Towards Scale-Aware Full Surround Monodepth with Transformers

Full surround monodepth (FSM) methods can learn from multiple camera views simultaneously in a self-supervised manner to predict the scale-aware depth, which is more practical for real-world applications in contrast to scale-ambiguous depth from a standalone monocular camera. In this work, we focus on enhancing the scale-awareness of FSM methods for depth estimation. To this end, we propose to improve FSM from two perspectives: depth network structure optimization and training pipeline optimization. First, we construct a transformer-based depth network with neighbor-enhanced cross-view attention (NCA). The cross-attention modules can better aggregate the cross-view context in both global and neighboring views. Second, we formulate a transformer-based feature matching scheme with progressive training to improve the structure-from-motion (SfM) pipeline. That allows us to learn scale-awareness with sufficient matches and further facilitate network convergence by removing mismatches based on SfM loss. Experiments demonstrate that the resulting Scale-aware full surround monodepth (SA-FSM) method largely improves the scale-aware depth predictions without median-scaling at the test time, and performs favorably against the state-of-the-art FSM methods, e.g., surpassing SurroundDepth by 3.8% in terms of accuracy at delta<1.25 on the DDAD benchmark.

FinCon: A Synthesized LLM Multi-Agent System with Conceptual Verbal Reinforcement for Enhanced Financial Decision Making

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable potential in conducting complex tasks and are increasingly utilized in various financial applications. However, high-quality sequential financial investment decision-making remains challenging. These tasks require multiple interactions with a volatile environment for every decision, demanding sufficient intelligence to maximize returns and manage risks. Although LLMs have been used to develop agent systems that surpass human teams and yield impressive investment returns, opportunities to enhance multi-sourced information synthesis and optimize decision-making outcomes through timely experience refinement remain unexplored. Here, we introduce the FinCon, an LLM-based multi-agent framework with CONceptual verbal reinforcement tailored for diverse FINancial tasks. Inspired by effective real-world investment firm organizational structures, FinCon utilizes a manager-analyst communication hierarchy. This structure allows for synchronized cross-functional agent collaboration towards unified goals through natural language interactions and equips each agent with greater memory capacity than humans. Additionally, a risk-control component in FinCon enhances decision quality by episodically initiating a self-critiquing mechanism to update systematic investment beliefs. The conceptualized beliefs serve as verbal reinforcement for the future agent's behavior and can be selectively propagated to the appropriate node that requires knowledge updates. This feature significantly improves performance while reducing unnecessary peer-to-peer communication costs. Moreover, FinCon demonstrates strong generalization capabilities in various financial tasks, including single stock trading and portfolio management.

Retain, Blend, and Exchange: A Quality-aware Spatial-Stereo Fusion Approach for Event Stream Recognition

Existing event stream-based pattern recognition models usually represent the event stream as the point cloud, voxel, image, etc., and design various deep neural networks to learn their features. Although considerable results can be achieved in simple cases, however, the model performance may be limited by monotonous modality expressions, sub-optimal fusion, and readout mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a novel dual-stream framework for event stream-based pattern recognition via differentiated fusion, termed EFV++. It models two common event representations simultaneously, i.e., event images and event voxels. The spatial and three-dimensional stereo information can be learned separately by utilizing Transformer and Graph Neural Network (GNN). We believe the features of each representation still contain both efficient and redundant features and a sub-optimal solution may be obtained if we directly fuse them without differentiation. Thus, we divide each feature into three levels and retain high-quality features, blend medium-quality features, and exchange low-quality features. The enhanced dual features will be fed into the fusion Transformer together with bottleneck features. In addition, we introduce a novel hybrid interaction readout mechanism to enhance the diversity of features as final representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple widely used event stream-based classification datasets. Specifically, we achieve new state-of-the-art performance on the Bullying10k dataset, i.e., $90.51\%$, which exceeds the second place by $+2.21\%$. The source code of this paper has been released on \url{https://github.com/Event-AHU/EFV_event_classification/tree/EFVpp}.

Scaling Laws for Linear Complexity Language Models

The interest in linear complexity models for large language models is on the rise, although their scaling capacity remains uncertain. In this study, we present the scaling laws for linear complexity language models to establish a foundation for their scalability. Specifically, we examine the scaling behaviors of three efficient linear architectures. These include TNL, a linear attention model with data-independent decay; HGRN2, a linear RNN with data-dependent decay; and cosFormer2, a linear attention model without decay. We also include LLaMA as a baseline architecture for softmax attention for comparison. These models were trained with six variants, ranging from 70M to 7B parameters on a 300B-token corpus, and evaluated with a total of 1,376 intermediate checkpoints on various downstream tasks. These tasks include validation loss, commonsense reasoning, and information retrieval and generation. The study reveals that existing linear complexity language models exhibit similar scaling capabilities as conventional transformer-based models while also demonstrating superior linguistic proficiency and knowledge retention.

Amphista: Accelerate LLM Inference with Bi-directional Multiple Drafting Heads in a Non-autoregressive Style

Large Language Models (LLMs) inherently use autoregressive decoding, which lacks parallelism in inference and results in significantly slow inference speeds, especially when hardware parallel accelerators and memory bandwidth are not fully utilized. In this work, we propose Amphista, a speculative decoding algorithm that adheres to a non-autoregressive decoding paradigm. Owing to the increased parallelism, our method demonstrates higher efficiency in inference compared to autoregressive methods. Specifically, Amphista models an Auto-embedding Block capable of parallel inference, incorporating bi-directional attention to enable interaction between different drafting heads. Additionally, Amphista implements Staged Adaptation Layers to facilitate the transition of semantic information from the base model's autoregressive inference to the drafting heads' non-autoregressive speculation, thereby achieving paradigm transformation and feature fusion. We conduct a series of experiments on a suite of Vicuna models using MT-Bench and Spec-Bench. For the Vicuna 33B model, Amphista achieves up to 2.75$\times$ and 1.40$\times$ wall-clock acceleration compared to vanilla autoregressive decoding and Medusa, respectively, while preserving lossless generation quality.

Fair Data Generation via Score-based Diffusion Model

The fairness of AI decision-making has garnered increasing attention, leading to the proposal of numerous fairness algorithms. In this paper, we aim not to address this issue by directly introducing fair learning algorithms, but rather by generating entirely new, fair synthetic data from biased datasets for use in any downstream tasks. Additionally, the distribution of test data may differ from that of the training set, potentially impacting the performance of the generated synthetic data in downstream tasks. To address these two challenges, we propose a diffusion model-based framework, FADM: Fairness-Aware Diffusion with Meta-training. FADM introduces two types of gradient induction during the sampling phase of the diffusion model: one to ensure that the generated samples belong to the desired target categories, and another to make the sensitive attributes of the generated samples difficult to classify into any specific sensitive attribute category. To overcome data distribution shifts in the test environment, we train the diffusion model and the two classifiers used for induction within a meta-learning framework. Compared to other baselines, FADM allows for flexible control over the categories of the generated samples and exhibits superior generalization capability. Experiments on real datasets demonstrate that FADM achieves better accuracy and optimal fairness in downstream tasks.

TernaryLLM: Ternarized Large Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, but they are hindered by high computational costs and memory requirements. Ternarization, an extreme form of quantization, offers a solution by reducing memory usage and enabling energy-efficient floating-point additions. However, applying ternarization to LLMs faces challenges stemming from outliers in both weights and activations. In this work, observing asymmetric outliers and non-zero means in weights, we introduce Dual Learnable Ternarization (DLT), which enables both scales and shifts to be learnable. We also propose Outlier-Friendly Feature Knowledge Distillation (OFF) to recover the information lost in extremely low-bit quantization. The proposed OFF can incorporate semantic information and is insensitive to outliers. At the core of OFF is maximizing the mutual information between features in ternarized and floating-point models using cosine similarity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our TernaryLLM surpasses previous low-bit quantization methods on the standard text generation and zero-shot benchmarks for different LLM families. Specifically, for one of the most powerful open-source models, LLaMA-3, our approach (W1.58A16) outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method (W2A16) by 5.8 in terms of perplexity on C4 and by 8.2% in terms of average accuracy on zero-shot tasks.

Perturbation Towards Easy Samples Improves Targeted Adversarial Transferability

The transferability of adversarial perturbations provides an effective shortcut for black-box attacks. Targeted perturbations have greater practicality but are more difficult to transfer between models. In this paper, we experimentally and theoretically demonstrated that neural networks trained on the same dataset have more consistent performance in High-Sample-Density-Regions (HSDR) of each class instead of low sample density regions. Therefore, in the target setting, adding perturbations towards HSDR of the target class is more effective in improving transferability. However, density estimation is challenging in high-dimensional scenarios. Further theoretical and experimental verification demonstrates that easy samples with low loss are more likely to be located in HSDR. Perturbations towards such easy samples in the target class can avoid density estimation for HSDR location. Based on the above facts, we verified that adding perturbations to easy samples in the target class improves targeted adversarial transferability of existing attack methods. A generative targeted attack strategy named Easy Sample Matching Attack (ESMA) is proposed, which has a higher success rate for targeted attacks and outperforms the SOTA generative method. Moreover, ESMA requires only 5% of the storage space and much less computation time comparing to the current SOTA, as ESMA attacks all classes with only one model instead of seperate models for each class. Our code is available at https://github.com/gjq100/ESMA.

You Only Scan Once: Efficient Multi-dimension Sequential Modeling with LightNet

Linear attention mechanisms have gained prominence in causal language models due to their linear computational complexity and enhanced speed. However, the inherent decay mechanism in linear attention presents challenges when applied to multi-dimensional sequence modeling tasks, such as image processing and multi-modal learning. In these scenarios, the utilization of sequential scanning to establish a global receptive field necessitates multiple scans for multi-dimensional data, thereby leading to inefficiencies. This paper identifies the inefficiency caused by a multiplicative linear recurrence and proposes an efficient alternative additive linear recurrence to avoid the issue, as it can handle multi-dimensional data within a single scan. We further develop an efficient multi-dimensional sequential modeling framework called LightNet based on the new recurrence. Moreover, we present two new multi-dimensional linear relative positional encoding methods, MD-TPE and MD-LRPE to enhance the model's ability to discern positional information in multi-dimensional scenarios. Our empirical evaluations across various tasks, including image classification, image generation, bidirectional language modeling, and autoregressive language modeling, demonstrate the efficacy of LightNet, showcasing its potential as a versatile and efficient solution for multi-dimensional sequential modeling.

FourierMamba: Fourier Learning Integration with State Space Models for Image Deraining

Image deraining aims to remove rain streaks from rainy images and restore clear backgrounds. Currently, some research that employs the Fourier transform has proved to be effective for image deraining, due to it acting as an effective frequency prior for capturing rain streaks. However, despite there exists dependency of low frequency and high frequency in images, these Fourier-based methods rarely exploit the correlation of different frequencies for conjuncting their learning procedures, limiting the full utilization of frequency information for image deraining. Alternatively, the recently emerged Mamba technique depicts its effectiveness and efficiency for modeling correlation in various domains (e.g., spatial, temporal), and we argue that introducing Mamba into its unexplored Fourier spaces to correlate different frequencies would help improve image deraining. This motivates us to propose a new framework termed FourierMamba, which performs image deraining with Mamba in the Fourier space. Owning to the unique arrangement of frequency orders in Fourier space, the core of FourierMamba lies in the scanning encoding of different frequencies, where the low-high frequency order formats exhibit differently in the spatial dimension (unarranged in axis) and channel dimension (arranged in axis). Therefore, we design FourierMamba that correlates Fourier space information in the spatial and channel dimensions with distinct designs. Specifically, in the spatial dimension Fourier space, we introduce the zigzag coding to scan the frequencies to rearrange the orders from low to high frequencies, thereby orderly correlating the connections between frequencies; in the channel dimension Fourier space with arranged orders of frequencies in axis, we can directly use Mamba to perform frequency correlation and improve the channel information representation.