Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Deep Learning


ReplaceMe: Network Simplification via Depth Pruning and Transformer Block Linearization

Neural Information Processing Systems

We introduce ReplaceMe, a generalized training-free depth pruning method that effectively replaces transformer blocks with a linear operation, while maintaining high performance for low compression ratios. In contrast to conventional pruning approaches that require additional training or fine-tuning, our approach requires only a small calibration dataset that is used to estimate a linear transformation, which approximates the pruned blocks. The estimated linear mapping can be seamlessly merged with the remaining transformer blocks, eliminating the need for any additional network parameters. Our experiments show that ReplaceMe consistently outperforms other training-free approaches and remains highly competitive with state-of-the-art pruning methods that involve extensive retraining/fine-tuning and architectural modifications. Applied to several large language models (LLMs), ReplaceMe achieves up to 25% pruning while retaining approximately 90% of the original model's performance on open benchmarks--without any training or healing steps, resulting in minimal computational overhead.


SteerConf: Steering LLMs for Confidence Elicitation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive performance across diverse domains but often suffer from overconfidence, limiting their reliability in critical applications. We propose SteerConf, a novel framework that systematically steers LLMs' confidence scores to improve their calibration and reliability. SteerConf introduces three key components: (1) a steering prompt strategy that guides LLMs to produce confidence scores in specified directions (e.g., conservative or optimistic) by leveraging prompts with varying steering levels; (2) a steered confidence consistency measure that quantifies alignment across multiple steered confidences to enhance calibration; and (3) a steered confidence calibration method that aggregates confidence scores using consistency measures and applies linear quantization for answer selection. SteerConf operates without additional training or fine-tuning, making it broadly applicable to existing LLMs. Experiments on seven benchmarks spanning professional knowledge, common sense, ethics, and reasoning tasks, using advanced LLM models (GPT-3.5, LLaMA 3, GPT-4), demonstrate that SteerConf significantly outperforms existing methods, often by a significant margin. Our findings highlight the potential of steering the confidence of LLMs to enhance their reliability for safer deployment in real-world applications.


Mamba Modulation On the Length Generalization of Mamba

Neural Information Processing Systems

The quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism in Transformer models has motivated the development of alternative architectures with sub-quadratic scaling, such as state-space models. Among these, Mamba has emerged as a leading architecture, achieving state-of-the-art results across a range of language modeling tasks. However, Mambas performance significantly deteriorates when applied to contexts longer than those seen during pre-training, revealing a sharp sensitivity to context length extension. Through detailed analysis, we attribute this limitation to the out-of-distribution behavior of its state-space dynamics, particularly within the parameterization of the state transition matrix A. Unlike recent works which attribute this sensitivity to the vanished accumulation of discretization time steps, exp( PN t=1 t), we establish a connection between state convergence behavior as the input length approaches infinity and the spectrum of the transition matrix A, offering a well-founded explanation of its role in length extension. Next, to overcome this challenge, we propose an approach that applies spectrum scaling to pre-trained Mamba models to enable robust long-context generalization by selectively modulating the spectrum of Amatrices in each layer. We show that this can significantly improve performance in settings where simply modulating t fails, validating our insights and providing avenues for better length generalization of state-space models with structured transition matrices.


1bf3dbbd6346f50627e2ab1795f90435-Paper-Conference.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

Diffusion Transformers have emerged as the foundation for vision generative models, but their scalability is limited by the high cost of hyperparameter (HP) tuning at large scales. Recently, Maximal Update Parametrization (µP) was proposed for vanilla Transformers, which enables stable HP transfer from small to large language models, and dramatically reduces tuning costs. However, it remains unclear whether µP of vanilla Transformers extends to diffusion Transformers, which differ architecturally and objectively. In this work, we generalize standard µP to diffusion Transformers and validate its effectiveness through large-scale experiments. First, we rigorously prove that µP of mainstream diffusion Transformers, including DiT, U-ViT, PixArt-α, and MMDiT, aligns with that of the vanilla Transformer, enabling the direct application of existing µP methodologies. Leveraging this result, we systematically demonstrate that DiT-µP enjoys robust HP transferability. Notably, DiT-XL-2-µP with transferred learning rate achieves 2.9 faster convergence than the original DiT-XL-2.


ReinAD: Towards Real-world Industrial Anomaly Detection with a Comprehensive Contrastive Dataset

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent years have witnessed significant advancements in industrial anomaly detection (IAD) thanks to existing anomaly detection datasets. However, the large performance gap between these benchmarks and real industrial practice reveals critical limitations in existing datasets. We argue that the mismatch between current datasets and real industrial scenarios becomes the primary barrier to practical IAD deployment. To this end, we propose ReinAD dataset, a comprehensive contrastive dataset towards Real-world industrial Anomaly Detection. Our dataset prioritizes three critical real-world requirements: 1) Contrast-based anomaly definition that is essential for industrial practice, 2) Fine-grained unaligned image pairs reflecting real inspections, and 3) Large-scale data from active production lines spanning multiple industrial categories. Based on our dataset, we introduce the ReinADNet. It takes both normal reference and test images as inputs, achieving anomaly detection through normal-anomaly comparison. To address the fine-grained and unaligned properties of real industrial scenes, our method integrates pyramidal similarity aggregation for comprehensive anomaly characterization and globallocal feature fusion for spatial misalignment tolerance. Our method outperforms all baselines on the ReinAD dataset (e.g., 64.5% v.s.



More effort is needed to protect pedestrian privacy in the era of AI

Neural Information Processing Systems

In the era of artificial intelligence (AI), pedestrian privacy is increasingly at risk. In research areas such as autonomous driving, computer vision, and surveillance, large datasets are often collected in public spaces, capturing pedestrians without consent or anonymization. These datasets are used to train systems that can identify, track, and analyze individuals, often without their knowledge. Although various technical methods and regional regulations have been proposed to address this issue, existing solutions are either insufficient to protect privacy or compromise data utility, thereby limiting their effectiveness for research. In this paper, we argue that more effort is needed to protect pedestrian privacy in the era of AI while maintaining data utility. We call on the AI and computer vision communities to take pedestrian privacy seriously and to rethink how pedestrian data are collected and anonymized. Collaboration with experts in law and ethics will also be essential for the responsible development of AI. Without stronger action, it will become increasingly difficult for individuals to protect their privacy, and public trust in AI may decline.


FuncGenFoil: Airfoil Generation and Editing Model in Function Space

Neural Information Processing Systems

Aircraft manufacturing is the jewel in the crown of industry, in which generating high-fidelity airfoil geometries with controllable and editable representations remains a fundamental challenge. Existing deep learning methods, which typically rely on predefined parametric representations (e.g., Bézier curves) or discrete point sets, face an inherent trade-off between expressive power and resolution adaptability. To tackle this challenge, we introduce FuncGenFoil, a novel functionspace generative model that directly reconstructs airfoil geometries as function curves. Our method inherits the advantages of arbitrary-resolution sampling and smoothness from parametric functions, as well as the strong expressiveness of discrete point-based representations. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that FuncGenFoil improves upon state-of-the-art methods in airfoil generation, achieving a relative 74.4% reduction in label error and a 23.2% increase in diversity on the AF-200K dataset. Our results highlight the advantages of function-space modeling for aerodynamic shape optimization, offering a powerful and flexible framework for high-fidelity airfoil design.


FLAME: Fast Long-context Adaptive Memory for Event-based Vision

Neural Information Processing Systems

We propose Fast Long-context Adaptive Memory for Event (FLAME), a novel scalable architecture that combines neuro-inspired feature extraction with robust structured sequence modeling to efficiently process asynchronous and sparse event camera data. As a departure from conventional input encoding methods, FLAME presents Event Attention Layer, a novel feature extractor that leverages neuromorphic dynamics (Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF)) to directly capture multi-timescale features from event streams. The feature extractor integrates with a structured state-space model with a novel Event-Aware HiPPO (EA-HiPPO) mechanism that dynamically adapts memory retention based on inter-event intervals to understand relationship across varying temporal scales and event sequences. ANormal Plus Low Rank (NPLR) decomposition reduces the computational complexity of state update from O(N2) to O(Nr), where N represents the dimension of the core state vector and r is the rank of a low-rank component (with r N). FLAME demonstrates state-of-the-art accuracy for event-by-event processing on complex event camera datasets.


Matching Markets Meet LLMs: Algorithmic Reasoning with Ranked Preferences

Neural Information Processing Systems

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has driven progress in reasoning tasks, from program synthesis to scientific hypothesis generation, yet their ability to handle ranked preferences and structured algorithms in combinatorial domains remains underexplored. We study matching markets, a core framework behind applications like resource allocation and ride-sharing, which require reconciling individual ranked preferences to ensure stable outcomes. We evaluate seven stateof-the-art models on a hierarchy of preference-based reasoning tasks--ranging from stable-matching generation to instability detection, instability resolution, and finegrained preference queries--to systematically expose their logical and algorithmic limitations in handling ranked inputs. Surprisingly, even top-performing models with advanced reasoning struggle to resolve instability in large markets, often failing to identify blocking pairs or execute algorithms iteratively. We further show that parameter-efficient fine-tuning (LoRA) significantly improves performance in small markets, but fails to bring about a similar improvement in large instances, suggesting the need for more sophisticated strategies to improve LLMs' reasoning with larger-context inputs.