Improving Low-resource Prompt-based Relation Representation with Multi-view Decoupling Learning

Recently, prompt-tuning with pre-trained language models (PLMs) has demonstrated the significantly enhancing ability of relation extraction (RE) tasks. However, in low-resource scenarios, where the available training data is scarce, previous prompt-based methods may still perform poorly for prompt-based representation learning due to a superficial understanding of the relation. To this end, we highlight the importance of learning high-quality relation representation in low-resource scenarios for RE, and propose a novel prompt-based relation representation method, named MVRE (\underline{M}ulti-\underline{V}iew \underline{R}elation \underline{E}xtraction), to better leverage the capacity of PLMs to improve the performance of RE within the low-resource prompt-tuning paradigm. Specifically, MVRE decouples each relation into different perspectives to encompass multi-view relation representations for maximizing the likelihood during relation inference. Furthermore, we also design a Global-Local loss and a Dynamic-Initialization method for better alignment of the multi-view relation-representing virtual words, containing the semantics of relation labels during the optimization learning process and initialization. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our method can achieve state-of-the-art in low-resource settings.

A Survey of Reasoning with Foundation Models

Reasoning, a crucial ability for complex problem-solving, plays a pivotal role in various real-world settings such as negotiation, medical diagnosis, and criminal investigation. It serves as a fundamental methodology in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). With the ongoing development of foundation models, there is a growing interest in exploring their abilities in reasoning tasks. In this paper, we introduce seminal foundation models proposed or adaptable for reasoning, highlighting the latest advancements in various reasoning tasks, methods, and benchmarks. We then delve into the potential future directions behind the emergence of reasoning abilities within foundation models. We also discuss the relevance of multimodal learning, autonomous agents, and super alignment in the context of reasoning. By discussing these future research directions, we hope to inspire researchers in their exploration of this field, stimulate further advancements in reasoning with foundation models, and contribute to the development of AGI.

ProS: Facial Omni-Representation Learning via Prototype-based Self-Distillation

This paper presents a novel approach, called Prototype-based Self-Distillation (ProS), for unsupervised face representation learning. The existing supervised methods heavily rely on a large amount of annotated training facial data, which poses challenges in terms of data collection and privacy concerns. To address these issues, we propose ProS, which leverages a vast collection of unlabeled face images to learn a comprehensive facial omni-representation. In particular, ProS consists of two vision-transformers (teacher and student models) that are trained with different augmented images (cropping, blurring, coloring, etc.). Besides, we build a face-aware retrieval system along with augmentations to obtain the curated images comprising predominantly facial areas. To enhance the discrimination of learned features, we introduce a prototype-based matching loss that aligns the similarity distributions between features (teacher or student) and a set of learnable prototypes. After pre-training, the teacher vision transformer serves as a backbone for downstream tasks, including attribute estimation, expression recognition, and landmark alignment, achieved through simple fine-tuning with additional layers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on various tasks, both in full and few-shot settings. Furthermore, we investigate pre-training with synthetic face images, and ProS exhibits promising performance in this scenario as well.

Merge, Then Compress: Demystify Efficient SMoE with Hints from Its Routing Policy

Sparsely activated Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) has shown promise to scale up the learning capacity of neural networks, however, they have issues like (a) High Memory Usage, due to duplication of the network layers into multiple copies as experts; and (b) Redundancy in Experts, as common learning-based routing policies suffer from representational collapse. Therefore, vanilla SMoE models are memory inefficient and non-scalable, especially for resource-constrained downstream scenarios. In this paper, we ask: Can we craft a compact SMoE model by consolidating expert information? What is the best recipe to merge multiple experts into fewer but more knowledgeable experts? Our pilot investigation reveals that conventional model merging methods fail to be effective in such expert merging for SMoE. The potential reasons are: (1) redundant information overshadows critical experts; (2) appropriate neuron permutation for each expert is missing to bring all of them in alignment. To address this, we propose M-SMoE, which leverages routing statistics to guide expert merging. Specifically, it starts with neuron permutation alignment for experts; then, dominant experts and their "group members" are formed; lastly, every expert group is merged into a single expert by utilizing each expert's activation frequency as their weight for merging, thus diminishing the impact of insignificant experts. Moreover, we observed that our proposed merging promotes a low dimensionality in the merged expert's weight space, naturally paving the way for additional compression. Hence, our final method, MC-SMoE (i.e., Merge, then Compress SMoE), further decomposes the merged experts into low-rank and structural sparse alternatives. Extensive experiments across 8 benchmarks validate the effectiveness of MC-SMoE. For instance, our MC-SMoE achieves up to 80% memory and a 20% FLOPs reduction, with virtually no loss in performance.

A Content-Driven Micro-Video Recommendation Dataset at Scale

Micro-videos have recently gained immense popularity, sparking critical research in micro-video recommendation with significant implications for the entertainment, advertising, and e-commerce industries. However, the lack of large-scale public micro-video datasets poses a major challenge for developing effective recommender systems. To address this challenge, we introduce a very large micro-video recommendation dataset, named "MicroLens", consisting of one billion user-item interaction behaviors, 34 million users, and one million micro-videos. This dataset also contains various raw modality information about videos, including titles, cover images, audio, and full-length videos. MicroLens serves as a benchmark for content-driven micro-video recommendation, enabling researchers to utilize various modalities of video information for recommendation, rather than relying solely on item IDs or off-the-shelf video features extracted from a pre-trained network. Our benchmarking of multiple recommender models and video encoders on MicroLens has yielded valuable insights into the performance of micro-video recommendation. We believe that this dataset will not only benefit the recommender system community but also promote the development of the video understanding field. Our datasets and code are available at https://github.com/westlake-repl/MicroLens.

ORTexME: Occlusion-Robust Human Shape and Pose via Temporal Average Texture and Mesh Encoding

In 3D human shape and pose estimation from a monocular video, models trained with limited labeled data cannot generalize well to videos with occlusion, which is common in the wild videos. The recent human neural rendering approaches focusing on novel view synthesis initialized by the off-the-shelf human shape and pose methods have the potential to correct the initial human shape. However, the existing methods have some drawbacks such as, erroneous in handling occlusion, sensitive to inaccurate human segmentation, and ineffective loss computation due to the non-regularized opacity field. To address these problems, we introduce ORTexME, an occlusion-robust temporal method that utilizes temporal information from the input video to better regularize the occluded body parts. While our ORTexME is based on NeRF, to determine the reliable regions for the NeRF ray sampling, we utilize our novel average texture learning approach to learn the average appearance of a person, and to infer a mask based on the average texture. In addition, to guide the opacity-field updates in NeRF to suppress blur and noise, we propose the use of human body mesh. The quantitative evaluation demonstrates that our method achieves significant improvement on the challenging multi-person 3DPW dataset, where our method achieves 1.8 P-MPJPE error reduction. The SOTA rendering-based methods fail and enlarge the error up to 5.6 on the same dataset.

NineRec: A Benchmark Dataset Suite for Evaluating Transferable Recommendation

Learning a recommender system model from an item's raw modality features (such as image, text, audio, etc.), called MoRec, has attracted growing interest recently. One key advantage of MoRec is that it can easily benefit from advances in other fields, such as natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV). Moreover, it naturally supports transfer learning across different systems through modality features, known as transferable recommender systems, or TransRec. However, so far, TransRec has made little progress, compared to groundbreaking foundation models in the fields of NLP and CV. The lack of large-scale, high-quality recommendation datasets poses a major obstacle. To this end, we introduce NineRec, a TransRec dataset suite that includes a large-scale source domain recommendation dataset and nine diverse target domain recommendation datasets. Each item in NineRec is represented by a text description and a high-resolution cover image. With NineRec, we can implement TransRec models in an end-to-end training manner instead of using pre-extracted invariant features. We conduct a benchmark study and empirical analysis of TransRec using NineRec, and our findings provide several valuable insights. To support further research, we make our code, datasets, benchmarks, and leaderboards publicly available at https://github.com/westlake-repl/NineRec.

An Image Dataset for Benchmarking Recommender Systems with Raw Pixels

Recommender systems (RS) have achieved significant success by leveraging explicit identification (ID) features. However, the full potential of content features, especially the pure image pixel features, remains relatively unexplored. The limited availability of large, diverse, and content-driven image recommendation datasets has hindered the use of raw images as item representations. In this regard, we present PixelRec, a massive image-centric recommendation dataset that includes approximately 200 million user-image interactions, 30 million users, and 400,000 high-quality cover images. By providing direct access to raw image pixels, PixelRec enables recommendation models to learn item representation directly from them. To demonstrate its utility, we begin by presenting the results of several classical pure ID-based baseline models, termed IDNet, trained on PixelRec. Then, to show the effectiveness of the dataset's image features, we substitute the itemID embeddings (from IDNet) with a powerful vision encoder that represents items using their raw image pixels. This new model is dubbed PixelNet.Our findings indicate that even in standard, non-cold start recommendation settings where IDNet is recognized as highly effective, PixelNet can already perform equally well or even better than IDNet. Moreover, PixelNet has several other notable advantages over IDNet, such as being more effective in cold-start and cross-domain recommendation scenarios. These results underscore the importance of visual features in PixelRec. We believe that PixelRec can serve as a critical resource and testing ground for research on recommendation models that emphasize image pixel content. The dataset, code, and leaderboard will be available at https://github.com/westlake-repl/PixelRec.