Daily Papers

Video Diffusion Models (VDMs) can generate high-quality videos, but often struggle with producing temporally coherent motion. Optical flow supervision is a promising approach to address this, with prior works commonly employing warping-based strategies that avoid explicit flow matching. In this work, we explore an alternative formulation, FlowLoss, which directly compares flow fields extracted from generated and ground-truth videos. To account for the unreliability of flow estimation under high-noise conditions in diffusion, we propose a noise-aware weighting scheme that modulates the flow loss across denoising steps. Experiments on robotic video datasets suggest that FlowLoss improves motion stability and accelerates convergence in early training stages. Our findings offer practical insights for incorporating motion-based supervision into noise-conditioned generative models.

Recent flow matching models for text-to-image generation have achieved remarkable quality, yet their integration with reinforcement learning for human preference alignment remains suboptimal, hindering fine-grained reward-based optimization. We observe that the key impediment to effective GRPO training of flow models is the temporal uniformity assumption in existing approaches: sparse terminal rewards with uniform credit assignment fail to capture the varying criticality of decisions across generation timesteps, resulting in inefficient exploration and suboptimal convergence. To remedy this shortcoming, we introduce TempFlow-GRPO (Temporal Flow GRPO), a principled GRPO framework that captures and exploits the temporal structure inherent in flow-based generation. TempFlow-GRPO introduces two key innovations: (i) a trajectory branching mechanism that provides process rewards by concentrating stochasticity at designated branching points, enabling precise credit assignment without requiring specialized intermediate reward models; and (ii) a noise-aware weighting scheme that modulates policy optimization according to the intrinsic exploration potential of each timestep, prioritizing learning during high-impact early stages while ensuring stable refinement in later phases. These innovations endow the model with temporally-aware optimization that respects the underlying generative dynamics, leading to state-of-the-art performance in human preference alignment and standard text-to-image benchmarks.

Diffusion models learn to restore noisy data, which is corrupted with different levels of noise, by optimizing the weighted sum of the corresponding loss terms, i.e., denoising score matching loss. In this paper, we show that restoring data corrupted with certain noise levels offers a proper pretext task for the model to learn rich visual concepts. We propose to prioritize such noise levels over other levels during training, by redesigning the weighting scheme of the objective function. We show that our simple redesign of the weighting scheme significantly improves the performance of diffusion models regardless of the datasets, architectures, and sampling strategies.

Diffusion models have demonstrated compelling generation quality by optimizing the variational lower bound through a simple denoising score matching loss. In this paper, we provide theoretical evidence that the prevailing practice of using a constant loss weight strategy in diffusion models leads to biased estimation during the training phase. Simply optimizing the denoising network to predict Gaussian noise with constant weighting may hinder precise estimations of original images. To address the issue, we propose an elegant and effective weighting strategy grounded in the theoretically unbiased principle. Moreover, we conduct a comprehensive and systematic exploration to dissect the inherent bias problem deriving from constant weighting loss from the perspectives of its existence, impact and reasons. These analyses are expected to advance our understanding and demystify the inner workings of diffusion models. Through empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that our proposed debiased estimation method significantly enhances sample quality without the reliance on complex techniques, and exhibits improved efficiency compared to the baseline method both in training and sampling processes.

Conditional diffusion models have shown remarkable performance in various generative tasks, but training them requires large-scale datasets that often contain noise in conditional inputs, a.k.a. noisy labels. This noise leads to condition mismatch and quality degradation of generated data. This paper proposes Transition-aware weighted Denoising Score Matching (TDSM) for training conditional diffusion models with noisy labels, which is the first study in the line of diffusion models. The TDSM objective contains a weighted sum of score networks, incorporating instance-wise and time-dependent label transition probabilities. We introduce a transition-aware weight estimator, which leverages a time-dependent noisy-label classifier distinctively customized to the diffusion process. Through experiments across various datasets and noisy label settings, TDSM improves the quality of generated samples aligned with given conditions. Furthermore, our method improves generation performance even on prevalent benchmark datasets, which implies the potential noisy labels and their risk of generative model learning. Finally, we show the improved performance of TDSM on top of conventional noisy label corrections, which empirically proving its contribution as a part of label-noise robust generative models. Our code is available at: https://github.com/byeonghu-na/tdsm.

We establish a new theoretical framework for learning under multi-class, instance-dependent label noise. This framework casts learning with label noise as a form of domain adaptation, in particular, domain adaptation under posterior drift. We introduce the concept of relative signal strength (RSS), a pointwise measure that quantifies the transferability from noisy to clean posterior. Using RSS, we establish nearly matching upper and lower bounds on the excess risk. Our theoretical findings support the simple Noise Ignorant Empirical Risk Minimization (NI-ERM) principle, which minimizes empirical risk while ignoring label noise. Finally, we translate this theoretical insight into practice: by using NI-ERM to fit a linear classifier on top of a self-supervised feature extractor, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on the CIFAR-N data challenge.

Real-world single image denoising is crucial and practical in computer vision. Bayesian inversions combined with score priors now have proven effective for single image denoising but are limited to white Gaussian noise. Moreover, applying existing score-based methods for real-world denoising requires not only the explicit train of score priors on the target domain but also the careful design of sampling procedures for posterior inference, which is complicated and impractical. To address these limitations, we propose a score priors-guided deep variational inference, namely ScoreDVI, for practical real-world denoising. By considering the deep variational image posterior with a Gaussian form, score priors are extracted based on easily accessible minimum MSE Non-i.i.d Gaussian denoisers and variational samples, which in turn facilitate optimizing the variational image posterior. Such a procedure adaptively applies cheap score priors to denoising. Additionally, we exploit a Non-i.i.d Gaussian mixture model and variational noise posterior to model the real-world noise. This scheme also enables the pixel-wise fusion of multiple image priors and variational image posteriors. Besides, we develop a noise-aware prior assignment strategy that dynamically adjusts the weight of image priors in the optimization. Our method outperforms other single image-based real-world denoising methods and achieves comparable performance to dataset-based unsupervised methods.

Diffusion-based image super-resolution methods have demonstrated significant advantages over GAN-based approaches, particularly in terms of perceptual quality. Building upon a lengthy Markov chain, diffusion-based methods possess remarkable modeling capacity, enabling them to achieve outstanding performance in real-world scenarios. Unlike previous methods that focus on modifying the noise schedule or sampling process to enhance performance, our approach emphasizes the improved utilization of LR information. We find that different regions of the LR image can be viewed as corresponding to different timesteps in a diffusion process, where flat areas are closer to the target HR distribution but edge and texture regions are farther away. In these flat areas, applying a slight noise is more advantageous for the reconstruction. We associate this characteristic with uncertainty and propose to apply uncertainty estimate to guide region-specific noise level control, a technique we refer to as Uncertainty-guided Noise Weighting. Pixels with lower uncertainty (i.e., flat regions) receive reduced noise to preserve more LR information, therefore improving performance. Furthermore, we modify the network architecture of previous methods to develop our Uncertainty-guided Perturbation Super-Resolution (UPSR) model. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that, despite reduced model size and training overhead, the proposed UWSR method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods across various datasets, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Deep neural networks are known to exhibit a spectral learning bias, wherein low-frequency components are learned early in training, while high-frequency modes emerge more gradually in later epochs. However, when the target signal lacks low-frequency components and is dominated by broadband high frequencies, training suffers from a 'spectral bottleneck', and the model fails to reconstruct the entire signal, including the frequency components that lie within the network's representational capacity. We examine such a scenario in the context of implicit neural representations (INRs) with sinusoidal representation networks (SIRENs), focusing on the challenge of fitting high-frequency-dominant signals that are susceptible to spectral bottleneck. To effectively fit any target signal irrespective of it's frequency content, we propose a generalized target-aware 'weight perturbation scheme' (WINNER - weight initialization with noise for neural representations) for network initialization. The scheme perturbs uniformly initialized weights with Gaussian noise, where the noise scales are adaptively determined by the spectral centroid of the target signal. We show that the noise scales can provide control over the spectra of network activations and the eigenbasis of the empirical neural tangent kernel. This method not only addresses the spectral bottleneck but also yields faster convergence and with improved representation accuracy, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches in audio fitting and achieving notable gains in image fitting and denoising tasks. Beyond signal reconstruction, our approach opens new directions for adaptive weight initialization strategies in computer vision and scientific machine learning.

Diffusion models have revolutionized generative tasks, especially in the domain of text-to-image synthesis; however, their iterative denoising process demands substantial computational resources. In this paper, we present a novel acceleration strategy that integrates token-level pruning with caching techniques to tackle this computational challenge. By employing noise relative magnitude, we identify significant token changes across denoising iterations. Additionally, we enhance token selection by incorporating spatial clustering and ensuring distributional balance. Our experiments demonstrate reveal a 50%-60% reduction in computational costs while preserving the performance of the model, thereby markedly increasing the efficiency of diffusion models. The code is available at https://github.com/ada-cheng/CAT-Pruning

Weight oscillation is an undesirable side effect of quantization-aware training, in which quantized weights frequently jump between two quantized levels, resulting in training instability and a sub-optimal final model. We discover that the learnable scaling factor, a widely-used de facto setting in quantization aggravates weight oscillation. In this study, we investigate the connection between the learnable scaling factor and quantized weight oscillation and use ViT as a case driver to illustrate the findings and remedies. In addition, we also found that the interdependence between quantized weights in query and key of a self-attention layer makes ViT vulnerable to oscillation. We, therefore, propose three techniques accordingly: statistical weight quantization (rm StatsQ) to improve quantization robustness compared to the prevalent learnable-scale-based method; confidence-guided annealing (rm CGA) that freezes the weights with high confidence and calms the oscillating weights; and query-key reparameterization (rm QKR) to resolve the query-key intertwined oscillation and mitigate the resulting gradient misestimation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that these proposed techniques successfully abate weight oscillation and consistently achieve substantial accuracy improvement on ImageNet. Specifically, our 2-bit DeiT-T/DeiT-S algorithms outperform the previous state-of-the-art by 9.8% and 7.7%, respectively. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/nbasyl/OFQ.

Large language models (LLMs) with hundreds of billions of parameters require powerful server-grade GPUs for inference, limiting their practical deployment. To address this challenge, we introduce the outlier-aware weight quantization (OWQ) method, which aims to minimize LLM's footprint through low-precision representation. OWQ prioritizes a small subset of structured weights sensitive to quantization, storing them in high-precision, while applying highly tuned quantization to the remaining dense weights. This sensitivity-aware mixed-precision scheme reduces the quantization error notably, and extensive experiments demonstrate that 3.1-bit models using OWQ perform comparably to 4-bit models optimized by OPTQ. Furthermore, OWQ incorporates a parameter-efficient fine-tuning for task-specific adaptation, called weak column tuning (WCT), enabling accurate task-specific LLM adaptation with minimal memory overhead in the optimized format. OWQ represents a notable advancement in the flexibility, efficiency, and practicality of LLM optimization literature. The source code is available at https://github.com/xvyaward/owq

Large language models (LLMs) often produce inaccurate or misleading content-hallucinations. To address this challenge, we introduce Noise-Augmented Fine-Tuning (NoiseFiT), a novel framework that leverages adaptive noise injection based on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to enhance model robustness. In particular, NoiseFiT selectively perturbs layers identified as either high-SNR (more robust) or low-SNR (potentially under-regularized) using a dynamically scaled Gaussian noise. We further propose a hybrid loss that combines standard cross-entropy, soft cross-entropy, and consistency regularization to ensure stable and accurate outputs under noisy training conditions. Our theoretical analysis shows that adaptive noise injection is both unbiased and variance-preserving, providing strong guarantees for convergence in expectation. Empirical results on multiple test and benchmark datasets demonstrate that NoiseFiT significantly reduces hallucination rates, often improving or matching baseline performance in key tasks. These findings highlight the promise of noise-driven strategies for achieving robust, trustworthy language modeling without incurring prohibitive computational overhead. Given the comprehensive and detailed nature of our experiments, we have publicly released the fine-tuning logs, benchmark evaluation artifacts, and source code online at W&B, Hugging Face, and GitHub, respectively, to foster further research, accessibility and reproducibility.

Multimodal Large Language Models excel in various tasks, yet often struggle with modality bias, where the model tends to rely heavily on a single modality and overlook critical information in other modalities, which leads to incorrect focus and generating irrelevant responses. In this paper, we propose using the paradigm of preference optimization to solve the modality bias problem, including RLAIFVBias, a debiased preference optimization dataset, and a Noise Aware Preference Optimization algorithm. Specifically, we first construct the dataset by introducing perturbations to reduce the informational content of certain modalities, compelling the model to rely on a specific modality when generating negative responses. To address the inevitable noise in automatically constructed data, we combine the noise robust Mean Absolute Error with the Binary Cross Entropy in Direct Preference Optimization by a negative Box Cox transformation, and dynamically adjust the algorithm noise robustness based on the evaluated noise levels in the data. Extensive experiments validate our approach, demonstrating not only its effectiveness in mitigating modality bias but also its significant role in minimizing hallucinations.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a crucial method for addressing hallucinations in large language models (LLMs). While recent research has extended RAG models to complex noisy scenarios, these explorations often confine themselves to limited noise types and presuppose that noise is inherently detrimental to LLMs, potentially deviating from real-world retrieval environments and restricting practical applicability. In this paper, we define seven distinct noise types from a linguistic perspective and establish a Noise RAG Benchmark (NoiserBench), a comprehensive evaluation framework encompassing multiple datasets and reasoning tasks. Through empirical evaluation of eight representative LLMs with diverse architectures and scales, we reveal that these noises can be further categorized into two practical groups: noise that is beneficial to LLMs (aka beneficial noise) and noise that is harmful to LLMs (aka harmful noise). While harmful noise generally impairs performance, beneficial noise may enhance several aspects of model capabilities and overall performance. Our analysis offers insights for developing more robust, adaptable RAG solutions and mitigating hallucinations across diverse retrieval scenarios.

A prominent approach to test-time scaling for text-to-image diffusion models formulates the problem as a search over multiple noise seeds, selecting the one that maximizes a certain image-reward function. The effectiveness of this strategy heavily depends on the number and diversity of noise seeds explored. However, verifying each candidate is computationally expensive, because each must be fully denoised before a reward can be computed. This severely limits the number of samples that can be explored under a fixed budget. We propose test-time scaling with noise-aware pruning (TTSnap), a framework that prunes low-quality candidates without fully denoising them. The key challenge is that reward models are learned in the clean image domain, and the ranking of rewards predicted for intermediate estimates are often inconsistent with those predicted for clean images. To overcome this, we train noise-aware reward models via self-distillation to align the reward for intermediate estimates with that of the final clean images. To stabilize learning across different noise levels, we adopt a curriculum training strategy that progressively shifts the data domain from clean images to noise images. In addition, we introduce a new metric that measures reward alignment and computational budget utilization. Experiments demonstrate that our approach improves performance by over 16\% compared with existing methods, enabling more efficient and effective test-time scaling. It also provides orthogonal gains when combined with post-training techniques and local test-time optimization. Code: https://github.com/TerrysLearning/TTSnap/.

Available training data for named entity recognition (NER) often contains a significant percentage of incorrect labels for entity types and entity boundaries. Such label noise poses challenges for supervised learning and may significantly deteriorate model quality. To address this, prior work proposed various noise-robust learning approaches capable of learning from data with partially incorrect labels. These approaches are typically evaluated using simulated noise where the labels in a clean dataset are automatically corrupted. However, as we show in this paper, this leads to unrealistic noise that is far easier to handle than real noise caused by human error or semi-automatic annotation. To enable the study of the impact of various types of real noise, we introduce NoiseBench, an NER benchmark consisting of clean training data corrupted with 6 types of real noise, including expert errors, crowdsourcing errors, automatic annotation errors and LLM errors. We present an analysis that shows that real noise is significantly more challenging than simulated noise, and show that current state-of-the-art models for noise-robust learning fall far short of their theoretically achievable upper bound. We release NoiseBench to the research community.

This study addresses the challenge of noise in training datasets for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), a method for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. We categorize noise into pointwise noise, which includes low-quality data points, and pairwise noise, which encompasses erroneous data pair associations that affect preference rankings. Utilizing Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO), we enhance DPO's resilience to these types of noise. Our theoretical insights reveal that DPO inherently embeds DRO principles, conferring robustness to pointwise noise, with the regularization coefficient beta playing a critical role in its noise resistance. Extending this framework, we introduce Distributionally Robustifying DPO (Dr. DPO), which integrates pairwise robustness by optimizing against worst-case pairwise scenarios. The novel hyperparameter beta' in Dr. DPO allows for fine-tuned control over data pair reliability, providing a strategic balance between exploration and exploitation in noisy training environments. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that Dr. DPO substantially improves the quality of generated text and response accuracy in preference datasets, showcasing enhanced performance in both noisy and noise-free settings. The code is available at https://github.com/junkangwu/Dr_DPO.

Text-to-image diffusion models often struggle to achieve accurate semantic alignment between generated images and text prompts while maintaining efficiency for deployment on resource-constrained hardware. Existing approaches either incur substantial computational overhead through noise optimization or compromise semantic fidelity by aggressively pruning tokens. In this work, we propose OptiPrune, a unified framework that combines distribution-aware initial noise optimization with similarity-based token pruning to address both challenges simultaneously. Specifically, (1) we introduce a distribution-aware noise optimization module guided by attention scores to steer the initial latent noise toward semantically meaningful regions, mitigating issues such as subject neglect and feature entanglement; (2) we design a hardware-efficient token pruning strategy that selects representative base tokens via patch-wise similarity, injects randomness to enhance generalization, and recovers pruned tokens using maximum similarity copying before attention operations. Our method preserves the Gaussian prior during noise optimization and enables efficient inference without sacrificing alignment quality. Experiments on benchmark datasets, including Animal-Animal, demonstrate that OptiPrune achieves state-of-the-art prompt-image consistency with significantly reduced computational cost.

Text-to-image synthesis (T2I) has advanced remarkably with the emergence of large-scale diffusion models. In the conventional setup, the text prompt provides explicit, user-defined guidance, directing the generation process by denoising a randomly sampled Gaussian noise. In this work, we reveal that the often-overlooked noise itself encodes inherent generative tendencies, acting as a "silent prompt" that implicitly guides the output. This implicit guidance, embedded in the noise scheduler design of diffusion model formulations and their training stages, generalizes across a wide range of T2I models and backbones. Building on this insight, we introduce NoiseQuery, a novel strategy that selects optimal initial noise from a pre-built noise library to meet diverse user needs. Our approach not only enhances high-level semantic alignment with text prompts, but also allows for nuanced adjustments of low-level visual attributes, such as texture, sharpness, shape, and color, which are typically challenging to control through text alone. Extensive experiments across various models and target attributes demonstrate the strong performance and zero-shot transferability of our approach, requiring no additional optimization.

Contemporary text-to-image models exhibit a surprising degree of mode collapse, as can be seen when sampling several images given the same text prompt. While previous work has attempted to address this issue by steering the model using guidance mechanisms, or by generating a large pool of candidates and refining them, in this work we take a different direction and aim for diversity in generations via noise optimization. Specifically, we show that a simple noise optimization objective can mitigate mode collapse while preserving the fidelity of the base model. We also analyze the frequency characteristics of the noise and show that alternative noise initializations with different frequency profiles can improve both optimization and search. Our experiments demonstrate that noise optimization yields superior results in terms of generation quality and variety.

During both pretraining and fine-tuning, Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on trillions of tokens of text of widely varying quality. Both phases of training typically involve heuristically filtering out ``low-quality'' or noisy training samples, yet little is known quantitatively about how the type or intensity of noise affects downstream performance. In this work, we study how noise in chain of thought (CoT) impacts task performance in the highly-controlled setting of algorithmically solvable tasks. First, we develop the Traced Integer (TInt) framework to generate highly customizable noised execution traces for any arithmetic function on lists of integers. We then define two types of noise: static noise, a local form of noise which is applied after the CoT trace is computed, and dynamic noise, a global form of noise which propagates errors in the trace as it is computed. We then evaluate the test performance of pretrained models both prompted and fine-tuned on noised datasets with varying levels of dataset contamination and intensity. We find fine-tuned models are extremely robust to high levels of static noise but struggle significantly more with lower levels of dynamic noise. In contrast, few-shot prompted models appear more sensitive to even static noise. We conclude with a discussion of how our findings impact noise filtering best-practices, in particular emphasizing the importance of removing samples containing destructive dynamic noise with global errors.

Recently, there has been extensive research interest in training deep networks to denoise images without clean reference. However, the representative approaches such as Noise2Noise, Noise2Void, Stein's unbiased risk estimator (SURE), etc. seem to differ from one another and it is difficult to find the coherent mathematical structure. To address this, here we present a novel approach, called Noise2Score, which reveals a missing link in order to unite these seemingly different approaches. Specifically, we show that image denoising problems without clean images can be addressed by finding the mode of the posterior distribution and that the Tweedie's formula offers an explicit solution through the score function (i.e. the gradient of log likelihood). Our method then uses the recent finding that the score function can be stably estimated from the noisy images using the amortized residual denoising autoencoder, the method of which is closely related to Noise2Noise or Nose2Void. Our Noise2Score approach is so universal that the same network training can be used to remove noises from images that are corrupted by any exponential family distributions and noise parameters. Using extensive experiments with Gaussian, Poisson, and Gamma noises, we show that Noise2Score significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art self-supervised denoising methods in the benchmark data set such as (C)BSD68, Set12, and Kodak, etc.

Federated learning (FL) leverages client-server communications to train global models on decentralized data. However, communication noise or errors can impair model accuracy. To address this problem, we propose a novel FL algorithm that enhances robustness against communication noise while also reducing communication load. We derive the proposed algorithm through solving the weighted least-squares (WLS) regression problem as an illustrative example. We first frame WLS regression as a distributed convex optimization problem over a federated network employing random scheduling for improved communication efficiency. We then apply the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to iteratively solve this problem. To counteract the detrimental effects of cumulative communication noise, we introduce a key modification by eliminating the dual variable and implementing a new local model update at each participating client. This subtle yet effective change results in using a single noisy global model update at each client instead of two, improving robustness against additive communication noise. Furthermore, we incorporate another modification enabling clients to continue local updates even when not selected by the server, leading to substantial performance improvements. Our theoretical analysis confirms the convergence of our algorithm in both mean and the mean-square senses, even when the server communicates with a random subset of clients over noisy links at each iteration. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm and corroborate our theoretical findings.

Text-to-image diffusion model is a popular paradigm that synthesizes personalized images by providing a text prompt and a random Gaussian noise. While people observe that some noises are ``golden noises'' that can achieve better text-image alignment and higher human preference than others, we still lack a machine learning framework to obtain those golden noises. To learn golden noises for diffusion sampling, we mainly make three contributions in this paper. First, we identify a new concept termed the noise prompt, which aims at turning a random Gaussian noise into a golden noise by adding a small desirable perturbation derived from the text prompt. Following the concept, we first formulate the noise prompt learning framework that systematically learns ``prompted'' golden noise associated with a text prompt for diffusion models. Second, we design a noise prompt data collection pipeline and collect a large-scale noise prompt dataset~(NPD) that contains 100k pairs of random noises and golden noises with the associated text prompts. With the prepared NPD as the training dataset, we trained a small noise prompt network~(NPNet) that can directly learn to transform a random noise into a golden noise. The learned golden noise perturbation can be considered as a kind of prompt for noise, as it is rich in semantic information and tailored to the given text prompt. Third, our extensive experiments demonstrate the impressive effectiveness and generalization of NPNet on improving the quality of synthesized images across various diffusion models, including SDXL, DreamShaper-xl-v2-turbo, and Hunyuan-DiT. Moreover, NPNet is a small and efficient controller that acts as a plug-and-play module with very limited additional inference and computational costs, as it just provides a golden noise instead of a random noise without accessing the original pipeline.

Existing denoising generative models rely on solving discretized reverse-time SDEs or ODEs. In this paper, we identify a long-overlooked yet pervasive issue in this family of models: a misalignment between the pre-defined noise level and the actual noise level encoded in intermediate states during sampling. We refer to this misalignment as noise shift. Through empirical analysis, we demonstrate that noise shift is widespread in modern diffusion models and exhibits a systematic bias, leading to sub-optimal generation due to both out-of-distribution generalization and inaccurate denoising updates. To address this problem, we propose Noise Awareness Guidance (NAG), a simple yet effective correction method that explicitly steers sampling trajectories to remain consistent with the pre-defined noise schedule. We further introduce a classifier-free variant of NAG, which jointly trains a noise-conditional and a noise-unconditional model via noise-condition dropout, thereby eliminating the need for external classifiers. Extensive experiments, including ImageNet generation and various supervised fine-tuning tasks, show that NAG consistently mitigates noise shift and substantially improves the generation quality of mainstream diffusion models.

Speech tokenization is the task of representing speech signals as a sequence of discrete units. Such representations can be later used for various downstream tasks including automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech, etc. More relevant to this study, such representation serves as the basis of Speech Language Models. In this work, we tackle the task of speech tokenization under the noisy setup and present NAST: Noise Aware Speech Tokenization for Speech Language Models. NAST is composed of three main components: (i) a predictor; (ii) a residual encoder; and (iii) a decoder. We evaluate the efficiency of NAST considering several spoken language modeling tasks and show that NAST is superior to the evaluated baselines across all setups. Lastly, we analyze NAST and show its disentanglement properties and robustness to signal variations in the form of noise, reverberation, pitch-shift, and time-stretch. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/ShovalMessica/NAST.

Diffusion models have emerged as a key pillar of foundation models in visual domains. One of their critical applications is to universally solve different downstream inverse tasks via a single diffusion prior without re-training for each task. Most inverse tasks can be formulated as inferring a posterior distribution over data (e.g., a full image) given a measurement (e.g., a masked image). This is however challenging in diffusion models since the nonlinear and iterative nature of the diffusion process renders the posterior intractable. To cope with this challenge, we propose a variational approach that by design seeks to approximate the true posterior distribution. We show that our approach naturally leads to regularization by denoising diffusion process (RED-Diff) where denoisers at different timesteps concurrently impose different structural constraints over the image. To gauge the contribution of denoisers from different timesteps, we propose a weighting mechanism based on signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR). Our approach provides a new variational perspective for solving inverse problems with diffusion models, allowing us to formulate sampling as stochastic optimization, where one can simply apply off-the-shelf solvers with lightweight iterates. Our experiments for image restoration tasks such as inpainting and superresolution demonstrate the strengths of our method compared with state-of-the-art sampling-based diffusion models.

Spoken query retrieval is an important interaction mode in modern information retrieval. However, existing evaluation datasets are often limited to simple queries under constrained noise conditions, making them inadequate for assessing the robustness of spoken query retrieval systems under complex acoustic perturbations. To address this limitation, we present SQuTR, a robustness benchmark for spoken query retrieval that includes a large-scale dataset and a unified evaluation protocol. SQuTR aggregates 37,317 unique queries from six commonly used English and Chinese text retrieval datasets, spanning multiple domains and diverse query types. We synthesize speech using voice profiles from 200 real speakers and mix 17 categories of real-world environmental noise under controlled SNR levels, enabling reproducible robustness evaluation from quiet to highly noisy conditions. Under the unified protocol, we conduct large-scale evaluations on representative cascaded and end-to-end retrieval systems. Experimental results show that retrieval performance decreases as noise increases, with substantially different drops across systems. Even large-scale retrieval models struggle under extreme noise, indicating that robustness remains a critical bottleneck. Overall, SQuTR provides a reproducible testbed for benchmarking and diagnostic analysis, and facilitates future research on robustness in spoken query to text retrieval.

Noisy partial label learning (noisy PLL) is an important branch of weakly supervised learning. Unlike PLL where the ground-truth label must conceal in the candidate label set, noisy PLL relaxes this constraint and allows the ground-truth label may not be in the candidate label set. To address this challenging problem, most of the existing works attempt to detect noisy samples and estimate the ground-truth label for each noisy sample. However, detection errors are unavoidable. These errors can accumulate during training and continuously affect model optimization. To this end, we propose a novel framework for noisy PLL with theoretical guarantees, called ``Adjusting Label Importance Mechanism (ALIM)''. It aims to reduce the negative impact of detection errors by trading off the initial candidate set and model outputs. ALIM is a plug-in strategy that can be integrated with existing PLL approaches. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance on noisy PLL. \textcolor[rgb]{0.93,0.0,0.47}{Our code can be found in Supplementary Material}.

In this paper, we present an efficient method for storing fine-tuned models by leveraging the low-rank properties of weight residuals. Our key observation is that weight residuals in large overparameterized models exhibit even stronger low-rank characteristics. Based on this insight, we propose Efficient Residual Encoding (ERE), a novel approach that achieves efficient storage of fine-tuned model weights by approximating the low-rank weight residuals. Furthermore, we analyze the robustness of weight residuals and push the limit of storage efficiency by utilizing additional quantization and layer-wise rank allocation. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly reduces memory footprint while preserving performance in various tasks and modalities. We release our code.

Sequential Recommenders generate recommendations based on users' historical interaction sequences. However, in practice, these collected sequences are often contaminated by noisy interactions, which significantly impairs recommendation performance. Accurately identifying such noisy interactions without additional information is particularly challenging due to the absence of explicit supervisory signals indicating noise. Large Language Models (LLMs), equipped with extensive open knowledge and semantic reasoning abilities, offer a promising avenue to bridge this information gap. However, employing LLMs for denoising in sequential recommendation presents notable challenges: 1) Direct application of pretrained LLMs may not be competent for the denoising task, frequently generating nonsensical responses; 2) Even after fine-tuning, the reliability of LLM outputs remains questionable, especially given the complexity of the denoising task and the inherent hallucinatory issue of LLMs. To tackle these challenges, we propose LLM4DSR, a tailored approach for denoising sequential recommendation using LLMs. We constructed a self-supervised fine-tuning task to activate LLMs' capabilities to identify noisy items and suggest replacements. Furthermore, we developed an uncertainty estimation module that ensures only high-confidence responses are utilized for sequence corrections. Remarkably, LLM4DSR is model-agnostic, allowing corrected sequences to be flexibly applied across various recommendation models. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of LLM4DSR over existing methods.

A visually rich document (VRD) utilizes visual features along with linguistic cues to disseminate information. Training a custom extractor that identifies named entities from a document requires a large number of instances of the target document type annotated at textual and visual modalities. This is an expensive bottleneck in enterprise scenarios, where we want to train custom extractors for thousands of different document types in a scalable way. Pre-training an extractor model on unlabeled instances of the target document type, followed by a fine-tuning step on human-labeled instances does not work in these scenarios, as it surpasses the maximum allowable training time allocated for the extractor. We address this scenario by proposing a Noise-Aware Training method or NAT in this paper. Instead of acquiring expensive human-labeled documents, NAT utilizes weakly labeled documents to train an extractor in a scalable way. To avoid degradation in the model's quality due to noisy, weakly labeled samples, NAT estimates the confidence of each training sample and incorporates it as uncertainty measure during training. We train multiple state-of-the-art extractor models using NAT. Experiments on a number of publicly available and in-house datasets show that NAT-trained models are not only robust in performance -- it outperforms a transfer-learning baseline by up to 6% in terms of macro-F1 score, but it is also more label-efficient -- it reduces the amount of human-effort required to obtain comparable performance by up to 73%.

The rapid advancement of GAN and Diffusion models makes it more difficult to distinguish AI-generated images from real ones. Recent studies often use image-based reconstruction errors as an important feature for determining whether an image is AI-generated. However, these approaches typically incur high computational costs and also fail to capture intrinsic noisy features present in the raw images. To solve these problems, we innovatively refine error extraction by using bit-plane-based image processing, as lower bit planes indeed represent noise patterns in images. We introduce an effective bit-planes guided noisy image generation and exploit various image normalization strategies, including scaling and thresholding. Then, to amplify the noise signal for easier AI-generated image detection, we design a maximum gradient patch selection that applies multi-directional gradients to compute the noise score and selects the region with the highest score. Finally, we propose a lightweight and effective classification head and explore two different structures: noise-based classifier and noise-guided classifier. Extensive experiments on the GenImage benchmark demonstrate the outstanding performance of our method, which achieves an average accuracy of 98.9\% (11.9\%~uparrow) and shows excellent cross-generator generalization capability. Particularly, our method achieves an accuracy of over 98.2\% from GAN to Diffusion and over 99.2\% from Diffusion to GAN. Moreover, it performs error extraction at the millisecond level, nearly a hundred times faster than existing methods. The code is at https://github.com/hongsong-wang/LOTA.

Image captioning is one of the straightforward tasks that can take advantage of large-scale web-crawled data which provides rich knowledge about the visual world for a captioning model. However, since web-crawled data contains image-text pairs that are aligned at different levels, the inherent noises (e.g., misaligned pairs) make it difficult to learn a precise captioning model. While the filtering strategy can effectively remove noisy data, however, it leads to a decrease in learnable knowledge and sometimes brings about a new problem of data deficiency. To take the best of both worlds, we propose a noise-aware learning framework, which learns rich knowledge from the whole web-crawled data while being less affected by the noises. This is achieved by the proposed quality controllable model, which is learned using alignment levels of the image-text pairs as an additional control signal during training. The alignment-conditioned training allows the model to generate high-quality captions of well-aligned by simply setting the control signal to desired alignment level at inference time. Through in-depth analysis, we show that our controllable captioning model is effective in handling noise. In addition, with two tasks of zero-shot captioning and text-to-image retrieval using generated captions (i.e., self-retrieval), we also demonstrate our model can produce high-quality captions in terms of descriptiveness and distinctiveness. Code is available at https://github.com/kakaobrain/noc.

We study the problem of multi-task learning under user-level differential privacy, in which n users contribute data to m tasks, each involving a subset of users. One important aspect of the problem, that can significantly impact quality, is the distribution skew among tasks. Certain tasks may have much fewer data samples than others, making them more susceptible to the noise added for privacy. It is natural to ask whether algorithms can adapt to this skew to improve the overall utility. We give a systematic analysis of the problem, by studying how to optimally allocate a user's privacy budget among tasks. We propose a generic algorithm, based on an adaptive reweighting of the empirical loss, and show that when there is task distribution skew, this gives a quantifiable improvement of excess empirical risk. Experimental studies on recommendation problems that exhibit a long tail of small tasks, demonstrate that our methods significantly improve utility, achieving the state of the art on two standard benchmarks.

Diffusion models have achieved state-of-the-art image generation. However, the random Gaussian noise used to start the diffusion process influences the final output, causing variations in image quality and prompt adherence. Existing noise-level optimization approaches generally rely on extra dataset construction, additional networks, or backpropagation-based optimization, limiting their practicality. In this paper, we propose Noise Level Guidance (NLG), a simple, efficient, and general noise-level optimization approach that refines initial noise by increasing the likelihood of its alignment with general guidance - requiring no additional training data, auxiliary networks, or backpropagation. The proposed NLG approach provides a unified framework generalizable to both conditional and unconditional diffusion models, accommodating various forms of diffusion-level guidance. Extensive experiments on five standard benchmarks demonstrate that our approach enhances output generation quality and input condition adherence. By seamlessly integrating with existing guidance methods while maintaining computational efficiency, our method establishes NLG as a practical and scalable enhancement to diffusion models. Code can be found at https://github.com/harveymannering/NoiseLevelGuidance.

Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods have gained popularity and democratized the usage of Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent studies have shown that a small subset of weights significantly impacts performance. Based on this observation, we introduce a novel PEFT method, called Gaussian noise Injected Fine Tuning of Salient Weights (GIFT-SW). Our method updates only salient columns, while injecting Gaussian noise into non-salient ones. To identify these columns, we developeda generalized sensitivity metric that extends and unifies metrics from previous studies. Experiments with LLaMA models demonstrate that GIFT-SW outperforms full fine-tuning and modern PEFT methods under the same computational budget. Moreover, GIFT-SW offers practical advantages to recover performance of models subjected to mixed-precision quantization with keeping salient weights in full precision.

Large language models (LLMs) show impressive performance in solving complex language tasks. However, its large number of parameters present significant challenges for the deployment and application of the model on edge devices. Compressing large language models to low bits can enable them to run on resource-constrained devices, often leading to performance degradation. To address this problem, we propose gradient-aware weight quantization (GWQ), the first quantization approach for low-bit weight quantization that leverages gradients to localize outliers, requiring only a minimal amount of calibration data for outlier detection. GWQ retains the weights corresponding to the top 1% outliers preferentially at FP16 precision, while the remaining non-outlier weights are stored in a low-bit format. GWQ found experimentally that utilizing the sensitive weights in the gradient localization model is more scientific compared to utilizing the sensitive weights in the Hessian matrix localization model. Compared to current quantization methods, GWQ can be applied to multiple language models and achieves lower PPL on the WikiText2 and C4 dataset. In the zero-shot task, GWQ quantized models have higher accuracy compared to other quantization methods. GWQ is also suitable for multimodal model quantization, and the quantized Qwen-VL family model is more accurate than other methods. Zero-shot target detection task dataset RefCOCO outperforms the current stat-of-the-arts method SPQR. GWQ achieves 1.2 times inference speedup in comparison to the original model, and effectively reduces the inference memory.

Recent strides in the development of diffusion models, exemplified by advancements such as Stable Diffusion, have underscored their remarkable prowess in generating visually compelling images. However, the imperative of achieving a seamless alignment between the generated image and the provided prompt persists as a formidable challenge. This paper traces the root of these difficulties to invalid initial noise, and proposes a solution in the form of Initial Noise Optimization (InitNO), a paradigm that refines this noise. Considering text prompts, not all random noises are effective in synthesizing semantically-faithful images. We design the cross-attention response score and the self-attention conflict score to evaluate the initial noise, bifurcating the initial latent space into valid and invalid sectors. A strategically crafted noise optimization pipeline is developed to guide the initial noise towards valid regions. Our method, validated through rigorous experimentation, shows a commendable proficiency in generating images in strict accordance with text prompts. Our code is available at https://github.com/xiefan-guo/initno.

Semi-supervised learning based methods are current SOTA solutions to the noisy-label learning problem, which rely on learning an unsupervised label cleaner first to divide the training samples into a labeled set for clean data and an unlabeled set for noise data. Typically, the cleaner is obtained via fitting a mixture model to the distribution of per-sample training losses. However, the modeling procedure is class agnostic and assumes the loss distributions of clean and noise samples are the same across different classes. Unfortunately, in practice, such an assumption does not always hold due to the varying learning difficulty of different classes, thus leading to sub-optimal label noise partition criteria. In this work, we reveal this long-ignored problem and propose a simple yet effective solution, named Class Prototype-based label noise Cleaner (CPC). Unlike previous works treating all the classes equally, CPC fully considers loss distribution heterogeneity and applies class-aware modulation to partition the clean and noise data. CPC takes advantage of loss distribution modeling and intra-class consistency regularization in feature space simultaneously and thus can better distinguish clean and noise labels. We theoretically justify the effectiveness of our method by explaining it from the Expectation-Maximization (EM) framework. Extensive experiments are conducted on the noisy-label benchmarks CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Clothing1M and WebVision. The results show that CPC consistently brings about performance improvement across all benchmarks. Codes and pre-trained models will be released at https://github.com/hjjpku/CPC.git.

Training a classifier on web-crawled data demands learning algorithms that are robust to annotation errors and irrelevant examples. This paper builds upon the recent empirical observation that applying unsupervised contrastive learning to noisy, web-crawled datasets yields a feature representation under which the in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) samples are linearly separable. We show that direct estimation of the separating hyperplane can indeed offer an accurate detection of OOD samples, and yet, surprisingly, this detection does not translate into gains in classification accuracy. Digging deeper into this phenomenon, we discover that the near-perfect detection misses a type of clean examples that are valuable for supervised learning. These examples often represent visually simple images, which are relatively easy to identify as clean examples using standard loss- or distance-based methods despite being poorly separated from the OOD distribution using unsupervised learning. Because we further observe a low correlation with SOTA metrics, this urges us to propose a hybrid solution that alternates between noise detection using linear separation and a state-of-the-art (SOTA) small-loss approach. When combined with the SOTA algorithm PLS, we substantially improve SOTA results for real-world image classification in the presence of web noise github.com/PaulAlbert31/LSA

Deep learning-based speech enhancement methods have significantly improved speech quality and intelligibility. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been proven to be essential components of many high-performance models. In this paper, we introduce adaptive convolution, an efficient and versatile convolutional module that enhances the model's capability to adaptively represent speech signals. Adaptive convolution performs frame-wise causal dynamic convolution, generating time-varying kernels for each frame by assembling multiple parallel candidate kernels. A lightweight attention mechanism is proposed for adaptive convolution, leveraging both current and historical information to assign adaptive weights to each candidate kernel. This enables the convolution operation to adapt to frame-level speech spectral features, leading to more efficient extraction and reconstruction. We integrate adaptive convolution into various CNN-based models, highlighting its generalizability. Experimental results demonstrate that adaptive convolution significantly improves the performance with negligible increases in computational complexity, especially for lightweight models. Moreover, we present an intuitive analysis revealing a strong correlation between kernel selection and signal characteristics. Furthermore, we propose the adaptive convolutional recurrent network (AdaptCRN), an ultra-lightweight model that incorporates adaptive convolution and an efficient encoder-decoder design, achieving superior performance compared to models with similar or even higher computational costs.

Distant and weak supervision allow to obtain large amounts of labeled training data quickly and cheaply, but these automatic annotations tend to contain a high amount of errors. A popular technique to overcome the negative effects of these noisy labels is noise modelling where the underlying noise process is modelled. In this work, we study the quality of these estimated noise models from the theoretical side by deriving the expected error of the noise model. Apart from evaluating the theoretical results on commonly used synthetic noise, we also publish NoisyNER, a new noisy label dataset from the NLP domain that was obtained through a realistic distant supervision technique. It provides seven sets of labels with differing noise patterns to evaluate different noise levels on the same instances. Parallel, clean labels are available making it possible to study scenarios where a small amount of gold-standard data can be leveraged. Our theoretical results and the corresponding experiments give insights into the factors that influence the noise model estimation like the noise distribution and the sampling technique.

Conformal Prediction (CP) controls the prediction uncertainty of classification systems by producing a small prediction set, ensuring a predetermined probability that the true class lies within this set. This is commonly done by defining a score, based on the model predictions, and setting a threshold on this score using a validation set. In this study, we address the problem of CP calibration when we only have access to a calibration set with noisy labels. We show how we can estimate the noise-free conformal threshold based on the noisy labeled data. We derive a finite sample coverage guarantee for uniform noise that remains effective even in tasks with a large number of classes. We dub our approach Noise-Aware Conformal Prediction (NACP). We illustrate the performance of the proposed results on several standard image classification datasets with a large number of classes.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated a remarkable success across various tasks. However, efficiently serving LLMs has been a challenge due to its large memory bottleneck, specifically in small batch inference settings (e.g. mobile devices). Weight-only quantization can be a promising approach, but sub-4 bit quantization remains a challenge due to large-magnitude activation outliers. To mitigate the undesirable outlier effect, we first propose per-IC quantization, a simple yet effective method that creates quantization groups within each input channel (IC) rather than the conventional per-output channel (OC). Our method is motivated by the observation that activation outliers affect the input dimension of the weight matrix, so similarly grouping the weights in the IC direction can isolate outliers to be within a group. We also find that activation outliers do not dictate quantization difficulty, and inherent weight sensitivities also exist. With per-IC quantization as a new outlier-friendly scheme, we then propose Adaptive Dimensions (AdaDim), a versatile quantization framework that can adapt to various weight sensitivity patterns. We demonstrate the effectiveness of AdaDim by augmenting prior methods such as Round-To-Nearest and GPTQ, showing significant improvements across various language modeling benchmarks for both base (up to +4.7% on MMLU) and instruction-tuned (up to +10% on HumanEval) LLMs.

Large audio-language models (LALMs) unify speech and text processing, but their robustness in noisy real-world settings remains underexplored. We investigate how irrelevant audio, such as silence, synthetic noise, and environmental sounds, affects text reasoning tasks where audio is unnecessary. Across three text-based benchmarks, we find that even non-informative audio reduces accuracy and increases prediction volatility; the severity of interference scales with longer durations, higher amplitudes, and elevated decoding temperatures. Silence, often assumed neutral, destabilizes outputs as strongly as synthetic noise. While larger models show greater resilience, vulnerabilities persist across all evaluated systems. We further test mitigation strategies and find that prompting shows limited effectiveness, whereas self-consistency improves stability at the cost of increased computation. Our results reveal cross-modal interference as a key robustness challenge and highlight the need for efficient fusion strategies that preserve reasoning performance in the presence of irrelevant inputs.

Diffusion models have emerged as the de facto choice for generating visual signals. However, training a single model to predict noise across various levels poses significant challenges, necessitating numerous iterations and incurring significant computational costs. Various approaches, such as loss weighting strategy design and architectural refinements, have been introduced to expedite convergence. In this study, we propose a novel approach to design the noise schedule for enhancing the training of diffusion models. Our key insight is that the importance sampling of the logarithm of the Signal-to-Noise ratio (logSNR), theoretically equivalent to a modified noise schedule, is particularly beneficial for training efficiency when increasing the sample frequency around log SNR=0. We empirically demonstrate the superiority of our noise schedule over the standard cosine schedule. Furthermore, we highlight the advantages of our noise schedule design on the ImageNet benchmark, showing that the designed schedule consistently benefits different prediction targets.

With the proliferation of algorithmic decision-making, increased scrutiny has been placed on these systems. This paper explores the relationship between the quality of the training data and the overall fairness of the models trained with such data in the context of supervised classification. We measure key fairness metrics across a range of algorithms over multiple image classification datasets that have a varying level of noise in both the labels and the training data itself. We describe noise in the labels as inaccuracies in the labelling of the data in the training set and noise in the data as distortions in the data, also in the training set. By adding noise to the original datasets, we can explore the relationship between the quality of the training data and the fairness of the output of the models trained on that data.

Recently, deep neural networks such as RNN, CNN and Transformer have been applied in the task of sequential recommendation, which aims to capture the dynamic preference characteristics from logged user behavior data for accurate recommendation. However, in online platforms, logged user behavior data is inevitable to contain noise, and deep recommendation models are easy to overfit on these logged data. To tackle this problem, we borrow the idea of filtering algorithms from signal processing that attenuates the noise in the frequency domain. In our empirical experiments, we find that filtering algorithms can substantially improve representative sequential recommendation models, and integrating simple filtering algorithms (eg Band-Stop Filter) with an all-MLP architecture can even outperform competitive Transformer-based models. Motivated by it, we propose FMLP-Rec, an all-MLP model with learnable filters for sequential recommendation task. The all-MLP architecture endows our model with lower time complexity, and the learnable filters can adaptively attenuate the noise information in the frequency domain. Extensive experiments conducted on eight real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over competitive RNN, CNN, GNN and Transformer-based methods. Our code and data are publicly available at the link: blue{https://github.com/RUCAIBox/FMLP-Rec}.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown excellent performance on various tasks, but the astronomical model size raises the hardware barrier for serving (memory size) and slows down token generation (memory bandwidth). In this paper, we propose Activation-aware Weight Quantization (AWQ), a hardware-friendly approach for LLM low-bit weight-only quantization. Our method is based on the observation that weights are not equally important: protecting only 1% of salient weights can greatly reduce quantization error. We then propose to search for the optimal per-channel scaling that protects the salient weights by observing the activation, not weights. AWQ does not rely on any backpropagation or reconstruction, so it can well preserve LLMs' generalization ability on different domains and modalities, without overfitting to the calibration set; it also does not rely on any data layout reordering, maintaining the hardware efficiency. AWQ outperforms existing work on various language modeling, common sense QA, and domain-specific benchmarks. Thanks to better generalization, it achieves excellent quantization performance for instruction-tuned LMs and, for the first time, multi-modal LMs. We also implement efficient tensor core kernels with reorder-free online dequantization to accelerate AWQ, achieving a 1.45x speedup over GPTQ and is 1.85x faster than the cuBLAS FP16 implementation. Our method provides a turn-key solution to compress LLMs to 3/4 bits for efficient deployment.

SGD does not produce robust results on datasets with label noise. Because the gradients calculated according to the losses of the noisy samples cause the optimization process to go in the wrong direction. In this paper, as an alternative to SGD, we recommend using samples with loss less than a threshold value determined during the optimization process, instead of using all samples in the mini-batch. Our proposed method, Adaptive-k, aims to exclude label noise samples from the optimization process and make the process robust. On noisy datasets, we found that using a threshold-based approach, such as Adaptive-k, produces better results than using all samples or a fixed number of low-loss samples in the mini-batch. Based on our theoretical analysis and experimental results, we show that the Adaptive-k method is closest to the performance of the oracle, in which noisy samples are entirely removed from the dataset. Adaptive-k is a simple but effective method. It does not require prior knowledge of the noise ratio of the dataset, does not require additional model training, and does not increase training time significantly. The code for Adaptive-k is available at https://github.com/enesdedeoglu-TR/Adaptive-k

The paper introduces the weighted convolution, a novel approach to the convolution for signals defined on regular grids (e.g., 2D images) through the application of an optimal density function to scale the contribution of neighbouring pixels based on their distance from the central pixel. This choice differs from the traditional uniform convolution, which treats all neighbouring pixels equally. Our weighted convolution can be applied to convolutional neural network problems to improve the approximation accuracy. Given a convolutional network, we define a framework to compute the optimal density function through a minimisation model. The framework separates the optimisation of the convolutional kernel weights (using stochastic gradient descent) from the optimisation of the density function (using DIRECT-L). Experimental results on a learning model for an image-to-image task (e.g., image denoising) show that the weighted convolution significantly reduces the loss (up to 53% improvement) and increases the test accuracy compared to standard convolution. While this method increases execution time by 11%, it is robust across several hyperparameters of the learning model. Future work will apply the weighted convolution to real-case 2D and 3D image convolutional learning problems.

Developing large language models is expensive and involves making decisions with small experiments, typically by evaluating on large, multi-task evaluation suites. In this work, we analyze specific properties which make a benchmark more reliable for such decisions, and interventions to design higher-quality evaluation benchmarks. We introduce two key metrics that show differences in current benchmarks: signal, a benchmark's ability to separate better models from worse models, and noise, a benchmark's sensitivity to random variability between training steps. We demonstrate that benchmarks with a better signal-to-noise ratio are more reliable when making decisions at small scale, and those with less noise have lower scaling law prediction error. These results suggest that improving signal or noise will lead to more useful benchmarks, so we introduce three interventions designed to directly affect signal or noise. For example, we propose that switching to a metric that has better signal and noise (e.g., perplexity rather than accuracy) leads to better reliability and improved scaling law error. We also find that filtering noisy subtasks, to improve an aggregate signal-to-noise ratio, leads to more reliable multi-task evaluations. We also find that averaging the output of a model's intermediate checkpoints to reduce noise leads to consistent improvements. We conclude by recommending that those creating new benchmarks, or selecting which existing benchmarks to use, aim for high signal and low noise. We use 30 benchmarks for these experiments, and 375 open-weight language models from 60M to 32B parameters, resulting in a new, publicly available dataset of 900K evaluation benchmark results, totaling 200M instances.

Recently, research on denoising diffusion models has expanded its application to the field of image restoration. Traditional diffusion-based image restoration methods utilize degraded images as conditional input to effectively guide the reverse generation process, without modifying the original denoising diffusion process. However, since the degraded images already include low-frequency information, starting from Gaussian white noise will result in increased sampling steps. We propose Resfusion, a general framework that incorporates the residual term into the diffusion forward process, starting the reverse process directly from the noisy degraded images. The form of our inference process is consistent with the DDPM. We introduced a weighted residual noise, named resnoise, as the prediction target and explicitly provide the quantitative relationship between the residual term and the noise term in resnoise. By leveraging a smooth equivalence transformation, Resfusion determine the optimal acceleration step and maintains the integrity of existing noise schedules, unifying the training and inference processes. The experimental results demonstrate that Resfusion exhibits competitive performance on ISTD dataset, LOL dataset and Raindrop dataset with only five sampling steps. Furthermore, Resfusion can be easily applied to image generation and emerges with strong versatility. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/nkicsl/Resfusion.

In the realm of continual learning, the presence of noisy labels within data streams represents a notable obstacle to model reliability and fairness. We focus on the data stream scenario outlined in pertinent literature, characterized by fuzzy task boundaries and noisy labels. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel and intuitive sampling method called Noisy Test Debiasing (NTD) to mitigate noisy labels in evolving data streams and establish a fair and robust continual learning algorithm. NTD is straightforward to implement, making it feasible across various scenarios. Our experiments benchmark four datasets, including two synthetic noise datasets (CIFAR10 and CIFAR100) and real-world noise datasets (mini-WebVision and Food-101N). The results validate the efficacy of NTD for online continual learning in scenarios with noisy labels in data streams. Compared to the previous leading approach, NTD achieves a training speedup enhancement over two times while maintaining or surpassing accuracy levels. Moreover, NTD utilizes less than one-fifth of the GPU memory resources compared to previous leading methods.

Long-context models (LCMs) have demonstrated great potential in processing long sequences, facilitating many real-world applications. The success of LCMs can be attributed to their ability to locate implicit critical information within the context for further prediction. However, recent research reveals that LCMs are often susceptible to contextual noise, i.e., irrelevant tokens, that can mislead model attention. In this paper, we conduct a fine-grained analysis of the context noise and propose an effective metric, the Integrated Gradient (IG) score, to detect and quantify the noise information within the context. Our findings reveal that even simple mitigation of detected context noise can substantially boost the model's attention on critical tokens and benefit subsequent predictions. Building on this insight, we propose Context Denoising Training (CDT), a straightforward yet effective training strategy that improves attention on critical tokens while reinforcing their influence on model predictions. Extensive experiments across four tasks, under both context window scaling and long-context alignment settings, demonstrate the superiority of CDT. Notably, when trained with CDT, an open-source 8B model can achieve performance (50.92) comparable to GPT-4o (51.00).

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly computationally complex, developing efficient deployment strategies, such as quantization, becomes crucial. State-of-the-art Post-training Quantization (PTQ) techniques often rely on calibration processes to maintain the accuracy of these models. However, while these calibration techniques can enhance performance in certain domains, they may not be as effective in others. This paper aims to draw attention to robust statistical approaches that can mitigate such issues. We propose a weight-adaptive PTQ method that can be considered a precursor to calibration-based PTQ methods, guiding the quantization process to preserve the distribution of weights by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the quantized weights and the originally trained weights. This minimization ensures that the quantized model retains the Shannon information content of the original model to a great extent, guaranteeing robust and efficient deployment across many tasks. As such, our proposed approach can perform on par with most common calibration-based PTQ methods, establishing a new pre-calibration step for further adjusting the quantized weights with calibration. We show that our pre-calibration results achieve the same accuracy as some existing calibration-based PTQ methods on various LLMs.

Recent advances in deep learning have relied on large, labelled datasets to train high-capacity models. However, collecting large datasets in a time- and cost-efficient manner often results in label noise. We present a method for learning from noisy labels that leverages similarities between training examples in feature space, encouraging the prediction of each example to be similar to its nearest neighbours. Compared to training algorithms that use multiple models or distinct stages, our approach takes the form of a simple, additional regularization term. It can be interpreted as an inductive version of the classical, transductive label propagation algorithm. We thoroughly evaluate our method on datasets evaluating both synthetic (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100) and realistic (mini-WebVision, WebVision, Clothing1M, mini-ImageNet-Red) noise, and achieve competitive or state-of-the-art accuracies across all of them.

Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) enhances the quality and condition adherence of text-to-image diffusion models. It operates by combining the conditional and unconditional predictions using a fixed weight. However, recent works vary the weights throughout the diffusion process, reporting superior results but without providing any rationale or analysis. By conducting comprehensive experiments, this paper provides insights into CFG weight schedulers. Our findings suggest that simple, monotonically increasing weight schedulers consistently lead to improved performances, requiring merely a single line of code. In addition, more complex parametrized schedulers can be optimized for further improvement, but do not generalize across different models and tasks.

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm where clients collaboratively train a model using their local (human-generated) datasets. While existing studies focus on FL algorithm development to tackle data heterogeneity across clients, the important issue of data quality (e.g., label noise) in FL is overlooked. This paper aims to fill this gap by providing a quantitative study on the impact of label noise on FL. We derive an upper bound for the generalization error that is linear in the clients' label noise level. Then we conduct experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets using various FL algorithms. Our empirical results show that the global model accuracy linearly decreases as the noise level increases, which is consistent with our theoretical analysis. We further find that label noise slows down the convergence of FL training, and the global model tends to overfit when the noise level is high.

The success of the text-guided diffusion model has inspired the development and release of numerous powerful diffusion models within the open-source community. These models are typically fine-tuned on various expert datasets, showcasing diverse denoising capabilities. Leveraging multiple high-quality models to produce stronger generation ability is valuable, but has not been extensively studied. Existing methods primarily adopt parameter merging strategies to produce a new static model. However, they overlook the fact that the divergent denoising capabilities of the models may dynamically change across different states, such as when experiencing different prompts, initial noises, denoising steps, and spatial locations. In this paper, we propose a novel ensembling method, Adaptive Feature Aggregation (AFA), which dynamically adjusts the contributions of multiple models at the feature level according to various states (i.e., prompts, initial noises, denoising steps, and spatial locations), thereby keeping the advantages of multiple diffusion models, while suppressing their disadvantages. Specifically, we design a lightweight Spatial-Aware Block-Wise (SABW) feature aggregator that adaptive aggregates the block-wise intermediate features from multiple U-Net denoisers into a unified one. The core idea lies in dynamically producing an individual attention map for each model's features by comprehensively considering various states. It is worth noting that only SABW is trainable with about 50 million parameters, while other models are frozen. Both the quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed Adaptive Feature Aggregation method. The code is available at https://github.com/tenvence/afa/.

We present a masked diffusion language modeling framework for data-efficient training for the BabyLM 2025 Challenge. Our approach applies diffusion training objectives to language modeling under strict data constraints, incorporating frequency-informed masking that prioritizes learning from rare tokens while maintaining theoretical validity. We explore multiple noise scheduling strategies, including two-mode approaches, and investigate different noise weighting schemes within the NELBO objective. We evaluate our method on the BabyLM benchmark suite, measuring linguistic competence, world knowledge, and human-likeness. Results show performance competitive to hybrid autoregressive-masked baselines, demonstrating that diffusion-based training offers a viable alternative for data-restricted language learning.

Denoising diffusion models have been a mainstream approach for image generation, however, training these models often suffers from slow convergence. In this paper, we discovered that the slow convergence is partly due to conflicting optimization directions between timesteps. To address this issue, we treat the diffusion training as a multi-task learning problem, and introduce a simple yet effective approach referred to as Min-SNR-gamma. This method adapts loss weights of timesteps based on clamped signal-to-noise ratios, which effectively balances the conflicts among timesteps. Our results demonstrate a significant improvement in converging speed, 3.4times faster than previous weighting strategies. It is also more effective, achieving a new record FID score of 2.06 on the ImageNet 256times256 benchmark using smaller architectures than that employed in previous state-of-the-art. The code is available at https://github.com/TiankaiHang/Min-SNR-Diffusion-Training.

While neural networks have been remarkably successful in a wide array of applications, implementing them in resource-constrained hardware remains an area of intense research. By replacing the weights of a neural network with quantized (e.g., 4-bit, or binary) counterparts, massive savings in computation cost, memory, and power consumption are attained. To that end, we generalize a post-training neural-network quantization method, GPFQ, that is based on a greedy path-following mechanism. Among other things, we propose modifications to promote sparsity of the weights, and rigorously analyze the associated error. Additionally, our error analysis expands the results of previous work on GPFQ to handle general quantization alphabets, showing that for quantizing a single-layer network, the relative square error essentially decays linearly in the number of weights -- i.e., level of over-parametrization. Our result holds across a range of input distributions and for both fully-connected and convolutional architectures thereby also extending previous results. To empirically evaluate the method, we quantize several common architectures with few bits per weight, and test them on ImageNet, showing only minor loss of accuracy compared to unquantized models. We also demonstrate that standard modifications, such as bias correction and mixed precision quantization, further improve accuracy.

Recent one-shot video tuning methods, which fine-tune the network on a specific video based on pre-trained text-to-image models (e.g., Stable Diffusion), are popular in the community because of the flexibility. However, these methods often produce videos marred by incoherence and inconsistency. To address these limitations, this paper introduces a simple yet effective noise constraint across video frames. This constraint aims to regulate noise predictions across their temporal neighbors, resulting in smooth latents. It can be simply included as a loss term during the training phase. By applying the loss to existing one-shot video tuning methods, we significantly improve the overall consistency and smoothness of the generated videos. Furthermore, we argue that current video evaluation metrics inadequately capture smoothness. To address this, we introduce a novel metric that considers detailed features and their temporal dynamics. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our approach in producing smoother videos on various one-shot video tuning baselines. The source codes and video demos are available at https://github.com/SPengLiang/SmoothVideo{https://github.com/SPengLiang/SmoothVideo}.

This paper explores the scenarios under which an attacker can claim that 'Noise and access to the softmax layer of the model is all you need' to steal the weights of a convolutional neural network whose architecture is already known. We were able to achieve 96% test accuracy using the stolen MNIST model and 82% accuracy using the stolen KMNIST model learned using only i.i.d. Bernoulli noise inputs. We posit that this theft-susceptibility of the weights is indicative of the complexity of the dataset and propose a new metric that captures the same. The goal of this dissemination is to not just showcase how far knowing the architecture can take you in terms of model stealing, but to also draw attention to this rather idiosyncratic weight learnability aspects of CNNs spurred by i.i.d. noise input. We also disseminate some initial results obtained with using the Ising probability distribution in lieu of the i.i.d. Bernoulli distribution.

With the rapid growth of information, recommender systems have become integral for providing personalized suggestions and overcoming information overload. However, their practical deployment often encounters "dirty" data, where noise or malicious information can lead to abnormal recommendations. Research on improving recommender systems' robustness against such dirty data has thus gained significant attention. This survey provides a comprehensive review of recent work on recommender systems' robustness. We first present a taxonomy to organize current techniques for withstanding malicious attacks and natural noise. We then explore state-of-the-art methods in each category, including fraudster detection, adversarial training, certifiable robust training against malicious attacks, and regularization, purification, self-supervised learning against natural noise. Additionally, we summarize evaluation metrics and common datasets used to assess robustness. We discuss robustness across varying recommendation scenarios and its interplay with other properties like accuracy, interpretability, privacy, and fairness. Finally, we delve into open issues and future research directions in this emerging field. Our goal is to equip readers with a holistic understanding of robust recommender systems and spotlight pathways for future research and development.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have promoted generative error correction (GER) for automatic speech recognition (ASR), which leverages the rich linguistic knowledge and powerful reasoning ability of LLMs to improve recognition results. The latest work proposes a GER benchmark with HyPoradise dataset to learn the mapping from ASR N-best hypotheses to ground-truth transcription by efficient LLM finetuning, which shows great effectiveness but lacks specificity on noise-robust ASR. In this work, we extend the benchmark to noisy conditions and investigate if we can teach LLMs to perform denoising for GER just like what robust ASR do}, where one solution is introducing noise information as a conditioner into LLM. However, directly incorporating noise embeddings from audio encoder could harm the LLM tuning due to cross-modality gap. To this end, we propose to extract a language-space noise embedding from the N-best list to represent the noise conditions of source speech, which can promote the denoising process in GER. Furthermore, in order to enhance its representation ability of audio noise, we design a knowledge distillation (KD) approach via mutual information estimation to distill the real noise information in audio embeddings to our language embedding. Experiments on various latest LLMs demonstrate our approach achieves a new breakthrough with up to 53.9% correction improvement in terms of word error rate while with limited training data. Analysis shows that our language-space noise embedding can well represent the noise conditions of source speech, under which off-the-shelf LLMs show strong ability of language-space denoising.

Denoising diffusion models have recently shown impressive results in generative tasks. By learning powerful priors from huge collections of training images, such models are able to gradually modify complete noise to a clean natural image via a sequence of small denoising steps, seemingly making them well-suited for single image denoising. However, effectively applying denoising diffusion models to removal of realistic noise is more challenging than it may seem, since their formulation is based on additive white Gaussian noise, unlike noise in real-world images. In this work, we present SVNR, a novel formulation of denoising diffusion that assumes a more realistic, spatially-variant noise model. SVNR enables using the noisy input image as the starting point for the denoising diffusion process, in addition to conditioning the process on it. To this end, we adapt the diffusion process to allow each pixel to have its own time embedding, and propose training and inference schemes that support spatially-varying time maps. Our formulation also accounts for the correlation that exists between the condition image and the samples along the modified diffusion process. In our experiments we demonstrate the advantages of our approach over a strong diffusion model baseline, as well as over a state-of-the-art single image denoising method.

Modern recommender systems struggle to effectively utilize the rich, yet high-dimensional and noisy, multi-modal features generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). Treating these features as static inputs decouples them from the core recommendation task. We address this limitation with a novel framework built on a key insight: deeply fusing multi-modal and collaborative knowledge for representation denoising. Our unified architecture introduces two primary technical innovations. First, we integrate dimensionality reduction directly into the recommendation model, enabling end-to-end co-training that makes the reduction process aware of the final ranking objective. Second, we introduce a contrastive learning objective that explicitly incorporates the collaborative filtering signal into the latent space. This synergistic process refines raw LLM embeddings, filtering noise while amplifying task-relevant signals. Extensive experiments confirm our method's superior discriminative power, proving that this integrated fusion and denoising strategy is critical for achieving state-of-the-art performance. Our work provides a foundational paradigm for effectively harnessing LLMs in recommender systems.

In the complex domain of large language models (LLMs), striking a balance between computational efficiency and maintaining model quality is a formidable challenge. Navigating the inherent limitations of uniform quantization, particularly when dealing with outliers, and motivated by the launch of NVIDIA's H100 hardware, this study delves into the viability of floating-point (FP) quantization, particularly focusing on FP8 and FP4, as a potential solution. Our comprehensive investigation reveals that for LLMs, FP8 activation consistently outshines its integer (INT8) equivalent, with the performance edge becoming more noticeable in models possessing parameters beyond one billion. For weight quantization, our findings indicate that FP4 exhibits comparable, if not superior, performance to INT4, simplifying deployment on FP-supported hardware like H100. To mitigate the overhead from precision alignment caused by the disparity between weights and activations, we propose two scaling constraints for weight quantization that negligibly impact the performance compared to the standard W4A8 model. We additionally enhance our quantization methods by integrating the Low Rank Compensation (LoRC) strategy, yielding improvements especially in smaller models. The results of our investigation emphasize the immense potential of FP quantization for LLMs, paving the way for high-efficiency deployment in resource-limited settings.

Recent sparse detectors with multiple, e.g. six, decoder layers achieve promising performance but much inference time due to complex heads. Previous works have explored using dense priors as initialization and built one-decoder-layer detectors. Although they gain remarkable acceleration, their performance still lags behind their six-decoder-layer counterparts by a large margin. In this work, we aim to bridge this performance gap while retaining fast speed. We find that the architecture discrepancy between dense and sparse detectors leads to feature conflict, hampering the performance of one-decoder-layer detectors. Thus we propose Adaptive Sparse Anchor Generator (ASAG) which predicts dynamic anchors on patches rather than grids in a sparse way so that it alleviates the feature conflict problem. For each image, ASAG dynamically selects which feature maps and which locations to predict, forming a fully adaptive way to generate image-specific anchors. Further, a simple and effective Query Weighting method eases the training instability from adaptiveness. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms dense-initialized ones and achieves a better speed-accuracy trade-off. The code is available at https://github.com/iSEE-Laboratory/ASAG.

Speech enhancement methods are commonly believed to improve the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) in noisy environments. However, the effectiveness of these techniques cannot be taken for granted in the case of modern large-scale ASR models trained on diverse, noisy data. We present a systematic evaluation of MetricGAN-plus-voicebank denoising on four state-of-the-art ASR systems: OpenAI Whisper, NVIDIA Parakeet, Google Gemini Flash 2.0, Parrotlet-a using 500 medical speech recordings under nine noise conditions. ASR performance is measured using semantic WER (semWER), a normalized word error rate (WER) metric accounting for domain-specific normalizations. Our results reveal a counterintuitive finding: speech enhancement preprocessing degrades ASR performance across all noise conditions and models. Original noisy audio achieves lower semWER than enhanced audio in all 40 tested configurations (4 models x 10 conditions), with degradations ranging from 1.1% to 46.6% absolute semWER increase. These findings suggest that modern ASR models possess sufficient internal noise robustness and that traditional speech enhancement may remove acoustic features critical for ASR. For practitioners deploying medical scribe systems in noisy clinical environments, our results indicate that preprocessing audio with noise reduction techniques might not just be computationally wasteful but also be potentially harmful to the transcription accuracy.

While deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved impressive success in image denoising with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), their performance remains limited on real-world noisy photographs. The main reason is that their learned models are easy to overfit on the simplified AWGN model which deviates severely from the complicated real-world noise model. In order to improve the generalization ability of deep CNN denoisers, we suggest training a convolutional blind denoising network (CBDNet) with more realistic noise model and real-world noisy-clean image pairs. On the one hand, both signal-dependent noise and in-camera signal processing pipeline is considered to synthesize realistic noisy images. On the other hand, real-world noisy photographs and their nearly noise-free counterparts are also included to train our CBDNet. To further provide an interactive strategy to rectify denoising result conveniently, a noise estimation subnetwork with asymmetric learning to suppress under-estimation of noise level is embedded into CBDNet. Extensive experimental results on three datasets of real-world noisy photographs clearly demonstrate the superior performance of CBDNet over state-of-the-arts in terms of quantitative metrics and visual quality. The code has been made available at https://github.com/GuoShi28/CBDNet.

Internal features from large-scale pre-trained diffusion models have recently been established as powerful semantic descriptors for a wide range of downstream tasks. Works that use these features generally need to add noise to images before passing them through the model to obtain the semantic features, as the models do not offer the most useful features when given images with little to no noise. We show that this noise has a critical impact on the usefulness of these features that cannot be remedied by ensembling with different random noises. We address this issue by introducing a lightweight, unsupervised fine-tuning method that enables diffusion backbones to provide high-quality, noise-free semantic features. We show that these features readily outperform previous diffusion features by a wide margin in a wide variety of extraction setups and downstream tasks, offering better performance than even ensemble-based methods at a fraction of the cost.

The INTERSPEECH 2020 Deep Noise Suppression (DNS) Challenge is intended to promote collaborative research in real-time single-channel Speech Enhancement aimed to maximize the subjective (perceptual) quality of the enhanced speech. A typical approach to evaluate the noise suppression methods is to use objective metrics on the test set obtained by splitting the original dataset. While the performance is good on the synthetic test set, often the model performance degrades significantly on real recordings. Also, most of the conventional objective metrics do not correlate well with subjective tests and lab subjective tests are not scalable for a large test set. In this challenge, we open-sourced a large clean speech and noise corpus for training the noise suppression models and a representative test set to real-world scenarios consisting of both synthetic and real recordings. We also open-sourced an online subjective test framework based on ITU-T P.808 for researchers to reliably test their developments. We evaluated the results using P.808 on a blind test set. The results and the key learnings from the challenge are discussed. The datasets and scripts can be found here for quick access https://github.com/microsoft/DNS-Challenge.

To achieve the highest perceptual quality, state-of-the-art diffusion models are optimized with objectives that typically look very different from the maximum likelihood and the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) objectives. In this work, we reveal that diffusion model objectives are actually closely related to the ELBO. Specifically, we show that all commonly used diffusion model objectives equate to a weighted integral of ELBOs over different noise levels, where the weighting depends on the specific objective used. Under the condition of monotonic weighting, the connection is even closer: the diffusion objective then equals the ELBO, combined with simple data augmentation, namely Gaussian noise perturbation. We show that this condition holds for a number of state-of-the-art diffusion models. In experiments, we explore new monotonic weightings and demonstrate their effectiveness, achieving state-of-the-art FID scores on the high-resolution ImageNet benchmark.

We discover that common diffusion noise schedules do not enforce the last timestep to have zero signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and some implementations of diffusion samplers do not start from the last timestep. Such designs are flawed and do not reflect the fact that the model is given pure Gaussian noise at inference, creating a discrepancy between training and inference. We show that the flawed design causes real problems in existing implementations. In Stable Diffusion, it severely limits the model to only generate images with medium brightness and prevents it from generating very bright and dark samples. We propose a few simple fixes: (1) rescale the noise schedule to enforce zero terminal SNR; (2) train the model with v prediction; (3) change the sampler to always start from the last timestep; (4) rescale classifier-free guidance to prevent over-exposure. These simple changes ensure the diffusion process is congruent between training and inference and allow the model to generate samples more faithful to the original data distribution.

Data balancing across multiple modalities and sources appears in various forms in foundation models in machine learning and AI, e.g. in CLIP and DINO. We show that data balancing across modalities and sources actually offers an unsuspected benefit: variance reduction. We present a non-asymptotic statistical bound that quantifies this variance reduction effect and relates it to the eigenvalue decay of Markov operators. Furthermore, we describe how various forms of data balancing in contrastive multimodal learning and self-supervised clustering can be better understood, and even improved upon, owing to our variance reduction viewpoint.

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) plays a crucial role in adapting large language models (LLMs) to specific domains or tasks. However, as demonstrated by empirical experiments, the collected data inevitably contains noise in practical applications, which poses significant challenges to model performance on downstream tasks. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a noise-robust SFT framework to enhance model capabilities in downstream tasks. To address this challenge, we introduce a robust SFT framework (RobustFT) that performs noise detection and relabeling on downstream task data. For noise identification, our approach employs a multi-expert collaborative system with inference-enhanced models to achieve superior noise detection. In the denoising phase, we utilize a context-enhanced strategy, which incorporates the most relevant and confident knowledge followed by careful assessment to generate reliable annotations. Additionally, we introduce an effective data selection mechanism based on response entropy, ensuring only high-quality samples are retained for fine-tuning. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple LLMs across five datasets demonstrate RobustFT's exceptional performance in noisy scenarios.

Adversarial examples, generated by carefully crafted perturbation, have attracted considerable attention in research fields. Recent works have argued that the existence of the robust and non-robust features is a primary cause of the adversarial examples, and investigated their internal interactions in the feature space. In this paper, we propose a way of explicitly distilling feature representation into the robust and non-robust features, using Information Bottleneck. Specifically, we inject noise variation to each feature unit and evaluate the information flow in the feature representation to dichotomize feature units either robust or non-robust, based on the noise variation magnitude. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that the distilled features are highly correlated with adversarial prediction, and they have human-perceptible semantic information by themselves. Furthermore, we present an attack mechanism intensifying the gradient of non-robust features that is directly related to the model prediction, and validate its effectiveness of breaking model robustness.

Current fake audio detection algorithms have achieved promising performances on most datasets. However, their performance may be significantly degraded when dealing with audio of a different dataset. The orthogonal weight modification to overcome catastrophic forgetting does not consider the similarity of genuine audio across different datasets. To overcome this limitation, we propose a continual learning algorithm for fake audio detection to overcome catastrophic forgetting, called Regularized Adaptive Weight Modification (RAWM). When fine-tuning a detection network, our approach adaptively computes the direction of weight modification according to the ratio of genuine utterances and fake utterances. The adaptive modification direction ensures the network can effectively detect fake audio on the new dataset while preserving its knowledge of old model, thus mitigating catastrophic forgetting. In addition, genuine audio collected from quite different acoustic conditions may skew their feature distribution, so we introduce a regularization constraint to force the network to remember the old distribution in this regard. Our method can easily be generalized to related fields, like speech emotion recognition. We also evaluate our approach across multiple datasets and obtain a significant performance improvement on cross-dataset experiments.

While implicit feedback is foundational to modern recommender systems, factors such as human error, uncertainty, and ambiguity in user behavior inevitably introduce significant noise into this feedback, adversely affecting the accuracy and robustness of recommendations. To address this issue, existing methods typically aim to reduce the training weight of noisy feedback or discard it entirely, based on the observation that noisy interactions often exhibit higher losses in the overall loss distribution. However, we identify two key issues: (1) there is a significant overlap between normal and noisy interactions in the overall loss distribution, and (2) this overlap becomes even more pronounced when transitioning from pointwise loss functions (e.g., BCE loss) to pairwise loss functions (e.g., BPR loss). This overlap leads traditional methods to misclassify noisy interactions as normal, and vice versa. To tackle these challenges, we further investigate the loss overlap and find that for a given user, there is a clear distinction between normal and noisy interactions in the user's personal loss distribution. Based on this insight, we propose a resampling strategy to Denoise using the user's Personal Loss distribution, named PLD, which reduces the probability of noisy interactions being optimized. Specifically, during each optimization iteration, we create a candidate item pool for each user and resample the items from this pool based on the user's personal loss distribution, prioritizing normal interactions. Additionally, we conduct a theoretical analysis to validate PLD's effectiveness and suggest ways to further enhance its performance. Extensive experiments conducted on three datasets with varying noise ratios demonstrate PLD's efficacy and robustness.

Image denoising is a fundamental challenge in computer vision, with applications in photography and medical imaging. While deep learning-based methods have shown remarkable success, their reliance on specific noise distributions limits generalization to unseen noise types and levels. Existing approaches attempt to address this with extensive training data and high computational resources but they still suffer from overfitting. To address these issues, we conduct image denoising by utilizing dynamically generated kernels via efficient operations. This approach helps prevent overfitting and improves resilience to unseen noise. Specifically, our method leverages a Feature Extraction Module for robust noise-invariant features, Global Statistics and Local Correlation Modules to capture comprehensive noise characteristics and structural correlations. The Kernel Prediction Module then employs these cues to produce pixel-wise varying kernels adapted to local structures, which are then applied iteratively for denoising. This ensures both efficiency and superior restoration quality. Despite being trained on single-level Gaussian noise, our compact model (~ 0.04 M) excels across diverse noise types and levels, demonstrating the promise of iterative dynamic filtering for practical image denoising.

While neural networks have advanced the frontiers in many applications, they often come at a high computational cost. Reducing the power and latency of neural network inference is key if we want to integrate modern networks into edge devices with strict power and compute requirements. Neural network quantization is one of the most effective ways of achieving these savings but the additional noise it induces can lead to accuracy degradation. In this white paper, we introduce state-of-the-art algorithms for mitigating the impact of quantization noise on the network's performance while maintaining low-bit weights and activations. We start with a hardware motivated introduction to quantization and then consider two main classes of algorithms: Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) and Quantization-Aware-Training (QAT). PTQ requires no re-training or labelled data and is thus a lightweight push-button approach to quantization. In most cases, PTQ is sufficient for achieving 8-bit quantization with close to floating-point accuracy. QAT requires fine-tuning and access to labeled training data but enables lower bit quantization with competitive results. For both solutions, we provide tested pipelines based on existing literature and extensive experimentation that lead to state-of-the-art performance for common deep learning models and tasks.

This paper proposes attentive statistics pooling for deep speaker embedding in text-independent speaker verification. In conventional speaker embedding, frame-level features are averaged over all the frames of a single utterance to form an utterance-level feature. Our method utilizes an attention mechanism to give different weights to different frames and generates not only weighted means but also weighted standard deviations. In this way, it can capture long-term variations in speaker characteristics more effectively. An evaluation on the NIST SRE 2012 and the VoxCeleb data sets shows that it reduces equal error rates (EERs) from the conventional method by 7.5% and 8.1%, respectively.

Label noise is prevalent in machine learning datasets. It is crucial to identify and remove label noise because models trained on noisy data can have substantially reduced accuracy and generalizability. Most existing label noise detection approaches are designed for classification tasks, and data cleaning for outcome prediction analysis is relatively unexplored. Inspired by the fluctuations in performance across different folds in cross-validation, we propose Repeated Cross-Validations for label noise estimation (ReCoV) to address this gap. ReCoV constructs a noise histogram that ranks the noise level of samples based on a large number of cross-validations by recording sample IDs in each worst-performing fold. We further propose three approaches for identifying noisy samples based on noise histograms to address increasingly complex noise distributions. We show that ReCoV outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms for label cleaning in a classification task benchmark. More importantly, we show that removing ReCoV-identified noisy samples in two medical imaging outcome prediction datasets significantly improves model performance on test sets. As a statistical approach that does not rely on hyperparameters, noise distributions, or model structures, ReCoV is compatible with any machine learning analysis.

Dual-encoder retrievers depend on the principle that relevant documents should score higher than irrelevant ones for a given query. Yet the dominant Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE) objective, which underpins Contrastive Loss, optimizes a softened ranking surrogate that we rigorously prove is fundamentally oblivious to score separation quality and unrelated to AUC. This mismatch leads to poor calibration and suboptimal performance in downstream tasks like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). To address this fundamental limitation, we introduce the MW loss, a new training objective that maximizes the Mann-Whitney U statistic, which is mathematically equivalent to the Area under the ROC Curve (AUC). MW loss encourages each positive-negative pair to be correctly ranked by minimizing binary cross entropy over score differences. We provide theoretical guarantees that MW loss directly upper-bounds the AoC, better aligning optimization with retrieval goals. We further promote ROC curves and AUC as natural threshold free diagnostics for evaluating retriever calibration and ranking quality. Empirically, retrievers trained with MW loss consistently outperform contrastive counterparts in AUC and standard retrieval metrics. Our experiments show that MW loss is an empirically superior alternative to Contrastive Loss, yielding better-calibrated and more discriminative retrievers for high-stakes applications like RAG.

Token-level reweighting is a simple yet effective mechanism for controlling supervised fine-tuning, but common indicators are largely one-dimensional: the ground-truth probability reflects downstream alignment, while token entropy reflects intrinsic uncertainty induced by the pre-training prior. Ignoring entropy can misidentify noisy or easily replaceable tokens as learning-critical, while ignoring probability fails to reflect target-specific alignment. RankTuner introduces a probability--entropy calibration signal, the Relative Rank Indicator, which compares the rank of the ground-truth token with its expected rank under the prediction distribution. The inverse indicator is used as a token-wise Relative Scale to reweight the fine-tuning objective, focusing updates on truly under-learned tokens without over-penalizing intrinsically uncertain positions. Experiments on multiple backbones show consistent improvements on mathematical reasoning benchmarks, transfer gains on out-of-distribution reasoning, and pre code generation performance over probability-only or entropy-only reweighting baselines.

It is widely believed that noise conditioning is indispensable for denoising diffusion models to work successfully. This work challenges this belief. Motivated by research on blind image denoising, we investigate a variety of denoising-based generative models in the absence of noise conditioning. To our surprise, most models exhibit graceful degradation, and in some cases, they even perform better without noise conditioning. We provide a theoretical analysis of the error caused by removing noise conditioning and demonstrate that our analysis aligns with empirical observations. We further introduce a noise-unconditional model that achieves a competitive FID of 2.23 on CIFAR-10, significantly narrowing the gap to leading noise-conditional models. We hope our findings will inspire the community to revisit the foundations and formulations of denoising generative models.

Diffusion models have garnered significant interest from the community for their great generative ability across various applications. However, their typical multi-step sequential-denoising nature gives rise to high cumulative latency, thereby precluding the possibilities of parallel computation. To address this, we introduce AsyncDiff, a universal and plug-and-play acceleration scheme that enables model parallelism across multiple devices. Our approach divides the cumbersome noise prediction model into multiple components, assigning each to a different device. To break the dependency chain between these components, it transforms the conventional sequential denoising into an asynchronous process by exploiting the high similarity between hidden states in consecutive diffusion steps. Consequently, each component is facilitated to compute in parallel on separate devices. The proposed strategy significantly reduces inference latency while minimally impacting the generative quality. Specifically, for the Stable Diffusion v2.1, AsyncDiff achieves a 2.7x speedup with negligible degradation and a 4.0x speedup with only a slight reduction of 0.38 in CLIP Score, on four NVIDIA A5000 GPUs. Our experiments also demonstrate that AsyncDiff can be readily applied to video diffusion models with encouraging performances. The code is available at https://github.com/czg1225/AsyncDiff.

Text-to-image generation using diffusion models has seen explosive popularity owing to their ability in producing high quality images adhering to text prompts. However, production-grade diffusion model serving is a resource intensive task that not only require high-end GPUs which are expensive but also incurs considerable latency. In this paper, we introduce a technique called approximate-caching that can reduce such iterative denoising steps for an image generation based on a prompt by reusing intermediate noise states created during a prior image generation for similar prompts. Based on this idea, we present an end to end text-to-image system, Nirvana, that uses the approximate-caching with a novel cache management-policy Least Computationally Beneficial and Frequently Used (LCBFU) to provide % GPU compute savings, 19.8% end-to-end latency reduction and 19% dollar savings, on average, on two real production workloads. We further present an extensive characterization of real production text-to-image prompts from the perspective of caching, popularity and reuse of intermediate states in a large production environment.

Pruning large language models (LLMs) is a challenging task due to their enormous size. The primary difficulty is fine-tuning the model after pruning, which is needed to recover the lost performance caused by dropping weights. Recent approaches have either ignored fine-tuning entirely, focusing on efficient pruning criteria, or attempted layer-wise weight updates, preserving the behavior of each layer. However, even layer-wise weight updates can be costly for LLMs, and previous works have resorted to various approximations. In our paper, we propose a fast and optimal weight update algorithm for pruned layers based on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). Coupled with a simple iterative pruning mask selection, our algorithm achieves state-of-the-art pruning performance across a wide range of LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/fmfi-compbio/admm-pruning.

Deep neural networks trained with standard cross-entropy loss memorize noisy labels, which degrades their performance. Most research to mitigate this memorization proposes new robust classification loss functions. Conversely, we propose a Multi-Objective Interpolation Training (MOIT) approach that jointly exploits contrastive learning and classification to mutually help each other and boost performance against label noise. We show that standard supervised contrastive learning degrades in the presence of label noise and propose an interpolation training strategy to mitigate this behavior. We further propose a novel label noise detection method that exploits the robust feature representations learned via contrastive learning to estimate per-sample soft-labels whose disagreements with the original labels accurately identify noisy samples. This detection allows treating noisy samples as unlabeled and training a classifier in a semi-supervised manner to prevent noise memorization and improve representation learning. We further propose MOIT+, a refinement of MOIT by fine-tuning on detected clean samples. Hyperparameter and ablation studies verify the key components of our method. Experiments on synthetic and real-world noise benchmarks demonstrate that MOIT/MOIT+ achieves state-of-the-art results. Code is available at https://git.io/JI40X.

We derive a minimalist but powerful deterministic denoising-diffusion model. While denoising diffusion has shown great success in many domains, its underlying theory remains largely inaccessible to non-expert users. Indeed, an understanding of graduate-level concepts such as Langevin dynamics or score matching appears to be required to grasp how it works. We propose an alternative approach that requires no more than undergrad calculus and probability. We consider two densities and observe what happens when random samples from these densities are blended (linearly interpolated). We show that iteratively blending and deblending samples produces random paths between the two densities that converge toward a deterministic mapping. This mapping can be evaluated with a neural network trained to deblend samples. We obtain a model that behaves like deterministic denoising diffusion: it iteratively maps samples from one density (e.g., Gaussian noise) to another (e.g., cat images). However, compared to the state-of-the-art alternative, our model is simpler to derive, simpler to implement, more numerically stable, achieves higher quality results in our experiments, and has interesting connections to computer graphics.

Low-light raw denoising is an important and valuable task in computational photography where learning-based methods trained with paired real data are mainstream. However, the limited data volume and complicated noise distribution have constituted a learnability bottleneck for paired real data, which limits the denoising performance of learning-based methods. To address this issue, we present a learnability enhancement strategy to reform paired real data according to noise modeling. Our strategy consists of two efficient techniques: shot noise augmentation (SNA) and dark shading correction (DSC). Through noise model decoupling, SNA improves the precision of data mapping by increasing the data volume and DSC reduces the complexity of data mapping by reducing the noise complexity. Extensive results on the public datasets and real imaging scenarios collectively demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method. Our code is available at: https://github.com/megvii-research/PMN.

We propose a simple but effective training-free approach tailored to diffusion-based image-to-image translation. Our approach revises the original noise prediction network of a pretrained diffusion model by introducing a noise correction term. We formulate the noise correction term as the difference between two noise predictions; one is computed from the denoising network with a progressive interpolation of the source and target prompt embeddings, while the other is the noise prediction with the source prompt embedding. The final noise prediction network is given by a linear combination of the standard denoising term and the noise correction term, where the former is designed to reconstruct must-be-preserved regions while the latter aims to effectively edit regions of interest relevant to the target prompt. Our approach can be easily incorporated into existing image-to-image translation methods based on diffusion models. Extensive experiments verify that the proposed technique achieves outstanding performance with low latency and consistently improves existing frameworks when combined with them.

Supervised models for speech enhancement are trained using artificially generated mixtures of clean speech and noise signals. However, the synthetic training conditions may not accurately reflect real-world conditions encountered during testing. This discrepancy can result in poor performance when the test domain significantly differs from the synthetic training domain. To tackle this issue, the UDASE task of the 7th CHiME challenge aimed to leverage real-world noisy speech recordings from the test domain for unsupervised domain adaptation of speech enhancement models. Specifically, this test domain corresponds to the CHiME-5 dataset, characterized by real multi-speaker and conversational speech recordings made in noisy and reverberant domestic environments, for which ground-truth clean speech signals are not available. In this paper, we present the objective and subjective evaluations of the systems that were submitted to the CHiME-7 UDASE task, and we provide an analysis of the results. This analysis reveals a limited correlation between subjective ratings and several supervised nonintrusive performance metrics recently proposed for speech enhancement. Conversely, the results suggest that more traditional intrusive objective metrics can be used for in-domain performance evaluation using the reverberant LibriCHiME-5 dataset developed for the challenge. The subjective evaluation indicates that all systems successfully reduced the background noise, but always at the expense of increased distortion. Out of the four speech enhancement methods evaluated subjectively, only one demonstrated an improvement in overall quality compared to the unprocessed noisy speech, highlighting the difficulty of the task. The tools and audio material created for the CHiME-7 UDASE task are shared with the community.

The URGENT 2024 Challenge aims to foster speech enhancement (SE) techniques with great universality, robustness, and generalizability, featuring a broader task definition, large-scale multi-domain data, and comprehensive evaluation metrics. Nourished by the challenge outcomes, this paper presents an in-depth analysis of two key, yet understudied, issues in SE system development: data cleaning and evaluation metrics. We highlight several overlooked problems in traditional SE pipelines: (1) mismatches between declared and effective audio bandwidths, along with label noise even in various "high-quality" speech corpora; (2) lack of both effective SE systems to conquer the hardest conditions (e.g., speech overlap, strong noise / reverberation) and reliable measure of speech sample difficulty; (3) importance of combining multifaceted metrics for a comprehensive evaluation correlating well with human judgment. We hope that this endeavor can inspire improved SE pipeline designs in the future.

Given a robust model trained to be resilient to one or multiple types of distribution shifts (e.g., natural image corruptions), how is that "robustness" encoded in the model weights, and how easily can it be disentangled and/or "zero-shot" transferred to some other models? This paper empirically suggests a surprisingly simple answer: linearly - by straightforward model weight arithmetic! We start by drawing several key observations: (1)assuming that we train the same model architecture on both a clean dataset and its corrupted version, resultant weights mostly differ in shallow layers; (2)the weight difference after projection, which we call "Robust Weight Signature" (RWS), appears to be discriminative and indicative of different corruption types; (3)for the same corruption type, the RWSs obtained by one model architecture are highly consistent and transferable across different datasets. We propose a minimalistic model robustness "patching" framework that carries a model trained on clean data together with its pre-extracted RWSs. In this way, injecting certain robustness to the model is reduced to directly adding the corresponding RWS to its weight. We verify our proposed framework to be remarkably (1)lightweight. since RWSs concentrate on the shallowest few layers and we further show they can be painlessly quantized, storing an RWS is up to 13 x more compact than storing the full weight copy; (2)in-situ adjustable. RWSs can be appended as needed and later taken off to restore the intact clean model. We further demonstrate one can linearly re-scale the RWS to control the patched robustness strength; (3)composable. Multiple RWSs can be added simultaneously to patch more comprehensive robustness at once; and (4)transferable. Even when the clean model backbone is continually adapted or updated, RWSs remain as effective patches due to their outstanding cross-dataset transferability.

Diffusion Models (DMs) have exhibited superior performance in generating high-quality and diverse images. However, this exceptional performance comes at the cost of expensive architectural design, particularly due to the attention module heavily used in leading models. Existing works mainly adopt a retraining process to enhance DM efficiency. This is computationally expensive and not very scalable. To this end, we introduce the Attention-driven Training-free Efficient Diffusion Model (AT-EDM) framework that leverages attention maps to perform run-time pruning of redundant tokens, without the need for any retraining. Specifically, for single-denoising-step pruning, we develop a novel ranking algorithm, Generalized Weighted Page Rank (G-WPR), to identify redundant tokens, and a similarity-based recovery method to restore tokens for the convolution operation. In addition, we propose a Denoising-Steps-Aware Pruning (DSAP) approach to adjust the pruning budget across different denoising timesteps for better generation quality. Extensive evaluations show that AT-EDM performs favorably against prior art in terms of efficiency (e.g., 38.8% FLOPs saving and up to 1.53x speed-up over Stable Diffusion XL) while maintaining nearly the same FID and CLIP scores as the full model. Project webpage: https://atedm.github.io.

Scaling recommendation models into large recommendation models has become one of the most widely discussed topics. Recent efforts focus on components beyond the scaling embedding dimension, as it is believed that scaling embedding may lead to performance degradation. Although there have been some initial observations on embedding, the root cause of their non-scalability remains unclear. Moreover, whether performance degradation occurs across different types of models and datasets is still an unexplored area. Regarding the effect of embedding dimensions on performance, we conduct large-scale experiments across 10 datasets with varying sparsity levels and scales, using 4 representative classical architectures. We surprisingly observe two novel phenomenon: double-peak and logarithmic. For the former, as the embedding dimension increases, performance first improves, then declines, rises again, and eventually drops. For the latter, it exhibits a perfect logarithmic curve. Our contributions are threefold. First, we discover two novel phenomena when scaling collaborative filtering models. Second, we gain an understanding of the underlying causes of the double-peak phenomenon. Lastly, we theoretically analyze the noise robustness of collaborative filtering models, with results matching empirical observations.

The overarching objective of this paper is two-fold. First, to explore model-based approaches to characterize the primary cause of the noise. in the RE dataset TACRED Second, to identify the potentially noisy instances. Towards the first objective, we analyze predictions and performance of state-of-the-art (SOTA) models to identify the root cause of noise in the dataset. Our analysis of TACRED shows that the majority of the noise in the dataset originates from the instances labeled as no-relation which are negative examples. For the second objective, we explore two nearest-neighbor-based strategies to automatically identify potentially noisy examples for elimination and reannotation. Our first strategy, referred to as Intrinsic Strategy (IS), is based on the assumption that positive examples are clean. Thus, we have used false-negative predictions to identify noisy negative examples. Whereas, our second approach, referred to as Extrinsic Strategy, is based on using a clean subset of the dataset to identify potentially noisy negative examples. Finally, we retrained the SOTA models on the eliminated and reannotated dataset. Our empirical results based on two SOTA models trained on TACRED-E following the IS show an average 4% F1-score improvement, whereas reannotation (TACRED-R) does not improve the original results. However, following ES, SOTA models show the average F1-score improvement of 3.8% and 4.4% when trained on respective eliminated (TACRED-EN) and reannotated (TACRED-RN) datasets respectively. We further extended the ES for cleaning positive examples as well, which resulted in an average performance improvement of 5.8% and 5.6% for the eliminated (TACRED-ENP) and reannotated (TACRED-RNP) datasets respectively.

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) aims to adapt pre-trained vision models to downstream tasks. Among PEFT paradigms, sparse tuning achieves remarkable performance by adjusting only the weights most relevant to downstream tasks, rather than densely tuning the entire weight matrix. Current methods follow a two-stage paradigm. First, it locates task-relevant weights by gradient information, which overlooks the parameter adjustments during fine-tuning and limits the performance. Second, it updates only the located weights by applying a sparse mask to the gradient of the weight matrix, which results in high memory usage due to the storage of all weight matrices in the optimizer. In this paper, we propose a one-stage method named SNELLA to overcome the above limitations. For memory usage, SNELLA selectively updates the weight matrix by adding it to another sparse matrix that is merged by two low-rank learnable matrices. We extend the low-rank decomposition by introducing nonlinear kernel functions, thereby increasing the rank of the resulting merged matrix to prevent the interdependency among weight updates, enabling better adaptation to downstream tasks. For locating task-relevant weights, we propose an adaptive bi-level sparsity allocation mechanism that encourages weights to compete across and inside layers based on their importance scores in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments are conducted on classification, segmentation, and generation tasks using different pre-trained vision models. The results show that SNELLA achieves SOTA performance with low memory usage. Notably, SNELLA obtains 1.8% (91.9% v.s. 90.1%) higher Top-1 accuracy on the FGVC benchmark compared to SPT-LoRA. Compared to previous methods, SNELLA achieves a memory reduction of 31.1%-39.9% across models with parameter scales from 86M to 632M. Our source codes are available at https://github.com/ssfgunner/SNELL.

Pre-training on large-scale datasets and then fine-tuning on downstream tasks have become a standard practice in deep learning. However, pre-training data often contain label noise that may adversely affect the generalization of the model. This paper aims to understand the nature of noise in pre-training datasets and to mitigate its impact on downstream tasks. More specifically, through extensive experiments of supervised pre-training models on synthetic noisy ImageNet-1K and YFCC15M datasets, we demonstrate that while slight noise in pre-training can benefit in-domain (ID) transfer performance, where the training and testing data share the same distribution, it always deteriorates out-of-domain (OOD) performance, where training and testing data distribution are different. We empirically verify that the reason behind is noise in pre-training shapes the feature space differently. We then propose a light-weight black-box tuning method (NMTune) to affine the feature space to mitigate the malignant effect of noise and improve generalization on both ID and OOD tasks, considering one may not be able to fully fine-tune or even access the pre-trained models. We conduct practical experiments on popular vision and language models that are pre-trained on noisy data for evaluation of our approach. Our analysis and results show the importance of this interesting and novel research direction, which we term Noisy Model Learning.

We study the class of location-scale or heteroscedastic noise models (LSNMs), in which the effect Y can be written as a function of the cause X and a noise source N independent of X, which may be scaled by a positive function g over the cause, i.e., Y = f(X) + g(X)N. Despite the generality of the model class, we show the causal direction is identifiable up to some pathological cases. To empirically validate these theoretical findings, we propose two estimators for LSNMs: an estimator based on (non-linear) feature maps, and one based on neural networks. Both model the conditional distribution of Y given X as a Gaussian parameterized by its natural parameters. When the feature maps are correctly specified, we prove that our estimator is jointly concave, and a consistent estimator for the cause-effect identification task. Although the the neural network does not inherit those guarantees, it can fit functions of arbitrary complexity, and reaches state-of-the-art performance across benchmarks.

Noise plagues many numerical datasets, where the recorded values in the data may fail to match the true underlying values due to reasons including: erroneous sensors, data entry/processing mistakes, or imperfect human estimates. We consider general regression settings with covariates and a potentially corrupted response whose observed values may contain errors. By accounting for various uncertainties, we introduced veracity scores that distinguish between genuine errors and natural data fluctuations, conditioned on the available covariate information in the dataset. We propose a simple yet efficient filtering procedure for eliminating potential errors, and establish theoretical guarantees for our method. We also contribute a new error detection benchmark involving 5 regression datasets with real-world numerical errors (for which the true values are also known). In this benchmark and additional simulation studies, our method identifies incorrect values with better precision/recall than other approaches.

In order to improve the quality of synthesized videos, currently, one predominant method involves retraining an expert diffusion model and then implementing a noising-denoising process for refinement. Despite the significant training costs, maintaining consistency of content between the original and enhanced videos remains a major challenge. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel formulation that considers both visual quality and consistency of content. Consistency of content is ensured by a proposed loss function that maintains the structure of the input, while visual quality is improved by utilizing the denoising process of pretrained diffusion models. To address the formulated optimization problem, we have developed a plug-and-play noise optimization strategy, referred to as Noise Calibration. By refining the initial random noise through a few iterations, the content of original video can be largely preserved, and the enhancement effect demonstrates a notable improvement. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Denoising Score Matching estimates the score of a noised version of a target distribution by minimizing a regression loss and is widely used to train the popular class of Denoising Diffusion Models. A well known limitation of Denoising Score Matching, however, is that it yields poor estimates of the score at low noise levels. This issue is particularly unfavourable for problems in the physical sciences and for Monte Carlo sampling tasks for which the score of the clean original target is known. Intuitively, estimating the score of a slightly noised version of the target should be a simple task in such cases. In this paper, we address this shortcoming and show that it is indeed possible to leverage knowledge of the target score. We present a Target Score Identity and corresponding Target Score Matching regression loss which allows us to obtain score estimates admitting favourable properties at low noise levels.

Existing methods to recover model accuracy on analog-digital hardware in the presence of quantization and analog noise include noise-injection training. However, it can be slow in practice, incurring high computational costs, even when starting from pretrained models. We introduce the Sensitivity-Aware Finetuning (SAFT) approach that identifies noise sensitive layers in a model, and uses the information to freeze specific layers for noise-injection training. Our results show that SAFT achieves comparable accuracy to noise-injection training and is 2x to 8x faster.

Diffusion models have shown a great ability at bridging the performance gap between predictive and generative approaches for speech enhancement. We have shown that they may even outperform their predictive counterparts for non-additive corruption types or when they are evaluated on mismatched conditions. However, diffusion models suffer from a high computational burden, mainly as they require to run a neural network for each reverse diffusion step, whereas predictive approaches only require one pass. As diffusion models are generative approaches they may also produce vocalizing and breathing artifacts in adverse conditions. In comparison, in such difficult scenarios, predictive models typically do not produce such artifacts but tend to distort the target speech instead, thereby degrading the speech quality. In this work, we present a stochastic regeneration approach where an estimate given by a predictive model is provided as a guide for further diffusion. We show that the proposed approach uses the predictive model to remove the vocalizing and breathing artifacts while producing very high quality samples thanks to the diffusion model, even in adverse conditions. We further show that this approach enables to use lighter sampling schemes with fewer diffusion steps without sacrificing quality, thus lifting the computational burden by an order of magnitude. Source code and audio examples are available online (https://uhh.de/inf-sp-storm).

Layout-aware text-to-image generation is a task to generate multi-object images that reflect layout conditions in addition to text conditions. The current layout-aware text-to-image diffusion models still have several issues, including mismatches between the text and layout conditions and quality degradation of generated images. This paper proposes a novel layout-aware text-to-image diffusion model called NoiseCollage to tackle these issues. During the denoising process, NoiseCollage independently estimates noises for individual objects and then crops and merges them into a single noise. This operation helps avoid condition mismatches; in other words, it can put the right objects in the right places. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations show that NoiseCollage outperforms several state-of-the-art models. These successful results indicate that the crop-and-merge operation of noises is a reasonable strategy to control image generation. We also show that NoiseCollage can be integrated with ControlNet to use edges, sketches, and pose skeletons as additional conditions. Experimental results show that this integration boosts the layout accuracy of ControlNet. The code is available at https://github.com/univ-esuty/noisecollage.

Removing background noise from speech audio has been the subject of considerable effort, especially in recent years due to the rise of virtual communication and amateur recordings. Yet background noise is not the only unpleasant disturbance that can prevent intelligibility: reverb, clipping, codec artifacts, problematic equalization, limited bandwidth, or inconsistent loudness are equally disturbing and ubiquitous. In this work, we propose to consider the task of speech enhancement as a holistic endeavor, and present a universal speech enhancement system that tackles 55 different distortions at the same time. Our approach consists of a generative model that employs score-based diffusion, together with a multi-resolution conditioning network that performs enhancement with mixture density networks. We show that this approach significantly outperforms the state of the art in a subjective test performed by expert listeners. We also show that it achieves competitive objective scores with just 4-8 diffusion steps, despite not considering any particular strategy for fast sampling. We hope that both our methodology and technical contributions encourage researchers and practitioners to adopt a universal approach to speech enhancement, possibly framing it as a generative task.

Correct labels are indispensable for training effective machine learning models. However, creating high-quality labels is expensive, and even professionally labeled data contains errors and ambiguities. Filtering and denoising can be applied to curate labeled data prior to training, at the cost of additional processing and loss of information. An alternative is on-the-fly sample reweighting during the training process to decrease the negative impact of incorrect or ambiguous labels, but this typically requires clean seed data. In this work we propose unsupervised on-the-fly meta loss rescaling to reweight training samples. Crucially, we rely only on features provided by the model being trained, to learn a rescaling function in real time without knowledge of the true clean data distribution. We achieve this via a novel meta learning setup that samples validation data for the meta update directly from the noisy training corpus by employing the rescaling function being trained. Our proposed method consistently improves performance across various NLP tasks with minimal computational overhead. Further, we are among the first to attempt on-the-fly training data reweighting on the challenging task of dialogue modeling, where noisy and ambiguous labels are common. Our strategy is robust in the face of noisy and clean data, handles class imbalance, and prevents overfitting to noisy labels. Our self-taught loss rescaling improves as the model trains, showing the ability to keep learning from the model's own signals. As training progresses, the impact of correctly labeled data is scaled up, while the impact of wrongly labeled data is suppressed.

Diffusion models have recently achieved great success in the synthesis of high-quality images and videos. However, the existing denoising techniques in diffusion models are commonly based on step-by-step noise predictions, which suffers from high computation cost, resulting in a prohibitive latency for interactive applications. In this paper, we propose AdaptiveDiffusion to relieve this bottleneck by adaptively reducing the noise prediction steps during the denoising process. Our method considers the potential of skipping as many noise prediction steps as possible while keeping the final denoised results identical to the original full-step ones. Specifically, the skipping strategy is guided by the third-order latent difference that indicates the stability between timesteps during the denoising process, which benefits the reusing of previous noise prediction results. Extensive experiments on image and video diffusion models demonstrate that our method can significantly speed up the denoising process while generating identical results to the original process, achieving up to an average 2~5x speedup without quality degradation.

Previous research has shown that the principal singular vectors of a pre-trained model's weight matrices capture critical knowledge. In contrast, those associated with small singular values may contain noise or less reliable information. As a result, the LoRA-based parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) approach, which does not constrain the use of the spectral space, may not be effective for tasks that demand high representation capacity. In this study, we enhance existing PEFT techniques by incorporating the spectral information of pre-trained weight matrices into the fine-tuning process. We investigate spectral adaptation strategies with a particular focus on the additive adjustment of top singular vectors. This is accomplished by applying singular value decomposition (SVD) to the pre-trained weight matrices and restricting the fine-tuning within the top spectral space. Extensive speaker verification experiments on VoxCeleb1 and CN-Celeb1 demonstrate enhanced tuning performance with the proposed approach. Code is released at https://github.com/lizhepolyu/SpectralFT.

Recent years have seen progress beyond domain-specific sound separation for speech or music towards universal sound separation for arbitrary sounds. Prior work on universal sound separation has investigated separating a target sound out of an audio mixture given a text query. Such text-queried sound separation systems provide a natural and scalable interface for specifying arbitrary target sounds. However, supervised text-queried sound separation systems require costly labeled audio-text pairs for training. Moreover, the audio provided in existing datasets is often recorded in a controlled environment, causing a considerable generalization gap to noisy audio in the wild. In this work, we aim to approach text-queried universal sound separation by using only unlabeled data. We propose to leverage the visual modality as a bridge to learn the desired audio-textual correspondence. The proposed CLIPSep model first encodes the input query into a query vector using the contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) model, and the query vector is then used to condition an audio separation model to separate out the target sound. While the model is trained on image-audio pairs extracted from unlabeled videos, at test time we can instead query the model with text inputs in a zero-shot setting, thanks to the joint language-image embedding learned by the CLIP model. Further, videos in the wild often contain off-screen sounds and background noise that may hinder the model from learning the desired audio-textual correspondence. To address this problem, we further propose an approach called noise invariant training for training a query-based sound separation model on noisy data. Experimental results show that the proposed models successfully learn text-queried universal sound separation using only noisy unlabeled videos, even achieving competitive performance against a supervised model in some settings.

The choice of initial noise significantly affects the quality and prompt alignment of video diffusion models, where different noise seeds for the same prompt can lead to drastically different generations. While recent methods rely on externally designed priors such as frequency filters or inter-frame smoothing, they often overlook internal model signals that indicate which noise seeds are inherently preferable. To address this, we propose ANSE (Active Noise Selection for Generation), a model-aware framework that selects high-quality noise seeds by quantifying attention-based uncertainty. At its core is BANSA (Bayesian Active Noise Selection via Attention), an acquisition function that measures entropy disagreement across multiple stochastic attention samples to estimate model confidence and consistency. For efficient inference-time deployment, we introduce a Bernoulli-masked approximation of BANSA that enables score estimation using a single diffusion step and a subset of attention layers. Experiments on CogVideoX-2B and 5B demonstrate that ANSE improves video quality and temporal coherence with only an 8% and 13% increase in inference time, respectively, providing a principled and generalizable approach to noise selection in video diffusion. See our project page: https://anse-project.github.io/anse-project/

In recent years, multiple notions of algorithmic fairness have arisen. One such notion is individual fairness (IF), which requires that individuals who are similar receive similar treatment. In parallel, matrix estimation (ME) has emerged as a natural paradigm for handling noisy data with missing values. In this work, we connect the two concepts. We show that pre-processing data using ME can improve an algorithm's IF without sacrificing performance. Specifically, we show that using a popular ME method known as singular value thresholding (SVT) to pre-process the data provides a strong IF guarantee under appropriate conditions. We then show that, under analogous conditions, SVT pre-processing also yields estimates that are consistent and approximately minimax optimal. As such, the ME pre-processing step does not, under the stated conditions, increase the prediction error of the base algorithm, i.e., does not impose a fairness-performance trade-off. We verify these results on synthetic and real data.