Search

This study examines gender disparities in patent law by analyzing the textual content of patent applications. While prior research has primarily focused on the study of metadata (i.e., filing year or technological class), we employ machine learning and natural language processing techniques to derive latent information from patent texts. In particular, these methods are used to predict inventor gender based on textual characteristics. We find that gender can be identified with notable accuracy - even without knowing the inventor's name. This ability to discern gender through text suggests that anonymized patent examination - often proposed as a solution to mitigate disparities in patent grant rate - may not fully address gender-specific outcomes in securing a patent. Our analysis additionally identifies gendered differences in textual choices within patent documents and the fields in which inventors choose to work. These findings highlight the complex interaction between textual choices, gender, and success in securing a patent. As discussed herein, this raises critical questions about the efficacy of current proposals aimed at achieving gender parity and efficiency in the patent system.

Recent research increasingly focuses on training vision-language models (VLMs) with long, detailed image captions. However, small-scale VLMs often struggle to balance the richness of these captions with the risk of hallucinating content during fine-tuning. In this paper, we explore how well VLMs adapt to such captions. To quantify caption quality, we propose Decomposed NLI (DNLI), an evaluation framework that breaks down generated captions into individual propositions, assessing each in isolation. This fine-grained analysis reveals a critical balance between capturing descriptive details and preventing hallucinations. Our findings show that simply reducing caption complexity or employing standard data curation techniques does not effectively resolve this issue. To tackle this challenge, we introduce Knowledge Adapted (KnowAda) fine-tuning, a data-centric approach that automatically adapts training data with the model's existing knowledge and visual understanding. KnowAda minimizes hallucinations while preserving high descriptiveness. We validate this approach across several small-scale VLMs (up to 7B parameters) and dense caption datasets, demonstrating that KnowAda effectively balances hallucination reduction and descriptiveness. Our results show that KnowAda outperforms various baselines in both automatic metrics and human evaluations. We will release our code and models.

Recent advancements in text-to-image generation have significantly enhanced the quality of synthesized images. Despite this progress, evaluations predominantly focus on aesthetic appeal or alignment with text prompts. Consequently, there is limited understanding of whether these models can accurately represent a wide variety of realistic visual entities - a task requiring real-world knowledge. To address this gap, we propose a benchmark focused on evaluating Knowledge-InTensive image generaTion on real-world ENtities (i.e., KITTEN). Using KITTEN, we conduct a systematic study on the fidelity of entities in text-to-image generation models, focusing on their ability to generate a wide range of real-world visual entities, such as landmark buildings, aircraft, plants, and animals. We evaluate the latest text-to-image models and retrieval-augmented customization models using both automatic metrics and carefully-designed human evaluations, with an emphasis on the fidelity of entities in the generated images. Our findings reveal that even the most advanced text-to-image models often fail to generate entities with accurate visual details. Although retrieval-augmented models can enhance the fidelity of entity by incorporating reference images during testing, they often over-rely on these references and struggle to produce novel configurations of the entity as requested in creative text prompts., Comment: Project page: https://kitten-project.github.io/

Will a Visual Language Model (VLM)-based bot warn us about slipping if it detects a wet floor? Recent VLMs have demonstrated impressive capabilities, yet their ability to infer outcomes and causes remains underexplored. To address this, we introduce NL-Eye, a benchmark designed to assess VLMs' visual abductive reasoning skills. NL-Eye adapts the abductive Natural Language Inference (NLI) task to the visual domain, requiring models to evaluate the plausibility of hypothesis images based on a premise image and explain their decisions. NL-Eye consists of 350 carefully curated triplet examples (1,050 images) spanning diverse reasoning categories: physical, functional, logical, emotional, cultural, and social. The data curation process involved two steps - writing textual descriptions and generating images using text-to-image models, both requiring substantial human involvement to ensure high-quality and challenging scenes. Our experiments show that VLMs struggle significantly on NL-Eye, often performing at random baseline levels, while humans excel in both plausibility prediction and explanation quality. This demonstrates a deficiency in the abductive reasoning capabilities of modern VLMs. NL-Eye represents a crucial step toward developing VLMs capable of robust multimodal reasoning for real-world applications, including accident-prevention bots and generated video verification.

Red teaming assesses how large language models (LLMs) can produce content that violates norms, policies, and rules set during their safety training. However, most existing automated methods in the literature are not representative of the way humans tend to interact with AI models. Common users of AI models may not have advanced knowledge of adversarial machine learning methods or access to model internals, and they do not spend a lot of time crafting a single highly effective adversarial prompt. Instead, they are likely to make use of techniques commonly shared online and exploit the multiturn conversational nature of LLMs. While manual testing addresses this gap, it is an inefficient and often expensive process. To address these limitations, we introduce the Generative Offensive Agent Tester (GOAT), an automated agentic red teaming system that simulates plain language adversarial conversations while leveraging multiple adversarial prompting techniques to identify vulnerabilities in LLMs. We instantiate GOAT with 7 red teaming attacks by prompting a general-purpose model in a way that encourages reasoning through the choices of methods available, the current target model's response, and the next steps. Our approach is designed to be extensible and efficient, allowing human testers to focus on exploring new areas of risk while automation covers the scaled adversarial stress-testing of known risk territory. We present the design and evaluation of GOAT, demonstrating its effectiveness in identifying vulnerabilities in state-of-the-art LLMs, with an ASR@10 of 97% against Llama 3.1 and 88% against GPT-4 on the JailbreakBench dataset.

Imagine observing someone scratching their arm; to understand why, additional context would be necessary. However, spotting a mosquito nearby would immediately offer a likely explanation for the person's discomfort, thereby alleviating the need for further information. This example illustrates how subtle visual cues can challenge our cognitive skills and demonstrates the complexity of interpreting visual scenarios. To study these skills, we present Visual Riddles, a benchmark aimed to test vision and language models on visual riddles requiring commonsense and world knowledge. The benchmark comprises 400 visual riddles, each featuring a unique image created by a variety of text-to-image models, question, ground-truth answer, textual hint, and attribution. Human evaluation reveals that existing models lag significantly behind human performance, which is at 82\% accuracy, with Gemini-Pro-1.5 leading with 40\% accuracy. Our benchmark comes with automatic evaluation tasks to make assessment scalable. These findings underscore the potential of Visual Riddles as a valuable resource for enhancing vision and language models' capabilities in interpreting complex visual scenarios., Comment: https://visual-riddles.github.io/

In this paper, we show that with the ability to jailbreak a GenAI model, attackers can escalate the outcome of attacks against RAG-based GenAI-powered applications in severity and scale. In the first part of the paper, we show that attackers can escalate RAG membership inference attacks and RAG entity extraction attacks to RAG documents extraction attacks, forcing a more severe outcome compared to existing attacks. We evaluate the results obtained from three extraction methods, the influence of the type and the size of five embeddings algorithms employed, the size of the provided context, and the GenAI engine. We show that attackers can extract 80%-99.8% of the data stored in the database used by the RAG of a Q&A chatbot. In the second part of the paper, we show that attackers can escalate the scale of RAG data poisoning attacks from compromising a single GenAI-powered application to compromising the entire GenAI ecosystem, forcing a greater scale of damage. This is done by crafting an adversarial self-replicating prompt that triggers a chain reaction of a computer worm within the ecosystem and forces each affected application to perform a malicious activity and compromise the RAG of additional applications. We evaluate the performance of the worm in creating a chain of confidential data extraction about users within a GenAI ecosystem of GenAI-powered email assistants and analyze how the performance of the worm is affected by the size of the context, the adversarial self-replicating prompt used, the type and size of the embeddings algorithm employed, and the number of hops in the propagation. Finally, we review and analyze guardrails to protect RAG-based inference and discuss the tradeoffs., Comment: for Github, see https://github.com/StavC/UnleashingWorms-ExtractingData

Of the many applications of whispering-gallery mode (WGM) microresonators, Single-atom cavity-QED poses the most extreme demands on mode-volume and quality factor. Here we present a model-based procedure for the fabrication of small mode-volume ultrahigh Q silica WGM microresonators of varying geometries, from toroidal to micro-spheres. We experimentally demonstrate WGM resonators with ultra-high qualities as high as $1.7\times 10^8$ at 780nm. We present a theoretical model that allows tailoring the recipe to attain the desired geometry of the fabricated WGM microresonators., Comment: 15 pages, 9 figure

In this paper we argue that a jailbroken GenAI model can cause substantial harm to GenAI-powered applications and facilitate PromptWare, a new type of attack that flips the GenAI model's behavior from serving an application to attacking it. PromptWare exploits user inputs to jailbreak a GenAI model to force/perform malicious activity within the context of a GenAI-powered application. First, we introduce a naive implementation of PromptWare that behaves as malware that targets Plan & Execute architectures (a.k.a., ReAct, function calling). We show that attackers could force a desired execution flow by creating a user input that produces desired outputs given that the logic of the GenAI-powered application is known to attackers. We demonstrate the application of a DoS attack that triggers the execution of a GenAI-powered assistant to enter an infinite loop that wastes money and computational resources on redundant API calls to a GenAI engine, preventing the application from providing service to a user. Next, we introduce a more sophisticated implementation of PromptWare that we name Advanced PromptWare Threat (APwT) that targets GenAI-powered applications whose logic is unknown to attackers. We show that attackers could create user input that exploits the GenAI engine's advanced AI capabilities to launch a kill chain in inference time consisting of six steps intended to escalate privileges, analyze the application's context, identify valuable assets, reason possible malicious activities, decide on one of them, and execute it. We demonstrate the application of APwT against a GenAI-powered e-commerce chatbot and show that it can trigger the modification of SQL tables, potentially leading to unauthorized discounts on the items sold to the user., Comment: Website, see https://sites.google.com/view/promptware

Modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems are powered by foundation models. This paper presents a new set of foundation models, called Llama 3. It is a herd of language models that natively support multilinguality, coding, reasoning, and tool usage. Our largest model is a dense Transformer with 405B parameters and a context window of up to 128K tokens. This paper presents an extensive empirical evaluation of Llama 3. We find that Llama 3 delivers comparable quality to leading language models such as GPT-4 on a plethora of tasks. We publicly release Llama 3, including pre-trained and post-trained versions of the 405B parameter language model and our Llama Guard 3 model for input and output safety. The paper also presents the results of experiments in which we integrate image, video, and speech capabilities into Llama 3 via a compositional approach. We observe this approach performs competitively with the state-of-the-art on image, video, and speech recognition tasks. The resulting models are not yet being broadly released as they are still under development.

Generated video scenes for action-centric sequence descriptions like recipe instructions and do-it-yourself projects include non-linear patterns, in which the next video may require to be visually consistent not on the immediate previous video but on earlier ones. Current multi-scene video synthesis approaches fail to meet these consistency requirements. To address this, we propose a contrastive sequential video diffusion method that selects the most suitable previously generated scene to guide and condition the denoising process of the next scene. The result is a multi-scene video that is grounded in the scene descriptions and coherent w.r.t the scenes that require visual consistency. Experiments with real-world action-centric data demonstrate the practicality and improved consistency of our model compared to prior work.

The performance of Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) is dependent on the size and quality of their training datasets. Existing video instruction tuning datasets lack diversity as they are derived by prompting large language models with video captions to generate question-answer pairs, and are therefore mostly descriptive. Meanwhile, many labeled video datasets with diverse labels and supervision exist - however, we find that their integration into LVLMs is non-trivial. Herein, we present Video Self-Training with augmented Reasoning (Video-STaR), the first video self-training approach. Video-STaR allows the utilization of any labeled video dataset for video instruction tuning. In Video-STaR, an LVLM cycles between instruction generation and finetuning, which we show (I) improves general video understanding and (II) adapts LVLMs to novel downstream tasks with existing supervision. During generation, an LVLM is prompted to propose an answer. The answers are then filtered only to those that contain the original video labels, and the LVLM is then re-trained on the generated dataset. By only training on generated answers that contain the correct video labels, Video-STaR utilizes these existing video labels as weak supervision for video instruction tuning. Our results demonstrate that Video-STaR-enhanced LVLMs exhibit improved performance in (I) general video QA, where TempCompass performance improved by 10%, and (II) on downstream tasks, where Video-STaR improved Kinetics700-QA accuracy by 20% and action quality assessment on FineDiving by 15%., Comment: Project page: https://orrzohar.github.io/projects/video-star/

Human feedback plays a critical role in learning and refining reward models for text-to-image generation, but the optimal form the feedback should take for learning an accurate reward function has not been conclusively established. This paper investigates the effectiveness of fine-grained feedback which captures nuanced distinctions in image quality and prompt-alignment, compared to traditional coarse-grained feedback (for example, thumbs up/down or ranking between a set of options). While fine-grained feedback holds promise, particularly for systems catering to diverse societal preferences, we show that demonstrating its superiority to coarse-grained feedback is not automatic. Through experiments on real and synthetic preference data, we surface the complexities of building effective models due to the interplay of model choice, feedback type, and the alignment between human judgment and computational interpretation. We identify key challenges in eliciting and utilizing fine-grained feedback, prompting a reassessment of its assumed benefits and practicality. Our findings -- e.g., that fine-grained feedback can lead to worse models for a fixed budget, in some settings; however, in controlled settings with known attributes, fine grained rewards can indeed be more helpful -- call for careful consideration of feedback attributes and potentially beckon novel modeling approaches to appropriately unlock the potential value of fine-grained feedback in-the-wild.

We introduce DataComp for Language Models (DCLM), a testbed for controlled dataset experiments with the goal of improving language models. As part of DCLM, we provide a standardized corpus of 240T tokens extracted from Common Crawl, effective pretraining recipes based on the OpenLM framework, and a broad suite of 53 downstream evaluations. Participants in the DCLM benchmark can experiment with data curation strategies such as deduplication, filtering, and data mixing at model scales ranging from 412M to 7B parameters. As a baseline for DCLM, we conduct extensive experiments and find that model-based filtering is key to assembling a high-quality training set. The resulting dataset, DCLM-Baseline enables training a 7B parameter language model from scratch to 64% 5-shot accuracy on MMLU with 2.6T training tokens. Compared to MAP-Neo, the previous state-of-the-art in open-data language models, DCLM-Baseline represents a 6.6 percentage point improvement on MMLU while being trained with 40% less compute. Our baseline model is also comparable to Mistral-7B-v0.3 and Llama 3 8B on MMLU (63% & 66%), and performs similarly on an average of 53 natural language understanding tasks while being trained with 6.6x less compute than Llama 3 8B. Our results highlight the importance of dataset design for training language models and offer a starting point for further research on data curation., Comment: Project page: https://www.datacomp.ai/dclm/

Recent advances in internet-scale video data pretraining have led to the development of text-to-video generative models that can create high-quality videos across a broad range of visual concepts, synthesize realistic motions and render complex objects. Hence, these generative models have the potential to become general-purpose simulators of the physical world. However, it is unclear how far we are from this goal with the existing text-to-video generative models. To this end, we present VideoPhy, a benchmark designed to assess whether the generated videos follow physical commonsense for real-world activities (e.g. marbles will roll down when placed on a slanted surface). Specifically, we curate diverse prompts that involve interactions between various material types in the physical world (e.g., solid-solid, solid-fluid, fluid-fluid). We then generate videos conditioned on these captions from diverse state-of-the-art text-to-video generative models, including open models (e.g., CogVideoX) and closed models (e.g., Lumiere, Dream Machine). Our human evaluation reveals that the existing models severely lack the ability to generate videos adhering to the given text prompts, while also lack physical commonsense. Specifically, the best performing model, CogVideoX-5B, generates videos that adhere to the caption and physical laws for 39.6% of the instances. VideoPhy thus highlights that the video generative models are far from accurately simulating the physical world. Finally, we propose an auto-evaluator, VideoCon-Physics, to assess the performance reliably for the newly released models., Comment: 43 pages, 29 figures, 12 tables. Added CogVideo and Dream Machine in v2

Multistep instructions, such as recipes and how-to guides, greatly benefit from visual aids, such as a series of images that accompany the instruction steps. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have become adept at generating coherent textual steps, Large Vision/Language Models (LVLMs) are less capable of generating accompanying image sequences. The most challenging aspect is that each generated image needs to adhere to the relevant textual step instruction, as well as be visually consistent with earlier images in the sequence. To address this problem, we propose an approach for generating consistent image sequences, which integrates a Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) with an LLM to transform the sequence into a caption to maintain the semantic coherence of the sequence. In addition, to maintain the visual coherence of the image sequence, we introduce a copy mechanism to initialise reverse diffusion processes with a latent vector iteration from a previously generated image from a relevant step. Both strategies will condition the reverse diffusion process on the sequence of instruction steps and tie the contents of the current image to previous instruction steps and corresponding images. Experiments show that the proposed approach is preferred by humans in 46.6% of the cases against 26.6% for the second best method. In addition, automatic metrics showed that the proposed method maintains semantic coherence and visual consistency across steps in both domains.

Most of these text-to-video (T2V) generative models often produce single-scene video clips that depict an entity performing a particular action (e.g., 'a red panda climbing a tree'). However, it is pertinent to generate multi-scene videos since they are ubiquitous in the real-world (e.g., 'a red panda climbing a tree' followed by 'the red panda sleeps on the top of the tree'). To generate multi-scene videos from the pretrained T2V model, we introduce a simple and effective Time-Aligned Captions (TALC) framework. Specifically, we enhance the text-conditioning mechanism in the T2V architecture to recognize the temporal alignment between the video scenes and scene descriptions. For instance, we condition the visual features of the earlier and later scenes of the generated video with the representations of the first scene description (e.g., 'a red panda climbing a tree') and second scene description (e.g., 'the red panda sleeps on the top of the tree'), respectively. As a result, we show that the T2V model can generate multi-scene videos that adhere to the multi-scene text descriptions and be visually consistent (e.g., entity and background). Further, we finetune the pretrained T2V model with multi-scene video-text data using the TALC framework. We show that the TALC-finetuned model outperforms the baseline by achieving a relative gain of 29% in the overall score, which averages visual consistency and text adherence using human evaluation., Comment: 22 pages, 14 figures, 11 tables

Despite the longstanding adage "an image is worth a thousand words," generating accurate hyper-detailed image descriptions remains unsolved. Trained on short web-scraped image text, vision-language models often generate incomplete descriptions with visual inconsistencies. We address this via a novel data-centric approach with ImageInWords (IIW), a carefully designed human-in-the-loop framework for curating hyper-detailed image descriptions. Human evaluations on IIW data show major gains compared to recent datasets (+66%) and GPT4V (+48%) across comprehensiveness, specificity, hallucinations, and more. We also show that fine-tuning with IIW data improves these metrics by +31% against models trained with prior work, even with only 9k samples. Lastly, we evaluate IIW models with text-to-image generation and vision-language reasoning tasks. Our generated descriptions result in the highest fidelity images, and boost compositional reasoning by up to 6% on ARO, SVO-Probes, and Winoground datasets. We release the IIW Eval benchmark with human judgement labels, object and image-level annotations from our framework, and existing image caption datasets enriched via IIW-model., Comment: Webpage (https://google.github.io/imageinwords), GitHub (https://github.com/google/imageinwords), HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/datasets/google/imageinwords)

Vision-language datasets are vital for both text-to-image (T2I) and image-to-text (I2T) research. However, current datasets lack descriptions with fine-grained detail that would allow for richer associations to be learned by models. To fill the gap, we introduce Descriptions of Connected and Contrasting Images (DOCCI), a dataset with long, human-annotated English descriptions for 15k images that were taken, curated and donated by a single researcher intent on capturing key challenges such as spatial relations, counting, text rendering, world knowledge, and more. We instruct human annotators to create comprehensive descriptions for each image; these average 136 words in length and are crafted to clearly distinguish each image from those that are related or similar. Each description is highly compositional and typically encompasses multiple challenges. Through both quantitative and qualitative analyses, we demonstrate that DOCCI serves as an effective training resource for image-to-text generation -- a PaLI 5B model finetuned on DOCCI shows equal or superior results compared to highly-performant larger models like LLaVA-1.5 7B and InstructBLIP 7B. Furthermore, we show that DOCCI is a useful testbed for text-to-image generation, highlighting the limitations of current text-to-image models in capturing long descriptions and fine details.

We present super-resolved coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) microscopy by implementing phase-resolved image scanning microscopy (ISM), achieving up to two-fold resolution increase as compared with a conventional CARS microscope. Phase-sensitivity is required for the standard pixel-reassignment procedure since the scattered field is coherent, thus the point-spread function (PSF) is well-defined only for the field amplitude. We resolve the complex field by a simple add-on to the CARS setup enabling inline interferometry. Phase-sensitivity offers additional contrast which informs the spatial distribution of both resonant and nonresonant scatterers. As compared with alternative super-resolution schemes in coherent nonlinear microscopy, the proposed method is simple, requires only low-intensity excitation, and is compatible with any conventional forward-detected CARS imaging setup.

In the past year, numerous companies have incorporated Generative AI (GenAI) capabilities into new and existing applications, forming interconnected Generative AI (GenAI) ecosystems consisting of semi/fully autonomous agents powered by GenAI services. While ongoing research highlighted risks associated with the GenAI layer of agents (e.g., dialog poisoning, membership inference, prompt leaking, jailbreaking), a critical question emerges: Can attackers develop malware to exploit the GenAI component of an agent and launch cyber-attacks on the entire GenAI ecosystem? This paper introduces Morris II, the first worm designed to target GenAI ecosystems through the use of adversarial self-replicating prompts. The study demonstrates that attackers can insert such prompts into inputs that, when processed by GenAI models, prompt the model to replicate the input as output (replication), engaging in malicious activities (payload). Additionally, these inputs compel the agent to deliver them (propagate) to new agents by exploiting the connectivity within the GenAI ecosystem. We demonstrate the application of Morris II against GenAIpowered email assistants in two use cases (spamming and exfiltrating personal data), under two settings (black-box and white-box accesses), using two types of input data (text and images). The worm is tested against three different GenAI models (Gemini Pro, ChatGPT 4.0, and LLaVA), and various factors (e.g., propagation rate, replication, malicious activity) influencing the performance of the worm are evaluated., Comment: Website: https://sites.google.com/view/compromptmized

Analogy-making is central to human cognition, allowing us to adapt to novel situations -- an ability that current AI systems still lack. Most analogy datasets today focus on simple analogies (e.g., word analogies); datasets including complex types of analogies are typically manually curated and very small. We believe that this holds back progress in computational analogy. In this work, we design a data generation pipeline, ParallelPARC (Parallel Paragraph Creator) leveraging state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) to create complex, paragraph-based analogies, as well as distractors, both simple and challenging. We demonstrate our pipeline and create ProPara-Logy, a dataset of analogies between scientific processes. We publish a gold-set, validated by humans, and a silver-set, generated automatically. We test LLMs' and humans' analogy recognition in binary and multiple-choice settings, and found that humans outperform the best models (~13% gap) after a light supervision. We demonstrate that our silver-set is useful for training models. Lastly, we show challenging distractors confuse LLMs, but not humans. We hope our pipeline will encourage research in this emerging field., Comment: NAACL 2024 (Main Conference)

Prompting language models to provide step-by-step answers (e.g., "Chain-of-Thought") is the prominent approach for complex reasoning tasks, where more accurate reasoning chains typically improve downstream task performance. Recent literature discusses automatic methods to verify reasoning to evaluate and improve their correctness. However, no fine-grained step-level datasets are available to enable thorough evaluation of such verification methods, hindering progress in this direction. We introduce REVEAL: Reasoning Verification Evaluation, a dataset to benchmark automatic verifiers of complex Chain-of-Thought reasoning in open-domain question-answering settings. REVEAL includes comprehensive labels for the relevance, attribution to evidence passages, and logical correctness of each reasoning step in a language model's answer, across a variety of datasets and state-of-the-art language models. Evaluation on REVEAL shows that verifiers struggle at verifying reasoning chains - in particular, verifying logical correctness and detecting contradictions. Available at https://reveal-dataset.github.io/ ., Comment: Accepted to ACL 2024

While existing image-text alignment models reach high quality binary assessments, they fall short of pinpointing the exact source of misalignment. In this paper, we present a method to provide detailed textual and visual explanation of detected misalignments between text-image pairs. We leverage large language models and visual grounding models to automatically construct a training set that holds plausible misaligned captions for a given image and corresponding textual explanations and visual indicators. We also publish a new human curated test set comprising ground-truth textual and visual misalignment annotations. Empirical results show that fine-tuning vision language models on our training set enables them to articulate misalignments and visually indicate them within images, outperforming strong baselines both on the binary alignment classification and the explanation generation tasks. Our method code and human curated test set are available at: https://mismatch-quest.github.io/

Despite being (pre)trained on a massive amount of data, state-of-the-art video-language alignment models are not robust to semantically-plausible contrastive changes in the video captions. Our work addresses this by identifying a broad spectrum of contrast misalignments, such as replacing entities, actions, and flipping event order, which alignment models should be robust against. To this end, we introduce the VideoCon, a video-language alignment dataset constructed by a large language model that generates plausible contrast video captions and explanations for differences between original and contrast video captions. Then, a generative video-language model is finetuned with VideoCon to assess video-language entailment and generate explanations. Our VideoCon-based alignment model significantly outperforms current models. It exhibits a 12-point increase in AUC for the video-language alignment task on human-generated contrast captions. Finally, our model sets new state of the art zero-shot performance in temporally-extensive video-language tasks such as text-to-video retrieval (SSv2-Temporal) and video question answering (ATP-Hard). Moreover, our model shows superior performance on novel videos and human-crafted captions and explanations. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Hritikbansal/videocon., Comment: 22 pages, 19 Figures, 7 Tables

Machine learning (ML) models are known to be vulnerable to a number of attacks that target the integrity of their predictions or the privacy of their training data. To carry out these attacks, a black-box adversary must typically possess the ability to query the model and observe its outputs (e.g., labels). In this work, we demonstrate, for the first time, the ability to enhance such decision-based attacks. To accomplish this, we present an approach that exploits a novel side channel in which the adversary simply measures the execution time of the algorithm used to post-process the predictions of the ML model under attack. The leakage of inference-state elements into algorithmic timing side channels has never been studied before, and we have found that it can contain rich information that facilitates superior timing attacks that significantly outperform attacks based solely on label outputs. In a case study, we investigate leakage from the non-maximum suppression (NMS) algorithm, which plays a crucial role in the operation of object detectors. In our examination of the timing side-channel vulnerabilities associated with this algorithm, we identified the potential to enhance decision-based attacks. We demonstrate attacks against the YOLOv3 detector, leveraging the timing leakage to successfully evade object detection using adversarial examples, and perform dataset inference. Our experiments show that our adversarial examples exhibit superior perturbation quality compared to a decision-based attack. In addition, we present a new threat model in which dataset inference based solely on timing leakage is performed. To address the timing leakage vulnerability inherent in the NMS algorithm, we explore the potential and limitations of implementing constant-time inference passes as a mitigation strategy.

We release Code Llama, a family of large language models for code based on Llama 2 providing state-of-the-art performance among open models, infilling capabilities, support for large input contexts, and zero-shot instruction following ability for programming tasks. We provide multiple flavors to cover a wide range of applications: foundation models (Code Llama), Python specializations (Code Llama - Python), and instruction-following models (Code Llama - Instruct) with 7B, 13B, 34B and 70B parameters each. All models are trained on sequences of 16k tokens and show improvements on inputs with up to 100k tokens. 7B, 13B and 70B Code Llama and Code Llama - Instruct variants support infilling based on surrounding content. Code Llama reaches state-of-the-art performance among open models on several code benchmarks, with scores of up to 67% and 65% on HumanEval and MBPP, respectively. Notably, Code Llama - Python 7B outperforms Llama 2 70B on HumanEval and MBPP, and all our models outperform every other publicly available model on MultiPL-E. We release Code Llama under a permissive license that allows for both research and commercial use.

We introduce VisIT-Bench (Visual InsTruction Benchmark), a benchmark for evaluation of instruction-following vision-language models for real-world use. Our starting point is curating 70 'instruction families' that we envision instruction tuned vision-language models should be able to address. Extending beyond evaluations like VQAv2 and COCO, tasks range from basic recognition to game playing and creative generation. Following curation, our dataset comprises 592 test queries, each with a human-authored instruction-conditioned caption. These descriptions surface instruction-specific factors, e.g., for an instruction asking about the accessibility of a storefront for wheelchair users, the instruction-conditioned caption describes ramps/potential obstacles. These descriptions enable 1) collecting human-verified reference outputs for each instance; and 2) automatic evaluation of candidate multimodal generations using a text-only LLM, aligning with human judgment. We quantify quality gaps between models and references using both human and automatic evaluations; e.g., the top-performing instruction-following model wins against the GPT-4 reference in just 27% of the comparison. VisIT-Bench is dynamic to participate, practitioners simply submit their model's response on the project website; Data, code and leaderboard is available at visit-bench.github.io., Comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2023, Datasets and Benchmarks. Website: https://visit-bench.github.io/

We introduce OpenFlamingo, a family of autoregressive vision-language models ranging from 3B to 9B parameters. OpenFlamingo is an ongoing effort to produce an open-source replication of DeepMind's Flamingo models. On seven vision-language datasets, OpenFlamingo models average between 80 - 89% of corresponding Flamingo performance. This technical report describes our models, training data, hyperparameters, and evaluation suite. We share our models and code at https://github.com/mlfoundations/open_flamingo.

The prevalence of large-scale multimodal datasets presents unique challenges in assessing dataset quality. We propose a two-step method to analyze multimodal datasets, which leverages a small seed of human annotation to map each multimodal instance to the modalities required to process it. Our method sheds light on the importance of different modalities in datasets, as well as the relationship between them. We apply our approach to TVQA, a video question-answering dataset, and discover that most questions can be answered using a single modality, without a substantial bias towards any specific modality. Moreover, we find that more than 70% of the questions are solvable using several different single-modality strategies, e.g., by either looking at the video or listening to the audio, highlighting the limited integration of multiple modalities in TVQA. We leverage our annotation and analyze the MERLOT Reserve, finding that it struggles with image-based questions compared to text and audio, but also with auditory speaker identification. Based on our observations, we introduce a new test set that necessitates multiple modalities, observing a dramatic drop in model performance. Our methodology provides valuable insights into multimodal datasets and highlights the need for the development of more robust models.

Weird, unusual, and uncanny images pique the curiosity of observers because they challenge commonsense. For example, an image released during the 2022 world cup depicts the famous soccer stars Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo playing chess, which playfully violates our expectation that their competition should occur on the football field. Humans can easily recognize and interpret these unconventional images, but can AI models do the same? We introduce WHOOPS!, a new dataset and benchmark for visual commonsense. The dataset is comprised of purposefully commonsense-defying images created by designers using publicly-available image generation tools like Midjourney. We consider several tasks posed over the dataset. In addition to image captioning, cross-modal matching, and visual question answering, we introduce a difficult explanation generation task, where models must identify and explain why a given image is unusual. Our results show that state-of-the-art models such as GPT3 and BLIP2 still lag behind human performance on WHOOPS!. We hope our dataset will inspire the development of AI models with stronger visual commonsense reasoning abilities. Data, models and code are available at the project website: whoops-benchmark.github.io, Comment: Accepted to ICCV 2023. Website: whoops-benchmark.github.io

Text to image generation methods (T2I) are widely popular in generating art and other creative artifacts. While visual hallucinations can be a positive factor in scenarios where creativity is appreciated, such artifacts are poorly suited for cases where the generated image needs to be grounded in complex natural language without explicit visual elements. In this paper, we propose to strengthen the consistency property of T2I methods in the presence of natural complex language, which often breaks the limits of T2I methods by including non-visual information, and textual elements that require knowledge for accurate generation. To address these phenomena, we propose a Natural Language to Verified Image generation approach (NL2VI) that converts a natural prompt into a visual prompt, which is more suitable for image generation. A T2I model then generates an image for the visual prompt, which is then verified with VQA algorithms. Experimentally, aligning natural prompts with image generation can improve the consistency of the generated images by up to 11% over the state of the art. Moreover, improvements can generalize to challenging domains like cooking and DIY tasks, where the correctness of the generated image is crucial to illustrate actions.

Automatically determining whether a text and a corresponding image are semantically aligned is a significant challenge for vision-language models, with applications in generative text-to-image and image-to-text tasks. In this work, we study methods for automatic text-image alignment evaluation. We first introduce SeeTRUE: a comprehensive evaluation set, spanning multiple datasets from both text-to-image and image-to-text generation tasks, with human judgements for whether a given text-image pair is semantically aligned. We then describe two automatic methods to determine alignment: the first involving a pipeline based on question generation and visual question answering models, and the second employing an end-to-end classification approach by finetuning multimodal pretrained models. Both methods surpass prior approaches in various text-image alignment tasks, with significant improvements in challenging cases that involve complex composition or unnatural images. Finally, we demonstrate how our approaches can localize specific misalignments between an image and a given text, and how they can be used to automatically re-rank candidates in text-to-image generation., Comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2023. Website: https://wysiwyr-itm.github.io/

One of the exciting capabilities of recent language models for dialog is their ability to independently search for relevant information to ground a given dialog response. However, obtaining training data to teach models how to issue search queries is time and resource consuming. In this work, we propose q2d: an automatic data generation pipeline that generates information-seeking dialogs from questions. We prompt a large language model (PaLM) to create conversational versions of question answering datasets, and use it to improve query generation models that communicate with external search APIs to ground dialog responses. Unlike previous approaches which relied on human written dialogs with search queries, our method allows to automatically generate query-based grounded dialogs with better control and scale. Our experiments demonstrate that: (1) For query generation on the QReCC dataset, models trained on our synthetically-generated data achieve 90%--97% of the performance of models trained on the human-generated data; (2) We can successfully generate data for training dialog models in new domains without any existing dialog data as demonstrated on the multi-hop MuSiQue and Bamboogle QA datasets. (3) We perform a thorough analysis of the generated dialogs showing that humans find them of high quality and struggle to distinguish them from human-written dialogs., Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 2023. Website: https://question2dialog.github.io/

Multimodal datasets are a critical component in recent breakthroughs such as Stable Diffusion and GPT-4, yet their design does not receive the same research attention as model architectures or training algorithms. To address this shortcoming in the ML ecosystem, we introduce DataComp, a testbed for dataset experiments centered around a new candidate pool of 12.8 billion image-text pairs from Common Crawl. Participants in our benchmark design new filtering techniques or curate new data sources and then evaluate their new dataset by running our standardized CLIP training code and testing the resulting model on 38 downstream test sets. Our benchmark consists of multiple compute scales spanning four orders of magnitude, which enables the study of scaling trends and makes the benchmark accessible to researchers with varying resources. Our baseline experiments show that the DataComp workflow leads to better training sets. In particular, our best baseline, DataComp-1B, enables training a CLIP ViT-L/14 from scratch to 79.2% zero-shot accuracy on ImageNet, outperforming OpenAI's CLIP ViT-L/14 by 3.7 percentage points while using the same training procedure and compute. We release DataComp and all accompanying code at www.datacomp.ai., Comment: NeurIPS 2023 Datasets and Benchmarks Track

While vision-and-language models perform well on tasks such as visual question answering, they struggle when it comes to basic human commonsense reasoning skills. In this work, we introduce WinoGAViL: an online game of vision-and-language associations (e.g., between werewolves and a full moon), used as a dynamic evaluation benchmark. Inspired by the popular card game Codenames, a spymaster gives a textual cue related to several visual candidates, and another player tries to identify them. Human players are rewarded for creating associations that are challenging for a rival AI model but still solvable by other human players. We use the game to collect 3.5K instances, finding that they are intuitive for humans (>90% Jaccard index) but challenging for state-of-the-art AI models, where the best model (ViLT) achieves a score of 52%, succeeding mostly where the cue is visually salient. Our analysis as well as the feedback we collect from players indicate that the collected associations require diverse reasoning skills, including general knowledge, common sense, abstraction, and more. We release the dataset, the code and the interactive game, allowing future data collection that can be used to develop models with better association abilities., Comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2022, Datasets and Benchmarks. Website: https://winogavil.github.io/