Compositional Image Retrieval via Instruction-Aware Contrastive Learning

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) involves retrieving a target image based on a composed query of an image paired with text that specifies modifications or changes to the visual reference. CIR is inherently an instruction-following task, as the model needs to interpret and apply modifications to the image. In practice, due to the scarcity of annotated data in downstream tasks, Zero-Shot CIR (ZS-CIR) is desirable. While existing ZS-CIR models based on CLIP have shown promising results, their capability in interpreting and following modification instructions remains limited. Some research attempts to address this by incorporating Large Language Models (LLMs). However, these approaches still face challenges in effectively integrating multimodal information and instruction understanding. To tackle above challenges, we propose a novel embedding method utilizing an instruction-tuned Multimodal LLM (MLLM) to generate composed representation, which significantly enhance the instruction following capability for a comprehensive integration between images and instructions. Nevertheless, directly applying MLLMs introduces a new challenge since MLLMs are primarily designed for text generation rather than embedding extraction as required in CIR. To address this, we introduce a two-stage training strategy to efficiently learn a joint multimodal embedding space and further refining the ability to follow modification instructions by tuning the model in a triplet dataset similar to the CIR format. Extensive experiments on four public datasets: FashionIQ, CIRR, GeneCIS, and CIRCO demonstrates the superior performance of our model, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by a significant margin. Codes are available at the GitHub repository.

DICE: Discrete Inversion Enabling Controllable Editing for Multinomial Diffusion and Masked Generative Models

Discrete diffusion models have achieved success in tasks like image generation and masked language modeling but face limitations in controlled content editing. We introduce DICE (Discrete Inversion for Controllable Editing), the first approach to enable precise inversion for discrete diffusion models, including multinomial diffusion and masked generative models. By recording noise sequences and masking patterns during the reverse diffusion process, DICE enables accurate reconstruction and flexible editing of discrete data without the need for predefined masks or attention manipulation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DICE across both image and text domains, evaluating it on models such as VQ-Diffusion, Paella, and RoBERTa. Our results show that DICE preserves high data fidelity while enhancing editing capabilities, offering new opportunities for fine-grained content manipulation in discrete spaces. For project webpage, see https://hexiaoxiao-cs.github.io/DICE/.

NeurLZ: On Enhancing Lossy Compression Performance based on Error-Controlled Neural Learning for Scientific Data

Large-scale scientific simulations generate massive datasets that pose significant challenges for storage and I/O. While traditional lossy compression techniques can improve performance, balancing compression ratio, data quality, and throughput remains difficult. To address this, we propose NeurLZ, a novel cross-field learning-based and error-controlled compression framework for scientific data. By integrating skipping DNN models, cross-field learning, and error control, our framework aims to substantially enhance lossy compression performance. Our contributions are three-fold: (1) We design a lightweight skipping model to provide high-fidelity detail retention, further improving prediction accuracy. (2) We adopt a cross-field learning approach to significantly improve data prediction accuracy, resulting in a substantially improved compression ratio. (3) We develop an error control approach to provide strict error bounds according to user requirements. We evaluated NeurLZ on several real-world HPC application datasets, including Nyx (cosmological simulation), Miranda (large turbulence simulation), and Hurricane (weather simulation). Experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves up to a 90% relative reduction in bit rate under the same data distortion, compared to the best existing approach.

CARES: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Trustworthiness in Medical Vision Language Models

Artificial intelligence has significantly impacted medical applications, particularly with the advent of Medical Large Vision Language Models (Med-LVLMs), sparking optimism for the future of automated and personalized healthcare. However, the trustworthiness of Med-LVLMs remains unverified, posing significant risks for future model deployment. In this paper, we introduce CARES and aim to comprehensively evaluate the Trustworthiness of Med-LVLMs across the medical domain. We assess the trustworthiness of Med-LVLMs across five dimensions, including trustfulness, fairness, safety, privacy, and robustness. CARES comprises about 41K question-answer pairs in both closed and open-ended formats, covering 16 medical image modalities and 27 anatomical regions. Our analysis reveals that the models consistently exhibit concerns regarding trustworthiness, often displaying factual inaccuracies and failing to maintain fairness across different demographic groups. Furthermore, they are vulnerable to attacks and demonstrate a lack of privacy awareness. We publicly release our benchmark and code in https://github.com/richard-peng-xia/CARES.

Spectrum-Aware Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning for Diffusion Models

Adapting large-scale pre-trained generative models in a parameter-efficient manner is gaining traction. Traditional methods like low rank adaptation achieve parameter efficiency by imposing constraints but may not be optimal for tasks requiring high representation capacity. We propose a novel spectrum-aware adaptation framework for generative models. Our method adjusts both singular values and their basis vectors of pretrained weights. Using the Kronecker product and efficient Stiefel optimizers, we achieve parameter-efficient adaptation of orthogonal matrices. We introduce Spectral Orthogonal Decomposition Adaptation (SODA), which balances computational efficiency and representation capacity. Extensive evaluations on text-to-image diffusion models demonstrate SODA's effectiveness, offering a spectrum-aware alternative to existing fine-tuning methods.

PathM3: A Multimodal Multi-Task Multiple Instance Learning Framework for Whole Slide Image Classification and Captioning

In the field of computational histopathology, both whole slide images (WSIs) and diagnostic captions provide valuable insights for making diagnostic decisions. However, aligning WSIs with diagnostic captions presents a significant challenge. This difficulty arises from two main factors: 1) Gigapixel WSIs are unsuitable for direct input into deep learning models, and the redundancy and correlation among the patches demand more attention; and 2) Authentic WSI diagnostic captions are extremely limited, making it difficult to train an effective model. To overcome these obstacles, we present PathM3, a multimodal, multi-task, multiple instance learning (MIL) framework for WSI classification and captioning. PathM3 adapts a query-based transformer to effectively align WSIs with diagnostic captions. Given that histopathology visual patterns are redundantly distributed across WSIs, we aggregate each patch feature with MIL method that considers the correlations among instances. Furthermore, our PathM3 overcomes data scarcity in WSI-level captions by leveraging limited WSI diagnostic caption data in the manner of multi-task joint learning. Extensive experiments with improved classification accuracy and caption generation demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on both WSI classification and captioning task.

Distribution-Free Fair Federated Learning with Small Samples

As federated learning gains increasing importance in real-world applications due to its capacity for decentralized data training, addressing fairness concerns across demographic groups becomes critically important. However, most existing machine learning algorithms for ensuring fairness are designed for centralized data environments and generally require large-sample and distributional assumptions, underscoring the urgent need for fairness techniques adapted for decentralized and heterogeneous systems with finite-sample and distribution-free guarantees. To address this issue, this paper introduces FedFaiREE, a post-processing algorithm developed specifically for distribution-free fair learning in decentralized settings with small samples. Our approach accounts for unique challenges in decentralized environments, such as client heterogeneity, communication costs, and small sample sizes. We provide rigorous theoretical guarantees for both fairness and accuracy, and our experimental results further provide robust empirical validation for our proposed method.

Segment Any Cell: A SAM-based Auto-prompting Fine-tuning Framework for Nuclei Segmentation

In the rapidly evolving field of AI research, foundational models like BERT and GPT have significantly advanced language and vision tasks. The advent of pretrain-prompting models such as ChatGPT and Segmentation Anything Model (SAM) has further revolutionized image segmentation. However, their applications in specialized areas, particularly in nuclei segmentation within medical imaging, reveal a key challenge: the generation of high-quality, informative prompts is as crucial as applying state-of-the-art (SOTA) fine-tuning techniques on foundation models. To address this, we introduce Segment Any Cell (SAC), an innovative framework that enhances SAM specifically for nuclei segmentation. SAC integrates a Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) within the attention layer of the Transformer to improve the fine-tuning process, outperforming existing SOTA methods. It also introduces an innovative auto-prompt generator that produces effective prompts to guide segmentation, a critical factor in handling the complexities of nuclei segmentation in biomedical imaging. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of SAC in nuclei segmentation tasks, proving its effectiveness as a tool for pathologists and researchers. Our contributions include a novel prompt generation strategy, automated adaptability for diverse segmentation tasks, the innovative application of Low-Rank Attention Adaptation in SAM, and a versatile framework for semantic segmentation challenges.

MIVC: Multiple Instance Visual Component for Visual-Language Models

Vision-language models have been widely explored across a wide range of tasks and achieve satisfactory performance. However, it's under-explored how to consolidate entity understanding through a varying number of images and to align it with the pre-trained language models for generative tasks. In this paper, we propose MIVC, a general multiple instance visual component to bridge the gap between various image inputs with off-the-shelf vision-language models by aggregating visual representations in a permutation-invariant fashion through a neural network. We show that MIVC could be plugged into the visual-language models to improve the model performance consistently on visual question answering, classification and captioning tasks on a public available e-commerce dataset with multiple images per product. Furthermore, we show that the component provides insight into the contribution of each image to the downstream tasks.

Structure-Aware DropEdge Towards Deep Graph Convolutional Networks

It has been discovered that Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) encounter a remarkable drop in performance when multiple layers are piled up. The main factor that accounts for why deep GCNs fail lies in over-smoothing, which isolates the network output from the input with the increase of network depth, weakening expressivity and trainability. In this paper, we start by investigating refined measures upon DropEdge -- an existing simple yet effective technique to relieve over-smoothing. We term our method as DropEdge++ for its two structure-aware samplers in contrast to DropEdge: layer-dependent sampler and feature-dependent sampler. Regarding the layer-dependent sampler, we interestingly find that increasingly sampling edges from the bottom layer yields superior performance than the decreasing counterpart as well as DropEdge. We theoretically reveal this phenomenon with Mean-Edge-Number (MEN), a metric closely related to over-smoothing. For the feature-dependent sampler, we associate the edge sampling probability with the feature similarity of node pairs, and prove that it further correlates the convergence subspace of the output layer with the input features. Extensive experiments on several node classification benchmarks, including both full- and semi- supervised tasks, illustrate the efficacy of DropEdge++ and its compatibility with a variety of backbones by achieving generally better performance over DropEdge and the no-drop version.