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Yo'LLaVA: Your Personalized Language and Vision Assistant

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across a variety of tasks (e.g., image captioning, visual question answering).While broad, their knowledge remains generic (e.g., recognizing a dog), and they are unable to handle personalized subjects (e.g., recognizing a user's pet dog).Human reasoning, in contrast, typically operates within the context of specific subjects in our surroundings. For example, one might ask, What should I buy for's birthday?; as opposed to a generic inquiry about What should I buy for's birthday?.Similarly, when looking at a friend's image, the interest lies in seeing their activities (e.g., is holding a cat), rather than merely observing generic human actions (e.g., is holding a cat).In this paper, we introduce the novel task of personalizing LMMs, so that they can have conversations about a specific subject. We propose Yo'LLaVA, which learns to embed a personalized subject into a set of latent tokens given a handful of example images of the subject. Our qualitative and quantitative analyses reveal that Yo'LLaVA can learn the concept more efficiently using fewer tokens and more effectively encode the visual attributes compared to strong prompting baselines (e.g., LLaVA).


A Siamese Transformer with Hierarchical Refinement for Lane Detection

Neural Information Processing Systems

Lane detection is an important yet challenging task in autonomous driving systems. Existing lane detection methods mainly rely on finer-scale information to identify key points of lane lines. Since local information in realistic road environments is frequently obscured by other vehicles or affected by poor outdoor lighting conditions, these methods struggle with the regression of such key points. In this paper, we propose a novel Siamese Transformer with hierarchical refinement for lane detection to improve the detection accuracy in complex road environments. Specifically, we propose a high-to-low hierarchical refinement Transformer structure, called LAne TRansformer (LATR), to refine the key points of lane lines, which integrates global semantics information and finer-scale features. Moreover, exploiting the thin and long characteristics of lane lines, we propose a novel Curve-IoU loss to supervise the fit of lane lines. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets of lane detection demonstrate that our proposed new method achieves state-of-the-art results with high accuracy and efficiency. Specifically, our method achieves improved F1 scores on the OpenLane dataset, surpassing the current best-performing method by 5.0 points.


Chaos unleashed by Trump has Europeans building bridges with China

The Japan Times

Two robots box while German Chancellor Friedrich Merz visits Unitree Robotics in Zhejiang Province, China. In the exhibition hall at Unitree Robotics in Hangzhou, Friedrich Merz smiled and applauded the martial arts display by a platoon of humanoid warriors. But when a robot boxer advanced toward him, punching the air with its red-gloved fists, the German chancellor flinched, a look of alarm crossing his face as he appeared to realize the danger posed by an autonomous fighting machine. It was also a moment that crystallized for Merz the power of China's technology, according to a person familiar with his thinking. He saw it, too, as a sign of how far behind Germany has fallen and how European Union regulation holds back their efforts to catch up, the person said, asking not to be named discussing the chancellor's private views. The trip, last month, has triggered a broader reckoning that is starting to settle in across Europe: Maybe de-risking from China is just too big a task.


Simple and Fast Distillation of Diffusion Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Diffusion-based generative models have demonstrated their powerful performance across various tasks, but this comes at a cost of the slow sampling speed. To achieve both efficient and high-quality synthesis, various distillation-based accelerated sampling methods have been developed recently. However, they generally require time-consuming fine tuning with elaborate designs to achieve satisfactory performance in a specific number of function evaluation (NFE), making them difficult to employ in practice. To address this issue, we propose **S**imple and **F**ast **D**istillation (SFD) of diffusion models, which simplifies the paradigm used in existing methods and largely shortens their fine-tuning time up to $1000\times$. We begin with a vanilla distillation-based sampling method and boost its performance to state of the art by identifying and addressing several small yet vital factors affecting the synthesis efficiency and quality. Our method can also achieve sampling with variable NFEs using a single distilled model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SFD strikes a good balance between the sample quality and fine-tuning costs in few-step image generation task.


HGDL: Heterogeneous Graph Label Distribution Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Label Distribution Learning (LDL) has been extensively studied in IID data applications such as computer vision, thanks to its more generic setting over single-label and multi-label classification. This paper advances LDL into graph domains and aims to tackle a novel and fundamentalheterogeneous graph label distribution learning (HGDL) problem.We argue that the graph heterogeneity reflected on node types, node attributes, and neighborhood structures can impose significant challenges for generalizing LDL onto graphs. To address the challenges, we propose a new learning framework with two key components: 1) proactive graph topology homogenization, and 2) topology and content consistency-aware graph transformer. Specifically, the former learns optimal information aggregation between meta-paths, so that the nodeheterogeneity can be proactively addressed prior to the succeeding embedding learning; the latter leverages an attention mechanism to learn consistency between meta-path and node attributes, allowing network topology and nodal attributes to be equally emphasized during the label distribution learning. By using KL-divergence and additional constraints, \method~delivers an end-to-end solution for learning and predicting label distribution for nodes.



LLM Circuit Analyses Are Consistent Across Training and Scale

Neural Information Processing Systems

Most currently deployed LLMs undergo continuous training or additional finetuning. By contrast, most research into LLMs' internal mechanisms focuses on models at one snapshot in time (the end of pre-training), raising the question of whether their results generalize to real-world settings. Existing studies of mechanisms over time focus on encoder-only or toy models, which differ significantly from most deployed models. In this study, we track how model mechanisms, operationalized as circuits, emerge and evolve across 300 billion tokens of training in decoder-only LLMs, in models ranging from 70 million to 2.8 billion parameters. We find that task abilities and the functional components that support them emerge consistently at similar token counts across scale. Moreover, although such components may be implemented by different attention heads over time, the overarching algorithm that they implement remains. Surprisingly, both these algorithms and the types of components involved therein tend to replicate across model scale. Finally, we find that circuit size correlates with model size and can fluctuate considerably over time even when the same algorithm is implemented. These results suggest that circuit analyses conducted on small models at the end of pre-training can provide insights that still apply after additional training and over model scale.


MotionTTT: 2D Test-Time-Training Motion Estimation for 3D Motion Corrected MRI

Neural Information Processing Systems

A major challenge of the long measurement times in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), an important medical imaging technology, is that patients may move during data acquisition. This leads to severe motion artifacts in the reconstructed images and volumes. In this paper, we propose MotionTTT a deep learning-based test-time-training (TTT) method for accurate motion estimation. The key idea is that a neural network trained for motion-free reconstruction has a small loss if there is no motion, thus optimizing over motion parameters passed through the reconstruction network enables accurate estimation of motion. The estimated motion parameters enable to correct for the motion and to reconstruct accurate motion-corrected images. Our method uses 2D reconstruction networks to estimate rigid motion in 3D, and constitutes the first deep learning based method for 3D rigid motion estimation towards 3D-motion-corrected MRI. We show that our method can provably reconstruct motion parameters for a simple signal and neural network model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for both retrospectively simulated motion and prospectively collected real motion-corrupted data.


Is Heterogeneity Notorious? Taming Heterogeneity to Handle Test-Time Shift in Federated Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Federated learning (FL) is an effective machine learning paradigm where multiple clients can train models based on heterogeneous data in a decentralized manner without accessing their private data. However, existing FL systems undergo performance deterioration due to feature-level test-time shifts, which are well investigated in centralized settings but rarely studied in FL. The common non-IID issue in FL usually refers to inter-client heterogeneity during training phase, while the test-time shift refers to the intra-client heterogeneity during test phase. Although the former is always deemed to be notorious for FL, there is still a wealth of useful information delivered by heterogeneous data sources, which may potentially help alleviate the latter issue. To explore the possibility of using inter-client heterogeneity in handling intra-client heterogeneity, we firstly propose a contrastive learning-based FL framework, namely FedICON, to capture invariant knowledge among heterogeneous clients and consistently tune the model to adapt to test data. In FedICON, each client performs sample-wise supervised contrastive learning during the local training phase, which enhances sample-wise invariance encoding ability. Through global aggregation, the invariance extraction ability can be mutually boosted among inter-client heterogeneity. During the test phase, our test-time adaptation procedure leverages unsupervised contrastive learning to guide the model to smoothly generalize to test data under intra-client heterogeneity. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed FedICON in taming heterogeneity to handle test-time shift problems.


Progressive Exploration-Conformal Learning for Sparsely Annotated Object Detection in Aerial Images

Neural Information Processing Systems

The ability to detect aerial objects with limited annotation is pivotal to the development of real-world aerial intelligence systems. In this work, we focus on a demanding but practical sparsely annotated object detection (SAOD) in aerial images, which encompasses a wider variety of aerial scenes with the same number of annotated objects. Although most existing SAOD methods rely on fixed thresholding to filter pseudo-labels for enhancing detector performance, adapting to aerial objects proves challenging due to the imbalanced probabilities/confidences associated with predicted aerial objects. To address this problem, we propose a novel Progressive Exploration-Conformal Learning (PECL) framework to address the SAOD task, which can adaptively perform the selection of high-quality pseudo-labels in aerial images. Specifically, the pseudo-label exploration can be formulated as a decision-making paradigm by adopting a conformal pseudo-label explorer and a multi-clue selection evaluator. The conformal pseudo-label explorer learns an adaptive policy by maximizing the cumulative reward, which can decide how to select these high-quality candidates by leveraging their essential characteristics and inter-instance contextual information. The multi-clue selection evaluator is designed to evaluate the explorer-guided pseudo-label selections by providing an instructive feedback for policy optimization. Finally, the explored pseudo-labels can be adopted to guide the optimization of aerial object detector in a closed-looping progressive fashion. Comprehensive evaluations on two public datasets demonstrate the superiority of our PECL when compared with other state-of-the-art methods in the sparsely annotated aerial object detection task.