Are VLMs Really Blind

Vision Language Models excel in handling a wide range of complex tasks, including Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Visual Question Answering (VQA), and advanced geometric reasoning. However, these models fail to perform well on low-level basic visual tasks which are especially easy for humans. Our goal in this work was to determine if these models are truly "blind" to geometric reasoning or if there are ways to enhance their capabilities in this area. Our work presents a novel automatic pipeline designed to extract key information from images in response to specific questions. Instead of just relying on direct VQA, we use question-derived keywords to create a caption that highlights important details in the image related to the question. This caption is then used by a language model to provide a precise answer to the question without requiring external fine-tuning.

Give me a hint: Can LLMs take a hint to solve math problems?

While many state-of-the-art LLMs have shown poor logical and basic mathematical reasoning, recent works try to improve their problem-solving abilities using prompting techniques. We propose giving "hints" to improve the language model's performance on advanced mathematical problems, taking inspiration from how humans approach math pedagogically. We also test the model's adversarial robustness to wrong hints. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by evaluating various LLMs, presenting them with a diverse set of problems of different difficulties and topics from the MATH dataset and comparing against techniques such as one-shot, few-shot, and chain of thought prompting.

Beyond Captioning: Task-Specific Prompting for Improved VLM Performance in Mathematical Reasoning

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have transformed tasks requiring visual and reasoning abilities, such as image retrieval and Visual Question Answering (VQA). Despite their success, VLMs face significant challenges with tasks involving geometric reasoning, algebraic problem-solving, and counting. These limitations stem from difficulties effectively integrating multiple modalities and accurately interpreting geometry-related tasks. Various works claim that introducing a captioning pipeline before VQA tasks enhances performance. We incorporated this pipeline for tasks involving geometry, algebra, and counting. We found that captioning results are not generalizable, specifically with larger VLMs primarily trained on downstream QnA tasks showing random performance on math-related challenges. However, we present a promising alternative: task-based prompting, enriching the prompt with task-specific guidance. This approach shows promise and proves more effective than direct captioning methods for math-heavy problems.

Attention Shift: Steering AI Away from Unsafe Content

This study investigates the generation of unsafe or harmful content in state-of-the-art generative models, focusing on methods for restricting such generations. We introduce a novel training-free approach using attention reweighing to remove unsafe concepts without additional training during inference. We compare our method against existing ablation methods, evaluating the performance on both, direct and adversarial jailbreak prompts, using qualitative and quantitative metrics. We hypothesize potential reasons for the observed results and discuss the limitations and broader implications of content restriction.

Snowy Scenes,Clear Detections: A Robust Model for Traffic Light Detection in Adverse Weather Conditions

With the rise of autonomous vehicles and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), ensuring reliable object detection in all weather conditions is crucial for safety and efficiency. Adverse weather like snow, rain, and fog presents major challenges for current detection systems, often resulting in failures and potential safety risks. This paper introduces a novel framework and pipeline designed to improve object detection under such conditions, focusing on traffic signal detection where traditional methods often fail due to domain shifts caused by adverse weather. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the limitations of existing techniques. Our proposed pipeline significantly enhances detection accuracy in snow, rain, and fog. Results show a 40.8% improvement in average IoU and F1 scores compared to naive fine-tuning and a 22.4% performance increase in domain shift scenarios, such as training on artificial snow and testing on rain images.

Unmasking the Veil: An Investigation into Concept Ablation for Privacy and Copyright Protection in Images

In this paper, we extend the study of concept ablation within pre-trained models as introduced in 'Ablating Concepts in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models' by (Kumari et al.,2022). Our work focuses on reproducing the results achieved by the different variants of concept ablation proposed and validated through predefined metrics. We also introduce a novel variant of concept ablation, namely 'trademark ablation'. This variant combines the principles of memorization and instance ablation to tackle the nuanced influence of proprietary or branded elements in model outputs. Further, our research contributions include an observational analysis of the model's limitations. Moreover, we investigate the model's behavior in response to ablation leakage-inducing prompts, which aim to indirectly ablate concepts, revealing insights into the model's resilience and adaptability. We also observe the model's performance degradation on images generated by concepts far from its target ablation concept, documented in the appendix.

Confidence Is All You Need for MI Attacks

In this evolving era of machine learning security, membership inference attacks have emerged as a potent threat to the confidentiality of sensitive data. In this attack, adversaries aim to determine whether a particular point was used during the training of a target model. This paper proposes a new method to gauge a data point's membership in a model's training set. Instead of correlating loss with membership, as is traditionally done, we have leveraged the fact that training examples generally exhibit higher confidence values when classified into their actual class. During training, the model is essentially being 'fit' to the training data and might face particular difficulties in generalization to unseen data. This asymmetry leads to the model achieving higher confidence on the training data as it exploits the specific patterns and noise present in the training data. Our proposed approach leverages the confidence values generated by the machine learning model. These confidence values provide a probabilistic measure of the model's certainty in its predictions and can further be used to infer the membership of a given data point. Additionally, we also introduce another variant of our method that allows us to carry out this attack without knowing the ground truth(true class) of a given data point, thus offering an edge over existing label-dependent attack methods.