Sampling from high-dimensional distributions is a fundamental problem in statistical research and practice. However, great challenges emerge when the target density function is unnormalized and contains isolated modes. We tackle this difficulty by fitting an invertible transformation mapping, called a transport map, between a reference probability measure and the target distribution, so that sampling from the target distribution can be achieved by pushing forward a reference sample through the transport map. We theoretically analyze the limitations of existing transport-based sampling methods using the Wasserstein gradient flow theory, and propose a new method called TemperFlow that addresses the multimodality issue. TemperFlow adaptively learns a sequence of tempered distributions to progressively approach the target distribution, and we prove that it overcomes the limitations of existing methods. Various experiments demonstrate the superior performance of this novel sampler compared to traditional methods, and we show its applications in modern deep learning tasks such as image generation. The programming code for the numerical experiments is available at //github.com/yixuan/temperflow.
In this work, we introduce S4M, a new efficient speech separation framework based on neural state-space models (SSM). Motivated by linear time-invariant systems for sequence modeling, our SSM-based approach can efficiently model input signals into a format of linear ordinary differential equations (ODEs) for representation learning. To extend the SSM technique into speech separation tasks, we first decompose the input mixture into multi-scale representations with different resolutions. This mechanism enables S4M to learn globally coherent separation and reconstruction. The experimental results show that S4M performs comparably to other separation backbones in terms of SI-SDRi, while having a much lower model complexity with significantly fewer trainable parameters. In addition, our S4M-tiny model (1.8M parameters) even surpasses attention-based Sepformer (26.0M parameters) in noisy conditions with only 9.2 of multiply-accumulate operation (MACs).
Accurately quantifying and removing submerged underwater waste plays a crucial role in safeguarding marine life and preserving the environment. While detecting floating and surface debris is relatively straightforward, quantifying submerged waste presents significant challenges due to factors like light refraction, absorption, suspended particles, and color distortion. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing the development of a custom dataset and an efficient detection approach for submerged marine debris. The dataset encompasses diverse underwater environments and incorporates annotations for precise labeling of debris instances. Ultimately, the primary objective of this custom dataset is to enhance the diversity of litter instances and improve their detection accuracy in deep submerged environments by leveraging state-of-the-art deep learning architectures.
We study various information-theoretic measures and the information geometry of the Poincar\'e distributions and the related hyperboloid distributions, and prove that their statistical mixture models are universal density estimators of smooth densities in hyperbolic spaces. The Poincar\'e and the hyperboloid distributions are two types of hyperbolic probability distributions defined using different models of hyperbolic geometry. Namely, the Poincar\'e distributions form a triparametric bivariate exponential family whose sample space is the hyperbolic Poincar\'e upper-half plane and natural parameter space is the open 3D convex cone of two-by-two positive-definite matrices. The family of hyperboloid distributions form another exponential family which has sample space the forward sheet of the two-sheeted unit hyperboloid modeling hyperbolic geometry. In the first part, we prove that all $f$-divergences between Poincar\'e distributions can be expressed using three canonical terms using Eaton's framework of maximal group invariance. We also show that the $f$-divergences between any two Poincar\'e distributions are asymmetric except when those distributions belong to a same leaf of a particular foliation of the parameter space. We report closed-form formula for the Fisher information matrix, the Shannon's differential entropy and the Kullback-Leibler divergence. and Bhattacharyya distances between such distributions using the framework of exponential families. In the second part, we state the corresponding results for the exponential family of hyperboloid distributions by highlighting a parameter correspondence between the Poincar\'e and the hyperboloid distributions. Finally, we describe a random generator to draw variates and present two Monte Carlo methods to stochastically estimate numerically $f$-divergences between hyperbolic distributions.
This paper explores the task of Temporal Video Grounding (TVG) where, given an untrimmed video and a natural language sentence query, the goal is to recognize and determine temporal boundaries of action instances in the video described by the query. Recent works tackled this task by improving query inputs with large pre-trained language models (PLM) at the cost of more expensive training. However, the effects of this integration are unclear, as these works also propose improvements in the visual inputs. Therefore, this paper studies the effects of PLMs in TVG and assesses the applicability of parameter-efficient training with NLP adapters. We couple popular PLMs with a selection of existing approaches and test different adapters to reduce the impact of the additional parameters. Our results on three challenging datasets show that, without changing the visual inputs, TVG models greatly benefited from the PLM integration and fine-tuning, stressing the importance of sentence query representation in this task. Furthermore, NLP adapters were an effective alternative to full fine-tuning, even though they were not tailored to our task, allowing PLM integration in larger TVG models and delivering results comparable to SOTA models. Finally, our results shed light on which adapters work best in different scenarios.
Federated learning (FL) is increasingly deployed among multiple clients to train a shared model over decentralized data. To address privacy concerns, FL systems need to safeguard the clients' data from disclosure during training and control data leakage through trained models when exposed to untrusted domains. Distributed differential privacy (DP) offers an appealing solution in this regard as it achieves a balanced tradeoff between privacy and utility without a trusted server. However, existing distributed DP mechanisms are impractical in the presence of client dropout, resulting in poor privacy guarantees or degraded training accuracy. In addition, these mechanisms suffer from severe efficiency issues. We present Hyades, a distributed differentially private FL framework that is highly efficient and resilient to client dropout. Specifically, we develop a novel 'add-then-remove' scheme that enforces a required noise level precisely in each training round, even if some sampled clients drop out. This ensures that the privacy budget is utilized prudently, despite unpredictable client dynamics. To boost performance, Hyades operates as a distributed parallel architecture via encapsulating the communication and computation operations into stages. It automatically divides the global model aggregation into several chunk-aggregation tasks and pipelines them for optimal speedup. Large-scale deployment evaluations demonstrate that Hyades efficiently handles client dropout in various realistic FL scenarios, achieving the optimal privacy-utility tradeoff and accelerating training by up to 2.4$\times$ compared to existing solutions.
We consider multi-variate signals spanned by the integer shifts of a set of generating functions with distinct frequency profiles and the problem of reconstructing them from samples taken on a random periodic set. We show that such a sampling strategy succeeds with high probability provided that the density of the sampling pattern exceeds the number of frequency profiles by a logarithmic factor. The signal model includes bandlimited functions with multi-band spectra. While in this well-studied setting delicate constructions provide sampling strategies that meet the information theoretic benchmark of Shannon and Landau, the sampling pattern that we consider provides, at the price of a logarithmic oversampling factor, a simple alternative that is accompanied by favorable a priori stability margins (snug frames). More generally, we also treat bandlimited functions with arbitrary compact spectra, and different measures of its complexity and approximation rates by integer tiles. At the technical level, we elaborate on recent work on relevant sampling, with the key difference that the reconstruction guarantees that we provide hold uniformly for all signals, rather than for a subset of well-concentrated ones. This is achieved by methods of concentration of measure formulated on the Zak domain.
Despite achieving remarkable performance on various vision-language tasks, Transformer-based pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) still suffer from efficiency issues arising from long inputs and numerous parameters, limiting their real-world applications. However, the huge computation is redundant for most samples and the degree of redundancy and the respective components vary significantly depending on tasks and input instances. In this work, we propose an adaptive acceleration method SmartTrim for VLMs, which adjusts the inference overhead based on the complexity of instances. Specifically, SmartTrim incorporates lightweight trimming modules into the backbone to perform task-specific pruning on redundant inputs and parameters, without the need for additional pre-training or data augmentation. Since visual and textual representations complement each other in VLMs, we propose to leverage cross-modal interaction information to provide more critical semantic guidance for identifying redundant parts. Meanwhile, we introduce a self-distillation strategy that encourages the trimmed model to be consistent with the full-capacity model, which yields further performance gains. Experimental results demonstrate that SmartTrim significantly reduces the computation overhead (2-3 times) of various VLMs with comparable performance (only a 1-2% degradation) on various vision-language tasks. Compared to previous acceleration methods, SmartTrim attains a better efficiency-performance trade-off, demonstrating great potential for application in resource-constrained scenarios.
This paper deals with the problem of efficient sampling from a stochastic differential equation, given the drift function and the diffusion matrix. The proposed approach leverages a recent model for probabilities \cite{rudi2021psd} (the positive semi-definite -- PSD model) from which it is possible to obtain independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) samples at precision $\varepsilon$ with a cost that is $m^2 d \log(1/\varepsilon)$ where $m$ is the dimension of the model, $d$ the dimension of the space. The proposed approach consists in: first, computing the PSD model that satisfies the Fokker-Planck equation (or its fractional variant) associated with the SDE, up to error $\varepsilon$, and then sampling from the resulting PSD model. Assuming some regularity of the Fokker-Planck solution (i.e. $\beta$-times differentiability plus some geometric condition on its zeros) We obtain an algorithm that: (a) in the preparatory phase obtains a PSD model with L2 distance $\varepsilon$ from the solution of the equation, with a model of dimension $m = \varepsilon^{-(d+1)/(\beta-2s)} (\log(1/\varepsilon))^{d+1}$ where $1/2\leq s\leq1$ is the fractional power to the Laplacian, and total computational complexity of $O(m^{3.5} \log(1/\varepsilon))$ and then (b) for Fokker-Planck equation, it is able to produce i.i.d.\ samples with error $\varepsilon$ in Wasserstein-1 distance, with a cost that is $O(d \varepsilon^{-2(d+1)/\beta-2} \log(1/\varepsilon)^{2d+3})$ per sample. This means that, if the probability associated with the SDE is somewhat regular, i.e. $\beta \geq 4d+2$, then the algorithm requires $O(\varepsilon^{-0.88} \log(1/\varepsilon)^{4.5d})$ in the preparatory phase, and $O(\varepsilon^{-1/2}\log(1/\varepsilon)^{2d+2})$ for each sample. Our results suggest that as the true solution gets smoother, we can circumvent the curse of dimensionality without requiring any sort of convexity.
We present prompt distribution learning for effectively adapting a pre-trained vision-language model to address downstream recognition tasks. Our method not only learns low-bias prompts from a few samples but also captures the distribution of diverse prompts to handle the varying visual representations. In this way, we provide high-quality task-related content for facilitating recognition. This prompt distribution learning is realized by an efficient approach that learns the output embeddings of prompts instead of the input embeddings. Thus, we can employ a Gaussian distribution to model them effectively and derive a surrogate loss for efficient training. Extensive experiments on 12 datasets demonstrate that our method consistently and significantly outperforms existing methods. For example, with 1 sample per category, it relatively improves the average result by 9.1% compared to human-crafted prompts.
We present self-supervised geometric perception (SGP), the first general framework to learn a feature descriptor for correspondence matching without any ground-truth geometric model labels (e.g., camera poses, rigid transformations). Our first contribution is to formulate geometric perception as an optimization problem that jointly optimizes the feature descriptor and the geometric models given a large corpus of visual measurements (e.g., images, point clouds). Under this optimization formulation, we show that two important streams of research in vision, namely robust model fitting and deep feature learning, correspond to optimizing one block of the unknown variables while fixing the other block. This analysis naturally leads to our second contribution -- the SGP algorithm that performs alternating minimization to solve the joint optimization. SGP iteratively executes two meta-algorithms: a teacher that performs robust model fitting given learned features to generate geometric pseudo-labels, and a student that performs deep feature learning under noisy supervision of the pseudo-labels. As a third contribution, we apply SGP to two perception problems on large-scale real datasets, namely relative camera pose estimation on MegaDepth and point cloud registration on 3DMatch. We demonstrate that SGP achieves state-of-the-art performance that is on-par or superior to the supervised oracles trained using ground-truth labels.