The recently proposed Conformer model has become the de facto backbone model for various downstream speech tasks based on its hybrid attention-convolution architecture that captures both local and global features. However, through a series of systematic studies, we find that the Conformer architecture's design choices are not optimal. After re-examining the design choices for both the macro and micro-architecture of Conformer, we propose Squeezeformer which consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art ASR models under the same training schemes. In particular, for the macro-architecture, Squeezeformer incorporates (i) the Temporal U-Net structure which reduces the cost of the multi-head attention modules on long sequences, and (ii) a simpler block structure of multi-head attention or convolution modules followed up by feed-forward module instead of the Macaron structure proposed in Conformer. Furthermore, for the micro-architecture, Squeezeformer (i) simplifies the activations in the convolutional block, (ii) removes redundant Layer Normalization operations, and (iii) incorporates an efficient depthwise downsampling layer to efficiently sub-sample the input signal. Squeezeformer achieves state-of-the-art results of 7.5%, 6.5%, and 6.0% word-error-rate (WER) on LibriSpeech test-other without external language models, which are 3.1%, 1.4%, and 0.6% better than Conformer-CTC with the same number of FLOPs. Our code is open-sourced and available online [25].

Recently, state-of-the-art approaches for pruning large pre-trained models (LPMs) have demonstrated that the training-free removal of non-critical residual blocks in Transformers is viable for reducing model size, achieving results that outperform previous training-free pruning approaches. Motivated by these findings, we extend BlockPruner (Zhong et al., 2024) and propose MultiPruner, a pruning approach that surpasses recent training-free pruning methods by adopting a multidimensional, iterative, fine-grained pruning strategy. In MultiPruner, multidimensional pruning reinstates the structural balance in block-pruned models by sequentially compressing along three dimensions: i) residual blocks, ii) channels of multilayer perceptrons (MLP), and iii) attention heads. This solution enhances zero-shot accuracy on downstream tasks compared to other techniques while improving model compression ratios, producing compressed models with fewer computing and memory requirements. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method across various large pre-trained models. The code and pruning configurations are available at https://github.com/IntelLabs/Hardware-Aware-Automated-Machine-Learning.

Colloidal synthesis of nanocrystals usually includes complex chemical reactions and multi-step crystallization processes. Despite the great success in the past 30 years, it remains challenging to clarify the correlations between synthetic parameters of chemical reaction and physical properties of nanocrystals. Here, we developed a deep learning-based nanocrystal synthesis model that correlates synthetic parameters with the final size and shape of target nanocrystals, using a dataset of 3500 recipes covering 348 distinct nanocrystal compositions. The size and shape labels were obtained from transmission electron microscope images using a segmentation model trained with a semi-supervised algorithm on a dataset comprising 1.2 million nanocrystals. By applying the reaction intermediate-based data augmentation method and elaborated descriptors, the synthesis model was able to predict nanocrystal's size with a mean absolute error of 1.39 nm, while reaching an 89% average accuracy for shape classification. The synthesis model shows knowledge transfer capabilities across different nanocrystals with inputs of new recipes. With that, the influence of chemicals on the final size of nanocrystals was further evaluated, revealing the importance order of nanocrystal composition, precursor or ligand, and solvent. Overall, the deep learning-based nanocrystal synthesis model offers a powerful tool to expedite the development of high-quality nanocrystals.

Building Graphical User Interface (GUI) assistants holds significant promise for enhancing human workflow productivity. While most agents are language-based, relying on closed-source API with text-rich meta-information (e.g., HTML or accessibility tree), they show limitations in perceiving UI visuals as humans do, highlighting the need for GUI visual agents. In this work, we develop a vision-language-action model in digital world, namely ShowUI, which features the following innovations: (i) UI-Guided Visual Token Selection to reduce computational costs by formulating screenshots as an UI connected graph, adaptively identifying their redundant relationship and serve as the criteria for token selection during self-attention blocks; (ii) Interleaved Vision-Language-Action Streaming that flexibly unifies diverse needs within GUI tasks, enabling effective management of visual-action history in navigation or pairing multi-turn query-action sequences per screenshot to enhance training efficiency; (iii) Small-scale High-quality GUI Instruction-following Datasets by careful data curation and employing a resampling strategy to address significant data type imbalances. With above components, ShowUI, a lightweight 2B model using 256K data, achieves a strong 75.1% accuracy in zero-shot screenshot grounding. Its UI-guided token selection further reduces 33% of redundant visual tokens during training and speeds up the performance by 1.4x. Navigation experiments across web Mind2Web, mobile AITW, and online MiniWob environments further underscore the effectiveness and potential of our model in advancing GUI visual agents. The models are available at https://github.com/showlab/ShowUI.

In this paper, we introduce SalsaNext for the uncertainty-aware semantic segmentation of a full 3D LiDAR point cloud in real-time. SalsaNext is the next version of SalsaNet [1] which has an encoder-decoder architecture where the encoder unit has a set of ResNet blocks and the decoder part combines upsampled features from the residual blocks. In contrast to SalsaNet, we introduce a new context module, replace the ResNet encoder blocks with a new residual dilated convolution stack with gradually increasing receptive fields and add the pixel-shuffle layer in the decoder. Additionally, we switch from stride convolution to average pooling and also apply central dropout treatment. To directly optimize the Jaccard index, we further combine the weighted cross-entropy loss with Lovasz-Softmax loss [2]. We finally inject a Bayesian treatment to compute the epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties for each point in the cloud. We provide a thorough quantitative evaluation on the Semantic-KITTI dataset [3], which demonstrates that the proposed SalsaNext outperforms other state-of-the-art semantic segmentation networks and ranks first on the Semantic-KITTI leaderboard. We also release our source code https://github.com/TiagoCortinhal/SalsaNext.

The recently proposed Conformer model has become the de facto backbone model for various downstream speech tasks based on its hybrid attention-convolution architecture that captures both local and global features. However, through a series of systematic studies, we find that the Conformer architecture's design choices are not optimal. After re-examining the design choices for both the macro and micro-architecture of Conformer, we propose Squeezeformer which consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art ASR models under the same training schemes. In particular, for the macro-architecture, Squeezeformer incorporates (i) the Temporal U-Net structure which reduces the cost of the multi-head attention modules on long sequences, and (ii) a simpler block structure of multi-head attention or convolution modules followed up by feed-forward module instead of the Macaron structure proposed in Conformer. Furthermore, for the micro-architecture, Squeezeformer (i) simplifies the activations in the convolutional block, (ii) removes redundant Layer Normalization operations, and (iii) incorporates an efficient depthwise down-sampling layer to efficiently sub-sample the input signal.

In this paper, we introduce Dynamic Layer Operations (DLO), a novel approach for vertically scaling transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) by dynamically expanding, activating, or skipping layers using a sophisticated routing policy based on layerwise feature similarity. Unlike traditional Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) methods that focus on extending the model width, our approach targets model depth, addressing the redundancy observed across layer representations for various input samples. Our framework is integrated with the Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) stage, eliminating the need for resource-intensive Continual Pre-Training (CPT). Experimental results demonstrate that DLO not only outperforms the original unscaled models but also achieves comparable results to densely expanded models with significantly improved efficiency. Our work offers a promising direction for building efficient yet powerful LLMs. We will release our implementation and model weights upon acceptance.

Despite real-time planners exhibiting remarkable performance in autonomous driving, the growing exploration of Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened avenues for enhancing the interpretability and controllability of motion planning. Nevertheless, LLM-based planners continue to encounter significant challenges, including elevated resource consumption and extended inference times, which pose substantial obstacles to practical deployment. In light of these challenges, we introduce AsyncDriver, a new asynchronous LLM-enhanced closed-loop framework designed to leverage scene-associated instruction features produced by LLM to guide real-time planners in making precise and controllable trajectory predictions. On one hand, our method highlights the prowess of LLMs in comprehending and reasoning with vectorized scene data and a series of routing instructions, demonstrating its effective assistance to real-time planners. On the other hand, the proposed framework decouples the inference processes of the LLM and real-time planners. By capitalizing on the asynchronous nature of their inference frequencies, our approach have successfully reduced the computational cost introduced by LLM, while maintaining comparable performance. Experiments show that our approach achieves superior closed-loop evaluation performance on nuPlan's challenging scenarios.

While the depth of convolutional neural networks has attracted substantial attention in the deep learning research, the width of these networks has recently received greater interest. The width of networks, defined as the size of the receptive fields and the density of the channels, has demonstrated crucial importance in low-level vision tasks such as image denoising and restoration. However, the limited generalization ability, due to the increased width of networks, creates a bottleneck in designing wider networks. In this paper, we propose the Deep Regulated Convolutional Network (RC-Net), a deep network composed of regulated sub-network blocks cascaded by skip-connections, to overcome this bottleneck. Specifically, the Regulated Convolution block (RC-block), featured by a combination of large and small convolution filters, balances the effectiveness of prominent feature extraction and the generalization ability of the network. RC-Nets have several compelling advantages: they embrace diversified features through large-small filter combinations, alleviate the hazy boundary and blurred details in image denoising and super-resolution problems, and stabilize the learning process. Our proposed RC-Nets outperform state-of-the-art approaches with significant performance gains in various image restoration tasks while demonstrating promising generalization ability. The code is available at https://github.com/cswin/RC-Nets.

Artificial intelligence (AI) methods have become critical in scientific applications to help accelerate scientific discovery. Large language models (LLMs) are being considered as a promising approach to address some of the challenging problems because of their superior generalization capabilities across domains. The effectiveness of the models and the accuracy of the applications is contingent upon their efficient execution on the underlying hardware infrastructure. Specialized AI accelerator hardware systems have recently become available for accelerating AI applications. However, the comparative performance of these AI accelerators on large language models has not been previously studied. In this paper, we systematically study LLMs on multiple AI accelerators and GPUs and evaluate their performance characteristics for these models. We evaluate these systems with (i) a micro-benchmark using a core transformer block, (ii) a GPT- 2 model, and (iii) an LLM-driven science use case, GenSLM. We present our findings and analyses of the models' performance to better understand the intrinsic capabilities of AI accelerators. Furthermore, our analysis takes into account key factors such as sequence lengths, scaling behavior, sparsity, and sensitivity to gradient accumulation steps.