Daily Papers

Quantum computers can be used to address molecular structure, materials science and condensed matter physics problems, which currently stretch the limits of existing high-performance computing resources. Finding exact numerical solutions to these interacting fermion problems has exponential cost, while Monte Carlo methods are plagued by the fermionic sign problem. These limitations of classical computational methods have made even few-atom molecular structures problems of practical interest for medium-sized quantum computers. Yet, thus far experimental implementations have been restricted to molecules involving only Period I elements. Here, we demonstrate the experimental optimization of up to six-qubit Hamiltonian problems with over a hundred Pauli terms, determining the ground state energy for molecules of increasing size, up to BeH2. This is enabled by a hardware-efficient variational quantum eigensolver with trial states specifically tailored to the available interactions in our quantum processor, combined with a compact encoding of fermionic Hamiltonians and a robust stochastic optimization routine. We further demonstrate the flexibility of our approach by applying the technique to a problem of quantum magnetism. Across all studied problems, we find agreement between experiment and numerical simulations with a noisy model of the device. These results help elucidate the requirements for scaling the method to larger systems, and aim at bridging the gap between problems at the forefront of high-performance computing and their implementation on quantum hardware.

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.

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) are becoming the leading paradigm for generative models. It has recently shown breakthroughs in audio synthesis, time series imputation and forecasting. In this paper, we propose Diffusion-TS, a novel diffusion-based framework that generates multivariate time series samples of high quality by using an encoder-decoder transformer with disentangled temporal representations, in which the decomposition technique guides Diffusion-TS to capture the semantic meaning of time series while transformers mine detailed sequential information from the noisy model input. Different from existing diffusion-based approaches, we train the model to directly reconstruct the sample instead of the noise in each diffusion step, combining a Fourier-based loss term. Diffusion-TS is expected to generate time series satisfying both interpretablity and realness. In addition, it is shown that the proposed Diffusion-TS can be easily extended to conditional generation tasks, such as forecasting and imputation, without any model changes. This also motivates us to further explore the performance of Diffusion-TS under irregular settings. Finally, through qualitative and quantitative experiments, results show that Diffusion-TS achieves the state-of-the-art results on various realistic analyses of time series.

In this work, we present a model for document-grounded response generation in dialog that is decomposed into two components according to Bayes theorem. One component is a traditional ungrounded response generation model and the other component models the reconstruction of the grounding document based on the dialog context and generated response. We propose different approximate decoding schemes and evaluate our approach on multiple open-domain and task-oriented document-grounded dialog datasets. Our experiments show that the model is more factual in terms of automatic factuality metrics than the baseline model. Furthermore, we outline how introducing scaling factors between the components allows for controlling the tradeoff between factuality and fluency in the model output. Finally, we compare our approach to a recently proposed method to control factuality in grounded dialog, CTRL (arXiv:2107.06963), and show that both approaches can be combined to achieve additional improvements.

This paper summarizes our submission to Task 2 of the second track of the 10th Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC10) "Knowledge-grounded Task-oriented Dialogue Modeling on Spoken Conversations". Similar to the previous year's iteration, the task consists of three subtasks: detecting whether a turn is knowledge seeking, selecting the relevant knowledge document and finally generating a grounded response. This year, the focus lies on adapting the system to noisy ASR transcripts. We explore different approaches to make the models more robust to this type of input and to adapt the generated responses to the style of spoken conversations. For the latter, we get the best results with a noisy channel model that additionally reduces the number of short and generic responses. Our best system achieved the 1st rank in the automatic and the 3rd rank in the human evaluation of the challenge.

We develop a differential-geometric framework for variational quantum circuits in which noisy single- and multi-qubit parameter spaces are modeled by weighted projective lines (WPLs). Starting from the pure-state Bloch sphere CP1, we show that realistic hardware noise induces anisotropic contractions of the Bloch ball that can be represented by a pair of physically interpretable parameters (lambda_perp, lambda_parallel). These parameters determine a unique WPL metric g_WPL(a_over_b, b) whose scalar curvature is R = 2 / b^2, yielding a compact and channel-resolved geometric surrogate for the intrinsic information structure of noisy quantum circuits. We develop a tomography-to-geometry pipeline that extracts (lambda_perp, lambda_parallel) from hardware data and maps them to the WPL parameters (a_over_b, b, R). Experiments on IBM Quantum backends show that the resulting WPL geometries accurately capture anisotropic curvature deformation across calibration periods. Finally, we demonstrate that WPL-informed quantum natural gradients (WPL-QNG) provide stable optimization dynamics for noisy variational quantum eigensolvers and enable curvature-aware mitigation of barren plateaus.

Recent studies on post-training large language models (LLMs) for reasoning through reinforcement learning (RL) typically focus on tasks that can be accurately verified and rewarded, such as solving math problems. In contrast, our research investigates the impact of reward noise, a more practical consideration for real-world scenarios involving the post-training of LLMs using reward models. We found that LLMs demonstrate strong robustness to substantial reward noise. For example, manually flipping 40% of the reward function's outputs in math tasks still allows a Qwen-2.5-7B model to achieve rapid convergence, improving its performance on math tasks from 5% to 72%, compared to the 75% accuracy achieved by a model trained with noiseless rewards. Surprisingly, by only rewarding the appearance of key reasoning phrases (namely reasoning pattern reward, RPR), such as ``first, I need to''-without verifying the correctness of answers, the model achieved peak downstream performance (over 70% accuracy for Qwen-2.5-7B) comparable to models trained with strict correctness verification and accurate rewards. Recognizing the importance of the reasoning process over the final results, we combined RPR with noisy reward models. RPR helped calibrate the noisy reward models, mitigating potential false negatives and enhancing the LLM's performance on open-ended tasks. These findings suggest the importance of improving models' foundational abilities during the pre-training phase while providing insights for advancing post-training techniques. Our code and scripts are available at https://github.com/trestad/Noisy-Rewards-in-Learning-to-Reason.

Recent advancements have integrated camera pose as a user-friendly and physics-informed condition in video diffusion models, enabling precise camera control. In this paper, we identify one of the key challenges as effectively modeling noisy cross-frame interactions to enhance geometry consistency and camera controllability. We innovatively associate the quality of a condition with its ability to reduce uncertainty and interpret noisy cross-frame features as a form of noisy condition. Recognizing that noisy conditions provide deterministic information while also introducing randomness and potential misguidance due to added noise, we propose applying epipolar attention to only aggregate features along corresponding epipolar lines, thereby accessing an optimal amount of noisy conditions. Additionally, we address scenarios where epipolar lines disappear, commonly caused by rapid camera movements, dynamic objects, or occlusions, ensuring robust performance in diverse environments. Furthermore, we develop a more robust and reproducible evaluation pipeline to address the inaccuracies and instabilities of existing camera control metrics. Our method achieves a 25.64% improvement in camera controllability on the RealEstate10K dataset without compromising dynamics or generation quality and demonstrates strong generalization to out-of-domain images. Training and inference require only 24GB and 12GB of memory, respectively, for 16-frame sequences at 256x256 resolution. We will release all checkpoints, along with training and evaluation code. Dynamic videos are best viewed at https://zgctroy.github.io/CamI2V.

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.

This paper summarizes our contributions to the document-grounded dialog tasks at the 9th and 10th Dialog System Technology Challenges (DSTC9 and DSTC10). In both iterations the task consists of three subtasks: first detect whether the current turn is knowledge seeking, second select a relevant knowledge document, and third generate a response grounded on the selected document. For DSTC9 we proposed different approaches to make the selection task more efficient. The best method, Hierarchical Selection, actually improves the results compared to the original baseline and gives a speedup of 24x. In the DSTC10 iteration of the task, the challenge was to adapt systems trained on written dialogs to perform well on noisy automatic speech recognition transcripts. Therefore, we proposed data augmentation techniques to increase the robustness of the models as well as methods to adapt the style of generated responses to fit well into the proceeding dialog. Additionally, we proposed a noisy channel model that allows for increasing the factuality of the generated responses. In addition to summarizing our previous contributions, in this work, we also report on a few small improvements and reconsider the automatic evaluation metrics for the generation task which have shown a low correlation to human judgments.

This paper describes Facebook FAIR's submission to the WMT19 shared news translation task. We participate in two language pairs and four language directions, English <-> German and English <-> Russian. Following our submission from last year, our baseline systems are large BPE-based transformer models trained with the Fairseq sequence modeling toolkit which rely on sampled back-translations. This year we experiment with different bitext data filtering schemes, as well as with adding filtered back-translated data. We also ensemble and fine-tune our models on domain-specific data, then decode using noisy channel model reranking. Our submissions are ranked first in all four directions of the human evaluation campaign. On En->De, our system significantly outperforms other systems as well as human translations. This system improves upon our WMT'18 submission by 4.5 BLEU points.

Diffusion models achieve strong generative performance but often rely on large datasets that may include sensitive content. This challenge is compounded by the models' tendency to memorize training data, raising privacy concerns. SFBD (Lu et al., 2025) addresses this by training on corrupted data and using limited clean samples to capture local structure and improve convergence. However, its iterative denoising and fine-tuning loop requires manual coordination, making it burdensome to implement. We reinterpret SFBD as an alternating projection algorithm and introduce a continuous variant, SFBD flow, that removes the need for alternating steps. We further show its connection to consistency constraint-based methods, and demonstrate that its practical instantiation, Online SFBD, consistently outperforms strong baselines across benchmarks.

Learning from preference-based feedback has recently gained traction as a promising approach to align language models with human interests. While these aligned generative models have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various tasks, their dependence on high-quality human preference data poses a bottleneck in practical applications. Specifically, noisy (incorrect and ambiguous) preference pairs in the dataset might restrict the language models from capturing human intent accurately. While practitioners have recently proposed heuristics to mitigate the effect of noisy preferences, a complete theoretical understanding of their workings remain elusive. In this work, we aim to bridge this gap by by introducing a general framework for policy optimization in the presence of random preference flips. We focus on the direct preference optimization (DPO) algorithm in particular since it assumes that preferences adhere to the Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model, raising concerns about the impact of noisy data on the learned policy. We design a novel loss function, which de-bias the effect of noise on average, making a policy trained by minimizing that loss robust to the noise. Under log-linear parameterization of the policy class and assuming good feature coverage of the SFT policy, we prove that the sub-optimality gap of the proposed robust DPO (rDPO) policy compared to the optimal policy is of the order O(1{1-2epsilon}frac{d{n}}), where epsilon < 1/2 is flip rate of labels, d is policy parameter dimension and n is size of dataset. Our experiments on IMDb sentiment generation and Anthropic's helpful-harmless dataset show that rDPO is robust to noise in preference labels compared to vanilla DPO and other heuristics proposed by practitioners.

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.

The oceans are a source of an impressive mixture of complex data that could be used to uncover relationships yet to be discovered. Such data comes from the oceans and their surface, such as Automatic Identification System (AIS) messages used for tracking vessels' trajectories. AIS messages are transmitted over radio or satellite at ideally periodic time intervals but vary irregularly over time. As such, this paper aims to model the AIS message transmission behavior through neural networks for forecasting upcoming AIS messages' content from multiple vessels, particularly in a simultaneous approach despite messages' temporal irregularities as outliers. We present a set of experiments comprising multiple algorithms for forecasting tasks with horizon sizes of varying lengths. Deep learning models (e.g., neural networks) revealed themselves to adequately preserve vessels' spatial awareness regardless of temporal irregularity. We show how convolutional layers, feed-forward networks, and recurrent neural networks can improve such tasks by working together. Experimenting with short, medium, and large-sized sequences of messages, our model achieved 36/37/38% of the Relative Percentage Difference - the lower, the better, whereas we observed 92/45/96% on the Elman's RNN, 51/52/40% on the GRU, and 129/98/61% on the LSTM. These results support our model as a driver for improving the prediction of vessel routes when analyzing multiple vessels of diverging types simultaneously under temporally noise data.

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.

With the help of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on various reasoning tasks. However, most of them have been evaluated under noise-free context and the dilemma for LLMs to produce inaccurate results under the noisy context has not been fully investigated. Existing studies utilize trigger sentences to encourage LLMs to concentrate on the relevant information but the trigger has limited effect on final answer prediction. Inspired by interactive CoT method, where intermediate reasoning steps are promoted by multiple rounds of interaction between users and LLMs, we propose a novel prompting method, namely R^3 prompting, for CoT reasoning under noisy context. Specifically, R^3 prompting interacts with LLMs to perform key sentence extraction, variable declaration and answer prediction, which corresponds to a thought process of reviewing, rephrasing and resolving. The responses generated at the last interaction will perform as hints to guide toward the responses of the next interaction. Our experiments show that R^3 prompting significantly outperforms existing CoT prompting methods on five reasoning tasks under noisy context. With GPT-3.5-turbo, we observe 3.7% accuracy improvement on average on the reasoning tasks under noisy context compared to the most competitive prompting baseline. More analyses and ablation studies show the robustness and generalization of R^3 prompting method in solving reasoning tasks in LLMs under noisy context.

Objective: Using natural language processing (NLP) to find sentences that state treatment plans in a clinical note, would automate plan extraction and would further enable their use in tools that help providers and care managers. However, as in the most NLP tasks on clinical text, creating gold standard to train and test NLP models is tedious and expensive. Fortuitously, sometimes but not always clinical notes contain sections with a heading that identifies the section as a plan. Leveraging contents of such labeled sections as a noisy training data, we assessed accuracy of NLP models trained with the data. Methods: We used common variations of plan headings and rule-based heuristics to find plan sections with headings in clinical notes, and we extracted sentences from them and formed a noisy training data of plan sentences. We trained Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models with the data. We measured accuracy of the trained models on the noisy dataset using ten-fold cross validation and separately on a set-aside manually annotated dataset. Results: About 13% of 117,730 clinical notes contained treatment plans sections with recognizable headings in the 1001 longitudinal patient records that were obtained from Cleveland Clinic under an IRB approval. We were able to extract and create a noisy training data of 13,492 plan sentences from the clinical notes. CNN achieved best F measures, 0.91 and 0.97 in the cross-validation and set-aside evaluation experiments respectively. SVM slightly underperformed with F measures of 0.89 and 0.96 in the same experiments. Conclusion: Our study showed that the training supervised learning models using noisy plan sentences was effective in identifying them in all clinical notes. More broadly, sections with informal headings in clinical notes can be a good source for generating effective training data.

We revisit the noisy binary search model of Karp and Kleinberg, in which we have n coins with unknown probabilities p_i that we can flip. The coins are sorted by increasing p_i, and we would like to find where the probability crosses (to within varepsilon) of a target value tau. This generalized the fixed-noise model of Burnashev and Zigangirov , in which p_i = 1{2} pm varepsilon, to a setting where coins near the target may be indistinguishable from it. Karp and Kleinberg showed that Theta(1{varepsilon^2} log n) samples are necessary and sufficient for this task. We produce a practical algorithm by solving two theoretical challenges: high-probability behavior and sharp constants. We give an algorithm that succeeds with probability 1-delta from \[ 1{C_{\tau, \varepsilon}} \cdot \left(\lg n + O(\log^{2/3} n \log^{1/3} 1{\delta} + \log 1{\delta})\right) \] samples, where C_{tau, varepsilon} is the optimal such constant achievable. For delta > n^{-o(1)} this is within 1 + o(1) of optimal, and for delta ll 1 it is the first bound within constant factors of optimal.

We present Voxlect, a novel benchmark for modeling dialects and regional languages worldwide using speech foundation models. Specifically, we report comprehensive benchmark evaluations on dialects and regional language varieties in English, Arabic, Mandarin and Cantonese, Tibetan, Indic languages, Thai, Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, and Italian. Our study used over 2 million training utterances from 30 publicly available speech corpora that are provided with dialectal information. We evaluate the performance of several widely used speech foundation models in classifying speech dialects. We assess the robustness of the dialectal models under noisy conditions and present an error analysis that highlights modeling results aligned with geographic continuity. In addition to benchmarking dialect classification, we demonstrate several downstream applications enabled by Voxlect. Specifically, we show that Voxlect can be applied to augment existing speech recognition datasets with dialect information, enabling a more detailed analysis of ASR performance across dialectal variations. Voxlect is also used as a tool to evaluate the performance of speech generation systems. Voxlect is publicly available with the license of the RAIL family at: https://github.com/tiantiaf0627/voxlect.

The large integration of microphones into devices increases the opportunities for Acoustic Side-Channel Attacks (ASCAs), as these can be used to capture keystrokes' audio signals that might reveal sensitive information. However, the current State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) models for ASCAs, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and hybrid models, such as CoAtNet, still exhibit limited robustness under realistic noisy conditions. Solving this problem requires either: (i) an increased model's capacity to infer contextual information from longer sequences, allowing the model to learn that an initially noisily typed word is the same as a futurely collected non-noisy word, or (ii) an approach to fix misidentified information from the contexts, as one does not type random words, but the ones that best fit the conversation context. In this paper, we demonstrate that both strategies are viable and complementary solutions for making ASCAs practical. We observed that no existing solution leverages advanced transformer architectures' power for these tasks and propose that: (i) Visual Transformers (VTs) are the candidate solutions for capturing long-term contextual information and (ii) transformer-powered Large Language Models (LLMs) are the candidate solutions to fix the ``typos'' (mispredictions) the model might make. Thus, we here present the first-of-its-kind approach that integrates VTs and LLMs for ASCAs. We first show that VTs achieve SOTA performance in classifying keystrokes when compared to the previous CNN benchmark. Second, we demonstrate that LLMs can mitigate the impact of real-world noise. Evaluations on the natural sentences revealed that: (i) incorporating LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o) in our ASCA pipeline boosts the performance of error-correction tasks; and (ii) the comparable performance can be attained by a lightweight, fine-tuned smaller LLM (67 times smaller than GPT-4o), using...

Large crowd-sourced datasets are often noisy and relation classification (RC) datasets are no exception. Reannotating the entire dataset is one probable solution however it is not always viable due to time and budget constraints. This paper addresses the problem of efficient reannotation of a large noisy dataset for the RC. Our goal is to catch more annotation errors in the dataset while reannotating fewer instances. Existing work on RC dataset reannotation lacks the flexibility about how much data to reannotate. We introduce the concept of a reannotation budget to overcome this limitation. The immediate follow-up problem is: Given a specific reannotation budget, which subset of the data should we reannotate? To address this problem, we present two strategies to selectively reannotate RC datasets. Our strategies utilize the taxonomic hierarchy of relation labels. The intuition of our work is to rely on the graph distance between actual and predicted relation labels in the label hierarchy graph. We evaluate our reannotation strategies on the well-known TACRED dataset. We design our experiments to answer three specific research questions. First, does our strategy select novel candidates for reannotation? Second, for a given reannotation budget is our reannotation strategy more efficient at catching annotation errors? Third, what is the impact of data reannotation on RC model performance measurement? Experimental results show that our both reannotation strategies are novel and efficient. Our analysis indicates that the current reported performance of RC models on noisy TACRED data is inflated.

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 present SURE-Score: an approach for learning score-based generative models using training samples corrupted by additive Gaussian noise. When a large training set of clean samples is available, solving inverse problems via score-based (diffusion) generative models trained on the underlying fully-sampled data distribution has recently been shown to outperform end-to-end supervised deep learning. In practice, such a large collection of training data may be prohibitively expensive to acquire in the first place. In this work, we present an approach for approximately learning a score-based generative model of the clean distribution, from noisy training data. We formulate and justify a novel loss function that leverages Stein's unbiased risk estimate to jointly denoise the data and learn the score function via denoising score matching, while using only the noisy samples. We demonstrate the generality of SURE-Score by learning priors and applying posterior sampling to ill-posed inverse problems in two practical applications from different domains: compressive wireless multiple-input multiple-output channel estimation and accelerated 2D multi-coil magnetic resonance imaging reconstruction, where we demonstrate competitive reconstruction performance when learning at signal-to-noise ratio values of 0 and 10 dB, respectively.

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.

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.

Referring perception, which aims at grounding visual objects with multimodal referring guidance, is essential for bridging the gap between humans, who provide instructions, and the environment where intelligent systems perceive. Despite progress in this field, the robustness of referring perception models (RPMs) against disruptive perturbations is not well explored. This work thoroughly assesses the resilience of RPMs against various perturbations in both general and specific contexts. Recognizing the complex nature of referring perception tasks, we present a comprehensive taxonomy of perturbations, and then develop a versatile toolbox for synthesizing and evaluating the effects of composite disturbances. Employing this toolbox, we construct R^2-Bench, a benchmark for assessing the Robustness of Referring perception models under noisy conditions across five key tasks. Moreover, we propose the R^2-Agent, an LLM-based agent that simplifies and automates model evaluation via natural language instructions. Our investigation uncovers the vulnerabilities of current RPMs to various perturbations and provides tools for assessing model robustness, potentially promoting the safe and resilient integration of intelligent systems into complex real-world scenarios.

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.

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.

The success of Deep Neural Network (DNN) models significantly depends on the quality of provided annotations. In medical image segmentation, for example, having multiple expert annotations for each data point is common to minimize subjective annotation bias. Then, the goal of estimation is to filter out the label noise and recover the ground-truth masks, which are not explicitly given. This paper proposes a probabilistic model for noisy observations that allows us to build a confident classification and segmentation models. To accomplish it, we explicitly model label noise and introduce a new information-based regularization that pushes the network to recover the ground-truth labels. In addition, for segmentation task we adjust the loss function by prioritizing learning in high-confidence regions where all the annotators agree on labeling. We evaluate the proposed method on a series of classification tasks such as noisy versions of MNIST, CIFAR-10, Fashion-MNIST datasets as well as CIFAR-10N, which is real-world dataset with noisy human annotations. Additionally, for segmentation task, we consider several medical imaging datasets, such as, LIDC and RIGA that reflect real-world inter-variability among multiple annotators. Our experiments show that our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art solutions for the considered classification and segmentation problems.

Obtaining accurate labels for instance segmentation is particularly challenging due to the complex nature of the task. Each image necessitates multiple annotations, encompassing not only the object's class but also its precise spatial boundaries. These requirements elevate the likelihood of errors and inconsistencies in both manual and automated annotation processes. By simulating different noise conditions, we provide a realistic scenario for assessing the robustness and generalization capabilities of instance segmentation models in different segmentation tasks, introducing COCO-N and Cityscapes-N. We also propose a benchmark for weakly annotation noise, dubbed COCO-WAN, which utilizes foundation models and weak annotations to simulate semi-automated annotation tools and their noisy labels. This study sheds light on the quality of segmentation masks produced by various models and challenges the efficacy of popular methods designed to address learning with label noise.

Unsupervised anomaly detection in brain images is crucial for identifying injuries and pathologies without access to labels. However, the accurate localization of anomalies in medical images remains challenging due to the inherent complexity and variability of brain structures and the scarcity of annotated abnormal data. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach that incorporates masking within diffusion models, leveraging their generative capabilities to learn robust representations of normal brain anatomy. During training, our model processes only normal brain MRI scans and performs a forward diffusion process in the latent space that adds noise to the features of randomly-selected patches. Following a dual objective, the model learns to identify which patches are noisy and recover their original features. This strategy ensures that the model captures intricate patterns of normal brain structures while isolating potential anomalies as noise in the latent space. At inference, the model identifies noisy patches corresponding to anomalies and generates a normal counterpart for these patches by applying a reverse diffusion process. Our method surpasses existing unsupervised anomaly detection techniques, demonstrating superior performance in generating accurate normal counterparts and localizing anomalies. The code is available at hhttps://github.com/farzad-bz/MAD-AD.

Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) is a fundamental approach for robustly estimating parametric models from noisy data. Existing learning-based RANSAC methods utilize deep learning to enhance the robustness of RANSAC against outliers. However, these approaches are trained and tested on the data generated by the same algorithms, leading to limited generalization to out-of-distribution data during inference. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel diffusion-based paradigm that progressively injects noise into ground-truth data, simulating the noisy conditions for training learning-based RANSAC. To enhance data diversity, we incorporate Monte Carlo sampling into the diffusion paradigm, approximating diverse data distributions by introducing different types of randomness at multiple stages. We evaluate our approach in the context of feature matching through comprehensive experiments on the ScanNet and MegaDepth datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our Monte Carlo diffusion mechanism significantly improves the generalization ability of learning-based RANSAC. We also develop extensive ablation studies that highlight the effectiveness of key components in our framework.

The quality of generative models depends on the quality of the data they are trained on. Creating large-scale, high-quality datasets is often expensive and sometimes impossible, e.g. in certain scientific applications where there is no access to clean data due to physical or instrumentation constraints. Ambient Diffusion and related frameworks train diffusion models with solely corrupted data (which are usually cheaper to acquire) but ambient models significantly underperform models trained on clean data. We study this phenomenon at scale by training more than 80 models on data with different corruption levels across three datasets ranging from 30,000 to approx 1.3M samples. We show that it is impossible, at these sample sizes, to match the performance of models trained on clean data when only training on noisy data. Yet, a combination of a small set of clean data (e.g.~10% of the total dataset) and a large set of highly noisy data suffices to reach the performance of models trained solely on similar-size datasets of clean data, and in particular to achieve near state-of-the-art performance. We provide theoretical evidence for our findings by developing novel sample complexity bounds for learning from Gaussian Mixtures with heterogeneous variances. Our theoretical model suggests that, for large enough datasets, the effective marginal utility of a noisy sample is exponentially worse than that of a clean sample. Providing a small set of clean samples can significantly reduce the sample size requirements for noisy data, as we also observe in our experiments.

Direct alignment methods are increasingly used for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, these methods suffer from the issues of verbosity and likelihood displacement, which can be driven by the noisy preference pairs that induce similar likelihood for preferred and dispreferred responses. The contributions of this paper are two-fold. First, we propose a new preference alignment method based on comparison oracles and provide the convergence guarantee for its basic scheme. Second, we improve our method using some heuristics and conduct the experiments to demonstrate the flexibility and compatibility of practical scheme in improving the performance of LLMs using noisy preference pairs. Evaluations are conducted across multiple base and instruction-tuned models (Mistral-7B, Llama-3-8B and Gemma-2-9B) with benchmarks (AlpacaEval 2, MT-Bench and Arena-Hard). Experimental results show the effectiveness of our method as an alternative to addressing the limitations of existing direct alignment methods. A highlight of our work is that we evidence the importance of designing specialized methods for preference pairs with distinct likelihood margin, which complements the recent findings in Razin-2025-Unintentional.

Spoken language understanding (SLU) system usually consists of various pipeline components, where each component heavily relies on the results of its upstream ones. For example, Intent detection (ID), and slot filling (SF) require its upstream automatic speech recognition (ASR) to transform the voice into text. In this case, the upstream perturbations, e.g. ASR errors, environmental noise and careless user speaking, will propagate to the ID and SF models, thus deteriorating the system performance. Therefore, the well-performing SF and ID models are expected to be noise resistant to some extent. However, existing models are trained on clean data, which causes a gap between clean data training and real-world inference. To bridge the gap, we propose a method from the perspective of domain adaptation, by which both high- and low-quality samples are embedding into similar vector space. Meanwhile, we design a denoising generation model to reduce the impact of the low-quality samples. Experiments on the widely-used dataset, i.e. Snips, and large scale in-house dataset (10 million training examples) demonstrate that this method not only outperforms the baseline models on real-world (noisy) corpus but also enhances the robustness, that is, it produces high-quality results under a noisy environment. The source code will be released.

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.

We present a method for joint alignment of sparse in-the-wild image collections of an object category. Most prior works assume either ground-truth keypoint annotations or a large dataset of images of a single object category. However, neither of the above assumptions hold true for the long-tail of the objects present in the world. We present a self-supervised technique that directly optimizes on a sparse collection of images of a particular object/object category to obtain consistent dense correspondences across the collection. We use pairwise nearest neighbors obtained from deep features of a pre-trained vision transformer (ViT) model as noisy and sparse keypoint matches and make them dense and accurate matches by optimizing a neural network that jointly maps the image collection into a learned canonical grid. Experiments on CUB and SPair-71k benchmarks demonstrate that our method can produce globally consistent and higher quality correspondences across the image collection when compared to existing self-supervised methods. Code and other material will be made available at https://kampta.github.io/asic.

Test-time adaptation (TTA) has shown to be effective at tackling distribution shifts between training and testing data by adapting a given model on test samples. However, the online model updating of TTA may be unstable and this is often a key obstacle preventing existing TTA methods from being deployed in the real world. Specifically, TTA may fail to improve or even harm the model performance when test data have: 1) mixed distribution shifts, 2) small batch sizes, and 3) online imbalanced label distribution shifts, which are quite common in practice. In this paper, we investigate the unstable reasons and find that the batch norm layer is a crucial factor hindering TTA stability. Conversely, TTA can perform more stably with batch-agnostic norm layers, \ie, group or layer norm. However, we observe that TTA with group and layer norms does not always succeed and still suffers many failure cases. By digging into the failure cases, we find that certain noisy test samples with large gradients may disturb the model adaption and result in collapsed trivial solutions, \ie, assigning the same class label for all samples. To address the above collapse issue, we propose a sharpness-aware and reliable entropy minimization method, called SAR, for further stabilizing TTA from two aspects: 1) remove partial noisy samples with large gradients, 2) encourage model weights to go to a flat minimum so that the model is robust to the remaining noisy samples. Promising results demonstrate that SAR performs more stably over prior methods and is computationally efficient under the above wild test scenarios.

Accurate diagnostic coding of medical notes is crucial for enhancing patient care, medical research, and error-free billing in healthcare organizations. Manual coding is a time-consuming task for providers, and diagnostic codes often exhibit low sensitivity and specificity, whereas the free text in medical notes can be a more precise description of a patients status. Thus, accurate automated diagnostic coding of medical notes has become critical for a learning healthcare system. Recent developments in long-document transformer architectures have enabled attention-based deep-learning models to adjudicate medical notes. In addition, contrastive loss functions have been used to jointly pre-train large language and image models with noisy labels. To further improve the automated adjudication of medical notes, we developed an approach based on i) models for ICD-10 diagnostic code sequences using a large real-world data set, ii) large language models for medical notes, and iii) contrastive pre-training to build an integrated model of both ICD-10 diagnostic codes and corresponding medical text. We demonstrate that a contrastive approach for pre-training improves performance over prior state-of-the-art models for the MIMIC-III-50, MIMIC-III-rare50, and MIMIC-III-full diagnostic coding tasks.

Image-to-video generation, which aims to generate a video starting from a given reference image, has drawn great attention. Existing methods try to extend pre-trained text-guided image diffusion models to image-guided video generation models. Nevertheless, these methods often result in either low fidelity or flickering over time due to their limitation to shallow image guidance and poor temporal consistency. To tackle these problems, we propose a high-fidelity image-to-video generation method by devising a frame retention branch based on a pre-trained video diffusion model, named DreamVideo. Instead of integrating the reference image into the diffusion process at a semantic level, our DreamVideo perceives the reference image via convolution layers and concatenates the features with the noisy latents as model input. By this means, the details of the reference image can be preserved to the greatest extent. In addition, by incorporating double-condition classifier-free guidance, a single image can be directed to videos of different actions by providing varying prompt texts. This has significant implications for controllable video generation and holds broad application prospects. We conduct comprehensive experiments on the public dataset, and both quantitative and qualitative results indicate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method. Especially for fidelity, our model has a powerful image retention ability and delivers the best results in UCF101 compared to other image-to-video models to our best knowledge. Also, precise control can be achieved by giving different text prompts. Further details and comprehensive results of our model will be presented in https://anonymous0769.github.io/DreamVideo/.

Attention mechanism in graph neural networks is designed to assign larger weights to important neighbor nodes for better representation. However, what graph attention learns is not understood well, particularly when graphs are noisy. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised graph attention network (SuperGAT), an improved graph attention model for noisy graphs. Specifically, we exploit two attention forms compatible with a self-supervised task to predict edges, whose presence and absence contain the inherent information about the importance of the relationships between nodes. By encoding edges, SuperGAT learns more expressive attention in distinguishing mislinked neighbors. We find two graph characteristics influence the effectiveness of attention forms and self-supervision: homophily and average degree. Thus, our recipe provides guidance on which attention design to use when those two graph characteristics are known. Our experiment on 17 real-world datasets demonstrates that our recipe generalizes across 15 datasets of them, and our models designed by recipe show improved performance over baselines.

In many applications, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) drives tool use and function calling by embedding the (user) queries and matching them to pre-specified tool/function descriptions. In this paper, we address an embedding misalignment issue that often arises in practical applications due to imperfect embedding models or noisy descriptions; such misalignment may lead to incorrect retrieval and task failure. We introduce Online-Optimized RAG, a deployment-time framework that continually adapts retrieval embeddings from live interactions using minimal feedback (e.g., task success). Online-Optimized RAG applies lightweight online gradient updates with negligible per-query latency and requires no changes to the underlying LLM. The method is plug-and-play: it supports both single- and multi-hop tool use, dynamic tool inventories, and K-retrieval with re-ranking. We provide a problem-dependent theoretical analysis that quantifies how the method's performance depends on the initialization quality of the embeddings and other related quantities. Across diverse tool-use and document-retrieval scenarios, our Online-Optimized RAG consistently improves tool selection accuracy and end-task success, thus providing a simple, practical path to robust, self-improving RAG systems.

Long short-term memory (LSTM) is a kind of recurrent neural networks (RNN) for sequence and temporal dependency data modeling and its effectiveness has been extensively established. In this work, we propose a hybrid quantum-classical model of LSTM, which we dub QLSTM. We demonstrate that the proposed model successfully learns several kinds of temporal data. In particular, we show that for certain testing cases, this quantum version of LSTM converges faster, or equivalently, reaches a better accuracy, than its classical counterpart. Due to the variational nature of our approach, the requirements on qubit counts and circuit depth are eased, and our work thus paves the way toward implementing machine learning algorithms for sequence modeling on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices.

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.

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.

Text-to-SQL, which involves translating natural language into Structured Query Language (SQL), is crucial for enabling broad access to structured databases without expert knowledge. However, designing models for such tasks is challenging due to numerous factors, including the presence of 'noise,' such as ambiguous questions and syntactical errors. This study provides an in-depth analysis of the distribution and types of noise in the widely used BIRD-Bench benchmark and the impact of noise on models. While BIRD-Bench was created to model dirty and noisy database values, it was not created to contain noise and errors in the questions and gold queries. We found that noise in questions and gold queries are prevalent in the dataset, with varying amounts across domains, and with an uneven distribution between noise types. The presence of incorrect gold SQL queries, which then generate incorrect gold answers, has a significant impact on the benchmark's reliability. Surprisingly, when evaluating models on corrected SQL queries, zero-shot baselines surpassed the performance of state-of-the-art prompting methods. We conclude that informative noise labels and reliable benchmarks are crucial to developing new Text-to-SQL methods that can handle varying types of noise. All datasets, annotations, and code are available at https://github.com/niklaswretblad/the-effects-of-noise-in-text-to-SQL.

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.

We propose a novel framework to perform classification via deep learning in the presence of noisy annotations. When trained on noisy labels, deep neural networks have been observed to first fit the training data with clean labels during an "early learning" phase, before eventually memorizing the examples with false labels. We prove that early learning and memorization are fundamental phenomena in high-dimensional classification tasks, even in simple linear models, and give a theoretical explanation in this setting. Motivated by these findings, we develop a new technique for noisy classification tasks, which exploits the progress of the early learning phase. In contrast with existing approaches, which use the model output during early learning to detect the examples with clean labels, and either ignore or attempt to correct the false labels, we take a different route and instead capitalize on early learning via regularization. There are two key elements to our approach. First, we leverage semi-supervised learning techniques to produce target probabilities based on the model outputs. Second, we design a regularization term that steers the model towards these targets, implicitly preventing memorization of the false labels. The resulting framework is shown to provide robustness to noisy annotations on several standard benchmarks and real-world datasets, where it achieves results comparable to the state of the art.

Machine learning models are routinely used to support decisions that affect individuals -- be it to screen a patient for a serious illness or to gauge their response to treatment. In these tasks, we are limited to learning models from datasets with noisy labels. In this paper, we study the instance-level impact of learning under label noise. We introduce a notion of regret for this regime, which measures the number of unforeseen mistakes due to noisy labels. We show that standard approaches to learning under label noise can return models that perform well at a population-level while subjecting individuals to a lottery of mistakes. We present a versatile approach to estimate the likelihood of mistakes at the individual-level from a noisy dataset by training models over plausible realizations of datasets without label noise. This is supported by a comprehensive empirical study of label noise in clinical prediction tasks. Our results reveal how failure to anticipate mistakes can compromise model reliability and adoption -- we demonstrate how we can address these challenges by anticipating and avoiding regretful decisions.

The brain is a noisy system subject to energy constraints. These facts are rarely taken into account when modelling artificial neural networks. In this paper, we are interested in demonstrating that those factors can actually lead to the appearance of robust associative memories. We first propose a simplified model of noise in the brain, taking into account synaptic noise and interference from neurons external to the network. When coarsely quantized, we show that this noise can be reduced to insertions and erasures. We take a neural network with recurrent modifiable connections, and subject it to noisy external inputs. We introduce an energy usage limitation principle in the network as well as consolidated Hebbian learning, resulting in an incremental processing of inputs. We show that the connections naturally formed correspond to state-of-the-art binary sparse associative memories.

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.

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.

This paper investigates an under-explored challenge in large language models (LLMs): chain-of-thought prompting with noisy rationales, which include irrelevant or inaccurate reasoning thoughts within examples used for in-context learning. We construct NoRa dataset that is tailored to evaluate the robustness of reasoning in the presence of noisy rationales. Our findings on NoRa dataset reveal a prevalent vulnerability to such noise among current LLMs, with existing robust methods like self-correction and self-consistency showing limited efficacy. Notably, compared to prompting with clean rationales, base LLM drops by 1.4%-19.8% in accuracy with irrelevant thoughts and more drastically by 2.2%-40.4% with inaccurate thoughts. Addressing this challenge necessitates external supervision that should be accessible in practice. Here, we propose the method of contrastive denoising with noisy chain-of-thought (CD-CoT). It enhances LLMs' denoising-reasoning capabilities by contrasting noisy rationales with only one clean rationale, which can be the minimal requirement for denoising-purpose prompting. This method follows a principle of exploration and exploitation: (1) rephrasing and selecting rationales in the input space to achieve explicit denoising and (2) exploring diverse reasoning paths and voting on answers in the output space. Empirically, CD-CoT demonstrates an average improvement of 17.8% in accuracy over the base model and shows significantly stronger denoising capabilities than baseline methods. The source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/tmlr-group/NoisyRationales.

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.

Today's denoising diffusion models do not "denoise" in the classical sense, i.e., they do not directly predict clean images. Rather, the neural networks predict noise or a noised quantity. In this paper, we suggest that predicting clean data and predicting noised quantities are fundamentally different. According to the manifold assumption, natural data should lie on a low-dimensional manifold, whereas noised quantities do not. With this assumption, we advocate for models that directly predict clean data, which allows apparently under-capacity networks to operate effectively in very high-dimensional spaces. We show that simple, large-patch Transformers on pixels can be strong generative models: using no tokenizer, no pre-training, and no extra loss. Our approach is conceptually nothing more than "Just image Transformers", or JiT, as we call it. We report competitive results using JiT with large patch sizes of 16 and 32 on ImageNet at resolutions of 256 and 512, where predicting high-dimensional noised quantities can fail catastrophically. With our networks mapping back to the basics of the manifold, our research goes back to basics and pursues a self-contained paradigm for Transformer-based diffusion on raw natural data.

By leveraging the retrieval of information from external knowledge databases, Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit enhanced capabilities for accomplishing many knowledge-intensive tasks. However, due to the inherent flaws of current retrieval systems, there might exist irrelevant information within those retrieving top-ranked passages. In this work, we present a comprehensive investigation into the robustness of LLMs to different types of irrelevant information under various conditions. We initially introduce a framework to construct high-quality irrelevant information that ranges from semantically unrelated, partially related, and related to questions. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that the constructed irrelevant information not only scores highly on similarity metrics, being highly retrieved by existing systems, but also bears semantic connections to the context. Our investigation reveals that current LLMs still face challenges in discriminating highly semantically related information and can be easily distracted by these irrelevant yet misleading contents. Besides, we also find that current solutions for handling irrelevant information have limitations in improving the robustness of LLMs to such distractions. Resources are available at https://github.com/Di-viner/LLM-Robustness-to-Irrelevant-Information.

Diffusion models are a class of generative models that learn to synthesize samples by inverting a diffusion process that gradually maps data into noise. While these models have enjoyed great success recently, a full theoretical understanding of their observed properties is still lacking, in particular, their weak sensitivity to the choice of noise family and the role of adequate scheduling of noise levels for good synthesis. By identifying a correspondence between diffusion models and a well-known paradigm in cognitive science known as serial reproduction, whereby human agents iteratively observe and reproduce stimuli from memory, we show how the aforementioned properties of diffusion models can be explained as a natural consequence of this correspondence. We then complement our theoretical analysis with simulations that exhibit these key features. Our work highlights how classic paradigms in cognitive science can shed light on state-of-the-art machine learning problems.

Current vision systems are trained on huge datasets, and these datasets come with costs: curation is expensive, they inherit human biases, and there are concerns over privacy and usage rights. To counter these costs, interest has surged in learning from cheaper data sources, such as unlabeled images. In this paper we go a step further and ask if we can do away with real image datasets entirely, instead learning from noise processes. We investigate a suite of image generation models that produce images from simple random processes. These are then used as training data for a visual representation learner with a contrastive loss. We study two types of noise processes, statistical image models and deep generative models under different random initializations. Our findings show that it is important for the noise to capture certain structural properties of real data but that good performance can be achieved even with processes that are far from realistic. We also find that diversity is a key property to learn good representations. Datasets, models, and code are available at https://mbaradad.github.io/learning_with_noise.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has been widely adopted to augment large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge for knowledge-intensive tasks. However, its effectiveness is often undermined by the presence of noisy (i.e., low-quality) retrieved passages. Enhancing LLMs' robustness to such noise is critical for improving the reliability of RAG systems. Recent advances have equipped LLMs with strong reasoning and self-reflection capabilities, allowing them to identify and correct errors in their reasoning process. Inspired by this ability, we propose Passage Injection-a simple yet effective method that explicitly incorporates retrieved passages into LLMs' reasoning process, aiming to enhance the model's ability to recognize and resist noisy passages. We validate Passage Injection under general RAG settings using BM25 as the retriever. Experiments on four reasoning-enhanced LLMs across four factual QA datasets demonstrate that Passage Injection significantly improves overall RAG performance. Further analysis on two noisy retrieval settings-random noise, where the model is provided irrelevant passages, and counterfactual noise, where it is given misleading passages-shows that Passage Injection consistently improves robustness. Controlled experiments confirm that Passage Injection can also effectively leverage helpful passages. These findings suggest that incorporating passages in LLMs' reasoning process is a promising direction for building more robust RAG systems. The code can be found here{https://github.com/mh-tang/Passage-Injection}.

We present Noisy Student Training, a semi-supervised learning approach that works well even when labeled data is abundant. Noisy Student Training achieves 88.4% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, which is 2.0% better than the state-of-the-art model that requires 3.5B weakly labeled Instagram images. On robustness test sets, it improves ImageNet-A top-1 accuracy from 61.0% to 83.7%, reduces ImageNet-C mean corruption error from 45.7 to 28.3, and reduces ImageNet-P mean flip rate from 27.8 to 12.2. Noisy Student Training extends the idea of self-training and distillation with the use of equal-or-larger student models and noise added to the student during learning. On ImageNet, we first train an EfficientNet model on labeled images and use it as a teacher to generate pseudo labels for 300M unlabeled images. We then train a larger EfficientNet as a student model on the combination of labeled and pseudo labeled images. We iterate this process by putting back the student as the teacher. During the learning of the student, we inject noise such as dropout, stochastic depth, and data augmentation via RandAugment to the student so that the student generalizes better than the teacher. Models are available at https://github.com/tensorflow/tpu/tree/master/models/official/efficientnet. Code is available at https://github.com/google-research/noisystudent.

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.

Existing speculative decoding methods typically require additional model structure and training processes to assist the model for draft token generation. This makes the migration of acceleration methods to the new model more costly and more demanding on device memory. To address this problem, we propose the Make Some Noise (MSN) training framework as a replacement for the supervised fine-tuning stage of the large language model. The training method simply introduces some noise at the input for the model to learn the denoising task. It significantly enhances the parallel decoding capability of the model without affecting the original task capability. In addition, we propose a tree-based retrieval-augmented Jacobi (TR-Jacobi) decoding strategy to further improve the inference speed of MSN models. Experiments in both the general and code domains have shown that MSN can improve inference speed by 2.3-2.7x times without compromising model performance. The MSN model also achieves comparable acceleration ratios to the SOTA model with additional model structure on Spec-Bench.

In this paper we apply self-knowledge distillation to text summarization which we argue can alleviate problems with maximum-likelihood training on single reference and noisy datasets. Instead of relying on one-hot annotation labels, our student summarization model is trained with guidance from a teacher which generates smoothed labels to help regularize training. Furthermore, to better model uncertainty during training, we introduce multiple noise signals for both teacher and student models. We demonstrate experimentally on three benchmarks that our framework boosts the performance of both pretrained and non-pretrained summarizers achieving state-of-the-art results.

Temporal data such as time series can be viewed as discretized measurements of the underlying function. To build a generative model for such data we have to model the stochastic process that governs it. We propose a solution by defining the denoising diffusion model in the function space which also allows us to naturally handle irregularly-sampled observations. The forward process gradually adds noise to functions, preserving their continuity, while the learned reverse process removes the noise and returns functions as new samples. To this end, we define suitable noise sources and introduce novel denoising and score-matching models. We show how our method can be used for multivariate probabilistic forecasting and imputation, and how our model can be interpreted as a neural process.

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.

Recent work has identified simple empirical scaling laws for language models, linking compute budget, dataset size, model size, and autoregressive modeling loss. The validity of these simple power laws across orders of magnitude in model scale provides compelling evidence that larger models are also more capable models. However, scaling up models under the constraints of hardware and infrastructure is no easy feat, and rapidly becomes a hard and expensive engineering problem. We investigate ways to tentatively cheat scaling laws, and train larger models for cheaper. We emulate an increase in effective parameters, using efficient approximations: either by doping the models with frozen random parameters, or by using fast structured transforms in place of dense linear layers. We find that the scaling relationship between test loss and compute depends only on the actual number of trainable parameters; scaling laws cannot be deceived by spurious parameters.

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.

Large reasoning models (LRMs) generate intermediate reasoning traces before producing final answers, yielding strong gains on multi-step and mathematical tasks. Yet aligning LRMs with human preferences, a crucial prerequisite for model deployment, remains underexplored. The statistically correct objective for preference alignment requires marginalizing over reasoning traces, but this computation is intractable in practice. A common workaround optimizes a single sampled trajectory, which introduces substantial gradient variance from stochastic trace sampling. To address this challenge, we frame preference optimization for LRMs through the lens of the bias--variance trade-off and propose Bias--Variance Optimized Preference Optimization (BVPO), a simple, drop-in method that mixes two gradient estimators: a high-variance trace-based estimator and a low-variance empty-trace estimator obtained by disabling reasoning trace generation. Our theory shows that BVPO strictly reduces trace-induced variance for any nontrivial mixture, provides a closed-form choice of the mixing weight that minimizes mean-squared error relative to the true marginal gradient, and under standard smoothness and step-size conditions, tightens classical convergence bounds for stochastic gradient descent. Empirically, BVPO improves alignment over the best baseline by up to 7.8 points on AlpacaEval~2 and 6.8 points on Arena-Hard. Despite being trained only on general conversational data, BVPO also boosts reasoning performance for base models by up to 4.0 points on the average of six math reasoning benchmarks. These results identify variance from trace sampling as a key bottleneck and demonstrate that directly optimizing the bias--variance trade-off yields more stable training and stronger overall performance.

With the rapid development of diffusion models and flow-based generative models, there has been a surge of interests in solving noisy linear inverse problems, e.g., super-resolution, deblurring, denoising, colorization, etc, with generative models. However, while remarkable reconstruction performances have been achieved, their inference time is typically too slow since most of them rely on the seminal diffusion posterior sampling (DPS) framework and thus to approximate the intractable likelihood score, time-consuming gradient calculation through back-propagation is needed. To address this issue, this paper provides a fast and effective solution by proposing a simple closed-form approximation to the likelihood score. For both diffusion and flow-based models, extensive experiments are conducted on various noisy linear inverse problems such as noisy super-resolution, denoising, deblurring, and colorization. In all these tasks, our method (namely DMPS) demonstrates highly competitive or even better reconstruction performances while being significantly faster than all the baseline methods.

In the presence of noisy labels, designing robust loss functions is critical for securing the generalization performance of deep neural networks. Cross Entropy (CE) loss has been shown to be not robust to noisy labels due to its unboundedness. To alleviate this issue, existing works typically design specialized robust losses with the symmetric condition, which usually lead to the underfitting issue. In this paper, our key idea is to induce a loss bound at the logit level, thus universally enhancing the noise robustness of existing losses. Specifically, we propose logit clipping (LogitClip), which clamps the norm of the logit vector to ensure that it is upper bounded by a constant. In this manner, CE loss equipped with our LogitClip method is effectively bounded, mitigating the overfitting to examples with noisy labels. Moreover, we present theoretical analyses to certify the noise-tolerant ability of LogitClip. Extensive experiments show that LogitClip not only significantly improves the noise robustness of CE loss, but also broadly enhances the generalization performance of popular robust losses.

Vision-language models such as CLIP learn a generic text-image embedding from large-scale training data. A vision-language model can be adapted to a new classification task through few-shot prompt tuning. We find that such a prompt tuning process is highly robust to label noises. This intrigues us to study the key reasons contributing to the robustness of the prompt tuning paradigm. We conducted extensive experiments to explore this property and find the key factors are: 1) the fixed classname tokens provide a strong regularization to the optimization of the model, reducing gradients induced by the noisy samples; 2) the powerful pre-trained image-text embedding that is learned from diverse and generic web data provides strong prior knowledge for image classification. Further, we demonstrate that noisy zero-shot predictions from CLIP can be used to tune its own prompt, significantly enhancing prediction accuracy in the unsupervised setting. The code is available at https://github.com/CEWu/PTNL.

With the increasing capabilities of large language models (LLMs), these high-performance models have achieved state-of-the-art results on a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, the models' performance on commonly-used benchmark datasets often fails to accurately reflect their reliability and robustness when applied to real-world noisy data. To address these challenges, we propose a unified robustness evaluation framework based on the slot-filling task to systematically evaluate the dialogue understanding capability of LLMs in diverse input perturbation scenarios. Specifically, we construct a input perturbation evaluation dataset, Noise-LLM, which contains five types of single perturbation and four types of mixed perturbation data. Furthermore, we utilize a multi-level data augmentation method (character, word, and sentence levels) to construct a candidate data pool, and carefully design two ways of automatic task demonstration construction strategies (instance-level and entity-level) with various prompt templates. Our aim is to assess how well various robustness methods of LLMs perform in real-world noisy scenarios. The experiments have demonstrated that the current open-source LLMs generally achieve limited perturbation robustness performance. Based on these experimental observations, we make some forward-looking suggestions to fuel the research in this direction.

Land-use and land cover (LULC) analysis is critical in remote sensing, with wide-ranging applications across diverse fields such as agriculture, utilities, and urban planning. However, automating LULC map generation using machine learning is rendered challenging due to noisy labels. Typically, the ground truths (e.g. ESRI LULC, MapBioMass) have noisy labels that hamper the model's ability to learn to accurately classify the pixels. Further, these erroneous labels can significantly distort the performance metrics of a model, leading to misleading evaluations. Traditionally, the ambiguous labels are rectified using unsupervised algorithms. These algorithms struggle not only with scalability but also with generalization across different geographies. To overcome these challenges, we propose a zero-shot approach using the foundation model, Segment Anything Model (SAM), to automatically delineate different land parcels/regions and leverage them to relabel the unsure pixels by using the local label statistics within each detected region. We achieve a significant reduction in label noise and an improvement in the performance of the downstream segmentation model by approx 5% when trained with denoised labels.

Traditionally, success in multilingual machine translation can be attributed to three key factors in training data: large volume, diverse translation directions, and high quality. In the current practice of fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for translation, we revisit the importance of all these factors. We find that LLMs display strong translation capability after being fine-tuned on as few as 32 training instances, and that fine-tuning on a single translation direction effectively enables LLMs to translate in multiple directions. However, the choice of direction is critical: fine-tuning LLMs with English on the target side can lead to task misinterpretation, which hinders translations into non-English languages. A similar problem arises when noise is introduced into the target side of parallel data, especially when the target language is well-represented in the LLM's pre-training. In contrast, noise in an under-represented language has a less pronounced effect. Our findings suggest that attaining successful alignment hinges on teaching the model to maintain a "superficial" focus, thereby avoiding the learning of erroneous biases beyond translation.

Recent diffusion-based generative models achieve remarkable results by training on massive datasets, yet this practice raises concerns about memorization and copyright infringement. A proposed remedy is to train exclusively on noisy data with potential copyright issues, ensuring the model never observes original content. However, through the lens of deconvolution theory, we show that although it is theoretically feasible to learn the data distribution from noisy samples, the practical challenge of collecting sufficient samples makes successful learning nearly unattainable. To overcome this limitation, we propose to pretrain the model with a small fraction of clean data to guide the deconvolution process. Combined with our Stochastic Forward--Backward Deconvolution (SFBD) method, we attain FID 6.31 on CIFAR-10 with just 4% clean images (and 3.58 with 10%). We also provide theoretical guarantees that SFBD learns the true data distribution. These results underscore the value of limited clean pretraining, or pretraining on similar datasets. Empirical studies further validate and enrich our findings.

In the realm of robot action recognition, identifying distinct but spatially proximate arm movements using vision systems in noisy environments poses a significant challenge. This paper studies robot arm action recognition in noisy environments using machine learning techniques. Specifically, a vision system is used to track the robot's movements followed by a deep learning model to extract the arm's key points. Through a comparative analysis of machine learning methods, the effectiveness and robustness of this model are assessed in noisy environments. A case study was conducted using the Tic-Tac-Toe game in a 3-by-3 grid environment, where the focus is to accurately identify the actions of the arms in selecting specific locations within this constrained environment. Experimental results show that our approach can achieve precise key point detection and action classification despite the addition of noise and uncertainties to the dataset.

While instruction-tuned language models have demonstrated impressive zero-shot generalization, these models often struggle to generate accurate responses when faced with instructions that fall outside their training set. This paper presents Instructive Decoding (ID), a simple yet effective approach that augments the efficacy of instruction-tuned models. Specifically, ID adjusts the logits for next-token prediction in a contrastive manner, utilizing predictions generated from a manipulated version of the original instruction, referred to as a noisy instruction. This noisy instruction aims to elicit responses that could diverge from the intended instruction yet remain plausible. We conduct experiments across a spectrum of such noisy instructions, ranging from those that insert semantic noise via random words to others like 'opposite' that elicit the deviated responses. Our approach achieves considerable performance gains across various instruction-tuned models and tasks without necessitating any additional parameter updates. Notably, utilizing 'opposite' as the noisy instruction in ID, which exhibits the maximum divergence from the original instruction, consistently produces the most significant performance gains across multiple models and tasks.

Small Language Models (SLMs) are generally considered to be more compact versions of large language models (LLMs), typically having fewer than 7 billion parameters. This study investigates the ability of small language models to learn, retain, and subsequently eliminate noise that is typically not found on the internet, where most pretraining datasets are sourced. For this, four pre-trained SLMs were utilized: Olmo 1B, Qwen1.5 1.8B, Gemma 2B, and Phi2 2.7B. The models were instruction-tuned without noise and tested for task execution with in-context learning. Afterward, noise patterns were introduced to evaluate the models' learning and unlearning capabilities. We evaluated the models' performance at various training levels. Phi consistently excelled with word-level noise but performed the worst with character-level noise. Despite being the smallest with approximately 1 billion parameters, Olmo performed consistently well on tasks.

The noise transition matrix plays a central role in the problem of learning with noisy labels. Among many other reasons, a large number of existing solutions rely on access to it. Identifying and estimating the transition matrix without ground truth labels is a critical and challenging task. When label noise transition depends on each instance, the problem of identifying the instance-dependent noise transition matrix becomes substantially more challenging. Despite recent works proposing solutions for learning from instance-dependent noisy labels, the field lacks a unified understanding of when such a problem remains identifiable. The goal of this paper is to characterize the identifiability of the label noise transition matrix. Building on Kruskal's identifiability results, we are able to show the necessity of multiple noisy labels in identifying the noise transition matrix for the generic case at the instance level. We further instantiate the results to explain the successes of the state-of-the-art solutions and how additional assumptions alleviated the requirement of multiple noisy labels. Our result also reveals that disentangled features are helpful in the above identification task and we provide empirical evidence.

Generative models have made significant impacts across various domains, largely due to their ability to scale during training by increasing data, computational resources, and model size, a phenomenon characterized by the scaling laws. Recent research has begun to explore inference-time scaling behavior in Large Language Models (LLMs), revealing how performance can further improve with additional computation during inference. Unlike LLMs, diffusion models inherently possess the flexibility to adjust inference-time computation via the number of denoising steps, although the performance gains typically flatten after a few dozen. In this work, we explore the inference-time scaling behavior of diffusion models beyond increasing denoising steps and investigate how the generation performance can further improve with increased computation. Specifically, we consider a search problem aimed at identifying better noises for the diffusion sampling process. We structure the design space along two axes: the verifiers used to provide feedback, and the algorithms used to find better noise candidates. Through extensive experiments on class-conditioned and text-conditioned image generation benchmarks, our findings reveal that increasing inference-time compute leads to substantial improvements in the quality of samples generated by diffusion models, and with the complicated nature of images, combinations of the components in the framework can be specifically chosen to conform with different application scenario.

Process reward models (PRMs) offer fine-grained, step-level evaluations that facilitate deeper reasoning processes in large language models (LLMs), proving effective in complex tasks like mathematical reasoning. However, developing PRMs is challenging due to the high cost and limited scalability of human-annotated data. Synthetic data from Monte Carlo (MC) estimation is a promising alternative but suffers from a high noise ratio, which can cause overfitting and hinder large-scale training. In this work, we conduct a preliminary study on the noise distribution in synthetic data from MC estimation, identifying that annotation models tend to both underestimate and overestimate step correctness due to limitations in their annotation capabilities. Building on these insights, we propose Self-Denoising Monte Carlo Annotation (SCAN), an efficient data synthesis and noise-tolerant learning framework. Our key findings indicate that: (1) Even lightweight models (e.g., 1.5B parameters) can produce high-quality annotations through a self-denoising strategy, enabling PRMs to achieve superior performance with only 6% the inference cost required by vanilla MC estimation. (2) With our robust learning strategy, PRMs can effectively learn from this weak supervision, achieving a 39.2 F1 score improvement (from 19.9 to 59.1) in ProcessBench. Despite using only a compact synthetic dataset, our models surpass strong baselines, including those trained on large-scale human-annotated datasets such as PRM800K. Furthermore, performance continues to improve as we scale up the synthetic data, highlighting the potential of SCAN for scalable, cost-efficient, and robust PRM training.

The success of Vision Language Models (VLMs) on various vision-language tasks heavily relies on pre-training with large scale web-crawled datasets. However, the noisy and incomplete nature of web data makes dataset scale crucial for performance, rendering end-to-end training increasingly prohibitive. In this paper, we propose NEVLP, a noise-robust framework for efficient vision-language pre-training that requires less pre-training data. Specifically, we bridge the modality gap between a frozen image encoder and a large language model with a transformer and introduce two innovative learning strategies: noise-adaptive learning and concept-enhanced learning to mitigate the impact of noise. In noise-adaptive learning, we estimate the noise probability of each image-text pair based on the transformer's memorization effect and employ noise-adaptive regularization on image-text contrastive learning to condition cross-modal alignment. In concept-enhanced learning, we enrich incomplete text by incorporating visual concepts (objects in the image) to provide prior information about existing objects for image-text matching and image-grounded text generation, thereby mitigating text incompletion. Our framework effectively utilizes noisy web data and achieves state-of-the-art performance with less pre-training data across a wide range of vision-language tasks, including image-text retrieval, image captioning, and visual question answering.

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.

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.

This paper presents a systematic overview and comparison of parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods covering over 40 papers published between February 2019 and February 2023. These methods aim to resolve the infeasibility and impracticality of fine-tuning large language models by only training a small set of parameters. We provide a taxonomy that covers a broad range of methods and present a detailed method comparison with a specific focus on real-life efficiency and fine-tuning multibillion-scale language models.

The new paradigm of test-time scaling has yielded remarkable breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) (e.g. reasoning models) and in generative vision models, allowing models to allocate additional computation during inference to effectively tackle increasingly complex problems. Despite the improvements of this approach, an important limitation emerges: the substantial increase in computation time makes the process slow and impractical for many applications. Given the success of this paradigm and its growing usage, we seek to preserve its benefits while eschewing the inference overhead. In this work we propose one solution to the critical problem of integrating test-time scaling knowledge into a model during post-training. Specifically, we replace reward guided test-time noise optimization in diffusion models with a Noise Hypernetwork that modulates initial input noise. We propose a theoretically grounded framework for learning this reward-tilted distribution for distilled generators, through a tractable noise-space objective that maintains fidelity to the base model while optimizing for desired characteristics. We show that our approach recovers a substantial portion of the quality gains from explicit test-time optimization at a fraction of the computational cost. Code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/HyperNoise

In this paper, we introduce a novel fine-tuning technique for language models, which involves incorporating symmetric noise into the embedding process. This method aims to enhance the model's function by more stringently regulating its local curvature, demonstrating superior performance over the current method, NEFTune. When fine-tuning the LLaMA-2-7B model using Alpaca, standard techniques yield a 29.79% score on AlpacaEval. However, our approach, SymNoise, increases this score significantly to 69.04%, using symmetric noisy embeddings. This is a 6.7% improvement over the state-of-the-art method, NEFTune~(64.69%). Furthermore, when tested on various models and stronger baseline instruction datasets, such as Evol-Instruct, ShareGPT, OpenPlatypus, SymNoise consistently outperforms NEFTune. The current literature, including NEFTune, has underscored the importance of more in-depth research into the application of noise-based strategies in the fine-tuning of language models. Our approach, SymNoise, is another significant step towards this direction, showing notable improvement over the existing state-of-the-art method.

We present a dynamic model in which the weights are conditioned on an input sample x and are learned to match those that would be obtained by finetuning a base model on x and its label y. This mapping between an input sample and network weights is approximated by a denoising diffusion model. The diffusion model we employ focuses on modifying a single layer of the base model and is conditioned on the input, activations, and output of this layer. Since the diffusion model is stochastic in nature, multiple initializations generate different networks, forming an ensemble, which leads to further improvements. Our experiments demonstrate the wide applicability of the method for image classification, 3D reconstruction, tabular data, speech separation, and natural language processing. Our code is available at https://github.com/ShaharLutatiPersonal/OCD

We introduce Noise2Music, where a series of diffusion models is trained to generate high-quality 30-second music clips from text prompts. Two types of diffusion models, a generator model, which generates an intermediate representation conditioned on text, and a cascader model, which generates high-fidelity audio conditioned on the intermediate representation and possibly the text, are trained and utilized in succession to generate high-fidelity music. We explore two options for the intermediate representation, one using a spectrogram and the other using audio with lower fidelity. We find that the generated audio is not only able to faithfully reflect key elements of the text prompt such as genre, tempo, instruments, mood, and era, but goes beyond to ground fine-grained semantics of the prompt. Pretrained large language models play a key role in this story -- they are used to generate paired text for the audio of the training set and to extract embeddings of the text prompts ingested by the diffusion models. Generated examples: https://google-research.github.io/noise2music

In this work, we build upon our previous publication and use diffusion-based generative models for speech enhancement. We present a detailed overview of the diffusion process that is based on a stochastic differential equation and delve into an extensive theoretical examination of its implications. Opposed to usual conditional generation tasks, we do not start the reverse process from pure Gaussian noise but from a mixture of noisy speech and Gaussian noise. This matches our forward process which moves from clean speech to noisy speech by including a drift term. We show that this procedure enables using only 30 diffusion steps to generate high-quality clean speech estimates. By adapting the network architecture, we are able to significantly improve the speech enhancement performance, indicating that the network, rather than the formalism, was the main limitation of our original approach. In an extensive cross-dataset evaluation, we show that the improved method can compete with recent discriminative models and achieves better generalization when evaluating on a different corpus than used for training. We complement the results with an instrumental evaluation using real-world noisy recordings and a listening experiment, in which our proposed method is rated best. Examining different sampler configurations for solving the reverse process allows us to balance the performance and computational speed of the proposed method. Moreover, we show that the proposed method is also suitable for dereverberation and thus not limited to additive background noise removal. Code and audio examples are available online, see https://github.com/sp-uhh/sgmse

Diffusion models have achieved state-of-the-art synthesis quality on both visual and audio tasks, and recent works further adapt them to textual data by diffusing on the embedding space. In this paper, we conduct systematic studies and analyze the challenges between the continuous data space and the embedding space which have not been carefully explored. Firstly, the data distribution is learnable for embeddings, which may lead to the collapse of the loss function. Secondly, as the norm of embeddings varies between popular and rare words, adding the same noise scale will lead to sub-optimal results. In addition, we find the normal level of noise causes insufficient training of the model. To address the above challenges, we propose Difformer, an embedding diffusion model based on Transformer, which consists of three essential modules including an additional anchor loss function, a layer normalization module for embeddings, and a noise factor to the Gaussian noise. Experiments on two seminal text generation tasks including machine translation and text summarization show the superiority of Difformer over compared embedding diffusion baselines.

Plenty of existing work has analyzed the abilities of the transformer architecture by describing its representational capacity with formal models of computation. However, the focus so far has been on analyzing the architecture in terms of language acceptance. We contend that this is an ill-suited problem in the study of language models (LMs), which are definitionally probability distributions over strings. In this paper, we focus on the relationship between transformer LMs and n-gram LMs, a simple and historically relevant class of language models. We show that transformer LMs using the hard or sparse attention mechanisms can exactly represent any n-gram LM, giving us a concrete lower bound on their probabilistic representational capacity. This provides a first step towards understanding the mechanisms that transformer LMs can use to represent probability distributions over strings.

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.

Transformer based large language models have achieved tremendous success. However, the significant memory and computational costs incurred during the inference process make it challenging to deploy large models on resource-constrained devices. In this paper, we investigate compression and efficient inference methods for large language models from an algorithmic perspective. Regarding taxonomy, similar to smaller models, compression and acceleration algorithms for large language models can still be categorized into quantization, pruning, distillation, compact architecture design, dynamic networks. However, Large language models have two prominent characteristics compared to smaller models: (1) Most of compression algorithms require finetuning or even retraining the model after compression. The most notable aspect of large models is the very high cost associated with model finetuning or training. Therefore, many algorithms for large models, such as quantization and pruning, start to explore tuning-free algorithms. (2) Large models emphasize versatility and generalization rather than performance on a single task. Hence, many algorithms, such as knowledge distillation, focus on how to preserving their versatility and generalization after compression. Since these two characteristics were not very pronounced in early large models, we further distinguish large language models into medium models and ``real'' large models. Additionally, we also provide an introduction to some mature frameworks for efficient inference of large models, which can support basic compression or acceleration algorithms, greatly facilitating model deployment for users.

We continue the investigation into the power of smaller Transformer-based language models as initiated by TinyStories -- a 10 million parameter model that can produce coherent English -- and the follow-up work on phi-1, a 1.3 billion parameter model with Python coding performance close to the state-of-the-art. The latter work proposed to use existing Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate ``textbook quality" data as a way to enhance the learning process compared to traditional web data. We follow the ``Textbooks Are All You Need" approach, focusing this time on common sense reasoning in natural language, and create a new 1.3 billion parameter model named phi-1.5, with performance on natural language tasks comparable to models 5x larger, and surpassing most non-frontier LLMs on more complex reasoning tasks such as grade-school mathematics and basic coding. More generally, phi-1.5 exhibits many of the traits of much larger LLMs, both good -- such as the ability to ``think step by step" or perform some rudimentary in-context learning -- and bad, including hallucinations and the potential for toxic and biased generations -- encouragingly though, we are seeing improvement on that front thanks to the absence of web data. We open-source phi-1.5 to promote further research on these urgent topics.

In real-world scenarios with naturally occurring datasets, reference summaries are noisy and may contain information that cannot be inferred from the source text. On large news corpora, removing low quality samples has been shown to reduce model hallucinations. Yet, for smaller, and/or noisier corpora, filtering is detrimental to performance. To improve reference quality while retaining all data, we propose a new approach: to selectively re-write unsupported reference sentences to better reflect source data. We automatically generate a synthetic dataset of positive and negative revisions by corrupting supported sentences and learn to revise reference sentences with contrastive learning. The intensity of revisions is treated as a controllable attribute so that, at inference, diverse candidates can be over-generated-then-rescored to balance faithfulness and abstraction. To test our methods, we extract noisy references from publicly available MIMIC-III discharge summaries for the task of hospital-course summarization, and vary the data on which models are trained. According to metrics and human evaluation, models trained on revised clinical references are much more faithful, informative, and fluent than models trained on original or filtered data.

Neural networks -- especially those that use large, pre-trained language models -- have improved search engines in various ways. Most prominently, they can estimate the relevance of a passage or document to a user's query. In this work, we depart from this direction by exploring whether neural networks can effectively predict which of a document's passages are unlikely to be relevant to any query submitted to the search engine. We refer to this query-agnostic estimation of passage relevance as a passage's quality. We find that our novel methods for estimating passage quality allow passage corpora to be pruned considerably while maintaining statistically equivalent effectiveness; our best methods can consistently prune >25% of passages in a corpora, across various retrieval pipelines. Such substantial pruning reduces the operating costs of neural search engines in terms of computing resources, power usage, and carbon footprint -- both when processing queries (thanks to a smaller index size) and when indexing (lightweight models can prune low-quality passages prior to the costly dense or learned sparse encoding step). This work sets the stage for developing more advanced neural "learning-what-to-index" methods.

Retrieval-augmented generation integrates the capabilities of large language models with relevant information retrieved from an extensive corpus, yet encounters challenges when confronted with real-world noisy data. One recent solution is to train a filter module to find relevant content but only achieve suboptimal noise compression. In this paper, we propose to introduce the information bottleneck theory into retrieval-augmented generation. Our approach involves the filtration of noise by simultaneously maximizing the mutual information between compression and ground output, while minimizing the mutual information between compression and retrieved passage. In addition, we derive the formula of information bottleneck to facilitate its application in novel comprehensive evaluations, the selection of supervised fine-tuning data, and the construction of reinforcement learning rewards. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves significant improvements across various question answering datasets, not only in terms of the correctness of answer generation but also in the conciseness with 2.5% compression rate.

We marry ideas from deep neural networks and approximate Bayesian inference to derive a generalised class of deep, directed generative models, endowed with a new algorithm for scalable inference and learning. Our algorithm introduces a recognition model to represent approximate posterior distributions, and that acts as a stochastic encoder of the data. We develop stochastic back-propagation -- rules for back-propagation through stochastic variables -- and use this to develop an algorithm that allows for joint optimisation of the parameters of both the generative and recognition model. We demonstrate on several real-world data sets that the model generates realistic samples, provides accurate imputations of missing data and is a useful tool for high-dimensional data visualisation.

Language model fine-tuning is essential for modern natural language processing, but is computationally expensive and time-consuming. Further, the effectiveness of fine-tuning is limited by the inclusion of training examples that negatively affect performance. Here we present a general fine-tuning method that we call information gain filtration for improving the overall training efficiency and final performance of language model fine-tuning. We define the information gain of an example as the improvement on a test metric after training on that example. A secondary learner is then trained to approximate this quantity. During fine-tuning, this learner selects informative examples and skips uninformative ones. We show that our method has consistent improvement across datasets, fine-tuning tasks, and language model architectures. For example, we achieve a median perplexity of 54.0 on a books dataset compared to 57.3 for standard fine-tuning. We present statistical evidence that offers insight into the improvements of our method over standard fine-tuning. The generality of our method leads us to propose a new paradigm for language model fine-tuning -- we encourage researchers to release pretrained secondary learners on common corpora to promote efficient and effective fine-tuning, thereby improving the performance and reducing the overall energy footprint of language model fine-tuning.

Unsupervised pretraining, which learns a useful representation using a large amount of unlabeled data to facilitate the learning of downstream tasks, is a critical component of modern large-scale machine learning systems. Despite its tremendous empirical success, the rigorous theoretical understanding of why unsupervised pretraining generally helps remains rather limited -- most existing results are restricted to particular methods or approaches for unsupervised pretraining with specialized structural assumptions. This paper studies a generic framework, where the unsupervised representation learning task is specified by an abstract class of latent variable models Phi and the downstream task is specified by a class of prediction functions Psi. We consider a natural approach of using Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) for unsupervised pretraining and Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) for learning downstream tasks. We prove that, under a mild ''informative'' condition, our algorithm achieves an excess risk of mathcal{O}(mathcal{C_Phi/m} + mathcal{C_Psi/n}) for downstream tasks, where C_Phi, C_Psi are complexity measures of function classes Phi, Psi, and m, n are the number of unlabeled and labeled data respectively. Comparing to the baseline of mathcal{O}(mathcal{C_{Phi circ Psi}/n}) achieved by performing supervised learning using only the labeled data, our result rigorously shows the benefit of unsupervised pretraining when m gg n and C_{Phicirc Psi} > C_Psi. This paper further shows that our generic framework covers a wide range of approaches for unsupervised pretraining, including factor models, Gaussian mixture models, and contrastive learning.

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}.

Learning exists in the context of data, yet notions of confidence typically focus on model predictions, not label quality. Confident learning (CL) is an alternative approach which focuses instead on label quality by characterizing and identifying label errors in datasets, based on the principles of pruning noisy data, counting with probabilistic thresholds to estimate noise, and ranking examples to train with confidence. Whereas numerous studies have developed these principles independently, here, we combine them, building on the assumption of a class-conditional noise process to directly estimate the joint distribution between noisy (given) labels and uncorrupted (unknown) labels. This results in a generalized CL which is provably consistent and experimentally performant. We present sufficient conditions where CL exactly finds label errors, and show CL performance exceeding seven recent competitive approaches for learning with noisy labels on the CIFAR dataset. Uniquely, the CL framework is not coupled to a specific data modality or model (e.g., we use CL to find several label errors in the presumed error-free MNIST dataset and improve sentiment classification on text data in Amazon Reviews). We also employ CL on ImageNet to quantify ontological class overlap (e.g., estimating 645 "missile" images are mislabeled as their parent class "projectile"), and moderately increase model accuracy (e.g., for ResNet) by cleaning data prior to training. These results are replicable using the open-source cleanlab release.

State-of-the-art results on image recognition tasks are achieved using over-parameterized learning algorithms that (nearly) perfectly fit the training set and are known to fit well even random labels. This tendency to memorize the labels of the training data is not explained by existing theoretical analyses. Memorization of the training data also presents significant privacy risks when the training data contains sensitive personal information and thus it is important to understand whether such memorization is necessary for accurate learning. We provide the first conceptual explanation and a theoretical model for this phenomenon. Specifically, we demonstrate that for natural data distributions memorization of labels is necessary for achieving close-to-optimal generalization error. Crucially, even labels of outliers and noisy labels need to be memorized. The model is motivated and supported by the results of several recent empirical works. In our model, data is sampled from a mixture of subpopulations and our results show that memorization is necessary whenever the distribution of subpopulation frequencies is long-tailed. Image and text data is known to be long-tailed and therefore our results establish a formal link between these empirical phenomena. Our results allow to quantify the cost of limiting memorization in learning and explain the disparate effects that privacy and model compression have on different subgroups.

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.

Retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs) represent a substantial advancement in the capabilities of large language models, notably in reducing factual hallucination by leveraging external knowledge sources. However, the reliability of the retrieved information is not always guaranteed. The retrieval of irrelevant data can lead to misguided responses, and potentially causing the model to overlook its inherent knowledge, even when it possesses adequate information to address the query. Moreover, standard RALMs often struggle to assess whether they possess adequate knowledge, both intrinsic and retrieved, to provide an accurate answer. In situations where knowledge is lacking, these systems should ideally respond with "unknown" when the answer is unattainable. In response to these challenges, we introduces Chain-of-Noting (CoN), a novel approach aimed at improving the robustness of RALMs in facing noisy, irrelevant documents and in handling unknown scenarios. The core idea of CoN is to generate sequential reading notes for retrieved documents, enabling a thorough evaluation of their relevance to the given question and integrating this information to formulate the final answer. We employed ChatGPT to create training data for CoN, which was subsequently trained on an LLaMa-2 7B model. Our experiments across four open-domain QA benchmarks show that RALMs equipped with CoN significantly outperform standard RALMs. Notably, CoN achieves an average improvement of +7.9 in EM score given entirely noisy retrieved documents and +10.5 in rejection rates for real-time questions that fall outside the pre-training knowledge scope.

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.

A ranker plays an indispensable role in the de facto 'retrieval & rerank' pipeline, but its training still lags behind -- learning from moderate negatives or/and serving as an auxiliary module for a retriever. In this work, we first identify two major barriers to a robust ranker, i.e., inherent label noises caused by a well-trained retriever and non-ideal negatives sampled for a high-capable ranker. Thereby, we propose multiple retrievers as negative generators improve the ranker's robustness, where i) involving extensive out-of-distribution label noises renders the ranker against each noise distribution, and ii) diverse hard negatives from a joint distribution are relatively close to the ranker's negative distribution, leading to more challenging thus effective training. To evaluate our robust ranker (dubbed R^2anker), we conduct experiments in various settings on the popular passage retrieval benchmark, including BM25-reranking, full-ranking, retriever distillation, etc. The empirical results verify the new state-of-the-art effectiveness of our model.

It is common to reject undesired outputs of Large Language Models (LLMs); however, current methods to do so require an excessive amount of computation, or severely distort the distribution of outputs. We present a method to balance the distortion of the output distribution with computational efficiency, allowing for the generation of long sequences of text with difficult-to-satisfy constraints, with less amplification of low probability outputs compared to existing methods. We show through a series of experiments that the task-specific performance of our method is comparable to methods that do not distort the output distribution, while being much more computationally efficient.

We study the capabilities of speech processing systems trained simply to predict large amounts of transcripts of audio on the internet. When scaled to 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervision, the resulting models generalize well to standard benchmarks and are often competitive with prior fully supervised results but in a zero-shot transfer setting without the need for any fine-tuning. When compared to humans, the models approach their accuracy and robustness. We are releasing models and inference code to serve as a foundation for further work on robust speech processing.

We present STAT: a simple algorithm to prune transformer models without any fine-tuning. STAT eliminates both attention heads and neurons from the network, while preserving accuracy by calculating a correction to the weights of the next layer. Each layer block in the network is compressed using a series of principled matrix factorizations that preserve the network structure. Our entire algorithm takes minutes to compress BERT, and less than three hours to compress models with 7B parameters using a single GPU. Using only several hundred data examples, STAT preserves the output of the network and improves upon existing gradient-free pruning methods. It is even competitive with methods that include significant fine-tuning. We demonstrate our method on both encoder and decoder architectures, including BERT, DistilBERT, and Llama-2 using benchmarks such as GLUE, Squad, WikiText2.

This paper addresses a regression problem in which output label values are the results of sensing the magnitude of a phenomenon. A low value of such labels can mean either that the actual magnitude of the phenomenon was low or that the sensor made an incomplete observation. This leads to a bias toward lower values in labels and the resultant learning because labels may have lower values due to incomplete observations, even if the actual magnitude of the phenomenon was high. Moreover, because an incomplete observation does not provide any tags indicating incompleteness, we cannot eliminate or impute them. To address this issue, we propose a learning algorithm that explicitly models incomplete observations corrupted with an asymmetric noise that always has a negative value. We show that our algorithm is unbiased as if it were learned from uncorrupted data that does not involve incomplete observations. We demonstrate the advantages of our algorithm through numerical experiments.

We investigate the rate at which algorithms for pre-training language models have improved since the advent of deep learning. Using a dataset of over 200 language model evaluations on Wikitext and Penn Treebank spanning 2012-2023, we find that the compute required to reach a set performance threshold has halved approximately every 8 months, with a 95% confidence interval of around 5 to 14 months, substantially faster than hardware gains per Moore's Law. We estimate augmented scaling laws, which enable us to quantify algorithmic progress and determine the relative contributions of scaling models versus innovations in training algorithms. Despite the rapid pace of algorithmic progress and the development of new architectures such as the transformer, our analysis reveals that the increase in compute made an even larger contribution to overall performance improvements over this time period. Though limited by noisy benchmark data, our analysis quantifies the rapid progress in language modeling, shedding light on the relative contributions from compute and algorithms.

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.

In-context learning refers to the emerging ability of large language models (LLMs) to perform a target task without additional training, utilizing demonstrations of the task. Recent studies aim to enhance in-context learning performance by selecting more useful demonstrations. However, they overlook the presence of inevitable noisy labels in task demonstrations that arise during the labeling process in the real-world. In this paper, we propose a new task, in-context learning with noisy labels, which aims to solve real-world problems for in-context learning where labels in task demonstrations would be corrupted. Moreover, we propose a new method and baseline methods for the new task, inspired by studies in learning with noisy labels. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed method can serve as a safeguard against performance degradation in in-context learning caused by noisy labels.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown significant promise in question-answering (QA) tasks, particularly in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) scenarios and long-context applications. However, their performance is hindered by noisy reference documents, which often distract from essential information. Despite fine-tuning efforts, Transformer-based architectures struggle to prioritize relevant content. This is evidenced by their tendency to allocate disproportionate attention to irrelevant or later-positioned documents. Recent work proposes the differential attention mechanism to address this issue, but this mechanism is limited by an unsuitable common-mode rejection ratio (CMRR) and high computational costs. Inspired by the operational amplifier (OpAmp), we propose the OpAmp adaptation to address these challenges, which is implemented with adapters efficiently. By integrating the adapter into pre-trained Transformer blocks, our approach enhances focus on the golden context without costly training from scratch. Empirical evaluations on noisy-context benchmarks reveal that our Qwen2.5-OpAmp-72B model, trained with our OpAmp adaptation, surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art LLMs, including DeepSeek-V3 and GPT-4o.

In recent years, the community of 'explainable artificial intelligence' (XAI) has created a vast body of methods to bridge a perceived gap between model 'complexity' and 'interpretability'. However, a concrete problem to be solved by XAI methods has not yet been formally stated. As a result, XAI methods are lacking theoretical and empirical evidence for the 'correctness' of their explanations, limiting their potential use for quality-control and transparency purposes. At the same time, Haufe et al. (2014) showed, using simple toy examples, that even standard interpretations of linear models can be highly misleading. Specifically, high importance may be attributed to so-called suppressor variables lacking any statistical relation to the prediction target. This behavior has been confirmed empirically for a large array of XAI methods in Wilming et al. (2022). Here, we go one step further by deriving analytical expressions for the behavior of a variety of popular XAI methods on a simple two-dimensional binary classification problem involving Gaussian class-conditional distributions. We show that the majority of the studied approaches will attribute non-zero importance to a non-class-related suppressor feature in the presence of correlated noise. This poses important limitations on the interpretations and conclusions that the outputs of these XAI methods can afford.

Despite being trained specifically to follow user instructions, today's instructiontuned language models perform poorly when instructed to produce random outputs. For example, when prompted to pick a number uniformly between one and ten Llama-2-13B-chat disproportionately favors the number five, and when tasked with picking a first name at random, Mistral-7B-Instruct chooses Avery 40 times more often than we would expect based on the U.S. population. When these language models are used for real-world tasks where diversity of outputs is crucial, such as language model assisted dataset construction, their inability to produce diffuse distributions over valid choices is a major hurdle. In this work, we propose a fine-tuning method that encourages language models to output distributions that are diffuse over valid outcomes. The methods we introduce generalize across a variety of tasks and distributions and make large language models practical for synthetic dataset generation with little human intervention.

Large language models (LLMs) have grown in their usage to provide support for question answering across numerous disciplines. The models on their own have already shown promise for answering basic questions, however fail quickly where expert domain knowledge is required or the question is nuanced. Scientific research often involves searching for relevant literature, distilling pertinent information from that literature and analysing how the findings support or contradict one another. The information is often encapsulated in the full text body of research articles, rather than just in the abstracts. Statements within these articles frequently require the wider article context to be fully understood. We have built an LLM-based system that performs such search and distillation of information encapsulated in scientific literature, and we evaluate our keyword based search and information distillation system against a set of biology related questions from previously released literature benchmarks. We demonstrate sparse retrieval methods exhibit results close to state of the art without the need for dense retrieval, with its associated infrastructure and complexity overhead. We also show how to increase the coverage of relevant documents for literature review generation.