AAAI 2025 Papers

In a decision-making scenario, a principal could use conditional predictions from an expert agent to inform their choice. However, this approach would introduce a fundamental conflict of interest. An agent optimizing for predictive accuracy is incentivized to manipulate their principal towards more predictable actions, which prevents that principal from being able to deterministically select their true preference. We demonstrate that this impossibility result can be overcome through the joint evaluation of multiple agents. When agents are made to engage in zero-sum competition, their incentive to influence the action taken is eliminated, and the principal can identify and take the action they most prefer. We further prove that this zero-sum setup is unique, efficiently implementable, and applicable under stochastic choice. Experiments in a toy environment demonstrate that training on a zero-sum objective significantly enhances both predictive accuracy and principal utility, and can eliminate previously learned manipulative behavior.

Knowledge stored in large language models requires timely updates to reflect the dynamic nature of real-world information. To update the knowledge, most knowledge editing methods focus on the low layers, since recent probes into the knowledge recall process reveal that the answer information is enriched in low layers. However, these probes only and could only reveal critical recall stages for the original answers, while the goal of editing is to rectify model's prediction for the target answers. This inconsistency indicates that both the probe approaches and the associated editing methods are deficient. To mitigate the inconsistency and identify critical editing regions, we propose a contrast-based probe approach, and locate two crucial stages where the model behavior diverges between the original and target answers: Information Enrichment in low layers and Probability Promotion in high layers. Building upon the insights, we develop the Joint knowledge Editing for information Enrichment and probability Promotion (JEEP) method, which jointly edits both the low and high layers to modify the two critical recall stages. Considering the mutual interference and growing forgetting due to dual modifications, JEEP is designed to ensure that updates to distinct regions share the same objectives and are complementary. We rigorously evaluate JEEP by editing up to thousands of facts on various models, i.e., GPT-J (6B) and LLaMA (7B), and addressing diverse editing objectives, i.e., adding factual and counterfactual knowledge. In all tested scenarios, JEEP achieves best performances, validating the effectiveness of the revealings of our probe approach and the designs of our editing method.

Novel class discovery(NCD) aims to cluster the unlabeled data with the help of a labeled set containing different but related classes. The key to solving NCD is the knowledge transfer between labeled and unlabeled sets.Since NCD requires that known classes and unknown classes are related, it is significant to explore class-level relationships between known and unknown for more effective knowledge transfer. However, most existing methods either facilitate knowledge transfer by learning a shared representation space or by modeling coarse-grained or asymmetric relationships between known and unknown, neglecting class-level relationships. To tackle these challenges, we propose a symmetric class-to-class relationship modeling and knowledge transfer method, achieving bidirectional knowledge transfer at class-level. Considering that class-level modeling often overlooks the subtle distinctions between samples, we propose pairwise similarity-based relationship modeling and consistency constraint for instance-level knowledge transfer. Extensive experiments on CIFAR100 and three fine-grained datasets demonstrate that our method achieves significant performance improvements compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Video Action Detection (VAD) entails localizing and categorizing action instances within videos, which inherently consist of diverse information sources such as audio, visual cues, and surrounding scene contexts. Leveraging this multi-modal information effectively for VAD poses a significant challenge, as the model must identify action-relevant cues with precision. In this study, we introduce a novel multi-modal VAD architecture, referred to as the Joint Actor-centric Visual, Audio, Language Encoder (JoVALE). JoVALE is the first VAD method to integrate audio and visual features with scene descriptive context sourced from large-capacity image captioning models. At the heart of JoVALE is the actor-centric aggregation of audio, visual, and scene descriptive information, enabling adaptive integration of crucial features for recognizing each actor's actions. We have developed a Transformer-based architecture, the Actor-centric Multi-modal Fusion Network, specifically designed to capture the dynamic interactions among actors and their multi-modal contexts. Our evaluation on three prominent VAD benchmarks—AVA, UCF101-24, and JHMDB51-21—demonstrates that incorporating multi-modal information significantly enhances performance, setting new state-of-the-art performances in the field.

Large Language Models (LLMs) aligned with human feedback have recently garnered significant attention. However, it remains vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, where adversaries manipulate prompts to induce harmful outputs. Exploring jailbreak attacks enables us to investigate the vulnerabilities of LLMs and further guides us in enhancing their security. Unfortunately, existing techniques mainly rely on handcrafted templates or generated-based optimization, posing challenges in scalability, efficiency and universality. To address these issues, we present JailPO, a novel black-box jailbreak framework to examine LLM alignment. For scalability and universality, JailPO meticulously trains attack models to automatically generate covert jailbreak prompts. Furthermore, we introduce a preference optimization-based attack method to enhance the jailbreak effectiveness, thereby improving efficiency. To analyze model vulnerabilities, we provide three flexible jailbreak patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that JailPO not only automates the attack process while maintaining effectiveness but also exhibits superior performance in efficiency, universality, and robustness against defenses compared to baselines. Additionally, our analysis of the three JailPO patterns reveals that attacks based on complex templates exhibit higher attack strength, whereas covert question transformations elicit riskier responses and are more likely to bypass defense mechanisms.

Large models for text-to-music generation have achieved significant progress, facilitating the creation of high-quality and varied musical compositions from provided text prompts. However, input text prompts may not precisely capture user requirements, particularly when the objective is to generate music that embodies a specific concept derived from a designated reference collection. In this paper, we propose a novel method for customized text-to-music generation, which can capture the concept from a two-minute reference music and generate a new piece of music conforming to the concept. We achieve this by fine-tuning a pretrained text-to-music model using the reference music. However, directly fine-tuning all parameters leads to overfitting issues. To address this problem, we propose a Pivotal Parameters Tuning method that enables the model to assimilate the new concept while preserving its original generative capabilities. Additionally, we identify a potential concept conflict when introducing multiple concepts into the pretrained model. We present a concept enhancement strategy to distinguish multiple concepts, enabling the fine-tuned model to generate music incorporating either individual or multiple concepts simultaneously. We also introduce a new dataset and evaluation protocol for this task. Our proposed JEN1-DreamStyler outperforms several baselines in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations.

With rapid advances in generative artificial intelligence, the text-to-music synthesis task has emerged as a promising direction for music generation. Nevertheless, achieving precise control over multi-track generation remains an open challenge. While existing models excel in directly generating multi-track mix, their limitations become evident when it comes to composing individual tracks and integrating them in a controllable manner. This departure from the typical workflows of professional composers hinders the ability to refine details in specific tracks. To address this gap, we propose JEN-1 Composer, a unified framework designed to efficiently model marginal, conditional, and joint distributions over multi-track music using a single model. Building upon an audio latent diffusion model, JEN-1 Composer extends the versatility of multi-track music generation. We introduce a progressive curriculum training strategy, which gradually escalates the difficulty of training tasks while ensuring the model's generalization ability and facilitating smooth transitions between different scenarios. During inference, users can iteratively generate and select music tracks, thus incrementally composing entire musical pieces in accordance with the Human-AI co-composition workflow. Our approach demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in controllable and high-fidelity multi-track music synthesis, marking a significant advancement in interactive AI-assisted music creation.

The co-design of neural network architectures, quantization precisions, and hardware accelerators offers a promising approach to achieving an optimal balance between performance and efficiency, particularly for model deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. In this work, we propose the JAQ Framework, which jointly optimizes the three critical dimensions. However, effectively automating the design process across the vast search space of those three dimensions poses significant challenges, especially when pursuing extremely low-bit quantization. Specifical, the primary challenges include: (1) Memory overhead in software-side: Low-precision quantization-aware training can lead to significant memory usage due to storing large intermediate features and latent weights for backpropagation, potentially causing memory exhaustion. (2) Search time-consuming in hardware-side: The discrete nature of hardware parameters and the complex interplay between compiler optimizations and individual operators make the accelerator search time-consuming. To address these issues, JAQ mitigates the memory overhead through a channel-wise sparse quantization (CSQ) scheme, selectively applying quantization to the most sensitive components of the model during optimization. Additionally, JAQ designs BatchTile, which employs a hardware generation network to encode all possible tiling modes, thereby speeding up the search for the optimal compiler mapping strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of JAQ, achieving approximately 7% higher Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet compared to previous methods and reducing the hardware search time per iteration to 0.15 seconds.

As the scale and capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) increase, their applications in knowledge-intensive fields such as legal domain have garnered widespread attention. However, it remains doubtful whether these LLMs make judgments based on domain knowledge for reasoning. If LLMs base their judgments solely on specific words or patterns, rather than on the underlying logic of the language, the “LLM-as-judges” paradigm poses substantial risks in the real-world applications. To address this question, we propose a method of legal knowledge injection attacks for robustness testing, thereby inferring whether LLMs have learned legal knowledge and reasoning logic. In this paper, we propose J&H: an evaluation framework for detecting the robustness of LLMs under knowledge injection attacks in the legal domain. The aim of the framework is to explore whether LLMs perform deductive reasoning when accomplishing legal tasks. To further this aim, we have attacked each part of the reasoning logic underlying these tasks (major premise, minor premise, and conclusion generation). We have collected mistakes that legal experts might make in judicial decisions in the real world, such as typos, legal synonyms, inaccurate external legal statutes retrieval. However, in real legal practice, legal experts tend to overlook these mistakes and make judgments based on logic. However, when faced with these errors, LLMs are likely to be misled by typographical errors and may not utilize logic in their judgments. We conducted knowledge injection attacks on existing general and domain-specific LLMs. Current LLMs are not robust against the attacks employed in our experiments. In addition we propose and compare several methods to enhance the knowledge robustness of LLMs. All code can be found at the link.

Longer historical behaviors often improve recommendation accuracy but bring efficient problems. As sequences get longer, the following two main challenges have not been addressed: (1) efficient modeling under increasing sequence length and (2) interest drifting within historical items. In this paper, we propose Iterative Sparse Attention for Long-sequence Recommendation (ISA) with Sparse Attention Layer and Iterative Attention Layer to efficiently capture sequential pattern and expand the receptive field of each historical items. We take the pioneering step to address the efficient and interest drifting challenges for the long-sequence recommendation simultaneously. The theoretical analysis illustrates that our proposed iterative method can approximate full attention efficiently. Experiments on two real-world datasets show the superiority of our proposed method against state-of-the-art baselines.

Generative models are widely used to produce synthetic images with annotations, alleviating the burden of image collection and annotation for training deep visual models. However, challenges such as limited image diversity, noisy pseudo labels, and domain gaps between synthetic and real images often undermine their effectiveness in downstream visual tasks. This paper introduces the Iterative Self-Training with Class-Aware Text-to-Image Synthesis (IST-CATS) framework, which addresses these challenges by integrating a class-aware text-to-image synthesis (CATS) component with an iterative self-training (IST) strategy. CATS innovatively introduces a class-aware chain approach to generate detailed descriptions. These descriptions act as prompts for a diffusion model, enabling the creation of a diverse of images accompanied by distinguishable objects against the background. The generated images can be easily pseudo-labeled by an unsupervised instance segmentation method, and then noisy pseudo labels can be effectively purified by a novel feature similarity-based filtering mechanism. The generated images underpin our IST, which progressively enhances vision models and refines pseudo labels through self-training and our proposed label filtering strategy (LabFilt). LabFilt meticulously improves the quality of pseudo labels by employing class-adaptive techniques at both the pixel and object levels, ensuring refined pseudo-label accuracy. IST-CATS demonstrates superior performance in object detection and semantic segmentation compared to traditional synthetic and semi/weakly-supervised methods, effectively addressing data collection and annotation challenges.

Counterfactual data augmentation (CDA) is a method for controlling information or biases in training datasets by generating a complementary dataset with typically opposing biases. Prior work often either relies on hand-crafted rules or algorithmic CDA methods which can leave unwanted information in the augmented dataset. In this work, we show iterative CDA (ICDA) with initial, high-noise interventions can converge to a state with significantly lower noise. Our ICDA procedure produces a dataset where one target signal in the training dataset maintains high mutual information with a corresponding label and the information of spurious signals are reduced. We show training on the augmented datasets produces rationales on documents that better align with human annotation. Our experiments include six human produced datasets and two large-language model generated datasets.

Zero-shot Referring Image Segmentation (RIS) identifies the instance mask that best aligns with a specified referring expression without training and fine-tuning, significantly reducing the labor-intensive annotation process. Despite achieving commendable results, previous CLIP-based models have a critical drawback: the models exhibit a notable reduction in their capacity to discern relative spatial relationships of objects. This is because they generate all possible masks on an image and evaluate each masked region for similarity to the given expression, often resulting in decreased sensitivity to direct positional clues in text inputs. Moreover, most methods have weak abilities to manage relationships between primary words and their contexts, causing confusion and reduced accuracy in identifying the correct target region. To address these challenges, we propose IteRPrimE (Iterative Grad-CAM Refinement and Primary word Emphasis), which leverages a saliency heatmap through Grad-CAM from a Vision-Language Pre-trained (VLP) model for image-text matching. An iterative Grad-CAM refinement strategy is introduced to progressively enhance the model's focus on the target region and overcome positional insensitivity, creating a self-correcting effect. Additionally, we design the Primary Word Emphasis module to help the model handle complex semantic relations, enhancing its ability to attend to the intended object. Extensive experiments conducted on the RefCOCO/+/g, and PhraseCut benchmarks demonstrate that IteRPrimE outperforms previous SOTA zero-shot methods, particularly excelling in out-of-domain scenarios.

This work introduces IsUMap, a novel manifold learning technique that enhances data representation by integrating aspects of UMAP and Isomap with Vietoris-Rips filtrations and metric realization of one-parameter filtrations of simplicial complexes. Inferring topological information from combinatorial models which have been built according to metric relations (Vietoris-Rips complexes) has proven useful in topological data analysis and general machine learning applications. This encourages the use of such objects for geometric inference. We extend this research direction by proposing a clear theoretical pipeline that not only provides a comprehensive guide for assigning a (triangulated) metric space to every admissible one- parameter filtration of simplicial complexes but also offers a method for merging these objects. With this, our method presents a systematic and detailed construction of a metric representation for locally distorted metric spaces that captures complex data structures more accurately than the previous schemes. Our approach addresses limitations in existing methods by accommodating non-uniform data distributions and intricate local geometries. We validate its performance through extensive experiments on examples with known geometries and in applications to data, in particular from computational biology.

Quantifying image complexity at the entity level is straightforward, but the assessment of semantic complexity has been largely overlooked. In fact, there are differences in semantic complexity across images. Images with richer semantics can tell vivid and engaging stories and offer a wide range of application scenarios. For example, the Cookie Theft picture is such a kind of image and is widely used to assess human language and cognitive abilities due to its higher semantic complexity. Additionally, semantically rich images can benefit the development of vision models, as images with limited semantics are becoming less challenging for them. However, such images are scarce, highlighting the need for a greater number of them. For instance, there is a need for more images like Cookie Theft to cater to people from different cultural backgrounds and eras. Assessing semantic complexity requires human experts and empirical evidence. Automatic evaluation of how semantically rich an image will be the first step of mining or generating more images with rich semantics, and benefit human cognitive assessment, Artificial Intelligence, and various other applications. In response, we propose the Image Semantic Assessment (ISA) task to address this problem. We introduce the first ISA dataset and a novel method that leverages language to solve this vision problem. Experiments on our dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Autonomous vehicles rely on camera-based perception systems to comprehend their driving environment and make crucial decisions, thereby ensuring vehicles to steer safely. However, a significant threat known as Electromagnetic Signal Injection Attacks (ESIA) can distort the images captured by these cameras, leading to incorrect AI decisions and potentially compromising the safety of autonomous vehicles. Despite the serious implications of ESIA, there is limited understanding of its impacts on the robustness of AI models across various and complex driving scenarios. To address this gap, our research analyzes the performance of different models under ESIA, revealing their vulnerabilities to the attacks. Moreover, due to the challenges in obtaining real-world attack data, we develop a novel ESIA simulation method and generate a simulated attack dataset for different driving scenarios. Our research provides a comprehensive simulation and evaluation framework, aiming to enhance the development of more robust AI models and secure intelligent systems, ultimately contributing to the advancement of safer and more reliable technology across various fields.

Hallucination continues to be one of the most critical challenges in the institutional adoption journey of Large Language Models (LLMs). While prior studies have primarily focused on the post-generation analysis and refinement of outputs, this paper centers on the effectiveness of queries in eliciting accurate responses from LLMs. We present HalluciBot, a model that estimates the query's propensity to hallucinate before generation, without invoking any LLMs during inference. HalluciBot can serve as a proxy reward model for query rewriting, offering a general framework to estimate query quality based on accuracy and consensus. In essence, HalluciBot investigates how poorly constructed queries can lead to erroneous outputs - moreover, by employing query rewriting guided by HalluciBot's empirical estimates, we demonstrate that 95.7% output accuracy can be achieved for Multiple Choice questions. The training procedure for HalluciBot consists of perturbing 369,837 queries n times, employing n+1 independent LLM agents, sampling an output from each query, conducting a Multi-Agent Monte Carlo simulation on the sampled outputs, and training an encoder classifier. The idea of perturbation is the outcome of our ablation studies that measures the increase in output diversity (+12.5 agreement spread) by perturbing a query in lexically different but semantically similar ways. Therefore, HalluciBot paves the way to ratiocinate (76.0% test F1 score, 46.6% in saved computation on hallucinatory queries), rewrite (+30.2% positive class transition from hallucinatory to non-hallucinatory), rank (+50.6% positive class transition from hallucinatory to non-hallucinatory), and route queries to effective pipelines.

Elaborating a series of intermediate reasoning steps significantly improves the ability of large language models (LLMs) to solve complex problems, as such steps would evoke LLMs to think sequentially. However, human sarcasm understanding is often considered an intuitive and holistic cognitive process, in which various linguistic, contextual, and emotional cues are integrated to form a comprehensive understanding, in a way that does not necessarily follow a step-by-step fashion. To verify the validity of this argument, we introduce a new prompting framework (called SarcasmCue) containing four sub-methods, viz. chain of contradiction (CoC), graph of cues (GoC), bagging of cues (BoC) and tensor of cues (ToC), which elicits LLMs to detect human sarcasm by considering sequential and non-sequential prompting methods. Through a comprehensive empirical comparison on four benchmarks, we highlight three key findings: (1) CoC and GoC show superior performance with more advanced models like GPT-4 and Claude 3.5, with an improvement of 3.5%. (2) ToC significantly outperforms other methods when smaller LLMs are evaluated, boosting the F1 score by 29.7% over the best baseline. (3) Our proposed framework consistently pushes the state-of-the-art (i.e., ToT) by 4.2%, 2.0%, 29.7%, and 58.2% in F1 scores across four datasets. This demonstrates the effectiveness and stability of the proposed framework.

Recent advancements in Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) have significantly impacted the alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs). The sensitivity of reinforcement learning algorithms such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has led to new line work on Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), which treats RLHF in a supervised learning framework. The increased practical use of these RLHF methods warrants an analysis of their vulnerabilities. In this work, we investigate the vulnerabilities of DPO to poisoning attacks under different scenarios and compare the effectiveness of preference poisoning, a first of its kind. We comprehensively analyze DPO's vulnerabilities under different types of attacks, i.e., backdoor and non-backdoor attacks, and different poisoning methods across a wide array of language models, i.e., LLama 7B, Mistral 7B, and Gemma 7B. We find that unlike PPO-based methods, which, when it comes to backdoor attacks, require at least 4% of the data to be poisoned to elicit harmful behavior, we exploit the vulnerabilities of DPO by simpler methods so we can poison the model with only as much as 0.5% of the data. We further the investigate efficacy of the existing defence methods and find that these poisoning attacks can evade the existing data anomaly detection methods.