Test-Time Model Adaptation with Only Forward Passes

Test-time adaptation has proven effective in adapting a given trained model to unseen test samples with potential distribution shifts. However, in real-world scenarios, models are usually deployed on resource-limited devices, e.g., FPGAs, and are often quantized and hard-coded with non-modifiable parameters for acceleration. In light of this, existing methods are often infeasible since they heavily depend on computation-intensive backpropagation for model updating that may be not supported. To address this, we propose a test-time Forward-Only Adaptation (FOA) method. In FOA, we seek to solely learn a newly added prompt (as model's input) via a derivative-free covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy. To make this strategy work stably under our online unsupervised setting, we devise a novel fitness function by measuring test-training statistic discrepancy and model prediction entropy. Moreover, we design an activation shifting scheme that directly tunes the model activations for shifted test samples, making them align with the source training domain, thereby further enhancing adaptation performance. Without using any backpropagation and altering model weights, FOA runs on quantized 8-bit ViT outperforms gradient-based TENT on full-precision 32-bit ViT, while achieving an up to 24-fold memory reduction on ImageNet-C. The source code will be released.

Uncertainty-Calibrated Test-Time Model Adaptation without Forgetting

Test-time adaptation (TTA) seeks to tackle potential distribution shifts between training and test data by adapting a given model w.r.t. any test sample. Although recent TTA has shown promising performance, we still face two key challenges: 1) prior methods perform backpropagation for each test sample, resulting in unbearable optimization costs to many applications; 2) while existing TTA can significantly improve the test performance on out-of-distribution data, they often suffer from severe performance degradation on in-distribution data after TTA (known as forgetting). To this end, we have proposed an Efficient Anti-Forgetting Test-Time Adaptation (EATA) method which develops an active sample selection criterion to identify reliable and non-redundant samples for test-time entropy minimization. To alleviate forgetting, EATA introduces a Fisher regularizer estimated from test samples to constrain important model parameters from drastic changes. However, in EATA, the adopted entropy loss consistently assigns higher confidence to predictions even for samples that are underlying uncertain, leading to overconfident predictions. To tackle this, we further propose EATA with Calibration (EATA-C) to separately exploit the reducible model uncertainty and the inherent data uncertainty for calibrated TTA. Specifically, we measure the model uncertainty by the divergence between predictions from the full network and its sub-networks, on which we propose a divergence loss to encourage consistent predictions instead of overconfident ones. To further recalibrate prediction confidence, we utilize the disagreement among predicted labels as an indicator of the data uncertainty, and then devise a min-max entropy regularizer to selectively increase and decrease prediction confidence for different samples. Experiments on image classification and semantic segmentation verify the effectiveness of our methods.

Invariant Test-Time Adaptation for Vision-Language Model Generalization

Vision-language foundation models have exhibited remarkable success across a multitude of downstream tasks due to their scalability on extensive image-text paired datasets. However, these models display significant limitations when applied to long-tail tasks, such as fine-grained image classification, as a result of "decision shortcuts" that hinders their generalization capabilities. In this work, we find that the CLIP model possesses a rich set of features, encompassing both \textit{desired invariant causal features} and \textit{undesired decision shortcuts}. Moreover, the underperformance of CLIP on downstream tasks originates from its inability to effectively utilize pre-trained features in accordance with specific task requirements. To address this challenge, this paper introduces a test-time prompt tuning paradigm that optimizes a learnable prompt, thereby compelling the model to exploit genuine causal invariant features while disregarding decision shortcuts during the inference phase. The proposed method effectively alleviates excessive dependence on potentially misleading, task-irrelevant contextual information, while concurrently emphasizing critical, task-related visual cues. We conduct comparative analysis of the proposed method against various approaches which validates its effectiveness.

Step-On-Feet Tuning: Scaling Self-Alignment of LLMs via Bootstrapping

Self-alignment is an effective way to reduce the cost of human annotation while ensuring promising model capability. However, most current methods complete the data collection and training steps in a single round, which may overlook the continuously improving ability of self-aligned models. This gives rise to a key query: What if we do multi-time bootstrapping self-alignment? Does this strategy enhance model performance or lead to rapid degradation? In this paper, our pioneering exploration delves into the impact of bootstrapping self-alignment on large language models. Our findings reveal that bootstrapping self-alignment markedly surpasses the single-round approach, by guaranteeing data diversity from in-context learning. To further exploit the capabilities of bootstrapping, we investigate and adjust the training order of data, which yields improved performance of the model. Drawing on these findings, we propose Step-On-Feet Tuning (SOFT) which leverages model's continuously enhanced few-shot ability to boost zero or one-shot performance. Based on easy-to-hard training recipe, we propose SOFT+ which further boost self-alignment's performance. Our experiments demonstrate the efficiency of SOFT (SOFT+) across various classification and generation tasks, highlighting the potential of bootstrapping self-alignment on continually enhancing model alignment performance.

Enhancing Neural Subset Selection: Integrating Background Information into Set Representations

Learning neural subset selection tasks, such as compound selection in AI-aided drug discovery, have become increasingly pivotal across diverse applications. The existing methodologies in the field primarily concentrate on constructing models that capture the relationship between utility function values and subsets within their respective supersets. However, these approaches tend to overlook the valuable information contained within the superset when utilizing neural networks to model set functions. In this work, we address this oversight by adopting a probabilistic perspective. Our theoretical findings demonstrate that when the target value is conditioned on both the input set and subset, it is essential to incorporate an \textit{invariant sufficient statistic} of the superset into the subset of interest for effective learning. This ensures that the output value remains invariant to permutations of the subset and its corresponding superset, enabling identification of the specific superset from which the subset originated. Motivated by these insights, we propose a simple yet effective information aggregation module designed to merge the representations of subsets and supersets from a permutation invariance perspective. Comprehensive empirical evaluations across diverse tasks and datasets validate the enhanced efficacy of our approach over conventional methods, underscoring the practicality and potency of our proposed strategies in real-world contexts.

X-Mark: Towards Lossless Watermarking Through Lexical Redundancy

Text watermarking has emerged as an important technique for detecting machine-generated text. However, existing methods can severely degrade text quality due to arbitrary vocabulary partitioning, which disrupts the language model's expressiveness and impedes textual coherence. To mitigate this, we introduce XMark, a novel approach that capitalizes on text redundancy within the lexical space. Specifically, XMark incorporates a mutually exclusive rule for synonyms during the language model decoding process, thereby integrating prior knowledge into vocabulary partitioning and preserving the capabilities of language generation. We present theoretical analyses and empirical evidence demonstrating that XMark substantially enhances text generation fluency while maintaining watermark detectability. Furthermore, we investigate watermarking's impact on the emergent abilities of large language models, including zero-shot and few-shot knowledge recall, logical reasoning, and instruction following. Our comprehensive experiments confirm that XMark consistently outperforms existing methods in retaining these crucial capabilities of LLMs.

LLM-Based Agent Society Investigation: Collaboration and Confrontation in Avalon Gameplay

This paper aims to investigate the open research problem of uncovering the social behaviors of LLM-based agents. To achieve this goal, we adopt Avalon, a representative communication game, as the environment and use system prompts to guide LLM agents to play the game. While previous studies have conducted preliminary investigations into gameplay with LLM agents, there lacks research on their social behaviors. In this paper, we present a novel framework designed to seamlessly adapt to Avalon gameplay. The core of our proposed framework is a multi-agent system that enables efficient communication and interaction among agents. We evaluate the performance of our framework based on metrics from two perspectives: winning the game and analyzing the social behaviors of LLM agents. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in generating adaptive and intelligent agents and highlight the potential of LLM-based agents in addressing the challenges associated with dynamic social environment interaction. By analyzing the social behaviors of LLM agents from the aspects of both collaboration and confrontation, we provide insights into the research and applications of this domain.

ETDock: A Novel Equivariant Transformer for Protein-Ligand Docking

Predicting the docking between proteins and ligands is a crucial and challenging task for drug discovery. However, traditional docking methods mainly rely on scoring functions, and deep learning-based docking approaches usually neglect the 3D spatial information of proteins and ligands, as well as the graph-level features of ligands, which limits their performance. To address these limitations, we propose an equivariant transformer neural network for protein-ligand docking pose prediction. Our approach involves the fusion of ligand graph-level features by feature processing, followed by the learning of ligand and protein representations using our proposed TAMformer module. Additionally, we employ an iterative optimization approach based on the predicted distance matrix to generate refined ligand poses. The experimental results on real datasets show that our model can achieve state-of-the-art performance.

Adapting Large Language Models for Content Moderation: Pitfalls in Data Engineering and Supervised Fine-tuning

Nowadays, billions of people engage in communication and express their opinions on the internet daily. Unfortunately, not all of these expressions are friendly or compliant, making content moderation an indispensable task. With the successful development of Large Language Models (LLMs) in recent years, LLM-based methods have become a feasible solution for handling tasks in various domains. However, in the field of content moderation, there is still a lack of detailed work that systematically introduces implementation details. In this paper, we introduce how to fine-tune an LLM model that can be privately deployed for content moderation. Specifically, we discuss whether incorporating reasons during the fine-tuning process would be better or if it should be treated as a classification task directly. We also explore the benefits of utilizing reasons generated by more powerful LLMs for fine-tuning privately deployed models and the impact of different processing approaches when the answers generated by the more powerful LLMs are incorrect. We report the entire research process and the key findings in this paper, hoping to provide valuable experience for researchers who are fine-tuning privately deployed models in their domain-specific research.