GeminiFusion: Efficient Pixel-wise Multimodal Fusion for Vision Transformer

Cross-modal transformers have demonstrated superiority in various vision tasks by effectively integrating different modalities. This paper first critiques prior token exchange methods which replace less informative tokens with inter-modal features, and demonstrate exchange based methods underperform cross-attention mechanisms, while the computational demand of the latter inevitably restricts its use with longer sequences. To surmount the computational challenges, we propose GeminiFusion, a pixel-wise fusion approach that capitalizes on aligned cross-modal representations. GeminiFusion elegantly combines intra-modal and inter-modal attentions, dynamically integrating complementary information across modalities. We employ a layer-adaptive noise to adaptively control their interplay on a per-layer basis, thereby achieving a harmonized fusion process. Notably, GeminiFusion maintains linear complexity with respect to the number of input tokens, ensuring this multimodal framework operates with efficiency comparable to unimodal networks. Comprehensive evaluations across multimodal image-to-image translation, 3D object detection and arbitrary-modal semantic segmentation tasks, including RGB, depth, LiDAR, event data, etc. demonstrate the superior performance of our GeminiFusion against leading-edge techniques. The PyTorch code is available at https://github.com/JiaDingCN/GeminiFusion

SA-GS: Semantic-Aware Gaussian Splatting for Large Scene Reconstruction with Geometry Constrain

With the emergence of Gaussian Splats, recent efforts have focused on large-scale scene geometric reconstruction. However, most of these efforts either concentrate on memory reduction or spatial space division, neglecting information in the semantic space. In this paper, we propose a novel method, named SA-GS, for fine-grained 3D geometry reconstruction using semantic-aware 3D Gaussian Splats. Specifically, we leverage prior information stored in large vision models such as SAM and DINO to generate semantic masks. We then introduce a geometric complexity measurement function to serve as soft regularization, guiding the shape of each Gaussian Splat within specific semantic areas. Additionally, we present a method that estimates the expected number of Gaussian Splats in different semantic areas, effectively providing a lower bound for Gaussian Splats in these areas. Subsequently, we extract the point cloud using a novel probability density-based extraction method, transforming Gaussian Splats into a point cloud crucial for downstream tasks. Our method also offers the potential for detailed semantic inquiries while maintaining high image-based reconstruction results. We provide extensive experiments on publicly available large-scale scene reconstruction datasets with highly accurate point clouds as ground truth and our novel dataset. Our results demonstrate the superiority of our method over current state-of-the-art Gaussian Splats reconstruction methods by a significant margin in terms of geometric-based measurement metrics. Code and additional results will soon be available on our project page.

SciFIBench: Benchmarking Large Multimodal Models for Scientific Figure Interpretation

Large multimodal models (LMMs) have proven flexible and generalisable across many tasks and fields. Although they have strong potential to aid scientific research, their capabilities in this domain are not well characterised. A key aspect of scientific research is the ability to understand and interpret figures, which serve as a rich, compressed source of complex information. In this work, we present SciFIBench, a scientific figure interpretation benchmark. Our main benchmark consists of a 1000-question gold set of multiple-choice questions split between two tasks across 12 categories. The questions are curated from CS arXiv paper figures and captions, using adversarial filtering to find hard negatives and human verification for quality control. We evaluate 26 LMMs on SciFIBench, finding it to be a challenging benchmark. Finally, we investigate the alignment and reasoning faithfulness of the LMMs on augmented question sets from our benchmark. We release SciFIBench to encourage progress in this domain.

EMS-SD: Efficient Multi-sample Speculative Decoding for Accelerating Large Language Models

Speculative decoding emerges as a pivotal technique for enhancing the inference speed of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite recent research aiming to improve prediction efficiency, multi-sample speculative decoding has been overlooked due to varying numbers of accepted tokens within a batch in the verification phase. Vanilla method adds padding tokens in order to ensure that the number of new tokens remains consistent across samples. However, this increases the computational and memory access overhead, thereby reducing the speedup ratio. We propose a novel method that can resolve the issue of inconsistent tokens accepted by different samples without necessitating an increase in memory or computing overhead. Furthermore, our proposed method can handle the situation where the prediction tokens of different samples are inconsistent without the need to add padding tokens. Sufficient experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our method. Our code is available at https://github.com/niyunsheng/EMS-SD.

Memory-Space Visual Prompting for Efficient Vision-Language Fine-Tuning

Current solutions for efficiently constructing large vision-language (VL) models follow a two-step paradigm: projecting the output of pre-trained vision encoders to the input space of pre-trained language models as visual prompts; and then transferring the models to downstream VL tasks via end-to-end parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). However, this paradigm still exhibits inefficiency since it significantly increases the input length of the language models. In this paper, in contrast to integrating visual prompts into inputs, we regard visual prompts as additional knowledge that facilitates language models in addressing tasks associated with visual information. Motivated by the finding that Feed-Forward Network (FFN) of language models acts as "key-value memory", we introduce a novel approach termed memory-space visual prompting (MemVP), wherein visual prompts are concatenated with the weights of FFN for visual knowledge injection. Experimental results across various VL tasks and language models reveal that MemVP significantly reduces the training time and inference latency of the finetuned VL models and surpasses the performance of previous PEFT methods. Code: https://github.com/JieShibo/MemVP

Kangaroo: Lossless Self-Speculative Decoding via Double Early Exiting

Speculative decoding has demonstrated its effectiveness in accelerating the inference of large language models while maintaining a consistent sampling distribution. However, the conventional approach of training a separate draft model to achieve a satisfactory token acceptance rate can be costly. Drawing inspiration from early exiting, we propose a novel self-speculative decoding framework \emph{Kangaroo}, which uses a fixed shallow sub-network as a self-draft model, with the remaining layers serving as the larger target model. We train a lightweight and efficient adapter module on top of the sub-network to bridge the gap between the sub-network and the full model's representation ability. It is noteworthy that the inference latency of the self-draft model may no longer be negligible compared to the large model, necessitating strategies to increase the token acceptance rate while minimizing the drafting steps of the small model. To address this challenge, we introduce an additional early exiting mechanism for generating draft tokens. Specifically, we halt the small model's subsequent prediction during the drafting phase once the confidence level for the current token falls below a certain threshold. Extensive experiments on the Spec-Bench demonstrate the effectiveness of Kangaroo. Under single-sequence verification, Kangaroo achieves speedups up to $1.68\times$ on Spec-Bench, outperforming Medusa-1 with 88.7\% fewer additional parameters (67M compared to 591M). The code for Kangaroo is available at https://github.com/Equationliu/Kangaroo.

GhostNetV3: Exploring the Training Strategies for Compact Models

Compact neural networks are specially designed for applications on edge devices with faster inference speed yet modest performance. However, training strategies of compact models are borrowed from that of conventional models at present, which ignores their difference in model capacity and thus may impede the performance of compact models. In this paper, by systematically investigating the impact of different training ingredients, we introduce a strong training strategy for compact models. We find that the appropriate designs of re-parameterization and knowledge distillation are crucial for training high-performance compact models, while some commonly used data augmentations for training conventional models, such as Mixup and CutMix, lead to worse performance. Our experiments on ImageNet-1K dataset demonstrate that our specialized training strategy for compact models is applicable to various architectures, including GhostNetV2, MobileNetV2 and ShuffleNetV2. Specifically, equipped with our strategy, GhostNetV3 1.3$\times$ achieves a top-1 accuracy of 79.1% with only 269M FLOPs and a latency of 14.46ms on mobile devices, surpassing its ordinarily trained counterpart by a large margin. Moreover, our observation can also be extended to object detection scenarios. PyTorch code and checkpoints can be found at https://github.com/huawei-noah/Efficient-AI-Backbones/tree/master/ghostnetv3_pytorch.

SPTNet: An Efficient Alternative Framework for Generalized Category Discovery with Spatial Prompt Tuning

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to classify unlabelled images from both `seen' and `unseen' classes by transferring knowledge from a set of labelled `seen' class images. A key theme in existing GCD approaches is adapting large-scale pre-trained models for the GCD task. An alternate perspective, however, is to adapt the data representation itself for better alignment with the pre-trained model. As such, in this paper, we introduce a two-stage adaptation approach termed SPTNet, which iteratively optimizes model parameters (i.e., model-finetuning) and data parameters (i.e., prompt learning). Furthermore, we propose a novel spatial prompt tuning method (SPT) which considers the spatial property of image data, enabling the method to better focus on object parts, which can transfer between seen and unseen classes. We thoroughly evaluate our SPTNet on standard benchmarks and demonstrate that our method outperforms existing GCD methods. Notably, we find our method achieves an average accuracy of 61.4% on the SSB, surpassing prior state-of-the-art methods by approximately 10%. The improvement is particularly remarkable as our method yields extra parameters amounting to only 0.117% of those in the backbone architecture. Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/sptnet.

DenseMamba: State Space Models with Dense Hidden Connection for Efficient Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) face a daunting challenge due to the excessive computational and memory requirements of the commonly used Transformer architecture. While state space model (SSM) is a new type of foundational network architecture offering lower computational complexity, their performance has yet to fully rival that of Transformers. This paper introduces DenseSSM, a novel approach to enhance the flow of hidden information between layers in SSMs. By selectively integrating shallowlayer hidden states into deeper layers, DenseSSM retains fine-grained information crucial for the final output. Dense connections enhanced DenseSSM still maintains the training parallelizability and inference efficiency. The proposed method can be widely applicable to various SSM types like RetNet and Mamba. With similar model size, DenseSSM achieves significant improvements, exemplified by DenseRetNet outperforming the original RetNet with up to 5% accuracy improvement on public benchmarks. code is avalaible at https://github.com/WailordHe/DenseSSM

A robust audio deepfake detection system via multi-view feature

With the advancement of generative modeling techniques, synthetic human speech becomes increasingly indistinguishable from real, and tricky challenges are elicited for the audio deepfake detection (ADD) system. In this paper, we exploit audio features to improve the generalizability of ADD systems. Investigation of the ADD task performance is conducted over a broad range of audio features, including various handcrafted features and learning-based features. Experiments show that learning-based audio features pretrained on a large amount of data generalize better than hand-crafted features on out-of-domain scenarios. Subsequently, we further improve the generalizability of the ADD system using proposed multi-feature approaches to incorporate complimentary information from features of different views. The model trained on ASV2019 data achieves an equal error rate of 24.27\% on the In-the-Wild dataset.