AFLoRA: Adaptive Freezing of Low Rank Adaptation in Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Models

We present a novel Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) method, dubbed as Adaptive Freezing of Low Rank Adaptation (AFLoRA). Specifically, for each pre-trained frozen weight tensor, we add a parallel path of trainable low-rank matrices, namely a down-projection and an up-projection matrix, each of which is followed by a feature transformation vector. Based on a novel freezing score, we the incrementally freeze these projection matrices during fine-tuning to reduce the computation and alleviate over-fitting. Our experimental results demonstrate that we can achieve state-of-the-art performance with an average improvement of up to $0.85\%$ as evaluated on GLUE benchmark while yeilding up to $9.5\times$ fewer average trainable parameters. While compared in terms of runtime, AFLoRA can yield up to $1.86\times$ improvement as opposed to similar PEFT alternatives. Besides the practical utility of our approach, we provide insights on the trainability requirements of LoRA paths at different modules and the freezing schedule for the different projection matrices. Code will be released.

Glyph-ByT5: A Customized Text Encoder for Accurate Visual Text Rendering

Visual text rendering poses a fundamental challenge for contemporary text-to-image generation models, with the core problem lying in text encoder deficiencies. To achieve accurate text rendering, we identify two crucial requirements for text encoders: character awareness and alignment with glyphs. Our solution involves crafting a series of customized text encoder, Glyph-ByT5, by fine-tuning the character-aware ByT5 encoder using a meticulously curated paired glyph-text dataset. We present an effective method for integrating Glyph-ByT5 with SDXL, resulting in the creation of the Glyph-SDXL model for design image generation. This significantly enhances text rendering accuracy, improving it from less than $20\%$ to nearly $90\%$ on our design image benchmark. Noteworthy is Glyph-SDXL's newfound ability for text paragraph rendering, achieving high spelling accuracy for tens to hundreds of characters with automated multi-line layouts. Finally, through fine-tuning Glyph-SDXL with a small set of high-quality, photorealistic images featuring visual text, we showcase a substantial improvement in scene text rendering capabilities in open-domain real images. These compelling outcomes aim to encourage further exploration in designing customized text encoders for diverse and challenging tasks.

LMUFormer: Low Complexity Yet Powerful Spiking Model With Legendre Memory Units

Transformer models have demonstrated high accuracy in numerous applications but have high complexity and lack sequential processing capability making them ill-suited for many streaming applications at the edge where devices are heavily resource-constrained. Thus motivated, many researchers have proposed reformulating the transformer models as RNN modules which modify the self-attention computation with explicit states. However, these approaches often incur significant performance degradation. The ultimate goal is to develop a model that has the following properties: parallel training, streaming and low-cost inference, and SOTA performance. In this paper, we propose a new direction to achieve this goal. We show how architectural modifications to a recurrent model can help push its performance toward Transformer models while retaining its sequential processing capability. Specifically, inspired by the recent success of Legendre Memory Units (LMU) in sequence learning tasks, we propose LMUFormer, which augments the LMU with convolutional patch embedding and convolutional channel mixer. Moreover, we present a spiking version of this architecture, which introduces the benefit of states within the patch embedding and channel mixer modules while simultaneously reducing the computing complexity. We evaluated our architectures on multiple sequence datasets. In comparison to SOTA transformer-based models within the ANN domain on the SCv2 dataset, our LMUFormer demonstrates comparable performance while necessitating a remarkable 53 times reduction in parameters and a substantial 65 times decrement in FLOPs. Additionally, owing to our model's proficiency in real-time data processing, we can achieve a 32.03% reduction in sequence length, all while incurring an inconsequential decline in performance. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/zeyuliu1037/LMUFormer.git.

When Bio-Inspired Computing meets Deep Learning: Low-Latency, Accurate, & Energy-Efficient Spiking Neural Networks from Artificial Neural Networks

Bio-inspired Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) are now demonstrating comparable accuracy to intricate convolutional neural networks (CNN), all while delivering remarkable energy and latency efficiency when deployed on neuromorphic hardware. In particular, ANN-to-SNN conversion has recently gained significant traction in developing deep SNNs with close to state-of-the-art (SOTA) test accuracy on complex image recognition tasks. However, advanced ANN-to-SNN conversion approaches demonstrate that for lossless conversion, the number of SNN time steps must equal the number of quantization steps in the ANN activation function. Reducing the number of time steps significantly increases the conversion error. Moreover, the spiking activity of the SNN, which dominates the compute energy in neuromorphic chips, does not reduce proportionally with the number of time steps. To mitigate the accuracy concern, we propose a novel ANN-to-SNN conversion framework, that incurs an exponentially lower number of time steps compared to that required in the SOTA conversion approaches. Our framework modifies the SNN integrate-and-fire (IF) neuron model with identical complexity and shifts the bias term of each batch normalization (BN) layer in the trained ANN. To mitigate the spiking activity concern, we propose training the source ANN with a fine-grained L1 regularizer with surrogate gradients that encourages high spike sparsity in the converted SNN. Our proposed framework thus yields lossless SNNs with ultra-low latency, ultra-low compute energy, thanks to the ultra-low timesteps and high spike sparsity, and ultra-high test accuracy, for example, 73.30% with only 4 time steps on the ImageNet dataset.

COLE: A Hierarchical Generation Framework for Graphic Design

Graphic design, which has been evolving since the 15th century, plays a crucial role in advertising. The creation of high-quality designs demands creativity, innovation, and lateral thinking. This intricate task involves understanding the objective, crafting visual elements such as the background, decoration, font, color, and shape, formulating diverse professional layouts, and adhering to fundamental visual design principles. In this paper, we introduce COLE, a hierarchical generation framework designed to comprehensively address these challenges. This COLE system can transform a straightforward intention prompt into a high-quality graphic design, while also supporting flexible editing based on user input. Examples of such input might include directives like ``design a poster for Hisaishi's concert.'' The key insight is to dissect the complex task of text-to-design generation into a hierarchy of simpler sub-tasks, each addressed by specialized models working collaboratively. The results from these models are then consolidated to produce a cohesive final output. Our hierarchical task decomposition can streamline the complex process and significantly enhance generation reliability. Our COLE system consists of multiple fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs), Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), and Diffusion Models (DMs), each specifically tailored for a design-aware text or image generation task. Furthermore, we construct the DESIGNERINTENTION benchmark to highlight the superiority of our COLE over existing methods in generating high-quality graphic designs from user intent. We perceive our COLE as an important step towards addressing more complex visual design generation tasks in the future.

Spiking Neural Networks with Dynamic Time Steps for Vision Transformers

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as a popular spatio-temporal computing paradigm for complex vision tasks. Recently proposed SNN training algorithms have significantly reduced the number of time steps (down to 1) for improved latency and energy efficiency, however, they target only convolutional neural networks (CNN). These algorithms, when applied on the recently spotlighted vision transformers (ViT), either require a large number of time steps or fail to converge. Based on analysis of the histograms of the ANN and SNN activation maps, we hypothesize that each ViT block has a different sensitivity to the number of time steps. We propose a novel training framework that dynamically allocates the number of time steps to each ViT module depending on a trainable score assigned to each timestep. In particular, we generate a scalar binary time step mask that filters spikes emitted by each neuron in a leaky-integrate-and-fire (LIF) layer. The resulting SNNs have high activation sparsity and require only accumulate operations (AC), except for the input embedding layer, in contrast to expensive multiply-and-accumulates (MAC) needed in traditional ViTs. This yields significant improvements in energy efficiency. We evaluate our training framework and resulting SNNs on image recognition tasks including CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and ImageNet with different ViT architectures. We obtain a test accuracy of 95.97% with 4.97 time steps with direct encoding on CIFAR10.

Overcoming Pathology Image Data Deficiency: Generating Images from Pathological Transformation Process

Histopathology serves as the gold standard for medical diagnosis but faces application limitations due to the shortage of medical resources. Leveraging deep learning, computer-aided diagnosis has the potential to alleviate the pathologist scarcity and provide timely clinical analysis. However, developing a reliable model generally necessitates substantial data for training, which is challenging in pathological field. In response, we propose an adaptive depth-controlled bidirectional diffusion (ADBD) network for image data generation. The domain migration approach can work with small trainset and overcome the diffusion overfitting by source information guidance. Specifically, we developed a hybrid attention strategy to blend global and local attention priorities, which guides the bidirectional diffusion and ensures the migration success. In addition, we developed the adaptive depth-controlled strategy to simulate physiological transformations, capable of yielding unlimited cross-domain intermediate images with corresponding soft labels. ADBD is effective for overcoming pathological image data deficiency and supportable for further pathology-related research.

CPIA Dataset: A Comprehensive Pathological Image Analysis Dataset for Self-supervised Learning Pre-training

Pathological image analysis is a crucial field in computer-aided diagnosis, where deep learning is widely applied. Transfer learning using pre-trained models initialized on natural images has effectively improved the downstream pathological performance. However, the lack of sophisticated domain-specific pathological initialization hinders their potential. Self-supervised learning (SSL) enables pre-training without sample-level labels, which has great potential to overcome the challenge of expensive annotations. Thus, studies focusing on pathological SSL pre-training call for a comprehensive and standardized dataset, similar to the ImageNet in computer vision. This paper presents the comprehensive pathological image analysis (CPIA) dataset, a large-scale SSL pre-training dataset combining 103 open-source datasets with extensive standardization. The CPIA dataset contains 21,427,877 standardized images, covering over 48 organs/tissues and about 100 kinds of diseases, which includes two main data types: whole slide images (WSIs) and characteristic regions of interest (ROIs). A four-scale WSI standardization process is proposed based on the uniform resolution in microns per pixel (MPP), while the ROIs are divided into three scales artificially. This multi-scale dataset is built with the diagnosis habits under the supervision of experienced senior pathologists. The CPIA dataset facilitates a comprehensive pathological understanding and enables pattern discovery explorations. Additionally, to launch the CPIA dataset, several state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines of SSL pre-training and downstream evaluation are specially conducted. The CPIA dataset along with baselines is available at https://github.com/zhanglab2021/CPIA_Dataset.

Corporate Credit Rating: A Survey

Corporate credit rating (CCR) plays a very important role in the process of contemporary economic and social development. How to use credit rating methods for enterprises has always been a problem worthy of discussion. Through reading and studying the relevant literature at home and abroad, this paper makes a systematic survey of CCR. This paper combs the context of the development of CCR methods from the three levels: statistical models, machine learning models and neural network models, summarizes the common databases of CCR, and deeply compares the advantages and disadvantages of the models. Finally, this paper summarizes the problems existing in the current research and prospects the future of CCR. Compared with the existing review of CCR, this paper expounds and analyzes the progress of neural network model in this field in recent years.

Latency-aware Unified Dynamic Networks for Efficient Image Recognition

Dynamic computation has emerged as a promising avenue to enhance the inference efficiency of deep networks. It allows selective activation of computational units, leading to a reduction in unnecessary computations for each input sample. However, the actual efficiency of these dynamic models can deviate from theoretical predictions. This mismatch arises from: 1) the lack of a unified approach due to fragmented research; 2) the focus on algorithm design over critical scheduling strategies, especially in CUDA-enabled GPU contexts; and 3) challenges in measuring practical latency, given that most libraries cater to static operations. Addressing these issues, we unveil the Latency-Aware Unified Dynamic Networks (LAUDNet), a framework that integrates three primary dynamic paradigms-spatially adaptive computation, dynamic layer skipping, and dynamic channel skipping. To bridge the theoretical and practical efficiency gap, LAUDNet merges algorithmic design with scheduling optimization, guided by a latency predictor that accurately gauges dynamic operator latency. We've tested LAUDNet across multiple vision tasks, demonstrating its capacity to notably reduce the latency of models like ResNet-101 by over 50% on platforms such as V100, RTX3090, and TX2 GPUs. Notably, LAUDNet stands out in balancing accuracy and efficiency. Code is available at: https://www.github.com/LeapLabTHU/LAUDNet.