PIN: A Knowledge-Intensive Dataset for Paired and Interleaved Multimodal Documents

Recent advancements in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have leveraged extensive multimodal datasets to enhance capabilities in complex knowledge-driven tasks. However, persistent challenges in perceptual and reasoning errors limit their efficacy, particularly in interpreting intricate visual data and deducing multimodal relationships. Addressing these issues, we introduce a novel dataset format, PIN (Paired and INterleaved multimodal documents), designed to significantly improve both the depth and breadth of multimodal training. The PIN format is built on three foundational principles: knowledge intensity, scalability, and support for diverse training modalities. This innovative format combines markdown files and comprehensive images to enrich training data with a dense knowledge structure and versatile training strategies. We present PIN-14M, an open-source dataset comprising 14 million samples derived from a diverse range of Chinese and English sources, tailored to include complex web and scientific content. This dataset is constructed meticulously to ensure data quality and ethical integrity, aiming to facilitate advanced training strategies and improve model robustness against common multimodal training pitfalls. Our initial results, forming the basis of this technical report, suggest significant potential for the PIN format in refining LMM performance, with plans for future expansions and detailed evaluations of its impact on model capabilities.

Physical formula enhanced multi-task learning for pharmacokinetics prediction

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology has demonstrated remarkable potential in drug dis-covery, where pharmacokinetics plays a crucial role in determining the dosage, safety, and efficacy of new drugs. A major challenge for AI-driven drug discovery (AIDD) is the scarcity of high-quality data, which often requires extensive wet-lab work. A typical example of this is pharmacokinetic experiments. In this work, we develop a physical formula enhanced mul-ti-task learning (PEMAL) method that predicts four key parameters of pharmacokinetics simultaneously. By incorporating physical formulas into the multi-task framework, PEMAL facilitates effective knowledge sharing and target alignment among the pharmacokinetic parameters, thereby enhancing the accuracy of prediction. Our experiments reveal that PEMAL significantly lowers the data demand, compared to typical Graph Neural Networks. Moreover, we demonstrate that PEMAL enhances the robustness to noise, an advantage that conventional Neural Networks do not possess. Another advantage of PEMAL is its high flexibility, which can be potentially applied to other multi-task machine learning scenarios. Overall, our work illustrates the benefits and potential of using PEMAL in AIDD and other scenarios with data scarcity and noise.

Domain Adaptive Detection of MAVs: A Benchmark and Noise Suppression Network

Visual detection of Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) has attracted increasing attention in recent years due to its important application in various tasks. The existing methods for MAV detection assume that the training set and testing set have the same distribution. As a result, when deployed in new domains, the detectors would have a significant performance degradation due to domain discrepancy. In this paper, we study the problem of cross-domain MAV detection. The contributions of this paper are threefold. 1) We propose a Multi-MAV-Multi-Domain (M3D) dataset consisting of both simulation and realistic images. Compared to other existing datasets, the proposed one is more comprehensive in the sense that it covers rich scenes, diverse MAV types, and various viewing angles. A new benchmark for cross-domain MAV detection is proposed based on the proposed dataset. 2) We propose a Noise Suppression Network (NSN) based on the framework of pseudo-labeling and a large-to-small training procedure. To reduce the challenging pseudo-label noises, two novel modules are designed in this network. The first is a prior-based curriculum learning module for allocating adaptive thresholds for pseudo labels with different difficulties. The second is a masked copy-paste augmentation module for pasting truly-labeled MAVs on unlabeled target images and thus decreasing pseudo-label noises. 3) Extensive experimental results verify the superior performance of the proposed method compared to the state-of-the-art ones. In particular, it achieves mAP of 46.9%(+5.8%), 50.5%(+3.7%), and 61.5%(+11.3%) on the tasks of simulation-to-real adaptation, cross-scene adaptation, and cross-camera adaptation, respectively.

Effective Two-Stage Knowledge Transfer for Multi-Entity Cross-Domain Recommendation

In recent years, the recommendation content on e-commerce platforms has become increasingly rich -- a single user feed may contain multiple entities, such as selling products, short videos, and content posts. To deal with the multi-entity recommendation problem, an intuitive solution is to adopt the shared-network-based architecture for joint training. The idea is to transfer the extracted knowledge from one type of entity (source entity) to another (target entity). However, different from the conventional same-entity cross-domain recommendation, multi-entity knowledge transfer encounters several important issues: (1) data distributions of the source entity and target entity are naturally different, making the shared-network-based joint training susceptible to the negative transfer issue, (2) more importantly, the corresponding feature schema of each entity is not exactly aligned (e.g., price is an essential feature for selling product while missing for content posts), making the existing methods no longer appropriate. Recent researchers have also experimented with the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm. Again, they only consider the scenarios with the same entity type and feature systems, which is inappropriate in our case. To this end, we design a pre-training & fine-tuning based Multi-entity Knowledge Transfer framework called MKT. MKT utilizes a multi-entity pre-training module to extract transferable knowledge across different entities. In particular, a feature alignment module is first applied to scale and align different feature schemas. Afterward, a couple of knowledge extractors are employed to extract the common and entity-specific knowledge. In the end, the extracted common knowledge is adopted for target entity model training. Through extensive offline and online experiments, we demonstrated the superiority of MKT over multiple State-Of-The-Art methods.

A Bearing-Angle Approach for Unknown Target Motion Analysis Based on Visual Measurements

Vision-based estimation of the motion of a moving target is usually formulated as a bearing-only estimation problem where the visual measurement is modeled as a bearing vector. Although the bearing-only approach has been studied for decades, a fundamental limitation of this approach is that it requires extra lateral motion of the observer to enhance the target's observability. Unfortunately, the extra lateral motion conflicts with the desired motion of the observer in many tasks. It is well-known that, once a target has been detected in an image, a bounding box that surrounds the target can be obtained. Surprisingly, this common visual measurement especially its size information has not been well explored up to now. In this paper, we propose a new bearing-angle approach to estimate the motion of a target by modeling its image bounding box as bearing-angle measurements. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results show that this approach can significantly enhance the observability without relying on additional lateral motion of the observer. The benefit of the bearing-angle approach comes with no additional cost because a bounding box is a standard output of object detection algorithms. The approach simply exploits the information that has not been fully exploited in the past. No additional sensing devices or special detection algorithms are required.

TeleChat Technical Report

In this technical report, we present TeleChat, a collection of large language models (LLMs) with parameters of 3 billion, 7 billion and 12 billion. It includes pretrained language models as well as fine-tuned chat models that is aligned with human preferences. TeleChat is initially pretrained on an extensive corpus containing a diverse collection of texts from both English and Chinese languages, including trillions of tokens. Subsequently, the model undergoes fine-tuning to align with human preferences, following a detailed methodology that we describe. We evaluate the performance of TeleChat on various tasks, including language understanding, mathematics, reasoning, code generation, and knowledge-based question answering. Our findings indicate that TeleChat achieves comparable performance to other open-source models of similar size across a wide range of public benchmarks. To support future research and applications utilizing LLMs, we release the fine-tuned model checkpoints of TeleChat's 7B and 12B variant, along with code and a portion of our pretraining data, to the public community.

Global-Local MAV Detection under Challenging Conditions based on Appearance and Motion

Visual detection of micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) has received increasing research attention in recent years due to its importance in many applications. However, the existing approaches based on either appearance or motion features of MAVs still face challenges when the background is complex, the MAV target is small, or the computation resource is limited. In this paper, we propose a global-local MAV detector that can fuse both motion and appearance features for MAV detection under challenging conditions. This detector first searches MAV target using a global detector and then switches to a local detector which works in an adaptive search region to enhance accuracy and efficiency. Additionally, a detector switcher is applied to coordinate the global and local detectors. A new dataset is created to train and verify the effectiveness of the proposed detector. This dataset contains more challenging scenarios that can occur in practice. Extensive experiments on three challenging datasets show that the proposed detector outperforms the state-of-the-art ones in terms of detection accuracy and computational efficiency. In particular, this detector can run with near real-time frame rate on NVIDIA Jetson NX Xavier, which demonstrates the usefulness of our approach for real-world applications. The dataset is available at https://github.com/WestlakeIntelligentRobotics/GLAD. In addition, A video summarizing this work is available at https://youtu.be/Tv473mAzHbU.

Why "classic" Transformers are shallow and how to make them go deep

Since its introduction in 2017, Transformer has emerged as the leading neural network architecture, catalyzing revolutionary advancements in many AI disciplines. The key innovation in Transformer is a Self-Attention (SA) mechanism designed to capture contextual information. However, extending the original Transformer design to models of greater depth has proven exceedingly challenging, if not impossible. Even though various modifications have been proposed in order to stack more layers of SA mechanism into deeper models, a full understanding of this depth problem remains elusive. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive investigation, both theoretically and empirically, to substantiate the claim that the depth problem is caused by \emph{token similarity escalation}; that is, tokens grow increasingly alike after repeated applications of the SA mechanism. Our analysis reveals that, driven by the invariant leading eigenspace and large spectral gaps of attention matrices, token similarity provably escalates at a linear rate. Based on the gained insight, we propose a simple strategy that, unlike most existing methods, surgically removes excessive similarity without discounting the SA mechanism as a whole. Preliminary experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach on moderate-scale post-norm Transformer models.

HierarchicalContrast: A Coarse-to-Fine Contrastive Learning Framework for Cross-Domain Zero-Shot Slot Filling

In task-oriented dialogue scenarios, cross-domain zero-shot slot filling plays a vital role in leveraging source domain knowledge to learn a model with high generalization ability in unknown target domain where annotated data is unavailable. However, the existing state-of-the-art zero-shot slot filling methods have limited generalization ability in target domain, they only show effective knowledge transfer on seen slots and perform poorly on unseen slots. To alleviate this issue, we present a novel Hierarchical Contrastive Learning Framework (HiCL) for zero-shot slot filling. Specifically, we propose a coarse- to fine-grained contrastive learning based on Gaussian-distributed embedding to learn the generalized deep semantic relations between utterance-tokens, by optimizing inter- and intra-token distribution distance. This encourages HiCL to generalize to the slot types unseen at training phase. Furthermore, we present a new iterative label set semantics inference method to unbiasedly and separately evaluate the performance of unseen slot types which entangled with their counterparts (i.e., seen slot types) in the previous zero-shot slot filling evaluation methods. The extensive empirical experiments on four datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves comparable or even better performance than the current state-of-the-art zero-shot slot filling approaches.

Large Language Models Are Also Good Prototypical Commonsense Reasoners

Commonsense reasoning is a pivotal skill for large language models, yet it presents persistent challenges in specific tasks requiring this competence. Traditional fine-tuning approaches can be resource-intensive and potentially compromise a model's generalization capacity. Furthermore, state-of-the-art language models like GPT-3.5 and Claude are primarily accessible through API calls, which makes fine-tuning models challenging. To address these challenges, we draw inspiration from the outputs of large models for tailored tasks and semi-automatically developed a set of novel prompts from several perspectives, including task-relevance, supportive evidence generation (e.g. chain-of-thought and knowledge), diverse path decoding to aid the model. Experimental results on ProtoQA dataset demonstrate that with better designed prompts we can achieve the new state-of-art(SOTA) on the ProtoQA leaderboard, improving the Max Answer@1 score by 8%, Max Incorrect@1 score by 4% (breakthrough 50% for the first time) compared to the previous SOTA model and achieved an improvement on StrategyQA and CommonsenseQA2.0 (3% and 1%, respectively). Furthermore, with the generated Chain-of-Thought and knowledge, we can improve the interpretability of the model while also surpassing the previous SOTA models. We hope that our work can provide insight for the NLP community to develop better prompts and explore the potential of large language models for more complex reasoning tasks.