QuadraNet: Improving High-Order Neural Interaction Efficiency with Hardware-Aware Quadratic Neural Networks

Recent progress in computer vision-oriented neural network designs is mostly driven by capturing high-order neural interactions among inputs and features. And there emerged a variety of approaches to accomplish this, such as Transformers and its variants. However, these interactions generate a large amount of intermediate state and/or strong data dependency, leading to considerable memory consumption and computing cost, and therefore compromising the overall runtime performance. To address this challenge, we rethink the high-order interactive neural network design with a quadratic computing approach. Specifically, we propose QuadraNet -- a comprehensive model design methodology from neuron reconstruction to structural block and eventually to the overall neural network implementation. Leveraging quadratic neurons' intrinsic high-order advantages and dedicated computation optimization schemes, QuadraNet could effectively achieve optimal cognition and computation performance. Incorporating state-of-the-art hardware-aware neural architecture search and system integration techniques, QuadraNet could also be well generalized in different hardware constraint settings and deployment scenarios. The experiment shows thatQuadraNet achieves up to 1.5$\times$ throughput, 30% less memory footprint, and similar cognition performance, compared with the state-of-the-art high-order approaches.

Spatially Covariant Image Registration with Text Prompts

Medical images are often characterized by their structured anatomical representations and spatially inhomogeneous contrasts. Leveraging anatomical priors in neural networks can greatly enhance their utility in resource-constrained clinical settings. Prior research has harnessed such information for image segmentation, yet progress in deformable image registration has been modest. Our work introduces textSCF, a novel method that integrates spatially covariant filters and textual anatomical prompts encoded by visual-language models, to fill this gap. This approach optimizes an implicit function that correlates text embeddings of anatomical regions to filter weights, relaxing the typical translation-invariance constraint of convolutional operations. TextSCF not only boosts computational efficiency but can also retain or improve registration accuracy. By capturing the contextual interplay between anatomical regions, it offers impressive inter-regional transferability and the ability to preserve structural discontinuities during registration. TextSCF's performance has been rigorously tested on inter-subject brain MRI and abdominal CT registration tasks, outperforming existing state-of-the-art models in the MICCAI Learn2Reg 2021 challenge and leading the leaderboard. In abdominal registrations, textSCF's larger model variant improved the Dice score by 11.3% over the second-best model, while its smaller variant maintained similar accuracy but with an 89.13% reduction in network parameters and a 98.34\% decrease in computational operations.

HiFi-Syn: Hierarchical Granularity Discrimination for High-Fidelity Synthesis of MR Images with Structure Preservation

Synthesizing medical images while preserving their structural information is crucial in medical research. In such scenarios, the preservation of anatomical content becomes especially important. Although recent advances have been made by incorporating instance-level information to guide translation, these methods overlook the spatial coherence of structural-level representation and the anatomical invariance of content during translation. To address these issues, we introduce hierarchical granularity discrimination, which exploits various levels of semantic information present in medical images. Our strategy utilizes three levels of discrimination granularity: pixel-level discrimination using a Brain Memory Bank, structure-level discrimination on each brain structure with a re-weighting strategy to focus on hard samples, and global-level discrimination to ensure anatomical consistency during translation. The image translation performance of our strategy has been evaluated on three independent datasets (UK Biobank, IXI, and BraTS 2018), and it has outperformed state-of-the-art algorithms. Particularly, our model excels not only in synthesizing normal structures but also in handling abnormal (pathological) structures, such as brain tumors, despite the variations in contrast observed across different imaging modalities due to their pathological characteristics. The diagnostic value of synthesized MR images containing brain tumors has been evaluated by radiologists. This indicates that our model may offer an alternative solution in scenarios where specific MR modalities of patients are unavailable. Extensive experiments further demonstrate the versatility of our method, providing unique insights into medical image translation.

Decentralized Personalized Online Federated Learning

Vanilla federated learning does not support learning in an online environment, learning a personalized model on each client, and learning in a decentralized setting. There are existing methods extending federated learning in each of the three aspects. However, some important applications on enterprise edge servers (e.g. online item recommendation at global scale) involve the three aspects at the same time. Therefore, we propose a new learning setting \textit{Decentralized Personalized Online Federated Learning} that considers all the three aspects at the same time. In this new setting for learning, the first technical challenge is how to aggregate the shared model parameters from neighboring clients to obtain a personalized local model with good performance on each client. We propose to directly learn an aggregation by optimizing the performance of the local model with respect to the aggregation weights. This not only improves personalization of each local model but also helps the local model adapting to potential data shift by intelligently incorporating the right amount of information from its neighbors. The second challenge is how to select the neighbors for each client. We propose a peer selection method based on the learned aggregation weights enabling each client to select the most helpful neighbors and reduce communication cost at the same time. We verify the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed method on three real-world item recommendation datasets and one air quality prediction dataset.

Foundation Model Based Native AI Framework in 6G with Cloud-Edge-End Collaboration

Future wireless communication networks are in a position to move beyond data-centric, device-oriented connectivity and offer intelligent, immersive experiences based on task-oriented connections, especially in the context of the thriving development of pre-trained foundation models (PFM) and the evolving vision of 6G native artificial intelligence (AI). Therefore, redefining modes of collaboration between devices and servers and constructing native intelligence libraries become critically important in 6G. In this paper, we analyze the challenges of achieving 6G native AI from the perspectives of data, intelligence, and networks. Then, we propose a 6G native AI framework based on foundation models, provide a customization approach for intent-aware PFM, present a construction of a task-oriented AI toolkit, and outline a novel cloud-edge-end collaboration paradigm. As a practical use case, we apply this framework for orchestration, achieving the maximum sum rate within a wireless communication system, and presenting preliminary evaluation results. Finally, we outline research directions for achieving native AI in 6G.

A Comprehensive Evaluation of Constrained Text Generation for Large Language Models

Advancements in natural language generation (NLG) and large language models (LLMs) have led to proficient text generation in various tasks. However, integrating intricate constraints into neural text generation, due to LLMs' opacity, remains challenging. This study investigates constrained text generation for LLMs, where predefined constraints are applied during LLM's generation process. Our research examines multiple LLMs, including ChatGPT and GPT-4, categorizing constraints into lexical, structural, and relation-based types. We also present various benchmarks to facilitate fair evaluation. The study addresses some key research questions, including the extent of LLMs' compliance with constraints. Results illuminate LLMs' capacity and deficiency to incorporate constraints and provide insights for future developments in constrained text generation. Codes and datasets will be released upon acceptance.

ToolChain*: Efficient Action Space Navigation in Large Language Models with A* Search

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful decision-making and planning capabilities in solving complicated real-world problems. LLM-based autonomous agents can interact with diverse tools (e.g., functional APIs) and generate solution plans that execute a series of API function calls in a step-by-step manner. The multitude of candidate API function calls significantly expands the action space, amplifying the critical need for efficient action space navigation. However, existing methods either struggle with unidirectional exploration in expansive action spaces, trapped into a locally optimal solution, or suffer from exhaustively traversing all potential actions, causing inefficient navigation. To address these issues, we propose ToolChain*, an efficient tree search-based planning algorithm for LLM-based agents. It formulates the entire action space as a decision tree, where each node represents a possible API function call involved in a solution plan. By incorporating the A* search algorithm with task-specific cost function design, it efficiently prunes high-cost branches that may involve incorrect actions, identifying the most low-cost valid path as the solution. Extensive experiments on multiple tool-use and reasoning tasks demonstrate that ToolChain* efficiently balances exploration and exploitation within an expansive action space. It outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on planning and reasoning tasks by 3.1% and 3.5% on average while requiring 7.35x and 2.31x less time, respectively.

Unveiling the Siren's Song: Towards Reliable Fact-Conflicting Hallucination Detection

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT/GPT-4, have garnered widespread attention owing to their myriad of practical applications, yet their adoption has been constrained by issues of fact-conflicting hallucinations across web platforms. The assessment of factuality in text, produced by LLMs, remains inadequately explored, extending not only to the judgment of vanilla facts but also encompassing the evaluation of factual errors emerging in complex inferential tasks like multi-hop, and etc. In response, we introduce FactCHD, a fact-conflicting hallucination detection benchmark meticulously designed for LLMs. Functioning as a pivotal tool in evaluating factuality within "Query-Respons" contexts, our benchmark assimilates a large-scale dataset, encapsulating a broad spectrum of factuality patterns, such as vanilla, multi-hops, comparison, and set-operation patterns. A distinctive feature of our benchmark is its incorporation of fact-based chains of evidence, thereby facilitating comprehensive and conducive factual reasoning throughout the assessment process. We evaluate multiple LLMs, demonstrating the effectiveness of the benchmark and current methods fall short of faithfully detecting factual errors. Furthermore, we present TRUTH-TRIANGULATOR that synthesizes reflective considerations by tool-enhanced ChatGPT and LoRA-tuning based on Llama2, aiming to yield more credible detection through the amalgamation of predictive results and evidence. The benchmark dataset and source code will be made available in https://github.com/zjunlp/FactCHD.

WikiIns: A High-Quality Dataset for Controlled Text Editing by Natural Language Instruction

Text editing, i.e., the process of modifying or manipulating text, is a crucial step in human writing process. In this paper, we study the problem of controlled text editing by natural language instruction. According to a given instruction that conveys the edit intention and necessary information, an original draft text is required to be revised into a target text. Existing automatically constructed datasets for this task are limited because they do not have informative natural language instruction. The informativeness requires the information contained in the instruction to be enough to produce the revised text. To address this limitation, we build and release WikiIns, a high-quality controlled text editing dataset with improved informativeness. We first preprocess the Wikipedia edit history database to extract the raw data (WikiIns-Raw). Then we crowdsource high-quality validation and test sets, as well as a small-scale training set (WikiIns-Gold). With the high-quality annotated dataset, we further propose automatic approaches to generate a large-scale ``silver'' training set (WikiIns-Silver). Finally, we provide some insightful analysis on our WikiIns dataset, including the evaluation results and the edit intention analysis. Our analysis and the experiment results on WikiIns may assist the ongoing research on text editing. The dataset, source code and annotation guideline are available at https://github.com/CasparSwift/WikiIns.

Towards Unified Deep Image Deraining: A Survey and A New Benchmark

Recent years have witnessed significant advances in image deraining due to the kinds of effective image priors and deep learning models. As each deraining approach has individual settings (e.g., training and test datasets, evaluation criteria), how to fairly evaluate existing approaches comprehensively is not a trivial task. Although existing surveys aim to review of image deraining approaches comprehensively, few of them focus on providing unify evaluation settings to examine the deraining capability and practicality evaluation. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of existing image deraining method and provide a unify evaluation setting to evaluate the performance of image deraining methods. We construct a new high-quality benchmark named HQ-RAIN to further conduct extensive evaluation, consisting of 5,000 paired high-resolution synthetic images with higher harmony and realism. We also discuss the existing challenges and highlight several future research opportunities worth exploring. To facilitate the reproduction and tracking of the latest deraining technologies for general users, we build an online platform to provide the off-the-shelf toolkit, involving the large-scale performance evaluation. This online platform and the proposed new benchmark are publicly available and will be regularly updated at http://www.deraining.tech/.