Arrow Research search

Author name cluster

Olivia Wiles

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.

8 papers
2 author rows

Possible papers

8

ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Century: A Framework and Dataset for Evaluating Historical Contextualisation of Sensitive Images

  • Canfer Akbulut
  • Kevin Robinson
  • Maribeth Rauh
  • Isabela Albuquerque
  • Olivia Wiles
  • Laura Weidinger
  • Verena Rieser
  • Yana Hasson

How do multi-modal generative models describe images of recent historical events and figures, whose legacies may be nuanced, multifaceted, or contested? This task necessitates not only accurate visual recognition, but also socio-cultural knowledge and cross-modal reasoning. To address this evaluation challenge, we introduce Century -- a novel dataset of sensitive historical images. This dataset consists of 1,500 images from recent history, created through an automated method combining knowledge graphs and language models with quality and diversity criteria created from the practices of museums and digital archives. We demonstrate through automated and human evaluation that this method produces a set of images that depict events and figures that are diverse across topics and represents all regions of the world. We additionally propose an evaluation framework for evaluating the historical contextualisation capabilities along dimensions of accuracy, thoroughness, and objectivity. We demonstrate this approach by using Century to evaluate four foundation models, scoring performance using both automated and human evaluation. We find that historical contextualisation of sensitive images poses a significant challenge for modern multi-modal foundation models, and offer practical recommendations for how developers can use Century to evaluate improvements to models and applications.

ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Revisiting text-to-image evaluation with Gecko: on metrics, prompts, and human rating

  • Olivia Wiles
  • Chuhan Zhang
  • Isabela Albuquerque
  • Ivana Kajic
  • Su Wang 0001
  • Emanuele Bugliarello
  • Yasumasa Onoe
  • Pinelopi Papalampidi

While text-to-image (T2I) generative models have become ubiquitous, they do not necessarily generate images that align with a given prompt. While many metrics and benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate T2I models and alignment metrics, the impact of the evaluation components (prompt sets, human annotations, evaluation task) has not been systematically measured. We find that looking at only *one slice of data*, i.e. one set of capabilities or human annotations, is not enough to obtain stable conclusions that generalise to new conditions or slices when evaluating T2I models or alignment metrics. We address this by introducing an evaluation suite of $>$100K annotations across four human annotation templates that comprehensively evaluates models' capabilities across a range of methods for gathering human annotations and comparing models. In particular, we propose (1) a carefully curated set of prompts -- *Gecko2K*; (2) a statistically grounded method of comparing T2I models; and (3) how to systematically evaluate metrics under three *evaluation tasks* -- *model ordering, pair-wise instance scoring, point-wise instance scoring*. Using this evaluation suite, we evaluate a wide range of metrics and find that a metric may do better in one setting but worse in another. As a result, we introduce a new, interpretable auto-eval metric that is consistently better correlated with human ratings than such existing metrics on our evaluation suite--across different human templates and evaluation settings--and on TIFA160.

ICML Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Evaluating Model Bias Requires Characterizing its Mistakes

  • Isabela Albuquerque
  • Jessica Schrouff
  • David Warde-Farley
  • A. Taylan Cemgil
  • Sven Gowal
  • Olivia Wiles

The ability to properly benchmark model performance in the face of spurious correlations is important to both build better predictors and increase confidence that models are operating as intended. We demonstrate that characterizing (as opposed to simply quantifying) model mistakes across subgroups is pivotal to properly reflect model biases, which are ignored by standard metrics such as worst-group accuracy or accuracy gap. Inspired by the hypothesis testing framework, we introduce SkewSize, a principled and flexible metric that captures bias from mistakes in a model’s predictions. It can be used in multi-class settings or generalised to the open vocabulary setting of generative models. SkewSize is an aggregation of the effect size of the interaction between two categorical variables: the spurious variable representing the bias attribute the model’s prediction. We demonstrate the utility of SkewSize in multiple settings including: standard vision models trained on synthetic data, vision models trained on ImageNet, and large scale vision-and-language models from the BLIP-2 family. In each case, the proposed SkewSize is able to highlight biases not captured by other metrics, while also providing insights on the impact of recently proposed techniques, such as instruction tuning.

NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Evaluating Numerical Reasoning in Text-to-Image Models

  • Ivana Kajić
  • Olivia Wiles
  • Isabela Albuquerque
  • Matthias Bauer
  • Su Wang
  • Jordi Pont-Tuset
  • Aida Nematzadeh

Text-to-image generative models are capable of producing high-quality images that often faithfully depict concepts described using natural language. In this work, we comprehensively evaluate a range of text-to-image models on numerical reasoning tasks of varying difficulty, and show that even the most advanced models have only rudimentary numerical skills. Specifically, their ability to correctly generate an exact number of objects in an image is limited to small numbers, it is highly dependent on the context the number term appears in, and it deteriorates quickly with each successive number. We also demonstrate that models have poor understanding of linguistic quantifiers (such as “few” or “as many as”), the concept of zero, and struggle with more advanced concepts such as fractional representations. We bundle prompts, generated images and human annotations into GeckoNum, a novel benchmark for evaluation of numerical reasoning.

ICLR Conference 2022 Conference Paper

A Fine-Grained Analysis on Distribution Shift

  • Olivia Wiles
  • Sven Gowal
  • Florian Stimberg
  • Sylvestre-Alvise Rebuffi
  • Ira Ktena
  • Krishnamurthy Dvijotham
  • A. Taylan Cemgil

Robustness to distribution shifts is critical for deploying machine learning models in the real world. Despite this necessity, there has been little work in defining the underlying mechanisms that cause these shifts and evaluating the robustness of algorithms across multiple, different distribution shifts. To this end, we introduce a framework that enables fine-grained analysis of various distribution shifts. We provide a holistic analysis of current state-of-the-art methods by evaluating 19 distinct methods grouped into five categories across both synthetic and real-world datasets. Overall, we train more than 85K models. Our experimental framework can be easily extended to include new methods, shifts, and datasets. We find, unlike previous work (Gulrajani & Lopez-Paz, 2021), that progress has been made over a standard ERM baseline; in particular, pretraining and augmentations (learned or heuristic) offer large gains in many cases. However, the best methods are not consistent over different datasets and shifts. We will open source our experimental framework, allowing future work to evaluate new methods over multiple shifts to obtain a more complete picture of a method's effectiveness. Code is available at github.com/deepmind/distribution_shift_framework.

ICLR Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Defending Against Image Corruptions Through Adversarial Augmentations

  • Dan A. Calian
  • Florian Stimberg
  • Olivia Wiles
  • Sylvestre-Alvise Rebuffi
  • András György 0001
  • Timothy A. Mann
  • Sven Gowal

Modern neural networks excel at image classification, yet they remain vulnerable to common image corruptions such as blur, speckle noise or fog. Recent methods that focus on this problem, such as AugMix and DeepAugment, introduce defenses that operate in expectation over a distribution of image corruptions. In contrast, the literature on Lp-norm bounded perturbations focuses on defenses against worst-case corruptions. In this work, we reconcile both approaches by proposing AdversarialAugment, a technique which optimizes the parameters of image-to-image models to generate adversarially corrupted augmented images. We theoretically motivate our method and give sufficient conditions for the consistency of its idealized version as well as that of DeepAugment. Our classifiers improve upon the state-of-the-art on common image corruption benchmarks conducted in expectation on CIFAR-10-C and improve worst-case performance against Lp-norm bounded perturbations on both CIFAR-10 and ImageNet.

NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Data Augmentation Can Improve Robustness

  • Sylvestre-Alvise Rebuffi
  • Sven Gowal
  • Dan Andrei Calian
  • Florian Stimberg
  • Olivia Wiles
  • Timothy A Mann

Adversarial training suffers from robust overfitting, a phenomenon where the robust test accuracy starts to decrease during training. In this paper, we focus on reducing robust overfitting by using common data augmentation schemes. We demonstrate that, contrary to previous findings, when combined with model weight averaging, data augmentation can significantly boost robust accuracy. Furthermore, we compare various augmentations techniques and observe that spatial composition techniques work the best for adversarial training. Finally, we evaluate our approach on CIFAR-10 against $\ell_\infty$ and $\ell_2$ norm-bounded perturbations of size $\epsilon = 8/255$ and $\epsilon = 128/255$, respectively. We show large absolute improvements of +2. 93% and +2. 16% in robust accuracy compared to previous state-of-the-art methods. In particular, against $\ell_\infty$ norm-bounded perturbations of size $\epsilon = 8/255$, our model reaches 60. 07% robust accuracy without using any external data. We also achieve a significant performance boost with this approach while using other architectures and datasets such as CIFAR-100, SVHN and TinyImageNet.

NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Improving Robustness using Generated Data

  • Sven Gowal
  • Sylvestre-Alvise Rebuffi
  • Olivia Wiles
  • Florian Stimberg
  • Dan Andrei Calian
  • Timothy A Mann

Recent work argues that robust training requires substantially larger datasets than those required for standard classification. On CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, this translates into a sizable robust-accuracy gap between models trained solely on data from the original training set and those trained with additional data extracted from the "80 Million Tiny Images" dataset (TI-80M). In this paper, we explore how generative models trained solely on the original training set can be leveraged to artificially increase the size of the original training set and improve adversarial robustness to $\ell_p$ norm-bounded perturbations. We identify the sufficient conditions under which incorporating additional generated data can improve robustness, and demonstrate that it is possible to significantly reduce the robust-accuracy gap to models trained with additional real data. Surprisingly, we even show that even the addition of non-realistic random data (generated by Gaussian sampling) can improve robustness. We evaluate our approach on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN and TinyImageNet against $\ell_\infty$ and $\ell_2$ norm-bounded perturbations of size $\epsilon = 8/255$ and $\epsilon = 128/255$, respectively. We show large absolute improvements in robust accuracy compared to previous state-of-the-art methods. Against $\ell_\infty$ norm-bounded perturbations of size $\epsilon = 8/255$, our models achieve 66. 10% and 33. 49% robust accuracy on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, respectively (improving upon the state-of-the-art by +8. 96% and +3. 29%). Against $\ell_2$ norm-bounded perturbations of size $\epsilon = 128/255$, our model achieves 78. 31% on CIFAR-10 (+3. 81%). These results beat most prior works that use external data.

v2026.09.13