Data curation is a wide-ranging area which contains many critical but time-consuming data processing tasks. However, the diversity of such tasks makes it challenging to develop a general-purpose data curation system. To address this issue, we present Lingua Manga, a user-friendly and versatile system that utilizes pre-trained large language models. Lingua Manga offers automatic optimization for achieving high performance and label efficiency while facilitating flexible and rapid development. Through three example applications with distinct objectives and users of varying levels of technical proficiency, we demonstrate that Lingua Manga can effectively assist both skilled programmers and low-code or even no-code users in addressing data curation challenges.
Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based recommender systems (RSs) have garnered considerable attention due to their ability to learn optimal recommendation policies and maximize long-term user rewards. However, deploying RL models directly in online environments and generating authentic data through A/B tests can pose challenges and require substantial resources. Simulators offer an alternative approach by providing training and evaluation environments for RS models, reducing reliance on real-world data. Existing simulators have shown promising results but also have limitations such as simplified user feedback, lacking consistency with real-world data, the challenge of simulator evaluation, and difficulties in migration and expansion across RSs. To address these challenges, we propose KuaiSim, a comprehensive user environment that provides user feedback with multi-behavior and cross-session responses. The resulting simulator can support three levels of recommendation problems: the request level list-wise recommendation task, the whole-session level sequential recommendation task, and the cross-session level retention optimization task. For each task, KuaiSim also provides evaluation protocols and baseline recommendation algorithms that further serve as benchmarks for future research. We also restructure existing competitive simulators on the KuaiRand Dataset and compare them against KuaiSim to future assess their performance and behavioral differences. Furthermore, to showcase KuaiSim's flexibility in accommodating different datasets, we demonstrate its versatility and robustness when deploying it on the ML-1m dataset.
Video instance segmentation, also known as multi-object tracking and segmentation, is an emerging computer vision research area introduced in 2019, aiming at detecting, segmenting, and tracking instances in videos simultaneously. By tackling the video instance segmentation tasks through effective analysis and utilization of visual information in videos, a range of computer vision-enabled applications (e.g., human action recognition, medical image processing, autonomous vehicle navigation, surveillance, etc) can be implemented. As deep-learning techniques take a dominant role in various computer vision areas, a plethora of deep-learning-based video instance segmentation schemes have been proposed. This survey offers a multifaceted view of deep-learning schemes for video instance segmentation, covering various architectural paradigms, along with comparisons of functional performance, model complexity, and computational overheads. In addition to the common architectural designs, auxiliary techniques for improving the performance of deep-learning models for video instance segmentation are compiled and discussed. Finally, we discuss a range of major challenges and directions for further investigations to help advance this promising research field.
Most existing parametric query optimization (PQO) techniques rely on traditional query optimizer cost models, which are often inaccurate and result in suboptimal query performance. We propose Kepler, an end-to-end learning-based approach to PQO that demonstrates significant speedups in query latency over a traditional query optimizer. Central to our method is Row Count Evolution (RCE), a novel plan generation algorithm based on perturbations in the sub-plan cardinality space. While previous approaches require accurate cost models, we bypass this requirement by evaluating candidate plans via actual execution data and training an ML model to predict the fastest plan given parameter binding values. Our models leverage recent advances in neural network uncertainty in order to robustly predict faster plans while avoiding regressions in query performance. Experimentally, we show that Kepler achieves significant improvements in query runtime on multiple datasets on PostgreSQL.
Transformer-based models have achieved state-of-the-art performance in many areas. However, the quadratic complexity of self-attention with respect to the input length hinders the applicability of Transformer-based models to long sequences. To address this, we present Fast Multipole Attention, a new attention mechanism that uses a divide-and-conquer strategy to reduce the time and memory complexity of attention for sequences of length $n$ from $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ to $\mathcal{O}(n \log n)$ or $O(n)$, while retaining a global receptive field. The hierarchical approach groups queries, keys, and values into $\mathcal{O}( \log n)$ levels of resolution, where groups at greater distances are increasingly larger in size and the weights to compute group quantities are learned. As such, the interaction between tokens far from each other is considered in lower resolution in an efficient hierarchical manner. The overall complexity of Fast Multipole Attention is $\mathcal{O}(n)$ or $\mathcal{O}(n \log n)$, depending on whether the queries are down-sampled or not. This multi-level divide-and-conquer strategy is inspired by fast summation methods from $n$-body physics and the Fast Multipole Method. We perform evaluation on autoregressive and bidirectional language modeling tasks and compare our Fast Multipole Attention model with other efficient attention variants on medium-size datasets. We find empirically that the Fast Multipole Transformer performs much better than other efficient transformers in terms of memory size and accuracy. The Fast Multipole Attention mechanism has the potential to empower large language models with much greater sequence lengths, taking the full context into account in an efficient, naturally hierarchical manner during training and when generating long sequences.
Generating controllable and photorealistic digital human avatars is a long-standing and important problem in Vision and Graphics. Recent methods have shown great progress in terms of either photorealism or inference speed while the combination of the two desired properties still remains unsolved. To this end, we propose a novel method, called DELIFFAS, which parameterizes the appearance of the human as a surface light field that is attached to a controllable and deforming human mesh model. At the core, we represent the light field around the human with a deformable two-surface parameterization, which enables fast and accurate inference of the human appearance. This allows perceptual supervision on the full image compared to previous approaches that could only supervise individual pixels or small patches due to their slow runtime. Our carefully designed human representation and supervision strategy leads to state-of-the-art synthesis results and inference time. The video results and code are available at //vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/DELIFFAS.
As a primary means of information acquisition, information retrieval (IR) systems, such as search engines, have integrated themselves into our daily lives. These systems also serve as components of dialogue, question-answering, and recommender systems. The trajectory of IR has evolved dynamically from its origins in term-based methods to its integration with advanced neural models. While the neural models excel at capturing complex contextual signals and semantic nuances, thereby reshaping the IR landscape, they still face challenges such as data scarcity, interpretability, and the generation of contextually plausible yet potentially inaccurate responses. This evolution requires a combination of both traditional methods (such as term-based sparse retrieval methods with rapid response) and modern neural architectures (such as language models with powerful language understanding capacity). Meanwhile, the emergence of large language models (LLMs), typified by ChatGPT and GPT-4, has revolutionized natural language processing due to their remarkable language understanding, generation, generalization, and reasoning abilities. Consequently, recent research has sought to leverage LLMs to improve IR systems. Given the rapid evolution of this research trajectory, it is necessary to consolidate existing methodologies and provide nuanced insights through a comprehensive overview. In this survey, we delve into the confluence of LLMs and IR systems, including crucial aspects such as query rewriters, retrievers, rerankers, and readers. Additionally, we explore promising directions within this expanding field.
Normalization is known to help the optimization of deep neural networks. Curiously, different architectures require specialized normalization methods. In this paper, we study what normalization is effective for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). First, we adapt and evaluate the existing methods from other domains to GNNs. Faster convergence is achieved with InstanceNorm compared to BatchNorm and LayerNorm. We provide an explanation by showing that InstanceNorm serves as a preconditioner for GNNs, but such preconditioning effect is weaker with BatchNorm due to the heavy batch noise in graph datasets. Second, we show that the shift operation in InstanceNorm results in an expressiveness degradation of GNNs for highly regular graphs. We address this issue by proposing GraphNorm with a learnable shift. Empirically, GNNs with GraphNorm converge faster compared to GNNs using other normalization. GraphNorm also improves the generalization of GNNs, achieving better performance on graph classification benchmarks.
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.
With the advent of deep neural networks, learning-based approaches for 3D reconstruction have gained popularity. However, unlike for images, in 3D there is no canonical representation which is both computationally and memory efficient yet allows for representing high-resolution geometry of arbitrary topology. Many of the state-of-the-art learning-based 3D reconstruction approaches can hence only represent very coarse 3D geometry or are limited to a restricted domain. In this paper, we propose occupancy networks, a new representation for learning-based 3D reconstruction methods. Occupancy networks implicitly represent the 3D surface as the continuous decision boundary of a deep neural network classifier. In contrast to existing approaches, our representation encodes a description of the 3D output at infinite resolution without excessive memory footprint. We validate that our representation can efficiently encode 3D structure and can be inferred from various kinds of input. Our experiments demonstrate competitive results, both qualitatively and quantitatively, for the challenging tasks of 3D reconstruction from single images, noisy point clouds and coarse discrete voxel grids. We believe that occupancy networks will become a useful tool in a wide variety of learning-based 3D tasks.
Spectral clustering is a leading and popular technique in unsupervised data analysis. Two of its major limitations are scalability and generalization of the spectral embedding (i.e., out-of-sample-extension). In this paper we introduce a deep learning approach to spectral clustering that overcomes the above shortcomings. Our network, which we call SpectralNet, learns a map that embeds input data points into the eigenspace of their associated graph Laplacian matrix and subsequently clusters them. We train SpectralNet using a procedure that involves constrained stochastic optimization. Stochastic optimization allows it to scale to large datasets, while the constraints, which are implemented using a special-purpose output layer, allow us to keep the network output orthogonal. Moreover, the map learned by SpectralNet naturally generalizes the spectral embedding to unseen data points. To further improve the quality of the clustering, we replace the standard pairwise Gaussian affinities with affinities leaned from unlabeled data using a Siamese network. Additional improvement can be achieved by applying the network to code representations produced, e.g., by standard autoencoders. Our end-to-end learning procedure is fully unsupervised. In addition, we apply VC dimension theory to derive a lower bound on the size of SpectralNet. State-of-the-art clustering results are reported on the Reuters dataset. Our implementation is publicly available at //github.com/kstant0725/SpectralNet .