Continual Learning: Forget-Free Winning Subnetworks for Video Representations
Haeyong Kang, Jaehong Yoon, Sung Ju Hwang, Chang D. Yoo
IF 18.6
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
Inspired by the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH), which highlights the existence of efficient subnetworks within larger, dense networks, a high-performing Winning Subnetwork (WSN) in terms of task performance under appropriate sparsity conditions is considered for various continual learning tasks. It leverages pre-existing weights from dense networks to achieve efficient learning in Task Incremental Learning (TIL) and Task-agnostic Incremental Learning (TaIL) scenarios. In Few-Shot Class Incremental Learning (FSCIL), a variation of WSN referred to as the Soft subnetwork (SoftNet) is designed to prevent overfitting when the data samples are scarce. Furthermore, the sparse reuse of WSN weights is considered for Video Incremental Learning (VIL). The use of Fourier Subneural Operator (FSO) within WSN is considered. It enables compact encoding of videos and identifies reusable subnetworks across varying bandwidths. We have integrated FSO into different architectural frameworks for continual learning, including VIL, TIL, and FSCIL. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate FSO's effectiveness, significantly improving task performance at various convolutional representational levels. Specifically, FSO enhances higher-layer performance in TIL and FSCIL and lower-layer performance in VIL.
<scp>READRetro</scp>: natural product biosynthesis predicting with retrieval‐augmented dual‐view retrosynthesis
Taein Kim, Seul Lee, Yejin Kwak, Min‐Soo Choi, Jeongbin Park, Sung Ju Hwang, Sang‐Gyu Kim
IF 8.1
New Phytologist
Plants, as a sessile organism, produce various secondary metabolites to interact with the environment. These chemicals have fascinated the plant science community because of their ecological significance and notable biological activity. However, predicting the complete biosynthetic pathways from target molecules to metabolic building blocks remains a challenge. Here, we propose retrieval-augmented dual-view retrosynthesis (READRetro) as a practical bio-retrosynthesis tool to predict the biosynthetic pathways of plant natural products. Conventional bio-retrosynthesis models have been limited in their ability to predict biosynthetic pathways for natural products. READRetro was optimized for the prediction of complex metabolic pathways by incorporating cutting-edge deep learning architectures, an ensemble approach, and two retrievers. Evaluation of single- and multi-step retrosynthesis showed that each component of READRetro significantly improved its ability to predict biosynthetic pathways. READRetro was also able to propose the known pathways of secondary metabolites such as monoterpene indole alkaloids and the unknown pathway of menisdaurilide, demonstrating its applicability to real-world bio-retrosynthesis of plant natural products. For researchers interested in the biosynthesis and production of secondary metabolites, a user-friendly website (https://readretro.net) and the open-source code of READRetro have been made available.
Reading between the Lines: Object Localization Using Implicit Cues from Image Tags
Sung Ju Hwang, Kristen Grauman
IF 18.6
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
Current uses of tagged images typically exploit only the most explicit information: the link between the nouns named and the objects present somewhere in the image. We propose to leverage "unspoken" cues that rest within an ordered list of image tags so as to improve object localization. We define three novel implicit features from an image's tags-the relative prominence of each object as signified by its order of mention, the scale constraints implied by unnamed objects, and the loose spatial links hinted at by the proximity of names on the list. By learning a conditional density over the localization parameters (position and scale) given these cues, we show how to improve both accuracy and efficiency when detecting the tagged objects. Furthermore, we show how the localization density can be learned in a semantic space shared by the visual and tag-based features, which makes the technique applicable for detection in untagged input images. We validate our approach on the PASCAL VOC, LabelMe, and Flickr image data sets, and demonstrate its effectiveness relative to both traditional sliding windows as well as a visual context baseline. Our algorithm improves state-of-the-art methods, successfully translating insights about human viewing behavior (such as attention, perceived importance, or gaze) into enhanced object detection.
Soro Bedionita, Bruno Andreis, Song Chong, Sung Ju Hwang
ArXiv.org
Learning to generate neural network parameters conditioned on task descriptions and architecture specifications is pivotal for advancing model adaptability and transfer learning. Existing methods especially those based on diffusion models suffer from limited scalability to large architectures, rigidity in handling varying network depths, and disjointed parameter generation that undermines inter-layer coherence. In this work, we propose IGPG (Instruction Guided Parameter Generation), an autoregressive framework that unifies parameter synthesis across diverse tasks and architectures. IGPG leverages a VQ-VAE and an autoregressive model to generate neural network parameters, conditioned on task instructions, dataset, and architecture details. By autoregressively generating neural network weights' tokens, IGPG ensures inter-layer coherence and enables efficient adaptation across models and datasets. Operating at the token level, IGPG effectively captures complex parameter distributions aggregated from a broad spectrum of pretrained models. Extensive experiments on multiple vision datasets demonstrate that IGPG consolidates diverse pretrained models into a single, flexible generative framework. The synthesized parameters achieve competitive or superior performance relative to state-of-the-art methods, especially in terms of scalability and efficiency when applied to large architectures. These results underscore ICPG potential as a powerful tool for pretrained weight retrieval, model selection, and rapid task-specific fine-tuning.
Database-Augmented Query Representation for Information Retrieval
Soyeong Jeong, Jinheon Baek, Sukmin Cho, Sung Ju Hwang, Jong Cheol Park
Information retrieval models that aim to search for documents relevant to a query have shown multiple successes, which have been applied to diverse tasks.Yet, the query from the user is oftentimes short, which challenges the retrievers to correctly fetch relevant documents.To tackle this, previous studies have proposed expanding the query with a couple of additional (userrelated) features related to it.However, they may be suboptimal to effectively augment the query, and there is plenty of other information available to augment it in a relational database.Motivated by this fact, we present a novel retrieval framework called Database-Augmented Query representation (DAQu), which augments the original query with various (query-related) metadata across multiple tables.In addition, as the number of features in the metadata can be very large and there is no order among them, we encode them with the graph-based set-encoding strategy, which considers hierarchies of features in the database without order.We validate our DAQu in diverse retrieval scenarios, demonstrating that it significantly enhances overall retrieval performance over relevant baselines.
Sketch-of-Thought: Efficient LLM Reasoning with Adaptive Cognitive-Inspired Sketching
Simon A. Aytes, Jinheon Baek, Sung Ju Hwang
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled strong reasoning capabilities through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, which elicits step-by-step problem solving, but often at the cost of excessive verbosity in intermediate outputs, leading to increased computational overhead.We propose Sketch-of-Thought (SoT), a prompting framework that integrates cognitively inspired reasoning paradigms with linguistic constraints to reduce token usage while preserving reasoning accuracy.SoT is designed as a flexible, modular approach and is instantiated with three paradigms-Conceptual Chaining, Chunked Symbolism, and Expert Lexicons-each tailored to distinct reasoning tasks and selected dynamically at test-time by a lightweight routing model.Across 18 reasoning datasets spanning multiple domains, languages, and modalities, SoT achieves token reductions of up to 84% with minimal accuracy loss.In tasks such as mathematical and multi-hop reasoning, it even improves accuracy while shortening outputs.
Multi-View Encoders for Performance Prediction in LLM-Based Agentic Workflows
Patara Trirat, Wonyong Jeong, Sung Ju Hwang
arXiv (Cornell University)
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, but optimizing LLM-based agentic systems remains challenging due to the vast search space of agent configurations, prompting strategies, and communication patterns. Existing approaches often rely on heuristic-based tuning or exhaustive evaluation, which can be computationally expensive and suboptimal. This paper proposes Agentic Predictor, a lightweight predictor for efficient agentic workflow evaluation. Agentic Predictor is equipped with a multi-view workflow encoding technique that leverages multi-view representation learning of agentic systems by incorporating code architecture, textual prompts, and interaction graph features. To achieve high predictive accuracy while significantly reducing the number of required workflow evaluations for training a predictor, Agentic Predictor employs cross-domain unsupervised pretraining. By learning to approximate task success rates, Agentic Predictor enables fast and accurate selection of optimal agentic workflow configurations for a given task, significantly reducing the need for expensive trial-and-error evaluations. Experiments on a carefully curated benchmark spanning three domains show that our predictor outperforms several strong graph-based baselines in both predictive accuracy and workflow utility, highlighting the potential of performance predictors in streamlining the design of LLM-based agentic workflows.
Silent Branding Attack: Trigger-free Data Poisoning Attack on Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Sangwon Jang, June Suk Choi, Jaehyeong Jo, Kimin Lee, Sung Ju Hwang
ArXiv.org
Text-to-image diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generating high-quality contents from text prompts. However, their reliance on publicly available data and the growing trend of data sharing for fine-tuning make these models particularly vulnerable to data poisoning attacks. In this work, we introduce the Silent Branding Attack, a novel data poisoning method that manipulates text-to-image diffusion models to generate images containing specific brand logos or symbols without any text triggers. We find that when certain visual patterns are repeatedly in the training data, the model learns to reproduce them naturally in its outputs, even without prompt mentions. Leveraging this, we develop an automated data poisoning algorithm that unobtrusively injects logos into original images, ensuring they blend naturally and remain undetected. Models trained on this poisoned dataset generate images containing logos without degrading image quality or text alignment. We experimentally validate our silent branding attack across two realistic settings on large-scale high-quality image datasets and style personalization datasets, achieving high success rates even without a specific text trigger. Human evaluation and quantitative metrics including logo detection show that our method can stealthily embed logos.
Continual Learning: Forget-Free Winning Subnetworks for Video Representations
Haeyong Kang, Jaehong Yoon, Sung Ju Hwang, Chang D. Yoo
IF 18.6
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
Inspired by the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH), which highlights the existence of efficient subnetworks within larger, dense networks, a high-performing Winning Subnetwork (WSN) in terms of task performance under appropriate sparsity conditions is considered for various continual learning tasks. It leverages pre-existing weights from dense networks to achieve efficient learning in Task Incremental Learning (TIL) and Task-agnostic Incremental Learning (TaIL) scenarios. In Few-Shot Class Incremental Learning (FSCIL), a variation of WSN referred to as the Soft subnetwork (SoftNet) is designed to prevent overfitting when the data samples are scarce. Furthermore, the sparse reuse of WSN weights is considered for Video Incremental Learning (VIL). The use of Fourier Subneural Operator (FSO) within WSN is considered. It enables compact encoding of videos and identifies reusable subnetworks across varying bandwidths. We have integrated FSO into different architectural frameworks for continual learning, including VIL, TIL, and FSCIL. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate FSO's effectiveness, significantly improving task performance at various convolutional representational levels. Specifically, FSO enhances higher-layer performance in TIL and FSCIL and lower-layer performance in VIL.
<scp>READRetro</scp>: natural product biosynthesis predicting with retrieval‐augmented dual‐view retrosynthesis
Taein Kim, Seul Lee, Yejin Kwak, Min‐Soo Choi, Jeongbin Park, Sung Ju Hwang, Sang‐Gyu Kim
IF 8.1
New Phytologist
Plants, as a sessile organism, produce various secondary metabolites to interact with the environment. These chemicals have fascinated the plant science community because of their ecological significance and notable biological activity. However, predicting the complete biosynthetic pathways from target molecules to metabolic building blocks remains a challenge. Here, we propose retrieval-augmented dual-view retrosynthesis (READRetro) as a practical bio-retrosynthesis tool to predict the biosynthetic pathways of plant natural products. Conventional bio-retrosynthesis models have been limited in their ability to predict biosynthetic pathways for natural products. READRetro was optimized for the prediction of complex metabolic pathways by incorporating cutting-edge deep learning architectures, an ensemble approach, and two retrievers. Evaluation of single- and multi-step retrosynthesis showed that each component of READRetro significantly improved its ability to predict biosynthetic pathways. READRetro was also able to propose the known pathways of secondary metabolites such as monoterpene indole alkaloids and the unknown pathway of menisdaurilide, demonstrating its applicability to real-world bio-retrosynthesis of plant natural products. For researchers interested in the biosynthesis and production of secondary metabolites, a user-friendly website (https://readretro.net) and the open-source code of READRetro have been made available.
Reading between the Lines: Object Localization Using Implicit Cues from Image Tags
Sung Ju Hwang, Kristen Grauman
IF 18.6
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
Current uses of tagged images typically exploit only the most explicit information: the link between the nouns named and the objects present somewhere in the image. We propose to leverage "unspoken" cues that rest within an ordered list of image tags so as to improve object localization. We define three novel implicit features from an image's tags-the relative prominence of each object as signified by its order of mention, the scale constraints implied by unnamed objects, and the loose spatial links hinted at by the proximity of names on the list. By learning a conditional density over the localization parameters (position and scale) given these cues, we show how to improve both accuracy and efficiency when detecting the tagged objects. Furthermore, we show how the localization density can be learned in a semantic space shared by the visual and tag-based features, which makes the technique applicable for detection in untagged input images. We validate our approach on the PASCAL VOC, LabelMe, and Flickr image data sets, and demonstrate its effectiveness relative to both traditional sliding windows as well as a visual context baseline. Our algorithm improves state-of-the-art methods, successfully translating insights about human viewing behavior (such as attention, perceived importance, or gaze) into enhanced object detection.