AlignMMBench: Evaluating Chinese Multimodal Alignment in Large Vision-Language Models

Evaluating the alignment capabilities of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is essential for determining their effectiveness as helpful assistants. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on basic abilities using nonverbal methods, such as yes-no and multiple-choice questions. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing AlignMMBench, a comprehensive alignment benchmark specifically designed for emerging Chinese VLMs. This benchmark is meticulously curated from real-world scenarios and Chinese Internet sources, encompassing thirteen specific tasks across three categories, and includes both single-turn and multi-turn dialogue scenarios. Incorporating a prompt rewrite strategy, AlignMMBench encompasses 1,054 images and 4,978 question-answer pairs. To facilitate the evaluation pipeline, we propose CritiqueVLM, a rule-calibrated evaluator that exceeds GPT-4's evaluation ability. Finally, we report the performance of representative VLMs on AlignMMBench, offering insights into the capabilities and limitations of different VLM architectures. All evaluation codes and data are available on https://alignmmbench.github.io.

LVBench: An Extreme Long Video Understanding Benchmark

Recent progress in multimodal large language models has markedly enhanced the understanding of short videos (typically under one minute), and several evaluation datasets have emerged accordingly. However, these advancements fall short of meeting the demands of real-world applications such as embodied intelligence for long-term decision-making, in-depth movie reviews and discussions, and live sports commentary, all of which require comprehension of long videos spanning several hours. To address this gap, we introduce LVBench, a benchmark specifically designed for long video understanding. Our dataset comprises publicly sourced videos and encompasses a diverse set of tasks aimed at long video comprehension and information extraction. LVBench is designed to challenge multimodal models to demonstrate long-term memory and extended comprehension capabilities. Our extensive evaluations reveal that current multimodal models still underperform on these demanding long video understanding tasks. Through LVBench, we aim to spur the development of more advanced models capable of tackling the complexities of long video comprehension. Our data and code are publicly available at: https://lvbench.github.io.

Memorization in deep learning: A survey

Deep Learning (DL) powered by Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has revolutionized various domains, yet understanding the intricacies of DNN decision-making and learning processes remains a significant challenge. Recent investigations have uncovered an interesting memorization phenomenon in which DNNs tend to memorize specific details from examples rather than learning general patterns, affecting model generalization, security, and privacy. This raises critical questions about the nature of generalization in DNNs and their susceptibility to security breaches. In this survey, we present a systematic framework to organize memorization definitions based on the generalization and security/privacy domains and summarize memorization evaluation methods at both the example and model levels. Through a comprehensive literature review, we explore DNN memorization behaviors and their impacts on security and privacy. We also introduce privacy vulnerabilities caused by memorization and the phenomenon of forgetting and explore its connection with memorization. Furthermore, we spotlight various applications leveraging memorization and forgetting mechanisms, including noisy label learning, privacy preservation, and model enhancement. This survey offers the first-in-kind understanding of memorization in DNNs, providing insights into its challenges and opportunities for enhancing AI development while addressing critical ethical concerns.

Trustworthy DNN Partition for Blockchain-enabled Digital Twin in Wireless IIoT Networks

Digital twin (DT) has emerged as a promising solution to enhance manufacturing efficiency in industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks. To promote the efficiency and trustworthiness of DT for wireless IIoT networks, we propose a blockchain-enabled DT (B-DT) framework that employs deep neural network (DNN) partitioning technique and reputation-based consensus mechanism, wherein the DTs maintained at the gateway side execute DNN inference tasks using the data collected from their associated IIoT devices. First, we employ DNN partitioning technique to offload the top-layer DNN inference tasks to the access point (AP) side, which alleviates the computation burden at the gateway side and thereby improves the efficiency of DNN inference. Second, we propose a reputation-based consensus mechanism that integrates Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS). Specifically, the proposed consensus mechanism evaluates the off-chain reputation of each AP according to its computation resource contributions to the DNN inference tasks, and utilizes the off-chain reputation as a stake to adjust the block generation difficulty. Third, we formulate a stochastic optimization problem of communication resource (i.e., partition point) and computation resource allocation (i.e., computation frequency of APs for top-layer DNN inference and block generation) to minimize system latency under the time-varying channel state and long-term constraints of off-chain reputation, and solve the problem using Lyapunov optimization method. Experimental results show that the proposed dynamic DNN partitioning and resource allocation (DPRA) algorithm outperforms the baselines in terms of reducing the overall latency while guaranteeing the trustworthiness of the B-DT system.

Towards Communication-efficient Federated Learning via Sparse and Aligned Adaptive Optimization

Adaptive moment estimation (Adam), as a Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) variant, has gained widespread popularity in federated learning (FL) due to its fast convergence. However, federated Adam (FedAdam) algorithms suffer from a threefold increase in uplink communication overhead compared to federated SGD (FedSGD) algorithms, which arises from the necessity to transmit both local model updates and first and second moment estimates from distributed devices to the centralized server for aggregation. Driven by this issue, we propose a novel sparse FedAdam algorithm called FedAdam-SSM, wherein distributed devices sparsify the updates of local model parameters and moment estimates and subsequently upload the sparse representations to the centralized server. To further reduce the communication overhead, the updates of local model parameters and moment estimates incorporate a shared sparse mask (SSM) into the sparsification process, eliminating the need for three separate sparse masks. Theoretically, we develop an upper bound on the divergence between the local model trained by FedAdam-SSM and the desired model trained by centralized Adam, which is related to sparsification error and imbalanced data distribution. By minimizing the divergence bound between the model trained by FedAdam-SSM and centralized Adam, we optimize the SSM to mitigate the learning performance degradation caused by sparsification error. Additionally, we provide convergence bounds for FedAdam-SSM in both convex and non-convex objective function settings, and investigate the impact of local epoch, learning rate and sparsification ratio on the convergence rate of FedAdam-SSM. Experimental results show that FedAdam-SSM outperforms baselines in terms of convergence rate (over 1.1$\times$ faster than the sparse FedAdam baselines) and test accuracy (over 14.5\% ahead of the quantized FedAdam baselines).

EmInspector: Combating Backdoor Attacks in Federated Self-Supervised Learning Through Embedding Inspection

Federated self-supervised learning (FSSL) has recently emerged as a promising paradigm that enables the exploitation of clients' vast amounts of unlabeled data while preserving data privacy. While FSSL offers advantages, its susceptibility to backdoor attacks, a concern identified in traditional federated supervised learning (FSL), has not been investigated. To fill the research gap, we undertake a comprehensive investigation into a backdoor attack paradigm, where unscrupulous clients conspire to manipulate the global model, revealing the vulnerability of FSSL to such attacks. In FSL, backdoor attacks typically build a direct association between the backdoor trigger and the target label. In contrast, in FSSL, backdoor attacks aim to alter the global model's representation for images containing the attacker's specified trigger pattern in favor of the attacker's intended target class, which is less straightforward. In this sense, we demonstrate that existing defenses are insufficient to mitigate the investigated backdoor attacks in FSSL, thus finding an effective defense mechanism is urgent. To tackle this issue, we dive into the fundamental mechanism of backdoor attacks on FSSL, proposing the Embedding Inspector (EmInspector) that detects malicious clients by inspecting the embedding space of local models. In particular, EmInspector assesses the similarity of embeddings from different local models using a small set of inspection images (e.g., ten images of CIFAR100) without specific requirements on sample distribution or labels. We discover that embeddings from backdoored models tend to cluster together in the embedding space for a given inspection image. Evaluation results show that EmInspector can effectively mitigate backdoor attacks on FSSL across various adversary settings. Our code is avaliable at https://github.com/ShuchiWu/EmInspector.

Robust Model Aggregation for Heterogeneous Federated Learning: Analysis and Optimizations

Conventional synchronous federated learning (SFL) frameworks suffer from performance degradation in heterogeneous systems due to imbalanced local data size and diverse computing power on the client side. To address this problem, asynchronous FL (AFL) and semi-asynchronous FL have been proposed to recover the performance loss by allowing asynchronous aggregation. However, asynchronous aggregation incurs a new problem of inconsistency between local updates and global updates. Motivated by the issues of conventional SFL and AFL, we first propose a time-driven SFL (T-SFL) framework for heterogeneous systems. The core idea of T-SFL is that the server aggregates the models from different clients, each with varying numbers of iterations, at regular time intervals. To evaluate the learning performance of T-SFL, we provide an upper bound on the global loss function. Further, we optimize the aggregation weights to minimize the developed upper bound. Then, we develop a discriminative model selection (DMS) algorithm that removes local models from clients whose number of iterations falls below a predetermined threshold. In particular, this algorithm ensures that each client's aggregation weight accurately reflects its true contribution to the global model update, thereby improving the efficiency and robustness of the system. To validate the effectiveness of T-SFL with the DMS algorithm, we conduct extensive experiments using several popular datasets including MNIST, Cifar-10, Fashion-MNIST, and SVHN. The experimental results demonstrate that T-SFL with the DMS algorithm can reduce the latency of conventional SFL by 50\%, while achieving an average 3\% improvement in learning accuracy over state-of-the-art AFL algorithms.

Inf-DiT: Upsampling Any-Resolution Image with Memory-Efficient Diffusion Transformer

Diffusion models have shown remarkable performance in image generation in recent years. However, due to a quadratic increase in memory during generating ultra-high-resolution images (e.g. 4096*4096), the resolution of generated images is often limited to 1024*1024. In this work. we propose a unidirectional block attention mechanism that can adaptively adjust the memory overhead during the inference process and handle global dependencies. Building on this module, we adopt the DiT structure for upsampling and develop an infinite super-resolution model capable of upsampling images of various shapes and resolutions. Comprehensive experiments show that our model achieves SOTA performance in generating ultra-high-resolution images in both machine and human evaluation. Compared to commonly used UNet structures, our model can save more than 5x memory when generating 4096*4096 images. The project URL is https://github.com/THUDM/Inf-DiT.

Privacy at a Price: Exploring its Dual Impact on AI Fairness

The worldwide adoption of machine learning (ML) and deep learning models, particularly in critical sectors, such as healthcare and finance, presents substantial challenges in maintaining individual privacy and fairness. These two elements are vital to a trustworthy environment for learning systems. While numerous studies have concentrated on protecting individual privacy through differential privacy (DP) mechanisms, emerging research indicates that differential privacy in machine learning models can unequally impact separate demographic subgroups regarding prediction accuracy. This leads to a fairness concern, and manifests as biased performance. Although the prevailing view is that enhancing privacy intensifies fairness disparities, a smaller, yet significant, subset of research suggests the opposite view. In this article, with extensive evaluation results, we demonstrate that the impact of differential privacy on fairness is not monotonous. Instead, we observe that the accuracy disparity initially grows as more DP noise (enhanced privacy) is added to the ML process, but subsequently diminishes at higher privacy levels with even more noise. Moreover, implementing gradient clipping in the differentially private stochastic gradient descent ML method can mitigate the negative impact of DP noise on fairness. This mitigation is achieved by moderating the disparity growth through a lower clipping threshold.

The Frontier of Data Erasure: Machine Unlearning for Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are foundational to AI advancements, facilitating applications like predictive text generation. Nonetheless, they pose risks by potentially memorizing and disseminating sensitive, biased, or copyrighted information from their vast datasets. Machine unlearning emerges as a cutting-edge solution to mitigate these concerns, offering techniques for LLMs to selectively discard certain data. This paper reviews the latest in machine unlearning for LLMs, introducing methods for the targeted forgetting of information to address privacy, ethical, and legal challenges without necessitating full model retraining. It divides existing research into unlearning from unstructured/textual data and structured/classification data, showcasing the effectiveness of these approaches in removing specific data while maintaining model efficacy. Highlighting the practicality of machine unlearning, this analysis also points out the hurdles in preserving model integrity, avoiding excessive or insufficient data removal, and ensuring consistent outputs, underlining the role of machine unlearning in advancing responsible, ethical AI.