Source-Free Cross-Modal Knowledge Transfer by Unleashing the Potential of Task-Irrelevant Data

Source-free cross-modal knowledge transfer is a crucial yet challenging task, which aims to transfer knowledge from one source modality (e.g., RGB) to the target modality (e.g., depth or infrared) with no access to the task-relevant (TR) source data due to memory and privacy concerns. A recent attempt leverages the paired task-irrelevant (TI) data and directly matches the features from them to eliminate the modality gap. However, it ignores a pivotal clue that the paired TI data could be utilized to effectively estimate the source data distribution and better facilitate knowledge transfer to the target modality. To this end, we propose a novel yet concise framework to unlock the potential of paired TI data for enhancing source-free cross-modal knowledge transfer. Our work is buttressed by two key technical components. Firstly, to better estimate the source data distribution, we introduce a Task-irrelevant data-Guided Modality Bridging (TGMB) module. It translates the target modality data (e.g., infrared) into the source-like RGB images based on paired TI data and the guidance of the available source model to alleviate two key gaps: 1) inter-modality gap between the paired TI data; 2) intra-modality gap between TI and TR target data. We then propose a Task-irrelevant data-Guided Knowledge Transfer (TGKT) module that transfers knowledge from the source model to the target model by leveraging the paired TI data. Notably, due to the unavailability of labels for the TR target data and its less reliable prediction from the source model, our TGKT model incorporates a self-supervised pseudo-labeling approach to enable the target model to learn from its predictions. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three datasets (RGB-to-depth and RGB-to-infrared).

G-Meta: Distributed Meta Learning in GPU Clusters for Large-Scale Recommender Systems

Recently, a new paradigm, meta learning, has been widely applied to Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRM) and significantly improves statistical performance, especially in cold-start scenarios. However, the existing systems are not tailored for meta learning based DLRM models and have critical problems regarding efficiency in distributed training in the GPU cluster. It is because the conventional deep learning pipeline is not optimized for two task-specific datasets and two update loops in meta learning. This paper provides a high-performance framework for large-scale training for Optimization-based Meta DLRM models over the \textbf{G}PU cluster, namely \textbf{G}-Meta. Firstly, G-Meta utilizes both data parallelism and model parallelism with careful orchestration regarding computation and communication efficiency, to enable high-speed distributed training. Secondly, it proposes a Meta-IO pipeline for efficient data ingestion to alleviate the I/O bottleneck. Various experimental results show that G-Meta achieves notable training speed without loss of statistical performance. Since early 2022, G-Meta has been deployed in Alipay's core advertising and recommender system, shrinking the continuous delivery of models by four times. It also obtains 6.48\% improvement in Conversion Rate (CVR) and 1.06\% increase in CPM (Cost Per Mille) in Alipay's homepage display advertising, with the benefit of larger training samples and tasks.

Hi-Map: Hierarchical Factorized Radiance Field for High-Fidelity Monocular Dense Mapping

In this paper, we introduce Hi-Map, a novel monocular dense mapping approach based on Neural Radiance Field (NeRF). Hi-Map is exceptional in its capacity to achieve efficient and high-fidelity mapping using only posed RGB inputs. Our method eliminates the need for external depth priors derived from e.g., a depth estimation model. Our key idea is to represent the scene as a hierarchical feature grid that encodes the radiance and then factorizes it into feature planes and vectors. As such, the scene representation becomes simpler and more generalizable for fast and smooth convergence on new observations. This allows for efficient computation while alleviating noise patterns by reducing the complexity of the scene representation. Buttressed by the hierarchical factorized representation, we leverage the Sign Distance Field (SDF) as a proxy of rendering for inferring the volume density, demonstrating high mapping fidelity. Moreover, we introduce a dual-path encoding strategy to strengthen the photometric cues and further boost the mapping quality, especially for the distant and textureless regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method's superiority in geometric and textural accuracy over the state-of-the-art NeRF-based monocular mapping methods.

2D-Guided 3D Gaussian Segmentation

Recently, 3D Gaussian, as an explicit 3D representation method, has demonstrated strong competitiveness over NeRF (Neural Radiance Fields) in terms of expressing complex scenes and training duration. These advantages signal a wide range of applications for 3D Gaussians in 3D understanding and editing. Meanwhile, the segmentation of 3D Gaussians is still in its infancy. The existing segmentation methods are not only cumbersome but also incapable of segmenting multiple objects simultaneously in a short amount of time. In response, this paper introduces a 3D Gaussian segmentation method implemented with 2D segmentation as supervision. This approach uses input 2D segmentation maps to guide the learning of the added 3D Gaussian semantic information, while nearest neighbor clustering and statistical filtering refine the segmentation results. Experiments show that our concise method can achieve comparable performances on mIOU and mAcc for multi-object segmentation as previous single-object segmentation methods.

YAYI 2: Multilingual Open-Source Large Language Models

As the latest advancements in natural language processing, large language models (LLMs) have achieved human-level language understanding and generation abilities in many real-world tasks, and even have been regarded as a potential path to the artificial general intelligence. To better facilitate research on LLMs, many open-source LLMs, such as Llama 2 and Falcon, have recently been proposed and gained comparable performances to proprietary models. However, these models are primarily designed for English scenarios and exhibit poor performances in Chinese contexts. In this technical report, we propose YAYI 2, including both base and chat models, with 30 billion parameters. YAYI 2 is pre-trained from scratch on a multilingual corpus which contains 2.65 trillion tokens filtered by our pre-training data processing pipeline. The base model is aligned with human values through supervised fine-tuning with millions of instructions and reinforcement learning from human feedback. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks, such as MMLU and CMMLU, consistently demonstrate that the proposed YAYI 2 outperforms other similar sized open-source models.

ClassLIE: Structure- and Illumination-Adaptive Classification for Low-Light Image Enhancement

Low-light images often suffer from limited visibility and multiple types of degradation, rendering low-light image enhancement (LIE) a non-trivial task. Some endeavors have been recently made to enhance low-light images using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, they have low efficiency in learning the structural information and diverse illumination levels at the local regions of an image. Consequently, the enhanced results are affected by unexpected artifacts, such as unbalanced exposure, blur, and color bias. To this end, this paper proposes a novel framework, called ClassLIE, that combines the potential of CNNs and transformers. It classifies and adaptively learns the structural and illumination information from the low-light images in a holistic and regional manner, thus showing better enhancement performance. Our framework first employs a structure and illumination classification (SIC) module to learn the degradation information adaptively. In SIC, we decompose an input image into an illumination map and a reflectance map. A class prediction block is then designed to classify the degradation information by calculating the structure similarity scores on the reflectance map and mean square error on the illumination map. As such, each input image can be divided into patches with three enhancement difficulty levels. Then, a feature learning and fusion (FLF) module is proposed to adaptively learn the feature information with CNNs for different enhancement difficulty levels while learning the long-range dependencies for the patches in a holistic manner. Experiments on five benchmark datasets consistently show our ClassLIE achieves new state-of-the-art performance, with 25.74 PSNR and 0.92 SSIM on the LOL dataset.

FedRec+: Enhancing Privacy and Addressing Heterogeneity in Federated Recommendation Systems

Preserving privacy and reducing communication costs for edge users pose significant challenges in recommendation systems. Although federated learning has proven effective in protecting privacy by avoiding data exchange between clients and servers, it has been shown that the server can infer user ratings based on updated non-zero gradients obtained from two consecutive rounds of user-uploaded gradients. Moreover, federated recommendation systems (FRS) face the challenge of heterogeneity, leading to decreased recommendation performance. In this paper, we propose FedRec+, an ensemble framework for FRS that enhances privacy while addressing the heterogeneity challenge. FedRec+ employs optimal subset selection based on feature similarity to generate near-optimal virtual ratings for pseudo items, utilizing only the user's local information. This approach reduces noise without incurring additional communication costs. Furthermore, we utilize the Wasserstein distance to estimate the heterogeneity and contribution of each client, and derive optimal aggregation weights by solving a defined optimization problem. Experimental results demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of FedRec+ across various reference datasets.

NurViD: A Large Expert-Level Video Database for Nursing Procedure Activity Understanding

The application of deep learning to nursing procedure activity understanding has the potential to greatly enhance the quality and safety of nurse-patient interactions. By utilizing the technique, we can facilitate training and education, improve quality control, and enable operational compliance monitoring. However, the development of automatic recognition systems in this field is currently hindered by the scarcity of appropriately labeled datasets. The existing video datasets pose several limitations: 1) these datasets are small-scale in size to support comprehensive investigations of nursing activity; 2) they primarily focus on single procedures, lacking expert-level annotations for various nursing procedures and action steps; and 3) they lack temporally localized annotations, which prevents the effective localization of targeted actions within longer video sequences. To mitigate these limitations, we propose NurViD, a large video dataset with expert-level annotation for nursing procedure activity understanding. NurViD consists of over 1.5k videos totaling 144 hours, making it approximately four times longer than the existing largest nursing activity datasets. Notably, it encompasses 51 distinct nursing procedures and 177 action steps, providing a much more comprehensive coverage compared to existing datasets that primarily focus on limited procedures. To evaluate the efficacy of current deep learning methods on nursing activity understanding, we establish three benchmarks on NurViD: procedure recognition on untrimmed videos, procedure and action recognition on trimmed videos, and action detection. Our benchmark and code will be available at \url{https://github.com/minghu0830/NurViD-benchmark}.

Fast Graph Condensation with Structure-based Neural Tangent Kernel

The rapid development of Internet technology has given rise to a vast amount of graph-structured data. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), as an effective method for various graph mining tasks, incurs substantial computational resource costs when dealing with large-scale graph data. A data-centric manner solution is proposed to condense the large graph dataset into a smaller one without sacrificing the predictive performance of GNNs. However, existing efforts condense graph-structured data through a computational intensive bi-level optimization architecture also suffer from massive computation costs. In this paper, we propose reforming the graph condensation problem as a Kernel Ridge Regression (KRR) task instead of iteratively training GNNs in the inner loop of bi-level optimization. More specifically, We propose a novel dataset condensation framework (GC-SNTK) for graph-structured data, where a Structure-based Neural Tangent Kernel (SNTK) is developed to capture the topology of graph and serves as the kernel function in KRR paradigm. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model in accelerating graph condensation while maintaining high prediction performance.

Integrated Sensing and Communication enabled Doppler Frequency Shift Estimation and Compensation

Despite the millimeter wave technology fulfills the low-latency and high data transmission, it will cause severe Doppler Frequency Shift (DFS) for high-speed vehicular network, which tremendously damages the communication performance. In this paper, we propose an Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) enabled DFS estimation and compensation algorithm. Firstly, the DFS is coarsely estimated and compensated using radar detection. Then, the designed preamble sequence is used to accurately estimate and compensate DFS. In addition, an adaptive DFS estimator is designed to reduce the computational complexity. Compared with the traditional DFS estimation algorithm, the improvement of the proposed algorithm is verified in bit error rate and mean square error performance by simulation results.