Better than Random: Reliable NLG Human Evaluation with Constrained Active Sampling

Human evaluation is viewed as a reliable evaluation method for NLG which is expensive and time-consuming. To save labor and costs, researchers usually perform human evaluation on a small subset of data sampled from the whole dataset in practice. However, different selection subsets will lead to different rankings of the systems. To give a more correct inter-system ranking and make the gold standard human evaluation more reliable, we propose a Constrained Active Sampling Framework (CASF) for reliable human judgment. CASF operates through a Learner, a Systematic Sampler and a Constrained Controller to select representative samples for getting a more correct inter-system ranking.Experiment results on 137 real NLG evaluation setups with 44 human evaluation metrics across 16 datasets and 5 NLG tasks demonstrate CASF receives 93.18% top-ranked system recognition accuracy and ranks first or ranks second on 90.91% of the human metrics with 0.83 overall inter-system ranking Kendall correlation.Code and data are publicly available online.

ProMamba: Prompt-Mamba for polyp segmentation

Detecting polyps through colonoscopy is an important task in medical image segmentation, which provides significant assistance and reference value for clinical surgery. However, accurate segmentation of polyps is a challenging task due to two main reasons. Firstly, polyps exhibit various shapes and colors. Secondly, the boundaries between polyps and their normal surroundings are often unclear. Additionally, significant differences between different datasets lead to limited generalization capabilities of existing methods. To address these issues, we propose a segmentation model based on Prompt-Mamba, which incorporates the latest Vision-Mamba and prompt technologies. Compared to previous models trained on the same dataset, our model not only maintains high segmentation accuracy on the validation part of the same dataset but also demonstrates superior accuracy on unseen datasets, exhibiting excellent generalization capabilities. Notably, we are the first to apply the Vision-Mamba architecture to polyp segmentation and the first to utilize prompt technology in a polyp segmentation model. Our model efficiently accomplishes segmentation tasks, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods by an average of 5% across six datasets. Furthermore, we have developed multiple versions of our model with scaled parameter counts, achieving better performance than previous models even with fewer parameters. Our code and trained weights will be released soon.

A Segmentation Foundation Model for Diverse-type Tumors

Large pre-trained models with their numerous model parameters and extensive training datasets have shown excellent performance in various tasks. Many publicly available medical image datasets do not have a sufficient amount of data so there are few large-scale models in medical imaging. We propose a large-scale Tumor Segmentation Foundation Model (TSFM) with 1.6 billion parameters using Resblock-backbone and Transformer-bottleneck,which has good transfer ability for downstream tasks. To make TSFM exhibit good performance in tumor segmentation, we make full use of the strong spatial correlation between tumors and organs in the medical image, innovatively fuse 7 tumor datasets and 3 multi-organ datasets to build a 3D medical dataset pool, including 2779 cases with totally 300k medical images, whose size currently exceeds many other single publicly available datasets. TSFM is the pre-trained model for medical image segmentation, which also can be transferred to multiple downstream tasks for fine-tuning learning. The average performance of our pre-trained model is 2% higher than that of nnU-Net across various tumor types. In the transfer learning task, TSFM only needs 5% training epochs of nnU-Net to achieve similar performance and can surpass nnU-Net by 2% on average with 10% training epoch. Pre-trained TSFM and its code will be released soon.

FedFMS: Exploring Federated Foundation Models for Medical Image Segmentation

Medical image segmentation is crucial for clinical diagnosis. The Segmentation Anything Model (SAM) serves as a powerful foundation model for visual segmentation and can be adapted for medical image segmentation. However, medical imaging data typically contain privacy-sensitive information, making it challenging to train foundation models with centralized storage and sharing. To date, there are few foundation models tailored for medical image deployment within the federated learning framework, and the segmentation performance, as well as the efficiency of communication and training, remain unexplored. In response to these issues, we developed Federated Foundation models for Medical image Segmentation (FedFMS), which includes the Federated SAM (FedSAM) and a communication and training-efficient Federated SAM with Medical SAM Adapter (FedMSA). Comprehensive experiments on diverse datasets are conducted to investigate the performance disparities between centralized training and federated learning across various configurations of FedFMS. The experiments revealed that FedFMS could achieve performance comparable to models trained via centralized training methods while maintaining privacy. Furthermore, FedMSA demonstrated the potential to enhance communication and training efficiency. Our model implementation codes are available at https://github.com/LIU-YUXI/FedFMS.

Spikformer V2: Join the High Accuracy Club on ImageNet with an SNN Ticket

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), known for their biologically plausible architecture, face the challenge of limited performance. The self-attention mechanism, which is the cornerstone of the high-performance Transformer and also a biologically inspired structure, is absent in existing SNNs. To this end, we explore the potential of leveraging both self-attention capability and biological properties of SNNs, and propose a novel Spiking Self-Attention (SSA) and Spiking Transformer (Spikformer). The SSA mechanism eliminates the need for softmax and captures the sparse visual feature employing spike-based Query, Key, and Value. This sparse computation without multiplication makes SSA efficient and energy-saving. Further, we develop a Spiking Convolutional Stem (SCS) with supplementary convolutional layers to enhance the architecture of Spikformer. The Spikformer enhanced with the SCS is referred to as Spikformer V2. To train larger and deeper Spikformer V2, we introduce a pioneering exploration of Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) within the SNN. Specifically, we pre-train Spikformer V2 with masking and reconstruction style inspired by the mainstream self-supervised Transformer, and then finetune the Spikformer V2 on the image classification on ImageNet. Extensive experiments show that Spikformer V2 outperforms other previous surrogate training and ANN2SNN methods. An 8-layer Spikformer V2 achieves an accuracy of 80.38% using 4 time steps, and after SSL, a 172M 16-layer Spikformer V2 reaches an accuracy of 81.10% with just 1 time step. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the SNN achieves 80+% accuracy on ImageNet. The code will be available at Spikformer V2.

Dual Branch Network Towards Accurate Printed Mathematical Expression Recognition

Over the past years, Printed Mathematical Expression Recognition (PMER) has progressed rapidly. However, due to the insufficient context information captured by Convolutional Neural Networks, some mathematical symbols might be incorrectly recognized or missed. To tackle this problem, in this paper, a Dual Branch transformer-based Network (DBN) is proposed to learn both local and global context information for accurate PMER. In our DBN, local and global features are extracted simultaneously, and a Context Coupling Module (CCM) is developed to complement the features between the global and local contexts. CCM adopts an interactive manner so that the coupled context clues are highly correlated to each expression symbol. Additionally, we design a Dynamic Soft Target (DST) strategy to utilize the similarities among symbol categories for reasonable label generation. Our experimental results have demonstrated that DBN can accurately recognize mathematical expressions and has achieved state-of-the-art performance.

ChatFace: Chat-Guided Real Face Editing via Diffusion Latent Space Manipulation

Editing real facial images is a crucial task in computer vision with significant demand in various real-world applications. While GAN-based methods have showed potential in manipulating images especially when combined with CLIP, these methods are limited in their ability to reconstruct real images due to challenging GAN inversion capability. Despite the successful image reconstruction achieved by diffusion-based methods, there are still challenges in effectively manipulating fine-gained facial attributes with textual instructions.To address these issues and facilitate convenient manipulation of real facial images, we propose a novel approach that conduct text-driven image editing in the semantic latent space of diffusion model. By aligning the temporal feature of the diffusion model with the semantic condition at generative process, we introduce a stable manipulation strategy, which perform precise zero-shot manipulation effectively. Furthermore, we develop an interactive system named ChatFace, which combines the zero-shot reasoning ability of large language models to perform efficient manipulations in diffusion semantic latent space. This system enables users to perform complex multi-attribute manipulations through dialogue, opening up new possibilities for interactive image editing. Extensive experiments confirmed that our approach outperforms previous methods and enables precise editing of real facial images, making it a promising candidate for real-world applications. Project page: https://dongxuyue.github.io/chatface/

DeepVecFont-v2: Exploiting Transformers to Synthesize Vector Fonts with Higher Quality

Vector font synthesis is a challenging and ongoing problem in the fields of Computer Vision and Computer Graphics. The recently-proposed DeepVecFont achieved state-of-the-art performance by exploiting information of both the image and sequence modalities of vector fonts. However, it has limited capability for handling long sequence data and heavily relies on an image-guided outline refinement post-processing. Thus, vector glyphs synthesized by DeepVecFont still often contain some distortions and artifacts and cannot rival human-designed results. To address the above problems, this paper proposes an enhanced version of DeepVecFont mainly by making the following three novel technical contributions. First, we adopt Transformers instead of RNNs to process sequential data and design a relaxation representation for vector outlines, markedly improving the model's capability and stability of synthesizing long and complex outlines. Second, we propose to sample auxiliary points in addition to control points to precisely align the generated and target B\'ezier curves or lines. Finally, to alleviate error accumulation in the sequential generation process, we develop a context-based self-refinement module based on another Transformer-based decoder to remove artifacts in the initially synthesized glyphs. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively resolves those intrinsic problems of the original DeepVecFont and outperforms existing approaches in generating English and Chinese vector fonts with complicated structures and diverse styles.

How to Describe Images in a More Funny Way? Towards a Modular Approach to Cross-Modal Sarcasm Generation

Sarcasm generation has been investigated in previous studies by considering it as a text-to-text generation problem, i.e., generating a sarcastic sentence for an input sentence. In this paper, we study a new problem of cross-modal sarcasm generation (CMSG), i.e., generating a sarcastic description for a given image. CMSG is challenging as models need to satisfy the characteristics of sarcasm, as well as the correlation between different modalities. In addition, there should be some inconsistency between the two modalities, which requires imagination. Moreover, high-quality training data is insufficient. To address these problems, we take a step toward generating sarcastic descriptions from images without paired training data and propose an Extraction-Generation-Ranking based Modular method (EGRM) for cross-model sarcasm generation. Specifically, EGRM first extracts diverse information from an image at different levels and uses the obtained image tags, sentimental descriptive caption, and commonsense-based consequence to generate candidate sarcastic texts. Then, a comprehensive ranking algorithm, which considers image-text relation, sarcasticness, and grammaticality, is proposed to select a final text from the candidate texts. Human evaluation at five criteria on a total of 1200 generated image-text pairs from eight systems and auxiliary automatic evaluation show the superiority of our method.

Spikformer: When Spiking Neural Network Meets Transformer

We consider two biologically plausible structures, the Spiking Neural Network (SNN) and the self-attention mechanism. The former offers an energy-efficient and event-driven paradigm for deep learning, while the latter has the ability to capture feature dependencies, enabling Transformer to achieve good performance. It is intuitively promising to explore the marriage between them. In this paper, we consider leveraging both self-attention capability and biological properties of SNNs, and propose a novel Spiking Self Attention (SSA) as well as a powerful framework, named Spiking Transformer (Spikformer). The SSA mechanism in Spikformer models the sparse visual feature by using spike-form Query, Key, and Value without softmax. Since its computation is sparse and avoids multiplication, SSA is efficient and has low computational energy consumption. It is shown that Spikformer with SSA can outperform the state-of-the-art SNNs-like frameworks in image classification on both neuromorphic and static datasets. Spikformer (66.3M parameters) with comparable size to SEW-ResNet-152 (60.2M,69.26%) can achieve 74.81% top1 accuracy on ImageNet using 4 time steps, which is the state-of-the-art in directly trained SNNs models.