Transferable Deep Clustering Model

Deep learning has shown remarkable success in the field of clustering recently. However, how to transfer a trained clustering model on a source domain to a target domain by leveraging the acquired knowledge to guide the clustering process remains challenging. Existing deep clustering methods often lack generalizability to new domains because they typically learn a group of fixed cluster centroids, which may not be optimal for the new domain distributions. In this paper, we propose a novel transferable deep clustering model that can automatically adapt the cluster centroids according to the distribution of data samples. Rather than learning a fixed set of centroids, our approach introduces a novel attention-based module that can adapt the centroids by measuring their relationship with samples. In addition, we theoretically show that our model is strictly more powerful than some classical clustering algorithms such as k-means or Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed transfer learning framework, which significantly improves the performance on target domain and reduces the computational cost.

Balancing Specialized and General Skills in LLMs: The Impact of Modern Tuning and Data Strategy

This paper introduces a multifaceted methodology for fine-tuning and evaluating large language models (LLMs) for specialized monetization tasks. The goal is to balance general language proficiency with domain-specific skills. The methodology has three main components: 1) Carefully blending in-domain and general-purpose data during fine-tuning to achieve an optimal balance between general and specialized capabilities; 2) Designing a comprehensive evaluation framework with 45 questions tailored to assess performance on functionally relevant dimensions like reliability, consistency, and business impact; 3) Analyzing how model size and continual training influence metrics to guide efficient resource allocation during fine-tuning. The paper details the design, data collection, analytical techniques, and results validating the proposed frameworks. It aims to provide businesses and researchers with actionable insights on effectively adapting LLMs for specialized contexts. We also intend to make public the comprehensive evaluation framework, which includes the 45 tailored questions and their respective scoring guidelines, to foster transparency and collaboration in adapting LLMs for specialized tasks.

Beyond Text: A Deep Dive into Large Language Models' Ability on Understanding Graph Data

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance on many natural language processing tasks. However, their capabilities on graph-structured data remain relatively unexplored. In this paper, we conduct a series of experiments benchmarking leading LLMs on diverse graph prediction tasks spanning node, edge, and graph levels. We aim to assess whether LLMs can effectively process graph data and leverage topological structures to enhance performance, compared to specialized graph neural networks. Through varied prompt formatting and task/dataset selection, we analyze how well LLMs can interpret and utilize graph structures. By comparing LLMs' performance with specialized graph models, we offer insights into the strengths and limitations of employing LLMs for graph analytics. Our findings provide insights into LLMs' capabilities and suggest avenues for further exploration in applying them to graph analytics.

Large Language Models for Spatial Trajectory Patterns Mining

Identifying anomalous human spatial trajectory patterns can indicate dynamic changes in mobility behavior with applications in domains like infectious disease monitoring and elderly care. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their ability to reason in a manner akin to humans. This presents significant potential for analyzing temporal patterns in human mobility. In this paper, we conduct empirical studies to assess the capabilities of leading LLMs like GPT-4 and Claude-2 in detecting anomalous behaviors from mobility data, by comparing to specialized methods. Our key findings demonstrate that LLMs can attain reasonable anomaly detection performance even without any specific cues. In addition, providing contextual clues about potential irregularities could further enhances their prediction efficacy. Moreover, LLMs can provide reasonable explanations for their judgments, thereby improving transparency. Our work provides insights on the strengths and limitations of LLMs for human spatial trajectory analysis.

DeepZero: Scaling up Zeroth-Order Optimization for Deep Model Training

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has become a popular technique for solving machine learning (ML) problems when first-order (FO) information is difficult or impossible to obtain. However, the scalability of ZO optimization remains an open problem: Its use has primarily been limited to relatively small-scale ML problems, such as sample-wise adversarial attack generation. To our best knowledge, no prior work has demonstrated the effectiveness of ZO optimization in training deep neural networks (DNNs) without a significant decrease in performance. To overcome this roadblock, we develop DeepZero, a principled ZO deep learning (DL) framework that can scale ZO optimization to DNN training from scratch through three primary innovations. First, we demonstrate the advantages of coordinate-wise gradient estimation (CGE) over randomized vector-wise gradient estimation in training accuracy and computational efficiency. Second, we propose a sparsity-induced ZO training protocol that extends the model pruning methodology using only finite differences to explore and exploit the sparse DL prior in CGE. Third, we develop the methods of feature reuse and forward parallelization to advance the practical implementations of ZO training. Our extensive experiments show that DeepZero achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy on ResNet-20 trained on CIFAR-10, approaching FO training performance for the first time. Furthermore, we show the practical utility of DeepZero in applications of certified adversarial defense and DL-based partial differential equation error correction, achieving 10-20% improvement over SOTA. We believe our results will inspire future research on scalable ZO optimization and contribute to advancing DL with black box.

KLoB: a Benchmark for Assessing Knowledge Locating Methods in Language Models

Recently, Locate-Then-Edit paradigm has emerged as one of the main approaches in changing factual knowledge stored in the Language models. However, there is a lack of research on whether present locating methods can pinpoint the exact parameters embedding the desired knowledge. Moreover, although many researchers have questioned the validity of locality hypothesis of factual knowledge, no method is provided to test the a hypothesis for more in-depth discussion and research. Therefore, we introduce KLoB, a benchmark examining three essential properties that a reliable knowledge locating method should satisfy. KLoB can serve as a benchmark for evaluating existing locating methods in language models, and can contributes a method to reassessing the validity of locality hypothesis of factual knowledge. Our is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/juyiming/KLoB}.

Rethinking Amodal Video Segmentation from Learning Supervised Signals with Object-centric Representation

Video amodal segmentation is a particularly challenging task in computer vision, which requires to deduce the full shape of an object from the visible parts of it. Recently, some studies have achieved promising performance by using motion flow to integrate information across frames under a self-supervised setting. However, motion flow has a clear limitation by the two factors of moving cameras and object deformation. This paper presents a rethinking to previous works. We particularly leverage the supervised signals with object-centric representation in \textit{real-world scenarios}. The underlying idea is the supervision signal of the specific object and the features from different views can mutually benefit the deduction of the full mask in any specific frame. We thus propose an Efficient object-centric Representation amodal Segmentation (EoRaS). Specially, beyond solely relying on supervision signals, we design a translation module to project image features into the Bird's-Eye View (BEV), which introduces 3D information to improve current feature quality. Furthermore, we propose a multi-view fusion layer based temporal module which is equipped with a set of object slots and interacts with features from different views by attention mechanism to fulfill sufficient object representation completion. As a result, the full mask of the object can be decoded from image features updated by object slots. Extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Our code will be released at \url{https://github.com/kfan21/EoRaS}.

Partition-A-Medical-Image: Extracting Multiple Representative Sub-regions for Few-shot Medical Image Segmentation

Few-shot Medical Image Segmentation (FSMIS) is a more promising solution for medical image segmentation tasks where high-quality annotations are naturally scarce. However, current mainstream methods primarily focus on extracting holistic representations from support images with large intra-class variations in appearance and background, and encounter difficulties in adapting to query images. In this work, we present an approach to extract multiple representative sub-regions from a given support medical image, enabling fine-grained selection over the generated image regions. Specifically, the foreground of the support image is decomposed into distinct regions, which are subsequently used to derive region-level representations via a designed Regional Prototypical Learning (RPL) module. We then introduce a novel Prototypical Representation Debiasing (PRD) module based on a two-way elimination mechanism which suppresses the disturbance of regional representations by a self-support, Multi-direction Self-debiasing (MS) block, and a support-query, Interactive Debiasing (ID) block. Finally, an Assembled Prediction (AP) module is devised to balance and integrate predictions of multiple prototypical representations learned using stacked PRD modules. Results obtained through extensive experiments on three publicly accessible medical imaging datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over the leading FSMIS methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/YazhouZhu19/PAMI.

Unsupervised Open-Vocabulary Object Localization in Videos

In this paper, we show that recent advances in video representation learning and pre-trained vision-language models allow for substantial improvements in self-supervised video object localization. We propose a method that first localizes objects in videos via a slot attention approach and then assigns text to the obtained slots. The latter is achieved by an unsupervised way to read localized semantic information from the pre-trained CLIP model. The resulting video object localization is entirely unsupervised apart from the implicit annotation contained in CLIP, and it is effectively the first unsupervised approach that yields good results on regular video benchmarks.

FLM-101B: An Open LLM and How to Train It with $100K Budget

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in NLP and multimodal tasks, among others. Despite these successes, two main challenges remain in developing LLMs: (i) high computational cost, and (ii) fair and objective evaluations. In this paper, we report a solution to significantly reduce LLM training cost through a growth strategy. We demonstrate that a 101B-parameter LLM with 0.31T tokens can be trained with a budget of 100K US dollars. Inspired by IQ tests, we also consolidate an additional range of evaluations on top of existing evaluations that focus on knowledge-oriented abilities. These IQ evaluations include symbolic mapping, rule understanding, pattern mining, and anti-interference. Such evaluations minimize the potential impact of memorization. Experimental results show that our model, named FLM-101B, trained with a budget of 100K US dollars, achieves performance comparable to powerful and well-known models, e.g., GPT-3 and GLM-130B, especially on the additional range of IQ evaluations. The checkpoint of FLM-101B is released at https://huggingface.co/CofeAI/FLM-101B.