Offline reinforcement learning (RL) leverages pre-collected datasets to train optimal policies. Diffusion Q-Learning (DQL), introducing diffusion models as a powerful and expressive policy class, significantly boosts the performance of offline RL. However, its reliance on iterative denoising sampling to generate actions slows down both training and inference. While several recent attempts have tried to accelerate diffusion-QL, the improvement in training and/or inference speed often results in degraded performance. In this paper, we introduce a dual policy approach, Diffusion Trusted Q-Learning (DTQL), which comprises a diffusion policy for pure behavior cloning and a practical one-step policy. We bridge the two polices by a newly introduced diffusion trust region loss. The diffusion policy maintains expressiveness, while the trust region loss directs the one-step policy to explore freely and seek modes within the region defined by the diffusion policy. DTQL eliminates the need for iterative denoising sampling during both training and inference, making it remarkably computationally efficient. We evaluate its effectiveness and algorithmic characteristics against popular Kullback--Leibler divergence-based distillation methods in 2D bandit scenarios and gym tasks. We then show that DTQL could not only outperform other methods on the majority of the D4RL benchmark tasks but also demonstrate efficiency in training and inference speeds. The PyTorch implementation is available at //github.com/TianyuCodings/Diffusion_Trusted_Q_Learning.
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) trained via contrastive learning have achieved notable success in natural image tasks. However, their application in the medical domain remains limited due to the scarcity of openly accessible, large-scale medical image-text datasets. Existing medical VLMs either train on closed-source proprietary or relatively small open-source datasets that do not generalize well. Similarly, most models remain specific to a single or limited number of medical imaging domains, again restricting their applicability to other modalities. To address this gap, we introduce UniMed, a large-scale, open-source multi-modal medical dataset comprising over 5.3 million image-text pairs across six diverse imaging modalities: X-ray, CT, MRI, Ultrasound, Pathology, and Fundus. UniMed is developed using a data-collection framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to transform modality-specific classification datasets into image-text formats while incorporating existing image-text data from the medical domain, facilitating scalable VLM pretraining. Using UniMed, we trained UniMed-CLIP, a unified VLM for six modalities that significantly outperforms existing generalist VLMs and matches modality-specific medical VLMs, achieving notable gains in zero-shot evaluations. For instance, UniMed-CLIP improves over BiomedCLIP (trained on proprietary data) by an absolute gain of +12.61, averaged over 21 datasets, while using 3x less training data. To facilitate future research, we release UniMed dataset, training codes, and models at //github.com/mbzuai-oryx/UniMed-CLIP.
We introduce Limited Rollout Beam Search (LRBS), a beam search strategy for deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based combinatorial optimization improvement heuristics. Utilizing pre-trained models on the Euclidean Traveling Salesperson Problem, LRBS significantly enhances both in-distribution performance and generalization to larger problem instances, achieving optimality gaps that outperform existing improvement heuristics and narrowing the gap with state-of-the-art constructive methods. We also extend our analysis to two pickup and delivery TSP variants to validate our results. Finally, we employ our search strategy for offline and online adaptation of the pre-trained improvement policy, leading to improved search performance and surpassing recent adaptive methods for constructive heuristics.
In deep learning, the recently introduced state space models utilize HiPPO (High-order Polynomial Projection Operators) memory units to approximate continuous-time trajectories of input functions using ordinary differential equations (ODEs), and these techniques have shown empirical success in capturing long-range dependencies in long input sequences. However, the mathematical foundations of these ODEs, particularly the singular HiPPO-LegS (Legendre Scaled) ODE, and their corresponding numerical discretizations remain unexplored. In this work, we fill this gap by establishing that HiPPO-LegS ODE is well-posed despite its singularity, albeit without the freedom of arbitrary initial conditions, and by establishing convergence of the associated numerical discretization schemes for Riemann-integrable input functions.
Current deep generative adversarial networks (GANs) can synthesize high-quality (HQ) images, so learning representation with GANs is favorable. GAN inversion is one of emerging approaches that study how to invert images into latent space. Existing GAN encoders can invert images on StyleGAN, but cannot adapt to other deep GANs. We propose a novel approach to address this issue. By evaluating diverse similarity in latent vectors and images, we design an adaptive encoder, named diverse similarity encoder (DSE), that can be expanded to a variety of state-of-the-art GANs. DSE makes GANs reconstruct higher fidelity images from HQ images, no matter whether they are synthesized or real images. DSE has unified convolutional blocks and adapts well to mainstream deep GANs, e.g., PGGAN, StyleGAN, and BigGAN.
Self-supervised learning through masked autoencoders (MAEs) has recently attracted great attention for remote sensing (RS) image representation learning, and thus embodies a significant potential for content-based image retrieval (CBIR) from ever-growing RS image archives. However, the existing MAE based CBIR studies in RS assume that the considered RS images are acquired by a single image sensor, and thus are only suitable for uni-modal CBIR problems. The effectiveness of MAEs for cross-sensor CBIR, which aims to search semantically similar images across different image modalities, has not been explored yet. In this paper, we take the first step to explore the effectiveness of MAEs for sensor-agnostic CBIR in RS. To this end, we present a systematic overview on the possible adaptations of the vanilla MAE to exploit masked image modeling on multi-sensor RS image archives (denoted as cross-sensor masked autoencoders [CSMAEs]) in the context of CBIR. Based on different adjustments applied to the vanilla MAE, we introduce different CSMAE models. We also provide an extensive experimental analysis of these CSMAE models. We finally derive a guideline to exploit masked image modeling for uni-modal and cross-modal CBIR problems in RS. The code of this work is publicly available at //github.com/jakhac/CSMAE.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) merges retrieval methods with deep learning advancements to address the static limitations of large language models (LLMs) by enabling the dynamic integration of up-to-date external information. This methodology, focusing primarily on the text domain, provides a cost-effective solution to the generation of plausible but incorrect responses by LLMs, thereby enhancing the accuracy and reliability of their outputs through the use of real-world data. As RAG grows in complexity and incorporates multiple concepts that can influence its performance, this paper organizes the RAG paradigm into four categories: pre-retrieval, retrieval, post-retrieval, and generation, offering a detailed perspective from the retrieval viewpoint. It outlines RAG's evolution and discusses the field's progression through the analysis of significant studies. Additionally, the paper introduces evaluation methods for RAG, addressing the challenges faced and proposing future research directions. By offering an organized framework and categorization, the study aims to consolidate existing research on RAG, clarify its technological underpinnings, and highlight its potential to broaden the adaptability and applications of LLMs.
Data augmentation, the artificial creation of training data for machine learning by transformations, is a widely studied research field across machine learning disciplines. While it is useful for increasing the generalization capabilities of a model, it can also address many other challenges and problems, from overcoming a limited amount of training data over regularizing the objective to limiting the amount data used to protect privacy. Based on a precise description of the goals and applications of data augmentation (C1) and a taxonomy for existing works (C2), this survey is concerned with data augmentation methods for textual classification and aims to achieve a concise and comprehensive overview for researchers and practitioners (C3). Derived from the taxonomy, we divided more than 100 methods into 12 different groupings and provide state-of-the-art references expounding which methods are highly promising (C4). Finally, research perspectives that may constitute a building block for future work are given (C5).
Deep learning has become the dominant approach in coping with various tasks in Natural LanguageProcessing (NLP). Although text inputs are typically represented as a sequence of tokens, there isa rich variety of NLP problems that can be best expressed with a graph structure. As a result, thereis a surge of interests in developing new deep learning techniques on graphs for a large numberof NLP tasks. In this survey, we present a comprehensive overview onGraph Neural Networks(GNNs) for Natural Language Processing. We propose a new taxonomy of GNNs for NLP, whichsystematically organizes existing research of GNNs for NLP along three axes: graph construction,graph representation learning, and graph based encoder-decoder models. We further introducea large number of NLP applications that are exploiting the power of GNNs and summarize thecorresponding benchmark datasets, evaluation metrics, and open-source codes. Finally, we discussvarious outstanding challenges for making the full use of GNNs for NLP as well as future researchdirections. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive overview of Graph NeuralNetworks for Natural Language Processing.
Recently, contrastive learning (CL) has emerged as a successful method for unsupervised graph representation learning. Most graph CL methods first perform stochastic augmentation on the input graph to obtain two graph views and maximize the agreement of representations in the two views. Despite the prosperous development of graph CL methods, the design of graph augmentation schemes -- a crucial component in CL -- remains rarely explored. We argue that the data augmentation schemes should preserve intrinsic structures and attributes of graphs, which will force the model to learn representations that are insensitive to perturbation on unimportant nodes and edges. However, most existing methods adopt uniform data augmentation schemes, like uniformly dropping edges and uniformly shuffling features, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel graph contrastive representation learning method with adaptive augmentation that incorporates various priors for topological and semantic aspects of the graph. Specifically, on the topology level, we design augmentation schemes based on node centrality measures to highlight important connective structures. On the node attribute level, we corrupt node features by adding more noise to unimportant node features, to enforce the model to recognize underlying semantic information. We perform extensive experiments of node classification on a variety of real-world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines and even surpasses some supervised counterparts, which validates the effectiveness of the proposed contrastive framework with adaptive augmentation.
There has been appreciable progress in unsupervised network representation learning (UNRL) approaches over graphs recently with flexible random-walk approaches, new optimization objectives and deep architectures. However, there is no common ground for systematic comparison of embeddings to understand their behavior for different graphs and tasks. In this paper we theoretically group different approaches under a unifying framework and empirically investigate the effectiveness of different network representation methods. In particular, we argue that most of the UNRL approaches either explicitly or implicit model and exploit context information of a node. Consequently, we propose a framework that casts a variety of approaches -- random walk based, matrix factorization and deep learning based -- into a unified context-based optimization function. We systematically group the methods based on their similarities and differences. We study the differences among these methods in detail which we later use to explain their performance differences (on downstream tasks). We conduct a large-scale empirical study considering 9 popular and recent UNRL techniques and 11 real-world datasets with varying structural properties and two common tasks -- node classification and link prediction. We find that there is no single method that is a clear winner and that the choice of a suitable method is dictated by certain properties of the embedding methods, task and structural properties of the underlying graph. In addition we also report the common pitfalls in evaluation of UNRL methods and come up with suggestions for experimental design and interpretation of results.