Chain-of-Talkers (CoTalk): Fast Human Annotation of Dense Image Captions

While densely annotated image captions significantly facilitate the learning of robust vision-language alignment, methodologies for systematically optimizing human annotation efforts remain underexplored. We introduce Chain-of-Talkers (CoTalk), an AI-in-the-loop methodology designed to maximize the number of annotated samples and improve their comprehensiveness under fixed budget constraints (e.g., total human annotation time). The framework is built upon two key insights. First, sequential annotation reduces redundant workload compared to conventional parallel annotation, as subsequent annotators only need to annotate the ``residual'' -- the missing visual information that previous annotations have not covered. Second, humans process textual input faster by reading while outputting annotations with much higher throughput via talking; thus a multimodal interface enables optimized efficiency. We evaluate our framework from two aspects: intrinsic evaluations that assess the comprehensiveness of semantic units, obtained by parsing detailed captions into object-attribute trees and analyzing their effective connections; extrinsic evaluation measures the practical usage of the annotated captions in facilitating vision-language alignment. Experiments with eight participants show our Chain-of-Talkers (CoTalk) improves annotation speed (0.42 vs. 0.30 units/sec) and retrieval performance (41.13\% vs. 40.52\%) over the parallel method.

Cross-Fusion Rule for Personalized Federated Learning

Data scarcity and heterogeneity pose significant performance challenges for personalized federated learning, and these challenges are mainly reflected in overfitting and low precision in existing methods. To overcome these challenges, a multi-layer multi-fusion strategy framework is proposed in this paper, i.e., the server adopts the network layer parameters of each client upload model as the basic unit of fusion for information-sharing calculation. Then, a new fusion strategy combining personalized and generic is purposefully proposed, and the network layer number fusion threshold of each fusion strategy is designed according to the network layer function. Under this mechanism, the L2-Norm negative exponential similarity metric is employed to calculate the fusion weights of the corresponding feature extraction layer parameters for each client, thus improving the efficiency of heterogeneous data personalized collaboration. Meanwhile, the federated global optimal model approximation fusion strategy is adopted in the network full-connect layer, and this generic fusion strategy alleviates the overfitting introduced by forceful personalized. Finally, the experimental results show that the proposed method is superior to the state-of-the-art methods.