Event Stream Super-Resolution (ESR) aims to address the challenge of insufficient spatial resolution in event streams, which holds great significance for the application of event cameras in complex scenarios. Previous works for ESR often process positive and negative events in a mixed paradigm. This paradigm limits their ability to effectively model the unique characteristics of each event and mutually refine each other by considering their correlations. In this paper, we propose a bilateral event mining and complementary network (BMCNet) to fully leverage the potential of each event and capture the shared information to complement each other simultaneously. Specifically, we resort to a two-stream network to accomplish comprehensive mining of each type of events individually. To facilitate the exchange of information between two streams, we propose a bilateral information exchange (BIE) module. This module is layer-wisely embedded between two streams, enabling the effective propagation of hierarchical global information while alleviating the impact of invalid information brought by inherent characteristics of events. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods in ESR, achieving performance improvements of over 11\% on both real and synthetic datasets. Moreover, our method significantly enhances the performance of event-based downstream tasks such as object recognition and video reconstruction. Our code is available at //github.com/Lqm26/BMCNet-ESR.
Structure-Based Drug Design (SBDD) focuses on generating valid ligands that strongly and specifically bind to a designated protein pocket. Several methods use machine learning for SBDD to generate these ligands in 3D space, conditioned on the structure of a desired protein pocket. Recently, diffusion models have shown success here by modeling the underlying distributions of atomic positions and types. While these methods are effective in considering the structural details of the protein pocket, they often fail to explicitly consider the binding affinity. Binding affinity characterizes how tightly the ligand binds to the protein pocket, and is measured by the change in free energy associated with the binding process. It is one of the most crucial metrics for benchmarking the effectiveness of the interaction between a ligand and protein pocket. To address this, we propose BADGER: Binding Affinity Diffusion Guidance with Enhanced Refinement. BADGER is a general guidance method to steer the diffusion sampling process towards improved protein-ligand binding, allowing us to adjust the distribution of the binding affinity between ligands and proteins. Our method is enabled by using a neural network (NN) to model the energy function, which is commonly approximated by AutoDock Vina (ADV). ADV's energy function is non-differentiable, and estimates the affinity based on the interactions between a ligand and target protein receptor. By using a NN as a differentiable energy function proxy, we utilize the gradient of our learned energy function as a guidance method on top of any trained diffusion model. We show that our method improves the binding affinity of generated ligands to their protein receptors by up to 60\%, significantly surpassing previous machine learning methods. We also show that our guidance method is flexible and can be easily applied to other diffusion-based SBDD frameworks.
Sentiment Analysis (SA) is a crucial aspect of Natural Language Processing (NLP), addressing subjective assessments in textual content. Syntactic parsing is useful in SA because explicit syntactic information can improve accuracy while providing explainability, but it tends to be a computational bottleneck in practice due to the slowness of parsing algorithms. This paper addresses said bottleneck by using a SEquence Labeling Syntactic Parser (SELSP) to inject syntax into SA. By treating dependency parsing as a sequence labeling problem, we greatly enhance the speed of syntax-based SA. SELSP is trained and evaluated on a ternary polarity classification task, demonstrating its faster performance and better accuracy in polarity prediction tasks compared to conventional parsers like Stanza and to heuristic approaches that use shallow syntactic rules for SA like VADER. This increased speed and improved accuracy make SELSP particularly appealing to SA practitioners in both research and industry. In addition, we test several sentiment dictionaries on our SELSP to see which one improves the performance in polarity prediction tasks. Moreover, we compare the SELSP with Transformer-based models trained on a 5-label classification task. The results show that dictionaries that capture polarity judgment variation provide better results than dictionaries that ignore polarity judgment variation. Moreover, we show that SELSP is considerably faster than Transformer-based models in polarity prediction tasks.
Change detection aims to identify remote sense object changes by analyzing data between bitemporal image pairs. Due to the large temporal and spatial span of data collection in change detection image pairs, there are often a significant amount of task-specific and task-agnostic noise. Previous effort has focused excessively on denoising, with this goes a great deal of loss of fine-grained information. In this paper, we revisit the importance of fine-grained features in change detection and propose a series of operations for fine-grained information compensation and noise decoupling (FINO). First, the context is utilized to compensate for the fine-grained information in the feature space. Next, a shape-aware and a brightness-aware module are designed to improve the capacity for representation learning. The shape-aware module guides the backbone for more precise shape estimation, guiding the backbone network in extracting object shape features. The brightness-aware module learns a overall brightness estimation to improve the model's robustness to task-agnostic noise. Finally, a task-specific noise decoupling structure is designed as a way to improve the model's ability to separate noise interference from feature similarity. With these training schemes, our proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results in multiple change detection benchmarks. The code will be made available.
Cloth-changing person Re-IDentification (Re-ID) is a particularly challenging task, suffering from two limitations of inferior discriminative features and limited training samples. Existing methods mainly leverage auxiliary information to facilitate identity-relevant feature learning, including soft-biometrics features of shapes or gaits, and additional labels of clothing. However, this information may be unavailable in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a novel FIne-grained Representation and Recomposition (FIRe$^{2}$) framework to tackle both limitations without any auxiliary annotation or data. Specifically, we first design a Fine-grained Feature Mining (FFM) module to separately cluster images of each person. Images with similar so-called fine-grained attributes (e.g., clothes and viewpoints) are encouraged to cluster together. An attribute-aware classification loss is introduced to perform fine-grained learning based on cluster labels, which are not shared among different people, promoting the model to learn identity-relevant features. Furthermore, to take full advantage of fine-grained attributes, we present a Fine-grained Attribute Recomposition (FAR) module by recomposing image features with different attributes in the latent space. It significantly enhances robust feature learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FIRe$^{2}$ can achieve state-of-the-art performance on five widely-used cloth-changing person Re-ID benchmarks. The code is available at //github.com/QizaoWang/FIRe-CCReID.
Referring Video Object Segmentation (RVOS) aims to segment the object referred to by the query sentence throughout the entire video. Most existing methods require end-to-end training with dense mask annotations, which could be computation-consuming and less scalable. In this work, we aim to efficiently adapt foundation segmentation models for addressing RVOS from weak supervision with the proposed Grounded Prompting (GroPrompt) framework. More specifically, we propose Text-Aware Prompt Contrastive Learning (TAP-CL) to enhance the association between the position prompts and the referring sentences with only box supervisions, including Text-Contrastive Prompt Learning (TextCon) and Modality-Contrastive Prompt Learning (ModalCon) at frame level and video level, respectively. With the proposed TAP-CL, our GroPrompt framework can generate temporal-consistent yet text-aware position prompts describing locations and movements for the referred object from the video. The experimental results in the standard RVOS benchmarks (Ref-YouTube-VOS, Ref-DAVIS17, A2D-Sentences, and JHMDB-Sentences) demonstrate the competitive performance of our proposed GroPrompt framework given only bounding box weak supervisions.
Language Model Programs, i.e. sophisticated pipelines of modular language model (LM) calls, are increasingly advancing NLP tasks, but they require crafting prompts that are jointly effective for all modules. We study prompt optimization for LM programs, i.e. how to update these prompts to maximize a downstream metric without access to module-level labels or gradients. To make this tractable, we factorize our problem into optimizing the free-form instructions and few-shot demonstrations of every module and introduce several strategies to craft task-grounded instructions and navigate credit assignment across modules. Our strategies include (i) program- and data-aware techniques for proposing effective instructions, (ii) a stochastic mini-batch evaluation function for learning a surrogate model of our objective, and (iii) a meta-optimization procedure in which we refine how LMs construct proposals over time. Using these insights we develop MIPRO, a novel optimizer that outperforms baselines on five of six diverse LM programs using a best-in-class open-source model (Llama-3-8B), by as high as 12.9% accuracy. We will release our new optimizers and benchmark in DSPy at //github.com/stanfordnlp/dspy
Divide-and-conquer MCMC is a strategy for parallelising Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling by running independent samplers on disjoint subsets of a dataset and merging their output. An ongoing challenge in the literature is to efficiently perform this merging without imposing distributional assumptions on the posteriors. We propose using diffusion generative modelling to fit density approximations to the subposterior distributions. This approach outperforms existing methods on challenging merging problems, while its computational cost scales more efficiently to high dimensional problems than existing density estimation approaches.
The success of AI models relies on the availability of large, diverse, and high-quality datasets, which can be challenging to obtain due to data scarcity, privacy concerns, and high costs. Synthetic data has emerged as a promising solution by generating artificial data that mimics real-world patterns. This paper provides an overview of synthetic data research, discussing its applications, challenges, and future directions. We present empirical evidence from prior art to demonstrate its effectiveness and highlight the importance of ensuring its factuality, fidelity, and unbiasedness. We emphasize the need for responsible use of synthetic data to build more powerful, inclusive, and trustworthy language models.
Few-shot Knowledge Graph (KG) completion is a focus of current research, where each task aims at querying unseen facts of a relation given its few-shot reference entity pairs. Recent attempts solve this problem by learning static representations of entities and references, ignoring their dynamic properties, i.e., entities may exhibit diverse roles within task relations, and references may make different contributions to queries. This work proposes an adaptive attentional network for few-shot KG completion by learning adaptive entity and reference representations. Specifically, entities are modeled by an adaptive neighbor encoder to discern their task-oriented roles, while references are modeled by an adaptive query-aware aggregator to differentiate their contributions. Through the attention mechanism, both entities and references can capture their fine-grained semantic meanings, and thus render more expressive representations. This will be more predictive for knowledge acquisition in the few-shot scenario. Evaluation in link prediction on two public datasets shows that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results with different few-shot sizes.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.