Multi-Prompting Decoder Helps Better Language Understanding

Recent Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) usually only provide users with the inference APIs, namely the emerging Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) setting. To adapt MaaS PLMs to downstream tasks without accessing their parameters and gradients, some existing methods focus on the output-side adaptation of PLMs, viewing the PLM as an encoder and then optimizing a task-specific decoder for decoding the output hidden states and class scores of the PLM. Despite the effectiveness of these methods, they only use a single prompt to query PLMs for decoding, leading to a heavy reliance on the quality of the adopted prompt. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective Multi-Prompting Decoder (MPD) framework for MaaS adaptation. The core idea is to query PLMs with multiple different prompts for each sample, thereby obtaining multiple output hidden states and class scores for subsequent decoding. Such multi-prompting decoding paradigm can simultaneously mitigate reliance on the quality of a single prompt, alleviate the issue of data scarcity under the few-shot setting, and provide richer knowledge extracted from PLMs. Specifically, we propose two decoding strategies: multi-prompting decoding with optimal transport for hidden states and calibrated decoding for class scores. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art results on multiple natural language understanding datasets under the few-shot setting.

V-Express: Conditional Dropout for Progressive Training of Portrait Video Generation

In the field of portrait video generation, the use of single images to generate portrait videos has become increasingly prevalent. A common approach involves leveraging generative models to enhance adapters for controlled generation. However, control signals (e.g., text, audio, reference image, pose, depth map, etc.) can vary in strength. Among these, weaker conditions often struggle to be effective due to interference from stronger conditions, posing a challenge in balancing these conditions. In our work on portrait video generation, we identified audio signals as particularly weak, often overshadowed by stronger signals such as facial pose and reference image. However, direct training with weak signals often leads to difficulties in convergence. To address this, we propose V-Express, a simple method that balances different control signals through the progressive training and the conditional dropout operation. Our method gradually enables effective control by weak conditions, thereby achieving generation capabilities that simultaneously take into account the facial pose, reference image, and audio. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can effectively generate portrait videos controlled by audio. Furthermore, a potential solution is provided for the simultaneous and effective use of conditions of varying strengths.

Ensembling Diffusion Models via Adaptive Feature Aggregation

The success of the text-guided diffusion model has inspired the development and release of numerous powerful diffusion models within the open-source community. These models are typically fine-tuned on various expert datasets, showcasing diverse denoising capabilities. Leveraging multiple high-quality models to produce stronger generation ability is valuable, but has not been extensively studied. Existing methods primarily adopt parameter merging strategies to produce a new static model. However, they overlook the fact that the divergent denoising capabilities of the models may dynamically change across different states, such as when experiencing different prompts, initial noises, denoising steps, and spatial locations. In this paper, we propose a novel ensembling method, Adaptive Feature Aggregation (AFA), which dynamically adjusts the contributions of multiple models at the feature level according to various states (i.e., prompts, initial noises, denoising steps, and spatial locations), thereby keeping the advantages of multiple diffusion models, while suppressing their disadvantages. Specifically, we design a lightweight Spatial-Aware Block-Wise (SABW) feature aggregator that adaptive aggregates the block-wise intermediate features from multiple U-Net denoisers into a unified one. The core idea lies in dynamically producing an individual attention map for each model's features by comprehensively considering various states. It is worth noting that only SABW is trainable with about 50 million parameters, while other models are frozen. Both the quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed Adaptive Feature Aggregation method. The code is available at https://github.com/tenvence/afa/.

MCA: Moment Channel Attention Networks

Channel attention mechanisms endeavor to recalibrate channel weights to enhance representation abilities of networks. However, mainstream methods often rely solely on global average pooling as the feature squeezer, which significantly limits the overall potential of models. In this paper, we investigate the statistical moments of feature maps within a neural network. Our findings highlight the critical role of high-order moments in enhancing model capacity. Consequently, we introduce a flexible and comprehensive mechanism termed Extensive Moment Aggregation (EMA) to capture the global spatial context. Building upon this mechanism, we propose the Moment Channel Attention (MCA) framework, which efficiently incorporates multiple levels of moment-based information while minimizing additional computation costs through our Cross Moment Convolution (CMC) module. The CMC module via channel-wise convolution layer to capture multiple order moment information as well as cross channel features. The MCA block is designed to be lightweight and easily integrated into a variety of neural network architectures. Experimental results on classical image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation tasks demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming existing channel attention methods.

ML-Bench: Large Language Models Leverage Open-source Libraries for Machine Learning Tasks

Large language models have shown promising performance in code generation benchmarks. However, a considerable divide exists between these benchmark achievements and their practical applicability, primarily attributed to real-world programming's reliance on pre-existing libraries. Instead of evaluating LLMs to code from scratch, this work aims to propose a new evaluation setup where LLMs use open-source libraries to finish machine learning tasks. Therefore, we propose ML-Bench, an expansive benchmark developed to assess the effectiveness of LLMs in leveraging existing functions in open-source libraries. Consisting of 10044 samples spanning 130 tasks over 14 notable machine learning GitHub repositories. In this setting, given a specific machine learning task instruction and the accompanying README in a codebase, an LLM is tasked to generate code to accomplish the task. This necessitates the comprehension of long and language-code interleaved documents, as well as the understanding of complex cross-file code structures, introducing new challenges. Notably, while GPT-4 exhibits remarkable improvement over other LLMs, it manages to accomplish only 39.73\% of the tasks, leaving a huge space for improvement. We address these challenges by proposing ML-Agent, designed to effectively navigate the codebase, locate documentation, retrieve code, and generate executable code. Empirical results demonstrate that ML-Agent, built upon GPT-4, results in further improvements. Code, data, and models are available at \url{https://ml-bench.github.io/}.

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface & Edge -- An Introduction of an EM manipulation structure on obstacles' edge

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) or metasurface is one of the important enabling technologies in mobile cellular networks that can effectively enhance the signal coverage performance in obstructed regions, and it is generally deployed on surfaces different from obstacles to redirect electromagnetic (EM) waves by reflection, or covered on objects' surfaces to manipulate EM waves by refraction. In this paper, Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface & Edge (RISE) is proposed to extend RIS' abilities of reflection and refraction over surfaces to diffraction around obstacles' edge for better adaptation to specific coverage scenarios. Based on that, this paper analyzes the performance of several different deployment locations and EM manipulation structure designs for different coverage scenarios. Then a novel EM manipulation structure deployed at the obstacles' edge is proposed to achieve static EM environment modification. Simulations validate the preference of the schemes for different scenarios and the new structure achieves better coverage performance than other typical structures in the static scheme.

Unifying Token and Span Level Supervisions for Few-Shot Sequence Labeling

Few-shot sequence labeling aims to identify novel classes based on only a few labeled samples. Existing methods solve the data scarcity problem mainly by designing token-level or span-level labeling models based on metric learning. However, these methods are only trained at a single granularity (i.e., either token level or span level) and have some weaknesses of the corresponding granularity. In this paper, we first unify token and span level supervisions and propose a Consistent Dual Adaptive Prototypical (CDAP) network for few-shot sequence labeling. CDAP contains the token-level and span-level networks, jointly trained at different granularities. To align the outputs of two networks, we further propose a consistent loss to enable them to learn from each other. During the inference phase, we propose a consistent greedy inference algorithm that first adjusts the predicted probability and then greedily selects non-overlapping spans with maximum probability. Extensive experiments show that our model achieves new state-of-the-art results on three benchmark datasets.

Controlling Class Layout for Deep Ordinal Classification via Constrained Proxies Learning

For deep ordinal classification, learning a well-structured feature space specific to ordinal classification is helpful to properly capture the ordinal nature among classes. Intuitively, when Euclidean distance metric is used, an ideal ordinal layout in feature space would be that the sample clusters are arranged in class order along a straight line in space. However, enforcing samples to conform to a specific layout in the feature space is a challenging problem. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel Constrained Proxies Learning (CPL) method, which can learn a proxy for each ordinal class and then adjusts the global layout of classes by constraining these proxies. Specifically, we propose two kinds of strategies: hard layout constraint and soft layout constraint. The hard layout constraint is realized by directly controlling the generation of proxies to force them to be placed in a strict linear layout or semicircular layout (i.e., two instantiations of strict ordinal layout). The soft layout constraint is realized by constraining that the proxy layout should always produce unimodal proxy-to-proxies similarity distribution for each proxy (i.e., to be a relaxed ordinal layout). Experiments show that the proposed CPL method outperforms previous deep ordinal classification methods under the same setting of feature extractor.

Learning to Classify Open Intent via Soft Labeling and Manifold Mixup

Open intent classification is a practical yet challenging task in dialogue systems. Its objective is to accurately classify samples of known intents while at the same time detecting those of open (unknown) intents. Existing methods usually use outlier detection algorithms combined with K-class classifier to detect open intents, where K represents the class number of known intents. Different from them, in this paper, we consider another way without using outlier detection algorithms. Specifically, we directly train a (K+1)-class classifier for open intent classification, where the (K+1)-th class represents open intents. To address the challenge that training a (K+1)-class classifier with training samples of only K classes, we propose a deep model based on Soft Labeling and Manifold Mixup (SLMM). In our method, soft labeling is used to reshape the label distribution of the known intent samples, aiming at reducing model's overconfident on known intents. Manifold mixup is used to generate pseudo samples for open intents, aiming at well optimizing the decision boundary of open intents. Experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms previous methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance. All the code and data of this work can be obtained at https://github.com/zifengcheng/SLMM.