Publications

Learning to Adapt Frozen CLIP for Few-Shot Test-Time Domain Adaptation
Zhixiang Chi
Li Gu
Huan Liu
Ziqiang Wang
Yanan Wu
Yang Wang
Konstantinos N Plataniotis
Few-shot Test-Time Domain Adaptation focuses on adapting a model at test time to a specific domain using only a few unlabeled examples, addr… (see more)essing domain shift. Prior methods leverage CLIP's strong out-of-distribution (OOD) abilities by generating domain-specific prompts to guide its generalized, frozen features. However, since downstream datasets are not explicitly seen by CLIP, solely depending on the feature space knowledge is constrained by CLIP's prior knowledge. Notably, when using a less robust backbone like ViT-B/16, performance significantly drops on challenging real-world benchmarks. Departing from the state-of-the-art of inheriting the intrinsic OOD capability of CLIP, this work introduces learning directly on the input space to complement the dataset-specific knowledge for frozen CLIP. Specifically, an independent side branch is attached in parallel with CLIP and enforced to learn exclusive knowledge via revert attention. To better capture the dataset-specific label semantics for downstream adaptation, we propose to enhance the inter-dispersion among text features via greedy text ensemble and refinement. The text and visual features are then progressively fused in a domain-aware manner by a generated domain prompt to adapt toward a specific domain. Extensive experiments show our method's superiority on 5 large-scale benchmarks (WILDS and DomainNet), notably improving over smaller networks like ViT-B/16 with gains of \textbf{+5.1} in F1 for iWildCam and \textbf{+3.1\%} in WC Acc for FMoW.
2025-04-22
International Conference on Learning Representations (Accept (Poster))
doi.org
openreview.net
Multilingual Hallucination Gaps
Cléa Chataigner
Afaf Taïk
Golnoosh Farnadi
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as alternatives to traditional searchengines given their capacity to generate text that r… (see more)esembles human language. However, thisshift is concerning, as LLMs often generate hallucinations—misleading or false informationthat appears highly credible. In this study, we explore the phenomenon of hallucinationsacross multiple languages in free-form text generation, focusing on what we call multilingualhallucination gaps. These gaps reflect differences in the frequency of hallucinated answersdepending on the prompt and language used. To quantify such hallucinations, we used theFActScore metric and extended its framework to a multilingual setting. We conductedexperiments using LLMs from the LLaMA, Qwen, and Aya families, generating biographiesin 19 languages and comparing the results to Wikipedia pages. Our results reveal varia-tions in hallucination rates, especially between high- and low-resource languages, raisingimportant questions about LLM multilingual performance and the challenges in evaluatinghallucinations in multilingual free-form text generation.
2025-04-22
Proceedings of the Algorithmic Fairness Through the Lens of Metrics and Evaluation (published)
proceedings.mlr.press
proceedings.mlr.press
Multi-Modal and Multi-Attribute Generation of Single Cells with CFGen
Alessandro Palma
Till Richter
Hanyi Zhang
Manuel Lubetzki
Alexander Tong
Andrea Dittadi
Fabian J. Theis
Generative modeling of single-cell RNA-seq data is crucial for tasks like trajectory inference, batch effect removal, and simulation of real… (see more)istic cellular data. However, recent deep generative models simulating synthetic single cells from noise operate on pre-processed continuous gene expression approximations, overlooking the discrete nature of single-cell data, which limits their effectiveness and hinders the incorporation of robust noise models. Additionally, aspects like controllable multi-modal and multi-label generation of cellular data remain underexplored. This work introduces CellFlow for Generation (CFGen), a flow-based conditional generative model that preserves the inherent discreteness of single-cell data. CFGen generates whole-genome multi-modal single-cell data reliably, improving the recovery of crucial biological data characteristics while tackling relevant generative tasks such as rare cell type augmentation and batch correction. We also introduce a novel framework for compositional data generation using Flow Matching. By showcasing CFGen on a diverse set of biological datasets and settings, we provide evidence of its value to the fields of computational biology and deep generative models.
2025-04-22
International Conference on Learning Representations (Accept (Poster))
doi.org
openreview.net
Performative Prediction on Games and Mechanism Design
Antonio Gois
Mehrnaz Mofakhami
Fernando P. Santos
Simon Lacoste-Julien
Gauthier Gidel
2025-04-22
Proceedings of The 28th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (published)
doi.org
proceedings.mlr.press
Planning and Learning in Risk-Aware Restless Multi-Arm Bandits
Nima Akbarzadeh
Yossiri Adulyasak
Erick Delage
2025-04-22
Proceedings of The 28th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (published)
proceedings.mlr.press
proceedings.mlr.press
Privacy-Preserving Group Fairness in Cross-Device Federated Learning
Sikha Pentyala
Nicola Neophytou
Anderson Nascimento
Martine De Cock
Golnoosh Farnadi
Group fairness ensures that the outcome of machine learning (ML) based decision making systems are notbiased towards a certain group of peop… (see more)le defined by a sensitive attribute such as gender or ethnicity. Achievinggroup fairness in Federated Learning (FL) is challenging because mitigating bias inherently requires usingthe sensitive attribute values of all clients, while FL is aimed precisely at protecting privacy by not givingaccess to the clients’ data. As we show in this paper, this conflict between fairness and privacy in FL can beresolved by combining FL with Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) and Differential Privacy (DP). Tothis end, we propose a privacy-preserving approach to calculate group fairness notions in the cross-device FLsetting. Then, we propose two bias mitigation pre-processing and post-processing techniques in cross-deviceFL under formal privacy guarantees, without requiring the clients to disclose their sensitive attribute values.Empirical evaluations on real world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution to train fair andaccurate ML models in federated cross-device setups with privacy guarantees to the users.
2025-04-22
Proceedings of the Algorithmic Fairness Through the Lens of Metrics and Evaluation (published)
proceedings.mlr.press
proceedings.mlr.press
Q-learning for Quantile MDPs: A Decomposition, Performance, and Convergence Analysis
Jia Lin Hau
Erick Delage
Esther Derman
Mohammad Ghavamzadeh
Marek Petrik
In Markov decision processes (MDPs), quantile risk measures such as Value-at-Risk are a standard metric for modeling RL agents' preferences … (see more)for certain outcomes. This paper proposes a new Q-learning algorithm for quantile optimization in MDPs with strong convergence and performance guarantees. The algorithm leverages a new, simple dynamic program (DP) decomposition for quantile MDPs. Compared with prior work, our DP decomposition requires neither known transition probabilities nor solving complex saddle point equations and serves as a suitable foundation for other model-free RL algorithms. Our numerical results in tabular domains show that our Q-learning algorithm converges to its DP variant and outperforms earlier algorithms.
2025-04-22
Proceedings of The 28th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (published)
doi.org
proceedings.mlr.press
Recovering undersampled single-cell transcriptomes with HyperCell
Liam Hodgson
Jack Stanley
Chloé Savignac
Anwesha Bhattacharya
Badr Ait Hammou
Emmanuel Noutahi
Alisandra K. Denton
Joseph E. Powell
Guy Wolf
Smita Krishnaswamy
Danilo Bzdok
Abstract

Single-cell transcriptomic technology has now matured, allowing quantification of mRNA transcripts corres… (see more)ponding to tens of thousands of genes within a cell. However, still only a small fraction of these mRNA is captured and measured by today’s single-cell assays. There are likely hundreds of thousands of mRNA copies present within a typical human cell, yet these assays omit a majority of the transcripts that are actually present. This introduces technical noise, especially non-biological variability and excessive sparsity, which frustrates downstream analysis and potentially skews biological conclusions. To overcome these challenges, we here develop HyperCell, a probabilistic deep learning approach that explicitly models this undersampling to produce estimates of each cell’s original gene transcript abundances across the whole transcriptome. We demonstrate that our framework offers benefits in various mRNA modeling settings, by i) correctly differentiating between spurious sampling-induced and real biological zeros, outperforming existing approaches, ii) estimating the total mRNA content of cells across states to reduce contamination due to background transcripts, iii) reducing contamination due to background transcripts, and iv) helping to counteract biases that may appear during typical differential gene expression analyses using widespread normalization approaches. Our approach to correcting for the technical noise introduced by the single-cell experimental process brings us closer to studying biology, starting from the true transcriptome of cells.

2025-04-22
Research Square (preprint)
doi.org
Representation Learning via Non-Contrastive Mutual Information
Zhaohan Daniel Guo
Bernardo Avila Pires
Khimya Khetarpal
Dale Schuurmans
Bo Dai
2025-04-22
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Steering Masked Discrete Diffusion Models via Discrete Denoising Posterior Prediction
Jarrid Rector-Brooks
Mohsin Hasan
Zhangzhi Peng
Zachary Quinn
Chenghao Liu
Sarthak Mittal
Nouha Dziri
Michael Bronstein
Yoshua Bengio
Pranam Chatterjee
Alexander Tong
Avishek Joey Bose
Generative modeling of discrete data underlies important applications spanning text-based agents like ChatGPT to the design of the very buil… (see more)ding blocks of life in protein sequences. However, application domains need to exert control over the generated data by steering the generative process - typically via RLHF - to satisfy a specified property, reward, or affinity metric. In this paper, we study the problem of steering Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs), a recent class of discrete diffusion models that offer a compelling alternative to traditional autoregressive models. We introduce Discrete Denoising Posterior Prediction (DDPP), a novel framework that casts the task of steering pre-trained MDMs as a problem of probabilistic inference by learning to sample from a target Bayesian posterior. Our DDPP framework leads to a family of three novel objectives that are all simulation-free, and thus scalable while applying to general non-differentiable reward functions. Empirically, we instantiate DDPP by steering MDMs to perform class-conditional pixel-level image modeling, RLHF-based alignment of MDMs using text-based rewards, and finetuning protein language models to generate more diverse secondary structures and shorter proteins. We substantiate our designs via wet-lab validation, where we observe transient expression of reward-optimized protein sequences.
2025-04-22
International Conference on Learning Representations (Accept (Poster))
doi.org
openreview.net
On the Identifiability of Causal Abstractions
Xiusi Li
Sékou-Oumar Kaba
Siamak Ravanbakhsh
Causal representation learning (CRL) enhances machine learning models' robustness and generalizability by learning structural causal models … (see more)associated with data-generating processes. We focus on a family of CRL methods that uses contrastive data pairs in the observable space, generated before and after a random, unknown intervention, to identify the latent causal model. (Brehmer et al., 2022) showed that this is indeed possible, given that all latent variables can be intervened on individually. However, this is a highly restrictive assumption in many systems. In this work, we instead assume interventions on arbitrary subsets of latent variables, which is more realistic. We introduce a theoretical framework that calculates the degree to which we can identify a causal model, given a set of possible interventions, up to an abstraction that describes the system at a higher level of granularity.
2025-04-22
Proceedings of The 28th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (published)
doi.org
proceedings.mlr.press
The Superposition of Diffusion Models Using the Itô Density Estimator
Marta Skreta
Lazar Atanackovic
Avishek Joey Bose
Alexander Tong
Kirill Neklyudov
The Cambrian explosion of easily accessible pre-trained diffusion models suggests a demand for methods that combine multiple different pre-t… (see more)rained diffusion models without incurring the significant computational burden of re-training a larger combined model. In this paper, we cast the problem of combining multiple pre-trained diffusion models at the generation stage under a novel proposed framework termed superposition. Theoretically, we derive superposition from rigorous first principles stemming from the celebrated continuity equation and design two novel algorithms tailor-made for combining diffusion models in SuperDiff. SuperDiff leverages a new scalable Itô density estimator for the log likelihood of the diffusion SDE which incurs no additional overhead compared to the well-known Hutchinson's estimator needed for divergence calculations. We demonstrate that SuperDiff is scalable to large pre-trained diffusion models as superposition is performed solely through composition during inference, and also enjoys painless implementation as it combines different pre-trained vector fields through an automated re-weighting scheme. Notably, we show that SuperDiff is efficient during inference time, and mimics traditional composition operators such as the logical OR and the logical AND. We empirically demonstrate the utility of using SuperDiff for generating more diverse images on CIFAR-10, more faithful prompt conditioned image editing using Stable Diffusion, as well as improved conditional molecule generation and unconditional de novo structure design of proteins. https://github.com/necludov/super-diffusion
2025-04-22
ICLR (Accept (Spotlight))
doi.org
openreview.net