Parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) based on large-scale pre-trained foundation models has achieved great success in various downstream applications. Existing tuning methods, such as prompt, prefix, and adapter, perform task-specific lightweight adjustments to different parts of the original architecture. However, they take effect on only some parts of the pre-trained models, i.e., only the feed-forward layers or the self-attention layers, which leaves the remaining frozen structures unable to adapt to the data distributions of downstream tasks. Further, the existing structures are strongly coupled with the Transformers, hindering parameter-efficient deployment as well as the design flexibility for new approaches. In this paper, we revisit the design paradigm of PETL and derive a unified framework U-Tuning for parameter-efficient transfer learning, which is composed of an operation with frozen parameters and a unified tuner that adapts the operation for downstream applications. The U-Tuning framework can simultaneously encompass existing methods and derive new approaches for parameter-efficient transfer learning, which prove to achieve on-par or better performances on CIFAR-100 and FGVC datasets when compared with existing PETL methods.
Recent large-scale generative models learned on big data are capable of synthesizing incredible images yet suffer from limited controllability. This work offers a new generation paradigm that allows flexible control of the output image, such as spatial layout and palette, while maintaining the synthesis quality and model creativity. With compositionality as the core idea, we first decompose an image into representative factors, and then train a diffusion model with all these factors as the conditions to recompose the input. At the inference stage, the rich intermediate representations work as composable elements, leading to a huge design space (i.e., exponentially proportional to the number of decomposed factors) for customizable content creation. It is noteworthy that our approach, which we call Composer, supports various levels of conditions, such as text description as the global information, depth map and sketch as the local guidance, color histogram for low-level details, etc. Besides improving controllability, we confirm that Composer serves as a general framework and facilitates a wide range of classical generative tasks without retraining. Code and models will be made available.
A recent line of works apply machine learning techniques to assist or rebuild cost-based query optimizers in DBMS. While exhibiting superiority in some benchmarks, their deficiencies, e.g., unstable performance, high training cost, and slow model updating, stem from the inherent hardness of predicting the cost or latency of execution plans using machine learning models. In this paper, we introduce a learning-to-rank query optimizer, called Lero, which builds on top of a native query optimizer and continuously learns to improve the optimization performance. The key observation is that the relative order or rank of plans, rather than the exact cost or latency, is sufficient for query optimization. Lero employs a pairwise approach to train a classifier to compare any two plans and tell which one is better. Such a binary classification task is much easier than the regression task to predict the cost or latency, in terms of model efficiency and accuracy. Rather than building a learned optimizer from scratch, Lero is designed to leverage decades of wisdom of databases and improve the native query optimizer. With its non-intrusive design, Lero can be implemented on top of any existing DBMS with minimal integration efforts. We implement Lero and demonstrate its outstanding performance using PostgreSQL. In our experiments, Lero achieves near optimal performance on several benchmarks. It reduces the plan execution time of the native optimizer in PostgreSQL by up to 70% and other learned query optimizers by up to 37%. Meanwhile, Lero continuously learns and automatically adapts to query workloads and changes in data.
Deep learning empowers the mainstream medical image segmentation methods. Nevertheless current deep segmentation approaches are not capable of efficiently and effectively adapting and updating the trained models when new incremental segmentation classes (along with new training datasets or not) are required to be added. In real clinical environment, it can be preferred that segmentation models could be dynamically extended to segment new organs/tumors without the (re-)access to previous training datasets due to obstacles of patient privacy and data storage. This process can be viewed as a continual semantic segmentation (CSS) problem, being understudied for multi-organ segmentation. In this work, we propose a new architectural CSS learning framework to learn a single deep segmentation model for segmenting a total of 143 whole-body organs. Using the encoder/decoder network structure, we demonstrate that a continually-trained then frozen encoder coupled with incrementally-added decoders can extract and preserve sufficiently representative image features for new classes to be subsequently and validly segmented. To maintain a single network model complexity, we trim each decoder progressively using neural architecture search and teacher-student based knowledge distillation. To incorporate with both healthy and pathological organs appearing in different datasets, a novel anomaly-aware and confidence learning module is proposed to merge the overlapped organ predictions, originated from different decoders. Trained and validated on 3D CT scans of 2500+ patients from four datasets, our single network can segment total 143 whole-body organs with very high accuracy, closely reaching the upper bound performance level by training four separate segmentation models (i.e., one model per dataset/task).
Recent years have witnessed a big convergence of language, vision, and multi-modal pretraining. In this work, we present mPLUG-2, a new unified paradigm with modularized design for multi-modal pretraining, which can benefit from modality collaboration while addressing the problem of modality entanglement. In contrast to predominant paradigms of solely relying on sequence-to-sequence generation or encoder-based instance discrimination, mPLUG-2 introduces a multi-module composition network by sharing common universal modules for modality collaboration and disentangling different modality modules to deal with modality entanglement. It is flexible to select different modules for different understanding and generation tasks across all modalities including text, image, and video. Empirical study shows that mPLUG-2 achieves state-of-the-art or competitive results on a broad range of over 30 downstream tasks, spanning multi-modal tasks of image-text and video-text understanding and generation, and uni-modal tasks of text-only, image-only, and video-only understanding. Notably, mPLUG-2 shows new state-of-the-art results of 48.0 top-1 accuracy and 80.3 CIDEr on the challenging MSRVTT video QA and video caption tasks with a far smaller model size and data scale. It also demonstrates strong zero-shot transferability on vision-language and video-language tasks. Code and models will be released in https://github.com/alibaba/AliceMind.
Human readers or radiologists routinely perform full-body multi-organ multi-disease detection and diagnosis in clinical practice, while most medical AI systems are built to focus on single organs with a narrow list of a few diseases. This might severely limit AI's clinical adoption. A certain number of AI models need to be assembled non-trivially to match the diagnostic process of a human reading a CT scan. In this paper, we construct a Unified Tumor Transformer (UniT) model to detect (tumor existence and location) and diagnose (tumor characteristics) eight major cancer-prevalent organs in CT scans. UniT is a query-based Mask Transformer model with the output of multi-organ and multi-tumor semantic segmentation. We decouple the object queries into organ queries, detection queries and diagnosis queries, and further establish hierarchical relationships among the three groups. This clinically-inspired architecture effectively assists inter- and intra-organ representation learning of tumors and facilitates the resolution of these complex, anatomically related multi-organ cancer image reading tasks. UniT is trained end-to-end using a curated large-scale CT images of 10,042 patients including eight major types of cancers and occurring non-cancer tumors (all are pathology-confirmed with 3D tumor masks annotated by radiologists). On the test set of 631 patients, UniT has demonstrated strong performance under a set of clinically relevant evaluation metrics, substantially outperforming both multi-organ segmentation methods and an assembly of eight single-organ expert models in tumor detection, segmentation, and diagnosis. Such a unified multi-cancer image reading model (UniT) can significantly reduce the number of false positives produced by combined multi-system models. This moves one step closer towards a universal high-performance cancer screening tool.
Generalist models, which are capable of performing diverse multi-modal tasks in a task-agnostic way within a single model, have been explored recently. Being, hopefully, an alternative to approaching general-purpose AI, existing generalist models are still at an early stage, where modality and task coverage is limited. To empower multi-modal task-scaling and speed up this line of research, we release a generalist model learning system, OFASys, built on top of a declarative task interface named multi-modal instruction. At the core of OFASys is the idea of decoupling multi-modal task representations from the underlying model implementations. In OFASys, a task involving multiple modalities can be defined declaratively even with just a single line of code. The system automatically generates task plans from such instructions for training and inference. It also facilitates multi-task training for diverse multi-modal workloads. As a starting point, we provide presets of 7 different modalities and 23 highly-diverse example tasks in OFASys, with which we also develop a first-in-kind, single model, OFA+, that can handle text, image, speech, video, and motion data. The single OFA+ model achieves 95% performance in average with only 16% parameters of 15 task-finetuned models, showcasing the performance reliability of multi-modal task-scaling provided by OFASys. Available at https://github.com/OFA-Sys/OFASys