The most advanced text-to-image (T2I) models require significant training costs (e.g., millions of GPU hours), seriously hindering the fundamental innovation for the AIGC community while increasing CO2 emissions. This paper introduces PIXART-$\alpha$, a Transformer-based T2I diffusion model whose image generation quality is competitive with state-of-the-art image generators (e.g., Imagen, SDXL, and even Midjourney), reaching near-commercial application standards. Additionally, it supports high-resolution image synthesis up to 1024px resolution with low training cost, as shown in Figure 1 and 2. To achieve this goal, three core designs are proposed: (1) Training strategy decomposition: We devise three distinct training steps that separately optimize pixel dependency, text-image alignment, and image aesthetic quality; (2) Efficient T2I Transformer: We incorporate cross-attention modules into Diffusion Transformer (DiT) to inject text conditions and streamline the computation-intensive class-condition branch; (3) High-informative data: We emphasize the significance of concept density in text-image pairs and leverage a large Vision-Language model to auto-label dense pseudo-captions to assist text-image alignment learning. As a result, PIXART-$\alpha$'s training speed markedly surpasses existing large-scale T2I models, e.g., PIXART-$\alpha$ only takes 10.8% of Stable Diffusion v1.5's training time (675 vs. 6,250 A100 GPU days), saving nearly \$300,000 (\$26,000 vs. \$320,000) and reducing 90% CO2 emissions. Moreover, compared with a larger SOTA model, RAPHAEL, our training cost is merely 1%. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PIXART-$\alpha$ excels in image quality, artistry, and semantic control. We hope PIXART-$\alpha$ will provide new insights to the AIGC community and startups to accelerate building their own high-quality yet low-cost generative models from scratch.
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown promising results across a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The application of LLMs to specific domains, such as biomedicine, has achieved increased attention. However, most biomedical LLMs focus on enhancing performance in monolingual biomedical question answering and conversation tasks. To further investigate the effectiveness of the LLMs on diverse biomedical NLP tasks in different languages, we present Taiyi, a bilingual (English and Chinese) fine-tuned LLM for diverse biomedical tasks. In this work, we first curated a comprehensive collection of 140 existing biomedical text mining datasets across over 10 task types. Subsequently, a two-stage strategy is proposed for supervised fine-tuning to optimize the model performance across varied tasks. Experimental results on 13 test sets covering named entity recognition, relation extraction, text classification, question answering tasks demonstrate Taiyi achieves superior performance compared to general LLMs. The case study involving additional biomedical NLP tasks further shows Taiyi's considerable potential for bilingual biomedical multi-tasking. The source code, datasets, and model for Taiyi are freely available at https://github.com/DUTIR-BioNLP/Taiyi-LLM.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning have significantly bolstered the technological world. This paper explores the potential of transfer learning in natural language processing focusing mainly on sentiment analysis. The models trained on the big data can also be used where data are scarce. The claim is that, compared to training models from scratch, transfer learning, using pre-trained BERT models, can increase sentiment classification accuracy. The study adopts a sophisticated experimental design that uses the IMDb dataset of sentimentally labelled movie reviews. Pre-processing includes tokenization and encoding of text data, making it suitable for NLP models. The dataset is used on a BERT based model, measuring its performance using accuracy. The result comes out to be 100 per cent accurate. Although the complete accuracy could appear impressive, it might be the result of overfitting or a lack of generalization. Further analysis is required to ensure the model's ability to handle diverse and unseen data. The findings underscore the effectiveness of transfer learning in NLP, showcasing its potential to excel in sentiment analysis tasks. However, the research calls for a cautious interpretation of perfect accuracy and emphasizes the need for additional measures to validate the model's generalization.
The field has made significant progress in synthesizing realistic human motion driven by various modalities. Yet, the need for different methods to animate various body parts according to different control signals limits the scalability of these techniques in practical scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a cohesive and scalable approach that consolidates multimodal (text, music, speech) and multi-part (hand, torso) human motion generation. Our methodology unfolds in several steps: We begin by quantizing the motions of diverse body parts into separate codebooks tailored to their respective domains. Next, we harness the robust capabilities of pre-trained models to transcode multimodal signals into a shared latent space. We then translate these signals into discrete motion tokens by iteratively predicting subsequent tokens to form a complete sequence. Finally, we reconstruct the continuous actual motion from this tokenized sequence. Our method frames the multimodal motion generation challenge as a token prediction task, drawing from specialized codebooks based on the modality of the control signal. This approach is inherently scalable, allowing for the easy integration of new modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of our design, emphasizing its potential for broad application.
Humans possess an extraordinary ability to selectively focus on the sound source of interest amidst complex acoustic environments, commonly referred to as cocktail party scenarios. In an attempt to replicate this remarkable auditory attention capability in machines, target speaker extraction (TSE) models have been developed. These models leverage the pre-registered cues of the target speaker to extract the sound source of interest. However, the effectiveness of these models is hindered in real-world scenarios due to the unreliable or even absence of pre-registered cues. To address this limitation, this study investigates the integration of natural language description to enhance the feasibility, controllability, and performance of existing TSE models. Specifically, we propose a model named LLM-TSE, wherein a large language model (LLM) extracts useful semantic cues from the user's typed text input. These cues can serve as independent extraction cues, task selectors to control the TSE process or complement the pre-registered cues. Our experimental results demonstrate competitive performance when only text-based cues are presented, the effectiveness of using input text as a task selector, and a new state-of-the-art when combining text-based cues with pre-registered cues. To our knowledge, this is the first study to successfully incorporate LLMs to guide target speaker extraction, which can be a cornerstone for cocktail party problem research.
This work tackles the task of extractive text summarization in a limited labeled data scenario using a semi-supervised approach. Specifically, we propose a prompt-based pseudolabel selection strategy using GPT-4. We evaluate our method on three text summarization datasets: TweetSumm, WikiHow, and ArXiv/PubMed. Our experiments show that by using an LLM to evaluate and generate pseudolabels, we can improve the ROUGE-1 by 10-20\% on the different datasets, which is akin to enhancing pretrained models. We also show that such a method needs a smaller pool of unlabeled examples to perform better.
Recent advancements in text-only large language models (LLMs) have highlighted the benefit of in-context learning for adapting to new tasks with a few demonstrations. However, extending in-context learning to large vision-language models (VLMs) using a huge amount of naturalistic vision-language data has shown limited success, particularly for egocentric videos, due to high data collection costs. We propose a novel training method $\mathbb{E}$fficient $\mathbb{I}$n-context $\mathbb{L}$earning on $\mathbb{E}$gocentric $\mathbb{V}$ideos ($\mathbb{EILEV}$), which elicits in-context learning in VLMs for egocentric videos without requiring massive, naturalistic egocentric video datasets. $\mathbb{EILEV}$ involves architectural and training data adaptations to allow the model to process contexts interleaved with video clips and narrations, sampling of in-context examples with clusters of similar verbs and nouns, use of data with skewed marginal distributions with a long tail of infrequent verbs and nouns, as well as homonyms and synonyms. Our evaluations show that $\mathbb{EILEV}$-trained models outperform larger VLMs trained on a huge amount of naturalistic data in in-context learning. Furthermore, they can generalize to not only out-of-distribution, but also novel, rare egocentric videos and texts via in-context learning, demonstrating potential for applications requiring cost-effective training, and rapid post-deployment adaptability. Our code and demo are available at \url{https://github.com/yukw777/EILEV}.
Recently, Vision Language Models (VLMs) have gained significant attention, exhibiting notable advancements across various tasks by leveraging extensive image-text paired data. However, prevailing VLMs often treat Visual Question Answering (VQA) as perception tasks, employing black-box models that overlook explicit modeling of relationships between different questions within the same visual scene. Moreover, the existing VQA methods that rely on Knowledge Bases (KBs) might frequently encounter biases from limited data and face challenges in relevant information indexing. Attempt to overcome these limitations, this paper introduces an explainable multi-agent collaboration framework by tapping into knowledge embedded in Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on extensive corpora. Inspired by human cognition, our framework uncovers latent information within the given question by employing three agents, i.e., Seeker, Responder, and Integrator, to perform a top-down reasoning process. The Seeker agent generates relevant issues related to the original question. The Responder agent, based on VLM, handles simple VQA tasks and provides candidate answers. The Integrator agent combines information from the Seeker agent and the Responder agent to produce the final VQA answer. Through the above collaboration mechanism, our framework explicitly constructs a multi-view knowledge base for a specific image scene, reasoning answers in a top-down processing manner. We extensively evaluate our method on diverse VQA datasets and VLMs, demonstrating its broad applicability and interpretability with comprehensive experimental results.
Large multi-modal models (LMMs) hold the potential to usher in a new era of automated visual assistance for people who are blind or low vision (BLV). Yet, these models have not been systematically evaluated on data captured by BLV users. We address this by empirically assessing CLIP, a widely-used LMM likely to underpin many assistive technologies. Testing 25 CLIP variants in a zero-shot classification task, we find that their accuracy is 15 percentage points lower on average for images captured by BLV users than web-crawled images. This disparity stems from CLIP's sensitivities to 1) image content (e.g. not recognizing disability objects as well as other objects); 2) image quality (e.g. not being robust to lighting variation); and 3) text content (e.g. not recognizing objects described by tactile adjectives as well as visual ones). We delve deeper with a textual analysis of three common pre-training datasets: LAION-400M, LAION-2B and DataComp-1B, showing that disability content is rarely mentioned. We then provide three examples that illustrate how the performance disparities extend to three downstream models underpinned by CLIP: OWL-ViT, CLIPSeg and DALL-E2. We find that few-shot learning with as few as 5 images can mitigate CLIP's quality-of-service disparities for BLV users in some scenarios, which we discuss alongside a set of other possible mitigations.
As generative large language models (LLMs) grow more performant and prevalent, we must develop comprehensive enough tools to measure and improve their fairness. Different prompt-based datasets can be used to measure social bias across multiple text domains and demographic axes, meaning that testing LLMs on more datasets can potentially help us characterize their biases more fully, and better ensure equal and equitable treatment of marginalized demographic groups. In this work, our focus is two-fold: (1) Benchmarking: a comparison of 6 different prompt-based bias and toxicity metrics across 12 demographic axes and 5 families of generative LLMs. Out of those 6 metrics, AdvPromptSet and HolisticBiasR are novel datasets proposed in the paper. The comparison of those benchmarks gives us insights about the bias and toxicity of the compared models. Therefore, we explore the frequency of demographic terms in common LLM pre-training corpora and how this may relate to model biases. (2) Mitigation: we conduct a comprehensive study of how well 3 bias/toxicity mitigation techniques perform across our suite of measurements. ROBBIE aims to provide insights for practitioners while deploying a model, emphasizing the need to not only measure potential harms, but also understand how they arise by characterizing the data, mitigate harms once found, and balance any trade-offs. We open-source our analysis code in hopes of encouraging broader measurements of bias in future LLMs.