Large-scale pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP and ALIGN, have introduced a new paradigm for learning transferable visual representations. Recently, there has been a surge of interest among researchers in developing lightweight fine-tuning techniques to adapt these models to downstream visual tasks. We recognize that current state-of-the-art fine-tuning methods, such as Tip-Adapter, simply consider the covariance between the query image feature and features of support few-shot training samples, which only captures linear relations and potentially instigates a deceptive perception of independence. To address this issue, in this work, we innovatively introduce Brownian Distance Covariance (BDC) to the field of vision-language reasoning. The BDC metric can model all possible relations, providing a robust metric for measuring feature dependence. Based on this, we present a novel method called BDC-Adapter, which integrates BDC prototype similarity reasoning and multi-modal reasoning network prediction to perform classification tasks. Our extensive experimental results show that the proposed BDC-Adapter can freely handle non-linear relations and fully characterize independence, outperforming the current state-of-the-art methods by large margins.
Standard approaches for uncertainty quantification in deep learning and physics-informed learning have persistent limitations. Indicatively, strong assumptions regarding the data likelihood are required, the performance highly depends on the selection of priors, and the posterior can be sampled only approximately, which leads to poor approximations because of the associated computational cost. This paper introduces and studies confidence interval (CI) estimation for deterministic partial differential equations as a novel problem. That is, to propagate confidence, in the form of CIs, from data locations to the entire domain with probabilistic guarantees. We propose a method, termed Physics-Informed Confidence Propagation (PICProp), based on bi-level optimization to compute a valid CI without making heavy assumptions. We provide a theorem regarding the validity of our method, and computational experiments, where the focus is on physics-informed learning.
Reinforcement learning (RL) requires either manually specifying a reward function, which is often infeasible, or learning a reward model from a large amount of human feedback, which is often very expensive. We study a more sample-efficient alternative: using pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) as zero-shot reward models (RMs) to specify tasks via natural language. We propose a natural and general approach to using VLMs as reward models, which we call VLM-RMs. We use VLM-RMs based on CLIP to train a MuJoCo humanoid to learn complex tasks without a manually specified reward function, such as kneeling, doing the splits, and sitting in a lotus position. For each of these tasks, we only provide a single sentence text prompt describing the desired task with minimal prompt engineering. We provide videos of the trained agents at: //sites.google.com/view/vlm-rm. We can improve performance by providing a second ``baseline'' prompt and projecting out parts of the CLIP embedding space irrelevant to distinguish between goal and baseline. Further, we find a strong scaling effect for VLM-RMs: larger VLMs trained with more compute and data are better reward models. The failure modes of VLM-RMs we encountered are all related to known capability limitations of current VLMs, such as limited spatial reasoning ability or visually unrealistic environments that are far off-distribution for the VLM. We find that VLM-RMs are remarkably robust as long as the VLM is large enough. This suggests that future VLMs will become more and more useful reward models for a wide range of RL applications.
Generative self-supervised learning (SSL) has exhibited significant potential and garnered increasing interest in graph learning. In this study, we aim to explore the problem of generative SSL in the context of heterogeneous graph learning (HGL). The previous SSL approaches for heterogeneous graphs have primarily relied on contrastive learning, necessitating the design of complex views to capture heterogeneity. However, existing generative SSL methods have not fully leveraged the capabilities of generative models to address the challenges of HGL. In this paper, we present HGCVAE, a novel contrastive variational graph auto-encoder that liberates HGL from the burden of intricate heterogeneity capturing. Instead of focusing on complicated heterogeneity, HGCVAE harnesses the full potential of generative SSL. HGCVAE innovatively consolidates contrastive learning with generative SSL, introducing several key innovations. Firstly, we employ a progressive mechanism to generate high-quality hard negative samples for contrastive learning, utilizing the power of variational inference. Additionally, we present a dynamic mask strategy to ensure effective and stable learning. Moreover, we propose an enhanced scaled cosine error as the criterion for better attribute reconstruction. As an initial step in combining generative and contrastive SSL, HGCVAE achieves remarkable results compared to various state-of-the-art baselines, confirming its superiority.
Deep learning has become the dominant approach in coping with various tasks in Natural LanguageProcessing (NLP). Although text inputs are typically represented as a sequence of tokens, there isa rich variety of NLP problems that can be best expressed with a graph structure. As a result, thereis a surge of interests in developing new deep learning techniques on graphs for a large numberof NLP tasks. In this survey, we present a comprehensive overview onGraph Neural Networks(GNNs) for Natural Language Processing. We propose a new taxonomy of GNNs for NLP, whichsystematically organizes existing research of GNNs for NLP along three axes: graph construction,graph representation learning, and graph based encoder-decoder models. We further introducea large number of NLP applications that are exploiting the power of GNNs and summarize thecorresponding benchmark datasets, evaluation metrics, and open-source codes. Finally, we discussvarious outstanding challenges for making the full use of GNNs for NLP as well as future researchdirections. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive overview of Graph NeuralNetworks for Natural Language Processing.
There recently has been a surge of interest in developing a new class of deep learning (DL) architectures that integrate an explicit time dimension as a fundamental building block of learning and representation mechanisms. In turn, many recent results show that topological descriptors of the observed data, encoding information on the shape of the dataset in a topological space at different scales, that is, persistent homology of the data, may contain important complementary information, improving both performance and robustness of DL. As convergence of these two emerging ideas, we propose to enhance DL architectures with the most salient time-conditioned topological information of the data and introduce the concept of zigzag persistence into time-aware graph convolutional networks (GCNs). Zigzag persistence provides a systematic and mathematically rigorous framework to track the most important topological features of the observed data that tend to manifest themselves over time. To integrate the extracted time-conditioned topological descriptors into DL, we develop a new topological summary, zigzag persistence image, and derive its theoretical stability guarantees. We validate the new GCNs with a time-aware zigzag topological layer (Z-GCNETs), in application to traffic forecasting and Ethereum blockchain price prediction. Our results indicate that Z-GCNET outperforms 13 state-of-the-art methods on 4 time series datasets.
Semi-supervised learning on class-imbalanced data, although a realistic problem, has been under studied. While existing semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods are known to perform poorly on minority classes, we find that they still generate high precision pseudo-labels on minority classes. By exploiting this property, in this work, we propose Class-Rebalancing Self-Training (CReST), a simple yet effective framework to improve existing SSL methods on class-imbalanced data. CReST iteratively retrains a baseline SSL model with a labeled set expanded by adding pseudo-labeled samples from an unlabeled set, where pseudo-labeled samples from minority classes are selected more frequently according to an estimated class distribution. We also propose a progressive distribution alignment to adaptively adjust the rebalancing strength dubbed CReST+. We show that CReST and CReST+ improve state-of-the-art SSL algorithms on various class-imbalanced datasets and consistently outperform other popular rebalancing methods.
Language model pre-training, such as BERT, has significantly improved the performances of many natural language processing tasks. However, pre-trained language models are usually computationally expensive and memory intensive, so it is difficult to effectively execute them on some resource-restricted devices. To accelerate inference and reduce model size while maintaining accuracy, we firstly propose a novel transformer distillation method that is a specially designed knowledge distillation (KD) method for transformer-based models. By leveraging this new KD method, the plenty of knowledge encoded in a large teacher BERT can be well transferred to a small student TinyBERT. Moreover, we introduce a new two-stage learning framework for TinyBERT, which performs transformer distillation at both the pre-training and task-specific learning stages. This framework ensures that TinyBERT can capture both the general-domain and task-specific knowledge of the teacher BERT. TinyBERT is empirically effective and achieves comparable results with BERT in GLUE datasets, while being 7.5x smaller and 9.4x faster on inference. TinyBERT is also significantly better than state-of-the-art baselines, even with only about 28% parameters and 31% inference time of baselines.
Transformers have a potential of learning longer-term dependency, but are limited by a fixed-length context in the setting of language modeling. We propose a novel neural architecture Transformer-XL that enables learning dependency beyond a fixed length without disrupting temporal coherence. It consists of a segment-level recurrence mechanism and a novel positional encoding scheme. Our method not only enables capturing longer-term dependency, but also resolves the context fragmentation problem. As a result, Transformer-XL learns dependency that is 80% longer than RNNs and 450% longer than vanilla Transformers, achieves better performance on both short and long sequences, and is up to 1,800+ times faster than vanilla Transformers during evaluation. Notably, we improve the state-of-the-art results of bpc/perplexity to 0.99 on enwiki8, 1.08 on text8, 18.3 on WikiText-103, 21.8 on One Billion Word, and 54.5 on Penn Treebank (without finetuning). When trained only on WikiText-103, Transformer-XL manages to generate reasonably coherent, novel text articles with thousands of tokens. Our code, pretrained models, and hyperparameters are available in both Tensorflow and PyTorch.
Graph-based semi-supervised learning (SSL) is an important learning problem where the goal is to assign labels to initially unlabeled nodes in a graph. Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have recently been shown to be effective for graph-based SSL problems. GCNs inherently assume existence of pairwise relationships in the graph-structured data. However, in many real-world problems, relationships go beyond pairwise connections and hence are more complex. Hypergraphs provide a natural modeling tool to capture such complex relationships. In this work, we explore the use of GCNs for hypergraph-based SSL. In particular, we propose HyperGCN, an SSL method which uses a layer-wise propagation rule for convolutional neural networks operating directly on hypergraphs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first principled adaptation of GCNs to hypergraphs. HyperGCN is able to encode both the hypergraph structure and hypernode features in an effective manner. Through detailed experimentation, we demonstrate HyperGCN's effectiveness at hypergraph-based SSL.
State-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) benefits a lot from multi-task learning (MTL), which learns multiple related tasks simultaneously to obtain shared or mutually related representations for different tasks. The most widely-used MTL CNN structure is based on an empirical or heuristic split on a specific layer (e.g., the last convolutional layer) to minimize different task-specific losses. However, this heuristic sharing/splitting strategy may be harmful to the final performance of one or multiple tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel CNN structure for MTL, which enables automatic feature fusing at every layer. Specifically, we first concatenate features from different tasks according to their channel dimension, and then formulate the feature fusing problem as discriminative dimensionality reduction. We show that this discriminative dimensionality reduction can be done by 1x1 Convolution, Batch Normalization, and Weight Decay in one CNN, which we refer to as Neural Discriminative Dimensionality Reduction (NDDR). We perform ablation analysis in details for different configurations in training the network. The experiments carried out on different network structures and different task sets demonstrate the promising performance and desirable generalizability of our proposed method.