Daily Papers

Generative models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, have societal implications that extend beyond the field of computer science. These models require large image databases like LAION-2B, which contain two billion images. At this scale, manual inspection is difficult and automated analysis is challenging. In addition, recent studies show that duplicated images pose copyright problems for models trained on LAION2B, which hinders its usability. This paper proposes an algorithmic chain that runs with modest compute, that compresses CLIP features to enable efficient duplicate detection, even for vast image volumes. Our approach demonstrates that roughly 700 million images, or about 30\%, of LAION-2B's images are likely duplicated. Our method also provides the histograms of duplication on this dataset, which we use to reveal more examples of verbatim copies by Stable Diffusion and further justify the approach. The current version of the de-duplicated set will be distributed online.

Deep neural networks that achieve remarkable performance in image classification have previously been shown to be easily fooled by tiny transformations such as a one pixel translation of the input image. In order to address this problem, two approaches have been proposed in recent years. The first approach suggests using huge datasets together with data augmentation in the hope that a highly varied training set will teach the network to learn to be invariant. The second approach suggests using architectural modifications based on sampling theory to deal explicitly with image translations. In this paper, we show that these approaches still fall short in robustly handling 'natural' image translations that simulate a subtle change in camera orientation. Our findings reveal that a mere one-pixel translation can result in a significant change in the predicted image representation for approximately 40% of the test images in state-of-the-art models (e.g. open-CLIP trained on LAION-2B or DINO-v2) , while models that are explicitly constructed to be robust to cyclic translations can still be fooled with 1 pixel realistic (non-cyclic) translations 11% of the time. We present Robust Inference by Crop Selection: a simple method that can be proven to achieve any desired level of consistency, although with a modest tradeoff with the model's accuracy. Importantly, we demonstrate how employing this method reduces the ability to fool state-of-the-art models with a 1 pixel translation to less than 5% while suffering from only a 1% drop in classification accuracy. Additionally, we show that our method can be easy adjusted to deal with circular shifts as well. In such case we achieve 100% robustness to integer shifts with state-of-the-art accuracy, and with no need for any further training.

Despite CLIP being the foundation model in numerous vision-language applications, the CLIP suffers from a severe text spotting bias. Such bias causes CLIP models to `Parrot' the visual text embedded within images while disregarding the authentic visual semantics. We uncover that in the most popular image-text dataset LAION-2B, the captions also densely parrot (spell) the text embedded in images. Our analysis shows that around 50\% of images are embedded with visual text content, and 90\% of their captions more or less parrot the visual text. Based on such observation, we thoroughly inspect the different release d versions of CLIP models and verify that the visual text is the dominant factor in measuring the LAION-style image-text similarity for these models. To examine whether these parrot captions shape the text spotting bias, we train a series of CLIP models with LAION subsets curated by different parrot-caption-oriented criteria. We show that training with parrot captions easily shapes such bias but harms the expected visual-language representation learning in CLIP models. This suggests that it is urgent to revisit either the design of CLIP-like models or the existing image-text dataset curation pipeline built on CLIP score filtering.

Large multimodal datasets have been instrumental in recent breakthroughs such as CLIP, Stable Diffusion, and GPT-4. At the same time, datasets rarely receive the same research attention as model architectures or training algorithms. To address this shortcoming in the machine learning ecosystem, we introduce DataComp, a benchmark where the training code is fixed and researchers innovate by proposing new training sets. We provide a testbed for dataset experiments centered around a new candidate pool of 12.8B image-text pairs from Common Crawl. Participants in our benchmark design new filtering techniques or curate new data sources and then evaluate their new dataset by running our standardized CLIP training code and testing on 38 downstream test sets. Our benchmark consists of multiple scales, with four candidate pool sizes and associated compute budgets ranging from 12.8M to 12.8B samples seen during training. This multi-scale design facilitates the study of scaling trends and makes the benchmark accessible to researchers with varying resources. Our baseline experiments show that the DataComp workflow is a promising way of improving multimodal datasets. We introduce DataComp-1B, a dataset created by applying a simple filtering algorithm to the 12.8B candidate pool. The resulting 1.4B subset enables training a CLIP ViT-L/14 from scratch to 79.2% zero-shot accuracy on ImageNet. Our new ViT-L/14 model outperforms a larger ViT-g/14 trained on LAION-2B by 0.7 percentage points while requiring 9x less training compute. We also outperform OpenAI's CLIP ViT-L/14 by 3.7 percentage points, which is trained with the same compute budget as our model. These gains highlight the potential for improving model performance by carefully curating training sets. We view DataComp-1B as only the first step and hope that DataComp paves the way toward the next generation of multimodal datasets.

We assemble a dataset of Creative-Commons-licensed (CC) images, which we use to train a set of open diffusion models that are qualitatively competitive with Stable Diffusion 2 (SD2). This task presents two challenges: (1) high-resolution CC images lack the captions necessary to train text-to-image generative models; (2) CC images are relatively scarce. In turn, to address these challenges, we use an intuitive transfer learning technique to produce a set of high-quality synthetic captions paired with curated CC images. We then develop a data- and compute-efficient training recipe that requires as little as 3% of the LAION-2B data needed to train existing SD2 models, but obtains comparable quality. These results indicate that we have a sufficient number of CC images (~70 million) for training high-quality models. Our training recipe also implements a variety of optimizations that achieve ~3X training speed-ups, enabling rapid model iteration. We leverage this recipe to train several high-quality text-to-image models, which we dub the CommonCanvas family. Our largest model achieves comparable performance to SD2 on a human evaluation, despite being trained on our CC dataset that is significantly smaller than LAION and using synthetic captions for training. We release our models, data, and code at https://github.com/mosaicml/diffusion/blob/main/assets/common-canvas.md

Large text corpora are the backbone of language models. However, we have a limited understanding of the content of these corpora, including general statistics, quality, social factors, and inclusion of evaluation data (contamination). In this work, we propose What's In My Big Data? (WIMBD), a platform and a set of sixteen analyses that allow us to reveal and compare the contents of large text corpora. WIMBD builds on two basic capabilities -- count and search -- at scale, which allows us to analyze more than 35 terabytes on a standard compute node. We apply WIMBD to ten different corpora used to train popular language models, including C4, The Pile, and RedPajama. Our analysis uncovers several surprising and previously undocumented findings about these corpora, including the high prevalence of duplicate, synthetic, and low-quality content, personally identifiable information, toxic language, and benchmark contamination. For instance, we find that about 50% of the documents in RedPajama and LAION-2B-en are duplicates. In addition, several datasets used for benchmarking models trained on such corpora are contaminated with respect to important benchmarks, including the Winograd Schema Challenge and parts of GLUE and SuperGLUE. We open-source WIMBD's code and artifacts to provide a standard set of evaluations for new text-based corpora and to encourage more analyses and transparency around them: github.com/allenai/wimbd.

Scaling up contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) is critical for empowering both vision and multimodal models. We present EVA-CLIP-18B, the largest and most powerful open-source CLIP model to date, with 18-billion parameters. With only 6-billion training samples seen, EVA-CLIP-18B achieves an exceptional 80.7% zero-shot top-1 accuracy averaged across 27 widely recognized image classification benchmarks, outperforming its forerunner EVA-CLIP (5-billion parameters) and other open-source CLIP models by a large margin. Remarkably, we observe a consistent performance improvement with the model size scaling of EVA-CLIP, despite maintaining a constant training dataset of 2-billion image-text pairs from LAION-2B and COYO-700M. This dataset is openly available and much smaller than the in-house datasets (e.g., DFN-5B, WebLI-10B) employed in other state-of-the-art CLIP models. EVA-CLIP-18B demonstrates the potential of EVA-style weak-to-strong visual model scaling. With our model weights made publicly available, we hope to facilitate future research in vision and multimodal foundation models.

Generative text-to-image models enable us to synthesize unlimited amounts of images in a controllable manner, spurring many recent efforts to train vision models with synthetic data. However, every synthetic image ultimately originates from the upstream data used to train the generator. What additional value does the intermediate generator provide over directly training on relevant parts of the upstream data? Grounding this question in the setting of image classification,a we compare finetuning on task-relevant, targeted synthetic data generated by Stable Diffusion -- a generative model trained on the LAION-2B dataset -- against finetuning on targeted real images retrieved directly from LAION-2B. We show that while synthetic data can benefit some downstream tasks, it is universally matched or outperformed by real data from our simple retrieval baseline. Our analysis suggests that this underperformance is partially due to generator artifacts and inaccurate task-relevant visual details in the synthetic images. Overall, we argue that retrieval is a critical baseline to consider when training with synthetic data -- a baseline that current methods do not yet surpass. We release code, data, and models at https://github.com/scottgeng00/unmet-promise.

Recent vision-language (VL) models are powerful, but can they reliably distinguish "right" from "left"? We curate three new corpora to quantify model comprehension of such basic spatial relations. These tests isolate spatial reasoning more precisely than existing datasets like VQAv2, e.g., our What'sUp benchmark contains sets of photographs varying only the spatial relations of objects, keeping their identity fixed (see Figure 1: models must comprehend not only the usual case of a dog under a table, but also, the same dog on top of the same table). We evaluate 18 VL models, finding that all perform poorly, e.g., BLIP finetuned on VQAv2, which nears human parity on VQAv2, achieves 56% accuracy on our benchmarks vs. humans at 99%. We conclude by studying causes of this surprising behavior, finding: 1) that popular vision-language pretraining corpora like LAION-2B contain little reliable data for learning spatial relationships; and 2) that basic modeling interventions like up-weighting preposition-containing instances or fine-tuning on our corpora are not sufficient to address the challenges our benchmarks pose. We are hopeful that these corpora will facilitate further research, and we release our data and code at https://github.com/amitakamath/whatsup_vlms.

Large training sets have become a cornerstone of machine learning and are the foundation for recent advances in language modeling and multimodal learning. While data curation for pre-training is often still ad-hoc, one common paradigm is to first collect a massive pool of data from the Web and then filter this candidate pool down to an actual training set via various heuristics. In this work, we study the problem of learning a data filtering network (DFN) for this second step of filtering a large uncurated dataset. Our key finding is that the quality of a network for filtering is distinct from its performance on downstream tasks: for instance, a model that performs well on ImageNet can yield worse training sets than a model with low ImageNet accuracy that is trained on a small amount of high-quality data. Based on our insights, we construct new data filtering networks that induce state-of-the-art image-text datasets. Specifically, our best performing dataset DFN-5B enables us to train state-of-the-art models for their compute budgets: among other improvements on a variety of tasks, a ViT-H trained on our dataset achieves 83.0% zero-shot transfer accuracy on ImageNet, out-performing models trained on other datasets such as LAION-2B, DataComp-1B, or OpenAI's WIT. In order to facilitate further research in dataset design, we also release a new 2 billion example dataset DFN-2B and show that high performance data filtering networks can be trained from scratch using only publicly available data.