Deep Learning
G2M: AGeneralized Gaussian Mirror Method to boost feature selection power
Recent advances in false discovery rate (FDR)-controlled feature selection methods have improved reliability by effectively limiting false positives, making them wellsuited for complex applications. A popular FDR-controlled framework called data splitting uses the "mirror statistics" to select features. However, we find that the unit variance assumption on mirror statistics could potentially limit the feature selection power. To address this, we generalize the mirror statistics in the Gaussian mirror framework and introduce a new approach called "generalized Gaussian mirror" (G2M), which adaptively learns the variance and forms new test statistics. We demonstrate both theoretically and empirically that the proposed test statistics achieve higher power than those of Gaussian mirror and data splitting. Comparisons with other FDR-controlled frameworks on synthetic, semi-synthetic, and real datasets highlight the superior performance of the G2M method in achieving higher power while maintaining FDR control. These findings suggest the potential for the G2M method for practical applications in real-world problems. Code is available at: https://github.com/skyve2012/G2M.
Harnessing the Computation Redundancy in ViTs to Boost Adversarial Transferability
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated impressive performance across a range of applications, including many safety-critical tasks. Many previous studies have observed that adversarial examples crafted on ViTs exhibit higher transferability than those crafted on CNNs, indicating that ViTs contain structural characteristics favorable for transferable attacks. In this work, we take a further step to deeply investigate the role of computational redundancy brought by its unique characteristics in ViTs and its impact on adversarial transferability. Specifically, we identify two forms of redundancy, including the data-level and model-level, that can be harnessed to amplify attack effectiveness. Building on this insight, we design a suite of techniques, including attention sparsity manipulation, attention head permutation, clean token regularization, ghost MoE diversification, and learning to robustify before the attack. A dynamic online learning strategy is also proposed to fully leverage these operations to enhance the adversarial transferability. Extensive experiments on the ImageNet-1k dataset validate the effectiveness of our approach, showing that our methods significantly outperform existing baselines in both transferability and generality across diverse model architectures, including different variants of ViTs and mainstream Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs).
GRIP: AGraph-Based Reasoning Instruction Producer
Large-scale, high-quality data is essential for advancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). As publicly available Internet data becomes increasingly scarce, synthetic data has emerged as a crucial research direction. However, existing data synthesis methods often suffer from limited scalability, insufficient sample diversity, and a tendency to overfit to seed data, which constrains their practical utility.
Appendix ATask Definitions
Table 3 outlines the and reasoning tasks included in the MMPerspective benchmark. Sample cases and representative questions are included to illustrate the task format and input style. We also show examples of perspective-invariant image operations for robustness evaluation in Figure 17, including cropping, masking, flipping, and rotation. Where is the vanishing point in this image? Critical Line Perception (CLP) 123 Figure 9 Determine which of the highlighted lines is the horizon line. Which line highlighted in the image is the Horizon Line?
Perspective is nothing more than a rational demonstration applied to the consideration of how objects in front of the eye transmit their image to it
Understanding perspective is fundamental to human visual perception, yet the extent to which multimodal large language models (MLLMs) internalize perspective geometry remains unclear. We introduce MMPerspective, the first benchmark specifically designed to systematically evaluate MLLMs' understanding of perspective through 10 carefully crafted tasks across three complementary dimensions: Perspective Perception, Reasoning, and Robustness.
Transformers are almost optimal metalearners for linear classification
Transformers have demonstrated impressive in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, raising the question of whether they can serve as metalearners that adapt to new tasks using only a small number of in-context examples, without any further training. While recent theoretical work has studied transformers' ability to perform ICL, most of these analyses do not address the formal metalearning setting, where the objective is to solve a collection of related tasks more efficiently than would be possible by solving each task individually. In this paper, we provide the first theoretical analysis showing that a simplified transformer architecture trained via gradient descent can act as a near-optimal metalearner in a linear classification setting. We consider a natural family of tasks where each task corresponds to a class-conditional Gaussian mixture model, with the mean vectors lying in a shared k-dimensional subspace of Rd. After training on a sufficient number of such tasks, we show that the transformer can generalize to a new task using only eO(k/eR4) in-context examples, where eR denotes the signal strength at test time. This performance (almost) matches that of an optimal learner that knows exactly the shared subspace and significantly outperforms any learner that only has access to the in-context data, which requires โฆ(d/eR4) examples to generalize. Importantly, our bounds on the number of training tasks and examples per task needed to achieve this result are independent of the ambient dimension d.
Improving Generalization of Neural Combinatorial Optimization for Vehicle Routing Problems via Test-Time Projection Learning
Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) has emerged as a promising learningbased paradigm for addressing Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) by minimizing the need for extensive manual engineering. While existing NCO methods, trained on small-scale instances (e.g., 100 nodes), have demonstrated considerable success on problems of similar scale, their performance significantly degrades when applied to large-scale scenarios. This degradation arises from the distributional shift between training and testing data, rendering policies learned on small instances ineffective for larger problems. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a novel learning framework driven by Large Language Models (LLMs). This framework learns a projection between the training and testing distributions, which is then deployed to enhance the scalability of the NCO model. Notably, unlike prevailing techniques that necessitate joint training with the neural network, our approach operates exclusively during the inference phase, obviating the need for model retraining. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method enables a backbone model (trained on 100-node instances) to achieve superior performance on large-scale Traveling Salesman Problems (TSPs) and Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problems (CVRPs) with up to 100K nodes from diverse distributions.
6ebb92aad3a4fe7aae230b0e63c2ef35-Paper-Conference.pdf
Recent advances in multimodal models have raised questions about whether visionand-language models (VLMs) integrate cross-modal information in ways that reflect human cognition. One well-studied test case in this domain is the boubakiki effect, where humans reliably associate pseudowords like'bouba' with round shapes and'kiki' with jagged ones. Given the mixed evidence found in prior studies for this effect in VLMs, we present a comprehensive re-evaluation focused on two variants of CLIP, ResNet and Vision Transformer (ViT), given their centrality in many state-of-the-art VLMs. We apply two complementary methods closely modelled after human experiments: a prompt-based evaluation that uses probabilities as a measure of model preference, and we use Grad-CAM as a novel approach to interpret visual attention in shape-word matching tasks. Our findings show that these model variants do not consistently exhibit the bouba-kiki effect. While ResNet shows a preference for round shapes, overall performance across both model variants lacks the expected associations. Moreover, direct comparison with prior human data on the same task shows that the models' responses fall markedly short of the robust, modality-integrated behaviour characteristic of human cognition. These results contribute to the ongoing debate about the extent to which VLMs truly understand cross-modal concepts, highlighting limitations in their internal representations and alignment with human intuitions.
MUSTAFAR: Promoting Unstructured Sparsity for KVCache Pruning in LLMInference
We demonstrate that unstructured sparsity significantly improves KV cache compression for LLMs, enabling sparsity levels up to 70% without compromising accuracy or requiring fine-tuning. We conduct a systematic exploration of pruning strategies and find per-token magnitude-based pruning as highly effective for both Key and Value caches under unstructured sparsity, surpassing prior structured pruning schemes. The Key cache benefits from prominent outlier elements, while the Value cache surprisingly benefits from a simple magnitude-based pruning despite its uniform distribution. KV cache size is the major bottleneck in decode performance due to high memory overhead for large context lengths. To address this, we use a bitmap-based sparse format and a custom attention kernel capable of compressing and directly computing over compressed caches pruned to arbitrary sparsity patterns, significantly accelerating memory-bound operations in decode computations and thereby compensating for the overhead of runtime pruning and compression. Our custom attention kernel coupled with the bitmap-based format delivers substantial compression of KV cache up to 45% of dense inference and thereby enables longer context lengths and increased tokens/sec throughput of up to 2.23 compared to dense inference.
SOFAR: Language-Grounded Orientation Bridges Spatial Reasoningand Object Manipulation
While spatial reasoning has made progress in object localization relationships, it often overlooks object orientation--a key factor in 6-DoF fine-grained manipulation. Traditional pose representations rely on pre-defined frames or templates, limiting generalization and semantic grounding. In this paper, we introduce the concept of semantic orientation, which defines object orientations using natural language in a reference-frame-free manner (e.g., the "plug-in" direction of a USB or the "handle" direction of a cup). To support this, we construct OrienText300K, a large-scale dataset of 3D objects annotated with semantic orientations, and develop PointSO, a general model for zero-shot semantic orientation prediction. By integrating semantic orientation into VLM agents, our SOFAR framework enables 6-DoF spatial reasoning and generates robotic actions. Extensive experiments demonstrated the effectiveness and generalization of our SOFAR, e.g., zero-shot 48.7% successful rate on Open6DOR and zero-shot 74.9% successful rate on SIMPLER-Env.