Large vision-language models have achieved outstanding performance, but their size and computational requirements make their deployment on resource-constrained devices and time-sensitive tasks impractical. Model distillation, the process of creating smaller, faster models that maintain the performance of larger models, is a promising direction towards the solution. This paper investigates the distillation of visual representations in large teacher vision-language models into lightweight student models using a small- or mid-scale dataset. Notably, this study focuses on open-vocabulary out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, a challenging problem that has been overlooked in previous model distillation literature. We propose two principles from vision and language modality perspectives to enhance student's OOD generalization: (1) by better imitating teacher's visual representation space, and carefully promoting better coherence in vision-language alignment with the teacher; (2) by enriching the teacher's language representations with informative and finegrained semantic attributes to effectively distinguish between different labels. We propose several metrics and conduct extensive experiments to investigate their techniques. The results demonstrate significant improvements in zero-shot and few-shot student performance on open-vocabulary out-of-distribution classification, highlighting the effectiveness of our proposed approaches. Code released at //github.com/xuanlinli17/large_vlm_distillation_ood
Large language models (LLMs) can respond to human language queries and have shown powerful potential applications in network operations (NetOps). Thanks to the large amount of commonsense knowledge inherent, LLMs achieve much better inference accuracy than traditional models and emerge with strong abilities in generalization, reasoning, and code generation. These abilities may have a crucial boost to automated and intelligent NetOps. However, it remains under-explored how well LLMs perform in various NetOps tasks. In this work, we make a systematic assessment of the capabilities, strengths, and limitations of selected LLMs in the field of NetOps. The evaluation is conducted on a collection of 5,732 questions about NetOps, encompassing 26 publicly available general-domain LLMs, including ChatGPT, LLaMA, Falcon, etc. We also finetune some of these LLMs with our collected NetOps corpus and evaluate the resulting models. The evaluation method follows the widely adopted benchmarks for general-domain LLMs, combined with Chain-of-Thought Prompts and Retrieval-Augmented Generation. The results show that only GPT-4 achieves high accuracy equivalent to passing the NetOps certification exam for humans, while all the other LLMs have much lower accuracy. However, some open models like LLaMA 2 still demonstrate significant potential. Furthermore, we evaluate the impact of factors such as model parameters, prompt engineering, instruction fine-tuning etc. This work shall be treated as the initial effort to systematic evaluation of LLMs in NetOps, and a more rigorous study is required for production use. The evaluation code and dataset will be released to benefit future research.
Statistical inferences for high-dimensional regression models have been extensively studied for their wide applications ranging from genomics, neuroscience, to economics. However, in practice, there are often potential unmeasured confounders associated with both the response and covariates, which can lead to invalidity of standard debiasing methods. This paper focuses on a generalized linear regression framework with hidden confounding and proposes a debiasing approach to address this high-dimensional problem, by adjusting for the effects induced by the unmeasured confounders. We establish consistency and asymptotic normality for the proposed debiased estimator. The finite sample performance of the proposed method is demonstrated through extensive numerical studies and an application to a genetic data set.
Continual learning is a challenging problem in which models need to be trained on non-stationary data across sequential tasks for class-incremental learning. While previous methods have focused on using either regularization or rehearsal-based frameworks to alleviate catastrophic forgetting in image classification, they are limited to a single modality and cannot learn compact class-aware cross-modal representations for continual audio-visual learning. To address this gap, we propose a novel class-incremental grouping network (CIGN) that can learn category-wise semantic features to achieve continual audio-visual learning. Our CIGN leverages learnable audio-visual class tokens and audio-visual grouping to continually aggregate class-aware features. Additionally, it utilizes class tokens distillation and continual grouping to prevent forgetting parameters learned from previous tasks, thereby improving the model's ability to capture discriminative audio-visual categories. We conduct extensive experiments on VGGSound-Instruments, VGGSound-100, and VGG-Sound Sources benchmarks. Our experimental results demonstrate that the CIGN achieves state-of-the-art audio-visual class-incremental learning performance. Code is available at //github.com/stoneMo/CIGN.
Recently, video recognition is emerging with the help of multi-modal learning, which focuses on integrating distinct modalities to improve the performance or robustness of the model. Although various multi-modal learning methods have been proposed and offer remarkable recognition results, almost all of these methods rely on high-quality manual annotations and assume that modalities among multi-modal data provide semantically relevant information. Unfortunately, the widely used video datasets are usually coarse-annotated or collected from the Internet. Thus, it inevitably contains a portion of noisy labels and noisy correspondence. To address this challenge, we use the audio-visual action recognition task as a proxy and propose a noise-tolerant learning framework to find anti-interference model parameters against both noisy labels and noisy correspondence. Specifically, our method consists of two phases that aim to rectify noise by the inherent correlation between modalities. First, a noise-tolerant contrastive training phase is performed to make the model immune to the possible noisy-labeled data. To alleviate the influence of noisy correspondence, we propose a cross-modal noise estimation component to adjust the consistency between different modalities. As the noisy correspondence existed at the instance level, we further propose a category-level contrastive loss to reduce its interference. Second, in the hybrid-supervised training phase, we calculate the distance metric among features to obtain corrected labels, which are used as complementary supervision to guide the training. Extensive experiments on a wide range of noisy levels demonstrate that our method significantly improves the robustness of the action recognition model and surpasses the baselines by a clear margin.
Vision-language models (VLMs) have recently demonstrated strong efficacy as visual assistants that can parse natural queries about the visual content and generate human-like outputs. In this work, we explore the ability of these models to demonstrate human-like reasoning based on the perceived information. To address a crucial concern regarding the extent to which their reasoning capabilities are fully consistent and grounded, we also measure the reasoning consistency of these models. We achieve this by proposing a chain-of-thought (CoT) based consistency measure. However, such an evaluation requires a benchmark that encompasses both high-level inference and detailed reasoning chains, which is costly. We tackle this challenge by proposing a LLM-Human-in-the-Loop pipeline, which notably reduces cost while simultaneously ensuring the generation of a high-quality dataset. Based on this pipeline and the existing coarse-grained annotated dataset, we build the CURE benchmark to measure both the zero-shot reasoning performance and consistency of VLMs. We evaluate existing state-of-the-art VLMs, and find that even the best-performing model is unable to demonstrate strong visual reasoning capabilities and consistency, indicating that substantial efforts are required to enable VLMs to perform visual reasoning as systematically and consistently as humans. As an early step, we propose a two-stage training framework aimed at improving both the reasoning performance and consistency of VLMs. The first stage involves employing supervised fine-tuning of VLMs using step-by-step reasoning samples automatically generated by LLMs. In the second stage, we further augment the training process by incorporating feedback provided by LLMs to produce reasoning chains that are highly consistent and grounded. We empirically highlight the effectiveness of our framework in both reasoning performance and consistency.
Deploying large language models (LLMs) is challenging because they are memory inefficient and compute-intensive for practical applications. In reaction, researchers train smaller task-specific models by either finetuning with human labels or distilling using LLM-generated labels. However, finetuning and distillation require large amounts of training data to achieve comparable performance to LLMs. We introduce Distilling step-by-step, a new mechanism that (a) trains smaller models that outperform LLMs, and (b) achieves so by leveraging less training data needed by finetuning or distillation. Our method extracts LLM rationales as additional supervision for small models within a multi-task training framework. We present three findings across 4 NLP benchmarks: First, compared to both finetuning and distillation, our mechanism achieves better performance with much fewer labeled/unlabeled training examples. Second, compared to LLMs, we achieve better performance using substantially smaller model sizes. Third, we reduce both the model size and the amount of data required to outperform LLMs; our 770M T5 model outperforms the 540B PaLM model using only 80% of available data on a benchmark task.
With the rise of powerful pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP, it becomes essential to investigate ways to adapt these models to downstream datasets. A recently proposed method named Context Optimization (CoOp) introduces the concept of prompt learning -- a recent trend in NLP -- to the vision domain for adapting pre-trained vision-language models. Specifically, CoOp turns context words in a prompt into a set of learnable vectors and, with only a few labeled images for learning, can achieve huge improvements over intensively-tuned manual prompts. In our study we identify a critical problem of CoOp: the learned context is not generalizable to wider unseen classes within the same dataset, suggesting that CoOp overfits base classes observed during training. To address the problem, we propose Conditional Context Optimization (CoCoOp), which extends CoOp by further learning a lightweight neural network to generate for each image an input-conditional token (vector). Compared to CoOp's static prompts, our dynamic prompts adapt to each instance and are thus less sensitive to class shift. Extensive experiments show that CoCoOp generalizes much better than CoOp to unseen classes, even showing promising transferability beyond a single dataset; and yields stronger domain generalization performance as well. Code is available at //github.com/KaiyangZhou/CoOp.
Pre-trained deep neural network language models such as ELMo, GPT, BERT and XLNet have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance on a variety of language understanding tasks. However, their size makes them impractical for a number of scenarios, especially on mobile and edge devices. In particular, the input word embedding matrix accounts for a significant proportion of the model's memory footprint, due to the large input vocabulary and embedding dimensions. Knowledge distillation techniques have had success at compressing large neural network models, but they are ineffective at yielding student models with vocabularies different from the original teacher models. We introduce a novel knowledge distillation technique for training a student model with a significantly smaller vocabulary as well as lower embedding and hidden state dimensions. Specifically, we employ a dual-training mechanism that trains the teacher and student models simultaneously to obtain optimal word embeddings for the student vocabulary. We combine this approach with learning shared projection matrices that transfer layer-wise knowledge from the teacher model to the student model. Our method is able to compress the BERT_BASE model by more than 60x, with only a minor drop in downstream task metrics, resulting in a language model with a footprint of under 7MB. Experimental results also demonstrate higher compression efficiency and accuracy when compared with other state-of-the-art compression techniques.
Object detection is considered as one of the most challenging problems in computer vision, since it requires correct prediction of both classes and locations of objects in images. In this study, we define a more difficult scenario, namely zero-shot object detection (ZSD) where no visual training data is available for some of the target object classes. We present a novel approach to tackle this ZSD problem, where a convex combination of embeddings are used in conjunction with a detection framework. For evaluation of ZSD methods, we propose a simple dataset constructed from Fashion-MNIST images and also a custom zero-shot split for the Pascal VOC detection challenge. The experimental results suggest that our method yields promising results for ZSD.
While existing machine learning models have achieved great success for sentiment classification, they typically do not explicitly capture sentiment-oriented word interaction, which can lead to poor results for fine-grained analysis at the snippet level (a phrase or sentence). Factorization Machine provides a possible approach to learning element-wise interaction for recommender systems, but they are not directly applicable to our task due to the inability to model contexts and word sequences. In this work, we develop two Position-aware Factorization Machines which consider word interaction, context and position information. Such information is jointly encoded in a set of sentiment-oriented word interaction vectors. Compared to traditional word embeddings, SWI vectors explicitly capture sentiment-oriented word interaction and simplify the parameter learning. Experimental results show that while they have comparable performance with state-of-the-art methods for document-level classification, they benefit the snippet/sentence-level sentiment analysis.