Learning Exposure Correction in Dynamic Scenes

Capturing videos with wrong exposure usually produces unsatisfactory visual effects. While image exposure correction is a popular topic, the video counterpart is less explored in the literature. Directly applying prior image-based methods to input videos often results in temporal incoherence with low visual quality. Existing research in this area is also limited by the lack of high-quality benchmark datasets. To address these issues, we construct the first real-world paired video dataset, including both underexposure and overexposure dynamic scenes. To achieve spatial alignment, we utilize two DSLR cameras and a beam splitter to simultaneously capture improper and normal exposure videos. In addition, we propose a Video Exposure Correction Network (VECNet) based on Retinex theory, which incorporates a two-stream illumination learning mechanism to enhance the overexposure and underexposure factors, respectively. The estimated multi-frame reflectance and dual-path illumination components are fused at both feature and image levels, leading to visually appealing results. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing image exposure correction and underexposed video enhancement methods. The code and dataset will be available soon.

In-Memory Learning: A Declarative Learning Framework for Large Language Models

The exploration of whether agents can align with their environment without relying on human-labeled data presents an intriguing research topic. Drawing inspiration from the alignment process observed in intelligent organisms, where declarative memory plays a pivotal role in summarizing past experiences, we propose a novel learning framework. The agents adeptly distill insights from past experiences, refining and updating existing notes to enhance their performance in the environment. This entire process transpires within the memory components and is implemented through natural language, so we character this framework as In-memory Learning. We also delve into the key features of benchmarks designed to evaluate the self-improvement process. Through systematic experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and provide insights into this problem.

Have Seen Me Before? Automating Dataset Updates Towards Reliable and Timely Evaluation

Due to the expanding capabilities and pre-training data, Large Language Models (LLMs) are facing increasingly serious evaluation challenges. On one hand, the data leakage issue cause over-estimation on existing benchmarks. On the other hand, periodically curating datasets manually is costly. In this paper, we propose to automate dataset updates for reliable and timely evaluation. The basic idea is to generate unseen and high-quality testing samples based on existing ones to mitigate leakage issues. In specific, we propose two strategies with systematically verification. First, the mimicking strategy employs LLMs to create new samples resembling existing ones, to the maximum extent preserving the stylistic of the original dataset. Our experiments demonstrate its evaluation stability across multiple instantiations and its effectiveness in dealing with data leakage issues in most cases. Second, for the cases that mimicking dataset works poorly, we design an extending strategy that adjusts the difficulty of the generated samples according to varying cognitive levels. This not only makes our evaluation more systematic, but also, with a balanced difficulty, even discern model capabilities better at fine-grained levels.

Multi-Task Contrastive Learning for 8192-Token Bilingual Text Embeddings

We introduce a novel suite of state-of-the-art bilingual text embedding models that are designed to support English and another target language. These models are capable of processing lengthy text inputs with up to 8192 tokens, making them highly versatile for a range of natural language processing tasks such as text retrieval, clustering, and semantic textual similarity (STS) calculations. By focusing on bilingual models and introducing a unique multi-task learning objective, we have significantly improved the model performance on STS tasks, which outperforms the capabilities of existing multilingual models in both target language understanding and cross-lingual evaluation tasks. Moreover, our bilingual models are more efficient, requiring fewer parameters and less memory due to their smaller vocabulary needs. Furthermore, we have expanded the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) to include benchmarks for German and Spanish embedding models. This integration aims to stimulate further research and advancement in text embedding technologies for these languages.

Graph-Mamba: Towards Long-Range Graph Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces

Attention mechanisms have been widely used to capture long-range dependencies among nodes in Graph Transformers. Bottlenecked by the quadratic computational cost, attention mechanisms fail to scale in large graphs. Recent improvements in computational efficiency are mainly achieved by attention sparsification with random or heuristic-based graph subsampling, which falls short in data-dependent context reasoning. State space models (SSMs), such as Mamba, have gained prominence for their effectiveness and efficiency in modeling long-range dependencies in sequential data. However, adapting SSMs to non-sequential graph data presents a notable challenge. In this work, we introduce Graph-Mamba, the first attempt to enhance long-range context modeling in graph networks by integrating a Mamba block with the input-dependent node selection mechanism. Specifically, we formulate graph-centric node prioritization and permutation strategies to enhance context-aware reasoning, leading to a substantial improvement in predictive performance. Extensive experiments on ten benchmark datasets demonstrate that Graph-Mamba outperforms state-of-the-art methods in long-range graph prediction tasks, with a fraction of the computational cost in both FLOPs and GPU memory consumption. The code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/bowang-lab/Graph-Mamba.

Self-supervised speech representation and contextual text embedding for match-mismatch classification with EEG recording

Relating speech to EEG holds considerable importance but is challenging. In this study, a deep convolutional network was employed to extract spatiotemporal features from EEG data. Self-supervised speech representation and contextual text embedding were used as speech features. Contrastive learning was used to relate EEG features to speech features. The experimental results demonstrate the benefits of using self-supervised speech representation and contextual text embedding. Through feature fusion and model ensemble, an accuracy of 60.29% was achieved, and the performance was ranked as No.2 in Task 1 of the Auditory EEG Challenge (ICASSP 2024). The code to implement our work is available on Github: https://github.com/bobwangPKU/EEG-Stimulus-Match-Mismatch.

Decentralised, Collaborative, and Privacy-preserving Machine Learning for Multi-Hospital Data

Machine Learning (ML) has demonstrated its great potential on medical data analysis. Large datasets collected from diverse sources and settings are essential for ML models in healthcare to achieve better accuracy and generalizability. Sharing data across different healthcare institutions is challenging because of complex and varying privacy and regulatory requirements. Hence, it is hard but crucial to allow multiple parties to collaboratively train an ML model leveraging the private datasets available at each party without the need for direct sharing of those datasets or compromising the privacy of the datasets through collaboration. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing Decentralized, Collaborative, and Privacy-preserving ML for Multi-Hospital Data (DeCaPH). It offers the following key benefits: (1) it allows different parties to collaboratively train an ML model without transferring their private datasets; (2) it safeguards patient privacy by limiting the potential privacy leakage arising from any contents shared across the parties during the training process; and (3) it facilitates the ML model training without relying on a centralized server. We demonstrate the generalizability and power of DeCaPH on three distinct tasks using real-world distributed medical datasets: patient mortality prediction using electronic health records, cell-type classification using single-cell human genomes, and pathology identification using chest radiology images. We demonstrate that the ML models trained with DeCaPH framework have an improved utility-privacy trade-off, showing it enables the models to have good performance while preserving the privacy of the training data points. In addition, the ML models trained with DeCaPH framework in general outperform those trained solely with the private datasets from individual parties, showing that DeCaPH enhances the model generalizability.

Towards Explainable Harmful Meme Detection through Multimodal Debate between Large Language Models

The age of social media is flooded with Internet memes, necessitating a clear grasp and effective identification of harmful ones. This task presents a significant challenge due to the implicit meaning embedded in memes, which is not explicitly conveyed through the surface text and image. However, existing harmful meme detection methods do not present readable explanations that unveil such implicit meaning to support their detection decisions. In this paper, we propose an explainable approach to detect harmful memes, achieved through reasoning over conflicting rationales from both harmless and harmful positions. Specifically, inspired by the powerful capacity of Large Language Models (LLMs) on text generation and reasoning, we first elicit multimodal debate between LLMs to generate the explanations derived from the contradictory arguments. Then we propose to fine-tune a small language model as the debate judge for harmfulness inference, to facilitate multimodal fusion between the harmfulness rationales and the intrinsic multimodal information within memes. In this way, our model is empowered to perform dialectical reasoning over intricate and implicit harm-indicative patterns, utilizing multimodal explanations originating from both harmless and harmful arguments. Extensive experiments on three public meme datasets demonstrate that our harmful meme detection approach achieves much better performance than state-of-the-art methods and exhibits a superior capacity for explaining the meme harmfulness of the model predictions.