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Sercan O Arik

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13 papers

1 author row

TMLR Journal 2026 Journal Article

Adversarial Attacks on Multimodal Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey

Bhavuk Jain
Sercan O Arik
HARDEO KUMAR THAKUR

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) integrate information from multiple modalities such as text, images, audio, and video, enabling complex capabilities such as visual question answering and audio translation. While powerful, this increased expressiveness introduces new and amplified vulnerabilities to adversarial manipulation. This survey provides a comprehensive and systematic analysis of adversarial threats to MLLMs, moving beyond enumerating attack techniques to explain the underlying causes of model susceptibility. We introduce a taxonomy that organizes adversarial attacks according to attacker objectives, unifying diverse attack surfaces across modalities and deployment settings. Additionally, we also present a vulnerability-centric analysis that links integrity attacks, safety and jailbreak failures, control and instruction hijacking, and training-time poisoning to shared architectural and representational weaknesses in multimodal systems. Together, this framework provides an explanatory foundation for understanding adversarial behavior in MLLMs and informs the development of more robust and secure multimodal language systems.

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TMLR Journal 2025 Journal Article

LLM-Guided Self-Supervised Tabular Learning With Task-Specific Pre-text Tasks

Sungwon Han
Seungeon Lee
Meeyoung Cha
Sercan O Arik
Jinsung Yoon

One of the most common approaches for self-supervised representation learning is defining pre-text tasks to learn data representations. Existing works determine pre-text tasks in a "task-agnostic'' way, without considering the forthcoming downstream tasks. This offers an advantage of broad applicability across tasks, but can also lead to a mismatch between task objectives, potentially degrading performance on downstream tasks. In this paper, we introduce TST-LLM, a framework that effectively reduces this mismatch when the natural language-based description of the downstream task is given without any ground-truth labels. TST-LLM instructs the LLM to use the downstream task's description and meta-information of data to discover features relevant to the target task. These discovered features are then treated as ground-truth labels to define "target-specific'' pre-text tasks. TST-LLM consistently outperforms contemporary baselines, such as STUNT and LFR, with win ratios of 95% and 81%, when applied to 22 benchmark tabular datasets, including binary and multi-class classification, and regression tasks.

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TMLR Journal 2025 Journal Article

SETS: Leveraging Self-Verification and Self-Correction for Improved Test-Time Scaling

Jiefeng Chen
Jie Ren
Xinyun Chen
Chengrun Yang
Ruoxi Sun
Jinsung Yoon
Sercan O Arik

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have created new opportunities to enhance performance on complex reasoning tasks by leveraging test-time computation. However, existing scaling methods have key limitations: parallel methods like repeated sampling are often inefficient and quickly saturate, while sequential methods like SELF-REFINE struggle to improve after a few rounds. Although combining these approaches shows promise, current methods require fine-tuned reward and revision models. This paper proposes Self-Enhanced Test-Time Scaling (SETS), a simple yet effective approach that overcomes these limitations by strategically combining parallel and sequential techniques and fully leveraging LLMs' self-improvement abilities. SETS exploits the inherent self-verification and self-correction capabilities of LLMs, unifying sampling, verification, and correction within a single framework. This facilitates efficient and scalable test-time computation for enhanced performance on complex tasks without any model training. Our comprehensive experimental results on challenging benchmarks spanning planning, reasoning, math, and coding demonstrate that SETS achieves significant performance improvements and more advantageous test-time scaling behavior than the alternatives.

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TMLR Journal 2024 Journal Article

ASPEST: Bridging the Gap Between Active Learning and Selective Prediction

Jiefeng Chen
Jinsung Yoon
Sayna Ebrahimi
Sercan O Arik
Somesh Jha
Tomas Pfister

Selective prediction aims to learn a reliable model that abstains from making predictions when uncertain. These predictions can then be deferred to humans for further evaluation. As an everlasting challenge for machine learning, in many real-world scenarios, the distribution of test data is different from the training data. This results in more inaccurate predictions, and often increased dependence on humans, which can be difficult and expensive. Active learning aims to lower the overall labeling effort, and hence human dependence, by querying the most informative examples. Selective prediction and active learning have been approached from different angles, with the connection between them missing. In this work, we introduce a new learning paradigm, active selective prediction, which aims to query more informative samples from the shifted target domain while increasing accuracy and coverage. For this new paradigm, we propose a simple yet effective approach, ASPEST, that utilizes ensembles of model snapshots with self-training with their aggregated outputs as pseudo labels. Extensive experiments on numerous image, text and structured datasets, which suffer from domain shifts, demonstrate that ASPEST can significantly outperform prior work on selective prediction and active learning (e.g. on the MNIST$\to$SVHN benchmark with the labeling budget of 100, ASPEST improves the AUACC metric from 79.36% to 88.84%) and achieves more optimal utilization of humans in the loop.

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TMLR Journal 2024 Journal Article

Provable Membership Inference Privacy

Zachary Izzo
Jinsung Yoon
Sercan O Arik
James Zou

In applications involving sensitive data, such as finance and healthcare, the necessity for preserving data privacy can be a significant barrier to machine learning model development. Differential privacy (DP) has emerged as one canonical standard for provable privacy. However, DP’s strong theoretical guarantees often come at the cost of a large drop in its utility for machine learning; and DP guarantees themselves are difficult to interpret. In this work, we propose a novel privacy notion, membership inference privacy (MIP), as a step towards addressing these challenges. We give a precise characterization of the relationship between MIP and DP, and show that in some cases, MIP can be achieved using less amount of randomness compared to the amount required for guaranteeing DP, leading to smaller drop in utility. MIP guarantees are also easily interpretable in terms of the success rate of membership inference attacks in a simple random subsampling setting. As a proof of concept, we also provide a simple algorithm for guaranteeing MIP without needing to guarantee DP.

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TMLR Journal 2024 Journal Article

SQL-PaLM: Improved large language model adaptation for Text-to-SQL

Ruoxi Sun
Sercan O Arik
Alexandre Muzio
Lesly Miculicich
Satya Kesav Gundabathula
Pengcheng Yin
Hanjun Dai
Hootan Nakhost

Text-to-SQL, the process of translating natural language into Structured Query Language (SQL), represents a transformative application of large language models (LLMs), potentially revolutionizing how humans interact with data. This paper introduces the SQL-PaLM framework, a comprehensive solution for understanding and enhancing Text-to-SQL using LLMs, using in the learning regimes of few-shot prompting and instruction fine-tuning. With few-shot prompting, we explore the effectiveness of consistency decoding with execution-based error filtering. With instruction fine-tuning, we delve deep in understanding the critical paradigms that influence the performance of tuned LLMs. In particular, we investigate how performance can be improved through expanded training data coverage and diversity, synthetic data augmentation, and integrating query-specific database content. We propose a test-time selection method to further refine accuracy by integrating SQL outputs from multiple paradigms with execution feedback as guidance. Additionally, we tackle the practical challenge of navigating intricate databases with a significant number of tables and columns, proposing efficient techniques for accurately selecting relevant database elements to enhance Text-to-SQL performance. Our holistic approach yields substantial advancements in Text-to-SQL, as demonstrated on two key public benchmarks, Spider and BIRD. Through comprehensive ablations and error analyses, we shed light on the strengths and weaknesses of our framework, offering valuable insights into Text-to-SQL's future work.

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TMLR Journal 2023 Journal Article

Interpretable Mixture of Experts

Aya Abdelsalam Ismail
Sercan O Arik
Jinsung Yoon
Ankur Taly
Soheil Feizi
Tomas Pfister

The need for reliable model explanations is prominent for many machine learning applications, particularly for tabular and time-series data as their use cases often involve high-stakes decision making. Towards this goal, we introduce a novel interpretable modeling framework, Interpretable Mixture of Experts (IME), that yields high accuracy, comparable to `black-box' Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in many cases, along with useful interpretability capabilities. IME consists of an assignment module and a mixture of experts, with each sample being assigned to a single expert for prediction. We introduce multiple options for IME based on the assignment and experts being interpretable. When the experts are chosen to be interpretable such as linear models, IME yields an inherently-interpretable architecture where the explanations produced by IME are the exact descriptions of how the prediction is computed. In addition to constituting a standalone inherently-interpretable architecture, IME has the premise of being integrated with existing DNNs to offer interpretability to a subset of samples while maintaining the accuracy of the DNNs. Through extensive experiments on 15 tabular and time-series datasets, IME is demonstrated to be more accurate than single interpretable models and perform comparably with existing state-of-the-art DNNs in accuracy. On most datasets, IME even outperforms DNNs, while providing faithful explanations. Lastly, IME's explanations are compared to commonly-used post-hoc explanations methods through a user study -- participants are able to better predict the model behavior when given IME explanations, while finding IME's explanations more faithful and trustworthy.

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TMLR Journal 2023 Journal Article

Invariant Structure Learning for Better Generalization and Causal Explainability

Yunhao Ge
Sercan O Arik
Jinsung Yoon
Ao Xu
Laurent Itti
Tomas Pfister

Learning the causal structure behind data is invaluable for improving generalization and ob- taining high-quality explanations. Towards this end, we propose a novel framework, Invariant Structure Learning (ISL), that is designed to improve causal structure discovery by utilizing generalization as an indication in the process. ISL splits the data into different environments, and learns a structure that is invariant to the target across different environments by imposing a consistency constraint. The proposed aggregation mechanism then selects the classifier based on a graph structure that reflects the causal mechanisms in the data more accurately compared to the structures learnt from individual environments. Furthermore, we extend ISL to a self-supervised learning setting, where accurate causal structure discovery does not rely on any labels. Self-supervised ISL utilizes proposals for invariant causality, by iteratively setting different nodes as targets. On synthetic and real-world datasets, we demonstrate that ISL accurately discovers the causal structure, outperforms alternative methods, and yields superior generalization for datasets with significant distribution shifts.

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TMLR Journal 2023 Journal Article

SPADE: Semi-supervised Anomaly Detection under Distribution Mismatch

Jinsung Yoon
Kihyuk Sohn
Chun-Liang Li
Sercan O Arik
Tomas Pfister

Semi-supervised anomaly detection is a common problem, as often the datasets containing anomalies are partially labeled. We propose a canonical framework: Semi-supervised Pseudo-labeler Anomaly Detection with Ensembling (SPADE) that isn't limited by the assumption that labeled and unlabeled data come from the same distribution. Indeed, the assumption is often violated in many applications -- for example, the labeled data may contain only anomalies unlike unlabeled data, or unlabeled data may contain different types of anomalies, or labeled data may contain only `easy-to-label' samples. SPADE utilizes an ensemble of one class classifiers as the pseudo-labeler to improve the robustness of pseudo-labeling with distribution mismatch. Partial matching is proposed to automatically select the critical hyper-parameters for pseudo-labeling without validation data, which is crucial with limited labeled data. SPADE shows state-of-the-art semi-supervised anomaly detection performance across a wide range of scenarios with distribution mismatch in both tabular and image domains. In some common real-world settings such as model facing new types of unlabeled anomalies, SPADE outperforms the state-of-the-art alternatives by 5% AUC in average.

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TMLR Journal 2023 Journal Article

Test-Time Adaptation for Visual Document Understanding

Sayna Ebrahimi
Sercan O Arik
Tomas Pfister

For visual document understanding (VDU), self-supervised pretraining has been shown to successfully generate transferable representations, yet, effective adaptation of such representations to distribution shifts at test-time remains to be an unexplored area. We propose DocTTA, a novel test-time adaptation method for documents, that does source-free domain adaptation using unlabeled target document data. DocTTA leverages cross-modality self-supervised learning via masked visual language modeling, as well as pseudo labeling to adapt models learned on a \textit{source} domain to an unlabeled \textit{target} domain at test time. We introduce new benchmarks using existing public datasets for various VDU tasks, including entity recognition, key-value extraction, and document visual question answering. DocTTA shows significant improvements on these compared to the source model performance, up to 1.89\% in (F1 score), 3.43\% (F1 score), and 17.68\% (ANLS score), respectively.

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TMLR Journal 2023 Journal Article

TSMixer: An All-MLP Architecture for Time Series Forecast-ing

Si-An Chen
Chun-Liang Li
Sercan O Arik
Nathanael Christian Yoder
Tomas Pfister

Real-world time-series datasets are often multivariate with complex dynamics. To capture this complexity, high capacity architectures like recurrent- or attention-based sequential deep learning models have become popular. However, recent work demonstrates that simple univariate linear models can outperform such deep learning models on several commonly used academic benchmarks. Extending them, in this paper, we investigate the capabilities of linear models for time-series forecasting and present Time-Series Mixer (TSMixer), a novel architecture designed by stacking multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs). TSMixer is based on mixing operations along both the time and feature dimensions to extract information efficiently. On popular academic benchmarks, the simple-to-implement TSMixer is comparable to specialized state-of-the-art models that leverage the inductive biases of specific benchmarks. On the challenging and large scale M5 benchmark, a real-world retail dataset, TSMixer demonstrates superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art alternatives. Our results underline the importance of efficiently utilizing cross-variate and auxiliary information for improving the performance of time series forecasting. We present various analyses to shed light into the capabilities of TSMixer. The design paradigms utilized in TSMixer are expected to open new horizons for deep learning-based time series forecasting.

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TMLR Journal 2022 Journal Article

LIMIS: Locally Interpretable Modeling using Instance-wise Subsampling

Jinsung Yoon
Sercan O Arik
Tomas Pfister

Understanding black-box machine learning models is crucial for their widespread adoption. Learning globally interpretable models is one approach, but achieving high performance with them is challenging. An alternative approach is to explain individual predictions using locally interpretable models. For locally interpretable modeling, various methods have been proposed and indeed commonly used, but they suffer from low fidelity, i.e. their explanations do not approximate the predictions well. In this paper, our goal is to push the state-of-the-art in high-fidelity locally interpretable modeling. We propose a novel framework, Locally Interpretable Modeling using Instance-wise Subsampling (LIMIS). LIMIS utilizes a policy gradient to select a small number of instances and distills the black-box model into a low-capacity locally interpretable model using those selected instances. Training is guided with a reward obtained directly by measuring the fidelity of the locally interpretable models. We show on multiple tabular datasets that LIMIS near-matches the prediction accuracy of black-box models, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art locally interpretable models in terms of fidelity and prediction accuracy.

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TMLR Journal 2022 Journal Article

Self-supervise, Refine, Repeat: Improving Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Jinsung Yoon
Kihyuk Sohn
Chun-Liang Li
Sercan O Arik
Chen-Yu Lee
Tomas Pfister

Anomaly detection (AD), separating anomalies from normal data, has many applications across domains, from security to healthcare. While most previous works were shown to be effective for cases with fully or partially labeled data, that setting is in practice less common due to labeling being particularly tedious for this task. In this paper, we focus on fully unsupervised AD, in which the entire training dataset, containing both normal and anomalous samples, is unlabeled. To tackle this problem effectively, we propose to improve the robustness of one-class classification trained on self-supervised representations using a data refinement process. Our proposed data refinement approach is based on an ensemble of one-class classifiers (OCCs), each of which is trained on a disjoint subset of training data. Representations learned by self-supervised learning on the refined data are iteratively updated as the data refinement improves. We demonstrate our method on various unsupervised AD tasks with image and tabular data. With a 10% anomaly ratio on CIFAR-10 image data / 2.5% anomaly ratio on Thyroid tabular data, the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art one-class classifier by 6.3 AUC and 12.5 average precision / 22.9 F1-score.

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