Large-scale Text-to-Image (T2I) models have rapidly gained prominence across creative fields, generating visually compelling outputs from textual prompts. However, controlling these models to ensure consistent style remains challenging, with existing methods necessitating fine-tuning and manual intervention to disentangle content and style. In this paper, we introduce StyleAligned, a novel technique designed to establish style alignment among a series of generated images. By employing minimal `attention sharing' during the diffusion process, our method maintains style consistency across images within T2I models. This approach allows for the creation of style-consistent images using a reference style through a straightforward inversion operation. Our method's evaluation across diverse styles and text prompts demonstrates high-quality synthesis and fidelity, underscoring its efficacy in achieving consistent style across various inputs.
The extraction of modular object-centric representations for downstream tasks is an emerging area of research. Learning grounded representations of objects that are guaranteed to be stable and invariant promises robust performance across different tasks and environments. Slot Attention (SA) learns object-centric representations by assigning objects to \textit{slots}, but presupposes a \textit{single} distribution from which all slots are randomly initialised. This results in an inability to learn \textit{specialized} slots which bind to specific object types and remain invariant to identity-preserving changes in object appearance. To address this, we present \emph{\textsc{Co}nditional \textsc{S}lot \textsc{A}ttention} (\textsc{CoSA}) using a novel concept of \emph{Grounded Slot Dictionary} (GSD) inspired by vector quantization. Our proposed GSD comprises (i) canonical object-level property vectors and (ii) parametric Gaussian distributions, which define a prior over the slots. We demonstrate the benefits of our method in multiple downstream tasks such as scene generation, composition, and task adaptation, whilst remaining competitive with SA in popular object discovery benchmarks.
The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to increasing concerns about the misuse of AI-generated text, and watermarking for LLM-generated text has emerged as a potential solution. However, it is challenging to generate high-quality watermarked text while maintaining strong security, robustness, and the ability to detect watermarks without prior knowledge of the prompt or model. This paper proposes an adaptive watermarking strategy to address this problem. To improve the text quality and maintain robustness, we adaptively add watermarking to token distributions with high entropy measured using an auxiliary model and keep the low entropy token distributions untouched. For the sake of security and to further minimize the watermark's impact on text quality, instead of using a fixed green/red list generated from a random secret key, which can be vulnerable to decryption and forgery, we adaptively scale up the output logits in proportion based on the semantic embedding of previously generated text using a well designed semantic mapping model. Our experiments involving various LLMs demonstrate that our approach achieves comparable robustness performance to existing watermark methods. Additionally, the text generated by our method has perplexity comparable to that of \emph{un-watermarked} LLMs while maintaining security even under various attacks.
The rapid growth of large-scale machine learning (ML) models has led numerous commercial companies to utilize ML models for generating predictive results to help business decision-making. As two primary components in traditional predictive pipelines, data processing, and model predictions often operate in separate execution environments, leading to redundant engineering and computations. Additionally, the diverging mathematical foundations of data processing and machine learning hinder cross-optimizations by combining these two components, thereby overlooking potential opportunities to expedite predictive pipelines. In this paper, we propose an operator fusing method based on GPU-accelerated linear algebraic evaluation of relational queries. Our method leverages linear algebra computation properties to merge operators in machine learning predictions and data processing, significantly accelerating predictive pipelines by up to 317x. We perform a complexity analysis to deliver quantitative insights into the advantages of operator fusion, considering various data and model dimensions. Furthermore, we extensively evaluate matrix multiplication query processing utilizing the widely-used Star Schema Benchmark. Through comprehensive evaluations, we demonstrate the effectiveness and potential of our approach in improving the efficiency of data processing and machine learning workloads on modern hardware.
Video Moment Retrieval (VMR) requires precise modelling of fine-grained moment-text associations to capture intricate visual-language relationships. Due to the lack of a diverse and generalisable VMR dataset to facilitate learning scalable moment-text associations, existing methods resort to joint training on both source and target domain videos for cross-domain applications. Meanwhile, recent developments in vision-language multimodal models pre-trained on large-scale image-text and/or video-text pairs are only based on coarse associations (weakly labelled). They are inadequate to provide fine-grained moment-text correlations required for cross-domain VMR. In this work, we solve the problem of unseen cross-domain VMR, where certain visual and textual concepts do not overlap across domains, by only utilising target domain sentences (text prompts) without accessing their videos. To that end, we explore generative video diffusion for fine-grained editing of source videos controlled by the target sentences, enabling us to simulate target domain videos. We address two problems in video editing for optimising unseen domain VMR: (1) generation of high-quality simulation videos of different moments with subtle distinctions, (2) selection of simulation videos that complement existing source training videos without introducing harmful noise or unnecessary repetitions. On the first problem, we formulate a two-stage video diffusion generation controlled simultaneously by (1) the original video structure of a source video, (2) subject specifics, and (3) a target sentence prompt. This ensures fine-grained variations between video moments. On the second problem, we introduce a hybrid selection mechanism that combines two quantitative metrics for noise filtering and one qualitative metric for leveraging VMR prediction on simulation video selection.
Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) has witnessed remarkable advancements, enabling the development of innovative machine learning applications that preserve the privacy of training data. However, existing theoretical research in this field has primarily focused on distributed optimization for minimization problems. This paper is the first to study PFL for saddle point problems encompassing a broader range of optimization problems, that require more than just solving minimization problems. In this work, we consider a recently proposed PFL setting with the mixing objective function, an approach combining the learning of a global model together with locally distributed learners. Unlike most previous work, which considered only the centralized setting, we work in a more general and decentralized setup that allows us to design and analyze more practical and federated ways to connect devices to the network. We proposed new algorithms to address this problem and provide a theoretical analysis of the smooth (strongly) convex-(strongly) concave saddle point problems in stochastic and deterministic cases. Numerical experiments for bilinear problems and neural networks with adversarial noise demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.
State of the art Named Entity Recognition (NER) models have achieved an impressive ability to extract common phrases from text that belong to labels such as location, organization, time, and person. However, typical NER systems that rely on having seen a specific entity in their training data in order to label an entity perform poorly on rare or unseen entities ta in order to label an entity perform poorly on rare or unseen entities (Derczynski et al., 2017). This paper attempts to improve recognition of person names, a diverse category that can grow any time someone is born or changes their name. In order for downstream tasks to not exhibit bias based on cultural background, a model should perform well on names from a variety of backgrounds. In this paper I experiment with the training data and input structure of an English Bi-LSTM name recognition model. I look at names from 103 countries to compare how well the model performs on names from different cultures, specifically in the context of a downstream task where extracted names will be matched to information on file. I find that a model with combined character and word input outperforms word-only models and may improve on accuracy compared to classical NER models that are not geared toward identifying unseen entity values.
2D-based Industrial Anomaly Detection has been widely discussed, however, multimodal industrial anomaly detection based on 3D point clouds and RGB images still has many untouched fields. Existing multimodal industrial anomaly detection methods directly concatenate the multimodal features, which leads to a strong disturbance between features and harms the detection performance. In this paper, we propose Multi-3D-Memory (M3DM), a novel multimodal anomaly detection method with hybrid fusion scheme: firstly, we design an unsupervised feature fusion with patch-wise contrastive learning to encourage the interaction of different modal features; secondly, we use a decision layer fusion with multiple memory banks to avoid loss of information and additional novelty classifiers to make the final decision. We further propose a point feature alignment operation to better align the point cloud and RGB features. Extensive experiments show that our multimodal industrial anomaly detection model outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on both detection and segmentation precision on MVTec-3D AD dataset. Code is available at //github.com/nomewang/M3DM.
Adversarial attack is a technique for deceiving Machine Learning (ML) models, which provides a way to evaluate the adversarial robustness. In practice, attack algorithms are artificially selected and tuned by human experts to break a ML system. However, manual selection of attackers tends to be sub-optimal, leading to a mistakenly assessment of model security. In this paper, a new procedure called Composite Adversarial Attack (CAA) is proposed for automatically searching the best combination of attack algorithms and their hyper-parameters from a candidate pool of \textbf{32 base attackers}. We design a search space where attack policy is represented as an attacking sequence, i.e., the output of the previous attacker is used as the initialization input for successors. Multi-objective NSGA-II genetic algorithm is adopted for finding the strongest attack policy with minimum complexity. The experimental result shows CAA beats 10 top attackers on 11 diverse defenses with less elapsed time (\textbf{6 $\times$ faster than AutoAttack}), and achieves the new state-of-the-art on $l_{\infty}$, $l_{2}$ and unrestricted adversarial attacks.
Knowledge graph (KG) embedding encodes the entities and relations from a KG into low-dimensional vector spaces to support various applications such as KG completion, question answering, and recommender systems. In real world, knowledge graphs (KGs) are dynamic and evolve over time with addition or deletion of triples. However, most existing models focus on embedding static KGs while neglecting dynamics. To adapt to the changes in a KG, these models need to be re-trained on the whole KG with a high time cost. In this paper, to tackle the aforementioned problem, we propose a new context-aware Dynamic Knowledge Graph Embedding (DKGE) method which supports the embedding learning in an online fashion. DKGE introduces two different representations (i.e., knowledge embedding and contextual element embedding) for each entity and each relation, in the joint modeling of entities and relations as well as their contexts, by employing two attentive graph convolutional networks, a gate strategy, and translation operations. This effectively helps limit the impacts of a KG update in certain regions, not in the entire graph, so that DKGE can rapidly acquire the updated KG embedding by a proposed online learning algorithm. Furthermore, DKGE can also learn KG embedding from scratch. Experiments on the tasks of link prediction and question answering in a dynamic environment demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of DKGE.
Embedding models for deterministic Knowledge Graphs (KG) have been extensively studied, with the purpose of capturing latent semantic relations between entities and incorporating the structured knowledge into machine learning. However, there are many KGs that model uncertain knowledge, which typically model the inherent uncertainty of relations facts with a confidence score, and embedding such uncertain knowledge represents an unresolved challenge. The capturing of uncertain knowledge will benefit many knowledge-driven applications such as question answering and semantic search by providing more natural characterization of the knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel uncertain KG embedding model UKGE, which aims to preserve both structural and uncertainty information of relation facts in the embedding space. Unlike previous models that characterize relation facts with binary classification techniques, UKGE learns embeddings according to the confidence scores of uncertain relation facts. To further enhance the precision of UKGE, we also introduce probabilistic soft logic to infer confidence scores for unseen relation facts during training. We propose and evaluate two variants of UKGE based on different learning objectives. Experiments are conducted on three real-world uncertain KGs via three tasks, i.e. confidence prediction, relation fact ranking, and relation fact classification. UKGE shows effectiveness in capturing uncertain knowledge by achieving promising results on these tasks, and consistently outperforms baselines on these tasks.