Adapting closed-box service models (i.e., APIs) for target tasks typically relies on reprogramming via Zeroth-Order Optimization (ZOO). However, this standard strategy is known for extensive, costly API calls and often suffers from slow, unstable optimization. Furthermore, we observe that this paradigm faces new challenges with modern APIs (e.g., GPT-4o). These models can be less sensitive to the input perturbations ZOO relies on, thereby hindering performance gains. To address these limitations, we propose an Alternative efficient Reprogramming approach for Service models (AReS). Instead of direct, continuous closed-box optimization, AReS initiates a single-pass interaction with the service API to prime an amenable local pre-trained encoder. This priming stage trains only a lightweight layer on top of the local encoder, making it highly receptive to the subsequent glass-box (white-box) reprogramming stage performed directly on the local model. Consequently, all subsequent adaptation and inference rely solely on this local proxy, eliminating all further API costs. Experiments demonstrate AReS's effectiveness where prior ZOO-based methods struggle: on GPT-4o, AReS achieves a +27.8%
We introduce a novel approach to reduce the number of times required for reprogramming memristors on bit-sliced compute-in-memory crossbars for deep neural networks (DNNs). Our idea addresses the limited non-volatile memory endurance, which restrict the number of times they can be reprogrammed. To reduce reprogramming demands, we employ two techniques: (1) we organize weights into sorted sections to schedule reprogramming of similar crossbars, maximizing memristor state reuse, and (2) we reprogram only a fraction of randomly selected memristors in low-order columns, leveraging their bit-level distribution and recognizing their relatively small impact on model accuracy. We evaluate our approach for state-of-the-art models on the ImageNet-1K dataset. We demonstrate a substantial reduction in crossbar reprogramming by 3.7x for ResNet-50 and 21x for ViT-Base, while maintaining model accuracy within a 1% margin.
An important proof technique in the random oracle model involves reprogramming it on hard to predict inputs and arguing that an attacker cannot detect that this occurred. In the quantum setting, a particularly challenging version of this considers adaptive reprogramming wherein the points to be reprogrammed (or the output values they should be programmed to) are dependent on choices made by the adversary. Some quantum frameworks for analyzing adaptive reprogramming were given by Unruh (CRYPTO 2014, EUROCRYPT 2015), Grilo-Hövelmanns-Hülsing-Majenz (ASIACRYPT 2021), and Pan-Zeng (PKC 2024). We show, counterintuitively, that these adaptive results follow from the \emph{nonadaptive} one-way to hiding theorem of Ambainis-Hamburg-Unruh (CRYPTO 2019). These implications contradict beliefs (whether stated explicitly or implicitly) that some properties of the adaptive frameworks cannot be provided by the Ambainis-Hamburg-Unruh result.
Foundation models have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing and computer vision, demonstrating strong capabilities in modeling complex patterns. While recent efforts have explored adapting large language models (LLMs) for time-series forecasting, LLMs primarily capture one-dimensional sequential dependencies and struggle to model the richer spatio-temporal (ST) correlations essential for accurate ST forecasting. In this paper, we present \textbf{ST-VFM}, a novel framework that systematically reprograms Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) for general-purpose spatio-temporal forecasting. While VFMs offer powerful spatial priors, two key challenges arise when applying them to ST tasks: (1) the lack of inherent temporal modeling capacity and (2) the modality gap between visual and ST data. To address these, ST-VFM adopts a \emph{dual-branch architecture} that integrates raw ST inputs with auxiliary ST flow inputs, where the flow encodes lightweight temporal difference signals interpretable as dynamic spatial cues. To effectively process these dual-branch inputs, ST-VFM introduces two dedicated reprogramming stages. The \emph{pre-VFM reprogramming} stage applies a Temp
This paper gives an overview of the use of control systems engineering in synthetic biology, motivated by applications such as cell therapy and cell fate reprogramming for regenerative medicine. A ubiquitous problem in these and other applications is the ability to control the concentration of specific regulatory factors in the cell accurately despite environmental uncertainty and perturbations. The paper describes the origin of these perturbations and how they affect the dynamics of the biomolecular ``plant'' to be controlled. A variety of biomolecular control implementations are then introduced to achieve robustness of the plant's output to perturbations and are grouped into feedback and feedforward control architectures. Although sophisticated control laws can be implemented in a computer today, they cannot be necessarily implemented inside the cell via biomolecular processes. This fact constraints the set of feasible control laws to those realizable through biomolecular processes that can be engineered with synthetic biology. After reviewing biomolecular feedback and feedforward control implementations, mostly focusing on the author's own work, the paper illustrates the applica
In this paper, we explore a novel model reusing task tailored for graph neural networks (GNNs), termed as "deep graph reprogramming". We strive to reprogram a pre-trained GNN, without amending raw node features nor model parameters, to handle a bunch of cross-level downstream tasks in various domains. To this end, we propose an innovative Data Reprogramming paradigm alongside a Model Reprogramming paradigm. The former one aims to address the challenge of diversified graph feature dimensions for various tasks on the input side, while the latter alleviates the dilemma of fixed per-task-per-model behavior on the model side. For data reprogramming, we specifically devise an elaborated Meta-FeatPadding method to deal with heterogeneous input dimensions, and also develop a transductive Edge-Slimming as well as an inductive Meta-GraPadding approach for diverse homogenous samples. Meanwhile, for model reprogramming, we propose a novel task-adaptive Reprogrammable-Aggregator, to endow the frozen model with larger expressive capacities in handling cross-domain tasks. Experiments on fourteen datasets across node/graph classification/regression, 3D object recognition, and distributed action re
Unsupervised Graph Domain Adaptation has become a promising paradigm for transferring knowledge from a fully labeled source graph to an unlabeled target graph. Existing graph domain adaptation models primarily focus on the closed-set setting, where the source and target domains share the same label spaces. However, this assumption might not be practical in the real-world scenarios, as the target domain might include classes that are not present in the source domain. In this paper, we investigate the problem of unsupervised open-set graph domain adaptation, where the goal is to not only correctly classify target nodes into the known classes, but also recognize previously unseen node types into the unknown class. Towards this end, we propose a novel framework called GraphRTA, which conducts reprogramming on both the graph and model sides. Specifically, we reprogram the graph by modifying target graph structure and node features, which facilitates better separation of known and unknown classes. Meanwhile, we also perform model reprogramming by pruning domain-specific parameters to reduce bias towards the source graph while preserving parameters that capture transferable patterns acros
Existing UDA pipelines fine-tune already well-trained backbone parameters for every new source-and-target pair, resulting in the number of training parameters and storage memory growing linearly with each new pair, and also preventing the reuse of these well-trained backbone parameters. Inspired by recent implications that existing backbones have textural biases, we propose making use of domain-specific textural bias for domain adaptation via visual reprogramming, namely VirDA. Instead of fine-tuning the full backbone, VirDA prepends a domain-specific visual reprogramming layer to the backbone. This layer produces visual prompts that act as an added textural bias to the input image, adapting its "style" to a target domain. To optimize these visual reprogramming layers, we use multiple objective functions that optimize the intra- and inter-domain distribution differences when domain-adapting visual prompts are applied. This process does not require modifying the backbone parameters, allowing the same backbone to be reused across different domains. We evaluate VirDA on Office-31 and obtain 92.8% mean accuracy with only 1.5M trainable parameters. VirDA surpasses PDA, the state-of-the-
We give a tighter lifting theorem for security games in the quantum random oracle model. At the core of our main result lies a novel measure-and-reprogram framework that we call coherent reprogramming. This framework gives a tighter lifting theorem for query complexity problems, that only requires purely classical reasoning. As direct applications of our lifting theorem, we first provide a quantum direct product theorem in the average case - i.e., an enabling tool to determine the hardness of solving multi-instance security games. This allows us to derive in a straightforward manner the hardness of various security games, for example (i) the non-uniform hardness of salted games, (ii) the hardness of specific cryptographic tasks such as the multiple instance version of one-wayness and collision-resistance, and (iii) uniform or non-uniform hardness of many other games.
Continual learning aims to emulate the human ability to continually accumulate knowledge over sequential tasks. The main challenge is to maintain performance on previously learned tasks after learning new tasks, i.e., to avoid catastrophic forgetting. We propose a Channel-wise Lightweight Reprogramming (CLR) approach that helps convolutional neural networks (CNNs) overcome catastrophic forgetting during continual learning. We show that a CNN model trained on an old task (or self-supervised proxy task) could be ``reprogrammed" to solve a new task by using our proposed lightweight (very cheap) reprogramming parameter. With the help of CLR, we have a better stability-plasticity trade-off to solve continual learning problems: To maintain stability and retain previous task ability, we use a common task-agnostic immutable part as the shared ``anchor" parameter set. We then add task-specific lightweight reprogramming parameters to reinterpret the outputs of the immutable parts, to enable plasticity and integrate new knowledge. To learn sequential tasks, we only train the lightweight reprogramming parameters to learn each new task. Reprogramming parameters are task-specific and exclusive t
Medical foundation models pre-trained on large-scale datasets have demonstrated powerful versatile capabilities for various tasks. However, due to the gap between pre-training tasks (or modalities) and downstream tasks (or modalities), the real-world computation and speed constraints, it might not be straightforward to apply medical foundation models in the downstream scenarios. Previous methods, such as parameter efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods and knowledge distillation (KD) methods, are unable to simultaneously address the task (or modality) inconsistency and achieve personalized lightweight deployment under diverse real-world demands. To address the above issues, we propose a novel framework called Reprogramming Distillation (RD). On one hand, RD reprograms the original feature space of the foundation model so that it is more relevant to downstream scenarios, aligning tasks and modalities. On the other hand, through a co-training mechanism and a shared classifier, connections are established between the reprogrammed knowledge and the knowledge of student models, ensuring that the reprogrammed feature space can be smoothly mimic by the student model of different structures.
Cellular reprogramming can be used for both the prevention and cure of different diseases. However, the efficiency of discovering reprogramming strategies with classical wet-lab experiments is hindered by lengthy time commitments and high costs. In this study, we develop a novel computational framework based on deep reinforcement learning that facilitates the identification of reprogramming strategies. For this aim, we formulate a control problem in the context of cellular reprogramming for the frameworks of BNs and PBNs under the asynchronous update mode. Furthermore, we introduce the notion of a pseudo-attractor and a procedure for identification of pseudo-attractor state during training. Finally, we devise a computational framework for solving the control problem, which we test on a number of different models.
Language mismatch is among the most common and challenging domain mismatches in deploying speaker verification (SV) systems. Adversarial reprogramming has shown promising results in cross-language adaptation for SV. The reprogramming is implemented by padding learnable parameters on the two sides of input speech signals. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the number of padded parameters and the performance of the reprogrammed models. Sufficient experiments are conducted with different scales of SV models and datasets. The results demonstrate that reprogramming consistently improves the performance of cross-language SV, while the improvement is saturated or even degraded when using larger padding lengths. The performance is mainly determined by the capacity of the original SV models instead of the number of padded parameters. The SV models with larger scales have higher upper bounds in performance and can endure longer padding without performance degradation.
Visual reprogramming (VR) reuses pre-trained vision models for downstream image classification tasks by adding trainable noise patterns to inputs. When applied to vision-language models (e.g., CLIP), existing VR approaches follow the same pipeline used in vision models (e.g., ResNet, ViT), where ground-truth class labels are inserted into fixed text templates to guide the optimization of VR patterns. This label-based approach, however, overlooks the rich information and diverse attribute-guided textual representations that CLIP can exploit, which may lead to the misclassification of samples. In this paper, we propose Attribute-based Visual Reprogramming (AttrVR) for CLIP, utilizing descriptive attributes (DesAttrs) and distinctive attributes (DistAttrs), which respectively represent common and unique feature descriptions for different classes. Besides, as images of the same class may reflect different attributes after VR, AttrVR iteratively refines patterns using the $k$-nearest DesAttrs and DistAttrs for each image sample, enabling more dynamic and sample-specific optimization. Theoretically, AttrVR is shown to reduce intra-class variance and increase inter-class separation. Empir
Model Reprogramming (MR) is a resource-efficient framework that adapts large pre-trained models to new tasks with minimal additional parameters and data, offering a promising solution to the challenges of training large models for diverse tasks. Despite its empirical success across various domains such as computer vision and time-series forecasting, the theoretical foundations of MR remain underexplored. In this paper, we present a comprehensive theoretical analysis of MR through the lens of the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) framework. We demonstrate that the success of MR is governed by the eigenvalue spectrum of the NTK matrix on the target dataset and establish the critical role of the source model's effectiveness in determining reprogramming outcomes. Our contributions include a novel theoretical framework for MR, insights into the relationship between source and target models, and extensive experiments validating our findings.
Model reprogramming adapts pretrained models to downstream tasks by modifying only the input and output spaces. Visual reprogramming (VR) is one instance for vision tasks that adds a trainable noise pattern (i.e., a visual prompt) to input images to facilitate downstream classification. The existing VR approaches for CLIP train a single visual prompt using all descriptions of different downstream classes. However, the limited learning capacity may result in (1) a failure to capture diverse aspects of the descriptions (e.g., shape, color, and texture), and (2) a possible bias toward less informative attributes that do not help distinguish between classes. In this paper, we introduce a decoupling-and-reweighting framework. Our decoupled visual prompts (DVP) are optimized using descriptions grouped by explicit causes (DVP-cse) or unsupervised clusters (DVP-cls). Then, we integrate the outputs of these visual prompts with a probabilistic reweighting matrix (PRM) that measures their contributions to each downstream class. Theoretically, DVP lowers the empirical risk bound. Experimentally, DVP outperforms baselines on average across 11 downstream datasets. Notably, the DVP-PRM integratio
While latent diffusion models (LDMs), such as Stable Diffusion, are designed for high-resolution (HR) image generation, they often struggle with significant structural distortions when generating images at resolutions higher than their training one. Instead of relying on extensive retraining, a more resource-efficient approach is to reprogram the pretrained model for HR image generation; however, existing methods often result in poor image quality and long inference time. We introduce RepLDM, a novel reprogramming framework for pretrained LDMs that enables high-quality, high-efficiency, high-resolution image generation; see Fig. 1. RepLDM consists of two stages: (i) an attention guidance stage, which generates a latent representation of a higher-quality training-resolution image using a novel training-free self-attention mechanism to enhance the structural consistency; and (ii) a progressive upsampling stage, which progressively performs upsampling in pixel space to mitigate the severe artifacts caused by latent space upsampling. The effective initialization from the first stage allows for denoising at higher resolutions with significantly fewer steps, improving the efficiency. Ext
In data-rich domains such as vision, language, and speech, deep learning prevails to deliver high-performance task-specific models and can even learn general task-agnostic representations for efficient finetuning to downstream tasks. However, deep learning in resource-limited domains still faces multiple challenges including (i) limited data, (ii) constrained model development cost, and (iii) lack of adequate pre-trained models for effective finetuning. This paper provides an overview of model reprogramming to bridge this gap. Model reprogramming enables resource-efficient cross-domain machine learning by repurposing and reusing a well-developed pre-trained model from a source domain to solve tasks in a target domain without model finetuning, where the source and target domains can be vastly different. In many applications, model reprogramming outperforms transfer learning and training from scratch. This paper elucidates the methodology of model reprogramming, summarizes existing use cases, provides a theoretical explanation of the success of model reprogramming, and concludes with a discussion on open-ended research questions and opportunities. A list of model reprogramming studie
The proliferation of deepfake faces poses huge potential negative impacts on our daily lives. Despite substantial advancements in deepfake detection over these years, the generalizability of existing methods against forgeries from unseen datasets or created by emerging generative models remains constrained. In this paper, inspired by the zero-shot advantages of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), we propose a novel approach that repurposes a well-trained VLM for general deepfake detection. Motivated by the model reprogramming paradigm that manipulates the model prediction via input perturbations, our method can reprogram a pre-trained VLM model (e.g., CLIP) solely based on manipulating its input without tuning the inner parameters. First, learnable visual perturbations are used to refine feature extraction for deepfake detection. Then, we exploit information of face embedding to create sample-level adaptative text prompts, improving the performance. Extensive experiments on several popular benchmark datasets demonstrate that (1) the cross-dataset and cross-manipulation performances of deepfake detection can be significantly and consistently improved (e.g., over 88\% AUC in cross-dataset
Recent developments in synthetic biology, next-generation sequencing, and machine learning provide an unprecedented opportunity to rationally design new disease treatments based on measured responses to gene perturbations and drugs to reprogram cells. The main challenges to seizing this opportunity are the incomplete knowledge of the cellular network and the combinatorial explosion of possible interventions, both of which are insurmountable by experiments. To address these challenges, we develop a transfer learning approach to control cell behavior that is pre-trained on transcriptomic data associated with human cell fates, thereby generating a model of the network dynamics that can be transferred to specific reprogramming goals. The approach combines transcriptional responses to gene perturbations to minimize the difference between a given pair of initial and target transcriptional states. We demonstrate our approach's versatility by applying it to a microarray dataset comprising >9,000 microarrays across 54 cell types and 227 unique perturbations, and an RNASeq dataset consisting of >10,000 sequencing runs across 36 cell types and 138 perturbations. Our approach reproduces