This paper demonstrates that a progressively aligned language model can effectively bridge frozen vision encoders and large language models (LLMs). While the fundamental architecture and pre-training methods of vision encoders and LLMs have been extensively studied, the architecture and training strategy of vision-language adapters vary significantly across recent works. Our research undertakes a thorough exploration of the state-of-the-art perceiver resampler architecture and builds a strong baseline. However, we observe that the vision-language alignment with perceiver resampler exhibits slow convergence and limited scalability with a lack of direct supervision. To address this issue, we propose PaLM2-VAdapter, employing a progressively aligned language model as the vision-language adapter. Compared to the strong baseline with perceiver resampler, our method empirically shows faster convergence, higher performance, and stronger scalability. Extensive experiments across various Visual Question Answering (VQA) and captioning tasks on both images and videos demonstrate that our model exhibits state-of-the-art visual understanding and multi-modal reasoning capabilities. Notably, our method achieves these advancements with 30~70% fewer parameters than the state-of-the-art large vision-language models, marking a significant efficiency improvement.
In the field of domain generalization, the task of constructing a predictive model capable of generalizing to a target domain without access to target data remains challenging. This problem becomes further complicated when considering evolving dynamics between domains. While various approaches have been proposed to address this issue, a comprehensive understanding of the underlying generalization theory is still lacking. In this study, we contribute novel theoretic results that aligning conditional distribution leads to the reduction of generalization bounds. Our analysis serves as a key motivation for solving the Temporal Domain Generalization (TDG) problem through the application of Koopman Neural Operators, resulting in Temporal Koopman Networks (TKNets). By employing Koopman Operators, we effectively address the time-evolving distributions encountered in TDG using the principles of Koopman theory, where measurement functions are sought to establish linear transition relations between evolving domains. Through empirical evaluations conducted on synthetic and real-world datasets, we validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
Federated learning has been rapidly evolving and gaining popularity in recent years due to its privacy-preserving features, among other advantages. Nevertheless, the exchange of model updates and gradients in this architecture provides new attack surfaces for malicious users of the network which may jeopardize the model performance and user and data privacy. For this reason, one of the main motivations for decentralized federated learning is to eliminate server-related threats by removing the server from the network and compensating for it through technologies such as blockchain. However, this advantage comes at the cost of challenging the system with new privacy threats. Thus, performing a thorough security analysis in this new paradigm is necessary. This survey studies possible variations of threats and adversaries in decentralized federated learning and overviews the potential defense mechanisms. Trustability and verifiability of decentralized federated learning are also considered in this study.
Cloth-changing person re-identification (CC-ReID) aims to match persons who change clothes over long periods. The key challenge in CC-ReID is to extract clothing-independent features, such as face, hairstyle, body shape, and gait. Current research mainly focuses on modeling body shape using multi-modal biological features (such as silhouettes and sketches). However, it does not fully leverage the personal description information hidden in the original RGB image. Considering that there are certain attribute descriptions which remain unchanged after the changing of cloth, we propose a Masked Attribute Description Embedding (MADE) method that unifies personal visual appearance and attribute description for CC-ReID. Specifically, handling variable clothing-sensitive information, such as color and type, is challenging for effective modeling. To address this, we mask the clothing and color information in the personal attribute description extracted through an attribute detection model. The masked attribute description is then connected and embedded into Transformer blocks at various levels, fusing it with the low-level to high-level features of the image. This approach compels the model to discard clothing information. Experiments are conducted on several CC-ReID benchmarks, including PRCC, LTCC, Celeb-reID-light, and LaST. Results demonstrate that MADE effectively utilizes attribute description, enhancing cloth-changing person re-identification performance, and compares favorably with state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/moon-wh/MADE.
As a fundamental problem in computer vision, point cloud registration aims to seek the optimal transformation for aligning a pair of point clouds. In most existing methods, the information flows are usually forward transferring, thus lacking the guidance from high-level information to low-level information. Besides, excessive high-level information may be overly redundant, and directly using it may conflict with the original low-level information. In this paper, we propose a novel Iterative Feedback Network (IFNet) for unsupervised point cloud registration, in which the representation of low-level features is efficiently enriched by rerouting subsequent high-level features. Specifically, our IFNet is built upon a series of Feedback Registration Block (FRB) modules, with each module responsible for generating the feedforward rigid transformation and feedback high-level features. These FRB modules are cascaded and recurrently unfolded over time. Further, the Feedback Transformer is designed to efficiently select relevant information from feedback high-level features, which is utilized to refine the low-level features. What's more, we incorporate a geometry-awareness descriptor to empower the network for making full use of most geometric information, which leads to more precise registration results. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior registration performance of our IFNet.
Knowledge distillation aims to train a compact student network using soft supervision from a larger teacher network and hard supervision from ground truths. However, determining an optimal knowledge fusion ratio that balances these supervisory signals remains challenging. Prior methods generally resort to a constant or heuristic-based fusion ratio, which often falls short of a proper balance. In this study, we introduce a novel adaptive method for learning a sample-wise knowledge fusion ratio, exploiting both the correctness of teacher and student, as well as how well the student mimics the teacher on each sample. Our method naturally leads to the intra-sample trilateral geometric relations among the student prediction ($S$), teacher prediction ($T$), and ground truth ($G$). To counterbalance the impact of outliers, we further extend to the inter-sample relations, incorporating the teacher's global average prediction $\bar{T}$ for samples within the same class. A simple neural network then learns the implicit mapping from the intra- and inter-sample relations to an adaptive, sample-wise knowledge fusion ratio in a bilevel-optimization manner. Our approach provides a simple, practical, and adaptable solution for knowledge distillation that can be employed across various architectures and model sizes. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements over other loss re-weighting methods on image classification, attack detection, and click-through rate prediction.
Empowering embodied agents, such as robots, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become increasingly important in recent years. A major challenge is task open-endedness. In practice, robots often need to perform tasks with novel goals that are multifaceted, dynamic, lack a definitive "end-state", and were not encountered during training. To tackle this problem, this paper introduces \textit{Diffusion for Open-ended Goals} (DOG), a novel framework designed to enable embodied AI to plan and act flexibly and dynamically for open-ended task goals. DOG synergizes the generative prowess of diffusion models with state-of-the-art, training-free guidance techniques to adaptively perform online planning and control. Our evaluations demonstrate that DOG can handle various kinds of novel task goals not seen during training, in both maze navigation and robot control problems. Our work sheds light on enhancing embodied AI's adaptability and competency in tackling open-ended goals.
Continual learning aims to learn a series of tasks sequentially without forgetting the knowledge acquired from the previous ones. In this work, we propose the Hessian Aware Low-Rank Perturbation algorithm for continual learning. By modeling the parameter transitions along the sequential tasks with the weight matrix transformation, we propose to apply the low-rank approximation on the task-adaptive parameters in each layer of the neural networks. Specifically, we theoretically demonstrate the quantitative relationship between the Hessian and the proposed low-rank approximation. The approximation ranks are then globally determined according to the marginal increment of the empirical loss estimated by the layer-specific gradient and low-rank approximation error. Furthermore, we control the model capacity by pruning less important parameters to diminish the parameter growth. We conduct extensive experiments on various benchmarks, including a dataset with large-scale tasks, and compare our method against some recent state-of-the-art methods to demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our proposed method. Empirical results show that our method performs better on different benchmarks, especially in achieving task order robustness and handling the forgetting issue. A demo code can be found at https://github.com/lijiaqi/HALRP.