ZeroFlow: Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting is Easier than You Think

Backpropagation provides a generalized configuration for overcoming catastrophic forgetting. Like, SGD and Adam are commonly used for weight updates in continual learning and continual pre-training. In practice, permission to access gradient information is not always granted (the gradient ban), such as black-box APIs, hardware limitations, and non-differentiable systems. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first benchmark ZeroFlow to evaluate gradient-free optimization algorithms for overcoming forgetting. This benchmark examines a suite of forward pass methods across multiple methods, forgetting scenarios, and datasets. We find that forward passes alone are enough to overcome forgetting. Our findings reveal new optimization principles that highlight the potential of forward-pass in mitigating forgetting, managing task conflicts, and reducing memory demands, alongside novel enhancements that further mitigate forgetting with just one forward pass. This work provides essential insights and tools for advancing forward pass methods to overcome forgetting.

ResearchTown: Simulator of Human Research Community

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in scientific domains, yet a fundamental question remains unanswered: Can we simulate human research communities with LLMs? Addressing this question can deepen our understanding of the processes behind idea brainstorming and inspire the automatic discovery of novel scientific insights. In this work, we propose ResearchTown, a multi-agent framework for research community simulation. Within this framework, the human research community is simplified and modeled as an agent-data graph, where researchers and papers are represented as agent-type and data-type nodes, respectively, and connected based on their collaboration relationships. We also introduce TextGNN, a text-based inference framework that models various research activities (e.g., paper reading, paper writing, and review writing) as special forms of a unified message-passing process on the agent-data graph. To evaluate the quality of the research simulation, we present ResearchBench, a benchmark that uses a node-masking prediction task for scalable and objective assessment based on similarity. Our experiments reveal three key findings: (1) ResearchTown can provide a realistic simulation of collaborative research activities, including paper writing and review writing; (2) ResearchTown can maintain robust simulation with multiple researchers and diverse papers; (3) ResearchTown can generate interdisciplinary research ideas that potentially inspire novel research directions.

PointTalk: Audio-Driven Dynamic Lip Point Cloud for 3D Gaussian-based Talking Head Synthesis

Talking head synthesis with arbitrary speech audio is a crucial challenge in the field of digital humans. Recently, methods based on radiance fields have received increasing attention due to their ability to synthesize high-fidelity and identity-consistent talking heads from just a few minutes of training video. However, due to the limited scale of the training data, these methods often exhibit poor performance in audio-lip synchronization and visual quality. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D Gaussian-based method called PointTalk, which constructs a static 3D Gaussian field of the head and deforms it in sync with the audio. It also incorporates an audio-driven dynamic lip point cloud as a critical component of the conditional information, thereby facilitating the effective synthesis of talking heads. Specifically, the initial step involves generating the corresponding lip point cloud from the audio signal and capturing its topological structure. The design of the dynamic difference encoder aims to capture the subtle nuances inherent in dynamic lip movements more effectively. Furthermore, we integrate the audio-point enhancement module, which not only ensures the synchronization of the audio signal with the corresponding lip point cloud within the feature space, but also facilitates a deeper understanding of the interrelations among cross-modal conditional features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior high-fidelity and audio-lip synchronization in talking head synthesis compared to previous methods.

Task-driven Image Fusion with Learnable Fusion Loss

Multi-modal image fusion aggregates information from multiple sensor sources, achieving superior visual quality and perceptual characteristics compared to any single source, often enhancing downstream tasks. However, current fusion methods for downstream tasks still use predefined fusion objectives that potentially mismatch the downstream tasks, limiting adaptive guidance and reducing model flexibility. To address this, we propose Task-driven Image Fusion (TDFusion), a fusion framework incorporating a learnable fusion loss guided by task loss. Specifically, our fusion loss includes learnable parameters modeled by a neural network called the loss generation module. This module is supervised by the loss of downstream tasks in a meta-learning manner. The learning objective is to minimize the task loss of the fused images, once the fusion module has been optimized by the fusion loss. Iterative updates between the fusion module and the loss module ensure that the fusion network evolves toward minimizing task loss, guiding the fusion process toward the task objectives. TDFusion's training relies solely on the loss of downstream tasks, making it adaptable to any specific task. It can be applied to any architecture of fusion and task networks. Experiments demonstrate TDFusion's performance in both fusion and task-related applications, including four public fusion datasets, semantic segmentation, and object detection. The code will be released.

CCIS-Diff: A Generative Model with Stable Diffusion Prior for Controlled Colonoscopy Image Synthesis

Colonoscopy is crucial for identifying adenomatous polyps and preventing colorectal cancer. However, developing robust models for polyp detection is challenging by the limited size and accessibility of existing colonoscopy datasets. While previous efforts have attempted to synthesize colonoscopy images, current methods suffer from instability and insufficient data diversity. Moreover, these approaches lack precise control over the generation process, resulting in images that fail to meet clinical quality standards. To address these challenges, we propose CCIS-DIFF, a Controlled generative model for high-quality Colonoscopy Image Synthesis based on a Diffusion architecture. Our method offers precise control over both the spatial attributes (polyp location and shape) and clinical characteristics of polyps that align with clinical descriptions. Specifically, we introduce a blur mask weighting strategy to seamlessly blend synthesized polyps with the colonic mucosa, and a text-aware attention mechanism to guide the generated images to reflect clinical characteristics. Notably, to achieve this, we construct a new multi-modal colonoscopy dataset that integrates images, mask annotations, and corresponding clinical text descriptions. Experimental results demonstrate that our method generates high-quality, diverse colonoscopy images with fine control over both spatial constraints and clinical consistency, offering valuable support for downstream segmentation and diagnostic tasks.

Graph of Records: Boosting Retrieval Augmented Generation for Long-context Summarization with Graphs

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has revitalized Large Language Models (LLMs) by injecting non-parametric factual knowledge. Compared with long-context LLMs, RAG is considered an effective summarization tool in a more concise and lightweight manner, which can interact with LLMs multiple times using diverse queries to get comprehensive responses. However, the LLM-generated historical responses, which contain potentially insightful information, are largely neglected and discarded by existing approaches, leading to suboptimal results. In this paper, we propose \textit{graph of records} (\textbf{GoR}), which leverages historical responses generated by LLMs to enhance RAG for long-context global summarization. Inspired by the \textit{retrieve-then-generate} paradigm of RAG, we construct a graph by establishing an edge between the retrieved text chunks and the corresponding LLM-generated response. To further uncover the intricate correlations between them, GoR further features a \textit{graph neural network} and an elaborately designed \textit{BERTScore}-based objective for self-supervised model training, enabling seamless supervision signal backpropagation between reference summaries and node embeddings. We comprehensively compare GoR with 12 baselines across four long-context summarization datasets, and the results indicate that our proposed method reaches the best performance e.g., 15\%, 8\%, and 19\% improvement over retrievers w.r.t. Rouge-L, Rouge-1, and Rouge-2 on the WCEP dataset). Extensive experiments further demonstrate the effectiveness of GoR. Code is available at https://github.com/ulab-uiuc/GoR

GraphRouter: A Graph-based Router for LLM Selections

The rapidly growing number and variety of Large Language Models (LLMs) present significant challenges in efficiently selecting the appropriate LLM for a given query, especially considering the trade-offs between performance and computational cost. Current LLM selection methods often struggle to generalize across new LLMs and different tasks because of their limited ability to leverage contextual interactions among tasks, queries, and LLMs, as well as their dependence on a transductive learning framework. To address these shortcomings, we introduce a novel inductive graph framework, named as GraphRouter, which fully utilizes the contextual information among tasks, queries, and LLMs to enhance the LLM selection process. GraphRouter constructs a heterogeneous graph comprising task, query, and LLM nodes, with interactions represented as edges, which efficiently captures the contextual information between the query's requirements and the LLM's capabilities. Through an innovative edge prediction mechanism, GraphRouter is able to predict attributes (the effect and cost of LLM response) of potential edges, allowing for optimized recommendations that adapt to both existing and newly introduced LLMs without requiring retraining. Comprehensive experiments across three distinct effect-cost weight scenarios have shown that GraphRouter substantially surpasses existing routers, delivering a minimum performance improvement of 12.3%. In addition, it achieves enhanced generalization across new LLMs settings and supports diverse tasks with at least a 9.5% boost in effect and a significant reduction in computational demands. This work endeavors to apply a graph-based approach for the contextual and adaptive selection of LLMs, offering insights for real-world applications. Our codes for GraphRouter will soon be released at https://github.com/ulab-uiuc/GraphRouter.

Paper Copilot: A Self-Evolving and Efficient LLM System for Personalized Academic Assistance

As scientific research proliferates, researchers face the daunting task of navigating and reading vast amounts of literature. Existing solutions, such as document QA, fail to provide personalized and up-to-date information efficiently. We present Paper Copilot, a self-evolving, efficient LLM system designed to assist researchers, based on thought-retrieval, user profile and high performance optimization. Specifically, Paper Copilot can offer personalized research services, maintaining a real-time updated database. Quantitative evaluation demonstrates that Paper Copilot saves 69.92\% of time after efficient deployment. This paper details the design and implementation of Paper Copilot, highlighting its contributions to personalized academic support and its potential to streamline the research process.

Learning in Order! A Sequential Strategy to Learn Invariant Features for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

This work proposes a novel and simple sequential learning strategy to train models on videos and texts for multimodal sentiment analysis. To estimate sentiment polarities on unseen out-of-distribution data, we introduce a multimodal model that is trained either in a single source domain or multiple source domains using our learning strategy. This strategy starts with learning domain invariant features from text, followed by learning sparse domain-agnostic features from videos, assisted by the selected features learned in text. Our experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves significantly better performance than the state-of-the-art approaches on average in both single-source and multi-source settings. Our feature selection procedure favors the features that are independent to each other and are strongly correlated with their polarity labels. To facilitate research on this topic, the source code of this work will be publicly available upon acceptance.

BattleAgentBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Cooperation and Competition Capabilities of Language Models in Multi-Agent Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly powerful and capable of handling complex tasks, e.g., building single agents and multi-agent systems. Compared to single agents, multi-agent systems have higher requirements for the collaboration capabilities of language models. Many benchmarks are proposed to evaluate their collaborative abilities. However, these benchmarks lack fine-grained evaluations of LLM collaborative capabilities. Additionally, multi-agent collaborative and competitive scenarios are ignored in existing works. To address these two problems, we propose a benchmark, called BattleAgentBench, which defines seven sub-stages of three varying difficulty levels and conducts a fine-grained evaluation of language models in terms of single-agent scenario navigation capabilities, paired-agent task execution abilities, and multi-agent collaboration and competition capabilities. We conducted extensive evaluations on leading four closed-source and seven open-source models. Experimental results indicate that API-based models perform excellently on simple tasks but open-source small models struggle with simple tasks. Regarding difficult tasks that require collaborative and competitive abilities, although API-based models have demonstrated some collaborative capabilities, there is still enormous room for improvement.