Machine Learning with Privacy for Protected Attributes

Differential privacy (DP) has become the standard for private data analysis. Certain machine learning applications only require privacy protection for specific protected attributes. Using naive variants of differential privacy in such use cases can result in unnecessary degradation of utility. In this work, we refine the definition of DP to create a more general and flexible framework that we call feature differential privacy (FDP). Our definition is simulation-based and allows for both addition/removal and replacement variants of privacy, and can handle arbitrary and adaptive separation of protected and non-protected features. We prove the properties of FDP, such as adaptive composition, and demonstrate its implications for limiting attribute inference attacks. We also propose a modification of the standard DP-SGD algorithm that satisfies FDP while leveraging desirable properties such as amplification via sub-sampling. We apply our framework to various machine learning tasks and show that it can significantly improve the utility of DP-trained models when public features are available. For example, we train diffusion models on the AFHQ dataset of animal faces and observe a drastic improvement in FID compared to DP, from 286.7 to 101.9 at $\epsilon=8$, assuming that the blurred version of a training image is available as a public feature. Overall, our work provides a new approach to private data analysis that can help reduce the utility cost of DP while still providing strong privacy guarantees.

How much do language models memorize?

We propose a new method for estimating how much a model ``knows'' about a datapoint and use it to measure the capacity of modern language models. Prior studies of language model memorization have struggled to disentangle memorization from generalization. We formally separate memorization into two components: \textit{unintended memorization}, the information a model contains about a specific dataset, and \textit{generalization}, the information a model contains about the true data-generation process. When we completely eliminate generalization, we can compute the total memorization, which provides an estimate of model capacity: our measurements estimate that GPT-style models have a capacity of approximately 3.6 bits per parameter. We train language models on datasets of increasing size and observe that models memorize until their capacity fills, at which point ``grokking'' begins, and unintended memorization decreases as models begin to generalize. We train hundreds of transformer language models ranging from $500K$ to $1.5B$ parameters and produce a series of scaling laws relating model capacity and data size to membership inference.

RoFL: Robust Fingerprinting of Language Models

AI developers are releasing large language models (LLMs) under a variety of different licenses. Many of these licenses restrict the ways in which the models or their outputs may be used. This raises the question how license violations may be recognized. In particular, how can we identify that an API or product uses (an adapted version of) a particular LLM? We present a new method that enable model developers to perform such identification via fingerprints: statistical patterns that are unique to the developer's model and robust to common alterations of that model. Our method permits model identification in a black-box setting using a limited number of queries, enabling identification of models that can only be accessed via an API or product. The fingerprints are non-invasive: our method does not require any changes to the model during training, hence by design, it does not impact model quality. Empirically, we find our method provides a high degree of robustness to common changes in the model or inference settings. In our experiments, it substantially outperforms prior art, including invasive methods that explicitly train watermarks into the model.

WASP: Benchmarking Web Agent Security Against Prompt Injection Attacks

Web navigation AI agents use language-and-vision foundation models to enhance productivity but these models are known to be susceptible to indirect prompt injections that get them to follow instructions different from the legitimate user's. Existing explorations of this threat applied to web agents often focus on a single isolated adversarial goal, test with injected instructions that are either too easy or not truly malicious, and often give the adversary unreasonable access. In order to better focus adversarial research, we construct a new benchmark called WASP (Web Agent Security against Prompt injection attacks) that introduces realistic web agent hijacking objectives and an isolated environment to test them in that does not affect real users or the live web. As part of WASP, we also develop baseline attacks against popular web agentic systems (VisualWebArena, Claude Computer Use, etc.) instantiated with various state-of-the-art models. Our evaluation shows that even AI agents backed by models with advanced reasoning capabilities and by models with instruction hierarchy mitigations are susceptible to low-effort human-written prompt injections. However, the realistic objectives in WASP also allow us to observe that agents are currently not capable enough to complete the goals of attackers end-to-end. Agents begin executing the adversarial instruction between 16 and 86% of the time but only achieve the goal between 0 and 17% of the time. Based on these findings, we argue that adversarial researchers should demonstrate stronger attacks that more consistently maintain control over the agent given realistic constraints on the adversary's power.

Sketch2Anim: Towards Transferring Sketch Storyboards into 3D Animation

Storyboarding is widely used for creating 3D animations. Animators use the 2D sketches in storyboards as references to craft the desired 3D animations through a trial-and-error process. The traditional approach requires exceptional expertise and is both labor-intensive and time-consuming. Consequently, there is a high demand for automated methods that can directly translate 2D storyboard sketches into 3D animations. This task is under-explored to date and inspired by the significant advancements of motion diffusion models, we propose to address it from the perspective of conditional motion synthesis. We thus present Sketch2Anim, composed of two key modules for sketch constraint understanding and motion generation. Specifically, due to the large domain gap between the 2D sketch and 3D motion, instead of directly conditioning on 2D inputs, we design a 3D conditional motion generator that simultaneously leverages 3D keyposes, joint trajectories, and action words, to achieve precise and fine-grained motion control. Then, we invent a neural mapper dedicated to aligning user-provided 2D sketches with their corresponding 3D keyposes and trajectories in a shared embedding space, enabling, for the first time, direct 2D control of motion generation. Our approach successfully transfers storyboards into high-quality 3D motions and inherently supports direct 3D animation editing, thanks to the flexibility of our multi-conditional motion generator. Comprehensive experiments and evaluations, and a user perceptual study demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

MotionDreamer: One-to-Many Motion Synthesis with Localized Generative Masked Transformer

Generative masked transformers have demonstrated remarkable success across various content generation tasks, primarily due to their ability to effectively model large-scale dataset distributions with high consistency. However, in the animation domain, large datasets are not always available. Applying generative masked modeling to generate diverse instances from a single MoCap reference may lead to overfitting, a challenge that remains unexplored. In this work, we present MotionDreamer, a localized masked modeling paradigm designed to learn internal motion patterns from a given motion with arbitrary topology and duration. By embedding the given motion into quantized tokens with a novel distribution regularization method, MotionDreamer constructs a robust and informative codebook for local motion patterns. Moreover, a sliding window local attention is introduced in our masked transformer, enabling the generation of natural yet diverse animations that closely resemble the reference motion patterns. As demonstrated through comprehensive experiments, MotionDreamer outperforms the state-of-the-art methods that are typically GAN or Diffusion-based in both faithfulness and diversity. Thanks to the consistency and robustness of the quantization-based approach, MotionDreamer can also effectively perform downstream tasks such as temporal motion editing, \textcolor{update}{crowd animation}, and beat-aligned dance generation, all using a single reference motion. Visit our project page: https://motiondreamer.github.io/

Measuring Déjà vu Memorization Efficiently

Recent research has shown that representation learning models may accidentally memorize their training data. For example, the d\'ej\`a vu method shows that for certain representation learning models and training images, it is sometimes possible to correctly predict the foreground label given only the representation of the background - better than through dataset-level correlations. However, their measurement method requires training two models - one to estimate dataset-level correlations and the other to estimate memorization. This multiple model setup becomes infeasible for large open-source models. In this work, we propose alternative simple methods to estimate dataset-level correlations, and show that these can be used to approximate an off-the-shelf model's memorization ability without any retraining. This enables, for the first time, the measurement of memorization in pre-trained open-source image representation and vision-language representation models. Our results show that different ways of measuring memorization yield very similar aggregate results. We also find that open-source models typically have lower aggregate memorization than similar models trained on a subset of the data. The code is available both for vision and vision language models.

Dance Like a Chicken: Low-Rank Stylization for Human Motion Diffusion

Text-to-motion generative models span a wide range of 3D human actions but struggle with nuanced stylistic attributes such as a "Chicken" style. Due to the scarcity of style-specific data, existing approaches pull the generative prior towards a reference style, which often results in out-of-distribution low quality generations. In this work, we introduce LoRA-MDM, a lightweight framework for motion stylization that generalizes to complex actions while maintaining editability. Our key insight is that adapting the generative prior to include the style, while preserving its overall distribution, is more effective than modifying each individual motion during generation. Building on this idea, LoRA-MDM learns to adapt the prior to include the reference style using only a few samples. The style can then be used in the context of different textual prompts for generation. The low-rank adaptation shifts the motion manifold in a semantically meaningful way, enabling realistic style infusion even for actions not present in the reference samples. Moreover, preserving the distribution structure enables advanced operations such as style blending and motion editing. We compare LoRA-MDM to state-of-the-art stylized motion generation methods and demonstrate a favorable balance between text fidelity and style consistency.

SceneMI: Motion In-betweening for Modeling Human-Scene Interactions

Modeling human-scene interactions (HSI) is essential for understanding and simulating everyday human behaviors. Recent approaches utilizing generative modeling have made progress in this domain; however, they are limited in controllability and flexibility for real-world applications. To address these challenges, we propose reformulating the HSI modeling problem as Scene-aware Motion In-betweening -- a more tractable and practical task. We introduce SceneMI, a framework that supports several practical applications, including keyframe-guided character animation in 3D scenes and enhancing the motion quality of imperfect HSI data. SceneMI employs dual scene descriptors to comprehensively encode global and local scene context. Furthermore, our framework leverages the inherent denoising nature of diffusion models to generalize on noisy keyframes. Experimental results demonstrate SceneMI's effectiveness in scene-aware keyframe in-betweening and generalization to the real-world GIMO dataset, where motions and scenes are acquired by noisy IMU sensors and smartphones. We further showcase SceneMI's applicability in HSI reconstruction from monocular videos.

A Survey on Human Interaction Motion Generation

Humans inhabit a world defined by interactions -- with other humans, objects, and environments. These interactive movements not only convey our relationships with our surroundings but also demonstrate how we perceive and communicate with the real world. Therefore, replicating these interaction behaviors in digital systems has emerged as an important topic for applications in robotics, virtual reality, and animation. While recent advances in deep generative models and new datasets have accelerated progress in this field, significant challenges remain in modeling the intricate human dynamics and their interactions with entities in the external world. In this survey, we present, for the first time, a comprehensive overview of the literature in human interaction motion generation. We begin by establishing foundational concepts essential for understanding the research background. We then systematically review existing solutions and datasets across three primary interaction tasks -- human-human, human-object, and human-scene interactions -- followed by evaluation metrics. Finally, we discuss open research directions and future opportunities.