Most evaluation metrics for binary classification are derived from the confusion matrix, which is inherently non-differentiable because it relies on discrete predictions. This limits their direct use as loss functions in gradient-based learning, creating a mismatch between training objectives and evaluation criteria. To that end, we offer a general-purpose approach, AnyLoss , that transforms any confusion-matrix-based metric into a differentiable loss function. AnyLoss employs a distinct approximation strategy to estimate a specific, targeted metric score for the prediction model. This is followed by a theoretical and practical analysis of the method, which involves conducting extensive experiments with neural network architectures ranging from simple to advanced across diverse data modalities, including tabular, image, and text. The experimental results demonstrate the generality of our new method, which can target any evaluation metrics derived from a confusion matrix, and highlight that it excels at handling imbalanced datasets.

Synthesizing 3D scenes from open-vocabulary text descriptions is a challenging, important, and recently-popular application. One of its critical subproblems is layout generation: given a set of objects, lay them out to produce a scene matching the input description. Nearly all recent work adopts a declarative paradigm for this problem: using an LLM to generate a specification of constraints between objects, then solving those constraints to produce the final layout. In contrast, we explore an alternative imperative paradigm, in which an LLM iteratively places objects, with each object’s position and orientation computed as a function of previously-placed objects. The imperative approach allows for a simpler scene specification language while also handling a wider variety and larger complexity of scenes. We further improve the robustness of our imperative scheme by developing an error correction mechanism that iteratively improves the scene’s validity while staying as close as possible to the original layout generated by the LLM. In forced-choice perceptual studies, participants preferred layouts generated by our imperative approach 82% and 94% of the time, respectively, when compared against two declarative layout generation methods. We also present a simple, automated evaluation metric for 3D scene layout generation that aligns well with human preferences.

Many evaluation metrics can be used to assess the performance of models in binary classification tasks. However, most of them are derived from a confusion matrix in a non-differentiable form, making it very difficult to generate a differentiable loss function that could directly optimize them. The lack of solutions to bridge this challenge not only hinders our ability to solve difficult tasks, such as imbalanced learning, but also requires the deployment of computationally expensive hyperparameter search processes in model selection. In this paper, we propose a general-purpose approach that transforms any confusion matrix-based metric into a loss function, AnyLoss, that is available in optimization processes. To this end, we use an approximation function to make a confusion matrix represented in a differentiable form, and this approach enables any confusion matrix-based metric to be directly used as a loss function. The mechanism of the approximation function is provided to ensure its operability and the differentiability of our loss functions is proved by suggesting their derivatives. We conduct extensive experiments under diverse neural networks with many datasets, and we demonstrate their general availability to target any confusion matrix-based metrics. Our method, especially, shows outstanding achievements in dealing with imbalanced datasets, and its competitive learning speed, compared to multiple baseline models, underscores its efficiency.