Instruction tuning for large language models (LLMs) has gained attention from researchers due to its ability to unlock the potential of LLMs in following instructions. While instruction tuning offers advantages for facilitating the adaptation of large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks as a fine-tuning approach, training models with tens of millions or even billions of parameters on large amounts of data results in unaffordable computational costs. To address this, we focus on reducing the data used in LLM instruction tuning to decrease training costs and improve data efficiency, dubbed as Low Training Data Instruction Tuning (LTD Instruction Tuning). Specifically, this paper conducts a preliminary exploration into reducing the data used in LLM training and identifies several observations regarding task specialization for LLM training, such as the optimization of performance for a specific task, the number of instruction types required for instruction tuning, and the amount of data required for task-specific models. The results suggest that task-specific models can be trained using less than 0.5% of the original dataset, with a 2% improvement in performance over those trained on full task-related data.
Recent studies have shown that dual encoder models trained with the sentence-level translation ranking task are effective methods for cross-lingual sentence embedding. However, our research indicates that token-level alignment is also crucial in multilingual scenarios, which has not been fully explored previously. Based on our findings, we propose a dual-alignment pre-training (DAP) framework for cross-lingual sentence embedding that incorporates both sentence-level and token-level alignment. To achieve this, we introduce a novel representation translation learning (RTL) task, where the model learns to use one-side contextualized token representation to reconstruct its translation counterpart. This reconstruction objective encourages the model to embed translation information into the token representation. Compared to other token-level alignment methods such as translation language modeling, RTL is more suitable for dual encoder architectures and is computationally efficient. Extensive experiments on three sentence-level cross-lingual benchmarks demonstrate that our approach can significantly improve sentence embedding. Our code is available at https://github.com/ChillingDream/DAP.
The principle of continual relation extraction~(CRE) involves adapting to emerging novel relations while preserving od knowledge. While current endeavors in CRE succeed in preserving old knowledge, they tend to fail when exposed to contaminated data streams. We assume this is attributed to their reliance on an artificial hypothesis that the data stream has no annotation errors, which hinders real-world applications for CRE. Considering the ubiquity of noisy labels in real-world datasets, in this paper, we formalize a more practical learning scenario, termed as \textit{noisy-CRE}. Building upon this challenging setting, we develop a noise-resistant contrastive framework named as \textbf{N}oise-guided \textbf{a}ttack in \textbf{C}ontrative \textbf{L}earning~(NaCL) to learn incremental corrupted relations. Compared to direct noise discarding or inaccessible noise relabeling, we present modifying the feature space to match the given noisy labels via attacking can better enrich contrastive representations. Extensive empirical validations highlight that NaCL can achieve consistent performance improvements with increasing noise rates, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines.
ELECTRA, the generator-discriminator pre-training framework, has achieved impressive semantic construction capability among various downstream tasks. Despite the convincing performance, ELECTRA still faces the challenges of monotonous training and deficient interaction. Generator with only masked language modeling (MLM) leads to biased learning and label imbalance for discriminator, decreasing learning efficiency; no explicit feedback loop from discriminator to generator results in the chasm between these two components, underutilizing the course learning. In this study, a multi-perspective course learning (MCL) method is proposed to fetch a many degrees and visual angles for sample-efficient pre-training, and to fully leverage the relationship between generator and discriminator. Concretely, three self-supervision courses are designed to alleviate inherent flaws of MLM and balance the label in a multi-perspective way. Besides, two self-correction courses are proposed to bridge the chasm between the two encoders by creating a "correction notebook" for secondary-supervision. Moreover, a course soups trial is conducted to solve the "tug-of-war" dynamics problem of MCL, evolving a stronger pre-trained model. Experimental results show that our method significantly improves ELECTRA's average performance by 2.8% and 3.2% absolute points respectively on GLUE and SQuAD 2.0 benchmarks, and overshadows recent advanced ELECTRA-style models under the same settings. The pre-trained MCL model is available at https://huggingface.co/McmanusChen/MCL-base.
Dataset bias, i.e., the over-reliance on dataset-specific literal heuristics, is getting increasing attention for its detrimental effect on the generalization ability of NLU models. Existing works focus on eliminating dataset bias by down-weighting problematic data in the training process, which induce the omission of valid feature information while mitigating bias. In this work, We analyze the causes of dataset bias from the perspective of causal inference and propose CausalAPM, a generalizable literal disentangling framework to ameliorate the bias problem from feature granularity. The proposed approach projects literal and semantic information into independent feature subspaces, and constrains the involvement of literal information in subsequent predictions. Extensive experiments on three NLP benchmarks (MNLI, FEVER, and QQP) demonstrate that our proposed framework significantly improves the OOD generalization performance while maintaining ID performance.
We present the UrbanBIS benchmark for large-scale 3D urban understanding, supporting practical urban-level semantic and building-level instance segmentation. UrbanBIS comprises six real urban scenes, with 2.5 billion points, covering a vast area of 10.78 square kilometers and 3,370 buildings, captured by 113,346 views of aerial photogrammetry. Particularly, UrbanBIS provides not only semantic-level annotations on a rich set of urban objects, including buildings, vehicles, vegetation, roads, and bridges, but also instance-level annotations on the buildings. Further, UrbanBIS is the first 3D dataset that introduces fine-grained building sub-categories, considering a wide variety of shapes for different building types. Besides, we propose B-Seg, a building instance segmentation method to establish UrbanBIS. B-Seg adopts an end-to-end framework with a simple yet effective strategy for handling large-scale point clouds. Compared with mainstream methods, B-Seg achieves better accuracy with faster inference speed on UrbanBIS. In addition to the carefully-annotated point clouds, UrbanBIS provides high-resolution aerial-acquisition photos and high-quality large-scale 3D reconstruction models, which shall facilitate a wide range of studies such as multi-view stereo, urban LOD generation, aerial path planning, autonomous navigation, road network extraction, and so on, thus serving as an important platform for many intelligent city applications.
The rapid growth of social media has caused tremendous effects on information propagation, raising extreme challenges in detecting rumors. Existing rumor detection methods typically exploit the reposting propagation of a rumor candidate for detection by regarding all reposts to a rumor candidate as a temporal sequence and learning semantics representations of the repost sequence. However, extracting informative support from the topological structure of propagation and the influence of reposting authors for debunking rumors is crucial, which generally has not been well addressed by existing methods. In this paper, we organize a claim post in circulation as an adhoc event tree, extract event elements, and convert it to bipartite adhoc event trees in terms of both posts and authors, i.e., author tree and post tree. Accordingly, we propose a novel rumor detection model with hierarchical representation on the bipartite adhoc event trees called BAET. Specifically, we introduce word embedding and feature encoder for the author and post tree, respectively, and design a root-aware attention module to perform node representation. Then we adopt the tree-like RNN model to capture the structural correlations and propose a tree-aware attention module to learn tree representation for the author tree and post tree, respectively. Extensive experimental results on two public Twitter datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of BAET in exploring and exploiting the rumor propagation structure and the superior detection performance of BAET over state-of-the-art baseline methods.
This paper discusses the results for the second edition of the Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge (MDEC). This edition was open to methods using any form of supervision, including fully-supervised, self-supervised, multi-task or proxy depth. The challenge was based around the SYNS-Patches dataset, which features a wide diversity of environments with high-quality dense ground-truth. This includes complex natural environments, e.g. forests or fields, which are greatly underrepresented in current benchmarks. The challenge received eight unique submissions that outperformed the provided SotA baseline on any of the pointcloud- or image-based metrics. The top supervised submission improved relative F-Score by 27.62%, while the top self-supervised improved it by 16.61%. Supervised submissions generally leveraged large collections of datasets to improve data diversity. Self-supervised submissions instead updated the network architecture and pretrained backbones. These results represent a significant progress in the field, while highlighting avenues for future research, such as reducing interpolation artifacts at depth boundaries, improving self-supervised indoor performance and overall natural image accuracy.
Representing visual signals with implicit coordinate-based neural networks, as an effective replacement of the traditional discrete signal representation, has gained considerable popularity in computer vision and graphics. In contrast to existing implicit neural representations which focus on modelling the scene only, this paper proposes a novel implicit camera model which represents the physical imaging process of a camera as a deep neural network. We demonstrate the power of this new implicit camera model on two inverse imaging tasks: i) generating all-in-focus photos, and ii) HDR imaging. Specifically, we devise an implicit blur generator and an implicit tone mapper to model the aperture and exposure of the camera's imaging process, respectively. Our implicit camera model is jointly learned together with implicit scene models under multi-focus stack and multi-exposure bracket supervision. We have demonstrated the effectiveness of our new model on a large number of test images and videos, producing accurate and visually appealing all-in-focus and high dynamic range images. In principle, our new implicit neural camera model has the potential to benefit a wide array of other inverse imaging tasks.
We propose LIRF (Local Implicit Ray Function), a generalizable neural rendering approach for novel view rendering. Current generalizable neural radiance fields (NeRF) methods sample a scene with a single ray per pixel and may therefore render blurred or aliased views when the input views and rendered views capture scene content with different resolutions. To solve this problem, we propose LIRF to aggregate the information from conical frustums to construct a ray. Given 3D positions within conical frustums, LIRF takes 3D coordinates and the features of conical frustums as inputs and predicts a local volumetric radiance field. Since the coordinates are continuous, LIRF renders high-quality novel views at a continuously-valued scale via volume rendering. Besides, we predict the visible weights for each input view via transformer-based feature matching to improve the performance in occluded areas. Experimental results on real-world scenes validate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on novel view rendering of unseen scenes at arbitrary scales.