for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search

Neural Information Processing Systems

Approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search is a key component in many modern machine learning pipelines; recent use cases include retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and vector databases. Clustering-based ANN algorithms, that use score computation methods based on product quantization (PQ), are often used in industrial-scale applications due to their scalability and suitability for distributed and disk-based implementations. However, they have slower query times than the leading graph-based ANN algorithms. In this work, we propose a new supervised score computation method based on the observation that inner product approximation is a multivariate (multi-output) regression problem that can be solved efficiently by reduced-rank regression. Our experiments show that on modern high-dimensional data sets, the proposed reduced-rank regression (RRR) method is superior to PQ in both query latency and memory usage. We also introduce LoRANN1, a clustering-based ANN library that leverages the proposed score computation method. LoRANNis competitive with the leading graph-based algorithms and outperforms the state-of-the-art GPUANN methods on high-dimensional data sets.