The Pitfalls of Memorization: When Memorization Hurts Generalization

Neural networks often learn simple explanations that fit the majority of the data while memorizing exceptions that deviate from these explanations.This behavior leads to poor generalization when the learned explanations rely on spurious correlations. In this work, we formalize the interplay between memorization and generalization, showing that spurious correlations would particularly lead to poor generalization when are combined with memorization. Memorization can reduce training loss to zero, leaving no incentive to learn robust, generalizable patterns. To address this, we propose memorization-aware training (MAT), which uses held-out predictions as a signal of memorization to shift a model's logits. MAT encourages learning robust patterns invariant across distributions, improving generalization under distribution shifts.

Towards Adversarially Robust Vision-Language Models: Insights from Design Choices and Prompt Formatting Techniques

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have witnessed a surge in both research and real-world applications. However, as they are becoming increasingly prevalent, ensuring their robustness against adversarial attacks is paramount. This work systematically investigates the impact of model design choices on the adversarial robustness of VLMs against image-based attacks. Additionally, we introduce novel, cost-effective approaches to enhance robustness through prompt formatting. By rephrasing questions and suggesting potential adversarial perturbations, we demonstrate substantial improvements in model robustness against strong image-based attacks such as Auto-PGD. Our findings provide important guidelines for developing more robust VLMs, particularly for deployment in safety-critical environments.