AI-Driven Innovations in Volumetric Video Streaming: A Review

Recent efforts to enhance immersive and interactive user experiences have driven the development of volumetric video, a form of 3D content that enables 6 DoF. Unlike traditional 2D content, volumetric content can be represented in various ways, such as point clouds, meshes, or neural representations. However, due to its complex structure and large amounts of data size, deploying this new form of 3D data presents significant challenges in transmission and rendering. These challenges have hindered the widespread adoption of volumetric video in daily applications. In recent years, researchers have proposed various AI-driven techniques to address these challenges and improve the efficiency and quality of volumetric content streaming. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of recent advances in AI-driven approaches to facilitate volumetric content streaming. Through this review, we aim to offer insights into the current state-of-the-art and suggest potential future directions for advancing the deployment of volumetric video streaming in real-world applications.

Aligned Vector Quantization for Edge-Cloud Collabrative Vision-Language Models

Vision Language Models (VLMs) are central to Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems and are typically deployed in the cloud due to their high computational demands. However, this cloud-only approach underutilizes edge computational resources and requires significant bandwidth for transmitting raw images. In this paper, we introduce an edge-cloud collaborative VQA system, called LLaVA-AlignedVQ, which features a novel Aligned Vector Quantization algorithm (AlignedVQ) that efficiently compress intermediate features without compromising accuracy to support partitioned execution. Our experiments demonstrate that LLaVA-AlignedVQ achieves approximately 1365x compression rate of intermediate features, reducing data transmission overhead by 96.8% compared to transmitting JPEG90-compressed images to the cloud. LLaVA-AlignedVQ achieves an inference speedup of 2-15x while maintaining high accuracy, remaining within -2.23% to +1.6% of the original model's accuracy performance across eight VQA datasets, compared to the cloud-only solution.

Integrating Graph Neural Networks and Many-Body Expansion Theory for Potential Energy Surfaces

Rational design of next-generation functional materials relied on quantitative predictions of their electronic structures beyond single building blocks. First-principles quantum mechanical (QM) modeling became infeasible as the size of a material grew beyond hundreds of atoms. In this study, we developed a new computational tool integrating fragment-based graph neural networks (FBGNN) into the fragment-based many-body expansion (MBE) theory, referred to as FBGNN-MBE, and demonstrated its capacity to reproduce full-dimensional potential energy surfaces (FD-PES) for hierarchic chemical systems with manageable accuracy, complexity, and interpretability. In particular, we divided the entire system into basic building blocks (fragments), evaluated their single-fragment energies using a first-principles QM model and attacked many-fragment interactions using the structure-property relationships trained by FBGNNs. Our development of FBGNN-MBE demonstrated the potential of a new framework integrating deep learning models into fragment-based QM methods, and marked a significant step towards computationally aided design of large functional materials.

Understanding and Alleviating Memory Consumption in RLHF for LLMs

Fine-tuning with Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) is essential for aligning large language models (LLMs). However, RLHF often encounters significant memory challenges. This study is the first to examine memory usage in the RLHF context, exploring various memory management strategies and unveiling the reasons behind excessive memory consumption. Additionally, we introduce a simple yet effective approach that substantially reduces the memory required for RLHF fine-tuning.

In-Situ Fine-Tuning of Wildlife Models in IoT-Enabled Camera Traps for Efficient Adaptation

Wildlife monitoring via camera traps has become an essential tool in ecology, but the deployment of machine learning models for on-device animal classification faces significant challenges due to domain shifts and resource constraints. This paper introduces WildFit, a novel approach that reconciles the conflicting goals of achieving high domain generalization performance and ensuring efficient inference for camera trap applications. WildFit leverages continuous background-aware model fine-tuning to deploy ML models tailored to the current location and time window, allowing it to maintain robust classification accuracy in the new environment without requiring significant computational resources. This is achieved by background-aware data synthesis, which generates training images representing the new domain by blending background images with animal images from the source domain. We further enhance fine-tuning effectiveness through background drift detection and class distribution drift detection, which optimize the quality of synthesized data and improve generalization performance. Our extensive evaluation across multiple camera trap datasets demonstrates that WildFit achieves significant improvements in classification accuracy and computational efficiency compared to traditional approaches.

AdapMTL: Adaptive Pruning Framework for Multitask Learning Model

In the domain of multimedia and multimodal processing, the efficient handling of diverse data streams such as images, video, and sensor data is paramount. Model compression and multitask learning (MTL) are crucial in this field, offering the potential to address the resource-intensive demands of processing and interpreting multiple forms of media simultaneously. However, effectively compressing a multitask model presents significant challenges due to the complexities of balancing sparsity allocation and accuracy performance across multiple tasks. To tackle these challenges, we propose AdapMTL, an adaptive pruning framework for MTL models. AdapMTL leverages multiple learnable soft thresholds independently assigned to the shared backbone and the task-specific heads to capture the nuances in different components' sensitivity to pruning. During training, it co-optimizes the soft thresholds and MTL model weights to automatically determine the suitable sparsity level at each component to achieve both high task accuracy and high overall sparsity. It further incorporates an adaptive weighting mechanism that dynamically adjusts the importance of task-specific losses based on each task's robustness to pruning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of AdapMTL through comprehensive experiments on popular multitask datasets, namely NYU-v2 and Tiny-Taskonomy, with different architectures, showcasing superior performance compared to state-of-the-art pruning methods.

ProTrain: Efficient LLM Training via Memory-Aware Techniques

It is extremely memory-hungry to train Large Language Models (LLM). To solve this problem, existing work exploits the combination of CPU and GPU for the training process, such as ZeRO-Offload. Such a technique largely democratizes billion-scale model training, making it possible to train with few consumer graphics cards. However, based on our observation, existing frameworks often provide coarse-grained memory management and require experienced experts in configuration tuning, leading to suboptimal hardware utilization and performance. This paper proposes ProTrain, a novel training system that intelligently balances memory usage and performance by coordinating memory, computation, and IO. ProTrain achieves adaptive memory management through Chunk-Based Model State Management and Block-Wise Activation Management, guided by a Memory-Aware Runtime Profiler without user intervention. ProTrain does not change the training algorithm and thus does not compromise accuracy. Experiments show that ProTrain improves training throughput by 1.43$\times$ to 2.71$\times$ compared to the SOTA training systems.

Graph Neural Network Training Systems: A Performance Comparison of Full-Graph and Mini-Batch

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have gained significant attention in recent years due to their ability to learn representations of graph structured data. Two common methods for training GNNs are mini-batch training and full-graph training. Since these two methods require different training pipelines and systems optimizations, two separate categories of GNN training systems emerged, each tailored for one method. Works that introduce systems belonging to a particular category predominantly compare them with other systems within the same category, offering limited or no comparison with systems from the other category. Some prior work also justifies its focus on one specific training method by arguing that it achieves higher accuracy than the alternative. The literature, however, has incomplete and contradictory evidence in this regard. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive empirical comparison of full-graph and mini-batch GNN training systems to get a clearer picture of the state of the art in the field. We find that the mini-batch training systems we consider consistently converge faster than the full-graph training ones across multiple datasets, GNN models, and system configurations, with speedups between 2.4x - 15.2x. We also find that both training techniques converge to similar accuracy values, so comparing systems across the two categories in terms of time-to-accuracy is a sound approach.

Thinking Forward: Memory-Efficient Federated Finetuning of Language Models

Finetuning large language models (LLMs) in federated learning (FL) settings has become important as it allows resource-constrained devices to finetune a model using private data. However, finetuning LLMs using backpropagation requires excessive memory (especially from intermediate activations) for resource-constrained devices. While Forward-mode Auto-Differentiation (AD) can reduce memory footprint from activations, we observe that directly applying it to LLM finetuning results in slow convergence and poor accuracy. This work introduces Spry, an FL algorithm that splits trainable weights of an LLM among participating clients, such that each client computes gradients using Forward-mode AD that are closer estimates of the true gradients. Spry achieves a low memory footprint, high accuracy, and fast convergence. We theoretically show that the global gradients in Spry are unbiased estimates of true global gradients for homogeneous data distributions across clients, while heterogeneity increases bias of the estimates. We also derive Spry's convergence rate, showing that the gradients decrease inversely proportional to the number of FL rounds, indicating the convergence up to the limits of heterogeneity. Empirically, Spry reduces the memory footprint during training by 1.4-7.1$\times$ in contrast to backpropagation, while reaching comparable accuracy, across a wide range of language tasks, models, and FL settings. Spry reduces the convergence time by 1.2-20.3$\times$ and achieves 5.2-13.5\% higher accuracy against state-of-the-art zero-order methods. When finetuning Llama2-7B with LoRA, compared to the peak memory usage of 33.9GB of backpropagation, Spry only consumes 6.2GB of peak memory. For OPT13B, the reduction is from 76.5GB to 10.8GB. Spry makes feasible previously impossible FL deployments on commodity mobile and edge devices. Source code is available at https://github.com/Astuary/Spry.

Robust Image Watermarking using Stable Diffusion

Watermarking images is critical for tracking image provenance and claiming ownership. With the advent of generative models, such as stable diffusion, able to create fake but realistic images, watermarking has become particularly important, e.g., to make generated images reliably identifiable. Unfortunately, the very same stable diffusion technology can remove watermarks injected using existing methods. To address this problem, we present a ZoDiac, which uses a pre-trained stable diffusion model to inject a watermark into the trainable latent space, resulting in watermarks that can be reliably detected in the latent vector, even when attacked. We evaluate ZoDiac on three benchmarks, MS-COCO, DiffusionDB, and WikiArt, and find that ZoDiac is robust against state-of-the-art watermark attacks, with a watermark detection rate over 98% and a false positive rate below 6.4%, outperforming state-of-the-art watermarking methods. Our research demonstrates that stable diffusion is a promising approach to robust watermarking, able to withstand even stable-diffusion-based attacks.