Faithful Temporal Question Answering over Heterogeneous Sources

Temporal question answering (QA) involves time constraints, with phrases such as "... in 2019" or "... before COVID". In the former, time is an explicit condition, in the latter it is implicit. State-of-the-art methods have limitations along three dimensions. First, with neural inference, time constraints are merely soft-matched, giving room to invalid or inexplicable answers. Second, questions with implicit time are poorly supported. Third, answers come from a single source: either a knowledge base (KB) or a text corpus. We propose a temporal QA system that addresses these shortcomings. First, it enforces temporal constraints for faithful answering with tangible evidence. Second, it properly handles implicit questions. Third, it operates over heterogeneous sources, covering KB, text and web tables in a unified manner. The method has three stages: (i) understanding the question and its temporal conditions, (ii) retrieving evidence from all sources, and (iii) faithfully answering the question. As implicit questions are sparse in prior benchmarks, we introduce a principled method for generating diverse questions. Experiments show superior performance over a suite of baselines.

DynaPipe: Optimizing Multi-task Training through Dynamic Pipelines

Multi-task model training has been adopted to enable a single deep neural network model (often a large language model) to handle multiple tasks (e.g., question answering and text summarization). Multi-task training commonly receives input sequences of highly different lengths due to the diverse contexts of different tasks. Padding (to the same sequence length) or packing (short examples into long sequences of the same length) is usually adopted to prepare input samples for model training, which is nonetheless not space or computation efficient. This paper proposes a dynamic micro-batching approach to tackle sequence length variation and enable efficient multi-task model training. We advocate pipeline-parallel training of the large model with variable-length micro-batches, each of which potentially comprises a different number of samples. We optimize micro-batch construction using a dynamic programming-based approach, and handle micro-batch execution time variation through dynamic pipeline and communication scheduling, enabling highly efficient pipeline training. Extensive evaluation on the FLANv2 dataset demonstrates up to 4.39x higher training throughput when training T5, and 3.25x when training GPT, as compared with packing-based baselines. DynaPipe's source code is publicly available at https://github.com/awslabs/optimizing-multitask-training-through-dynamic-pipelines.

Multi-Semantic Fusion Model for Generalized Zero-Shot Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

Generalized zero-shot skeleton-based action recognition (GZSSAR) is a new challenging problem in computer vision community, which requires models to recognize actions without any training samples. Previous studies only utilize the action labels of verb phrases as the semantic prototypes for learning the mapping from skeleton-based actions to a shared semantic space. However, the limited semantic information of action labels restricts the generalization ability of skeleton features for recognizing unseen actions. In order to solve this dilemma, we propose a multi-semantic fusion (MSF) model for improving the performance of GZSSAR, where two kinds of class-level textual descriptions (i.e., action descriptions and motion descriptions), are collected as auxiliary semantic information to enhance the learning efficacy of generalizable skeleton features. Specially, a pre-trained language encoder takes the action descriptions, motion descriptions and original class labels as inputs to obtain rich semantic features for each action class, while a skeleton encoder is implemented to extract skeleton features. Then, a variational autoencoder (VAE) based generative module is performed to learn a cross-modal alignment between skeleton and semantic features. Finally, a classification module is built to recognize the action categories of input samples, where a seen-unseen classification gate is adopted to predict whether the sample comes from seen action classes or not in GZSSAR. The superior performance in comparisons with previous models validates the effectiveness of the proposed MSF model on GZSSAR.

Soft-IntroVAE for Continuous Latent space Image Super-Resolution

Continuous image super-resolution (SR) recently receives a lot of attention from researchers, for its practical and flexible image scaling for various displays. Local implicit image representation is one of the methods that can map the coordinates and 2D features for latent space interpolation. Inspired by Variational AutoEncoder, we propose a Soft-introVAE for continuous latent space image super-resolution (SVAE-SR). A novel latent space adversarial training is achieved for photo-realistic image restoration. To further improve the quality, a positional encoding scheme is used to extend the original pixel coordinates by aggregating frequency information over the pixel areas. We show the effectiveness of the proposed SVAE-SR through quantitative and qualitative comparisons, and further, illustrate its generalization in denoising and real-image super-resolution.

Arbitrary point cloud upsampling via Dual Back-Projection Network

Point clouds acquired from 3D sensors are usually sparse and noisy. Point cloud upsampling is an approach to increase the density of the point cloud so that detailed geometric information can be restored. In this paper, we propose a Dual Back-Projection network for point cloud upsampling (DBPnet). A Dual Back-Projection is formulated in an up-down-up manner for point cloud upsampling. It not only back projects feature residues but also coordinates residues so that the network better captures the point correlations in the feature and space domains, achieving lower reconstruction errors on both uniform and non-uniform sparse point clouds. Our proposed method is also generalizable for arbitrary upsampling tasks (e.g. 4x, 5.5x). Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves the lowest point set matching losses with respect to the benchmark. In addition, the success of our approach demonstrates that generative networks are not necessarily needed for non-uniform point clouds.

RAF: Holistic Compilation for Deep Learning Model Training

As deep learning is pervasive in modern applications, many deep learning frameworks are presented for deep learning practitioners to develop and train DNN models rapidly. Meanwhile, as training large deep learning models becomes a trend in recent years, the training throughput and memory footprint are getting crucial. Accordingly, optimizing training workloads with compiler optimizations is inevitable and getting more and more attentions. However, existing deep learning compilers (DLCs) mainly target inference and do not incorporate holistic optimizations, such as automatic differentiation and automatic mixed precision, in training workloads. In this paper, we present RAF, a deep learning compiler for training. Unlike existing DLCs, RAF accepts a forward model and in-house generates a training graph. Accordingly, RAF is able to systematically consolidate graph optimizations for performance, memory and distributed training. In addition, to catch up to the state-of-the-art performance with hand-crafted kernel libraries as well as tensor compilers, RAF proposes an operator dialect mechanism to seamlessly integrate all possible kernel implementations. We demonstrate that by in-house training graph generation and operator dialect mechanism, we are able to perform holistic optimizations and achieve either better training throughput or larger batch size against PyTorch (eager and torchscript mode), XLA, and DeepSpeed for popular transformer models on GPUs.

Human Image Generation: A Comprehensive Survey

Image and video synthesis has become a blooming topic in computer vision and machine learning communities along with the developments of deep generative models, due to its great academic and application value. Many researchers have been devoted to synthesizing high-fidelity human images as one of the most commonly seen object categories in daily lives, where a large number of studies are performed based on various deep generative models, task settings and applications. Thus, it is necessary to give a comprehensive overview on these variant methods on human image generation. In this paper, we divide human image generation techniques into three paradigms, i.e., data-driven methods, knowledge-guided methods and hybrid methods. For each route, the most representative models and the corresponding variants are presented, where the advantages and characteristics of different methods are summarized in terms of model architectures and input/output requirements. Besides, the main public human image datasets and evaluation metrics in the literature are also summarized. Furthermore, due to the wide application potentials, two typical downstream usages of synthesized human images are covered, i.e., data augmentation for person recognition tasks and virtual try-on for fashion customers. Finally, we discuss the challenges and potential directions of human image generation to shed light on future research.

DRAformer: Differentially Reconstructed Attention Transformer for Time-Series Forecasting

Time-series forecasting plays an important role in many real-world scenarios, such as equipment life cycle forecasting, weather forecasting, and traffic flow forecasting. It can be observed from recent research that a variety of transformer-based models have shown remarkable results in time-series forecasting. However, there are still some issues that limit the ability of transformer-based models on time-series forecasting tasks: (i) learning directly on raw data is susceptible to noise due to its complex and unstable feature representation; (ii) the self-attention mechanisms pay insufficient attention to changing features and temporal dependencies. In order to solve these two problems, we propose a transformer-based differentially reconstructed attention model DRAformer. Specifically, DRAformer has the following innovations: (i) learning against differenced sequences, which preserves clear and stable sequence features by differencing and highlights the changing properties of sequences; (ii) the reconstructed attention: integrated distance attention exhibits sequential distance through a learnable Gaussian kernel, distributed difference attention calculates distribution difference by mapping the difference sequence to the adaptive feature space, and the combination of the two effectively focuses on the sequences with prominent associations; (iii) the reconstructed decoder input, which extracts sequence features by integrating variation information and temporal correlations, thereby obtaining a more comprehensive sequence representation. Extensive experiments on four large-scale datasets demonstrate that DRAformer outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

Complex Temporal Question Answering on Knowledge Graphs

Question answering over knowledge graphs (KG-QA) is a vital topic in IR. Questions with temporal intent are a special class of practical importance, but have not received much attention in research. This work presents EXAQT, the first end-to-end system for answering complex temporal questions that have multiple entities and predicates, and associated temporal conditions. EXAQT answers natural language questions over KGs in two stages, one geared towards high recall, the other towards precision at top ranks. The first step computes question-relevant compact subgraphs within the KG, and judiciously enhances them with pertinent temporal facts, using Group Steiner Trees and fine-tuned BERT models. The second step constructs relational graph convolutional networks (R-GCNs) from the first step's output, and enhances the R-GCNs with time-aware entity embeddings and attention over temporal relations. We evaluate EXAQT on TimeQuestions, a large dataset of 16k temporal questions we compiled from a variety of general purpose KG-QA benchmarks. Results show that EXAQT outperforms three state-of-the-art systems for answering complex questions over KGs, thereby justifying specialized treatment of temporal QA.

Learning Domain Invariant Representations for Generalizable Person Re-Identification

Generalizable person Re-Identification (ReID) has attracted growing attention in recent computer vision community, as it offers ready-to-use ReID models without the need for model retraining in new environments. In this work, we introduce causality into person ReID and propose a novel generalizable framework, named Domain Invariant Representations for generalizable person Re-Identification (DIR-ReID). We assume the data generation process is controlled by two sets of factors, i.e. identity-specific factors containing identity related cues, and domain-specific factors describing other scene-related information which cause distribution shifts across domains. With the assumption above, a novel Multi-Domain Disentangled Adversarial Network (MDDAN) is designed to disentangle these two sets of factors. Furthermore, a Causal Data Augmentation (CDA) block is proposed to perform feature-level data augmentation for better domain-invariant representations, which can be explained as interventions on latent factors from a causal learning perspective. Extensive experiments have been conducted, showing that DIR-ReID outperforms state-of-the-art methods on large-scale domain generalization (DG) ReID benchmarks. Moreover, a theoretical analysis is provided for a better understanding of our method.