Daily Papers

Zero-shot quantization (ZSQ) enables neural network compression without training data, which is crucial in restricted data access environments. However, existing ZSQ methods suffer from significant activation loss in low-bit environments owing to their coarse-grained scaling strategy. To address this issue, we propose GranQ, a novel ZSQ approach that leverages layer-channel awareness to minimize the quantization error. Unlike conventional layer- or channel-wise quantization, GranQ dynamically adjusts quantization granularity by considering both layer- and channel-level activation distributions. This enables fine-grained quantization while minimizing activation distortion. Additionally, we introduce vectorized activation quantization, which enables efficient parallel computation and reduces computational overhead while preserving accuracy. GranQ achieves superior performance compared with those of state-of-the-art ZSQ methods that employ quantization-aware training. With these findings, we anticipate that GranQ will inspire novel research directions beyond conventional ZSQ approaches focused on data generation and model training.

Although Kolmogorov-Arnold based interpretable networks (KAN) have strong theoretical expressiveness, they face significant parameter explosion and high-frequency feature capture challenges in high-dimensional tasks. To address this issue, we propose the Kolmogorov-Arnold-Fourier Network (KAF), which effectively integrates trainable Random Fourier Features (RFF) and a novel hybrid GELU-Fourier activation mechanism to balance parameter efficiency and spectral representation capabilities. Our key technical contributions include: (1) merging KAN's dual-matrix structure through matrix association properties to substantially reduce parameters; (2) introducing learnable RFF initialization strategies to eliminate spectral distortion in high-dimensional approximation tasks; (3) implementing an adaptive hybrid activation function that progressively enhances frequency representation during the training process. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our KAF across various domains including vision, NLP, audio processing, and differential equation-solving tasks, effectively combining theoretical interpretability with practical utility and computational efficiency.

Prior work has analyzed the robustness of visual encoders to image transformations and corruptions, particularly in cases where such alterations are not seen during training. When this occurs, they introduce a form of distribution shift at test time, often leading to performance degradation. The primary focus has been on severe corruptions that, when applied aggressively, distort useful signals necessary for accurate semantic predictions. We take a different perspective by analyzing parameters of the image acquisition process and transformations that may be subtle or even imperceptible to the human eye. We find that such parameters are systematically encoded in the learned visual representations and can be easily recovered. More strikingly, their presence can have a profound impact, either positively or negatively, on semantic predictions. This effect depends on whether there is a strong correlation or anti-correlation between semantic labels and these acquisition-based or processing-based labels. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/ryan-caesar-ramos/visual-encoder-traces

As large language models are increasingly responsible for online content, concerns arise about the impact of repeatedly processing their own outputs. Inspired by the "broken telephone" effect in chained human communication, this study investigates whether LLMs similarly distort information through iterative generation. Through translation-based experiments, we find that distortion accumulates over time, influenced by language choice and chain complexity. While degradation is inevitable, it can be mitigated through strategic prompting techniques. These findings contribute to discussions on the long-term effects of AI-mediated information propagation, raising important questions about the reliability of LLM-generated content in iterative workflows.

Activation compressed training provides a solution towards reducing the memory cost of training deep neural networks~(DNNs). However, state-of-the-art work combines a search of quantization bit-width with the training, which makes the procedure complicated and less transparent. To this end, we propose a simple and effective method to compress DNN training. Our method is motivated by an instructive observation: DNN backward propagation mainly utilizes the low-frequency component (LFC) of the activation maps, while the majority of memory is for caching the high-frequency component (HFC) during the training. This indicates the HFC of activation maps is highly redundant and compressible during DNN training, which inspires our proposed Dual Activation Precision (DIVISION). During the training, DIVISION preserves the high-precision copy of LFC and compresses the HFC into a light-weight copy with low numerical precision. This can significantly reduce the memory cost without negatively affecting the precision of backward propagation such that DIVISION maintains competitive model accuracy. Experiment results show DIVISION has better comprehensive performance than state-of-the-art methods, including over 10x compression of activation maps and competitive training throughput, without loss of model accuracy.

Catastrophic overfitting (CO) presents a significant challenge in single-step adversarial training (AT), manifesting as highly distorted deep neural networks (DNNs) that are vulnerable to multi-step adversarial attacks. However, the underlying factors that lead to the distortion of decision boundaries remain unclear. In this work, we delve into the specific changes within different DNN layers and discover that during CO, the former layers are more susceptible, experiencing earlier and greater distortion, while the latter layers show relative insensitivity. Our analysis further reveals that this increased sensitivity in former layers stems from the formation of pseudo-robust shortcuts, which alone can impeccably defend against single-step adversarial attacks but bypass genuine-robust learning, resulting in distorted decision boundaries. Eliminating these shortcuts can partially restore robustness in DNNs from the CO state, thereby verifying that dependence on them triggers the occurrence of CO. This understanding motivates us to implement adaptive weight perturbations across different layers to hinder the generation of pseudo-robust shortcuts, consequently mitigating CO. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method, Layer-Aware Adversarial Weight Perturbation (LAP), can effectively prevent CO and further enhance robustness.

We propose a new method for generating realistic datasets with distribution shifts using any decoder-based generative model. Our approach systematically creates datasets with varying intensities of distribution shifts, facilitating a comprehensive analysis of model performance degradation. We then use these generated datasets to evaluate the performance of various commonly used networks and observe a consistent decline in performance with increasing shift intensity, even when the effect is almost perceptually unnoticeable to the human eye. We see this degradation even when using data augmentations. We also find that enlarging the training dataset beyond a certain point has no effect on the robustness and that stronger inductive biases increase robustness.

Activation steering is a promising technique for controlling LLM behavior by adding semantically meaningful vectors directly into a model's hidden states during inference. It is often framed as a precise, interpretable, and potentially safer alternative to fine-tuning. We demonstrate the opposite: steering systematically breaks model alignment safeguards, making it comply with harmful requests. Through extensive experiments on different model families, we show that even steering in a random direction can increase the probability of harmful compliance from 0% to 2-27%. Alarmingly, steering benign features from a sparse autoencoder (SAE), a common source of interpretable directions, increases these rates by a further 2-4%. Finally, we show that combining 20 randomly sampled vectors that jailbreak a single prompt creates a universal attack, significantly increasing harmful compliance on unseen requests. These results challenge the paradigm of safety through interpretability, showing that precise control over model internals does not guarantee precise control over model behavior.

Mechanistic interpretability aims to understand model behaviors in terms of specific, interpretable features, often hypothesized to manifest as low-dimensional subspaces of activations. Specifically, recent studies have explored subspace interventions (such as activation patching) as a way to simultaneously manipulate model behavior and attribute the features behind it to given subspaces. In this work, we demonstrate that these two aims diverge, potentially leading to an illusory sense of interpretability. Counterintuitively, even if a subspace intervention makes the model's output behave as if the value of a feature was changed, this effect may be achieved by activating a dormant parallel pathway leveraging another subspace that is causally disconnected from model outputs. We demonstrate this phenomenon in a distilled mathematical example, in two real-world domains (the indirect object identification task and factual recall), and present evidence for its prevalence in practice. In the context of factual recall, we further show a link to rank-1 fact editing, providing a mechanistic explanation for previous work observing an inconsistency between fact editing performance and fact localization. However, this does not imply that activation patching of subspaces is intrinsically unfit for interpretability. To contextualize our findings, we also show what a success case looks like in a task (indirect object identification) where prior manual circuit analysis informs an understanding of the location of a feature. We explore the additional evidence needed to argue that a patched subspace is faithful.

The success of artificial neural networks (ANNs) hinges greatly on the judicious selection of an activation function, introducing non-linearity into network and enabling them to model sophisticated relationships in data. However, the search of activation functions has largely relied on empirical knowledge in the past, lacking theoretical guidance, which has hindered the identification of more effective activation functions. In this work, we offer a proper solution to such issue. Firstly, we theoretically demonstrate the existence of the worst activation function with boundary conditions (WAFBC) from the perspective of information entropy. Furthermore, inspired by the Taylor expansion form of information entropy functional, we propose the Entropy-based Activation Function Optimization (EAFO) methodology. EAFO methodology presents a novel perspective for designing static activation functions in deep neural networks and the potential of dynamically optimizing activation during iterative training. Utilizing EAFO methodology, we derive a novel activation function from ReLU, known as Correction Regularized ReLU (CRReLU). Experiments conducted with vision transformer and its variants on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet-1K datasets demonstrate the superiority of CRReLU over existing corrections of ReLU. Extensive empirical studies on task of large language model (LLM) fine-tuning, CRReLU exhibits superior performance compared to GELU, suggesting its broader potential for practical applications.

Perspective distortion (PD) causes unprecedented changes in shape, size, orientation, angles, and other spatial relationships of visual concepts in images. Precisely estimating camera intrinsic and extrinsic parameters is a challenging task that prevents synthesizing perspective distortion. Non-availability of dedicated training data poses a critical barrier to developing robust computer vision methods. Additionally, distortion correction methods make other computer vision tasks a multi-step approach and lack performance. In this work, we propose mitigating perspective distortion (MPD) by employing a fine-grained parameter control on a specific family of M\"obius transform to model real-world distortion without estimating camera intrinsic and extrinsic parameters and without the need for actual distorted data. Also, we present a dedicated perspectively distorted benchmark dataset, ImageNet-PD, to benchmark the robustness of deep learning models against this new dataset. The proposed method outperforms existing benchmarks, ImageNet-E and ImageNet-X. Additionally, it significantly improves performance on ImageNet-PD while consistently performing on standard data distribution. Notably, our method shows improved performance on three PD-affected real-world applications crowd counting, fisheye image recognition, and person re-identification and one PD-affected challenging CV task: object detection. The source code, dataset, and models are available on the project webpage at https://prakashchhipa.github.io/projects/mpd.

Distributional shift is a central challenge in the deployment of machine learning models as they can be ill-equipped for real-world data. This is particularly evident in text-to-audio generation where the encoded representations are easily undermined by unseen prompts, which leads to the degradation of generated audio -- the limited set of the text-audio pairs remains inadequate for conditional audio generation in the wild as user prompts are under-specified. In particular, we observe a consistent audio quality degradation in generated audio samples with user prompts, as opposed to training set prompts. To this end, we present a retrieval-based in-context prompt editing framework that leverages the training captions as demonstrative exemplars to revisit the user prompts. We show that the framework enhanced the audio quality across the set of collected user prompts, which were edited with reference to the training captions as exemplars.

Activation sparsity refers to the existence of considerable weakly-contributed elements among activation outputs. As a prevalent property of the models using the ReLU activation function, it has been proven a promising paradigm to boost model inference efficiency. Nevertheless, most large language models (LLMs) adopt activation functions without intrinsic activation sparsity (e.g., GELU and Swish). Some recent efforts have explored introducing ReLU or its variants as the substitutive activation function to help LLMs achieve activation sparsity and inference acceleration, but few can simultaneously obtain high sparsity and comparable model performance. This paper introduces an effective sparsification method named "ProSparse" to push LLMs for higher activation sparsity without decreasing model performance. Specifically, after substituting the activation function of LLMs with ReLU, ProSparse adopts progressive sparsity regularization with a factor smoothly increasing along sine curves in multiple stages. This can enhance activation sparsity and alleviate performance degradation by avoiding radical shifts in activation distribution. With ProSparse, we obtain high sparsity of 89.32% and 88.80% for LLaMA2-7B and LLaMA2-13B, respectively, achieving comparable performance to their original Swish-activated versions. Our inference acceleration experiments further demonstrate the practical acceleration brought by higher activation sparsity.

Neural networks have proven to be a highly effective tool for solving complex problems in many areas of life. Recently, their importance and practical usability have further been reinforced with the advent of deep learning. One of the important conditions for the success of neural networks is the choice of an appropriate activation function introducing non-linearity into the model. Many types of these functions have been proposed in the literature in the past, but there is no single comprehensive source containing their exhaustive overview. The absence of this overview, even in our experience, leads to redundancy and the unintentional rediscovery of already existing activation functions. To bridge this gap, our paper presents an extensive survey involving 400 activation functions, which is several times larger in scale than previous surveys. Our comprehensive compilation also references these surveys; however, its main goal is to provide the most comprehensive overview and systematization of previously published activation functions with links to their original sources. The secondary aim is to update the current understanding of this family of functions.

The capacity of a modern deep learning system to determine if a sample falls within its realm of knowledge is fundamental and important. In this paper, we offer insights and analyses of recent state-of-the-art out-of-distribution (OOD) detection methods - extremely simple activation shaping (ASH). We demonstrate that activation pruning has a detrimental effect on OOD detection, while activation scaling enhances it. Moreover, we propose SCALE, a simple yet effective post-hoc network enhancement method for OOD detection, which attains state-of-the-art OOD detection performance without compromising in-distribution (ID) accuracy. By integrating scaling concepts into the training process to capture a sample's ID characteristics, we propose Intermediate Tensor SHaping (ISH), a lightweight method for training time OOD detection enhancement. We achieve AUROC scores of +1.85\% for near-OOD and +0.74\% for far-OOD datasets on the OpenOOD v1.5 ImageNet-1K benchmark. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/kai422/SCALE.

Recent work has shown that narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs, a phenomenon termed emergent misalignment (EM). While concerning, these findings were limited to finetuning and activation steering, leaving out in-context learning (ICL). We therefore ask: does EM emerge in ICL? We find that it does: across three datasets, three frontier models produce broadly misaligned responses at rates between 2% and 17% given 64 narrow in-context examples, and up to 58% with 256 examples. We also examine mechanisms of EM by eliciting step-by-step reasoning (while leaving in-context examples unchanged). Manual analysis of the resulting chain-of-thought shows that 67.5% of misaligned traces explicitly rationalize harmful outputs by adopting a reckless or dangerous ''persona'', echoing prior results on finetuning-induced EM.

In this paper, we propose Image Downscaling Assessment by Rate-Distortion (IDA-RD), a novel measure to quantitatively evaluate image downscaling algorithms. In contrast to image-based methods that measure the quality of downscaled images, ours is process-based that draws ideas from rate-distortion theory to measure the distortion incurred during downscaling. Our main idea is that downscaling and super-resolution (SR) can be viewed as the encoding and decoding processes in the rate-distortion model, respectively, and that a downscaling algorithm that preserves more details in the resulting low-resolution (LR) images should lead to less distorted high-resolution (HR) images in SR. In other words, the distortion should increase as the downscaling algorithm deteriorates. However, it is non-trivial to measure this distortion as it requires the SR algorithm to be blind and stochastic. Our key insight is that such requirements can be met by recent SR algorithms based on deep generative models that can find all matching HR images for a given LR image on their learned image manifolds. Extensive experimental results show the effectiveness of our IDA-RD measure.

The widely used ReLU is favored for its hardware efficiency, {as the implementation at inference is a one bit sign case,} yet suffers from issues such as the ``dying ReLU'' problem, where during training, neurons fail to activate and constantly remain at zero, as highlighted by Lu et al. Traditional approaches to mitigate this issue often introduce more complex and less hardware-friendly activation functions. In this work, we propose a Hysteresis Rectified Linear Unit (HeLU), an efficient activation function designed to address the ``dying ReLU'' problem with minimal complexity. Unlike traditional activation functions with fixed thresholds for training and inference, HeLU employs a variable threshold that refines the backpropagation. This refined mechanism allows simpler activation functions to achieve competitive performance comparable to their more complex counterparts without introducing unnecessary complexity or requiring inductive biases. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that HeLU enhances model generalization across diverse datasets, offering a promising solution for efficient and effective inference suitable for a wide range of neural network architectures.

Motivated in part by their relevance for low-precision training and quantization, massive activations in large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as a topic of interest. However, existing analyses are limited in scope, and generalizability across architectures is unclear. This paper helps address some of these gaps by conducting an analysis of massive activations across a broad range of LLMs, including both GLU-based and non-GLU-based architectures. Our findings challenge several prior assumptions, most importantly: (1) not all massive activations are detrimental, i.e. suppressing them does not lead to an explosion of perplexity or a collapse in downstream task performance; (2) proposed mitigation strategies such as Attention KV bias are model-specific and ineffective in certain cases. We consequently investigate novel hybrid mitigation strategies; in particular pairing Target Variance Rescaling (TVR) with Attention KV bias or Dynamic Tanh (DyT) successfully balances the mitigation of massive activations with preserved downstream model performance in the scenarios we investigated. Our code is available at: https://github.com/bluorion-com/refine_massive_activations.

The effect of underrepresentation on the performance of minority groups is known to be a serious problem in supervised learning settings; however, it has been underexplored so far in the context of self-supervised learning (SSL). In this paper, we demonstrate that contrastive learning (CL), a popular variant of SSL, tends to collapse representations of minority groups with certain majority groups. We refer to this phenomenon as representation harm and demonstrate it on image and text datasets using the corresponding popular CL methods. Furthermore, our causal mediation analysis of allocation harm on a downstream classification task reveals that representation harm is partly responsible for it, thus emphasizing the importance of studying and mitigating representation harm. Finally, we provide a theoretical explanation for representation harm using a stochastic block model that leads to a representational neural collapse in a contrastive learning setting.

Reliably controlling the behavior of large language models is a pressing open problem. Existing methods include supervised finetuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback, prompt engineering and guided decoding. We instead investigate activation engineering: modifying activations at inference-time to predictably alter model behavior. We bias the forward pass with a 'steering vector' implicitly specified through natural language. Past work learned these steering vectors; our Activation Addition (ActAdd) method instead computes them by taking the activation differences which result from pairs of prompts. We demonstrate ActAdd on GPT-2 on OpenWebText and ConceptNet, and replicate the effect on Llama-13B and GPT-J-6B. Our approach yields inference-time control over high-level properties of output & preserves performance on off-target topics. The method requires far less compute and implementation effort than finetuning and RLHF, allows for natural language specification by users, and its overhead scales naturally with model size.

Humans are prone to cognitive distortions -- biased thinking patterns that lead to exaggerated responses to specific stimuli, albeit in very different contexts. This paper demonstrates that advanced Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit similar tendencies. While these models are designed to respond queries under safety mechanism, they sometimes reject harmless queries in the presence of certain visual stimuli, disregarding the benign nature of their contexts. As the initial step in investigating this behavior, we identify three types of stimuli that trigger the oversensitivity of existing MLLMs: Exaggerated Risk, Negated Harm, and Counterintuitive Interpretation. To systematically evaluate MLLMs' oversensitivity to these stimuli, we propose the Multimodal OverSenSitivity Benchmark (MOSSBench). This toolkit consists of 300 manually collected benign multimodal queries, cross-verified by third-party reviewers (AMT). Empirical studies using MOSSBench on 20 MLLMs reveal several insights: (1). Oversensitivity is prevalent among SOTA MLLMs, with refusal rates reaching up to 76% for harmless queries. (2). Safer models are more oversensitive: increasing safety may inadvertently raise caution and conservatism in the model's responses. (3). Different types of stimuli tend to cause errors at specific stages -- perception, intent reasoning, and safety judgement -- in the response process of MLLMs. These findings highlight the need for refined safety mechanisms that balance caution with contextually appropriate responses, improving the reliability of MLLMs in real-world applications. We make our project available at https://turningpoint-ai.github.io/MOSSBench/.

The activation function plays a crucial role in model optimisation, yet the optimal choice remains unclear. For example, the Sigmoid activation is the de-facto activation in balanced classification tasks, however, in imbalanced classification, it proves inappropriate due to bias towards frequent classes. In this work, we delve deeper in this phenomenon by performing a comprehensive statistical analysis in the classification and intermediate layers of both balanced and imbalanced networks and we empirically show that aligning the activation function with the data distribution, enhances the performance in both balanced and imbalanced tasks. To this end, we propose the Adaptive Parametric Activation (APA) function, a novel and versatile activation function that unifies most common activation functions under a single formula. APA can be applied in both intermediate layers and attention layers, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art on several imbalanced benchmarks such as ImageNet-LT, iNaturalist2018, Places-LT, CIFAR100-LT and LVIS and balanced benchmarks such as ImageNet1K, COCO and V3DET. The code is available at https://github.com/kostas1515/AGLU.

Many perception systems in mobile computing, autonomous navigation, and AR/VR face strict compute constraints that are particularly challenging for high-resolution input images. Previous works propose nonuniform downsamplers that "learn to zoom" on salient image regions, reducing compute while retaining task-relevant image information. However, for tasks with spatial labels (such as 2D/3D object detection and semantic segmentation), such distortions may harm performance. In this work (LZU), we "learn to zoom" in on the input image, compute spatial features, and then "unzoom" to revert any deformations. To enable efficient and differentiable unzooming, we approximate the zooming warp with a piecewise bilinear mapping that is invertible. LZU can be applied to any task with 2D spatial input and any model with 2D spatial features, and we demonstrate this versatility by evaluating on a variety of tasks and datasets: object detection on Argoverse-HD, semantic segmentation on Cityscapes, and monocular 3D object detection on nuScenes. Interestingly, we observe boosts in performance even when high-resolution sensor data is unavailable, implying that LZU can be used to "learn to upsample" as well.

This article presents a method for improving a keyword spotter (KWS) algorithm in noisy environments. Although beamforming (BF) and adaptive noise cancellation (ANC) techniques are robust in some conditions, they may degrade the performance of the activation system by distorting or suppressing useful signals. The authors propose a neural network architecture that uses several input channels and an attention mechanism that allows the network to determine the most useful channel or their combination. The improved quality of the algorithm was demonstrated on two datasets: from a laboratory with controlled conditions and from smart speakers in natural conditions. The proposed algorithm was compared against several baselines in terms of the quality of noise reduction metrics, KWS metrics, and computing resources in comparison with existing solutions.

Perceptual similarity metrics have progressively become more correlated with human judgments on perceptual similarity; however, despite recent advances, the addition of an imperceptible distortion can still compromise these metrics. In our study, we systematically examine the robustness of these metrics to imperceptible adversarial perturbations. Following the two-alternative forced-choice experimental design with two distorted images and one reference image, we perturb the distorted image closer to the reference via an adversarial attack until the metric flips its judgment. We first show that all metrics in our study are susceptible to perturbations generated via common adversarial attacks such as FGSM, PGD, and the One-pixel attack. Next, we attack the widely adopted LPIPS metric using spatial-transformation-based adversarial perturbations (stAdv) in a white-box setting to craft adversarial examples that can effectively transfer to other similarity metrics in a black-box setting. We also combine the spatial attack stAdv with PGD (ell_infty-bounded) attack to increase transferability and use these adversarial examples to benchmark the robustness of both traditional and recently developed metrics. Our benchmark provides a good starting point for discussion and further research on the robustness of metrics to imperceptible adversarial perturbations.

LLMs have shown remarkable capabilities, but precisely controlling their response behavior remains challenging. Existing activation steering methods alter LLM behavior indiscriminately, limiting their practical applicability in settings where selective responses are essential, such as content moderation or domain-specific assistants. In this paper, we propose Conditional Activation Steering (CAST), which analyzes LLM activation patterns during inference to selectively apply or withhold activation steering based on the input context. Our method is based on the observation that different categories of prompts activate distinct patterns in the model's hidden states. Using CAST, one can systematically control LLM behavior with rules like "if input is about hate speech or adult content, then refuse" or "if input is not about legal advice, then refuse." This allows for selective modification of responses to specific content while maintaining normal responses to other content, all without requiring weight optimization. We release an open-source implementation of our framework at github.com/IBM/activation-steering .

In recent years, we have witnessed the great advancement of Deep neural networks (DNNs) in image restoration. However, a critical limitation is that they cannot generalize well to real-world degradations with different degrees or types. In this paper, we are the first to propose a novel training strategy for image restoration from the causality perspective, to improve the generalization ability of DNNs for unknown degradations. Our method, termed Distortion Invariant representation Learning (DIL), treats each distortion type and degree as one specific confounder, and learns the distortion-invariant representation by eliminating the harmful confounding effect of each degradation. We derive our DIL with the back-door criterion in causality by modeling the interventions of different distortions from the optimization perspective. Particularly, we introduce counterfactual distortion augmentation to simulate the virtual distortion types and degrees as the confounders. Then, we instantiate the intervention of each distortion with a virtual model updating based on corresponding distorted images, and eliminate them from the meta-learning perspective. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our DIL on the generalization capability for unseen distortion types and degrees. Our code will be available at https://github.com/lixinustc/Causal-IR-DIL.

We observe an empirical phenomenon in Large Language Models (LLMs) -- very few activations exhibit significantly larger values than others (e.g., 100,000 times larger). We call them massive activations. First, we demonstrate the widespread existence of massive activations across various LLMs and characterize their locations. Second, we find their values largely stay constant regardless of the input, and they function as indispensable bias terms in LLMs. Third, these massive activations lead to the concentration of attention probabilities to their corresponding tokens, and further, implicit bias terms in the self-attention output. Last, we also study massive activations in Vision Transformers. Code is available at https://github.com/locuslab/massive-activations.

Spiking Neural Networks promise brain-inspired and energy-efficient computation by transmitting information through binary (0/1) spikes. Yet, their performance still lags behind that of artificial neural networks, often assumed to result from information loss caused by sparse and binary activations. In this work, we challenge this long-standing assumption and reveal a previously overlooked frequency bias: spiking neurons inherently suppress high-frequency components and preferentially propagate low-frequency information. This frequency-domain imbalance, we argue, is the root cause of degraded feature representation in SNNs. Empirically, on Spiking Transformers, adopting Avg-Pooling (low-pass) for token mixing lowers performance to 76.73% on Cifar-100, whereas replacing it with Max-Pool (high-pass) pushes the top-1 accuracy to 79.12%. Accordingly, we introduce Max-Former that restores high-frequency signals through two frequency-enhancing operators: (1) extra Max-Pool in patch embedding, and (2) Depth-Wise Convolution in place of self-attention. Notably, Max-Former attains 82.39% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet using only 63.99M parameters, surpassing Spikformer (74.81%, 66.34M) by +7.58%. Extending our insight beyond transformers, our Max-ResNet-18 achieves state-of-the-art performance on convolution-based benchmarks: 97.17% on CIFAR-10 and 83.06\% on CIFAR-100. We hope this simple yet effective solution inspires future research to explore the distinctive nature of spiking neural networks. Code is available: https://github.com/bic-L/MaxFormer.

To improve how neural networks function it is crucial to understand their learning process. The information bottleneck theory of deep learning proposes that neural networks achieve good generalization by compressing their representations to disregard information that is not relevant to the task. However, empirical evidence for this theory is conflicting, as compression was only observed when networks used saturating activation functions. In contrast, networks with non-saturating activation functions achieved comparable levels of task performance but did not show compression. In this paper we developed more robust mutual information estimation techniques, that adapt to hidden activity of neural networks and produce more sensitive measurements of activations from all functions, especially unbounded functions. Using these adaptive estimation techniques, we explored compression in networks with a range of different activation functions. With two improved methods of estimation, firstly, we show that saturation of the activation function is not required for compression, and the amount of compression varies between different activation functions. We also find that there is a large amount of variation in compression between different network initializations. Secondary, we see that L2 regularization leads to significantly increased compression, while preventing overfitting. Finally, we show that only compression of the last layer is positively correlated with generalization.

Objective assessment of source-separation systems still mismatches subjective human perception, especially when leakage and self-distortion interact. We introduce the Perceptual Separation (PS) and Perceptual Match (PM), the first pair of measures that functionally isolate these two factors. Our intrusive method begins with generating a bank of fundamental distortions for each reference waveform signal in the mixture. Distortions, references, and their respective system outputs from all sources are then independently encoded by a pre-trained self-supervised learning model. These representations are aggregated and projected onto a manifold via diffusion maps, which aligns Euclidean distances on the manifold with dissimilarities of the encoded waveforms. On this manifold, the PM measures the Mahalanobis distance from each output to its attributed cluster that consists of its reference and distortions embeddings, capturing self-distortion. The PS accounts for the Mahalanobis distance of the output to the attributed and to the closest non-attributed clusters, quantifying leakage. Both measures are differentiable and granular, operating at a resolution as low as 50 frames per second. We further derive, for both measures, deterministic error radius and non-asymptotic, high-probability confidence intervals (CIs). Experiments on English, Spanish, and music mixtures show that the PS and PM nearly always achieve the highest linear correlation coefficients with human mean-opinion scores than 14 competitors, reaching as high as 86.36% for speech and 87.21% for music. We observe, at worst, an error radius of 1.39% and a probabilistic 95% CI of 12.21% for these coefficients, which improves reliable and informed evaluation. Using mutual information, the measures complement each other most as their values decrease, suggesting they are jointly more informative as system performance degrades.

Real-world analog systems intrinsically suffer from noise that can impede model convergence and accuracy on a variety of deep learning models. We demonstrate that differentiable activations like GELU and SiLU enable robust propagation of gradients which help to mitigate analog quantization error that is ubiquitous to all analog systems. We perform analysis and training of convolutional, linear, and transformer networks in the presence of quantized noise. Here, we are able to demonstrate that continuously differentiable activation functions are significantly more noise resilient over conventional rectified activations. As in the case of ReLU, the error in gradients are 100x higher than those in GELU near zero. Our findings provide guidance for selecting appropriate activations to realize performant and reliable hardware implementations across several machine learning domains such as computer vision, signal processing, and beyond.

Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) have emerged as a promising solution for reducing the memory footprint and compute costs of deep neural networks. BNNs, on the other hand, suffer from information loss because binary activations are limited to only two values, resulting in reduced accuracy. To improve the accuracy, previous studies have attempted to control the distribution of binary activation by manually shifting the threshold of the activation function or making the shift amount trainable. During the process, they usually depended on statistical information computed from a batch. We argue that using statistical data from a batch fails to capture the crucial information for each input instance in BNN computations, and the differences between statistical information computed from each instance need to be considered when determining the binary activation threshold of each instance. Based on the concept, we propose the Binary Neural Network with INSTAnce-aware threshold (INSTA-BNN), which decides the activation threshold value considering the difference between statistical data computed from a batch and each instance. The proposed INSTA-BNN outperforms the baseline by 2.5% and 2.3% on the ImageNet classification task with comparable computing cost, achieving 68.0% and 71.7% top-1 accuracy on ResNet-18 and MobileNetV1 based models, respectively.

Recent studies suggest that with sufficiently wide models, most SGD solutions can, up to permutation, converge into the same basin. This phenomenon, known as the model re-basin regime, has significant implications for model averaging by ensuring the linear mode connectivity. However, current re-basin strategies are ineffective in many scenarios due to a lack of comprehensive understanding of underlying mechanisms. Addressing this gap, this paper provides novel insights into understanding and improving the standard practice. Firstly, we decompose re-normalization into rescaling and reshift, uncovering that rescaling plays a crucial role in re-normalization while re-basin performance is sensitive to shifts in model activation. The finding calls for a more nuanced handling of the activation shift. Secondly, we identify that the merged model suffers from the issue of activation collapse and magnitude collapse. Varying the learning rate, weight decay, and initialization method can mitigate the issues and improve model performance. Lastly, we propose a new perspective to unify the re-basin and pruning, under which a lightweight yet effective post-pruning technique is derived, which can significantly improve the model performance after pruning. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/XingyuQu/rethink-re-basin.

The increasing capabilities of large generative models and their ever more widespread deployment have raised concerns about their reliability, safety, and potential misuse. To address these issues, recent works have proposed to control model generation by steering model activations in order to effectively induce or prevent the emergence of concepts or behaviors in the generated output. In this paper we introduce Activation Transport (AcT), a general framework to steer activations guided by optimal transport theory that generalizes many previous activation-steering works. AcT is modality-agnostic and provides fine-grained control over the model behavior with negligible computational overhead, while minimally impacting model abilities. We experimentally show the effectiveness and versatility of our approach by addressing key challenges in large language models (LLMs) and text-to-image diffusion models (T2Is). For LLMs, we show that AcT can effectively mitigate toxicity, induce arbitrary concepts, and increase their truthfulness. In T2Is, we show how AcT enables fine-grained style control and concept negation.

Mechanistic interpretability seeks to understand the internal mechanisms of machine learning models, where localization -- identifying the important model components -- is a key step. Activation patching, also known as causal tracing or interchange intervention, is a standard technique for this task (Vig et al., 2020), but the literature contains many variants with little consensus on the choice of hyperparameters or methodology. In this work, we systematically examine the impact of methodological details in activation patching, including evaluation metrics and corruption methods. In several settings of localization and circuit discovery in language models, we find that varying these hyperparameters could lead to disparate interpretability results. Backed by empirical observations, we give conceptual arguments for why certain metrics or methods may be preferred. Finally, we provide recommendations for the best practices of activation patching going forwards.

Neural vocoders and codecs reconstruct waveforms from acoustic representations, which directly impact the audio quality. Among existing methods, upsampling-based time-domain models are superior in both inference speed and synthesis quality, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Still, despite their success in producing perceptually natural sound, their synthesis fidelity remains limited due to the aliasing artifacts brought by the inadequately designed model architectures. In particular, the unconstrained nonlinear activation generates an infinite number of harmonics that exceed the Nyquist frequency, resulting in ``folded-back'' aliasing artifacts. The widely used upsampling layer, ConvTranspose, copies the mirrored low-frequency parts to fill the empty high-frequency region, resulting in ``mirrored'' aliasing artifacts. Meanwhile, the combination of its inherent periodicity and the mirrored DC bias also brings ``tonal artifact,'' resulting in constant-frequency ringing. This paper aims to solve these issues from a signal processing perspective. Specifically, we apply oversampling and anti-derivative anti-aliasing to the activation function to obtain its anti-aliased form, and replace the problematic ConvTranspose layer with resampling to avoid the ``tonal artifact'' and eliminate aliased components. Based on our proposed anti-aliased modules, we introduce Pupu-Vocoder and Pupu-Codec, and release high-quality pre-trained checkpoints to facilitate audio generation research. We build a test signal benchmark to illustrate the effectiveness of the anti-aliased modules, and conduct experiments on speech, singing voice, music, and audio to validate our proposed models. Experimental results confirm that our lightweight Pupu-Vocoder and Pupu-Codec models can easily outperform existing systems on singing voice, music, and audio, while achieving comparable performance on speech.

We introduce Contrastive Activation Addition (CAA), an innovative method for steering language models by modifying activations during their forward passes. CAA computes ``steering vectors'' by averaging the difference in residual stream activations between pairs of positive and negative examples of a particular behavior such as factual versus hallucinatory responses. During inference, these steering vectors are added at all token positions after the user's prompt with either a positive or negative coefficient, allowing precise control over the degree of the targeted behavior. We evaluate CAA's effectiveness on Llama 2 Chat using both multiple-choice behavioral question datasets and open-ended generation tasks. We demonstrate that CAA significantly alters model behavior, outperforms traditional methods like finetuning and few-shot prompting, and minimally reduces capabilities. Moreover, by employing various activation space interpretation methods, we gain deeper insights into CAA's mechanisms. CAA both accurately steers model outputs and also sheds light on how high-level concepts are represented in Large Language Models (LLMs).

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely deployed in vast fields, but they often struggle to maintain accurate representations as graphs evolve. We theoretically establish a lower bound, proving that under mild conditions, representation distortion inevitably occurs over time. To estimate the temporal distortion without human annotation after deployment, one naive approach is to pre-train a recurrent model (e.g., RNN) before deployment and use this model afterwards, but the estimation is far from satisfactory. In this paper, we analyze the representation distortion from an information theory perspective, and attribute it primarily to inaccurate feature extraction during evolution. Consequently, we introduce Smart, a straightforward and effective baseline enhanced by an adaptive feature extractor through self-supervised graph reconstruction. In synthetic random graphs, we further refine the former lower bound to show the inevitable distortion over time and empirically observe that Smart achieves good estimation performance. Moreover, we observe that Smart consistently shows outstanding generalization estimation on four real-world evolving graphs. The ablation studies underscore the necessity of graph reconstruction. For example, on OGB-arXiv dataset, the estimation metric MAPE deteriorates from 2.19% to 8.00% without reconstruction.

Activation sparsity denotes the existence of substantial weakly-contributed elements within activation outputs that can be eliminated, benefiting many important applications concerned with large language models (LLMs). Although promoting greater activation sparsity within LLMs deserves deep studies, existing works lack comprehensive and quantitative research on the correlation between activation sparsity and potentially influential factors. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on the quantitative scaling properties and influential factors of the activation sparsity within decoder-only Transformer-based LLMs. Specifically, we propose PPL-p% sparsity, a precise and performance-aware activation sparsity metric that is applicable to any activation function. Through extensive experiments, we find several important phenomena. Firstly, different activation functions exhibit comparable performance but opposite training-time sparsity trends. The activation ratio (i.e., 1-sparsity ratio) evolves as a convergent increasing power-law and decreasing logspace power-law with the amount of training data for SiLU-activated and ReLU-activated LLMs, respectively. These demonstrate that ReLU is more efficient as the activation function than SiLU and can leverage more training data to improve activation sparsity. Secondly, the activation ratio linearly increases with the width-depth ratio below a certain bottleneck point, indicating the potential advantage of a deeper architecture at a fixed parameter scale. Finally, at similar width-depth ratios, we surprisingly find that the limit value of activation sparsity varies weakly with the parameter scale, i.e., the activation patterns within LLMs are insensitive to the parameter scale. These empirical laws towards LLMs with greater activation sparsity have important implications for making LLMs more efficient and interpretable.

Data-free quantization is a task that compresses the neural network to low bit-width without access to original training data. Most existing data-free quantization methods cause severe performance degradation due to inaccurate activation clipping range and quantization error, especially for low bit-width. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective data-free quantization method with accurate activation clipping and adaptive batch normalization. Accurate activation clipping (AAC) improves the model accuracy by exploiting accurate activation information from the full-precision model. Adaptive batch normalization firstly proposes to address the quantization error from distribution changes by updating the batch normalization layer adaptively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed data-free quantization method can yield surprisingly performance, achieving 64.33% top-1 accuracy of ResNet18 on ImageNet dataset, with 3.7% absolute improvement outperforming the existing state-of-the-art methods.

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in image generation tasks, yet their practical deployment is restrained by the high memory and time consumption. While quantization paves a way for diffusion model compression and acceleration, existing methods totally fail when the models are quantized to low-bits. In this paper, we unravel three properties in quantized diffusion models that compromise the efficacy of current methods: imbalanced activation distributions, imprecise temporal information, and vulnerability to perturbations of specific modules. To alleviate the intensified low-bit quantization difficulty stemming from the distribution imbalance, we propose finetuning the quantized model to better adapt to the activation distribution. Building on this idea, we identify two critical types of quantized layers: those holding vital temporal information and those sensitive to reduced bit-width, and finetune them to mitigate performance degradation with efficiency. We empirically verify that our approach modifies the activation distribution and provides meaningful temporal information, facilitating easier and more accurate quantization. Our method is evaluated over three high-resolution image generation tasks and achieves state-of-the-art performance under various bit-width settings, as well as being the first method to generate readable images on full 4-bit (i.e. W4A4) Stable Diffusion. Code is been made publicly available.

Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) is the primary metric for ranking models in data-driven generative modeling. While remarkably successful, the metric is known to sometimes disagree with human judgement. We investigate a root cause of these discrepancies, and visualize what FID "looks at" in generated images. We show that the feature space that FID is (typically) computed in is so close to the ImageNet classifications that aligning the histograms of Top-N classifications between sets of generated and real images can reduce FID substantially -- without actually improving the quality of results. Thus, we conclude that FID is prone to intentional or accidental distortions. As a practical example of an accidental distortion, we discuss a case where an ImageNet pre-trained FastGAN achieves a FID comparable to StyleGAN2, while being worse in terms of human evaluation.

We investigate the mechanism underlying a previously identified phenomenon in Vision Transformers -- the emergence of high-norm tokens that lead to noisy attention maps. We observe that in multiple models (e.g., CLIP, DINOv2), a sparse set of neurons is responsible for concentrating high-norm activations on outlier tokens, leading to irregular attention patterns and degrading downstream visual processing. While the existing solution for removing these outliers involves retraining models from scratch with additional learned register tokens, we use our findings to create a training-free approach to mitigate these artifacts. By shifting the high-norm activations from our discovered register neurons into an additional untrained token, we can mimic the effect of register tokens on a model already trained without registers. We demonstrate that our method produces cleaner attention and feature maps, enhances performance over base models across multiple downstream visual tasks, and achieves results comparable to models explicitly trained with register tokens. We then extend test-time registers to off-the-shelf vision-language models to improve their interpretability. Our results suggest that test-time registers effectively take on the role of register tokens at test-time, offering a training-free solution for any pre-trained model released without them.

We address the challenges of precise image inversion and disentangled image editing in the context of few-step diffusion models. We introduce an encoder based iterative inversion technique. The inversion network is conditioned on the input image and the reconstructed image from the previous step, allowing for correction of the next reconstruction towards the input image. We demonstrate that disentangled controls can be easily achieved in the few-step diffusion model by conditioning on an (automatically generated) detailed text prompt. To manipulate the inverted image, we freeze the noise maps and modify one attribute in the text prompt (either manually or via instruction based editing driven by an LLM), resulting in the generation of a new image similar to the input image with only one attribute changed. It can further control the editing strength and accept instructive text prompt. Our approach facilitates realistic text-guided image edits in real-time, requiring only 8 number of functional evaluations (NFEs) in inversion (one-time cost) and 4 NFEs per edit. Our method is not only fast, but also significantly outperforms state-of-the-art multi-step diffusion editing techniques.

Off-resonance artifacts in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are visual distortions that occur when the actual resonant frequencies of spins within the imaging volume differ from the expected frequencies used to encode spatial information. These discrepancies can be caused by a variety of factors, including magnetic field inhomogeneities, chemical shifts, or susceptibility differences within the tissues. Such artifacts can manifest as blurring, ghosting, or misregistration of the reconstructed image, and they often compromise its diagnostic quality. We propose to resolve these artifacts by lifting the 2D MRI reconstruction problem to 3D, introducing an additional "spectral" dimension to model this off-resonance. Our approach is inspired by recent progress in modeling radiance fields, and is capable of reconstructing both static and dynamic MR images as well as separating fat and water, which is of independent clinical interest. We demonstrate our approach in the context of PROPELLER (Periodically Rotated Overlapping ParallEL Lines with Enhanced Reconstruction) MRI acquisitions, which are popular for their robustness to motion artifacts. Our method operates in a few minutes on a single GPU, and to our knowledge is the first to correct for chemical shift in gradient echo PROPELLER MRI reconstruction without additional measurements or pretraining data.

The growing use of generative models in daily life calls for efficient mechanisms to control their generation, to e.g., produce safe content or provide users with tools to explore style changes. Ideally, such mechanisms should require low volume of unpaired data (i.e., without explicit preference), and should be cheap, both at train and inference time, while preserving output quality. Recent research has shown that such mechanisms can be obtained by intervening exclusively on model activations, with the goal of correcting distributional differences between activations seen when using prompts from a source vs. a target set (e.g., toxic and non-toxic sentences). While cheap, these fast methods are inherently crude: their maps are tuned locally, not accounting for their impact on downstream layers, resulting in interventions that cause unintended shifts when used out-of-sample. We propose in this work linear end-to-end activation steering (LinEAS), an approach trained with a global loss that accounts simultaneously for all layer-wise distributional shifts. In addition to being more robust, the loss used to train LinEAS can be regularized with sparsifying norms, which can automatically carry out neuron selection. LinEAS only requires a handful of unpaired samples to be effective, and beats similar baselines on toxicity mitigation in language models, becoming competitive with oracle-dependent methods that have access to strong supervision. LinEAS is modality-agnostic and we empirically find that it outperforms existing activation steering methods at mitigating and including new concepts at the output of single-step text-to-image generation models.

We introduce the Similarity-Distance-Magnitude (SDM) activation function, a more robust and interpretable formulation of the standard softmax activation function, adding Similarity (i.e., correctly predicted depth-matches into training) awareness and Distance-to-training-distribution awareness to the existing output Magnitude (i.e., decision-boundary) awareness, and enabling interpretability-by-exemplar via dense matching. We further introduce the SDM estimator, based on a data-driven partitioning of the class-wise empirical CDFs via the SDM activation, to control the class- and prediction-conditional accuracy among selective classifications. When used as the final-layer activation over pre-trained language models for selective classification, the SDM estimator is more robust to co-variate shifts and out-of-distribution inputs than existing calibration methods using softmax activations, while remaining informative over in-distribution data.

Previous research observed accuracy degradation when replacing the attention softmax with a point-wise activation such as ReLU. In the context of vision transformers, we find that this degradation is mitigated when dividing by sequence length. Our experiments training small to large vision transformers on ImageNet-21k indicate that ReLU-attention can approach or match the performance of softmax-attention in terms of scaling behavior as a function of compute.

The ability of the deep learning model to recognize when a sample falls outside its learned distribution is critical for safe and reliable deployment. Recent state-of-the-art out-of-distribution (OOD) detection methods leverage activation shaping to improve the separation between in-distribution (ID) and OOD inputs. These approaches resort to sample-specific scaling but apply a static percentile threshold across all samples regardless of their nature, resulting in suboptimal ID-OOD separability. In this work, we propose AdaSCALE, an adaptive scaling procedure that dynamically adjusts the percentile threshold based on a sample's estimated OOD likelihood. This estimation leverages our key observation: OOD samples exhibit significantly more pronounced activation shifts at high-magnitude activations under minor perturbation compared to ID samples. AdaSCALE enables stronger scaling for likely ID samples and weaker scaling for likely OOD samples, yielding highly separable energy scores. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art OOD detection performance, outperforming the latest rival OptFS by 14.94 in near-OOD and 21.67 in far-OOD datasets in average FPR@95 metric on the ImageNet-1k benchmark across eight diverse architectures. The code is available at: https://github.com/sudarshanregmi/AdaSCALE/

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical to building reliable machine learning systems in the open world. Researchers have proposed various strategies to reduce model overconfidence on OOD data. Among them, ReAct is a typical and effective technique to deal with model overconfidence, which truncates high activations to increase the gap between in-distribution and OOD. Despite its promising results, is this technique the best choice for widening the gap? To answer this question, we leverage the variational method to find the optimal operation and verify the necessity of suppressing abnormally low and high activations and amplifying intermediate activations in OOD detection, rather than focusing only on high activations like ReAct. This motivates us to propose a novel technique called ``Variational Rectified Activation (VRA)'', which simulates these suppression and amplification operations using piecewise functions. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing post-hoc strategies. Meanwhile, VRA is compatible with different scoring functions and network architectures. \textcolor[rgb]{0.93,0.0,0.47}{Our code can be found in Supplementary Material}.

Metalenses offer significant potential for ultra-compact computational imaging but face challenges from complex optical degradation and computational restoration difficulties. Existing methods typically rely on precise optical calibration or massive paired datasets, which are non-trivial for real-world imaging systems. Furthermore, a lack of control over the inference process often results in undesirable hallucinated artifacts. We introduce Degradation-Modeled Multipath Diffusion for tunable metalens photography, leveraging powerful natural image priors from pretrained models instead of large datasets. Our framework uses positive, neutral, and negative-prompt paths to balance high-frequency detail generation, structural fidelity, and suppression of metalens-specific degradation, alongside pseudo data augmentation. A tunable decoder enables controlled trade-offs between fidelity and perceptual quality. Additionally, a spatially varying degradation-aware attention (SVDA) module adaptively models complex optical and sensor-induced degradation. Finally, we design and build a millimeter-scale MetaCamera for real-world validation. Extensive results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving high-fidelity and sharp image reconstruction. More materials: https://dmdiff.github.io/.

Well-known activation functions like ReLU or Leaky ReLU are non-differentiable at the origin. Over the years, many smooth approximations of ReLU have been proposed using various smoothing techniques. We propose new smooth approximations of a non-differentiable activation function by convolving it with approximate identities. In particular, we present smooth approximations of Leaky ReLU and show that they outperform several well-known activation functions in various datasets and models. We call this function Smooth Activation Unit (SAU). Replacing ReLU by SAU, we get 5.12% improvement with ShuffleNet V2 (2.0x) model on CIFAR100 dataset.

Activation steering methods were shown to be effective in conditioning language model generation by additively intervening over models' intermediate representations. However, the evaluation of these techniques has so far been limited to single conditioning properties and synthetic settings. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of various activation steering strategies, highlighting the property-dependent nature of optimal parameters to ensure a robust effect throughout generation. To address this issue, we propose Dynamic Activation Composition, an information-theoretic approach to modulate the steering intensity of one or more properties throughout generation. Our experiments on multi-property steering show that our method successfully maintains high conditioning while minimizing the impact of conditioning on generation fluency.

The pursuit of computational efficiency has driven the adoption of low-precision formats for training transformer models. However, this progress is often hindered by notorious training instabilities. This paper provides the first mechanistic explanation for a long-standing and unresolved failure case where training with flash attention in low-precision settings leads to catastrophic loss explosions. Our in-depth analysis reveals that the failure is not a random artifact but caused by two intertwined phenomena: the emergence of similar low-rank representations within the attention mechanism and the compounding effect of biased rounding errors inherent in low-precision arithmetic. We demonstrate how these factors create a vicious cycle of error accumulation that corrupts weight updates, ultimately derailing the training dynamics. To validate our findings, we introduce a minimal modification to the flash attention that mitigates the bias in rounding errors. This simple change stabilizes the training process, confirming our analysis and offering a practical solution to this persistent problem.

Activation patching is a standard method in mechanistic interpretability for localizing the components of a model responsible for specific behaviors, but it is computationally expensive to apply at scale. Attribution patching offers a faster, gradient-based approximation, yet suffers from noise and reduced reliability in deep, highly non-linear networks. In this work, we introduce Relevance Patching (RelP), which replaces the local gradients in attribution patching with propagation coefficients derived from Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP). LRP propagates the network's output backward through the layers, redistributing relevance to lower-level components according to local propagation rules that ensure properties such as relevance conservation or improved signal-to-noise ratio. Like attribution patching, RelP requires only two forward passes and one backward pass, maintaining computational efficiency while improving faithfulness. We validate RelP across a range of models and tasks, showing that it more accurately approximates activation patching than standard attribution patching, particularly when analyzing residual stream and MLP outputs in the Indirect Object Identification (IOI) task. For instance, for MLP outputs in GPT-2 Large, attribution patching achieves a Pearson correlation of 0.006, whereas RelP reaches 0.956, highlighting the improvement offered by RelP. Additionally, we compare the faithfulness of sparse feature circuits identified by RelP and Integrated Gradients (IG), showing that RelP achieves comparable faithfulness without the extra computational cost associated with IG.

Lossy image compression aims to represent images in as few bits as possible while maintaining fidelity to the original. Theoretical results indicate that optimizing distortion metrics such as PSNR or MS-SSIM necessarily leads to a discrepancy in the statistics of original images from those of reconstructions, in particular at low bitrates, often manifested by the blurring of the compressed images. Previous work has leveraged adversarial discriminators to improve statistical fidelity. Yet these binary discriminators adopted from generative modeling tasks may not be ideal for image compression. In this paper, we introduce a non-binary discriminator that is conditioned on quantized local image representations obtained via VQ-VAE autoencoders. Our evaluations on the CLIC2020, DIV2K and Kodak datasets show that our discriminator is more effective for jointly optimizing distortion (e.g., PSNR) and statistical fidelity (e.g., FID) than the state-of-the-art HiFiC model. On the CLIC2020 test set, we obtain the same FID as HiFiC with 30-40% fewer bits.

Exploiting activation sparsity is a promising approach to significantly accelerating the inference process of large language models (LLMs) without compromising performance. However, activation sparsity is determined by activation functions, and commonly used ones like SwiGLU and GeGLU exhibit limited sparsity. Simply replacing these functions with ReLU fails to achieve sufficient sparsity. Moreover, inadequate training data can further increase the risk of performance degradation. To address these challenges, we propose a novel dReLU function, which is designed to improve LLM activation sparsity, along with a high-quality training data mixture ratio to facilitate effective sparsification. Additionally, we leverage sparse activation patterns within the Feed-Forward Network (FFN) experts of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models to further boost efficiency. By applying our neuron sparsification method to the Mistral and Mixtral models, only 2.5 billion and 4.3 billion parameters are activated per inference iteration, respectively, while achieving even more powerful model performance. Evaluation results demonstrate that this sparsity achieves a 2-5x decoding speedup. Remarkably, on mobile phones, our TurboSparse-Mixtral-47B achieves an inference speed of 11 tokens per second. Our models are available at https://huggingface.co/PowerInfer

Activation patching is a popular mechanistic interpretability technique, but has many subtleties regarding how it is applied and how one may interpret the results. We provide a summary of advice and best practices, based on our experience using this technique in practice. We include an overview of the different ways to apply activation patching and a discussion on how to interpret the results. We focus on what evidence patching experiments provide about circuits, and on the choice of metric and associated pitfalls.

Text-guided diffusion models have significantly advanced image editing, enabling high-quality and diverse modifications driven by text prompts. However, effective editing requires inverting the source image into a latent space, a process often hindered by prediction errors inherent in DDIM inversion. These errors accumulate during the diffusion process, resulting in inferior content preservation and edit fidelity, especially with conditional inputs. We address these challenges by investigating the primary contributors to error accumulation in DDIM inversion and identify the singularity problem in traditional noise schedules as a key issue. To resolve this, we introduce the Logistic Schedule, a novel noise schedule designed to eliminate singularities, improve inversion stability, and provide a better noise space for image editing. This schedule reduces noise prediction errors, enabling more faithful editing that preserves the original content of the source image. Our approach requires no additional retraining and is compatible with various existing editing methods. Experiments across eight editing tasks demonstrate the Logistic Schedule's superior performance in content preservation and edit fidelity compared to traditional noise schedules, highlighting its adaptability and effectiveness.

The concept of negative prompts, emerging from conditional generation models like Stable Diffusion, allows users to specify what to exclude from the generated images.%, demonstrating significant practical efficacy. Despite the widespread use of negative prompts, their intrinsic mechanisms remain largely unexplored. This paper presents the first comprehensive study to uncover how and when negative prompts take effect. Our extensive empirical analysis identifies two primary behaviors of negative prompts. Delayed Effect: The impact of negative prompts is observed after positive prompts render corresponding content. Deletion Through Neutralization: Negative prompts delete concepts from the generated image through a mutual cancellation effect in latent space with positive prompts. These insights reveal significant potential real-world applications; for example, we demonstrate that negative prompts can facilitate object inpainting with minimal alterations to the background via a simple adaptive algorithm. We believe our findings will offer valuable insights for the community in capitalizing on the potential of negative prompts.

The attention mechanism of a transformer has a quadratic complexity, leading to high inference costs and latency for long sequences. However, attention matrices are mostly sparse, which implies that many entries may be omitted from computation for efficient inference. Sparse attention inference methods aim to reduce this computational burden; however, they also come with a troublesome performance degradation. We discover that one reason for this degradation is that the sparse calculation induces a distributional shift in the attention outputs. The distributional shift causes decoding-time queries to fail to align well with the appropriate keys from the prefill stage, leading to a drop in performance. We propose a simple, novel, and effective procedure for correcting this distributional shift, bringing the distribution of sparse attention outputs closer to that of quadratic attention. Our method can be applied on top of any sparse attention method, and results in an average 36%pt performance increase, recovering 88% of quadratic attention accuracy on the 131K RULER benchmark when applied on top of sliding window attention with sink tokens while only adding a small overhead. Our method can maintain approximately 98.5% sparsity over full quadratic attention, making our model 32 times faster than Flash Attention 2 when processing 1M token prefills.

The choice of activation functions in deep networks has a significant effect on the training dynamics and task performance. Currently, the most successful and widely-used activation function is the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU). Although various hand-designed alternatives to ReLU have been proposed, none have managed to replace it due to inconsistent gains. In this work, we propose to leverage automatic search techniques to discover new activation functions. Using a combination of exhaustive and reinforcement learning-based search, we discover multiple novel activation functions. We verify the effectiveness of the searches by conducting an empirical evaluation with the best discovered activation function. Our experiments show that the best discovered activation function, f(x) = x cdot sigmoid(beta x), which we name Swish, tends to work better than ReLU on deeper models across a number of challenging datasets. For example, simply replacing ReLUs with Swish units improves top-1 classification accuracy on ImageNet by 0.9\% for Mobile NASNet-A and 0.6\% for Inception-ResNet-v2. The simplicity of Swish and its similarity to ReLU make it easy for practitioners to replace ReLUs with Swish units in any neural network.

Massive activations are scalar values in transformer hidden states that achieve values orders of magnitude larger than typical activations and have been shown to be critical for model functionality. While prior work has characterized these phenomena in fully trained models, the temporal dynamics of their emergence during training remain poorly understood. We present the first comprehensive analysis of massive activation development throughout transformer training, using the Pythia model family as our testbed. Through systematic analysis of various model sizes across multiple training checkpoints, we demonstrate that massive activation emergence follows predictable mathematical patterns that can be accurately modeled using an exponentially-modulated logarithmic function with five key parameters. We develop a machine learning framework to predict these mathematical parameters from architectural specifications alone, achieving high accuracy for steady-state behavior and moderate accuracy for emergence timing and magnitude. These findings enable architects to predict and potentially control key aspects of massive activation emergence through design choices, with significant implications for model stability, training cycle length, interpretability, and optimization. Our findings demonstrate that the emergence of massive activations is governed by model design and can be anticipated, and potentially controlled, before training begins.

Solid results from Transformers have made them prevailing architectures in various natural language and vision tasks. As a default component in Transformers, Layer Normalization (LN) normalizes activations within each token to boost the robustness. However, LN requires on-the-fly statistics calculation in inference as well as division and square root operations, leading to inefficiency on hardware. What is more, replacing LN with other hardware-efficient normalization schemes (e.g., Batch Normalization) results in inferior performance, even collapse in training. We find that this dilemma is caused by abnormal behaviors of activation statistics, including large fluctuations over iterations and extreme outliers across layers. To tackle these issues, we propose Unified Normalization (UN), which can speed up the inference by being fused with other linear operations and achieve comparable performance on par with LN. UN strives to boost performance by calibrating the activation and gradient statistics with a tailored fluctuation smoothing strategy. Meanwhile, an adaptive outlier filtration strategy is applied to avoid collapse in training whose effectiveness is theoretically proved and experimentally verified in this paper. We demonstrate that UN can be an efficient drop-in alternative to LN by conducting extensive experiments on language and vision tasks. Besides, we evaluate the efficiency of our method on GPU. Transformers equipped with UN enjoy about 31% inference speedup and nearly 18% memory reduction. Code will be released at https://github.com/hikvision-research/Unified-Normalization.

Image codecs are typically optimized to trade-off bitrate \vs distortion metrics. At low bitrates, this leads to compression artefacts which are easily perceptible, even when training with perceptual or adversarial losses. To improve image quality and remove dependency on the bitrate, we propose to decode with iterative diffusion models. We condition the decoding process on a vector-quantized image representation, as well as a global image description to provide additional context. We dub our model PerCo for 'perceptual compression', and compare it to state-of-the-art codecs at rates from 0.1 down to 0.003 bits per pixel. The latter rate is more than an order of magnitude smaller than those considered in most prior work, compressing a 512x768 Kodak image with less than 153 bytes. Despite this ultra-low bitrate, our approach maintains the ability to reconstruct realistic images. We find that our model leads to reconstructions with state-of-the-art visual quality as measured by FID and KID. As predicted by rate-distortion-perception theory, visual quality is less dependent on the bitrate than previous methods.

Inducing and leveraging sparse activations during training and inference is a promising avenue for improving the computational efficiency of deep networks, which is increasingly important as network sizes continue to grow and their application becomes more widespread. Here we use the large width Gaussian process limit to analyze the behaviour, at random initialization, of nonlinear activations that induce sparsity in the hidden outputs. A previously unreported form of training instability is proven for arguably two of the most natural candidates for hidden layer sparsification; those being a shifted ReLU (phi(x)=max(0, x-tau) for tauge 0) and soft thresholding (phi(x)=0 for |x|letau and x-sign(x)tau for |x|>tau). We show that this instability is overcome by clipping the nonlinear activation magnitude, at a level prescribed by the shape of the associated Gaussian process variance map. Numerical experiments verify the theory and show that the proposed magnitude clipped sparsifying activations can be trained with training and test fractional sparsity as high as 85\% while retaining close to full accuracy.

In real-world scenarios, image impairments often manifest as composite degradations, presenting a complex interplay of elements such as low light, haze, rain, and snow. Despite this reality, existing restoration methods typically target isolated degradation types, thereby falling short in environments where multiple degrading factors coexist. To bridge this gap, our study proposes a versatile imaging model that consolidates four physical corruption paradigms to accurately represent complex, composite degradation scenarios. In this context, we propose OneRestore, a novel transformer-based framework designed for adaptive, controllable scene restoration. The proposed framework leverages a unique cross-attention mechanism, merging degraded scene descriptors with image features, allowing for nuanced restoration. Our model allows versatile input scene descriptors, ranging from manual text embeddings to automatic extractions based on visual attributes. Our methodology is further enhanced through a composite degradation restoration loss, using extra degraded images as negative samples to fortify model constraints. Comparative results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate OneRestore as a superior solution, significantly advancing the state-of-the-art in addressing complex, composite degradations.

Generating 360-degree panoramas from narrow field of view (NFoV) image is a promising computer vision task for Virtual Reality (VR) applications. Existing methods mostly assess the generated panoramas with InceptionNet or CLIP based metrics, which tend to perceive the image quality and is not suitable for evaluating the distortion. In this work, we first propose a distortion-specific CLIP, named Distort-CLIP to accurately evaluate the panorama distortion and discover the ``visual cheating'' phenomenon in previous works (\ie, tending to improve the visual results by sacrificing distortion accuracy). This phenomenon arises because prior methods employ a single network to learn the distinct panorama distortion and content completion at once, which leads the model to prioritize optimizing the latter. To address the phenomenon, we propose PanoDecouple, a decoupled diffusion model framework, which decouples the panorama generation into distortion guidance and content completion, aiming to generate panoramas with both accurate distortion and visual appeal. Specifically, we design a DistortNet for distortion guidance by imposing panorama-specific distortion prior and a modified condition registration mechanism; and a ContentNet for content completion by imposing perspective image information. Additionally, a distortion correction loss function with Distort-CLIP is introduced to constrain the distortion explicitly. The extensive experiments validate that PanoDecouple surpasses existing methods both in distortion and visual metrics.

Activation functions are fundamental in deep neural networks and directly impact gradient flow, optimization stability, and generalization. Although ReLU remains standard because of its simplicity, it suffers from vanishing gradients and lacks adaptability. Alternatives like Swish and GELU introduce smooth transitions, but fail to dynamically adjust to input statistics. We propose VeLU, a Variance-enhanced Learning Unit as an activation function that dynamically scales based on input variance by integrating ArcTan-Sin transformations and Wasserstein-2 regularization, effectively mitigating covariate shifts and stabilizing optimization. Extensive experiments on ViT_B16, VGG19, ResNet50, DenseNet121, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNetB3 confirm VeLU's superiority over ReLU, ReLU6, Swish, and GELU on six vision benchmarks. The codes of VeLU are publicly available on GitHub.

Post-training quantization (PTQ) has emerged as a promising technique for mitigating memory consumption and computational costs in large language models (LLMs). However, a systematic examination of various quantization schemes, model families, and quantization bit precision has been absent from the literature. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of these factors by investigating the effects of PTQ on weight-only, activation-only, and weight-and-activation quantization using diverse methods such as round-to-nearest (RTN), GPTQ, ZeroQuant, and their variants. We apply these methods to two distinct model families with parameters ranging from 125M to 176B. Our contributions include: (1) a sensitivity analysis revealing that activation quantization is generally more susceptible to weight quantization, with smaller models often outperforming larger models in terms of activation quantization; (2) an evaluation and comparison of existing PTQ methods to optimize model size reduction while minimizing the impact on accuracy, revealing that none of the current methods can achieve the original model quality for quantization with either INT4-weight or INT4-weight-and-INT8-activation; (3) based on these insights, we propose an optimized method called Low-Rank Compensation (LoRC), which employs low-rank matrices to enhance model quality recovery with a minimal increase in model size.

Deploying large language models (LLMs) on edge devices presents significant challenges due to the substantial computational overhead and memory requirements. Activation sparsification can mitigate these challenges by reducing the number of activated neurons during inference. Existing methods typically employ thresholding-based sparsification based on the statistics of activation tensors. However, these methods do not explicitly model the impact of activation sparsification on performance, leading to suboptimal performance degradation. To address this issue, this paper reformulates the activation sparsification problem by introducing a new objective that optimizes the sparsification decisions. Building on this reformulation, we propose CHESS, a general activation sparsification approach via CHannel-wise thrEsholding and Selective Sparsification. First, channel-wise thresholding assigns a unique threshold to each activation channel in the feed-forward network (FFN) layers. Then, selective sparsification involves applying thresholding-based activation sparsification to specific layers within the attention modules. Finally, we detail the implementation of sparse kernels to accelerate LLM inference. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CHESS achieves lower performance degradation over 8 downstream tasks while activating fewer parameters compared to existing methods, thus speeding up the LLM inference by up to 1.27x.

Vision language models (VLMs) often generate hallucination, i.e., content that cannot be substantiated by either textual or visual inputs. Prior work primarily attributes this to over-reliance on linguistic prior knowledge rather than visual inputs. Some methods attempt to mitigate hallucination by amplifying visual token attention proportionally to their attention scores. However, these methods overlook the visual attention sink problem, where attention is frequently misallocated to task-irrelevant visual regions, and neglect cross-modal fusion balance by enhancing only visual attention without adjusting attention to the user query. This can result in amplifying incorrect areas while failing to properly interpret the user query. To address these challenges, we propose a simple yet effective method called Gaze Shift-Guided Cross-modal Fusion Enhancement (GIFT). GIFT pre-computes a holistic visual saliency map by tracking positive changes in visual attention, or "gaze shifts", during user query comprehension, and leverages this map to amplify attention to both salient visual information and the user query at each decoding step. This reduces the impact of visual attention sink, as irrelevant tokens exhibit minimal shifts, while ensuring balanced cross-modal fusion for well-integrated representation. Extensive experiments show that GIFT effectively mitigates hallucination in VLMs across both generative and classification tasks, achieving up to 20.7% improvement over greedy decoding, while maintaining general vision-language performance with low computational overhead.

Mammalian brains handle complex reasoning tasks in a gestalt manner by integrating information from regions of the brain that are specialised to individual sensory modalities. This allows for improved robustness and better generalisation ability. In contrast, deep neural networks are usually designed to process one particular information stream and susceptible to various types of adversarial perturbations. While many methods exist for detecting and defending against adversarial attacks, they do not generalise across a range of attacks and negatively affect performance on clean, unperturbed data. We developed a fusion model using a combination of background and foreground features extracted in parallel from Places-CNN and Imagenet-CNN. We tested the benefits of the fusion approach on preserving adversarial robustness for human perceivable (e.g., Gaussian blur) and network perceivable (e.g., gradient-based) attacks for CIFAR-10 and MS COCO data sets. For gradient based attacks, our results show that fusion allows for significant improvements in classification without decreasing performance on unperturbed data and without need to perform adversarial retraining. Our fused model revealed improvements for Gaussian blur type perturbations as well. The increase in performance from fusion approach depended on the variability of the image contexts; larger increases were seen for classes of images with larger differences in their contexts. We also demonstrate the effect of regularization to bias the classifier decision in the presence of a known adversary. We propose that this biologically inspired approach to integrate information across multiple modalities provides a new way to improve adversarial robustness that can be complementary to current state of the art approaches.

We consider the training of the first layer of vision models and notice the clear relationship between pixel values and gradient update magnitudes: the gradients arriving at the weights of a first layer are by definition directly proportional to (normalized) input pixel values. Thus, an image with low contrast has a smaller impact on learning than an image with higher contrast, and a very bright or very dark image has a stronger impact on the weights than an image with moderate brightness. In this work, we propose performing gradient descent on the embeddings produced by the first layer of the model. However, switching to discrete inputs with an embedding layer is not a reasonable option for vision models. Thus, we propose the conceptual procedure of (i) a gradient descent step on first layer activations to construct an activation proposal, and (ii) finding the optimal weights of the first layer, i.e., those weights which minimize the squared distance to the activation proposal. We provide a closed form solution of the procedure and adjust it for robust stochastic training while computing everything efficiently. Empirically, we find that TrAct (Training Activations) speeds up training by factors between 1.25x and 4x while requiring only a small computational overhead. We demonstrate the utility of TrAct with different optimizers for a range of different vision models including convolutional and transformer architectures.

Given that Transformers are ubiquitous in wide tasks, interpreting their internals is a pivotal issue. Still, their particular components, feed-forward (FF) blocks, have typically been less analyzed despite their substantial parameter amounts. We analyze the input contextualization effects of FF blocks by rendering them in the attention maps as a human-friendly visualization scheme. Our experiments with both masked- and causal-language models reveal that FF networks modify the input contextualization to emphasize specific types of linguistic compositions. In addition, FF and its surrounding components tend to cancel out each other's effects, suggesting potential redundancy in the processing of the Transformer layer.

Controllable person image generation aims to generate a person image conditioned on reference images, allowing precise control over the person's appearance or pose. However, prior methods often distort fine-grained textural details from the reference image, despite achieving high overall image quality. We attribute these distortions to inadequate attention to corresponding regions in the reference image. To address this, we thereby propose learning flow fields in attention (Leffa), which explicitly guides the target query to attend to the correct reference key in the attention layer during training. Specifically, it is realized via a regularization loss on top of the attention map within a diffusion-based baseline. Our extensive experiments show that Leffa achieves state-of-the-art performance in controlling appearance (virtual try-on) and pose (pose transfer), significantly reducing fine-grained detail distortion while maintaining high image quality. Additionally, we show that our loss is model-agnostic and can be used to improve the performance of other diffusion models.

Generative universal speech enhancement (USE) methods aim to leverage generative models to improve speech quality under various types of distortions. Diffusion- or flow-based generative models are capable of producing enhanced speech with high quality and fidelity. However, they typically achieve speech enhancement by learning an acoustic feature mapping from degraded speech to clean speech, while lacking awareness of high-level semantic information. This deficiency tends to cause semantic ambiguity and acoustic discontinuities in the enhanced speech. In contrast, humans can often comprehend heavily corrupted speech by relying on semantic priors, suggesting that semantics play a crucial role in speech enhancement. Therefore, in this paper, we propose SenSE, which leverages a language model to capture the semantic information of distorted speech and effectively integrates it into a flow-matching-based speech enhancement framework. Specifically, we introduce a semantic-aware speech language model to capture the semantics of degraded speech and generate semantic tokens. We then design a semantic guidance mechanism that incorporates semantic information into the flow-matching-based speech enhancement process, effectively mitigating semantic ambiguity. In addition, we propose a prompt guidance mechanism, which leverages a short reference utterance to alleviate the loss of speaker similarity under severe distortion conditions. The results of several benchmark data sets demonstrate that SenSE not only ensures high perceptual quality but also substantially improves speech fidelity while maintaining strong robustness under severe distortions. Codes and demos are available.

Single-step adversarial training (SSAT) has demonstrated the potential to achieve both efficiency and robustness. However, SSAT suffers from catastrophic overfitting (CO), a phenomenon that leads to a severely distorted classifier, making it vulnerable to multi-step adversarial attacks. In this work, we observe that some adversarial examples generated on the SSAT-trained network exhibit anomalous behaviour, that is, although these training samples are generated by the inner maximization process, their associated loss decreases instead, which we named abnormal adversarial examples (AAEs). Upon further analysis, we discover a close relationship between AAEs and classifier distortion, as both the number and outputs of AAEs undergo a significant variation with the onset of CO. Given this observation, we re-examine the SSAT process and uncover that before the occurrence of CO, the classifier already displayed a slight distortion, indicated by the presence of few AAEs. Furthermore, the classifier directly optimizing these AAEs will accelerate its distortion, and correspondingly, the variation of AAEs will sharply increase as a result. In such a vicious circle, the classifier rapidly becomes highly distorted and manifests as CO within a few iterations. These observations motivate us to eliminate CO by hindering the generation of AAEs. Specifically, we design a novel method, termed Abnormal Adversarial Examples Regularization (AAER), which explicitly regularizes the variation of AAEs to hinder the classifier from becoming distorted. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can effectively eliminate CO and further boost adversarial robustness with negligible additional computational overhead.

The training process of neural networks usually optimize weights and bias parameters of linear transformations, while nonlinear activation functions are pre-specified and fixed. This work develops a systematic approach to constructing matrix activation functions whose entries are generalized from ReLU. The activation is based on matrix-vector multiplications using only scalar multiplications and comparisons. The proposed activation functions depend on parameters that are trained along with the weights and bias vectors. Neural networks based on this approach are simple and efficient and are shown to be robust in numerical experiments.

Large multimodal models have achieved remarkable progress in both understanding and generation. Recent efforts pursue unified multimodal models that integrate heterogeneous components to support both capabilities within a single framework. However, such unification introduces inference inefficiencies, e.g., specific tasks or samples may not require the full knowledge or capacity of the unified model. Yet, a systematic understanding of how these inefficiencies manifest across different components remains limited. In this work, we first conduct a systematic analysis of unified multimodal model components using training-free pruning as a probing methodology, considering both depth pruning and width reduction. Our study reveals that the understanding component exhibits notable compressibility in both understanding and generation tasks, which is more pronounced in the latter. In contrast, the generation components are highly sensitive to compression, with performance deteriorating sharply even under moderate compression ratios. To address this limitation, we propose the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Adaptation, inspired by the dynamic activation patterns observed across different samples. This approach partitions the generation module into multiple experts and enables sparse activation to restore generation quality. We validate the effectiveness of sparse activation through expert-frozen tuning and further demonstrate that a fully trainable adaptation delivers additional gains. As a result, the adapted BAGEL model achieves performance comparable to the full model while activating only about half of its parameters. The code is released at https://github.com/Shwai-He/SparseUnifiedModel{this link}.

Multimodal misinformation, encompassing textual, visual, and cross-modal distortions, poses an increasing societal threat that is amplified by generative AI. Existing methods typically focus on a single type of distortion and struggle to generalize to unseen scenarios. In this work, we observe that different distortion types share common reasoning capabilities while also requiring task-specific skills. We hypothesize that joint training across distortion types facilitates knowledge sharing and enhances the model's ability to generalize. To this end, we introduce TRUST-VL, a unified and explainable vision-language model for general multimodal misinformation detection. TRUST-VL incorporates a novel Question-Aware Visual Amplifier module, designed to extract task-specific visual features. To support training, we also construct TRUST-Instruct, a large-scale instruction dataset containing 198K samples featuring structured reasoning chains aligned with human fact-checking workflows. Extensive experiments on both in-domain and zero-shot benchmarks demonstrate that TRUST-VL achieves state-of-the-art performance, while also offering strong generalization and interpretability.

We present new intuitions and theoretical assessments of the emergence of disentangled representation in variational autoencoders. Taking a rate-distortion theory perspective, we show the circumstances under which representations aligned with the underlying generative factors of variation of data emerge when optimising the modified ELBO bound in beta-VAE, as training progresses. From these insights, we propose a modification to the training regime of beta-VAE, that progressively increases the information capacity of the latent code during training. This modification facilitates the robust learning of disentangled representations in beta-VAE, without the previous trade-off in reconstruction accuracy.

We propose the Gaussian Error Linear Unit (GELU), a high-performing neural network activation function. The GELU activation function is xPhi(x), where Phi(x) the standard Gaussian cumulative distribution function. The GELU nonlinearity weights inputs by their value, rather than gates inputs by their sign as in ReLUs (x1_{x>0}). We perform an empirical evaluation of the GELU nonlinearity against the ReLU and ELU activations and find performance improvements across all considered computer vision, natural language processing, and speech tasks.

We present the Mixture-of-Tunable-Experts (MoTE), a method that extends the Mixture-of-Experts architecture of Large Language Models (LLMs). Without additional training, MoTE enables meaningful and focused behavior changes in LLMs on-the-fly during inference time. By analyzing the digital LLM brain of DeepSeek-R1 using a technique we dub 'functional Token Resonance Imaging' (fTRI) -- inspired by fMRI and using prompts designed to elicit specific behavior (e.g., 'What happened {time}{place}?') -- we empirically identify distinctive experts associated with behaviors like refusal responses. Using MoTE we are able to intervene and control such specific behavior. We switched off the top 10 most refusal-relevant experts (0.07% of R1's 14,848 routed experts), achieving a 52% refusal reduction on sensitive reference prompts without performance degradation on MT-Bench. Random expert deactivation resulted in smaller behavioral shifts with increased noise, whereas forced expert activation led to significantly higher refusal rates. Our approach shares similarities with sparse autoencoders (SAEs) in terms of explainability and steerability. Unlike SAEs, MoTE does not require large training efforts, as within MoEs with a vast number of experts, specialization already emerged naturally during pretraining. Our findings suggest that significant functional mechanisms in Mixture-of-Experts architectures can at least partially be localized in a small number of specific experts, rather than being distributed throughout the model's weights. Expert subgroups can be tuned to trigger significant behavior variations, providing insights into the inner workings of LLMs.

The recent use of diffusion prior, enhanced by pre-trained text-image models, has markedly elevated the performance of image super-resolution (SR). To alleviate the huge computational cost required by pixel-based diffusion SR, latent-based methods utilize a feature encoder to transform the image and then implement the SR image generation in a compact latent space. Nevertheless, there are two major issues that limit the performance of latent-based diffusion. First, the compression of latent space usually causes reconstruction distortion. Second, huge computational cost constrains the parameter scale of the diffusion model. To counteract these issues, we first propose a frequency compensation module that enhances the frequency components from latent space to pixel space. The reconstruction distortion (especially for high-frequency information) can be significantly decreased. Then, we propose to use Sample-Space Mixture of Experts (SS-MoE) to achieve more powerful latent-based SR, which steadily improves the capacity of the model without a significant increase in inference costs. These carefully crafted designs contribute to performance improvements in largely explored 4x blind super-resolution benchmarks and extend to large magnification factors, i.e., 8x image SR benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/amandaluof/moe_sr.

We propose ERA, a new paradigm that constrains the sampling entropy above given thresholds by applying specially designed activations to the outputs of models. Our approach demonstrates broad effectiveness across different domains: 1) for large language models(LLMs), boosting the AIME 2025 score for Qwen2.5-Math-7B by 37.4%; 2) for continuous control reinforcement learning agents, improving performance by more than 30% over strong baselines such as SAC on the challenging HumanoidBench; 3) for image classification, enhancing ImageNet top-1 accuracy by 0.69% for ResNet-50. These gains are achieved with a computational overhead of less than 7%. Our work validates output activation as a powerful tool for entropy control, opening a new direction for designing simpler and more robust algorithms.

Diffusion models have recently advanced video editing, yet controllable editing remains challenging due to the need for precise manipulation of diverse object properties. Current methods require different control signal for diverse editing tasks, which complicates model design and demands significant training resources. To address this, we propose O-DisCo-Edit, a unified framework that incorporates a novel object distortion control (O-DisCo). This signal, based on random and adaptive noise, flexibly encapsulates a wide range of editing cues within a single representation. Paired with a "copy-form" preservation module for preserving non-edited regions, O-DisCo-Edit enables efficient, high-fidelity editing through an effective training paradigm. Extensive experiments and comprehensive human evaluations consistently demonstrate that O-DisCo-Edit surpasses both specialized and multitask state-of-the-art methods across various video editing tasks. https://cyqii.github.io/O-DisCo-Edit.github.io/

Transformer models encounter challenges in scaling hidden dimensions efficiently, as uniformly increasing them inflates computational and memory costs while failing to emphasize the most relevant features for each token. For further understanding, we study hidden dimension sparsity and observe that trained Transformers utilize only a small fraction of token dimensions, revealing an "activation flow" pattern. Notably, there are shared sub-dimensions with sustained activation across multiple consecutive tokens and specialized sub-dimensions uniquely activated for each token. To better model token-relevant sub-dimensions, we propose MoHD (Mixture of Hidden Dimensions), a sparse conditional activation architecture. Particularly, MoHD employs shared sub-dimensions for common token features and a routing mechanism to dynamically activate specialized sub-dimensions. To mitigate potential information loss from sparsity, we design activation scaling and group fusion mechanisms to preserve activation flow. In this way, MoHD expands hidden dimensions with negligible increases in computation or parameters, efficient training and inference while maintaining performance. Evaluations across 10 NLP tasks show that MoHD surpasses Vanilla Transformers in parameter efficiency and task performance. It achieves 1.7% higher performance with 50% fewer activation parameters and 3.7% higher performance with a 3x parameter expansion at constant activation cost. MOHD offers a new perspective for scaling the model, showcasing the potential of hidden dimension sparsity to boost efficiency

Human vision organizes local cues into coherent global forms using Gestalt principles like closure, proximity, and figure-ground assignment -- functions reliant on global spatial structure. We investigate whether modern vision models show similar behaviors, and under what training conditions these emerge. We find that Vision Transformers (ViTs) trained with Masked Autoencoding (MAE) exhibit activation patterns consistent with Gestalt laws, including illusory contour completion, convexity preference, and dynamic figure-ground segregation. To probe the computational basis, we hypothesize that modeling global dependencies is necessary for Gestalt-like organization. We introduce the Distorted Spatial Relationship Testbench (DiSRT), which evaluates sensitivity to global spatial perturbations while preserving local textures. Using DiSRT, we show that self-supervised models (e.g., MAE, CLIP) outperform supervised baselines and sometimes even exceed human performance. ConvNeXt models trained with MAE also exhibit Gestalt-compatible representations, suggesting such sensitivity can arise without attention architectures. However, classification finetuning degrades this ability. Inspired by biological vision, we show that a Top-K activation sparsity mechanism can restore global sensitivity. Our findings identify training conditions that promote or suppress Gestalt-like perception and establish DiSRT as a diagnostic for global structure sensitivity across models.

The ability to cope with out-of-distribution (OOD) corruptions and adversarial attacks is crucial in real-world safety-demanding applications. In this study, we develop a general mechanism to increase neural network robustness based on focus analysis. Recent studies have revealed the phenomenon of Overfocusing, which leads to a performance drop. When the network is primarily influenced by small input regions, it becomes less robust and prone to misclassify under noise and corruptions. However, quantifying overfocusing is still vague and lacks clear definitions. Here, we provide a mathematical definition of focus, overfocusing and underfocusing. The notions are general, but in this study, we specifically investigate the case of 3D point clouds. We observe that corrupted sets result in a biased focus distribution compared to the clean training set. We show that as focus distribution deviates from the one learned in the training phase - classification performance deteriorates. We thus propose a parameter-free refocusing algorithm that aims to unify all corruptions under the same distribution. We validate our findings on a 3D zero-shot classification task, achieving SOTA in robust 3D classification on ModelNet-C dataset, and in adversarial defense against Shape-Invariant attack. Code is available in: https://github.com/yossilevii100/refocusing.

All-in-one image restoration, which aims to address diverse degradations within a unified framework, is critical for practical applications. However, existing methods rely on predicting and integrating degradation conditions, which can misactivate degradation-specific features in complex scenarios, limiting their restoration performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel all-in-one image restoration framework guided by Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG), named HOGformer. By leveraging the degradation-discriminative capability of HOG descriptors, HOGformer employs a dynamic self-attention mechanism that adaptively attends to long-range spatial dependencies based on degradation-aware HOG cues. To enhance the degradation sensitivity of attention inputs, we design a HOG-guided local dynamic-range convolution module that captures long-range degradation similarities while maintaining awareness of global structural information. Furthermore, we propose a dynamic interaction feed-forward module, efficiently increasing the model capacity to adapt to different degradations through channel-spatial interactions. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks, including adverse weather and natural degradations, demonstrate that HOGformer achieves state-of-the-art performance and generalizes effectively to complex real-world degradations. Code is available at https://github.com/Fire-friend/HOGformer.

Activation sparsity improves compute efficiency and resource utilization in sparsity-aware neural network accelerators. As the predominant operation in DNNs is multiply-accumulate (MAC) of activations with weights to compute inner products, skipping operations where (at least) one of the two operands is zero can make inference more efficient in terms of latency and power. Spatial sparsification of activations is a popular topic in DNN literature and several methods have already been established to bias a DNN for it. On the other hand, temporal sparsity is an inherent feature of bio-inspired spiking neural networks (SNNs), which neuromorphic processing exploits for hardware efficiency. Introducing and exploiting spatio-temporal sparsity, is a topic much less explored in DNN literature, but in perfect resonance with the trend in DNN, to shift from static signal processing to more streaming signal processing. Towards this goal, in this paper we introduce a new DNN layer (called Delta Activation Layer), whose sole purpose is to promote temporal sparsity of activations during training. A Delta Activation Layer casts temporal sparsity into spatial activation sparsity to be exploited when performing sparse tensor multiplications in hardware. By employing delta inference and ``the usual'' spatial sparsification heuristics during training, the resulting model learns to exploit not only spatial but also temporal activation sparsity (for a given input data distribution). One may use the Delta Activation Layer either during vanilla training or during a refinement phase. We have implemented Delta Activation Layer as an extension of the standard Tensoflow-Keras library, and applied it to train deep neural networks on the Human Action Recognition (UCF101) dataset. We report an almost 3x improvement of activation sparsity, with recoverable loss of model accuracy after longer training.

Activation functions are fundamental elements of deep learning architectures as they significantly influence training dynamics. ReLU, while widely used, is prone to the dying neuron problem, which has been mitigated by variants such as LeakyReLU, PReLU, and ELU that better handle negative neuron outputs. Recently, self-gated activations like GELU and Swish have emerged as state-of-the-art alternatives, leveraging their smoothness to ensure stable gradient flow and prevent neuron inactivity. In this work, we introduce the Gompertz Linear Unit (GoLU), a novel self-gated activation function defined as GoLU(x) = x , Gompertz(x), where Gompertz(x) = e^{-e^{-x}}. The GoLU activation leverages the asymmetry in the Gompertz function to reduce variance in the latent space more effectively compared to GELU and Swish, while preserving robust gradient flow. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks, including Image Classification, Language Modeling, Semantic Segmentation, Object Detection, Instance Segmentation, and Diffusion, highlight GoLU's superior performance relative to state-of-the-art activation functions, establishing GoLU as a robust alternative to existing activation functions.

In the present work we present Training Noise Token (TNT) Pruning for vision transformers. Our method relaxes the discrete token dropping condition to continuous additive noise, providing smooth optimization in training, while retaining discrete dropping computational gains in deployment settings. We provide theoretical connections to Rate-Distortion literature, and empirical evaluations on the ImageNet dataset using ViT and DeiT architectures demonstrating TNT's advantages over previous pruning methods.

Text-guided image generation and editing using diffusion models have achieved remarkable advancements. Among these, tuning-free methods have gained attention for their ability to perform edits without extensive model adjustments, offering simplicity and efficiency. However, existing tuning-free approaches often struggle with balancing fidelity and editing precision. Reconstruction errors in DDIM Inversion are partly attributed to the cross-attention mechanism in U-Net, which introduces misalignments during the inversion and reconstruction process. To address this, we analyze reconstruction from a structural perspective and propose a novel approach that replaces traditional cross-attention with uniform attention maps, significantly enhancing image reconstruction fidelity. Our method effectively minimizes distortions caused by varying text conditions during noise prediction. To complement this improvement, we introduce an adaptive mask-guided editing technique that integrates seamlessly with our reconstruction approach, ensuring consistency and accuracy in editing tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach not only excels in achieving high-fidelity image reconstruction but also performs robustly in real image composition and editing scenarios. This study underscores the potential of uniform attention maps to enhance the fidelity and versatility of diffusion-based image processing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Mowenyii/Uniform-Attention-Maps.

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have recently gained attention as a powerful approach for continuously representing signals such as images, videos, and 3D shapes using multilayer perceptrons (MLPs). However, MLPs are known to exhibit a low-frequency bias, limiting their ability to capture high-frequency details accurately. This limitation is typically addressed by incorporating high-frequency input embeddings or specialized activation layers. In this work, we demonstrate that these embeddings and activations are often configured with hyperparameters that perform well on average but are suboptimal for specific input signals under consideration, necessitating a costly grid search to identify optimal settings. Our key observation is that the initial frequency spectrum of an untrained model's output correlates strongly with the model's eventual performance on a given target signal. Leveraging this insight, we propose frequency shifting (or FreSh), a method that selects embedding hyperparameters to align the frequency spectrum of the model's initial output with that of the target signal. We show that this simple initialization technique improves performance across various neural representation methods and tasks, achieving results comparable to extensive hyperparameter sweeps but with only marginal computational overhead compared to training a single model with default hyperparameters.

Large language models have demonstrated promising capabilities upon scaling up parameters. However, serving large language models incurs substantial computation and memory movement costs due to their large scale. Quantization methods have been employed to reduce service costs and latency. Nevertheless, outliers in activations hinder the development of INT4 weight-activation quantization. Existing approaches separate outliers and normal values into two matrices or migrate outliers from activations to weights, suffering from high latency or accuracy degradation. Based on observing activations from large language models, outliers can be classified into channel-wise and spike outliers. In this work, we propose Rotated Runtime Smooth (RRS), a plug-and-play activation smoother for quantization, consisting of Runtime Smooth and the Rotation operation. Runtime Smooth (RS) is introduced to eliminate channel-wise outliers by smoothing activations with channel-wise maximums during runtime. The rotation operation can narrow the gap between spike outliers and normal values, alleviating the effect of victims caused by channel-wise smoothing. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art method in the LLaMA and Qwen families and improves WikiText-2 perplexity from 57.33 to 6.66 for INT4 inference.

The behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) when facing contextual information that conflicts with their internal parametric knowledge is inconsistent, with no generally accepted explanation for the expected outcome distribution. Recent work has identified in autoregressive transformer models a class of neurons -- called entropy neurons -- that produce a significant effect on the model output entropy while having an overall moderate impact on the ranking of the predicted tokens. In this paper, we investigate the preliminary claim that these neurons are involved in inhibiting context copying behavior in transformers by looking at their role in resolving conflicts between contextual and parametric information. We show that entropy neurons are responsible for suppressing context copying across a range of LLMs, and that ablating them leads to a significant change in the generation process. These results enhance our understanding of the internal dynamics of LLMs when handling conflicting information.

Activation Functions introduce non-linearity in the deep neural networks. This nonlinearity helps the neural networks learn faster and efficiently from the dataset. In deep learning, many activation functions are developed and used based on the type of problem statement. ReLU's variants, SWISH, and MISH are goto activation functions. MISH function is considered having similar or even better performance than SWISH, and much better than ReLU. In this paper, we propose an activation function named APTx which behaves similar to MISH, but requires lesser mathematical operations to compute. The lesser computational requirements of APTx does speed up the model training, and thus also reduces the hardware requirement for the deep learning model. Source code: https://github.com/mr-ravin/aptx_activation

Modern language models can imitate complex patterns through few-shot learning, enabling them to complete challenging tasks without fine-tuning. However, imitation can also lead models to reproduce inaccuracies or harmful content if present in the context. We study harmful imitation through the lens of a model's internal representations, and identify two related phenomena: "overthinking" and "false induction heads". The first phenomenon, overthinking, appears when we decode predictions from intermediate layers, given correct vs. incorrect few-shot demonstrations. At early layers, both demonstrations induce similar model behavior, but the behavior diverges sharply at some "critical layer", after which the accuracy given incorrect demonstrations progressively decreases. The second phenomenon, false induction heads, are a possible mechanistic cause of overthinking: these are heads in late layers that attend to and copy false information from previous demonstrations, and whose ablation reduces overthinking. Beyond scientific understanding, our results suggest that studying intermediate model computations could be a promising avenue for understanding and guarding against harmful model behaviors.

We demonstrate how images and sounds can be used for indirect prompt and instruction injection in multi-modal LLMs. An attacker generates an adversarial perturbation corresponding to the prompt and blends it into an image or audio recording. When the user asks the (unmodified, benign) model about the perturbed image or audio, the perturbation steers the model to output the attacker-chosen text and/or make the subsequent dialog follow the attacker's instruction. We illustrate this attack with several proof-of-concept examples targeting LLaVa and PandaGPT.

It is often useful to compactly summarize important properties of model parameters and training data so that they can be used later without storing and/or iterating over the entire dataset. As a specific case, we consider estimating the Function Space Distance (FSD) over a training set, i.e. the average discrepancy between the outputs of two neural networks. We propose a Linearized Activation Function TRick (LAFTR) and derive an efficient approximation to FSD for ReLU neural networks. The key idea is to approximate the architecture as a linear network with stochastic gating. Despite requiring only one parameter per unit of the network, our approach outcompetes other parametric approximations with larger memory requirements. Applied to continual learning, our parametric approximation is competitive with state-of-the-art nonparametric approximations, which require storing many training examples. Furthermore, we show its efficacy in estimating influence functions accurately and detecting mislabeled examples without expensive iterations over the entire dataset.

We provide a new LLM-compression solution via SVD, unlocking new possibilities for LLM compression beyond quantization and pruning. We point out that the optimal use of SVD lies in truncating activations, rather than merely using activations as an optimization distance. Building on this principle, we address three critical challenges in SVD-based LLM compression: including (1) How can we determine the optimal activation truncation position for each weight matrix in LLMs? (2) How can we efficiently reconstruct the weight matrices based on truncated activations? (3) How can we address the inherent "injection" nature that results in the information loss of the SVD? We propose Dobi-SVD, which establishes a new, principled approach to SVD-based LLM compression.

Activation Patching is a method of directly computing causal attributions of behavior to model components. However, applying it exhaustively requires a sweep with cost scaling linearly in the number of model components, which can be prohibitively expensive for SoTA Large Language Models (LLMs). We investigate Attribution Patching (AtP), a fast gradient-based approximation to Activation Patching and find two classes of failure modes of AtP which lead to significant false negatives. We propose a variant of AtP called AtP*, with two changes to address these failure modes while retaining scalability. We present the first systematic study of AtP and alternative methods for faster activation patching and show that AtP significantly outperforms all other investigated methods, with AtP* providing further significant improvement. Finally, we provide a method to bound the probability of remaining false negatives of AtP* estimates.

Although there have been significant advances in the field of image restoration recently, the system complexity of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods is increasing as well, which may hinder the convenient analysis and comparison of methods. In this paper, we propose a simple baseline that exceeds the SOTA methods and is computationally efficient. To further simplify the baseline, we reveal that the nonlinear activation functions, e.g. Sigmoid, ReLU, GELU, Softmax, etc. are not necessary: they could be replaced by multiplication or removed. Thus, we derive a Nonlinear Activation Free Network, namely NAFNet, from the baseline. SOTA results are achieved on various challenging benchmarks, e.g. 33.69 dB PSNR on GoPro (for image deblurring), exceeding the previous SOTA 0.38 dB with only 8.4% of its computational costs; 40.30 dB PSNR on SIDD (for image denoising), exceeding the previous SOTA 0.28 dB with less than half of its computational costs. The code and the pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/megvii-research/NAFNet.

With the rapid proliferation of 3D devices and the shortage of 3D content, stereo conversion is attracting increasing attention. Recent works introduce pretrained Diffusion Models (DMs) into this task. However, due to the scarcity of large-scale training data and comprehensive benchmarks, the optimal methodologies for employing DMs in stereo conversion and the accurate evaluation of stereo effects remain largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce the Mono2Stereo dataset, providing high-quality training data and benchmark to support in-depth exploration of stereo conversion. With this dataset, we conduct an empirical study that yields two primary findings. 1) The differences between the left and right views are subtle, yet existing metrics consider overall pixels, failing to concentrate on regions critical to stereo effects. 2) Mainstream methods adopt either one-stage left-to-right generation or warp-and-inpaint pipeline, facing challenges of degraded stereo effect and image distortion respectively. Based on these findings, we introduce a new evaluation metric, Stereo Intersection-over-Union, which prioritizes disparity and achieves a high correlation with human judgments on stereo effect. Moreover, we propose a strong baseline model, harmonizing the stereo effect and image quality simultaneously, and notably surpassing current mainstream methods. Our code and data will be open-sourced to promote further research in stereo conversion. Our models are available at mono2stereo-bench.github.io.

Quantifying similarity between neural representations -- e.g. hidden layer activation vectors -- is a perennial problem in deep learning and neuroscience research. Existing methods compare deterministic responses (e.g. artificial networks that lack stochastic layers) or averaged responses (e.g., trial-averaged firing rates in biological data). However, these measures of _deterministic_ representational similarity ignore the scale and geometric structure of noise, both of which play important roles in neural computation. To rectify this, we generalize previously proposed shape metrics (Williams et al. 2021) to quantify differences in _stochastic_ representations. These new distances satisfy the triangle inequality, and thus can be used as a rigorous basis for many supervised and unsupervised analyses. Leveraging this novel framework, we find that the stochastic geometries of neurobiological representations of oriented visual gratings and naturalistic scenes respectively resemble untrained and trained deep network representations. Further, we are able to more accurately predict certain network attributes (e.g. training hyperparameters) from its position in stochastic (versus deterministic) shape space.

Diffusion models have demonstrated great success in the field of text-to-image generation. However, alleviating the misalignment between the text prompts and images is still challenging. The root reason behind the misalignment has not been extensively investigated. We observe that the misalignment is caused by inadequate token attention activation. We further attribute this phenomenon to the diffusion model's insufficient condition utilization, which is caused by its training paradigm. To address the issue, we propose CoMat, an end-to-end diffusion model fine-tuning strategy with an image-to-text concept matching mechanism. We leverage an image captioning model to measure image-to-text alignment and guide the diffusion model to revisit ignored tokens. A novel attribute concentration module is also proposed to address the attribute binding problem. Without any image or human preference data, we use only 20K text prompts to fine-tune SDXL to obtain CoMat-SDXL. Extensive experiments show that CoMat-SDXL significantly outperforms the baseline model SDXL in two text-to-image alignment benchmarks and achieves start-of-the-art performance.

Given the recent advances in music source separation and automatic mixing, removing audio effects in music tracks is a meaningful step toward developing an automated remixing system. This paper focuses on removing distortion audio effects applied to guitar tracks in music production. We explore whether effect removal can be solved by neural networks designed for source separation and audio effect modeling. Our approach proves particularly effective for effects that mix the processed and clean signals. The models achieve better quality and significantly faster inference compared to state-of-the-art solutions based on sparse optimization. We demonstrate that the models are suitable not only for declipping but also for other types of distortion effects. By discussing the results, we stress the usefulness of multiple evaluation metrics to assess different aspects of reconstruction in distortion effect removal.

Neural networks achieve remarkable performance through superposition: encoding multiple features as overlapping directions in activation space rather than dedicating individual neurons to each feature. This challenges interpretability, yet we lack principled methods to measure superposition. We present an information-theoretic framework measuring a neural representation's effective degrees of freedom. We apply Shannon entropy to sparse autoencoder activations to compute the number of effective features as the minimum neurons needed for interference-free encoding. Equivalently, this measures how many "virtual neurons" the network simulates through superposition. When networks encode more effective features than actual neurons, they must accept interference as the price of compression. Our metric strongly correlates with ground truth in toy models, detects minimal superposition in algorithmic tasks, and reveals systematic reduction under dropout. Layer-wise patterns mirror intrinsic dimensionality studies on Pythia-70M. The metric also captures developmental dynamics, detecting sharp feature consolidation during grokking. Surprisingly, adversarial training can increase effective features while improving robustness, contradicting the hypothesis that superposition causes vulnerability. Instead, the effect depends on task complexity and network capacity: simple tasks with ample capacity allow feature expansion (abundance regime), while complex tasks or limited capacity force reduction (scarcity regime). By defining superposition as lossy compression, this work enables principled measurement of how neural networks organize information under computational constraints, connecting superposition to adversarial robustness.

How neuronal circuits achieve credit assignment remains a central unsolved question in systems neuroscience. Various studies have suggested plausible solutions for back-propagating error signals through multi-layer networks. These purely functionally motivated models assume distinct neuronal compartments to represent local error signals that determine the sign of synaptic plasticity. However, this explicit error modulation is inconsistent with phenomenological plasticity models in which the sign depends primarily on postsynaptic activity. Here we show how a plausible microcircuit model and Hebbian learning rule derived within an adaptive control theory framework can resolve this discrepancy. Assuming errors are encoded in top-down dis-inhibitory synaptic afferents, we show that error-modulated learning emerges naturally at the circuit level when recurrent inhibition explicitly influences Hebbian plasticity. The same learning rule accounts for experimentally observed plasticity in the absence of inhibition and performs comparably to back-propagation of error (BP) on several non-linearly separable benchmarks. Our findings bridge the gap between functional and experimentally observed plasticity rules and make concrete predictions on inhibitory modulation of excitatory plasticity.

Neural networks have a number of shortcomings. Amongst the severest ones is the sensitivity to distribution shifts which allows models to be easily fooled into wrong predictions by small perturbations to inputs that are often imperceivable to humans and do not have to carry semantic meaning. Adversarial training poses a partial solution to address this issue by training models on worst-case perturbations. Yet, recent work has also pointed out that the reasoning in neural networks is different from humans. Humans identify objects by shape, while neural nets mainly employ texture cues. Exemplarily, a model trained on photographs will likely fail to generalize to datasets containing sketches. Interestingly, it was also shown that adversarial training seems to favorably increase the shift toward shape bias. In this work, we revisit this observation and provide an extensive analysis of this effect on various architectures, the common ell_2- and ell_infty-training, and Transformer-based models. Further, we provide a possible explanation for this phenomenon from a frequency perspective.

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) are a versatile and powerful tool for encoding various forms of data, including images, videos, sound, and 3D shapes. A critical factor in the success of INRs is the initialization of the network, which can significantly impact the convergence and accuracy of the learned model. Unfortunately, commonly used neural network initializations are not widely applicable for many activation functions, especially those used by INRs. In this paper, we improve upon previous initialization methods by deriving an initialization that has stable variance across layers, and applies to any activation function. We show that this generalizes many previous initialization methods, and has even better stability for well studied activations. We also show that our initialization leads to improved results with INR activation functions in multiple signal modalities. Our approach is particularly effective for Gaussian INRs, where we demonstrate that the theory of our initialization matches with task performance in multiple experiments, allowing us to achieve improvements in image, audio, and 3D surface reconstruction.

Many videos contain flickering artifacts. Common causes of flicker include video processing algorithms, video generation algorithms, and capturing videos under specific situations. Prior work usually requires specific guidance such as the flickering frequency, manual annotations, or extra consistent videos to remove the flicker. In this work, we propose a general flicker removal framework that only receives a single flickering video as input without additional guidance. Since it is blind to a specific flickering type or guidance, we name this "blind deflickering." The core of our approach is utilizing the neural atlas in cooperation with a neural filtering strategy. The neural atlas is a unified representation for all frames in a video that provides temporal consistency guidance but is flawed in many cases. To this end, a neural network is trained to mimic a filter to learn the consistent features (e.g., color, brightness) and avoid introducing the artifacts in the atlas. To validate our method, we construct a dataset that contains diverse real-world flickering videos. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves satisfying deflickering performance and even outperforms baselines that use extra guidance on a public benchmark.

Image copy detection and retrieval from large databases leverage two components. First, a neural network maps an image to a vector representation, that is relatively robust to various transformations of the image. Second, an efficient but approximate similarity search algorithm trades scalability (size and speed) against quality of the search, thereby introducing a source of error. This paper improves the robustness of image copy detection with active indexing, that optimizes the interplay of these two components. We reduce the quantization loss of a given image representation by making imperceptible changes to the image before its release. The loss is back-propagated through the deep neural network back to the image, under perceptual constraints. These modifications make the image more retrievable. Our experiments show that the retrieval and copy detection of activated images is significantly improved. For instance, activation improves by +40% the Recall1@1 on various image transformations, and for several popular indexing structures based on product quantization and locality sensitivity hashing.

AI systems can take harmful actions and are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. We present an approach, inspired by recent advances in representation engineering, that "short-circuits" models as they respond with harmful outputs. Existing techniques aimed at improving alignment, such as refusal training, are often bypassed. Techniques such as adversarial training try to plug these holes by countering specific attacks. As an alternative to refusal training and adversarial training, short-circuiting directly controls the representations that are responsible for harmful outputs in the first place. Our technique can be applied to both text-only and multimodal language models to prevent the generation of harmful outputs without sacrificing utility -- even in the presence of powerful unseen attacks. Notably, while adversarial robustness in standalone image recognition remains an open challenge, short-circuiting allows the larger multimodal system to reliably withstand image "hijacks" that aim to produce harmful content. Finally, we extend our approach to AI agents, demonstrating considerable reductions in the rate of harmful actions when they are under attack. Our approach represents a significant step forward in the development of reliable safeguards to harmful behavior and adversarial attacks.

We present a method for making neural network predictions robust to shifts from the training data distribution. The proposed method is based on making predictions via a diverse set of cues (called 'middle domains') and ensembling them into one strong prediction. The premise of the idea is that predictions made via different cues respond differently to a distribution shift, hence one should be able to merge them into one robust final prediction. We perform the merging in a straightforward but principled manner based on the uncertainty associated with each prediction. The evaluations are performed using multiple tasks and datasets (Taskonomy, Replica, ImageNet, CIFAR) under a wide range of adversarial and non-adversarial distribution shifts which demonstrate the proposed method is considerably more robust than its standard learning counterpart, conventional deep ensembles, and several other baselines.

With the growing accessibility and wide adoption of large language models, concerns about their safety and alignment with human values have become paramount. In this paper, we identify a concerning phenomenon: Reasoning-Induced Misalignment (RIM), in which misalignment emerges when reasoning capabilities strengthened-particularly when specific types of reasoning patterns are introduced during inference or training. Beyond reporting this vulnerability, we provide the first mechanistic account of its origins. Through representation analysis, we discover that specific attention heads facilitate refusal by reducing their attention to CoT tokens, a mechanism that modulates the model's rationalization process during inference. During training, we find significantly higher activation entanglement between reasoning and safety in safety-critical neurons than in control neurons, particularly after fine-tuning with those identified reasoning patterns. This entanglement strongly correlates with catastrophic forgetting, providing a neuron-level explanation for RIM.