VTBench: Evaluating Visual Tokenizers for Autoregressive Image Generation

Autoregressive (AR) models have recently shown strong performance in image generation, where a critical component is the visual tokenizer (VT) that maps continuous pixel inputs to discrete token sequences. The quality of the VT largely defines the upper bound of AR model performance. However, current discrete VTs fall significantly behind continuous variational autoencoders (VAEs), leading to degraded image reconstructions and poor preservation of details and text. Existing benchmarks focus on end-to-end generation quality, without isolating VT performance. To address this gap, we introduce VTBench, a comprehensive benchmark that systematically evaluates VTs across three core tasks: Image Reconstruction, Detail Preservation, and Text Preservation, and covers a diverse range of evaluation scenarios. We systematically assess state-of-the-art VTs using a set of metrics to evaluate the quality of reconstructed images. Our findings reveal that continuous VAEs produce superior visual representations compared to discrete VTs, particularly in retaining spatial structure and semantic detail. In contrast, the degraded representations produced by discrete VTs often lead to distorted reconstructions, loss of fine-grained textures, and failures in preserving text and object integrity. Furthermore, we conduct experiments on GPT-4o image generation and discuss its potential AR nature, offering new insights into the role of visual tokenization. We release our benchmark and codebase publicly to support further research and call on the community to develop strong, general-purpose open-source VTs.

UniGuardian: A Unified Defense for Detecting Prompt Injection, Backdoor Attacks and Adversarial Attacks in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to attacks like prompt injection, backdoor attacks, and adversarial attacks, which manipulate prompts or models to generate harmful outputs. In this paper, departing from traditional deep learning attack paradigms, we explore their intrinsic relationship and collectively term them Prompt Trigger Attacks (PTA). This raises a key question: Can we determine if a prompt is benign or poisoned? To address this, we propose UniGuardian, the first unified defense mechanism designed to detect prompt injection, backdoor attacks, and adversarial attacks in LLMs. Additionally, we introduce a single-forward strategy to optimize the detection pipeline, enabling simultaneous attack detection and text generation within a single forward pass. Our experiments confirm that UniGuardian accurately and efficiently identifies malicious prompts in LLMs.

Visual Fourier Prompt Tuning

With the scale of vision Transformer-based models continuing to grow, finetuning these large-scale pretrained models for new tasks has become increasingly parameter-intensive. Visual prompt tuning is introduced as a parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT) method to this trend. Despite its successes, a notable research challenge persists within almost all PEFT approaches: significant performance degradation is observed when there is a substantial disparity between the datasets applied in pretraining and finetuning phases. To address this challenge, we draw inspiration from human visual cognition, and propose the Visual Fourier Prompt Tuning (VFPT) method as a general and effective solution for adapting large-scale transformer-based models. Our approach innovatively incorporates the Fast Fourier Transform into prompt embeddings and harmoniously considers both spatial and frequency domain information. Apart from its inherent simplicity and intuitiveness, VFPT exhibits superior performance across all datasets, offering a general solution to dataset challenges, irrespective of data disparities. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art baselines on two benchmarks, with low parameter usage (e.g., 0.57% of model parameters on VTAB-1k) and notable performance enhancements (e.g., 73.20% of mean accuracy on VTAB-1k). Our code is avaliable at https://github.com/runtsang/VFPT.

Diff-PIC: Revolutionizing Particle-In-Cell Simulation for Advancing Nuclear Fusion with Diffusion Models

Sustainable energy is a crucial global challenge, and recent breakthroughs in nuclear fusion ignition underscore the potential of harnessing energy extracted from nuclear fusion in everyday life, thereby drawing significant attention to fusion ignition research, especially Laser-Plasma Interaction (LPI). Unfortunately, the complexity of LPI at ignition scale renders theory-based analysis nearly impossible -- instead, it has to rely heavily on Particle-in-Cell (PIC) simulations, which is extremely computationally intensive, making it a major bottleneck in advancing fusion ignition. In response, this work introduces Diff-PIC, a novel paradigm that leverages conditional diffusion models as a computationally efficient alternative to PIC simulations for generating high-fidelity scientific data. Specifically, we design a distillation paradigm to distill the physical patterns captured by PIC simulations into diffusion models, demonstrating both theoretical and practical feasibility. Moreover, to ensure practical effectiveness, we provide solutions for two critical challenges: (1) We develop a physically-informed conditional diffusion model that can learn and generate meaningful embeddings for mathematically continuous physical conditions. This model offers algorithmic generalization and adaptable transferability, effectively capturing the complex relationships between physical conditions and simulation outcomes; and (2) We employ the rectified flow technique to make our model a one-step conditional diffusion model, enhancing its efficiency further while maintaining high fidelity and physical validity. Diff-PIC establishes a new paradigm for using diffusion models to overcome the computational barriers in nuclear fusion research, setting a benchmark for future innovations and advancements in this field.

Inertial Confinement Fusion Forecasting via LLMs

Controlled fusion energy is deemed pivotal for the advancement of human civilization. In this study, we introduce $\textbf{Fusion-LLM}$, a novel integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) with classical reservoir computing paradigms tailored to address challenges in Inertial Confinement Fusion ($\texttt{ICF}$). Our approach offers several key contributions: Firstly, we propose the $\textit{LLM-anchored Reservoir}$, augmented with a fusion-specific prompt, enabling accurate forecasting of hot electron dynamics during implosion. Secondly, we develop $\textit{Signal-Digesting Channels}$ to temporally and spatially describe the laser intensity across time, capturing the unique characteristics of $\texttt{ICF}$ inputs. Lastly, we design the $\textit{Confidence Scanner}$ to quantify the confidence level in forecasting, providing valuable insights for domain experts to design the $\texttt{ICF}$ process. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our method, achieving 1.90 CAE, 0.14 $\texttt{top-1}$ MAE, and 0.11 $\texttt{top-5}$ MAE in predicting Hard X-ray ($\texttt{HXR}$) energies of $\texttt{ICF}$ tasks, which presents state-of-the-art comparisons against concurrent best systems. Additionally, we present $\textbf{Fusion4AI}$, the first $\texttt{ICF}$ benchmark based on physical experiments, aimed at fostering novel ideas in plasma physics research and enhancing the utility of LLMs in scientific exploration. Overall, our work strives to forge an innovative synergy between AI and plasma science for advancing fusion energy.

Accelerating Communication in Deep Learning Recommendation Model Training with Dual-Level Adaptive Lossy Compression

DLRM is a state-of-the-art recommendation system model that has gained widespread adoption across various industry applications. The large size of DLRM models, however, necessitates the use of multiple devices/GPUs for efficient training. A significant bottleneck in this process is the time-consuming all-to-all communication required to collect embedding data from all devices. To mitigate this, we introduce a method that employs error-bounded lossy compression to reduce the communication data size and accelerate DLRM training. We develop a novel error-bounded lossy compression algorithm, informed by an in-depth analysis of embedding data features, to achieve high compression ratios. Moreover, we introduce a dual-level adaptive strategy for error-bound adjustment, spanning both table-wise and iteration-wise aspects, to balance the compression benefits with the potential impacts on accuracy. We further optimize our compressor for PyTorch tensors on GPUs, minimizing compression overhead. Evaluation shows that our method achieves a 1.38$\times$ training speedup with a minimal accuracy impact.

Prototypical Transformer as Unified Motion Learners

In this work, we introduce the Prototypical Transformer (ProtoFormer), a general and unified framework that approaches various motion tasks from a prototype perspective. ProtoFormer seamlessly integrates prototype learning with Transformer by thoughtfully considering motion dynamics, introducing two innovative designs. First, Cross-Attention Prototyping discovers prototypes based on signature motion patterns, providing transparency in understanding motion scenes. Second, Latent Synchronization guides feature representation learning via prototypes, effectively mitigating the problem of motion uncertainty. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive performance on popular motion tasks such as optical flow and scene depth. Furthermore, it exhibits generality across various downstream tasks, including object tracking and video stabilization.

Accurate and Data-Efficient Micro-XRD Phase Identification Using Multi-Task Learning: Application to Hydrothermal Fluids

Traditional analysis of highly distorted micro-X-ray diffraction ({\mu}-XRD) patterns from hydrothermal fluid environments is a time-consuming process, often requiring substantial data preprocessing and labeled experimental data. This study demonstrates the potential of deep learning with a multitask learning (MTL) architecture to overcome these limitations. We trained MTL models to identify phase information in {\mu}-XRD patterns, minimizing the need for labeled experimental data and masking preprocessing steps. Notably, MTL models showed superior accuracy compared to binary classification CNNs. Additionally, introducing a tailored cross-entropy loss function improved MTL model performance. Most significantly, MTL models tuned to analyze raw and unmasked XRD patterns achieved close performance to models analyzing preprocessed data, with minimal accuracy differences. This work indicates that advanced deep learning architectures like MTL can automate arduous data handling tasks, streamline the analysis of distorted XRD patterns, and reduce the reliance on labor-intensive experimental datasets.

Evaluating Emerging AI/ML Accelerators: IPU, RDU, and NVIDIA/AMD GPUs

The relentless advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications necessitates the development of specialized hardware accelerators capable of handling the increasing complexity and computational demands. Traditional computing architectures, based on the von Neumann model, are being outstripped by the requirements of contemporary AI/ML algorithms, leading to a surge in the creation of accelerators like the Graphcore Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU), Sambanova Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit (RDU), and enhanced GPU platforms. These hardware accelerators are characterized by their innovative data-flow architectures and other design optimizations that promise to deliver superior performance and energy efficiency for AI/ML tasks. This research provides a preliminary evaluation and comparison of these commercial AI/ML accelerators, delving into their hardware and software design features to discern their strengths and unique capabilities. By conducting a series of benchmark evaluations on common DNN operators and other AI/ML workloads, we aim to illuminate the advantages of data-flow architectures over conventional processor designs and offer insights into the performance trade-offs of each platform. The findings from our study will serve as a valuable reference for the design and performance expectations of research prototypes, thereby facilitating the development of next-generation hardware accelerators tailored for the ever-evolving landscape of AI/ML applications. Through this analysis, we aspire to contribute to the broader understanding of current accelerator technologies and to provide guidance for future innovations in the field.

ClusterFormer: Clustering As A Universal Visual Learner

This paper presents CLUSTERFORMER, a universal vision model that is based on the CLUSTERing paradigm with TransFORMER. It comprises two novel designs: 1. recurrent cross-attention clustering, which reformulates the cross-attention mechanism in Transformer and enables recursive updates of cluster centers to facilitate strong representation learning; and 2. feature dispatching, which uses the updated cluster centers to redistribute image features through similarity-based metrics, resulting in a transparent pipeline. This elegant design streamlines an explainable and transferable workflow, capable of tackling heterogeneous vision tasks (i.e., image classification, object detection, and image segmentation) with varying levels of clustering granularity (i.e., image-, box-, and pixel-level). Empirical results demonstrate that CLUSTERFORMER outperforms various well-known specialized architectures, achieving 83.41% top-1 acc. over ImageNet-1K for image classification, 54.2% and 47.0% mAP over MS COCO for object detection and instance segmentation, 52.4% mIoU over ADE20K for semantic segmentation, and 55.8% PQ over COCO Panoptic for panoptic segmentation. For its efficacy, we hope our work can catalyze a paradigm shift in universal models in computer vision.