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Jinwoo Shin

Publications and source records attributed to Jinwoo Shin.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

Hierarchical Vision Language Action Model Using Success and Failure Demonstrations

Prior Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically trained on teleoperated successful demonstrations, while discarding numerous failed attempts that occur naturally during data collection. However, these failures encode where and how policies can be fragile, information that can be exploited to improve robustness. We address this problem by leveraging mixed-quality datasets to learn failure-aware reasoning at planning time. We introduce VINE, a hierarchical vision-language-action model that separates high-level reasoning (System 2) from low-level control (System 1) under a hierarchical reinforcement learning formalism, making failures usable as a structured learning signal rather than noisy supervision. System 2 performs feasibility-guided tree search over a 2D scene-graph abstraction: it proposes subgoal transitions, predicts success probabilities from both successes and failures, and prunes brittle branches before execution, effectively casting plan evaluation as feasibility scoring. The selected subgoal sequence is then passed to System 1, which executes low-level actions without modifying the agent's core skills. Trained entirely from offline teleoperation data, VINE integrates negative experience directly into the decision loop. Across challenging manipulation tasks, this approach consistently improves success rates and robustness, demonstrating that failure data is an essential resource for converting the broad competence of VLAs into robust execution.

cs.RO↗

Compress, Gather, and Recompute: REFORMing Long-Context Processing in Transformers

As large language models increasingly gain popularity in real-world applications, processing extremely long contexts, often exceeding the model's pre-trained context limits, has emerged as a critical challenge. While existing approaches to efficient long-context processing show promise, recurrent compression-based methods struggle with information preservation, whereas random access approaches require substantial memory resources. We introduce REFORM, a novel inference framework that efficiently handles long contexts through a two-phase approach. First, it incrementally processes input chunks while maintaining a compressed KV cache, constructs cross-layer context embeddings, and utilizes early exit strategy for improved efficiency. Second, it identifies and gathers essential tokens via similarity matching and selectively recomputes the KV cache. Compared to baselines, REFORM achieves over 52% and 34% performance gains on RULER and BABILong respectively at 1M context length. It also outperforms baselines on Infinite-Bench, RepoEval, and MM-NIAH, demonstrating flexibility across diverse tasks and domains. Additionally, REFORM reduces inference time by 30% and peak memory usage by 5%, achieving both efficiency and superior performance.

cs.CL↗

CLIP Meets Diffusion: A Synergistic Approach to Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection is a complex problem due to the ambiguity in defining anomalies, the diversity of anomaly types (e.g., local and global defect), and the scarcity of training data. As such, it necessitates a comprehensive model capable of capturing both low-level and high-level features, even with limited data. To address this, we propose CLIPFUSION, a method that leverages both discriminative and generative foundation models. Specifically, the CLIP-based discriminative model excels at capturing global features, while the diffusion-based generative model effectively captures local details, creating a synergistic and complementary approach. Notably, we introduce a methodology for utilizing cross-attention maps and feature maps extracted from diffusion models specifically for anomaly detection. Experimental results on benchmark datasets (MVTec-AD, VisA) demonstrate that CLIPFUSION consistently outperforms baseline methods, achieving outstanding performance in both anomaly segmentation and classification. We believe that our method underscores the effectiveness of multi-modal and multi-model fusion in tackling the multifaceted challenges of anomaly detection, providing a scalable solution for real-world applications.

cs.CV↗

Decoupled MeanFlow: Turning Flow Models into Flow Maps for Accelerated Sampling

Denoising generative models, such as diffusion and flow-based models, produce high-quality samples but require many denoising steps due to discretization error. Flow maps, which estimate the average velocity between timesteps, mitigate this error and enable faster sampling. However, their training typically demands architectural changes that limit compatibility with pretrained flow models. We introduce Decoupled MeanFlow, a simple decoding strategy that converts flow models into flow map models without architectural modifications. Our method conditions the final blocks of diffusion transformers on the subsequent timestep, allowing pretrained flow models to be directly repurposed as flow maps. Combined with enhanced training techniques, this design enables high-quality generation in as few as 1 to 4 steps. Notably, we find that training flow models and subsequently converting them is more efficient and effective than training flow maps from scratch. On ImageNet 256x256 and 512x512, our models attain 1-step FID of 2.16 and 2.12, respectively, surpassing prior art by a large margin. Furthermore, we achieve FID of 1.51 and 1.68 when increasing the steps to 4, which nearly matches the performance of flow models while delivering over 100x faster inference.

cs.CV↗

Self-Refining Language Model Anonymizers via Adversarial Distillation

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in sensitive domains, where their ability to infer personal data from seemingly benign text introduces emerging privacy risks. While recent LLM-based anonymization methods help mitigate such risks, they often rely on proprietary models (e.g., GPT-4), raising concerns about cost and the potential exposure of sensitive data to untrusted external systems. To address this, we introduce SElf-refining Anonymization with Language model (SEAL), a novel distillation framework for training small language models (SLMs) to perform effective anonymization without relying on external models at inference time. SEAL leverages adversarial interactions between an LLM anonymizer and an inference model to collect trajectories of anonymized texts and inferred attributes, which are then used to distill anonymization and critique capabilities into SLMs through supervised fine-tuning and preference learning. The resulting models learn both to anonymize text and to evaluate their outputs, enabling iterative improvement of anonymization quality via self-refinement. Experiments on SynthPAI, a dataset of synthetic personal profiles and text comments, demonstrate that SLMs trained with SEAL achieve substantial improvements in anonymization capabilities. Notably, 8B models attain a privacy-utility trade-off comparable to that of the GPT-4 anonymizer and, with self-refinement, even surpass it in terms of privacy protection. These results highlight the effectiveness of our adversarial distillation framework for training SLMs as efficient anonymizers.

cs.CL↗

ContextVLA: Vision-Language-Action Model with Amortized Multi-Frame Context

Leveraging temporal context is crucial for success in partially observable robotic tasks. However, prior work in behavior cloning has demonstrated inconsistent performance gains when using multi-frame observations. In this paper, we introduce ContextVLA, a policy model that robustly improves robotic task performance by effectively leveraging multi-frame observations. Our approach is motivated by the key observation that Vision-Language-Action models (VLA), i.e., policy models built upon a Vision-Language Model (VLM), more effectively utilize multi-frame observations for action generation. This suggests that VLMs' inherent temporal understanding capability enables them to extract more meaningful context from multi-frame observations. However, the high dimensionality of video inputs introduces significant computational overhead, making VLA training and inference inefficient. To address this, ContextVLA compresses past observations into a single context token, allowing the policy to efficiently leverage temporal context for action generation. Our experiments show that ContextVLA consistently improves over single-frame VLAs and achieves the benefits of full multi-frame training but with reduced training and inference times.

cs.RO↗

Scalable and Robust LLM Unlearning by Correcting Responses with Retrieved Exclusions

Language models trained on web-scale corpora risk memorizing and exposing sensitive information, prompting the need for effective machine unlearning. Prior methods mainly focus on input queries to suppress sensitive outputs, yet this often fails to eliminate the underlying knowledge and limits scalability. To address this, we propose Corrective Unlearning with Retrieved Exclusions (CURE), a novel unlearning framework that verifies model outputs for leakage and revises them into safe responses. Specifically, CURE employs a lightweight corrector that is applied to the original model to verify whether outputs contain target knowledge and to rewrite them if any leakage is detected. To efficiently handle large-scale unlearning requests, CURE retrieves unlearning targets that are relevant to the initial response and provides them as in-context references to the corrector for detection and conditional revision. By leveraging this retrieval augmentation, the corrector can adapt to new unlearning requests without additional training. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that CURE substantially reduces information leakage, even from indirect queries where prior works fall short, while maintaining response quality and general utility. Moreover, it demonstrates robustness under continual unlearning scenarios, making it practical for real-world applications.

cs.AI↗

DiffusionGuard: A Robust Defense Against Malicious Diffusion-based Image Editing

Recent advances in diffusion models have introduced a new era of text-guided image manipulation, enabling users to create realistic edited images with simple textual prompts. However, there is significant concern about the potential misuse of these methods, especially in creating misleading or harmful content. Although recent defense strategies, which introduce imperceptible adversarial noise to induce model failure, have shown promise, they remain ineffective against more sophisticated manipulations, such as editing with a mask. In this work, we propose DiffusionGuard, a robust and effective defense method against unauthorized edits by diffusion-based image editing models, even in challenging setups. Through a detailed analysis of these models, we introduce a novel objective that generates adversarial noise targeting the early stage of the diffusion process. This approach significantly improves the efficiency and effectiveness of adversarial noises. We also introduce a mask-augmentation technique to enhance robustness against various masks during test time. Finally, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of methods in protecting against privacy threats in realistic scenarios. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method achieves stronger protection and improved mask robustness with lower computational costs compared to the strongest baseline. Additionally, our method exhibits superior transferability and better resilience to noise removal techniques compared to all baseline methods. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/choi403/DiffusionGuard.

cs.CV↗

Calibrated Multi-Preference Optimization for Aligning Diffusion Models

Aligning text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models with preference optimization is valuable for human-annotated datasets, but the heavy cost of manual data collection limits scalability. Using reward models offers an alternative, however, current preference optimization methods fall short in exploiting the rich information, as they only consider pairwise preference distribution. Furthermore, they lack generalization to multi-preference scenarios and struggle to handle inconsistencies between rewards. To address this, we present Calibrated Preference Optimization (CaPO), a novel method to align T2I diffusion models by incorporating the general preference from multiple reward models without human annotated data. The core of our approach involves a reward calibration method to approximate the general preference by computing the expected win-rate against the samples generated by the pretrained models. Additionally, we propose a frontier-based pair selection method that effectively manages the multi-preference distribution by selecting pairs from Pareto frontiers. Finally, we use regression loss to fine-tune diffusion models to match the difference between calibrated rewards of a selected pair. Experimental results show that CaPO consistently outperforms prior methods, such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), in both single and multi-reward settings validated by evaluation on T2I benchmarks, including GenEval and T2I-Compbench.

cs.CV↗

Personalized Language Models via Privacy-Preserving Evolutionary Model Merging

Personalization in language models aims to tailor model behavior to individual users or user groups. Prompt-based methods incorporate user preferences into queries, while training-based methods encode them into model parameters. Model merging has also been explored for personalization under limited data. However, existing methods often fail to directly optimize task-specific utility and lack explicit mechanisms for privacy preservation. To address the limitations, we propose Privacy-Preserving Model Merging via Evolutionary Algorithms (PriME), a novel personalization approach that employs gradient-free methods to directly optimize utility while reducing privacy risks. By integrating privacy preservation into the optimization objective, PriME creates personalized modules that effectively capture target user preferences while minimizing privacy risks for data-sharing users. Experiments on the LaMP benchmark show that PriME consistently outperforms a range of baselines, achieving up to a 45% improvement in task performance. Further analysis demonstrates that PriME achieves a superior privacy-utility trade-off compared to a prior state-of-the-art, with enhanced robustness to membership inference attacks and greater utility in capturing user preferences.

cs.CL↗

Training Text-to-Molecule Models with Context-Aware Tokenization

Recently, text-to-molecule models have shown great potential across various chemical applications, e.g., drug-discovery. These models adapt language models to molecular data by representing molecules as sequences of atoms. However, they rely on atom-level tokenizations, which primarily focus on modeling local connectivity, thereby limiting the ability of models to capture the global structural context within molecules. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel text-to-molecule model, coined Context-Aware Molecular T5 (CAMT5). Inspired by the significance of the substructure-level contexts in understanding molecule structures, e.g., ring systems, we introduce substructure-level tokenization for text-to-molecule models. Building on our tokenization scheme, we develop an importance-based training strategy that prioritizes key substructures, enabling CAMT5 to better capture the molecular semantics. Extensive experiments verify the superiority of CAMT5 in various text-to-molecule generation tasks. Intriguingly, we find that CAMT5 outperforms the state-of-the-art methods using only 2% of training tokens. In addition, we propose a simple yet effective ensemble strategy that aggregates the outputs of text-to-molecule models to further boost the generation performance. Code is available at https://github.com/Songhyeontae/CAMT5.git.

cs.CL↗

Blow-up phenomena for the constant scalar curvature and constant boundary mean curvature equation (after Chen and Wu)

In this paper, the compactness of the solutions to the constant scalar curvature and constant boundary mean curvature equation is considered. Chen and Wu constructed a smooth counterexample showing that the compactness of the set of ``lower energy" solutions to the above equation fails when the dimension of the manifold is not less than 62. We prove that a smooth counterexample still exists when the dimension of the manifold is not less than 35.

math.DG↗

MLE-STAR: Machine Learning Engineering Agent via Search and Targeted Refinement

Agents based on large language models (LLMs) for machine learning engineering (MLE) can automatically implement ML models via code generation. However, existing approaches to build such agents often rely heavily on inherent LLM knowledge and employ coarse exploration strategies that modify the entire code structure at once. This limits their ability to select effective task-specific models and perform deep exploration within specific components, such as experimenting extensively with feature engineering options. To overcome these, we propose MLE-STAR, a novel approach to build MLE agents. MLE-STAR first leverages external knowledge by using a search engine to retrieve effective models from the web, forming an initial solution, then iteratively refines it by exploring various strategies targeting specific ML components. This exploration is guided by ablation studies analyzing the impact of individual code blocks. Furthermore, we introduce a novel ensembling method using an effective strategy suggested by MLE-STAR. Our experimental results show that MLE-STAR achieves medals in 64% of the Kaggle competitions on the MLE-bench Lite, significantly outperforming the best alternative.

cs.LG↗

Learning Multi-frame and Monocular Prior for Estimating Geometry in Dynamic Scenes

In monocular videos that capture dynamic scenes, estimating the 3D geometry of video contents has been a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Specifically, the task is significantly challenged by the object motion, where existing models are limited to predict only partial attributes of the dynamic scenes, such as depth or pointmaps spanning only over a pair of frames. Since these attributes are inherently noisy under multiple frames, test-time global optimizations are often employed to fully recover the geometry, which is liable to failure and incurs heavy inference costs. To address the challenge, we present a new model, coined MMP, to estimate the geometry in a feed-forward manner, which produces a dynamic pointmap representation that evolves over multiple frames. Specifically, based on the recent Siamese architecture, we introduce a new trajectory encoding module to project point-wise dynamics on the representation for each frame, which can provide significantly improved expressiveness for dynamic scenes. In our experiments, we find MMP can achieve state-of-the-art quality in feed-forward pointmap prediction, e.g., 15.1% enhancement in the regression error.

cs.CV↗

ReVISE: Learning to Refine at Test-Time via Intrinsic Self-Verification

Self-awareness, i.e., the ability to assess and correct one's own generation, is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence, making its replication in large language models (LLMs) an important yet challenging task. Previous works tackle this by employing extensive reinforcement learning or rather relying on large external verifiers. In this work, we propose Refine via Intrinsic Self-Verification (ReVISE), an efficient and effective framework that enables LLMs to self-correct their outputs through self-verification. The core idea of ReVISE is to enable LLMs to verify their reasoning processes and continually rethink reasoning trajectories based on its verification. We introduce a structured curriculum based upon online preference learning to implement this efficiently. Specifically, as ReVISE involves two challenging tasks (i.e., self-verification and reasoning correction), we tackle each task sequentially using curriculum learning, collecting both failed and successful reasoning paths to construct preference pairs for efficient training. During inference, our approach enjoys natural test-time scaling by integrating self-verification and correction capabilities, further enhanced by our proposed confidence-aware decoding mechanism. Our experiments on various reasoning tasks demonstrate that ReVISE achieves efficient self-correction and significantly improves reasoning performance.

cs.LG↗

MALT Diffusion: Memory-Augmented Latent Transformers for Any-Length Video Generation

Diffusion models are successful for synthesizing high-quality videos but are limited to generating short clips (e.g., 2-10 seconds). Synthesizing sustained footage (e.g. over minutes) still remains an open research question. In this paper, we propose MALT Diffusion (using Memory-Augmented Latent Transformers), a new diffusion model specialized for long video generation. MALT Diffusion (or just MALT) handles long videos by subdividing them into short segments and doing segment-level autoregressive generation. To achieve this, we first propose recurrent attention layers that encode multiple segments into a compact memory latent vector; by maintaining this memory vector over time, MALT is able to condition on it and continuously generate new footage based on a long temporal context. We also present several training techniques that enable the model to generate frames over a long horizon with consistent quality and minimal degradation. We validate the effectiveness of MALT through experiments on long video benchmarks. We first perform extensive analysis of MALT in long-contextual understanding capability and stability using popular long video benchmarks. For example, MALT achieves an FVD score of 220.4 on 128-frame video generation on UCF-101, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art of 648.4. Finally, we explore MALT's capabilities in a text-to-video generation setting and show that it can produce long videos compared with recent techniques for long text-to-video generation.

cs.CV↗

Margin Matching Preference Optimization: Enhanced Model Alignment with Granular Feedback

Large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned with alignment techniques, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, have been instrumental in developing some of the most capable AI systems to date. Despite their success, existing methods typically rely on simple binary labels, such as those indicating preferred outputs in pairwise preferences, which fail to capture the subtle differences in relative quality between pairs. To address this limitation, we introduce an approach called Margin Matching Preference Optimization (MMPO), which incorporates relative quality margins into optimization, leading to improved LLM policies and reward models. Specifically, given quality margins in pairwise preferences, we design soft target probabilities based on the Bradley-Terry model, which are then used to train models with the standard cross-entropy objective. Experiments with both human and AI feedback data demonstrate that MMPO consistently outperforms baseline methods, often by a substantial margin, on popular benchmarks including MT-bench and RewardBench. Notably, the 7B model trained with MMPO achieves state-of-the-art performance on RewardBench as of June 2024, outperforming other models of the same scale. Our analysis also shows that MMPO is more robust to overfitting, leading to better-calibrated models.

cs.CL↗

StarFT: Robust Fine-tuning of Zero-shot Models via Spuriosity Alignment

Learning robust representations from data often requires scale, which has led to the success of recent zero-shot models such as CLIP. However, the obtained robustness can easily be deteriorated when these models are fine-tuned on other downstream tasks (e.g., of smaller scales). Previous works often interpret this phenomenon in the context of domain shift, developing fine-tuning methods that aim to preserve the original domain as much as possible. However, in a different context, fine-tuned models with limited data are also prone to learning features that are spurious to humans, such as background or texture. In this paper, we propose StarFT (Spurious Textual Alignment Regularization), a novel framework for fine-tuning zero-shot models to enhance robustness by preventing them from learning spuriosity. We introduce a regularization that aligns the output distribution for spuriosity-injected labels with the original zero-shot model, ensuring that the model is not induced to extract irrelevant features further from these descriptions. We leverage recent language models to get such spuriosity-injected labels by generating alternative textual descriptions that highlight potentially confounding features. Extensive experiments validate the robust generalization of StarFT and its emerging properties: zero-shot group robustness and improved zero-shot classification. Notably, StarFT boosts both worst-group and average accuracy by 14.30% and 3.02%, respectively, in the Waterbirds group shift scenario, where other robust fine-tuning baselines show even degraded performance.

cs.AI↗