Tailoring Instructions to Student's Learning Levels Boosts Knowledge Distillation

It has been commonly observed that a teacher model with superior performance does not necessarily result in a stronger student, highlighting a discrepancy between current teacher training practices and effective knowledge transfer. In order to enhance the guidance of the teacher training process, we introduce the concept of distillation influence to determine the impact of distillation from each training sample on the student's generalization ability. In this paper, we propose Learning Good Teacher Matters (LGTM), an efficient training technique for incorporating distillation influence into the teacher's learning process. By prioritizing samples that are likely to enhance the student's generalization ability, our LGTM outperforms 10 common knowledge distillation baselines on 6 text classification tasks in the GLUE benchmark.

XTab: Cross-table Pretraining for Tabular Transformers

The success of self-supervised learning in computer vision and natural language processing has motivated pretraining methods on tabular data. However, most existing tabular self-supervised learning models fail to leverage information across multiple data tables and cannot generalize to new tables. In this work, we introduce XTab, a framework for cross-table pretraining of tabular transformers on datasets from various domains. We address the challenge of inconsistent column types and quantities among tables by utilizing independent featurizers and using federated learning to pretrain the shared component. Tested on 84 tabular prediction tasks from the OpenML-AutoML Benchmark (AMLB), we show that (1) XTab consistently boosts the generalizability, learning speed, and performance of multiple tabular transformers, (2) by pretraining FT-Transformer via XTab, we achieve superior performance than other state-of-the-art tabular deep learning models on various tasks such as regression, binary, and multiclass classification.

Scanpath Prediction in Panoramic Videos via Expected Code Length Minimization

Predicting human scanpaths when exploring panoramic videos is a challenging task due to the spherical geometry and the multimodality of the input, and the inherent uncertainty and diversity of the output. Most previous methods fail to give a complete treatment of these characteristics, and thus are prone to errors. In this paper, we present a simple new criterion for scanpath prediction based on principles from lossy data compression. This criterion suggests minimizing the expected code length of quantized scanpaths in a training set, which corresponds to fitting a discrete conditional probability model via maximum likelihood. Specifically, the probability model is conditioned on two modalities: a viewport sequence as the deformation-reduced visual input and a set of relative historical scanpaths projected onto respective viewports as the aligned path input. The probability model is parameterized by a product of discretized Gaussian mixture models to capture the uncertainty and the diversity of scanpaths from different users. Most importantly, the training of the probability model does not rely on the specification of "ground-truth" scanpaths for imitation learning. We also introduce a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller-based sampler to generate realistic human-like scanpaths from the learned probability model. Experimental results demonstrate that our method consistently produces better quantitative scanpath results in terms of prediction accuracy (by comparing to the assumed "ground-truths") and perceptual realism (through machine discrimination) over a wide range of prediction horizons. We additionally verify the perceptual realism improvement via a formal psychophysical experiment and the generalization improvement on several unseen panoramic video datasets.

A Cheaper and Better Diffusion Language Model with Soft-Masked Noise

Diffusion models that are based on iterative denoising have been recently proposed and leveraged in various generation tasks like image generation. Whereas, as a way inherently built for continuous data, existing diffusion models still have some limitations in modeling discrete data, e.g., languages. For example, the generally used Gaussian noise can not handle the discrete corruption well, and the objectives in continuous spaces fail to be stable for textual data in the diffusion process especially when the dimension is high. To alleviate these issues, we introduce a novel diffusion model for language modeling, Masked-Diffuse LM, with lower training cost and better performances, inspired by linguistic features in languages. Specifically, we design a linguistic-informed forward process which adds corruptions to the text through strategically soft-masking to better noise the textual data. Also, we directly predict the categorical distribution with cross-entropy loss function in every diffusion step to connect the continuous space and discrete space in a more efficient and straightforward way. Through experiments on 5 controlled generation tasks, we demonstrate that our Masked-Diffuse LM can achieve better generation quality than the state-of-the-art diffusion models with better efficiency.

Prompt Pre-Training with Twenty-Thousand Classes for Open-Vocabulary Visual Recognition

This work proposes POMP, a prompt pre-training method for vision-language models. Being memory and computation efficient, POMP enables the learned prompt to condense semantic information for a rich set of visual concepts with over twenty-thousand classes. Once pre-trained, the prompt with a strong transferable ability can be directly plugged into a variety of visual recognition tasks including image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection, to boost recognition performances in a zero-shot manner. Empirical evaluation shows that POMP achieves state-of-the-art performances on 21 downstream datasets, e.g., 67.0% average accuracy on 10 classification dataset (+3.1% compared to CoOp) and 84.4 hIoU on open-vocabulary Pascal VOC segmentation (+6.9 compared to ZSSeg).

RAF: Holistic Compilation for Deep Learning Model Training

As deep learning is pervasive in modern applications, many deep learning frameworks are presented for deep learning practitioners to develop and train DNN models rapidly. Meanwhile, as training large deep learning models becomes a trend in recent years, the training throughput and memory footprint are getting crucial. Accordingly, optimizing training workloads with compiler optimizations is inevitable and getting more and more attentions. However, existing deep learning compilers (DLCs) mainly target inference and do not incorporate holistic optimizations, such as automatic differentiation and automatic mixed precision, in training workloads. In this paper, we present RAF, a deep learning compiler for training. Unlike existing DLCs, RAF accepts a forward model and in-house generates a training graph. Accordingly, RAF is able to systematically consolidate graph optimizations for performance, memory and distributed training. In addition, to catch up to the state-of-the-art performance with hand-crafted kernel libraries as well as tensor compilers, RAF proposes an operator dialect mechanism to seamlessly integrate all possible kernel implementations. We demonstrate that by in-house training graph generation and operator dialect mechanism, we are able to perform holistic optimizations and achieve either better training throughput or larger batch size against PyTorch (eager and torchscript mode), XLA, and DeepSpeed for popular transformer models on GPUs.

Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on complex reasoning by leveraging chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting to generate intermediate reasoning chains as the rationale to infer the answer. However, existing CoT studies have focused on the language modality. We propose Multimodal-CoT that incorporates language (text) and vision (images) modalities into a two-stage framework that separates rationale generation and answer inference. In this way, answer inference can leverage better generated rationales that are based on multimodal information. With Multimodal-CoT, our model under 1 billion parameters outperforms the previous state-of-the-art LLM (GPT-3.5) by 16 percentage points (75.17%->91.68% accuracy) on the ScienceQA benchmark and even surpasses human performance. Code is publicly available available at https://github.com/amazon-science/mm-cot.

LayoutDiffuse: Adapting Foundational Diffusion Models for Layout-to-Image Generation

Layout-to-image generation refers to the task of synthesizing photo-realistic images based on semantic layouts. In this paper, we propose LayoutDiffuse that adapts a foundational diffusion model pretrained on large-scale image or text-image datasets for layout-to-image generation. By adopting a novel neural adaptor based on layout attention and task-aware prompts, our method trains efficiently, generates images with both high perceptual quality and layout alignment, and needs less data. Experiments on three datasets show that our method significantly outperforms other 10 generative models based on GANs, VQ-VAE, and diffusion models.

GFM: Building Geospatial Foundation Models via Continual Pretraining

Geospatial technologies are becoming increasingly essential in our world for a large range of tasks, such as earth monitoring and natural disaster response. To help improve the applicability and performance of deep learning models on these geospatial tasks, various works have pursued the idea of a geospatial foundation model, i.e., training networks from scratch on a large corpus of remote sensing imagery. However, this approach often requires a significant amount of data and training time to achieve suitable performance, especially when employing large state-of-the-art transformer models. In light of these challenges, we investigate a sustainable approach to building geospatial foundation models. In our investigations, we discover two important factors in the process. First, we find that the selection of pretraining data matters, even within the geospatial domain. We therefore gather a concise yet effective dataset for pretraining. Second, we find that available pretrained models on diverse datasets like ImageNet-22k should not be ignored when building geospatial foundation models, as their representations are still surprisingly effective. Rather, by leveraging their representations, we can build strong models for geospatial applications in a sustainable manner. To this end, we formulate a multi-objective continual pretraining approach for training sustainable geospatial foundation models. We experiment on a wide variety of downstream datasets and tasks, achieving strong performance across the board in comparison to ImageNet baselines and state-of-the-art geospatial pretrained models.

AIM: Adapting Image Models for Efficient Video Action Recognition

Recent vision transformer based video models mostly follow the ``image pre-training then finetuning" paradigm and have achieved great success on multiple video benchmarks. However, full finetuning such a video model could be computationally expensive and unnecessary, given the pre-trained image transformer models have demonstrated exceptional transferability. In this work, we propose a novel method to Adapt pre-trained Image Models (AIM) for efficient video understanding. By freezing the pre-trained image model and adding a few lightweight Adapters, we introduce spatial adaptation, temporal adaptation and joint adaptation to gradually equip an image model with spatiotemporal reasoning capability. We show that our proposed AIM can achieve competitive or even better performance than prior arts with substantially fewer tunable parameters on four video action recognition benchmarks. Thanks to its simplicity, our method is also generally applicable to different image pre-trained models, which has the potential to leverage more powerful image foundation models in the future. The project webpage is \url{https://adapt-image-models.github.io/}.