Although the advancements of pre-trained Large Language Models have significantly accelerated recent progress in NLP, their ever-increasing size poses significant challenges for conventional fine-tuning, especially in memory-intensive tasks. We investigate the potential of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning, focusing on Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), in the domain of multilingual summarization, a task that is both challenging (due to typically long inputs), and relatively unexplored. We conduct an extensive study across different data availability scenarios, including high- and low-data settings, and cross-lingual transfer, leveraging models of different sizes. Our findings reveal that LoRA is competitive with full fine-tuning when trained with high quantities of data, and excels in low-data scenarios and cross-lingual transfer. We also study different strategies for few-shot cross-lingual transfer, finding that continued LoRA tuning outperforms full fine-tuning and the dynamic composition of language-specific LoRA modules.
Adapting state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and Gemini for specific tasks is challenging. Due to the opacity in their parameters, embeddings, and even output probabilities, existing fine-tuning adaptation methods are inapplicable. Consequently, adapting these black-box LLMs is only possible through their API services, raising concerns about transparency, privacy, and cost. To address these challenges, we introduce BBox-Adapter, a novel lightweight adapter for black-box LLMs. BBox-Adapter distinguishes target and source domain data by treating target data as positive and source data as negative. It employs a ranking-based Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE) loss to promote the likelihood of target domain data while penalizing that of the source domain. Furthermore, it features an online adaptation mechanism, which incorporates real-time positive data sampling from ground-truth, human, or AI feedback, coupled with negative data from previous adaptations. Extensive experiments demonstrate BBox-Adapter's effectiveness and cost efficiency. It improves model performance by up to 6.77% across diverse tasks and domains, while reducing training and inference costs by 31.30x and 1.84x, respectively.
Recent advancements in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly improved their performance in tasks combining vision and language. However, challenges persist in detailed multi-modal understanding, comprehension of complex tasks, and reasoning over multi-modal information. This paper introduces MMCTAgent, a novel multi-modal critical thinking agent framework designed to address the inherent limitations of current MLLMs in complex visual reasoning tasks. Inspired by human cognitive processes and critical thinking, MMCTAgent iteratively analyzes multi-modal information, decomposes queries, plans strategies, and dynamically evolves its reasoning. Additionally, MMCTAgent incorporates critical thinking elements such as verification of final answers and self-reflection through a novel approach that defines a vision-based critic and identifies task-specific evaluation criteria, thereby enhancing its decision-making abilities. Through rigorous evaluations across various image and video understanding benchmarks, we demonstrate that MMCTAgent (with and without the critic) outperforms both foundational MLLMs and other tool-augmented pipelines.
Modern Tabletop Games present various interesting challenges for Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning. In this paper, we introduce PyTAG, a new framework that supports interacting with a large collection of games implemented in the Tabletop Games framework. In this work we highlight the challenges tabletop games provide, from a game-playing agent perspective, along with the opportunities they provide for future research. Additionally, we highlight the technical challenges that involve training Reinforcement Learning agents on these games. To explore the Multi-agent setting provided by PyTAG we train the popular Proximal Policy Optimisation Reinforcement Learning algorithm using self-play on a subset of games and evaluate the trained policies against some simple agents and Monte-Carlo Tree Search implemented in the Tabletop Games framework.
In the past year, MultiModal Large Language Models (MM-LLMs) have undergone substantial advancements, augmenting off-the-shelf LLMs to support MM inputs or outputs via cost-effective training strategies. The resulting models not only preserve the inherent reasoning and decision-making capabilities of LLMs but also empower a diverse range of MM tasks. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey aimed at facilitating further research of MM-LLMs. Initially, we outline general design formulations for model architecture and training pipeline. Subsequently, we introduce a taxonomy encompassing 126 MM-LLMs, each characterized by its specific formulations. Furthermore, we review the performance of selected MM-LLMs on mainstream benchmarks and summarize key training recipes to enhance the potency of MM-LLMs. Finally, we explore promising directions for MM-LLMs while concurrently maintaining a real-time tracking website for the latest developments in the field. We hope that this survey contributes to the ongoing advancement of the MM-LLMs domain.
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are known to be vulnerable to backdoor attacks, posing concerning threats to their reliable deployment. Recent research reveals that backdoors can be erased from infected DNNs by pruning a specific group of neurons, while how to effectively identify and remove these backdoor-associated neurons remains an open challenge. Most of the existing defense methods rely on defined rules and focus on neuron's local properties, ignoring the exploration and optimization of pruning policies. To address this gap, we propose an Optimized Neuron Pruning (ONP) method combined with Graph Neural Network (GNN) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) to repair backdoor models. Specifically, ONP first models the target DNN as graphs based on neuron connectivity, and then uses GNN-based RL agents to learn graph embeddings and find a suitable pruning policy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to employ GNN and RL for optimizing pruning policies in the field of backdoor defense. Experiments show, with a small amount of clean data, ONP can effectively prune the backdoor neurons implanted by a set of backdoor attacks at the cost of negligible performance degradation, achieving a new state-of-the-art performance for backdoor mitigation.
Advancements in 3D Gaussian Splatting have significantly accelerated 3D reconstruction and generation. However, it may require a large number of Gaussians, which creates a substantial memory footprint. This paper introduces GES (Generalized Exponential Splatting), a novel representation that employs Generalized Exponential Function (GEF) to model 3D scenes, requiring far fewer particles to represent a scene and thus significantly outperforming Gaussian Splatting methods in efficiency with a plug-and-play replacement ability for Gaussian-based utilities. GES is validated theoretically and empirically in both principled 1D setup and realistic 3D scenes. It is shown to represent signals with sharp edges more accurately, which are typically challenging for Gaussians due to their inherent low-pass characteristics. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that GEF outperforms Gaussians in fitting natural-occurring signals (e.g. squares, triangles, and parabolic signals), thereby reducing the need for extensive splitting operations that increase the memory footprint of Gaussian Splatting. With the aid of a frequency-modulated loss, GES achieves competitive performance in novel-view synthesis benchmarks while requiring less than half the memory storage of Gaussian Splatting and increasing the rendering speed by up to 39%. The code is available on the project website //abdullahamdi.com/ges .
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved great success in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks under the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm. With large quantities of parameters, PLMs are computation-intensive and resource-hungry. Hence, model pruning has been introduced to compress large-scale PLMs. However, most prior approaches only consider task-specific knowledge towards downstream tasks, but ignore the essential task-agnostic knowledge during pruning, which may cause catastrophic forgetting problem and lead to poor generalization ability. To maintain both task-agnostic and task-specific knowledge in our pruned model, we propose ContrAstive Pruning (CAP) under the paradigm of pre-training and fine-tuning. It is designed as a general framework, compatible with both structured and unstructured pruning. Unified in contrastive learning, CAP enables the pruned model to learn from the pre-trained model for task-agnostic knowledge, and fine-tuned model for task-specific knowledge. Besides, to better retain the performance of the pruned model, the snapshots (i.e., the intermediate models at each pruning iteration) also serve as effective supervisions for pruning. Our extensive experiments show that adopting CAP consistently yields significant improvements, especially in extremely high sparsity scenarios. With only 3% model parameters reserved (i.e., 97% sparsity), CAP successfully achieves 99.2% and 96.3% of the original BERT performance in QQP and MNLI tasks. In addition, our probing experiments demonstrate that the model pruned by CAP tends to achieve better generalization ability.
Despite the recent progress in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), it remains challenging to explain the predictions made by GNNs. Existing explanation methods mainly focus on post-hoc explanations where another explanatory model is employed to provide explanations for a trained GNN. The fact that post-hoc methods fail to reveal the original reasoning process of GNNs raises the need of building GNNs with built-in interpretability. In this work, we propose Prototype Graph Neural Network (ProtGNN), which combines prototype learning with GNNs and provides a new perspective on the explanations of GNNs. In ProtGNN, the explanations are naturally derived from the case-based reasoning process and are actually used during classification. The prediction of ProtGNN is obtained by comparing the inputs to a few learned prototypes in the latent space. Furthermore, for better interpretability and higher efficiency, a novel conditional subgraph sampling module is incorporated to indicate which part of the input graph is most similar to each prototype in ProtGNN+. Finally, we evaluate our method on a wide range of datasets and perform concrete case studies. Extensive results show that ProtGNN and ProtGNN+ can provide inherent interpretability while achieving accuracy on par with the non-interpretable counterparts.
Autonomous driving is regarded as one of the most promising remedies to shield human beings from severe crashes. To this end, 3D object detection serves as the core basis of such perception system especially for the sake of path planning, motion prediction, collision avoidance, etc. Generally, stereo or monocular images with corresponding 3D point clouds are already standard layout for 3D object detection, out of which point clouds are increasingly prevalent with accurate depth information being provided. Despite existing efforts, 3D object detection on point clouds is still in its infancy due to high sparseness and irregularity of point clouds by nature, misalignment view between camera view and LiDAR bird's eye of view for modality synergies, occlusions and scale variations at long distances, etc. Recently, profound progress has been made in 3D object detection, with a large body of literature being investigated to address this vision task. As such, we present a comprehensive review of the latest progress in this field covering all the main topics including sensors, fundamentals, and the recent state-of-the-art detection methods with their pros and cons. Furthermore, we introduce metrics and provide quantitative comparisons on popular public datasets. The avenues for future work are going to be judiciously identified after an in-deep analysis of the surveyed works. Finally, we conclude this paper.
We propose UniViLM: a Unified Video and Language pre-training Model for multimodal understanding and generation. Motivated by the recent success of BERT based pre-training technique for NLP and image-language tasks, VideoBERT and CBT are proposed to exploit BERT model for video and language pre-training using narrated instructional videos. Different from their works which only pre-train understanding task, we propose a unified video-language pre-training model for both understanding and generation tasks. Our model comprises of 4 components including two single-modal encoders, a cross encoder and a decoder with the Transformer backbone. We first pre-train our model to learn the universal representation for both video and language on a large instructional video dataset. Then we fine-tune the model on two multimodal tasks including understanding task (text-based video retrieval) and generation task (multimodal video captioning). Our extensive experiments show that our method can improve the performance of both understanding and generation tasks and achieves the state-of-the art results.