Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) holds great promise in addressing challenges associated with long video understanding. These methods retrieve useful moments from long videos for their presented tasks, thereby enabling multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to generate high-quality answers in a cost-effective way. In this work, we present MomentSeeker, a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate retrieval models' performance in handling general long-video moment retrieval (LVMR) tasks. MomentSeeker offers three key advantages. First, it incorporates long videos of over 500 seconds on average, making it the first benchmark specialized for long-video moment retrieval. Second, it covers a wide range of task categories (including Moment Search, Caption Alignment, Image-conditioned Moment Search, and Video-conditioned Moment Search) and diverse application scenarios (e.g., sports, movies, cartoons, and ego), making it a comprehensive tool for assessing retrieval models' general LVMR performance. Additionally, the evaluation tasks are carefully curated through human annotation, ensuring the reliability of assessment. We further fine-tune an MLLM-based LVMR retriever on synthetic data, which demonstrates strong performance on our benchmark. We perform extensive experiments with various popular multimodal retrievers based on our benchmark, whose results highlight the challenges of LVMR and limitations for existing methods. Our created resources will be shared with community to advance future research in this field.

With the popularity of multimodal techniques, it receives growing interests to acquire useful information in visual forms. In this work, we formally define an emerging IR paradigm called \textit{Visualized Information Retrieval}, or \textbf{Vis-IR}, where multimodal information, such as texts, images, tables and charts, is jointly represented by a unified visual format called \textbf{Screenshots}, for various retrieval applications. We further make three key contributions for Vis-IR. First, we create \textbf{VIRA} (Vis-IR Aggregation), a large-scale dataset comprising a vast collection of screenshots from diverse sources, carefully curated into captioned and question-answer formats. Second, we develop \textbf{UniSE} (Universal Screenshot Embeddings), a family of retrieval models that enable screenshots to query or be queried across arbitrary data modalities. Finally, we construct \textbf{MVRB} (Massive Visualized IR Benchmark), a comprehensive benchmark covering a variety of task forms and application scenarios. Through extensive evaluations on MVRB, we highlight the deficiency from existing multimodal retrievers and the substantial improvements made by UniSE. Our work will be shared with the community, laying a solid foundation for this emerging field.

In recent years, pre-trained multimodal large models have attracted widespread attention due to their outstanding performance in various multimodal applications. Nonetheless, the extensive computational resources and vast datasets required for their training present significant hurdles for deployment in environments with limited computational resources. To address this challenge, we propose a novel dynamic self-adaptive multiscale distillation from pre-trained multimodal large model for efficient cross-modal representation learning for the first time. Unlike existing distillation methods, our strategy employs a multiscale perspective, enabling the extraction structural knowledge across from the pre-trained multimodal large model. Ensuring that the student model inherits a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the teacher knowledge. To optimize each distillation loss in a balanced and efficient manner, we propose a dynamic self-adaptive distillation loss balancer, a novel component eliminating the need for manual loss weight adjustments and dynamically balances each loss item during the distillation process. Our methodology streamlines pre-trained multimodal large models using only their output features and original image-level information, requiring minimal computational resources. This efficient approach is suited for various applications and allows the deployment of advanced multimodal technologies even in resource-limited settings. Extensive experiments has demonstrated that our method maintains high performance while significantly reducing model complexity and training costs. Moreover, our distilled student model utilizes only image-level information to achieve state-of-the-art performance on cross-modal retrieval tasks, surpassing previous methods that relied on region-level information.

Diffusion models based on permutation-equivariant networks can learn permutation-invariant distributions for graph data. However, in comparison to their non-invariant counterparts, we have found that these invariant models encounter greater learning challenges since 1) their effective target distributions exhibit more modes; 2) their optimal one-step denoising scores are the score functions of Gaussian mixtures with more components. Motivated by this analysis, we propose a non-invariant diffusion model, called $\textit{SwinGNN}$, which employs an efficient edge-to-edge 2-WL message passing network and utilizes shifted window based self-attention inspired by SwinTransformers. Further, through systematic ablations, we identify several critical training and sampling techniques that significantly improve the sample quality of graph generation. At last, we introduce a simple post-processing trick, $\textit{i.e.}$, randomly permuting the generated graphs, which provably converts any graph generative model to a permutation-invariant one. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world protein and molecule datasets show that our SwinGNN achieves state-of-the-art performances. Our code is released at https://github.com/qiyan98/SwinGNN.

This paper proposes a hypothesis for the aesthetic appreciation that aesthetic images make a neural network strengthen salient concepts and discard inessential concepts. In order to verify this hypothesis, we use multi-variate interactions to represent salient concepts and inessential concepts contained in images. Furthermore, we design a set of operations to revise images towards more beautiful ones. In experiments, we find that the revised images are more aesthetic than the original ones to some extent. The code will be released when the paper is accepted.