Author name cluster

Carl Vondrick

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

25 papers

2 author rows

ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Generative Data Mining with Longtail-Guided Diffusion

David S. Hayden
Mao Ye 0006
Timur Garipov
Gregory P. Meyer
Carl Vondrick
Zhao Chen
Yuning Chai
Eric M. Wolff

It is difficult to anticipate the myriad challenges that a predictive model will encounter once deployed. Common practice entails a reactive, cyclical approach: model deployment, data mining, and retraining. We instead develop a proactive longtail discovery process by imagining additional data during training. In particular, we develop general model-based longtail signals, including a differentiable, single forward pass formulation of epistemic uncertainty that does not impact model parameters or predictive performance but can flag rare or hard inputs. We leverage these signals as guidance to generate additional training data from a latent diffusion model in a process we call Longtail Guidance (LTG). Crucially, we can perform LTG without retraining the diffusion model or the predictive model, and we do not need to expose the predictive model to intermediate diffusion states. Data generated by LTG exhibit semantically meaningful variation, yield significant generalization improvements on numerous image classification benchmarks, and can be analyzed by a VLM to proactively discover, textually explain, and address conceptual gaps in a deployed predictive model.

Details

ICRA Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Self-Improving Autonomous Underwater Manipulation

Ruoshi Liu
Huy Ha
Mengxue Hou
Shuran Song
Carl Vondrick

Underwater robotic manipulation faces significant challenges due to complex fluid dynamics and unstructured environments, causing most manipulation systems to rely heavily on human teleoperation. In this paper, we introduce AquaBot, a fully autonomous manipulation system that combines behavior cloning from human demonstrations with self-learning optimization to improve beyond human teleoperation performance. With extensive real-world experiments, we demonstrate AquaBot's versatility across diverse manipulation tasks, including object grasping, trash sorting, and rescue retrieval. Our real-world experiments show that AquaBot's self-optimized policy outperforms a human operator by 41% in speed. AquaBot represents a promising step towards autonomous and self-improving underwater manipulation systems. We will open-source both hardware and software implementation details.

Details

ICLR Conference 2024 Conference Paper

INViTE: INterpret and Control Vision-Language Models with Text Explanations

Haozhe Chen
Junfeng Yang
Carl Vondrick
Chengzhi Mao

Large-scale pre-trained vision foundation models, such as CLIP, have become de facto backbones for various vision tasks. However, due to their black-box nature, understanding the underlying rules behind these models’ predictions and controlling model behaviors have remained open challenges. We present INViTE: a framework for INterpreting Vision Transformer’s latent tokens with Text Explanations. Given a latent token, INViTE retains its semantic information to the final layer using transformer’s local operations and retrieves the closest text for explanation. INViTE enables understanding of model visual reasoning procedure without needing additional model training or data collection. Based on the obtained interpretations, INViTE allows for model editing that controls model reasoning behaviors and improves model robustness against biases and spurious correlations. Our code is available at https://github.com/tonychenxyz/vit-interpret.

Details

ICLR Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Raidar: geneRative AI Detection viA Rewriting

Chengzhi Mao
Carl Vondrick
Hao Wang 0014
Junfeng Yang

We find that large language models (LLMs) are more likely to modify human-written text than AI-generated text when tasked with rewriting. This tendency arises because LLMs often perceive AI-generated text as high-quality, leading to fewer modifications. We introduce a method to detect AI-generated content by prompting LLMs to rewrite text and calculating the editing distance of the output. We dubbed our geneRative AI Detection viA Rewriting method Raidar. Raidar significantly improves the F1 detection scores of existing AI content detection models -- both academic and commercial -- across various domains, including News, creative writing, student essays, code, Yelp reviews, and arXiv papers, with gains of up to 29 points. Operating solely on word symbols without high-dimensional features, our method is compatible with black box LLMs, and is inherently robust on new content. Our results illustrate the unique imprint of machine-generated text through the lens of the machines themselves.

Details

ICLR Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Remote Sensing Vision-Language Foundation Models without Annotations via Ground Remote Alignment

Utkarsh Mall
Cheng Perng Phoo
Meilin Kelsey Liu
Carl Vondrick
Bharath Hariharan
Kavita Bala

We introduce a method to train vision-language models for remote-sensing images without using any textual annotations. Our key insight is to use co-located internet imagery taken on the ground as an intermediary for connecting remote-sensing images and language. Specifically, we train an image encoder for remote sensing images to align with the image encoder of CLIP using a large amount of paired internet and satellite images. Our unsupervised approach enables the training of a first-of-its-kind large scale VLM for remote sensing images at two different resolutions. We show that these VLMs enable zero-shot, open-vocabulary image classification, retrieval, segmentation and visual question answering for satellite images. On each of these tasks, our VLM trained without textual annotations outperforms existing VLMs trained with supervision, with gains of up to 20\% for classification and 80\% for segmentation.

Details

ICML Conference 2024 Conference Paper

SelfIE: Self-Interpretation of Large Language Model Embeddings

Haozhe Chen
Carl Vondrick
Chengzhi Mao

How do large language models (LLMs) obtain their answers? The ability to explain and control an LLM’s reasoning process is key for reliability, transparency, and future model developments. We propose SelfIE (Self-Interpretation of Embeddings), a framework that enables LLMs to interpret their own embeddings in natural language by leveraging their ability to respond to inquiries about a given passage. Capable of interpreting open-world concepts in the hidden embeddings, SelfIE reveals LLM internal reasoning in cases such as making ethical decisions, internalizing prompt injection, and recalling harmful knowledge. SelfIE’s text descriptions on hidden embeddings open avenues to control LLM reasoning. We propose Supervised Control, which allows editing open-ended concepts while only requiring gradient computation of individual layer. We extend RLHF to hidden embeddings and propose Reinforcement Control that erases harmful knowledge in LLM without supervision targets.

Details

ICLR Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Sin3DM: Learning a Diffusion Model from a Single 3D Textured Shape

Rundi Wu
Ruoshi Liu
Carl Vondrick
Changxi Zheng

Synthesizing novel 3D models that resemble the input example as long been pursued by graphics artists and machine learning researchers. In this paper, we present Sin3DM, a diffusion model that learns the internal patch distribution from a single 3D textured shape and generates high-quality variations with fine geometry and texture details. Training a diffusion model directly in 3D would induce large memory and computational cost. Therefore, we first compress the input into a lower-dimensional latent space and then train a diffusion model on it. Specifically, we encode the input 3D textured shape into triplane feature maps that represent the signed distance and texture fields of the input. The denoising network of our diffusion model has a limited receptive field to avoid overfitting, and uses triplane-aware 2D convolution blocks to improve the result quality. Aside from randomly generating new samples, our model also facilitates applications such as retargeting, outpainting and local editing. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluation, we show that our method outperforms prior methods in generation quality of 3D shapes.

Details

NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

ClimSim: A large multi-scale dataset for hybrid physics-ML climate emulation

Sungduk Yu
Walter Hannah
Liran Peng
Jerry Lin
Mohamed Aziz Bhouri
Ritwik Gupta
Björn Lütjens
Justus C. Will

Modern climate projections lack adequate spatial and temporal resolution due to computational constraints. A consequence is inaccurate and imprecise predictions of critical processes such as storms. Hybrid methods that combine physics with machine learning (ML) have introduced a new generation of higher fidelity climate simulators that can sidestep Moore's Law by outsourcing compute-hungry, short, high-resolution simulations to ML emulators. However, this hybrid ML-physics simulation approach requires domain-specific treatment and has been inaccessible to ML experts because of lack of training data and relevant, easy-to-use workflows. We present ClimSim, the largest-ever dataset designed for hybrid ML-physics research. It comprises multi-scale climate simulations, developed by a consortium of climate scientists and ML researchers. It consists of 5. 7 billion pairs of multivariate input and output vectors that isolate the influence of locally-nested, high-resolution, high-fidelity physics on a host climate simulator's macro-scale physical state. The dataset is global in coverage, spans multiple years at high sampling frequency, and is designed such that resulting emulators are compatible with downstream coupling into operational climate simulators. We implement a range of deterministic and stochastic regression baselines to highlight the ML challenges and their scoring. The data (https: //huggingface. co/datasets/LEAP/ClimSim_high-res) and code (https: //leap-stc. github. io/ClimSim) are released openly to support the development of hybrid ML-physics and high-fidelity climate simulations for the benefit of science and society.

PDF Details

NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Objaverse-XL: A Universe of 10M+ 3D Objects

Matt Deitke
Ruoshi Liu
Matthew Wallingford
Huong Ngo
Oscar Michel
Aditya Kusupati
Alan Fan
Christian Laforte

Natural language processing and 2D vision models have attained remarkable proficiency on many tasks primarily by escalating the scale of training data. However, 3D vision tasks have not seen the same progress, in part due to the challenges of acquiring high-quality 3D data. In this work, we present Objaverse-XL, a dataset of over 10 million 3D objects. Our compilation comprises deduplicated 3D objects from a diverse set of sources, including manually designed objects, photogrammetry scans of landmarks and everyday items, and professional scans of historic and antique artifacts. Representing the largest scale and diversity in the realm of 3D datasets, Objaverse-XL enables significant new possibilities for 3D vision. Our experiments demonstrate the vast improvements enabled with the scale provided by Objaverse-XL. We show that by training Zero123 on novel view synthesis, utilizing over 100 million multi-view rendered images, we achieve strong zero-shot generalization abilities. We hope that releasing Objaverse-XL will enable further innovations in the field of 3D vision at scale.

PDF Details

ICML Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Robust Perception through Equivariance

Chengzhi Mao
Lingyu Zhang
Abhishek Vaibhav Joshi
Junfeng Yang
Hao Wang 0014
Carl Vondrick

Deep networks for computer vision are not reliable when they encounter adversarial examples. In this paper, we introduce a framework that uses the dense intrinsic constraints in natural images to robustify inference. By introducing constraints at inference time, we can shift the burden of robustness from training to testing, thereby allowing the model to dynamically adjust to each individual image’s unique and potentially novel characteristics at inference time. Our theoretical results show the importance of having dense constraints at inference time. In contrast to existing single-constraint methods, we propose to use equivariance, which naturally allows dense constraints at a fine-grained level in the feature space. Our empirical experiments show that restoring feature equivariance at inference time defends against worst-case adversarial perturbations. The method obtains improved adversarial robustness on four datasets (ImageNet, Cityscapes, PASCAL VOC, and MS-COCO) on image recognition, semantic segmentation, and instance segmentation tasks.

Details

ICLR Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Understanding Zero-shot Adversarial Robustness for Large-Scale Models

Chengzhi Mao
Scott Geng
Junfeng Yang
Xin Wang 0066
Carl Vondrick

Pretrained large-scale vision-language models like CLIP have exhibited strong generalization over unseen tasks. Yet imperceptible adversarial perturbations can significantly reduce CLIP's performance on new tasks. In this work, we identify and explore the problem of adapting large-scale models for zero-shot adversarial robustness. We first identify two key factors during model adaption--training losses and adaptation methods--that affect the model's zero-shot adversarial robustness. We then propose a text-guided contrastive adversarial training loss, which aligns the text embeddings and the adversarial visual features with contrastive learning on a small set of training data. We apply this training loss to two adaption methods, model finetuning and visual prompt tuning. We find that visual prompt tuning is more effective in the absence of texts, while finetuning wins in the existence of text guidance. Overall, our approach significantly improves the zero-shot adversarial robustness over CLIP, seeing an average improvement of 31 points over ImageNet and 15 zero-shot datasets. We hope this work can shed light on understanding the zero-shot adversarial robustness of large-scale models.

Details

ICLR Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Visual Classification via Description from Large Language Models

Sachit Menon
Carl Vondrick

Vision-language models such as CLIP have shown promising performance on a variety of recognition tasks using the standard zero-shot classification procedure -- computing similarity between the query image and the embedded words for each category. By only using the category name, they neglect to make use of the rich context of additional information that language affords. The procedure gives no intermediate understanding of why a category is chosen, and furthermore provides no mechanism for adjusting the criteria used towards this decision. We present an alternative framework for classification with VLMs, which we call classification by description. We ask VLMs to check for descriptive features rather than broad categories: to find a tiger, look for its stripes; its claws; and more. By basing decisions on these descriptors, we can provide additional cues that encourage using the features we want to be used. In the process, we can get a clear idea of what the model ``thinks" it is seeing to make its decision; it gains some level of inherent explainability. We query large language models (e.g., GPT-3) for these descriptors to obtain them in a scalable way. Extensive experiments show our framework has numerous advantages past interpretability. We show improvements in accuracy on ImageNet across distribution shifts; demonstrate the ability to adapt VLMs to recognize concepts unseen during training; and illustrate how descriptors can be edited to effectively mitigate bias compared to the baseline.

Details

ICLR Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Discrete Representations Strengthen Vision Transformer Robustness

Chengzhi Mao
Lu Jiang 0004
Mostafa Dehghani 0001
Carl Vondrick
Rahul Sukthankar
Irfan Essa

Vision Transformer (ViT) is emerging as the state-of-the-art architecture for image recognition. While recent studies suggest that ViTs are more robust than their convolutional counterparts, our experiments find that ViTs are overly reliant on local features (\eg, nuisances and texture) and fail to make adequate use of global context (\eg, shape and structure). As a result, ViTs fail to generalize to out-of-distribution, real-world data. To address this deficiency, we present a simple and effective architecture modification to ViT's input layer by adding discrete tokens produced by a vector-quantized encoder. Different from the standard continuous pixel tokens, discrete tokens are invariant under small perturbations and contain less information individually, which promote ViTs to learn global information that is invariant. Experimental results demonstrate that adding discrete representation on four architecture variants strengthens ViT robustness by up to 12\% across seven ImageNet robustness benchmarks while maintaining the performance on ImageNet.

Details

UAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Forget-me-not! Contrastive critics for mitigating posterior collapse

Sachit Menon
David M. Blei
Carl Vondrick

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) suffer from posterior collapse, where the powerful neural networks used for modeling and inference optimize the objective without meaningfully using the latent representation. We introduce inference critics that detect and incentivize against posterior collapse by requiring correspondence between latent variables and the observations. By connecting the critic’s objective to the literature in self-supervised contrastive representation learning, we show both theoretically and empirically that optimizing inference critics increases the mutual information between observations and latents, mitigating posterior collapse. This approach is straightforward to implement and requires significantly less training time than prior methods, yet obtains competitive results on three established datasets. Overall, the approach lays the foundation to bridge the previously disconnected frameworks of contrastive learning and probabilistic modeling with variational autoencoders, underscoring the benefits both communities may find at their intersection.

Details

NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Private Multiparty Perception for Navigation

Hui Lu
Mia Chiquier
Carl Vondrick

We introduce a framework for navigating through cluttered environments by connecting multiple cameras together while simultanously preserving privacy. Occlusions and obstacles in large environments are often challenging situations for navigation agents because the environment is not fully observable from a single camera view. Given multiple camera views of an environment, our approach learns to produce a multiview scene representation that can only be used for navigation, provably preventing one party from inferring anything beyond the output task. On a new navigation dataset that we will publicly release, experiments show that private multiparty representations allow navigation through complex scenes and around obstacles while jointly preserving privacy. Our approach scales to an arbitrary number of camera viewpoints. We believe developing visual representations that preserve privacy is increasingly important for many applications such as navigation.

PDF Details

ICLR Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Real-Time Neural Voice Camouflage

Mia Chiquier
Chengzhi Mao
Carl Vondrick

Automatic speech recognition systems have created exciting possibilities for applications, however they also enable opportunities for systematic eavesdropping.We propose a method to camouflage a person's voice from these systems without inconveniencing the conversation between people in the room. Standard adversarial attacks are not effective in real-time streaming situations because the characteristics of the signal will have changed by the time the attack is executed. We introduce predictive adversarial attacks, which achieves real-time performance by forecasting the attack vector that will be the most effective in the future. Under real-time constraints, our method jams the established speech recognition system DeepSpeech 3.9x more than online projected gradient descent as measured through word error rate, and 6.6x more as measured through character error rate. We furthermore demonstrate our approach is practically effective in realistic environments with complex scene geometries.

Details

NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Representing Spatial Trajectories as Distributions

Didac Suris Coll-Vinent
Carl Vondrick

We introduce a representation learning framework for spatial trajectories. We represent partial observations of trajectories as probability distributions in a learned latent space, which characterize the uncertainty about unobserved parts of the trajectory. Our framework allows us to obtain samples from a trajectory for any continuous point in time—both interpolating and extrapolating. Our flexible approach supports directly modifying specific attributes of a trajectory, such as its pace, as well as combining different partial observations into single representations. Experiments show our method's superiority over baselines in prediction tasks.

PDF Details

AAAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Towards a Unifying Framework for Formal Theories of Novelty

Terrance Boult
Przemyslaw Grabowicz
Derek Prijatelj
Roni Stern
Lawrence Holder
Joshua Alspector
Mohsen M. Jafarzadeh
Toqueer Ahmad

Managing inputs that are novel, unknown, or out-ofdistribution is critical as an agent moves from the lab to the open world. Novelty-related problems include being tolerant to novel perturbations of the normal input, detecting when the input includes novel items, and adapting to novel inputs. While significant research has been undertaken in these areas, a noticeable gap exists in the lack of a formalized definition of novelty that transcends problem domains. As a team of researchers spanning multiple research groups and different domains, we have seen, first hand, the difficulties that arise from ill-specified novelty problems, as well as inconsistent definitions and terminology. Therefore, we present the first unified framework for formal theories of novelty and use the framework to formally define a family of novelty types. Our framework can be applied across a wide range of domains, from symbolic AI to reinforcement learning, and beyond to open world image recognition. Thus, it can be used to help kick-start new research efforts and accelerate ongoing work on these important novelty-related problems.

PDF Details

NeurIPS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Listening to Sounds of Silence for Speech Denoising

Ruilin Xu
Rundi Wu
Yuko Ishiwaka
Carl Vondrick
Changxi Zheng

We introduce a deep learning model for speech denoising, a long-standing challenge in audio analysis arising in numerous applications. Our approach is based on a key observation about human speech: there is often a short pause between each sentence or word. In a recorded speech signal, those pauses introduce a series of time periods during which only noise is present. We leverage these incidental silent intervals to learn a model for automatic speech denoising given only mono-channel audio. Detected silent intervals over time expose not just pure noise but its time-varying features, allowing the model to learn noise dynamics and suppress it from the speech signal. Experiments on multiple datasets confirm the pivotal role of silent interval detection for speech denoising, and our method outperforms several state-of-the-art denoising methods, including those that accept only audio input (like ours) and those that denoise based on audiovisual input (and hence require more information). We also show that our method enjoys excellent generalization properties, such as denoising spoken languages not seen during training.

PDF Details

NeurIPS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Metric Learning for Adversarial Robustness

Chengzhi Mao
Ziyuan Zhong
Junfeng Yang
Carl Vondrick
Baishakhi Ray

Deep networks are well-known to be fragile to adversarial attacks. We conduct an empirical analysis of deep representations under the state-of-the-art attack method called PGD, and find that the attack causes the internal representation to shift closer to the ``false'' class. Motivated by this observation, we propose to regularize the representation space under attack with metric learning to produce more robust classifiers. By carefully sampling examples for metric learning, our learned representation not only increases robustness, but also detects previously unseen adversarial samples. Quantitative experiments show improvement of robustness accuracy by up to 4% and detection efficiency by up to 6% according to Area Under Curve score over prior work. The code of our work is available at https: //github. com/columbia/Metric Learning Adversarial_Robustness.

PDF Details

NeurIPS Conference 2016 Conference Paper

Generating Videos with Scene Dynamics

Carl Vondrick
Hamed Pirsiavash
Antonio Torralba

We capitalize on large amounts of unlabeled video in order to learn a model of scene dynamics for both video recognition tasks (e. g. action classification) and video generation tasks (e. g. future prediction). We propose a generative adversarial network for video with a spatio-temporal convolutional architecture that untangles the scene's foreground from the background. Experiments suggest this model can generate tiny videos up to a second at full frame rate better than simple baselines, and we show its utility at predicting plausible futures of static images. Moreover, experiments and visualizations show the model internally learns useful features for recognizing actions with minimal supervision, suggesting scene dynamics are a promising signal for representation learning. We believe generative video models can impact many applications in video understanding and simulation.

PDF Details

NeurIPS Conference 2016 Conference Paper

SoundNet: Learning Sound Representations from Unlabeled Video

Yusuf Aytar
Carl Vondrick
Antonio Torralba

We learn rich natural sound representations by capitalizing on large amounts of unlabeled sound data collected in the wild. We leverage the natural synchronization between vision and sound to learn an acoustic representation using two-million unlabeled videos. Unlabeled video has the advantage that it can be economically acquired at massive scales, yet contains useful signals about natural sound. We propose a student-teacher training procedure which transfers discriminative visual knowledge from well established visual recognition models into the sound modality using unlabeled video as a bridge. Our sound representation yields significant performance improvements over the state-of-the-art results on standard benchmarks for acoustic scene/object classification. Visualizations suggest some high-level semantics automatically emerge in the sound network, even though it is trained without ground truth labels.

PDF Details

NeurIPS Conference 2015 Conference Paper

Learning visual biases from human imagination

Carl Vondrick
Hamed Pirsiavash
Aude Oliva
Antonio Torralba

Although the human visual system can recognize many concepts under challengingconditions, it still has some biases. In this paper, we investigate whether wecan extract these biases and transfer them into a machine recognition system. We introduce a novel method that, inspired by well-known tools in humanpsychophysics, estimates the biases that the human visual system might use forrecognition, but in computer vision feature spaces. Our experiments aresurprising, and suggest that classifiers from the human visual system can betransferred into a machine with some success. Since these classifiers seem tocapture favorable biases in the human visual system, we further present an SVMformulation that constrains the orientation of the SVM hyperplane to agree withthe bias from human visual system. Our results suggest that transferring thishuman bias into machines may help object recognition systems generalize acrossdatasets and perform better when very little training data is available.

PDF Details

NeurIPS Conference 2015 Conference Paper

Where are they looking?

Adria Recasens
Aditya Khosla
Carl Vondrick
Antonio Torralba

Humans have the remarkable ability to follow the gaze of other people to identify what they are looking at. Following eye gaze, or gaze-following, is an important ability that allows us to understand what other people are thinking, the actions they are performing, and even predict what they might do next. Despite the importance of this topic, this problem has only been studied in limited scenarios within the computer vision community. In this paper, we propose a deep neural network-based approach for gaze-following and a new benchmark dataset for thorough evaluation. Given an image and the location of a head, our approach follows the gaze of the person and identifies the object being looked at. After training, the network is able to discover how to extract head pose and gaze orientation, and to select objects in the scene that are in the predicted line of sight and likely to be looked at (such as televisions, balls and food). The quantitative evaluation shows that our approach produces reliable results, even when viewing only the back of the head. While our method outperforms several baseline approaches, we are still far from reaching human performance at this task. Overall, we believe that this is a challenging and important task that deserves more attention from the community.

PDF Details

NeurIPS Conference 2011 Conference Paper

Video Annotation and Tracking with Active Learning

Carl Vondrick
Deva Ramanan

We introduce a novel active learning framework for video annotation. By judiciously choosing which frames a user should annotate, we can obtain highly accurate tracks with minimal user effort. We cast this problem as one of active learning, and show that we can obtain excellent performance by querying frames that, if annotated, would produce a large expected change in the estimated object track. We implement a constrained tracker and compute the expected change for putative annotations with efficient dynamic programming algorithms. We demonstrate our framework on four datasets, including two benchmark datasets constructed with key frame annotations obtained by Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our results indicate that we could obtain equivalent labels for a small fraction of the original cost.

PDF Details