Otter: A Multi-Modal Model with In-Context Instruction Tuning

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant universal capabilities as few/zero-shot learners in various tasks due to their pre-training on vast amounts of text data, as exemplified by GPT-3, which boosted to InstrctGPT and ChatGPT, effectively following natural language instructions to accomplish real-world tasks. In this paper, we propose to introduce instruction tuning into multi-modal models, motivated by the Flamingo model's upstream interleaved format pretraining dataset. We adopt a similar approach to construct our MultI-Modal In-Context Instruction Tuning (MIMIC-IT) dataset. We then introduce Otter, a multi-modal model based on OpenFlamingo (open-sourced version of DeepMind's Flamingo), trained on MIMIC-IT and showcasing improved instruction-following ability and in-context learning. We also optimize OpenFlamingo's implementation for researchers, democratizing the required training resources from 1$\times$ A100 GPU to 4$\times$ RTX-3090 GPUs, and integrate both OpenFlamingo and Otter into Huggingface Transformers for more researchers to incorporate the models into their customized training and inference pipelines.

The Second Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge

This paper discusses the results for the second edition of the Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge (MDEC). This edition was open to methods using any form of supervision, including fully-supervised, self-supervised, multi-task or proxy depth. The challenge was based around the SYNS-Patches dataset, which features a wide diversity of environments with high-quality dense ground-truth. This includes complex natural environments, e.g. forests or fields, which are greatly underrepresented in current benchmarks. The challenge received eight unique submissions that outperformed the provided SotA baseline on any of the pointcloud- or image-based metrics. The top supervised submission improved relative F-Score by 27.62%, while the top self-supervised improved it by 16.61%. Supervised submissions generally leveraged large collections of datasets to improve data diversity. Self-supervised submissions instead updated the network architecture and pretrained backbones. These results represent a significant progress in the field, while highlighting avenues for future research, such as reducing interpolation artifacts at depth boundaries, improving self-supervised indoor performance and overall natural image accuracy.

Evaluating ChatGPT's Information Extraction Capabilities: An Assessment of Performance, Explainability, Calibration, and Faithfulness

The capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to comprehend user intent and provide reasonable responses has made them extremely popular lately. In this paper, we focus on assessing the overall ability of ChatGPT using 7 fine-grained information extraction (IE) tasks. Specially, we present the systematically analysis by measuring ChatGPT's performance, explainability, calibration, and faithfulness, and resulting in 15 keys from either the ChatGPT or domain experts. Our findings reveal that ChatGPT's performance in Standard-IE setting is poor, but it surprisingly exhibits excellent performance in the OpenIE setting, as evidenced by human evaluation. In addition, our research indicates that ChatGPT provides high-quality and trustworthy explanations for its decisions. However, there is an issue of ChatGPT being overconfident in its predictions, which resulting in low calibration. Furthermore, ChatGPT demonstrates a high level of faithfulness to the original text in the majority of cases. We manually annotate and release the test sets of 7 fine-grained IE tasks contains 14 datasets to further promote the research. The datasets and code are available at https://github.com/pkuserc/ChatGPT_for_IE.

Fast vehicle detection algorithm based on lightweight YOLO7-tiny

The swift and precise detection of vehicles plays a significant role in intelligent transportation systems. Current vehicle detection algorithms encounter challenges of high computational complexity, low detection rate, and limited feasibility on mobile devices. To address these issues, this paper proposes a lightweight vehicle detection algorithm based on YOLOv7-tiny (You Only Look Once version seven) called Ghost-YOLOv7. The width of model is scaled to 0.5 and the standard convolution of the backbone network is replaced with Ghost convolution to achieve a lighter network and improve the detection speed; then a self-designed Ghost bi-directional feature pyramid network (Ghost-BiFPN) is embedded into the neck network to enhance feature extraction capability of the algorithm and enriches semantic information; and a Ghost Decouoled Head (GDH) is employed for accurate prediction of vehicle location and species; finally, a coordinate attention mechanism is introduced into the output layer to suppress environmental interference. The WIoU loss function is employed to further enhance the detection accuracy. Ablation experiments results on the PASCAL VOC dataset demonstrate that Ghost-YOLOv7 outperforms the original YOLOv7-tiny model. It achieving a 29.8% reduction in computation, 37.3% reduction in the number of parameters, 35.1% reduction in model weights, 1.1% higher mean average precision (mAP), the detection speed is higher 27FPS compared with the original algorithm. Ghost-YOLOv7 was also compared on KITTI and BIT-vehicle datasets as well, and the results show that this algorithm has the overall best performance.

Shall We Pretrain Autoregressive Language Models with Retrieval? A Comprehensive Study

Large decoder-only language models (LMs) can be largely improved in terms of perplexity by retrieval (e.g., RETRO), but its impact on text generation quality and downstream task accuracy is unclear. Thus, it is still an open question: shall we pretrain large autoregressive LMs with retrieval? To answer it, we perform a comprehensive study on a scalable pre-trained retrieval-augmented LM (i.e., RETRO) compared with standard GPT and retrieval-augmented GPT incorporated at fine-tuning or inference stages. We first provide the recipe to reproduce RETRO up to 9.5B parameters while retrieving a text corpus with 330B tokens. Based on that, we have the following novel findings: i) RETRO outperforms GPT on text generation with much less degeneration (i.e., repetition), moderately higher factual accuracy, and slightly lower toxicity with a nontoxic retrieval database. ii) On the LM Evaluation Harness benchmark, RETRO largely outperforms GPT on knowledge-intensive tasks, but is on par with GPT on other tasks. Furthermore, we introduce a simple variant of the model, RETRO++, which largely improves open-domain QA results of original RETRO (e.g., EM score +8.6 on Natural Question) and significantly outperforms retrieval-augmented GPT across different model sizes. Our findings highlight the promising direction of pretraining autoregressive LMs with retrieval as future foundation models. We release our implementation at: https://github.com/NVIDIA/Megatron-LM#retro

Can SAM Segment Anything? When SAM Meets Camouflaged Object Detection

SAM is a segmentation model recently released by Meta AI Research and has been gaining attention quickly due to its impressive performance in generic object segmentation. However, its ability to generalize to specific scenes such as camouflaged scenes is still unknown. Camouflaged object detection (COD) involves identifying objects that are seamlessly integrated into their surroundings and has numerous practical applications in fields such as medicine, art, and agriculture. In this study, we try to ask if SAM can address the COD task and evaluate the performance of SAM on the COD benchmark by employing maximum segmentation evaluation and camouflage location evaluation. We also compare SAM's performance with 22 state-of-the-art COD methods. Our results indicate that while SAM shows promise in generic object segmentation, its performance on the COD task is limited. This presents an opportunity for further research to explore how to build a stronger SAM that may address the COD task. The results of this paper are provided in \url{https://github.com/luckybird1994/SAMCOD}.

Conditional Adapters: Parameter-efficient Transfer Learning with Fast Inference

We propose Conditional Adapter (CoDA), a parameter-efficient transfer learning method that also improves inference efficiency. CoDA generalizes beyond standard adapter approaches to enable a new way of balancing speed and accuracy using conditional computation. Starting with an existing dense pretrained model, CoDA adds sparse activation together with a small number of new parameters and a light-weight training phase. Our experiments demonstrate that the CoDA approach provides an unexpectedly efficient way to transfer knowledge. Across a variety of language, vision, and speech tasks, CoDA achieves a 2x to 8x inference speed-up compared to the state-of-the-art Adapter approach with moderate to no accuracy loss and the same parameter efficiency.

Predictive Heterogeneity: Measures and Applications

As an intrinsic and fundamental property of big data, data heterogeneity exists in a variety of real-world applications, such as precision medicine, autonomous driving, financial applications, etc. For machine learning algorithms, the ignorance of data heterogeneity will greatly hurt the generalization performance and the algorithmic fairness, since the prediction mechanisms among different sub-populations are likely to differ from each other. In this work, we focus on the data heterogeneity that affects the prediction of machine learning models, and firstly propose the \emph{usable predictive heterogeneity}, which takes into account the model capacity and computational constraints. We prove that it can be reliably estimated from finite data with probably approximately correct (PAC) bounds. Additionally, we design a bi-level optimization algorithm to explore the usable predictive heterogeneity from data. Empirically, the explored heterogeneity provides insights for sub-population divisions in income prediction, crop yield prediction and image classification tasks, and leveraging such heterogeneity benefits the out-of-distribution generalization performance.