TableLLM: Enabling Tabular Data Manipulation by LLMs in Real Office Usage Scenarios

We introduce TableLLM, a robust large language model (LLM) with 13 billion parameters, purpose-built for proficiently handling tabular data manipulation tasks, whether they are embedded within documents or spreadsheets, catering to real-world office scenarios. We propose a distant supervision method for training, which comprises a reasoning process extension strategy, aiding in training LLMs to understand reasoning patterns more effectively as well as a cross-way validation strategy, ensuring the quality of the automatically generated data. To evaluate the performance of TableLLM, we have crafted a benchmark tailored to address both document and spreadsheet formats as well as constructed a well-organized evaluation pipeline capable of handling both scenarios. Thorough evaluations underscore the advantages of TableLLM when compared to various existing general-purpose and tabular data-focused LLMs. We have publicly released the model checkpoint, source code, benchmarks, and a web application for user interaction.Our codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/TableLLM/TableLLM.

PRIME: Protect Your Videos From Malicious Editing

With the development of generative models, the quality of generated content keeps increasing. Recently, open-source models have made it surprisingly easy to manipulate and edit photos and videos, with just a few simple prompts. While these cutting-edge technologies have gained popularity, they have also given rise to concerns regarding the privacy and portrait rights of individuals. Malicious users can exploit these tools for deceptive or illegal purposes. Although some previous works focus on protecting photos against generative models, we find there are still gaps between protecting videos and images in the aspects of efficiency and effectiveness. Therefore, we introduce our protection method, PRIME, to significantly reduce the time cost and improve the protection performance. Moreover, to evaluate our proposed protection method, we consider both objective metrics and human subjective metrics. Our evaluation results indicate that PRIME only costs 8.3% GPU hours of the cost of the previous state-of-the-art method and achieves better protection results on both human evaluation and objective metrics. Code can be found in https://github.com/GuanlinLee/prime.

Singular Regularization with Information Bottleneck Improves Model's Adversarial Robustness

Adversarial examples are one of the most severe threats to deep learning models. Numerous works have been proposed to study and defend adversarial examples. However, these works lack analysis of adversarial information or perturbation, which cannot reveal the mystery of adversarial examples and lose proper interpretation. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by studying adversarial information as unstructured noise, which does not have a clear pattern. Specifically, we provide some empirical studies with singular value decomposition, by decomposing images into several matrices, to analyze adversarial information for different attacks. Based on the analysis, we propose a new module to regularize adversarial information and combine information bottleneck theory, which is proposed to theoretically restrict intermediate representations. Therefore, our method is interpretable. Moreover, the fashion of our design is a novel principle that is general and unified. Equipped with our new module, we evaluate two popular model structures on two mainstream datasets with various adversarial attacks. The results indicate that the improvement in robust accuracy is significant. On the other hand, we prove that our method is efficient with only a few additional parameters and able to be explained under regional faithfulness analysis.

Rethinking Adversarial Training with Neural Tangent Kernel

Adversarial training (AT) is an important and attractive topic in deep learning security, exhibiting mysteries and odd properties. Recent studies of neural network training dynamics based on Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) make it possible to reacquaint AT and deeply analyze its properties. In this paper, we perform an in-depth investigation of AT process and properties with NTK, such as NTK evolution. We uncover three new findings that are missed in previous works. First, we disclose the impact of data normalization on AT and the importance of unbiased estimators in batch normalization layers. Second, we experimentally explore the kernel dynamics and propose more time-saving AT methods. Third, we study the spectrum feature inside the kernel to address the catastrophic overfitting problem. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first work leveraging the observations of kernel dynamics to improve existing AT methods.

Omnipotent Adversarial Training for Unknown Label-noisy and Imbalanced Datasets

Adversarial training is an important topic in robust deep learning, but the community lacks attention to its practical usage. In this paper, we aim to resolve a real-world application challenge, i.e., training a model on an imbalanced and noisy dataset to achieve high clean accuracy and robustness, with our proposed Omnipotent Adversarial Training (OAT). Our strategy consists of two innovative methodologies to address the label noise and data imbalance in the training set. We first introduce an oracle into the adversarial training process to help the model learn a correct data-label conditional distribution. This carefully-designed oracle can provide correct label annotations for adversarial training. We further propose logits adjustment adversarial training to overcome the data imbalance challenge, which can help the model learn a Bayes-optimal distribution. Our comprehensive evaluation results show that OAT outperforms other baselines by more than 20% clean accuracy improvement and 10% robust accuracy improvement under the complex combinations of data imbalance and label noise scenarios. The code can be found in https://github.com/GuanlinLee/OAT.

Adversarial Training Over Long-Tailed Distribution

In this paper, we study adversarial training on datasets that obey the long-tailed distribution, which is practical but rarely explored in previous works. Compared with conventional adversarial training on balanced datasets, this process falls into the dilemma of generating uneven adversarial examples (AEs) and an unbalanced feature embedding space, causing the resulting model to exhibit low robustness and accuracy on tail data. To combat that, we propose a new adversarial training framework -- Re-balancing Adversarial Training (REAT). This framework consists of two components: (1) a new training strategy inspired by the term effective number to guide the model to generate more balanced and informative AEs; (2) a carefully constructed penalty function to force a satisfactory feature space. Evaluation results on different datasets and model structures prove that REAT can effectively enhance the model's robustness and preserve the model's clean accuracy. The code can be found in https://github.com/GuanlinLee/REAT.

A Benchmark of Long-tailed Instance Segmentation with Noisy Labels (Short Version)

In this paper, we consider the instance segmentation task on a long-tailed dataset, which contains label noise, i.e., some of the annotations are incorrect. There are two main reasons making this case realistic. First, datasets collected from real world usually obey a long-tailed distribution. Second, for instance segmentation datasets, as there are many instances in one image and some of them are tiny, it is easier to introduce noise into the annotations. Specifically, we propose a new dataset, which is a large vocabulary long-tailed dataset containing label noise for instance segmentation. Furthermore, we evaluate previous proposed instance segmentation algorithms on this dataset. The results indicate that the noise in the training dataset will hamper the model in learning rare categories and decrease the overall performance, and inspire us to explore more effective approaches to address this practical challenge. The code and dataset are available in https://github.com/GuanlinLee/Noisy-LVIS.

Low-Light Hyperspectral Image Enhancement

Due to inadequate energy captured by the hyperspectral camera sensor in poor illumination conditions, low-light hyperspectral images (HSIs) usually suffer from low visibility, spectral distortion, and various noises. A range of HSI restoration methods have been developed, yet their effectiveness in enhancing low-light HSIs is constrained. This work focuses on the low-light HSI enhancement task, which aims to reveal the spatial-spectral information hidden in darkened areas. To facilitate the development of low-light HSI processing, we collect a low-light HSI (LHSI) dataset of both indoor and outdoor scenes. Based on Laplacian pyramid decomposition and reconstruction, we developed an end-to-end data-driven low-light HSI enhancement (HSIE) approach trained on the LHSI dataset. With the observation that illumination is related to the low-frequency component of HSI, while textural details are closely correlated to the high-frequency component, the proposed HSIE is designed to have two branches. The illumination enhancement branch is adopted to enlighten the low-frequency component with reduced resolution. The high-frequency refinement branch is utilized for refining the high-frequency component via a predicted mask. In addition, to improve information flow and boost performance, we introduce an effective channel attention block (CAB) with residual dense connection, which served as the basic block of the illumination enhancement branch. The effectiveness and efficiency of HSIE both in quantitative assessment measures and visual effects are demonstrated by experimental results on the LHSI dataset. According to the classification performance on the remote sensing Indian Pines dataset, downstream tasks benefit from the enhanced HSI. Datasets and codes are available: \href{https://github.com/guanguanboy/HSIE}{https://github.com/guanguanboy/HSIE}.

ShiftNAS: Towards Automatic Generation of Advanced Mulitplication-Less Neural Networks

Multiplication-less neural networks significantly reduce the time and energy cost on the hardware platform, as the compute-intensive multiplications are replaced with lightweight bit-shift operations. However, existing bit-shift networks are all directly transferred from state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which lead to non-negligible accuracy drop or even failure of model convergence. To combat this, we propose ShiftNAS, the first framework tailoring Neural Architecture Search (NAS) to substantially reduce the accuracy gap between bit-shift neural networks and their real-valued counterparts. Specifically, we pioneer dragging NAS into a shift-oriented search space and endow it with the robust topology-related search strategy and custom regularization and stabilization. As a result, our ShiftNAS breaks through the incompatibility of traditional NAS methods for bit-shift neural networks and achieves more desirable performance in terms of accuracy and convergence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ShiftNAS sets a new state-of-the-art for bit-shift neural networks, where the accuracy increases (1.69-8.07)% on CIFAR10, (5.71-18.09)% on CIFAR100 and (4.36-67.07)% on ImageNet, especially when many conventional CNNs fail to converge on ImageNet with bit-shift weights.

MotionInput v2.0 supporting DirectX: A modular library of open-source gesture-based machine learning and computer vision methods for interacting and controlling existing software with a webcam

Touchless computer interaction has become an important consideration during the COVID-19 pandemic period. Despite progress in machine learning and computer vision that allows for advanced gesture recognition, an integrated collection of such open-source methods and a user-customisable approach to utilising them in a low-cost solution for touchless interaction in existing software is still missing. In this paper, we introduce the MotionInput v2.0 application. This application utilises published open-source libraries and additional gesture definitions developed to take the video stream from a standard RGB webcam as input. It then maps human motion gestures to input operations for existing applications and games. The user can choose their own preferred way of interacting from a series of motion types, including single and bi-modal hand gesturing, full-body repetitive or extremities-based exercises, head and facial movements, eye tracking, and combinations of the above. We also introduce a series of bespoke gesture recognition classifications as DirectInput triggers, including gestures for idle states, auto calibration, depth capture from a 2D RGB webcam stream and tracking of facial motions such as mouth motions, winking, and head direction with rotation. Three use case areas assisted the development of the modules: creativity software, office and clinical software, and gaming software. A collection of open-source libraries has been integrated and provide a layer of modular gesture mapping on top of existing mouse and keyboard controls in Windows via DirectX. With ease of access to webcams integrated into most laptops and desktop computers, touchless computing becomes more available with MotionInput v2.0, in a federated and locally processed method.