Education
Towards Lifelong Few-Shot Customization of Text-to-Image Diffusion
Song, Nan, Yang, Xiaofeng, Yang, Ze, Lin, Guosheng
Lifelong few-shot customization for text-to-image diffusion aims to continually generalize existing models for new tasks with minimal data while preserving old knowledge. Current customization diffusion models excel in few-shot tasks but struggle with catastrophic forgetting problems in lifelong generations. In this study, we identify and categorize the catastrophic forgetting problems into two folds: relevant concepts forgetting and previous concepts forgetting. To address these challenges, we first devise a data-free knowledge distillation strategy to tackle relevant concepts forgetting. Unlike existing methods that rely on additional real data or offline replay of original concept data, our approach enables on-the-fly knowledge distillation to retain the previous concepts while learning new ones, without accessing any previous data. Second, we develop an In-Context Generation (ICGen) paradigm that allows the diffusion model to be conditioned upon the input vision context, which facilitates the few-shot generation and mitigates the issue of previous concepts forgetting. Extensive experiments show that the proposed Lifelong Few-Shot Diffusion (LFS-Diffusion) method can produce high-quality and accurate images while maintaining previously learned knowledge.
Quantifying artificial intelligence through algebraic generalization
Ito, Takuya, Campbell, Murray, Horesh, Lior, Klinger, Tim, Ram, Parikshit
The rapid development of modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems has created an urgent need for their scientific quantification. While their fluency across a variety of domains is impressive, modern AI systems fall short on tests requiring symbolic processing and abstraction - a glaring limitation given the necessity for interpretable and reliable technology. Despite a surge of reasoning benchmarks emerging from the academic community, no comprehensive and theoretically-motivated framework exists to quantify reasoning (and more generally, symbolic ability) in AI systems. Here, we adopt a framework from computational complexity theory to explicitly quantify symbolic generalization: algebraic circuit complexity. Many symbolic reasoning problems can be recast as algebraic expressions. Thus, algebraic circuit complexity theory - the study of algebraic expressions as circuit models (i.e., directed acyclic graphs) - is a natural framework to study the complexity of symbolic computation. The tools of algebraic circuit complexity enable the study of generalization by defining benchmarks in terms of their complexity-theoretic properties (i.e., the difficulty of a problem). Moreover, algebraic circuits are generic mathematical objects; for a given algebraic circuit, an arbitrarily large number of samples can be generated for a specific circuit, making it an optimal testbed for the data-hungry machine learning algorithms that are used today. Here, we adopt tools from algebraic circuit complexity theory, apply it to formalize a science of symbolic generalization, and address key theoretical and empirical challenges for its successful application to AI science and its impact on the broader community.
Online-LoRA: Task-free Online Continual Learning via Low Rank Adaptation
Wei, Xiwen, Li, Guihong, Marculescu, Radu
Catastrophic forgetting is a significant challenge in online continual learning (OCL), especially for non-stationary data streams that do not have well-defined task boundaries. This challenge is exacerbated by the memory constraints and privacy concerns inherent in rehearsal buffers. To tackle catastrophic forgetting, in this paper, we introduce Online-LoRA, a novel framework for task-free OCL. Online-LoRA allows to finetune pre-trained Vision Transformer (ViT) models in real-time to address the limitations of rehearsal buffers and leverage pre-trained models' performance benefits. As the main contribution, our approach features a novel online weight regularization strategy to identify and consolidate important model parameters. Moreover, Online-LoRA leverages the training dynamics of loss values to enable the automatic recognition of the data distribution shifts. Extensive experiments across many task-free OCL scenarios and benchmark datasets (including CIFAR-100, ImageNet-R, ImageNet-S, CUB-200 and CORe50) demonstrate that Online-LoRA can be robustly adapted to various ViT architectures, while achieving better performance compared to SOTA methods. Our code will be publicly available at: https://github.com/Christina200/Online-LoRA-official.git.
Autoregressive Models in Vision: A Survey
Xiong, Jing, Liu, Gongye, Huang, Lun, Wu, Chengyue, Wu, Taiqiang, Mu, Yao, Yao, Yuan, Shen, Hui, Wan, Zhongwei, Huang, Jinfa, Tao, Chaofan, Yan, Shen, Yao, Huaxiu, Kong, Lingpeng, Yang, Hongxia, Zhang, Mi, Sapiro, Guillermo, Luo, Jiebo, Luo, Ping, Wong, Ngai
Autoregressive modeling has been a huge success in the field of natural language processing (NLP). Recently, autoregressive models have emerged as a significant area of focus in computer vision, where they excel in producing high-quality visual content. Autoregressive models in NLP typically operate on subword tokens. However, the representation strategy in computer vision can vary in different levels, \textit{i.e.}, pixel-level, token-level, or scale-level, reflecting the diverse and hierarchical nature of visual data compared to the sequential structure of language. This survey comprehensively examines the literature on autoregressive models applied to vision. To improve readability for researchers from diverse research backgrounds, we start with preliminary sequence representation and modeling in vision. Next, we divide the fundamental frameworks of visual autoregressive models into three general sub-categories, including pixel-based, token-based, and scale-based models based on the strategy of representation. We then explore the interconnections between autoregressive models and other generative models. Furthermore, we present a multi-faceted categorization of autoregressive models in computer vision, including image generation, video generation, 3D generation, and multi-modal generation. We also elaborate on their applications in diverse domains, including emerging domains such as embodied AI and 3D medical AI, with about 250 related references. Finally, we highlight the current challenges to autoregressive models in vision with suggestions about potential research directions. We have also set up a Github repository to organize the papers included in this survey at: \url{https://github.com/ChaofanTao/Autoregressive-Models-in-Vision-Survey}.
BhasaAnuvaad: A Speech Translation Dataset for 13 Indian Languages
Jain, Sparsh, Sankar, Ashwin, Choudhary, Devilal, Suman, Dhairya, Narasimhan, Nikhil, Khan, Mohammed Safi Ur Rahman, Kunchukuttan, Anoop, Khapra, Mitesh M, Dabre, Raj
Automatic Speech Translation (AST) datasets for Indian languages remain critically scarce, with public resources covering fewer than 10 of the 22 official languages. This scarcity has resulted in AST systems for Indian languages lagging far behind those available for high-resource languages like English. In this paper, we first evaluate the performance of widely-used AST systems on Indian languages, identifying notable performance gaps and challenges. Our findings show that while these systems perform adequately on read speech, they struggle significantly with spontaneous speech, including disfluencies like pauses and hesitations. Additionally, there is a striking absence of systems capable of accurately translating colloquial and informal language, a key aspect of everyday communication. To this end, we introduce BhasaAnuvaad, the largest publicly available dataset for AST involving 13 out of 22 scheduled Indian languages and English spanning over 44,400 hours and 17M text segments. BhasaAnuvaad contains data for English speech to Indic text, as well as Indic speech to English text. This dataset comprises three key categories: (1) Curated datasets from existing resources, (2) Large-scale web mining, and (3) Synthetic data generation. By offering this diverse and expansive dataset, we aim to bridge the resource gap and promote advancements in AST for Indian languages.
Why ChatGPT struggles with math
Have you ever tried to use an AI tool like ChatGPT to do some math and found it doesn't always add up? It turns out there's a reason for that. As large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's ChatGPT become more ubiquitous, people increasingly rely on them for work and research assistance. Yuntian Deng, assistant professor at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, discusses some of the challenges in LLMs' reasoning capabilities, particularly in math, and explores the implications of using these models to aid problem-solving. As I explained in a recent post on X, the latest reasoning variant of ChatGPT o1, struggles with large-digit multiplication, especially when multiplying numbers beyond nine digits. This is a notable improvement over the previous ChatGPT-4o model, which struggled even with four-digit multiplication, but it's still a major flaw.
Intellectual Property Protection for Deep Learning Model and Dataset Intelligence
Jiang, Yongqi, Gao, Yansong, Zhou, Chunyi, Hu, Hongsheng, Fu, Anmin, Susilo, Willy
With the growing applications of Deep Learning (DL), especially recent spectacular achievements of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and LLaMA, the commercial significance of these remarkable models has soared. However, acquiring well-trained models is costly and resource-intensive. It requires a considerable high-quality dataset, substantial investment in dedicated architecture design, expensive computational resources, and efforts to develop technical expertise. Consequently, safeguarding the Intellectual Property (IP) of well-trained models is attracting increasing attention. In contrast to existing surveys overwhelmingly focusing on model IPP mainly, this survey not only encompasses the protection on model level intelligence but also valuable dataset intelligence. Firstly, according to the requirements for effective IPP design, this work systematically summarizes the general and scheme-specific performance evaluation metrics. Secondly, from proactive IP infringement prevention and reactive IP ownership verification perspectives, it comprehensively investigates and analyzes the existing IPP methods for both dataset and model intelligence. Additionally, from the standpoint of training settings, it delves into the unique challenges that distributed settings pose to IPP compared to centralized settings. Furthermore, this work examines various attacks faced by deep IPP techniques. Finally, we outline prospects for promising future directions that may act as a guide for innovative research.
Silicone-made Tactile Actuator Integrated with Hot Thermo-fiber Finger Sleeve
Hashem, Mohammad Shadman, Raza, Ahsan, Jeon, Seokhee
Multi-mode haptic feedback is essential to achieve high realism and immersion in virtual environments. This paper proposed a novel silicone fingertip actuator integrated with a hot thermal fabric finger sleeve to render pressure, vibration, and hot thermal feedback simultaneously. The actuator is pneumatically actuated to render a realistic and effective tactile experience in accordance with hot thermal sensation. The silicone actuator, with two air chambers controlled by pneumatic valves connected to compressed air tanks. Simultaneously, a PWM signal from a microcontroller regulates the temperature of the thermal fabric sleeve, enhancing overall system functionality. The lower chamber of the silicone actuator is responsible for pressure feedback, whereas the upper chamber is devoted to vibrotactile feedback. The conductive yarn or thread was utilized to spread the thermal feedback actuation points on the thermal fabric's surface. To demonstrate the actuator's capability, a VR environment consisting of a bowl of liquid and a stove with fire was designed. Based on different functionalities the scenario can simulate the tactile perception of pressure, vibration, and temperature simultaneously or consecutively.
Discern-XR: An Online Classifier for Metaverse Network Traffic
Manjunath, Yoga Suhas Kuruba, Wissborn, Austin, Szymanowski, Mathew, Li, Mushu, Zhao, Lian, Zhang, Xiao-Ping
In this paper, we design an exclusive Metaverse network traffic classifier, named Discern-XR, to help Internet service providers (ISP) and router manufacturers enhance the quality of Metaverse services. Leveraging segmented learning, the Frame Vector Representation (FVR) algorithm and Frame Identification Algorithm (FIA) are proposed to extract critical frame-related statistics from raw network data having only four application-level features. A novel Augmentation, Aggregation, and Retention Online Training (A2R-OT) algorithm is proposed to find an accurate classification model through online training methodology. In addition, we contribute to the real-world Metaverse dataset comprising virtual reality (VR) games, VR video, VR chat, augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) traffic, providing a comprehensive benchmark. Discern-XR outperforms state-of-the-art classifiers by 7% while improving training efficiency and reducing false-negative rates. Our work advances Metaverse network traffic classification by standing as the state-of-the-art solution.
What talking you?: Translating Code-Mixed Messaging Texts to English
Ng, Lynnette Hui Xian, Chan, Luo Qi
Translation of code-mixed texts to formal English allow a wider audience to understand these code-mixed languages, and facilitate downstream analysis applications such as sentiment analysis. In this work, we look at translating Singlish, which is colloquial Singaporean English, to formal standard English. Singlish is formed through the code-mixing of multiple Asian languages and dialects. We analysed the presence of other Asian languages and variants which can facilitate translation. Our dataset is short message texts, written as informal communication between Singlish speakers. We use a multi-step prompting scheme on five Large Language Models (LLMs) for language detection and translation. Our analysis show that LLMs do not perform well in this task, and we describe the challenges involved in translation of code-mixed languages. We also release our dataset in this link https://github.com/luoqichan/singlish.