HyDRA: Hierarchical and Dynamic Rank Adaptation for Mobile Vision Language Model

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have undergone significant advancements, particularly with the emergence of mobile-oriented VLMs, which offer a wide range of application scenarios. However, the substantial computational requirements for training these models present a significant obstacle to their practical application. To address this issue, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has been proposed. Nevertheless, the standard LoRA with a fixed rank lacks sufficient capability for training mobile VLMs that process both text and image modalities. In this work, we introduce HyDRA, a parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework designed to implement hierarchical and dynamic rank scheduling for mobile VLMs. This framework incorporates two essential optimization strategies: (1) hierarchical optimization, which involves a coarse-grained approach that assigns different ranks to various layers, as well as a fine-grained method that adjusts ranks within individual layers, and (2) dynamic adjustment, which employs an end-to-end automatic optimization using a lightweight performance model to determine and adjust ranks during the fine-tuning process. Comprehensive experiments conducted on popular benchmarks demonstrate that HyDRA consistently outperforms the baseline, achieving a 4.7\% improvement across various model sizes without increasing the number of trainable parameters. In some tasks, it even surpasses full-parameter fine-tuning.

Re-Representation in Sentential Relation Extraction with Sequence Routing Algorithm

Sentential relation extraction (RE) is an important task in natural language processing (NLP). In this paper we propose to do sentential RE with dynamic routing in capsules. We first show that the proposed approach outperform state of the art on common sentential relation extraction datasets Tacred, Tacredrev, Retacred, and Conll04. We then investigate potential reasons for its good performance on the mentioned datasets, and yet low performance on another similar, yet larger sentential RE dataset, Wikidata. As such, we identify noise in Wikidata labels as one of the reasons that can hinder performance. Additionally, we show associativity of better performance with better re-representation, a term from neuroscience referred to change of representation in human brain to improve the match at comparison time. As example, in the given analogous terms King:Queen::Man:Woman, at comparison time, and as a result of re-representation, the similarity between related head terms (King,Man), and tail terms (Queen,Woman) increases. As such, our observation show that our proposed model can do re-representation better than the vanilla model compared with. To that end, beside noise in the labels of the distantly supervised RE datasets, we propose re-representation as a challenge in sentential RE.

Benchmarking pig detection and tracking under diverse and challenging conditions

To ensure animal welfare and effective management in pig farming, monitoring individual behavior is a crucial prerequisite. While monitoring tasks have traditionally been carried out manually, advances in machine learning have made it possible to collect individualized information in an increasingly automated way. Central to these methods is the localization of animals across space (object detection) and time (multi-object tracking). Despite extensive research of these two tasks in pig farming, a systematic benchmarking study has not yet been conducted. In this work, we address this gap by curating two datasets: PigDetect for object detection and PigTrack for multi-object tracking. The datasets are based on diverse image and video material from realistic barn conditions, and include challenging scenarios such as occlusions or bad visibility. For object detection, we show that challenging training images improve detection performance beyond what is achievable with randomly sampled images alone. Comparing different approaches, we found that state-of-the-art models offer substantial improvements in detection quality over real-time alternatives. For multi-object tracking, we observed that SORT-based methods achieve superior detection performance compared to end-to-end trainable models. However, end-to-end models show better association performance, suggesting they could become strong alternatives in the future. We also investigate characteristic failure cases of end-to-end models, providing guidance for future improvements. The detection and tracking models trained on our datasets perform well in unseen pens, suggesting good generalization capabilities. This highlights the importance of high-quality training data. The datasets and research code are made publicly available to facilitate reproducibility, re-use and further development.

Bridging Textual and Tabular Worlds for Fact Verification: A Lightweight, Attention-Based Model

FEVEROUS is a benchmark and research initiative focused on fact extraction and verification tasks involving unstructured text and structured tabular data. In FEVEROUS, existing works often rely on extensive preprocessing and utilize rule-based transformations of data, leading to potential context loss or misleading encodings. This paper introduces a simple yet powerful model that nullifies the need for modality conversion, thereby preserving the original evidence's context. By leveraging pre-trained models on diverse text and tabular datasets and by incorporating a lightweight attention-based mechanism, our approach efficiently exploits latent connections between different data types, thereby yielding comprehensive and reliable verdict predictions. The model's modular structure adeptly manages multi-modal information, ensuring the integrity and authenticity of the original evidence are uncompromised. Comparative analyses reveal that our approach exhibits competitive performance, aligning itself closely with top-tier models on the FEVEROUS benchmark.