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Synergistic Dual Spatial-aware Generation of Image-to-Text and Text-to-Image Y u Zhao

Neural Information Processing Systems

In the visual spatial understanding (VSU) area, spatial image-to-text (SI2T) and spatial text-to-image (ST2I) are two fundamental tasks that appear in dual form. Existing methods for standalone SI2T or ST2I perform imperfectly in spatial understanding, due to the difficulty of 3D-wise spatial feature modeling.






OptEx: Expediting First-Order Optimization with Approximately Parallelized Iterations

Neural Information Processing Systems

First-order optimization (FOO) algorithms are pivotal in numerous computational domains, such as reinforcement learning and deep learning. However, their application to complex tasks often entails significant optimization inefficiency due to their need of many sequential iterations for convergence. In response, we introduce first-order opt imization ex pedited with approximately parallelized iterations (OptEx), the first general framework that enhances the optimization efficiency of FOO by leveraging parallel computing to directly mitigate its requirement of many sequential iterations for convergence. To achieve this, OptEx utilizes a kernelized gradient estimation that is based on the history of evaluated gradients to predict the gradients required by the next few sequential iterations in FOO, which helps to break the inherent iterative dependency and hence enables the approximate paral-lelization of iterations in FOO. We further establish theoretical guarantees for the estimation error of our kernelized gradient estimation and the iteration complexity of SGD-based OptEx, confirming that the estimation error diminishes to zero as the history of gradients accumulates and that our SGD-based OptEx enjoys an effective acceleration rate of Θ( N) over standard SGD given parallelism of N, in terms of the sequential iterations required for convergence. Finally, we provide extensive empirical studies, including synthetic functions, reinforcement learning tasks, and neural network training on various datasets, to underscore the substantial efficiency improvements achieved by OptEx in practice. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/youyve/OptEx .