Language models demonstrate remarkable capacity to generalize representations learned in one modality to downstream tasks in other modalities. Can we trace this ability to individual neurons? We study the case where a frozen text transformer is augmented with vision using a self-supervised visual encoder and a single linear projection learned on an image-to-text task. Outputs of the projection layer are not immediately decodable into language describing image content; instead, we find that translation between modalities occurs deeper within the transformer. We introduce a procedure for identifying "multimodal neurons" that convert visual representations into corresponding text, and decoding the concepts they inject into the model's residual stream. In a series of experiments, we show that multimodal neurons operate on specific visual concepts across inputs, and have a systematic causal effect on image captioning.
Diffusion models (DMs) have recently been introduced in image deblurring and exhibited promising performance, particularly in terms of details reconstruction. However, the diffusion model requires a large number of inference iterations to recover the clean image from pure Gaussian noise, which consumes massive computational resources. Moreover, the distribution synthesized by the diffusion model is often misaligned with the target results, leading to restrictions in distortion-based metrics. To address the above issues, we propose the Hierarchical Integration Diffusion Model (HI-Diff), for realistic image deblurring. Specifically, we perform the DM in a highly compacted latent space to generate the prior feature for the deblurring process. The deblurring process is implemented by a regression-based method to obtain better distortion accuracy. Meanwhile, the highly compact latent space ensures the efficiency of the DM. Furthermore, we design the hierarchical integration module to fuse the prior into the regression-based model from multiple scales, enabling better generalization in complex blurry scenarios. Comprehensive experiments on synthetic and real-world blur datasets demonstrate that our HI-Diff outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Code and trained models are available at //github.com/zhengchen1999/HI-Diff.
In multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems with frequency-flat channels, a single-antenna jammer causes receive interference that is confined to a one-dimensional subspace. Such a jammer can thus be nulled using linear spatial filtering at the cost of one degree of freedom. Frequency-selective channels are often transformed into multiple frequency-flat subcarriers with orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM). We show that when a single-antenna jammer violates the OFDM protocol by not sending a cyclic prefix, the interference received on each subcarrier by a multi-antenna receiver is, in general, not confined to a subspace of dimension one (as a single-antenna jammer in a frequency-flat scenario would be), but of dimension L, where L is the jammer's number of channel taps. In MIMO-OFDM systems, a single-antenna jammer can therefore resemble an L-antenna jammer. Simulations corroborate our theoretical results. These findings imply that mitigating jammers with large delay spread through linear spatial filtering is infeasible. We discuss some (im)possibilities for the way forward.
The recent large-scale generative modeling has attained unprecedented performance especially in producing high-fidelity images driven by text prompts. Text inversion (TI), alongside the text-to-image model backbones, is proposed as an effective technique in personalizing the generation when the prompts contain user-defined, unseen or long-tail concept tokens. Despite that, we find and show that the deployment of TI remains full of "dark-magics" -- to name a few, the harsh requirement of additional datasets, arduous human efforts in the loop and lack of robustness. In this work, we propose a much-enhanced version of TI, dubbed Controllable Textual Inversion (COTI), in resolving all the aforementioned problems and in turn delivering a robust, data-efficient and easy-to-use framework. The core to COTI is a theoretically-guided loss objective instantiated with a comprehensive and novel weighted scoring mechanism, encapsulated by an active-learning paradigm. The extensive results show that COTI significantly outperforms the prior TI-related approaches with a 26.05 decrease in the FID score and a 23.00% boost in the R-precision.
Ordered sequences of data, specified with a join operation to combine sequences, serve as a foundation for the implementation of parallel functional algorithms. This abstract data type can be elegantly and efficiently implemented using balanced binary trees, where a join operation is provided to combine two trees and rebalance as necessary. In this work, we present a verified implementation and cost analysis of joinable red-black trees in $\textbf{calf}$, a dependent type theory for cost analysis. We implement red-black trees and auxiliary intermediate data structures in such a way that all correctness invariants are intrinsically maintained. Then, we describe and verify precise cost bounds on the operations, making use of the red-black tree invariants. Finally, we implement standard algorithms on sequences using the simple join-based signature and bound their cost in the case that red-black trees are used as the underlying implementation. All proofs are formally mechanized using the embedding of $\textbf{calf}$ in the Agda theorem prover.
Nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) is typically restricted to short, finite horizons to limit the computational burden of online optimization. This makes a global planner necessary to avoid local minima when using NMPC for navigation in complex environments. For this reason, the performance of NMPC approaches are often limited by that of the global planner. While control policies trained with reinforcement learning (RL) can theoretically learn to avoid such local minima, they are usually unable to guarantee enforcement of general state constraints. In this paper, we augment a sampling-based stochastic NMPC (SNMPC) approach with an RL trained perception-informed value function. This allows the system to avoid observable local minima in the environment by reasoning about perception information beyond the finite planning horizon. By using Probably Approximately Correct NMPC (PAC-NMPC) as our base controller, we are also able to generate statistical guarantees of performance and safety. We demonstrate our approach in simulation and on hardware using a 1/10th scale rally car with lidar.
Denoising diffusion models represent a recent emerging topic in computer vision, demonstrating remarkable results in the area of generative modeling. A diffusion model is a deep generative model that is based on two stages, a forward diffusion stage and a reverse diffusion stage. In the forward diffusion stage, the input data is gradually perturbed over several steps by adding Gaussian noise. In the reverse stage, a model is tasked at recovering the original input data by learning to gradually reverse the diffusion process, step by step. Diffusion models are widely appreciated for the quality and diversity of the generated samples, despite their known computational burdens, i.e. low speeds due to the high number of steps involved during sampling. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of articles on denoising diffusion models applied in vision, comprising both theoretical and practical contributions in the field. First, we identify and present three generic diffusion modeling frameworks, which are based on denoising diffusion probabilistic models, noise conditioned score networks, and stochastic differential equations. We further discuss the relations between diffusion models and other deep generative models, including variational auto-encoders, generative adversarial networks, energy-based models, autoregressive models and normalizing flows. Then, we introduce a multi-perspective categorization of diffusion models applied in computer vision. Finally, we illustrate the current limitations of diffusion models and envision some interesting directions for future research.
Leveraging datasets available to learn a model with high generalization ability to unseen domains is important for computer vision, especially when the unseen domain's annotated data are unavailable. We study a novel and practical problem of Open Domain Generalization (OpenDG), which learns from different source domains to achieve high performance on an unknown target domain, where the distributions and label sets of each individual source domain and the target domain can be different. The problem can be generally applied to diverse source domains and widely applicable to real-world applications. We propose a Domain-Augmented Meta-Learning framework to learn open-domain generalizable representations. We augment domains on both feature-level by a new Dirichlet mixup and label-level by distilled soft-labeling, which complements each domain with missing classes and other domain knowledge. We conduct meta-learning over domains by designing new meta-learning tasks and losses to preserve domain unique knowledge and generalize knowledge across domains simultaneously. Experiment results on various multi-domain datasets demonstrate that the proposed Domain-Augmented Meta-Learning (DAML) outperforms prior methods for unseen domain recognition.
Social relations are often used to improve recommendation quality when user-item interaction data is sparse in recommender systems. Most existing social recommendation models exploit pairwise relations to mine potential user preferences. However, real-life interactions among users are very complicated and user relations can be high-order. Hypergraph provides a natural way to model complex high-order relations, while its potentials for improving social recommendation are under-explored. In this paper, we fill this gap and propose a multi-channel hypergraph convolutional network to enhance social recommendation by leveraging high-order user relations. Technically, each channel in the network encodes a hypergraph that depicts a common high-order user relation pattern via hypergraph convolution. By aggregating the embeddings learned through multiple channels, we obtain comprehensive user representations to generate recommendation results. However, the aggregation operation might also obscure the inherent characteristics of different types of high-order connectivity information. To compensate for the aggregating loss, we innovatively integrate self-supervised learning into the training of the hypergraph convolutional network to regain the connectivity information with hierarchical mutual information maximization. The experimental results on multiple real-world datasets show that the proposed model outperforms the SOTA methods, and the ablation study verifies the effectiveness of the multi-channel setting and the self-supervised task. The implementation of our model is available via //github.com/Coder-Yu/RecQ.
Learning with limited data is a key challenge for visual recognition. Few-shot learning methods address this challenge by learning an instance embedding function from seen classes and apply the function to instances from unseen classes with limited labels. This style of transfer learning is task-agnostic: the embedding function is not learned optimally discriminative with respect to the unseen classes, where discerning among them is the target task. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to adapt the embedding model to the target classification task, yielding embeddings that are task-specific and are discriminative. To this end, we employ a type of self-attention mechanism called Transformer to transform the embeddings from task-agnostic to task-specific by focusing on relating instances from the test instances to the training instances in both seen and unseen classes. Our approach also extends to both transductive and generalized few-shot classification, two important settings that have essential use cases. We verify the effectiveness of our model on two standard benchmark few-shot classification datasets --- MiniImageNet and CUB, where our approach demonstrates state-of-the-art empirical performance.
The low resolution of objects of interest in aerial images makes pedestrian detection and action detection extremely challenging tasks. Furthermore, using deep convolutional neural networks to process large images can be demanding in terms of computational requirements. In order to alleviate these challenges, we propose a two-step, yes and no question answering framework to find specific individuals doing one or multiple specific actions in aerial images. First, a deep object detector, Single Shot Multibox Detector (SSD), is used to generate object proposals from small aerial images. Second, another deep network, is used to learn a latent common sub-space which associates the high resolution aerial imagery and the pedestrian action labels that are provided by the human-based sources