Fool Your (Vision and) Language Model With Embarrassingly Simple Permutations

Large language and vision-language models are rapidly being deployed in practice thanks to their impressive capabilities in instruction following, in-context learning, and so on. This raises an urgent need to carefully analyse their robustness so that stakeholders can understand if and when such models are trustworthy enough to be relied upon in any given application. In this paper, we highlight a specific vulnerability in popular models, namely permutation sensitivity in multiple-choice question answering (MCQA). Specifically, we show empirically that popular models are vulnerable to adversarial permutation in answer sets for multiple-choice prompting, which is surprising as models should ideally be as invariant to prompt permutation as humans are. These vulnerabilities persist across various model sizes, and exist in very recent language and vision-language models. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/ys-zong/FoolyourVLLMs}.

Meta Omnium: A Benchmark for General-Purpose Learning-to-Learn

Meta-learning and other approaches to few-shot learning are widely studied for image recognition, and are increasingly applied to other vision tasks such as pose estimation and dense prediction. This naturally raises the question of whether there is any few-shot meta-learning algorithm capable of generalizing across these diverse task types? To support the community in answering this question, we introduce Meta Omnium, a dataset-of-datasets spanning multiple vision tasks including recognition, keypoint localization, semantic segmentation and regression. We experiment with popular few-shot meta-learning baselines and analyze their ability to generalize across tasks and to transfer knowledge between them. Meta Omnium enables meta-learning researchers to evaluate model generalization to a much wider array of tasks than previously possible, and provides a single framework for evaluating meta-learners across a wide suite of vision applications in a consistent manner.

Amortised Invariance Learning for Contrastive Self-Supervision

Contrastive self-supervised learning methods famously produce high quality transferable representations by learning invariances to different data augmentations. Invariances established during pre-training can be interpreted as strong inductive biases. However these may or may not be helpful, depending on if they match the invariance requirements of downstream tasks or not. This has led to several attempts to learn task-specific invariances during pre-training, however, these methods are highly compute intensive and tedious to train. We introduce the notion of amortised invariance learning for contrastive self supervision. In the pre-training stage, we parameterize the feature extractor by differentiable invariance hyper-parameters that control the invariances encoded by the representation. Then, for any downstream task, both linear readout and task-specific invariance requirements can be efficiently and effectively learned by gradient-descent. We evaluate the notion of amortised invariances for contrastive learning over two different modalities: vision and audio, on two widely-used contrastive learning methods in vision: SimCLR and MoCo-v2 with popular architectures like ResNets and Vision Transformers, and SimCLR with ResNet-18 for audio. We show that our amortised features provide a reliable way to learn diverse downstream tasks with different invariance requirements, while using a single feature and avoiding task-specific pre-training. This provides an exciting perspective that opens up new horizons in the field of general purpose representation learning.

HyperInvariances: Amortizing Invariance Learning

Providing invariances in a given learning task conveys a key inductive bias that can lead to sample-efficient learning and good generalisation, if correctly specified. However, the ideal invariances for many problems of interest are often not known, which has led both to a body of engineering lore as well as attempts to provide frameworks for invariance learning. However, invariance learning is expensive and data intensive for popular neural architectures. We introduce the notion of amortizing invariance learning. In an up-front learning phase, we learn a low-dimensional manifold of feature extractors spanning invariance to different transformations using a hyper-network. Then, for any problem of interest, both model and invariance learning are rapid and efficient by fitting a low-dimensional invariance descriptor an output head. Empirically, this framework can identify appropriate invariances in different downstream tasks and lead to comparable or better test performance than conventional approaches. Our HyperInvariance framework is also theoretically appealing as it enables generalisation-bounds that provide an interesting new operating point in the trade-off between model fit and complexity.

FRIDA -- Generative Feature Replay for Incremental Domain Adaptation

We tackle the novel problem of incremental unsupervised domain adaptation (IDA) in this paper. We assume that a labeled source domain and different unlabeled target domains are incrementally observed with the constraint that data corresponding to the current domain is only available at a time. The goal is to preserve the accuracies for all the past domains while generalizing well for the current domain. The IDA setup suffers due to the abrupt differences among the domains and the unavailability of past data including the source domain. Inspired by the notion of generative feature replay, we propose a novel framework called Feature Replay based Incremental Domain Adaptation (FRIDA) which leverages a new incremental generative adversarial network (GAN) called domain-generic auxiliary classification GAN (DGAC-GAN) for producing domain-specific feature representations seamlessly. For domain alignment, we propose a simple extension of the popular domain adversarial neural network (DANN) called DANN-IB which encourages discriminative domain-invariant and task-relevant feature learning. Experimental results on Office-Home, Office-CalTech, and DomainNet datasets confirm that FRIDA maintains superior stability-plasticity trade-off than the literature.

A Novel Actor Dual-Critic Model for Remote Sensing Image Captioning

We deal with the problem of generating textual captions from optical remote sensing (RS) images using the notion of deep reinforcement learning. Due to the high inter-class similarity in reference sentences describing remote sensing data, jointly encoding the sentences and images encourages prediction of captions that are semantically more precise than the ground truth in many cases. To this end, we introduce an Actor Dual-Critic training strategy where a second critic model is deployed in the form of an encoder-decoder RNN to encode the latent information corresponding to the original and generated captions. While all actor-critic methods use an actor to predict sentences for an image and a critic to provide rewards, our proposed encoder-decoder RNN guarantees high-level comprehension of images by sentence-to-image translation. We observe that the proposed model generates sentences on the test data highly similar to the ground truth and is successful in generating even better captions in many critical cases. Extensive experiments on the benchmark Remote Sensing Image Captioning Dataset (RSICD) and the UCM-captions dataset confirm the superiority of the proposed approach in comparison to the previous state-of-the-art where we obtain a gain of sharp increments in both the ROUGE-L and CIDEr measures.