Daily Papers

Dataset distillation methods have achieved remarkable success in distilling a large dataset into a small set of representative samples. However, they are not designed to produce a distilled dataset that can be effectively used for facilitating self-supervised pre-training. To this end, we propose a novel problem of distilling an unlabeled dataset into a set of small synthetic samples for efficient self-supervised learning (SSL). We first prove that a gradient of synthetic samples with respect to a SSL objective in naive bilevel optimization is biased due to the randomness originating from data augmentations or masking. To address this issue, we propose to minimize the mean squared error (MSE) between a model's representations of the synthetic examples and their corresponding learnable target feature representations for the inner objective, which does not introduce any randomness. Our primary motivation is that the model obtained by the proposed inner optimization can mimic the self-supervised target model. To achieve this, we also introduce the MSE between representations of the inner model and the self-supervised target model on the original full dataset for outer optimization. Lastly, assuming that a feature extractor is fixed, we only optimize a linear head on top of the feature extractor, which allows us to reduce the computational cost and obtain a closed-form solution of the head with kernel ridge regression. We empirically validate the effectiveness of our method on various applications involving transfer learning.

We present HebDB, a weakly supervised dataset for spoken language processing in the Hebrew language. HebDB offers roughly 2500 hours of natural and spontaneous speech recordings in the Hebrew language, consisting of a large variety of speakers and topics. We provide raw recordings together with a pre-processed, weakly supervised, and filtered version. The goal of HebDB is to further enhance research and development of spoken language processing tools for the Hebrew language. Hence, we additionally provide two baseline systems for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR): (i) a self-supervised model; and (ii) a fully supervised model. We present the performance of these two methods optimized on HebDB and compare them to current multi-lingual ASR alternatives. Results suggest the proposed method reaches better results than the evaluated baselines considering similar model sizes. Dataset, code, and models are publicly available under https://pages.cs.huji.ac.il/adiyoss-lab/HebDB/.

The widespread use of offensive content in social media has led to an abundance of research in detecting language such as hate speech, cyberbullying, and cyber-aggression. Recent work presented the OLID dataset, which follows a taxonomy for offensive language identification that provides meaningful information for understanding the type and the target of offensive messages. However, it is limited in size and it might be biased towards offensive language as it was collected using keywords. In this work, we present SOLID, an expanded dataset, where the tweets were collected in a more principled manner. SOLID contains over nine million English tweets labeled in a semi-supervised fashion. We demonstrate that using SOLID along with OLID yields sizable performance gains on the OLID test set for two different models, especially for the lower levels of the taxonomy.

Interactive programming with interleaved code snippet cells and natural language markdown is recently gaining popularity in the form of Jupyter notebooks, which accelerate prototyping and collaboration. To study code generation conditioned on a long context history, we present JuICe, a corpus of 1.5 million examples with a curated test set of 3.7K instances based on online programming assignments. Compared with existing contextual code generation datasets, JuICe provides refined human-curated data, open-domain code, and an order of magnitude more training data. Using JuICe, we train models for two tasks: (1) generation of the API call sequence in a code cell, and (2) full code cell generation, both conditioned on the NL-Code history up to a particular code cell. Experiments using current baseline code generation models show that both context and distant supervision aid in generation, and that the dataset is challenging for current systems.

We create a framework for bootstrapping visual representation learning from a primitive visual grouping capability. We operationalize grouping via a contour detector that partitions an image into regions, followed by merging of those regions into a tree hierarchy. A small supervised dataset suffices for training this grouping primitive. Across a large unlabeled dataset, we apply this learned primitive to automatically predict hierarchical region structure. These predictions serve as guidance for self-supervised contrastive feature learning: we task a deep network with producing per-pixel embeddings whose pairwise distances respect the region hierarchy. Experiments demonstrate that our approach can serve as state-of-the-art generic pre-training, benefiting downstream tasks. We additionally explore applications to semantic region search and video-based object instance tracking.

Unit testing is an essential part of the software development process, which helps to identify issues with source code in early stages of development and prevent regressions. Machine learning has emerged as viable approach to help software developers generate automated unit tests. However, generating reliable unit test cases that are semantically correct and capable of catching software bugs or unintended behavior via machine learning requires large, metadata-rich, datasets. In this paper we present Methods2Test: A dataset of focal methods mapped to test cases: a large, supervised dataset of test cases mapped to corresponding methods under test (i.e., focal methods). This dataset contains 780,944 pairs of JUnit tests and focal methods, extracted from a total of 91,385 Java open source projects hosted on GitHub with licenses permitting re-distribution. The main challenge behind the creation of the Methods2Test was to establish a reliable mapping between a test case and the relevant focal method. To this aim, we designed a set of heuristics, based on developers' best practices in software testing, which identify the likely focal method for a given test case. To facilitate further analysis, we store a rich set of metadata for each method-test pair in JSON-formatted files. Additionally, we extract textual corpus from the dataset at different context levels, which we provide both in raw and tokenized forms, in order to enable researchers to train and evaluate machine learning models for Automated Test Generation. Methods2Test is publicly available at: https://github.com/microsoft/methods2test

Hashtag segmentation is the task of breaking a hashtag into its constituent tokens. Hashtags often encode the essence of user-generated posts, along with information like topic and sentiment, which are useful in downstream tasks. Hashtags prioritize brevity and are written in unique ways -- transliterating and mixing languages, spelling variations, creative named entities. Benchmark datasets used for the hashtag segmentation task -- STAN, BOUN -- are small in size and extracted from a single set of tweets. However, datasets should reflect the variations in writing styles of hashtags and also account for domain and language specificity, failing which the results will misrepresent model performance. We argue that model performance should be assessed on a wider variety of hashtags, and datasets should be carefully curated. To this end, we propose HashSet, a dataset comprising of: a) 1.9k manually annotated dataset; b) 3.3M loosely supervised dataset. HashSet dataset is sampled from a different set of tweets when compared to existing datasets and provides an alternate distribution of hashtags to build and validate hashtag segmentation models. We show that the performance of SOTA models for Hashtag Segmentation drops substantially on proposed dataset, indicating that the proposed dataset provides an alternate set of hashtags to train and assess models.

The Transformer architecture is shown to provide a powerful machine transduction framework for online handwritten gestures corresponding to glyph strokes of natural language sentences. The attention mechanism is successfully used to create latent representations of an end-to-end encoder-decoder model, solving multi-level segmentation while also learning some language features and syntax rules. The additional use of a large decoding space with some learned Byte-Pair-Encoding (BPE) is shown to provide robustness to ablated inputs and syntax rules. The encoder stack was directly fed with spatio-temporal data tokens potentially forming an infinitely large input vocabulary, an approach that finds applications beyond that of this work. Encoder transfer learning capabilities is also demonstrated on several languages resulting in faster optimisation and shared parameters. A new supervised dataset of online handwriting gestures suitable for generic handwriting recognition tasks was used to successfully train a small transformer model to an average normalised Levenshtein accuracy of 96% on English or German sentences and 94% in French.

The Transformer architecture is shown to provide a powerful framework as an end-to-end model for building expression trees from online handwritten gestures corresponding to glyph strokes. In particular, the attention mechanism was successfully used to encode, learn and enforce the underlying syntax of expressions creating latent representations that are correctly decoded to the exact mathematical expression tree, providing robustness to ablated inputs and unseen glyphs. For the first time, the encoder is fed with spatio-temporal data tokens potentially forming an infinitely large vocabulary, which finds applications beyond that of online gesture recognition. A new supervised dataset of online handwriting gestures is provided for training models on generic handwriting recognition tasks and a new metric is proposed for the evaluation of the syntactic correctness of the output expression trees. A small Transformer model suitable for edge inference was successfully trained to an average normalised Levenshtein accuracy of 94%, resulting in valid postfix RPN tree representation for 94% of predictions.

Large language models have recently been shown to attain reasonable zero-shot generalization on a diverse set of tasks (Brown et al., 2020). It has been hypothesized that this is a consequence of implicit multitask learning in language models' pretraining (Radford et al., 2019). Can zero-shot generalization instead be directly induced by explicit multitask learning? To test this question at scale, we develop a system for easily mapping any natural language tasks into a human-readable prompted form. We convert a large set of supervised datasets, each with multiple prompts with diverse wording. These prompted datasets allow for benchmarking the ability of a model to perform completely held-out tasks. We fine-tune a pretrained encoder-decoder model (Raffel et al., 2020; Lester et al., 2021) on this multitask mixture covering a wide variety of tasks. The model attains strong zero-shot performance on several standard datasets, often outperforming models up to 16x its size. Further, our approach attains strong performance on a subset of tasks from the BIG-bench benchmark, outperforming models up to 6x its size. All trained models are available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/t-zero and all prompts are available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/promptsource.

Pretraining has been shown to scale well with compute, data size and data diversity. Multitask learning trains on a mixture of supervised datasets and produces improved performance compared to self-supervised pretraining. Until now, massively multitask learning required simultaneous access to all datasets in the mixture and heavy compute resources that are only available to well-resourced teams. In this paper, we propose ColD Fusion, a method that provides the benefits of multitask learning but leverages distributed computation and requires limited communication and no sharing of data. Consequentially, ColD Fusion can create a synergistic loop, where finetuned models can be recycled to continually improve the pretrained model they are based on. We show that ColD Fusion yields comparable benefits to multitask pretraining by producing a model that (a) attains strong performance on all of the datasets it was multitask trained on and (b) is a better starting point for finetuning on unseen datasets. We find ColD Fusion outperforms RoBERTa and even previous multitask models. Specifically, when training and testing on 35 diverse datasets, ColD Fusion-based model outperforms RoBERTa by 2.45 points in average without any changes to the architecture.

Deep neural networks trained on large supervised datasets have led to impressive results in image classification and other tasks. However, well-annotated datasets can be time-consuming and expensive to collect, lending increased interest to larger but noisy datasets that are more easily obtained. In this paper, we show that deep neural networks are capable of generalizing from training data for which true labels are massively outnumbered by incorrect labels. We demonstrate remarkably high test performance after training on corrupted data from MNIST, CIFAR, and ImageNet. For example, on MNIST we obtain test accuracy above 90 percent even after each clean training example has been diluted with 100 randomly-labeled examples. Such behavior holds across multiple patterns of label noise, even when erroneous labels are biased towards confusing classes. We show that training in this regime requires a significant but manageable increase in dataset size that is related to the factor by which correct labels have been diluted. Finally, we provide an analysis of our results that shows how increasing noise decreases the effective batch size.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive zero-shot abilities on a variety of open-ended tasks, while recent research has also explored the use of LLMs for multi-modal generation. In this study, we introduce mPLUG-Owl, a novel training paradigm that equips LLMs with multi-modal abilities through modularized learning of foundation LLM, a visual knowledge module, and a visual abstractor module. This approach can support multiple modalities and facilitate diverse unimodal and multimodal abilities through modality collaboration. The training paradigm of mPLUG-Owl involves a two-stage method for aligning image and text, which learns visual knowledge with the assistance of LLM while maintaining and even improving the generation abilities of LLM. In the first stage, the visual knowledge module and abstractor module are trained with a frozen LLM module to align the image and text. In the second stage, language-only and multi-modal supervised datasets are used to jointly fine-tune a low-rank adaption (LoRA) module on LLM and the abstractor module by freezing the visual knowledge module. We carefully build a visually-related instruction evaluation set OwlEval. Experimental results show that our model outperforms existing multi-modal models, demonstrating mPLUG-Owl's impressive instruction and visual understanding ability, multi-turn conversation ability, and knowledge reasoning ability. Besides, we observe some unexpected and exciting abilities such as multi-image correlation and scene text understanding, which makes it possible to leverage it for harder real scenarios, such as vision-only document comprehension. Our code, pre-trained model, instruction-tuned models, and evaluation set are available at https://github.com/X-PLUG/mPLUG-Owl. The online demo is available at https://www.modelscope.cn/studios/damo/mPLUG-Owl.

Transfer of pre-trained representations improves sample efficiency and simplifies hyperparameter tuning when training deep neural networks for vision. We revisit the paradigm of pre-training on large supervised datasets and fine-tuning the model on a target task. We scale up pre-training, and propose a simple recipe that we call Big Transfer (BiT). By combining a few carefully selected components, and transferring using a simple heuristic, we achieve strong performance on over 20 datasets. BiT performs well across a surprisingly wide range of data regimes -- from 1 example per class to 1M total examples. BiT achieves 87.5% top-1 accuracy on ILSVRC-2012, 99.4% on CIFAR-10, and 76.3% on the 19 task Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark (VTAB). On small datasets, BiT attains 76.8% on ILSVRC-2012 with 10 examples per class, and 97.0% on CIFAR-10 with 10 examples per class. We conduct detailed analysis of the main components that lead to high transfer performance.

Mathematical reasoning is a challenging task for large language models (LLMs), while the scaling relationship of it with respect to LLM capacity is under-explored. In this paper, we investigate how the pre-training loss, supervised data amount, and augmented data amount influence the reasoning performances of a supervised LLM. We find that pre-training loss is a better indicator of the model's performance than the model's parameter count. We apply supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with different amounts of supervised data and empirically find a log-linear relation between data amount and model performance, and we find better models improve less with enlarged supervised datasets. To augment more data samples for improving model performances without any human effort, we propose to apply Rejection sampling Fine-Tuning (RFT). RFT uses supervised models to generate and collect correct reasoning paths as augmented fine-tuning datasets. We find with augmented samples containing more distinct reasoning paths, RFT improves mathematical reasoning performance more for LLMs. We also find RFT brings more improvement for less performant LLMs. Furthermore, we combine rejection samples from multiple models which push LLaMA-7B to an accuracy of 49.3% and outperforms the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) accuracy of 35.9% significantly.

Text ranking is a critical task in various information retrieval applications, and the recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in natural language processing has sparked interest in their application to text ranking. These methods primarily involve combining query and candidate documents and leveraging prompt learning to determine query-document relevance using the LLM's output probabilities for specific tokens or by directly generating a ranked list of candidate documents. Although these approaches have demonstrated promise, a noteworthy disparity arises between the training objective of LLMs, which typically centers around next token prediction, and the objective of evaluating query-document relevance. To address this gap and fully leverage LLM potential in text ranking tasks, we propose a progressive multi-stage training strategy. Firstly, we introduce a large-scale weakly supervised dataset of relevance texts to enable the LLMs to acquire the ability to predict relevant tokens without altering their original training objective. Subsequently, we incorporate supervised training to further enhance LLM ranking capability. Our experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method compared to previous competitive approaches, both in in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios.

We consider the task of semantic robotic grasping, in which a robot picks up an object of a user-specified class using only monocular images. Inspired by the two-stream hypothesis of visual reasoning, we present a semantic grasping framework that learns object detection, classification, and grasp planning in an end-to-end fashion. A "ventral stream" recognizes object class while a "dorsal stream" simultaneously interprets the geometric relationships necessary to execute successful grasps. We leverage the autonomous data collection capabilities of robots to obtain a large self-supervised dataset for training the dorsal stream, and use semi-supervised label propagation to train the ventral stream with only a modest amount of human supervision. We experimentally show that our approach improves upon grasping systems whose components are not learned end-to-end, including a baseline method that uses bounding box detection. Furthermore, we show that jointly training our model with auxiliary data consisting of non-semantic grasping data, as well as semantically labeled images without grasp actions, has the potential to substantially improve semantic grasping performance.

A neural architecture with randomly initialized weights, in the infinite width limit, is equivalent to a Gaussian Random Field whose covariance function is the so-called Neural Network Gaussian Process kernel (NNGP). We prove that a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) defined by the NNGP contains only functions that can be approximated by the architecture. To achieve a certain approximation error the required number of neurons in each layer is defined by the RKHS norm of the target function. Moreover, the approximation can be constructed from a supervised dataset by a random multi-layer representation of an input vector, together with training of the last layer's weights. For a 2-layer NN and a domain equal to an n-1-dimensional sphere in {mathbb R}^n, we compare the number of neurons required by Barron's theorem and by the multi-layer features construction. We show that if eigenvalues of the integral operator of the NNGP decay slower than k^{-n-2{3}} where k is an order of an eigenvalue, then our theorem guarantees a more succinct neural network approximation than Barron's theorem. We also make some computational experiments to verify our theoretical findings. Our experiments show that realistic neural networks easily learn target functions even when both theorems do not give any guarantees.

Training and evaluating language models increasingly requires the construction of meta-datasets --diverse collections of curated data with clear provenance. Natural language prompting has recently lead to improved zero-shot generalization by transforming existing, supervised datasets into a diversity of novel pretraining tasks, highlighting the benefits of meta-dataset curation. While successful in general-domain text, translating these data-centric approaches to biomedical language modeling remains challenging, as labeled biomedical datasets are significantly underrepresented in popular data hubs. To address this challenge, we introduce BigBIO a community library of 126+ biomedical NLP datasets, currently covering 12 task categories and 10+ languages. BigBIO facilitates reproducible meta-dataset curation via programmatic access to datasets and their metadata, and is compatible with current platforms for prompt engineering and end-to-end few/zero shot language model evaluation. We discuss our process for task schema harmonization, data auditing, contribution guidelines, and outline two illustrative use cases: zero-shot evaluation of biomedical prompts and large-scale, multi-task learning. BigBIO is an ongoing community effort and is available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/biomedical

Enhancing word usage is a desired feature for writing assistance. To further advance research in this area, this paper introduces "Smart Word Suggestions" (SWS) task and benchmark. Unlike other works, SWS emphasizes end-to-end evaluation and presents a more realistic writing assistance scenario. This task involves identifying words or phrases that require improvement and providing substitution suggestions. The benchmark includes human-labeled data for testing, a large distantly supervised dataset for training, and the framework for evaluation. The test data includes 1,000 sentences written by English learners, accompanied by over 16,000 substitution suggestions annotated by 10 native speakers. The training dataset comprises over 3.7 million sentences and 12.7 million suggestions generated through rules. Our experiments with seven baselines demonstrate that SWS is a challenging task. Based on experimental analysis, we suggest potential directions for future research on SWS. The dataset and related codes is available at https://github.com/microsoft/SmartWordSuggestions.

An effective method for cross-lingual transfer is to fine-tune a bilingual or multilingual model on a supervised dataset in one language and evaluating it on another language in a zero-shot manner. Translating examples at training time or inference time are also viable alternatives. However, there are costs associated with these methods that are rarely addressed in the literature. In this work, we analyze cross-lingual methods in terms of their effectiveness (e.g., accuracy), development and deployment costs, as well as their latencies at inference time. Our experiments on three tasks indicate that the best cross-lingual method is highly task-dependent. Finally, by combining zero-shot and translation methods, we achieve the state-of-the-art in two of the three datasets used in this work. Based on these results, we question the need for manually labeled training data in a target language. Code and translated datasets are available at https://github.com/unicamp-dl/cross-lingual-analysis

Multitask prompted finetuning (MTF) has been shown to help large language models generalize to new tasks in a zero-shot setting, but so far explorations of MTF have focused on English data and models. We apply MTF to the pretrained multilingual BLOOM and mT5 model families to produce finetuned variants called BLOOMZ and mT0. We find finetuning large multilingual language models on English tasks with English prompts allows for task generalization to non-English languages that appear only in the pretraining corpus. Finetuning on multilingual tasks with English prompts further improves performance on English and non-English tasks leading to various state-of-the-art zero-shot results. We also investigate finetuning on multilingual tasks with prompts that have been machine-translated from English to match the language of each dataset. We find training on these machine-translated prompts leads to better performance on human-written prompts in the respective languages. Surprisingly, we find models are capable of zero-shot generalization to tasks in languages they have never intentionally seen. We conjecture that the models are learning higher-level capabilities that are both task- and language-agnostic. In addition, we introduce xP3, a composite of supervised datasets in 46 languages with English and machine-translated prompts. Our code, datasets and models are publicly available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/xmtf.

Recent advances in text-to-image diffusion models have enabled the generation of diverse and high-quality images. However, generated images often fall short of depicting subtle details and are susceptible to errors due to ambiguity in the input text. One way of alleviating these issues is to train diffusion models on class-labeled datasets. This comes with a downside, doing so limits their expressive power: (i) supervised datasets are generally small compared to large-scale scraped text-image datasets on which text-to-image models are trained, and so the quality and diversity of generated images are severely affected, or (ii) the input is a hard-coded label, as opposed to free-form text, which limits the control over the generated images. In this work, we propose a non-invasive fine-tuning technique that capitalizes on the expressive potential of free-form text while achieving high accuracy through discriminative signals from a pretrained classifier, which guides the generation. This is done by iteratively modifying the embedding of a single input token of a text-to-image diffusion model, using the classifier, by steering generated images toward a given target class. Our method is fast compared to prior fine-tuning methods and does not require a collection of in-class images or retraining of a noise-tolerant classifier. We evaluate our method extensively, showing that the generated images are: (i) more accurate and of higher quality than standard diffusion models, (ii) can be used to augment training data in a low-resource setting, and (iii) reveal information about the data used to train the guiding classifier. The code is available at https://github.com/idansc/discriminative_class_tokens

The research on code-mixed data is limited due to the unavailability of dedicated code-mixed datasets and pre-trained language models. In this work, we focus on the low-resource Indian language Marathi which lacks any prior work in code-mixing. We present L3Cube-MeCorpus, a large code-mixed Marathi-English (Mr-En) corpus with 10 million social media sentences for pretraining. We also release L3Cube-MeBERT and MeRoBERTa, code-mixed BERT-based transformer models pre-trained on MeCorpus. Furthermore, for benchmarking, we present three supervised datasets MeHate, MeSent, and MeLID for downstream tasks like code-mixed Mr-En hate speech detection, sentiment analysis, and language identification respectively. These evaluation datasets individually consist of manually annotated ~12,000 Marathi-English code-mixed tweets. Ablations show that the models trained on this novel corpus significantly outperform the existing state-of-the-art BERT models. This is the first work that presents artifacts for code-mixed Marathi research. All datasets and models are publicly released at https://github.com/l3cube-pune/MarathiNLP .

This paper revisits the standard pretrain-then-finetune paradigm used in computer vision for visual recognition tasks. Typically, state-of-the-art foundation models are pretrained using large scale (weakly) supervised datasets with billions of images. We introduce an additional pre-pretraining stage that is simple and uses the self-supervised MAE technique to initialize the model. While MAE has only been shown to scale with the size of models, we find that it scales with the size of the training dataset as well. Thus, our MAE-based pre-pretraining scales with both model and data size making it applicable for training foundation models. Pre-pretraining consistently improves both the model convergence and the downstream transfer performance across a range of model scales (millions to billions of parameters), and dataset sizes (millions to billions of images). We measure the effectiveness of pre-pretraining on 10 different visual recognition tasks spanning image classification, video recognition, object detection, low-shot classification and zero-shot recognition. Our largest model achieves new state-of-the-art results on iNaturalist-18 (91.3%), 1-shot ImageNet-1k (62.1%), and zero-shot transfer on Food-101 (96.0%). Our study reveals that model initialization plays a significant role, even for web-scale pretraining with billions of images.

Various applications of voice synthesis have been developed independently despite the fact that they generate "voice" as output in common. In addition, the majority of voice synthesis models currently rely on annotated audio data, but it is crucial to scale them to self-supervised datasets in order to effectively capture the wide range of acoustic variations present in human voice, including speaker identity, emotion, and prosody. In this work, we propose Make-A-Voice, a unified framework for synthesizing and manipulating voice signals from discrete representations. Make-A-Voice leverages a "coarse-to-fine" approach to model the human voice, which involves three stages: 1) semantic stage: model high-level transformation between linguistic content and self-supervised semantic tokens, 2) acoustic stage: introduce varying control signals as acoustic conditions for semantic-to-acoustic modeling, and 3) generation stage: synthesize high-fidelity waveforms from acoustic tokens. Make-A-Voice offers notable benefits as a unified voice synthesis framework: 1) Data scalability: the major backbone (i.e., acoustic and generation stage) does not require any annotations, and thus the training data could be scaled up. 2) Controllability and conditioning flexibility: we investigate different conditioning mechanisms and effectively handle three voice synthesis applications, including text-to-speech (TTS), voice conversion (VC), and singing voice synthesis (SVS) by re-synthesizing the discrete voice representations with prompt guidance. Experimental results demonstrate that Make-A-Voice exhibits superior audio quality and style similarity compared with competitive baseline models. Audio samples are available at https://Make-A-Voice.github.io

Aligning large language models (LLMs) to human preferences is a crucial step in building helpful and safe AI tools, which usually involve training on supervised datasets. Popular algorithms such as Direct Preference Optimization rely on pairs of AI-generated responses ranked according to human feedback. The labeling process is the most labor-intensive and costly part of the alignment pipeline, and improving its efficiency would have a meaningful impact on AI development. We propose a strategy for sampling a high-quality training dataset that focuses on acquiring the most informative response pairs for labeling out of a set of AI-generated responses. Experimental results on synthetic HH-RLHF benchmarks indicate that choosing dissimilar response pairs enhances the direct alignment of LLMs while reducing inherited labeling errors. We also applied our method to the real-world dataset SHP2, selecting optimal pairs from multiple responses. The model aligned on dissimilar response pairs obtained the best win rate on the dialogue task. Our findings suggest that focusing on less similar pairs can improve the efficiency of LLM alignment, saving up to 65% of annotators' work.

Accurate stock market predictions following earnings reports are crucial for investors. Traditional methods, particularly classical machine learning models, struggle with these predictions because they cannot effectively process and interpret extensive textual data contained in earnings reports and often overlook nuances that influence market movements. This paper introduces an advanced approach by employing Large Language Models (LLMs) instruction fine-tuned with a novel combination of instruction-based techniques and quantized low-rank adaptation (QLoRA) compression. Our methodology integrates 'base factors', such as financial metric growth and earnings transcripts, with 'external factors', including recent market indices performances and analyst grades, to create a rich, supervised dataset. This comprehensive dataset enables our models to achieve superior predictive performance in terms of accuracy, weighted F1, and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC), especially evident in the comparison with benchmarks such as GPT-4. We specifically highlight the efficacy of the llama-3-8b-Instruct-4bit model, which showcases significant improvements over baseline models. The paper also discusses the potential of expanding the output capabilities to include a 'Hold' option and extending the prediction horizon, aiming to accommodate various investment styles and time frames. This study not only demonstrates the power of integrating cutting-edge AI with fine-tuned financial data but also paves the way for future research in enhancing AI-driven financial analysis tools.

We report the development of Japanese SimCSE, Japanese sentence embedding models fine-tuned with SimCSE. Since there is a lack of sentence embedding models for Japanese that can be used as a baseline in sentence embedding research, we conducted extensive experiments on Japanese sentence embeddings involving 24 pre-trained Japanese or multilingual language models, five supervised datasets, and four unsupervised datasets. In this report, we provide the detailed training setup for Japanese SimCSE and their evaluation results.

We introduce ART, a new corpus-level autoencoding approach for training dense retrieval models that does not require any labeled training data. Dense retrieval is a central challenge for open-domain tasks, such as Open QA, where state-of-the-art methods typically require large supervised datasets with custom hard-negative mining and denoising of positive examples. ART, in contrast, only requires access to unpaired inputs and outputs (e.g. questions and potential answer documents). It uses a new document-retrieval autoencoding scheme, where (1) an input question is used to retrieve a set of evidence documents, and (2) the documents are then used to compute the probability of reconstructing the original question. Training for retrieval based on question reconstruction enables effective unsupervised learning of both document and question encoders, which can be later incorporated into complete Open QA systems without any further finetuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ART obtains state-of-the-art results on multiple QA retrieval benchmarks with only generic initialization from a pre-trained language model, removing the need for labeled data and task-specific losses.

Advancing AI in computational pathology requires large, high-quality, and diverse datasets, yet existing public datasets are often limited in organ diversity, class coverage, or annotation quality. To bridge this gap, we introduce SPIDER (Supervised Pathology Image-DEscription Repository), the largest publicly available patch-level dataset covering multiple organ types, including Skin, Colorectal, and Thorax, with comprehensive class coverage for each organ. SPIDER provides high-quality annotations verified by expert pathologists and includes surrounding context patches, which enhance classification performance by providing spatial context. Alongside the dataset, we present baseline models trained on SPIDER using the Hibou-L foundation model as a feature extractor combined with an attention-based classification head. The models achieve state-of-the-art performance across multiple tissue categories and serve as strong benchmarks for future digital pathology research. Beyond patch classification, the model enables rapid identification of significant areas, quantitative tissue metrics, and establishes a foundation for multimodal approaches. Both the dataset and trained models are publicly available to advance research, reproducibility, and AI-driven pathology development. Access them at: https://github.com/HistAI/SPIDER

We present TriviaQA, a challenging reading comprehension dataset containing over 650K question-answer-evidence triples. TriviaQA includes 95K question-answer pairs authored by trivia enthusiasts and independently gathered evidence documents, six per question on average, that provide high quality distant supervision for answering the questions. We show that, in comparison to other recently introduced large-scale datasets, TriviaQA (1) has relatively complex, compositional questions, (2) has considerable syntactic and lexical variability between questions and corresponding answer-evidence sentences, and (3) requires more cross sentence reasoning to find answers. We also present two baseline algorithms: a feature-based classifier and a state-of-the-art neural network, that performs well on SQuAD reading comprehension. Neither approach comes close to human performance (23% and 40% vs. 80%), suggesting that TriviaQA is a challenging testbed that is worth significant future study. Data and code available at -- http://nlp.cs.washington.edu/triviaqa/

The global cost of drug discovery and development exceeds $200 billion annually. The main results of drug discovery and development are the outcomes of clinical trials, which directly influence the regulatory approval of new drug candidates and ultimately affect patient outcomes. Despite their significance, large-scale, high-quality clinical trial outcome data are not readily available to the public. Suppose a large clinical trial outcome dataset is provided; machine learning researchers can potentially develop accurate prediction models using past trials and outcome labels, which could help prioritize and optimize therapeutic programs, ultimately benefiting patients. This paper introduces Clinical Trial Outcome (CTO) dataset, the largest trial outcome dataset with around 479K clinical trials, aggregating outcomes from multiple sources of weakly supervised labels, minimizing the noise from individual sources, and eliminating the need for human annotation. These sources include large language model (LLM) decisions on trial-related documents, news headline sentiments, stock prices of trial sponsors, trial linkages across phases, and other signals such as patient dropout rates and adverse events. CTO's labels show unprecedented agreement with supervised clinical trial outcome labels from test split of the supervised TOP dataset, with a 91 F1.

Recently, considerable literature has grown up around the theme of few-shot named entity recognition (NER), but little published benchmark data specifically focused on the practical and challenging task. Current approaches collect existing supervised NER datasets and re-organize them to the few-shot setting for empirical study. These strategies conventionally aim to recognize coarse-grained entity types with few examples, while in practice, most unseen entity types are fine-grained. In this paper, we present Few-NERD, a large-scale human-annotated few-shot NER dataset with a hierarchy of 8 coarse-grained and 66 fine-grained entity types. Few-NERD consists of 188,238 sentences from Wikipedia, 4,601,160 words are included and each is annotated as context or a part of a two-level entity type. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first few-shot NER dataset and the largest human-crafted NER dataset. We construct benchmark tasks with different emphases to comprehensively assess the generalization capability of models. Extensive empirical results and analysis show that Few-NERD is challenging and the problem requires further research. We make Few-NERD public at https://ningding97.github.io/fewnerd/.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a common and life-saving medical imaging technique. However, acquiring high signal-to-noise ratio MRI scans requires long scan times, resulting in increased costs and patient discomfort, and decreased throughput. Thus, there is great interest in denoising MRI scans, especially for the subtype of diffusion MRI scans that are severely SNR-limited. While most prior MRI denoising methods are supervised in nature, acquiring supervised training datasets for the multitude of anatomies, MRI scanners, and scan parameters proves impractical. Here, we propose Denoising Diffusion Models for Denoising Diffusion MRI (DDM^2), a self-supervised denoising method for MRI denoising using diffusion denoising generative models. Our three-stage framework integrates statistic-based denoising theory into diffusion models and performs denoising through conditional generation. During inference, we represent input noisy measurements as a sample from an intermediate posterior distribution within the diffusion Markov chain. We conduct experiments on 4 real-world in-vivo diffusion MRI datasets and show that our DDM^2 demonstrates superior denoising performances ascertained with clinically-relevant visual qualitative and quantitative metrics.

Natural agents can effectively learn from multiple data sources that differ in size, quality, and types of measurements. We study this heterogeneity in the context of offline reinforcement learning (RL) by introducing a new, practically motivated semi-supervised setting. Here, an agent has access to two sets of trajectories: labelled trajectories containing state, action and reward triplets at every timestep, along with unlabelled trajectories that contain only state and reward information. For this setting, we develop and study a simple meta-algorithmic pipeline that learns an inverse dynamics model on the labelled data to obtain proxy-labels for the unlabelled data, followed by the use of any offline RL algorithm on the true and proxy-labelled trajectories. Empirically, we find this simple pipeline to be highly successful -- on several D4RL benchmarks~fu2020d4rl, certain offline RL algorithms can match the performance of variants trained on a fully labelled dataset even when we label only 10\% of trajectories which are highly suboptimal. To strengthen our understanding, we perform a large-scale controlled empirical study investigating the interplay of data-centric properties of the labelled and unlabelled datasets, with algorithmic design choices (e.g., choice of inverse dynamics, offline RL algorithm) to identify general trends and best practices for training RL agents on semi-supervised offline datasets.

Video anomaly detection (VAD) without human monitoring is a complex computer vision task that can have a positive impact on society if implemented successfully. While recent advances have made significant progress in solving this task, most existing approaches overlook a critical real-world concern: privacy. With the increasing popularity of artificial intelligence technologies, it becomes crucial to implement proper AI ethics into their development. Privacy leakage in VAD allows models to pick up and amplify unnecessary biases related to people's personal information, which may lead to undesirable decision making. In this paper, we propose TeD-SPAD, a privacy-aware video anomaly detection framework that destroys visual private information in a self-supervised manner. In particular, we propose the use of a temporally-distinct triplet loss to promote temporally discriminative features, which complements current weakly-supervised VAD methods. Using TeD-SPAD, we achieve a positive trade-off between privacy protection and utility anomaly detection performance on three popular weakly supervised VAD datasets: UCF-Crime, XD-Violence, and ShanghaiTech. Our proposed anonymization model reduces private attribute prediction by 32.25% while only reducing frame-level ROC AUC on the UCF-Crime anomaly detection dataset by 3.69%. Project Page: https://joefioresi718.github.io/TeD-SPAD_webpage/

Supervised learning datasets may contain multiple cues that explain the training set equally well, i.e., learning any of them would lead to the correct predictions on the training data. However, many of them can be spurious, i.e., lose their predictive power under a distribution shift and consequently fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Recently developed "diversification" methods (Lee et al., 2023; Pagliardini et al., 2023) approach this problem by finding multiple diverse hypotheses that rely on different features. This paper aims to study this class of methods and identify the key components contributing to their OOD generalization abilities. We show that (1) diversification methods are highly sensitive to the distribution of the unlabeled data used for diversification and can underperform significantly when away from a method-specific sweet spot. (2) Diversification alone is insufficient for OOD generalization. The choice of the used learning algorithm, e.g., the model's architecture and pretraining, is crucial. In standard experiments (classification on Waterbirds and Office-Home datasets), using the second-best choice leads to an up to 20\% absolute drop in accuracy. (3) The optimal choice of learning algorithm depends on the unlabeled data and vice versa i.e. they are co-dependent. (4) Finally, we show that, in practice, the above pitfalls cannot be alleviated by increasing the number of diverse hypotheses, the major feature of diversification methods. These findings provide a clearer understanding of the critical design factors influencing the OOD generalization abilities of diversification methods. They can guide practitioners in how to use the existing methods best and guide researchers in developing new, better ones.

Video anomaly detection is an ill-posed problem because it relies on many parameters such as appearance, pose, camera angle, background, and more. We distill the problem to anomaly detection of human pose, thus decreasing the risk of nuisance parameters such as appearance affecting the result. Focusing on pose alone also has the side benefit of reducing bias against distinct minority groups. Our model works directly on human pose graph sequences and is exceptionally lightweight (~1K parameters), capable of running on any machine able to run the pose estimation with negligible additional resources. We leverage the highly compact pose representation in a normalizing flows framework, which we extend to tackle the unique characteristics of spatio-temporal pose data and show its advantages in this use case. The algorithm is quite general and can handle training data of only normal examples as well as a supervised setting that consists of labeled normal and abnormal examples. We report state-of-the-art results on two anomaly detection benchmarks - the unsupervised ShanghaiTech dataset and the recent supervised UBnormal dataset.

While language models (LMs) can sometimes generate factually correct text and estimate truth values of individual claims, these generally do not reflect a globally coherent, manipulable model of the world. As a consequence, current LMs also generate incorrect or nonsensical content, and are difficult to edit and bring up to date. We present a method called Deductive Closure Training (DCT) that uses LMs themselves to identify implications of (and contradictions within) the text that they generate, yielding an efficient self-supervised procedure for improving LM factuality. Given a collection of seed documents, DCT prompts LMs to generate additional text implied by these documents, reason globally about the correctness of this generated text, and finally fine-tune on text inferred to be correct. Given seed documents from a trusted source, DCT provides a tool for supervised model updating; if seed documents are sampled from the LM itself, DCT enables fully unsupervised fine-tuning for improved coherence and accuracy. Across the CREAK, MQUaKE, and Reversal Curse datasets, supervised DCT improves LM fact verification and text generation accuracy by 3-26%; on CREAK fully unsupervised DCT improves verification accuracy by 12%. These results show that LMs' reasoning capabilities during inference can be leveraged during training to improve their reliability.

Automatic phenotype concept recognition from unstructured text remains a challenging task in biomedical text mining research. Previous works that address the task typically use dictionary-based matching methods, which can achieve high precision but suffer from lower recall. Recently, machine learning-based methods have been proposed to identify biomedical concepts, which can recognize more unseen concept synonyms by automatic feature learning. However, most methods require large corpora of manually annotated data for model training, which is difficult to obtain due to the high cost of human annotation. In this paper, we propose PhenoTagger, a hybrid method that combines both dictionary and machine learning-based methods to recognize Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) concepts in unstructured biomedical text. We first use all concepts and synonyms in HPO to construct a dictionary, which is then used to automatically build a distantly supervised training dataset for machine learning. Next, a cutting-edge deep learning model is trained to classify each candidate phrase (n-gram from input sentence) into a corresponding concept label. Finally, the dictionary and machine learning-based prediction results are combined for improved performance. Our method is validated with two HPO corpora, and the results show that PhenoTagger compares favorably to previous methods. In addition, to demonstrate the generalizability of our method, we retrained PhenoTagger using the disease ontology MEDIC for disease concept recognition to investigate the effect of training on different ontologies. Experimental results on the NCBI disease corpus show that PhenoTagger without requiring manually annotated training data achieves competitive performance as compared with state-of-the-art supervised methods.

In an increasing number of domains it has been demonstrated that deep learning models can be trained using relatively large batch sizes without sacrificing data efficiency. However the limits of this massive data parallelism seem to differ from domain to domain, ranging from batches of tens of thousands in ImageNet to batches of millions in RL agents that play the game Dota 2. To our knowledge there is limited conceptual understanding of why these limits to batch size differ or how we might choose the correct batch size in a new domain. In this paper, we demonstrate that a simple and easy-to-measure statistic called the gradient noise scale predicts the largest useful batch size across many domains and applications, including a number of supervised learning datasets (MNIST, SVHN, CIFAR-10, ImageNet, Billion Word), reinforcement learning domains (Atari and Dota), and even generative model training (autoencoders on SVHN). We find that the noise scale increases as the loss decreases over a training run and depends on the model size primarily through improved model performance. Our empirically-motivated theory also describes the tradeoff between compute-efficiency and time-efficiency, and provides a rough model of the benefits of adaptive batch-size training.

Open Information Extraction (OIE) systems seek to compress the factual propositions of a sentence into a series of n-ary tuples. These tuples are useful for downstream tasks in natural language processing like knowledge base creation, textual entailment, and natural language understanding. However, current OIE datasets are limited in both size and diversity. We introduce a new dataset by converting the QA-SRL 2.0 dataset to a large-scale OIE dataset (LSOIE). Our LSOIE dataset is 20 times larger than the next largest human-annotated OIE dataset. We construct and evaluate several benchmark OIE models on LSOIE, providing baselines for future improvements on the task. Our LSOIE data, models, and code are made publicly available

Open-source large language models (LLMs) have gained significant strength across diverse fields. Nevertheless, the majority of studies primarily concentrate on English, with only limited exploration into the realm of multilingual supervised fine-tuning. In this work, we therefore construct an open-source multilingual supervised fine-tuning dataset. Different from previous works that simply translate English instructions, we consider both the language-specific and language-agnostic abilities of LLMs. For language-specific abilities, we introduce a knowledge-grounded data augmentation approach to elicit more culture-specific knowledge of LLMs, improving their ability to serve users from different countries. For language-agnostic abilities, we find through experiments that modern LLMs exhibit strong cross-lingual transfer capabilities, thus repeatedly learning identical content in various languages is not necessary. Consequently, we can substantially prune the language-agnostic SFT data without any performance degradation, making the SFT process more efficient. The resulting UltraLink dataset comprises approximately 1 million samples across five languages, and the proposed data construction method can also be easily extended to other languages. UltraLink-LM, which is trained on UltraLink, outperforms several representative baselines across many tasks.

Aligning sentences in a reference summary with their counterparts in source documents was shown as a useful auxiliary summarization task, notably for generating training data for salience detection. Despite its assessed utility, the alignment step was mostly approached with heuristic unsupervised methods, typically ROUGE-based, and was never independently optimized or evaluated. In this paper, we propose establishing summary-source alignment as an explicit task, while introducing two major novelties: (1) applying it at the more accurate proposition span level, and (2) approaching it as a supervised classification task. To that end, we created a novel training dataset for proposition-level alignment, derived automatically from available summarization evaluation data. In addition, we crowdsourced dev and test datasets, enabling model development and proper evaluation. Utilizing these data, we present a supervised proposition alignment baseline model, showing improved alignment-quality over the unsupervised approach.

Colorectal Cancer(CRC) poses a great risk to public health. It is the third most common cause of cancer in the US. Development of colorectal polyps is one of the earliest signs of cancer. Early detection and resection of polyps can greatly increase survival rate to 90%. Manual inspection can cause misdetections because polyps vary in color, shape, size and appearance. To this end, Computer-Aided Diagnosis systems(CADx) has been proposed that detect polyps by processing the colonoscopic videos. The system acts a secondary check to help clinicians reduce misdetections so that polyps may be resected before they transform to cancer. Polyps vary in color, shape, size, texture and appearance. As a result, the miss rate of polyps is between 6% and 27% despite the prominence of CADx solutions. Furthermore, sessile and flat polyps which have diameter less than 10 mm are more likely to be undetected. Convolutional Neural Networks(CNN) have shown promising results in polyp segmentation. However, all of these works have a supervised approach and are limited by the size of the dataset. It was observed that smaller datasets reduce the segmentation accuracy of ResUNet++. We train a U-Net to inpaint randomly dropped out pixels in the image as a proxy task. The dataset we use for pre-training is Kvasir-SEG dataset. This is followed by a supervised training on the limited Kvasir-Sessile dataset. Our experimental results demonstrate that with limited annotated dataset and a larger unlabeled dataset, self-supervised approach is a better alternative than fully supervised approach. Specifically, our self-supervised U-Net performs better than five segmentation models which were trained in supervised manner on the Kvasir-Sessile dataset.

Since their inception, embeddings have become a primary ingredient in many flavours of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks supplanting earlier types of representation. Even though multilingual embeddings have been used for the increasing number of multilingual tasks, due to the scarcity of parallel training data, low-resource languages such as Sinhala, tend to focus more on monolingual embeddings. Then when it comes to the aforementioned multi-lingual tasks, it is challenging to utilize these monolingual embeddings given that even if the embedding spaces have a similar geometric arrangement due to an identical training process, the embeddings of the languages considered are not aligned. This is solved by the embedding alignment task. Even in this, high-resource language pairs are in the limelight while low-resource languages such as Sinhala which is in dire need of help seem to have fallen by the wayside. In this paper, we try to align Sinhala and English word embedding spaces based on available alignment techniques and introduce a benchmark for Sinhala language embedding alignment. In addition to that, to facilitate the supervised alignment, as an intermediate task, we also introduce Sinhala-English alignment datasets. These datasets serve as our anchor datasets for supervised word embedding alignment. Even though we do not obtain results comparable to the high-resource languages such as French, German, or Chinese, we believe our work lays the groundwork for more specialized alignment between English and Sinhala embeddings.

There have been many image denoisers using deep neural networks, which outperform conventional model-based methods by large margins. Recently, self-supervised methods have attracted attention because constructing a large real noise dataset for supervised training is an enormous burden. The most representative self-supervised denoisers are based on blind-spot networks, which exclude the receptive field's center pixel. However, excluding any input pixel is abandoning some information, especially when the input pixel at the corresponding output position is excluded. In addition, a standard blind-spot network fails to reduce real camera noise due to the pixel-wise correlation of noise, though it successfully removes independently distributed synthetic noise. Hence, to realize a more practical denoiser, we propose a novel self-supervised training framework that can remove real noise. For this, we derive the theoretic upper bound of a supervised loss where the network is guided by the downsampled blinded output. Also, we design a conditional blind-spot network (C-BSN), which selectively controls the blindness of the network to use the center pixel information. Furthermore, we exploit a random subsampler to decorrelate noise spatially, making the C-BSN free of visual artifacts that were often seen in downsample-based methods. Extensive experiments show that the proposed C-BSN achieves state-of-the-art performance on real-world datasets as a self-supervised denoiser and shows qualitatively pleasing results without any post-processing or refinement.

Patent examiners need to solve a complex information retrieval task when they assess the novelty and inventive step of claims made in a patent application. Given a claim, they search for prior art, which comprises all relevant publicly available information. This time-consuming task requires a deep understanding of the respective technical domain and the patent-domain-specific language. For these reasons, we address the computer-assisted search for prior art by creating a training dataset for supervised machine learning called PatentMatch. It contains pairs of claims from patent applications and semantically corresponding text passages of different degrees from cited patent documents. Each pair has been labeled by technically-skilled patent examiners from the European Patent Office. Accordingly, the label indicates the degree of semantic correspondence (matching), i.e., whether the text passage is prejudicial to the novelty of the claimed invention or not. Preliminary experiments using a baseline system show that PatentMatch can indeed be used for training a binary text pair classifier on this challenging information retrieval task. The dataset is available online: https://hpi.de/naumann/s/patentmatch.

Automatic medical text simplification can assist providers with patient-friendly communication and make medical texts more accessible, thereby improving health literacy. But curating a quality corpus for this task requires the supervision of medical experts. In this work, we present Med-EASi (textbf{Med}ical dataset for textbf{E}laborative and textbf{A}bstractive textbf{Si}mplification), a uniquely crowdsourced and finely annotated dataset for supervised simplification of short medical texts. Its expert-layman-AI collaborative annotations facilitate controllability over text simplification by marking four kinds of textual transformations: elaboration, replacement, deletion, and insertion. To learn medical text simplification, we fine-tune T5-large with four different styles of input-output combinations, leading to two control-free and two controllable versions of the model. We add two types of controllability into text simplification, by using a multi-angle training approach: position-aware, which uses in-place annotated inputs and outputs, and position-agnostic, where the model only knows the contents to be edited, but not their positions. Our results show that our fine-grained annotations improve learning compared to the unannotated baseline. Furthermore, position-aware control generates better simplification than the position-agnostic one. The data and code are available at https://github.com/Chandrayee/CTRL-SIMP.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP), yet open-source multilingual LLMs remain scarce, with existing models often limited in language coverage. Such models typically prioritize well-resourced languages, while widely spoken but under-resourced languages are often overlooked. To address this disparity, we introduce Babel, an open multilingual LLM that covers the top 25 languages by number of speakers, supports over 90% of the global population, and includes many languages neglected by other open multilingual LLMs. Unlike traditional continue pretraining approaches, Babel expands its parameter count through a layer extension technique that elevates Babel's performance ceiling. We introduce two variants: Babel-9B, designed for efficient inference and fine-tuning, and Babel-83B, which sets a new standard for open multilingual LLMs. Extensive evaluations on multilingual tasks demonstrate its superior performance compared to open LLMs of comparable size. In addition, using open-source supervised fine-tuning datasets, Babel achieves remarkable performance, with Babel-9B-Chat leading among 10B-sized LLMs and Babel-83B-Chat setting a new standard for multilingual tasks, reaching the same level of commercial models.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential in natural language processing tasks within the financial domain. In this work, we present a Chinese Financial Generative Pre-trained Transformer framework, named CFGPT, which includes a dataset~(CFData) for pre-training and supervised fine-tuning, a financial LLM~(CFLLM) to adeptly manage financial texts, and a deployment framework~(CFAPP) designed to navigate real-world financial applications. The CFData comprising both a pre-training dataset and a supervised fine-tuning dataset, where the pre-training dataset collates Chinese financial data and analytics, alongside a smaller subset of general-purpose text with 584M documents and 141B tokens in total, and the supervised fine-tuning dataset is tailored for six distinct financial tasks, embodying various facets of financial analysis and decision-making with 1.5M instruction pairs and 1.5B tokens in total. The CFLLM, which is based on InternLM-7B to balance the model capability and size, is trained on CFData in two stage, continued pre-training and supervised fine-tuning. The CFAPP is centered on large language models (LLMs) and augmented with additional modules to ensure multifaceted functionality in real-world application. Our codes are released at https://github.com/TongjiFinLab/CFGPT.

We propose DISC-LawLLM, an intelligent legal system utilizing large language models (LLMs) to provide a wide range of legal services. We adopt legal syllogism prompting strategies to construct supervised fine-tuning datasets in the Chinese Judicial domain and fine-tune LLMs with legal reasoning capability. We augment LLMs with a retrieval module to enhance models' ability to access and utilize external legal knowledge. A comprehensive legal benchmark, DISC-Law-Eval, is presented to evaluate intelligent legal systems from both objective and subjective dimensions. Quantitative and qualitative results on DISC-Law-Eval demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in serving various users across diverse legal scenarios. The detailed resources are available at https://github.com/FudanDISC/DISC-LawLLM.

Continual pretraining of large language models on domain-specific data has been proposed to enhance performance on downstream tasks. In astronomy, the previous absence of astronomy-focused benchmarks has hindered objective evaluation of these specialized LLM models. Leveraging a recent initiative to curate high-quality astronomical MCQs, this study aims to quantitatively assess specialized LLMs in astronomy. We find that the previously released AstroLLaMA series, based on LLaMA-2-7B, underperforms compared to the base model. We demonstrate that this performance degradation can be partially mitigated by utilizing high-quality data for continual pretraining, such as summarized text from arXiv. Despite the observed catastrophic forgetting in smaller models, our results indicate that continual pretraining on the 70B model can yield significant improvements. However, the current supervised fine-tuning dataset still constrains the performance of instruct models. In conjunction with this study, we introduce a new set of models, AstroLLaMA-3-8B and AstroLLaMA-2-70B, building upon the previous AstroLLaMA series.

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance across various tasks, they often struggle with complex reasoning tasks, such as answering mathematical questions. Recent efforts to address this issue have primarily focused on leveraging mathematical datasets through supervised fine-tuning or self-improvement techniques. However, these methods often depend on high-quality datasets that are difficult to prepare, or they require substantial computational resources for fine-tuning. Inspired by findings that LLMs know how to produce the right answer but struggle to select the correct reasoning path, we propose a purely inference-based searching method -- MindStar (M*). This method formulates reasoning tasks as searching problems and proposes two search ideas to identify the optimal reasoning paths. We evaluate the M* framework on both the GSM8K and MATH datasets, comparing its performance with existing open and closed-source LLMs. Our results demonstrate that M* significantly enhances the reasoning abilities of open-source models, such as Llama-2-13B and Mistral-7B, and achieves comparable performance to GPT-3.5 and Grok-1, but with substantially reduced model size and computational costs.

Modern machine learning relies on datasets to develop and validate research ideas. Given the growth of publicly available data, finding the right dataset to use is increasingly difficult. Any research question imposes explicit and implicit constraints on how well a given dataset will enable researchers to answer this question, such as dataset size, modality, and domain. We operationalize the task of recommending datasets given a short natural language description of a research idea, to help people find relevant datasets for their needs. Dataset recommendation poses unique challenges as an information retrieval problem; datasets are hard to directly index for search and there are no corpora readily available for this task. To facilitate this task, we build the DataFinder Dataset which consists of a larger automatically-constructed training set (17.5K queries) and a smaller expert-annotated evaluation set (392 queries). Using this data, we compare various information retrieval algorithms on our test set and present a superior bi-encoder retriever for text-based dataset recommendation. This system, trained on the DataFinder Dataset, finds more relevant search results than existing third-party dataset search engines. To encourage progress on dataset recommendation, we release our dataset and models to the public.

Recently, various studies have been directed towards exploring dense passage retrieval techniques employing pre-trained language models, among which the masked auto-encoder (MAE) pre-training architecture has emerged as the most promising. The conventional MAE framework relies on leveraging the passage reconstruction of decoder to bolster the text representation ability of encoder, thereby enhancing the performance of resulting dense retrieval systems. Within the context of building the representation ability of the encoder through passage reconstruction of decoder, it is reasonable to postulate that a ``more demanding'' decoder will necessitate a corresponding increase in the encoder's ability. To this end, we propose a novel token importance aware masking strategy based on pointwise mutual information to intensify the challenge of the decoder. Importantly, our approach can be implemented in an unsupervised manner, without adding additional expenses to the pre-training phase. Our experiments verify that the proposed method is both effective and robust on large-scale supervised passage retrieval datasets and out-of-domain zero-shot retrieval benchmarks.

While sentiment analysis has become an established field in the NLP community, research into languages other than English has been hindered by the lack of resources. Although much research in multi-lingual and cross-lingual sentiment analysis has focused on unsupervised or semi-supervised approaches, these still require a large number of resources and do not reach the performance of supervised approaches. With this in mind, we introduce two datasets for supervised aspect-level sentiment analysis in Basque and Catalan, both of which are under-resourced languages. We provide high-quality annotations and benchmarks with the hope that they will be useful to the growing community of researchers working on these languages.

This paper presents RISC, an open-source Python package data generator (https://github.com/GRAAL-Research/risc). RISC generates look-alike automobile insurance contracts based on the Quebec regulatory insurance form in French and English. Insurance contracts are 90 to 100 pages long and use complex legal and insurance-specific vocabulary for a layperson. Hence, they are a much more complex class of documents than those in traditional NLP corpora. Therefore, we introduce RISCBAC, a Realistic Insurance Synthetic Bilingual Automobile Contract dataset based on the mandatory Quebec car insurance contract. The dataset comprises 10,000 French and English unannotated insurance contracts. RISCBAC enables NLP research for unsupervised automatic summarisation, question answering, text simplification, machine translation and more. Moreover, it can be further automatically annotated as a dataset for supervised tasks such as NER

Underlying data distributions of natural language, programming code, and mathematical symbols vary vastly, presenting a complex challenge for large language models (LLMs) that strive to achieve high performance across all three domains simultaneously. Achieving a very high level of proficiency for an LLM within a specific domain often requires extensive training with relevant corpora, which is typically accompanied by a sacrifice in performance in other domains. In this paper, we propose to fuse models that are already highly-specialized directly. The proposed fusing framework, UltraFuser, consists of three distinct specialists that are already sufficiently trained on language, coding, and mathematics. A token-level gating mechanism is introduced to blend the specialists' outputs. A two-stage training strategy accompanied by balanced sampling is designed to ensure stability. To effectively train the fused model, we further construct a high-quality supervised instruction tuning dataset, UltraChat 2, which includes text, code, and mathematical content. This dataset comprises approximately 300,000 instructions and covers a wide range of topics in each domain. Experiments show that our model could simultaneously achieve mastery of the three crucial domains.

In this paper, we present a method for detecting objects of interest, including cars, humans, and fire, in aerial images captured by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) usually during vegetation fires. To achieve this, we use artificial neural networks and create a dataset for supervised learning. We accomplish the assisted labeling of the dataset through the implementation of an object detection pipeline that combines classic image processing techniques with pretrained neural networks. In addition, we develop a data augmentation pipeline to augment the dataset with automatically labeled images. Finally, we evaluate the performance of different neural networks.

The limited generalization of coreference resolution (CR) models has been a major bottleneck in the task's broad application. Prior work has identified annotation differences, especially for mention detection, as one of the main reasons for the generalization gap and proposed using additional annotated target domain data. Rather than relying on this additional annotation, we propose an alternative referential task, Major Entity Identification (MEI), where we: (a) assume the target entities to be specified in the input, and (b) limit the task to only the frequent entities. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that MEI models generalize well across domains on multiple datasets with supervised models and LLM-based few-shot prompting. Additionally, MEI fits the classification framework, which enables the use of robust and intuitive classification-based metrics. Finally, MEI is also of practical use as it allows a user to search for all mentions of a particular entity or a group of entities of interest.

From the perspective of content safety issues, alignment has shown to limit large language models' (LLMs) harmful content generation. This intentional method of reinforcing models to not respond to certain user inputs seem to be present in many modern open-source instruction tuning datasets such as OpenAssistant or Guanaco. We introduce a novel insight to an instruction-tuned model's performance affected by the presence of alignment in supervised fine-tuning dataset. To be specific, we noticed that alignment acts as if it is poisoning the instruction dataset. Experimentally, we demonstrate that aligned answers significantly worsen the performance of the resulting fine-tuned model's on various reasoning benchmarks such as Big Bench (BBH), Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU), Human Eval, and Discrete Reasoning Over Paragraphs (DROP), performing worse than the counterpart tuned without alignment by 4-33%.

Efforts to align Large Language Models (LLMs) are mainly conducted via Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) methods. However, RLHF encounters major challenges including training reward models, actor-critic engineering, and importantly, it requires access to LLM parameters. Here we introduce Aligner, a new efficient alignment paradigm that bypasses the whole RLHF process by learning the correctional residuals between the aligned and the unaligned answers. Our Aligner offers several key advantages. Firstly, it is an autoregressive seq2seq model that is trained on the query-answer-correction dataset via supervised learning; this offers a parameter-efficient alignment solution with minimal resources. Secondly, the Aligner facilitates weak-to-strong generalization; finetuning large pretrained models by Aligner's supervisory signals demonstrates strong performance boost. Thirdly, Aligner functions as a model-agnostic plug-and-play module, allowing for its direct application on different open-source and API-based models. Remarkably, Aligner-7B improves 11 different LLMs by 21.9% in helpfulness and 23.8% in harmlessness on average (GPT-4 by 17.5% and 26.9%). When finetuning (strong) Llama2-70B with (weak) Aligner-13B's supervision, we can improve Llama2 by 8.2% in helpfulness and 61.6% in harmlessness. See our dataset and code at https://aligner2024.github.io

Effective communication, specifically through documentation, is the beating heart of collaboration among contributors in software development. Recent advancements in language models (LMs) have enabled the introduction of a new type of actor in that ecosystem: LM-powered assistants capable of code generation, optimization, and maintenance. Our study investigates the efficacy of small language models (SLMs) for generating high-quality docstrings by assessing accuracy, conciseness, and clarity, benchmarking performance quantitatively through mathematical formulas and qualitatively through human evaluation using Likert scale. Further, we introduce DocuMint, as a large-scale supervised fine-tuning dataset with 100,000 samples. In quantitative experiments, Llama 3 8B achieved the best performance across all metrics, with conciseness and clarity scores of 0.605 and 64.88, respectively. However, under human evaluation, CodeGemma 7B achieved the highest overall score with an average of 8.3 out of 10 across all metrics. Fine-tuning the CodeGemma 2B model using the DocuMint dataset led to significant improvements in performance across all metrics, with gains of up to 22.5% in conciseness. The fine-tuned model and the dataset can be found in HuggingFace and the code can be found in the repository.

We introduce NVLM 1.0, a family of frontier-class multimodal large language models (LLMs) that achieve state-of-the-art results on vision-language tasks, rivaling the leading proprietary models (e.g., GPT-4o) and open-access models (e.g., Llama 3-V 405B and InternVL 2). Remarkably, NVLM 1.0 shows improved text-only performance over its LLM backbone after multimodal training. In terms of model design, we perform a comprehensive comparison between decoder-only multimodal LLMs (e.g., LLaVA) and cross-attention-based models (e.g., Flamingo). Based on the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches, we propose a novel architecture that enhances both training efficiency and multimodal reasoning capabilities. Furthermore, we introduce a 1-D tile-tagging design for tile-based dynamic high-resolution images, which significantly boosts performance on multimodal reasoning and OCR-related tasks. Regarding training data, we meticulously curate and provide detailed information on our multimodal pretraining and supervised fine-tuning datasets. Our findings indicate that dataset quality and task diversity are more important than scale, even during the pretraining phase, across all architectures. Notably, we develop production-grade multimodality for the NVLM-1.0 models, enabling them to excel in vision-language tasks while maintaining and even improving text-only performance compared to their LLM backbones. To achieve this, we craft and integrate a high-quality text-only dataset into multimodal training, alongside a substantial amount of multimodal math and reasoning data, leading to enhanced math and coding capabilities across modalities. To advance research in the field, we are releasing the model weights and will open-source the code for the community: https://nvlm-project.github.io/.

Large language models (LLMs) often generate inaccurate or fabricated information and generally fail to indicate their confidence, which limits their broader applications. Previous work elicits confidence from LLMs by direct or self-consistency prompting, or constructing specific datasets for supervised finetuning. The prompting-based approaches have inferior performance, and the training-based approaches are limited to binary or inaccurate group-level confidence estimates. In this work, we present the advanced SaySelf, a training framework that teaches LLMs to express more accurate fine-grained confidence estimates. In addition, beyond the confidence scores, SaySelf initiates the process of directing LLMs to produce self-reflective rationales that clearly identify gaps in their parametric knowledge and explain their uncertainty. This is achieved by using an LLM to automatically summarize the uncertainties in specific knowledge via natural language. The summarization is based on the analysis of the inconsistency in multiple sampled reasoning chains, and the resulting data is utilized for supervised fine-tuning. Moreover, we utilize reinforcement learning with a meticulously crafted reward function to calibrate the confidence estimates, motivating LLMs to deliver accurate, high-confidence predictions and to penalize overconfidence in erroneous outputs. Experimental results in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SaySelf in reducing the confidence calibration error and maintaining the task performance. We show that the generated self-reflective rationales are reasonable and can further contribute to the calibration. The code is made public at https://github.com/xu1868/SaySelf.

System messages play a crucial role in interactions with large language models (LLMs), often serving as prompts to initiate conversations. Through system messages, users can assign specific roles, perform intended tasks, incorporate background information, specify various output formats and communication styles. Despite such versatility, publicly available data are often lack system messages and subject to strict license constraints in the industry field. Manual labeling of publicly available data with system messages that align with user instructions demands significant resources. In view of such challenges, our work introduces SysGen, a pipeline for generating system messages with better aligned assistant responses from the supervised fine-tuning dataset without system messages. Training on SysGen data has demonstrated substantial improvements in the alignment of model responses with system messages and user instructions, as demonstrated across various open-source models on the Multifacet benchmark, while maintaining minimal impact on other unseen benchmarks such as Open LLM Leaderboard 2. Our qualitative analysis highlights the importance of diverse system messages to ensure better adaptability across different contexts.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been successfully applied to many recognition and learning tasks using a universal recipe; training a deep model on a very large dataset of supervised examples. However, this approach is rather restrictive in practice since collecting a large set of labeled images is very expensive. One way to ease this problem is coming up with smart ways for choosing images to be labelled from a very large collection (ie. active learning). Our empirical study suggests that many of the active learning heuristics in the literature are not effective when applied to CNNs in batch setting. Inspired by these limitations, we define the problem of active learning as core-set selection, ie. choosing set of points such that a model learned over the selected subset is competitive for the remaining data points. We further present a theoretical result characterizing the performance of any selected subset using the geometry of the datapoints. As an active learning algorithm, we choose the subset which is expected to yield best result according to our characterization. Our experiments show that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing approaches in image classification experiments by a large margin.

We introduce OmChat, a model designed to excel in handling long contexts and video understanding tasks. OmChat's new architecture standardizes how different visual inputs are processed, making it more efficient and adaptable. It uses a dynamic vision encoding process to effectively handle images of various resolutions, capturing fine details across a range of image qualities. OmChat utilizes an active progressive multimodal pretraining strategy, which gradually increases the model's capacity for long contexts and enhances its overall abilities. By selecting high-quality data during training, OmChat learns from the most relevant and informative data points. With support for a context length of up to 512K, OmChat demonstrates promising performance in tasks involving multiple images and videos, outperforming most open-source models in these benchmarks. Additionally, OmChat proposes a prompting strategy for unifying complex multimodal inputs including single image text, multi-image text and videos, and achieving competitive performance on single-image benchmarks. To further evaluate the model's capabilities, we proposed a benchmark dataset named Temporal Visual Needle in a Haystack. This dataset assesses OmChat's ability to comprehend temporal visual details within long videos. Our analysis highlights several key factors contributing to OmChat's success: support for any-aspect high image resolution, the active progressive pretraining strategy, and high-quality supervised fine-tuning datasets. This report provides a detailed overview of OmChat's capabilities and the strategies that enhance its performance in visual understanding.

Pre-trained language models (PLM) based on transformer neural networks developed in the field of natural language processing (NLP) offer great opportunities to improve automatic content analysis in communication science, especially for the coding of complex semantic categories in large datasets via supervised machine learning. However, three characteristics so far impeded the widespread adoption of the methods in the applying disciplines: the dominance of English language models in NLP research, the necessary computing resources, and the effort required to produce training data to fine-tune PLMs. In this study, we address these challenges by using a multilingual transformer model in combination with the adapter extension to transformers, and few-shot learning methods. We test our approach on a realistic use case from communication science to automatically detect claims and arguments together with their stance in the German news debate on arms deliveries to Ukraine. In three experiments, we evaluate (1) data preprocessing strategies and model variants for this task, (2) the performance of different few-shot learning methods, and (3) how well the best setup performs on varying training set sizes in terms of validity, reliability, replicability and reproducibility of the results. We find that our proposed combination of transformer adapters with pattern exploiting training provides a parameter-efficient and easily shareable alternative to fully fine-tuning PLMs. It performs on par in terms of validity, while overall, provides better properties for application in communication studies. The results also show that pre-fine-tuning for a task on a near-domain dataset leads to substantial improvement, in particular in the few-shot setting. Further, the results indicate that it is useful to bias the dataset away from the viewpoints of specific prominent individuals.

As video games evolve into expansive, detailed worlds, visual quality becomes essential, yet increasingly challenging. Traditional testing methods, limited by resources, face difficulties in addressing the plethora of potential bugs. Machine learning offers scalable solutions; however, heavy reliance on large labeled datasets remains a constraint. Addressing this challenge, we propose a novel method, utilizing unlabeled gameplay and domain-specific augmentations to generate datasets & self-supervised objectives used during pre-training or multi-task settings for downstream visual bug detection. Our methodology uses weak-supervision to scale datasets for the crafted objectives and facilitates both autonomous and interactive weak-supervision, incorporating unsupervised clustering and/or an interactive approach based on text and geometric prompts. We demonstrate on first-person player clipping/collision bugs (FPPC) within the expansive Giantmap game world, that our approach is very effective, improving over a strong supervised baseline in a practical, very low-prevalence, low data regime (0.336 rightarrow 0.550 F1 score). With just 5 labeled "good" exemplars (i.e., 0 bugs), our self-supervised objective alone captures enough signal to outperform the low-labeled supervised settings. Building on large-pretrained vision models, our approach is adaptable across various visual bugs. Our results suggest applicability in curating datasets for broader image and video tasks within video games beyond visual bugs.

In this paper, we propose an iterative framework, which consists of two phases: a generation phase and a training phase, to generate realistic training data and yield a supervised homography network. In the generation phase, given an unlabeled image pair, we utilize the pre-estimated dominant plane masks and homography of the pair, along with another sampled homography that serves as ground truth to generate a new labeled training pair with realistic motion. In the training phase, the generated data is used to train the supervised homography network, in which the training data is refined via a content consistency module and a quality assessment module. Once an iteration is finished, the trained network is used in the next data generation phase to update the pre-estimated homography. Through such an iterative strategy, the quality of the dataset and the performance of the network can be gradually and simultaneously improved. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and existing supervised methods can be also improved based on the generated dataset. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/JianghaiSCU/RealSH.

Distant supervision (DS) is a well established technique for creating large-scale datasets for relation extraction (RE) without using human annotations. However, research in DS-RE has been mostly limited to the English language. Constraining RE to a single language inhibits utilization of large amounts of data in other languages which could allow extraction of more diverse facts. Very recently, a dataset for multilingual DS-RE has been released. However, our analysis reveals that the proposed dataset exhibits unrealistic characteristics such as 1) lack of sentences that do not express any relation, and 2) all sentences for a given entity pair expressing exactly one relation. We show that these characteristics lead to a gross overestimation of the model performance. In response, we propose a new dataset, DiS-ReX, which alleviates these issues. Our dataset has more than 1.5 million sentences, spanning across 4 languages with 36 relation classes + 1 no relation (NA) class. We also modify the widely used bag attention models by encoding sentences using mBERT and provide the first benchmark results on multilingual DS-RE. Unlike the competing dataset, we show that our dataset is challenging and leaves enough room for future research to take place in this field.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has become the de facto method of 3D representation in many vision tasks. This calls for the 3D understanding directly in this representation space. To facilitate the research in this direction, we first build a large-scale dataset of 3DGS using the commonly used ShapeNet and ModelNet datasets. Our dataset ShapeSplat consists of 65K objects from 87 unique categories, whose labels are in accordance with the respective datasets. The creation of this dataset utilized the compute equivalent of 2 GPU years on a TITAN XP GPU. We utilize our dataset for unsupervised pretraining and supervised finetuning for classification and segmentation tasks. To this end, we introduce \textit{Gaussian-MAE}, which highlights the unique benefits of representation learning from Gaussian parameters. Through exhaustive experiments, we provide several valuable insights. In particular, we show that (1) the distribution of the optimized GS centroids significantly differs from the uniformly sampled point cloud (used for initialization) counterpart; (2) this change in distribution results in degradation in classification but improvement in segmentation tasks when using only the centroids; (3) to leverage additional Gaussian parameters, we propose Gaussian feature grouping in a normalized feature space, along with splats pooling layer, offering a tailored solution to effectively group and embed similar Gaussians, which leads to notable improvement in finetuning tasks.

Intentionally luring readers to click on a particular content by exploiting their curiosity defines a title as clickbait. Although several studies focused on detecting clickbait titles in English articles, low resource language like Bangla has not been given adequate attention. To tackle clickbait titles in Bangla, we have constructed the first Bangla clickbait detection dataset containing 15,056 labeled news articles and 65,406 unlabelled news articles extracted from clickbait dense news sites. Each article has been labeled by three expert linguists and includes an article's title, body, and other metadata. By incorporating labeled and unlabelled data, we finetune a pretrained Bangla transformer model in an adversarial fashion using Semi Supervised Generative Adversarial Networks (SS GANs). The proposed model acts as a good baseline for this dataset, outperforming traditional neural network models (LSTM, GRU, CNN) and linguistic feature based models. We expect that this dataset and the detailed analysis and comparison of these clickbait detection models will provide a fundamental basis for future research into detecting clickbait titles in Bengali articles. We have released the corresponding code and dataset.

Deep learning in medical imaging has the potential to minimize the risk of diagnostic errors, reduce radiologist workload, and accelerate diagnosis. Training such deep learning models requires large and accurate datasets, with annotations for all training samples. However, in the medical imaging domain, annotated datasets for specific tasks are often small due to the high complexity of annotations, limited access, or the rarity of diseases. To address this challenge, deep learning models can be pre-trained on large image datasets without annotations using methods from the field of self-supervised learning. After pre-training, small annotated datasets are sufficient to fine-tune the models for a specific task. The most popular self-supervised pre-training approaches in medical imaging are based on contrastive learning. However, recent studies in natural image processing indicate a strong potential for masked autoencoder approaches. Our work compares state-of-the-art contrastive learning methods with the recently introduced masked autoencoder approach "SparK" for convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on medical images. Therefore we pre-train on a large unannotated CT image dataset and fine-tune on several CT classification tasks. Due to the challenge of obtaining sufficient annotated training data in medical imaging, it is of particular interest to evaluate how the self-supervised pre-training methods perform when fine-tuning on small datasets. By experimenting with gradually reducing the training dataset size for fine-tuning, we find that the reduction has different effects depending on the type of pre-training chosen. The SparK pre-training method is more robust to the training dataset size than the contrastive methods. Based on our results, we propose the SparK pre-training for medical imaging tasks with only small annotated datasets.

Self-supervised representation learning approaches have recently surpassed their supervised learning counterparts on downstream tasks like object detection and image classification. Somewhat mysteriously the recent gains in performance come from training instance classification models, treating each image and it's augmented versions as samples of a single class. In this work, we first present quantitative experiments to demystify these gains. We demonstrate that approaches like MOCO and PIRL learn occlusion-invariant representations. However, they fail to capture viewpoint and category instance invariance which are crucial components for object recognition. Second, we demonstrate that these approaches obtain further gains from access to a clean object-centric training dataset like Imagenet. Finally, we propose an approach to leverage unstructured videos to learn representations that possess higher viewpoint invariance. Our results show that the learned representations outperform MOCOv2 trained on the same data in terms of invariances encoded and the performance on downstream image classification and semantic segmentation tasks.

Using large training datasets enhances the generalization capabilities of neural networks. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) is useful when there are few labeled data and a lot of unlabeled data. SSL methods that use data augmentation are most successful for image datasets. In contrast, texts do not have consistent augmentation methods as images. Consequently, methods that use augmentation are not as effective in text data as they are in image data. In this study, we compared SSL algorithms that do not require augmentation; these are self-training, co-training, tri-training, and tri-training with disagreement. In the experiments, we used 4 different text datasets for different tasks. We examined the algorithms from a variety of perspectives by asking experiment questions and suggested several improvements. Among the algorithms, tri-training with disagreement showed the closest performance to the Oracle; however, performance gap shows that new semi-supervised algorithms or improvements in existing methods are needed.

Computational pathology can lead to saving human lives, but models are annotation hungry and pathology images are notoriously expensive to annotate. Self-supervised learning has shown to be an effective method for utilizing unlabeled data, and its application to pathology could greatly benefit its downstream tasks. Yet, there are no principled studies that compare SSL methods and discuss how to adapt them for pathology. To address this need, we execute the largest-scale study of SSL pre-training on pathology image data, to date. Our study is conducted using 4 representative SSL methods on diverse downstream tasks. We establish that large-scale domain-aligned pre-training in pathology consistently out-performs ImageNet pre-training in standard SSL settings such as linear and fine-tuning evaluations, as well as in low-label regimes. Moreover, we propose a set of domain-specific techniques that we experimentally show leads to a performance boost. Lastly, for the first time, we apply SSL to the challenging task of nuclei instance segmentation and show large and consistent performance improvements under diverse settings.

Glaucoma is the number one cause of irreversible blindness globally. A major challenge for accurate glaucoma detection and progression forecasting is the bottleneck of limited labeled patients with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) 3D retinal imaging data of optical coherence tomography (OCT). To address the data scarcity issue, this paper proposes two solutions. First, we develop a novel generalization-reinforced semi-supervised learning (SSL) model called pseudo supervisor to optimally utilize unlabeled data. Compared with SOTA models, the proposed pseudo supervisor optimizes the policy of predicting pseudo labels with unlabeled samples to improve empirical generalization. Our pseudo supervisor model is evaluated with two clinical tasks consisting of glaucoma detection and progression forecasting. The progression forecasting task is evaluated both unimodally and multimodally. Our pseudo supervisor model demonstrates superior performance than SOTA SSL comparison models. Moreover, our model also achieves the best results on the publicly available LAG fundus dataset. Second, we introduce the Harvard Glaucoma Detection and Progression (Harvard-GDP) Dataset, a multimodal multitask dataset that includes data from 1,000 patients with OCT imaging data, as well as labels for glaucoma detection and progression. This is the largest glaucoma detection dataset with 3D OCT imaging data and the first glaucoma progression forecasting dataset that is publicly available. Detailed sex and racial analysis are provided, which can be used by interested researchers for fairness learning studies. Our released dataset is benchmarked with several SOTA supervised CNN and transformer deep learning models. The dataset and code are made publicly available via https://ophai.hms.harvard.edu/datasets/harvard-gdp1000.

Semantic understanding of roadways is a key enabling factor for safe autonomous driving. However, existing autonomous driving datasets provide well-structured urban roads while ignoring unstructured roadways containing distress, potholes, water puddles, and various kinds of road patches i.e., earthen, gravel etc. To this end, we introduce Road Region Segmentation dataset (R2S100K) -- a large-scale dataset and benchmark for training and evaluation of road segmentation in aforementioned challenging unstructured roadways. R2S100K comprises 100K images extracted from a large and diverse set of video sequences covering more than 1000 KM of roadways. Out of these 100K privacy respecting images, 14,000 images have fine pixel-labeling of road regions, with 86,000 unlabeled images that can be leveraged through semi-supervised learning methods. Alongside, we present an Efficient Data Sampling (EDS) based self-training framework to improve learning by leveraging unlabeled data. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves learning methods in generalizability and reduces the labeling cost for semantic segmentation tasks. Our benchmark will be publicly available to facilitate future research at https://r2s100k.github.io/.

While self-supervised learning has made rapid advances in natural language processing, it remains unclear when researchers should engage in resource-intensive domain-specific pretraining (domain pretraining). The law, puzzlingly, has yielded few documented instances of substantial gains to domain pretraining in spite of the fact that legal language is widely seen to be unique. We hypothesize that these existing results stem from the fact that existing legal NLP tasks are too easy and fail to meet conditions for when domain pretraining can help. To address this, we first present CaseHOLD (Case Holdings On Legal Decisions), a new dataset comprised of over 53,000+ multiple choice questions to identify the relevant holding of a cited case. This dataset presents a fundamental task to lawyers and is both legally meaningful and difficult from an NLP perspective (F1 of 0.4 with a BiLSTM baseline). Second, we assess performance gains on CaseHOLD and existing legal NLP datasets. While a Transformer architecture (BERT) pretrained on a general corpus (Google Books and Wikipedia) improves performance, domain pretraining (using corpus of approximately 3.5M decisions across all courts in the U.S. that is larger than BERT's) with a custom legal vocabulary exhibits the most substantial performance gains with CaseHOLD (gain of 7.2% on F1, representing a 12% improvement on BERT) and consistent performance gains across two other legal tasks. Third, we show that domain pretraining may be warranted when the task exhibits sufficient similarity to the pretraining corpus: the level of performance increase in three legal tasks was directly tied to the domain specificity of the task. Our findings inform when researchers should engage resource-intensive pretraining and show that Transformer-based architectures, too, learn embeddings suggestive of distinct legal language.

We present a Few-Shot Relation Classification Dataset (FewRel), consisting of 70, 000 sentences on 100 relations derived from Wikipedia and annotated by crowdworkers. The relation of each sentence is first recognized by distant supervision methods, and then filtered by crowdworkers. We adapt the most recent state-of-the-art few-shot learning methods for relation classification and conduct a thorough evaluation of these methods. Empirical results show that even the most competitive few-shot learning models struggle on this task, especially as compared with humans. We also show that a range of different reasoning skills are needed to solve our task. These results indicate that few-shot relation classification remains an open problem and still requires further research. Our detailed analysis points multiple directions for future research. All details and resources about the dataset and baselines are released on http://zhuhao.me/fewrel.

Over the past decade, computer vision applications in minimally invasive surgery have rapidly increased. Despite this growth, the impact of surgical computer vision remains limited compared to other medical fields like pathology and radiology, primarily due to the scarcity of representative annotated data. Whereas transfer learning from large annotated datasets such as ImageNet has been conventionally the norm to achieve high-performing models, recent advancements in self-supervised learning (SSL) have demonstrated superior performance. In medical image analysis, in-domain SSL pretraining has already been shown to outperform ImageNet-based initialization. Although unlabeled data in the field of surgical computer vision is abundant, the diversity within this data is limited. This study investigates the role of dataset diversity in SSL for surgical computer vision, comparing procedure-specific datasets against a more heterogeneous general surgical dataset across three different downstream surgical applications. The obtained results show that using solely procedure-specific data can lead to substantial improvements of 13.8%, 9.5%, and 36.8% compared to ImageNet pretraining. However, extending this data with more heterogeneous surgical data further increases performance by an additional 5.0%, 5.2%, and 2.5%, suggesting that increasing diversity within SSL data is beneficial for model performance. The code and pretrained model weights are made publicly available at https://github.com/TimJaspers0801/SurgeNet.

Self-supervised pre-training bears potential to generate expressive representations without human annotation. Most pre-training in Earth observation (EO) are based on ImageNet or medium-size, labeled remote sensing (RS) datasets. We share an unlabeled RS dataset SSL4EO-S12 (Self-Supervised Learning for Earth Observation - Sentinel-1/2) to assemble a large-scale, global, multimodal, and multi-seasonal corpus of satellite imagery from the ESA Sentinel-1 \& -2 satellite missions. For EO applications we demonstrate SSL4EO-S12 to succeed in self-supervised pre-training for a set of methods: MoCo-v2, DINO, MAE, and data2vec. Resulting models yield downstream performance close to, or surpassing accuracy measures of supervised learning. In addition, pre-training on SSL4EO-S12 excels compared to existing datasets. We make openly available the dataset, related source code, and pre-trained models at https://github.com/zhu-xlab/SSL4EO-S12.

In this paper, we consider a problem of self-supervised learning for small-scale datasets based on contrastive loss between multiple views of the data, which demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance in classification task. Despite the reported results, such factors as the complexity of training requiring complex architectures, the needed number of views produced by data augmentation, and their impact on the classification accuracy are understudied problems. To establish the role of these factors, we consider an architecture of contrastive loss system such as SimCLR, where baseline model is replaced by geometrically invariant "hand-crafted" network ScatNet with small trainable adapter network and argue that the number of parameters of the whole system and the number of views can be considerably reduced while practically preserving the same classification accuracy. In addition, we investigate the impact of regularization strategies using pretext task learning based on an estimation of parameters of augmentation transform such as rotation and jigsaw permutation for both traditional baseline models and ScatNet based models. Finally, we demonstrate that the proposed architecture with pretext task learning regularization achieves the state-of-the-art classification performance with a smaller number of trainable parameters and with reduced number of views.

In recent decades, wildfires, as widespread and extremely destructive natural disasters, have caused tremendous property losses and fatalities, as well as extensive damage to forest ecosystems. Many fire risk assessment projects have been proposed to prevent wildfires, but GIS-based methods are inherently challenging to scale to different geographic areas due to variations in data collection and local conditions. Inspired by the abundance of publicly available remote sensing projects and the burgeoning development of deep learning in computer vision, our research focuses on assessing fire risk using remote sensing imagery. In this work, we propose a novel remote sensing dataset, FireRisk, consisting of 7 fire risk classes with a total of 91872 labelled images for fire risk assessment. This remote sensing dataset is labelled with the fire risk classes supplied by the Wildfire Hazard Potential (WHP) raster dataset, and remote sensing images are collected using the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP), a high-resolution remote sensing imagery program. On FireRisk, we present benchmark performance for supervised and self-supervised representations, with Masked Autoencoders (MAE) pre-trained on ImageNet1k achieving the highest classification accuracy, 65.29%. This remote sensing dataset, FireRisk, provides a new direction for fire risk assessment, and we make it publicly available on https://github.com/CharmonyShen/FireRisk.

Weakly-supervised object localization (WSOL) has gained popularity over the last years for its promise to train localization models with only image-level labels. Since the seminal WSOL work of class activation mapping (CAM), the field has focused on how to expand the attention regions to cover objects more broadly and localize them better. However, these strategies rely on full localization supervision for validating hyperparameters and model selection, which is in principle prohibited under the WSOL setup. In this paper, we argue that WSOL task is ill-posed with only image-level labels, and propose a new evaluation protocol where full supervision is limited to only a small held-out set not overlapping with the test set. We observe that, under our protocol, the five most recent WSOL methods have not made a major improvement over the CAM baseline. Moreover, we report that existing WSOL methods have not reached the few-shot learning baseline, where the full-supervision at validation time is used for model training instead. Based on our findings, we discuss some future directions for WSOL.

The main challenges of 3D pose transfer are: 1) Lack of paired training data with different characters performing the same pose; 2) Disentangling pose and shape information from the target mesh; 3) Difficulty in applying to meshes with different topologies. We thus propose a novel weakly-supervised keypoint-based framework to overcome these difficulties. Specifically, we use a topology-agnostic keypoint detector with inverse kinematics to compute transformations between the source and target meshes. Our method only requires supervision on the keypoints, can be applied to meshes with different topologies and is shape-invariant for the target which allows extraction of pose-only information from the target meshes without transferring shape information. We further design a cycle reconstruction to perform self-supervised pose transfer without the need for ground truth deformed mesh with the same pose and shape as the target and source, respectively. We evaluate our approach on benchmark human and animal datasets, where we achieve superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches and even comparable performance with the fully supervised approaches. We test on the more challenging Mixamo dataset to verify our approach's ability in handling meshes with different topologies and complex clothes. Cross-dataset evaluation further shows the strong generalization ability of our approach.

Scene flow allows autonomous vehicles to reason about the arbitrary motion of multiple independent objects which is the key to long-term mobile autonomy. While estimating the scene flow from LiDAR has progressed recently, it remains largely unknown how to estimate the scene flow from a 4-D radar - an increasingly popular automotive sensor for its robustness against adverse weather and lighting conditions. Compared with the LiDAR point clouds, radar data are drastically sparser, noisier and in much lower resolution. Annotated datasets for radar scene flow are also in absence and costly to acquire in the real world. These factors jointly pose the radar scene flow estimation as a challenging problem. This work aims to address the above challenges and estimate scene flow from 4-D radar point clouds by leveraging self-supervised learning. A robust scene flow estimation architecture and three novel losses are bespoken designed to cope with intractable radar data. Real-world experimental results validate that our method is able to robustly estimate the radar scene flow in the wild and effectively supports the downstream task of motion segmentation.

Learning visual features from unlabeled images has proven successful for semantic categorization, often by mapping different views of the same object to the same feature to achieve recognition invariance. However, visual recognition involves not only identifying what an object is but also understanding how it is presented. For example, seeing a car from the side versus head-on is crucial for deciding whether to stay put or jump out of the way. While unsupervised feature learning for downstream viewpoint reasoning is important, it remains under-explored, partly due to the lack of a standardized evaluation method and benchmarks. We introduce a new dataset of adjacent image triplets obtained from a viewpoint trajectory, without any semantic or pose labels. We benchmark both semantic classification and pose estimation accuracies on the same visual feature. Additionally, we propose a viewpoint trajectory regularization loss for learning features from unlabeled image triplets. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach helps develop a visual representation that encodes object identity and organizes objects by their poses, retaining semantic classification accuracy while achieving emergent global pose awareness and better generalization to novel objects. Our dataset and code are available at http://pwang.pw/trajSSL/.

Modern consumer cameras usually employ the rolling shutter (RS) mechanism, where images are captured by scanning scenes row-by-row, yielding RS distortions for dynamic scenes. To correct RS distortions, existing methods adopt a fully supervised learning manner, where high framerate global shutter (GS) images should be collected as ground-truth supervision. In this paper, we propose a Self-supervised learning framework for Dual reversed RS distortions Correction (SelfDRSC), where a DRSC network can be learned to generate a high framerate GS video only based on dual RS images with reversed distortions. In particular, a bidirectional distortion warping module is proposed for reconstructing dual reversed RS images, and then a self-supervised loss can be deployed to train DRSC network by enhancing the cycle consistency between input and reconstructed dual reversed RS images. Besides start and end RS scanning time, GS images at arbitrary intermediate scanning time can also be supervised in SelfDRSC, thus enabling the learned DRSC network to generate a high framerate GS video. Moreover, a simple yet effective self-distillation strategy is introduced in self-supervised loss for mitigating boundary artifacts in generated GS images. On synthetic dataset, SelfDRSC achieves better or comparable quantitative metrics in comparison to state-of-the-art methods trained in the full supervision manner. On real-world RS cases, our SelfDRSC can produce high framerate GS videos with finer correction textures and better temporary consistency. The source code and trained models are made publicly available at https://github.com/shangwei5/SelfDRSC.

This paper aims to investigate representation learning for large scale visual place recognition, which consists of determining the location depicted in a query image by referring to a database of reference images. This is a challenging task due to the large-scale environmental changes that can occur over time (i.e., weather, illumination, season, traffic, occlusion). Progress is currently challenged by the lack of large databases with accurate ground truth. To address this challenge, we introduce GSV-Cities, a new image dataset providing the widest geographic coverage to date with highly accurate ground truth, covering more than 40 cities across all continents over a 14-year period. We subsequently explore the full potential of recent advances in deep metric learning to train networks specifically for place recognition, and evaluate how different loss functions influence performance. In addition, we show that performance of existing methods substantially improves when trained on GSV-Cities. Finally, we introduce a new fully convolutional aggregation layer that outperforms existing techniques, including GeM, NetVLAD and CosPlace, and establish a new state-of-the-art on large-scale benchmarks, such as Pittsburgh, Mapillary-SLS, SPED and Nordland. The dataset and code are available for research purposes at https://github.com/amaralibey/gsv-cities.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) learns high-quality representations from large pools of unlabeled training data. As datasets grow larger, it becomes crucial to identify the examples that contribute the most to learning such representations. This enables efficient SSL by reducing the volume of data required. Nevertheless, quantifying the value of examples for SSL has remained an open question. In this work, we address this problem for the first time, by proving that examples that contribute the most to contrastive SSL are those that have the most similar augmentations to other examples, in expectation. We provide rigorous guarantees for the generalization performance of contrastive learning on such subsets. Through extensive experiments, we show that we can safely exclude 20% of examples from CIFAR100 and 40% from STL10 and TinyImageNet, without affecting downstream task performance. In general, subsets selected by our method outperform random subsets by over 3% across these datasets. Interestingly, we also discover the subsets that contribute the most to contrastive learning are those that contribute the least to supervised learning.

Despite the recent developments in 3D Face Reconstruction from occluded and noisy face images, the performance is still unsatisfactory. Moreover, most existing methods rely on additional dependencies, posing numerous constraints over the training procedure. Therefore, we propose a Self-Supervised RObustifying GUidancE (ROGUE) framework to obtain robustness against occlusions and noise in the face images. The proposed network contains 1) the Guidance Pipeline to obtain the 3D face coefficients for the clean faces and 2) the Robustification Pipeline to acquire the consistency between the estimated coefficients for occluded or noisy images and the clean counterpart. The proposed image- and feature-level loss functions aid the ROGUE learning process without posing additional dependencies. To facilitate model evaluation, we propose two challenging occlusion face datasets, ReaChOcc and SynChOcc, containing real-world and synthetic occlusion-based face images for robustness evaluation. Also, a noisy variant of the test dataset of CelebA is produced for evaluation. Our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art method by large margins (e.g., for the perceptual errors, a reduction of 23.8% for real-world occlusions, 26.4% for synthetic occlusions, and 22.7% for noisy images), demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The occlusion datasets and the corresponding evaluation code are released publicly at https://github.com/ArcTrinity9/Datasets-ReaChOcc-and-SynChOcc.

Contrastive pretraining techniques for text classification has been largely studied in an unsupervised setting. However, oftentimes labeled data from related tasks which share label semantics with current task is available. We hypothesize that using this labeled data effectively can lead to better generalization on current task. In this paper, we propose a novel way to effectively utilize labeled data from related tasks with a graph based supervised contrastive learning approach. We formulate a token-graph by extrapolating the supervised information from examples to tokens. Our formulation results in an embedding space where tokens with high/low probability of belonging to same class are near/further-away from one another. We also develop detailed theoretical insights which serve as a motivation for our method. In our experiments with 13 datasets, we show our method outperforms pretraining schemes by 2.5% and also example-level contrastive learning based formulation by 1.8% on average. In addition, we show cross-domain effectiveness of our method in a zero-shot setting by 3.91% on average. Lastly, we also demonstrate our method can be used as a noisy teacher in a knowledge distillation setting to significantly improve performance of transformer based models in low labeled data regime by 4.57% on average.

Recent work on open domain question answering (QA) assumes strong supervision of the supporting evidence and/or assumes a blackbox information retrieval (IR) system to retrieve evidence candidates. We argue that both are suboptimal, since gold evidence is not always available, and QA is fundamentally different from IR. We show for the first time that it is possible to jointly learn the retriever and reader from question-answer string pairs and without any IR system. In this setting, evidence retrieval from all of Wikipedia is treated as a latent variable. Since this is impractical to learn from scratch, we pre-train the retriever with an Inverse Cloze Task. We evaluate on open versions of five QA datasets. On datasets where the questioner already knows the answer, a traditional IR system such as BM25 is sufficient. On datasets where a user is genuinely seeking an answer, we show that learned retrieval is crucial, outperforming BM25 by up to 19 points in exact match.

This paper presents a new approach to image similarity search in the context of fashion, a domain with inherent ambiguity due to the multiple ways in which images can be considered similar. We introduce the concept of Referred Visual Search (RVS), where users provide additional information to define the desired similarity. We present a new dataset, LAION-RVS-Fashion, consisting of 272K fashion products with 842K images extracted from LAION, designed explicitly for this task. We then propose an innovative method for learning conditional embeddings using weakly-supervised training, achieving a 6% increase in Recall at one (R@1) against a gallery with 2M distractors, compared to classical approaches based on explicit attention and filtering. The proposed method demonstrates robustness, maintaining similar R@1 when dealing with 2.5 times as many distractors as the baseline methods. We believe this is a step forward in the emerging field of Referred Visual Search both in terms of accessible data and approach. Code, data and models are available at https://www.github.com/Simon-Lepage/CondViT-LRVSF .

Automatic summarisation is a popular approach to reduce a document to its main arguments. Recent research in the area has focused on neural approaches to summarisation, which can be very data-hungry. However, few large datasets exist and none for the traditionally popular domain of scientific publications, which opens up challenging research avenues centered on encoding large, complex documents. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset for summarisation of computer science publications by exploiting a large resource of author provided summaries and show straightforward ways of extending it further. We develop models on the dataset making use of both neural sentence encoding and traditionally used summarisation features and show that models which encode sentences as well as their local and global context perform best, significantly outperforming well-established baseline methods.

Through the integration of external tools, large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4o and Llama 3.1 significantly expand their functional capabilities, evolving from elementary conversational agents to general-purpose assistants. We argue that the primary drivers of these advancements are the quality and diversity of the training data. However, the existing LLMs with external tool integration provide only limited transparency regarding their datasets and data collection methods, which has led to the initiation of this research. Specifically, in this paper, our objective is to elucidate the detailed process involved in constructing datasets that empower LLMs to effectively learn how to utilize external tools and make this information available to the public through the introduction of ToolBridge. ToolBridge proposes to employ a collection of general open-access datasets as its raw dataset pool and applies a series of strategies to identify appropriate data entries from the pool for external tool API insertions. By supervised fine-tuning on these curated data entries, LLMs can invoke external tools in appropriate contexts to boost their predictive accuracy, particularly for basic functions including data processing, numerical computation, and factual retrieval. Our experiments rigorously isolates model architectures and training configurations, focusing exclusively on the role of data. The experimental results indicate that LLMs trained on ToolBridge demonstrate consistent performance improvements on both standard benchmarks and custom evaluation datasets. All the associated code and data will be open-source at https://github.com/CharlesPikachu/ToolBridge, promoting transparency and facilitating the broader community to explore approaches for equipping LLMs with external tools capabilities.

Reward models (RM) capture the values and preferences of humans and play a central role in Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) to align pretrained large language models (LLMs). Traditionally, training these models relies on extensive human-annotated preference data, which poses significant challenges in terms of scalability and cost. To overcome these limitations, we propose Semi-Supervised Reward Modeling (SSRM), an approach that enhances RM training using unlabeled data. Given an unlabeled dataset, SSRM involves three key iterative steps: pseudo-labeling unlabeled examples, selecting high-confidence examples through a confidence threshold, and supervised finetuning on the refined dataset. Across extensive experiments on various model configurations, we demonstrate that SSRM significantly improves reward models without incurring additional labeling costs. Notably, SSRM can achieve performance comparable to models trained entirely on labeled data of equivalent volumes. Overall, SSRM substantially reduces the dependency on large volumes of human-annotated data, thereby decreasing the overall cost and time involved in training effective reward models.

Several recent deep learning (DL) based techniques perform considerably well on image-based multilingual text detection. However, their performance relies heavily on the availability and quality of training data. There are numerous types of page-level document images consisting of information in several modalities, languages, fonts, and layouts. This makes text detection a challenging problem in the field of computer vision (CV), especially for low-resource or handwritten languages. Furthermore, there is a scarcity of word-level labeled data for text detection, especially for multilingual settings and Indian scripts that incorporate both printed and handwritten text. Conventionally, Indian script text detection requires training a DL model on plenty of labeled data, but to the best of our knowledge, no relevant datasets are available. Manual annotation of such data requires a lot of time, effort, and expertise. In order to solve this problem, we propose TEXTRON, a Data Programming-based approach, where users can plug various text detection methods into a weak supervision-based learning framework. One can view this approach to multilingual text detection as an ensemble of different CV-based techniques and DL approaches. TEXTRON can leverage the predictions of DL models pre-trained on a significant amount of language data in conjunction with CV-based methods to improve text detection in other languages. We demonstrate that TEXTRON can improve the detection performance for documents written in Indian languages, despite the absence of corresponding labeled data. Further, through extensive experimentation, we show improvement brought about by our approach over the current State-of-the-art (SOTA) models, especially for handwritten Devanagari text. Code and dataset has been made available at https://github.com/IITB-LEAP-OCR/TEXTRON

Crop detection is integral for precision agriculture applications such as automated yield estimation or fruit picking. However, crop detection, e.g., apple detection in orchard environments remains challenging due to a lack of large-scale datasets and the small relative size of the crops in the image. In this work, we address these challenges by reformulating the apple detection task in a semi-supervised manner. To this end, we provide the large, high-resolution dataset MAD comprising 105 labeled images with 14,667 annotated apple instances and 4,440 unlabeled images. Utilizing this dataset, we also propose a novel Semi-Supervised Small Apple Detection system S^3AD based on contextual attention and selective tiling to improve the challenging detection of small apples, while limiting the computational overhead. We conduct an extensive evaluation on MAD and the MSU dataset, showing that S^3AD substantially outperforms strong fully-supervised baselines, including several small object detection systems, by up to 14.9%. Additionally, we exploit the detailed annotations of our dataset w.r.t. apple properties to analyze the influence of relative size or level of occlusion on the results of various systems, quantifying current challenges.

Dataset summarisation is a fruitful approach to dataset inspection. However, when applied to a single dataset the discovery of visual concepts is restricted to those most prominent. We argue that a comparative approach can expand upon this paradigm to enable richer forms of dataset inspection that go beyond the most prominent concepts. To enable dataset comparison we present a module that learns concept-level prototypes across datasets. We leverage self-supervised learning to discover these prototypes without supervision, and we demonstrate the benefits of our approach in two case-studies. Our findings show that dataset comparison extends dataset inspection and we hope to encourage more works in this direction. Code and usage instructions available at https://github.com/Nanne/ProtoSim

Recent progress has been made towards learning invariant or equivariant representations with self-supervised learning. While invariant methods are evaluated on large scale datasets, equivariant ones are evaluated in smaller, more controlled, settings. We aim at bridging the gap between the two in order to learn more diverse representations that are suitable for a wide range of tasks. We start by introducing a dataset called 3DIEBench, consisting of renderings from 3D models over 55 classes and more than 2.5 million images where we have full control on the transformations applied to the objects. We further introduce a predictor architecture based on hypernetworks to learn equivariant representations with no possible collapse to invariance. We introduce SIE (Split Invariant-Equivariant) which combines the hypernetwork-based predictor with representations split in two parts, one invariant, the other equivariant, to learn richer representations. We demonstrate significant performance gains over existing methods on equivariance related tasks from both a qualitative and quantitative point of view. We further analyze our introduced predictor and show how it steers the learned latent space. We hope that both our introduced dataset and approach will enable learning richer representations without supervision in more complex scenarios. Code and data are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/SIE.

Fight detection in videos is an emerging deep learning application with today's prevalence of surveillance systems and streaming media. Previous work has largely relied on action recognition techniques to tackle this problem. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective method that solves the task from a new perspective: we design the fight detection model as a composition of an action-aware feature extractor and an anomaly score generator. Also, considering that collecting frame-level labels for videos is too laborious, we design a weakly supervised two-stage training scheme, where we utilize multiple-instance-learning loss calculated on video-level labels to train the score generator, and adopt the self-training technique to further improve its performance. Extensive experiments on a publicly available large-scale dataset, UBI-Fights, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and the performance on the dataset exceeds several previous state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, we collect a new dataset, VFD-2000, that specializes in video fight detection, with a larger scale and more scenarios than existing datasets. The implementation of our method and the proposed dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/Hepta-Col/VideoFightDetection.

In its daily use, the Indonesian language is riddled with informality, that is, deviations from the standard in terms of vocabulary, spelling, and word order. On the other hand, current available Indonesian NLP models are typically developed with the standard Indonesian in mind. In this work, we address a style-transfer from informal to formal Indonesian as a low-resource machine translation problem. We build a new dataset of parallel sentences of informal Indonesian and its formal counterpart. We benchmark several strategies to perform style transfer from informal to formal Indonesian. We also explore augmenting the training set with artificial forward-translated data. Since we are dealing with an extremely low-resource setting, we find that a phrase-based machine translation approach outperforms the Transformer-based approach. Alternatively, a pre-trained GPT-2 fined-tuned to this task performed equally well but costs more computational resource. Our findings show a promising step towards leveraging machine translation models for style transfer. Our code and data are available in https://github.com/haryoa/stif-indonesia

In the image classification task, the most common approach is to resize all images in a dataset to a unique shape, while reducing their precision to a size which facilitates experimentation at scale. This practice has benefits from a computational perspective, but it entails negative side-effects on performance due to loss of information and image deformation. In this work we introduce the MAMe dataset, an image classification dataset with remarkable high resolution and variable shape properties. The goal of MAMe is to provide a tool for studying the impact of such properties in image classification, while motivating research in the field. The MAMe dataset contains thousands of artworks from three different museums, and proposes a classification task consisting on differentiating between 29 mediums (i.e. materials and techniques) supervised by art experts. After reviewing the singularity of MAMe in the context of current image classification tasks, a thorough description of the task is provided, together with dataset statistics. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the impact of using high resolution images, variable shape inputs and both properties at the same time. Results illustrate the positive impact in performance when using high resolution images, while highlighting the lack of solutions to exploit variable shapes. An additional experiment exposes the distinctiveness between the MAMe dataset and the prototypical ImageNet dataset. Finally, the baselines are inspected using explainability methods and expert knowledge, to gain insights on the challenges that remain ahead.

Large transformer models trained on diverse datasets have shown a remarkable ability to learn in-context, achieving high few-shot performance on tasks they were not explicitly trained to solve. In this paper, we study the in-context learning capabilities of transformers in decision-making problems, i.e., reinforcement learning (RL) for bandits and Markov decision processes. To do so, we introduce and study Decision-Pretrained Transformer (DPT), a supervised pretraining method where the transformer predicts an optimal action given a query state and an in-context dataset of interactions, across a diverse set of tasks. This procedure, while simple, produces a model with several surprising capabilities. We find that the pretrained transformer can be used to solve a range of RL problems in-context, exhibiting both exploration online and conservatism offline, despite not being explicitly trained to do so. The model also generalizes beyond the pretraining distribution to new tasks and automatically adapts its decision-making strategies to unknown structure. Theoretically, we show DPT can be viewed as an efficient implementation of Bayesian posterior sampling, a provably sample-efficient RL algorithm. We further leverage this connection to provide guarantees on the regret of the in-context algorithm yielded by DPT, and prove that it can learn faster than algorithms used to generate the pretraining data. These results suggest a promising yet simple path towards instilling strong in-context decision-making abilities in transformers.

Music emotion recognition (MER) aims to identify the emotions conveyed in a given musical piece. But currently in the field of MER, the available public datasets have limited sample sizes. Recently, segment-based methods for emotion-related tasks have been proposed, which train backbone networks on shorter segments instead of entire audio clips, thereby naturally augmenting training samples without requiring additional resources. Then, the predicted segment-level results are aggregated to obtain the entire song prediction. The most commonly used method is that segment inherits the label of the clip containing it, but music emotion is not constant during the whole clip. Doing so will introduce label noise and make the training overfit easily. To handle the noisy label issue, we propose a semi-supervised self-learning (SSSL) method, which can differentiate between samples with correct and incorrect labels in a self-learning manner, thus effectively utilizing the augmented segment-level data. Experiments on three public emotional datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve better or comparable performance.

Online social media platforms, such as Twitter, provide valuable information during disaster events. Existing tweet disaster summarization approaches provide a summary of these events to aid government agencies, humanitarian organizations, etc., to ensure effective disaster response. In the literature, there are two types of approaches for disaster summarization, namely, supervised and unsupervised approaches. Although supervised approaches are typically more effective, they necessitate a sizable number of disaster event summaries for testing and training. However, there is a lack of good number of disaster summary datasets for training and evaluation. This motivates us to add more datasets to make supervised learning approaches more efficient. In this paper, we present ADSumm, which adds annotated ground-truth summaries for eight disaster events which consist of both natural and man-made disaster events belonging to seven different countries. Our experimental analysis shows that the newly added datasets improve the performance of the supervised summarization approaches by 8-28% in terms of ROUGE-N F1-score. Moreover, in newly annotated dataset, we have added a category label for each input tweet which helps to ensure good coverage from different categories in summary. Additionally, we have added two other features relevance label and key-phrase, which provide information about the quality of a tweet and explanation about the inclusion of the tweet into summary, respectively. For ground-truth summary creation, we provide the annotation procedure adapted in detail, which has not been described in existing literature. Experimental analysis shows the quality of ground-truth summary is very good with Coverage, Relevance and Diversity.

Existing head pose estimation datasets are either composed of numerous samples by non-realistic synthesis or lab collection, or limited images by labor-intensive annotating. This makes deep supervised learning based solutions compromised due to the reliance on generous labeled data. To alleviate it, we propose the first semi-supervised unconstrained head pose estimation (SemiUHPE) method, which can leverage a large amount of unlabeled wild head images. Specifically, we follow the recent semi-supervised rotation regression, and focus on the diverse and complex head pose domain. Firstly, we claim that the aspect-ratio invariant cropping of heads is superior to the previous landmark-based affine alignment, which does not fit unlabeled natural heads or practical applications where landmarks are often unavailable. Then, instead of using an empirically fixed threshold to filter out pseudo labels, we propose the dynamic entropy-based filtering by updating thresholds for adaptively removing unlabeled outliers. Moreover, we revisit the design of weak-strong augmentations, and further exploit its superiority by devising two novel head-oriented strong augmentations named pose-irrelevant cut-occlusion and pose-altering rotation consistency. Extensive experiments show that SemiUHPE can surpass SOTAs with remarkable improvements on public benchmarks under both front-range and full-range. Our code is released in https://github.com/hnuzhy/SemiUHPE.

Sequential decision making algorithms often struggle to leverage different sources of unstructured offline interaction data. Imitation learning (IL) methods based on supervised learning are robust, but require optimal demonstrations, which are hard to collect. Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms promise to learn from sub-optimal data, but face optimization challenges especially with high-dimensional data. To bridge the gap between IL and RL, we introduce Distance Weighted Supervised Learning or DWSL, a supervised method for learning goal-conditioned policies from offline data. DWSL models the entire distribution of time-steps between states in offline data with only supervised learning, and uses this distribution to approximate shortest path distances. To extract a policy, we weight actions by their reduction in distance estimates. Theoretically, DWSL converges to an optimal policy constrained to the data distribution, an attractive property for offline learning, without any bootstrapping. Across all datasets we test, DWSL empirically maintains behavior cloning as a lower bound while still exhibiting policy improvement. In high-dimensional image domains, DWSL surpasses the performance of both prior goal-conditioned IL and RL algorithms. Visualizations and code can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/dwsl/home .

Immunohistochemical (IHC) staining highlights the molecular information critical to diagnostics in tissue samples. However, compared to H&E staining, IHC staining can be much more expensive in terms of both labor and the laboratory equipment required. This motivates recent research that demonstrates that the correlations between the morphological information present in the H&E-stained slides and the molecular information in the IHC-stained slides can be used for H&E-to-IHC stain translation. However, due to a lack of pixel-perfect H&E-IHC groundtruth pairs, most existing methods have resorted to relying on expert annotations. To remedy this situation, we present a new loss function, Adaptive Supervised PatchNCE (ASP), to directly deal with the input to target inconsistencies in a proposed H&E-to-IHC image-to-image translation framework. The ASP loss is built upon a patch-based contrastive learning criterion, named Supervised PatchNCE (SP), and augments it further with weight scheduling to mitigate the negative impact of noisy supervision. Lastly, we introduce the Multi-IHC Stain Translation (MIST) dataset, which contains aligned H&E-IHC patches for 4 different IHC stains critical to breast cancer diagnosis. In our experiment, we demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing image-to-image translation methods for stain translation to multiple IHC stains. All of our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/lifangda01/AdaptiveSupervisedPatchNCE.

Masked autoencoding has become a successful pretraining paradigm for Transformer models for text, images, and, recently, point clouds. Raw automotive datasets are suitable candidates for self-supervised pre-training as they generally are cheap to collect compared to annotations for tasks like 3D object detection (OD). However, the development of masked autoencoders for point clouds has focused solely on synthetic and indoor data. Consequently, existing methods have tailored their representations and models toward small and dense point clouds with homogeneous point densities. In this work, we study masked autoencoding for point clouds in an automotive setting, which are sparse and for which the point density can vary drastically among objects in the same scene. To this end, we propose Voxel-MAE, a simple masked autoencoding pre-training scheme designed for voxel representations. We pre-train the backbone of a Transformer-based 3D object detector to reconstruct masked voxels and to distinguish between empty and non-empty voxels. Our method improves the 3D OD performance by 1.75 mAP points and 1.05 NDS on the challenging nuScenes dataset. Further, we show that by pre-training with Voxel-MAE, we require only 40% of the annotated data to outperform a randomly initialized equivalent. Code available at https://github.com/georghess/voxel-mae

Conversational recommender systems offer the promise of interactive, engaging ways for users to find items they enjoy. We seek to improve conversational recommendation via three dimensions: 1) We aim to mimic a common mode of human interaction for recommendation: experts justify their suggestions, a seeker explains why they don't like the item, and both parties iterate through the dialog to find a suitable item. 2) We leverage ideas from conversational critiquing to allow users to flexibly interact with natural language justifications by critiquing subjective aspects. 3) We adapt conversational recommendation to a wider range of domains where crowd-sourced ground truth dialogs are not available. We develop a new two-part framework for training conversational recommender systems. First, we train a recommender system to jointly suggest items and justify its reasoning with subjective aspects. We then fine-tune this model to incorporate iterative user feedback via self-supervised bot-play. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our system can be applied to different recommendation models across diverse domains to achieve superior performance in conversational recommendation compared to state-of-the-art methods. We also evaluate our model on human users, showing that systems trained under our framework provide more useful, helpful, and knowledgeable recommendations in warm- and cold-start settings.

Observing the close relationship among panoptic, semantic and instance segmentation tasks, we propose to train a universal multi-dataset multi-task segmentation model: DaTaSeg.We use a shared representation (mask proposals with class predictions) for all tasks. To tackle task discrepancy, we adopt different merge operations and post-processing for different tasks. We also leverage weak-supervision, allowing our segmentation model to benefit from cheaper bounding box annotations. To share knowledge across datasets, we use text embeddings from the same semantic embedding space as classifiers and share all network parameters among datasets. We train DaTaSeg on ADE semantic, COCO panoptic, and Objects365 detection datasets. DaTaSeg improves performance on all datasets, especially small-scale datasets, achieving 54.0 mIoU on ADE semantic and 53.5 PQ on COCO panoptic. DaTaSeg also enables weakly-supervised knowledge transfer on ADE panoptic and Objects365 instance segmentation. Experiments show DaTaSeg scales with the number of training datasets and enables open-vocabulary segmentation through direct transfer. In addition, we annotate an Objects365 instance segmentation set of 1,000 images and will release it as a public benchmark.

Existing models for extractive summarization are usually trained from scratch with a cross-entropy loss, which does not explicitly capture the global context at the document level. In this paper, we aim to improve this task by introducing three auxiliary pre-training tasks that learn to capture the document-level context in a self-supervised fashion. Experiments on the widely-used CNN/DM dataset validate the effectiveness of the proposed auxiliary tasks. Furthermore, we show that after pre-training, a clean model with simple building blocks is able to outperform previous state-of-the-art that are carefully designed.

Using supervised automatic summarisation methods requires sufficient corpora that include pairs of documents and their summaries. Similarly to many tasks in natural language processing, most of the datasets available for summarization are in English, posing challenges for developing summarization models in other languages. Thus, in this work, we introduce RoLargeSum, a novel large-scale summarization dataset for the Romanian language crawled from various publicly available news websites from Romania and the Republic of Moldova that were thoroughly cleaned to ensure a high-quality standard. RoLargeSum contains more than 615K news articles, together with their summaries, as well as their headlines, keywords, dialect, and other metadata that we found on the targeted websites. We further evaluated the performance of several BART variants and open-source large language models on RoLargeSum for benchmarking purposes. We manually evaluated the results of the best-performing system to gain insight into the potential pitfalls of this data set and future development.

The field of Earth Observations (EO) offers a wealth of data from diverse sensors, presenting a great opportunity for advancing self-supervised multimodal learning. However, current multimodal EO datasets and models focus on a single data type, either mono-date images or time series, which limits their expressivity. We introduce OmniSat, a novel architecture that exploits the spatial alignment between multiple EO modalities to learn expressive multimodal representations without labels. To demonstrate the advantages of combining modalities of different natures, we augment two existing datasets with new modalities. As demonstrated on three downstream tasks: forestry, land cover classification, and crop mapping. OmniSat can learn rich representations in an unsupervised manner, leading to improved performance in the semi- and fully-supervised settings, even when only one modality is available for inference. The code and dataset are available at github.com/gastruc/OmniSat.

Weakly supervised 3D object detection aims to learn a 3D detector with lower annotation cost, e.g., 2D labels. Unlike prior work which still relies on few accurate 3D annotations, we propose a framework to study how to leverage constraints between 2D and 3D domains without requiring any 3D labels. Specifically, we employ visual data from three perspectives to establish connections between 2D and 3D domains. First, we design a feature-level constraint to align LiDAR and image features based on object-aware regions. Second, the output-level constraint is developed to enforce the overlap between 2D and projected 3D box estimations. Finally, the training-level constraint is utilized by producing accurate and consistent 3D pseudo-labels that align with the visual data. We conduct extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset to validate the effectiveness of the proposed three constraints. Without using any 3D labels, our method achieves favorable performance against state-of-the-art approaches and is competitive with the method that uses 500-frame 3D annotations. Code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/kuanchihhuang/VG-W3D.

In this paper, we propose a novel method for single-view 3D style transfer that generates a unique 3D object with both shape and texture transfer. Our focus lies primarily on birds, a popular subject in 3D reconstruction, for which no existing single-view 3D transfer methods have been developed.The method we propose seeks to generate a 3D mesh shape and texture of a bird from two single-view images. To achieve this, we introduce a novel shape transfer generator that comprises a dual residual gated network (DRGNet), and a multi-layer perceptron (MLP). DRGNet extracts the features of source and target images using a shared coordinate gate unit, while the MLP generates spatial coordinates for building a 3D mesh. We also introduce a semantic UV texture transfer module that implements textural style transfer using semantic UV segmentation, which ensures consistency in the semantic meaning of the transferred regions. This module can be widely adapted to many existing approaches. Finally, our method constructs a novel 3D bird using a differentiable renderer. Experimental results on the CUB dataset verify that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the single-view 3D style transfer task. Code is available in https://github.com/wrk226/creative_birds.

Liquid perception is critical for robotic pouring tasks. It usually requires the robust visual detection of flowing liquid. However, while recent works have shown promising results in liquid perception, they typically require labeled data for model training, a process that is both time-consuming and reliant on human labor. To this end, this paper proposes a simple yet effective framework PourIt!, to serve as a tool for robotic pouring tasks. We design a simple data collection pipeline that only needs image-level labels to reduce the reliance on tedious pixel-wise annotations. Then, a binary classification model is trained to generate Class Activation Map (CAM) that focuses on the visual difference between these two kinds of collected data, i.e., the existence of liquid drop or not. We also devise a feature contrast strategy to improve the quality of the CAM, thus entirely and tightly covering the actual liquid regions. Then, the container pose is further utilized to facilitate the 3D point cloud recovery of the detected liquid region. Finally, the liquid-to-container distance is calculated for visual closed-loop control of the physical robot. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we also contribute a novel dataset for our task and name it PourIt! dataset. Extensive results on this dataset and physical Franka robot have shown the utility and effectiveness of our method in the robotic pouring tasks. Our dataset, code and pre-trained models will be available on the project page.

Growing interest in conversational agents promote twoway human-computer communications involving asking and answering visual questions have become an active area of research in AI. Thus, generation of visual questionanswer pair(s) becomes an important and challenging task. To address this issue, we propose a weakly-supervised visual question answer generation method that generates a relevant question-answer pairs for a given input image and associated caption. Most of the prior works are supervised and depend on the annotated question-answer datasets. In our work, we present a weakly supervised method that synthetically generates question-answer pairs procedurally from visual information and captions. The proposed method initially extracts list of answer words, then does nearest question generation that uses the caption and answer word to generate synthetic question. Next, the relevant question generator converts the nearest question to relevant language question by dependency parsing and in-order tree traversal, finally, fine-tune a ViLBERT model with the question-answer pair(s) generated at end. We perform an exhaustive experimental analysis on VQA dataset and see that our model significantly outperform SOTA methods on BLEU scores. We also show the results wrt baseline models and ablation study.

This paper describes recent developments in object specific pose and shape prediction from single images. The main contribution is a new approach to camera pose prediction by self-supervised learning of keypoints corresponding to locations on a category specific deformable shape. We designed a network to generate a proxy ground-truth heatmap from a set of keypoints distributed all over the category-specific mean shape, where each is represented by a unique color on a labeled texture. The proxy ground-truth heatmap is used to train a deep keypoint prediction network, which can be used in online inference. The proposed approach to camera pose prediction show significant improvements when compared with state-of-the-art methods. Our approach to camera pose prediction is used to infer 3D objects from 2D image frames of video sequences online. To train the reconstruction model, it receives only a silhouette mask from a single frame of a video sequence in every training step and a category-specific mean object shape. We conducted experiments using three different datasets representing the bird category: the CUB [51] image dataset, YouTubeVos and the Davis video datasets. The network is trained on the CUB dataset and tested on all three datasets. The online experiments are demonstrated on YouTubeVos and Davis [56] video sequences using a network trained on the CUB training set.

This paper introduces the RGB Arabic Alphabet Sign Language (AASL) dataset. AASL comprises 7,856 raw and fully labelled RGB images of the Arabic sign language alphabets, which to our best knowledge is the first publicly available RGB dataset. The dataset is aimed to help those interested in developing real-life Arabic sign language classification models. AASL was collected from more than 200 participants and with different settings such as lighting, background, image orientation, image size, and image resolution. Experts in the field supervised, validated and filtered the collected images to ensure a high-quality dataset. AASL is made available to the public on Kaggle.

GNNs and chemical fingerprints are the predominant approaches to representing molecules for property prediction. However, in NLP, transformers have become the de-facto standard for representation learning thanks to their strong downstream task transfer. In parallel, the software ecosystem around transformers is maturing rapidly, with libraries like HuggingFace and BertViz enabling streamlined training and introspection. In this work, we make one of the first attempts to systematically evaluate transformers on molecular property prediction tasks via our ChemBERTa model. ChemBERTa scales well with pretraining dataset size, offering competitive downstream performance on MoleculeNet and useful attention-based visualization modalities. Our results suggest that transformers offer a promising avenue of future work for molecular representation learning and property prediction. To facilitate these efforts, we release a curated dataset of 77M SMILES from PubChem suitable for large-scale self-supervised pretraining.

Learning visual representations with self-supervised learning has become popular in computer vision. The idea is to design auxiliary tasks where labels are free to obtain. Most of these tasks end up providing data to learn specific kinds of invariance useful for recognition. In this paper, we propose to exploit different self-supervised approaches to learn representations invariant to (i) inter-instance variations (two objects in the same class should have similar features) and (ii) intra-instance variations (viewpoint, pose, deformations, illumination, etc). Instead of combining two approaches with multi-task learning, we argue to organize and reason the data with multiple variations. Specifically, we propose to generate a graph with millions of objects mined from hundreds of thousands of videos. The objects are connected by two types of edges which correspond to two types of invariance: "different instances but a similar viewpoint and category" and "different viewpoints of the same instance". By applying simple transitivity on the graph with these edges, we can obtain pairs of images exhibiting richer visual invariance. We use this data to train a Triplet-Siamese network with VGG16 as the base architecture and apply the learned representations to different recognition tasks. For object detection, we achieve 63.2% mAP on PASCAL VOC 2007 using Fast R-CNN (compare to 67.3% with ImageNet pre-training). For the challenging COCO dataset, our method is surprisingly close (23.5%) to the ImageNet-supervised counterpart (24.4%) using the Faster R-CNN framework. We also show that our network can perform significantly better than the ImageNet network in the surface normal estimation task.

Data collected from the real world typically exhibit long-tailed distributions, where frequent classes contain abundant data while rare ones have only a limited number of samples. While existing supervised learning approaches have been proposed to tackle such data imbalance, the requirement of label supervision would limit their applicability to real-world scenarios in which label annotation might not be available. Without the access to class labels nor the associated class frequencies, we propose Frequency-Aware Self-Supervised Learning (FASSL) in this paper. Targeting at learning from unlabeled data with inherent long-tailed distributions, the goal of FASSL is to produce discriminative feature representations for downstream classification tasks. In FASSL, we first learn frequency-aware prototypes, reflecting the associated long-tailed distribution. Particularly focusing on rare-class samples, the relationships between image data and the derived prototypes are further exploited with the introduced self-supervised learning scheme. Experiments on long-tailed image datasets quantitatively and qualitatively verify the effectiveness of our learning scheme.

As a promising non-password authentication technology, radio frequency (RF) fingerprinting can greatly improve wireless security. Recent work has shown that RF fingerprinting based on deep learning can significantly outperform conventional approaches. The superiority, however, is mainly attributed to supervised learning using a large amount of labeled data, and it significantly degrades if only limited labeled data is available, making many existing algorithms lack practicability. Considering that it is often easier to obtain enough unlabeled data in practice with minimal resources, we leverage deep semi-supervised learning for RF fingerprinting, which largely relies on a composite data augmentation scheme designed for radio signals, combined with two popular techniques: consistency-based regularization and pseudo-labeling. Experimental results on both simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed method for semi-supervised RF fingerprinting is far superior to other competing ones, and it can achieve remarkable performance almost close to that of fully supervised learning with a very limited number of examples.

Scene flow estimation is a long-standing problem in computer vision, where the goal is to find the 3D motion of a scene from its consecutive observations. Recently, there have been efforts to compute the scene flow from 3D point clouds. A common approach is to train a regression model that consumes source and target point clouds and outputs the per-point translation vector. An alternative is to learn point matches between the point clouds concurrently with regressing a refinement of the initial correspondence flow. In both cases, the learning task is very challenging since the flow regression is done in the free 3D space, and a typical solution is to resort to a large annotated synthetic dataset. We introduce SCOOP, a new method for scene flow estimation that can be learned on a small amount of data without employing ground-truth flow supervision. In contrast to previous work, we train a pure correspondence model focused on learning point feature representation and initialize the flow as the difference between a source point and its softly corresponding target point. Then, in the run-time phase, we directly optimize a flow refinement component with a self-supervised objective, which leads to a coherent and accurate flow field between the point clouds. Experiments on widespread datasets demonstrate the performance gains achieved by our method compared to existing leading techniques while using a fraction of the training data. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/itailang/SCOOP.

Recently, there has been significant interest in replacing the reward model in Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) methods for Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants. These approaches commonly use a binary cross-entropy mechanism on pairwise samples, i.e., minimizing and maximizing the loss based on preferred or dis-preferred responses, respectively. However, while this training strategy omits the reward model, it also overlooks the varying preference degrees within different responses. We hypothesize that this is a key factor hindering LLMs from sufficiently understanding human preferences. To address this problem, we propose a novel Self-supervised Preference Optimization (SPO) framework, which constructs a self-supervised preference degree loss combined with the alignment loss, thereby helping LLMs improve their ability to understand the degree of preference. Extensive experiments are conducted on two widely used datasets of different tasks. The results demonstrate that SPO can be seamlessly integrated with existing preference optimization methods and significantly boost their performance to achieve state-of-the-art performance. We also conduct detailed analyses to offer comprehensive insights into SPO, which verifies its effectiveness. The code is available at https://github.com/lijian16/SPO.

Deep neural networks are typically trained using global error signals that backpropagate (BP) end-to-end, which is not only biologically implausible but also suffers from the update locking problem and requires huge memory consumption. Local learning, which updates each layer independently with a gradient-isolated auxiliary network, offers a promising alternative to address the above problems. However, existing local learning methods are confronted with a large accuracy gap with the BP counterpart, particularly for large-scale networks. This is due to the weak coupling between local layers and their subsequent network layers, as there is no gradient communication across layers. To tackle this issue, we put forward an augmented local learning method, dubbed AugLocal. AugLocal constructs each hidden layer's auxiliary network by uniformly selecting a small subset of layers from its subsequent network layers to enhance their synergy. We also propose to linearly reduce the depth of auxiliary networks as the hidden layer goes deeper, ensuring sufficient network capacity while reducing the computational cost of auxiliary networks. Our extensive experiments on four image classification datasets (i.e., CIFAR-10, SVHN, STL-10, and ImageNet) demonstrate that AugLocal can effectively scale up to tens of local layers with a comparable accuracy to BP-trained networks while reducing GPU memory usage by around 40%. The proposed AugLocal method, therefore, opens up a myriad of opportunities for training high-performance deep neural networks on resource-constrained platforms.Code is available at https://github.com/ChenxiangMA/AugLocal.

Log anomaly detection plays a critical role in ensuring the security and maintenance of modern software systems. At present, the primary approach for detecting anomalies in log data is through supervised anomaly detection. Nonetheless, existing supervised methods heavily rely on labeled data, which can be frequently limited in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised log anomaly detection method that combines the DQN algorithm from deep reinforcement learning, which is called DQNLog. DQNLog leverages a small amount of labeled data and a large-scale unlabeled dataset, effectively addressing the challenges of imbalanced data and limited labeling. This approach not only learns known anomalies by interacting with an environment biased towards anomalies but also discovers unknown anomalies by actively exploring the unlabeled dataset. Additionally, DQNLog incorporates a cross-entropy loss term to prevent model overestimation during Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). Our evaluation on three widely-used datasets demonstrates that DQNLog significantly improves recall rate and F1-score while maintaining precision, validating its practicality.

Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with maintaining accuracy across a sequence of intermediate reasoning steps in mathematical reasoning, leading to error propagation that undermines the final result. The current methodology to mitigate this issue primarily involves using a verifier model to assess the correctness of generated solution candidates, focusing either on the overall reasoning path or on an incomplete reasoning path. By rethinking this approach, we argue that assessing potentials of incomplete reasoning paths could be more advantageous as it guides towards correct final answers, transforming the task into a planning problem. Our proposed verifier, the Outcome-supervision Value Model (OVM), employs outcome supervision for training, offering an efficient and intuitive method for planning by prioritizing steps that lead to accurate conclusions over mere per-step correctness. Furthermore, the OVM eschews the need for labor-intensive annotations on step-level correctness, enhancing its scalability. Our experiments on two multi-step mathematical reasoning datasets, GSM8K and Game of 24, demonstrate the superior performance of the OVM model. Notably, in GSM8K, our OVM-7B model achieves state-of-the-art results among LLMs up to 13B parameters; especially it does not utilize GPT-4 or code execution. These findings offer a novel perspective on the role of outcome supervision in training verifiers for multi-step reasoning tasks and provide theoretical justification for its advantage in value estimation for planning.

Automatic tree density estimation and counting using single aerial and satellite images is a challenging task in photogrammetry and remote sensing, yet has an important role in forest management. In this paper, we propose the first semisupervised transformer-based framework for tree counting which reduces the expensive tree annotations for remote sensing images. Our method, termed as TreeFormer, first develops a pyramid tree representation module based on transformer blocks to extract multi-scale features during the encoding stage. Contextual attention-based feature fusion and tree density regressor modules are further designed to utilize the robust features from the encoder to estimate tree density maps in the decoder. Moreover, we propose a pyramid learning strategy that includes local tree density consistency and local tree count ranking losses to utilize unlabeled images into the training process. Finally, the tree counter token is introduced to regulate the network by computing the global tree counts for both labeled and unlabeled images. Our model was evaluated on two benchmark tree counting datasets, Jiangsu, and Yosemite, as well as a new dataset, KCL-London, created by ourselves. Our TreeFormer outperforms the state of the art semi-supervised methods under the same setting and exceeds the fully-supervised methods using the same number of labeled images. The codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/HAAClassic/TreeFormer.

Learning on text-attributed graphs (TAGs), in which nodes are associated with one or more texts, has been the subject of much recent work. However, most approaches tend to make strong assumptions about the downstream task of interest, are reliant on hand-labeled data, or fail to equally balance the importance of both text and graph representations. In this work, we propose Contrastive Graph-Text pretraining (ConGraT), a general, self-supervised approach for jointly learning separate representations of texts and nodes in a TAG. Our method trains a language model (LM) and a graph neural network (GNN) to align their representations in a common latent space using a batch-wise contrastive learning objective inspired by CLIP. We further propose an extension to the CLIP objective that leverages graph structure to incorporate information about inter-node similarity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ConGraT outperforms baselines on various downstream tasks, including node and text category classification, link prediction, and language modeling. Finally, we present an application of our method to community detection in social graphs, which enables finding more textually grounded communities, rather than purely graph-based ones. Code and certain datasets are available at https://github.com/wwbrannon/congrat.

Recent trends in semi-supervised learning have significantly boosted the performance of 3D semi-supervised medical image segmentation. Compared with 2D images, 3D medical volumes involve information from different directions, e.g., transverse, sagittal, and coronal planes, so as to naturally provide complementary views. These complementary views and the intrinsic similarity among adjacent 3D slices inspire us to develop a novel annotation way and its corresponding semi-supervised model for effective segmentation. Specifically, we firstly propose the orthogonal annotation by only labeling two orthogonal slices in a labeled volume, which significantly relieves the burden of annotation. Then, we perform registration to obtain the initial pseudo labels for sparsely labeled volumes. Subsequently, by introducing unlabeled volumes, we propose a dual-network paradigm named Dense-Sparse Co-training (DeSCO) that exploits dense pseudo labels in early stage and sparse labels in later stage and meanwhile forces consistent output of two networks. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets validated our effectiveness in performance and efficiency in annotation. For example, with only 10 annotated slices, our method reaches a Dice up to 86.93% on KiTS19 dataset.

In Self-Supervised Learning (SSL), models are typically pretrained, fine-tuned, and evaluated on the same domains. However, they tend to perform poorly when evaluated on unseen domains, a challenge that Unsupervised Domain Generalization (UDG) seeks to address. Current UDG methods rely on domain labels, which are often challenging to collect, and domain-specific architectures that lack scalability when confronted with numerous domains, making the current methodology impractical and rigid. Inspired by contrastive-based UDG methods that mitigate spurious correlations by restricting comparisons to examples from the same domain, we hypothesize that eliminating style variability within a batch could provide a more convenient and flexible way to reduce spurious correlations without requiring domain labels. To verify this hypothesis, we introduce Batch Styles Standardization (BSS), a relatively simple yet powerful Fourier-based method to standardize the style of images in a batch specifically designed for integration with SSL methods to tackle UDG. Combining BSS with existing SSL methods offers serious advantages over prior UDG methods: (1) It eliminates the need for domain labels or domain-specific network components to enhance domain-invariance in SSL representations, and (2) offers flexibility as BSS can be seamlessly integrated with diverse contrastive-based but also non-contrastive-based SSL methods. Experiments on several UDG datasets demonstrate that it significantly improves downstream task performances on unseen domains, often outperforming or rivaling with UDG methods. Finally, this work clarifies the underlying mechanisms contributing to BSS's effectiveness in improving domain-invariance in SSL representations and performances on unseen domain.

Collecting large-scale medical datasets with fully annotated samples for training of deep networks is prohibitively expensive, especially for 3D volume data. Recent breakthroughs in self-supervised learning (SSL) offer the ability to overcome the lack of labeled training samples by learning feature representations from unlabeled data. However, most current SSL techniques in the medical field have been designed for either 2D images or 3D volumes. In practice, this restricts the capability to fully leverage unlabeled data from numerous sources, which may include both 2D and 3D data. Additionally, the use of these pre-trained networks is constrained to downstream tasks with compatible data dimensions. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for unsupervised joint learning on 2D and 3D data modalities. Given a set of 2D images or 2D slices extracted from 3D volumes, we construct an SSL task based on a 2D contrastive clustering problem for distinct classes. The 3D volumes are exploited by computing vectored embedding at each slice and then assembling a holistic feature through deformable self-attention mechanisms in Transformer, allowing incorporating long-range dependencies between slices inside 3D volumes. These holistic features are further utilized to define a novel 3D clustering agreement-based SSL task and masking embedding prediction inspired by pre-trained language models. Experiments on downstream tasks, such as 3D brain segmentation, lung nodule detection, 3D heart structures segmentation, and abnormal chest X-ray detection, demonstrate the effectiveness of our joint 2D and 3D SSL approach. We improve plain 2D Deep-ClusterV2 and SwAV by a significant margin and also surpass various modern 2D and 3D SSL approaches.

Semi-supervised Learning (SSL) has received increasing attention in autonomous driving to reduce the enormous burden of 3D annotation. In this paper, we propose UpCycling, a novel SSL framework for 3D object detection with zero additional raw-level point cloud: learning from unlabeled de-identified intermediate features (i.e., smashed data) to preserve privacy. Since these intermediate features are naturally produced by the inference pipeline, no additional computation is required on autonomous vehicles. However, generating effective consistency loss for unlabeled feature-level scene turns out to be a critical challenge. The latest SSL frameworks for 3D object detection that enforce consistency regularization between different augmentations of an unlabeled raw-point scene become detrimental when applied to intermediate features. To solve the problem, we introduce a novel combination of hybrid pseudo labels and feature-level Ground Truth sampling (F-GT), which safely augments unlabeled multi-type 3D scene features and provides high-quality supervision. We implement UpCycling on two representative 3D object detection models: SECOND-IoU and PV-RCNN. Experiments on widely-used datasets (Waymo, KITTI, and Lyft) verify that UpCycling outperforms other augmentation methods applied at the feature level. In addition, while preserving privacy, UpCycling performs better or comparably to the state-of-the-art methods that utilize raw-level unlabeled data in both domain adaptation and partial-label scenarios.

Despite being the third most popular language in India, the Marathi language lacks useful NLP resources. Moreover, popular NLP libraries do not have support for the Marathi language. With L3Cube-MahaNLP, we aim to build resources and a library for Marathi natural language processing. We present datasets and transformer models for supervised tasks like sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, and hate speech detection. We have also published a monolingual Marathi corpus for unsupervised language modeling tasks. Overall we present MahaCorpus, MahaSent, MahaNER, and MahaHate datasets and their corresponding MahaBERT models fine-tuned on these datasets. We aim to move ahead of benchmark datasets and prepare useful resources for Marathi. The resources are available at https://github.com/l3cube-pune/MarathiNLP.

Segmenting or detecting objects in sparse Lidar point clouds are two important tasks in autonomous driving to allow a vehicle to act safely in its 3D environment. The best performing methods in 3D semantic segmentation or object detection rely on a large amount of annotated data. Yet annotating 3D Lidar data for these tasks is tedious and costly. In this context, we propose a self-supervised pre-training method for 3D perception models that is tailored to autonomous driving data. Specifically, we leverage the availability of synchronized and calibrated image and Lidar sensors in autonomous driving setups for distilling self-supervised pre-trained image representations into 3D models. Hence, our method does not require any point cloud nor image annotations. The key ingredient of our method is the use of superpixels which are used to pool 3D point features and 2D pixel features in visually similar regions. We then train a 3D network on the self-supervised task of matching these pooled point features with the corresponding pooled image pixel features. The advantages of contrasting regions obtained by superpixels are that: (1) grouping together pixels and points of visually coherent regions leads to a more meaningful contrastive task that produces features well adapted to 3D semantic segmentation and 3D object detection; (2) all the different regions have the same weight in the contrastive loss regardless of the number of 3D points sampled in these regions; (3) it mitigates the noise produced by incorrect matching of points and pixels due to occlusions between the different sensors. Extensive experiments on autonomous driving datasets demonstrate the ability of our image-to-Lidar distillation strategy to produce 3D representations that transfer well on semantic segmentation and object detection tasks.

Large speech emotion recognition datasets are hard to obtain, and small datasets may contain biases. Deep-net-based classifiers, in turn, are prone to exploit those biases and find shortcuts such as speaker characteristics. These shortcuts usually harm a model's ability to generalize. To address this challenge, we propose a gradient-based adversary learning framework that learns a speech emotion recognition task while normalizing speaker characteristics from the feature representation. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method on both speaker-independent and speaker-dependent settings and obtain new state-of-the-art results on the challenging IEMOCAP dataset.

Labelling point clouds fully is highly time-consuming and costly. As larger point cloud datasets with billions of points become more common, we ask whether the full annotation is even necessary, demonstrating that existing baselines designed under a fully annotated assumption only degrade slightly even when faced with 1% random point annotations. However, beyond this point, e.g., at 0.1% annotations, segmentation accuracy is unacceptably low. We observe that, as point clouds are samples of the 3D world, the distribution of points in a local neighborhood is relatively homogeneous, exhibiting strong semantic similarity. Motivated by this, we propose a new weak supervision method to implicitly augment highly sparse supervision signals. Extensive experiments demonstrate the proposed Semantic Query Network (SQN) achieves promising performance on seven large-scale open datasets under weak supervision schemes, while requiring only 0.1% randomly annotated points for training, greatly reducing annotation cost and effort. The code is available at https://github.com/QingyongHu/SQN.

Large scale recommender models find most relevant items from huge catalogs, and they play a critical role in modern search and recommendation systems. To model the input space with large-vocab categorical features, a typical recommender model learns a joint embedding space through neural networks for both queries and items from user feedback data. However, with millions to billions of items in the corpus, users tend to provide feedback for a very small set of them, causing a power-law distribution. This makes the feedback data for long-tail items extremely sparse. Inspired by the recent success in self-supervised representation learning research in both computer vision and natural language understanding, we propose a multi-task self-supervised learning (SSL) framework for large-scale item recommendations. The framework is designed to tackle the label sparsity problem by learning better latent relationship of item features. Specifically, SSL improves item representation learning as well as serving as additional regularization to improve generalization. Furthermore, we propose a novel data augmentation method that utilizes feature correlations within the proposed framework. We evaluate our framework using two real-world datasets with 500M and 1B training examples respectively. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of SSL regularization and show its superior performance over the state-of-the-art regularization techniques. We also have already launched the proposed techniques to a web-scale commercial app-to-app recommendation system, with significant improvements top-tier business metrics demonstrated in A/B experiments on live traffic. Our online results also verify our hypothesis that our framework indeed improves model performance even more on slices that lack supervision.

We present a novel supervised word alignment method based on cross-language span prediction. We first formalize a word alignment problem as a collection of independent predictions from a token in the source sentence to a span in the target sentence. As this is equivalent to a SQuAD v2.0 style question answering task, we then solve this problem by using multilingual BERT, which is fine-tuned on a manually created gold word alignment data. We greatly improved the word alignment accuracy by adding the context of the token to the question. In the experiments using five word alignment datasets among Chinese, Japanese, German, Romanian, French, and English, we show that the proposed method significantly outperformed previous supervised and unsupervised word alignment methods without using any bitexts for pretraining. For example, we achieved an F1 score of 86.7 for the Chinese-English data, which is 13.3 points higher than the previous state-of-the-art supervised methods.

Contrastive learning applied to self-supervised representation learning has seen a resurgence in recent years, leading to state of the art performance in the unsupervised training of deep image models. Modern batch contrastive approaches subsume or significantly outperform traditional contrastive losses such as triplet, max-margin and the N-pairs loss. In this work, we extend the self-supervised batch contrastive approach to the fully-supervised setting, allowing us to effectively leverage label information. Clusters of points belonging to the same class are pulled together in embedding space, while simultaneously pushing apart clusters of samples from different classes. We analyze two possible versions of the supervised contrastive (SupCon) loss, identifying the best-performing formulation of the loss. On ResNet-200, we achieve top-1 accuracy of 81.4% on the ImageNet dataset, which is 0.8% above the best number reported for this architecture. We show consistent outperformance over cross-entropy on other datasets and two ResNet variants. The loss shows benefits for robustness to natural corruptions and is more stable to hyperparameter settings such as optimizers and data augmentations. Our loss function is simple to implement, and reference TensorFlow code is released at https://t.ly/supcon.

Multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) has demonstrated promising results in prostate cancer (PCa) detection using deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Recently, transformers have achieved competitive performance compared to CNNs in computer vision. Large-scale transformers need abundant annotated data for training, which are difficult to obtain in medical imaging. Self-supervised learning can effectively leverage unlabeled data to extract useful semantic representations without annotation and its associated costs. This can improve model performance on downstream tasks with limited labelled data and increase generalizability. We introduce a novel end-to-end Cross-Shaped windows (CSwin) transformer UNet model, CSwin UNet, to detect clinically significant prostate cancer (csPCa) in prostate bi-parametric MR imaging (bpMRI) and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed self-supervised pre-training framework. Using a large prostate bpMRI dataset with 1500 patients, we first pre-train CSwin transformer using multi-task self-supervised learning to improve data-efficiency and network generalizability. We then finetuned using lesion annotations to perform csPCa detection. Five-fold cross validation shows that self-supervised CSwin UNet achieves 0.888 AUC and 0.545 Average Precision (AP), significantly outperforming four state-of-the-art models (Swin UNETR, DynUNet, Attention UNet, UNet). Using a separate bpMRI dataset with 158 patients, we evaluated our model robustness to external hold-out data. Self-supervised CSwin UNet achieves 0.79 AUC and 0.45 AP, still outperforming all other comparable methods and demonstrating generalization to a dataset shift.

Predicting gene function from its DNA sequence is a fundamental challenge in biology. Many deep learning models have been proposed to embed DNA sequences and predict their enzymatic function, leveraging information in public databases linking DNA sequences to an enzymatic function label. However, much of the scientific community's knowledge of biological function is not represented in these categorical labels, and is instead captured in unstructured text descriptions of mechanisms, reactions, and enzyme behavior. These descriptions are often captured alongside DNA sequences in biological databases, albeit in an unstructured manner. Deep learning of models predicting enzymatic function are likely to benefit from incorporating this multi-modal data encoding scientific knowledge of biological function. There is, however, no dataset designed for machine learning algorithms to leverage this multi-modal information. Here we propose a novel dataset and benchmark suite that enables the exploration and development of large multi-modal neural network models on gene DNA sequences and natural language descriptions of gene function. We present baseline performance on benchmarks for both unsupervised and supervised tasks that demonstrate the difficulty of this modeling objective, while demonstrating the potential benefit of incorporating multi-modal data types in function prediction compared to DNA sequences alone. Our dataset is at: https://hoarfrost-lab.github.io/BioTalk/.

Dongba pictographs are the only pictographs still in use in the world. They have pictorial ideographic features, and their symbols carry rich cultural and contextual information. Due to the lack of relevant datasets, existing research has difficulty in advancing the study of semantic understanding of Dongba pictographs. To this end, we propose DongbaMIE, the first multimodal dataset for semantic understanding and extraction of Dongba pictographs. The dataset consists of Dongba pictograph images and their corresponding Chinese semantic annotations. It contains 23,530 sentence-level and 2,539 paragraph-level images, covering four semantic dimensions: objects, actions, relations, and attributes. We systematically evaluate the GPT-4o, Gemini-2.0, and Qwen2-VL models. Experimental results show that the F1 scores of GPT-4o and Gemini in the best object extraction are only 3.16 and 3.11 respectively. The F1 score of Qwen2-VL after supervised fine-tuning is only 11.49. These results suggest that current large multimodal models still face significant challenges in accurately recognizing the diverse semantic information in Dongba pictographs. The dataset can be obtained from this URL.

Lower-Limb Fractures (LLF) are a major health concern for older adults, often leading to reduced mobility and prolonged recovery, potentially impairing daily activities and independence. During recovery, older adults frequently face social isolation and functional decline, complicating rehabilitation and adversely affecting physical and mental health. Multi-modal sensor platforms that continuously collect data and analyze it using machine-learning algorithms can remotely monitor this population and infer health outcomes. They can also alert clinicians to individuals at risk of isolation and decline. This paper presents a new publicly available multi-modal sensor dataset, MAISON-LLF, collected from older adults recovering from LLF in community settings. The dataset includes data from smartphone and smartwatch sensors, motion detectors, sleep-tracking mattresses, and clinical questionnaires on isolation and decline. The dataset was collected from ten older adults living alone at home for eight weeks each, totaling 560 days of 24-hour sensor data. For technical validation, supervised machine-learning and deep-learning models were developed using the sensor and clinical questionnaire data, providing a foundational comparison for the research community.

Foundation models have revolutionized computer vision by achieving vastly superior performance across diverse tasks through large-scale pretraining on extensive datasets. However, their application in surgical computer vision has been limited. This study addresses this gap by introducing SurgeNetXL, a novel surgical foundation model that sets a new benchmark in surgical computer vision. Trained on the largest reported surgical dataset to date, comprising over 4.7 million video frames, SurgeNetXL achieves consistent top-tier performance across six datasets spanning four surgical procedures and three tasks, including semantic segmentation, phase recognition, and critical view of safety (CVS) classification. Compared with the best-performing surgical foundation models, SurgeNetXL shows mean improvements of 2.4, 9.0, and 12.6 percent for semantic segmentation, phase recognition, and CVS classification, respectively. Additionally, SurgeNetXL outperforms the best-performing ImageNet-based variants by 14.4, 4.0, and 1.6 percent in the respective tasks. In addition to advancing model performance, this study provides key insights into scaling pretraining datasets, extending training durations, and optimizing model architectures specifically for surgical computer vision. These findings pave the way for improved generalizability and robustness in data-scarce scenarios, offering a comprehensive framework for future research in this domain. All models and a subset of the SurgeNetXL dataset, including over 2 million video frames, are publicly available at: https://github.com/TimJaspers0801/SurgeNet.

While machine-learned models are now routinely employed to facilitate astronomical inquiry, model inputs tend to be limited to a primary data source (namely images or time series) and, in the more advanced approaches, some metadata. Yet with the growing use of wide-field, multiplexed observational resources, individual sources of interest often have a broad range of observational modes available. Here we construct an astronomical multimodal dataset and propose AstroM^3, a self-supervised pre-training approach that enables a model to learn from multiple modalities simultaneously. Specifically, we extend the CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining) model to a trimodal setting, allowing the integration of time-series photometry data, spectra, and astrophysical metadata. In a fine-tuning supervised setting, our results demonstrate that CLIP pre-training improves classification performance for time-series photometry, where accuracy increases from 84.6% to 91.5%. Furthermore, CLIP boosts classification accuracy by up to 12.6% when the availability of labeled data is limited, showing the effectiveness of leveraging larger corpora of unlabeled data. In addition to fine-tuned classification, we can use the trained model in other downstream tasks that are not explicitly contemplated during the construction of the self-supervised model. In particular we show the efficacy of using the learned embeddings for misclassifications identification, similarity search, and anomaly detection. One surprising highlight is the "rediscovery" of Mira subtypes and two Rotational variable subclasses using manifold learning and dimension reduction algorithm. To our knowledge this is the first construction of an n>2 mode model in astronomy. Extensions to n>3 modes is naturally anticipated with this approach.

Event cameras excel in capturing high-contrast scenes and dynamic objects, offering a significant advantage over traditional frame-based cameras. Despite active research into leveraging event cameras for semantic segmentation, generating pixel-wise dense semantic maps for such challenging scenarios remains labor-intensive. As a remedy, we present EV-WSSS: a novel weakly supervised approach for event-based semantic segmentation that utilizes sparse point annotations. To fully leverage the temporal characteristics of event data, the proposed framework performs asymmetric dual-student learning between 1) the original forward event data and 2) the longer reversed event data, which contain complementary information from the past and the future, respectively. Besides, to mitigate the challenges posed by sparse supervision, we propose feature-level contrastive learning based on class-wise prototypes, carefully aggregated at both spatial region and sample levels. Additionally, we further excavate the potential of our dual-student learning model by exchanging prototypes between the two learning paths, thereby harnessing their complementary strengths. With extensive experiments on various datasets, including DSEC Night-Point with sparse point annotations newly provided by this paper, the proposed method achieves substantial segmentation results even without relying on pixel-level dense ground truths. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Chohoonhee/EV-WSSS.

Deep learning (DL) has proven highly effective for ultrasound-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) of breast cancers. In an automaticCAD system, lesion detection is critical for the following diagnosis. However, existing DL-based methods generally require voluminous manually-annotated region of interest (ROI) labels and class labels to train both the lesion detection and diagnosis models. In clinical practice, the ROI labels, i.e. ground truths, may not always be optimal for the classification task due to individual experience of sonologists, resulting in the issue of coarse annotation that limits the diagnosis performance of a CAD model. To address this issue, a novel Two-Stage Detection and Diagnosis Network (TSDDNet) is proposed based on weakly supervised learning to enhance diagnostic accuracy of the ultrasound-based CAD for breast cancers. In particular, all the ROI-level labels are considered as coarse labels in the first training stage, and then a candidate selection mechanism is designed to identify optimallesion areas for both the fully and partially annotated samples. It refines the current ROI-level labels in the fully annotated images and the detected ROIs in the partially annotated samples with a weakly supervised manner under the guidance of class labels. In the second training stage, a self-distillation strategy further is further proposed to integrate the detection network and classification network into a unified framework as the final CAD model for joint optimization, which then further improves the diagnosis performance. The proposed TSDDNet is evaluated on a B-mode ultrasound dataset, and the experimental results show that it achieves the best performance on both lesion detection and diagnosis tasks, suggesting promising application potential.

Humans can learn to operate the user interface (UI) of an application by reading an instruction manual or how-to guide. Along with text, these resources include visual content such as UI screenshots and images of application icons referenced in the text. We explore how to leverage this data to learn generic visio-linguistic representations of UI screens and their components. These representations are useful in many real applications, such as accessibility, voice navigation, and task automation. Prior UI representation models rely on UI metadata (UI trees and accessibility labels), which is often missing, incompletely defined, or not accessible. We avoid such a dependency, and propose Lexi, a pre-trained vision and language model designed to handle the unique features of UI screens, including their text richness and context sensitivity. To train Lexi we curate the UICaption dataset consisting of 114k UI images paired with descriptions of their functionality. We evaluate Lexi on four tasks: UI action entailment, instruction-based UI image retrieval, grounding referring expressions, and UI entity recognition.

Skills play a central role in the job market and many human resources (HR) processes. In the wake of other digital experiences, today's online job market has candidates expecting to see the right opportunities based on their skill set. Similarly, enterprises increasingly need to use data to guarantee that the skills within their workforce remain future-proof. However, structured information about skills is often missing, and processes building on self- or manager-assessment have shown to struggle with issues around adoption, completeness, and freshness of the resulting data. Extracting skills is a highly challenging task, given the many thousands of possible skill labels mentioned either explicitly or merely described implicitly and the lack of finely annotated training corpora. Previous work on skill extraction overly simplifies the task to an explicit entity detection task or builds on manually annotated training data that would be infeasible if applied to a complete vocabulary of skills. We propose an end-to-end system for skill extraction, based on distant supervision through literal matching. We propose and evaluate several negative sampling strategies, tuned on a small validation dataset, to improve the generalization of skill extraction towards implicitly mentioned skills, despite the lack of such implicit skills in the distantly supervised data. We observe that using the ESCO taxonomy to select negative examples from related skills yields the biggest improvements, and combining three different strategies in one model further increases the performance, up to 8 percentage points in RP@5. We introduce a manually annotated evaluation benchmark for skill extraction based on the ESCO taxonomy, on which we validate our models. We release the benchmark dataset for research purposes to stimulate further research on the task.

Obtaining text datasets with semantic annotations is an effortful process, yet crucial for supervised training in natural language processsing (NLP). In general, developing and applying new NLP pipelines in domain-specific contexts for tasks often requires custom designed datasets to address NLP tasks in supervised machine learning fashion. When operating in non-English languages for medical data processing, this exposes several minor and major, interconnected problems such as lack of task-matching datasets as well as task-specific pre-trained models. In our work we suggest to leverage pretrained language models for training data acquisition in order to retrieve sufficiently large datasets for training smaller and more efficient models for use-case specific tasks. To demonstrate the effectiveness of your approach, we create a custom dataset which we use to train a medical NER model for German texts, GPTNERMED, yet our method remains language-independent in principle. Our obtained dataset as well as our pre-trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/frankkramer-lab/GPTNERMED

Recent efforts on scene text erasing have shown promising results. However, existing methods require rich yet costly label annotations to obtain robust models, which limits the use for practical applications. To this end, we study an unsupervised scenario by proposing a novel Self-supervised Text Erasing (STE) framework that jointly learns to synthesize training images with erasure ground-truth and accurately erase texts in the real world. We first design a style-aware image synthesis function to generate synthetic images with diverse styled texts based on two synthetic mechanisms. To bridge the text style gap between the synthetic and real-world data, a policy network is constructed to control the synthetic mechanisms by picking style parameters with the guidance of two specifically designed rewards. The synthetic training images with erasure ground-truth are then fed to train a coarse-to-fine erasing network. To produce better erasing outputs, a triplet erasure loss is designed to enforce the refinement stage to recover background textures. Moreover, we provide a new dataset (called PosterErase), which contains 60K high-resolution posters with texts and is more challenging for the text erasing task. The proposed method has been extensively evaluated with both PosterErase and the widely-used SCUT-Enstext dataset. Notably, on PosterErase, our unsupervised method achieves 5.07 in terms of FID, with a relative performance of 20.9% over existing supervised baselines.

Voice cloning is a difficult task which requires robust and informative features incorporated in a high quality TTS system in order to effectively copy an unseen speaker's voice. In our work, we utilize features learned in a self-supervised framework via the Bootstrap Your Own Latent (BYOL) method, which is shown to produce high quality speech representations when specific audio augmentations are applied to the vanilla algorithm. We further extend the augmentations in the training procedure to aid the resulting features to capture the speaker identity and to make them robust to noise and acoustic conditions. The learned features are used as pre-trained utterance-level embeddings and as inputs to a Non-Attentive Tacotron based architecture, aiming to achieve multispeaker speech synthesis without utilizing additional speaker features. This method enables us to train our model in an unlabeled multispeaker dataset as well as use unseen speaker embeddings to copy a speaker's voice. Subjective and objective evaluations are used to validate the proposed model, as well as the robustness to the acoustic conditions of the target utterance.

Criminals have become increasingly experienced in using cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, for money laundering. The use of cryptocurrencies can hide criminal identities and transfer hundreds of millions of dollars of dirty funds through their criminal digital wallets. However, this is considered a paradox because cryptocurrencies are goldmines for open-source intelligence, giving law enforcement agencies more power when conducting forensic analyses. This paper proposed Inspection-L, a graph neural network (GNN) framework based on a self-supervised Deep Graph Infomax (DGI) and Graph Isomorphism Network (GIN), with supervised learning algorithms, namely Random Forest (RF), to detect illicit transactions for anti-money laundering (AML). To the best of our knowledge, our proposal is the first to apply self-supervised GNNs to the problem of AML in Bitcoin. The proposed method was evaluated on the Elliptic dataset and shows that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of key classification metrics, which demonstrates the potential of self-supervised GNN in the detection of illicit cryptocurrency transactions.

A large-scale labeled dataset is a key factor for the success of supervised deep learning in computer vision. However, a limited number of annotated data is very common, especially in ophthalmic image analysis, since manual annotation is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods bring huge opportunities for better utilizing unlabeled data, as they do not need massive annotations. With an attempt to use as many as possible unlabeled ophthalmic images, it is necessary to break the dimension barrier, simultaneously making use of both 2D and 3D images. In this paper, we propose a universal self-supervised Transformer framework, named Uni4Eye, to discover the inherent image property and capture domain-specific feature embedding in ophthalmic images. Uni4Eye can serve as a global feature extractor, which builds its basis on a Masked Image Modeling task with a Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture. We employ a Unified Patch Embedding module to replace the origin patch embedding module in ViT for jointly processing both 2D and 3D input images. Besides, we design a dual-branch multitask decoder module to simultaneously perform two reconstruction tasks on the input image and its gradient map, delivering discriminative representations for better convergence. We evaluate the performance of our pre-trained Uni4Eye encoder by fine-tuning it on six downstream ophthalmic image classification tasks. The superiority of Uni4Eye is successfully established through comparisons to other state-of-the-art SSL pre-training methods.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) achieves great success in speech recognition, while limited exploration has been attempted for other speech processing tasks. As speech signal contains multi-faceted information including speaker identity, paralinguistics, spoken content, etc., learning universal representations for all speech tasks is challenging. To tackle the problem, we propose a new pre-trained model, WavLM, to solve full-stack downstream speech tasks. WavLM jointly learns masked speech prediction and denoising in pre-training. By this means, WavLM does not only keep the speech content modeling capability by the masked speech prediction, but also improves the potential to non-ASR tasks by the speech denoising. In addition, WavLM employs gated relative position bias for the Transformer structure to better capture the sequence ordering of input speech. We also scale up the training dataset from 60k hours to 94k hours. WavLM Large achieves state-of-the-art performance on the SUPERB benchmark, and brings significant improvements for various speech processing tasks on their representative benchmarks. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://aka.ms/wavlm.

Computer vision has long relied on ImageNet and other large datasets of images sampled from the Internet for pretraining models. However, these datasets have ethical and technical shortcomings, such as containing personal information taken without consent, unclear license usage, biases, and, in some cases, even problematic image content. On the other hand, state-of-the-art pretraining is nowadays obtained with unsupervised methods, meaning that labelled datasets such as ImageNet may not be necessary, or perhaps not even optimal, for model pretraining. We thus propose an unlabelled dataset PASS: Pictures without humAns for Self-Supervision. PASS only contains images with CC-BY license and complete attribution metadata, addressing the copyright issue. Most importantly, it contains no images of people at all, and also avoids other types of images that are problematic for data protection or ethics. We show that PASS can be used for pretraining with methods such as MoCo-v2, SwAV and DINO. In the transfer learning setting, it yields similar downstream performances to ImageNet pretraining even on tasks that involve humans, such as human pose estimation. PASS does not make existing datasets obsolete, as for instance it is insufficient for benchmarking. However, it shows that model pretraining is often possible while using safer data, and it also provides the basis for a more robust evaluation of pretraining methods.

Floods wreak havoc throughout the world, causing billions of dollars in damages, and uprooting communities, ecosystems and economies. The NASA Impact Flood Detection competition tasked participants with predicting flooded pixels after training with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images in a supervised setting. We propose a semi-supervised learning pseudo-labeling scheme that derives confidence estimates from U-Net ensembles, progressively improving accuracy. Concretely, we use a cyclical approach involving multiple stages (1) training an ensemble model of multiple U-Net architectures with the provided high confidence hand-labeled data and, generated pseudo labels or low confidence labels on the entire unlabeled test dataset, and then, (2) filter out quality generated labels and, (3) combine the generated labels with the previously available high confidence hand-labeled dataset. This assimilated dataset is used for the next round of training ensemble models and the cyclical process is repeated until the performance improvement plateaus. We post process our results with Conditional Random Fields. Our approach sets a new state-of-the-art on the Sentinel-1 dataset with 0.7654 IoU, an impressive improvement over the 0.60 IoU baseline. Our method, which we release with all the code and models, can also be used as an open science benchmark for the Sentinel-1 dataset.

In the realms of computer vision, it is evident that deep neural networks perform better in a supervised setting with a large amount of labeled data. The representations learned with supervision are not only of high quality but also helps the model in enhancing its accuracy. However, the collection and annotation of a large dataset are costly and time-consuming. To avoid the same, there has been a lot of research going on in the field of unsupervised visual representation learning especially in a self-supervised setting. Amongst the recent advancements in self-supervised methods for visual recognition, in SimCLR Chen et al. shows that good quality representations can indeed be learned without explicit supervision. In SimCLR, the authors maximize the similarity of augmentations of the same image and minimize the similarity of augmentations of different images. A linear classifier trained with the representations learned using this approach yields 76.5% top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet ILSVRC-2012 dataset. In this work, we propose that, with the normalized temperature-scaled cross-entropy (NT-Xent) loss function (as used in SimCLR), it is beneficial to not have images of the same category in the same batch. In an unsupervised setting, the information of images pertaining to the same category is missing. We use the latent space representation of a denoising autoencoder trained on the unlabeled dataset and cluster them with k-means to obtain pseudo labels. With this apriori information we batch images, where no two images from the same category are to be found. We report comparable performance enhancements on the CIFAR10 dataset and a subset of the ImageNet dataset. We refer to our method as G-SimCLR.

Self-supervision can dramatically cut back the amount of manually-labelled data required to train deep neural networks. While self-supervision has usually been considered for tasks such as image classification, in this paper we aim at extending it to geometry-oriented tasks such as semantic matching and part detection. We do so by building on several recent ideas in unsupervised landmark detection. Our approach learns dense distinctive visual descriptors from an unlabelled dataset of images using synthetic image transformations. It does so by means of a robust probabilistic formulation that can introspectively determine which image regions are likely to result in stable image matching. We show empirically that a network pre-trained in this manner requires significantly less supervision to learn semantic object parts compared to numerous pre-training alternatives. We also show that the pre-trained representation is excellent for semantic object matching.

We propose a new self-supervised CNN pre-training technique based on a novel auxiliary task called "odd-one-out learning". In this task, the machine is asked to identify the unrelated or odd element from a set of otherwise related elements. We apply this technique to self-supervised video representation learning where we sample subsequences from videos and ask the network to learn to predict the odd video subsequence. The odd video subsequence is sampled such that it has wrong temporal order of frames while the even ones have the correct temporal order. Therefore, to generate a odd-one-out question no manual annotation is required. Our learning machine is implemented as multi-stream convolutional neural network, which is learned end-to-end. Using odd-one-out networks, we learn temporal representations for videos that generalizes to other related tasks such as action recognition. On action classification, our method obtains 60.3\% on the UCF101 dataset using only UCF101 data for training which is approximately 10% better than current state-of-the-art self-supervised learning methods. Similarly, on HMDB51 dataset we outperform self-supervised state-of-the art methods by 12.7% on action classification task.

Supervised contour detection methods usually require many labeled training images to obtain satisfactory performance. However, a large set of annotated data might be unavailable or extremely labor intensive. In this paper, we investigate the usage of semi-supervised learning (SSL) to obtain competitive detection accuracy with very limited training data (three labeled images). Specifically, we propose a semi-supervised structured ensemble learning approach for contour detection built on structured random forests (SRF). To allow SRF to be applicable to unlabeled data, we present an effective sparse representation approach to capture inherent structure in image patches by finding a compact and discriminative low-dimensional subspace representation in an unsupervised manner, enabling the incorporation of abundant unlabeled patches with their estimated structured labels to help SRF perform better node splitting. We re-examine the role of sparsity and propose a novel and fast sparse coding algorithm to boost the overall learning efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to apply SSL for contour detection. Extensive experiments on the BSDS500 segmentation dataset and the NYU Depth dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) plays a crucial role in adapting large language models (LLMs) to specific domains or tasks. However, as demonstrated by empirical experiments, the collected data inevitably contains noise in practical applications, which poses significant challenges to model performance on downstream tasks. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a noise-robust SFT framework to enhance model capabilities in downstream tasks. To address this challenge, we introduce a robust SFT framework (RobustFT) that performs noise detection and relabeling on downstream task data. For noise identification, our approach employs a multi-expert collaborative system with inference-enhanced models to achieve superior noise detection. In the denoising phase, we utilize a context-enhanced strategy, which incorporates the most relevant and confident knowledge followed by careful assessment to generate reliable annotations. Additionally, we introduce an effective data selection mechanism based on response entropy, ensuring only high-quality samples are retained for fine-tuning. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple LLMs across five datasets demonstrate RobustFT's exceptional performance in noisy scenarios.

Self-supervised features are the cornerstone of modern machine learning systems. They are typically pre-trained on data collections whose construction and curation typically require extensive human effort. This manual process has some limitations similar to those encountered in supervised learning, e.g., the crowd-sourced selection of data is costly and time-consuming, preventing scaling the dataset size. In this work, we consider the problem of automatic curation of high-quality datasets for self-supervised pre-training. We posit that such datasets should be large, diverse and balanced, and propose a clustering-based approach for building ones satisfying all these criteria. Our method involves successive and hierarchical applications of k-means on a large and diverse data repository to obtain clusters that distribute uniformly among data concepts, followed by a hierarchical, balanced sampling step from these clusters. Extensive experiments on three different data domains including web-based images, satellite images and text show that features trained on our automatically curated datasets outperform those trained on uncurated data while being on par or better than ones trained on manually curated data.

With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their ubiquitous deployment in diverse domains, measuring language model behavior on realistic data is imperative. For example, a company deploying a client-facing chatbot must ensure that the model will not respond to client requests with profanity. Current evaluations approach this problem using small, domain-specific datasets with human-curated labels. These evaluation sets are often sampled from a narrow and simplified distribution, and data sources can unknowingly be leaked into the training set which can lead to misleading evaluations. To bypass these drawbacks, we propose a framework for self-supervised evaluation of LLMs by analyzing their sensitivity or invariance to transformations on the input text. Self-supervised evaluation can directly monitor LLM behavior on datasets collected in the wild or streamed during live model deployment. We demonstrate self-supervised evaluation strategies for measuring closed-book knowledge, toxicity, and long-range context dependence, in addition to sensitivity to grammatical structure and tokenization errors. When comparisons to similar human-labeled benchmarks are available, we find strong correlations between self-supervised and human-supervised evaluations. The self-supervised paradigm complements current evaluation strategies that rely on labeled data.

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on specific datasets is a common practice to improve performance on target tasks. However, this performance gain often leads to overfitting, where the model becomes too specialized in either the task or the characteristics of the training data, resulting in a loss of generalization. This paper introduces Selective Self-to-Supervised Fine-Tuning (S3FT), a fine-tuning approach that achieves better performance than the standard supervised fine-tuning (SFT) while improving generalization. S3FT leverages the existence of multiple valid responses to a query. By utilizing the model's correct responses, S3FT reduces model specialization during the fine-tuning stage. S3FT first identifies the correct model responses from the training set by deploying an appropriate judge. Then, it fine-tunes the model using the correct model responses and the gold response (or its paraphrase) for the remaining samples. The effectiveness of S3FT is demonstrated through experiments on mathematical reasoning, Python programming and reading comprehension tasks. The results show that standard SFT can lead to an average performance drop of up to 4.4 on multiple benchmarks, such as MMLU and TruthfulQA. In contrast, S3FT reduces this drop by half, i.e. 2.5, indicating better generalization capabilities than SFT while performing significantly better on the fine-tuning tasks.

We present DenseAV, a novel dual encoder grounding architecture that learns high-resolution, semantically meaningful, and audio-visually aligned features solely through watching videos. We show that DenseAV can discover the ``meaning'' of words and the ``location'' of sounds without explicit localization supervision. Furthermore, it automatically discovers and distinguishes between these two types of associations without supervision. We show that DenseAV's localization abilities arise from a new multi-head feature aggregation operator that directly compares dense image and audio representations for contrastive learning. In contrast, many other systems that learn ``global'' audio and video representations cannot localize words and sound. Finally, we contribute two new datasets to improve the evaluation of AV representations through speech and sound prompted semantic segmentation. On these and other datasets we show DenseAV dramatically outperforms the prior art on speech and sound prompted semantic segmentation. DenseAV outperforms the previous state-of-the-art, ImageBind, on cross-modal retrieval using fewer than half of the parameters. Project Page: https://aka.ms/denseav{https://aka.ms/denseav}

Semi-supervised heterogeneous domain adaptation (SHDA) addresses learning across domains with distinct feature representations and distributions, where source samples are labeled while most target samples are unlabeled, with only a small fraction labeled. Moreover, there is no one-to-one correspondence between source and target samples. Although various SHDA methods have been developed to tackle this problem, the nature of the knowledge transferred across heterogeneous domains remains unclear. This paper delves into this question from an empirical perspective. We conduct extensive experiments on about 330 SHDA tasks, employing two supervised learning methods and seven representative SHDA methods. Surprisingly, our observations indicate that both the category and feature information of source samples do not significantly impact the performance of the target domain. Additionally, noise drawn from simple distributions, when used as source samples, may contain transferable knowledge. Based on this insight, we perform a series of experiments to uncover the underlying principles of transferable knowledge in SHDA. Specifically, we design a unified Knowledge Transfer Framework (KTF) for SHDA. Based on the KTF, we find that the transferable knowledge in SHDA primarily stems from the transferability and discriminability of the source domain. Consequently, ensuring those properties in source samples, regardless of their origin (e.g., image, text, noise), can enhance the effectiveness of knowledge transfer in SHDA tasks. The codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/yyyaoyuan/SHDA.

In semi-supervised semantic segmentation, a model is trained with a limited number of labeled images along with a large corpus of unlabeled images to reduce the high annotation effort. While previous methods are able to learn good segmentation boundaries, they are prone to confuse classes with similar visual appearance due to the limited supervision. On the other hand, vision-language models (VLMs) are able to learn diverse semantic knowledge from image-caption datasets but produce noisy segmentation due to the image-level training. In SemiVL, we propose to integrate rich priors from VLM pre-training into semi-supervised semantic segmentation to learn better semantic decision boundaries. To adapt the VLM from global to local reasoning, we introduce a spatial fine-tuning strategy for label-efficient learning. Further, we design a language-guided decoder to jointly reason over vision and language. Finally, we propose to handle inherent ambiguities in class labels by providing the model with language guidance in the form of class definitions. We evaluate SemiVL on 4 semantic segmentation datasets, where it significantly outperforms previous semi-supervised methods. For instance, SemiVL improves the state-of-the-art by +13.5 mIoU on COCO with 232 annotated images and by +6.1 mIoU on Pascal VOC with 92 labels. Project page: https://github.com/google-research/semivl

In knowledge-intensive tasks such as open-domain question answering (OpenQA), Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle to generate factual answers relying solely on their internal (parametric) knowledge. To address this limitation, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems enhance LLMs by retrieving relevant information from external sources, thereby positioning the retriever as a pivotal component. Although dense retrieval demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, its training poses challenges due to the scarcity of ground-truth evidence, largely attributed to the high costs of human annotation. In this paper, we propose W-RAG by utilizing the ranking capabilities of LLMs to create weakly labeled data for training dense retrievers. Specifically, we rerank the top-K passages retrieved via BM25 by assessing the probability that LLMs will generate the correct answer based on the question and each passage. The highest-ranking passages are then used as positive training examples for dense retrieval. Our comprehensive experiments across four publicly available OpenQA datasets demonstrate that our approach enhances both retrieval and OpenQA performance compared to baseline models.

In recent years, datasets of paired audio and captions have enabled remarkable success in automatically generating descriptions for audio clips, namely Automated Audio Captioning (AAC). However, it is labor-intensive and time-consuming to collect a sufficient number of paired audio and captions. Motivated by the recent advances in Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP), we propose a weakly-supervised approach to train an AAC model assuming only text data and a pre-trained CLAP model, alleviating the need for paired target data. Our approach leverages the similarity between audio and text embeddings in CLAP. During training, we learn to reconstruct the text from the CLAP text embedding, and during inference, we decode using the audio embeddings. To mitigate the modality gap between the audio and text embeddings we employ strategies to bridge the gap during training and inference stages. We evaluate our proposed method on Clotho and AudioCaps datasets demonstrating its ability to achieve a relative performance of up to ~83% compared to fully supervised approaches trained with paired target data.

This paper presents E5, a family of state-of-the-art text embeddings that transfer well to a wide range of tasks. The model is trained in a contrastive manner with weak supervision signals from our curated large-scale text pair dataset (called CCPairs). E5 can be readily used as a general-purpose embedding model for any tasks requiring a single-vector representation of texts such as retrieval, clustering, and classification, achieving strong performance in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. We conduct extensive evaluations on 56 datasets from the BEIR and MTEB benchmarks. For zero-shot settings, E5 is the first model that outperforms the strong BM25 baseline on the BEIR retrieval benchmark without using any labeled data. When fine-tuned, E5 obtains the best results on the MTEB benchmark, beating existing embedding models with 40x more parameters.

Vision Transformers (ViT)s have shown great performance in self-supervised learning of global and local representations that can be transferred to downstream applications. Inspired by these results, we introduce a novel self-supervised learning framework with tailored proxy tasks for medical image analysis. Specifically, we propose: (i) a new 3D transformer-based model, dubbed Swin UNEt TRansformers (Swin UNETR), with a hierarchical encoder for self-supervised pre-training; (ii) tailored proxy tasks for learning the underlying pattern of human anatomy. We demonstrate successful pre-training of the proposed model on 5,050 publicly available computed tomography (CT) images from various body organs. The effectiveness of our approach is validated by fine-tuning the pre-trained models on the Beyond the Cranial Vault (BTCV) Segmentation Challenge with 13 abdominal organs and segmentation tasks from the Medical Segmentation Decathlon (MSD) dataset. Our model is currently the state-of-the-art (i.e. ranked 1st) on the public test leaderboards of both MSD and BTCV datasets. Code: https://monai.io/research/swin-unetr

Despite the recent progress of fully-supervised action segmentation techniques, the performance is still not fully satisfactory. One main challenge is the problem of spatiotemporal variations (e.g. different people may perform the same activity in various ways). Therefore, we exploit unlabeled videos to address this problem by reformulating the action segmentation task as a cross-domain problem with domain discrepancy caused by spatio-temporal variations. To reduce the discrepancy, we propose Self-Supervised Temporal Domain Adaptation (SSTDA), which contains two self-supervised auxiliary tasks (binary and sequential domain prediction) to jointly align cross-domain feature spaces embedded with local and global temporal dynamics, achieving better performance than other Domain Adaptation (DA) approaches. On three challenging benchmark datasets (GTEA, 50Salads, and Breakfast), SSTDA outperforms the current state-of-the-art method by large margins (e.g. for the F1@25 score, from 59.6% to 69.1% on Breakfast, from 73.4% to 81.5% on 50Salads, and from 83.6% to 89.1% on GTEA), and requires only 65% of the labeled training data for comparable performance, demonstrating the usefulness of adapting to unlabeled target videos across variations. The source code is available at https://github.com/cmhungsteve/SSTDA.

Diffusion-based audio-driven talking avatar methods have recently gained attention for their high-fidelity, vivid, and expressive results. However, their slow inference speed limits practical applications. Despite the development of various distillation techniques for diffusion models, we found that naive diffusion distillation methods do not yield satisfactory results. Distilled models exhibit reduced robustness with open-set input images and a decreased correlation between audio and video compared to teacher models, undermining the advantages of diffusion models. To address this, we propose FADA (Fast Diffusion Avatar Synthesis with Mixed-Supervised Multi-CFG Distillation). We first designed a mixed-supervised loss to leverage data of varying quality and enhance the overall model capability as well as robustness. Additionally, we propose a multi-CFG distillation with learnable tokens to utilize the correlation between audio and reference image conditions, reducing the threefold inference runs caused by multi-CFG with acceptable quality degradation. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets show that FADA generates vivid videos comparable to recent diffusion model-based methods while achieving an NFE speedup of 4.17-12.5 times. Demos are available at our webpage http://fadavatar.github.io.

Process supervision enhances the performance of large language models in reasoning tasks by providing feedback at each step of chain-of-thought reasoning. However, due to the lack of effective process supervision methods, even advanced large language models are prone to logical errors and redundant reasoning. We claim that the effectiveness of process supervision significantly depends on both the accuracy and the length of reasoning chains. Moreover, we identify that these factors exhibit a nonlinear relationship with the overall reward score of the reasoning process. Inspired by these insights, we propose a novel process supervision paradigm, PSPO*, which systematically outlines the workflow from reward model training to policy optimization, and highlights the importance of nonlinear rewards in process supervision. Based on PSPO*, we develop the PSPO-WRS, which considers the number of reasoning steps in determining reward scores and utilizes an adjusted Weibull distribution for nonlinear reward shaping. Experimental results on six mathematical reasoning datasets demonstrate that PSPO-WRS consistently outperforms current mainstream models.

3D facial landmark localization has proven to be of particular use for applications, such as face tracking, 3D face modeling, and image-based 3D face reconstruction. In the supervised learning case, such methods usually rely on 3D landmark datasets derived from 3DMM-based registration that often lack spatial definition alignment, as compared with that chosen by hand-labeled human consensus, e.g., how are eyebrow landmarks defined? This creates a gap between landmark datasets generated via high-quality 2D human labels and 3DMMs, and it ultimately limits their effectiveness. To address this issue, we introduce a novel semi-supervised learning approach that learns 3D landmarks by directly lifting (visible) hand-labeled 2D landmarks and ensures better definition alignment, without the need for 3D landmark datasets. To lift 2D landmarks to 3D, we leverage 3D-aware GANs for better multi-view consistency learning and in-the-wild multi-frame videos for robust cross-generalization. Empirical experiments demonstrate that our method not only achieves better definition alignment between 2D-3D landmarks but also outperforms other supervised learning 3D landmark localization methods on both 3DMM labeled and photogrammetric ground truth evaluation datasets. Project Page: https://davidcferman.github.io/FaceLift

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation has garnered considerable attention for its applications in autonomous driving and robotics. While recent methods have made strides in leveraging techniques like the Self Query Layer (SQL) to infer depth from motion, they often overlook the potential of strengthening pose information. In this paper, we introduce SPIdepth, a novel approach that prioritizes enhancing the pose network for improved depth estimation. Building upon the foundation laid by SQL, SPIdepth emphasizes the importance of pose information in capturing fine-grained scene structures. By enhancing the pose network's capabilities, SPIdepth achieves remarkable advancements in scene understanding and depth estimation. Experimental results on benchmark datasets such as KITTI, Cityscapes, and Make3D showcase SPIdepth's state-of-the-art performance, surpassing previous methods by significant margins. Specifically, SPIdepth tops the self-supervised KITTI benchmark. Additionally, SPIdepth achieves the lowest AbsRel (0.029), SqRel (0.069), and RMSE (1.394) on KITTI, establishing new state-of-the-art results. On Cityscapes, SPIdepth shows improvements over SQLdepth of 21.7% in AbsRel, 36.8% in SqRel, and 16.5% in RMSE, even without using motion masks. On Make3D, SPIdepth in zero-shot outperforms all other models. Remarkably, SPIdepth achieves these results using only a single image for inference, surpassing even methods that utilize video sequences for inference, thus demonstrating its efficacy and efficiency in real-world applications. Our approach represents a significant leap forward in self-supervised monocular depth estimation, underscoring the importance of strengthening pose information for advancing scene understanding in real-world applications. The code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/Lavreniuk/SPIdepth.

We present a new self-supervised approach, SelfPose3d, for estimating 3d poses of multiple persons from multiple camera views. Unlike current state-of-the-art fully-supervised methods, our approach does not require any 2d or 3d ground-truth poses and uses only the multi-view input images from a calibrated camera setup and 2d pseudo poses generated from an off-the-shelf 2d human pose estimator. We propose two self-supervised learning objectives: self-supervised person localization in 3d space and self-supervised 3d pose estimation. We achieve self-supervised 3d person localization by training the model on synthetically generated 3d points, serving as 3d person root positions, and on the projected root-heatmaps in all the views. We then model the 3d poses of all the localized persons with a bottleneck representation, map them onto all views obtaining 2d joints, and render them using 2d Gaussian heatmaps in an end-to-end differentiable manner. Afterwards, we use the corresponding 2d joints and heatmaps from the pseudo 2d poses for learning. To alleviate the intrinsic inaccuracy of the pseudo labels, we propose an adaptive supervision attention mechanism to guide the self-supervision. Our experiments and analysis on three public benchmark datasets, including Panoptic, Shelf, and Campus, show the effectiveness of our approach, which is comparable to fully-supervised methods. Code: https://github.com/CAMMA-public/SelfPose3D. Video demo: https://youtu.be/GAqhmUIr2E8.

Semi-supervised learning relaxes the need of large pixel-wise labeled datasets for image segmentation by leveraging unlabeled data. A prominent way to exploit unlabeled data is to regularize model predictions. Since the predictions of unlabeled data can be unreliable, uncertainty-aware schemes are typically employed to gradually learn from meaningful and reliable predictions. Uncertainty estimation methods, however, rely on multiple inferences from the model predictions that must be computed for each training step, which is computationally expensive. Moreover, these uncertainty maps capture pixel-wise disparities and do not consider global information. This work proposes a novel method to estimate segmentation uncertainty by leveraging global information from the segmentation masks. More precisely, an anatomically-aware representation is first learnt to model the available segmentation masks. The learnt representation thereupon maps the prediction of a new segmentation into an anatomically-plausible segmentation. The deviation from the plausible segmentation aids in estimating the underlying pixel-level uncertainty in order to further guide the segmentation network. The proposed method consequently estimates the uncertainty using a single inference from our representation, thereby reducing the total computation. We evaluate our method on two publicly available segmentation datasets of left atria in cardiac MRIs and of multiple organs in abdominal CTs. Our anatomically-aware method improves the segmentation accuracy over the state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods in terms of two commonly used evaluation metrics.

Recently, pre-trained foundation models have enabled significant advancements in multiple fields. In molecular machine learning, however, where datasets are often hand-curated, and hence typically small, the lack of datasets with labeled features, and codebases to manage those datasets, has hindered the development of foundation models. In this work, we present seven novel datasets categorized by size into three distinct categories: ToyMix, LargeMix and UltraLarge. These datasets push the boundaries in both the scale and the diversity of supervised labels for molecular learning. They cover nearly 100 million molecules and over 3000 sparsely defined tasks, totaling more than 13 billion individual labels of both quantum and biological nature. In comparison, our datasets contain 300 times more data points than the widely used OGB-LSC PCQM4Mv2 dataset, and 13 times more than the quantum-only QM1B dataset. In addition, to support the development of foundational models based on our proposed datasets, we present the Graphium graph machine learning library which simplifies the process of building and training molecular machine learning models for multi-task and multi-level molecular datasets. Finally, we present a range of baseline results as a starting point of multi-task and multi-level training on these datasets. Empirically, we observe that performance on low-resource biological datasets show improvement by also training on large amounts of quantum data. This indicates that there may be potential in multi-task and multi-level training of a foundation model and fine-tuning it to resource-constrained downstream tasks.

Curvilinear object segmentation is critical for many applications. However, manually annotating curvilinear objects is very time-consuming and error-prone, yielding insufficiently available annotated datasets for existing supervised methods and domain adaptation methods. This paper proposes a self-supervised curvilinear object segmentation method that learns robust and distinctive features from fractals and unlabeled images (FreeCOS). The key contributions include a novel Fractal-FDA synthesis (FFS) module and a geometric information alignment (GIA) approach. FFS generates curvilinear structures based on the parametric Fractal L-system and integrates the generated structures into unlabeled images to obtain synthetic training images via Fourier Domain Adaptation. GIA reduces the intensity differences between the synthetic and unlabeled images by comparing the intensity order of a given pixel to the values of its nearby neighbors. Such image alignment can explicitly remove the dependency on absolute intensity values and enhance the inherent geometric characteristics which are common in both synthetic and real images. In addition, GIA aligns features of synthetic and real images via the prediction space adaptation loss (PSAL) and the curvilinear mask contrastive loss (CMCL). Extensive experimental results on four public datasets, i.e., XCAD, DRIVE, STARE and CrackTree demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised methods, self-supervised methods and traditional methods by a large margin. The source code of this work is available at https://github.com/TY-Shi/FreeCOS.

Supervised contrastive loss (SCL) is a competitive and often superior alternative to the cross-entropy loss for classification. While prior studies have demonstrated that both losses yield symmetric training representations under balanced data, this symmetry breaks under class imbalances. This paper presents an intriguing discovery: the introduction of a ReLU activation at the final layer effectively restores the symmetry in SCL-learned representations. We arrive at this finding analytically, by establishing that the global minimizers of an unconstrained features model with SCL loss and entry-wise non-negativity constraints form an orthogonal frame. Extensive experiments conducted across various datasets, architectures, and imbalance scenarios corroborate our finding. Importantly, our experiments reveal that the inclusion of the ReLU activation restores symmetry without compromising test accuracy. This constitutes the first geometry characterization of SCL under imbalances. Additionally, our analysis and experiments underscore the pivotal role of batch selection strategies in representation geometry. By proving necessary and sufficient conditions for mini-batch choices that ensure invariant symmetric representations, we introduce batch-binding as an efficient strategy that guarantees these conditions hold.

We propose UnMixMatch, a semi-supervised learning framework which can learn effective representations from unconstrained unlabelled data in order to scale up performance. Most existing semi-supervised methods rely on the assumption that labelled and unlabelled samples are drawn from the same distribution, which limits the potential for improvement through the use of free-living unlabeled data. Consequently, the generalizability and scalability of semi-supervised learning are often hindered by this assumption. Our method aims to overcome these constraints and effectively utilize unconstrained unlabelled data in semi-supervised learning. UnMixMatch consists of three main components: a supervised learner with hard augmentations that provides strong regularization, a contrastive consistency regularizer to learn underlying representations from the unlabelled data, and a self-supervised loss to enhance the representations that are learnt from the unlabelled data. We perform extensive experiments on 4 commonly used datasets and demonstrate superior performance over existing semi-supervised methods with a performance boost of 4.79%. Extensive ablation and sensitivity studies show the effectiveness and impact of each of the proposed components of our method.

Automatic speaker verification task has made great achievements using deep learning approaches with the large-scale manually annotated dataset. However, it's very difficult and expensive to collect a large amount of well-labeled data for system building. In this paper, we propose a novel and advanced self-supervised learning framework which can construct a high performance speaker verification system without using any labeled data. To avoid the impact of false negative pairs, we adopt the self-distillation with no labels (DINO) framework as the initial model, which can be trained without exploiting negative pairs. Then, we introduce a cluster-aware training strategy for DINO to improve the diversity of data. In the iteration learning stage, due to a mass of unreliable labels from clustering, the quality of pseudo labels is important for the system training. This motivates us to propose dynamic loss-gate and label correction (DLG-LC) methods to alleviate the performance degradation caused by unreliable labels. More specifically, we model the loss distribution with GMM and obtain the loss-gate threshold dynamically to distinguish the reliable and unreliable labels. Besides, we adopt the model predictions to correct the unreliable label, for better utilizing the unreliable data rather than dropping them directly. Moreover, we extend the DLG-LC to multi-modality to further improve the performance. The experiments are performed on the commonly used Voxceleb dataset. Compared to the best-known self-supervised speaker verification system, our proposed method obtain 22.17%, 27.94% and 25.56% relative EER improvement on Vox-O, Vox-E and Vox-H test sets, even with fewer iterations, smaller models, and simpler clustering methods. More importantly, the newly proposed system even achieves comparable results with the fully supervised system, but without using any human labeled data.

Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) using image-level labels typically utilizes Class Activation Map (CAM) to generate the pseudo labels. Limited by the local structure perception of CNN, CAM usually cannot identify the integral object regions. Though the recent Vision Transformer (ViT) can remedy this flaw, we observe it also brings the over-smoothing issue, \ie, the final patch tokens incline to be uniform. In this work, we propose Token Contrast (ToCo) to address this issue and further explore the virtue of ViT for WSSS. Firstly, motivated by the observation that intermediate layers in ViT can still retain semantic diversity, we designed a Patch Token Contrast module (PTC). PTC supervises the final patch tokens with the pseudo token relations derived from intermediate layers, allowing them to align the semantic regions and thus yield more accurate CAM. Secondly, to further differentiate the low-confidence regions in CAM, we devised a Class Token Contrast module (CTC) inspired by the fact that class tokens in ViT can capture high-level semantics. CTC facilitates the representation consistency between uncertain local regions and global objects by contrasting their class tokens. Experiments on the PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets show the proposed ToCo can remarkably surpass other single-stage competitors and achieve comparable performance with state-of-the-art multi-stage methods. Code is available at https://github.com/rulixiang/ToCo.

In contrastive self-supervised learning, the common way to learn discriminative representation is to pull different augmented "views" of the same image closer while pushing all other images further apart, which has been proven to be effective. However, it is unavoidable to construct undesirable views containing different semantic concepts during the augmentation procedure. It would damage the semantic consistency of representation to pull these augmentations closer in the feature space indiscriminately. In this study, we introduce feature-level augmentation and propose a novel semantics-consistent feature search (SCFS) method to mitigate this negative effect. The main idea of SCFS is to adaptively search semantics-consistent features to enhance the contrast between semantics-consistent regions in different augmentations. Thus, the trained model can learn to focus on meaningful object regions, improving the semantic representation ability. Extensive experiments conducted on different datasets and tasks demonstrate that SCFS effectively improves the performance of self-supervised learning and achieves state-of-the-art performance on different downstream tasks.

LiDAR mapping is important yet challenging in self-driving and mobile robotics. To tackle such a global point cloud registration problem, DeepMapping converts the complex map estimation into a self-supervised training of simple deep networks. Despite its broad convergence range on small datasets, DeepMapping still cannot produce satisfactory results on large-scale datasets with thousands of frames. This is due to the lack of loop closures and exact cross-frame point correspondences, and the slow convergence of its global localization network. We propose DeepMapping2 by adding two novel techniques to address these issues: (1) organization of training batch based on map topology from loop closing, and (2) self-supervised local-to-global point consistency loss leveraging pairwise registration. Our experiments and ablation studies on public datasets (KITTI, NCLT, and Nebula) demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Temporal action segmentation in videos has drawn much attention recently. Timestamp supervision is a cost-effective way for this task. To obtain more information to optimize the model, the existing method generated pseudo frame-wise labels iteratively based on the output of a segmentation model and the timestamp annotations. However, this practice may introduce noise and oscillation during the training, and lead to performance degeneration. To address this problem, we propose a new framework for timestamp supervised temporal action segmentation by introducing a teacher model parallel to the segmentation model to help stabilize the process of model optimization. The teacher model can be seen as an ensemble of the segmentation model, which helps to suppress the noise and to improve the stability of pseudo labels. We further introduce a segmentally smoothing loss, which is more focused and cohesive, to enforce the smooth transition of the predicted probabilities within action instances. The experiments on three datasets show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method and performs comparably against the fully-supervised methods at a much lower annotation cost.

Advances in deep learning for human activity recognition have been relatively limited due to the lack of large labelled datasets. In this study, we leverage self-supervised learning techniques on the UK-Biobank activity tracker dataset--the largest of its kind to date--containing more than 700,000 person-days of unlabelled wearable sensor data. Our resulting activity recognition model consistently outperformed strong baselines across seven benchmark datasets, with an F1 relative improvement of 2.5%-100% (median 18.4%), the largest improvements occurring in the smaller datasets. In contrast to previous studies, our results generalise across external datasets, devices, and environments. Our open-source model will help researchers and developers to build customisable and generalisable activity classifiers with high performance.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has been extensively explored in recent years. Particularly, generative SSL has seen emerging success in natural language processing and other AI fields, such as the wide adoption of BERT and GPT. Despite this, contrastive learning-which heavily relies on structural data augmentation and complicated training strategies-has been the dominant approach in graph SSL, while the progress of generative SSL on graphs, especially graph autoencoders (GAEs), has thus far not reached the potential as promised in other fields. In this paper, we identify and examine the issues that negatively impact the development of GAEs, including their reconstruction objective, training robustness, and error metric. We present a masked graph autoencoder GraphMAE that mitigates these issues for generative self-supervised graph pretraining. Instead of reconstructing graph structures, we propose to focus on feature reconstruction with both a masking strategy and scaled cosine error that benefit the robust training of GraphMAE. We conduct extensive experiments on 21 public datasets for three different graph learning tasks. The results manifest that GraphMAE-a simple graph autoencoder with careful designs-can consistently generate outperformance over both contrastive and generative state-of-the-art baselines. This study provides an understanding of graph autoencoders and demonstrates the potential of generative self-supervised pre-training on graphs.

A major bottleneck in training robust Human-Activity Recognition models (HAR) is the need for large-scale labeled sensor datasets. Because labeling large amounts of sensor data is an expensive task, unsupervised and semi-supervised learning techniques have emerged that can learn good features from the data without requiring any labels. In this paper, we extend this line of research and present a novel technique called Collaborative Self-Supervised Learning (ColloSSL) which leverages unlabeled data collected from multiple devices worn by a user to learn high-quality features of the data. A key insight that underpins the design of ColloSSL is that unlabeled sensor datasets simultaneously captured by multiple devices can be viewed as natural transformations of each other, and leveraged to generate a supervisory signal for representation learning. We present three technical innovations to extend conventional self-supervised learning algorithms to a multi-device setting: a Device Selection approach which selects positive and negative devices to enable contrastive learning, a Contrastive Sampling algorithm which samples positive and negative examples in a multi-device setting, and a loss function called Multi-view Contrastive Loss which extends standard contrastive loss to a multi-device setting. Our experimental results on three multi-device datasets show that ColloSSL outperforms both fully-supervised and semi-supervised learning techniques in majority of the experiment settings, resulting in an absolute increase of upto 7.9% in F_1 score compared to the best performing baselines. We also show that ColloSSL outperforms the fully-supervised methods in a low-data regime, by just using one-tenth of the available labeled data in the best case.

Model pre-training is a cornerstone of modern visual recognition systems. Although fully supervised pre-training on datasets like ImageNet is still the de-facto standard, recent studies suggest that large-scale weakly supervised pre-training can outperform fully supervised approaches. This paper revisits weakly-supervised pre-training of models using hashtag supervision with modern versions of residual networks and the largest-ever dataset of images and corresponding hashtags. We study the performance of the resulting models in various transfer-learning settings including zero-shot transfer. We also compare our models with those obtained via large-scale self-supervised learning. We find our weakly-supervised models to be very competitive across all settings, and find they substantially outperform their self-supervised counterparts. We also include an investigation into whether our models learned potentially troubling associations or stereotypes. Overall, our results provide a compelling argument for the use of weakly supervised learning in the development of visual recognition systems. Our models, Supervised Weakly through hashtAGs (SWAG), are available publicly.

Rapid progress in 3D semantic segmentation is inseparable from the advances of deep network models, which highly rely on large-scale annotated data for training. To address the high cost and challenges of 3D point-level labeling, we present a method for semi-supervised point cloud semantic segmentation to adopt unlabeled point clouds in training to boost the model performance. Inspired by the recent contrastive loss in self-supervised tasks, we propose the guided point contrastive loss to enhance the feature representation and model generalization ability in semi-supervised setting. Semantic predictions on unlabeled point clouds serve as pseudo-label guidance in our loss to avoid negative pairs in the same category. Also, we design the confidence guidance to ensure high-quality feature learning. Besides, a category-balanced sampling strategy is proposed to collect positive and negative samples to mitigate the class imbalance problem. Extensive experiments on three datasets (ScanNet V2, S3DIS, and SemanticKITTI) show the effectiveness of our semi-supervised method to improve the prediction quality with unlabeled data.

Learning high-quality sentence representations benefits a wide range of natural language processing tasks. Though BERT-based pre-trained language models achieve high performance on many downstream tasks, the native derived sentence representations are proved to be collapsed and thus produce a poor performance on the semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks. In this paper, we present ConSERT, a Contrastive Framework for Self-Supervised Sentence Representation Transfer, that adopts contrastive learning to fine-tune BERT in an unsupervised and effective way. By making use of unlabeled texts, ConSERT solves the collapse issue of BERT-derived sentence representations and make them more applicable for downstream tasks. Experiments on STS datasets demonstrate that ConSERT achieves an 8\% relative improvement over the previous state-of-the-art, even comparable to the supervised SBERT-NLI. And when further incorporating NLI supervision, we achieve new state-of-the-art performance on STS tasks. Moreover, ConSERT obtains comparable results with only 1000 samples available, showing its robustness in data scarcity scenarios.

Self-supervised learning methods are gaining increasing traction in computer vision due to their recent success in reducing the gap with supervised learning. In natural language processing (NLP) self-supervised learning and transformers are already the methods of choice. The recent literature suggests that the transformers are becoming increasingly popular also in computer vision. So far, the vision transformers have been shown to work well when pretrained either using a large scale supervised data or with some kind of co-supervision, e.g. in terms of teacher network. These supervised pretrained vision transformers achieve very good results in downstream tasks with minimal changes. In this work we investigate the merits of self-supervised learning for pretraining image/vision transformers and then using them for downstream classification tasks. We propose Self-supervised vIsion Transformers (SiT) and discuss several self-supervised training mechanisms to obtain a pretext model. The architectural flexibility of SiT allows us to use it as an autoencoder and work with multiple self-supervised tasks seamlessly. We show that a pretrained SiT can be finetuned for a downstream classification task on small scale datasets, consisting of a few thousand images rather than several millions. The proposed approach is evaluated on standard datasets using common protocols. The results demonstrate the strength of the transformers and their suitability for self-supervised learning. We outperformed existing self-supervised learning methods by large margin. We also observed that SiT is good for few shot learning and also showed that it is learning useful representation by simply training a linear classifier on top of the learned features from SiT. Pretraining, finetuning, and evaluation codes will be available under: https://github.com/Sara-Ahmed/SiT.

Video Question Answering (Video QA) requires fine-grained understanding of both video and language modalities to answer the given questions. In this paper, we propose novel training schemes for multiple-choice video question answering with a self-supervised pre-training stage and a supervised contrastive learning in the main stage as an auxiliary learning. In the self-supervised pre-training stage, we transform the original problem format of predicting the correct answer into the one that predicts the relevant question to provide a model with broader contextual inputs without any further dataset or annotation. For contrastive learning in the main stage, we add a masking noise to the input corresponding to the ground-truth answer, and consider the original input of the ground-truth answer as a positive sample, while treating the rest as negative samples. By mapping the positive sample closer to the masked input, we show that the model performance is improved. We further employ locally aligned attention to focus more effectively on the video frames that are particularly relevant to the given corresponding subtitle sentences. We evaluate our proposed model on highly competitive benchmark datasets related to multiple-choice video QA: TVQA, TVQA+, and DramaQA. Experimental results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on all datasets. We also validate our approaches through further analyses.

We propose a self-supervised method to learn feature representations from videos. A standard approach in traditional self-supervised methods uses positive-negative data pairs to train with contrastive learning strategy. In such a case, different modalities of the same video are treated as positives and video clips from a different video are treated as negatives. Because the spatio-temporal information is important for video representation, we extend the negative samples by introducing intra-negative samples, which are transformed from the same anchor video by breaking temporal relations in video clips. With the proposed Inter-Intra Contrastive (IIC) framework, we can train spatio-temporal convolutional networks to learn video representations. There are many flexible options in our IIC framework and we conduct experiments by using several different configurations. Evaluations are conducted on video retrieval and video recognition tasks using the learned video representation. Our proposed IIC outperforms current state-of-the-art results by a large margin, such as 16.7% and 9.5% points improvements in top-1 accuracy on UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets for video retrieval, respectively. For video recognition, improvements can also be obtained on these two benchmark datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/BestJuly/Inter-intra-video-contrastive-learning.

Answering natural language questions over tables is usually seen as a semantic parsing task. To alleviate the collection cost of full logical forms, one popular approach focuses on weak supervision consisting of denotations instead of logical forms. However, training semantic parsers from weak supervision poses difficulties, and in addition, the generated logical forms are only used as an intermediate step prior to retrieving the denotation. In this paper, we present TAPAS, an approach to question answering over tables without generating logical forms. TAPAS trains from weak supervision, and predicts the denotation by selecting table cells and optionally applying a corresponding aggregation operator to such selection. TAPAS extends BERT's architecture to encode tables as input, initializes from an effective joint pre-training of text segments and tables crawled from Wikipedia, and is trained end-to-end. We experiment with three different semantic parsing datasets, and find that TAPAS outperforms or rivals semantic parsing models by improving state-of-the-art accuracy on SQA from 55.1 to 67.2 and performing on par with the state-of-the-art on WIKISQL and WIKITQ, but with a simpler model architecture. We additionally find that transfer learning, which is trivial in our setting, from WIKISQL to WIKITQ, yields 48.7 accuracy, 4.2 points above the state-of-the-art.

Training accurate 3D human pose estimators requires large amount of 3D ground-truth data which is costly to collect. Various weakly or self supervised pose estimation methods have been proposed due to lack of 3D data. Nevertheless, these methods, in addition to 2D ground-truth poses, require either additional supervision in various forms (e.g. unpaired 3D ground truth data, a small subset of labels) or the camera parameters in multiview settings. To address these problems, we present EpipolarPose, a self-supervised learning method for 3D human pose estimation, which does not need any 3D ground-truth data or camera extrinsics. During training, EpipolarPose estimates 2D poses from multi-view images, and then, utilizes epipolar geometry to obtain a 3D pose and camera geometry which are subsequently used to train a 3D pose estimator. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on standard benchmark datasets i.e. Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP where we set the new state-of-the-art among weakly/self-supervised methods. Furthermore, we propose a new performance measure Pose Structure Score (PSS) which is a scale invariant, structure aware measure to evaluate the structural plausibility of a pose with respect to its ground truth. Code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/mkocabas/EpipolarPose

Large-scale labeled data are generally required to train deep neural networks in order to obtain better performance in visual feature learning from images or videos for computer vision applications. To avoid extensive cost of collecting and annotating large-scale datasets, as a subset of unsupervised learning methods, self-supervised learning methods are proposed to learn general image and video features from large-scale unlabeled data without using any human-annotated labels. This paper provides an extensive review of deep learning-based self-supervised general visual feature learning methods from images or videos. First, the motivation, general pipeline, and terminologies of this field are described. Then the common deep neural network architectures that used for self-supervised learning are summarized. Next, the main components and evaluation metrics of self-supervised learning methods are reviewed followed by the commonly used image and video datasets and the existing self-supervised visual feature learning methods. Finally, quantitative performance comparisons of the reviewed methods on benchmark datasets are summarized and discussed for both image and video feature learning. At last, this paper is concluded and lists a set of promising future directions for self-supervised visual feature learning.

State-of-the-art visual perception models for a wide range of tasks rely on supervised pretraining. ImageNet classification is the de facto pretraining task for these models. Yet, ImageNet is now nearly ten years old and is by modern standards "small". Even so, relatively little is known about the behavior of pretraining with datasets that are multiple orders of magnitude larger. The reasons are obvious: such datasets are difficult to collect and annotate. In this paper, we present a unique study of transfer learning with large convolutional networks trained to predict hashtags on billions of social media images. Our experiments demonstrate that training for large-scale hashtag prediction leads to excellent results. We show improvements on several image classification and object detection tasks, and report the highest ImageNet-1k single-crop, top-1 accuracy to date: 85.4% (97.6% top-5). We also perform extensive experiments that provide novel empirical data on the relationship between large-scale pretraining and transfer learning performance.

We introduce an unsupervised feature learning approach that embeds 3D shape information into a single-view image representation. The main idea is a self-supervised training objective that, given only a single 2D image, requires all unseen views of the object to be predictable from learned features. We implement this idea as an encoder-decoder convolutional neural network. The network maps an input image of an unknown category and unknown viewpoint to a latent space, from which a deconvolutional decoder can best "lift" the image to its complete viewgrid showing the object from all viewing angles. Our class-agnostic training procedure encourages the representation to capture fundamental shape primitives and semantic regularities in a data-driven manner---without manual semantic labels. Our results on two widely-used shape datasets show 1) our approach successfully learns to perform "mental rotation" even for objects unseen during training, and 2) the learned latent space is a powerful representation for object recognition, outperforming several existing unsupervised feature learning methods.

Metonymy plays an important role in our daily communication. People naturally think about things using their most salient properties or commonly related concepts. For example, by saying "The bus decided to skip our stop today," we actually mean that the bus driver made the decision, not the bus. Prior work on metonymy resolution has mainly focused on named entities. However, metonymy involving common nouns (such as desk, baby, and school) is also a frequent and challenging phenomenon. We argue that NLP systems should be capable of identifying the metonymic use of common nouns in context. We create a new metonymy dataset ConMeC, which consists of 6,000 sentences, where each sentence is paired with a target common noun and annotated by humans to indicate whether that common noun is used metonymically or not in that context. We also introduce a chain-of-thought based prompting method for detecting metonymy using large language models (LLMs). We evaluate our LLM-based pipeline, as well as a supervised BERT model on our dataset and three other metonymy datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that LLMs could achieve performance comparable to the supervised BERT model on well-defined metonymy categories, while still struggling with instances requiring nuanced semantic understanding. Our dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/SaptGhosh/ConMeC.

Despite the effectiveness of vision-language supervised fine-tuning in enhancing the performance of Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs). However, existing visual instruction tuning datasets include the following limitations: (1) Instruction annotation quality: despite existing VLLMs exhibiting strong performance, instructions generated by those advanced VLLMs may still suffer from inaccuracies, such as hallucinations. (2) Instructions and image diversity: the limited range of instruction types and the lack of diversity in image data may impact the model's ability to generate diversified and closer to real-world scenarios outputs. To address these challenges, we construct a high-quality, diverse visual instruction tuning dataset MMInstruct, which consists of 973K instructions from 24 domains. There are four instruction types: Judgement, Multiple-Choice, Long Visual Question Answering and Short Visual Question Answering. To construct MMInstruct, we propose an instruction generation data engine that leverages GPT-4V, GPT-3.5, and manual correction. Our instruction generation engine enables semi-automatic, low-cost, and multi-domain instruction generation at 1/6 the cost of manual construction. Through extensive experiment validation and ablation experiments, we demonstrate that MMInstruct could significantly improve the performance of VLLMs, e.g., the model fine-tuning on MMInstruct achieves new state-of-the-art performance on 10 out of 12 benchmarks. The code and data shall be available at https://github.com/yuecao0119/MMInstruct.

Extractive summarization plays a pivotal role in natural language processing due to its wide-range applications in summarizing diverse content efficiently, while also being faithful to the original content. Despite significant advancement achieved in extractive summarization by Large Language Models (LLMs), these summaries frequently exhibit incoherence. An important aspect of the coherent summary is its readability for intended users. Although there have been many datasets and benchmarks proposed for creating coherent extractive summaries, none of them currently incorporate user intent to improve coherence in extractive summarization. Motivated by this, we propose a systematically created human-annotated dataset consisting of coherent summaries for five publicly available datasets and natural language user feedback, offering valuable insights into how to improve coherence in extractive summaries. We utilize this dataset for aligning LLMs through supervised fine-tuning with natural language human feedback to enhance the coherence of their generated summaries. Preliminary experiments with Falcon-40B and Llama-2-13B show significant performance improvements (~10% Rouge-L) in terms of producing coherent summaries. We further utilize human feedback to benchmark results over instruction-tuned models such as FLAN-T5 which resulted in several interesting findings. Data and source code are available at https://github.com/Mihir3009/Extract-AI.

How can we discover join relationships among columns of tabular data in a data repository? Can this be done effectively when metadata is missing? Traditional column matching works mainly rely on similarity measures based on exact value overlaps, hence missing important semantics or failing to handle noise in the data. At the same time, recent dataset discovery methods focusing on deep table representation learning techniques, do not take into consideration the rich set of column similarity signals found in prior matching and discovery methods. Finally, existing methods heavily depend on user-provided similarity thresholds, hindering their deployability in real-world settings. In this paper, we propose OmniMatch, a novel join discovery technique that detects equi-joins and fuzzy-joins betwen columns by combining column-pair similarity measures with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). OmniMatch's GNN can capture column relatedness leveraging graph transitivity, significantly improving the recall of join discovery tasks. At the same time, OmniMatch also increases the precision by augmenting its training data with negative column join examples through an automated negative example generation process. Most importantly, compared to the state-of-the-art matching and discovery methods, OmniMatch exhibits up to 14% higher effectiveness in F1 score and AUC without relying on metadata or user-provided thresholds for each similarity metric.

In this paper, we explore various approaches for semi supervised learning in an end to end automatic speech recognition (ASR) framework. The first step in our approach involves training a seed model on the limited amount of labelled data. Additional unlabelled speech data is employed through a data selection mechanism to obtain the best hypothesized output, further used to retrain the seed model. However, uncertainties of the model may not be well captured with a single hypothesis. As opposed to this technique, we apply a dropout mechanism to capture the uncertainty by obtaining multiple hypothesized text transcripts of an speech recording. We assume that the diversity of automatically generated transcripts for an utterance will implicitly increase the reliability of the model. Finally, the data selection process is also applied on these hypothesized transcripts to reduce the uncertainty. Experiments on freely available TEDLIUM corpus and proprietary Adobe's internal dataset show that the proposed approach significantly reduces ASR errors, compared to the baseline model.

Despite over a decade of legislative efforts to address modern slavery in the supply chains of large corporations, the effectiveness of government oversight remains hampered by the challenge of scrutinizing thousands of statements annually. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can be considered a well established solution for the automatic analysis and summarization of documents, recognizing concrete modern slavery countermeasures taken by companies and differentiating those from vague claims remains a challenging task. To help evaluate and fine-tune LLMs for the assessment of corporate statements, we introduce a dataset composed of 5,731 modern slavery statements taken from the Australian Modern Slavery Register and annotated at the sentence level. This paper details the construction steps for the dataset that include the careful design of annotation specifications, the selection and preprocessing of statements, and the creation of high-quality annotation subsets for effective model evaluations. To demonstrate our dataset's utility, we propose a machine learning methodology for the detection of sentences relevant to mandatory reporting requirements set by the Australian Modern Slavery Act. We then follow this methodology to benchmark modern language models under zero-shot and supervised learning settings.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in medical applications such as disease diagnosis and treatment planning. However, most existing medical LLMs struggle with the advanced reasoning required for complex clinical scenarios, such as differential diagnosis or personalized treatment suggestions. We proposed FineMedLM-o1, which leverages high-quality synthetic medical data and long-form reasoning data for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), enabling advanced dialogue and deep reasoning capabilities. Additionally, we introduced Test-Time Training (TTT) in the medical domain for the first time, facilitating domain adaptation and ensuring reliable, accurate reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate that FineMedLM-o1 achieves a 23% average performance improvement over prior models on key medical benchmarks. Furthermore, the introduction of TTT provides an additional 14% performance boost, highlighting its effectiveness in enhancing medical reasoning capabilities. To support this process, we also proposed a novel method for synthesizing medical dialogue. Compared to other open-source datasets, our dataset stands out as superior in both quality and complexity. The project and data will be released on GitHub.

This work contributes to breast cancer sub-type classification using histopathological images. We utilize masked autoencoders (MAEs) to learn a self-supervised embedding tailored for computer vision tasks in this domain. This embedding captures informative representations of histopathological data, facilitating feature learning without extensive labeled datasets. During pre-training, we investigate employing a random crop technique to generate a large dataset from WSIs automatically. Additionally, we assess the performance of linear probes for multi-class classification tasks of cancer sub-types using the representations learnt by the MAE. Our approach aims to achieve strong performance on downstream tasks by leveraging the complementary strengths of ViTs and autoencoders. We evaluate our model's performance on the BRACS dataset and compare it with existing benchmarks.

Deep learning-based object recognition systems can be easily fooled by various adversarial perturbations. One reason for the weak robustness may be that they do not have part-based inductive bias like the human recognition process. Motivated by this, several part-based recognition models have been proposed to improve the adversarial robustness of recognition. However, due to the lack of part annotations, the effectiveness of these methods is only validated on small-scale nonstandard datasets. In this work, we propose PIN++, short for PartImageNet++, a dataset providing high-quality part segmentation annotations for all categories of ImageNet-1K (IN-1K). With these annotations, we build part-based methods directly on the standard IN-1K dataset for robust recognition. Different from previous two-stage part-based models, we propose a Multi-scale Part-supervised Model (MPM), to learn a robust representation with part annotations. Experiments show that MPM yielded better adversarial robustness on the large-scale IN-1K over strong baselines across various attack settings. Furthermore, MPM achieved improved robustness on common corruptions and several out-of-distribution datasets. The dataset, together with these results, enables and encourages researchers to explore the potential of part-based models in more real applications.

We present DurLAR, a high-fidelity 128-channel 3D LiDAR dataset with panoramic ambient (near infrared) and reflectivity imagery, as well as a sample benchmark task using depth estimation for autonomous driving applications. Our driving platform is equipped with a high resolution 128 channel LiDAR, a 2MPix stereo camera, a lux meter and a GNSS/INS system. Ambient and reflectivity images are made available along with the LiDAR point clouds to facilitate multi-modal use of concurrent ambient and reflectivity scene information. Leveraging DurLAR, with a resolution exceeding that of prior benchmarks, we consider the task of monocular depth estimation and use this increased availability of higher resolution, yet sparse ground truth scene depth information to propose a novel joint supervised/self-supervised loss formulation. We compare performance over both our new DurLAR dataset, the established KITTI benchmark and the Cityscapes dataset. Our evaluation shows our joint use supervised and self-supervised loss terms, enabled via the superior ground truth resolution and availability within DurLAR improves the quantitative and qualitative performance of leading contemporary monocular depth estimation approaches (RMSE=3.639, Sq Rel=0.936).

We introduce and make publicly available the NIFTY Financial News Headlines dataset, designed to facilitate and advance research in financial market forecasting using large language models (LLMs). This dataset comprises two distinct versions tailored for different modeling approaches: (i) NIFTY-LM, which targets supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of LLMs with an auto-regressive, causal language-modeling objective, and (ii) NIFTY-RL, formatted specifically for alignment methods (like reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF)) to align LLMs via rejection sampling and reward modeling. Each dataset version provides curated, high-quality data incorporating comprehensive metadata, market indices, and deduplicated financial news headlines systematically filtered and ranked to suit modern LLM frameworks. We also include experiments demonstrating some applications of the dataset in tasks like stock price movement and the role of LLM embeddings in information acquisition/richness. The NIFTY dataset along with utilities (like truncating prompt's context length systematically) are available on Hugging Face at https://huggingface.co/datasets/raeidsaqur/NIFTY.

Mobile sensing appears as a promising solution for health inference problem (e.g., influenza-like symptom recognition) by leveraging diverse smart sensors to capture fine-grained information about human behaviors and ambient contexts. Centralized training of machine learning models can place mobile users' sensitive information under privacy risks due to data breach and misexploitation. Federated Learning (FL) enables mobile devices to collaboratively learn global models without the exposure of local private data. However, there are challenges of on-device FL deployment using mobile sensing: 1) long-term and continuously collected mobile sensing data may exhibit domain shifts as sensing objects (e.g. humans) have varying behaviors as a result of internal and/or external stimulus; 2) model retraining using all available data may increase computation and memory burden; and 3) the sparsity of annotated crowd-sourced data causes supervised FL to lack robustness. In this work, we propose FedMobile, an incremental semi-supervised federated learning algorithm, to train models semi-supervisedly and incrementally in a decentralized online fashion. We evaluate FedMobile using a real-world mobile sensing dataset for influenza-like symptom recognition. Our empirical results show that FedMobile-trained models achieve the best results in comparison to the selected baseline methods.

Point cloud completion aims to recover the complete shape based on a partial observation. Existing methods require either complete point clouds or multiple partial observations of the same object for learning. In contrast to previous approaches, we present Partial2Complete (P2C), the first self-supervised framework that completes point cloud objects using training samples consisting of only a single incomplete point cloud per object. Specifically, our framework groups incomplete point clouds into local patches as input and predicts masked patches by learning prior information from different partial objects. We also propose Region-Aware Chamfer Distance to regularize shape mismatch without limiting completion capability, and devise the Normal Consistency Constraint to incorporate a local planarity assumption, encouraging the recovered shape surface to be continuous and complete. In this way, P2C no longer needs multiple observations or complete point clouds as ground truth. Instead, structural cues are learned from a category-specific dataset to complete partial point clouds of objects. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on both synthetic ShapeNet data and real-world ScanNet data, showing that P2C produces comparable results to methods trained with complete shapes, and outperforms methods learned with multiple partial observations. Code is available at https://github.com/CuiRuikai/Partial2Complete.

We introduce a simple and intuitive self-supervision task, Natural Synthetic Anomalies (NSA), for training an end-to-end model for anomaly detection and localization using only normal training data. NSA integrates Poisson image editing to seamlessly blend scaled patches of various sizes from separate images. This creates a wide range of synthetic anomalies which are more similar to natural sub-image irregularities than previous data-augmentation strategies for self-supervised anomaly detection. We evaluate the proposed method using natural and medical images. Our experiments with the MVTec AD dataset show that a model trained to localize NSA anomalies generalizes well to detecting real-world a priori unknown types of manufacturing defects. Our method achieves an overall detection AUROC of 97.2 outperforming all previous methods that learn without the use of additional datasets. Code available at https://github.com/hmsch/natural-synthetic-anomalies.

Current state of the art methods in Domain Adaptation follow adversarial approaches, making training a challenge. Existing non-adversarial methods learn mappings between the source and target domains, to achieve reasonable performance. However, even these methods do not focus on a key aspect: maintaining performance on the source domain, even after optimizing over the target domain. Additionally, there exist very few methods in low resource supervised domain adaptation. This work proposes a method, LRS-DAG, that aims to solve these current issues in the field. By adding a set of "encoder layers" which map the target domain to the source, and can be removed when dealing directly with the source data, the model learns to perform optimally on both domains. LRS-DAG showcases its uniqueness by being a new algorithm for low resource domain adaptation which maintains performance over the source domain, with a new metric for learning mappings between domains being introduced. We show that, in the case of FCNs, when transferring from MNIST to SVHN, LRS-DAG performs comparably to fine tuning, with the advantage of maintaining performance over the source domain. LRS-DAG outperforms fine tuning when transferring to a synthetic dataset similar to MNIST, which is a setting more representative of low resource supervised domain adaptation.

Robot warehouse automation has attracted significant interest in recent years, perhaps most visibly in the Amazon Picking Challenge (APC). A fully autonomous warehouse pick-and-place system requires robust vision that reliably recognizes and locates objects amid cluttered environments, self-occlusions, sensor noise, and a large variety of objects. In this paper we present an approach that leverages multi-view RGB-D data and self-supervised, data-driven learning to overcome those difficulties. The approach was part of the MIT-Princeton Team system that took 3rd- and 4th- place in the stowing and picking tasks, respectively at APC 2016. In the proposed approach, we segment and label multiple views of a scene with a fully convolutional neural network, and then fit pre-scanned 3D object models to the resulting segmentation to get the 6D object pose. Training a deep neural network for segmentation typically requires a large amount of training data. We propose a self-supervised method to generate a large labeled dataset without tedious manual segmentation. We demonstrate that our system can reliably estimate the 6D pose of objects under a variety of scenarios. All code, data, and benchmarks are available at http://apc.cs.princeton.edu/

Recent work has shown that optical flow estimation can be formulated as a supervised learning task and can be successfully solved with convolutional networks. Training of the so-called FlowNet was enabled by a large synthetically generated dataset. The present paper extends the concept of optical flow estimation via convolutional networks to disparity and scene flow estimation. To this end, we propose three synthetic stereo video datasets with sufficient realism, variation, and size to successfully train large networks. Our datasets are the first large-scale datasets to enable training and evaluating scene flow methods. Besides the datasets, we present a convolutional network for real-time disparity estimation that provides state-of-the-art results. By combining a flow and disparity estimation network and training it jointly, we demonstrate the first scene flow estimation with a convolutional network.

Affordance denotes the potential interactions inherent in objects. The perception of affordance can enable intelligent agents to navigate and interact with new environments efficiently. Weakly supervised affordance grounding teaches agents the concept of affordance without costly pixel-level annotations, but with exocentric images. Although recent advances in weakly supervised affordance grounding yielded promising results, there remain challenges including the requirement for paired exocentric and egocentric image dataset, and the complexity in grounding diverse affordances for a single object. To address them, we propose INTeraction Relationship-aware weakly supervised Affordance grounding (INTRA). Unlike prior arts, INTRA recasts this problem as representation learning to identify unique features of interactions through contrastive learning with exocentric images only, eliminating the need for paired datasets. Moreover, we leverage vision-language model embeddings for performing affordance grounding flexibly with any text, designing text-conditioned affordance map generation to reflect interaction relationship for contrastive learning and enhancing robustness with our text synonym augmentation. Our method outperformed prior arts on diverse datasets such as AGD20K, IIT-AFF, CAD and UMD. Additionally, experimental results demonstrate that our method has remarkable domain scalability for synthesized images / illustrations and is capable of performing affordance grounding for novel interactions and objects.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit emerging in-context learning abilities through prompt engineering. The recent progress in large-scale generative models has further expanded their use in real-world language applications. However, the critical challenge of improving the generalizability and factuality of LLMs in natural language understanding and question answering remains under-explored. While previous in-context learning research has focused on enhancing models to adhere to users' specific instructions and quality expectations, and to avoid undesired outputs, little to no work has explored the use of task-Specific fine-tuned Language Models (SLMs) to improve LLMs' in-context learning during the inference stage. Our primary contribution is the establishment of a simple yet effective framework that enhances the reliability of LLMs as it: 1) generalizes out-of-distribution data, 2) elucidates how LLMs benefit from discriminative models, and 3) minimizes hallucinations in generative tasks. Using our proposed plug-in method, enhanced versions of Llama 2 and ChatGPT surpass their original versions regarding generalizability and factuality. We offer a comprehensive suite of resources, including 16 curated datasets, prompts, model checkpoints, and LLM outputs across 9 distinct tasks. Our empirical analysis sheds light on the advantages of incorporating discriminative models into LLMs and highlights the potential of our methodology in fostering more reliable LLMs.

Mathematical reasoning capabilities are increasing with tool-augmented language agents, but methods often rely either on closed-source or large models, external data, or extensive prompt engineering. This work introduces MATATA, a novel cost-effective method to train LLM agents for tabular data problems through reasoning, planning, and tool use. With a progressive self-improvement paradigm and an iterative weak supervision, it empowers 3.8B/8B Small Language Models (SLMs), particularly suited for local hosting and sensitive business contexts where data privacy is crucial. By employing a flexible and reusable tools across different datasets, it achieves robust performance with effective scalability across shared tasks. Experiments show that MATATA reaches state-of-the-art performances on FinQA and TAT-QA among reasoning frameworks based on open-source models. Moreover, MATATA models compete with GPT-4 based frameworks on TabMWP, while being SLMs.

Human action understanding is crucial for the advancement of multimodal systems. While recent developments, driven by powerful large language models (LLMs), aim to be general enough to cover a wide range of categories, they often overlook the need for more specific capabilities. In this work, we address the more challenging task of Fine-grained Action Recognition (FAR), which focuses on detailed semantic labels within shorter temporal duration (e.g., "salto backward tucked with 1 turn"). Given the high costs of annotating fine-grained labels and the substantial data needed for fine-tuning LLMs, we propose to adopt semi-supervised learning (SSL). Our framework, SeFAR, incorporates several innovative designs to tackle these challenges. Specifically, to capture sufficient visual details, we construct Dual-level temporal elements as more effective representations, based on which we design a new strong augmentation strategy for the Teacher-Student learning paradigm through involving moderate temporal perturbation. Furthermore, to handle the high uncertainty within the teacher model's predictions for FAR, we propose the Adaptive Regulation to stabilize the learning process. Experiments show that SeFAR achieves state-of-the-art performance on two FAR datasets, FineGym and FineDiving, across various data scopes. It also outperforms other semi-supervised methods on two classical coarse-grained datasets, UCF101 and HMDB51. Further analysis and ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our designs. Additionally, we show that the features extracted by our SeFAR could largely promote the ability of multimodal foundation models to understand fine-grained and domain-specific semantics.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) foundation models have emerged as powerful, domain-agnostic, general-purpose feature extractors applicable to a wide range of tasks. Such models pre-trained on human speech have demonstrated high transferability for bioacoustic processing. This paper investigates (i) whether SSL models pre-trained directly on animal vocalizations offer a significant advantage over those pre-trained on speech, and (ii) whether fine-tuning speech-pretrained models on automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks can enhance bioacoustic classification. We conduct a comparative analysis using three diverse bioacoustic datasets and two different bioacoustic tasks. Results indicate that pre-training on bioacoustic data provides only marginal improvements over speech-pretrained models, with comparable performance in most scenarios. Fine-tuning on ASR tasks yields mixed outcomes, suggesting that the general-purpose representations learned during SSL pre-training are already well-suited for bioacoustic tasks. These findings highlight the robustness of speech-pretrained SSL models for bioacoustics and imply that extensive fine-tuning may not be necessary for optimal performance.

Depression, a prevalent mental health disorder impacting millions globally, demands reliable assessment systems. Unlike previous studies that focus solely on either detecting depression or predicting its severity, our work identifies individual symptoms of depression while also predicting its severity using speech input. We leverage self-supervised learning (SSL)-based speech models to better utilize the small-sized datasets that are frequently encountered in this task. Our study demonstrates notable performance improvements by utilizing SSL embeddings compared to conventional speech features. We compare various types of SSL pretrained models to elucidate the type of speech information (semantic, speaker, or prosodic) that contributes the most in identifying different symptoms. Additionally, we evaluate the impact of combining multiple SSL embeddings on performance. Furthermore, we show the significance of multi-task learning for identifying depressive symptoms effectively.

Data-driven methods such as reinforcement and imitation learning have achieved remarkable success in robot autonomy. However, their data-centric nature still hinders them from generalizing well to ever-changing environments. Moreover, collecting large datasets for robotic tasks is often impractical and expensive. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a new self-supervised neural-symbolic (NeSy) computational framework, imperative learning (IL), for robot autonomy, leveraging the generalization abilities of symbolic reasoning. The framework of IL consists of three primary components: a neural module, a reasoning engine, and a memory system. We formulate IL as a special bilevel optimization (BLO), which enables reciprocal learning over the three modules. This overcomes the label-intensive obstacles associated with data-driven approaches and takes advantage of symbolic reasoning concerning logical reasoning, physical principles, geometric analysis, etc. We discuss several optimization techniques for IL and verify their effectiveness in five distinct robot autonomy tasks including path planning, rule induction, optimal control, visual odometry, and multi-robot routing. Through various experiments, we show that IL can significantly enhance robot autonomy capabilities and we anticipate that it will catalyze further research across diverse domains.

Most existing neural-based text-to-speech methods rely on extensive datasets and face challenges under low-resource condition. In this paper, we introduce a novel semi-supervised text-to-speech synthesis model that learns from both paired and unpaired data to address this challenge. The key component of the proposed model is a dynamic quantized representation module, which is integrated into a sequential autoencoder. When given paired data, the module incorporates a trainable codebook that learns quantized representations under the supervision of the paired data. However, due to the limited paired data in low-resource scenario, these paired data are difficult to cover all phonemes. Then unpaired data is fed to expand the dynamic codebook by adding quantized representation vectors that are sufficiently distant from the existing ones during training. Experiments show that with less than 120 minutes of paired data, the proposed method outperforms existing methods in both subjective and objective metrics.

In this paper, we address the problem of generalized category discovery (GCD), \ie, given a set of images where part of them are labelled and the rest are not, the task is to automatically cluster the images in the unlabelled data, leveraging the information from the labelled data, while the unlabelled data contain images from the labelled classes and also new ones. GCD is similar to semi-supervised learning (SSL) but is more realistic and challenging, as SSL assumes all the unlabelled images are from the same classes as the labelled ones. We also do not assume the class number in the unlabelled data is known a-priori, making the GCD problem even harder. To tackle the problem of GCD without knowing the class number, we propose an EM-like framework that alternates between representation learning and class number estimation. We propose a semi-supervised variant of the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) with a stochastic splitting and merging mechanism to dynamically determine the prototypes by examining the cluster compactness and separability. With these prototypes, we leverage prototypical contrastive learning for representation learning on the partially labelled data subject to the constraints imposed by the labelled data. Our framework alternates between these two steps until convergence. The cluster assignment for an unlabelled instance can then be retrieved by identifying its nearest prototype. We comprehensively evaluate our framework on both generic image classification datasets and challenging fine-grained object recognition datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has made remarkable progress in visual representation learning. Some studies combine SSL with knowledge distillation (SSL-KD) to boost the representation learning performance of small models. In this study, we propose a Multi-mode Online Knowledge Distillation method (MOKD) to boost self-supervised visual representation learning. Different from existing SSL-KD methods that transfer knowledge from a static pre-trained teacher to a student, in MOKD, two different models learn collaboratively in a self-supervised manner. Specifically, MOKD consists of two distillation modes: self-distillation and cross-distillation modes. Among them, self-distillation performs self-supervised learning for each model independently, while cross-distillation realizes knowledge interaction between different models. In cross-distillation, a cross-attention feature search strategy is proposed to enhance the semantic feature alignment between different models. As a result, the two models can absorb knowledge from each other to boost their representation learning performance. Extensive experimental results on different backbones and datasets demonstrate that two heterogeneous models can benefit from MOKD and outperform their independently trained baseline. In addition, MOKD also outperforms existing SSL-KD methods for both the student and teacher models.

Multiple Instance learning (MIL) models have been extensively used in pathology to predict biomarkers and risk-stratify patients from gigapixel-sized images. Machine learning problems in medical imaging often deal with rare diseases, making it important for these models to work in a label-imbalanced setting. In pathology images, there is another level of imbalance, where given a positively labeled Whole Slide Image (WSI), only a fraction of pixels within it contribute to the positive label. This compounds the severity of imbalance and makes imbalanced classification in pathology challenging. Furthermore, these imbalances can occur in out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets when the models are deployed in the real-world. We leverage the idea that decoupling feature and classifier learning can lead to improved decision boundaries for label imbalanced datasets. To this end, we investigate the integration of supervised contrastive learning with multiple instance learning (SC-MIL). Specifically, we propose a joint-training MIL framework in the presence of label imbalance that progressively transitions from learning bag-level representations to optimal classifier learning. We perform experiments with different imbalance settings for two well-studied problems in cancer pathology: subtyping of non-small cell lung cancer and subtyping of renal cell carcinoma. SC-MIL provides large and consistent improvements over other techniques on both in-distribution (ID) and OOD held-out sets across multiple imbalanced settings.

In this work, we present a wireless localization method that operates on self-supervised and unlabeled channel estimates. Our self-supervising method learns general-purpose channel features robust to fading and system impairments. Learned representations are easily transferable to new environments and ready to use for other wireless downstream tasks. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed method is the first joint-embedding self-supervised approach to forsake the dependency on contrastive channel estimates. Our approach outperforms fully-supervised techniques in small data regimes under fine-tuning and, in some cases, linear evaluation. We assess the performance in centralized and distributed massive MIMO systems for multiple datasets. Moreover, our method works indoors and outdoors without additional assumptions or design changes.

Densely annotating LiDAR point clouds is costly, which restrains the scalability of fully-supervised learning methods. In this work, we study the underexplored semi-supervised learning (SSL) in LiDAR segmentation. Our core idea is to leverage the strong spatial cues of LiDAR point clouds to better exploit unlabeled data. We propose LaserMix to mix laser beams from different LiDAR scans, and then encourage the model to make consistent and confident predictions before and after mixing. Our framework has three appealing properties: 1) Generic: LaserMix is agnostic to LiDAR representations (e.g., range view and voxel), and hence our SSL framework can be universally applied. 2) Statistically grounded: We provide a detailed analysis to theoretically explain the applicability of the proposed framework. 3) Effective: Comprehensive experimental analysis on popular LiDAR segmentation datasets (nuScenes, SemanticKITTI, and ScribbleKITTI) demonstrates our effectiveness and superiority. Notably, we achieve competitive results over fully-supervised counterparts with 2x to 5x fewer labels and improve the supervised-only baseline significantly by 10.8% on average. We hope this concise yet high-performing framework could facilitate future research in semi-supervised LiDAR segmentation. Code is publicly available.

Recent advances in wearable devices and Internet-of-Things (IoT) have led to massive growth in sensor data generated in edge devices. Labeling such massive data for classification tasks has proven to be challenging. In addition, data generated by different users bear various personal attributes and edge heterogeneity, rendering it impractical to develop a global model that adapts well to all users. Concerns over data privacy and communication costs also prohibit centralized data accumulation and training. We propose SemiPFL that supports edge users having no label or limited labeled datasets and a sizable amount of unlabeled data that is insufficient to train a well-performing model. In this work, edge users collaborate to train a Hyper-network in the server, generating personalized autoencoders for each user. After receiving updates from edge users, the server produces a set of base models for each user, which the users locally aggregate them using their own labeled dataset. We comprehensively evaluate our proposed framework on various public datasets from a wide range of application scenarios, from wearable health to IoT, and demonstrate that SemiPFL outperforms state-of-art federated learning frameworks under the same assumptions regarding user performance, network footprint, and computational consumption. We also show that the solution performs well for users without label or having limited labeled datasets and increasing performance for increased labeled data and number of users, signifying the effectiveness of SemiPFL for handling data heterogeneity and limited annotation. We also demonstrate the stability of SemiPFL for handling user hardware resource heterogeneity in three real-time scenarios.

Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization (W-TAL) aims to classify and localize all action instances in an untrimmed video under only video-level supervision. However, without frame-level annotations, it is challenging for W-TAL methods to identify false positive action proposals and generate action proposals with precise temporal boundaries. In this paper, we present a Two-Stream Consensus Network (TSCN) to simultaneously address these challenges. The proposed TSCN features an iterative refinement training method, where a frame-level pseudo ground truth is iteratively updated, and used to provide frame-level supervision for improved model training and false positive action proposal elimination. Furthermore, we propose a new attention normalization loss to encourage the predicted attention to act like a binary selection, and promote the precise localization of action instance boundaries. Experiments conducted on the THUMOS14 and ActivityNet datasets show that the proposed TSCN outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, and even achieves comparable results with some recent fully-supervised methods.

Current video-based Masked Autoencoders (MAEs) primarily focus on learning effective spatiotemporal representations from a visual perspective, which may lead the model to prioritize general spatial-temporal patterns but often overlook nuanced semantic attributes like specific interactions or sequences that define actions - such as action-specific features that align more closely with human cognition for space-time correspondence. This can limit the model's ability to capture the essence of certain actions that are contextually rich and continuous. Humans are capable of mapping visual concepts, object view invariance, and semantic attributes available in static instances to comprehend natural dynamic scenes or videos. Existing MAEs for videos and static images rely on separate datasets for videos and images, which may lack the rich semantic attributes necessary for fully understanding the learned concepts, especially when compared to using video and corresponding sampled frame images together. To this end, we propose CrossVideoMAE an end-to-end self-supervised cross-modal contrastive learning MAE that effectively learns both video-level and frame-level rich spatiotemporal representations and semantic attributes. Our method integrates mutual spatiotemporal information from videos with spatial information from sampled frames within a feature-invariant space, while encouraging invariance to augmentations within the video domain. This objective is achieved through jointly embedding features of visible tokens and combining feature correspondence within and across modalities, which is critical for acquiring rich, label-free guiding signals from both video and frame image modalities in a self-supervised manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods and ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our approach.

Conventional 2D human pose estimation methods typically require extensive labeled annotations, which are both labor-intensive and expensive. In contrast, semi-supervised 2D human pose estimation can alleviate the above problems by leveraging a large amount of unlabeled data along with a small portion of labeled data. Existing semi-supervised 2D human pose estimation methods update the network through backpropagation, ignoring crucial historical information from the previous training process. Therefore, we propose a novel semi-supervised 2D human pose estimation method by utilizing a newly designed Teacher-Reviewer-Student framework. Specifically, we first mimic the phenomenon that human beings constantly review previous knowledge for consolidation to design our framework, in which the teacher predicts results to guide the student's learning and the reviewer stores important historical parameters to provide additional supervision signals. Secondly, we introduce a Multi-level Feature Learning strategy, which utilizes the outputs from different stages of the backbone to estimate the heatmap to guide network training, enriching the supervisory information while effectively capturing keypoint relationships. Finally, we design a data augmentation strategy, i.e., Keypoint-Mix, to perturb pose information by mixing different keypoints, thus enhancing the network's ability to discern keypoints. Extensive experiments on publicly available datasets, demonstrate our method achieves significant improvements compared to the existing methods.

Compositional image retrieval (CIR) is a multimodal learning task where a model combines a query image with a user-provided text modification to retrieve a target image. CIR finds applications in a variety of domains including product retrieval (e-commerce) and web search. Existing methods primarily focus on fully-supervised learning, wherein models are trained on datasets of labeled triplets such as FashionIQ and CIRR. This poses two significant challenges: (i) curating such triplet datasets is labor intensive; and (ii) models lack generalization to unseen objects and domains. In this work, we propose SCOT (Self-supervised COmpositional Training), a novel zero-shot compositional pretraining strategy that combines existing large image-text pair datasets with the generative capabilities of large language models to contrastively train an embedding composition network. Specifically, we show that the text embedding from a large-scale contrastively-pretrained vision-language model can be utilized as proxy target supervision during compositional pretraining, replacing the target image embedding. In zero-shot settings, this strategy surpasses SOTA zero-shot compositional retrieval methods as well as many fully-supervised methods on standard benchmarks such as FashionIQ and CIRR.

Alignment, endowing a pre-trained Large language model (LLM) with the ability to follow instructions, is crucial for its real-world applications. Conventional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) methods formalize it as causal language modeling typically with a cross-entropy objective, requiring a large amount of high-quality instruction-response pairs. However, the quality of widely used SFT datasets can not be guaranteed due to the high cost and intensive labor for the creation and maintenance in practice. To overcome the limitations associated with the quality of SFT datasets, we introduce a novel preference-oriented supervised fine-tuning approach, namely PoFT. The intuition is to boost SFT by imposing a particular preference: favoring the target model over aligned LLMs on the same SFT data. This preference encourages the target model to predict a higher likelihood than that predicted by the aligned LLMs, incorporating assessment information on data quality (i.e., predicted likelihood by the aligned LLMs) into the training process. Extensive experiments are conducted, and the results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. PoFT achieves stable and consistent improvements over the SFT baselines across different training datasets and base models. Moreover, we prove that PoFT can be integrated with existing SFT data filtering methods to achieve better performance, and further improved by following preference optimization procedures, such as DPO.

This work asks: with abundant, unlabeled real faces, how to learn a robust and transferable facial representation that boosts various face security tasks with respect to generalization performance? We make the first attempt and propose a self-supervised pretraining framework to learn fundamental representations of real face images, FSFM, that leverages the synergy between masked image modeling (MIM) and instance discrimination (ID). We explore various facial masking strategies for MIM and present a simple yet powerful CRFR-P masking, which explicitly forces the model to capture meaningful intra-region consistency and challenging inter-region coherency. Furthermore, we devise the ID network that naturally couples with MIM to establish underlying local-to-global correspondence via tailored self-distillation. These three learning objectives, namely 3C, empower encoding both local features and global semantics of real faces. After pretraining, a vanilla ViT serves as a universal vision foundation model for downstream face security tasks: cross-dataset deepfake detection, cross-domain face anti-spoofing, and unseen diffusion facial forgery detection. Extensive experiments on 10 public datasets demonstrate that our model transfers better than supervised pretraining, visual and facial self-supervised learning arts, and even outperforms task-specialized SOTA methods.

3D object detection is essential for understanding 3D scenes. Contemporary techniques often require extensive annotated training data, yet obtaining point-wise annotations for point clouds is time-consuming and laborious. Recent developments in semi-supervised methods seek to mitigate this problem by employing a teacher-student framework to generate pseudo-labels for unlabeled point clouds. However, these pseudo-labels frequently suffer from insufficient diversity and inferior quality. To overcome these hurdles, we introduce an Agent-based Diffusion Model for Semi-supervised 3D Object Detection (Diff3DETR). Specifically, an agent-based object query generator is designed to produce object queries that effectively adapt to dynamic scenes while striking a balance between sampling locations and content embedding. Additionally, a box-aware denoising module utilizes the DDIM denoising process and the long-range attention in the transformer decoder to refine bounding boxes incrementally. Extensive experiments on ScanNet and SUN RGB-D datasets demonstrate that Diff3DETR outperforms state-of-the-art semi-supervised 3D object detection methods.

Air traffic trajectory recognition has gained significant interest within the air traffic management community, particularly for fundamental tasks such as classification and clustering. This paper introduces Aircraft Trajectory Segmentation-based Contrastive Coding (ATSCC), a novel self-supervised time series representation learning framework designed to capture semantic information in air traffic trajectory data. The framework leverages the segmentable characteristic of trajectories and ensures consistency within the self-assigned segments. Intensive experiments were conducted on datasets from three different airports, totaling four datasets, comparing the learned representation's performance of downstream classification and clustering with other state-of-the-art representation learning techniques. The results show that ATSCC outperforms these methods by aligning with the labels defined by aeronautical procedures. ATSCC is adaptable to various airport configurations and scalable to incomplete trajectories. This research has expanded upon existing capabilities, achieving these improvements independently without predefined inputs such as airport configurations, maneuvering procedures, or labeled data.

We propose a novel TACLE (TAsk and CLass-awarE) framework to address the relatively unexplored and challenging problem of exemplar-free semi-supervised class incremental learning. In this scenario, at each new task, the model has to learn new classes from both (few) labeled and unlabeled data without access to exemplars from previous classes. In addition to leveraging the capabilities of pre-trained models, TACLE proposes a novel task-adaptive threshold, thereby maximizing the utilization of the available unlabeled data as incremental learning progresses. Additionally, to enhance the performance of the under-represented classes within each task, we propose a class-aware weighted cross-entropy loss. We also exploit the unlabeled data for classifier alignment, which further enhances the model performance. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, namely CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and ImageNet-Subset100 demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed TACLE framework. We further showcase its effectiveness when the unlabeled data is imbalanced and also for the extreme case of one labeled example per class.

Deep neural networks conventionally employ end-to-end backpropagation for their training process, which lacks biological credibility and triggers a locking dilemma during network parameter updates, leading to significant GPU memory use. Supervised local learning, which segments the network into multiple local blocks updated by independent auxiliary networks. However, these methods cannot replace end-to-end training due to lower accuracy, as gradients only propagate within their local block, creating a lack of information exchange between blocks. To address this issue and establish information transfer across blocks, we propose a Momentum Auxiliary Network (MAN) that establishes a dynamic interaction mechanism. The MAN leverages an exponential moving average (EMA) of the parameters from adjacent local blocks to enhance information flow. This auxiliary network, updated through EMA, helps bridge the informational gap between blocks. Nevertheless, we observe that directly applying EMA parameters has certain limitations due to feature discrepancies among local blocks. To overcome this, we introduce learnable biases, further boosting performance. We have validated our method on four image classification datasets (CIFAR-10, STL-10, SVHN, ImageNet), attaining superior performance and substantial memory savings. Notably, our method can reduce GPU memory usage by more than 45\% on the ImageNet dataset compared to end-to-end training, while achieving higher performance. The Momentum Auxiliary Network thus offers a new perspective for supervised local learning. Our code is available at: https://github.com/JunhaoSu0/MAN.

The integration of pre-trained text-based large language models (LLM) with speech input has enabled instruction-following capabilities for diverse speech tasks. This integration requires the use of a speech encoder, a speech adapter, and an LLM, trained on diverse tasks. We propose the use of discrete speech units (DSU), rather than continuous-valued speech encoder outputs, that are converted to the LLM token embedding space using the speech adapter. We generate DSU using a self-supervised speech encoder followed by k-means clustering. The proposed model shows robust performance on speech inputs from seen/unseen domains and instruction-following capability in spoken question answering. We also explore various types of DSU extracted from different layers of the self-supervised speech encoder, as well as Mel frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC). Our findings suggest that the ASR task and datasets are not crucial in instruction-tuning for spoken question answering tasks.

The prevailing approach to aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically relies on human or AI feedback and assumes access to specific types of preference datasets. In our work, we question the efficacy of such datasets and explore various scenarios where alignment with expert demonstrations proves more realistic. We build a sequential decision-making framework to formulate the problem of aligning LLMs using demonstration datasets. Drawing insights from inverse reinforcement learning and imitation learning, we introduce various approaches for divergence minimization in the LLM alignment tasks. Our analysis highlights the mass-covering and mode-seeking behaviors of these different approaches. Inclusively, we examine the pros and cons of the classical supervised fine-tuning method, elaborating on scenarios where different methods shine.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has recently received significant attention due to its ability to train high-performance encoders purely on unlabeled data-often scraped from the internet. This data can still be sensitive and empirical evidence suggests that SSL encoders memorize private information of their training data and can disclose them at inference time. Since existing theoretical definitions of memorization from supervised learning rely on labels, they do not transfer to SSL. To address this gap, we propose SSLMem, a framework for defining memorization within SSL. Our definition compares the difference in alignment of representations for data points and their augmented views returned by both encoders that were trained on these data points and encoders that were not. Through comprehensive empirical analysis on diverse encoder architectures and datasets we highlight that even though SSL relies on large datasets and strong augmentations-both known in supervised learning as regularization techniques that reduce overfitting-still significant fractions of training data points experience high memorization. Through our empirical results, we show that this memorization is essential for encoders to achieve higher generalization performance on different downstream tasks.

Semi-supervised image segmentation has attracted great attention recently. The key is how to leverage unlabeled images in the training process. Most methods maintain consistent predictions of the unlabeled images under variations (e.g., adding noise/perturbations, or creating alternative versions) in the image and/or model level. In most image-level variation, medical images often have prior structure information, which has not been well explored. In this paper, we propose novel dual structure-aware image filterings (DSAIF) as the image-level variations for semi-supervised medical image segmentation. Motivated by connected filtering that simplifies image via filtering in structure-aware tree-based image representation, we resort to the dual contrast invariant Max-tree and Min-tree representation. Specifically, we propose a novel connected filtering that removes topologically equivalent nodes (i.e. connected components) having no siblings in the Max/Min-tree. This results in two filtered images preserving topologically critical structure. Applying the proposed DSAIF to mutually supervised networks decreases the consensus of their erroneous predictions on unlabeled images. This helps to alleviate the confirmation bias issue of overfitting to noisy pseudo labels of unlabeled images, and thus effectively improves the segmentation performance. Extensive experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly/consistently outperforms some state-of-the-art methods. The source codes will be publicly available.

Training visual embeddings with labeled data supervision has been the de facto setup for representation learning in computer vision. Inspired by recent success of adopting masked image modeling (MIM) in self-supervised representation learning, we propose a simple yet effective setup that can easily integrate MIM into existing supervised training paradigms. In our design, in addition to the original classification task applied to a vision transformer image encoder, we add a shallow transformer-based decoder on top of the encoder and introduce an MIM task which tries to reconstruct image tokens based on masked image inputs. We show with minimal change in architecture and no overhead in inference that this setup is able to improve the quality of the learned representations for downstream tasks such as classification, image retrieval, and semantic segmentation. We conduct a comprehensive study and evaluation of our setup on public benchmarks. On ImageNet-1k, our ViT-B/14 model achieves 81.72% validation accuracy, 2.01% higher than the baseline model. On K-Nearest-Neighbor image retrieval evaluation with ImageNet-1k, the same model outperforms the baseline by 1.32%. We also show that this setup can be easily scaled to larger models and datasets. Code and checkpoints will be released.