Papers Read on AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to greatly improve society, but as with any powerful technology, it comes with heightened risks and responsibilities. Current AI research lacks a systematic discussion of how to manage long-tail risks from AI systems, including speculative long-term risks. Keeping in mind that AI may be integral to improving humanity’s long-term potential, there is some concern that building ever more intelligent and powerful AI systems could eventually result in systems that are more powerful than us; some say this is like playing with fire and speculate that this could create existential risks (x-risks). To add precision and ground these discussions, we review a collection of time-tested concepts from hazard analysis and systems safety, which have been designed to steer large processes in safer directions. We then discuss how AI researchers can realistically have long-term impacts on the safety of AI systems. Finally, we discuss how to robustly shape the processes that will affect the balance between safety and general capabilities.

2022: Dan Hendrycks, Mantas Mazeika

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.05862v7.pdf

We introduce Zero-1-to-3, a framework for changing the camera viewpoint of an object given just a single RGB image. To perform novel view synthesis in this under-constrained setting, we capitalize on the geometric priors that large-scale diffusion models learn about natural images. Our conditional diffusion model uses a synthetic dataset to learn controls of the relative camera viewpoint, which allow new images to be generated of the same object under a specified camera transformation. Even though it is trained on a synthetic dataset, our model retains a strong zero-shot generalization ability to out-of-distribution datasets as well as in-the-wild images, including impressionist paintings.

2023: Ruoshi Liu, Rundi Wu, Basile Van Hoorick, P. Tokmakov, Sergey Zakharov, Carl Vondrick

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.11328v1.pdf

Large language models (LLMs) show excellent performance but are compute- and memory-intensive. Quantization can reduce memory and accelerate inference. However, for LLMs beyond 100 billion parameters, existing methods cannot maintain accuracy or do not run efficiently on hardware. We propose SmoothQuant, a training-free, accuracy-preserving, and general-purpose post-training quantization (PTQ) solution to enable 8-bit weight, 8-bit activation (W8A8) quantization for LLMs. Based on the fact that weights are easy to quantize while activations are not, SmoothQuant smooths the activation outliers by offline migrating the quantization difficulty from activations to weights with a mathematically equivalent transformation.

2022: Guangxuan Xiao, Ji Lin, Mickael Seznec, Julien Demouth, Song Han

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.10438v4.pdf

Zero-shot information extraction (IE) aims to build IE systems from the unannotated text. It is challenging due to involving little human intervention. Challenging but worthwhile, zero-shot IE reduces the time and effort that data labeling takes. Recent efforts on large language models (LLMs, e.g., GPT-3, ChatGPT) show promising performance on zero-shot settings, thus inspiring us to explore prompt-based methods. In this work, we ask whether strong IE models can be constructed by directly prompting LLMs.

2023: Xiang Wei, Xingyu Cui, Ning Cheng, Xiaobin Wang, Xin Zhang, Shen Huang, Pengjun Xie, Jinan Xu, Yufeng Chen, Meishan Zhang, Yong Jiang, Wenjuan Han

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.10205v1.pdf

Zero-shot information extraction (IE) aims to build IE systems from the unannotated text. It is challenging due to involving little human intervention. Challenging but worthwhile, zero-shot IE reduces the time and effort that data labeling takes. Recent efforts on large language models (LLMs, e.g., GPT-3, ChatGPT) show promising performance on zero-shot settings, thus inspiring us to explore prompt-based methods. In this work, we ask whether strong IE models can be constructed by directly prompting LLMs.

2023: Xiang Wei, Xingyu Cui, Ning Cheng, Xiaobin Wang, Xin Zhang, Shen Huang, Pengjun Xie, Jinan Xu, Yufeng Chen, Meishan Zhang, Yong Jiang, Wenjuan Han

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.10205v1.pdf

We present a Non-parametric Network for 3D point cloud analysis, Point-NN, which consists of purely non-learnable components: farthest point sampling (FPS), k-nearest neighbors (k-NN), and pooling operations, with trigonometric functions. Surprisingly, it performs well on various 3D tasks, requiring no parameters or training, and even surpasses existing fully trained models. Starting from this basic non-parametric model, we propose two extensions. First, Point-NN can serve as a base architectural framework to construct Parametric Networks by simply inserting linear layers on top. Given the superior non-parametric foundation, the derived Point-PN exhibits a high performance-efficiency trade-off with only a few learnable parameters. Second, Point-NN can be regarded as a plug-and-play module for the already trained 3D models during inference. Point-NN captures the complementary geometric knowledge and enhances existing methods for different 3D benchmarks without re-training. We hope our work may cast a light on the community for understanding 3D point clouds with non-parametric methods. Code is available at https://github.com/ZrrSkywalker/Point-NN.

2023: Renrui Zhang, Liuhui Wang, Yali Wang, Peng Gao, Hongsheng Li, Jianbo Shi

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.08134v1.pdf

Large “instruction-tuned” language models (finetuned to respond to instructions) have demonstrated a remarkable ability to generalize zero-shot to new tasks. Nevertheless, they depend heavily on human-written instruction data that is limited in quantity, diversity, and creativity, therefore hindering the generality of the tuned model. We introduce S ELF -I NSTRUCT , a framework for improving the instruction-following capabilities of pretrained language models by bootstrapping off its own generations. Our pipeline generates instruction, input, and output samples from a language model, then prunes them before using them to finetune the original model.

2022: Yizhong Wang, Yeganeh Kordi, Swaroop Mishra, Alisa Liu, Noah A. Smith, Daniel Khashabi, Hannaneh Hajishirzi

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.10560v1.pdf

The diffusion-based generative models have achieved remarkable success in text-based image generation. However, since it contains enormous randomness in generation progress, it is still challenging to apply such models for real-world visual content editing, especially in videos. In this paper, we propose FateZero, a zero-shot text-based editing method on real-world videos without per-prompt training or use-specific mask. To edit videos consistently, we propose several techniques based on the pre-trained models. Firstly, in contrast to the straightforward DDIM inversion technique, our approach captures intermediate attention maps during inversion, which effectively retain both structural and motion information. These maps are directly fused in the editing process rather than generated during denoising.

2023: Chenyang Qi, Xiaodong Cun, Yong Zhang, Chenyang Lei, Xintao Wang, Ying Shan, Qifeng Chen

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.09535v1.pdf

We report the development of GPT-4, a large-scale, multimodal model which can accept image and text inputs and produce text outputs. While less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios, GPT-4 exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks, including passing a simulated bar exam with a score around the top 10% of test takers. GPT-4 is a Transformer-based model pre-trained to predict the next token in a document. The post-training alignment process results in improved performance on measures of factuality and adherence to desired behavior. A core component of this project was developing infrastructure and optimization methods that behave predictably across a wide range of scales. This allowed us to accurately predict some aspects of GPT-4's performance based on models trained with no more than 1/1,000th the compute of GPT-4.

2023: OpenAI

Ranked #1 on Multi-task Language Understanding on MMLU

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.08774v2.pdf

Recent vision-language models have shown impressive multi-modal generation capabilities. However, typically they require training huge models on massive datasets. As a more scalable alternative, we introduce Prismer, a data- and parameter-efficient vision-language model that leverages an ensemble of domain experts. Prismer only requires training of a small number of components, with the majority of network weights inherited from readily-available, pre-trained domain experts, and kept frozen during training. By leveraging experts from a wide range of domains, we show that Prismer can efficiently pool this expert knowledge and adapt it to various vision-language reasoning tasks. In our experiments, we show that Prismer achieves fine-tuned and few-shot learning performance which is competitive with current state-of-the-art models, whilst requiring up to two orders of magnitude less training data. Code is available at https://github.com/NVlabs/prismer.

2023: Shikun Liu, Linxi (Jim) Fan, Edward Johns, Zhiding Yu, Chaowei Xiao, Anima Anandkumar

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.02506v1.pdf