A Unified Label-Aware Contrastive Learning Framework for Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition

Few-shot Named Entity Recognition (NER) aims to extract named entities using only a limited number of labeled examples. Existing contrastive learning methods often suffer from insufficient distinguishability in context vector representation because they either solely rely on label semantics or completely disregard them. To tackle this issue, we propose a unified label-aware token-level contrastive learning framework. Our approach enriches the context by utilizing label semantics as suffix prompts. Additionally, it simultaneously optimizes context-context and context-label contrastive learning objectives to enhance generalized discriminative contextual representations.Extensive experiments on various traditional test domains (OntoNotes, CoNLL'03, WNUT'17, GUM, I2B2) and the large-scale few-shot NER dataset (FEWNERD) demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. It outperforms prior state-of-the-art models by a significant margin, achieving an average absolute gain of 7% in micro F1 scores across most scenarios. Further analysis reveals that our model benefits from its powerful transfer capability and improved contextual representations.

Samsung Research China-Beijing at SemEval-2024 Task 3: A multi-stage framework for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction in Conversations

In human-computer interaction, it is crucial for agents to respond to human by understanding their emotions. Unraveling the causes of emotions is more challenging. A new task named Multimodal Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction in Conversations is responsible for recognizing emotion and identifying causal expressions. In this study, we propose a multi-stage framework to generate emotion and extract the emotion causal pairs given the target emotion. In the first stage, Llama-2-based InstructERC is utilized to extract the emotion category of each utterance in a conversation. After emotion recognition, a two-stream attention model is employed to extract the emotion causal pairs given the target emotion for subtask 2 while MuTEC is employed to extract causal span for subtask 1. Our approach achieved first place for both of the two subtasks in the competition.

Sur2f: A Hybrid Representation for High-Quality and Efficient Surface Reconstruction from Multi-view Images

Multi-view surface reconstruction is an ill-posed, inverse problem in 3D vision research. It involves modeling the geometry and appearance with appropriate surface representations. Most of the existing methods rely either on explicit meshes, using surface rendering of meshes for reconstruction, or on implicit field functions, using volume rendering of the fields for reconstruction. The two types of representations in fact have their respective merits. In this work, we propose a new hybrid representation, termed Sur2f, aiming to better benefit from both representations in a complementary manner. Technically, we learn two parallel streams of an implicit signed distance field and an explicit surrogate surface Sur2f mesh, and unify volume rendering of the implicit signed distance function (SDF) and surface rendering of the surrogate mesh with a shared, neural shader; the unified shading promotes their convergence to the same, underlying surface. We synchronize learning of the surrogate mesh by driving its deformation with functions induced from the implicit SDF. In addition, the synchronized surrogate mesh enables surface-guided volume sampling, which greatly improves the sampling efficiency per ray in volume rendering. We conduct thorough experiments showing that Sur$^2$f outperforms existing reconstruction methods and surface representations, including hybrid ones, in terms of both recovery quality and recovery efficiency.

Improving the Generalization of Segmentation Foundation Model under Distribution Shift via Weakly Supervised Adaptation

The success of large language models has inspired the computer vision community to explore image segmentation foundation model that is able to zero/few-shot generalize through prompt engineering. Segment-Anything(SAM), among others, is the state-of-the-art image segmentation foundation model demonstrating strong zero/few-shot generalization. Despite the success, recent studies reveal the weakness of SAM under strong distribution shift. In particular, SAM performs awkwardly on corrupted natural images, camouflaged images, medical images, etc. Motivated by the observations, we aim to develop a self-training based strategy to adapt SAM to target distribution. Given the unique challenges of large source dataset, high computation cost and incorrect pseudo label, we propose a weakly supervised self-training architecture with anchor regularization and low-rank finetuning to improve the robustness and computation efficiency of adaptation. We validate the effectiveness on 5 types of downstream segmentation tasks including natural clean/corrupted images, medical images, camouflaged images and robotic images. Our proposed method is task-agnostic in nature and outperforms pre-trained SAM and state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods on almost all downstream tasks with the same testing prompt inputs.

Fine-Tuning Pre-Trained Language Models Effectively by Optimizing Subnetworks Adaptively

Large-scale pre-trained language models have achieved impressive results on a wide range of downstream tasks recently. However, fine-tuning an extremely large-scale pre-trained language model on limited target datasets is often plagued by overfitting and representation degradation. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Parameter Selection (DPS) algorithm for the large-scale pre-trained models during fine-tuning, which adaptively selects a more promising subnetwork to perform staging updates based on gradients of back-propagation. Experiments on the GLUE benchmark show that DPS outperforms previous fine-tuning methods in terms of overall performance and stability, and consistently achieves better results with variable pre-trained language models. In addition, DPS brings a large magnitude of improvement in out-of-domain transferring experiments and low-resource scenarios, which shows that it can maintain stable general contextual features and reduce the representation collapse. We release our code at https://github.com/ZhangHaojie077/DPS

Improve Transformer Pre-Training with Decoupled Directional Relative Position Encoding and Representation Differentiations

In this work, we revisit the Transformer-based pre-trained language models and identify two problems that may limit the expressiveness of the model. Firstly, existing relative position encoding models (e.g., T5 and DEBERTA) confuse two heterogeneous information: relative distance and direction. It may make the model unable to capture the associative semantics of the same direction or the same distance, which in turn affects the performance of downstream tasks. Secondly, we notice the pre-trained BERT with Mask Language Modeling (MLM) pre-training objective outputs similar token representations and attention weights of different heads, which may impose difficulties in capturing discriminative semantic representations. Motivated by the above investigation, we propose two novel techniques to improve pre-trained language models: Decoupled Directional Relative Position (DDRP) encoding and MTH pre-training objective. DDRP decouples the relative distance features and the directional features in classical relative position encoding for better position information understanding. MTH designs two novel auxiliary losses besides MLM to enlarge the dissimilarities between (a) last hidden states of different tokens, and (b) attention weights of different heads, alleviating homogenization and anisotropic problem in representation learning for better optimization. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on GLUE benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

Hybrid Robotic-assisted Frameworks for Endomicroscopy Scanning in Retinal Surgeries

High-resolution real-time imaging at cellular levelin retinal surgeries is very challenging due to extremely confinedspace within the eyeball and lack of appropriate modalities.Probe-based confocal laser endomicroscopy (pCLE) system,which has a small footprint and provides highly-magnified im-ages, can be a potential imaging modality for improved diagnosis.The ability to visualize in cellular-level the retinal pigmentepithelium and the chorodial blood vessels underneath canprovide useful information for surgical outcomes in conditionssuch as retinal detachment. However, the adoption of pCLE islimited due to narrow field of view and micron-level range offocus. The physiological tremor of surgeons' hand also deterioratethe image quality considerably and leads to poor imaging results. In this paper, a novel image-based hybrid motion controlapproach is proposed to mitigate challenges of using pCLEin retinal surgeries. The proposed framework enables sharedcontrol of the pCLE probe by a surgeon to scan the tissueprecisely without hand tremors and an auto-focus image-basedcontrol algorithm that optimizes quality of pCLE images. Thecontrol strategy is deployed on two semi-autonomous frameworks: cooperative and teleoperated. Both frameworks consist of theSteady-Hand Eye Robot (SHER), whose end-effector holds thepCLE probe...