Enhancing Chat Language Models by Scaling High-quality Instructional Conversations

Fine-tuning on instruction data has been widely validated as an effective practice for implementing chat language models like ChatGPT. Scaling the diversity and quality of such data, although straightforward, stands a great chance of leading to improved performance. This paper aims to improve the upper bound of open-source models further. We first provide a systematically designed, diverse, informative, large-scale dataset of instructional conversations, UltraChat, which does not involve human queries. Our objective is to capture the breadth of interactions that a human might have with an AI assistant and employs a comprehensive framework to generate multi-turn conversation iteratively. UltraChat contains 1.5 million high-quality multi-turn dialogues and covers a wide range of topics and instructions. Our statistical analysis of UltraChat reveals its superiority in various key metrics, including scale, average length, diversity, coherence, etc., solidifying its position as a leading open-source dataset. Building upon UltraChat, we fine-tune a LLaMA model to create a powerful conversational model, UltraLLaMA. Our evaluations indicate that UltraLLaMA consistently outperforms other open-source models, including Vicuna, the previously recognized state-of-the-art open-source model. The dataset and the model will be publicly released\footnote{\url{https://github.com/thunlp/UltraChat}}.

WebCPM: Interactive Web Search for Chinese Long-form Question Answering

Long-form question answering (LFQA) aims at answering complex, open-ended questions with detailed, paragraph-length responses. The de facto paradigm of LFQA necessitates two procedures: information retrieval, which searches for relevant supporting facts, and information synthesis, which integrates these facts into a coherent answer. In this paper, we introduce WebCPM, the first Chinese LFQA dataset. One unique feature of WebCPM is that its information retrieval is based on interactive web search, which engages with a search engine in real time. Following WebGPT, we develop a web search interface. We recruit annotators to search for relevant information using our interface and then answer questions. Meanwhile, the web search behaviors of our annotators would be recorded. In total, we collect 5,500 high-quality question-answer pairs, together with 14,315 supporting facts and 121,330 web search actions. We fine-tune pre-trained language models to imitate human behaviors for web search and to generate answers based on the collected facts. Our LFQA pipeline, built on these fine-tuned models, generates answers that are no worse than human-written ones in 32.5% and 47.5% of the cases on our dataset and DuReader, respectively.

Surgical tool classification and localization: results and methods from the MICCAI 2022 SurgToolLoc challenge

The ability to automatically detect and track surgical instruments in endoscopic videos can enable transformational interventions. Assessing surgical performance and efficiency, identifying skilled tool use and choreography, and planning operational and logistical aspects of OR resources are just a few of the applications that could benefit. Unfortunately, obtaining the annotations needed to train machine learning models to identify and localize surgical tools is a difficult task. Annotating bounding boxes frame-by-frame is tedious and time-consuming, yet large amounts of data with a wide variety of surgical tools and surgeries must be captured for robust training. Moreover, ongoing annotator training is needed to stay up to date with surgical instrument innovation. In robotic-assisted surgery, however, potentially informative data like timestamps of instrument installation and removal can be programmatically harvested. The ability to rely on tool installation data alone would significantly reduce the workload to train robust tool-tracking models. With this motivation in mind we invited the surgical data science community to participate in the challenge, SurgToolLoc 2022. The goal was to leverage tool presence data as weak labels for machine learning models trained to detect tools and localize them in video frames with bounding boxes. We present the results of this challenge along with many of the team's efforts. We conclude by discussing these results in the broader context of machine learning and surgical data science. The training data used for this challenge consisting of 24,695 video clips with tool presence labels is also being released publicly and can be accessed at https://console.cloud.google.com/storage/browser/isi-surgtoolloc-2022.

SalienDet: A Saliency-based Feature Enhancement Algorithm for Object Detection for Autonomous Driving

Object detection (OD) is crucial to autonomous driving. Unknown objects are one of the reasons that hinder autonomous vehicles from driving beyond the operational domain. We propose a saliency-based OD algorithm (SalienDet) to detect objects that do not appear in the training sample set. SalienDet utilizes a saliency-based algorithm to enhance image features for object proposal generation. Then, we design a dataset relabeling approach to differentiate the unknown objects from all objects to achieve open-world detection. We evaluate SalienDet on KITTI, NuScenes, and BDD datasets, and the result indicates that it outperforms existing algorithms for unknown object detection. Additionally, SalienDet can be easily adapted for incremental learning in open-world detection tasks.

Estimation of control area in badminton doubles with pose information from top and back view drone videos

The application of visual tracking to the performance analysis of sports players in dynamic competitions is vital for effective coaching. In racket sports, most previous studies have focused on analyzing and assessing singles players without occlusion in broadcast videos and discrete representations (e.g., stroke) that ignore meaningful spatial distributions. In this work, we present the first annotated drone dataset from top and back views in badminton doubles and propose a framework to estimate the control area probability map, which can be used to evaluate teamwork performance. We present an efficient framework of deep neural networks that enables the calculation of full probability surfaces, which utilizes the embedding of a Gaussian mixture map of players' positions and graph convolution of their poses. In the experiment, we verify our approach by comparing various baselines and discovering the correlations between the score and control area. Furthermore, we propose the practical application of assessing optimal positioning to provide instructions during a game. Our approach can visually and quantitatively evaluate players' movements, providing valuable insights into doubles teamwork.

Tool Learning with Foundation Models

Humans possess an extraordinary ability to create and utilize tools, allowing them to overcome physical limitations and explore new frontiers. With the advent of foundation models, AI systems have the potential to be equally adept in tool use as humans. This paradigm, i.e., tool learning with foundation models, combines the strengths of specialized tools and foundation models to achieve enhanced accuracy, efficiency, and automation in problem-solving. Despite its immense potential, there is still a lack of a comprehensive understanding of key challenges, opportunities, and future endeavors in this field. To this end, we present a systematic investigation of tool learning in this paper. We first introduce the background of tool learning, including its cognitive origins, the paradigm shift of foundation models, and the complementary roles of tools and models. Then we recapitulate existing tool learning research into tool-augmented and tool-oriented learning. We formulate a general tool learning framework: starting from understanding the user instruction, models should learn to decompose a complex task into several subtasks, dynamically adjust their plan through reasoning, and effectively conquer each sub-task by selecting appropriate tools. We also discuss how to train models for improved tool-use capabilities and facilitate the generalization in tool learning. Considering the lack of a systematic tool learning evaluation in prior works, we experiment with 17 representative tools and show the potential of current foundation models in skillfully utilizing tools. Finally, we discuss several open problems that require further investigation for tool learning. Overall, we hope this paper could inspire future research in integrating tools with foundation models.

Enhancing Depth Completion with Multi-View Monitored Distillation

This paper presents a novel method for depth completion, which leverages multi-view improved monitored distillation to generate more precise depth maps. Our approach builds upon the state-of-the-art ensemble distillation method, in which we introduce a stereo-based model as a teacher model to improve the accuracy of the student model for depth completion. By minimizing the reconstruction error for a given image during ensemble distillation, we can avoid learning inherent error modes of completion-based teachers. To provide self-supervised information, we also employ multi-view depth consistency and multi-scale minimum reprojection. These techniques utilize existing structural constraints to yield supervised signals for student model training, without requiring costly ground truth depth information. Our extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that our proposed method significantly improves the accuracy of the baseline monitored distillation method.

FractalAD: A simple industrial anomaly segmentation method using fractal anomaly generation and backbone knowledge distillation

Although industrial anomaly detection (AD) technology has made significant progress in recent years, generating realistic anomalies and learning priors knowledge of normal remain challenging tasks. In this study, we propose an end-to-end industrial anomaly segmentation method called FractalAD. Training samples are obtained by synthesizing fractal images and patches from normal samples. This fractal anomaly generation method is designed to sample the full morphology of anomalies. Moreover, we designed a backbone knowledge distillation structure to extract prior knowledge contained in normal samples. The differences between a teacher and a student model are converted into anomaly attention using a cosine similarity attention module. The proposed method enables an end-to-end semantic segmentation network to be used for anomaly detection without adding any trainable parameters to the backbone and segmentation head. The results of ablation studies confirmed the effectiveness of fractal anomaly generation and backbone knowledge distillation. The results of performance experiments showed that FractalAD achieved competitive results on the MVTec AD dataset compared with other state-of-the-art anomaly detection methods.

Decoder Tuning: Efficient Language Understanding as Decoding

With the evergrowing sizes of pre-trained models (PTMs), it has been an emerging practice to only provide the inference APIs for users, namely model-as-a-service (MaaS) setting. To adapt PTMs with model parameters frozen, most current approaches focus on the input side, seeking for powerful prompts to stimulate models for correct answers. However, we argue that input-side adaptation could be arduous due to the lack of gradient signals and they usually require thousands of API queries, resulting in high computation and time costs. In light of this, we present Decoder Tuning (DecT), which in contrast optimizes task-specific decoder networks on the output side. Specifically, DecT first extracts prompt-stimulated output scores for initial predictions. On top of that, we train an additional decoder network on the output representations to incorporate posterior data knowledge. By gradient-based optimization, DecT can be trained within several seconds and requires only one PTM query per sample. Empirically, we conduct extensive natural language understanding experiments and show that DecT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms with a $10^3\times$ speed-up.