Deng, Xin
CODA: Repurposing Continuous VAEs for Discrete Tokenization
Liu, Zeyu, Ni, Zanlin, Hua, Yeguo, Deng, Xin, Ma, Xiao, Zhong, Cheng, Huang, Gao
Discrete visual tokenizers transform images into a sequence of tokens, enabling token-based visual generation akin to language models. However, this process is inherently challenging, as it requires both compressing visual signals into a compact representation and discretizing them into a fixed set of codes. Traditional discrete tokenizers typically learn the two tasks jointly, often leading to unstable training, low codebook utilization, and limited reconstruction quality. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{CODA}(\textbf{CO}ntinuous-to-\textbf{D}iscrete \textbf{A}daptation), a framework that decouples compression and discretization. Instead of training discrete tokenizers from scratch, CODA adapts off-the-shelf continuous VAEs -- already optimized for perceptual compression -- into discrete tokenizers via a carefully designed discretization process. By primarily focusing on discretization, CODA ensures stable and efficient training while retaining the strong visual fidelity of continuous VAEs. Empirically, with $\mathbf{6 \times}$ less training budget than standard VQGAN, our approach achieves a remarkable codebook utilization of 100% and notable reconstruction FID (rFID) of $\mathbf{0.43}$ and $\mathbf{1.34}$ for $8 \times$ and $16 \times$ compression on ImageNet 256$\times$ 256 benchmark.
HiGraphDTI: Hierarchical Graph Representation Learning for Drug-Target Interaction Prediction
Liu, Bin, Wu, Siqi, Wang, Jin, Deng, Xin, Zhou, Ao
The discovery of drug-target interactions (DTIs) plays a crucial role in pharmaceutical development. The deep learning model achieves more accurate results in DTI prediction due to its ability to extract robust and expressive features from drug and target chemical structures. However, existing deep learning methods typically generate drug features via aggregating molecular atom representations, ignoring the chemical properties carried by motifs, i.e., substructures of the molecular graph. The atom-drug double-level molecular representation learning can not fully exploit structure information and fails to interpret the DTI mechanism from the motif perspective. In addition, sequential model-based target feature extraction either fuses limited contextual information or requires expensive computational resources. To tackle the above issues, we propose a hierarchical graph representation learning-based DTI prediction method (HiGraphDTI). Specifically, HiGraphDTI learns hierarchical drug representations from triple-level molecular graphs to thoroughly exploit chemical information embedded in atoms, motifs, and molecules. Then, an attentional feature fusion module incorporates information from different receptive fields to extract expressive target features.Last, the hierarchical attention mechanism identifies crucial molecular segments, which offers complementary views for interpreting interaction mechanisms. The experiment results not only demonstrate the superiority of HiGraphDTI to the state-of-the-art methods, but also confirm the practical ability of our model in interaction interpretation and new DTI discovery.
Uncertainty Guided Adaptive Warping for Robust and Efficient Stereo Matching
Jing, Junpeng, Li, Jiankun, Xiong, Pengfei, Liu, Jiangyu, Liu, Shuaicheng, Guo, Yichen, Deng, Xin, Xu, Mai, Jiang, Lai, Sigal, Leonid
Correlation based stereo matching has achieved outstanding performance, which pursues cost volume between two feature maps. Unfortunately, current methods with a fixed model do not work uniformly well across various datasets, greatly limiting their real-world applicability. To tackle this issue, this paper proposes a new perspective to dynamically calculate correlation for robust stereo matching. A novel Uncertainty Guided Adaptive Correlation (UGAC) module is introduced to robustly adapt the same model for different scenarios. Specifically, a variance-based uncertainty estimation is employed to adaptively adjust the sampling area during warping operation. Additionally, we improve the traditional non-parametric warping with learnable parameters, such that the position-specific weights can be learned. We show that by empowering the recurrent network with the UGAC module, stereo matching can be exploited more robustly and effectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance over the ETH3D, KITTI, and Middlebury datasets when employing the same fixed model over these datasets without any retraining procedure. To target real-time applications, we further design a lightweight model based on UGAC, which also outperforms other methods over KITTI benchmarks with only 0.6 M parameters.
Improving Grounded Language Understanding in a Collaborative Environment by Interacting with Agents Through Help Feedback
Mehta, Nikhil, Teruel, Milagro, Sanz, Patricio Figueroa, Deng, Xin, Awadallah, Ahmed Hassan, Kiseleva, Julia
Many approaches to Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks often treat them as single-step problems, where an agent receives an instruction, executes it, and is evaluated based on the final outcome. However, human language is inherently interactive, as evidenced by the back-and-forth nature of human conversations. In light of this, we posit that human-AI collaboration should also be interactive, with humans monitoring the work of AI agents and providing feedback that the agent can understand and utilize. Further, the AI agent should be able to detect when it needs additional information and proactively ask for help. Enabling this scenario would lead to more natural, efficient, and engaging human-AI collaborations. In this work, we explore these directions using the challenging task defined by the IGLU competition, an interactive grounded language understanding task in a MineCraft-like world. We explore multiple types of help players can give to the AI to guide it and analyze the impact of this help in AI behavior, resulting in performance improvements.
Semi-Supervised Learning Approach to Discover Enterprise User Insights from Feedback and Support
Deng, Xin, Smith, Ross, Quintin, Genevieve
With the evolution of the cloud and customer centric culture, we inherently accumulate huge repositories of textual reviews, feedback, and support data.This has driven enterprises to seek and research engagement patterns, user network analysis, topic detections, etc.However, huge manual work is still necessary to mine data to be able to mine actionable outcomes. In this paper, we proposed and developed an innovative Semi-Supervised Learning approach by utilizing Deep Learning and Topic Modeling to have a better understanding of the user voice.This approach combines a BERT-based multiclassification algorithm through supervised learning combined with a novel Probabilistic and Semantic Hybrid Topic Inference (PSHTI) Model through unsupervised learning, aiming at automating the process of better identifying the main topics or areas as well as the sub-topics from the textual feedback and support.There are three major break-through: 1. As the advancement of deep learning technology, there have been tremendous innovations in the NLP field, yet the traditional topic modeling as one of the NLP applications lag behind the tide of deep learning. In the methodology and technical perspective, we adopt transfer learning to fine-tune a BERT-based multiclassification system to categorize the main topics and then utilize the novel PSHTI model to infer the sub-topics under the predicted main topics. 2. The traditional unsupervised learning-based topic models or clustering methods suffer from the difficulty of automatically generating a meaningful topic label, but our system enables mapping the top words to the self-help issues by utilizing domain knowledge about the product through web-crawling. 3. This work provides a prominent showcase by leveraging the state-of-the-art methodology in the real production to help shed light to discover user insights and drive business investment priorities.