Can Large Language Models Understand Context?

Understanding context is key to understanding human language, an ability which Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly seen to demonstrate to an impressive extent. However, though the evaluation of LLMs encompasses various domains within the realm of Natural Language Processing, limited attention has been paid to probing their linguistic capability of understanding contextual features. This paper introduces a context understanding benchmark by adapting existing datasets to suit the evaluation of generative models. This benchmark comprises of four distinct tasks and nine datasets, all featuring prompts designed to assess the models' ability to understand context. First, we evaluate the performance of LLMs under the in-context learning pretraining scenario. Experimental results indicate that pre-trained dense models struggle with understanding more nuanced contextual features when compared to state-of-the-art fine-tuned models. Second, as LLM compression holds growing significance in both research and real-world applications, we assess the context understanding of quantized models under in-context-learning settings. We find that 3-bit post-training quantization leads to varying degrees of performance reduction on our benchmark. We conduct an extensive analysis of these scenarios to substantiate our experimental results.

ChatterBox: Multi-round Multimodal Referring and Grounding

In this study, we establish a baseline for a new task named multimodal multi-round referring and grounding (MRG), opening up a promising direction for instance-level multimodal dialogues. We present a new benchmark and an efficient vision-language model for this purpose. The new benchmark, named CB-300K, spans challenges including multi-round dialogue, complex spatial relationships among multiple instances, and consistent reasoning, which are beyond those shown in existing benchmarks. The proposed model, named ChatterBox, utilizes a two-branch architecture to collaboratively handle vision and language tasks. By tokenizing instance regions, the language branch acquires the ability to perceive referential information. Meanwhile, ChatterBox feeds a query embedding in the vision branch to a token receiver for visual grounding. A two-stage optimization strategy is devised, making use of both CB-300K and auxiliary external data to improve the model's stability and capacity for instance-level understanding. Experiments show that ChatterBox outperforms existing models in MRG both quantitatively and qualitatively, paving a new path towards multimodal dialogue scenarios with complicated and precise interactions. Code, data, and model are available at: https://github.com/sunsmarterjie/ChatterBox.

Cloud-Device Collaborative Learning for Multimodal Large Language Models

The burgeoning field of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has exhibited remarkable performance in diverse tasks such as captioning, commonsense reasoning, and visual scene understanding. However, the deployment of these large-scale MLLMs on client devices is hindered by their extensive model parameters, leading to a notable decline in generalization capabilities when these models are compressed for device deployment. Addressing this challenge, we introduce a Cloud-Device Collaborative Continual Adaptation framework, designed to enhance the performance of compressed, device-deployed MLLMs by leveraging the robust capabilities of cloud-based, larger-scale MLLMs. Our framework is structured into three key components: a device-to-cloud uplink for efficient data transmission, cloud-based knowledge adaptation, and an optimized cloud-to-device downlink for model deployment. In the uplink phase, we employ an Uncertainty-guided Token Sampling (UTS) strategy to effectively filter out-of-distribution tokens, thereby reducing transmission costs and improving training efficiency. On the cloud side, we propose Adapter-based Knowledge Distillation (AKD) method to transfer refined knowledge from large-scale to compressed, pocket-size MLLMs. Furthermore, we propose a Dynamic Weight update Compression (DWC) strategy for the downlink, which adaptively selects and quantizes updated weight parameters, enhancing transmission efficiency and reducing the representational disparity between cloud and device models. Extensive experiments on several multimodal benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework over prior Knowledge Distillation and device-cloud collaboration methods. Notably, we also validate the feasibility of our approach to real-world experiments.

FedSODA: Federated Cross-assessment and Dynamic Aggregation for Histopathology Segmentation

Federated learning (FL) for histopathology image segmentation involving multiple medical sites plays a crucial role in advancing the field of accurate disease diagnosis and treatment. However, it is still a task of great challenges due to the sample imbalance across clients and large data heterogeneity from disparate organs, variable segmentation tasks, and diverse distribution. Thus, we propose a novel FL approach for histopathology nuclei and tissue segmentation, FedSODA, via synthetic-driven cross-assessment operation (SO) and dynamic stratified-layer aggregation (DA). Our SO constructs a cross-assessment strategy to connect clients and mitigate the representation bias under sample imbalance. Our DA utilizes layer-wise interaction and dynamic aggregation to diminish heterogeneity and enhance generalization. The effectiveness of our FedSODA has been evaluated on the most extensive histopathology image segmentation dataset from 7 independent datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/yuanzhang7/FedSODA.

DVIS++: Improved Decoupled Framework for Universal Video Segmentation

We present the \textbf{D}ecoupled \textbf{VI}deo \textbf{S}egmentation (DVIS) framework, a novel approach for the challenging task of universal video segmentation, including video instance segmentation (VIS), video semantic segmentation (VSS), and video panoptic segmentation (VPS). Unlike previous methods that model video segmentation in an end-to-end manner, our approach decouples video segmentation into three cascaded sub-tasks: segmentation, tracking, and refinement. This decoupling design allows for simpler and more effective modeling of the spatio-temporal representations of objects, especially in complex scenes and long videos. Accordingly, we introduce two novel components: the referring tracker and the temporal refiner. These components track objects frame by frame and model spatio-temporal representations based on pre-aligned features. To improve the tracking capability of DVIS, we propose a denoising training strategy and introduce contrastive learning, resulting in a more robust framework named DVIS++. Furthermore, we evaluate DVIS++ in various settings, including open vocabulary and using a frozen pre-trained backbone. By integrating CLIP with DVIS++, we present OV-DVIS++, the first open-vocabulary universal video segmentation framework. We conduct extensive experiments on six mainstream benchmarks, including the VIS, VSS, and VPS datasets. Using a unified architecture, DVIS++ significantly outperforms state-of-the-art specialized methods on these benchmarks in both close- and open-vocabulary settings. Code:~\url{https://github.com/zhang-tao-whu/DVIS_Plus}.

Stable Segment Anything Model

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) achieves remarkable promptable segmentation given high-quality prompts which, however, often require good skills to specify. To make SAM robust to casual prompts, this paper presents the first comprehensive analysis on SAM's segmentation stability across a diverse spectrum of prompt qualities, notably imprecise bounding boxes and insufficient points. Our key finding reveals that given such low-quality prompts, SAM's mask decoder tends to activate image features that are biased towards the background or confined to specific object parts. To mitigate this issue, our key idea consists of calibrating solely SAM's mask attention by adjusting the sampling locations and amplitudes of image features, while the original SAM model architecture and weights remain unchanged. Consequently, our deformable sampling plugin (DSP) enables SAM to adaptively shift attention to the prompted target regions in a data-driven manner, facilitated by our effective robust training strategy (RTS). During inference, dynamic routing plugin (DRP) is proposed that toggles SAM between the deformable and regular grid sampling modes, conditioned on the input prompt quality. Thus, our solution, termed Stable-SAM, offers several advantages: 1) improved SAM's segmentation stability across a wide range of prompt qualities, while 2) retaining SAM's powerful promptable segmentation efficiency and generality, with 3) minimal learnable parameters (0.08 M) and fast adaptation (by 1 training epoch). Extensive experiments across multiple datasets validate the effectiveness and advantages of our approach, underscoring Stable-SAM as a more robust solution for segmenting anything. Codes will be released upon acceptance. https://github.com/fanq15/Stable-SAM

FreeKD: Knowledge Distillation via Semantic Frequency Prompt

Knowledge distillation (KD) has been applied to various tasks successfully, and mainstream methods typically boost the student model via spatial imitation losses. However, the consecutive downsamplings induced in the spatial domain of teacher model is a type of corruption, hindering the student from analyzing what specific information needs to be imitated, which results in accuracy degradation. To better understand the underlying pattern of corrupted feature maps, we shift our attention to the frequency domain. During frequency distillation, we encounter a new challenge: the low-frequency bands convey general but minimal context, while the high are more informative but also introduce noise. Not each pixel within the frequency bands contributes equally to the performance. To address the above problem: (1) We propose the Frequency Prompt plugged into the teacher model, absorbing the semantic frequency context during finetuning. (2) During the distillation period, a pixel-wise frequency mask is generated via Frequency Prompt, to localize those pixel of interests (PoIs) in various frequency bands. Additionally, we employ a position-aware relational frequency loss for dense prediction tasks, delivering a high-order spatial enhancement to the student model. We dub our Frequency Knowledge Distillation method as FreeKD, which determines the optimal localization and extent for the frequency distillation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FreeKD not only outperforms spatial-based distillation methods consistently on dense prediction tasks (e.g., FreeKD brings 3.8 AP gains for RepPoints-R50 on COCO2017 and 4.55 mIoU gains for PSPNet-R18 on Cityscapes), but also conveys more robustness to the student. Notably, we also validate the generalization of our approach on large-scale vision models (e.g., DINO and SAM).

MARRS: Multimodal Reference Resolution System

Successfully handling context is essential for any dialog understanding task. This context maybe be conversational (relying on previous user queries or system responses), visual (relying on what the user sees, for example, on their screen), or background (based on signals such as a ringing alarm or playing music). In this work, we present an overview of MARRS, or Multimodal Reference Resolution System, an on-device framework within a Natural Language Understanding system, responsible for handling conversational, visual and background context. In particular, we present different machine learning models to enable handing contextual queries; specifically, one to enable reference resolution, and one to handle context via query rewriting. We also describe how these models complement each other to form a unified, coherent, lightweight system that can understand context while preserving user privacy.

Collaboration and Transition: Distilling Item Transitions into Multi-Query Self-Attention for Sequential Recommendation

Modern recommender systems employ various sequential modules such as self-attention to learn dynamic user interests. However, these methods are less effective in capturing collaborative and transitional signals within user interaction sequences. First, the self-attention architecture uses the embedding of a single item as the attention query, which is inherently challenging to capture collaborative signals. Second, these methods typically follow an auto-regressive framework, which is unable to learn global item transition patterns. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new method called Multi-Query Self-Attention with Transition-Aware Embedding Distillation (MQSA-TED). First, we propose an $L$-query self-attention module that employs flexible window sizes for attention queries to capture collaborative signals. In addition, we introduce a multi-query self-attention method that balances the bias-variance trade-off in modeling user preferences by combining long and short-query self-attentions. Second, we develop a transition-aware embedding distillation module that distills global item-to-item transition patterns into item embeddings, which enables the model to memorize and leverage transitional signals and serves as a calibrator for collaborative signals. Experimental results on four real-world datasets show the superiority of our proposed method over state-of-the-art sequential recommendation methods.