Improving In-Context Learning with Reasoning Distillation

Language models rely on semantic priors to perform in-context learning, which leads to poor performance on tasks involving inductive reasoning. Instruction-tuning methods based on imitation learning can superficially enhance the in-context learning performance of language models, but they often fail to improve the model's understanding of the underlying rules that connect inputs and outputs in few-shot demonstrations. We propose ReDis, a reasoning distillation technique designed to improve the inductive reasoning capabilities of language models. Through a careful combination of data augmentation, filtering, supervised fine-tuning, and alignment, ReDis achieves significant performance improvements across a diverse range of tasks, including 1D-ARC, List Function, ACRE, and MiniSCAN. Experiments on three language model backbones show that ReDis outperforms equivalent few-shot prompting baselines across all tasks and even surpasses the teacher model, GPT-4o, in some cases. ReDis, based on the LLaMA-3 backbone, achieves relative improvements of 23.2%, 2.8%, and 66.6% over GPT-4o on 1D-ARC, ACRE, and MiniSCAN, respectively, within a similar hypothesis search space. The code, dataset, and model checkpoints will be made available at https://github.com/NafisSadeq/reasoning-distillation.git.

Using machine learning method for variable star classification using the TESS Sectors 1-57 data

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is a wide-field all-sky survey mission designed to detect Earth-sized exoplanets. After over four years photometric surveys, data from sectors 1-57, including approximately 1,050,000 light curves with a 2-minute cadence, were collected. By cross-matching the data with Gaia's variable star catalogue, we obtained labeled datasets for further analysis. Using a random forest classifier, we performed classification of variable stars and designed distinct classification processes for each subclass, 6770 EA, 2971 EW, 980 CEP, 8347 DSCT, 457 RRab, 404 RRc and 12348 ROT were identified. Each variable star was visually inspected to ensure the reliability and accuracy of the compiled catalog. Subsequently, we ultimately obtained 6046 EA, 3859 EW, 2058 CEP, 8434 DSCT, 482 RRab, 416 RRc, and 9694 ROT, and a total of 14092 new variable stars were discovered.

OccludeNeRF: Geometric-aware 3D Scene Inpainting with Collaborative Score Distillation in NeRF

With Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) arising as a powerful 3D representation, research has investigated its various downstream tasks, including inpainting NeRFs with 2D images. Despite successful efforts addressing the view consistency and geometry quality, prior methods yet suffer from occlusion in NeRF inpainting tasks, where 2D prior is severely limited in forming a faithful reconstruction of the scene to inpaint. To address this, we propose a novel approach that enables cross-view information sharing during knowledge distillation from a diffusion model, effectively propagating occluded information across limited views. Additionally, to align the distillation direction across multiple sampled views, we apply a grid-based denoising strategy and incorporate additional rendered views to enhance cross-view consistency. To assess our approach's capability of handling occlusion cases, we construct a dataset consisting of challenging scenes with severe occlusion, in addition to existing datasets. Compared with baseline methods, our method demonstrates better performance in cross-view consistency and faithfulness in reconstruction, while preserving high rendering quality and fidelity.

TD-BFR: Truncated Diffusion Model for Efficient Blind Face Restoration

Diffusion-based methodologies have shown significant potential in blind face restoration (BFR), leveraging their robust generative capabilities. However, they are often criticized for two significant problems: 1) slow training and inference speed, and 2) inadequate recovery of fine-grained facial details. To address these problems, we propose a novel Truncated Diffusion model for efficient Blind Face Restoration (TD-BFR), a three-stage paradigm tailored for the progressive resolution of degraded images. Specifically, TD-BFR utilizes an innovative truncated sampling method, starting from low-quality (LQ) images at low resolution to enhance sampling speed, and then introduces an adaptive degradation removal module to handle unknown degradations and connect the generation processes across different resolutions. Additionally, we further adapt the priors of pre-trained diffusion models to recover rich facial details. Our method efficiently restores high-quality images in a coarse-to-fine manner and experimental results demonstrate that TD-BFR is, on average, \textbf{4.75$\times$} faster than current state-of-the-art diffusion-based BFR methods while maintaining competitive quality.

Gradient-guided Attention Map Editing: Towards Efficient Contextual Hallucination Mitigation

In tasks like summarization and open-book question answering (QA), Large Language Models (LLMs) often encounter "contextual hallucination", where they produce irrelevant or incorrect responses despite having access to accurate source information. This typically occurs because these models tend to prioritize self-generated content over the input context, causing them to disregard pertinent details. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel method called "Guided Attention Map Editing" (GAME), which dynamically adjusts attention maps to improve contextual relevance. During inference, GAME employs a trained classifier to identify attention maps prone to inducing hallucinations and executes targeted interventions. These interventions, guided by gradient-informed "edit directions'', strategically redistribute attention weights across various heads to effectively reduce hallucination. Comprehensive evaluations on challenging summarization and open-book QA tasks show that GAME consistently reduces hallucinations across a variety of open-source models. Specifically, GAME reduces hallucinations by 10% in the XSum summarization task while achieving a 7X speed-up in computational efficiency compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.

Learning to Search Effective Example Sequences for In-Context Learning

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive few-shot learning capabilities, but their performance varies widely based on the sequence of in-context examples. Key factors influencing this include the sequence's length, composition, and arrangement, as well as its relation to the specific query. Existing methods often tackle these factors in isolation, overlooking their interdependencies. Moreover, the extensive search space for selecting optimal sequences complicates the development of a holistic approach. In this work, we introduce Beam Search-based Example Sequence Constructor (BESC), a novel method for learning to construct optimal example sequences. BESC addresses all key factors involved in sequence selection by considering them jointly during inference, while incrementally building the sequence. This design enables the use of beam search to significantly reduce the complexity of the search space. Experiments across various datasets and language models show notable improvements in performance.

PTDiffusion: Free Lunch for Generating Optical Illusion Hidden Pictures with Phase-Transferred Diffusion Model

Optical illusion hidden picture is an interesting visual perceptual phenomenon where an image is cleverly integrated into another picture in a way that is not immediately obvious to the viewer. Established on the off-the-shelf text-to-image (T2I) diffusion model, we propose a novel training-free text-guided image-to-image (I2I) translation framework dubbed as \textbf{P}hase-\textbf{T}ransferred \textbf{Diffusion} Model (PTDiffusion) for hidden art syntheses. PTDiffusion embeds an input reference image into arbitrary scenes as described by the text prompts, while exhibiting hidden visual cues of the reference image. At the heart of our method is a plug-and-play phase transfer mechanism that dynamically and progressively transplants diffusion features' phase spectrum from the denoising process to reconstruct the reference image into the one to sample the generated illusion image, realizing harmonious fusion of the reference structural information and the textual semantic information. Furthermore, we propose asynchronous phase transfer to enable flexible control to the degree of hidden content discernability. Our method bypasses any model training and fine-tuning, all while substantially outperforming related methods in image quality, text fidelity, visual discernibility, and contextual naturalness for illusion picture synthesis, as demonstrated by extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments.

RefSAM3D: Adapting SAM with Cross-modal Reference for 3D Medical Image Segmentation

The Segment Anything Model (SAM), originally built on a 2D Vision Transformer (ViT), excels at capturing global patterns in 2D natural images but struggles with 3D medical imaging modalities like CT and MRI. These modalities require capturing spatial information in volumetric space for tasks such as organ segmentation and tumor quantification. To address this challenge, we introduce RefSAM3D, which adapts SAM for 3D medical imaging by incorporating a 3D image adapter and cross-modal reference prompt generation. Our approach modifies the visual encoder to handle 3D inputs and enhances the mask decoder for direct 3D mask generation. We also integrate textual prompts to improve segmentation accuracy and consistency in complex anatomical scenarios. By employing a hierarchical attention mechanism, our model effectively captures and integrates information across different scales. Extensive evaluations on multiple medical imaging datasets demonstrate the superior performance of RefSAM3D over state-of-the-art methods. Our contributions advance the application of SAM in accurately segmenting complex anatomical structures in medical imaging.

Predicting Long-Term Allograft Survival in Liver Transplant Recipients

Liver allograft failure occurs in approximately 20% of liver transplant recipients within five years post-transplant, leading to mortality or the need for retransplantation. Providing an accurate and interpretable model for individualized risk estimation of graft failure is essential for improving post-transplant care. To this end, we introduce the Model for Allograft Survival (MAS), a simple linear risk score that outperforms other advanced survival models. Using longitudinal patient follow-up data from the United States (U.S.), we develop our models on 82,959 liver transplant recipients and conduct multi-site evaluations on 11 regions. Additionally, by testing on a separate non-U.S. cohort, we explore the out-of-distribution generalization performance of various models without additional fine-tuning, a crucial property for clinical deployment. We find that the most complex models are also the ones most vulnerable to distribution shifts despite achieving the best in-distribution performance. Our findings not only provide a strong risk score for predicting long-term graft failure but also suggest that the routine machine learning pipeline with only in-distribution held-out validation could create harmful consequences for patients at deployment.

FBSDiff: Plug-and-Play Frequency Band Substitution of Diffusion Features for Highly Controllable Text-Driven Image Translation

Large-scale text-to-image diffusion models have been a revolutionary milestone in the evolution of generative AI and multimodal technology, allowing wonderful image generation with natural-language text prompt. However, the issue of lacking controllability of such models restricts their practical applicability for real-life content creation. Thus, attention has been focused on leveraging a reference image to control text-to-image synthesis, which is also regarded as manipulating (or editing) a reference image as per a text prompt, namely, text-driven image-to-image translation. This paper contributes a novel, concise, and efficient approach that adapts pre-trained large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion model to the image-to-image (I2I) paradigm in a plug-and-play manner, realizing high-quality and versatile text-driven I2I translation without any model training, model fine-tuning, or online optimization process. To guide T2I generation with a reference image, we propose to decompose diverse guiding factors with different frequency bands of diffusion features in the DCT spectral space, and accordingly devise a novel frequency band substitution layer which realizes dynamic control of the reference image to the T2I generation result in a plug-and-play manner. We demonstrate that our method allows flexible control over both guiding factor and guiding intensity of the reference image simply by tuning the type and bandwidth of the substituted frequency band, respectively. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments verify superiority of our approach over related methods in I2I translation visual quality, versatility, and controllability. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/XiangGao1102/FBSDiff.