Improvable Gap Balancing for Multi-Task Learning

In multi-task learning (MTL), gradient balancing has recently attracted more research interest than loss balancing since it often leads to better performance. However, loss balancing is much more efficient than gradient balancing, and thus it is still worth further exploration in MTL. Note that prior studies typically ignore that there exist varying improvable gaps across multiple tasks, where the improvable gap per task is defined as the distance between the current training progress and desired final training progress. Therefore, after loss balancing, the performance imbalance still arises in many cases. In this paper, following the loss balancing framework, we propose two novel improvable gap balancing (IGB) algorithms for MTL: one takes a simple heuristic, and the other (for the first time) deploys deep reinforcement learning for MTL. Particularly, instead of directly balancing the losses in MTL, both algorithms choose to dynamically assign task weights for improvable gap balancing. Moreover, we combine IGB and gradient balancing to show the complementarity between the two types of algorithms. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our IGB algorithms lead to the best results in MTL via loss balancing and achieve further improvements when combined with gradient balancing. Code is available at https://github.com/YanqiDai/IGB4MTL.

VDT: An Empirical Study on Video Diffusion with Transformers

This work introduces Video Diffusion Transformer (VDT), which pioneers the use of transformers in diffusion-based video generation. It features transformer blocks with modularized temporal and spatial attention modules, allowing separate optimization of each component and leveraging the rich spatial-temporal representation inherited from transformers. VDT offers several appealing benefits. 1) It excels at capturing temporal dependencies to produce temporally consistent video frames and even simulate the dynamics of 3D objects over time. 2) It enables flexible conditioning information through simple concatenation in the token space, effectively unifying video generation and prediction tasks. 3) Its modularized design facilitates a spatial-temporal decoupled training strategy, leading to improved efficiency. Extensive experiments on video generation, prediction, and dynamics modeling (i.e., physics-based QA) tasks have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of VDT in various scenarios, including autonomous driving, human action, and physics-based simulation. We hope our study on the capabilities of transformer-based video diffusion in capturing accurate temporal dependencies, handling conditioning information, and achieving efficient training will benefit future research and advance the field. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/RERV/VDT.

UniAdapter: Unified Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for Cross-modal Modeling

Large-scale vision-language pre-trained models have shown promising transferability to various downstream tasks. As the size of these foundation models and the number of downstream tasks grow, the standard full fine-tuning paradigm becomes unsustainable due to heavy computational and storage costs. This paper proposes UniAdapter, which unifies unimodal and multimodal adapters for parameter-efficient cross-modal adaptation on pre-trained vision-language models. Specifically, adapters are distributed to different modalities and their interactions, with the total number of tunable parameters reduced by partial weight sharing. The unified and knowledge-sharing design enables powerful cross-modal representations that can benefit various downstream tasks, requiring only 1.0%-2.0% tunable parameters of the pre-trained model. Extensive experiments on 6 cross-modal downstream benchmarks (including video-text retrieval, image-text retrieval, VideoQA, and VQA) show that in most cases, UniAdapter not only outperforms the state-of-the-arts, but even beats the full fine-tuning strategy. Particularly, on the MSRVTT retrieval task, UniAdapter achieves 49.7% recall@1 with 2.2% model parameters, outperforming the latest competitors by 2.0%. The code and models are available at https://github.com/RERV/UniAdapter.

TikTalk: A Multi-Modal Dialogue Dataset for Real-World Chitchat

We present a novel multi-modal chitchat dialogue dataset-TikTalk aimed at facilitating the research of intelligent chatbots. It consists of the videos and corresponding dialogues users generate on video social applications. In contrast to existing multi-modal dialogue datasets, we construct dialogue corpora based on video comment-reply pairs, which is more similar to chitchat in real-world dialogue scenarios. Our dialogue context includes three modalities: text, vision, and audio. Compared with previous image-based dialogue datasets, the richer sources of context in TikTalk lead to a greater diversity of conversations. TikTalk contains over 38K videos and 367K dialogues. Data analysis shows that responses in TikTalk are in correlation with various contexts and external knowledge. It poses a great challenge for the deep understanding of multi-modal information and the generation of responses. We evaluate several baselines on three types of automatic metrics and conduct case studies. Experimental results demonstrate that there is still a large room for future improvement on TikTalk. Our dataset is available at \url{https://github.com/RUC-AIMind/TikTalk}.

Text2Poster: Laying out Stylized Texts on Retrieved Images

Poster generation is a significant task for a wide range of applications, which is often time-consuming and requires lots of manual editing and artistic experience. In this paper, we propose a novel data-driven framework, called \textit{Text2Poster}, to automatically generate visually-effective posters from textual information. Imitating the process of manual poster editing, our framework leverages a large-scale pretrained visual-textual model to retrieve background images from given texts, lays out the texts on the images iteratively by cascaded auto-encoders, and finally, stylizes the texts by a matching-based method. We learn the modules of the framework by weakly- and self-supervised learning strategies, mitigating the demand for labeled data. Both objective and subjective experiments demonstrate that our Text2Poster outperforms state-of-the-art methods, including academic research and commercial software, on the quality of generated posters.

LGDN: Language-Guided Denoising Network for Video-Language Modeling

Video-language modeling has attracted much attention with the rapid growth of web videos. Most existing methods assume that the video frames and text description are semantically correlated, and focus on video-language modeling at video level. However, this hypothesis often fails for two reasons: (1) With the rich semantics of video contents, it is difficult to cover all frames with a single video-level description; (2) A raw video typically has noisy/meaningless information (e.g., scenery shot, transition or teaser). Although a number of recent works deploy attention mechanism to alleviate this problem, the irrelevant/noisy information still makes it very difficult to address. To overcome such challenge, we thus propose an efficient and effective model, termed Language-Guided Denoising Network (LGDN), for video-language modeling. Different from most existing methods that utilize all extracted video frames, LGDN dynamically filters out the misaligned or redundant frames under the language supervision and obtains only 2--4 salient frames per video for cross-modal token-level alignment. Extensive experiments on five public datasets show that our LGDN outperforms the state-of-the-arts by large margins. We also provide detailed ablation study to reveal the critical importance of solving the noise issue, in hope of inspiring future video-language work.

A Molecular Multimodal Foundation Model Associating Molecule Graphs with Natural Language

Although artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant progress in understanding molecules in a wide range of fields, existing models generally acquire the single cognitive ability from the single molecular modality. Since the hierarchy of molecular knowledge is profound, even humans learn from different modalities including both intuitive diagrams and professional texts to assist their understanding. Inspired by this, we propose a molecular multimodal foundation model which is pretrained from molecular graphs and their semantically related textual data (crawled from published Scientific Citation Index papers) via contrastive learning. This AI model represents a critical attempt that directly bridges molecular graphs and natural language. Importantly, through capturing the specific and complementary information of the two modalities, our proposed model can better grasp molecular expertise. Experimental results show that our model not only exhibits promising performance in cross-modal tasks such as cross-modal retrieval and molecule caption, but also enhances molecular property prediction and possesses capability to generate meaningful molecular graphs from natural language descriptions. We believe that our model would have a broad impact on AI-empowered fields across disciplines such as biology, chemistry, materials, environment, and medicine, among others.

Multimodal foundation models are better simulators of the human brain

Multimodal learning, especially large-scale multimodal pre-training, has developed rapidly over the past few years and led to the greatest advances in artificial intelligence (AI). Despite its effectiveness, understanding the underlying mechanism of multimodal pre-training models still remains a grand challenge. Revealing the explainability of such models is likely to enable breakthroughs of novel learning paradigms in the AI field. To this end, given the multimodal nature of the human brain, we propose to explore the explainability of multimodal learning models with the aid of non-invasive brain imaging technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Concretely, we first present a newly-designed multimodal foundation model pre-trained on 15 million image-text pairs, which has shown strong multimodal understanding and generalization abilities in a variety of cognitive downstream tasks. Further, from the perspective of neural encoding (based on our foundation model), we find that both visual and lingual encoders trained multimodally are more brain-like compared with unimodal ones. Particularly, we identify a number of brain regions where multimodally-trained encoders demonstrate better neural encoding performance. This is consistent with the findings in existing studies on exploring brain multi-sensory integration. Therefore, we believe that multimodal foundation models are more suitable tools for neuroscientists to study the multimodal signal processing mechanisms in the human brain. Our findings also demonstrate the potential of multimodal foundation models as ideal computational simulators to promote both AI-for-brain and brain-for-AI research.

COTS: Collaborative Two-Stream Vision-Language Pre-Training Model for Cross-Modal Retrieval

Large-scale single-stream pre-training has shown dramatic performance in image-text retrieval. Regrettably, it faces low inference efficiency due to heavy attention layers. Recently, two-stream methods like CLIP and ALIGN with high inference efficiency have also shown promising performance, however, they only consider instance-level alignment between the two streams (thus there is still room for improvement). To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel COllaborative Two-Stream vision-language pretraining model termed COTS for image-text retrieval by enhancing cross-modal interaction. In addition to instance level alignment via momentum contrastive learning, we leverage two extra levels of cross-modal interactions in our COTS: (1) Token-level interaction - a masked visionlanguage modeling (MVLM) learning objective is devised without using a cross-stream network module, where variational autoencoder is imposed on the visual encoder to generate visual tokens for each image. (2) Task-level interaction - a KL-alignment learning objective is devised between text-to-image and image-to-text retrieval tasks, where the probability distribution per task is computed with the negative queues in momentum contrastive learning. Under a fair comparison setting, our COTS achieves the highest performance among all two-stream methods and comparable performance (but with 10,800X faster in inference) w.r.t. the latest single-stream methods. Importantly, our COTS is also applicable to text-to-video retrieval, yielding new state-ofthe-art on the widely-used MSR-VTT dataset.

A Roadmap for Big Model

With the rapid development of deep learning, training Big Models (BMs) for multiple downstream tasks becomes a popular paradigm. Researchers have achieved various outcomes in the construction of BMs and the BM application in many fields. At present, there is a lack of research work that sorts out the overall progress of BMs and guides the follow-up research. In this paper, we cover not only the BM technologies themselves but also the prerequisites for BM training and applications with BMs, dividing the BM review into four parts: Resource, Models, Key Technologies and Application. We introduce 16 specific BM-related topics in those four parts, they are Data, Knowledge, Computing System, Parallel Training System, Language Model, Vision Model, Multi-modal Model, Theory&Interpretability, Commonsense Reasoning, Reliability&Security, Governance, Evaluation, Machine Translation, Text Generation, Dialogue and Protein Research. In each topic, we summarize clearly the current studies and propose some future research directions. At the end of this paper, we conclude the further development of BMs in a more general view.