We present Video-LLaMA a multi-modal framework that empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) with the capability of understanding both visual and auditory content in the video. Video-LLaMA bootstraps cross-modal training from the frozen pre-trained visual and audio encoders and the frozen LLMs. Unlike previous works that complement LLMs to process the visual or audio signals only, Video-LLaMA enables video comprehension by tackling two challenges: (1) capturing the temporal changes in visual scenes, (2) integrating audio-visual signals. To counter the first challenge, we propose a Video Q-former to assemble a pre-trained image encoder into our video encoder and introduce a video-to-text generation task to learn video-language correspondence. For the second challenge, we leverage ImageBind, a universal embedding model aligning multiple modalities, as the pre-trained audio encoder and introduce an Audio Q-former on top of ImageBind to learn reasonable auditory query embeddings for the LLM module. To align the output of both visual and audio encoders with LLM's embedding space, we first train Video-LLaMA on massive video/image-caption pairs and then tune our model with visual-instruction datasets of moderate amount but higher quality. We found Video-LLaMA shows the ability to perceive and comprehend video content and generate meaningful responses grounded in the visual and auditory information presented in the videos.
Quantum Relative Entropy (QRE) programming is a recently popular and challenging class of convex optimization problems with significant applications in quantum computing and quantum information theory. We are interested in modern interior point (IP) methods based on optimal self-concordant barriers for the QRE cone. A range of theoretical and numerical challenges associated with such barrier functions and the QRE cones have hindered the scalability of IP methods. To address these challenges, we propose a series of numerical and linear algebraic techniques and heuristics aimed at enhancing the efficiency of gradient and Hessian computations for the self-concordant barrier function, solving linear systems, and performing matrix-vector products. We also introduce and deliberate about some interesting concepts related to QRE such as symmetric quantum relative entropy (SQRE). We also introduce a two-phase method for performing facial reduction that can significantly improve the performance of QRE programming. Our new techniques have been implemented in the latest version (DDS 2.2) of the software package DDS. In addition to handling QRE constraints, DDS accepts any combination of several other conic and non-conic convex constraints. Our comprehensive numerical experiments encompass several parts including 1) a comparison of DDS 2.2 with Hypatia for the nearest correlation matrix problem, 2) using DDS for combining QRE constraints with various other constraint types, and 3) calculating the key rate for quantum key distribution (QKD) channels and presenting results for several QKD protocols.
In this letter, we design a downlink multi-user communication framework based on Rate-Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA) for semantic-aware networks. First, we formulate an optimization problem to obtain the optimal user scheduling, precoding, and power allocation schemes jointly. We consider the metric Age of Incorrect Information (AoII) in the objective function of the formulated problem to maximize the freshness of the overall information to be transmitted. Using big-M and Successive Convex Approximation (SCA) methods, we convert the resulting non-convex problem with conditional objective and constraints into a convex one and propose an iterative algorithm to solve it. By numerical results, we show that RSMA achieves a lower AoII than SDMA owing to its superior performance under multi-user interference.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated outstanding performance in various applications. Existing frameworks utilize CPU-GPU heterogeneous environments to train GNN models and integrate mini-batch and sampling techniques to overcome the GPU memory limitation. In CPU-GPU heterogeneous environments, we can divide sample-based GNN training into three steps: sample, gather, and train. Existing GNN systems use different task orchestrating methods to employ each step on CPU or GPU. After extensive experiments and analysis, we find that existing task orchestrating methods fail to fully utilize the heterogeneous resources, limited by inefficient CPU processing or GPU resource contention. In this paper, we propose NeutronOrch, a system for sample-based GNN training that incorporates a layer-based task orchestrating method and ensures balanced utilization of the CPU and GPU. NeutronOrch decouples the training process by layer and pushes down the training task of the bottom layer to the CPU. This significantly reduces the computational load and memory footprint of GPU training. To avoid inefficient CPU processing, NeutronOrch only offloads the training of frequently accessed vertices to the CPU and lets GPU reuse their embeddings with bounded staleness. Furthermore, NeutronOrch provides a fine-grained pipeline design for the layer-based task orchestrating method, fully overlapping different tasks on heterogeneous resources while strictly guaranteeing bounded staleness. The experimental results show that compared with the state-of-the-art GNN systems, NeutronOrch can achieve up to 11.51x performance speedup.
We present Integrated Multimodal Perception (IMP), a simple and scalable multimodal multi-task training and modeling approach. IMP integrates multimodal inputs including image, video, text, and audio into a single Transformer encoder with minimal modality-specific components. IMP makes use of a novel design that combines Alternating Gradient Descent (AGD) and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) for efficient model and task scaling. We conduct extensive empirical studies and reveal the following key insights: 1) Performing gradient descent updates by alternating on diverse modalities, loss functions, and tasks, with varying input resolutions, efficiently improves the model. 2) Sparsification with MoE on a single modality-agnostic encoder substantially improves the performance, outperforming dense models that use modality-specific encoders or additional fusion layers and greatly mitigates the conflicts between modalities. IMP achieves competitive performance on a wide range of downstream tasks including video classification, image classification, image-text, and video-text retrieval. Most notably, we train a sparse IMP-MoE-L variant focusing on video tasks that achieves new state-of-the-art in zero-shot video classification: 77.0% on Kinetics-400, 76.8% on Kinetics-600, and 68.3% on Kinetics-700, improving the previous state-of-the-art by +5%, +6.7%, and +5.8%, respectively, while using only 15% of their total training computational cost.
Building artificial intelligence (AI) systems on top of a set of foundation models (FMs) is becoming a new paradigm in AI research. Their representative and generative abilities learnt from vast amounts of data can be easily adapted and transferred to a wide range of downstream tasks without extra training from scratch. However, leveraging FMs in cross-modal generation remains under-researched when audio modality is involved. On the other hand, automatically generating semantically-relevant sound from visual input is an important problem in cross-modal generation studies. To solve this vision-to-audio (V2A) generation problem, existing methods tend to design and build complex systems from scratch using modestly sized datasets. In this paper, we propose a lightweight solution to this problem by leveraging foundation models, specifically CLIP, CLAP, and AudioLDM. We first investigate the domain gap between the latent space of the visual CLIP and the auditory CLAP models. Then we propose a simple yet effective mapper mechanism (V2A-Mapper) to bridge the domain gap by translating the visual input between CLIP and CLAP spaces. Conditioned on the translated CLAP embedding, pretrained audio generative FM AudioLDM is adopted to produce high-fidelity and visually-aligned sound. Compared to previous approaches, our method only requires a quick training of the V2A-Mapper. We further analyze and conduct extensive experiments on the choice of the V2A-Mapper and show that a generative mapper is better at fidelity and variability (FD) while a regression mapper is slightly better at relevance (CS). Both objective and subjective evaluation on two V2A datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method compared to current state-of-the-art approaches - trained with 86% fewer parameters but achieving 53% and 19% improvement in FD and CS, respectively.
The recent evolution of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) leads to the emergence of groundbreaking applications such as ChatGPT, which not only enhances the efficiency of digital content production, such as text, audio, video, or even network traffic data, but also enriches its diversity. Beyond digital content creation, GAI's capability in analyzing complex data distributions offers great potential for wireless communications, particularly amidst a rapid expansion of new physical layer communication technologies. For example, the diffusion model can learn input signal distributions and use them to improve the channel estimation accuracy, while the variational autoencoder can model channel distribution and infer latent variables for blind channel equalization. Therefore, this paper presents a comprehensive investigation of GAI's applications for communications at the physical layer, ranging from traditional issues, including signal classification, channel estimation, and equalization, to emerging topics, such as intelligent reflecting surfaces and joint source channel coding. We also compare GAI-enabled physical layer communications with those supported by traditional AI, highlighting GAI's inherent capabilities and unique contributions in these areas. Finally, the paper discusses open issues and proposes several future research directions, laying a foundation for further exploration and advancement of GAI in physical layer communications.
We present EE-LLM, a framework for large-scale training and inference of early-exit large language models (LLMs). While recent works have shown preliminary evidence for the efficacy of early exiting in accelerating LLM inference, EE-LLM makes a foundational step towards scaling up early-exit LLMs by supporting their training and inference with massive 3D parallelism. Built upon Megatron-LM, EE-LLM implements a variety of algorithmic innovations and performance optimizations tailored to early exiting, including a lightweight method that facilitates backpropagation for the early-exit training objective with pipeline parallelism, techniques of leveraging idle resources in the original pipeline schedule for computation related to early-exit layers, and two approaches of early-exit inference that are compatible with KV caching for autoregressive generation. Our analytical and empirical study shows that EE-LLM achieves great training efficiency with negligible computational overhead compared to standard LLM training, as well as outstanding inference speedup without compromising output quality. To facilitate further research and adoption, we release EE-LLM at //github.com/pan-x-c/EE-LLM.
This paper presents a Gaussian Process (GP) framework, a non-parametric technique widely acknowledged for regression and classification tasks, to address inverse problems in mean field games (MFGs). By leveraging GPs, we aim to recover agents' strategic actions and the environment's configurations from partial and noisy observations of the population of agents and the setup of the environment. Our method is a probabilistic tool to infer the behaviors of agents in MFGs from data in scenarios where the comprehensive dataset is either inaccessible or contaminated by noises.
This paper presents Pix2Seq, a simple and generic framework for object detection. Unlike existing approaches that explicitly integrate prior knowledge about the task, we simply cast object detection as a language modeling task conditioned on the observed pixel inputs. Object descriptions (e.g., bounding boxes and class labels) are expressed as sequences of discrete tokens, and we train a neural net to perceive the image and generate the desired sequence. Our approach is based mainly on the intuition that if a neural net knows about where and what the objects are, we just need to teach it how to read them out. Beyond the use of task-specific data augmentations, our approach makes minimal assumptions about the task, yet it achieves competitive results on the challenging COCO dataset, compared to highly specialized and well optimized detection algorithms.
Point cloud-based large scale place recognition is fundamental for many applications like Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Although many models have been proposed and have achieved good performance by learning short-range local features, long-range contextual properties have often been neglected. Moreover, the model size has also become a bottleneck for their wide applications. To overcome these challenges, we propose a super light-weight network model termed SVT-Net for large scale place recognition. Specifically, on top of the highly efficient 3D Sparse Convolution (SP-Conv), an Atom-based Sparse Voxel Transformer (ASVT) and a Cluster-based Sparse Voxel Transformer (CSVT) are proposed to learn both short-range local features and long-range contextual features in this model. Consisting of ASVT and CSVT, SVT-Net can achieve state-of-the-art on benchmark datasets in terms of both accuracy and speed with a super-light model size (0.9M). Meanwhile, two simplified versions of SVT-Net are introduced, which also achieve state-of-the-art and further reduce the model size to 0.8M and 0.4M respectively.