Referring Image Segmentation (RIS), aims to segment the object referred by a given sentence in an image by understanding both visual and linguistic information. However, existing RIS methods tend to explore top-performance models, disregarding considerations for practical applications on resources-limited edge devices. This oversight poses a significant challenge for on-device RIS inference. To this end, we propose an effective and efficient post-training quantization framework termed PTQ4RIS. Specifically, we first conduct an in-depth analysis of the root causes of performance degradation in RIS model quantization and propose dual-region quantization (DRQ) and reorder-based outlier-retained quantization (RORQ) to address the quantization difficulties in visual and text encoders. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks with different bits settings (from 8 to 4 bits) demonstrates its superior performance. Importantly, we are the first PTQ method specifically designed for the RIS task, highlighting the feasibility of PTQ in RIS applications. Code will be available at {//github.com/gugu511yy/PTQ4RIS}.
Long-Context Question Answering (LCQA), a challenging task, aims to reason over long-context documents to yield accurate answers to questions. Existing long-context Large Language Models (LLMs) for LCQA often struggle with the "lost in the middle" issue. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates this issue by providing external factual evidence. However, its chunking strategy disrupts the global long-context information, and its low-quality retrieval in long contexts hinders LLMs from identifying effective factual details due to substantial noise. To this end, we propose LongRAG, a general, dual-perspective, and robust LLM-based RAG system paradigm for LCQA to enhance RAG's understanding of complex long-context knowledge (i.e., global information and factual details). We design LongRAG as a plug-and-play paradigm, facilitating adaptation to various domains and LLMs. Extensive experiments on three multi-hop datasets demonstrate that LongRAG significantly outperforms long-context LLMs (up by 6.94%), advanced RAG (up by 6.16%), and Vanilla RAG (up by 17.25%). Furthermore, we conduct quantitative ablation studies and multi-dimensional analyses, highlighting the effectiveness of the system's components and fine-tuning strategies. Data and code are available at //github.com/QingFei1/LongRAG.
Electronic Design Automation (EDA) is essential for IC design and has recently benefited from AI-based techniques to improve efficiency. Logic synthesis, a key EDA stage, transforms high-level hardware descriptions into optimized netlists. Recent research has employed machine learning to predict Quality of Results (QoR) for pairs of And-Inverter Graphs (AIGs) and synthesis recipes. However, the severe scarcity of data due to a very limited number of available AIGs results in overfitting, significantly hindering performance. Additionally, the complexity and large number of nodes in AIGs make plain GNNs less effective for learning expressive graph-level representations. To tackle these challenges, we propose MTLSO - a Multi-Task Learning approach for Logic Synthesis Optimization. On one hand, it maximizes the use of limited data by training the model across different tasks. This includes introducing an auxiliary task of binary multi-label graph classification alongside the primary regression task, allowing the model to benefit from diverse supervision sources. On the other hand, we employ a hierarchical graph representation learning strategy to improve the model's capacity for learning expressive graph-level representations of large AIGs, surpassing traditional plain GNNs. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and against state-of-the-art baselines demonstrate the superiority of our method, achieving an average performance gain of 8.22\% for delay and 5.95\% for area.
The need for large text corpora has increased with the advent of pretrained language models and, in particular, the discovery of scaling laws for these models. Most available corpora have sufficient data only for languages with large dominant communities. However, there is no corpus available that (i) covers a wide range of minority languages; (ii) is generated by an open-source reproducible pipeline; and (iii) is rigorously cleaned from noise, making it trustworthy to use. We present GlotCC, a clean, document-level, 2TB general domain corpus derived from CommonCrawl, covering more than 1000 languages. We make GlotCC and the system used to generate it - including the pipeline, language identification model, and filters - available to the research community. Corpus v. 1.0 //huggingface.co/datasets/cis-lmu/GlotCC-v1, Pipeline v. 3.0 //github.com/cisnlp/GlotCC.
Goal hijacking is a type of adversarial attack on Large Language Models (LLMs) where the objective is to manipulate the model into producing a specific, predetermined output, regardless of the user's original input. In goal hijacking, an attacker typically appends a carefully crafted malicious suffix to the user's prompt, which coerces the model into ignoring the user's original input and generating the target response. In this paper, we introduce a novel goal hijacking attack method called Pseudo-Conversation Injection, which leverages the weaknesses of LLMs in role identification within conversation contexts. Specifically, we construct the suffix by fabricating responses from the LLM to the user's initial prompt, followed by a prompt for a malicious new task. This leads the model to perceive the initial prompt and fabricated response as a completed conversation, thereby executing the new, falsified prompt. Following this approach, we propose three Pseudo-Conversation construction strategies: Targeted Pseudo-Conversation, Universal Pseudo-Conversation, and Robust Pseudo-Conversation. These strategies are designed to achieve effective goal hijacking across various scenarios. Our experiments, conducted on two mainstream LLM platforms including ChatGPT and Qwen, demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms existing approaches in terms of attack effectiveness.
Lighting plays a pivotal role in ensuring the naturalness of video generation, significantly influencing the aesthetic quality of the generated content. However, due to the deep coupling between lighting and the temporal features of videos, it remains challenging to disentangle and model independent and coherent lighting attributes, limiting the ability to control lighting in video generation. In this paper, inspired by the established controllable T2I models, we propose LumiSculpt, which, for the first time, enables precise and consistent lighting control in T2V generation models.LumiSculpt equips the video generation with strong interactive capabilities, allowing the input of custom lighting reference image sequences. Furthermore, the core learnable plug-and-play module of LumiSculpt facilitates remarkable control over lighting intensity, position, and trajectory in latent video diffusion models based on the advanced DiT backbone.Additionally, to effectively train LumiSculpt and address the issue of insufficient lighting data, we construct LumiHuman, a new lightweight and flexible dataset for portrait lighting of images and videos. Experimental results demonstrate that LumiSculpt achieves precise and high-quality lighting control in video generation.
Thanks to the great interest posed by researchers and companies, recommendation systems became a cornerstone of machine learning applications. However, concerns have arisen recently about the need for reproducibility, making it challenging to identify suitable pipelines. Several frameworks have been proposed to improve reproducibility, covering the entire process from data reading to performance evaluation. Despite this effort, these solutions often overlook the role of data management, do not promote interoperability, and neglect data analysis despite its well-known impact on recommender performance. To address these gaps, we propose DataRec, which facilitates using and manipulating recommendation datasets. DataRec supports reading and writing in various formats, offers filtering and splitting techniques, and enables data distribution analysis using well-known metrics. It encourages a unified approach to data manipulation by allowing data export in formats compatible with several recommendation frameworks.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely used in code completion, and researchers are focusing on scaling up LLMs to improve their accuracy. However, larger LLMs will increase the response time of code completion and decrease the developers' productivity. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and effective LLM for code completion named aiXcoder-7B. Compared to existing LLMs, aiXcoder-7B achieves higher code completion accuracy while having smaller scales (i.e., 7 billion parameters). We attribute the superiority of aiXcoder-7B to three key factors: (1) Multi-objective training. We employ three training objectives, one of which is our proposed Structured Fill-In-the-Middle (SFIM). SFIM considers the syntax structures in code and effectively improves the performance of LLMs for code. (2) Diverse data sampling strategies. They consider inter-file relationships and enhance the capability of LLMs in understanding cross-file contexts. (3) Extensive high-quality data. We establish a rigorous data collection pipeline and consume a total of 1.2 trillion unique tokens for training aiXcoder-7B. This vast volume of data enables aiXcoder-7B to learn a broad distribution of code. We evaluate aiXcoder-7B in five popular code completion benchmarks and a new benchmark collected by this paper. The results show that aiXcoder-7B outperforms the latest six LLMs with similar sizes and even surpasses four larger LLMs (e.g., StarCoder2-15B and CodeLlama-34B), positioning aiXcoder-7B as a lightweight and effective LLM for academia and industry. Finally, we summarize three valuable insights for helping practitioners train the next generations of LLMs for code. aiXcoder-7B has been open-souced and gained significant attention. As of the submission date, aiXcoder-7B has received 2,193 GitHub Stars.
Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine-learning paradigm, in which a global server iteratively averages the model parameters of local users without accessing their data. User heterogeneity has imposed significant challenges to FL, which can incur drifted global models that are slow to converge. Knowledge Distillation has recently emerged to tackle this issue, by refining the server model using aggregated knowledge from heterogeneous users, other than directly averaging their model parameters. This approach, however, depends on a proxy dataset, making it impractical unless such a prerequisite is satisfied. Moreover, the ensemble knowledge is not fully utilized to guide local model learning, which may in turn affect the quality of the aggregated model. Inspired by the prior art, we propose a data-free knowledge distillation} approach to address heterogeneous FL, where the server learns a lightweight generator to ensemble user information in a data-free manner, which is then broadcasted to users, regulating local training using the learned knowledge as an inductive bias. Empirical studies powered by theoretical implications show that, our approach facilitates FL with better generalization performance using fewer communication rounds, compared with the state-of-the-art.
The problem of Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) consists in following the trajectory of different objects in a sequence, usually a video. In recent years, with the rise of Deep Learning, the algorithms that provide a solution to this problem have benefited from the representational power of deep models. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on works that employ Deep Learning models to solve the task of MOT on single-camera videos. Four main steps in MOT algorithms are identified, and an in-depth review of how Deep Learning was employed in each one of these stages is presented. A complete experimental comparison of the presented works on the three MOTChallenge datasets is also provided, identifying a number of similarities among the top-performing methods and presenting some possible future research directions.
Distant supervision can effectively label data for relation extraction, but suffers from the noise labeling problem. Recent works mainly perform soft bag-level noise reduction strategies to find the relatively better samples in a sentence bag, which is suboptimal compared with making a hard decision of false positive samples in sentence level. In this paper, we introduce an adversarial learning framework, which we named DSGAN, to learn a sentence-level true-positive generator. Inspired by Generative Adversarial Networks, we regard the positive samples generated by the generator as the negative samples to train the discriminator. The optimal generator is obtained until the discrimination ability of the discriminator has the greatest decline. We adopt the generator to filter distant supervision training dataset and redistribute the false positive instances into the negative set, in which way to provide a cleaned dataset for relation classification. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision relation extraction comparing to state-of-the-art systems.