Contemporary practices in instruction tuning often hinge on enlarging data scaling without a clear strategy for ensuring data quality, inadvertently introducing noise that may compromise model performance. To address this challenge, we introduce \textsc{Nuggets}, a novel and efficient methodology that leverages one-shot learning to discern and select high-quality instruction data from extensive datasets. \textsc{Nuggets} assesses the potential of individual instruction examples to act as effective one-shot learning instances, thereby identifying those that can significantly improve performance across diverse tasks. \textsc{Nuggets} utilizes a scoring system based on the impact of candidate examples on the perplexity of a diverse anchor set, facilitating the selection of the most advantageous data for instruction tuning. Through comprehensive evaluations on two benchmarks, including MT-Bench and Alpaca-Eval, we show that instruction tuning with the top 1\% of examples curated by \textsc{Nuggets} substantially outperforms conventional methods employing the entire dataset.
Large models represent a groundbreaking advancement in multiple application fields, enabling remarkable achievements across various tasks. However, their unprecedented scale comes with significant computational costs. These models, often consisting of billions of parameters, require vast amounts of computational resources for execution. Especially, the expansive scale and computational demands pose considerable challenges when customizing them for particular downstream tasks, particularly over the hardware platforms constrained by computational capabilities. Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) provides a practical solution by efficiently adjusting the large models over the various downstream tasks. In particular, PEFT refers to the process of adjusting the parameters of a pre-trained large models to adapt it to a specific task or domain while minimizing the number of additional parameters introduced or computational resources required. This approach is particularly important when dealing with large-scale language models with high parameter counts, as fine-tuning these models from scratch can be computationally expensive and resource-intensive, posing considerable challenges in the supporting system platform design. In this survey, we present comprehensive studies of various PEFT algorithms, examining their performance and computational overhead. Moreover, we provide an overview of applications developed using different PEFT algorithms and discuss common techniques employed to mitigate computation costs for PEFT. In addition to providing an extensive survey from an algorithmic standpoint, we also examine various real-world system designs to investigate the implementation costs associated with different PEFT approaches. This survey serves as an indispensable resource for researchers aiming to understand both the PEFT algorithm and its system implementation, offering detailed ......
Large-scale LiDAR mappings and localization leverage place recognition techniques to mitigate odometry drifts, ensuring accurate mapping. These techniques utilize scene representations from LiDAR point clouds to identify previously visited sites within a database. Local descriptors, assigned to each point within a point cloud, are aggregated to form a scene representation for the point cloud. These descriptors are also used to re-rank the retrieved point clouds based on geometric fitness scores. We propose SALSA, a novel, lightweight, and efficient framework for LiDAR place recognition. It consists of a Sphereformer backbone that uses radial window attention to enable information aggregation for sparse distant points, an adaptive self-attention layer to pool local descriptors into tokens, and a multi-layer-perceptron Mixer layer for aggregating the tokens to generate a scene descriptor. The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on various LiDAR place recognition datasets in terms of both retrieval and metric localization while operating in real-time.
Most recent unsupervised non-rigid 3D shape matching methods are based on the functional map framework due to its efficiency and superior performance. Nevertheless, respective methods struggle to obtain spatially smooth pointwise correspondences due to the lack of proper regularisation. In this work, inspired by the success of message passing on graphs, we propose a synchronous diffusion process which we use as regularisation to achieve smoothness in non-rigid 3D shape matching problems. The intuition of synchronous diffusion is that diffusing the same input function on two different shapes results in consistent outputs. Using different challenging datasets, we demonstrate that our novel regularisation can substantially improve the state-of-the-art in shape matching, especially in the presence of topological noise.
The task of sampling from a probability density can be approached as transporting a tractable density function to the target, known as dynamical measure transport. In this work, we tackle it through a principled unified framework using deterministic or stochastic evolutions described by partial differential equations (PDEs). This framework incorporates prior trajectory-based sampling methods, such as diffusion models or Schr\"odinger bridges, without relying on the concept of time-reversals. Moreover, it allows us to propose novel numerical methods for solving the transport task and thus sampling from complicated targets without the need for the normalization constant or data samples. We employ physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to approximate the respective PDE solutions, implying both conceptional and computational advantages. In particular, PINNs allow for simulation- and discretization-free optimization and can be trained very efficiently, leading to significantly better mode coverage in the sampling task compared to alternative methods. Moreover, they can readily be fine-tuned with Gauss-Newton methods to achieve high accuracy in sampling.
Tracking and segmenting multiple similar objects with complex or separate parts in long-term videos is inherently challenging due to the ambiguity of target parts and identity confusion caused by occlusion, background clutter, and long-term variations. In this paper, we propose a robust video object segmentation framework equipped with spatial-semantic features and discriminative object queries to address the above issues. Specifically, we construct a spatial-semantic network comprising a semantic embedding block and spatial dependencies modeling block to associate the pretrained ViT features with global semantic features and local spatial features, providing a comprehensive target representation. In addition, we develop a masked cross-attention module to generate object queries that focus on the most discriminative parts of target objects during query propagation, alleviating noise accumulation and ensuring effective long-term query propagation. The experimental results show that the proposed method set a new state-of-the-art performance on multiple datasets, including the DAVIS2017 test (89.1%), YoutubeVOS 2019 (88.5%), MOSE (75.1%), LVOS test (73.0%), and LVOS val (75.1%), which demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization capacity of the proposed method. We will make all source code and trained models publicly available.
The success of AI models relies on the availability of large, diverse, and high-quality datasets, which can be challenging to obtain due to data scarcity, privacy concerns, and high costs. Synthetic data has emerged as a promising solution by generating artificial data that mimics real-world patterns. This paper provides an overview of synthetic data research, discussing its applications, challenges, and future directions. We present empirical evidence from prior art to demonstrate its effectiveness and highlight the importance of ensuring its factuality, fidelity, and unbiasedness. We emphasize the need for responsible use of synthetic data to build more powerful, inclusive, and trustworthy language models.
The existence of representative datasets is a prerequisite of many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, the subsequent application of these models often involves scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. The reasons for this are manifold and range from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable use of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is a huge challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches, and eventually to increase the generalization capability of these models. Furthermore, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-based models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories integration, extraction and conformity. Special attention is given to applications in the field of autonomous driving.
Generative commonsense reasoning which aims to empower machines to generate sentences with the capacity of reasoning over a set of concepts is a critical bottleneck for text generation. Even the state-of-the-art pre-trained language generation models struggle at this task and often produce implausible and anomalous sentences. One reason is that they rarely consider incorporating the knowledge graph which can provide rich relational information among the commonsense concepts. To promote the ability of commonsense reasoning for text generation, we propose a novel knowledge graph augmented pre-trained language generation model KG-BART, which encompasses the complex relations of concepts through the knowledge graph and produces more logical and natural sentences as output. Moreover, KG-BART can leverage the graph attention to aggregate the rich concept semantics that enhances the model generalization on unseen concept sets. Experiments on benchmark CommonGen dataset verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach by comparing with several strong pre-trained language generation models, particularly KG-BART outperforms BART by 5.80, 4.60, in terms of BLEU-3, 4. Moreover, we also show that the generated context by our model can work as background scenarios to benefit downstream commonsense QA tasks.
Multi-relation Question Answering is a challenging task, due to the requirement of elaborated analysis on questions and reasoning over multiple fact triples in knowledge base. In this paper, we present a novel model called Interpretable Reasoning Network that employs an interpretable, hop-by-hop reasoning process for question answering. The model dynamically decides which part of an input question should be analyzed at each hop; predicts a relation that corresponds to the current parsed results; utilizes the predicted relation to update the question representation and the state of the reasoning process; and then drives the next-hop reasoning. Experiments show that our model yields state-of-the-art results on two datasets. More interestingly, the model can offer traceable and observable intermediate predictions for reasoning analysis and failure diagnosis, thereby allowing manual manipulation in predicting the final answer.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.