Video personalization, which generates customized videos using reference images, has gained significant attention. However, prior methods typically focus on single-concept personalization, limiting broader applications that require multi-concept integration. Attempts to extend these models to multiple concepts often lead to identity blending, which results in composite characters with fused attributes from multiple sources. This challenge arises due to the lack of a mechanism to link each concept with its specific reference image. We address this with anchored prompts, which embed image anchors as unique tokens within text prompts, guiding accurate referencing during generation. Additionally, we introduce concept embeddings to encode the order of reference images. Our approach, Movie Weaver, seamlessly weaves multiple concepts-including face, body, and animal images-into one video, allowing flexible combinations in a single model. The evaluation shows that Movie Weaver outperforms existing methods for multi-concept video personalization in identity preservation and overall quality.

Artifact detection algorithms are crucial to correcting the output generated by diffusion models. However, because of the variety of artifact forms, existing methods require substantial annotated data for training. This requirement limits their scalability and efficiency, which restricts their wide application. This paper shows that the similarity of denoised images between consecutive time steps during the sampling process is related to the severity of artifacts in images generated by diffusion models. Building on this observation, we introduce the concept of Similarity Trajectory to characterize the sampling process and its correlation with the image artifacts presented. Using an annotated data set of 680 images, which is only 0.1% of the amount of data used in the prior work, we trained a classifier on these trajectories to predict the presence of artifacts in images. By performing 10-fold validation testing on the balanced annotated data set, the classifier can achieve an accuracy of 72.35%, highlighting the connection between the Similarity Trajectory and the occurrence of artifacts. This approach enables differentiation between artifact-exhibiting and natural-looking images using limited training data.

Model Compression has drawn much attention within the deep learning community recently. Compressing a dense neural network offers many advantages including lower computation cost, deployability to devices of limited storage and memories, and resistance to adversarial attacks. This may be achieved via weight pruning or fully discarding certain input features. Here we demonstrate a novel strategy to emulate principles of Bayesian model selection in a deep learning setup. Given a fully connected Bayesian neural network with spike-and-slab priors trained via a variational algorithm, we obtain the posterior inclusion probability for every node that typically gets lost. We employ these probabilities for pruning and feature selection on a host of simulated and real-world benchmark data and find evidence of better generalizability of the pruned model in all our experiments.

With rapidly increasing distributed deep learning workloads in large-scale data centers, efficient distributed deep learning framework strategies for resource allocation and workload scheduling have become the key to high-performance deep learning. The large-scale environment with large volumes of datasets, models, and computational and communication resources raises various unique challenges for resource allocation and workload scheduling in distributed deep learning, such as scheduling complexity, resource and workload heterogeneity, and fault tolerance. To uncover these challenges and corresponding solutions, this survey reviews the literature, mainly from 2019 to 2024, on efficient resource allocation and workload scheduling strategies for large-scale distributed DL. We explore these strategies by focusing on various resource types, scheduling granularity levels, and performance goals during distributed training and inference processes. We highlight critical challenges for each topic and discuss key insights of existing technologies. To illustrate practical large-scale resource allocation and workload scheduling in real distributed deep learning scenarios, we use a case study of training large language models. This survey aims to encourage computer science, artificial intelligence, and communications researchers to understand recent advances and explore future research directions for efficient framework strategies for large-scale distributed deep learning.

With the rapid growth in the volume of data sets, models, and devices in the domain of deep learning, there is increasing attention on large-scale distributed deep learning. In contrast to traditional distributed deep learning, the large-scale scenario poses new challenges that include fault tolerance, scalability of algorithms and infrastructures, and heterogeneity in data sets, models, and resources. Due to intensive synchronization of models and sharing of data across GPUs and computing nodes during distributed training and inference processes, communication efficiency becomes the bottleneck for achieving high performance at a large scale. This article surveys the literature over the period of 2018-2023 on algorithms and technologies aimed at achieving efficient communication in large-scale distributed deep learning at various levels, including algorithms, frameworks, and infrastructures. Specifically, we first introduce efficient algorithms for model synchronization and communication data compression in the context of large-scale distributed training. Next, we introduce efficient strategies related to resource allocation and task scheduling for use in distributed training and inference. After that, we present the latest technologies pertaining to modern communication infrastructures used in distributed deep learning with a focus on examining the impact of the communication overhead in a large-scale and heterogeneous setting. Finally, we conduct a case study on the distributed training of large language models at a large scale to illustrate how to apply these technologies in real cases. This article aims to offer researchers a comprehensive understanding of the current landscape of large-scale distributed deep learning and to reveal promising future research directions toward communication-efficient solutions in this scope.

We study the asymptotic error of score-based diffusion model sampling in large-sample scenarios from a non-parametric statistics perspective. We show that a kernel-based score estimator achieves an optimal mean square error of $\widetilde{O}\left(n^{-1} t^{-\frac{d+2}{2}}(t^{\frac{d}{2}} \vee 1)\right)$ for the score function of $p_0*\mathcal{N}(0,t\boldsymbol{I}_d)$, where $n$ and $d$ represent the sample size and the dimension, $t$ is bounded above and below by polynomials of $n$, and $p_0$ is an arbitrary sub-Gaussian distribution. As a consequence, this yields an $\widetilde{O}\left(n^{-1/2} t^{-\frac{d}{4}}\right)$ upper bound for the total variation error of the distribution of the sample generated by the diffusion model under a mere sub-Gaussian assumption. If in addition, $p_0$ belongs to the nonparametric family of the $\beta$-Sobolev space with $\beta\le 2$, by adopting an early stopping strategy, we obtain that the diffusion model is nearly (up to log factors) minimax optimal. This removes the crucial lower bound assumption on $p_0$ in previous proofs of the minimax optimality of the diffusion model for nonparametric families.

Transfer learning on edge is challenging due to on-device limited resources. Existing work addresses this issue by training a subset of parameters or adding model patches. Developed with inference in mind, Inverted Residual Blocks (IRBs) split a convolutional layer into depthwise and pointwise convolutions, leading to more stacking layers, e.g., convolution, normalization, and activation layers. Though they are efficient for inference, IRBs require that additional activation maps are stored in memory for training weights for convolution layers and scales for normalization layers. As a result, their high memory cost prohibits training IRBs on resource-limited edge devices, and making them unsuitable in the context of transfer learning. To address this issue, we present MobileTL, a memory and computationally efficient on-device transfer learning method for models built with IRBs. MobileTL trains the shifts for internal normalization layers to avoid storing activation maps for the backward pass. Also, MobileTL approximates the backward computation of the activation layer (e.g., Hard-Swish and ReLU6) as a signed function which enables storing a binary mask instead of activation maps for the backward pass. MobileTL fine-tunes a few top blocks (close to output) rather than propagating the gradient through the whole network to reduce the computation cost. Our method reduces memory usage by 46% and 53% for MobileNetV2 and V3 IRBs, respectively. For MobileNetV3, we observe a 36% reduction in floating-point operations (FLOPs) when fine-tuning 5 blocks, while only incurring a 0.6% accuracy reduction on CIFAR10. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that our method is Pareto-optimal (best accuracy under given hardware constraints) compared to prior work in transfer learning for edge devices.

This paper shows that Masking the Deep hierarchical features is an efficient self-supervised method, denoted as MaskDeep. MaskDeep treats each patch in the representation space as an independent instance. We mask part of patches in the representation space and then utilize sparse visible patches to reconstruct high semantic image representation. The intuition of MaskDeep lies in the fact that models can reason from sparse visible patches semantic to the global semantic of the image. We further propose three designs in our framework: 1) a Hierarchical Deep-Masking module to concern the hierarchical property of patch representations, 2) a multi-group strategy to improve the efficiency without any extra computing consumption of the encoder and 3) a multi-target strategy to provide more description of the global semantic. Our MaskDeep brings decent improvements. Trained on ResNet50 with 200 epochs, MaskDeep achieves state-of-the-art results of 71.2% Top1 accuracy linear classification on ImageNet. On COCO object detection tasks, MaskDeep outperforms the self-supervised method SoCo, which specifically designed for object detection. When trained with 100 epochs, MaskDeep achieves 69.6% Top1 accuracy, which surpasses current methods trained with 200 epochs, such as HCSC, by 0.4% .

Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation aims to segment an image into semantic regions according to text descriptions, which may not have been seen during training. Recent two-stage methods first generate class-agnostic mask proposals and then leverage pre-trained vision-language models, e.g., CLIP, to classify masked regions. We identify the performance bottleneck of this paradigm to be the pre-trained CLIP model, since it does not perform well on masked images. To address this, we propose to finetune CLIP on a collection of masked image regions and their corresponding text descriptions. We collect training data by mining an existing image-caption dataset (e.g., COCO Captions), using CLIP to match masked image regions to nouns in the image captions. Compared with the more precise and manually annotated segmentation labels with fixed classes (e.g., COCO-Stuff), we find our noisy but diverse dataset can better retain CLIP's generalization ability. Along with finetuning the entire model, we utilize the "blank" areas in masked images using a method we dub mask prompt tuning. Experiments demonstrate mask prompt tuning brings significant improvement without modifying any weights of CLIP, and it can further improve a fully finetuned model. In particular, when trained on COCO and evaluated on ADE20K-150, our best model achieves 29.6% mIoU, which is +8.5% higher than the previous state-of-the-art. For the first time, open-vocabulary generalist models match the performance of supervised specialist models in 2017 without dataset-specific adaptations.

Scheduled batch jobs have been widely used on the asynchronous computing platforms to execute various enterprise applications, including the scheduled notifications and the candidate pre-computation for the modern recommender systems. It is important to deliver or update the information to the users at the right time to maintain the user experience and the execution impact. However, it is challenging to provide a versatile execution time optimization solution for the user-basis scheduled jobs to satisfy various product scenarios while maintaining reasonable infrastructure resource consumption. In this paper, we describe how we apply a learning-to-rank approach plus a "best time policy" in the best time selection. In addition, we propose an ensemble learner to minimize the ranking loss by efficiently leveraging multiple streams of user activity signals in our scheduling decisions of the execution time. Especially, we observe the cannibalization cross use cases to compete the user's peak time slot and introduce a coordination system to mitigate the problem. Our optimization approach has been successfully tested with production traffic that serves billions of users per day, with statistically significant improvements in various product metrics, including the notifications and content candidate generation. To the best of our knowledge, our study represents the first ML-based multi-tenant solution of the execution time optimization problem for the scheduled jobs at a large industrial scale cross different product domains.