From GPT-4 to Gemini and Beyond: Assessing the Landscape of MLLMs on Generalizability, Trustworthiness and Causality through Four Modalities

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive abilities in generating reasonable responses with respect to multi-modal contents. However, there is still a wide gap between the performance of recent MLLM-based applications and the expectation of the broad public, even though the most powerful OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini have been deployed. This paper strives to enhance understanding of the gap through the lens of a qualitative study on the generalizability, trustworthiness, and causal reasoning capabilities of recent proprietary and open-source MLLMs across four modalities: ie, text, code, image, and video, ultimately aiming to improve the transparency of MLLMs. We believe these properties are several representative factors that define the reliability of MLLMs, in supporting various downstream applications. To be specific, we evaluate the closed-source GPT-4 and Gemini and 6 open-source LLMs and MLLMs. Overall we evaluate 230 manually designed cases, where the qualitative results are then summarized into 12 scores (ie, 4 modalities times 3 properties). In total, we uncover 14 empirical findings that are useful to understand the capabilities and limitations of both proprietary and open-source MLLMs, towards more reliable downstream multi-modal applications.

FengWu-GHR: Learning the Kilometer-scale Medium-range Global Weather Forecasting

Kilometer-scale modeling of global atmosphere dynamics enables fine-grained weather forecasting and decreases the risk of disastrous weather and climate activity. Therefore, building a kilometer-scale global forecast model is a persistent pursuit in the meteorology domain. Active international efforts have been made in past decades to improve the spatial resolution of numerical weather models. Nonetheless, developing the higher resolution numerical model remains a long-standing challenge due to the substantial consumption of computational resources. Recent advances in data-driven global weather forecasting models utilize reanalysis data for model training and have demonstrated comparable or even higher forecasting skills than numerical models. However, they are all limited by the resolution of reanalysis data and incapable of generating higher-resolution forecasts. This work presents FengWu-GHR, the first data-driven global weather forecasting model running at the 0.09$^{\circ}$ horizontal resolution. FengWu-GHR introduces a novel approach that opens the door for operating ML-based high-resolution forecasts by inheriting prior knowledge from a pretrained low-resolution model. The hindcast of weather prediction in 2022 indicates that FengWu-GHR is superior to the IFS-HRES. Furthermore, evaluations on station observations and case studies of extreme events support the competitive operational forecasting skill of FengWu-GHR at the high resolution.

Observation-Guided Meteorological Field Downscaling at Station Scale: A Benchmark and a New Method

Downscaling (DS) of meteorological variables involves obtaining high-resolution states from low-resolution meteorological fields and is an important task in weather forecasting. Previous methods based on deep learning treat downscaling as a super-resolution task in computer vision and utilize high-resolution gridded meteorological fields as supervision to improve resolution at specific grid scales. However, this approach has struggled to align with the continuous distribution characteristics of meteorological fields, leading to an inherent systematic bias between the downscaled results and the actual observations at meteorological stations. In this paper, we extend meteorological downscaling to arbitrary scattered station scales, establish a brand new benchmark and dataset, and retrieve meteorological states at any given station location from a coarse-resolution meteorological field. Inspired by data assimilation techniques, we integrate observational data into the downscaling process, providing multi-scale observational priors. Building on this foundation, we propose a new downscaling model based on hypernetwork architecture, namely HyperDS, which efficiently integrates different observational information into the model training, achieving continuous scale modeling of the meteorological field. Through extensive experiments, our proposed method outperforms other specially designed baseline models on multiple surface variables. Notably, the mean squared error (MSE) for wind speed and surface pressure improved by 67% and 19.5% compared to other methods. We will release the dataset and code subsequently.

Bilateral Reference for High-Resolution Dichotomous Image Segmentation

We introduce a novel bilateral reference framework (***BiRefNet***) for high-resolution dichotomous image segmentation (DIS). It comprises two essential components: the localization module (LM) and the reconstruction module (RM) with our proposed bilateral reference (BiRef). The LM aids in object localization using global semantic information. Within the RM, we utilize BiRef for the reconstruction process, where hierarchical patches of images provide the source reference and gradient maps serve as the target reference. These components collaborate to generate the final predicted maps. We also introduce auxiliary gradient supervision to enhance focus on regions with finer details. Furthermore, we outline practical training strategies tailored for DIS to improve map quality and training process. To validate the general applicability of our approach, we conduct extensive experiments on four tasks to evince that *BiRefNet* exhibits remarkable performance, outperforming task-specific cutting-edge methods across all benchmarks.

Merging Vision Transformers from Different Tasks and Domains

This work targets to merge various Vision Transformers (ViTs) trained on different tasks (i.e., datasets with different object categories) or domains (i.e., datasets with the same categories but different environments) into one unified model, yielding still good performance on each task or domain. Previous model merging works focus on either CNNs or NLP models, leaving the ViTs merging research untouched. To fill this gap, we first explore and find that existing model merging methods cannot well handle the merging of the whole ViT models and still have improvement space. To enable the merging of the whole ViT, we propose a simple-but-effective gating network that can both merge all kinds of layers (e.g., Embedding, Norm, Attention, and MLP) and select the suitable classifier. Specifically, the gating network is trained by unlabeled datasets from all the tasks (domains), and predicts the probability of which task (domain) the input belongs to for merging the models during inference. To further boost the performance of the merged model, especially when the difficulty of merging tasks increases, we design a novel metric of model weight similarity, and utilize it to realize controllable and combined weight merging. Comprehensive experiments on kinds of newly established benchmarks, validate the superiority of the proposed ViT merging framework for different tasks and domains. Our method can even merge beyond 10 ViT models from different vision tasks with a negligible effect on the performance of each task.

Partial Fine-Tuning: A Successor to Full Fine-Tuning for Vision Transformers

Fine-tuning pre-trained foundation models has gained significant popularity in various research fields. Existing methods for fine-tuning can be roughly divided into two categories, namely Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning and High-Performance Fine-Tuning. The former aims at improving efficiency, while the latter focuses on enhancing performance. Beyond these methods, we demonstrate that Partial Fine-Tuning can be an innovative and promising direction capable of concurrently enhancing both efficiency and accuracy. We first validate eight manually-defined partial fine-tuning strategies across kinds of datasets and vision transformer architectures, and find that some partial fine-tuning strategies (e.g., ffn only or attention only) can achieve better performance with fewer tuned parameters than full fine-tuning, and selecting appropriate layers is critical to partial fine-tuning. Thus, we propose a novel fine-tuned angle metric to guide the selection of appropriate layers for partial fine-tuning, making it flexible to be adapted to various scenarios for more practicable partial fine-tuning. Additionally, we show that partial fine-tuning can serve as a new dimension for Model Soups, improving both the model performance and generalization with fewer tuned parameters. Comprehensive experiments on a wide range of datasets and models validate the great potential of partial fine-tuning.

Efficient Architecture Search via Bi-level Data Pruning

Improving the efficiency of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is a challenging but significant task that has received much attention. Previous works mainly adopted the Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) and improved its search strategies or modules to enhance search efficiency. Recently, some methods have started considering data reduction for speedup, but they are not tightly coupled with the architecture search process, resulting in sub-optimal performance. To this end, this work pioneers an exploration into the critical role of dataset characteristics for DARTS bi-level optimization, and then proposes a novel Bi-level Data Pruning (BDP) paradigm that targets the weights and architecture levels of DARTS to enhance efficiency from a data perspective. Specifically, we introduce a new progressive data pruning strategy that utilizes supernet prediction dynamics as the metric, to gradually prune unsuitable samples for DARTS during the search. An effective automatic class balance constraint is also integrated into BDP, to suppress potential class imbalances resulting from data-efficient algorithms. Comprehensive evaluations on the NAS-Bench-201 search space, DARTS search space, and MobileNet-like search space validate that BDP reduces search costs by over 50% while achieving superior performance when applied to baseline DARTS. Besides, we demonstrate that BDP can harmoniously integrate with advanced DARTS variants, like PC-DARTS and \b{eta}-DARTS, offering an approximately 2 times speedup with minimal performance compromises.

Towards an End-to-End Artificial Intelligence Driven Global Weather Forecasting System

The weather forecasting system is important for science and society, and significant achievements have been made in applying artificial intelligence (AI) to medium-range weather forecasting. However, existing AI-based weather forecasting models still rely on analysis or reanalysis products from the traditional numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems as initial conditions for making predictions, preventing them from being fully independent systems. As a crucial component of an end-to-end global weather forecasting system, data assimilation is vital in generating initial states for forecasting. In this paper, we present an AI-based data assimilation model, i.e., Adas, for global weather variables, which learns to generate the analysis from the background and sparse observations. Different from existing assimilation methods, Adas employs the gated convolution module to handle sparse observations and the gated cross-attention module for capturing the interactions between observations and background efficiently, which are guided by the confidence matrix to represent the availability and quality of observations. Then, we combine Adas with the advanced AI-based weather forecasting model (i.e., FengWu) and construct the first end-to-end AI-based global weather forecasting system: FengWu-Adas. Experiments demonstrate that Adas can assimilate the simulated global observations with the AI-generated background through a one-year simulation and generate high-quality analysis stably in a cyclic manner. Based on the generated analysis, FengWu-Adas exhibits skillful performance and outperforms the Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) in weather forecasting over seven days.

ContraNovo: A Contrastive Learning Approach to Enhance De Novo Peptide Sequencing

De novo peptide sequencing from mass spectrometry (MS) data is a critical task in proteomics research. Traditional de novo algorithms have encountered a bottleneck in accuracy due to the inherent complexity of proteomics data. While deep learning-based methods have shown progress, they reduce the problem to a translation task, potentially overlooking critical nuances between spectra and peptides. In our research, we present ContraNovo, a pioneering algorithm that leverages contrastive learning to extract the relationship between spectra and peptides and incorporates the mass information into peptide decoding, aiming to address these intricacies more efficiently. Through rigorous evaluations on two benchmark datasets, ContraNovo consistently outshines contemporary state-of-the-art solutions, underscoring its promising potential in enhancing de novo peptide sequencing. The source code is available at https://github.com/BEAM-Labs/ContraNovo.

ResoNet: Robust and Explainable ENSO Forecasts with Hybrid Convolution and Transformer Networks

Recent studies have shown that deep learning (DL) models can skillfully predict the El Ni\~no-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) forecasts over 1.5 years ahead. However, concerns regarding the reliability of predictions made by DL methods persist, including potential overfitting issues and lack of interpretability. Here, we propose ResoNet, a DL model that combines convolutional neural network (CNN) and Transformer architectures. This hybrid architecture design enables our model to adequately capture local SSTA as well as long-range inter-basin interactions across oceans. We show that ResoNet can robustly predict ESNO at lead times between 19 and 26 months, thus outperforming existing approaches in terms of the forecast horizon. According to an explainability method applied to ResoNet predictions of El Ni\~no and La Ni\~na events from 1- to 18-month lead, we find that it predicts the Ni\~no3.4 index based on multiple physically reasonable mechanisms, such as the Recharge Oscillator concept, Seasonal Footprint Mechanism, and Indian Ocean capacitor effect. Moreover, we demonstrate that for the first time, the asymmetry between El Ni\~no and La Ni\~na development can be captured by ResoNet. Our results could help alleviate skepticism about applying DL models for ENSO prediction and encourage more attempts to discover and predict climate phenomena using AI methods.