零样本分类

Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP have shown excellent performance for zero-shot classification. Based on CLIP, recent methods design various learnable prompts to evaluate the zero-shot generalization capability on a base-to-novel setting. This setting assumes test samples are already divided into either base or novel classes, limiting its application to realistic scenarios. In this paper, we focus on a more challenging and practical setting: generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL), i.e., testing with no information about the base/novel division. To address this challenging zero-shot problem, we introduce two unique designs that enable us to classify an image without the need of knowing whether it comes from seen or unseen classes. Firstly, most existing methods only adopt a single latent space to align visual and linguistic features, which has a limited ability to represent complex visual-linguistic patterns, especially for fine-grained tasks. Instead, we propose a dual-space feature alignment module that effectively augments the latent space with a novel attribute space induced by a well-devised attribute reservoir. In particular, the attribute reservoir consists of a static vocabulary and learnable tokens complementing each other for flexible control over feature granularity. Secondly, finetuning CLIP models (e.g., prompt learning) on seen base classes usually sacrifices the model's original generalization capability on unseen novel classes. To mitigate this issue, we present a new topology-preserving objective that can enforce feature topology structures of the combined base and novel classes to resemble the topology of CLIP. In this manner, our model will inherit the generalization ability of CLIP through maintaining the pairwise class angles in the attribute space. Extensive experiments on twelve object recognition datasets demonstrate that our model, termed Topology-Preserving Reservoir (TPR), outperforms strong baselines including both prompt learning and conventional generative-based zero-shot methods.

Zero-shot learning methods typically assume that the new, unseen classes encountered during deployment come from the same distribution as the the classes in the training set. However, real-world scenarios often involve class distribution shifts (e.g., in age or gender for person identification), posing challenges for zero-shot classifiers that rely on learned representations from training classes. In this work, we propose and analyze a model that assumes that the attribute responsible for the shift is unknown in advance. We show that in this setting, standard training may lead to non-robust representations. To mitigate this, we develop an algorithm for learning robust representations in which (a) synthetic data environments are constructed via hierarchical sampling, and (b) environment balancing penalization, inspired by out-of-distribution problems, is applied. We show that our algorithm improves generalization to diverse class distributions in both simulations and experiments on real-world datasets.

Graph Transformers (GTs) have recently emerged as popular alternatives to traditional message-passing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), due to their theoretically superior expressiveness and impressive performance reported on standard node classification benchmarks, often significantly outperforming GNNs. In this paper, we conduct a thorough empirical analysis to reevaluate the performance of three classic GNN models (GCN, GAT, and GraphSAGE) against GTs. Our findings suggest that the previously reported superiority of GTs may have been overstated due to suboptimal hyperparameter configurations in GNNs. Remarkably, with slight hyperparameter tuning, these classic GNN models achieve state-of-the-art performance, matching or even exceeding that of recent GTs across 17 out of the 18 diverse datasets examined. Additionally, we conduct detailed ablation studies to investigate the influence of various GNN configurations—such as normalization, dropout, residual connections, and network depth—on node classification performance. Our study aims to promote a higher standard of empirical rigor in the field of graph machine learning, encouraging more accurate comparisons and evaluations of model capabilities. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/LUOyk1999/tunedGNN.

Deploying deep neural networks for risk-sensitive tasks necessitates an uncertainty estimation mechanism. This paper introduces *hierarchical selective classification*, extending selective classification to a hierarchical setting. Our approach leverages the inherent structure of class relationships, enabling models to reduce the specificity of their predictions when faced with uncertainty. In this paper, we first formalize hierarchical risk and coverage, and introduce hierarchical risk-coverage curves. Next, we develop algorithms for hierarchical selective classification (which we refer to as "inference rules"), and propose an efficient algorithm that guarantees a target accuracy constraint with high probability. Lastly, we conduct extensive empirical studies on over a thousand ImageNet classifiers, revealing that training regimes such as CLIP, pretraining on ImageNet21k and knowledge distillation boost hierarchical selective performance.

In this paper, we propose a provably efficient natural policy gradient algorithm called Spectral Dynamic Embedding Policy Optimization (\SDEPO) for two-player zero-sum stochastic Markov games with continuous state space and finite action space. In the policy evaluation procedure of our algorithm, a novel kernel embedding method is employed to construct a finite-dimensional linear approximations to the state-action value function. We explicitly analyze the approximation error in policy evaluation, and show that \SDEPO\ achieves an $\tilde{O}(\frac{1}{(1-\gamma)^3\epsilon})$ last-iterate convergence to the $\epsilon-$optimal Nash equilibrium, which is independent of the cardinality of the state space. The complexity result matches the best-known results for global convergence of policy gradient algorithms for single agent setting. Moreover, we also propose a practical variant of \SDEPO\ to deal with continuous action space and empirical results demonstrate the practical superiority of the proposed method.

We examine the continuous-time counterpart of mirror descent, namely mirror flow, on classification problems which are linearly separable. Such problems are minimised ‘at infinity’ and have many possible solutions; we study which solution is preferred by the algorithm depending on the mirror potential. For exponential tailed losses and under mild assumptions on the potential, we show that the iterates converge in direction towards a $\phi_\infty$-maximum margin classifier. The function $\phi_\infty$ is the horizon function of the mirror potential and characterises its shape ‘at infinity’. When the potential is separable, a simple formula allows to compute this function. We analyse several examples of potentials and provide numerical experiments highlighting our results.

A straightforward pipeline for zero-shot out-of-distribution (OOD) detection involves selecting potential OOD labels from an extensive semantic pool and then leveraging a pre-trained vision-language model to perform classification on both in-distribution (ID) and OOD labels. In this paper, we theorize that enhancing performance requires expanding the semantic pool, while increasing the expected probability of selected OOD labels being activated by OOD samples, and ensuring low mutual dependence among the activations of these OOD labels. A natural expansion manner is to adopt a larger lexicon; however, the inevitable introduction of numerous synonyms and uncommon words fails to meet the above requirements, indicating that viable expansion manners move beyond merely selecting words from a lexicon. Since OOD detection aims to correctly classify input images into ID/OOD class groups, we can "make up" OOD label candidates which are not standard class names but beneficial for the process. Observing that the original semantic pool is comprised of unmodified specific class names, we correspondingly construct a conjugated semantic pool (CSP) consisting of modified superclass names, each serving as a cluster center for samples sharing similar properties across different categories. Consistent with our established theory, expanding OOD label candidates with the CSP satisfies the requirements and outperforms existing works by 7.89% in FPR95. Codes are available in https://github.com/MengyuanChen21/NeurIPS2024-CSP.

EEVR (Emotion Elicitation in Virtual Reality) is a novel dataset specifically designed for language supervision-based pre-training of emotion recognition tasks, such as valence and arousal classification. It features high-quality physiological signals, including electrodermal activity (EDA) and photoplethysmography (PPG), acquired through emotion elicitation via 360-degree virtual reality (VR) videos. Additionally, it includes subject-wise textual descriptions of emotions experienced during each stimulus gathered from qualitative interviews. The dataset consists of recordings from 37 participants and is the first dataset to pair raw text with physiological signals, providing additional contextual information that objective labels cannot offer. To leverage this dataset, we introduced the Contrastive Language Signal Pre-training (CLSP) method, which jointly learns representations using pairs of physiological signals and textual descriptions. Our results show that integrating self-reported textual descriptions with physiological signals significantly improves performance on emotion recognition tasks, such as arousal and valence classification. Moreover, our pre-trained CLSP model demonstrates strong zero-shot transferability to existing datasets, outperforming supervised baseline models, suggesting that the representations learned by our method are more contextualized and generalized. The dataset also includes baseline models for arousal, valence, and emotion classification, as well as code for data cleaning and feature extraction. Further details and access to the dataset are available at https://melangelabiiitd.github.io/EEVR/.

Understanding the semantics of individual regions or patches of unconstrained images, such as open-world object detection, remains a critical yet challenging task in computer vision. Building on the success of powerful image-level vision-language (ViL) foundation models like CLIP, recent efforts have sought to harness their capabilities by either training a contrastive model from scratch with an extensive collection of region-label pairs or aligning the outputs of a detection model with image-level representations of region proposals. Despite notable progress, these approaches are plagued by computationally intensive training requirements, susceptibility to data noise, and deficiency in contextual information. To address these limitations, we explore the synergistic potential of off-the-shelf foundation models, leveraging their respective strengths in localization and semantics. We introduce a novel, generic, and efficient architecture, named RegionSpot, designed to integrate position-aware localization knowledge from a localization foundation model (e.g., SAM) with semantic information from a ViL model (e.g., CLIP). To fully exploit pretrained knowledge while minimizing training overhead, we keep both foundation models frozen, focusing optimization efforts solely on a lightweight attention-based knowledge integration module. Extensive experiments in open-world object recognition show that our RegionSpot achieves significant performance gain over prior alternatives, along with substantial computational savings (e.g., training our model with 3 million data in a single day using 8 V100 GPUs). RegionSpot outperforms GLIP-L by 2.9 in mAP on LVIS val set, with an even larger margin of 13.1 AP for more challenging and rare categories, and a 2.5 AP increase on ODinW. Furthermore, it exceeds GroundingDINO-L by 11.0 AP for rare categories on the LVIS minival set.

Fine-tuning foundation models often compromises their robustness to distribution shifts. To remedy this, most robust fine-tuning methods aim to preserve the pre-trained features. However, not all pre-trained features are robust and those methods are largely indifferent to which ones to preserve. We propose dual risk minimization (DRM), which combines empirical risk minimization with worst-case risk minimization, to better preserve the core features of downstream tasks. In particular, we utilize core-feature descriptions generated by LLMs to induce core-based zero-shot predictions which then serve as proxies to estimate the worst-case risk. DRM balances two crucial aspects of model robustness: expected performance and worst-case performance, establishing a new state of the art on various real-world benchmarks. DRM significantly improves the out-of-distribution performance of CLIP ViT-L/14@336 on ImageNet (75.9$\to$77.1), WILDS-iWildCam (47.1$\to$51.8), and WILDS-FMoW (50.7$\to$53.1); opening up new avenues for robust fine-tuning. Our code is available at https://github.com/vaynexie/DRM.

In this work, we observe that model trained on vast general images via masking strategy, has been naturally embedded with their distribution knowledge, thus spontaneously attains the underlying potential for strong image denoising. Based on this observation, we propose a novel zero-shot denoising paradigm, i.e., $\textbf{M}$asked $\textbf{P}$re-train then $\textbf{I}$terative fill ($\textbf{MPI}$). MPI first trains model via masking and then employs pre-trained weight for high-quality zero-shot image denoising on a single noisy image. Concretely, MPI comprises two key procedures: $\textbf{1) Masked Pre-training}$ involves training model to reconstruct massive natural images with random masking for generalizable representations, gathering the potential for valid zero-shot denoising on images with varying noise degradation and even in distinct image types. $\textbf{2) Iterative filling}$ exploits pre-trained knowledge for effective zero-shot denoising. It iteratively optimizes the image by leveraging pre-trained weights, focusing on alternate reconstruction of different image parts, and gradually assembles fully denoised image within limited number of iterations. Comprehensive experiments across various noisy scenarios underscore the notable advances of MPI over previous approaches with a marked reduction in inference time.

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) performs zero-shot image classification by mapping images and textual class representation into a shared embedding space, then retrieving the class closest to the image. This work provides a new approach for interpreting CLIP models for image classification from the lens of mutual knowledge between the two modalities. Specifically, we ask: what concepts do both vision and language CLIP encoders learn in common that influence the joint embedding space, causing points to be closer or further apart? We answer this question via an approach of textual concept-based explanations, showing their effectiveness, and perform an analysis encompassing a pool of 13 CLIP models varying in architecture, size and pretraining datasets. We explore those different aspects in relation to mutual knowledge, and analyze zero-shot predictions. Our approach demonstrates an effective and human-friendly way of understanding zero-shot classification decisions with CLIP.

Interpreting the decisions of deep learning models, including audio classifiers, is crucial for ensuring the transparency and trustworthiness of this technology. In this paper, we introduce LMAC-ZS (Listenable Maps for Zero-Shot Audio Classifiers), which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first decoder-based post-hoc explanation method for explaining the decisions of zero-shot audio classifiers. The proposed method utilizes a novel loss function that aims to closely reproduce the original similarity patterns between text-and-audio pairs in the generated explanations. We provide an extensive evaluation using the Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP) model to showcase that our interpreter remains faithful to the decisions in a zero-shot classification context. Moreover, we qualitatively show that our method produces meaningful explanations that correlate well with different text prompts.

Zero-Shot Temporal Action Detection (ZSTAD) aims to classify and localize action segments in untrimmed videos for unseen action categories. Most existing ZSTAD methods utilize a foreground-based approach, limiting the integration of text and visual features due to their reliance on pre-extracted proposals. In this paper, we introduce a cross-modal ZSTAD baseline with mutual cross-attention, integrating both text and visual information throughout the detection process. Our simple approach results in superior performance compared to previous methods. Despite this improvement, we further identify a common-action bias issue that the cross-modal baseline over-focus on common sub-actions due to a lack of ability to discriminate text-related visual parts. To address this issue, we propose Text-infused attention and Foreground-aware Action Detection (Ti-FAD), which enhances the ability to focus on text-related sub-actions and distinguish relevant action segments from the background. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that Ti-FAD outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on ZSTAD benchmarks by a large margin: 41.2\% (+ 11.0\%) on THUMOS14 and 32.0\% (+ 5.4\%) on ActivityNet v1.3. Code is available at: https://github.com/YearangLee/Ti-FAD.

Toxicity classification in textual content remains a significant problem. Data with labels from a single annotator fall short of capturing the diversity of human perspectives. Therefore, there is a growing need to incorporate crowdsourced annotations for training an effective toxicity classifier. Additionally, the standard approach to training a classifier using empirical risk minimization (ERM) may fail to address the potential shifts between the training set and testing set due to exploiting spurious correlations. This work introduces a novel bi-level optimization framework that integrates crowdsourced annotations with the soft-labeling technique and optimizes the soft-label weights by Group Distributionally Robust Optimization (GroupDRO) to enhance the robustness against out-of-distribution (OOD) risk. We theoretically prove the convergence of our bi-level optimization algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing baseline methods in terms of both average and worst-group accuracy, confirming its effectiveness in leveraging crowdsourced annotations to achieve more effective and robust toxicity classification.

Self play via online learning is one of the premier ways to solve large-scale zero-sum games, both in theory and practice. Particularly popular algorithms include optimistic multiplicative weights update (OMWU) and optimistic gradient-descent-ascent (OGDA). While both algorithms enjoy $O(1/T)$ ergodic convergence to Nash equilibrium in two-player zero-sum games, OMWU offers several advantages, including logarithmic dependence on the size of the payoff matrix and $\tilde{O}(1/T)$ convergence to coarse correlated equilibria even in general-sum games. However, in terms of last-iterate convergence in two-player zero-sum games, an increasingly popular topic in this area, OGDA guarantees that the duality gap shrinks at a rate of $(1/\sqrt{T})$, while the best existing last-iterate convergence for OMWU depends on some game-dependent constant that could be arbitrarily large. This begs the question: is this potentially slow last-iterate convergence an inherent disadvantage of OMWU, or is the current analysis too loose? Somewhat surprisingly, we show that the former is true. More generally, we prove that a broad class of algorithms that do not forget the past quickly all suffer the same issue: for any arbitrarily small $\delta>0$, there exists a $2\times 2$ matrix game such that the algorithm admits a constant duality gap even after $1/\delta$ rounds. This class of algorithms includes OMWU and other standard optimistic follow-the-regularized-leader algorithms.

Convolutional residual neural networks (ConvResNets), though overparametersized, can achieve remarkable prediction performance in practice, which cannot be well explained by conventional wisdom. To bridge this gap, we study the performance of ConvResNeXts trained with weight decay, which cover ConvResNets as a special case, from the perspective of nonparametric classification. Our analysis allows for infinitely many building blocks in ConvResNeXts, and shows that weight decay implicitly enforces sparsity on these blocks. Specifically, we consider a smooth target function supported on a low-dimensional manifold, then prove that ConvResNeXts can adapt to the function smoothness and low-dimensional structures and efficiently learn the function without suffering from the curse of dimensionality. Our findings partially justify the advantage of overparameterized ConvResNeXts over conventional machine learning models.

Significant research efforts have been made to scale and improve vision-language model (VLM) training approaches. Yet, with an ever-growing number of benchmarks, researchers are tasked with the heavy burden of implementing each protocol, bearing a non-trivial computational cost, and making sense of how all these benchmarks translate into meaningful axes of progress. To facilitate a systematic evaluation of VLM progress, we introduce UniBench: a unified implementation of 50+ VLM benchmarks spanning a range of carefully categorized vision-centric capabilities from object recognition to spatial awareness, counting, and much more. We showcase the utility of UniBench for measuring progress by evaluating nearly 60 publicly available vision-language models, trained on scales of up to 12.8B samples. We find that while scaling training data or model size can boost many vision-language model capabilities, scaling offers little benefit for reasoning or relations. Surprisingly, we also discover today's best VLMs struggle on simple digit recognition and counting tasks, e.g. MNIST, which much simpler networks can solve. Where scale falls short, we find that more precise interventions, such as data quality or tailored-learning objectives offer more promise. For practitioners, we also offer guidance on selecting a suitable VLM for a given application. Finally, we release an easy-to-run UniBench code-base with the full set of 50+ benchmarks and comparisons across 59 models as well as a distilled, representative set of benchmarks that runs in 5 minutes on a single GPU. UniBench with model evaluations on all benchmarks are provided as a toolbox at: https://github.com/facebookresearch/unibench

Zero-shot optimization involves optimizing a target task that was not seen during training, aiming to provide the optimal solution without or with minimal adjustments to the optimizer. It is crucial to ensure reliable and robust performance in various applications. Current optimizers often struggle with zero-shot optimization and require intricate hyperparameter tuning to adapt to new tasks. To address this, we propose a Pretrained Optimization Model (POM) that leverages knowledge gained from optimizing diverse tasks, offering efficient solutions to zero-shot optimization through direct application or fine-tuning with few-shot samples. Evaluation on the BBOB benchmark and two robot control tasks demonstrates that POM outperforms state-of-the-art black-box optimization methods, especially for high-dimensional tasks. Fine-tuning POM with a small number of samples and budget yields significant performance improvements. Moreover, POM demonstrates robust generalization across diverse task distributions, dimensions, population sizes, and optimization horizons. For code implementation, see https://github.com/ninja-wm/POM/.

Markov jump processes are continuous-time stochastic processes which describe dynamical systems evolving in discrete state spaces. These processes find wide application in the natural sciences and machine learning, but their inference is known to be far from trivial. In this work we introduce a methodology for *zero-shot inference* of Markov jump processes (MJPs), on bounded state spaces, from noisy and sparse observations, which consists of two components. First, a broad probability distribution over families of MJPs, as well as over possible observation times and noise mechanisms, with which we simulate a synthetic dataset of hidden MJPs and their noisy observations. Second, a neural recognition model that processes subsets of the simulated observations, and that is trained to output the initial condition and rate matrix of the target MJP in a supervised way. We empirically demonstrate that *one and the same* (pretrained) recognition model can infer, *in a zero-shot fashion*, hidden MJPs evolving in state spaces of different dimensionalities. Specifically, we infer MJPs which describe (i) discrete flashing ratchet systems, which are a type of Brownian motors, and the conformational dynamics in (ii) molecular simulations, (iii) experimental ion channel data and (iv) simple protein folding models. What is more, we show that our model performs on par with state-of-the-art models which are trained on the target datasets. Our pretrained model is available online.