The probability prediction of multivariate time series is a notoriously challenging but practical task. On the one hand, the challenge is how to effectively capture the cross-series correlations between interacting time series, to achieve accurate distribution modeling. On the other hand, we should consider how to capture the contextual information within time series more accurately to model multivariate temporal dynamics of time series. In this work, we proposed a novel non-autoregressive deep learning model, called Multi-scale Attention Normalizing Flow(MANF), where we integrate multi-scale attention and relative position information and the multivariate data distribution is represented by the conditioned normalizing flow. Additionally, compared with autoregressive modeling methods, our model avoids the influence of cumulative error and does not increase the time complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on many popular multivariate datasets.
Dexterous manipulation of objects once held in hand remains a challenge. Such skills are, however, necessary for robotics to move beyond gripper-based manipulation and use all the dexterity offered by anthropomorphic robotic hands. One major challenge when manipulating an object within the hand is that fingers must move around the object while avoiding collision with other fingers or the object. Such collision-free paths must be computed in real-time, as the smallest deviation from the original plan can easily lead to collisions. We present a real-time approach to computing collision-free paths in a high-dimensional space. To guide the exploration, we learn an explicit representation of the free space, retrievable in real-time. We further combine this representation with closed-loop control via dynamical systems and sampling-based motion planning and show that the combination increases performance compared to alternatives, offering efficient search of feasible paths and real-time obstacle avoidance in a multi-fingered robotic hand.
In the Text-to-speech(TTS) task, the latent diffusion model has excellent fidelity and generalization, but its expensive resource consumption and slow inference speed have always been a challenging. This paper proposes Discrete Diffusion Model with Contrastive Learning for Text-to-Speech Generation(DCTTS). The following contributions are made by DCTTS: 1) The TTS diffusion model based on discrete space significantly lowers the computational consumption of the diffusion model and improves sampling speed; 2) The contrastive learning method based on discrete space is used to enhance the alignment connection between speech and text and improve sampling quality; and 3) It uses an efficient text encoder to simplify the model's parameters and increase computational efficiency. The experimental results demonstrate that the approach proposed in this paper has outstanding speech synthesis quality and sampling speed while significantly reducing the resource consumption of diffusion model. The synthesized samples are available at //github.com/lawtherWu/DCTTS.
Domain generalized semantic segmentation (DGSS) is a critical yet challenging task, where the model is trained only on source data without access to any target data. Despite the proposal of numerous DGSS strategies, the generalization capability remains limited in CNN architectures. Though some Transformer-based segmentation models show promising performance, they primarily focus on capturing intra-sample attentive relationships, disregarding inter-sample correlations which can potentially benefit DGSS. To this end, we enhance the attention modules in Transformer networks for improving DGSS by incorporating information from other independent samples in the same batch, enriching contextual information, and diversifying the training data for each attention block. Specifically, we propose two alternative intra-batch attention mechanisms, namely mean-based intra-batch attention (MIBA) and element-wise intra-batch attention (EIBA), to capture correlations between different samples, enhancing feature representation and generalization capabilities. Building upon intra-batch attention, we introduce IBAFormer, which integrates self-attention modules with the proposed intra-batch attention for DGSS. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IBAFormer achieves SOTA performance in DGSS, and ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of each introduced component.
Recently, speech separation (SS) task has achieved remarkable progress driven by deep learning technique. However, it is still challenging to separate target speech from noisy mixture, as the neural model is vulnerable to assign background noise to each speaker. In this paper, we propose a noise-aware SS (NASS) method, which aims to improve the speech quality for separated signals under noisy conditions. Specifically, NASS views background noise as an independent output and predicts it with other speakers in a mask-based manner. Then we conduct patch-wise contrastive learning on feature level to minimize the mutual information between the predicted noise output and other speakers, which suppresses the noise information in separated signals, and vice versa. Experimental results show that NASS could achieve competitive results on different datasets, and significantly improve the noise-robustness for different mask-based SS backbones with less than 0.1M parameter increase.
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have received considerable attention not only for their superiority in energy efficiency with discrete signal processing but also for their natural suitability to integrate multi-scale biological plasticity. However, most SNNs directly adopt the structure of the well-established Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), and rarely automatically design Neural Architecture Search (NAS) for SNNs. The neural motifs topology, modular regional structure and global cross-brain region connection of the human brain are the product of natural evolution and can serve as a perfect reference for designing brain-inspired SNN architecture. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Scale Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search (MSE-NAS) for SNN, simultaneously considering micro-, meso- and macro-scale brain topologies as the evolutionary search space. MSE-NAS evolves individual neuron operation, self-organized integration of multiple circuit motifs, and global connectivity across motifs through a brain-inspired indirect evaluation function, Representational Dissimilarity Matrices (RDMs). This training-free fitness function could greatly reduce computational consumption and NAS's time, and its task-independent property enables the searched SNNs to exhibit excellent transferability on multiple datasets. Furthermore, MSE-NAS show robustness against the training method and noise. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance with shorter simulation steps on static datasets (CIFAR10, CIFAR100) and neuromorphic datasets (CIFAR10-DVS and DVS128-Gesture). The thorough analysis also illustrates the significant performance improvement and consistent bio-interpretability deriving from the topological evolution at different scales and the RDMs fitness function.
While impressive performance has been achieved in image captioning, the limited diversity of the generated captions and the large parameter scale remain major barriers to the real-word application of these systems. In this work, we propose a lightweight image captioning network in combination with continuous diffusion, called Prefix-diffusion. To achieve diversity, we design an efficient method that injects prefix image embeddings into the denoising process of the diffusion model. In order to reduce trainable parameters, we employ a pre-trained model to extract image features and further design an extra mapping network. Prefix-diffusion is able to generate diverse captions with relatively less parameters, while maintaining the fluency and relevance of the captions benefiting from the generative capabilities of the diffusion model. Our work paves the way for scaling up diffusion models for image captioning, and achieves promising performance compared with recent approaches.
Learning effective high-order feature interactions is very crucial in the CTR prediction task. However, it is very time-consuming to calculate high-order feature interactions with massive features in online e-commerce platforms. Most existing methods manually design a maximal order and further filter out the useless interactions from them. Although they reduce the high computational costs caused by the exponential growth of high-order feature combinations, they still suffer from the degradation of model capability due to the suboptimal learning of the restricted feature orders. The solution to maintain the model capability and meanwhile keep it efficient is a technical challenge, which has not been adequately addressed. To address this issue, we propose an adaptive feature interaction learning model, named as EulerNet, in which the feature interactions are learned in a complex vector space by conducting space mapping according to Euler's formula. EulerNet converts the exponential powers of feature interactions into simple linear combinations of the modulus and phase of the complex features, making it possible to adaptively learn the high-order feature interactions in an efficient way. Furthermore, EulerNet incorporates the implicit and explicit feature interactions into a unified architecture, which achieves the mutual enhancement and largely boosts the model capabilities. Such a network can be fully learned from data, with no need of pre-designed form or order for feature interactions. Extensive experiments conducted on three public datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach. Our code is available at: //github.com/RUCAIBox/EulerNet.
With the urgent demand for generalized deep models, many pre-trained big models are proposed, such as BERT, ViT, GPT, etc. Inspired by the success of these models in single domains (like computer vision and natural language processing), the multi-modal pre-trained big models have also drawn more and more attention in recent years. In this work, we give a comprehensive survey of these models and hope this paper could provide new insights and helps fresh researchers to track the most cutting-edge works. Specifically, we firstly introduce the background of multi-modal pre-training by reviewing the conventional deep learning, pre-training works in natural language process, computer vision, and speech. Then, we introduce the task definition, key challenges, and advantages of multi-modal pre-training models (MM-PTMs), and discuss the MM-PTMs with a focus on data, objectives, network architectures, and knowledge enhanced pre-training. After that, we introduce the downstream tasks used for the validation of large-scale MM-PTMs, including generative, classification, and regression tasks. We also give visualization and analysis of the model parameters and results on representative downstream tasks. Finally, we point out possible research directions for this topic that may benefit future works. In addition, we maintain a continuously updated paper list for large-scale pre-trained multi-modal big models: //github.com/wangxiao5791509/MultiModal_BigModels_Survey
Few-shot Knowledge Graph (KG) completion is a focus of current research, where each task aims at querying unseen facts of a relation given its few-shot reference entity pairs. Recent attempts solve this problem by learning static representations of entities and references, ignoring their dynamic properties, i.e., entities may exhibit diverse roles within task relations, and references may make different contributions to queries. This work proposes an adaptive attentional network for few-shot KG completion by learning adaptive entity and reference representations. Specifically, entities are modeled by an adaptive neighbor encoder to discern their task-oriented roles, while references are modeled by an adaptive query-aware aggregator to differentiate their contributions. Through the attention mechanism, both entities and references can capture their fine-grained semantic meanings, and thus render more expressive representations. This will be more predictive for knowledge acquisition in the few-shot scenario. Evaluation in link prediction on two public datasets shows that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results with different few-shot sizes.
Object detection is an important and challenging problem in computer vision. Although the past decade has witnessed major advances in object detection in natural scenes, such successes have been slow to aerial imagery, not only because of the huge variation in the scale, orientation and shape of the object instances on the earth's surface, but also due to the scarcity of well-annotated datasets of objects in aerial scenes. To advance object detection research in Earth Vision, also known as Earth Observation and Remote Sensing, we introduce a large-scale Dataset for Object deTection in Aerial images (DOTA). To this end, we collect $2806$ aerial images from different sensors and platforms. Each image is of the size about 4000-by-4000 pixels and contains objects exhibiting a wide variety of scales, orientations, and shapes. These DOTA images are then annotated by experts in aerial image interpretation using $15$ common object categories. The fully annotated DOTA images contains $188,282$ instances, each of which is labeled by an arbitrary (8 d.o.f.) quadrilateral To build a baseline for object detection in Earth Vision, we evaluate state-of-the-art object detection algorithms on DOTA. Experiments demonstrate that DOTA well represents real Earth Vision applications and are quite challenging.