With the comprehensive research conducted on various face analysis tasks, there is a growing interest among researchers to develop a unified approach to face perception. Existing methods mainly discuss unified representation and training, which lack task extensibility and application efficiency. To tackle this issue, we focus on the unified model structure, exploring a face generalist model. As an intuitive design, Naive Faceptor enables tasks with the same output shape and granularity to share the structural design of the standardized output head, achieving improved task extensibility. Furthermore, Faceptor is proposed to adopt a well-designed single-encoder dual-decoder architecture, allowing task-specific queries to represent new-coming semantics. This design enhances the unification of model structure while improving application efficiency in terms of storage overhead. Additionally, we introduce Layer-Attention into Faceptor, enabling the model to adaptively select features from optimal layers to perform the desired tasks. Through joint training on 13 face perception datasets, Faceptor achieves exceptional performance in facial landmark localization, face parsing, age estimation, expression recognition, binary attribute classification, and face recognition, achieving or surpassing specialized methods in most tasks. Our training framework can also be applied to auxiliary supervised learning, significantly improving performance in data-sparse tasks such as age estimation and expression recognition. The code and models will be made publicly available at //github.com/lxq1000/Faceptor.
Over the past decade, visual gaze estimation has garnered increasing attention within the research community, owing to its wide-ranging application scenarios. While existing estimation approaches have achieved remarkable success in enhancing prediction accuracy, they primarily infer gaze from single-image signals, neglecting the potential benefits of the currently dominant text guidance. Notably, visual-language collaboration has been extensively explored across various visual tasks, such as image synthesis and manipulation, leveraging the remarkable transferability of large-scale Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model. Nevertheless, existing gaze estimation approaches overlook the rich semantic cues conveyed by linguistic signals and the priors embedded in CLIP feature space, thereby yielding performance setbacks. To address this gap, we delve deeply into the text-eye collaboration protocol and introduce a novel gaze estimation framework, named GazeCLIP. Specifically, we intricately design a linguistic description generator to produce text signals with coarse directional cues. Additionally, a CLIP-based backbone that excels in characterizing text-eye pairs for gaze estimation is presented. This is followed by the implementation of a fine-grained multi-modal fusion module aimed at modeling the interrelationships between heterogeneous inputs. Extensive experiments on three challenging datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed GazeCLIP which achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy.
The success of many RL techniques heavily relies on human-engineered dense rewards, which typically demand substantial domain expertise and extensive trial and error. In our work, we propose DrS (Dense reward learning from Stages), a novel approach for learning reusable dense rewards for multi-stage tasks in a data-driven manner. By leveraging the stage structures of the task, DrS learns a high-quality dense reward from sparse rewards and demonstrations if given. The learned rewards can be \textit{reused} in unseen tasks, thus reducing the human effort for reward engineering. Extensive experiments on three physical robot manipulation task families with 1000+ task variants demonstrate that our learned rewards can be reused in unseen tasks, resulting in improved performance and sample efficiency of RL algorithms. The learned rewards even achieve comparable performance to human-engineered rewards on some tasks. See our project page (//sites.google.com/view/iclr24drs) for more details.
Cell tracking remains a pivotal yet challenging task in biomedical research. The full potential of deep learning for this purpose is often untapped due to the limited availability of comprehensive and varied training data sets. In this paper, we present SynCellFactory, a generative cell video augmentation. At the heart of SynCellFactory lies the ControlNet architecture, which has been fine-tuned to synthesize cell imagery with photorealistic accuracy in style and motion patterns. This technique enables the creation of synthetic yet realistic cell videos that mirror the complexity of authentic microscopy time-lapses. Our experiments demonstrate that SynCellFactory boosts the performance of well-established deep learning models for cell tracking, particularly when original training data is sparse.
Summarizing comparative opinions about entities (e.g., hotels, phones) from a set of source reviews, often referred to as contrastive summarization, can considerably aid users in decision making. However, reliably measuring the contrastiveness of the output summaries without relying on human evaluations remains an open problem. Prior work has proposed token-overlap based metrics, Distinctiveness Score, to measure contrast which does not take into account the sensitivity to meaning-preserving lexical variations. In this work, we propose an automated evaluation metric CASPR to better measure contrast between a pair of summaries. Our metric is based on a simple and light-weight method that leverages natural language inference (NLI) task to measure contrast by segmenting reviews into single-claim sentences and carefully aggregating NLI scores between them to come up with a summary-level score. We compare CASPR with Distinctiveness Score and a simple yet powerful baseline based on BERTScore. Our results on a prior dataset CoCoTRIP demonstrate that CASPR can more reliably capture the contrastiveness of the summary pairs compared to the baselines.
More than one hundred benchmarks have been developed to test the commonsense knowledge and commonsense reasoning abilities of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. However, these benchmarks are often flawed and many aspects of common sense remain untested. Consequently, we do not currently have any reliable way of measuring to what extent existing AI systems have achieved these abilities. This paper surveys the development and uses of AI commonsense benchmarks. We discuss the nature of common sense; the role of common sense in AI; the goals served by constructing commonsense benchmarks; and desirable features of commonsense benchmarks. We analyze the common flaws in benchmarks, and we argue that it is worthwhile to invest the work needed ensure that benchmark examples are consistently high quality. We survey the various methods of constructing commonsense benchmarks. We enumerate 139 commonsense benchmarks that have been developed: 102 text-based, 18 image-based, 12 video based, and 7 simulated physical environments. We discuss the gaps in the existing benchmarks and aspects of commonsense reasoning that are not addressed in any existing benchmark. We conclude with a number of recommendations for future development of commonsense AI benchmarks.
Interpretability methods are developed to understand the working mechanisms of black-box models, which is crucial to their responsible deployment. Fulfilling this goal requires both that the explanations generated by these methods are correct and that people can easily and reliably understand them. While the former has been addressed in prior work, the latter is often overlooked, resulting in informal model understanding derived from a handful of local explanations. In this paper, we introduce explanation summary (ExSum), a mathematical framework for quantifying model understanding, and propose metrics for its quality assessment. On two domains, ExSum highlights various limitations in the current practice, helps develop accurate model understanding, and reveals easily overlooked properties of the model. We also connect understandability to other properties of explanations such as human alignment, robustness, and counterfactual minimality and plausibility.
Recently many efforts have been devoted to applying graph neural networks (GNNs) to molecular property prediction which is a fundamental task for computational drug and material discovery. One of major obstacles to hinder the successful prediction of molecule property by GNNs is the scarcity of labeled data. Though graph contrastive learning (GCL) methods have achieved extraordinary performance with insufficient labeled data, most focused on designing data augmentation schemes for general graphs. However, the fundamental property of a molecule could be altered with the augmentation method (like random perturbation) on molecular graphs. Whereas, the critical geometric information of molecules remains rarely explored under the current GNN and GCL architectures. To this end, we propose a novel graph contrastive learning method utilizing the geometry of the molecule across 2D and 3D views, which is named GeomGCL. Specifically, we first devise a dual-view geometric message passing network (GeomMPNN) to adaptively leverage the rich information of both 2D and 3D graphs of a molecule. The incorporation of geometric properties at different levels can greatly facilitate the molecular representation learning. Then a novel geometric graph contrastive scheme is designed to make both geometric views collaboratively supervise each other to improve the generalization ability of GeomMPNN. We evaluate GeomGCL on various downstream property prediction tasks via a finetune process. Experimental results on seven real-life molecular datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed GeomGCL against state-of-the-art baselines.
Graph representation learning resurges as a trending research subject owing to the widespread use of deep learning for Euclidean data, which inspire various creative designs of neural networks in the non-Euclidean domain, particularly graphs. With the success of these graph neural networks (GNN) in the static setting, we approach further practical scenarios where the graph dynamically evolves. Existing approaches typically resort to node embeddings and use a recurrent neural network (RNN, broadly speaking) to regulate the embeddings and learn the temporal dynamics. These methods require the knowledge of a node in the full time span (including both training and testing) and are less applicable to the frequent change of the node set. In some extreme scenarios, the node sets at different time steps may completely differ. To resolve this challenge, we propose EvolveGCN, which adapts the graph convolutional network (GCN) model along the temporal dimension without resorting to node embeddings. The proposed approach captures the dynamism of the graph sequence through using an RNN to evolve the GCN parameters. Two architectures are considered for the parameter evolution. We evaluate the proposed approach on tasks including link prediction, edge classification, and node classification. The experimental results indicate a generally higher performance of EvolveGCN compared with related approaches. The code is available at \url{//github.com/IBM/EvolveGCN}.
With the capability of modeling bidirectional contexts, denoising autoencoding based pretraining like BERT achieves better performance than pretraining approaches based on autoregressive language modeling. However, relying on corrupting the input with masks, BERT neglects dependency between the masked positions and suffers from a pretrain-finetune discrepancy. In light of these pros and cons, we propose XLNet, a generalized autoregressive pretraining method that (1) enables learning bidirectional contexts by maximizing the expected likelihood over all permutations of the factorization order and (2) overcomes the limitations of BERT thanks to its autoregressive formulation. Furthermore, XLNet integrates ideas from Transformer-XL, the state-of-the-art autoregressive model, into pretraining. Empirically, XLNet outperforms BERT on 20 tasks, often by a large margin, and achieves state-of-the-art results on 18 tasks including question answering, natural language inference, sentiment analysis, and document ranking.
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have gained significant traction in the field of machine learning, particularly due to their high accuracy in visual recognition. Recent works have pushed the performance of GPU implementations of CNNs to significantly improve their classification and training times. With these improvements, many frameworks have become available for implementing CNNs on both CPUs and GPUs, with no support for FPGA implementations. In this work we present a modified version of the popular CNN framework Caffe, with FPGA support. This allows for classification using CNN models and specialized FPGA implementations with the flexibility of reprogramming the device when necessary, seamless memory transactions between host and device, simple-to-use test benches, and the ability to create pipelined layer implementations. To validate the framework, we use the Xilinx SDAccel environment to implement an FPGA-based Winograd convolution engine and show that the FPGA layer can be used alongside other layers running on a host processor to run several popular CNNs (AlexNet, GoogleNet, VGG A, Overfeat). The results show that our framework achieves 50 GFLOPS across 3x3 convolutions in the benchmarks. This is achieved within a practical framework, which will aid in future development of FPGA-based CNNs.