Abstract:Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have gained considerable prominence in recent years due to their remarkable capability to effectively integrate and process both textual and visual information. This integration has significantly enhanced performance across a diverse spectrum of applications, such as scene perception and robotics. However, the deployment of VLMs has also given rise to critical safety and security concerns, necessitating extensive research to assess the potential vulnerabilities these VLM systems may harbor. In this work, we present an in-depth survey of the attack strategies tailored for VLMs. We categorize these attacks based on their underlying objectives - namely jailbreak, camouflage, and exploitation - while also detailing the various methodologies employed for data manipulation of VLMs. Meanwhile, we outline corresponding defense mechanisms that have been proposed to mitigate these vulnerabilities. By discerning key connections and distinctions among the diverse types of attacks, we propose a compelling taxonomy for VLM attacks. Moreover, we summarize the evaluation metrics that comprehensively describe the characteristics and impact of different attacks on VLMs. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of promising future research directions that could further enhance the robustness and safety of VLMs, emphasizing the importance of ongoing exploration in this critical area of study. To facilitate community engagement, we maintain an up-to-date project page, accessible at: https://github.com/AobtDai/VLM_Attack_Paper_List.
Abstract:In this study, Disentanglement in Difference(DiD) is proposed to address the inherent inconsistency between the statistical independence of latent variables and the goal of semantic disentanglement in disentanglement representation learning. Conventional disentanglement methods achieve disentanglement representation by improving statistical independence among latent variables. However, the statistical independence of latent variables does not necessarily imply that they are semantically unrelated, thus, improving statistical independence does not always enhance disentanglement performance. To address the above issue, DiD is proposed to directly learn semantic differences rather than the statistical independence of latent variables. In the DiD, a Difference Encoder is designed to measure the semantic differences; a contrastive loss function is established to facilitate inter-dimensional comparison. Both of them allow the model to directly differentiate and disentangle distinct semantic factors, thereby resolving the inconsistency between statistical independence and semantic disentanglement. Experimental results on the dSprites and 3DShapes datasets demonstrate that the proposed DiD outperforms existing mainstream methods across various disentanglement metrics.
Abstract:Conventional knowledge distillation (KD) approaches are designed for the student model to predict similar output as the teacher model for each sample. Unfortunately, the relationship across samples with same class is often neglected. In this paper, we explore to redefine the knowledge in distillation, capturing the relationship between each sample and its corresponding in-context samples (a group of similar samples with the same or different classes), and perform KD from an in-context sample retrieval perspective. As KD is a type of learned label smoothing regularization (LSR), we first conduct a theoretical analysis showing that the teacher's knowledge from the in-context samples is a crucial contributor to regularize the student training with the corresponding samples. Buttressed by the analysis, we propose a novel in-context knowledge distillation (IC-KD) framework that shows its superiority across diverse KD paradigms (offline, online, and teacher-free KD). Firstly, we construct a feature memory bank from the teacher model and retrieve in-context samples for each corresponding sample through retrieval-based learning. We then introduce Positive In-Context Distillation (PICD) to reduce the discrepancy between a sample from the student and the aggregated in-context samples with the same class from the teacher in the logit space. Moreover, Negative In-Context Distillation (NICD) is introduced to separate a sample from the student and the in-context samples with different classes from the teacher in the logit space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IC-KD is effective across various types of KD, and consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet datasets.
Abstract:Graph condensation reduces the size of large graphs while preserving performance, addressing the scalability challenges of Graph Neural Networks caused by computational inefficiencies on large datasets. Existing methods often rely on bi-level optimization, requiring extensive GNN training and limiting their scalability. To address these issues, this paper proposes Graph Condensation via Gaussian Process (GCGP), a novel and computationally efficient approach to graph condensation. GCGP utilizes a Gaussian Process (GP), with the condensed graph serving as observations, to estimate the posterior distribution of predictions. This approach eliminates the need for the iterative and resource-intensive training typically required by GNNs. To enhance the capability of the GCGP in capturing dependencies between function values, we derive a specialized covariance function that incorporates structural information. This covariance function broadens the receptive field of input nodes by local neighborhood aggregation, thereby facilitating the representation of intricate dependencies within the nodes. To address the challenge of optimizing binary structural information in condensed graphs, Concrete random variables are utilized to approximate the binary adjacency matrix in a continuous counterpart. This relaxation process allows the adjacency matrix to be represented in a differentiable form, enabling the application of gradient-based optimization techniques to discrete graph structures. Experimental results show that the proposed GCGP method efficiently condenses large-scale graph data while preserving predictive performance, addressing the scalability and efficiency challenges. The implementation of our method is publicly available at https://github.com/WANGLin0126/GCGP.
Abstract:In this paper, we address the challenging modality-agnostic semantic segmentation (MaSS), aiming at centering the value of every modality at every feature granularity. Training with all available visual modalities and effectively fusing an arbitrary combination of them is essential for robust multi-modal fusion in semantic segmentation, especially in real-world scenarios, yet remains less explored to date. Existing approaches often place RGB at the center, treating other modalities as secondary, resulting in an asymmetric architecture. However, RGB alone can be limiting in scenarios like nighttime, where modalities such as event data excel. Therefore, a resilient fusion model must dynamically adapt to each modality's strengths while compensating for weaker inputs.To this end, we introduce the MAGIC++ framework, which comprises two key plug-and-play modules for effective multi-modal fusion and hierarchical modality selection that can be equipped with various backbone models. Firstly, we introduce a multi-modal interaction module to efficiently process features from the input multi-modal batches and extract complementary scene information with channel-wise and spatial-wise guidance. On top, a unified multi-scale arbitrary-modal selection module is proposed to utilize the aggregated features as the benchmark to rank the multi-modal features based on the similarity scores at hierarchical feature spaces. This way, our method can eliminate the dependence on RGB modality at every feature granularity and better overcome sensor failures and environmental noises while ensuring the segmentation performance. Under the common multi-modal setting, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both real-world and synthetic benchmarks. Moreover, our method is superior in the novel modality-agnostic setting, where it outperforms prior arts by a large margin.
Abstract:Large Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models demand a vast number of parameters, copious amounts of data, and significant computational resources during the training process. However, such models can merely be deployed on high-compute cloud platforms and are only capable of performing speech recognition tasks. This leads to high costs and restricted capabilities. In this report, we initially propose the elastic mixture of the expert (eMoE) model. This model can be trained just once and then be elastically scaled in accordance with deployment requirements. Secondly, we devise an unsupervised data creation and validation procedure and gather millions of hours of audio data from diverse domains for training. Using these two techniques, our system achieves elastic deployment capabilities while reducing the Character Error Rate (CER) on the SpeechIO testsets from 4.98\% to 2.45\%. Thirdly, our model is not only competent in Mandarin speech recognition but also proficient in multilingual, multi-dialect, emotion, gender, and sound event perception. We refer to this as Automatic Speech Perception (ASP), and the perception results are presented in the experimental section.
Abstract:Recent studies have highlighted the limitations of large language models in mathematical reasoning, particularly their inability to capture the underlying logic. Inspired by meta-learning, we propose that models should acquire not only task-specific knowledge but also transferable problem-solving skills. We introduce MetaRuleGPT, a novel Transformer-based architecture that performs precise numerical calculations and complex logical operations by learning and combining different rules. In contrast with traditional training sets, which are heavily composed of massive raw instance data, MetaRuleGPT is pre-trained on much less abstract datasets containing basic, compound, and iterative rules for mathematical reasoning. Extensive experimental results demonstrate MetaRuleGPT can mimic human's rule-following capabilities, break down complexity, and iteratively derive accurate results for complex mathematical problems. These findings prove the potential of rule learning to enhance the numerical reasoning abilities of language models.
Abstract:Distilling 3D representations from pretrained 2D diffusion models is essential for 3D creative applications across gaming, film, and interior design. Current SDS-based methods are hindered by inefficient information distillation from diffusion models, which prevents the creation of photorealistic 3D contents. Our research reevaluates the SDS approach by analyzing its fundamental nature as a basic image editing process that commonly results in over-saturation, over-smoothing and lack of rich content due to the poor-quality single-step denoising. To address these limitations, we propose GE3D (3D Generation by Editing). Each iteration of GE3D utilizes a 2D editing framework that combines a noising trajectory to preserve the information of the input image, alongside a text-guided denoising trajectory. We optimize the process by aligning the latents across both trajectories. This approach fully exploits pretrained diffusion models to distill multi-granularity information through multiple denoising steps, resulting in photorealistic 3D outputs. Both theoretical and experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our approach, which not only advances 3D generation technology but also establishes a novel connection between 3D generation and 2D editing. This could potentially inspire further research in the field. Code and demos are released at https://jahnsonblack.github.io/GE3D/.
Abstract:Linear Text Segmentation is the task of automatically tagging text documents with topic shifts, i.e. the places in the text where the topics change. A well-established area of research in Natural Language Processing, drawing from well-understood concepts in linguistic and computational linguistic research, the field has recently seen a lot of interest as a result of the surge of text, video, and audio available on the web, which in turn require ways of summarising and categorizing the mole of content for which linear text segmentation is a fundamental step. In this survey, we provide an extensive overview of current advances in linear text segmentation, describing the state of the art in terms of resources and approaches for the task. Finally, we highlight the limitations of available resources and of the task itself, while indicating ways forward based on the most recent literature and under-explored research directions.
Abstract:Generating realistic and diverse road scenarios is essential for autonomous vehicle testing and validation. Nevertheless, owing to the complexity and variability of real-world road environments, creating authentic and varied scenarios for intelligent driving testing is challenging. In this paper, we propose DiffRoad, a novel diffusion model designed to produce controllable and high-fidelity 3D road scenarios. DiffRoad leverages the generative capabilities of diffusion models to synthesize road layouts from white noise through an inverse denoising process, preserving real-world spatial features. To enhance the quality of generated scenarios, we design the Road-UNet architecture, optimizing the balance between backbone and skip connections for high-realism scenario generation. Furthermore, we introduce a road scenario evaluation module that screens adequate and reasonable scenarios for intelligent driving testing using two critical metrics: road continuity and road reasonableness. Experimental results on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate DiffRoad's ability to generate realistic and smooth road structures while maintaining the original distribution. Additionally, the generated scenarios can be fully automated into the OpenDRIVE format, facilitating generalized autonomous vehicle simulation testing. DiffRoad provides a rich and diverse scenario library for large-scale autonomous vehicle testing and offers valuable insights for future infrastructure designs that are better suited for autonomous vehicles.