iDAT: inverse Distillation Adapter-Tuning

Adapter-Tuning (AT) method involves freezing a pre-trained model and introducing trainable adapter modules to acquire downstream knowledge, thereby calibrating the model for better adaptation to downstream tasks. This paper proposes a distillation framework for the AT method instead of crafting a carefully designed adapter module, which aims to improve fine-tuning performance. For the first time, we explore the possibility of combining the AT method with knowledge distillation. Via statistical analysis, we observe significant differences in the knowledge acquisition between adapter modules of different models. Leveraging these differences, we propose a simple yet effective framework called inverse Distillation Adapter-Tuning (iDAT). Specifically, we designate the smaller model as the teacher and the larger model as the student. The two are jointly trained, and online knowledge distillation is applied to inject knowledge of different perspective to student model, and significantly enhance the fine-tuning performance on downstream tasks. Extensive experiments on the VTAB-1K benchmark with 19 image classification tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of iDAT. The results show that using existing AT method within our iDAT framework can further yield a 2.66% performance gain, with only an additional 0.07M trainable parameters. Our approach compares favorably with state-of-the-arts without bells and whistles. Our code is available at https://github.com/JCruan519/iDAT.

CLAPP: Contrastive Language-Audio Pre-training in Passive Underwater Vessel Classification

Existing research on audio classification faces challenges in recognizing attributes of passive underwater vessel scenarios and lacks well-annotated datasets due to data privacy concerns. In this study, we introduce CLAPP (Contrastive Language-Audio Pre-training in Passive Underwater Vessel Classification), a novel model. Our aim is to train a neural network using a wide range of vessel audio and vessel state text pairs obtained from an oceanship dataset. CLAPP is capable of directly learning from raw vessel audio data and, when available, from carefully curated labels, enabling improved recognition of vessel attributes in passive underwater vessel scenarios. Model's zero-shot capability allows predicting the most relevant vessel state description for a given vessel audio, without directly optimizing for the task. Our approach aims to solve 2 challenges: vessel audio-text classification and passive underwater vessel audio attribute recognition. The proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art results on both Deepship and Shipsear public datasets, with a notable margin of about 7%-13% for accuracy compared to prior methods on zero-shot task.

LAMM: Label Alignment for Multi-Modal Prompt Learning

With the success of pre-trained visual-language (VL) models such as CLIP in visual representation tasks, transferring pre-trained models to downstream tasks has become a crucial paradigm. Recently, the prompt tuning paradigm, which draws inspiration from natural language processing (NLP), has made significant progress in VL field. However, preceding methods mainly focus on constructing prompt templates for text and visual inputs, neglecting the gap in class label representations between the VL models and downstream tasks. To address this challenge, we introduce an innovative label alignment method named \textbf{LAMM}, which can dynamically adjust the category embeddings of downstream datasets through end-to-end training. Moreover, to achieve a more appropriate label distribution, we propose a hierarchical loss, encompassing the alignment of the parameter space, feature space, and logits space. We conduct experiments on 11 downstream vision datasets and demonstrate that our method significantly improves the performance of existing multi-modal prompt learning models in few-shot scenarios, exhibiting an average accuracy improvement of 2.31(\%) compared to the state-of-the-art methods on 16 shots. Moreover, our methodology exhibits the preeminence in continual learning compared to other prompt tuning methods. Importantly, our method is synergistic with existing prompt tuning methods and can boost the performance on top of them. Our code and dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/gaojingsheng/LAMM.

GIST: Improving Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning via Knowledge Interaction

The Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) method, which adjusts or introduces fewer trainable parameters to calibrate pre-trained models on downstream tasks, has become a recent research interest. However, existing PEFT methods within the traditional fine-tiuning framework have two main shortcomings: 1) They overlook the explicit association between trainable parameters and downstream task knowledge. 2) They neglect the interaction between the intrinsic task-agnostic knowledge of pre-trained models and the task-specific knowledge in downstream tasks. To address this gap, we propose a novel fine-tuning framework, named GIST, in a plug-and-play manner. Specifically, our framework first introduces a trainable token, called the Gist token, when applying PEFT methods on downstream tasks. This token serves as an aggregator of the task-specific knowledge learned by the PEFT methods and forms an explicit association with downstream knowledge. Furthermore, to facilitate explicit interaction between task-agnostic and task-specific knowledge, we introduce the concept of Knowledge Interaction via a Bidirectional Kullback-Leibler Divergence objective. As a result, PEFT methods within our framework can make the pre-trained model understand downstream tasks more comprehensively by leveraging the knowledge interaction. Extensive experiments demonstrate the universality and scalability of our framework. Notably, on the VTAB-1K benchmark, we employ the Adapter (a prevalent PEFT method) within our GIST framework and achieve a performance boost of 2.25%, with an increase of only 0.8K parameters. The Code will be released.

EGE-UNet: an Efficient Group Enhanced UNet for skin lesion segmentation

Transformer and its variants have been widely used for medical image segmentation. However, the large number of parameter and computational load of these models make them unsuitable for mobile health applications. To address this issue, we propose a more efficient approach, the Efficient Group Enhanced UNet (EGE-UNet). We incorporate a Group multi-axis Hadamard Product Attention module (GHPA) and a Group Aggregation Bridge module (GAB) in a lightweight manner. The GHPA groups input features and performs Hadamard Product Attention mechanism (HPA) on different axes to extract pathological information from diverse perspectives. The GAB effectively fuses multi-scale information by grouping low-level features, high-level features, and a mask generated by the decoder at each stage. Comprehensive experiments on the ISIC2017 and ISIC2018 datasets demonstrate that EGE-UNet outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. In short, compared to the TransFuse, our model achieves superior segmentation performance while reducing parameter and computation costs by 494x and 160x, respectively. Moreover, to our best knowledge, this is the first model with a parameter count limited to just 50KB. Our code is available at https://github.com/JCruan519/EGE-UNet.

LiveChat: A Large-Scale Personalized Dialogue Dataset Automatically Constructed from Live Streaming

Open-domain dialogue systems have made promising progress in recent years. While the state-of-the-art dialogue agents are built upon large-scale text-based social media data and large pre-trained models, there is no guarantee these agents could also perform well in fast-growing scenarios, such as live streaming, due to the bounded transferability of pre-trained models and biased distributions of public datasets from Reddit and Weibo, etc. To improve the essential capability of responding and establish a benchmark in the live open-domain scenario, we introduce the LiveChat dataset, composed of 1.33 million real-life Chinese dialogues with almost 3800 average sessions across 351 personas and fine-grained profiles for each persona. LiveChat is automatically constructed by processing numerous live videos on the Internet and naturally falls within the scope of multi-party conversations, where the issues of Who says What to Whom should be considered. Therefore, we target two critical tasks of response modeling and addressee recognition and propose retrieval-based baselines grounded on advanced techniques. Experimental results have validated the positive effects of leveraging persona profiles and larger average sessions per persona. In addition, we also benchmark the transferability of advanced generation-based models on LiveChat and pose some future directions for current challenges.

Learning Robust Visual-Semantic Embedding for Generalizable Person Re-identification

Generalizable person re-identification (Re-ID) is a very hot research topic in machine learning and computer vision, which plays a significant role in realistic scenarios due to its various applications in public security and video surveillance. However, previous methods mainly focus on the visual representation learning, while neglect to explore the potential of semantic features during training, which easily leads to poor generalization capability when adapted to the new domain. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Modal Equivalent Transformer called MMET for more robust visual-semantic embedding learning on visual, textual and visual-textual tasks respectively. To further enhance the robust feature learning in the context of transformer, a dynamic masking mechanism called Masked Multimodal Modeling strategy (MMM) is introduced to mask both the image patches and the text tokens, which can jointly works on multimodal or unimodal data and significantly boost the performance of generalizable person Re-ID. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the competitive performance of our method over previous approaches. We hope this method could advance the research towards visual-semantic representation learning. Our source code is also publicly available at https://github.com/JeremyXSC/MMET.

CluCDD:Contrastive Dialogue Disentanglement via Clustering

A huge number of multi-participant dialogues happen online every day, which leads to difficulty in understanding the nature of dialogue dynamics for both humans and machines. Dialogue disentanglement aims at separating an entangled dialogue into detached sessions, thus increasing the readability of long disordered dialogue. Previous studies mainly focus on message-pair classification and clustering in two-step methods, which cannot guarantee the whole clustering performance in a dialogue. To address this challenge, we propose a simple yet effective model named CluCDD, which aggregates utterances by contrastive learning. More specifically, our model pulls utterances in the same session together and pushes away utterances in different ones. Then a clustering method is adopted to generate predicted clustering labels. Comprehensive experiments conducted on the Movie Dialogue dataset and IRC dataset demonstrate that our model achieves a new state-of-the-art result.

MALUNet: A Multi-Attention and Light-weight UNet for Skin Lesion Segmentation

Recently, some pioneering works have preferred applying more complex modules to improve segmentation performances. However, it is not friendly for actual clinical environments due to limited computing resources. To address this challenge, we propose a light-weight model to achieve competitive performances for skin lesion segmentation at the lowest cost of parameters and computational complexity so far. Briefly, we propose four modules: (1) DGA consists of dilated convolution and gated attention mechanisms to extract global and local feature information; (2) IEA, which is based on external attention to characterize the overall datasets and enhance the connection between samples; (3) CAB is composed of 1D convolution and fully connected layers to perform a global and local fusion of multi-stage features to generate attention maps at channel axis; (4) SAB, which operates on multi-stage features by a shared 2D convolution to generate attention maps at spatial axis. We combine four modules with our U-shape architecture and obtain a light-weight medical image segmentation model dubbed as MALUNet. Compared with UNet, our model improves the mIoU and DSC metrics by 2.39% and 1.49%, respectively, with a 44x and 166x reduction in the number of parameters and computational complexity. In addition, we conduct comparison experiments on two skin lesion segmentation datasets (ISIC2017 and ISIC2018). Experimental results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art in balancing the number of parameters, computational complexity and segmentation performances. Code is available at https://github.com/JCruan519/MALUNet.