Discrete diffusion models have gained increasing attention for their ability to model complex distributions with tractable sampling and inference. However, the error analysis for discrete diffusion models remains less well-understood. In this work, we propose a comprehensive framework for the error analysis of discrete diffusion models based on L\'evy-type stochastic integrals. By generalizing the Poisson random measure to that with a time-independent and state-dependent intensity, we rigorously establish a stochastic integral formulation of discrete diffusion models and provide the corresponding change of measure theorems that are intriguingly analogous to It\^o integrals and Girsanov's theorem for their continuous counterparts. Our framework unifies and strengthens the current theoretical results on discrete diffusion models and obtains the first error bound for the $\tau$-leaping scheme in KL divergence. With error sources clearly identified, our analysis gives new insight into the mathematical properties of discrete diffusion models and offers guidance for the design of efficient and accurate algorithms for real-world discrete diffusion model applications.
Existing multimodal retrieval systems often rely on disjointed models for image comprehension, such as object detectors and caption generators, leading to cumbersome implementations and training processes. To overcome this limitation, we propose an end-to-end retrieval system, Ret-XKnow, to endow a text retriever with the ability to understand multimodal queries via dynamic modality interaction. Ret-XKnow leverages a partial convolution mechanism to focus on visual information relevant to the given textual query, thereby enhancing multimodal query representations. To effectively learn multimodal interaction, we also introduce the Visual Dialogue-to-Retrieval (ViD2R) dataset automatically constructed from visual dialogue datasets. Our dataset construction process ensures that the dialogues are transformed into suitable information retrieval tasks using a text retriever. We demonstrate that our approach not only significantly improves retrieval performance in zero-shot settings but also achieves substantial improvements in fine-tuning scenarios. Our code is publicly available: //github.com/yeongjoonJu/Ret_XKnow.
Packet scheduling is a fundamental networking task that recently received renewed attention in the context of programmable data planes. Programmable packet scheduling systems such as those based on Push-In First-Out (PIFO) abstraction enabled flexible scheduling policies, but are too resource-expensive for large-scale line rate operation. This prompted research into practical programmable schedulers (e.g., SP-PIFO, AIFO) approximating PIFO behavior on regular hardware. Yet, their scalability remains limited due to extensive number of memory operations. To address this, we design an effective yet resource-efficient packet scheduler, Range-In First-Out (RIFO), which uses only three mutable memory cells and one FIFO queue per PIFO queue. RIFO is based on multi-criteria decision-making principles and uses small guaranteed admission buffers. Our large-scale simulations in Netbench demonstrate that despite using fewer resources, RIFO generally achieves competitive flow completion times across all studied workloads, and is especially effective in workloads with a significant share of large flows, reducing flow completion time up to 4.91x in datamining workload compared to state-of-the-art solutions. Our prototype implementation using P4 on Tofino switches requires only 650 lines of code, is scalable, and runs at line rate.
The Softmax attention mechanism in Transformer models is notoriously computationally expensive, particularly due to its quadratic complexity, posing significant challenges in vision applications. In contrast, linear attention provides a far more efficient solution by reducing the complexity to linear levels. However, compared to Softmax attention, linear attention often experiences significant performance degradation. Our experiments indicate that this performance drop is due to the low-rank nature of linear attention's feature map, which hinders its ability to adequately model complex spatial information. In this paper, to break the low-rank dilemma of linear attention, we conduct rank analysis from two perspectives: the KV buffer and the output features. Consequently, we introduce Rank-Augmented Linear Attention (RALA), which rivals the performance of Softmax attention while maintaining linear complexity and high efficiency. Based on RALA, we construct the Rank-Augmented Vision Linear Transformer (RAVLT). Extensive experiments demonstrate that RAVLT achieves excellent performance across various vision tasks. Specifically, without using any additional labels, data, or supervision during training, RAVLT achieves an 84.4% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1k with only 26M parameters and 4.6G FLOPs. This result significantly surpasses previous linear attention mechanisms, fully illustrating the potential of RALA. Code will be available at //github.com/qhfan/RALA.
Binary code similarity detection is an important problem with applications in areas such as malware analysis, vulnerability research and license violation detection. This paper proposes a novel graph neural network architecture combined with a novel graph data representation called call graphlets. A call graphlet encodes the neighborhood around each function in a binary executable, capturing the local and global context through a series of statistical features. A specialized graph neural network model operates on this graph representation, learning to map it to a feature vector that encodes semantic binary code similarities using deep-metric learning. The proposed approach is evaluated across five distinct datasets covering different architectures, compiler tool chains, and optimization levels. Experimental results show that the combination of call graphlets and the novel graph neural network architecture achieves comparable or state-of-the-art performance compared to baseline techniques across cross-architecture, mono-architecture and zero shot tasks. In addition, our proposed approach also performs well when evaluated against an out-of-domain function inlining task. The work provides a general and effective graph neural network-based solution for conducting binary code similarity detection.
Although text-to-image (T2I) models exhibit remarkable generation capabilities, they frequently fail to accurately bind semantically related objects or attributes in the input prompts; a challenge termed semantic binding. Previous approaches either involve intensive fine-tuning of the entire T2I model or require users or large language models to specify generation layouts, adding complexity. In this paper, we define semantic binding as the task of associating a given object with its attribute, termed attribute binding, or linking it to other related sub-objects, referred to as object binding. We introduce a novel method called Token Merging (ToMe), which enhances semantic binding by aggregating relevant tokens into a single composite token. This ensures that the object, its attributes and sub-objects all share the same cross-attention map. Additionally, to address potential confusion among main objects with complex textual prompts, we propose end token substitution as a complementary strategy. To further refine our approach in the initial stages of T2I generation, where layouts are determined, we incorporate two auxiliary losses, an entropy loss and a semantic binding loss, to iteratively update the composite token to improve the generation integrity. We conducted extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of ToMe, comparing it against various existing methods on the T2I-CompBench and our proposed GPT-4o object binding benchmark. Our method is particularly effective in complex scenarios that involve multiple objects and attributes, which previous methods often fail to address. The code will be publicly available at \url{//github.com/hutaihang/ToMe}.
Language models (LMs) have demonstrated an improved capacity to handle long-context information, yet existing long-context benchmarks primarily measure LMs' retrieval abilities with extended inputs, e.g., pinpointing a short phrase from long-form text. Therefore, they may fall short when evaluating models' global context understanding capacity, such as synthesizing and reasoning over content across input to generate the response. In this paper, we study long-context language model (LCLM) evaluation through many-shot in-context learning (ICL). Concretely, we identify the skills each ICL task requires, and examine models' long-context capabilities on them. We first ask: What types of ICL tasks benefit from additional demonstrations, and are these tasks effective at evaluating LCLMs? We find that classification and summarization tasks show notable performance improvements with additional demonstrations, while translation and reasoning tasks do not exhibit clear trends. This suggests the classification tasks predominantly test models' retrieval skills. Next, we ask: To what extent does each task require retrieval skills versus global context understanding from LCLMs? We develop metrics to categorize ICL tasks into two groups: (i) retrieval tasks that require strong retrieval ability to pinpoint relevant examples, and (ii) global context understanding tasks that necessitate a deeper comprehension of the full input. We find that not all datasets can effectively evaluate these long-context capabilities. To address this gap, we introduce a new many-shot ICL benchmark, MANYICLBENCH, designed to characterize LCLMs' retrieval and global context understanding capabilities separately. Benchmarking 11 open-weight LCLMs with MANYICLBENCH, we find that while state-of-the-art models perform well in retrieval tasks up to 64k tokens, many show significant drops in global context tasks at just 16k tokens.
Recent models for natural language understanding are inclined to exploit simple patterns in datasets, commonly known as shortcuts. These shortcuts hinge on spurious correlations between labels and latent features existing in the training data. At inference time, shortcut-dependent models are likely to generate erroneous predictions under distribution shifts, particularly when some latent features are no longer correlated with the labels. To avoid this, previous studies have trained models to eliminate the reliance on shortcuts. In this study, we explore a different direction: pessimistically aggregating the predictions of a mixture-of-experts, assuming each expert captures relatively different latent features. The experimental results demonstrate that our post-hoc control over the experts significantly enhances the model's robustness to the distribution shift in shortcuts. Besides, we show that our approach has some practical advantages. We also analyze our model and provide results to support the assumption.
Backdoor attacks pose significant challenges to the security of machine learning models, particularly for overparameterized models like deep neural networks. In this paper, we propose ProP (Propagation Perturbation), a novel and scalable backdoor detection method that leverages statistical output distributions to identify backdoored models and their target classes without relying on exhausive optimization strategies. ProP introduces a new metric, the benign score, to quantify output distributions and effectively distinguish between benign and backdoored models. Unlike existing approaches, ProP operates with minimal assumptions, requiring no prior knowledge of triggers or malicious samples, making it highly applicable to real-world scenarios. Extensive experimental validation across multiple popular backdoor attacks demonstrates that ProP achieves high detection accuracy and computational efficiency, outperforming existing methods. These results highlight ProP's potential as a robust and practical solution for backdoor detection.
Lifelong few-shot customization for text-to-image diffusion aims to continually generalize existing models for new tasks with minimal data while preserving old knowledge. Current customization diffusion models excel in few-shot tasks but struggle with catastrophic forgetting problems in lifelong generations. In this study, we identify and categorize the catastrophic forgetting problems into two folds: relevant concepts forgetting and previous concepts forgetting. To address these challenges, we first devise a data-free knowledge distillation strategy to tackle relevant concepts forgetting. Unlike existing methods that rely on additional real data or offline replay of original concept data, our approach enables on-the-fly knowledge distillation to retain the previous concepts while learning new ones, without accessing any previous data. Second, we develop an In-Context Generation (ICGen) paradigm that allows the diffusion model to be conditioned upon the input vision context, which facilitates the few-shot generation and mitigates the issue of previous concepts forgetting. Extensive experiments show that the proposed Lifelong Few-Shot Diffusion (LFS-Diffusion) method can produce high-quality and accurate images while maintaining previously learned knowledge.
Current models for event causality identification (ECI) mainly adopt a supervised framework, which heavily rely on labeled data for training. Unfortunately, the scale of current annotated datasets is relatively limited, which cannot provide sufficient support for models to capture useful indicators from causal statements, especially for handing those new, unseen cases. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel approach, shortly named CauSeRL, which leverages external causal statements for event causality identification. First of all, we design a self-supervised framework to learn context-specific causal patterns from external causal statements. Then, we adopt a contrastive transfer strategy to incorporate the learned context-specific causal patterns into the target ECI model. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms previous methods on EventStoryLine and Causal-TimeBank (+2.0 and +3.4 points on F1 value respectively).