Rapid progress has been made in instruction-learning for image editing with natural-language instruction, as exemplified by InstructPix2Pix. In biomedicine, such methods can be applied to counterfactual image generation, which helps differentiate causal structure from spurious correlation and facilitate robust image interpretation for disease progression modeling. However, generic image-editing models are ill-suited for the biomedical domain, and counterfactual biomedical image generation is largely underexplored. In this paper, we present BiomedJourney, a novel method for counterfactual biomedical image generation by instruction-learning from multimodal patient journeys. Given a patient with two biomedical images taken at different time points, we use GPT-4 to process the corresponding imaging reports and generate a natural language description of disease progression. The resulting triples (prior image, progression description, new image) are then used to train a latent diffusion model for counterfactual biomedical image generation. Given the relative scarcity of image time series data, we introduce a two-stage curriculum that first pretrains the denoising network using the much more abundant single image-report pairs (with dummy prior image), and then continues training using the counterfactual triples. Experiments using the standard MIMIC-CXR dataset demonstrate the promise of our method. In a comprehensive battery of tests on counterfactual medical image generation, BiomedJourney substantially outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods in instruction image editing and medical image generation such as InstructPix2Pix and RoentGen. To facilitate future study in counterfactual medical generation, we plan to release our instruction-learning code and pretrained models.

We present TexFusion (Texture Diffusion), a new method to synthesize textures for given 3D geometries, using large-scale text-guided image diffusion models. In contrast to recent works that leverage 2D text-to-image diffusion models to distill 3D objects using a slow and fragile optimization process, TexFusion introduces a new 3D-consistent generation technique specifically designed for texture synthesis that employs regular diffusion model sampling on different 2D rendered views. Specifically, we leverage latent diffusion models, apply the diffusion model's denoiser on a set of 2D renders of the 3D object, and aggregate the different denoising predictions on a shared latent texture map. Final output RGB textures are produced by optimizing an intermediate neural color field on the decodings of 2D renders of the latent texture. We thoroughly validate TexFusion and show that we can efficiently generate diverse, high quality and globally coherent textures. We achieve state-of-the-art text-guided texture synthesis performance using only image diffusion models, while avoiding the pitfalls of previous distillation-based methods. The text-conditioning offers detailed control and we also do not rely on any ground truth 3D textures for training. This makes our method versatile and applicable to a broad range of geometry and texture types. We hope that TexFusion will advance AI-based texturing of 3D assets for applications in virtual reality, game design, simulation, and more.

There are two aspects of machine learning and artificial intelligence: (1) interpreting information, and (2) inventing new useful information. Much advance has been made for (1) with a focus on pattern recognition techniques (e.g., interpreting visual data). This paper focuses on (2) with intelligent duplication (ID) for invention. We explore the possibility of learning a specific individual's creative reasoning in order to leverage the learned expertise and talent to invent new information. More specifically, we employ a deep learning system to learn from the great composer Beethoven and capture his composition ability in a hash-based knowledge base. This new form of knowledge base provides a reasoning facility to drive the music composition through a novel music generation method.

Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT/GPT-4, have proven to be powerful tools in promoting the user experience as an AI assistant. The continuous works are proposing multi-modal large language models (MLLM), empowering LLMs with the ability to sense multiple modality inputs through constructing a joint semantic space (e.g. visual-text space). Though significant success was achieved in LLMs and MLLMs, exploring LLMs and MLLMs in domain-specific applications that required domain-specific knowledge and expertise has been less conducted, especially for \textbf{marine domain}. Different from general-purpose MLLMs, the marine-specific MLLM is required to yield much more \textbf{sensitive}, \textbf{informative}, and \textbf{scientific} responses. In this work, we demonstrate that the existing MLLMs optimized on huge amounts of readily available general-purpose training data show a minimal ability to understand domain-specific intents and then generate informative and satisfactory responses. To address these issues, we propose \textbf{MarineGPT}, the first vision-language model specially designed for the marine domain, unlocking the secrets of the ocean to the public. We present our \textbf{Marine-5M} dataset with more than 5 million marine image-text pairs to inject domain-specific marine knowledge into our model and achieve better marine vision and language alignment. Our MarineGPT not only pushes the boundaries of marine understanding to the general public but also offers a standard protocol for adapting a general-purpose assistant to downstream domain-specific experts. We pave the way for a wide range of marine applications while setting valuable data and pre-trained models for future research in both academic and industrial communities.

Quality classification of wood boards is an essential task in the sawmill industry, which is still usually performed by human operators in small to median companies in developing countries. Machine learning algorithms have been successfully employed to investigate the problem, offering a more affordable alternative compared to other solutions. However, such approaches usually present some drawbacks regarding the proper selection of their hyperparameters. Moreover, the models are susceptible to the features extracted from wood board images, which influence the induction of the model and, consequently, its generalization power. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the problem of simultaneously tuning the hyperparameters of an artificial neural network (ANN) as well as selecting a subset of characteristics that better describes the wood board quality. Experiments were conducted over a private dataset composed of images obtained from a sawmill industry and described using different feature descriptors. The predictive performance of the model was compared against five baseline methods as well as a random search, performing either ANN hyperparameter tuning and feature selection. Experimental results suggest that hyperparameters should be adjusted according to the feature set, or the features should be selected considering the hyperparameter values. In summary, the best predictive performance, i.e., a balanced accuracy of $0.80$, was achieved in two distinct scenarios: (i) performing only feature selection, and (ii) performing both tasks concomitantly. Thus, we suggest that at least one of the two approaches should be considered in the context of industrial applications.

Opinion summarization is expected to digest larger review sets and provide summaries from different perspectives. However, most existing solutions are deficient in epitomizing extensive reviews and offering opinion summaries from various angles due to the lack of designs for information selection. To this end, we propose SUBSUMM, a supervised summarization framework for large-scale multi-perspective opinion summarization. SUBSUMM consists of a review sampling strategy set and a two-stage training scheme. The sampling strategies take sentiment orientation and contrastive information value into consideration, with which the review subsets from different perspectives and quality levels can be selected. Subsequently, the summarizer is encouraged to learn from the sub-optimal and optimal subsets successively in order to capitalize on the massive input. Experimental results on AmaSum and Rotten Tomatoes datasets demonstrate that SUBSUMM is adept at generating pros, cons, and verdict summaries from hundreds of input reviews. Furthermore, our in-depth analysis verifies that the advanced selection of review subsets and the two-stage training scheme are vital to boosting the summarization performance.

Yes-no questions expect a yes or no for an answer, but people often skip polar keywords. Instead, they answer with long explanations that must be interpreted. In this paper, we focus on this challenging problem and release new benchmarks in eight languages. We present a distant supervision approach to collect training data. We also demonstrate that direct answers (i.e., with polar keywords) are useful to train models to interpret indirect answers (i.e., without polar keywords). Experimental results demonstrate that monolingual fine-tuning is beneficial if training data can be obtained via distant supervision for the language of interest (5 languages). Additionally, we show that cross-lingual fine-tuning is always beneficial (8 languages).

Learning-to-rank is an applied domain of supervised machine learning. As feature selection has been found to be effective for improving the accuracy of learning models in general, it is intriguing to investigate this process for learning-to-rank domain. In this study, we investigate the use of a popular meta-heuristic approach called simulated annealing for this task. Under the general framework of simulated annealing, we explore various neighborhood selection strategies and temperature cooling schemes. We further introduce a new hyper-parameter called the progress parameter that can effectively be used to traverse the search space. Our algorithms are evaluated on five publicly benchmark datasets of learning-to-rank. For a better validation, we also compare the simulated annealing-based feature selection algorithm with another effective meta-heuristic algorithm, namely local beam search. Extensive experimental results shows the efficacy of our proposed models.

Transformer-based models have achieved state-of-the-art performance in many areas. However, the quadratic complexity of self-attention with respect to the input length hinders the applicability of Transformer-based models to long sequences. To address this, we present Fast Multipole Attention, a new attention mechanism that uses a divide-and-conquer strategy to reduce the time and memory complexity of attention for sequences of length $n$ from $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ to $\mathcal{O}(n \log n)$ or $O(n)$, while retaining a global receptive field. The hierarchical approach groups queries, keys, and values into $\mathcal{O}( \log n)$ levels of resolution, where groups at greater distances are increasingly larger in size and the weights to compute group quantities are learned. As such, the interaction between tokens far from each other is considered in lower resolution in an efficient hierarchical manner. The overall complexity of Fast Multipole Attention is $\mathcal{O}(n)$ or $\mathcal{O}(n \log n)$, depending on whether the queries are down-sampled or not. This multi-level divide-and-conquer strategy is inspired by fast summation methods from $n$-body physics and the Fast Multipole Method. We perform evaluation on autoregressive and bidirectional language modeling tasks and compare our Fast Multipole Attention model with other efficient attention variants on medium-size datasets. We find empirically that the Fast Multipole Transformer performs much better than other efficient transformers in terms of memory size and accuracy. The Fast Multipole Attention mechanism has the potential to empower large language models with much greater sequence lengths, taking the full context into account in an efficient, naturally hierarchical manner during training and when generating long sequences.

Idioms are common in everyday language, but often pose a challenge to translators because their meanings do not follow from the meanings of their parts. Despite significant advances, machine translation systems still struggle to translate idiomatic expressions. We provide a simple characterization of idiomatic translation and related issues. This allows us to conduct a synthetic experiment revealing a tipping point at which transformer-based machine translation models correctly default to idiomatic translations. To expand multilingual resources, we compile a dataset of ~4k natural sentences containing idiomatic expressions in French, Finnish, and Japanese. To improve translation of natural idioms, we introduce two straightforward yet effective techniques: the strategic upweighting of training loss on potentially idiomatic sentences, and using retrieval-augmented models. This not only improves the accuracy of a strong pretrained MT model on idiomatic sentences by up to 13% in absolute accuracy, but also holds potential benefits for non-idiomatic sentences.