Zero-Shot Long-Form Video Understanding through Screenplay

The Long-form Video Question-Answering task requires the comprehension and analysis of extended video content to respond accurately to questions by utilizing both temporal and contextual information. In this paper, we present MM-Screenplayer, an advanced video understanding system with multi-modal perception capabilities that can convert any video into textual screenplay representations. Unlike previous storytelling methods, we organize video content into scenes as the basic unit, rather than just visually continuous shots. Additionally, we developed a ``Look Back'' strategy to reassess and validate uncertain information, particularly targeting breakpoint mode. MM-Screenplayer achieved highest score in the CVPR'2024 LOng-form VidEo Understanding (LOVEU) Track 1 Challenge, with a global accuracy of 87.5% and a breakpoint accuracy of 68.8%.

Machine Unlearning with Minimal Gradient Dependence for High Unlearning Ratios

In the context of machine unlearning, the primary challenge lies in effectively removing traces of private data from trained models while maintaining model performance and security against privacy attacks like membership inference attacks. Traditional gradient-based unlearning methods often rely on extensive historical gradients, which becomes impractical with high unlearning ratios and may reduce the effectiveness of unlearning. Addressing these limitations, we introduce Mini-Unlearning, a novel approach that capitalizes on a critical observation: unlearned parameters correlate with retrained parameters through contraction mapping. Our method, Mini-Unlearning, utilizes a minimal subset of historical gradients and leverages this contraction mapping to facilitate scalable, efficient unlearning. This lightweight, scalable method significantly enhances model accuracy and strengthens resistance to membership inference attacks. Our experiments demonstrate that Mini-Unlearning not only works under higher unlearning ratios but also outperforms existing techniques in both accuracy and security, offering a promising solution for applications requiring robust unlearning capabilities.

Learnable In-Context Vector for Visual Question Answering

As language models continue to scale, Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited emerging capabilities in In-Context Learning (ICL), enabling them to solve language tasks by prefixing a few in-context demonstrations (ICDs) as context. Inspired by these advancements, researchers have extended these techniques to develop Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with ICL capabilities. However, applying ICL usually faces two major challenges: 1) using more ICDs will largely increase the inference time and 2) the performance is sensitive to the selection of ICDs. These challenges are further exacerbated in LMMs due to the integration of multiple data types and the combinational complexity of multimodal ICDs. Recently, to address these challenges, some NLP studies introduce non-learnable In-Context Vectors (ICVs) which extract useful task information from ICDs into a single vector and then insert it into the LLM to help solve the corresponding task. However, although useful in simple NLP tasks, these non-learnable methods fail to handle complex multimodal tasks like Visual Question Answering (VQA). In this study, we propose \textbf{Learnable ICV} (L-ICV) to distill essential task information from demonstrations, improving ICL performance in LMMs. Experiments show that L-ICV can significantly reduce computational costs while enhancing accuracy in VQA tasks compared to traditional ICL and other non-learnable ICV methods.

C$^3$P-VoxelMap: Compact, Cumulative and Coalescible Probabilistic Voxel Mapping

This work presents a compact, cumulative and coalescible probabilistic voxel mapping method to enhance performance, accuracy and memory efficiency in LiDAR odometry. Probabilistic voxel mapping requires storing past point clouds and re-iterating on them to update the uncertainty every iteration, which consumes large memory space and CPU cycles. To solve this problem, we propose a two-folded strategy. First, we introduce a compact point-free representation for probabilistic voxels and derive a cumulative update of the planar uncertainty without caching original point clouds. Our voxel structure only keeps track of a predetermined set of statistics for points that lie inside it. This method reduces the runtime complexity from $O(MN)$ to $O(N)$ and the space complexity from $O(N)$ to $O(1)$ where $M$ is the number of iterations and $N$ is the number of points. Second, to further minimize memory usage and enhance mapping accuracy, we provide a strategy to dynamically merge voxels associated with the same physical planes by taking advantage of the geometric features in the real world. Rather than scanning for these coalescible voxels constantly at every iteration, our merging strategy accumulates voxels in a locality-sensitive hash and triggers merging lazily. On-demand merging not only reduces memory footprint with minimal computational overhead but also improves localization accuracy thanks to cross-voxel denoising. Experiments exhibit 20% higher accuracy, 20% faster performance and 70% lower memory consumption than the state-of-the-art.

Unlearning Concepts in Diffusion Model via Concept Domain Correction and Concept Preserving Gradient

Current text-to-image diffusion models have achieved groundbreaking results in image generation tasks. However, the unavoidable inclusion of sensitive information during pre-training introduces significant risks such as copyright infringement and privacy violations in the generated images. Machine Unlearning (MU) provides a effective way to the sensitive concepts captured by the model, has been shown to be a promising approach to addressing these issues. Nonetheless, existing MU methods for concept erasure encounter two primary bottlenecks: 1) generalization issues, where concept erasure is effective only for the data within the unlearn set, and prompts outside the unlearn set often still result in the generation of sensitive concepts; and 2) utility drop, where erasing target concepts significantly degrades the model's performance. To this end, this paper first proposes a concept domain correction framework for unlearning concepts in diffusion models. By aligning the output domains of sensitive concepts and anchor concepts through adversarial training, we enhance the generalizability of the unlearning results. Secondly, we devise a concept-preserving scheme based on gradient surgery. This approach alleviates the parts of the unlearning gradient that contradict the relearning gradient, ensuring that the process of unlearning minimally disrupts the model's performance. Finally, extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our model, demonstrating our method's capability to address the challenges of concept unlearning in diffusion models while preserving model utility.

Free Performance Gain from Mixing Multiple Partially Labeled Samples in Multi-label Image Classification

Multi-label image classification datasets are often partially labeled where many labels are missing, posing a significant challenge to training accurate deep classifiers. However, the powerful Mixup sample-mixing data augmentation cannot be well utilized to address this challenge, as it cannot perform linear interpolation on the unknown labels to construct augmented samples. In this paper, we propose LogicMix, a Mixup variant designed for such partially labeled datasets. LogicMix mixes the sample labels by logical OR so that the unknown labels can be correctly mixed by utilizing OR's logical equivalences, including the domination and identity laws. Unlike Mixup, which mixes exactly two samples, LogicMix can mix multiple ($\geq2$) partially labeled samples, constructing visually more confused augmented samples to regularize training. LogicMix is more general and effective than other compared Mixup variants in the experiments on various partially labeled dataset scenarios. Moreover, it is plug-and-play and only requires minimal computation, hence it can be easily inserted into existing frameworks to collaborate with other methods to improve model performance with a negligible impact on training time, as demonstrated through extensive experiments. In particular, through the collaboration of LogicMix, RandAugment, Curriculum Labeling, and Category-wise Fine-Tuning, we attain state-of-the-art performance on MS-COCO, VG-200, and Pascal VOC 2007 benchmarking datasets. The remarkable generality, effectiveness, collaboration, and simplicity suggest that LogicMix promises to be a popular and vital data augmentation method.

Exploring the Distinctiveness and Fidelity of the Descriptions Generated by Large Vision-Language Models

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are gaining traction for their remarkable ability to process and integrate visual and textual data. Despite their popularity, the capacity of LVLMs to generate precise, fine-grained textual descriptions has not been fully explored. This study addresses this gap by focusing on \textit{distinctiveness} and \textit{fidelity}, assessing how models like Open-Flamingo, IDEFICS, and MiniGPT-4 can distinguish between similar objects and accurately describe visual features. We proposed the Textual Retrieval-Augmented Classification (TRAC) framework, which, by leveraging its generative capabilities, allows us to delve deeper into analyzing fine-grained visual description generation. This research provides valuable insights into the generation quality of LVLMs, enhancing the understanding of multimodal language models. Notably, MiniGPT-4 stands out for its better ability to generate fine-grained descriptions, outperforming the other two models in this aspect. The code is provided at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Explore_FGVDs-E277}.

Exploring Learngene via Stage-wise Weight Sharing for Initializing Variable-sized Models

In practice, we usually need to build variable-sized models adapting for diverse resource constraints in different application scenarios, where weight initialization is an important step prior to training. The Learngene framework, introduced recently, firstly learns one compact part termed as learngene from a large well-trained model, after which learngene is expanded to initialize variable-sized models. In this paper, we start from analysing the importance of guidance for the expansion of well-trained learngene layers, inspiring the design of a simple but highly effective Learngene approach termed SWS (Stage-wise Weight Sharing), where both learngene layers and their learning process critically contribute to providing knowledge and guidance for initializing models at varying scales. Specifically, to learn learngene layers, we build an auxiliary model comprising multiple stages where the layer weights in each stage are shared, after which we train it through distillation. Subsequently, we expand these learngene layers containing stage information at their corresponding stage to initialize models of variable depths. Extensive experiments on ImageNet-1K demonstrate that SWS achieves consistent better performance compared to many models trained from scratch, while reducing around 6.6x total training costs. In some cases, SWS performs better only after 1 epoch tuning. When initializing variable-sized models adapting for different resource constraints, SWS achieves better results while reducing around 20x parameters stored to initialize these models and around 10x pre-training costs, in contrast to the pre-training and fine-tuning approach.

FedMPQ: Secure and Communication-Efficient Federated Learning with Multi-codebook Product Quantization

In federated learning, particularly in cross-device scenarios, secure aggregation has recently gained popularity as it effectively defends against inference attacks by malicious aggregators. However, secure aggregation often requires additional communication overhead and can impede the convergence rate of the global model, which is particularly challenging in wireless network environments with extremely limited bandwidth. Therefore, achieving efficient communication compression under the premise of secure aggregation presents a highly challenging and valuable problem. In this work, we propose a novel uplink communication compression method for federated learning, named FedMPQ, which is based on multi shared codebook product quantization.Specifically, we utilize updates from the previous round to generate sufficiently robust codebooks. Secure aggregation is then achieved through trusted execution environments (TEE) or a trusted third party (TTP).In contrast to previous works, our approach exhibits greater robustness in scenarios where data is not independently and identically distributed (non-IID) and there is a lack of sufficient public data. The experiments conducted on the LEAF dataset demonstrate that our proposed method achieves 99% of the baseline's final accuracy, while reducing uplink communications by 90-95%

RD2Bench: Toward Data-Centric Automatic R&D

The progress of humanity is driven by those successful discoveries accompanied by countless failed experiments. Researchers often seek the potential research directions by reading and then verifying them through experiments. The process imposes a significant burden on researchers. In the past decade, the data-driven black-box deep learning method demonstrates its effectiveness in a wide range of real-world scenarios, which exacerbates the experimental burden of researchers and thus renders the potential successful discoveries veiled. Therefore, automating such a research and development (R&D) process is an urgent need. In this paper, we serve as the first effort to formalize the goal by proposing a Real-world Data-centric automatic R&D Benchmark, namely RD2Bench. RD2Bench benchmarks all the operations in data-centric automatic R&D (D-CARD) as a whole to navigate future work toward our goal directly. We focuses on evaluating the interaction and synergistic effects of various model capabilities and aiding to select the well-performed trustworthy models. Although RD2Bench is very challenging to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) large language model (LLM) named GPT-4, indicating ample research opportunities and more research efforts, LLMs possess promising potential to bring more significant development to D-CARD: They are able to implement some simple methods without adopting any additional techniques. We appeal to future work to take developing techniques for tackling automatic R&D into consideration, thus bringing the opportunities of the potential revolutionary upgrade to human productivity.