Certified robustness is a critical measure for assessing the reliability of machine learning systems. Traditionally, the computational burden associated with certifying the robustness of machine learning models has posed a substantial challenge, particularly with the continuous expansion of model sizes. In this paper, we introduce an innovative approach to expedite the verification process for L2-norm certified robustness through sparse transfer learning. Our approach is both efficient and effective. It leverages verification results obtained from pre-training tasks and applies sparse updates to these results. To enhance performance, we incorporate dynamic sparse mask selection and introduce a novel stability-based regularizer called DiffStab. Empirical results demonstrate that our method accelerates the verification process for downstream tasks by as much as 70-80%, with only slight reductions in certified accuracy compared to dense parameter updates. We further validate that this performance improvement is even more pronounced in the few-shot transfer learning scenario.

Building a generalist model for user interface (UI) understanding is challenging due to various foundational issues, such as platform diversity, resolution variation, and data limitation. In this paper, we introduce Ferret-UI 2, a multimodal large language model (MLLM) designed for universal UI understanding across a wide range of platforms, including iPhone, Android, iPad, Webpage, and AppleTV. Building on the foundation of Ferret-UI, Ferret-UI 2 introduces three key innovations: support for multiple platform types, high-resolution perception through adaptive scaling, and advanced task training data generation powered by GPT-4o with set-of-mark visual prompting. These advancements enable Ferret-UI 2 to perform complex, user-centered interactions, making it highly versatile and adaptable for the expanding diversity of platform ecosystems. Extensive empirical experiments on referring, grounding, user-centric advanced tasks (comprising 9 subtasks $\times$ 5 platforms), GUIDE next-action prediction dataset, and GUI-World multi-platform benchmark demonstrate that Ferret-UI 2 significantly outperforms Ferret-UI, and also shows strong cross-platform transfer capabilities.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as dominant tools for various tasks, particularly when tailored for a specific target by prompt tuning. Nevertheless, concerns surrounding data privacy present obstacles due to the tuned prompts' dependency on sensitive private information. A practical solution is to host a local LLM and optimize a soft prompt privately using data. Yet, hosting a local model becomes problematic when model ownership is protected. Alternative methods, like sending data to the model's provider for training, intensify these privacy issues facing an untrusted provider. In this paper, we present a novel solution called Differentially-Private Offsite Prompt Tuning (DP-OPT) to address this challenge. Our approach involves tuning a discrete prompt on the client side and then applying it to the desired cloud models. We demonstrate that prompts suggested by LLMs themselves can be transferred without compromising performance significantly. To ensure that the prompts do not leak private information, we introduce the first private prompt generation mechanism, by a differentially-private (DP) ensemble of in-context learning with private demonstrations. With DP-OPT, generating privacy-preserving prompts by Vicuna-7b can yield competitive performance compared to non-private in-context learning on GPT3.5 or local private prompt tuning. Codes are available at https://github.com/VITA-Group/DP-OPT.

Compressing high-capability Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a favored strategy for resource-efficient inferences. While state-of-the-art (SoTA) compression methods boast impressive advancements in preserving benign task performance, the potential risks of compression in terms of safety and trustworthiness have been largely neglected. This study conducts the first, thorough evaluation of **three (3) leading LLMs** using **five (5) SoTA compression techniques** across **eight (8) trustworthiness dimensions**. Our experiments highlight the intricate interplay between compression and trustworthiness, revealing some interesting patterns. We find that quantization is currently a more effective approach than pruning in achieving efficiency and trustworthiness simultaneously. For instance, a 4-bit quantized model retains the trustworthiness of its original counterpart, but model pruning significantly degrades trustworthiness, even at 50% sparsity. Moreover, employing quantization within a moderate bit range could unexpectedly improve certain trustworthiness dimensions such as ethics and fairness. Conversely, extreme quantization to very low bit levels (3 bits) tends to reduce trustworthiness significantly. This increased risk cannot be uncovered by looking at benign performance alone, in turn, mandating comprehensive trustworthiness evaluation in practice. These findings culminate in practical recommendations for simultaneously achieving high utility, efficiency, and trustworthiness in LLMs. Code and models are available at https://decoding-comp-trust.github.io.

Sparse Neural Networks (SNNs) have received voluminous attention for mitigating the explosion in computational costs and memory footprints of modern deep neural networks. Despite their popularity, most state-of-the-art training approaches seek to find a single high-quality sparse subnetwork with a preset sparsity pattern and ratio, making them inadequate to satiate platform and resource variability. Recently proposed approaches attempt to jointly train multiple subnetworks (we term as “sparse co-training") with a fixed sparsity pattern, to allow switching sparsity ratios subject to resource requirements. In this work, we take one more step forward and expand the scope of sparse co-training to cover diverse sparsity patterns and multiple sparsity ratios at once. We introduce Sparse Cocktail, the first sparse co-training framework that co-trains a suite of sparsity patterns simultaneously, loaded with multiple sparsity ratios which facilitate harmonious switch across various sparsity patterns and ratios at inference depending on the hardware availability. More specifically, Sparse Cocktail alternatively trains subnetworks generated from different sparsity patterns with a gradual increase in sparsity ratios across patterns and relies on an unified mask generation process and the Dense Pivot Co-training to ensure the subnetworks of different patterns orchestrate their shared parameters without canceling each other’s performance. Experiment results on image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation illustrate the favorable effectiveness and flexibility of Sparse Cocktail, pointing to a promising direction for sparse co-training. Codes will be released.

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) are potentially short of the ability to learn hierarchical representation for graph embedding, which holds them back in the graph classification task. Here, we propose AttPool, which is a novel graph pooling module based on attention mechanism, to remedy the problem. It is able to select nodes that are significant for graph representation adaptively, and generate hierarchical features via aggregating the attention-weighted information in nodes. Additionally, we devise a hierarchical prediction architecture to sufficiently leverage the hierarchical representation and facilitate the model learning. The AttPool module together with the entire training structure can be integrated into existing GCNs, and is trained in an end-to-end fashion conveniently. The experimental results on several graph-classification benchmark datasets with various scales demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

In recent years, memory-augmented neural networks(MANNs) have shown promising power to enhance the memory ability of neural networks for sequential processing tasks. However, previous MANNs suffer from complex memory addressing mechanism, making them relatively hard to train and causing computational overheads. Moreover, many of them reuse the classical RNN structure such as LSTM for memory processing, causing inefficient exploitations of memory information. In this paper, we introduce a novel MANN, the Auto-addressing and Recurrent Memory Integrating Network (ARMIN) to address these issues. The ARMIN only utilizes hidden state h_t for automatic memory addressing, and uses a novel RNN cell for refined integration of memory information. Empirical results on a variety of experiments demonstrate that the ARMIN is more light-weight and efficient compared to existing memory networks. Moreover, we demonstrate that the ARMIN can achieve much lower computational overhead than vanilla LSTM while keeping similar performances. Codes are available on github.com/zoharli/armin.