Video Creation by Demonstration

We explore a novel video creation experience, namely Video Creation by Demonstration. Given a demonstration video and a context image from a different scene, we generate a physically plausible video that continues naturally from the context image and carries out the action concepts from the demonstration. To enable this capability, we present $\delta$-Diffusion, a self-supervised training approach that learns from unlabeled videos by conditional future frame prediction. Unlike most existing video generation controls that are based on explicit signals, we adopts the form of implicit latent control for maximal flexibility and expressiveness required by general videos. By leveraging a video foundation model with an appearance bottleneck design on top, we extract action latents from demonstration videos for conditioning the generation process with minimal appearance leakage. Empirically, $\delta$-Diffusion outperforms related baselines in terms of both human preference and large-scale machine evaluations, and demonstrates potentials towards interactive world simulation. Sampled video generation results are available at https://delta-diffusion.github.io/.

Multi-Stage Vision Token Dropping: Towards Efficient Multimodal Large Language Model

The vision tokens in multimodal large language models usually exhibit significant spatial and temporal redundancy and take up most of the input tokens, which harms their inference efficiency. To solve this problem, some recent works were introduced to drop the unimportant tokens during inference where the importance of each token is decided only by the information in either the vision encoding stage or the prefilling stage. In this paper, we propose Multi-stage Token Dropping (MustDrop) to measure the importance of each token from the whole lifecycle, including the vision encoding stage, prefilling stage, and decoding stage. Concretely, in the visual encoding stage, MustDrop merges spatially adjacent tokens with high similarity, and establishes a key token set to retain the most vision-critical tokens, preventing them from being discarded in later stages. In the prefilling stage, MustDrop further compresses vision tokens by the guidance of text semantics, with a dual-attention filtering strategy. In the decoding stage, an output-aware cache policy is proposed to further reduce the size of the KV cache. By leveraging tailored strategies in the multi-stage process, MustDrop can more precisely recognize the important and redundant tokens, thus achieving an optimal balance between performance and efficiency. For instance, MustDrop reduces about 88.5\% FLOPs on LLaVA with a compression ratio of 92.2\% while maintaining comparable accuracy. Our codes are available at \url{https://github.com/liuting20/MustDrop}.

Unstructured Text Enhanced Open-domain Dialogue System: A Systematic Survey

Incorporating external knowledge into dialogue generation has been proven to benefit the performance of an open-domain Dialogue System (DS), such as generating informative or stylized responses, controlling conversation topics. In this article, we study the open-domain DS that uses unstructured text as external knowledge sources (\textbf{U}nstructured \textbf{T}ext \textbf{E}nhanced \textbf{D}ialogue \textbf{S}ystem, \textbf{UTEDS}). The existence of unstructured text entails distinctions between UTEDS and traditional data-driven DS and we aim to analyze these differences. We first give the definition of the UTEDS related concepts, then summarize the recently released datasets and models. We categorize UTEDS into Retrieval and Generative models and introduce them from the perspective of model components. The retrieval models consist of Fusion, Matching, and Ranking modules, while the generative models comprise Dialogue and Knowledge Encoding, Knowledge Selection, and Response Generation modules. We further summarize the evaluation methods utilized in UTEDS and analyze the current models' performance. At last, we discuss the future development trends of UTEDS, hoping to inspire new research in this field.

Prove Your Point!: Bringing Proof-Enhancement Principles to Argumentative Essay Generation

Argumentative essay generation (AEG) aims to generate complete texts on specific controversial topics or debates. Although current AEG methods can generate individual opinions, they often overlook the high-level connections between these opinions. This often leads to the generated results being mired in logical confusion, unable to proof their own arguments effectively. The generated essay may present evidence that contradicts the claims or they may fail to assemble the claims into logical flow. In this paper, we present a unified two-stage framework: Proof-Enhancement and Self-Annotation (PESA) for AEG with a focus on logical enhancement. Specifically, we first construct pseudo-labels for logical information,claims and grounds, using a large language model. We then propose a tree planning approach that introduces proof principles and ensures logical consistency. Extensive experimental results show that, benefiting from proof principle guidance, PESA generates argumentative essays with better logical validity and persuasiveness than strong baseline models.

Visualizing attention zones in machine reading comprehension models

The attention mechanism plays an important role in the machine reading comprehension (MRC) model. Here, we describe a pipeline for building an MRC model with a pretrained language model and visualizing the effect of each attention zone in different layers, which can indicate the explainability of the model. With the presented protocol and accompanying code, researchers can easily visualize the relevance of each attention zone in the MRC model. This approach can be generalized to other pretrained language models.

A Static and Dynamic Attention Framework for Multi Turn Dialogue Generation

Recently, research on open domain dialogue systems have attracted extensive interests of academic and industrial researchers. The goal of an open domain dialogue system is to imitate humans in conversations. Previous works on single turn conversation generation have greatly promoted the research of open domain dialogue systems. However, understanding multiple single turn conversations is not equal to the understanding of multi turn dialogue due to the coherent and context dependent properties of human dialogue. Therefore, in open domain multi turn dialogue generation, it is essential to modeling the contextual semantics of the dialogue history, rather than only according to the last utterance. Previous research had verified the effectiveness of the hierarchical recurrent encoder-decoder framework on open domain multi turn dialogue generation. However, using RNN-based model to hierarchically encoding the utterances to obtain the representation of dialogue history still face the problem of a vanishing gradient. To address this issue, in this paper, we proposed a static and dynamic attention-based approach to model the dialogue history and then generate open domain multi turn dialogue responses. Experimental results on Ubuntu and Opensubtitles datasets verify the effectiveness of the proposed static and dynamic attention-based approach on automatic and human evaluation metrics in various experimental settings. Meanwhile, we also empirically verify the performance of combining the static and dynamic attentions on open domain multi turn dialogue generation.

A Stack-Propagation Framework for Low-Resource Personalized Dialogue Generation

With the resurgent interest in building open-domain dialogue systems, the dialogue generation task has attracted increasing attention over the past few years. This task is usually formulated as a conditional generation problem, which aims to generate a natural and meaningful response given dialogue contexts and specific constraints, such as persona. And maintaining a consistent persona is essential for the dialogue systems to gain trust from the users. Although tremendous advancements have been brought, traditional persona-based dialogue models are typically trained by leveraging a large number of persona-dense dialogue examples. Yet, such persona-dense training data are expensive to obtain, leading to a limited scale. This work presents a novel approach to learning from limited training examples by regarding consistency understanding as a regularization of response generation. To this end, we propose a novel stack-propagation framework for learning a generation and understanding pipeline.Specifically, the framework stacks a Transformer encoder and two Transformer decoders, where the first decoder models response generation and the second serves as a regularizer and jointly models response generation and consistency understanding. The proposed framework can benefit from the stacked encoder and decoders to learn from much smaller personalized dialogue data while maintaining competitive performance. Under different low-resource settings, subjective and objective evaluations prove that the stack-propagation framework outperforms strong baselines in response quality and persona consistency and largely overcomes the shortcomings of traditional models that rely heavily on the persona-dense dialogue data.

Policy-driven Knowledge Selection and Response Generation for Document-grounded Dialogue

Document-grounded dialogue (DGD) uses documents as external knowledge for dialogue generation. Correctly understanding the dialogue context is crucial for selecting knowledge from the document and generating proper responses. In this paper, we propose using a dialogue policy to help the dialogue understanding in DGD. Our dialogue policy consists of two kinds of guiding signals: utterance function and topic transfer intent. The utterance function reflects the purpose and style of an utterance, and the topic transfer intent reflects the topic and content of an utterance. We propose a novel framework exploiting our dialogue policy for two core tasks in DGD, namely knowledge selection (KS) and response generation (RG). The framework consists of two modules: the Policy planner leverages policy-aware dialogue representation to select knowledge and predict the policy of the response; the generator uses policy/knowledge-aware dialogue representation for response generation. Our policy-driven model gets state-of-the-art performance on three public benchmarks and we provide a detailed analysis of the experimental results. Our code/data will be released on GitHub.

Accelerating Diffusion Transformers with Token-wise Feature Caching

Diffusion transformers have shown significant effectiveness in both image and video synthesis at the expense of huge computation costs. To address this problem, feature caching methods have been introduced to accelerate diffusion transformers by caching the features in previous timesteps and reusing them in the following timesteps. However, previous caching methods ignore that different tokens exhibit different sensitivities to feature caching, and feature caching on some tokens may lead to 10$\times$ more destruction to the overall generation quality compared with other tokens. In this paper, we introduce token-wise feature caching, allowing us to adaptively select the most suitable tokens for caching, and further enable us to apply different caching ratios to neural layers in different types and depths. Extensive experiments on PixArt-$\alpha$, OpenSora, and DiT demonstrate our effectiveness in both image and video generation with no requirements for training. For instance, 2.36$\times$ and 1.93$\times$ acceleration are achieved on OpenSora and PixArt-$\alpha$ with almost no drop in generation quality.

Understanding Robustness of Parameter-Efficient Tuning for Image Classification

Parameter-efficient tuning (PET) techniques calibrate the model's predictions on downstream tasks by freezing the pre-trained models and introducing a small number of learnable parameters. However, despite the numerous PET methods proposed, their robustness has not been thoroughly investigated. In this paper, we systematically explore the robustness of four classical PET techniques (e.g., VPT, Adapter, AdaptFormer, and LoRA) under both white-box attacks and information perturbations. For white-box attack scenarios, we first analyze the performance of PET techniques using FGSM and PGD attacks. Subsequently, we further explore the transferability of adversarial samples and the impact of learnable parameter quantities on the robustness of PET methods. Under information perturbation attacks, we introduce four distinct perturbation strategies, including Patch-wise Drop, Pixel-wise Drop, Patch Shuffle, and Gaussian Noise, to comprehensively assess the robustness of these PET techniques in the presence of information loss. Via these extensive studies, we enhance the understanding of the robustness of PET methods, providing valuable insights for improving their performance in computer vision applications. The code is available at https://github.com/JCruan519/PETRobustness.