DrivingSphere: Building a High-fidelity 4D World for Closed-loop Simulation

Autonomous driving evaluation requires simulation environments that closely replicate actual road conditions, including real-world sensory data and responsive feedback loops. However, many existing simulations need to predict waypoints along fixed routes on public datasets or synthetic photorealistic data, \ie, open-loop simulation usually lacks the ability to assess dynamic decision-making. While the recent efforts of closed-loop simulation offer feedback-driven environments, they cannot process visual sensor inputs or produce outputs that differ from real-world data. To address these challenges, we propose DrivingSphere, a realistic and closed-loop simulation framework. Its core idea is to build 4D world representation and generate real-life and controllable driving scenarios. In specific, our framework includes a Dynamic Environment Composition module that constructs a detailed 4D driving world with a format of occupancy equipping with static backgrounds and dynamic objects, and a Visual Scene Synthesis module that transforms this data into high-fidelity, multi-view video outputs, ensuring spatial and temporal consistency. By providing a dynamic and realistic simulation environment, DrivingSphere enables comprehensive testing and validation of autonomous driving algorithms, ultimately advancing the development of more reliable autonomous cars. The benchmark will be publicly released.

CAVM: Conditional Autoregressive Vision Model for Contrast-Enhanced Brain Tumor MRI Synthesis

Contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is pivotal in the pipeline of brain tumor segmentation and analysis. Gadolinium-based contrast agents, as the most commonly used contrast agents, are expensive and may have potential side effects, and it is desired to obtain contrast-enhanced brain tumor MRI scans without the actual use of contrast agents. Deep learning methods have been applied to synthesize virtual contrast-enhanced MRI scans from non-contrast images. However, as this synthesis problem is inherently ill-posed, these methods fall short in producing high-quality results. In this work, we propose Conditional Autoregressive Vision Model (CAVM) for improving the synthesis of contrast-enhanced brain tumor MRI. As the enhancement of image intensity grows with a higher dose of contrast agents, we assume that it is less challenging to synthesize a virtual image with a lower dose, where the difference between the contrast-enhanced and non-contrast images is smaller. Thus, CAVM gradually increases the contrast agent dosage and produces higher-dose images based on previous lower-dose ones until the final desired dose is achieved. Inspired by the resemblance between the gradual dose increase and the Chain-of-Thought approach in natural language processing, CAVM uses an autoregressive strategy with a decomposition tokenizer and a decoder. Specifically, the tokenizer is applied to obtain a more compact image representation for computational efficiency, and it decomposes the image into dose-variant and dose-invariant tokens. Then, a masked self-attention mechanism is developed for autoregression that gradually increases the dose of the virtual image based on the dose-variant tokens. Finally, the updated dose-variant tokens corresponding to the desired dose are decoded together with dose-invariant tokens to produce the final contrast-enhanced MRI.

Monotonic Paraphrasing Improves Generalization of Language Model Prompting

Performance of large language models (LLMs) may vary with different prompts or instructions of even the same task. One commonly recognized factor for this phenomenon is the model's familiarity with the given prompt or instruction, which is typically estimated by its perplexity. However, finding the prompt with the lowest perplexity is challenging, given the enormous space of possible prompting phrases. In this paper, we propose monotonic paraphrasing (MonoPara), an end-to-end decoding strategy that paraphrases given prompts or instructions into their lower perplexity counterparts based on an ensemble of a paraphrase LM for prompt (or instruction) rewriting, and a target LM (i.e. the prompt or instruction executor) that constrains the generation for lower perplexity. The ensemble decoding process can efficiently paraphrase the original prompt without altering its semantic meaning, while monotonically decreasing the perplexity of each generation as calculated by the target LM. We explore in detail both greedy and search-based decoding as two alternative decoding schemes of MonoPara. Notably, MonoPara does not require any training and can monotonically lower the perplexity of the paraphrased prompt or instruction, leading to improved performance of zero-shot LM prompting as evaluated on a wide selection of tasks. In addition, MonoPara is also shown to effectively improve LMs' generalization on perturbed and unseen task instructions.

Contrastive Instruction Tuning

Instruction tuning has been used as a promising approach to improve the performance of large language models (LLMs) on unseen tasks. However, current LLMs exhibit limited robustness to unseen instructions, generating inconsistent outputs when the same instruction is phrased with slightly varied forms or language styles. This behavior indicates LLMs' lack of robustness to textual variations and generalizability to unseen instructions, potentially leading to trustworthiness issues. Accordingly, we propose Contrastive Instruction Tuning, which maximizes the similarity between the hidden representations of semantically equivalent instruction-instance pairs while minimizing the similarity between semantically different ones. To facilitate this approach, we augment the existing FLAN collection by paraphrasing task instructions. Experiments on the PromptBench benchmark show that CoIN consistently improves LLMs' robustness to unseen instructions with variations across character, word, sentence, and semantic levels by an average of +2.5% in accuracy.

Multi-task Collaborative Pre-training and Individual-adaptive-tokens Fine-tuning: A Unified Framework for Brain Representation Learning

Structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) provides accurate estimates of the brain's structural organization and learning invariant brain representations from sMRI is an enduring issue in neuroscience. Previous deep representation learning models ignore the fact that the brain, as the core of human cognitive activity, is distinct from other organs whose primary attribute is anatomy. Therefore, capturing the semantic structure that dominates interindividual cognitive variability is key to accurately representing the brain. Given that this high-level semantic information is subtle, distributed, and interdependently latent in the brain structure, sMRI-based models need to capture fine-grained details and understand how they relate to the overall global structure. However, existing models are optimized by simple objectives, making features collapse into homogeneity and worsening simultaneous representation of fine-grained information and holistic semantics, causing a lack of biological plausibility and interpretation of cognition. Here, we propose MCIAT, a unified framework that combines Multi-task Collaborative pre-training and Individual-Adaptive-Tokens fine-tuning. Specifically, we first synthesize restorative learning, age prediction auxiliary learning and adversarial learning as a joint proxy task for deep semantic representation learning. Then, a mutual-attention-based token selection method is proposed to highlight discriminative features. The proposed MCIAT achieves state-of-the-art diagnosis performance on the ADHD-200 dataset compared with several sMRI-based approaches and shows superior generalization on the MCIC and OASIS datasets. Moreover, we studied 12 behavioral tasks and found significant associations between cognitive functions and MCIAT-established representations, which verifies the interpretability of our proposed framework.

Connectional-Style-Guided Contextual Representation Learning for Brain Disease Diagnosis

Structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) has shown great clinical value and has been widely used in deep learning (DL) based computer-aided brain disease diagnosis. Previous approaches focused on local shapes and textures in sMRI that may be significant only within a particular domain. The learned representations are likely to contain spurious information and have a poor generalization ability in other diseases and datasets. To facilitate capturing meaningful and robust features, it is necessary to first comprehensively understand the intrinsic pattern of the brain that is not restricted within a single data/task domain. Considering that the brain is a complex connectome of interlinked neurons, the connectional properties in the brain have strong biological significance, which is shared across multiple domains and covers most pathological information. In this work, we propose a connectional style contextual representation learning model (CS-CRL) to capture the intrinsic pattern of the brain, used for multiple brain disease diagnosis. Specifically, it has a vision transformer (ViT) encoder and leverages mask reconstruction as the proxy task and Gram matrices to guide the representation of connectional information. It facilitates the capture of global context and the aggregation of features with biological plausibility. The results indicate that CS-CRL achieves superior accuracy in multiple brain disease diagnosis tasks across six datasets and three diseases and outperforms state-of-the-art models. Furthermore, we demonstrate that CS-CRL captures more brain-network-like properties, better aggregates features, is easier to optimize and is more robust to noise, which explains its superiority in theory. Our source code will be released soon.

Robust Natural Language Understanding with Residual Attention Debiasing

Natural language understanding (NLU) models often suffer from unintended dataset biases. Among bias mitigation methods, ensemble-based debiasing methods, especially product-of-experts (PoE), have stood out for their impressive empirical success. However, previous ensemble-based debiasing methods typically apply debiasing on top-level logits without directly addressing biased attention patterns. Attention serves as the main media of feature interaction and aggregation in PLMs and plays a crucial role in providing robust prediction. In this paper, we propose REsidual Attention Debiasing (READ), an end-to-end debiasing method that mitigates unintended biases from attention. Experiments on three NLU tasks show that READ significantly improves the performance of BERT-based models on OOD data with shortcuts removed, including +12.9% accuracy on HANS, +11.0% accuracy on FEVER-Symmetric, and +2.7% F1 on PAWS. Detailed analyses demonstrate the crucial role of unbiased attention in robust NLU models and that READ effectively mitigates biases in attention. Code is available at https://github.com/luka-group/READ.

Plug-and-Play Pseudo Label Correction Network for Unsupervised Person Re-identification

Clustering-based methods, which alternate between the generation of pseudo labels and the optimization of the feature extraction network, play a dominant role in both unsupervised learning (USL) and unsupervised domain adaptive (UDA) person re-identification (Re-ID). To alleviate the adverse effect of noisy pseudo labels, the existing methods either abandon unreliable labels or refine the pseudo labels via mutual learning or label propagation. However, a great many erroneous labels are still accumulated because these methods mostly adopt traditional unsupervised clustering algorithms which rely on certain assumptions on data distribution and fail to capture the distribution of complex real-world data. In this paper, we propose the plug-and-play graph-based pseudo label correction network (GLC) to refine the pseudo labels in the manner of supervised clustering. GLC is trained to perceive the varying data distribution at each epoch of the self-training with the supervision of initial pseudo labels generated by any clustering method. It can learn to rectify the initial noisy labels by means of the relationship constraints between samples on the k Nearest Neighbor (kNN) graph and early-stop training strategy. Specifically, GLC learns to aggregate node features from neighbors and predict whether the nodes should be linked on the graph. Besides, GLC is optimized with 'early stop' before the noisy labels are severely memorized to prevent overfitting to noisy pseudo labels. Consequently, GLC improves the quality of pseudo labels though the supervision signals contain some noise, leading to better Re-ID performance. Extensive experiments in USL and UDA person Re-ID on Market-1501 and MSMT17 show that our method is widely compatible with various clustering-based methods and promotes the state-of-the-art performance consistently.

Part-Aware Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Person Re-Identification

In person re-identification (ReID), very recent researches have validated pre-training the models on unlabelled person images is much better than on ImageNet. However, these researches directly apply the existing self-supervised learning (SSL) methods designed for image classification to ReID without any adaption in the framework. These SSL methods match the outputs of local views (e.g., red T-shirt, blue shorts) to those of the global views at the same time, losing lots of details. In this paper, we propose a ReID-specific pre-training method, Part-Aware Self-Supervised pre-training (PASS), which can generate part-level features to offer fine-grained information and is more suitable for ReID. PASS divides the images into several local areas, and the local views randomly cropped from each area are assigned with a specific learnable [PART] token. On the other hand, the [PART]s of all local areas are also appended to the global views. PASS learns to match the output of the local views and global views on the same [PART]. That is, the learned [PART] of the local views from a local area is only matched with the corresponding [PART] learned from the global views. As a result, each [PART] can focus on a specific local area of the image and extracts fine-grained information of this area. Experiments show PASS sets the new state-of-the-art performances on Market1501 and MSMT17 on various ReID tasks, e.g., vanilla ViT-S/16 pre-trained by PASS achieves 92.2\%/90.2\%/88.5\% mAP accuracy on Market1501 for supervised/UDA/USL ReID. Our codes are available at https://github.com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/PASS-reID.

Towards Efficient Full 8-bit Integer DNN Online Training on Resource-limited Devices without Batch Normalization

Huge computational costs brought by convolution and batch normalization (BN) have caused great challenges for the online training and corresponding applications of deep neural networks (DNNs), especially in resource-limited devices. Existing works only focus on the convolution or BN acceleration and no solution can alleviate both problems with satisfactory performance. Online training has gradually become a trend in resource-limited devices like mobile phones while there is still no complete technical scheme with acceptable model performance, processing speed, and computational cost. In this research, an efficient online-training quantization framework termed EOQ is proposed by combining Fixup initialization and a novel quantization scheme for DNN model compression and acceleration. Based on the proposed framework, we have successfully realized full 8-bit integer network training and removed BN in large-scale DNNs. Especially, weight updates are quantized to 8-bit integers for the first time. Theoretical analyses of EOQ utilizing Fixup initialization for removing BN have been further given using a novel Block Dynamical Isometry theory with weaker assumptions. Benefiting from rational quantization strategies and the absence of BN, the full 8-bit networks based on EOQ can achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and immense advantages in computational cost and processing speed. What is more, the design of deep learning chips can be profoundly simplified for the absence of unfriendly square root operations in BN. Beyond this, EOQ has been evidenced to be more advantageous in small-batch online training with fewer batch samples. In summary, the EOQ framework is specially designed for reducing the high cost of convolution and BN in network training, demonstrating a broad application prospect of online training in resource-limited devices.