Given the ubiquity of graph data and its applications in diverse domains, building a Graph Foundation Model (GFM) that can work well across different graphs and tasks with a unified backbone has recently garnered significant interests. A major obstacle to achieving this goal stems from the fact that graphs from different domains often exhibit diverse node features. Inspired by multi-modal models that align different modalities with natural language, the text has recently been adopted to provide a unified feature space for diverse graphs. Despite the great potential of these text-space GFMs, current research in this field is hampered by two problems. First, the absence of a comprehensive benchmark with unified problem settings hinders a clear understanding of the comparative effectiveness and practical value of different text-space GFMs. Second, there is a lack of sufficient datasets to thoroughly explore the methods' full potential and verify their effectiveness across diverse settings. To address these issues, we conduct a comprehensive benchmark providing novel text-space datasets and comprehensive evaluation under unified problem settings. Empirical results provide new insights and inspire future research directions. Our code and data are publicly available from https://github.com/CurryTang/TSGFM.

Image Restoration (IR), a classic low-level vision task, has witnessed significant advancements through deep models that effectively model global information. Notably, the emergence of Vision Transformers (ViTs) has further propelled these advancements. When computing, the self-attention mechanism, a cornerstone of ViTs, tends to encompass all global cues, even those from semantically unrelated objects or regions. This inclusivity introduces computational inefficiencies, particularly noticeable with high input resolution, as it requires processing irrelevant information, thereby impeding efficiency. Additionally, for IR, it is commonly noted that small segments of a degraded image, particularly those closely aligned semantically, provide particularly relevant information to aid in the restoration process, as they contribute essential contextual cues crucial for accurate reconstruction. To address these challenges, we propose boosting IR's performance by sharing the key semantics via Transformer for IR (i.e., SemanIR) in this paper.

Understanding the mechanisms of information storage and transfer in Transformer-based models is important for driving model understanding progress. Recent work has studied these mechanisms for Large Language Models (LLMs), revealing insights on how information is stored in a model's parameters and how information flows to and from these parameters in response to specific prompts. However, these studies have not yet been extended to Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Given their expanding capabilities and real-world use, we start by studying one aspect of these models -- how MLLMs process information in a factual visual question answering task. We use a constraint-based formulation which views a visual question as having a set of visual or textual constraints that the model's generated answer must satisfy to be correct (e.g.

We study the interplay between local differential privacy (LDP) and robustness to Huber corruption and possibly heavy-tailed rewards in the context of multi-armed bandits (MABs). We consider two different practical settings: LDP-then-Corruption (LTC) where each user's locally private response might be further corrupted during the data collection process, and Corruption-then-LDP (CTL) where each user's raw data may be corrupted such that the LDP mechanism will only be applied to the corrupted data. To start with, we present the first tight characterization of the mean estimation error in high probability under both LTC and CTL settings. Leveraging this new result, we then present an almost tight characterization (up to log factor) of the minimax regret in online MABs and sub-optimality in offline MABs under both LTC and CTL settings, respectively. Our theoretical results in both settings are also corroborated by a set of systematic simulations. One key message in this paper is that LTC is a more difficult setting that leads to a worse performance guarantee compared to the CTL setting (in the minimax sense). Our sharp understanding of LTC and CTL also naturally allows us to give the first tight performance bounds for the most practical setting where corruption could happen both before and after the LDP mechanism. As an important by-product, we also give the first correct and tight regret bound for locally private and heavy-tailed online MABs, i.e., without Huber corruption, by identifying a fundamental flaw in the state-of-the-art.

We introduce a decoder-decoder architecture, YOCO, for large language models, which only caches key-value pairs once. It consists of two components, i.e., a cross-decoder stacked upon a self-decoder. The self-decoder efficiently encodes global key-value (KV) caches that are reused by the cross-decoder via cross-attention. The overall model behaves like a decoder-only Transformer, although YOCO only caches once. The design substantially reduces GPU memory demands, yet retains global attention capability. Additionally, the computation flow enables prefilling to early exit without changing the final output, thereby significantly speeding up the prefill stage. Experimental results demonstrate that YOCO achieves favorable performance compared to Transformer in various settings of scaling up model size and number of training tokens. We also extend YOCO to 1M context length with near-perfect needle retrieval accuracy. The profiling results show that YOCO improves inference memory, prefill latency, and throughput by orders of magnitude across context lengths and model sizes.

Over 200 Ukrainian military experts in Gulf region to counter Iran's drones More than 200 Ukrainian military experts are in the Gulf region and wider Middle East helping governments in their defence against Iran's drone attacks, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said. In an address to dozens of members of the United Kingdom Parliament in London on Tuesday, the Ukrainian leader said 201 Ukrainian anti-drone experts are in the region and another 34 "are ready to deploy". "Our teams are already in the Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and on the way to Kuwait," the Ukrainian leader said. "We are working with several other countries - agreements are already in place. We do not want this terror of the Iranian regime against its neighbours to succeed," he said.

Higgs Boson breakthrough was UK triumph, but British physics faces'catastrophic' cuts When the Nobel Prize in Physics was announced in Stockholm in October 2013, the world was watching. Among the names read out was Prof Peter Higgs, the British theorist who, nearly half a century earlier, had predicted the existence of a particle believed to hold the cosmos together - the Higgs boson. The announcement, broadcast live from Sweden, was what many scientists had hoped for since a year earlier, when experiments at CERN had finally confirmed Higgs's theory by discovering the Higgs boson - hailed as one of the biggest discoveries in a generation. At the time Higgs, who has since passed away, said in a statement: I hope this recognition of fundamental science will help raise awareness of the value of blue-sky research. Blue-sky research asks questions to understand the universe, rather than design new products.

Real-world geometry and 3D vision tasks are replete with challenging symmetries that defy tractable analytical expression. In this paper, we introduce Neural Isometries, an autoencoder framework which learns to map the observation space to a general-purpose latent space wherein encodings are related by isometries whenever their corresponding observations are geometrically related in world space. Specifically, we regularize the latent space such that maps between encodings preserve a learned inner product and commute with a learned functional operator, in the same manner as rigid-body transformations commute with the Laplacian. This approach forms an effective backbone for self-supervised representation learning, and we demonstrate that a simple off-the-shelf equivariant network operating in the pre-trained latent space can achieve results on par with meticulously-engineered, handcrafted networks designed to handle complex, nonlinear symmetries. Furthermore, isometric maps capture information about the respective transformations in world space, and we show that this allows us to regress camera poses directly from the coefficients of the maps between encodings of adjacent views of a scene.

The rapid progression of urbanization has generated a diverse array of urban data, facilitating significant advancements in urban science and urban computing. Current studies often work on separate problems case by case using diverse data, e.g., air quality prediction, and built-up areas classification. This fragmented approach hinders the urban research field from advancing at the pace observed in Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing, due to two primary reasons. On the one hand, the diverse data processing steps lead to the lack of large-scale benchmarks and therefore decelerate iterative methodology improvement on a single problem. On the other hand, the disparity in multi-modal data formats hinders the combination of the related modal data to stimulate more research findings.

Powered by remarkable advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities in manifold tasks.However, the practical application scenarios of MLLMs are intricate, exposing them to potential malicious instructions and thereby posing safety risks.While current benchmarks do incorporate certain safety considerations, they often lack comprehensive coverage and fail to exhibit the necessary rigor and robustness.For instance, the common practice of employing GPT-4V as both the evaluator and a model to be evaluated lacks credibility, as it tends to exhibit a bias toward its own responses.In this paper, we present MLLMGuard, a multi-dimensional safety evaluation suite for MLLMs, including a bilingual image-text evaluation dataset, inference utilities, and a lightweight evaluator.MLLMGuard's assessment comprehensively covers two languages (English and Chinese) and five important safety dimensions (Privacy, Bias, Toxicity, Truthfulness, and Legality), each with corresponding rich subtasks.Focusing on these dimensions, our evaluation dataset is primarily sourced from platforms such as social media, and it integrates text-based and image-based red teaming techniques with meticulous annotation by human experts.This can prevent inaccurate evaluation caused by data leakage when using open-source datasets and ensures the quality and challenging nature of our benchmark.Additionally, a fully automated lightweight evaluator termed GuardRank is developed, which achieves significantly higher evaluation accuracy than GPT-4.Our evaluation results across 13 advanced models indicate that MLLMs still have a substantial journey ahead before they can be considered safe and responsible.