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Mar 11

The Model Openness Framework: Promoting Completeness and Openness for Reproducibility, Transparency, and Usability in Artificial Intelligence

Generative AI (GAI) offers unprecedented opportunities for research and innovation, but its commercialization has raised concerns about transparency, reproducibility, and safety. Many open GAI models lack the necessary components for full understanding and reproducibility, and some use restrictive licenses whilst claiming to be ``open-source''. To address these concerns, we propose the Model Openness Framework (MOF), a ranked classification system that rates machine learning models based on their completeness and openness, following principles of open science, open source, open data, and open access. The MOF requires specific components of the model development lifecycle to be included and released under appropriate open licenses. This framework aims to prevent misrepresentation of models claiming to be open, guide researchers and developers in providing all model components under permissive licenses, and help individuals and organizations identify models that can be safely adopted without restrictions. By promoting transparency and reproducibility, the MOF combats ``openwashing'' practices and establishes completeness and openness as primary criteria alongside the core tenets of responsible AI. Wide adoption of the MOF will foster a more open AI ecosystem, benefiting research, innovation, and adoption of state-of-the-art models.

Computational reproducibility of Jupyter notebooks from biomedical publications

Jupyter notebooks facilitate the bundling of executable code with its documentation and output in one interactive environment, and they represent a popular mechanism to document and share computational workflows. The reproducibility of computational aspects of research is a key component of scientific reproducibility but has not yet been assessed at scale for Jupyter notebooks associated with biomedical publications. We address computational reproducibility at two levels: First, using fully automated workflows, we analyzed the computational reproducibility of Jupyter notebooks related to publications indexed in PubMed Central. We identified such notebooks by mining the articles full text, locating them on GitHub and re-running them in an environment as close to the original as possible. We documented reproduction success and exceptions and explored relationships between notebook reproducibility and variables related to the notebooks or publications. Second, this study represents a reproducibility attempt in and of itself, using essentially the same methodology twice on PubMed Central over two years. Out of 27271 notebooks from 2660 GitHub repositories associated with 3467 articles, 22578 notebooks were written in Python, including 15817 that had their dependencies declared in standard requirement files and that we attempted to re-run automatically. For 10388 of these, all declared dependencies could be installed successfully, and we re-ran them to assess reproducibility. Of these, 1203 notebooks ran through without any errors, including 879 that produced results identical to those reported in the original notebook and 324 for which our results differed from the originally reported ones. Running the other notebooks resulted in exceptions. We zoom in on common problems, highlight trends and discuss potential improvements to Jupyter-related workflows associated with biomedical publications.

Reproducibility of the Methods in Medical Imaging with Deep Learning

Concerns about the reproducibility of deep learning research are more prominent than ever, with no clear solution in sight. The relevance of machine learning research can only be improved if we also employ empirical rigor that incorporates reproducibility guidelines, especially so in the medical imaging field. The Medical Imaging with Deep Learning (MIDL) conference has made advancements in this direction by advocating open access, and recently also recommending authors to make their code public - both aspects being adopted by the majority of the conference submissions. This helps the reproducibility of the methods, however, there is currently little or no support for further evaluation of these supplementary material, making them vulnerable to poor quality, which affects the impact of the entire submission. We have evaluated all accepted full paper submissions to MIDL between 2018 and 2022 using established, but slightly adjusted guidelines on reproducibility and the quality of the public repositories. The evaluations show that publishing repositories and using public datasets are becoming more popular, which helps traceability, but the quality of the repositories has not improved over the years, leaving room for improvement in every aspect of designing repositories. Merely 22% of all submissions contain a repository that were deemed repeatable using our evaluations. From the commonly encountered issues during the evaluations, we propose a set of guidelines for machine learning-related research for medical imaging applications, adjusted specifically for future submissions to MIDL.

DiffRhythm: Blazingly Fast and Embarrassingly Simple End-to-End Full-Length Song Generation with Latent Diffusion

Recent advancements in music generation have garnered significant attention, yet existing approaches face critical limitations. Some current generative models can only synthesize either the vocal track or the accompaniment track. While some models can generate combined vocal and accompaniment, they typically rely on meticulously designed multi-stage cascading architectures and intricate data pipelines, hindering scalability. Additionally, most systems are restricted to generating short musical segments rather than full-length songs. Furthermore, widely used language model-based methods suffer from slow inference speeds. To address these challenges, we propose DiffRhythm, the first latent diffusion-based song generation model capable of synthesizing complete songs with both vocal and accompaniment for durations of up to 4m45s in only ten seconds, maintaining high musicality and intelligibility. Despite its remarkable capabilities, DiffRhythm is designed to be simple and elegant: it eliminates the need for complex data preparation, employs a straightforward model structure, and requires only lyrics and a style prompt during inference. Additionally, its non-autoregressive structure ensures fast inference speeds. This simplicity guarantees the scalability of DiffRhythm. Moreover, we release the complete training code along with the pre-trained model on large-scale data to promote reproducibility and further research.

Pipeline and Dataset Generation for Automated Fact-checking in Almost Any Language

This article presents a pipeline for automated fact-checking leveraging publicly available Language Models and data. The objective is to assess the accuracy of textual claims using evidence from a ground-truth evidence corpus. The pipeline consists of two main modules -- the evidence retrieval and the claim veracity evaluation. Our primary focus is on the ease of deployment in various languages that remain unexplored in the field of automated fact-checking. Unlike most similar pipelines, which work with evidence sentences, our pipeline processes data on a paragraph level, simplifying the overall architecture and data requirements. Given the high cost of annotating language-specific fact-checking training data, our solution builds on the Question Answering for Claim Generation (QACG) method, which we adapt and use to generate the data for all models of the pipeline. Our strategy enables the introduction of new languages through machine translation of only two fixed datasets of moderate size. Subsequently, any number of training samples can be generated based on an evidence corpus in the target language. We provide open access to all data and fine-tuned models for Czech, English, Polish, and Slovak pipelines, as well as to our codebase that may be used to reproduce the results.We comprehensively evaluate the pipelines for all four languages, including human annotations and per-sample difficulty assessment using Pointwise V-information. The presented experiments are based on full Wikipedia snapshots to promote reproducibility. To facilitate implementation and user interaction, we develop the FactSearch application featuring the proposed pipeline and the preliminary feedback on its performance.

MathCoder2: Better Math Reasoning from Continued Pretraining on Model-translated Mathematical Code

Code has been shown to be effective in enhancing the mathematical reasoning abilities of large language models due to its precision and accuracy. Previous works involving continued mathematical pretraining often include code that utilizes math-related packages, which are primarily designed for fields such as engineering, machine learning, signal processing, or module testing, rather than being directly focused on mathematical reasoning. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for generating mathematical code accompanied with corresponding reasoning steps for continued pretraining. Our approach begins with the construction of a high-quality mathematical continued pretraining dataset by incorporating math-related web data, code using mathematical packages, math textbooks, and synthetic data. Next, we construct reasoning steps by extracting LaTeX expressions, the conditions needed for the expressions, and the results of the expressions from the previously collected dataset. Based on this extracted information, we generate corresponding code to accurately capture the mathematical reasoning process. Appending the generated code to each reasoning step results in data consisting of paired natural language reasoning steps and their corresponding code. Combining this data with the original dataset results in a 19.2B-token high-performing mathematical pretraining corpus, which we name MathCode-Pile. Training several popular base models with this corpus significantly improves their mathematical abilities, leading to the creation of the MathCoder2 family of models. All of our data processing and training code is open-sourced, ensuring full transparency and easy reproducibility of the entire data collection and training pipeline. The code is released at https://github.com/mathllm/MathCoder2 .

Eureka: Evaluating and Understanding Large Foundation Models

Rigorous and reproducible evaluation is critical for assessing the state of the art and for guiding scientific advances in Artificial Intelligence. Evaluation is challenging in practice due to several reasons, including benchmark saturation, lack of transparency in methods used for measurement, development challenges in extracting measurements for generative tasks, and, more generally, the extensive number of capabilities required for a well-rounded comparison across models. We make three contributions to alleviate the above challenges. First, we present Eureka, an open-source framework for standardizing evaluations of large foundation models beyond single-score reporting and rankings. Second, we introduce Eureka-Bench as an extensible collection of benchmarks testing capabilities that (i) are still challenging for state-of-the-art models and (ii) represent fundamental but overlooked language and multimodal capabilities. The inherent space for improvement in non-saturated benchmarks enables us to discover meaningful differences between models at a capability level. Third, using Eureka, we conduct an analysis of 12 state-of-the-art models, providing in-depth insights into failure understanding and model comparison, which can be leveraged to plan targeted improvements. In contrast to recent trends in reports and leaderboards showing absolute rankings and claims for one model or another to be the best, our analysis shows that there is no such best model. Different models have different strengths, but there are models that appear more often than others as best performers for some capabilities. Despite the recent improvements, current models still struggle with several fundamental capabilities including detailed image understanding, benefiting from multimodal input when available rather than fully relying on language, factuality and grounding for information retrieval, and over refusals.

FAIR Jupyter: a knowledge graph approach to semantic sharing and granular exploration of a computational notebook reproducibility dataset

The way in which data are shared can affect their utility and reusability. Here, we demonstrate how data that we had previously shared in bulk can be mobilized further through a knowledge graph that allows for much more granular exploration and interrogation. The original dataset is about the computational reproducibility of GitHub-hosted Jupyter notebooks associated with biomedical publications. It contains rich metadata about the publications, associated GitHub repositories and Jupyter notebooks, and the notebooks' reproducibility. We took this dataset, converted it into semantic triples and loaded these into a triple store to create a knowledge graph, FAIR Jupyter, that we made accessible via a web service. This enables granular data exploration and analysis through queries that can be tailored to specific use cases. Such queries may provide details about any of the variables from the original dataset, highlight relationships between them or combine some of the graph's content with materials from corresponding external resources. We provide a collection of example queries addressing a range of use cases in research and education. We also outline how sets of such queries can be used to profile specific content types, either individually or by class. We conclude by discussing how such a semantically enhanced sharing of complex datasets can both enhance their FAIRness, i.e., their findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability, and help identify and communicate best practices, particularly with regards to data quality, standardization, automation and reproducibility.

Open RL Benchmark: Comprehensive Tracked Experiments for Reinforcement Learning

In many Reinforcement Learning (RL) papers, learning curves are useful indicators to measure the effectiveness of RL algorithms. However, the complete raw data of the learning curves are rarely available. As a result, it is usually necessary to reproduce the experiments from scratch, which can be time-consuming and error-prone. We present Open RL Benchmark, a set of fully tracked RL experiments, including not only the usual data such as episodic return, but also all algorithm-specific and system metrics. Open RL Benchmark is community-driven: anyone can download, use, and contribute to the data. At the time of writing, more than 25,000 runs have been tracked, for a cumulative duration of more than 8 years. Open RL Benchmark covers a wide range of RL libraries and reference implementations. Special care is taken to ensure that each experiment is precisely reproducible by providing not only the full parameters, but also the versions of the dependencies used to generate it. In addition, Open RL Benchmark comes with a command-line interface (CLI) for easy fetching and generating figures to present the results. In this document, we include two case studies to demonstrate the usefulness of Open RL Benchmark in practice. To the best of our knowledge, Open RL Benchmark is the first RL benchmark of its kind, and the authors hope that it will improve and facilitate the work of researchers in the field.

BIOMEDICA: An Open Biomedical Image-Caption Archive, Dataset, and Vision-Language Models Derived from Scientific Literature

The development of vision-language models (VLMs) is driven by large-scale and diverse multimodal datasets. However, progress toward generalist biomedical VLMs is limited by the lack of annotated, publicly accessible datasets across biology and medicine. Existing efforts are restricted to narrow domains, missing the full diversity of biomedical knowledge encoded in scientific literature. To address this gap, we introduce BIOMEDICA, a scalable, open-source framework to extract, annotate, and serialize the entirety of the PubMed Central Open Access subset into an easy-to-use, publicly accessible dataset.Our framework produces a comprehensive archive with over 24 million unique image-text pairs from over 6 million articles. Metadata and expert-guided annotations are also provided. We demonstrate the utility and accessibility of our resource by releasing BMCA-CLIP, a suite of CLIP-style models continuously pre-trained on the BIOMEDICA dataset via streaming, eliminating the need to download 27 TB of data locally.On average, our models achieve state-of-the-art performance across 40 tasks - spanning pathology, radiology, ophthalmology, dermatology, surgery, molecular biology, parasitology, and cell biology - excelling in zero-shot classification with a 6.56% average improvement (as high as 29.8% and 17.5% in dermatology and ophthalmology, respectively), and stronger image-text retrieval, all while using 10x less compute. To foster reproducibility and collaboration, we release our codebase and dataset for the broader research community.

ACES: Automatic Cohort Extraction System for Event-Stream Datasets

Reproducibility remains a significant challenge in machine learning (ML) for healthcare. In this field, datasets, model pipelines, and even task/cohort definitions are often private, leading to a significant barrier in sharing, iterating, and understanding ML results on electronic health record (EHR) datasets. In this paper, we address a significant part of this problem by introducing the Automatic Cohort Extraction System for Event-Stream Datasets (ACES). This tool is designed to simultaneously simplify the development of task/cohorts for ML in healthcare and enable the reproduction of these cohorts, both at an exact level for single datasets and at a conceptual level across datasets. To accomplish this, ACES provides (1) a highly intuitive and expressive configuration language for defining both dataset-specific concepts and dataset-agnostic inclusion/exclusion criteria, and (2) a pipeline to automatically extract patient records that meet these defined criteria from real-world data. ACES can be automatically applied to any dataset in either the Medical Event Data Standard (MEDS) or EventStreamGPT (ESGPT) formats, or to *any* dataset for which the necessary task-specific predicates can be extracted in an event-stream form. ACES has the potential to significantly lower the barrier to entry for defining ML tasks, redefine the way researchers interact with EHR datasets, and significantly improve the state of reproducibility for ML studies in this modality. ACES is available at https://github.com/justin13601/aces.

CORE-Bench: Fostering the Credibility of Published Research Through a Computational Reproducibility Agent Benchmark

AI agents have the potential to aid users on a variety of consequential tasks, including conducting scientific research. To spur the development of useful agents, we need benchmarks that are challenging, but more crucially, directly correspond to real-world tasks of interest. This paper introduces such a benchmark, designed to measure the accuracy of AI agents in tackling a crucial yet surprisingly challenging aspect of scientific research: computational reproducibility. This task, fundamental to the scientific process, involves reproducing the results of a study using the provided code and data. We introduce CORE-Bench (Computational Reproducibility Agent Benchmark), a benchmark consisting of 270 tasks based on 90 scientific papers across three disciplines (computer science, social science, and medicine). Tasks in CORE-Bench consist of three difficulty levels and include both language-only and vision-language tasks. We provide an evaluation system to measure the accuracy of agents in a fast and parallelizable way, saving days of evaluation time for each run compared to a sequential implementation. We evaluated two baseline agents: the general-purpose AutoGPT and a task-specific agent called CORE-Agent. We tested both variants using two underlying language models: GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini. The best agent achieved an accuracy of 21% on the hardest task, showing the vast scope for improvement in automating routine scientific tasks. Having agents that can reproduce existing work is a necessary step towards building agents that can conduct novel research and could verify and improve the performance of other research agents. We hope that CORE-Bench can improve the state of reproducibility and spur the development of future research agents.

BARS-CTR: Open Benchmarking for Click-Through Rate Prediction

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a critical task for many applications, as its accuracy has a direct impact on user experience and platform revenue. In recent years, CTR prediction has been widely studied in both academia and industry, resulting in a wide variety of CTR prediction models. Unfortunately, there is still a lack of standardized benchmarks and uniform evaluation protocols for CTR prediction research. This leads to non-reproducible or even inconsistent experimental results among existing studies, which largely limits the practical value and potential impact of their research. In this work, we aim to perform open benchmarking for CTR prediction and present a rigorous comparison of different models in a reproducible manner. To this end, we ran over 7,000 experiments for more than 12,000 GPU hours in total to re-evaluate 24 existing models on multiple datasets and settings. Surprisingly, our experiments show that with sufficient hyper-parameter search and model tuning, many deep models have smaller differences than expected. The results also reveal that making real progress on the modeling of CTR prediction is indeed a very challenging research task. We believe that our benchmarking work could not only allow researchers to gauge the effectiveness of new models conveniently but also make them fairly compare with the state of the arts. We have publicly released the benchmarking code, evaluation protocols, and hyper-parameter settings of our work to promote reproducible research in this field.

Alice in Wonderland: Simple Tasks Showing Complete Reasoning Breakdown in State-Of-the-Art Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are often described as being instances of foundation models - that is, models that transfer strongly across various tasks and conditions in few-show or zero-shot manner, while exhibiting scaling laws that predict function improvement when increasing the pre-training scale. These claims of excelling in different functions and tasks rely on measurements taken across various sets of standardized benchmarks showing high scores for such models. We demonstrate here a dramatic breakdown of function and reasoning capabilities of state-of-the-art models trained at the largest available scales which claim strong function, using a simple, short, conventional common sense problem formulated in concise natural language, easily solvable by humans. The breakdown is dramatic, as models also express strong overconfidence in their wrong solutions, while providing often non-sensical "reasoning"-like explanations akin to confabulations to justify and backup the validity of their clearly failed responses, making them sound plausible. Various standard interventions in an attempt to get the right solution, like various type of enhanced prompting, or urging the models to reconsider the wrong solutions again by multi step re-evaluation, fail. We take these initial observations to the scientific and technological community to stimulate urgent re-assessment of the claimed capabilities of current generation of LLMs, Such re-assessment also requires common action to create standardized benchmarks that would allow proper detection of such basic reasoning deficits that obviously manage to remain undiscovered by current state-of-the-art evaluation procedures and benchmarks. Code for reproducing experiments in the paper and raw experiments data can be found at https://github.com/LAION-AI/AIW

An Exploratory Literature Study on Sharing and Energy Use of Language Models for Source Code

Large language models trained on source code can support a variety of software development tasks, such as code recommendation and program repair. Large amounts of data for training such models benefit the models' performance. However, the size of the data and models results in long training times and high energy consumption. While publishing source code allows for replicability, users need to repeat the expensive training process if models are not shared. The main goal of the study is to investigate if publications that trained language models for software engineering (SE) tasks share source code and trained artifacts. The second goal is to analyze the transparency on training energy usage. We perform a snowballing-based literature search to find publications on language models for source code, and analyze their reusability from a sustainability standpoint. From 494 unique publications, we identified 293 relevant publications that use language models to address code-related tasks. Among them, 27% (79 out of 293) make artifacts available for reuse. This can be in the form of tools or IDE plugins designed for specific tasks or task-agnostic models that can be fine-tuned for a variety of downstream tasks. Moreover, we collect insights on the hardware used for model training, as well as training time, which together determine the energy consumption of the development process. We find that there are deficiencies in the sharing of information and artifacts for current studies on source code models for software engineering tasks, with 40% of the surveyed papers not sharing source code or trained artifacts. We recommend the sharing of source code as well as trained artifacts, to enable sustainable reproducibility. Moreover, comprehensive information on training times and hardware configurations should be shared for transparency on a model's carbon footprint.

Bt-GAN: Generating Fair Synthetic Healthdata via Bias-transforming Generative Adversarial Networks

Synthetic data generation offers a promising solution to enhance the usefulness of Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR) by generating realistic de-identified data. However, the existing literature primarily focuses on the quality of synthetic health data, neglecting the crucial aspect of fairness in downstream predictions. Consequently, models trained on synthetic EHR have faced criticism for producing biased outcomes in target tasks. These biases can arise from either spurious correlations between features or the failure of models to accurately represent sub-groups. To address these concerns, we present Bias-transforming Generative Adversarial Networks (Bt-GAN), a GAN-based synthetic data generator specifically designed for the healthcare domain. In order to tackle spurious correlations (i), we propose an information-constrained Data Generation Process that enables the generator to learn a fair deterministic transformation based on a well-defined notion of algorithmic fairness. To overcome the challenge of capturing exact sub-group representations (ii), we incentivize the generator to preserve sub-group densities through score-based weighted sampling. This approach compels the generator to learn from underrepresented regions of the data manifold. We conduct extensive experiments using the MIMIC-III database. Our results demonstrate that Bt-GAN achieves SOTA accuracy while significantly improving fairness and minimizing bias amplification. We also perform an in-depth explainability analysis to provide additional evidence supporting the validity of our study. In conclusion, our research introduces a novel and professional approach to addressing the limitations of synthetic data generation in the healthcare domain. By incorporating fairness considerations and leveraging advanced techniques such as GANs, we pave the way for more reliable and unbiased predictions in healthcare applications.

Hyperspectral Unmixing: Ground Truth Labeling, Datasets, Benchmark Performances and Survey

Hyperspectral unmixing (HU) is a very useful and increasingly popular preprocessing step for a wide range of hyperspectral applications. However, the HU research has been constrained a lot by three factors: (a) the number of hyperspectral images (especially the ones with ground truths) are very limited; (b) the ground truths of most hyperspectral images are not shared on the web, which may cause lots of unnecessary troubles for researchers to evaluate their algorithms; (c) the codes of most state-of-the-art methods are not shared, which may also delay the testing of new methods. Accordingly, this paper deals with the above issues from the following three perspectives: (1) as a profound contribution, we provide a general labeling method for the HU. With it, we labeled up to 15 hyperspectral images, providing 18 versions of ground truths. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to summarize and share up to 15 hyperspectral images and their 18 versions of ground truths for the HU. Observing that the hyperspectral classification (HyC) has much more standard datasets (whose ground truths are generally publicly shared) than the HU, we propose an interesting method to transform the HyC datasets for the HU research. (2) To further facilitate the evaluation of HU methods under different conditions, we reviewed and implemented the algorithm to generate a complex synthetic hyperspectral image. By tuning the hyper-parameters in the code, we may verify the HU methods from four perspectives. The code would also be shared on the web. (3) To provide a standard comparison, we reviewed up to 10 state-of-the-art HU algorithms, then selected the 5 most benchmark HU algorithms, and compared them on the 15 real hyperspectral datasets. The experiment results are surely reproducible; the implemented codes would be shared on the web.

BARS: Towards Open Benchmarking for Recommender Systems

The past two decades have witnessed the rapid development of personalized recommendation techniques. Despite significant progress made in both research and practice of recommender systems, to date, there is a lack of a widely-recognized benchmarking standard in this field. Many existing studies perform model evaluations and comparisons in an ad-hoc manner, for example, by employing their own private data splits or using different experimental settings. Such conventions not only increase the difficulty in reproducing existing studies, but also lead to inconsistent experimental results among them. This largely limits the credibility and practical value of research results in this field. To tackle these issues, we present an initiative project (namely BARS) aiming for open benchmarking for recommender systems. In comparison to some earlier attempts towards this goal, we take a further step by setting up a standardized benchmarking pipeline for reproducible research, which integrates all the details about datasets, source code, hyper-parameter settings, running logs, and evaluation results. The benchmark is designed with comprehensiveness and sustainability in mind. It covers both matching and ranking tasks, and also enables researchers to easily follow and contribute to the research in this field. This project will not only reduce the redundant efforts of researchers to re-implement or re-run existing baselines, but also drive more solid and reproducible research on recommender systems. We would like to call upon everyone to use the BARS benchmark for future evaluation, and contribute to the project through the portal at: https://openbenchmark.github.io/BARS.

O1 Replication Journey: A Strategic Progress Report -- Part 1

This paper introduces a pioneering approach to artificial intelligence research, embodied in our O1 Replication Journey. In response to the announcement of OpenAI's groundbreaking O1 model, we embark on a transparent, real-time exploration to replicate its capabilities while reimagining the process of conducting and communicating AI research. Our methodology addresses critical challenges in modern AI research, including the insularity of prolonged team-based projects, delayed information sharing, and the lack of recognition for diverse contributions. By providing comprehensive, real-time documentation of our replication efforts, including both successes and failures, we aim to foster open science, accelerate collective advancement, and lay the groundwork for AI-driven scientific discovery. Our research progress report diverges significantly from traditional research papers, offering continuous updates, full process transparency, and active community engagement throughout the research journey. Technologically, we proposed the journey learning paradigm, which encourages models to learn not just shortcuts, but the complete exploration process, including trial and error, reflection, and backtracking. With only 327 training samples and without any additional tricks, journey learning outperformed conventional supervised learning by over 8\% on the MATH dataset, demonstrating its extremely powerful potential. We believe this to be the most crucial component of O1 technology that we have successfully decoded. We share valuable resources including technical hypotheses and insights, cognitive exploration maps, custom-developed tools, etc at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/O1-Journey.

ICON: Improving Inter-Report Consistency of Radiology Report Generation via Lesion-aware Mix-up Augmentation

Previous research on radiology report generation has made significant progress in terms of increasing the clinical accuracy of generated reports. In this paper, we emphasize another crucial quality that it should possess, i.e., inter-report consistency, which refers to the capability of generating consistent reports for semantically equivalent radiographs. This quality is even of greater significance than the overall report accuracy in terms of ensuring the system's credibility, as a system prone to providing conflicting results would severely erode users' trust. Regrettably, existing approaches struggle to maintain inter-report consistency, exhibiting biases towards common patterns and susceptibility to lesion variants. To address this issue, we propose ICON, which improves the inter-report consistency of radiology report generation. Aiming at enhancing the system's ability to capture the similarities in semantically equivalent lesions, our approach involves first extracting lesions from input images and examining their characteristics. Then, we introduce a lesion-aware mix-up augmentation technique to ensure that the representations of the semantically equivalent lesions align with the same attributes, by linearly interpolating them during the training phase. Extensive experiments on three publicly available chest X-ray datasets verify the effectiveness of our approach, both in terms of improving the consistency and accuracy of the generated reports.

ImagenHub: Standardizing the evaluation of conditional image generation models

Recently, a myriad of conditional image generation and editing models have been developed to serve different downstream tasks, including text-to-image generation, text-guided image editing, subject-driven image generation, control-guided image generation, etc. However, we observe huge inconsistencies in experimental conditions: datasets, inference, and evaluation metrics - render fair comparisons difficult. This paper proposes ImagenHub, which is a one-stop library to standardize the inference and evaluation of all the conditional image generation models. Firstly, we define seven prominent tasks and curate high-quality evaluation datasets for them. Secondly, we built a unified inference pipeline to ensure fair comparison. Thirdly, we design two human evaluation scores, i.e. Semantic Consistency and Perceptual Quality, along with comprehensive guidelines to evaluate generated images. We train expert raters to evaluate the model outputs based on the proposed metrics. Our human evaluation achieves a high inter-worker agreement of Krippendorff's alpha on 76% models with a value higher than 0.4. We comprehensively evaluated a total of around 30 models and observed three key takeaways: (1) the existing models' performance is generally unsatisfying except for Text-guided Image Generation and Subject-driven Image Generation, with 74% models achieving an overall score lower than 0.5. (2) we examined the claims from published papers and found 83% of them hold with a few exceptions. (3) None of the existing automatic metrics has a Spearman's correlation higher than 0.2 except subject-driven image generation. Moving forward, we will continue our efforts to evaluate newly published models and update our leaderboard to keep track of the progress in conditional image generation.

Surveying the Effects of Quality, Diversity, and Complexity in Synthetic Data From Large Language Models

Synthetic data generation with Large Language Models is a promising paradigm for augmenting natural data over a nearly infinite range of tasks. Given this variety, direct comparisons among synthetic data generation algorithms are scarce, making it difficult to understand where improvement comes from and what bottlenecks exist. We propose to evaluate algorithms via the makeup of synthetic data generated by each algorithm in terms of data quality, diversity, and complexity. We choose these three characteristics for their significance in open-ended processes and the impact each has on the capabilities of downstream models. We find quality to be essential for in-distribution model generalization, diversity to be essential for out-of-distribution generalization, and complexity to be beneficial for both. Further, we emphasize the existence of Quality-Diversity trade-offs in training data and the downstream effects on model performance. We then examine the effect of various components in the synthetic data pipeline on each data characteristic. This examination allows us to taxonomize and compare synthetic data generation algorithms through the components they utilize and the resulting effects on data QDC composition. This analysis extends into a discussion on the importance of balancing QDC in synthetic data for efficient reinforcement learning and self-improvement algorithms. Analogous to the QD trade-offs in training data, often there exist trade-offs between model output quality and output diversity which impact the composition of synthetic data. We observe that many models are currently evaluated and optimized only for output quality, thereby limiting output diversity and the potential for self-improvement. We argue that balancing these trade-offs is essential to the development of future self-improvement algorithms and highlight a number of works making progress in this direction.

A New Benchmark: On the Utility of Synthetic Data with Blender for Bare Supervised Learning and Downstream Domain Adaptation

Deep learning in computer vision has achieved great success with the price of large-scale labeled training data. However, exhaustive data annotation is impracticable for each task of all domains of interest, due to high labor costs and unguaranteed labeling accuracy. Besides, the uncontrollable data collection process produces non-IID training and test data, where undesired duplication may exist. All these nuisances may hinder the verification of typical theories and exposure to new findings. To circumvent them, an alternative is to generate synthetic data via 3D rendering with domain randomization. We in this work push forward along this line by doing profound and extensive research on bare supervised learning and downstream domain adaptation. Specifically, under the well-controlled, IID data setting enabled by 3D rendering, we systematically verify the typical, important learning insights, e.g., shortcut learning, and discover the new laws of various data regimes and network architectures in generalization. We further investigate the effect of image formation factors on generalization, e.g., object scale, material texture, illumination, camera viewpoint, and background in a 3D scene. Moreover, we use the simulation-to-reality adaptation as a downstream task for comparing the transferability between synthetic and real data when used for pre-training, which demonstrates that synthetic data pre-training is also promising to improve real test results. Lastly, to promote future research, we develop a new large-scale synthetic-to-real benchmark for image classification, termed S2RDA, which provides more significant challenges for transfer from simulation to reality. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/huitangtang/On_the_Utility_of_Synthetic_Data.

LiveXiv -- A Multi-Modal Live Benchmark Based on Arxiv Papers Content

The large-scale training of multi-modal models on data scraped from the web has shown outstanding utility in infusing these models with the required world knowledge to perform effectively on multiple downstream tasks. However, one downside of scraping data from the web can be the potential sacrifice of the benchmarks on which the abilities of these models are often evaluated. To safeguard against test data contamination and to truly test the abilities of these foundation models we propose LiveXiv: A scalable evolving live benchmark based on scientific ArXiv papers. LiveXiv accesses domain-specific manuscripts at any given timestamp and proposes to automatically generate visual question-answer pairs (VQA). This is done without any human-in-the-loop, using the multi-modal content in the manuscripts, like graphs, charts, and tables. Moreover, we introduce an efficient evaluation approach that estimates the performance of all models on the evolving benchmark using evaluations of only a subset of models. This significantly reduces the overall evaluation cost. We benchmark multiple open and proprietary Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) on the first version of our benchmark, showing its challenging nature and exposing the models true abilities, avoiding contamination. Lastly, in our commitment to high quality, we have collected and evaluated a manually verified subset. By comparing its overall results to our automatic annotations, we have found that the performance variance is indeed minimal (<2.5%). Our dataset is available online on HuggingFace, and our code will be available here.

PRISM: Patient Records Interpretation for Semantic Clinical Trial Matching using Large Language Models

Clinical trial matching is the task of identifying trials for which patients may be potentially eligible. Typically, this task is labor-intensive and requires detailed verification of patient electronic health records (EHRs) against the stringent inclusion and exclusion criteria of clinical trials. This process is manual, time-intensive, and challenging to scale up, resulting in many patients missing out on potential therapeutic options. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have made automating patient-trial matching possible, as shown in multiple concurrent research studies. However, the current approaches are confined to constrained, often synthetic datasets that do not adequately mirror the complexities encountered in real-world medical data. In this study, we present the first, end-to-end large-scale empirical evaluation of clinical trial matching using real-world EHRs. Our study showcases the capability of LLMs to accurately match patients with appropriate clinical trials. We perform experiments with proprietary LLMs, including GPT-4 and GPT-3.5, as well as our custom fine-tuned model called OncoLLM and show that OncoLLM, despite its significantly smaller size, not only outperforms GPT-3.5 but also matches the performance of qualified medical doctors. All experiments were carried out on real-world EHRs that include clinical notes and available clinical trials from a single cancer center in the United States.

Assessment of Data Consistency through Cascades of Independently Recurrent Inference Machines for fast and robust accelerated MRI reconstruction

Machine Learning methods can learn how to reconstruct Magnetic Resonance Images and thereby accelerate acquisition, which is of paramount importance to the clinical workflow. Physics-informed networks incorporate the forward model of accelerated MRI reconstruction in the learning process. With increasing network complexity, robustness is not ensured when reconstructing data unseen during training. We aim to embed data consistency (DC) in deep networks while balancing the degree of network complexity. While doing so, we will assess whether either explicit or implicit enforcement of DC in varying network architectures is preferred to optimize performance. We propose a scheme called Cascades of Independently Recurrent Inference Machines (CIRIM) to assess DC through unrolled optimization. Herein we assess DC both implicitly by gradient descent and explicitly by a designed term. Extensive comparison of the CIRIM to CS as well as to other methods is performed: the E2EVN, CascadeNet, KIKINet, LPDNet, RIM, IRIM, and UNet. Models were trained and evaluated on T1-weighted and FLAIR contrast brain data, and T2-weighted knee data. Both 1D and 2D undersampling patterns were evaluated. Robustness was tested by reconstructing 7.5x prospectively undersampled 3D FLAIR MRI data of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) patients with white matter lesions. The CIRIM performed best when implicitly enforcing DC, while the E2EVN required an explicit DC formulation. In reconstructing MS patient data, prospectively acquired with a sampling pattern unseen during model training, the CIRIM maintained lesion contrast while efficiently denoising the images. The CIRIM showed highly promising generalization capabilities maintaining a very fair trade-off between reconstructed image quality and fast reconstruction times, which is crucial in the clinical workflow.

Generative AI for Medical Imaging: extending the MONAI Framework

Recent advances in generative AI have brought incredible breakthroughs in several areas, including medical imaging. These generative models have tremendous potential not only to help safely share medical data via synthetic datasets but also to perform an array of diverse applications, such as anomaly detection, image-to-image translation, denoising, and MRI reconstruction. However, due to the complexity of these models, their implementation and reproducibility can be difficult. This complexity can hinder progress, act as a use barrier, and dissuade the comparison of new methods with existing works. In this study, we present MONAI Generative Models, a freely available open-source platform that allows researchers and developers to easily train, evaluate, and deploy generative models and related applications. Our platform reproduces state-of-art studies in a standardised way involving different architectures (such as diffusion models, autoregressive transformers, and GANs), and provides pre-trained models for the community. We have implemented these models in a generalisable fashion, illustrating that their results can be extended to 2D or 3D scenarios, including medical images with different modalities (like CT, MRI, and X-Ray data) and from different anatomical areas. Finally, we adopt a modular and extensible approach, ensuring long-term maintainability and the extension of current applications for future features.

Fidelity and Privacy of Synthetic Medical Data

The digitization of medical records ushered in a new era of big data to clinical science, and with it the possibility that data could be shared, to multiply insights beyond what investigators could abstract from paper records. The need to share individual-level medical data to accelerate innovation in precision medicine continues to grow, and has never been more urgent, as scientists grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic. However, enthusiasm for the use of big data has been tempered by a fully appropriate concern for patient autonomy and privacy. That is, the ability to extract private or confidential information about an individual, in practice, renders it difficult to share data, since significant infrastructure and data governance must be established before data can be shared. Although HIPAA provided de-identification as an approved mechanism for data sharing, linkage attacks were identified as a major vulnerability. A variety of mechanisms have been established to avoid leaking private information, such as field suppression or abstraction, strictly limiting the amount of information that can be shared, or employing mathematical techniques such as differential privacy. Another approach, which we focus on here, is creating synthetic data that mimics the underlying data. For synthetic data to be a useful mechanism in support of medical innovation and a proxy for real-world evidence, one must demonstrate two properties of the synthetic dataset: (1) any analysis on the real data must be matched by analysis of the synthetic data (statistical fidelity) and (2) the synthetic data must preserve privacy, with minimal risk of re-identification (privacy guarantee). In this paper we propose a framework for quantifying the statistical fidelity and privacy preservation properties of synthetic datasets and demonstrate these metrics for synthetic data generated by Syntegra technology.

Reliable and Efficient Concept Erasure of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Text-to-image models encounter safety issues, including concerns related to copyright and Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) content. Despite several methods have been proposed for erasing inappropriate concepts from diffusion models, they often exhibit incomplete erasure, consume a lot of computing resources, and inadvertently damage generation ability. In this work, we introduce Reliable and Efficient Concept Erasure (RECE), a novel approach that modifies the model in 3 seconds without necessitating additional fine-tuning. Specifically, RECE efficiently leverages a closed-form solution to derive new target embeddings, which are capable of regenerating erased concepts within the unlearned model. To mitigate inappropriate content potentially represented by derived embeddings, RECE further aligns them with harmless concepts in cross-attention layers. The derivation and erasure of new representation embeddings are conducted iteratively to achieve a thorough erasure of inappropriate concepts. Besides, to preserve the model's generation ability, RECE introduces an additional regularization term during the derivation process, resulting in minimizing the impact on unrelated concepts during the erasure process. All the processes above are in closed-form, guaranteeing extremely efficient erasure in only 3 seconds. Benchmarking against previous approaches, our method achieves more efficient and thorough erasure with minor damage to original generation ability and demonstrates enhanced robustness against red-teaming tools. Code is available at https://github.com/CharlesGong12/RECE.

EasyTPP: Towards Open Benchmarking Temporal Point Processes

Continuous-time event sequences play a vital role in real-world domains such as healthcare, finance, online shopping, social networks, and so on. To model such data, temporal point processes (TPPs) have emerged as the most natural and competitive models, making a significant impact in both academic and application communities. Despite the emergence of many powerful models in recent years, there hasn't been a central benchmark for these models and future research endeavors. This lack of standardization impedes researchers and practitioners from comparing methods and reproducing results, potentially slowing down progress in this field. In this paper, we present EasyTPP, the first central repository of research assets (e.g., data, models, evaluation programs, documentations) in the area of event sequence modeling. Our EasyTPP makes several unique contributions to this area: a unified interface of using existing datasets and adding new datasets; a wide range of evaluation programs that are easy to use and extend as well as facilitate reproducible research; implementations of popular neural TPPs, together with a rich library of modules by composing which one could quickly build complex models. All the data and implementation can be found at https://github.com/ant-research/EasyTemporalPointProcess. We will actively maintain this benchmark and welcome contributions from other researchers and practitioners. Our benchmark will help promote reproducible research in this field, thus accelerating research progress as well as making more significant real-world impacts.

AdaStop: sequential testing for efficient and reliable comparisons of Deep RL Agents

The reproducibility of many experimental results in Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) is under question. To solve this reproducibility crisis, we propose a theoretically sound methodology to compare multiple Deep RL algorithms. The performance of one execution of a Deep RL algorithm is random so that independent executions are needed to assess it precisely. When comparing several RL algorithms, a major question is how many executions must be made and how can we assure that the results of such a comparison is theoretically sound. Researchers in Deep RL often use less than 5 independent executions to compare algorithms: we claim that this is not enough in general. Moreover, when comparing several algorithms at once, the error of each comparison accumulates and must be taken into account with a multiple tests procedure to preserve low error guarantees. To address this problem in a statistically sound way, we introduce AdaStop, a new statistical test based on multiple group sequential tests. When comparing algorithms, AdaStop adapts the number of executions to stop as early as possible while ensuring that we have enough information to distinguish algorithms that perform better than the others in a statistical significant way. We prove both theoretically and empirically that AdaStop has a low probability of making an error (Family-Wise Error). Finally, we illustrate the effectiveness of AdaStop in multiple use-cases, including toy examples and difficult cases such as Mujoco environments.

FineBio: A Fine-Grained Video Dataset of Biological Experiments with Hierarchical Annotation

In the development of science, accurate and reproducible documentation of the experimental process is crucial. Automatic recognition of the actions in experiments from videos would help experimenters by complementing the recording of experiments. Towards this goal, we propose FineBio, a new fine-grained video dataset of people performing biological experiments. The dataset consists of multi-view videos of 32 participants performing mock biological experiments with a total duration of 14.5 hours. One experiment forms a hierarchical structure, where a protocol consists of several steps, each further decomposed into a set of atomic operations. The uniqueness of biological experiments is that while they require strict adherence to steps described in each protocol, there is freedom in the order of atomic operations. We provide hierarchical annotation on protocols, steps, atomic operations, object locations, and their manipulation states, providing new challenges for structured activity understanding and hand-object interaction recognition. To find out challenges on activity understanding in biological experiments, we introduce baseline models and results on four different tasks, including (i) step segmentation, (ii) atomic operation detection (iii) object detection, and (iv) manipulated/affected object detection. Dataset and code are available from https://github.com/aistairc/FineBio.

Hyperparameters in Reinforcement Learning and How To Tune Them

In order to improve reproducibility, deep reinforcement learning (RL) has been adopting better scientific practices such as standardized evaluation metrics and reporting. However, the process of hyperparameter optimization still varies widely across papers, which makes it challenging to compare RL algorithms fairly. In this paper, we show that hyperparameter choices in RL can significantly affect the agent's final performance and sample efficiency, and that the hyperparameter landscape can strongly depend on the tuning seed which may lead to overfitting. We therefore propose adopting established best practices from AutoML, such as the separation of tuning and testing seeds, as well as principled hyperparameter optimization (HPO) across a broad search space. We support this by comparing multiple state-of-the-art HPO tools on a range of RL algorithms and environments to their hand-tuned counterparts, demonstrating that HPO approaches often have higher performance and lower compute overhead. As a result of our findings, we recommend a set of best practices for the RL community, which should result in stronger empirical results with fewer computational costs, better reproducibility, and thus faster progress. In order to encourage the adoption of these practices, we provide plug-and-play implementations of the tuning algorithms used in this paper at https://github.com/facebookresearch/how-to-autorl.

Evidence Inference 2.0: More Data, Better Models

How do we most effectively treat a disease or condition? Ideally, we could consult a database of evidence gleaned from clinical trials to answer such questions. Unfortunately, no such database exists; clinical trial results are instead disseminated primarily via lengthy natural language articles. Perusing all such articles would be prohibitively time-consuming for healthcare practitioners; they instead tend to depend on manually compiled systematic reviews of medical literature to inform care. NLP may speed this process up, and eventually facilitate immediate consult of published evidence. The Evidence Inference dataset was recently released to facilitate research toward this end. This task entails inferring the comparative performance of two treatments, with respect to a given outcome, from a particular article (describing a clinical trial) and identifying supporting evidence. For instance: Does this article report that chemotherapy performed better than surgery for five-year survival rates of operable cancers? In this paper, we collect additional annotations to expand the Evidence Inference dataset by 25\%, provide stronger baseline models, systematically inspect the errors that these make, and probe dataset quality. We also release an abstract only (as opposed to full-texts) version of the task for rapid model prototyping. The updated corpus, documentation, and code for new baselines and evaluations are available at http://evidence-inference.ebm-nlp.com/.

Replication in Visual Diffusion Models: A Survey and Outlook

Visual diffusion models have revolutionized the field of creative AI, producing high-quality and diverse content. However, they inevitably memorize training images or videos, subsequently replicating their concepts, content, or styles during inference. This phenomenon raises significant concerns about privacy, security, and copyright within generated outputs. In this survey, we provide the first comprehensive review of replication in visual diffusion models, marking a novel contribution to the field by systematically categorizing the existing studies into unveiling, understanding, and mitigating this phenomenon. Specifically, unveiling mainly refers to the methods used to detect replication instances. Understanding involves analyzing the underlying mechanisms and factors that contribute to this phenomenon. Mitigation focuses on developing strategies to reduce or eliminate replication. Beyond these aspects, we also review papers focusing on its real-world influence. For instance, in the context of healthcare, replication is critically worrying due to privacy concerns related to patient data. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion of the ongoing challenges, such as the difficulty in detecting and benchmarking replication, and outlines future directions including the development of more robust mitigation techniques. By synthesizing insights from diverse studies, this paper aims to equip researchers and practitioners with a deeper understanding at the intersection between AI technology and social good. We release this project at https://github.com/WangWenhao0716/Awesome-Diffusion-Replication.

CLARA: Clinical Report Auto-completion

Generating clinical reports from raw recordings such as X-rays and electroencephalogram (EEG) is an essential and routine task for doctors. However, it is often time-consuming to write accurate and detailed reports. Most existing methods try to generate the whole reports from the raw input with limited success because 1) generated reports often contain errors that need manual review and correction, 2) it does not save time when doctors want to write additional information into the report, and 3) the generated reports are not customized based on individual doctors' preference. We propose {\it CL}inic{\it A}l {\it R}eport {\it A}uto-completion (CLARA), an interactive method that generates reports in a sentence by sentence fashion based on doctors' anchor words and partially completed sentences. CLARA searches for most relevant sentences from existing reports as the template for the current report. The retrieved sentences are sequentially modified by combining with the input feature representations to create the final report. In our experimental evaluation, CLARA achieved 0.393 CIDEr and 0.248 BLEU-4 on X-ray reports and 0.482 CIDEr and 0.491 BLEU-4 for EEG reports for sentence-level generation, which is up to 35% improvement over the best baseline. Also via our qualitative evaluation, CLARA is shown to produce reports which have a significantly higher level of approval by doctors in a user study (3.74 out of 5 for CLARA vs 2.52 out of 5 for the baseline).

A standardized Project Gutenberg corpus for statistical analysis of natural language and quantitative linguistics

The use of Project Gutenberg (PG) as a text corpus has been extremely popular in statistical analysis of language for more than 25 years. However, in contrast to other major linguistic datasets of similar importance, no consensual full version of PG exists to date. In fact, most PG studies so far either consider only a small number of manually selected books, leading to potential biased subsets, or employ vastly different pre-processing strategies (often specified in insufficient details), raising concerns regarding the reproducibility of published results. In order to address these shortcomings, here we present the Standardized Project Gutenberg Corpus (SPGC), an open science approach to a curated version of the complete PG data containing more than 50,000 books and more than 3 times 10^9 word-tokens. Using different sources of annotated metadata, we not only provide a broad characterization of the content of PG, but also show different examples highlighting the potential of SPGC for investigating language variability across time, subjects, and authors. We publish our methodology in detail, the code to download and process the data, as well as the obtained corpus itself on 3 different levels of granularity (raw text, timeseries of word tokens, and counts of words). In this way, we provide a reproducible, pre-processed, full-size version of Project Gutenberg as a new scientific resource for corpus linguistics, natural language processing, and information retrieval.

Enforcing public data archiving policies in academic publishing: A study of ecology journals

To improve the quality and efficiency of research, groups within the scientific community seek to exploit the value of data sharing. Funders, institutions, and specialist organizations are developing and implementing strategies to encourage or mandate data sharing within and across disciplines, with varying degrees of success. Academic journals in ecology and evolution have adopted several types of public data archiving policies requiring authors to make data underlying scholarly manuscripts freely available. Yet anecdotes from the community and studies evaluating data availability suggest that these policies have not obtained the desired effects, both in terms of quantity and quality of available datasets. We conducted a qualitative, interview-based study with journal editorial staff and other stakeholders in the academic publishing process to examine how journals enforce data archiving policies. We specifically sought to establish who editors and other stakeholders perceive as responsible for ensuring data completeness and quality in the peer review process. Our analysis revealed little consensus with regard to how data archiving policies should be enforced and who should hold authors accountable for dataset submissions. Themes in interviewee responses included hopefulness that reviewers would take the initiative to review datasets and trust in authors to ensure the completeness and quality of their datasets. We highlight problematic aspects of these thematic responses and offer potential starting points for improvement of the public data archiving process.

ScienceAgentBench: Toward Rigorous Assessment of Language Agents for Data-Driven Scientific Discovery

The advancements of language language models (LLMs) have piqued growing interest in developing LLM-based language agents to automate scientific discovery end-to-end, which has sparked both excitement and skepticism about the true capabilities of such agents. In this work, we argue that for an agent to fully automate scientific discovery, it must be able to complete all essential tasks in the workflow. Thus, we call for rigorous assessment of agents on individual tasks in a scientific workflow before making bold claims on end-to-end automation. To this end, we present ScienceAgentBench, a new benchmark for evaluating language agents for data-driven scientific discovery. To ensure the scientific authenticity and real-world relevance of our benchmark, we extract 102 tasks from 44 peer-reviewed publications in four disciplines and engage nine subject matter experts to validate them. We unify the target output for every task to a self-contained Python program file and employ an array of evaluation metrics to examine the generated programs, execution results, and costs. Each task goes through multiple rounds of manual validation by annotators and subject matter experts to ensure its annotation quality and scientific plausibility. We also propose two effective strategies to mitigate data contamination concerns. Using our benchmark, we evaluate five open-weight and proprietary LLMs, each with three frameworks: direct prompting, OpenHands, and self-debug. Given three attempts for each task, the best-performing agent can only solve 32.4% of the tasks independently and 34.3% with expert-provided knowledge. These results underscore the limited capacities of current language agents in generating code for data-driven discovery, let alone end-to-end automation for scientific research.

LeanDojo: Theorem Proving with Retrieval-Augmented Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in proving formal theorems using proof assistants such as Lean. However, existing methods are difficult to reproduce or build on, due to private code, data, and large compute requirements. This has created substantial barriers to research on machine learning methods for theorem proving. This paper removes these barriers by introducing LeanDojo: an open-source Lean playground consisting of toolkits, data, models, and benchmarks. LeanDojo extracts data from Lean and enables interaction with the proof environment programmatically. It contains fine-grained annotations of premises in proofs, providing valuable data for premise selection: a key bottleneck in theorem proving. Using this data, we develop ReProver (Retrieval-Augmented Prover): the first LLM-based prover that is augmented with retrieval for selecting premises from a vast math library. It is inexpensive and needs only one GPU week of training. Our retriever leverages LeanDojo's program analysis capability to identify accessible premises and hard negative examples, which makes retrieval much more effective. Furthermore, we construct a new benchmark consisting of 96,962 theorems and proofs extracted from Lean's math library. It features challenging data split requiring the prover to generalize to theorems relying on novel premises that are never used in training. We use this benchmark for training and evaluation, and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of ReProver over non-retrieval baselines and GPT-4. We thus provide the first set of open-source LLM-based theorem provers without any proprietary datasets and release it under a permissive MIT license to facilitate further research.

Nebula: Self-Attention for Dynamic Malware Analysis

Dynamic analysis enables detecting Windows malware by executing programs in a controlled environment and logging their actions. Previous work has proposed training machine learning models, i.e., convolutional and long short-term memory networks, on homogeneous input features like runtime APIs to either detect or classify malware, neglecting other relevant information coming from heterogeneous data like network and file operations. To overcome these issues, we introduce Nebula, a versatile, self-attention Transformer-based neural architecture that generalizes across different behavioral representations and formats, combining diverse information from dynamic log reports. Nebula is composed by several components needed to tokenize, filter, normalize and encode data to feed the transformer architecture. We firstly perform a comprehensive ablation study to evaluate their impact on the performance of the whole system, highlighting which components can be used as-is, and which must be enriched with specific domain knowledge. We perform extensive experiments on both malware detection and classification tasks, using three datasets acquired from different dynamic analyses platforms, show that, on average, Nebula outperforms state-of-the-art models at low false positive rates, with a peak of 12% improvement. Moreover, we showcase how self-supervised learning pre-training matches the performance of fully-supervised models with only 20% of training data, and we inspect the output of Nebula through explainable AI techniques, pinpointing how attention is focusing on specific tokens correlated to malicious activities of malware families. To foster reproducibility, we open-source our findings and models at https://github.com/dtrizna/nebula.

Vision-Language Generative Model for View-Specific Chest X-ray Generation

Synthetic medical data generation has opened up new possibilities in the healthcare domain, offering a powerful tool for simulating clinical scenarios, enhancing diagnostic and treatment quality, gaining granular medical knowledge, and accelerating the development of unbiased algorithms. In this context, we present a novel approach called ViewXGen, designed to overcome the limitations of existing methods that rely on general domain pipelines using only radiology reports to generate frontal-view chest X-rays. Our approach takes into consideration the diverse view positions found in the dataset, enabling the generation of chest X-rays with specific views, which marks a significant advancement in the field. To achieve this, we introduce a set of specially designed tokens for each view position, tailoring the generation process to the user's preferences. Furthermore, we leverage multi-view chest X-rays as input, incorporating valuable information from different views within the same study. This integration rectifies potential errors and contributes to faithfully capturing abnormal findings in chest X-ray generation. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted statistical analyses, evaluating its performance in a clinical efficacy metric on the MIMIC-CXR dataset. Also, human evaluation demonstrates the remarkable capabilities of ViewXGen, particularly in producing realistic view-specific X-rays that closely resemble the original images.

DeepSeek-Prover: Advancing Theorem Proving in LLMs through Large-Scale Synthetic Data

Proof assistants like Lean have revolutionized mathematical proof verification, ensuring high accuracy and reliability. Although large language models (LLMs) show promise in mathematical reasoning, their advancement in formal theorem proving is hindered by a lack of training data. To address this issue, we introduce an approach to generate extensive Lean 4 proof data derived from high-school and undergraduate-level mathematical competition problems. This approach involves translating natural language problems into formal statements, filtering out low-quality statements, and generating proofs to create synthetic data. After fine-tuning the DeepSeekMath 7B model on this synthetic dataset, which comprises 8 million formal statements with proofs, our model achieved whole-proof generation accuracies of 46.3% with 64 samples and 52% cumulatively on the Lean 4 miniF2F test, surpassing the baseline GPT-4 at 23.0% with 64 samples and a tree search reinforcement learning method at 41.0%. Additionally, our model successfully proved 5 out of 148 problems in the Lean 4 Formalized International Mathematical Olympiad (FIMO) benchmark, while GPT-4 failed to prove any. These results demonstrate the potential of leveraging large-scale synthetic data to enhance theorem-proving capabilities in LLMs. Both the synthetic dataset and the model will be made available to facilitate further research in this promising field.

Accelerating Clinical Evidence Synthesis with Large Language Models

Synthesizing clinical evidence largely relies on systematic reviews of clinical trials and retrospective analyses from medical literature. However, the rapid expansion of publications presents challenges in efficiently identifying, summarizing, and updating clinical evidence. Here, we introduce TrialMind, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) pipeline for facilitating human-AI collaboration in three crucial tasks for evidence synthesis: study search, screening, and data extraction. To assess its performance, we chose published systematic reviews to build the benchmark dataset, named TrialReviewBench, which contains 100 systematic reviews and the associated 2,220 clinical studies. Our results show that TrialMind excels across all three tasks. In study search, it generates diverse and comprehensive search queries to achieve high recall rates (Ours 0.711-0.834 v.s. Human baseline 0.138-0.232). For study screening, TrialMind surpasses traditional embedding-based methods by 30% to 160%. In data extraction, it outperforms a GPT-4 baseline by 29.6% to 61.5%. We further conducted user studies to confirm its practical utility. Compared to manual efforts, human-AI collaboration using TrialMind yielded a 71.4% recall lift and 44.2% time savings in study screening and a 23.5% accuracy lift and 63.4% time savings in data extraction. Additionally, when comparing synthesized clinical evidence presented in forest plots, medical experts favored TrialMind's outputs over GPT-4's outputs in 62.5% to 100% of cases. These findings show the promise of LLM-based approaches like TrialMind to accelerate clinical evidence synthesis via streamlining study search, screening, and data extraction from medical literature, with exceptional performance improvement when working with human experts.

Relation Extraction in underexplored biomedical domains: A diversity-optimised sampling and synthetic data generation approach

The sparsity of labelled data is an obstacle to the development of Relation Extraction models and the completion of databases in various biomedical areas. While being of high interest in drug-discovery, the natural-products literature, reporting the identification of potential bioactive compounds from organisms, is a concrete example of such an overlooked topic. To mark the start of this new task, we created the first curated evaluation dataset and extracted literature items from the LOTUS database to build training sets. To this end, we developed a new sampler inspired by diversity metrics in ecology, named Greedy Maximum Entropy sampler, or GME-sampler (https://github.com/idiap/gme-sampler). The strategic optimization of both balance and diversity of the selected items in the evaluation set is important given the resource-intensive nature of manual curation. After quantifying the noise in the training set, in the form of discrepancies between the input abstracts text and the expected output labels, we explored different strategies accordingly. Framing the task as an end-to-end Relation Extraction, we evaluated the performance of standard fine-tuning as a generative task and few-shot learning with open Large Language Models (LLaMA 7B-65B). In addition to their evaluation in few-shot settings, we explore the potential of open Large Language Models (Vicuna-13B) as synthetic data generator and propose a new workflow for this purpose. All evaluated models exhibited substantial improvements when fine-tuned on synthetic abstracts rather than the original noisy data. We provide our best performing (f1-score=59.0) BioGPT-Large model for end-to-end RE of natural-products relationships along with all the generated synthetic data and the evaluation dataset. See more details at https://github.com/idiap/abroad-re.

Diminished Diversity-of-Thought in a Standard Large Language Model

We test whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to simulate human participants in social-science studies. To do this, we run replications of 14 studies from the Many Labs 2 replication project with OpenAI's text-davinci-003 model, colloquially known as GPT3.5. Based on our pre-registered analyses, we find that among the eight studies we could analyse, our GPT sample replicated 37.5% of the original results and 37.5% of the Many Labs 2 results. However, we were unable to analyse the remaining six studies due to an unexpected phenomenon we call the "correct answer" effect. Different runs of GPT3.5 answered nuanced questions probing political orientation, economic preference, judgement, and moral philosophy with zero or near-zero variation in responses: with the supposedly "correct answer." In one exploratory follow-up study, we found that a "correct answer" was robust to changing the demographic details that precede the prompt. In another, we found that most but not all "correct answers" were robust to changing the order of answer choices. One of our most striking findings occurred in our replication of the Moral Foundations Theory survey results, where we found GPT3.5 identifying as a political conservative in 99.6% of the cases, and as a liberal in 99.3% of the cases in the reverse-order condition. However, both self-reported 'GPT conservatives' and 'GPT liberals' showed right-leaning moral foundations. Our results cast doubts on the validity of using LLMs as a general replacement for human participants in the social sciences. Our results also raise concerns that a hypothetical AI-led future may be subject to a diminished diversity-of-thought.

Standardized Benchmark Dataset for Localized Exposure to a Realistic Source at 10-90 GHz

The lack of freely available standardized datasets represents an aggravating factor during the development and testing the performance of novel computational techniques in exposure assessment and dosimetry research. This hinders progress as researchers are required to generate numerical data (field, power and temperature distribution) anew using simulation software for each exposure scenario. Other than being time consuming, this approach is highly susceptible to errors that occur during the configuration of the electromagnetic model. To address this issue, in this paper, the limited available data on the incident power density and resultant maximum temperature rise on the skin surface considering various steady-state exposure scenarios at 10-90 GHz have been statistically modeled. The synthetic data have been sampled from the fitted statistical multivariate distribution with respect to predetermined dosimetric constraints. We thus present a comprehensive and open-source dataset compiled of the high-fidelity numerical data considering various exposures to a realistic source. Furthermore, different surrogate models for predicting maximum temperature rise on the skin surface were fitted based on the synthetic dataset. All surrogate models were tested on the originally available data where satisfactory predictive performance has been demonstrated. A simple technique of combining quadratic polynomial and tensor-product spline surrogates, each operating on its own cluster of data, has achieved the lowest mean absolute error of 0.058 {\deg}C. Therefore, overall experimental results indicate the validity of the proposed synthetic dataset.

NCL-SM: A Fully Annotated Dataset of Images from Human Skeletal Muscle Biopsies

Single cell analysis of human skeletal muscle (SM) tissue cross-sections is a fundamental tool for understanding many neuromuscular disorders. For this analysis to be reliable and reproducible, identification of individual fibres within microscopy images (segmentation) of SM tissue should be automatic and precise. Biomedical scientists in this field currently rely on custom tools and general machine learning (ML) models, both followed by labour intensive and subjective manual interventions to fine-tune segmentation. We believe that fully automated, precise, reproducible segmentation is possible by training ML models. However, in this important biomedical domain, there are currently no good quality, publicly available annotated imaging datasets available for ML model training. In this paper we release NCL-SM: a high quality bioimaging dataset of 46 human SM tissue cross-sections from both healthy control subjects and from patients with genetically diagnosed muscle pathology. These images include > 50k manually segmented muscle fibres (myofibres). In addition we also curated high quality myofibre segmentations, annotating reasons for rejecting low quality myofibres and low quality regions in SM tissue images, making these annotations completely ready for downstream analysis. This, we believe, will pave the way for development of a fully automatic pipeline that identifies individual myofibres within images of tissue sections and, in particular, also classifies individual myofibres that are fit for further analysis.

O1 Replication Journey -- Part 2: Surpassing O1-preview through Simple Distillation, Big Progress or Bitter Lesson?

This paper presents a critical examination of current approaches to replicating OpenAI's O1 model capabilities, with particular focus on the widespread but often undisclosed use of knowledge distillation techniques. While our previous work explored the fundamental technical path to O1 replication, this study reveals how simple distillation from O1's API, combined with supervised fine-tuning, can achieve superior performance on complex mathematical reasoning tasks. Through extensive experiments, we show that a base model fine-tuned on simply tens of thousands of samples O1-distilled long-thought chains outperforms O1-preview on the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME) with minimal technical complexity. Moreover, our investigation extends beyond mathematical reasoning to explore the generalization capabilities of O1-distilled models across diverse tasks: hallucination, safety and open-domain QA. Notably, despite training only on mathematical problem-solving data, our models demonstrated strong generalization to open-ended QA tasks and became significantly less susceptible to sycophancy after fine-tuning. We deliberately make this finding public to promote transparency in AI research and to challenge the current trend of obscured technical claims in the field. Our work includes: (1) A detailed technical exposition of the distillation process and its effectiveness, (2) A comprehensive benchmark framework for evaluating and categorizing O1 replication attempts based on their technical transparency and reproducibility, (3) A critical discussion of the limitations and potential risks of over-relying on distillation approaches, our analysis culminates in a crucial bitter lesson: while the pursuit of more capable AI systems is important, the development of researchers grounded in first-principles thinking is paramount.

EHRSHOT: An EHR Benchmark for Few-Shot Evaluation of Foundation Models

While the general machine learning (ML) community has benefited from public datasets, tasks, and models, the progress of ML in healthcare has been hampered by a lack of such shared assets. The success of foundation models creates new challenges for healthcare ML by requiring access to shared pretrained models to validate performance benefits. We help address these challenges through three contributions. First, we publish a new dataset, EHRSHOT, which contains deidentified structured data from the electronic health records (EHRs) of 6,739 patients from Stanford Medicine. Unlike MIMIC-III/IV and other popular EHR datasets, EHRSHOT is longitudinal and not restricted to ICU/ED patients. Second, we publish the weights of CLMBR-T-base, a 141M parameter clinical foundation model pretrained on the structured EHR data of 2.57M patients. We are one of the first to fully release such a model for coded EHR data; in contrast, most prior models released for clinical data (e.g. GatorTron, ClinicalBERT) only work with unstructured text and cannot process the rich, structured data within an EHR. We provide an end-to-end pipeline for the community to validate and build upon its performance. Third, we define 15 few-shot clinical prediction tasks, enabling evaluation of foundation models on benefits such as sample efficiency and task adaptation. Our model and dataset are available via a research data use agreement from the Stanford AIMI Center. Code to reproduce our results are available at our Github repo: https://github.com/som-shahlab/ehrshot-benchmark

Diversity-Driven Synthesis: Enhancing Dataset Distillation through Directed Weight Adjustment

The sharp increase in data-related expenses has motivated research into condensing datasets while retaining the most informative features. Dataset distillation has thus recently come to the fore. This paradigm generates synthetic datasets that are representative enough to replace the original dataset in training a neural network. To avoid redundancy in these synthetic datasets, it is crucial that each element contains unique features and remains diverse from others during the synthesis stage. In this paper, we provide a thorough theoretical and empirical analysis of diversity within synthesized datasets. We argue that enhancing diversity can improve the parallelizable yet isolated synthesizing approach. Specifically, we introduce a novel method that employs dynamic and directed weight adjustment techniques to modulate the synthesis process, thereby maximizing the representativeness and diversity of each synthetic instance. Our method ensures that each batch of synthetic data mirrors the characteristics of a large, varying subset of the original dataset. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets, including CIFAR, Tiny-ImageNet, and ImageNet-1K, demonstrate the superior performance of our method, highlighting its effectiveness in producing diverse and representative synthetic datasets with minimal computational expense. Our code is available at https://github.com/AngusDujw/Diversity-Driven-Synthesis.https://github.com/AngusDujw/Diversity-Driven-Synthesis.

The Minimum Information about CLinical Artificial Intelligence Checklist for Generative Modeling Research (MI-CLAIM-GEN)

Recent advances in generative models, including large language models (LLMs), vision language models (VLMs), and diffusion models, have accelerated the field of natural language and image processing in medicine and marked a significant paradigm shift in how biomedical models can be developed and deployed. While these models are highly adaptable to new tasks, scaling and evaluating their usage presents new challenges not addressed in previous frameworks. In particular, the ability of these models to produce useful outputs with little to no specialized training data ("zero-" or "few-shot" approaches), as well as the open-ended nature of their outputs, necessitate the development of new guidelines for robust reporting of clinical generative model research. In response to gaps in standards and best practices for the development of clinical AI tools identified by US Executive Order 141103 and several emerging national networks for clinical AI evaluation, we begin to formalize some of these guidelines by building on the original MI-CLAIM checklist. The new checklist, MI-CLAIM-GEN (Table 1), aims to address differences in training, evaluation, interpretability, and reproducibility of new generative models compared to non-generative ("predictive") AI models. This MI-CLAIM-GEN checklist also seeks to clarify cohort selection reporting with unstructured clinical data and adds additional items on alignment with ethical standards for clinical AI research.

BEHAVIOR Vision Suite: Customizable Dataset Generation via Simulation

The systematic evaluation and understanding of computer vision models under varying conditions require large amounts of data with comprehensive and customized labels, which real-world vision datasets rarely satisfy. While current synthetic data generators offer a promising alternative, particularly for embodied AI tasks, they often fall short for computer vision tasks due to low asset and rendering quality, limited diversity, and unrealistic physical properties. We introduce the BEHAVIOR Vision Suite (BVS), a set of tools and assets to generate fully customized synthetic data for systematic evaluation of computer vision models, based on the newly developed embodied AI benchmark, BEHAVIOR-1K. BVS supports a large number of adjustable parameters at the scene level (e.g., lighting, object placement), the object level (e.g., joint configuration, attributes such as "filled" and "folded"), and the camera level (e.g., field of view, focal length). Researchers can arbitrarily vary these parameters during data generation to perform controlled experiments. We showcase three example application scenarios: systematically evaluating the robustness of models across different continuous axes of domain shift, evaluating scene understanding models on the same set of images, and training and evaluating simulation-to-real transfer for a novel vision task: unary and binary state prediction. Project website: https://behavior-vision-suite.github.io/

Self-Consuming Generative Models with Curated Data Provably Optimize Human Preferences

The rapid progress in generative models has resulted in impressive leaps in generation quality, blurring the lines between synthetic and real data. Web-scale datasets are now prone to the inevitable contamination by synthetic data, directly impacting the training of future generated models. Already, some theoretical results on self-consuming generative models (a.k.a., iterative retraining) have emerged in the literature, showcasing that either model collapse or stability could be possible depending on the fraction of generated data used at each retraining step. However, in practice, synthetic data is often subject to human feedback and curated by users before being used and uploaded online. For instance, many interfaces of popular text-to-image generative models, such as Stable Diffusion or Midjourney, produce several variations of an image for a given query which can eventually be curated by the users. In this paper, we theoretically study the impact of data curation on iterated retraining of generative models and show that it can be seen as an implicit preference optimization mechanism. However, unlike standard preference optimization, the generative model does not have access to the reward function or negative samples needed for pairwise comparisons. Moreover, our study doesn't require access to the density function, only to samples. We prove that, if the data is curated according to a reward model, then the expected reward of the iterative retraining procedure is maximized. We further provide theoretical results on the stability of the retraining loop when using a positive fraction of real data at each step. Finally, we conduct illustrative experiments on both synthetic datasets and on CIFAR10 showing that such a procedure amplifies biases of the reward model.

Generating Drug Repurposing Hypotheses through the Combination of Disease-Specific Hypergraphs

The drug development pipeline for a new compound can last 10-20 years and cost over 10 billion. Drug repurposing offers a more time- and cost-effective alternative. Computational approaches based on biomedical knowledge graph representations have recently yielded new drug repurposing hypotheses. In this study, we present a novel, disease-specific hypergraph representation learning technique to derive contextual embeddings of biological pathways of various lengths but that all start at any given drug and all end at the disease of interest. Further, we extend this method to multi-disease hypergraphs. To determine the repurposing potential of each of the 1,522 drugs, we derive drug-specific distributions of cosine similarity values and ultimately consider the median for ranking. Cosine similarity values are computed between (1) all biological pathways starting at the considered drug and ending at the disease of interest and (2) all biological pathways starting at drugs currently prescribed against that disease and ending at the disease of interest. We illustrate our approach with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and two of its risk factors: hypertension (HTN) and type 2 diabetes (T2D). We compare each drug's rank across four hypergraph settings (single- or multi-disease): AD only, AD + HTN, AD + T2D, and AD + HTN + T2D. Notably, our framework led to the identification of two promising drugs whose repurposing potential was significantly higher in hypergraphs combining two diseases: dapagliflozin (antidiabetic; moved up, from top 32% to top 7%, across all considered drugs) and debrisoquine (antihypertensive; moved up, from top 76% to top 23%). Our approach serves as a hypothesis generation tool, to be paired with a validation pipeline relying on laboratory experiments and semi-automated parsing of the biomedical literature.

Consistency-diversity-realism Pareto fronts of conditional image generative models

Building world models that accurately and comprehensively represent the real world is the utmost aspiration for conditional image generative models as it would enable their use as world simulators. For these models to be successful world models, they should not only excel at image quality and prompt-image consistency but also ensure high representation diversity. However, current research in generative models mostly focuses on creative applications that are predominantly concerned with human preferences of image quality and aesthetics. We note that generative models have inference time mechanisms - or knobs - that allow the control of generation consistency, quality, and diversity. In this paper, we use state-of-the-art text-to-image and image-and-text-to-image models and their knobs to draw consistency-diversity-realism Pareto fronts that provide a holistic view on consistency-diversity-realism multi-objective. Our experiments suggest that realism and consistency can both be improved simultaneously; however there exists a clear tradeoff between realism/consistency and diversity. By looking at Pareto optimal points, we note that earlier models are better at representation diversity and worse in consistency/realism, and more recent models excel in consistency/realism while decreasing significantly the representation diversity. By computing Pareto fronts on a geodiverse dataset, we find that the first version of latent diffusion models tends to perform better than more recent models in all axes of evaluation, and there exist pronounced consistency-diversity-realism disparities between geographical regions. Overall, our analysis clearly shows that there is no best model and the choice of model should be determined by the downstream application. With this analysis, we invite the research community to consider Pareto fronts as an analytical tool to measure progress towards world models.

SAGE-RT: Synthetic Alignment data Generation for Safety Evaluation and Red Teaming

We introduce Synthetic Alignment data Generation for Safety Evaluation and Red Teaming (SAGE-RT or SAGE) a novel pipeline for generating synthetic alignment and red-teaming data. Existing methods fall short in creating nuanced and diverse datasets, providing necessary control over the data generation and validation processes, or require large amount of manually generated seed data. SAGE addresses these limitations by using a detailed taxonomy to produce safety-alignment and red-teaming data across a wide range of topics. We generated 51,000 diverse and in-depth prompt-response pairs, encompassing over 1,500 topics of harmfulness and covering variations of the most frequent types of jailbreaking prompts faced by large language models (LLMs). We show that the red-teaming data generated through SAGE jailbreaks state-of-the-art LLMs in more than 27 out of 32 sub-categories, and in more than 58 out of 279 leaf-categories (sub-sub categories). The attack success rate for GPT-4o, GPT-3.5-turbo is 100% over the sub-categories of harmfulness. Our approach avoids the pitfalls of synthetic safety-training data generation such as mode collapse and lack of nuance in the generation pipeline by ensuring a detailed coverage of harmful topics using iterative expansion of the topics and conditioning the outputs on the generated raw-text. This method can be used to generate red-teaming and alignment data for LLM Safety completely synthetically to make LLMs safer or for red-teaming the models over a diverse range of topics.

Inference Scaling scriptsizeFLaws: The Limits of LLM Resampling with Imperfect Verifiers

Recent research has generated hope that inference scaling could allow weaker language models to match or exceed the accuracy of stronger models, such as by repeatedly sampling solutions to a coding problem until it passes unit tests. The central thesis of this paper is that there is no free lunch for inference scaling: indefinite accuracy improvement through resampling can only be realized if the "verifier" (in this case, a set of unit tests) is perfect. When the verifier is imperfect, as it almost always is in domains such as reasoning or coding (for example, unit tests have imperfect coverage), there is a nonzero probability of false positives: incorrect solutions that pass the verifier. Resampling cannot decrease this probability, so it imposes an upper bound to the accuracy of resampling-based inference scaling even with an infinite compute budget. We find that there is a very strong correlation between the model's single-sample accuracy (i.e. accuracy without unit tests) and its false positive rate on coding benchmarks HumanEval and MBPP, whose unit tests have limited coverage. Therefore, no amount of inference scaling of weaker models can enable them to match the single-sample accuracy of a sufficiently strong model (Fig. 1a). When we consider that false positives have a negative utility compared to abstaining from producing a solution, it bends the inference scaling curve further downward. Empirically, we find that the optimal number of samples can be less than 10 under realistic assumptions (Fig. 1b). Finally, we show that beyond accuracy, false positives may have other undesirable qualities, such as poor adherence to coding style conventions.

DiffuseHigh: Training-free Progressive High-Resolution Image Synthesis through Structure Guidance

Recent surge in large-scale generative models has spurred the development of vast fields in computer vision. In particular, text-to-image diffusion models have garnered widespread adoption across diverse domain due to their potential for high-fidelity image generation. Nonetheless, existing large-scale diffusion models are confined to generate images of up to 1K resolution, which is far from meeting the demands of contemporary commercial applications. Directly sampling higher-resolution images often yields results marred by artifacts such as object repetition and distorted shapes. Addressing the aforementioned issues typically necessitates training or fine-tuning models on higher resolution datasets. However, this undertaking poses a formidable challenge due to the difficulty in collecting large-scale high-resolution contents and substantial computational resources. While several preceding works have proposed alternatives, they often fail to produce convincing results. In this work, we probe the generative ability of diffusion models at higher resolution beyond its original capability and propose a novel progressive approach that fully utilizes generated low-resolution image to guide the generation of higher resolution image. Our method obviates the need for additional training or fine-tuning which significantly lowers the burden of computational costs. Extensive experiments and results validate the efficiency and efficacy of our method. Project page: https://yhyun225.github.io/DiffuseHigh/

Evaluating Machine Learning Models with NERO: Non-Equivariance Revealed on Orbits

Proper evaluations are crucial for better understanding, troubleshooting, interpreting model behaviors and further improving model performance. While using scalar-based error metrics provides a fast way to overview model performance, they are often too abstract to display certain weak spots and lack information regarding important model properties, such as robustness. This not only hinders machine learning models from being more interpretable and gaining trust, but also can be misleading to both model developers and users. Additionally, conventional evaluation procedures often leave researchers unclear about where and how model fails, which complicates model comparisons and further developments. To address these issues, we propose a novel evaluation workflow, named Non-Equivariance Revealed on Orbits (NERO) Evaluation. The goal of NERO evaluation is to turn focus from traditional scalar-based metrics onto evaluating and visualizing models equivariance, closely capturing model robustness, as well as to allow researchers quickly investigating interesting or unexpected model behaviors. NERO evaluation is consist of a task-agnostic interactive interface and a set of visualizations, called NERO plots, which reveals the equivariance property of the model. Case studies on how NERO evaluation can be applied to multiple research areas, including 2D digit recognition, object detection, particle image velocimetry (PIV), and 3D point cloud classification, demonstrate that NERO evaluation can quickly illustrate different model equivariance, and effectively explain model behaviors through interactive visualizations of the model outputs. In addition, we propose consensus, an alternative to ground truths, to be used in NERO evaluation so that model equivariance can still be evaluated with new, unlabeled datasets.

CycleResearcher: Improving Automated Research via Automated Review

The automation of scientific discovery has been a long-standing goal within the research community, driven by the potential to accelerate knowledge creation. While significant progress has been made using commercial large language models (LLMs) as research assistants or idea generators, the possibility of automating the entire research process with open-source LLMs remains largely unexplored. This paper explores the feasibility of using open-source post-trained LLMs as autonomous agents capable of performing the full cycle of automated research and review, from literature review and manuscript preparation to peer review and paper revision. Our iterative preference training framework consists of CycleResearcher, which conducts research tasks, and CycleReviewer, which simulates the peer review process, providing iterative feedback via reinforcement learning. To train these models, we develop two new datasets, Review-5k and Research-14k, reflecting real-world machine learning research and peer review dynamics. Our results demonstrate that CycleReviewer achieves a 26.89\% improvement in mean absolute error (MAE) over individual human reviewers in predicting paper scores, indicating that LLMs can surpass expert-level performance in research evaluation. In research, the papers generated by the CycleResearcher model achieved a score of 5.36 in simulated peer reviews, surpassing the preprint level of 5.24 from human experts and approaching the accepted paper level of 5.69. This work represents a significant step toward fully automated scientific inquiry, providing ethical safeguards and advancing AI-driven research capabilities. The code, dataset and model weight are released at http://github/minjun-zhu/Researcher.

Towards Realistic Example-based Modeling via 3D Gaussian Stitching

Using parts of existing models to rebuild new models, commonly termed as example-based modeling, is a classical methodology in the realm of computer graphics. Previous works mostly focus on shape composition, making them very hard to use for realistic composition of 3D objects captured from real-world scenes. This leads to combining multiple NeRFs into a single 3D scene to achieve seamless appearance blending. However, the current SeamlessNeRF method struggles to achieve interactive editing and harmonious stitching for real-world scenes due to its gradient-based strategy and grid-based representation. To this end, we present an example-based modeling method that combines multiple Gaussian fields in a point-based representation using sample-guided synthesis. Specifically, as for composition, we create a GUI to segment and transform multiple fields in real time, easily obtaining a semantically meaningful composition of models represented by 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). For texture blending, due to the discrete and irregular nature of 3DGS, straightforwardly applying gradient propagation as SeamlssNeRF is not supported. Thus, a novel sampling-based cloning method is proposed to harmonize the blending while preserving the original rich texture and content. Our workflow consists of three steps: 1) real-time segmentation and transformation of a Gaussian model using a well-tailored GUI, 2) KNN analysis to identify boundary points in the intersecting area between the source and target models, and 3) two-phase optimization of the target model using sampling-based cloning and gradient constraints. Extensive experimental results validate that our approach significantly outperforms previous works in terms of realistic synthesis, demonstrating its practicality. More demos are available at https://ingra14m.github.io/gs_stitching_website.

SYNFAC-EDIT: Synthetic Imitation Edit Feedback for Factual Alignment in Clinical Summarization

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT & Llama have demonstrated significant achievements in summarization tasks but struggle with factual inaccuracies, a critical issue in clinical NLP applications where errors could lead to serious consequences. To counter the high costs and limited availability of expert-annotated data for factual alignment, this study introduces an innovative pipeline that utilizes >100B parameter GPT variants like GPT-3.5 & GPT-4 to act as synthetic experts to generate high-quality synthetics feedback aimed at enhancing factual consistency in clinical note summarization. Our research primarily focuses on edit feedback generated by these synthetic feedback experts without additional human annotations, mirroring and optimizing the practical scenario in which medical professionals refine AI system outputs. Although such 100B+ parameter GPT variants have proven to demonstrate expertise in various clinical NLP tasks, such as the Medical Licensing Examination, there is scant research on their capacity to act as synthetic feedback experts and deliver expert-level edit feedback for improving the generation quality of weaker (<10B parameter) LLMs like GPT-2 (1.5B) & Llama 2 (7B) in clinical domain. So in this work, we leverage 100B+ GPT variants to act as synthetic feedback experts offering expert-level edit feedback, that is used to reduce hallucinations and align weaker (<10B parameter) LLMs with medical facts using two distinct alignment algorithms (DPO & SALT), endeavoring to narrow the divide between AI-generated content and factual accuracy. This highlights the substantial potential of LLM-based synthetic edits in enhancing the alignment of clinical factuality.

Can Language Models Falsify? Evaluating Algorithmic Reasoning with Counterexample Creation

There is growing excitement about the potential of Language Models (LMs) to accelerate scientific discovery. Falsifying hypotheses is key to scientific progress, as it allows claims to be iteratively refined over time. This process requires significant researcher effort, reasoning, and ingenuity. Yet current benchmarks for LMs predominantly assess their ability to generate solutions rather than challenge them. We advocate for developing benchmarks that evaluate this inverse capability - creating counterexamples for subtly incorrect solutions. To demonstrate this approach, we start with the domain of algorithmic problem solving, where counterexamples can be evaluated automatically using code execution. Specifically, we introduce REFUTE, a dynamically updating benchmark that includes recent problems and incorrect submissions from programming competitions, where human experts successfully identified counterexamples. Our analysis finds that the best reasoning agents, even OpenAI o3-mini (high) with code execution feedback, can create counterexamples for only <9% of incorrect solutions in REFUTE, even though ratings indicate its ability to solve up to 48% of these problems from scratch. We hope our work spurs progress in evaluating and enhancing LMs' ability to falsify incorrect solutions - a capability that is crucial for both accelerating research and making models self-improve through reliable reflective reasoning.

DocGenome: An Open Large-scale Scientific Document Benchmark for Training and Testing Multi-modal Large Language Models

Scientific documents record research findings and valuable human knowledge, comprising a vast corpus of high-quality data. Leveraging multi-modality data extracted from these documents and assessing large models' abilities to handle scientific document-oriented tasks is therefore meaningful. Despite promising advancements, large models still perform poorly on multi-page scientific document extraction and understanding tasks, and their capacity to process within-document data formats such as charts and equations remains under-explored. To address these issues, we present DocGenome, a structured document benchmark constructed by annotating 500K scientific documents from 153 disciplines in the arXiv open-access community, using our custom auto-labeling pipeline. DocGenome features four key characteristics: 1) Completeness: It is the first dataset to structure data from all modalities including 13 layout attributes along with their LaTeX source codes. 2) Logicality: It provides 6 logical relationships between different entities within each scientific document. 3) Diversity: It covers various document-oriented tasks, including document classification, visual grounding, document layout detection, document transformation, open-ended single-page QA and multi-page QA. 4) Correctness: It undergoes rigorous quality control checks conducted by a specialized team. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the advantages of DocGenome and objectively evaluate the performance of large models on our benchmark.

DropletVideo: A Dataset and Approach to Explore Integral Spatio-Temporal Consistent Video Generation

Spatio-temporal consistency is a critical research topic in video generation. A qualified generated video segment must ensure plot plausibility and coherence while maintaining visual consistency of objects and scenes across varying viewpoints. Prior research, especially in open-source projects, primarily focuses on either temporal or spatial consistency, or their basic combination, such as appending a description of a camera movement after a prompt without constraining the outcomes of this movement. However, camera movement may introduce new objects to the scene or eliminate existing ones, thereby overlaying and affecting the preceding narrative. Especially in videos with numerous camera movements, the interplay between multiple plots becomes increasingly complex. This paper introduces and examines integral spatio-temporal consistency, considering the synergy between plot progression and camera techniques, and the long-term impact of prior content on subsequent generation. Our research encompasses dataset construction through to the development of the model. Initially, we constructed a DropletVideo-10M dataset, which comprises 10 million videos featuring dynamic camera motion and object actions. Each video is annotated with an average caption of 206 words, detailing various camera movements and plot developments. Following this, we developed and trained the DropletVideo model, which excels in preserving spatio-temporal coherence during video generation. The DropletVideo dataset and model are accessible at https://dropletx.github.io.

Optimized Conformal Selection: Powerful Selective Inference After Conformity Score Optimization

Model selection/optimization in conformal inference is challenging, since it may break the exchangeability between labeled and unlabeled data. We study this problem in the context of conformal selection, which uses conformal p-values to select ``interesting'' instances with large unobserved labels from a pool of unlabeled data, while controlling the FDR in finite sample. For validity, existing solutions require the model choice to be independent of the data used to construct the p-values and calibrate the selection set. However, when presented with many model choices and limited labeled data, it is desirable to (i) select the best model in a data-driven manner, and (ii) mitigate power loss due to sample splitting. This paper presents OptCS, a general framework that allows valid statistical testing (selection) after flexible data-driven model optimization. We introduce general conditions under which OptCS constructs valid conformal p-values despite substantial data reuse and handles complex p-value dependencies to maintain finite-sample FDR control via a novel multiple testing procedure. We instantiate this general recipe to propose three FDR-controlling procedures, each optimizing the models differently: (i) selecting the most powerful one among multiple pre-trained candidate models, (ii) using all data for model fitting without sample splitting, and (iii) combining full-sample model fitting and selection. We demonstrate the efficacy of our methods via simulation studies and real applications in drug discovery and alignment of large language models in radiology report generation.

Do Language Models Know When They're Hallucinating References?

State-of-the-art language models (LMs) are notoriously susceptible to generating hallucinated information. Such inaccurate outputs not only undermine the reliability of these models but also limit their use and raise serious concerns about misinformation and propaganda. In this work, we focus on hallucinated book and article references and present them as the "model organism" of language model hallucination research, due to their frequent and easy-to-discern nature. We posit that if a language model cites a particular reference in its output, then it should ideally possess sufficient information about its authors and content, among other relevant details. Using this basic insight, we illustrate that one can identify hallucinated references without ever consulting any external resources, by asking a set of direct or indirect queries to the language model about the references. These queries can be considered as "consistency checks." Our findings highlight that while LMs, including GPT-4, often produce inconsistent author lists for hallucinated references, they also often accurately recall the authors of real references. In this sense, the LM can be said to "know" when it is hallucinating references. Furthermore, these findings show how hallucinated references can be dissected to shed light on their nature. Replication code and results can be found at https://github.com/microsoft/hallucinated-references.

torchdistill: A Modular, Configuration-Driven Framework for Knowledge Distillation

While knowledge distillation (transfer) has been attracting attentions from the research community, the recent development in the fields has heightened the need for reproducible studies and highly generalized frameworks to lower barriers to such high-quality, reproducible deep learning research. Several researchers voluntarily published frameworks used in their knowledge distillation studies to help other interested researchers reproduce their original work. Such frameworks, however, are usually neither well generalized nor maintained, thus researchers are still required to write a lot of code to refactor/build on the frameworks for introducing new methods, models, datasets and designing experiments. In this paper, we present our developed open-source framework built on PyTorch and dedicated for knowledge distillation studies. The framework is designed to enable users to design experiments by declarative PyYAML configuration files, and helps researchers complete the recently proposed ML Code Completeness Checklist. Using the developed framework, we demonstrate its various efficient training strategies, and implement a variety of knowledge distillation methods. We also reproduce some of their original experimental results on the ImageNet and COCO datasets presented at major machine learning conferences such as ICLR, NeurIPS, CVPR and ECCV, including recent state-of-the-art methods. All the source code, configurations, log files and trained model weights are publicly available at https://github.com/yoshitomo-matsubara/torchdistill .

RepQ-ViT: Scale Reparameterization for Post-Training Quantization of Vision Transformers

Post-training quantization (PTQ), which only requires a tiny dataset for calibration without end-to-end retraining, is a light and practical model compression technique. Recently, several PTQ schemes for vision transformers (ViTs) have been presented; unfortunately, they typically suffer from non-trivial accuracy degradation, especially in low-bit cases. In this paper, we propose RepQ-ViT, a novel PTQ framework for ViTs based on quantization scale reparameterization, to address the above issues. RepQ-ViT decouples the quantization and inference processes, where the former employs complex quantizers and the latter employs scale-reparameterized simplified quantizers. This ensures both accurate quantization and efficient inference, which distinguishes it from existing approaches that sacrifice quantization performance to meet the target hardware. More specifically, we focus on two components with extreme distributions: post-LayerNorm activations with severe inter-channel variation and post-Softmax activations with power-law features, and initially apply channel-wise quantization and log2 quantization, respectively. Then, we reparameterize the scales to hardware-friendly layer-wise quantization and log2 quantization for inference, with only slight accuracy or computational costs. Extensive experiments are conducted on multiple vision tasks with different model variants, proving that RepQ-ViT, without hyperparameters and expensive reconstruction procedures, can outperform existing strong baselines and encouragingly improve the accuracy of 4-bit PTQ of ViTs to a usable level. Code is available at https://github.com/zkkli/RepQ-ViT.

How Many Van Goghs Does It Take to Van Gogh? Finding the Imitation Threshold

Text-to-image models are trained using large datasets collected by scraping image-text pairs from the internet. These datasets often include private, copyrighted, and licensed material. Training models on such datasets enables them to generate images with such content, which might violate copyright laws and individual privacy. This phenomenon is termed imitation -- generation of images with content that has recognizable similarity to its training images. In this work we study the relationship between a concept's frequency in the training dataset and the ability of a model to imitate it. We seek to determine the point at which a model was trained on enough instances to imitate a concept -- the imitation threshold. We posit this question as a new problem: Finding the Imitation Threshold (FIT) and propose an efficient approach that estimates the imitation threshold without incurring the colossal cost of training multiple models from scratch. We experiment with two domains -- human faces and art styles -- for which we create four datasets, and evaluate three text-to-image models which were trained on two pretraining datasets. Our results reveal that the imitation threshold of these models is in the range of 200-600 images, depending on the domain and the model. The imitation threshold can provide an empirical basis for copyright violation claims and acts as a guiding principle for text-to-image model developers that aim to comply with copyright and privacy laws. We release the code and data at https://github.com/vsahil/MIMETIC-2.git and the project's website is hosted at https://how-many-van-goghs-does-it-take.github.io.

PFGM++: Unlocking the Potential of Physics-Inspired Generative Models

We introduce a new family of physics-inspired generative models termed PFGM++ that unifies diffusion models and Poisson Flow Generative Models (PFGM). These models realize generative trajectories for N dimensional data by embedding paths in N{+}D dimensional space while still controlling the progression with a simple scalar norm of the D additional variables. The new models reduce to PFGM when D{=}1 and to diffusion models when D{to}infty. The flexibility of choosing D allows us to trade off robustness against rigidity as increasing D results in more concentrated coupling between the data and the additional variable norms. We dispense with the biased large batch field targets used in PFGM and instead provide an unbiased perturbation-based objective similar to diffusion models. To explore different choices of D, we provide a direct alignment method for transferring well-tuned hyperparameters from diffusion models (D{to} infty) to any finite D values. Our experiments show that models with finite D can be superior to previous state-of-the-art diffusion models on CIFAR-10/FFHQ 64{times}64 datasets, with FID scores of 1.91/2.43 when D{=}2048/128. In class-conditional setting, D{=}2048 yields current state-of-the-art FID of 1.74 on CIFAR-10. In addition, we demonstrate that models with smaller D exhibit improved robustness against modeling errors. Code is available at https://github.com/Newbeeer/pfgmpp

StarCraftImage: A Dataset For Prototyping Spatial Reasoning Methods For Multi-Agent Environments

Spatial reasoning tasks in multi-agent environments such as event prediction, agent type identification, or missing data imputation are important for multiple applications (e.g., autonomous surveillance over sensor networks and subtasks for reinforcement learning (RL)). StarCraft II game replays encode intelligent (and adversarial) multi-agent behavior and could provide a testbed for these tasks; however, extracting simple and standardized representations for prototyping these tasks is laborious and hinders reproducibility. In contrast, MNIST and CIFAR10, despite their extreme simplicity, have enabled rapid prototyping and reproducibility of ML methods. Following the simplicity of these datasets, we construct a benchmark spatial reasoning dataset based on StarCraft II replays that exhibit complex multi-agent behaviors, while still being as easy to use as MNIST and CIFAR10. Specifically, we carefully summarize a window of 255 consecutive game states to create 3.6 million summary images from 60,000 replays, including all relevant metadata such as game outcome and player races. We develop three formats of decreasing complexity: Hyperspectral images that include one channel for every unit type (similar to multispectral geospatial images), RGB images that mimic CIFAR10, and grayscale images that mimic MNIST. We show how this dataset can be used for prototyping spatial reasoning methods. All datasets, code for extraction, and code for dataset loading can be found at https://starcraftdata.davidinouye.com

Deduction under Perturbed Evidence: Probing Student Simulation Capabilities of Large Language Models

We explore whether Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of logical reasoning with distorted facts, which we call Deduction under Perturbed Evidence (DUPE). DUPE presents a unique challenge to LLMs since they typically rely on their parameters, which encode mostly accurate information, to reason and make inferences. However, in DUPE, LLMs must reason over manipulated or falsified evidence present in their prompts, which can result in false conclusions that are valid only under the manipulated evidence. Our goal with DUPE is to determine whether LLMs can arrive at these false conclusions and identify whether the dominant factor influencing the deduction process is the encoded data in the parameters or the manipulated evidence in the prompts. To evaluate the DUPE capabilities of LLMs, we create a DUPEd version of the StrategyQA dataset, where facts are manipulated to reverse the answer to the question. Our findings show that even the most advanced GPT models struggle to reason on manipulated facts - showcasing poor DUPE skills - with accuracy dropping by 45% compared to the original dataset. We also investigate prompt settings inspired from student simulation models, which mitigate the accuracy drop to some extent. Our findings have practical implications for understanding the performance of LLMs in real-world applications such as student simulation models that involve reasoning over inaccurate information.

DATED: Guidelines for Creating Synthetic Datasets for Engineering Design Applications

Exploiting the recent advancements in artificial intelligence, showcased by ChatGPT and DALL-E, in real-world applications necessitates vast, domain-specific, and publicly accessible datasets. Unfortunately, the scarcity of such datasets poses a significant challenge for researchers aiming to apply these breakthroughs in engineering design. Synthetic datasets emerge as a viable alternative. However, practitioners are often uncertain about generating high-quality datasets that accurately represent real-world data and are suitable for the intended downstream applications. This study aims to fill this knowledge gap by proposing comprehensive guidelines for generating, annotating, and validating synthetic datasets. The trade-offs and methods associated with each of these aspects are elaborated upon. Further, the practical implications of these guidelines are illustrated through the creation of a turbo-compressors dataset. The study underscores the importance of thoughtful sampling methods to ensure the appropriate size, diversity, utility, and realism of a dataset. It also highlights that design diversity does not equate to performance diversity or realism. By employing test sets that represent uniform, real, or task-specific samples, the influence of sample size and sampling strategy is scrutinized. Overall, this paper offers valuable insights for researchers intending to create and publish synthetic datasets for engineering design, thereby paving the way for more effective applications of AI advancements in the field. The code and data for the dataset and methods are made publicly accessible at https://github.com/cyrilpic/radcomp .

Multi-Coil MRI Reconstruction Challenge -- Assessing Brain MRI Reconstruction Models and their Generalizability to Varying Coil Configurations

Deep-learning-based brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reconstruction methods have the potential to accelerate the MRI acquisition process. Nevertheless, the scientific community lacks appropriate benchmarks to assess MRI reconstruction quality of high-resolution brain images, and evaluate how these proposed algorithms will behave in the presence of small, but expected data distribution shifts. The Multi-Coil Magnetic Resonance Image (MC-MRI) Reconstruction Challenge provides a benchmark that aims at addressing these issues, using a large dataset of high-resolution, three-dimensional, T1-weighted MRI scans. The challenge has two primary goals: 1) to compare different MRI reconstruction models on this dataset and 2) to assess the generalizability of these models to data acquired with a different number of receiver coils. In this paper, we describe the challenge experimental design, and summarize the results of a set of baseline and state of the art brain MRI reconstruction models. We provide relevant comparative information on the current MRI reconstruction state-of-the-art and highlight the challenges of obtaining generalizable models that are required prior to broader clinical adoption. The MC-MRI benchmark data, evaluation code and current challenge leaderboard are publicly available. They provide an objective performance assessment for future developments in the field of brain MRI reconstruction.

SciRIFF: A Resource to Enhance Language Model Instruction-Following over Scientific Literature

We present SciRIFF (Scientific Resource for Instruction-Following and Finetuning), a dataset of 137K instruction-following demonstrations for 54 tasks covering five essential scientific literature understanding capabilities: information extraction, summarization, question answering, claim verification, and classification. SciRIFF demonstrations are notable for their long input contexts, detailed task specifications, and complex structured outputs. While instruction-following resources are available in specific domains such as clinical medicine and chemistry, SciRIFF is the first dataset focused on extracting and synthesizing information from research literature across a wide range of scientific fields. To demonstrate the utility of SciRIFF, we develop a sample-efficient strategy to adapt a general instruction-following model for science by performing additional finetuning on a mix of general-domain and SciRIFF demonstrations. In evaluations on nine held-out scientific tasks, our model -- called SciTulu -- improves over a strong LLM baseline by 28.1% and 6.5% at the 7B and 70B scales respectively, while maintaining general instruction-following performance within 2% of the baseline. We are optimistic that SciRIFF will facilitate the development and evaluation of LLMs to help researchers navigate the ever-growing body of scientific literature. We release our dataset, model checkpoints, and data processing and evaluation code to enable further research.

Foundation Models and Fair Use

Existing foundation models are trained on copyrighted material. Deploying these models can pose both legal and ethical risks when data creators fail to receive appropriate attribution or compensation. In the United States and several other countries, copyrighted content may be used to build foundation models without incurring liability due to the fair use doctrine. However, there is a caveat: If the model produces output that is similar to copyrighted data, particularly in scenarios that affect the market of that data, fair use may no longer apply to the output of the model. In this work, we emphasize that fair use is not guaranteed, and additional work may be necessary to keep model development and deployment squarely in the realm of fair use. First, we survey the potential risks of developing and deploying foundation models based on copyrighted content. We review relevant U.S. case law, drawing parallels to existing and potential applications for generating text, source code, and visual art. Experiments confirm that popular foundation models can generate content considerably similar to copyrighted material. Second, we discuss technical mitigations that can help foundation models stay in line with fair use. We argue that more research is needed to align mitigation strategies with the current state of the law. Lastly, we suggest that the law and technical mitigations should co-evolve. For example, coupled with other policy mechanisms, the law could more explicitly consider safe harbors when strong technical tools are used to mitigate infringement harms. This co-evolution may help strike a balance between intellectual property and innovation, which speaks to the original goal of fair use. But we emphasize that the strategies we describe here are not a panacea and more work is needed to develop policies that address the potential harms of foundation models.

AIM 2024 Sparse Neural Rendering Challenge: Dataset and Benchmark

Recent developments in differentiable and neural rendering have made impressive breakthroughs in a variety of 2D and 3D tasks, e.g. novel view synthesis, 3D reconstruction. Typically, differentiable rendering relies on a dense viewpoint coverage of the scene, such that the geometry can be disambiguated from appearance observations alone. Several challenges arise when only a few input views are available, often referred to as sparse or few-shot neural rendering. As this is an underconstrained problem, most existing approaches introduce the use of regularisation, together with a diversity of learnt and hand-crafted priors. A recurring problem in sparse rendering literature is the lack of an homogeneous, up-to-date, dataset and evaluation protocol. While high-resolution datasets are standard in dense reconstruction literature, sparse rendering methods often evaluate with low-resolution images. Additionally, data splits are inconsistent across different manuscripts, and testing ground-truth images are often publicly available, which may lead to over-fitting. In this work, we propose the Sparse Rendering (SpaRe) dataset and benchmark. We introduce a new dataset that follows the setup of the DTU MVS dataset. The dataset is composed of 97 new scenes based on synthetic, high-quality assets. Each scene has up to 64 camera views and 7 lighting configurations, rendered at 1600x1200 resolution. We release a training split of 82 scenes to foster generalizable approaches, and provide an online evaluation platform for the validation and test sets, whose ground-truth images remain hidden. We propose two different sparse configurations (3 and 9 input images respectively). This provides a powerful and convenient tool for reproducible evaluation, and enable researchers easy access to a public leaderboard with the state-of-the-art performance scores. Available at: https://sparebenchmark.github.io/

Inspecting the Geographical Representativeness of Images from Text-to-Image Models

Recent progress in generative models has resulted in models that produce both realistic as well as relevant images for most textual inputs. These models are being used to generate millions of images everyday, and hold the potential to drastically impact areas such as generative art, digital marketing and data augmentation. Given their outsized impact, it is important to ensure that the generated content reflects the artifacts and surroundings across the globe, rather than over-representing certain parts of the world. In this paper, we measure the geographical representativeness of common nouns (e.g., a house) generated through DALL.E 2 and Stable Diffusion models using a crowdsourced study comprising 540 participants across 27 countries. For deliberately underspecified inputs without country names, the generated images most reflect the surroundings of the United States followed by India, and the top generations rarely reflect surroundings from all other countries (average score less than 3 out of 5). Specifying the country names in the input increases the representativeness by 1.44 points on average for DALL.E 2 and 0.75 for Stable Diffusion, however, the overall scores for many countries still remain low, highlighting the need for future models to be more geographically inclusive. Lastly, we examine the feasibility of quantifying the geographical representativeness of generated images without conducting user studies.

Rethinking Scale: The Efficacy of Fine-Tuned Open-Source LLMs in Large-Scale Reproducible Social Science Research

Large Language Models (LLMs) are distinguished by their architecture, which dictates their parameter size and performance capabilities. Social scientists have increasingly adopted LLMs for text classification tasks, which are difficult to scale with human coders. While very large, closed-source models often deliver superior performance, their use presents significant risks. These include lack of transparency, potential exposure of sensitive data, challenges to replicability, and dependence on proprietary systems. Additionally, their high costs make them impractical for large-scale research projects. In contrast, open-source models, although available in various sizes, may underperform compared to commercial alternatives if used without further fine-tuning. However, open-source models offer distinct advantages: they can be run locally (ensuring data privacy), fine-tuned for specific tasks, shared within the research community, and integrated into reproducible workflows. This study demonstrates that small, fine-tuned open-source LLMs can achieve equal or superior performance to models such as ChatGPT-4. We further explore the relationship between training set size and fine-tuning efficacy in open-source models. Finally, we propose a hybrid workflow that leverages the strengths of both open and closed models, offering a balanced approach to performance, transparency, and reproducibility.

DiffuseVAE: Efficient, Controllable and High-Fidelity Generation from Low-Dimensional Latents

Diffusion probabilistic models have been shown to generate state-of-the-art results on several competitive image synthesis benchmarks but lack a low-dimensional, interpretable latent space, and are slow at generation. On the other hand, standard Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) typically have access to a low-dimensional latent space but exhibit poor sample quality. We present DiffuseVAE, a novel generative framework that integrates VAE within a diffusion model framework, and leverage this to design novel conditional parameterizations for diffusion models. We show that the resulting model equips diffusion models with a low-dimensional VAE inferred latent code which can be used for downstream tasks like controllable synthesis. The proposed method also improves upon the speed vs quality tradeoff exhibited in standard unconditional DDPM/DDIM models (for instance, FID of 16.47 vs 34.36 using a standard DDIM on the CelebA-HQ-128 benchmark using T=10 reverse process steps) without having explicitly trained for such an objective. Furthermore, the proposed model exhibits synthesis quality comparable to state-of-the-art models on standard image synthesis benchmarks like CIFAR-10 and CelebA-64 while outperforming most existing VAE-based methods. Lastly, we show that the proposed method exhibits inherent generalization to different types of noise in the conditioning signal. For reproducibility, our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/kpandey008/DiffuseVAE.

Application of NotebookLM, a Large Language Model with Retrieval-Augmented Generation, for Lung Cancer Staging

Purpose: In radiology, large language models (LLMs), including ChatGPT, have recently gained attention, and their utility is being rapidly evaluated. However, concerns have emerged regarding their reliability in clinical applications due to limitations such as hallucinations and insufficient referencing. To address these issues, we focus on the latest technology, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which enables LLMs to reference reliable external knowledge (REK). Specifically, this study examines the utility and reliability of a recently released RAG-equipped LLM (RAG-LLM), NotebookLM, for staging lung cancer. Materials and methods: We summarized the current lung cancer staging guideline in Japan and provided this as REK to NotebookLM. We then tasked NotebookLM with staging 100 fictional lung cancer cases based on CT findings and evaluated its accuracy. For comparison, we performed the same task using a gold-standard LLM, GPT-4 Omni (GPT-4o), both with and without the REK. Results: NotebookLM achieved 86% diagnostic accuracy in the lung cancer staging experiment, outperforming GPT-4o, which recorded 39% accuracy with the REK and 25% without it. Moreover, NotebookLM demonstrated 95% accuracy in searching reference locations within the REK. Conclusion: NotebookLM successfully performed lung cancer staging by utilizing the REK, demonstrating superior performance compared to GPT-4o. Additionally, it provided highly accurate reference locations within the REK, allowing radiologists to efficiently evaluate the reliability of NotebookLM's responses and detect possible hallucinations. Overall, this study highlights the potential of NotebookLM, a RAG-LLM, in image diagnosis.

Rethinking Benchmark and Contamination for Language Models with Rephrased Samples

Large language models are increasingly trained on all the data ever produced by humans. Many have raised concerns about the trustworthiness of public benchmarks due to potential contamination in pre-training or fine-tuning datasets. While most data decontamination efforts apply string matching (e.g., n-gram overlap) to remove benchmark data, we show that these methods are insufficient, and simple variations of test data (e.g., paraphrasing, translation) can easily bypass these decontamination measures. Furthermore, we demonstrate that if such variation of test data is not eliminated, a 13B model can easily overfit a test benchmark and achieve drastically high performance, on par with GPT-4. We validate such observations in widely used benchmarks such as MMLU, GSK8k, and HumanEval. To address this growing risk, we propose a stronger LLM-based decontamination method and apply it to widely used pre-training and fine-tuning datasets, revealing significant previously unknown test overlap. For example, in pre-training sets such as RedPajama-Data-1T and StarCoder-Data, we identified that 8-18\% of the HumanEval benchmark overlaps. Interestingly, we also find such contamination in synthetic dataset generated by GPT-3.5/4, suggesting a potential risk of unintentional contamination. We urge the community to adopt stronger decontamination approaches when using public benchmarks. Moreover, we call for the community to actively develop fresh one-time exams to evaluate models accurately. Our decontamination tool is publicly available at https://github.com/lm-sys/llm-decontaminator.

LiveBench: A Challenging, Contamination-Free LLM Benchmark

Test set contamination, wherein test data from a benchmark ends up in a newer model's training set, is a well-documented obstacle for fair LLM evaluation and can quickly render benchmarks obsolete. To mitigate this, many recent benchmarks crowdsource new prompts and evaluations from human or LLM judges; however, these can introduce significant biases, and break down when scoring hard questions. In this work, we introduce a new benchmark for LLMs designed to be immune to both test set contamination and the pitfalls of LLM judging and human crowdsourcing. We release LiveBench, the first benchmark that (1) contains frequently-updated questions from recent information sources, (2) scores answers automatically according to objective ground-truth values, and (3) contains a wide variety of challenging tasks, spanning math, coding, reasoning, language, instruction following, and data analysis. To achieve this, LiveBench contains questions that are based on recently-released math competitions, arXiv papers, news articles, and datasets, and it contains harder, contamination-free versions of tasks from previous benchmarks such as Big-Bench Hard, AMPS, and IFEval. We evaluate many prominent closed-source models, as well as dozens of open-source models ranging from 0.5B to 110B in size. LiveBench is difficult, with top models achieving below 65% accuracy. We release all questions, code, and model answers. Questions will be added and updated on a monthly basis, and we will release new tasks and harder versions of tasks over time so that LiveBench can distinguish between the capabilities of LLMs as they improve in the future. We welcome community engagement and collaboration for expanding the benchmark tasks and models.

Extending the WILDS Benchmark for Unsupervised Adaptation

Machine learning systems deployed in the wild are often trained on a source distribution but deployed on a different target distribution. Unlabeled data can be a powerful point of leverage for mitigating these distribution shifts, as it is frequently much more available than labeled data and can often be obtained from distributions beyond the source distribution as well. However, existing distribution shift benchmarks with unlabeled data do not reflect the breadth of scenarios that arise in real-world applications. In this work, we present the WILDS 2.0 update, which extends 8 of the 10 datasets in the WILDS benchmark of distribution shifts to include curated unlabeled data that would be realistically obtainable in deployment. These datasets span a wide range of applications (from histology to wildlife conservation), tasks (classification, regression, and detection), and modalities (photos, satellite images, microscope slides, text, molecular graphs). The update maintains consistency with the original WILDS benchmark by using identical labeled training, validation, and test sets, as well as the evaluation metrics. On these datasets, we systematically benchmark state-of-the-art methods that leverage unlabeled data, including domain-invariant, self-training, and self-supervised methods, and show that their success on WILDS is limited. To facilitate method development and evaluation, we provide an open-source package that automates data loading and contains all of the model architectures and methods used in this paper. Code and leaderboards are available at https://wilds.stanford.edu.

VBench++: Comprehensive and Versatile Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models

Video generation has witnessed significant advancements, yet evaluating these models remains a challenge. A comprehensive evaluation benchmark for video generation is indispensable for two reasons: 1) Existing metrics do not fully align with human perceptions; 2) An ideal evaluation system should provide insights to inform future developments of video generation. To this end, we present VBench, a comprehensive benchmark suite that dissects "video generation quality" into specific, hierarchical, and disentangled dimensions, each with tailored prompts and evaluation methods. VBench has several appealing properties: 1) Comprehensive Dimensions: VBench comprises 16 dimensions in video generation (e.g., subject identity inconsistency, motion smoothness, temporal flickering, and spatial relationship, etc). The evaluation metrics with fine-grained levels reveal individual models' strengths and weaknesses. 2) Human Alignment: We also provide a dataset of human preference annotations to validate our benchmarks' alignment with human perception, for each evaluation dimension respectively. 3) Valuable Insights: We look into current models' ability across various evaluation dimensions, and various content types. We also investigate the gaps between video and image generation models. 4) Versatile Benchmarking: VBench++ supports evaluating text-to-video and image-to-video. We introduce a high-quality Image Suite with an adaptive aspect ratio to enable fair evaluations across different image-to-video generation settings. Beyond assessing technical quality, VBench++ evaluates the trustworthiness of video generative models, providing a more holistic view of model performance. 5) Full Open-Sourcing: We fully open-source VBench++ and continually add new video generation models to our leaderboard to drive forward the field of video generation.

Reprogramming Pretrained Language Models for Antibody Sequence Infilling

Antibodies comprise the most versatile class of binding molecules, with numerous applications in biomedicine. Computational design of antibodies involves generating novel and diverse sequences, while maintaining structural consistency. Unique to antibodies, designing the complementarity-determining region (CDR), which determines the antigen binding affinity and specificity, creates its own unique challenges. Recent deep learning models have shown impressive results, however the limited number of known antibody sequence/structure pairs frequently leads to degraded performance, particularly lacking diversity in the generated sequences. In our work we address this challenge by leveraging Model Reprogramming (MR), which repurposes pretrained models on a source language to adapt to the tasks that are in a different language and have scarce data - where it may be difficult to train a high-performing model from scratch or effectively fine-tune an existing pre-trained model on the specific task. Specifically, we introduce ReprogBert in which a pretrained English language model is repurposed for protein sequence infilling - thus considers cross-language adaptation using less data. Results on antibody design benchmarks show that our model on low-resourced antibody sequence dataset provides highly diverse CDR sequences, up to more than a two-fold increase of diversity over the baselines, without losing structural integrity and naturalness. The generated sequences also demonstrate enhanced antigen binding specificity and virus neutralization ability. Code is available at https://github.com/IBM/ReprogBERT

Closing the gap between open-source and commercial large language models for medical evidence summarization

Large language models (LLMs) hold great promise in summarizing medical evidence. Most recent studies focus on the application of proprietary LLMs. Using proprietary LLMs introduces multiple risk factors, including a lack of transparency and vendor dependency. While open-source LLMs allow better transparency and customization, their performance falls short compared to proprietary ones. In this study, we investigated to what extent fine-tuning open-source LLMs can further improve their performance in summarizing medical evidence. Utilizing a benchmark dataset, MedReview, consisting of 8,161 pairs of systematic reviews and summaries, we fine-tuned three broadly-used, open-sourced LLMs, namely PRIMERA, LongT5, and Llama-2. Overall, the fine-tuned LLMs obtained an increase of 9.89 in ROUGE-L (95% confidence interval: 8.94-10.81), 13.21 in METEOR score (95% confidence interval: 12.05-14.37), and 15.82 in CHRF score (95% confidence interval: 13.89-16.44). The performance of fine-tuned LongT5 is close to GPT-3.5 with zero-shot settings. Furthermore, smaller fine-tuned models sometimes even demonstrated superior performance compared to larger zero-shot models. The above trends of improvement were also manifested in both human and GPT4-simulated evaluations. Our results can be applied to guide model selection for tasks demanding particular domain knowledge, such as medical evidence summarization.

Any2AnyTryon: Leveraging Adaptive Position Embeddings for Versatile Virtual Clothing Tasks

Image-based virtual try-on (VTON) aims to generate a virtual try-on result by transferring an input garment onto a target person's image. However, the scarcity of paired garment-model data makes it challenging for existing methods to achieve high generalization and quality in VTON. Also, it limits the ability to generate mask-free try-ons. To tackle the data scarcity problem, approaches such as Stable Garment and MMTryon use a synthetic data strategy, effectively increasing the amount of paired data on the model side. However, existing methods are typically limited to performing specific try-on tasks and lack user-friendliness. To enhance the generalization and controllability of VTON generation, we propose Any2AnyTryon, which can generate try-on results based on different textual instructions and model garment images to meet various needs, eliminating the reliance on masks, poses, or other conditions. Specifically, we first construct the virtual try-on dataset LAION-Garment, the largest known open-source garment try-on dataset. Then, we introduce adaptive position embedding, which enables the model to generate satisfactory outfitted model images or garment images based on input images of different sizes and categories, significantly enhancing the generalization and controllability of VTON generation. In our experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our Any2AnyTryon and compare it with existing methods. The results show that Any2AnyTryon enables flexible, controllable, and high-quality image-based virtual try-on generation.https://logn-2024.github.io/Any2anyTryonProjectPage/

Carve3D: Improving Multi-view Reconstruction Consistency for Diffusion Models with RL Finetuning

Recent advancements in the text-to-3D task leverage finetuned text-to-image diffusion models to generate multi-view images, followed by NeRF reconstruction. Yet, existing supervised finetuned (SFT) diffusion models still suffer from multi-view inconsistency and the resulting NeRF artifacts. Although training longer with SFT improves consistency, it also causes distribution shift, which reduces diversity and realistic details. We argue that the SFT of multi-view diffusion models resembles the instruction finetuning stage of the LLM alignment pipeline and can benefit from RL finetuning (RLFT) methods. Essentially, RLFT methods optimize models beyond their SFT data distribution by using their own outputs, effectively mitigating distribution shift. To this end, we introduce Carve3D, a RLFT method coupled with the Multi-view Reconstruction Consistency (MRC) metric, to improve the consistency of multi-view diffusion models. To compute MRC on a set of multi-view images, we compare them with their corresponding renderings of the reconstructed NeRF at the same viewpoints. We validate the robustness of MRC with extensive experiments conducted under controlled inconsistency levels. We enhance the base RLFT algorithm to stabilize the training process, reduce distribution shift, and identify scaling laws. Through qualitative and quantitative experiments, along with a user study, we demonstrate Carve3D's improved multi-view consistency, the resulting superior NeRF reconstruction quality, and minimal distribution shift compared to longer SFT. Project webpage: https://desaixie.github.io/carve-3d.

RE-Bench: Evaluating frontier AI R&D capabilities of language model agents against human experts

Frontier AI safety policies highlight automation of AI research and development (R&D) by AI agents as an important capability to anticipate. However, there exist few evaluations for AI R&D capabilities, and none that are highly realistic and have a direct comparison to human performance. We introduce RE-Bench (Research Engineering Benchmark, v1), which consists of 7 challenging, open-ended ML research engineering environments and data from 71 8-hour attempts by 61 distinct human experts. We confirm that our experts make progress in the environments given 8 hours, with 82% of expert attempts achieving a non-zero score and 24% matching or exceeding our strong reference solutions. We compare humans to several public frontier models through best-of-k with varying time budgets and agent designs, and find that the best AI agents achieve a score 4x higher than human experts when both are given a total time budget of 2 hours per environment. However, humans currently display better returns to increasing time budgets, narrowly exceeding the top AI agent scores given an 8-hour budget, and achieving 2x the score of the top AI agent when both are given 32 total hours (across different attempts). Qualitatively, we find that modern AI agents possess significant expertise in many ML topics -- e.g. an agent wrote a faster custom Triton kernel than any of our human experts' -- and can generate and test solutions over ten times faster than humans, at much lower cost. We open-source the evaluation environments, human expert data, analysis code and agent trajectories to facilitate future research.

The Topology and Geometry of Neural Representations

A central question for neuroscience is how to characterize brain representations of perceptual and cognitive content. An ideal characterization should distinguish different functional regions with robustness to noise and idiosyncrasies of individual brains that do not correspond to computational differences. Previous studies have characterized brain representations by their representational geometry, which is defined by the representational dissimilarity matrix (RDM), a summary statistic that abstracts from the roles of individual neurons (or responses channels) and characterizes the discriminability of stimuli. Here we explore a further step of abstraction: from the geometry to the topology of brain representations. We propose topological representational similarity analysis (tRSA), an extension of representational similarity analysis (RSA) that uses a family of geo-topological summary statistics that generalizes the RDM to characterize the topology while de-emphasizing the geometry. We evaluate this new family of statistics in terms of the sensitivity and specificity for model selection using both simulations and functional MRI (fMRI) data. In the simulations, the ground truth is a data-generating layer representation in a neural network model and the models are the same and other layers in different model instances (trained from different random seeds). In fMRI, the ground truth is a visual area and the models are the same and other areas measured in different subjects. Results show that topology-sensitive characterizations of population codes are robust to noise and interindividual variability and maintain excellent sensitivity to the unique representational signatures of different neural network layers and brain regions.

Inversion-Free Image Editing with Natural Language

Despite recent advances in inversion-based editing, text-guided image manipulation remains challenging for diffusion models. The primary bottlenecks include 1) the time-consuming nature of the inversion process; 2) the struggle to balance consistency with accuracy; 3) the lack of compatibility with efficient consistency sampling methods used in consistency models. To address the above issues, we start by asking ourselves if the inversion process can be eliminated for editing. We show that when the initial sample is known, a special variance schedule reduces the denoising step to the same form as the multi-step consistency sampling. We name this Denoising Diffusion Consistent Model (DDCM), and note that it implies a virtual inversion strategy without explicit inversion in sampling. We further unify the attention control mechanisms in a tuning-free framework for text-guided editing. Combining them, we present inversion-free editing (InfEdit), which allows for consistent and faithful editing for both rigid and non-rigid semantic changes, catering to intricate modifications without compromising on the image's integrity and explicit inversion. Through extensive experiments, InfEdit shows strong performance in various editing tasks and also maintains a seamless workflow (less than 3 seconds on one single A40), demonstrating the potential for real-time applications. Project Page: https://sled-group.github.io/InfEdit/

CopyrightMeter: Revisiting Copyright Protection in Text-to-image Models

Text-to-image diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for generating high-quality images from textual descriptions. However, their increasing popularity has raised significant copyright concerns, as these models can be misused to reproduce copyrighted content without authorization. In response, recent studies have proposed various copyright protection methods, including adversarial perturbation, concept erasure, and watermarking techniques. However, their effectiveness and robustness against advanced attacks remain largely unexplored. Moreover, the lack of unified evaluation frameworks has hindered systematic comparison and fair assessment of different approaches. To bridge this gap, we systematize existing copyright protection methods and attacks, providing a unified taxonomy of their design spaces. We then develop CopyrightMeter, a unified evaluation framework that incorporates 17 state-of-the-art protections and 16 representative attacks. Leveraging CopyrightMeter, we comprehensively evaluate protection methods across multiple dimensions, thereby uncovering how different design choices impact fidelity, efficacy, and resilience under attacks. Our analysis reveals several key findings: (i) most protections (16/17) are not resilient against attacks; (ii) the "best" protection varies depending on the target priority; (iii) more advanced attacks significantly promote the upgrading of protections. These insights provide concrete guidance for developing more robust protection methods, while its unified evaluation protocol establishes a standard benchmark for future copyright protection research in text-to-image generation.

Improved Techniques for Training Consistency Models

Consistency models are a nascent family of generative models that can sample high quality data in one step without the need for adversarial training. Current consistency models achieve optimal sample quality by distilling from pre-trained diffusion models and employing learned metrics such as LPIPS. However, distillation limits the quality of consistency models to that of the pre-trained diffusion model, and LPIPS causes undesirable bias in evaluation. To tackle these challenges, we present improved techniques for consistency training, where consistency models learn directly from data without distillation. We delve into the theory behind consistency training and identify a previously overlooked flaw, which we address by eliminating Exponential Moving Average from the teacher consistency model. To replace learned metrics like LPIPS, we adopt Pseudo-Huber losses from robust statistics. Additionally, we introduce a lognormal noise schedule for the consistency training objective, and propose to double total discretization steps every set number of training iterations. Combined with better hyperparameter tuning, these modifications enable consistency models to achieve FID scores of 2.51 and 3.25 on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet 64times 64 respectively in a single sampling step. These scores mark a 3.5times and 4times improvement compared to prior consistency training approaches. Through two-step sampling, we further reduce FID scores to 2.24 and 2.77 on these two datasets, surpassing those obtained via distillation in both one-step and two-step settings, while narrowing the gap between consistency models and other state-of-the-art generative models.

Hyperparameters in Continual Learning: a Reality Check

Various algorithms for continual learning (CL) have been designed with the goal of effectively alleviating the trade-off between stability and plasticity during the CL process. To achieve this goal, tuning appropriate hyperparameters for each algorithm is essential. As an evaluation protocol, it has been common practice to train a CL algorithm using diverse hyperparameter values on a CL scenario constructed with a benchmark dataset. Subsequently, the best performance attained with the optimal hyperparameter value serves as the criterion for evaluating the CL algorithm. In this paper, we contend that this evaluation protocol is not only impractical but also incapable of effectively assessing the CL capability of a CL algorithm. Returning to the fundamental principles of model evaluation in machine learning, we propose an evaluation protocol that involves Hyperparameter Tuning and Evaluation phases. Those phases consist of different datasets but share the same CL scenario. In the Hyperparameter Tuning phase, each algorithm is iteratively trained with different hyperparameter values to find the optimal hyperparameter values. Subsequently, in the Evaluation phase, the optimal hyperparameter values is directly applied for training each algorithm, and their performance in the Evaluation phase serves as the criterion for evaluating them. Through experiments on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet-100 based on the proposed protocol in class-incremental learning, we not only observed that the existing evaluation method fail to properly assess the CL capability of each algorithm but also observe that some recently proposed state-of-the-art algorithms, which reported superior performance, actually exhibit inferior performance compared to the previous algorithm.

Re-Thinking Inverse Graphics With Large Language Models

Inverse graphics -- the task of inverting an image into physical variables that, when rendered, enable reproduction of the observed scene -- is a fundamental challenge in computer vision and graphics. Disentangling an image into its constituent elements, such as the shape, color, and material properties of the objects of the 3D scene that produced it, requires a comprehensive understanding of the environment. This requirement limits the ability of existing carefully engineered approaches to generalize across domains. Inspired by the zero-shot ability of large language models (LLMs) to generalize to novel contexts, we investigate the possibility of leveraging the broad world knowledge encoded in such models in solving inverse-graphics problems. To this end, we propose the Inverse-Graphics Large Language Model (IG-LLM), an inverse-graphics framework centered around an LLM, that autoregressively decodes a visual embedding into a structured, compositional 3D-scene representation. We incorporate a frozen pre-trained visual encoder and a continuous numeric head to enable end-to-end training. Through our investigation, we demonstrate the potential of LLMs to facilitate inverse graphics through next-token prediction, without the use of image-space supervision. Our analysis opens up new possibilities for precise spatial reasoning about images that exploit the visual knowledge of LLMs. We will release our code and data to ensure the reproducibility of our investigation and to facilitate future research at https://ig-llm.is.tue.mpg.de/

From Fake to Real: Pretraining on Balanced Synthetic Images to Prevent Spurious Correlations in Image Recognition

Visual recognition models are prone to learning spurious correlations induced by a biased training set where certain conditions B (\eg, Indoors) are over-represented in certain classes Y (\eg, Big Dogs). Synthetic data from off-the-shelf large-scale generative models offers a promising direction to mitigate this issue by augmenting underrepresented subgroups in the real dataset. However, by using a mixed distribution of real and synthetic data, we introduce another source of bias due to distributional differences between synthetic and real data (\eg synthetic artifacts). As we will show, prior work's approach for using synthetic data to resolve the model's bias toward B do not correct the model's bias toward the pair (B, G), where G denotes whether the sample is real or synthetic. Thus, the model could simply learn signals based on the pair (B, G) (\eg, Synthetic Indoors) to make predictions about Y (\eg, Big Dogs). To address this issue, we propose a simple, easy-to-implement, two-step training pipeline that we call From Fake to Real (FFR). The first step of FFR pre-trains a model on balanced synthetic data to learn robust representations across subgroups. In the second step, FFR fine-tunes the model on real data using ERM or common loss-based bias mitigation methods. By training on real and synthetic data separately, FFR does not expose the model to the statistical differences between real and synthetic data and thus avoids the issue of bias toward the pair (B, G). Our experiments show that FFR improves worst group accuracy over the state-of-the-art by up to 20\% over three datasets. Code available: https://github.com/mqraitem/From-Fake-to-Real

Cousins Of The Vendi Score: A Family Of Similarity-Based Diversity Metrics For Science And Machine Learning

Measuring diversity accurately is important for many scientific fields, including machine learning (ML), ecology, and chemistry. The Vendi Score was introduced as a generic similarity-based diversity metric that extends the Hill number of order q=1 by leveraging ideas from quantum statistical mechanics. Contrary to many diversity metrics in ecology, the Vendi Score accounts for similarity and does not require knowledge of the prevalence of the categories in the collection to be evaluated for diversity. However, the Vendi Score treats each item in a given collection with a level of sensitivity proportional to the item's prevalence. This is undesirable in settings where there is a significant imbalance in item prevalence. In this paper, we extend the other Hill numbers using similarity to provide flexibility in allocating sensitivity to rare or common items. This leads to a family of diversity metrics -- Vendi scores with different levels of sensitivity -- that can be used in a variety of applications. We study the properties of the scores in a synthetic controlled setting where the ground truth diversity is known. We then test their utility in improving molecular simulations via Vendi Sampling. Finally, we use the Vendi scores to better understand the behavior of image generative models in terms of memorization, duplication, diversity, and sample quality.

SEAL: A Framework for Systematic Evaluation of Real-World Super-Resolution

Real-world Super-Resolution (Real-SR) methods focus on dealing with diverse real-world images and have attracted increasing attention in recent years. The key idea is to use a complex and high-order degradation model to mimic real-world degradations. Although they have achieved impressive results in various scenarios, they are faced with the obstacle of evaluation. Currently, these methods are only assessed by their average performance on a small set of degradation cases randomly selected from a large space, which fails to provide a comprehensive understanding of their overall performance and often yields inconsistent and potentially misleading results. To overcome the limitation in evaluation, we propose SEAL, a framework for systematic evaluation of real-SR. In particular, we cluster the extensive degradation space to create a set of representative degradation cases, which serves as a comprehensive test set. Next, we propose a coarse-to-fine evaluation protocol to measure the distributed and relative performance of real-SR methods on the test set. The protocol incorporates two new metrics: acceptance rate (AR) and relative performance ratio (RPR), derived from acceptance and excellence lines. Under SEAL, we benchmark existing real-SR methods, obtain new observations and insights into their performance, and develop a new strong baseline. We consider SEAL as the first step towards creating a comprehensive real-SR evaluation platform, which can promote the development of real-SR. The source code is available at https://github.com/XPixelGroup/SEAL

TestGenEval: A Real World Unit Test Generation and Test Completion Benchmark

Code generation models can help improve many common software tasks ranging from code completion to defect prediction. Most of the existing benchmarks for code generation LLMs focus on code authoring or code completion. Surprisingly, there has been far less effort dedicated to benchmarking software testing, despite the strong correlation between well-tested software and effective bug detection. To address this gap, we create and release TestGenEval, a large-scale benchmark to measure test generation performance. Based on SWEBench, TestGenEval comprises 68,647 tests from 1,210 code and test file pairs across 11 well-maintained Python repositories. It covers initial tests authoring, test suite completion, and code coverage improvements. Test authoring simulates the process of a developer writing a test suite from scratch, while test completion mimics the scenario where a developer aims to improve the coverage of an existing test suite. We evaluate several popular models, with sizes ranging from 7B to 405B parameters. Our detailed analysis highlights TestGenEval's contribution to a comprehensive evaluation of test generation performance. In particular, models struggle to generate high-coverage test suites, with the best model, GPT-4o, achieving an average coverage of only 35.2%. This is primarily due to models struggling to reason about execution, and their frequent assertion errors when addressing complex code paths.

DF40: Toward Next-Generation Deepfake Detection

We propose a new comprehensive benchmark to revolutionize the current deepfake detection field to the next generation. Predominantly, existing works identify top-notch detection algorithms and models by adhering to the common practice: training detectors on one specific dataset (e.g., FF++) and testing them on other prevalent deepfake datasets. This protocol is often regarded as a "golden compass" for navigating SoTA detectors. But can these stand-out "winners" be truly applied to tackle the myriad of realistic and diverse deepfakes lurking in the real world? If not, what underlying factors contribute to this gap? In this work, we found the dataset (both train and test) can be the "primary culprit" due to: (1) forgery diversity: Deepfake techniques are commonly referred to as both face forgery and entire image synthesis. Most existing datasets only contain partial types of them, with limited forgery methods implemented; (2) forgery realism: The dominated training dataset, FF++, contains out-of-date forgery techniques from the past four years. "Honing skills" on these forgeries makes it difficult to guarantee effective detection generalization toward nowadays' SoTA deepfakes; (3) evaluation protocol: Most detection works perform evaluations on one type, which hinders the development of universal deepfake detectors. To address this dilemma, we construct a highly diverse deepfake detection dataset called DF40, which comprises 40 distinct deepfake techniques. We then conduct comprehensive evaluations using 4 standard evaluation protocols and 8 representative detection methods, resulting in over 2,000 evaluations. Through these evaluations, we provide an extensive analysis from various perspectives, leading to 7 new insightful findings. We also open up 4 valuable yet previously underexplored research questions to inspire future works. Our project page is https://github.com/YZY-stack/DF40.

Synthesis of 3D on-air signatures with the Sigma-Lognormal model

Signature synthesis is a computation technique that generates artificial specimens which can support decision making in automatic signature verification. A lot of work has been dedicated to this subject, which centres on synthesizing dynamic and static two-dimensional handwriting on canvas. This paper proposes a framework to generate synthetic 3D on-air signatures exploiting the lognormality principle, which mimics the complex neuromotor control processes at play as the fingertip moves. Addressing the usual cases involving the development of artificial individuals and duplicated samples, this paper contributes to the synthesis of: (1) the trajectory and velocity of entirely 3D new signatures; (2) kinematic information when only the 3D trajectory of the signature is known, and (3) duplicate samples of 3D real signatures. Validation was conducted by generating synthetic 3D signature databases mimicking real ones and showing that automatic signature verifications of genuine and skilled forgeries report performances similar to those of real and synthetic databases. We also observed that training 3D automatic signature verifiers with duplicates can reduce errors. We further demonstrated that our proposal is also valid for synthesizing 3D air writing and gestures. Finally, a perception test confirmed the human likeness of the generated specimens. The databases generated are publicly available, only for research purposes, at .

MOOSE-Chem: Large Language Models for Rediscovering Unseen Chemistry Scientific Hypotheses

Scientific discovery contributes largely to human society's prosperity, and recent progress shows that LLMs could potentially catalyze this process. However, it is still unclear whether LLMs can discover novel and valid hypotheses in chemistry. In this work, we investigate this central research question: Can LLMs automatically discover novel and valid chemistry research hypotheses given only a chemistry research background (consisting of a research question and/or a background survey), without limitation on the domain of the research question? After extensive discussions with chemistry experts, we propose an assumption that a majority of chemistry hypotheses can be resulted from a research background and several inspirations. With this key insight, we break the central question into three smaller fundamental questions. In brief, they are: (1) given a background question, whether LLMs can retrieve good inspirations; (2) with background and inspirations, whether LLMs can lead to hypothesis; and (3) whether LLMs can identify good hypotheses to rank them higher. To investigate these questions, we construct a benchmark consisting of 51 chemistry papers published in Nature, Science, or a similar level in 2024 (all papers are only available online since 2024). Every paper is divided by chemistry PhD students into three components: background, inspirations, and hypothesis. The goal is to rediscover the hypothesis, given only the background and a large randomly selected chemistry literature corpus consisting the ground truth inspiration papers, with LLMs trained with data up to 2023. We also develop an LLM-based multi-agent framework that leverages the assumption, consisting of three stages reflecting the three smaller questions. The proposed method can rediscover many hypotheses with very high similarity with the ground truth ones, covering the main innovations.

Reconstructing unseen modalities and pathology with an efficient Recurrent Inference Machine

Objective: To allow efficient learning using the Recurrent Inference Machine (RIM) for image reconstruction whereas not being strictly dependent on the training data distribution so that unseen modalities and pathologies are still accurately recovered. Methods: Theoretically, the RIM learns to solve the inverse problem of accelerated-MRI reconstruction whereas being robust to variable imaging conditions. The efficiency and generalization capabilities with different training datasets were studied, as well as recurrent network units with decreasing complexity: the Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), the Minimal Gated Unit (MGU), and the Independently Recurrent Neural Network (IndRNN), to reduce inference times. Validation was performed against Compressed Sensing (CS) and further assessed based on data unseen during training. A pathology study was conducted by reconstructing simulated white matter lesions and prospectively undersampled data of a Multiple Sclerosis patient. Results: Training on a single modality of 3T T_1-weighted brain data appeared sufficient to also reconstruct 7T T_{2}^*-weighted brain and 3T T_2-weighted knee data. The IndRNN is an efficient recurrent unit, reducing inference time by 68\% compared to CS, whereas maintaining performance. The RIM was able to reconstruct lesions unseen during training more accurately than CS when trained on T_2-weighted knee data. Training on T_1-weighted brain data and on combined data slightly enhanced the signal compared to CS. Conclusion: The RIM is efficient when decreasing its complexity, which reduces the inference time, whereas still being able to reconstruct data and pathology that was unseen during training.

FMB: a Functional Manipulation Benchmark for Generalizable Robotic Learning

In this paper, we propose a real-world benchmark for studying robotic learning in the context of functional manipulation: a robot needs to accomplish complex long-horizon behaviors by composing individual manipulation skills in functionally relevant ways. The core design principles of our Functional Manipulation Benchmark (FMB) emphasize a harmonious balance between complexity and accessibility. Tasks are deliberately scoped to be narrow, ensuring that models and datasets of manageable scale can be utilized effectively to track progress. Simultaneously, they are diverse enough to pose a significant generalization challenge. Furthermore, the benchmark is designed to be easily replicable, encompassing all essential hardware and software components. To achieve this goal, FMB consists of a variety of 3D-printed objects designed for easy and accurate replication by other researchers. The objects are procedurally generated, providing a principled framework to study generalization in a controlled fashion. We focus on fundamental manipulation skills, including grasping, repositioning, and a range of assembly behaviors. The FMB can be used to evaluate methods for acquiring individual skills, as well as methods for combining and ordering such skills to solve complex, multi-stage manipulation tasks. We also offer an imitation learning framework that includes a suite of policies trained to solve the proposed tasks. This enables researchers to utilize our tasks as a versatile toolkit for examining various parts of the pipeline. For example, researchers could propose a better design for a grasping controller and evaluate it in combination with our baseline reorientation and assembly policies as part of a pipeline for solving multi-stage tasks. Our dataset, object CAD files, code, and evaluation videos can be found on our project website: https://functional-manipulation-benchmark.github.io

SciClaimHunt: A Large Dataset for Evidence-based Scientific Claim Verification

Verifying scientific claims presents a significantly greater challenge than verifying political or news-related claims. Unlike the relatively broad audience for political claims, the users of scientific claim verification systems can vary widely, ranging from researchers testing specific hypotheses to everyday users seeking information on a medication. Additionally, the evidence for scientific claims is often highly complex, involving technical terminology and intricate domain-specific concepts that require specialized models for accurate verification. Despite considerable interest from the research community, there is a noticeable lack of large-scale scientific claim verification datasets to benchmark and train effective models. To bridge this gap, we introduce two large-scale datasets, SciClaimHunt and SciClaimHunt_Num, derived from scientific research papers. We propose several baseline models tailored for scientific claim verification to assess the effectiveness of these datasets. Additionally, we evaluate models trained on SciClaimHunt and SciClaimHunt_Num against existing scientific claim verification datasets to gauge their quality and reliability. Furthermore, we conduct human evaluations of the claims in proposed datasets and perform error analysis to assess the effectiveness of the proposed baseline models. Our findings indicate that SciClaimHunt and SciClaimHunt_Num serve as highly reliable resources for training models in scientific claim verification.

Safe-SD: Safe and Traceable Stable Diffusion with Text Prompt Trigger for Invisible Generative Watermarking

Recently, stable diffusion (SD) models have typically flourished in the field of image synthesis and personalized editing, with a range of photorealistic and unprecedented images being successfully generated. As a result, widespread interest has been ignited to develop and use various SD-based tools for visual content creation. However, the exposure of AI-created content on public platforms could raise both legal and ethical risks. In this regard, the traditional methods of adding watermarks to the already generated images (i.e. post-processing) may face a dilemma (e.g., being erased or modified) in terms of copyright protection and content monitoring, since the powerful image inversion and text-to-image editing techniques have been widely explored in SD-based methods. In this work, we propose a Safe and high-traceable Stable Diffusion framework (namely Safe-SD) to adaptively implant the graphical watermarks (e.g., QR code) into the imperceptible structure-related pixels during the generative diffusion process for supporting text-driven invisible watermarking and detection. Different from the previous high-cost injection-then-detection training framework, we design a simple and unified architecture, which makes it possible to simultaneously train watermark injection and detection in a single network, greatly improving the efficiency and convenience of use. Moreover, to further support text-driven generative watermarking and deeply explore its robustness and high-traceability, we elaborately design lambda sampling and encryption algorithm to fine-tune a latent diffuser wrapped by a VAE for balancing high-fidelity image synthesis and high-traceable watermark detection. We present our quantitative and qualitative results on two representative datasets LSUN, COCO and FFHQ, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance of Safe-SD and showing it significantly outperforms the previous approaches.

Rethinking the Up-Sampling Operations in CNN-based Generative Network for Generalizable Deepfake Detection

Recently, the proliferation of highly realistic synthetic images, facilitated through a variety of GANs and Diffusions, has significantly heightened the susceptibility to misuse. While the primary focus of deepfake detection has traditionally centered on the design of detection algorithms, an investigative inquiry into the generator architectures has remained conspicuously absent in recent years. This paper contributes to this lacuna by rethinking the architectures of CNN-based generators, thereby establishing a generalized representation of synthetic artifacts. Our findings illuminate that the up-sampling operator can, beyond frequency-based artifacts, produce generalized forgery artifacts. In particular, the local interdependence among image pixels caused by upsampling operators is significantly demonstrated in synthetic images generated by GAN or diffusion. Building upon this observation, we introduce the concept of Neighboring Pixel Relationships(NPR) as a means to capture and characterize the generalized structural artifacts stemming from up-sampling operations. A comprehensive analysis is conducted on an open-world dataset, comprising samples generated by 28 distinct generative models. This analysis culminates in the establishment of a novel state-of-the-art performance, showcasing a remarkable 11.6\% improvement over existing methods. The code is available at https://github.com/chuangchuangtan/NPR-DeepfakeDetection.

Towards Foundation Time Series Model: To Synthesize Or Not To Synthesize?

The industry is rich in cases when we are required to make forecasting for large amounts of time series at once. However, we might be in a situation where we can not afford to train a separate model for each of them. Such issue in time series modeling remains without due attention. The remedy for this setting is the establishment of a foundation model. Such a model is expected to work in zero-shot and few-shot regimes. However, what should we take as a training dataset for such kind of model? Witnessing the benefits from the enrichment of NLP datasets with artificially-generated data, we might want to adopt their experience for time series. In contrast to natural language, the process of generation of synthetic time series data is even more favorable because it provides full control of series patterns, time horizons, and number of samples. In this work, we consider the essential question if it is advantageous to train a foundation model on synthetic data or it is better to utilize only a limited number of real-life examples. Our experiments are conducted only for regular time series and speak in favor of leveraging solely the real time series. Moreover, the choice of the proper source dataset strongly influences the performance during inference. When provided access even to a limited quantity of short time series data, employing it within a supervised framework yields more favorable results than training on a larger volume of synthetic data. The code for our experiments is publicly available on Github https://github.com/sb-ai-lab/synthesize_or_not.

Boosting 3D Object Generation through PBR Materials

Automatic 3D content creation has gained increasing attention recently, due to its potential in various applications such as video games, film industry, and AR/VR. Recent advancements in diffusion models and multimodal models have notably improved the quality and efficiency of 3D object generation given a single RGB image. However, 3D objects generated even by state-of-the-art methods are still unsatisfactory compared to human-created assets. Considering only textures instead of materials makes these methods encounter challenges in photo-realistic rendering, relighting, and flexible appearance editing. And they also suffer from severe misalignment between geometry and high-frequency texture details. In this work, we propose a novel approach to boost the quality of generated 3D objects from the perspective of Physics-Based Rendering (PBR) materials. By analyzing the components of PBR materials, we choose to consider albedo, roughness, metalness, and bump maps. For albedo and bump maps, we leverage Stable Diffusion fine-tuned on synthetic data to extract these values, with novel usages of these fine-tuned models to obtain 3D consistent albedo UV and bump UV for generated objects. In terms of roughness and metalness maps, we adopt a semi-automatic process to provide room for interactive adjustment, which we believe is more practical. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model is generally beneficial for various state-of-the-art generation methods, significantly boosting the quality and realism of their generated 3D objects, with natural relighting effects and substantially improved geometry.

Deep Probability Estimation

Reliable probability estimation is of crucial importance in many real-world applications where there is inherent (aleatoric) uncertainty. Probability-estimation models are trained on observed outcomes (e.g. whether it has rained or not, or whether a patient has died or not), because the ground-truth probabilities of the events of interest are typically unknown. The problem is therefore analogous to binary classification, with the difference that the objective is to estimate probabilities rather than predicting the specific outcome. This work investigates probability estimation from high-dimensional data using deep neural networks. There exist several methods to improve the probabilities generated by these models but they mostly focus on model (epistemic) uncertainty. For problems with inherent uncertainty, it is challenging to evaluate performance without access to ground-truth probabilities. To address this, we build a synthetic dataset to study and compare different computable metrics. We evaluate existing methods on the synthetic data as well as on three real-world probability estimation tasks, all of which involve inherent uncertainty: precipitation forecasting from radar images, predicting cancer patient survival from histopathology images, and predicting car crashes from dashcam videos. We also give a theoretical analysis of a model for high-dimensional probability estimation which reproduces several of the phenomena evinced in our experiments. Finally, we propose a new method for probability estimation using neural networks, which modifies the training process to promote output probabilities that are consistent with empirical probabilities computed from the data. The method outperforms existing approaches on most metrics on the simulated as well as real-world data.

A Comprehensive Benchmark for COVID-19 Predictive Modeling Using Electronic Health Records in Intensive Care

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a heavy burden to the healthcare system worldwide and caused huge social disruption and economic loss. Many deep learning models have been proposed to conduct clinical predictive tasks such as mortality prediction for COVID-19 patients in intensive care units using Electronic Health Record (EHR) data. Despite their initial success in certain clinical applications, there is currently a lack of benchmarking results to achieve a fair comparison so that we can select the optimal model for clinical use. Furthermore, there is a discrepancy between the formulation of traditional prediction tasks and real-world clinical practice in intensive care. To fill these gaps, we propose two clinical prediction tasks, Outcome-specific length-of-stay prediction and Early mortality prediction for COVID-19 patients in intensive care units. The two tasks are adapted from the naive length-of-stay and mortality prediction tasks to accommodate the clinical practice for COVID-19 patients. We propose fair, detailed, open-source data-preprocessing pipelines and evaluate 17 state-of-the-art predictive models on two tasks, including 5 machine learning models, 6 basic deep learning models and 6 deep learning predictive models specifically designed for EHR data. We provide benchmarking results using data from two real-world COVID-19 EHR datasets. One dataset is publicly available without needing any inquiry and another dataset can be accessed on request. We provide fair, reproducible benchmarking results for two tasks. We deploy all experiment results and models on an online platform. We also allow clinicians and researchers to upload their data to the platform and get quick prediction results using our trained models. We hope our efforts can further facilitate deep learning and machine learning research for COVID-19 predictive modeling.