T ext-guided image editing aims to modify specific regions of an image according to natural language instructions while maintaining the general structure and the background fidelity. Existing methods utilize masks derived from cross-attention maps generated from diffusion models to identify the target regions for modification. However, since cross-attention mechanisms focus on semantic relevance, they struggle to maintain the image integrity. As a result, these methods often lack spatial consistency, leading to editing artifacts and distortions. In this work, we address these limitations and introduce LOCATEdit, which enhances cross-attention maps through a graph-based approach utilizing self-attention-derived patch relationships to maintain smooth, coherent attention across image regions, ensuring that alterations are limited to the designated items while retaining the surrounding structure. LOCATEdit consistently and substantially outperforms existing baselines on PIE-Bench, demonstrating its state-of-the-art performance and effectiveness on various editing tasks.

Unsupervised domain adaptation for semantic segmentation (DASS) aims to transfer knowledge from a label-rich source domain to a target domain with no labels. Two key approaches in DASS are (1) vision-only approaches using masking or multi-resolution crops, and (2) language-based approaches that use generic class-wise prompts informed by target domain (e.g. "a {snowy} photo of a {class}"). However, the former is susceptible to noisy pseudo-labels that are biased to the source domain. The latter does not fully capture the intricate spatial relationships of objects -- key for dense prediction tasks. To this end, we propose LangDA. LangDA addresses these challenges by, first, learning contextual relationships between objects via VLM-generated scene descriptions (e.g. "a pedestrian is on the sidewalk, and the street is lined with buildings."). Second, LangDA aligns the entire image features with text representation of this context-aware scene caption and learns generalized representations via text. With this, LangDA sets the new state-of-the-art across three DASS benchmarks, outperforming existing methods by 2.6%, 1.4% and 3.9%.

Training Large Language Models (LLMs) demand significant time and computational resources due to their large model sizes and optimizer states. To overcome these challenges, recent methods, such as BAdam, employ partial weight updates to enhance time and memory efficiency, though sometimes at the cost of performance. Others, like GaLore, focus on maintaining performance while optimizing memory usage through full parameter training, but may incur higher time complexity. By leveraging the low-rank structure of the gradient and the Grassmannian geometry, we propose SubTrack-Grad, a subspace tracking-based optimization method that efficiently tracks the evolving gradient subspace by incorporating estimation errors and previously identified subspaces. SubTrack-Grad delivers better or on-par results compared to GaLore, while significantly outperforming BAdam, which, despite being time-efficient, compromises performance. SubTrack-Grad reduces wall-time by up to 20.57% on GLUE tasks (15% average reduction) and up to 65% on SuperGLUE tasks (22% average reduction) compared to GaLore. Notably, for a 3B parameter model, GaLore incurred a substantial 157% increase in wall-time compared to full-rank training, whereas SubTrack-Grad exhibited a 31% increase, representing a 49% reduction in wall-time, while enjoying the same memory reductions as GaLore.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to bridge the gap between source and target domains in the absence of target domain labels using two main techniques: input-level alignment (such as generative modeling and stylization) and feature-level alignment (which matches the distribution of the feature maps, e.g. gradient reversal layers). Motivated from the success of generative modeling for image classification, stylization-based methods were recently proposed for regression tasks, such as pose estimation. However, use of input-level alignment via generative modeling and stylization incur additional overhead and computational complexity which limit their use in real-world DA tasks. To investigate the role of input-level alignment for DA, we ask the following question: Is generative modeling-based stylization necessary for visual domain adaptation in regression? Surprisingly, we find that input-alignment has little effect on regression tasks as compared to classification. Based on these insights, we develop a non-parametric feature-level domain alignment method -- Implicit Stylization (ImSty) -- which results in consistent improvements over SOTA regression task, without the need for computationally intensive stylization and generative modeling. Our work conducts a critical evaluation of the role of generative modeling and stylization, at a time when these are also gaining popularity for domain generalization.

Domain generalization (DG) focuses on transferring domain-invariant knowledge from multiple source domains (available at train time) to an, a priori, unseen target domain(s). This requires a class to be expressed in multiple domains for the learning algorithm to break the spurious correlations between domain and class. However, in the real-world, classes may often be domain-linked, i.e. expressed only in a specific domain, which leads to extremely poor generalization performance for these classes. In this work, we aim to learn generalizable representations for these domain-linked classes by transferring domain-invariant knowledge from classes expressed in multiple source domains (domain-shared classes). To this end, we introduce this task to the community and propose a Fair and cONtrastive feature-space regularization algorithm for Domain-linked DG, FOND. Rigorous and reproducible experiments with baselines across popular DG tasks demonstrate our method and its variants' ability to accomplish state-of-the-art DG results for domain-linked classes. We also provide practical insights on data conditions that increase domain-linked class generalizability to tackle real-world data scarcity.

Vast amount of data generated from networks of sensors, wearables, and the Internet of Things (IoT) devices underscores the need for advanced modeling techniques that leverage the spatio-temporal structure of decentralized data due to the need for edge computation and licensing (data access) issues. While federated learning (FL) has emerged as a framework for model training without requiring direct data sharing and exchange, effectively modeling the complex spatio-temporal dependencies to improve forecasting capabilities still remains an open problem. On the other hand, state-of-the-art spatio-temporal forecasting models assume unfettered access to the data, neglecting constraints on data sharing. To bridge this gap, we propose a federated spatio-temporal model -- Cross-Node Federated Graph Neural Network (CNFGNN) -- which explicitly encodes the underlying graph structure using graph neural network (GNN)-based architecture under the constraint of cross-node federated learning, which requires that data in a network of nodes is generated locally on each node and remains decentralized. CNFGNN operates by disentangling the temporal dynamics modeling on devices and spatial dynamics on the server, utilizing alternating optimization to reduce the communication cost, facilitating computations on the edge devices. Experiments on the traffic flow forecasting task show that CNFGNN achieves the best forecasting performance in both transductive and inductive learning settings with no extra computation cost on edge devices, while incurring modest communication cost.

As countries look towards re-opening of economic activities amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring public health has been challenging. While contact tracing only aims to track past activities of infected users, one path to safe reopening is to develop reliable spatiotemporal risk scores to indicate the propensity of the disease. Existing works which aim to develop risk scores either rely on compartmental model-based reproduction numbers (which assume uniform population mixing) or develop coarse-grain spatial scores based on reproduction number (R0) and macro-level density-based mobility statistics. Instead, in this paper, we develop a Hawkes process-based technique to assign relatively fine-grain spatial and temporal risk scores by leveraging high-resolution mobility data based on cell-phone originated location signals. While COVID-19 risk scores also depend on a number of factors specific to an individual, including demography and existing medical conditions, the primary mode of disease transmission is via physical proximity and contact. Therefore, we focus on developing risk scores based on location density and mobility behaviour. We demonstrate the efficacy of the developed risk scores via simulation based on real-world mobility data. Our results show that fine-grain spatiotemporal risk scores based on high-resolution mobility data can provide useful insights and facilitate safe re-opening.

We consider the problem of factorizing a structured 3-way tensor into its constituent Canonical Polyadic (CP) factors. This decomposition, which can be viewed as a generalization of singular value decomposition (SVD) for tensors, reveals how the tensor dimensions (features) interact with each other. However, since the factors are a priori unknown, the corresponding optimization problems are inherently non-convex. The existing guaranteed algorithms which handle this non-convexity incur an irreducible error (bias), and only apply to cases where all factors have the same structure. To this end, we develop a provable algorithm for online structured tensor factorization, wherein one of the factors obeys some incoherence conditions, and the others are sparse. Specifically we show that, under some relatively mild conditions on initialization, rank, and sparsity, our algorithm recovers the factors exactly (up to scaling and permutation) at a linear rate. Complementary to our theoretical results, our synthetic and real-world data evaluations showcase superior performance compared to related techniques. Moreover, its scalability and ability to learn on-the-fly makes it suitable for real-world tasks.

Machine learning transparency calls for interpretable explanations of how inputs relate to predictions. Feature attribution is a way to analyze the impact of features on predictions. Feature interactions are the contextual dependence between features that jointly impact predictions. There are a number of methods that extract feature interactions in prediction models; however, the methods that assign attributions to interactions are either uninterpretable, model-specific, or non-axiomatic. We propose an interaction attribution and detection framework called Archipelago which addresses these problems and is also scalable in real-world settings. Our experiments on standard annotation labels indicate our approach provides significantly more interpretable explanations than comparable methods, which is important for analyzing the impact of interactions on predictions. We also provide accompanying visualizations of our approach that give new insights into deep neural networks.

Modeling the dynamics of real-world physical systems is critical for spatiotemporal prediction tasks, but challenging when data is limited. The scarcity of real-world data and the difficulty in reproducing the data distribution hinder directly applying meta-learning techniques. Although the knowledge of governing partial differential equations (PDEs) of the data can be helpful for the fast adaptation to few observations, it is difficult to generalize to different or unknown dynamics. In this paper, we propose a framework, physics-aware modular meta-learning with auxiliary tasks (PiMetaL) whose spatial modules incorporate PDE-independent knowledge and temporal modules are rapidly adaptable to the limited data, respectively. The framework does not require the exact form of governing equations to model the observed spatiotemporal data. Furthermore, it mitigates the need for a large number of real-world tasks for meta-learning by leveraging simulated data. We apply the proposed framework to both synthetic and real-world spatiotemporal prediction tasks and demonstrate its superior performance with limited observations.