Generating Unseen Nonlinear Evolution in Sea Surface Temperature Using a Deep Learning-Based Latent Space Data Assimilation Framework

Advances in data assimilation (DA) methods have greatly improved the accuracy of Earth system predictions. To fuse multi-source data and reconstruct the nonlinear evolution missing from observations, geoscientists are developing future-oriented DA methods. In this paper, we redesign a purely data-driven latent space DA framework (DeepDA) that employs a generative artificial intelligence model to capture the nonlinear evolution in sea surface temperature. Under variational constraints, DeepDA embedded with nonlinear features can effectively fuse heterogeneous data. The results show that DeepDA remains highly stable in capturing and generating nonlinear evolutions even when a large amount of observational information is missing. It can be found that when only 10% of the observation information is available, the error increase of DeepDA does not exceed 40%. Furthermore, DeepDA has been shown to be robust in the fusion of real observations and ensemble simulations. In particular, this paper provides a mechanism analysis of the nonlinear evolution generated by DeepDA from the perspective of physical patterns, which reveals the inherent explainability of our DL model in capturing multi-scale ocean signals.

AnimateAnything: Consistent and Controllable Animation for Video Generation

We present a unified controllable video generation approach AnimateAnything that facilitates precise and consistent video manipulation across various conditions, including camera trajectories, text prompts, and user motion annotations. Specifically, we carefully design a multi-scale control feature fusion network to construct a common motion representation for different conditions. It explicitly converts all control information into frame-by-frame optical flows. Then we incorporate the optical flows as motion priors to guide final video generation. In addition, to reduce the flickering issues caused by large-scale motion, we propose a frequency-based stabilization module. It can enhance temporal coherence by ensuring the video's frequency domain consistency. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches. For more details and videos, please refer to the webpage: https://yu-shaonian.github.io/Animate_Anything/.

Linear Chain Transformation: Expanding Optimization Dynamics for Fine-Tuning Large Language Models

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) has become essential for adapting pretrained models to specific downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose Linear Chain Transformation (LinChain), a novel approach that introduces a sequence of linear transformations during fine-tuning to enrich optimization dynamics. By incorporating multiple linear transformations into the parameter update process, LinChain expands the effective rank of updates and enhances the model's ability to learn complex task-specific representations. We demonstrate that this method significantly improves the performance of LLM fine-tuning over state-of-the-art methods by providing more flexible optimization paths during training, while maintaining the inference efficiency of the resulting model. Our experiments on various benchmark tasks show that LinChain leads to better generalization, fewer learnable parameters, and improved task adaptation, making it a compelling strategy for LLM fine-tuning.

ATLAS: Adapter-Based Multi-Modal Continual Learning with a Two-Stage Learning Strategy

While vision-and-language models significantly advance in many fields, the challenge of continual learning is unsolved. Parameter-efficient modules like adapters and prompts present a promising way to alleviate catastrophic forgetting. However, existing works usually learn individual adapters for each task, which may result in redundant knowledge among adapters. Moreover, they continue to use the original pre-trained model to initialize the downstream model, leading to negligible changes in the model's generalization compared to the original model. In addition, there is still a lack of research investigating the consequences of integrating a multi-modal model into the updating procedure for both uni-modal and multi-modal tasks and the subsequent impacts it has on downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose an adapter-based two-stage learning paradigm, a multi-modal continual learning scheme that consists of experience-based learning and novel knowledge expansion, which helps the model fully use experience knowledge and compensate for novel knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is proficient for continual learning. It expands the distribution of representation upstream while also minimizing the negative impact of forgetting previous tasks. Additionally, it enhances the generalization capability for downstream tasks. Furthermore, we incorporate both multi-modal and uni-modal tasks into upstream continual learning. We observe that learning from upstream tasks can help with downstream tasks. Our code will be available at: https://github.com/lihong2303/ATLAS.

The Labyrinth of Links: Navigating the Associative Maze of Multi-modal LLMs

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have exhibited impressive capability. However, recently many deficiencies of MLLMs have been found compared to human intelligence, $\textit{e.g.}$, hallucination. To drive the MLLMs study, the community dedicated efforts to building larger benchmarks with complex tasks. In this paper, we propose benchmarking an essential but usually overlooked intelligence: $\textbf{association}$, a human's basic capability to link observation and prior practice memory. To comprehensively investigate MLLM's performance on the association, we formulate the association task and devise a standard benchmark based on adjective and verb semantic concepts. Instead of costly data annotation and curation, we propose a convenient $\textbf{annotation-free}$ construction method transforming the general dataset for our association tasks. Simultaneously, we devise a rigorous data refinement process to eliminate confusion in the raw dataset. Building on this database, we establish three levels of association tasks: single-step, synchronous, and asynchronous associations. Moreover, we conduct a comprehensive investigation into the MLLMs' zero-shot association capabilities, addressing multiple dimensions, including three distinct memory strategies, both open-source and closed-source MLLMs, cutting-edge Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models, and the involvement of human experts. Our systematic investigation shows that current open-source MLLMs consistently exhibit poor capability in our association tasks, even the currently state-of-the-art GPT-4V(vision) also has a significant gap compared to humans. We believe our benchmark would pave the way for future MLLM studies. $\textit{Our data and code are available at:}$ https://mvig-rhos.com/llm_inception.

DiffuX2CT: Diffusion Learning to Reconstruct CT Images from Biplanar X-Rays

Computed tomography (CT) is widely utilized in clinical settings because it delivers detailed 3D images of the human body. However, performing CT scans is not always feasible due to radiation exposure and limitations in certain surgical environments. As an alternative, reconstructing CT images from ultra-sparse X-rays offers a valuable solution and has gained significant interest in scientific research and medical applications. However, it presents great challenges as it is inherently an ill-posed problem, often compromised by artifacts resulting from overlapping structures in X-ray images. In this paper, we propose DiffuX2CT, which models CT reconstruction from orthogonal biplanar X-rays as a conditional diffusion process. DiffuX2CT is established with a 3D global coherence denoising model with a new, implicit conditioning mechanism. We realize the conditioning mechanism by a newly designed tri-plane decoupling generator and an implicit neural decoder. By doing so, DiffuX2CT achieves structure-controllable reconstruction, which enables 3D structural information to be recovered from 2D X-rays, therefore producing faithful textures in CT images. As an extra contribution, we collect a real-world lumbar CT dataset, called LumbarV, as a new benchmark to verify the clinical significance and performance of CT reconstruction from X-rays. Extensive experiments on this dataset and three more publicly available datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal.

Async Learned User Embeddings for Ads Delivery Optimization

User representation is crucial for recommendation systems as it helps to deliver personalized recommendations by capturing user preferences and behaviors in low-dimensional vectors. High-quality user embeddings can capture subtle preferences, enable precise similarity calculations, and adapt to changing preferences over time to maintain relevance. The effectiveness of recommendation systems depends significantly on the quality of user embedding. We propose to asynchronously learn high fidelity user embeddings for billions of users each day from sequence based multimodal user activities in Meta platforms through a Transformer-like large scale feature learning module. The async learned user representations embeddings (ALURE) are further converted to user similarity graphs through graph learning and then combined with user realtime activities to retrieval highly related ads candidates for the entire ads delivery system. Our method shows significant gains in both offline and online experiments.

EditWorld: Simulating World Dynamics for Instruction-Following Image Editing

Diffusion models have significantly improved the performance of image editing. Existing methods realize various approaches to achieve high-quality image editing, including but not limited to text control, dragging operation, and mask-and-inpainting. Among these, instruction-based editing stands out for its convenience and effectiveness in following human instructions across diverse scenarios. However, it still focuses on simple editing operations like adding, replacing, or deleting, and falls short of understanding aspects of world dynamics that convey the realistic dynamic nature in the physical world. Therefore, this work, EditWorld, introduces a new editing task, namely world-instructed image editing, which defines and categorizes the instructions grounded by various world scenarios. We curate a new image editing dataset with world instructions using a set of large pretrained models (e.g., GPT-3.5, Video-LLava and SDXL). To enable sufficient simulation of world dynamics for image editing, our EditWorld trains model in the curated dataset, and improves instruction-following ability with designed post-edit strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method significantly outperforms existing editing methods in this new task. Our dataset and code will be available at https://github.com/YangLing0818/EditWorld

IPDreamer: Appearance-Controllable 3D Object Generation with Image Prompts

Recent advances in text-to-3D generation have been remarkable, with methods such as DreamFusion leveraging large-scale text-to-image diffusion-based models to supervise 3D generation. These methods, including the variational score distillation proposed by ProlificDreamer, enable the synthesis of detailed and photorealistic textured meshes. However, the appearance of 3D objects generated by these methods is often random and uncontrollable, posing a challenge in achieving appearance-controllable 3D objects. To address this challenge, we introduce IPDreamer, a novel approach that incorporates image prompts to provide specific and comprehensive appearance information for 3D object generation. Our results demonstrate that IPDreamer effectively generates high-quality 3D objects that are consistent with both the provided text and image prompts, demonstrating its promising capability in appearance-controllable 3D object generation.

Tree-of-Mixed-Thought: Combining Fast and Slow Thinking for Multi-hop Visual Reasoning

There emerges a promising trend of using large language models (LLMs) to generate code-like plans for complex inference tasks such as visual reasoning. This paradigm, known as LLM-based planning, provides flexibility in problem solving and endows better interpretability. However, current research is mostly limited to basic scenarios of simple questions that can be straightforward answered in a few inference steps. Planning for the more challenging multi-hop visual reasoning tasks remains under-explored. Specifically, under multi-hop reasoning situations, the trade-off between accuracy and the complexity of plan-searching becomes prominent. The prevailing algorithms either address the efficiency issue by employing the fast one-stop generation or adopt a complex iterative generation method to improve accuracy. Both fail to balance the need for efficiency and performance. Drawing inspiration from the dual system of cognition in the human brain, the fast and the slow think processes, we propose a hierarchical plan-searching algorithm that integrates the one-stop reasoning (fast) and the Tree-of-thought (slow). Our approach succeeds in performance while significantly saving inference steps. Moreover, we repurpose the PTR and the CLEVER datasets, developing a systematic framework for evaluating the performance and efficiency of LLMs-based plan-search algorithms under reasoning tasks at different levels of difficulty. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed algorithm in terms of performance and efficiency. The dataset and code will be release soon.