Responsible Task Automation: Empowering Large Language Models as Responsible Task Automators

The recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs) signifies an impressive stride towards artificial general intelligence. They have shown a promising prospect in automatically completing tasks upon user instructions, functioning as brain-like coordinators. The associated risks will be revealed as we delegate an increasing number of tasks to machines for automated completion. A big question emerges: how can we make machines behave responsibly when helping humans automate tasks as personal copilots? In this paper, we explore this question in depth from the perspectives of feasibility, completeness and security. In specific, we present Responsible Task Automation (ResponsibleTA) as a fundamental framework to facilitate responsible collaboration between LLM-based coordinators and executors for task automation with three empowered capabilities: 1) predicting the feasibility of the commands for executors; 2) verifying the completeness of executors; 3) enhancing the security (e.g., the protection of users' privacy). We further propose and compare two paradigms for implementing the first two capabilities. One is to leverage the generic knowledge of LLMs themselves via prompt engineering while the other is to adopt domain-specific learnable models. Moreover, we introduce a local memory mechanism for achieving the third capability. We evaluate our proposed ResponsibleTA on UI task automation and hope it could bring more attentions to ensuring LLMs more responsible in diverse scenarios. The research project homepage is at https://task-automation-research.github.io/responsible_task_automation.

Vector-based Representation is the Key: A Study on Disentanglement and Compositional Generalization

Recognizing elementary underlying concepts from observations (disentanglement) and generating novel combinations of these concepts (compositional generalization) are fundamental abilities for humans to support rapid knowledge learning and generalize to new tasks, with which the deep learning models struggle. Towards human-like intelligence, various works on disentangled representation learning have been proposed, and recently some studies on compositional generalization have been presented. However, few works study the relationship between disentanglement and compositional generalization, and the observed results are inconsistent. In this paper, we study several typical disentangled representation learning works in terms of both disentanglement and compositional generalization abilities, and we provide an important insight: vector-based representation (using a vector instead of a scalar to represent a concept) is the key to empower both good disentanglement and strong compositional generalization. This insight also resonates the neuroscience research that the brain encodes information in neuron population activity rather than individual neurons. Motivated by this observation, we further propose a method to reform the scalar-based disentanglement works ($\beta$-TCVAE and FactorVAE) to be vector-based to increase both capabilities. We investigate the impact of the dimensions of vector-based representation and one important question: whether better disentanglement indicates higher compositional generalization. In summary, our study demonstrates that it is possible to achieve both good concept recognition and novel concept composition, contributing an important step towards human-like intelligence.

ReSup: Reliable Label Noise Suppression for Facial Expression Recognition

Because of the ambiguous and subjective property of the facial expression recognition (FER) task, the label noise is widely existing in the FER dataset. For this problem, in the training phase, current FER methods often directly predict whether the label of the input image is noised or not, aiming to reduce the contribution of the noised data in training. However, we argue that this kind of method suffers from the low reliability of such noise data decision operation. It makes that some mistakenly abounded clean data are not utilized sufficiently and some mistakenly kept noised data disturbing the model learning process. In this paper, we propose a more reliable noise-label suppression method called ReSup (Reliable label noise Suppression for FER). First, instead of directly predicting noised or not, ReSup makes the noise data decision by modeling the distribution of noise and clean labels simultaneously according to the disagreement between the prediction and the target. Specifically, to achieve optimal distribution modeling, ReSup models the similarity distribution of all samples. To further enhance the reliability of our noise decision results, ReSup uses two networks to jointly achieve noise suppression. Specifically, ReSup utilize the property that two networks are less likely to make the same mistakes, making two networks swap decisions and tending to trust decisions with high agreement. Extensive experiments on three popular benchmarks show that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art noisy label FER methods by 3.01% on FERPlus becnmarks. Code: https://github.com/purpleleaves007/FERDenoise

ABC-KD: Attention-Based-Compression Knowledge Distillation for Deep Learning-Based Noise Suppression

Noise suppression (NS) models have been widely applied to enhance speech quality. Recently, Deep Learning-Based NS, which we denote as Deep Noise Suppression (DNS), became the mainstream NS method due to its excelling performance over traditional ones. However, DNS models face 2 major challenges for supporting the real-world applications. First, high-performing DNS models are usually large in size, causing deployment difficulties. Second, DNS models require extensive training data, including noisy audios as inputs and clean audios as labels. It is often difficult to obtain clean labels for training DNS models. We propose the use of knowledge distillation (KD) to resolve both challenges. Our study serves 2 main purposes. To begin with, we are among the first to comprehensively investigate mainstream KD techniques on DNS models to resolve the two challenges. Furthermore, we propose a novel Attention-Based-Compression KD method that outperforms all investigated mainstream KD frameworks on DNS task.

Clothes-Invariant Feature Learning by Causal Intervention for Clothes-Changing Person Re-identification

Clothes-invariant feature extraction is critical to the clothes-changing person re-identification (CC-ReID). It can provide discriminative identity features and eliminate the negative effects caused by the confounder--clothing changes. But we argue that there exists a strong spurious correlation between clothes and human identity, that restricts the common likelihood-based ReID method P(Y|X) to extract clothes-irrelevant features. In this paper, we propose a new Causal Clothes-Invariant Learning (CCIL) method to achieve clothes-invariant feature learning by modeling causal intervention P(Y|do(X)). This new causality-based model is inherently invariant to the confounder in the causal view, which can achieve the clothes-invariant features and avoid the barrier faced by the likelihood-based methods. Extensive experiments on three CC-ReID benchmarks, including PRCC, LTCC, and VC-Clothes, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which achieves a new state of the art.

Learning Trajectories are Generalization Indicators

The aim of this paper is to investigate the connection between learning trajectories of the Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) and their corresponding generalization capabilities when being optimized with broadly used gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent algorithms. In this paper, we construct Linear Approximation Function to model the trajectory information and we propose a new generalization bound with richer trajectory information based on it. Our proposed generalization bound relies on the complexity of learning trajectory and the ratio between the bias and diversity of training set. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method effectively captures the generalization trend across various training steps, learning rates, and label noise levels.

High-Fidelity and Freely Controllable Talking Head Video Generation

Talking head generation is to generate video based on a given source identity and target motion. However, current methods face several challenges that limit the quality and controllability of the generated videos. First, the generated face often has unexpected deformation and severe distortions. Second, the driving image does not explicitly disentangle movement-relevant information, such as poses and expressions, which restricts the manipulation of different attributes during generation. Third, the generated videos tend to have flickering artifacts due to the inconsistency of the extracted landmarks between adjacent frames. In this paper, we propose a novel model that produces high-fidelity talking head videos with free control over head pose and expression. Our method leverages both self-supervised learned landmarks and 3D face model-based landmarks to model the motion. We also introduce a novel motion-aware multi-scale feature alignment module to effectively transfer the motion without face distortion. Furthermore, we enhance the smoothness of the synthesized talking head videos with a feature context adaptation and propagation module. We evaluate our model on challenging datasets and demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance. More information is available at https://yuegao.me/PECHead.

MRVM-NeRF: Mask-Based Pretraining for Neural Radiance Fields

Most Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have poor generalization ability, limiting their application when representing multiple scenes by a single model. To ameliorate this problem, existing methods simply condition NeRF models on image features, lacking the global understanding and modeling of the entire 3D scene. Inspired by the significant success of mask-based modeling in other research fields, we propose a masked ray and view modeling method for generalizable NeRF (MRVM-NeRF), the first attempt to incorporate mask-based pretraining into 3D implicit representations. Specifically, considering that the core of NeRFs lies in modeling 3D representations along the rays and across the views, we randomly mask a proportion of sampled points along the ray at fine stage by discarding partial information obtained from multi-viewpoints, targeting at predicting the corresponding features produced in the coarse branch. In this way, the learned prior knowledge of 3D scenes during pretraining helps the model generalize better to novel scenarios after finetuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed MRVM-NeRF under various synthetic and real-world settings, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Our empirical studies reveal the effectiveness of our proposed innovative MRVM which is specifically designed for NeRF models.

Two-shot Video Object Segmentation

Previous works on video object segmentation (VOS) are trained on densely annotated videos. Nevertheless, acquiring annotations in pixel level is expensive and time-consuming. In this work, we demonstrate the feasibility of training a satisfactory VOS model on sparsely annotated videos-we merely require two labeled frames per training video while the performance is sustained. We term this novel training paradigm as two-shot video object segmentation, or two-shot VOS for short. The underlying idea is to generate pseudo labels for unlabeled frames during training and to optimize the model on the combination of labeled and pseudo-labeled data. Our approach is extremely simple and can be applied to a majority of existing frameworks. We first pre-train a VOS model on sparsely annotated videos in a semi-supervised manner, with the first frame always being a labeled one. Then, we adopt the pre-trained VOS model to generate pseudo labels for all unlabeled frames, which are subsequently stored in a pseudo-label bank. Finally, we retrain a VOS model on both labeled and pseudo-labeled data without any restrictions on the first frame. For the first time, we present a general way to train VOS models on two-shot VOS datasets. By using 7.3% and 2.9% labeled data of YouTube-VOS and DAVIS benchmarks, our approach achieves comparable results in contrast to the counterparts trained on fully labeled set. Code and models are available at https://github.com/yk-pku/Two-shot-Video-Object-Segmentation.