Joint Salient Object Detection and Camouflaged Object Detection via Uncertainty-aware Learning

Salient objects attract human attention and usually stand out clearly from their surroundings. In contrast, camouflaged objects share similar colors or textures with the environment. In this case, salient objects are typically non-camouflaged, and camouflaged objects are usually not salient. Due to this inherent contradictory attribute, we introduce an uncertainty-aware learning pipeline to extensively explore the contradictory information of salient object detection (SOD) and camouflaged object detection (COD) via data-level and task-wise contradiction modeling. We first exploit the dataset correlation of these two tasks and claim that the easy samples in the COD dataset can serve as hard samples for SOD to improve the robustness of the SOD model. Based on the assumption that these two models should lead to activation maps highlighting different regions of the same input image, we further introduce a contrastive module with a joint-task contrastive learning framework to explicitly model the contradictory attributes of these two tasks. Different from conventional intra-task contrastive learning for unsupervised representation learning, our contrastive module is designed to model the task-wise correlation, leading to cross-task representation learning. To better understand the two tasks from the perspective of uncertainty, we extensively investigate the uncertainty estimation techniques for modeling the main uncertainties of the two tasks, namely task uncertainty (for SOD) and data uncertainty (for COD), and aiming to effectively estimate the challenging regions for each task to achieve difficulty-aware learning. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our solution leads to both state-of-the-art performance and informative uncertainty estimation.

Monte Carlo Sampling without Isoperimetry: A Reverse Diffusion Approach

The efficacy of modern generative models is commonly contingent upon the precision of score estimation along the diffusion path, with a focus on diffusion models and their ability to generate high-quality data samples. This study delves into the potentialities of posterior sampling through reverse diffusion. An examination of the sampling literature reveals that score estimation can be transformed into a mean estimation problem via the decomposition of the transition kernel. By estimating the mean of the auxiliary distribution, the reverse diffusion process can give rise to a novel posterior sampling algorithm, which diverges from traditional gradient-based Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. We provide the convergence analysis in total variation distance and demonstrate that the isoperimetric dependency of the proposed algorithm is comparatively lower than that observed in conventional MCMC techniques, which justifies the superior performance for high dimensional sampling with error tolerance. Our analytical framework offers fresh perspectives on the complexity of score estimation at various time points, as denoted by the properties of the auxiliary distribution.

LMFlow: An Extensible Toolkit for Finetuning and Inference of Large Foundation Models

Large foundation models have demonstrated a great ability to achieve general human-level intelligence far beyond traditional approaches. As the technique keeps attracting attention from the AI community, more and more large foundation models have become publically available. However, most of those models exhibit a major deficiency in specialized-task applications, where the step of finetuning is still required for obtaining satisfactory performance. As the number of available models and specialized tasks keeps growing, the job of general finetuning becomes highly nontrivial. In this paper, we take the first step to address this issue. We introduce an extensible and lightweight toolkit, LMFlow, which aims to simplify the finetuning and inference of general large foundation models. LMFlow offers a complete finetuning workflow for a large foundation model to support personalized training with limited computing resources. Furthermore, it supports continuous pretraining, instruction tuning, parameter-efficient finetuning, alignment tuning, and large model inference, along with carefully designed and extensible APIs. This toolkit has been thoroughly tested and is available at https://github.com/OptimalScale/LMFlow.

Structure-Sensitive Graph Dictionary Embedding for Graph Classification

Graph structure expression plays a vital role in distinguishing various graphs. In this work, we propose a Structure-Sensitive Graph Dictionary Embedding (SS-GDE) framework to transform input graphs into the embedding space of a graph dictionary for the graph classification task. Instead of a plain use of a base graph dictionary, we propose the variational graph dictionary adaptation (VGDA) to generate a personalized dictionary (named adapted graph dictionary) for catering to each input graph. In particular, for the adaptation, the Bernoulli sampling is introduced to adjust substructures of base graph keys according to each input, which increases the expression capacity of the base dictionary tremendously. To make cross-graph measurement sensitive as well as stable, multi-sensitivity Wasserstein encoding is proposed to produce the embeddings by designing multi-scale attention on optimal transport. To optimize the framework, we introduce mutual information as the objective, which further deduces to variational inference of the adapted graph dictionary. We perform our SS-GDE on multiple datasets of graph classification, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority over the state-of-the-art methods.

A Universal Semantic-Geometric Representation for Robotic Manipulation

Robots rely heavily on sensors, especially RGB and depth cameras, to perceive and interact with the world. RGB cameras record 2D images with rich semantic information while missing precise spatial information. On the other side, depth cameras offer critical 3D geometry data but capture limited semantics. Therefore, integrating both modalities is crucial for learning representations for robotic perception and control. However, current research predominantly focuses on only one of these modalities, neglecting the benefits of incorporating both. To this end, we present Semantic-Geometric Representation (SGR), a universal perception module for robotics that leverages the rich semantic information of large-scale pre-trained 2D models and inherits the merits of 3D spatial reasoning. Our experiments demonstrate that SGR empowers the agent to successfully complete a diverse range of simulated and real-world robotic manipulation tasks, outperforming state-of-the-art methods significantly in both single-task and multi-task settings. Furthermore, SGR possesses the unique capability to generalize to novel semantic attributes, setting it apart from the other methods.

Dual Adaptive Representation Alignment for Cross-domain Few-shot Learning

Few-shot learning aims to recognize novel queries with limited support samples by learning from base knowledge. Recent progress in this setting assumes that the base knowledge and novel query samples are distributed in the same domains, which are usually infeasible for realistic applications. Toward this issue, we propose to address the cross-domain few-shot learning problem where only extremely few samples are available in target domains. Under this realistic setting, we focus on the fast adaptation capability of meta-learners by proposing an effective dual adaptive representation alignment approach. In our approach, a prototypical feature alignment is first proposed to recalibrate support instances as prototypes and reproject these prototypes with a differentiable closed-form solution. Therefore feature spaces of learned knowledge can be adaptively transformed to query spaces by the cross-instance and cross-prototype relations. Besides the feature alignment, we further present a normalized distribution alignment module, which exploits prior statistics of query samples for solving the covariant shifts among the support and query samples. With these two modules, a progressive meta-learning framework is constructed to perform the fast adaptation with extremely few-shot samples while maintaining its generalization capabilities. Experimental evidence demonstrates our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results on 4 CDFSL benchmarks and 4 fine-grained cross-domain benchmarks.

Customizing General-Purpose Foundation Models for Medical Report Generation

Medical caption prediction which can be regarded as a task of medical report generation (MRG), requires the automatic generation of coherent and accurate captions for the given medical images. However, the scarcity of labelled medical image-report pairs presents great challenges in the development of deep and large-scale neural networks capable of harnessing the potential artificial general intelligence power like large language models (LLMs). In this work, we propose customizing off-the-shelf general-purpose large-scale pre-trained models, i.e., foundation models (FMs), in computer vision and natural language processing with a specific focus on medical report generation. Specifically, following BLIP-2, a state-of-the-art vision-language pre-training approach, we introduce our encoder-decoder-based MRG model. This model utilizes a lightweight query Transformer to connect two FMs: the giant vision Transformer EVA-ViT-g and a bilingual LLM trained to align with human intentions (referred to as ChatGLM-6B). Furthermore, we conduct ablative experiments on the trainable components of the model to identify the crucial factors for effective transfer learning. Our findings demonstrate that unfreezing EVA-ViT-g to learn medical image representations, followed by parameter-efficient training of ChatGLM-6B to capture the writing styles of medical reports, is essential for achieving optimal results. Our best attempt (PCLmed Team) achieved the 4th and the 2nd, respectively, out of 13 participating teams, based on the BERTScore and ROUGE-1 metrics, in the ImageCLEFmedical Caption 2023 Caption Prediction Task competition.

Mixture-of-Domain-Adapters: Decoupling and Injecting Domain Knowledge to Pre-trained Language Models Memories

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) demonstrate excellent abilities to understand texts in the generic domain while struggling in a specific domain. Although continued pre-training on a large domain-specific corpus is effective, it is costly to tune all the parameters on the domain. In this paper, we investigate whether we can adapt PLMs both effectively and efficiently by only tuning a few parameters. Specifically, we decouple the feed-forward networks (FFNs) of the Transformer architecture into two parts: the original pre-trained FFNs to maintain the old-domain knowledge and our novel domain-specific adapters to inject domain-specific knowledge in parallel. Then we adopt a mixture-of-adapters gate to fuse the knowledge from different domain adapters dynamically. Our proposed Mixture-of-Domain-Adapters (MixDA) employs a two-stage adapter-tuning strategy that leverages both unlabeled data and labeled data to help the domain adaptation: i) domain-specific adapter on unlabeled data; followed by ii) the task-specific adapter on labeled data. MixDA can be seamlessly plugged into the pretraining-finetuning paradigm and our experiments demonstrate that MixDA achieves superior performance on in-domain tasks (GLUE), out-of-domain tasks (ChemProt, RCT, IMDB, Amazon), and knowledge-intensive tasks (KILT). Further analyses demonstrate the reliability, scalability, and efficiency of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/Amano-Aki/Mixture-of-Domain-Adapters.

What is Essential for Unseen Goal Generalization of Offline Goal-conditioned RL?

Offline goal-conditioned RL (GCRL) offers a way to train general-purpose agents from fully offline datasets. In addition to being conservative within the dataset, the generalization ability to achieve unseen goals is another fundamental challenge for offline GCRL. However, to the best of our knowledge, this problem has not been well studied yet. In this paper, we study out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization of offline GCRL both theoretically and empirically to identify factors that are important. In a number of experiments, we observe that weighted imitation learning enjoys better generalization than pessimism-based offline RL method. Based on this insight, we derive a theory for OOD generalization, which characterizes several important design choices. We then propose a new offline GCRL method, Generalizable Offline goAl-condiTioned RL (GOAT), by combining the findings from our theoretical and empirical studies. On a new benchmark containing 9 independent identically distributed (IID) tasks and 17 OOD tasks, GOAT outperforms current state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.

Inconsistency, Instability, and Generalization Gap of Deep Neural Network Training

As deep neural networks are highly expressive, it is important to find solutions with small generalization gap (the difference between the performance on the training data and unseen data). Focusing on the stochastic nature of training, we first present a theoretical analysis in which the bound of generalization gap depends on what we call inconsistency and instability of model outputs, which can be estimated on unlabeled data. Our empirical study based on this analysis shows that instability and inconsistency are strongly predictive of generalization gap in various settings. In particular, our finding indicates that inconsistency is a more reliable indicator of generalization gap than the sharpness of the loss landscape. Furthermore, we show that algorithmic reduction of inconsistency leads to superior performance. The results also provide a theoretical basis for existing methods such as co-distillation and ensemble.