WebCPM: Interactive Web Search for Chinese Long-form Question Answering

Long-form question answering (LFQA) aims at answering complex, open-ended questions with detailed, paragraph-length responses. The de facto paradigm of LFQA necessitates two procedures: information retrieval, which searches for relevant supporting facts, and information synthesis, which integrates these facts into a coherent answer. In this paper, we introduce WebCPM, the first Chinese LFQA dataset. One unique feature of WebCPM is that its information retrieval is based on interactive web search, which engages with a search engine in real time. Following WebGPT, we develop a web search interface. We recruit annotators to search for relevant information using our interface and then answer questions. Meanwhile, the web search behaviors of our annotators would be recorded. In total, we collect 5,500 high-quality question-answer pairs, together with 14,315 supporting facts and 121,330 web search actions. We fine-tune pre-trained language models to imitate human behaviors for web search and to generate answers based on the collected facts. Our LFQA pipeline, built on these fine-tuned models, generates answers that are no worse than human-written ones in 32.5% and 47.5% of the cases on our dataset and DuReader, respectively.

Efficient Cross-Lingual Transfer for Chinese Stable Diffusion with Images as Pivots

Diffusion models have made impressive progress in text-to-image synthesis. However, training such large-scale models (e.g. Stable Diffusion), from scratch requires high computational costs and massive high-quality text-image pairs, which becomes unaffordable in other languages. To handle this challenge, we propose IAP, a simple but effective method to transfer English Stable Diffusion into Chinese. IAP optimizes only a separate Chinese text encoder with all other parameters fixed to align Chinese semantics space to the English one in CLIP. To achieve this, we innovatively treat images as pivots and minimize the distance of attentive features produced from cross-attention between images and each language respectively. In this way, IAP establishes connections of Chinese, English and visual semantics in CLIP's embedding space efficiently, advancing the quality of the generated image with direct Chinese prompts. Experimental results show that our method outperforms several strong Chinese diffusion models with only 5%~10% training data.

DualGenerator: Information Interaction-based Generative Network for Point Cloud Completion

Point cloud completion estimates complete shapes from incomplete point clouds to obtain higher-quality point cloud data. Most existing methods only consider global object features, ignoring spatial and semantic information of adjacent points. They cannot distinguish structural information well between different object parts, and the robustness of models is poor. To tackle these challenges, we propose an information interaction-based generative network for point cloud completion ($\mathbf{DualGenerator}$). It contains an adversarial generation path and a variational generation path, which interact with each other and share weights. DualGenerator introduces a local refinement module in generation paths, which captures general structures from partial inputs, and then refines shape details of the point cloud. It promotes completion in the unknown region and makes a distinction between different parts more obvious. Moreover, we design DGStyleGAN to improve the generation quality further. It promotes the robustness of this network combined with fusion analysis of dual-path completion results. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our method is superior on MVP and Completion3D datasets. The performance will not degrade significantly after adding noise interference or sparse sampling.

Recyclable Tuning for Continual Pre-training

Continual pre-training is the paradigm where pre-trained language models (PLMs) continually acquire fresh knowledge from growing data and gradually get upgraded. Before an upgraded PLM is released, we may have tuned the original PLM for various tasks and stored the adapted weights. However, when tuning the upgraded PLM, these outdated adapted weights will typically be ignored and discarded, causing a potential waste of resources. We bring this issue to the forefront and contend that proper algorithms for recycling outdated adapted weights should be developed. To this end, we formulate the task of recyclable tuning for continual pre-training. In pilot studies, we find that after continual pre-training, the upgraded PLM remains compatible with the outdated adapted weights to some extent. Motivated by this finding, we analyze the connection between continually pre-trained PLMs from two novel aspects, i.e., mode connectivity, and functional similarity. Based on the corresponding findings, we propose both an initialization-based method and a distillation-based method for our task. We demonstrate their feasibility in improving the convergence and performance for tuning the upgraded PLM. We also show that both methods can be combined to achieve better performance. The source codes are publicly available at https://github.com/thunlp/RecyclableTuning.

Efficient and Degree-Guided Graph Generation via Discrete Diffusion Modeling

Diffusion-based generative graph models have been proven effective in generating high-quality small graphs. However, they need to be more scalable for generating large graphs containing thousands of nodes desiring graph statistics. In this work, we propose EDGE, a new diffusion-based generative graph model that addresses generative tasks with large graphs. To improve computation efficiency, we encourage graph sparsity by using a discrete diffusion process that randomly removes edges at each time step and finally obtains an empty graph. EDGE only focuses on a portion of nodes in the graph at each denoising step. It makes much fewer edge predictions than previous diffusion-based models. Moreover, EDGE admits explicitly modeling the node degrees of the graphs, further improving the model performance. The empirical study shows that EDGE is much more efficient than competing methods and can generate large graphs with thousands of nodes. It also outperforms baseline models in generation quality: graphs generated by our approach have more similar graph statistics to those of the training graphs.

A Majorization-Minimization Gauss-Newton Method for 1-Bit Matrix Completion

In 1-bit matrix completion, the aim is to estimate an underlying low-rank matrix from a partial set of binary observations. We propose a novel method for 1-bit matrix completion called MMGN. Our method is based on the majorization-minimization (MM) principle, which yields a sequence of standard low-rank matrix completion problems in our setting. We solve each of these sub-problems by a factorization approach that explicitly enforces the assumed low-rank structure and then apply a Gauss-Newton method. Our numerical studies and application to a real-data example illustrate that MMGN outputs comparable if not more accurate estimates, is often significantly faster, and is less sensitive to the spikiness of the underlying matrix than existing methods.

Tool Learning with Foundation Models

Humans possess an extraordinary ability to create and utilize tools, allowing them to overcome physical limitations and explore new frontiers. With the advent of foundation models, AI systems have the potential to be equally adept in tool use as humans. This paradigm, i.e., tool learning with foundation models, combines the strengths of specialized tools and foundation models to achieve enhanced accuracy, efficiency, and automation in problem-solving. Despite its immense potential, there is still a lack of a comprehensive understanding of key challenges, opportunities, and future endeavors in this field. To this end, we present a systematic investigation of tool learning in this paper. We first introduce the background of tool learning, including its cognitive origins, the paradigm shift of foundation models, and the complementary roles of tools and models. Then we recapitulate existing tool learning research into tool-augmented and tool-oriented learning. We formulate a general tool learning framework: starting from understanding the user instruction, models should learn to decompose a complex task into several subtasks, dynamically adjust their plan through reasoning, and effectively conquer each sub-task by selecting appropriate tools. We also discuss how to train models for improved tool-use capabilities and facilitate the generalization in tool learning. Considering the lack of a systematic tool learning evaluation in prior works, we experiment with 17 representative tools and show the potential of current foundation models in skillfully utilizing tools. Finally, we discuss several open problems that require further investigation for tool learning. Overall, we hope this paper could inspire future research in integrating tools with foundation models.

Deep Learning for Iris Recognition: A Review

Iris recognition is a secure biometric technology known for its stability and privacy. With no two irises being identical and little change throughout a person's lifetime, iris recognition is considered more reliable and less susceptible to external factors than other biometric recognition methods. Unlike traditional machine learning-based iris recognition methods, deep learning technology does not rely on feature engineering and boasts excellent performance. This paper collects 120 relevant papers to summarize the development of iris recognition based on deep learning. We first introduce the background of iris recognition and the motivation and contribution of this survey. Then, we present the common datasets widely used in iris recognition. After that, we summarize the key tasks involved in the process of iris recognition based on deep learning technology, including identification, segmentation, presentation attack detection, and localization. Finally, we discuss the challenges and potential development of iris recognition. This review provides a comprehensive sight of the research of iris recognition based on deep learning.

The OpenCDA Open-source Ecosystem for Cooperative Driving Automation Research

Advances in Single-vehicle intelligence of automated driving have encountered significant challenges because of limited capabilities in perception and interaction with complex traffic environments. Cooperative Driving Automation~(CDA) has been considered a pivotal solution to next-generation automated driving and intelligent transportation. Though CDA has attracted much attention from both academia and industry, exploration of its potential is still in its infancy. In industry, companies tend to build their in-house data collection pipeline and research tools to tailor their needs and protect intellectual properties. Reinventing the wheels, however, wastes resources and limits the generalizability of the developed approaches since no standardized benchmarks exist. On the other hand, in academia, due to the absence of real-world traffic data and computation resources, researchers often investigate CDA topics in simplified and mostly simulated environments, restricting the possibility of scaling the research outputs to real-world scenarios. Therefore, there is an urgent need to establish an open-source ecosystem~(OSE) to address the demands of different communities for CDA research, particularly in the early exploratory research stages, and provide the bridge to ensure an integrated development and testing pipeline that diverse communities can share. In this paper, we introduce the OpenCDA research ecosystem, a unified OSE integrated with a model zoo, a suite of driving simulators at various resolutions, large-scale real-world and simulated datasets, complete development toolkits for benchmark training/testing, and a scenario database/generator. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of OpenCDA OSE through example use cases, including cooperative 3D LiDAR detection, cooperative merge, cooperative camera-based map prediction, and adversarial scenario generation.

PatchGT: Transformer over Non-trainable Clusters for Learning Graph Representations

Recently the Transformer structure has shown good performances in graph learning tasks. However, these Transformer models directly work on graph nodes and may have difficulties learning high-level information. Inspired by the vision transformer, which applies to image patches, we propose a new Transformer-based graph neural network: Patch Graph Transformer (PatchGT). Unlike previous transformer-based models for learning graph representations, PatchGT learns from non-trainable graph patches, not from nodes directly. It can help save computation and improve the model performance. The key idea is to segment a graph into patches based on spectral clustering without any trainable parameters, with which the model can first use GNN layers to learn patch-level representations and then use Transformer to obtain graph-level representations. The architecture leverages the spectral information of graphs and combines the strengths of GNNs and Transformers. Further, we show the limitations of previous hierarchical trainable clusters theoretically and empirically. We also prove the proposed non-trainable spectral clustering method is permutation invariant and can help address the information bottlenecks in the graph. PatchGT achieves higher expressiveness than 1-WL-type GNNs, and the empirical study shows that PatchGT achieves competitive performances on benchmark datasets and provides interpretability to its predictions. The implementation of our algorithm is released at our Github repo: https://github.com/tufts-ml/PatchGT.