Recently, diffusion models have excelled in image generation tasks and have also been applied to neural language processing (NLP) for controllable text generation. However, the application of diffusion models in a cross-lingual setting is less unexplored. Additionally, while pretraining with diffusion models has been studied within a single language, the potential of cross-lingual pretraining remains understudied. To address these gaps, we propose XDLM, a novel Cross-lingual diffusion model for machine translation, consisting of pretraining and fine-tuning stages. In the pretraining stage, we propose TLDM, a new training objective for mastering the mapping between different languages; in the fine-tuning stage, we build up the translation system based on the pretrained model. We evaluate the result on several machine translation benchmarks and outperformed both diffusion and Transformer baselines.
Large language models (LLMs) have been successfully adapted for interactive decision-making tasks like web navigation. While achieving decent performance, previous methods implicitly assume a forward-only execution mode for the model, where they only provide oracle trajectories as in-context examples to teach the model how to reason in the interactive environment. Consequently, the model could not handle more challenging scenarios not covered in the in-context examples, e.g., mistakes, leading to sub-optimal performance. To address this issue, we propose to model the interactive task as state space exploration, where the LLM agent transitions among a pre-defined set of states by performing actions to complete the task. This formulation enables flexible back-tracking, allowing the model to easily recover from errors. We evaluate our proposed LLM Agent with State-Space ExploRation (LASER) on the WebShop task. Experimental results show that our LASER agent significantly outperforms previous methods and closes the gap with human performance on the web navigation task.
Tiny, causal models are crucial for embedded audio machine learning applications. Model compression can be achieved via distilling knowledge from a large teacher into a smaller student model. In this work, we propose a novel two-step approach for tiny speech enhancement model distillation. In contrast to the standard approach of a weighted mixture of distillation and supervised losses, we firstly pre-train the student using only the knowledge distillation (KD) objective, after which we switch to a fully supervised training regime. We also propose a novel fine-grained similarity-preserving KD loss, which aims to match the student's intra-activation Gram matrices to that of the teacher. Our method demonstrates broad improvements, but particularly shines in adverse conditions including high compression and low signal to noise ratios (SNR), yielding signal to distortion ratio gains of 0.9 dB and 1.1 dB, respectively, at -5 dB input SNR and 63x compression compared to baseline.
Starting from the resurgence of deep learning, vision-language models (VLMs) benefiting from large language models (LLMs) have never been so popular. However, while LLMs can utilize extensive background knowledge and task information with in-context learning, most VLMs still struggle with understanding complex multi-modal prompts with multiple images. The issue can traced back to the architectural design of VLMs or pre-training data. Specifically, the current VLMs primarily emphasize utilizing multi-modal data with a single image some, rather than multi-modal prompts with interleaved multiple images and text. Even though some newly proposed VLMs could handle user prompts with multiple images, pre-training data does not provide more sophisticated multi-modal prompts than interleaved image and text crawled from the web. We propose MMICL to address the issue by considering both the model and data perspectives. We introduce a well-designed architecture capable of seamlessly integrating visual and textual context in an interleaved manner and MIC dataset to reduce the gap between the training data and the complex user prompts in real-world applications, including: 1) multi-modal context with interleaved images and text, 2) textual references for each image, and 3) multi-image data with spatial, logical, or temporal relationships. Our experiments confirm that MMICL achieves new stat-of-the-art zero-shot and few-shot performance on a wide range of general vision-language tasks, especially for complex reasoning benchmarks including MME and MMBench. Our analysis demonstrates that MMICL effectively deals with the challenge of complex multi-modal prompt understanding. The experiments on ScienceQA-IMG also show that MMICL successfully alleviates the issue of language bias in VLMs, which we believe is the reason behind the advanced performance of MMICL.
Image reconstruction-based anomaly detection models are widely explored in industrial visual inspection. However, existing models usually suffer from the trade-off between normal reconstruction fidelity and abnormal reconstruction distinguishability, which damages the performance. In this paper, we find that the above trade-off can be better mitigated by leveraging the distinct frequency biases between normal and abnormal reconstruction errors. To this end, we propose Frequency-aware Image Restoration (FAIR), a novel self-supervised image restoration task that restores images from their high-frequency components. It enables precise reconstruction of normal patterns while mitigating unfavorable generalization to anomalies. Using only a simple vanilla UNet, FAIR achieves state-of-the-art performance with higher efficiency on various defect detection datasets. Code: //github.com/liutongkun/FAIR.
Segment anything model (SAM), an eminent universal image segmentation model, has recently gathered considerable attention within the domain of medical image segmentation. Despite the remarkable performance of SAM on natural images, it grapples with significant performance degradation and limited generalization when confronted with medical images, particularly with those involving objects of low contrast, faint boundaries, intricate shapes, and diminutive sizes. In this paper, we propose SAMUS, a universal model tailored for ultrasound image segmentation. In contrast to previous SAM-based universal models, SAMUS pursues not only better generalization but also lower deployment cost, rendering it more suitable for clinical applications. Specifically, based on SAM, a parallel CNN branch is introduced to inject local features into the ViT encoder through cross-branch attention for better medical image segmentation. Then, a position adapter and a feature adapter are developed to adapt SAM from natural to medical domains and from requiring large-size inputs (1024x1024) to small-size inputs (256x256) for more clinical-friendly deployment. A comprehensive ultrasound dataset, comprising about 30k images and 69k masks and covering six object categories, is collected for verification. Extensive comparison experiments demonstrate SAMUS's superiority against the state-of-the-art task-specific models and universal foundation models under both task-specific evaluation and generalization evaluation. Moreover, SAMUS is deployable on entry-level GPUs, as it has been liberated from the constraints of long sequence encoding. The code, data, and models will be released at //github.com/xianlin7/SAMUS.
Vision Transformers have been incredibly effective when tackling computer vision tasks due to their ability to model long feature dependencies. By using large-scale training data and various self-supervised signals (e.g., masked random patches), vision transformers provide state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarking datasets, such as ImageNet-1k and CIFAR-10. However, these vision transformers pretrained over general large-scale image corpora could only produce an anisotropic representation space, limiting their generalizability and transferability to the target downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective Label-aware Contrastive Training framework LaCViT, which improves the isotropy of the pretrained representation space for vision transformers, thereby enabling more effective transfer learning amongst a wide range of image classification tasks. Through experimentation over five standard image classification datasets, we demonstrate that LaCViT-trained models outperform the original pretrained baselines by around 9% absolute Accuracy@1, and consistent improvements can be observed when applying LaCViT to our three evaluated vision transformers.
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has substantially influenced natural language processing, demonstrating exceptional results across various tasks. In this study, we employ ``Introspective Tips" to facilitate LLMs in self-optimizing their decision-making. By introspectively examining trajectories, LLM refines its policy by generating succinct and valuable tips. Our method enhances the agent's performance in both few-shot and zero-shot learning situations by considering three essential scenarios: learning from the agent's past experiences, integrating expert demonstrations, and generalizing across diverse games. Importantly, we accomplish these improvements without fine-tuning the LLM parameters; rather, we adjust the prompt to generalize insights from the three aforementioned situations. Our framework not only supports but also emphasizes the advantage of employing LLM in in-contxt decision-making. Experiments involving over 100 games in TextWorld illustrate the superior performance of our approach.
Deep learning has shown great potential for modeling the physical dynamics of complex particle systems such as fluids (in Lagrangian descriptions). Existing approaches, however, require the supervision of consecutive particle properties, including positions and velocities. In this paper, we consider a partially observable scenario known as fluid dynamics grounding, that is, inferring the state transitions and interactions within the fluid particle systems from sequential visual observations of the fluid surface. We propose a differentiable two-stage network named NeuroFluid. Our approach consists of (i) a particle-driven neural renderer, which involves fluid physical properties into the volume rendering function, and (ii) a particle transition model optimized to reduce the differences between the rendered and the observed images. NeuroFluid provides the first solution to unsupervised learning of particle-based fluid dynamics by training these two models jointly. It is shown to reasonably estimate the underlying physics of fluids with different initial shapes, viscosity, and densities. It is a potential alternative approach to understanding complex fluid mechanics, such as turbulence, that are difficult to model using traditional methods of mathematical physics.
Multiple instance learning (MIL) is a powerful tool to solve the weakly supervised classification in whole slide image (WSI) based pathology diagnosis. However, the current MIL methods are usually based on independent and identical distribution hypothesis, thus neglect the correlation among different instances. To address this problem, we proposed a new framework, called correlated MIL, and provided a proof for convergence. Based on this framework, we devised a Transformer based MIL (TransMIL), which explored both morphological and spatial information. The proposed TransMIL can effectively deal with unbalanced/balanced and binary/multiple classification with great visualization and interpretability. We conducted various experiments for three different computational pathology problems and achieved better performance and faster convergence compared with state-of-the-art methods. The test AUC for the binary tumor classification can be up to 93.09% over CAMELYON16 dataset. And the AUC over the cancer subtypes classification can be up to 96.03% and 98.82% over TCGA-NSCLC dataset and TCGA-RCC dataset, respectively.
Visual dialogue is a challenging task that needs to extract implicit information from both visual (image) and textual (dialogue history) contexts. Classical approaches pay more attention to the integration of the current question, vision knowledge and text knowledge, despising the heterogeneous semantic gaps between the cross-modal information. In the meantime, the concatenation operation has become de-facto standard to the cross-modal information fusion, which has a limited ability in information retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel Knowledge-Bridge Graph Network (KBGN) model by using graph to bridge the cross-modal semantic relations between vision and text knowledge in fine granularity, as well as retrieving required knowledge via an adaptive information selection mode. Moreover, the reasoning clues for visual dialogue can be clearly drawn from intra-modal entities and inter-modal bridges. Experimental results on VisDial v1.0 and VisDial-Q datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms exiting models with state-of-the-art results.