Beyond Accuracy: Ensuring Correct Predictions With Correct Rationales

Large pretrained foundation models demonstrate exceptional performance and, in some high-stakes applications, even surpass human experts. However, most of these models are currently evaluated primarily on prediction accuracy, overlooking the validity of the rationales behind their accurate predictions. For the safe deployment of foundation models, there is a pressing need to ensure double-correct predictions, i.e., correct prediction backed by correct rationales. To achieve this, we propose a two-phase scheme: First, we curate a new dataset that offers structured rationales for visual recognition tasks. Second, we propose a rationale-informed optimization method to guide the model in disentangling and localizing visual evidence for each rationale, without requiring manual annotations. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art models by up to 10.1% in prediction accuracy across a wide range of tasks. Furthermore, our method significantly improves the model's rationale correctness, improving localization by 7.5% and disentanglement by 36.5%. Our dataset, source code, and pretrained weights: https://github.com/deep-real/DCP

SeafloorAI: A Large-scale Vision-Language Dataset for Seafloor Geological Survey

A major obstacle to the advancements of machine learning models in marine science, particularly in sonar imagery analysis, is the scarcity of AI-ready datasets. While there have been efforts to make AI-ready sonar image dataset publicly available, they suffer from limitations in terms of environment setting and scale. To bridge this gap, we introduce SeafloorAI, the first extensive AI-ready datasets for seafloor mapping across 5 geological layers that is curated in collaboration with marine scientists. We further extend the dataset to SeafloorGenAI by incorporating the language component in order to facilitate the development of both vision- and language-capable machine learning models for sonar imagery. The dataset consists of 62 geo-distributed data surveys spanning 17,300 square kilometers, with 696K sonar images, 827K annotated segmentation masks, 696K detailed language descriptions and approximately 7M question-answer pairs. By making our data processing source code publicly available, we aim to engage the marine science community to enrich the data pool and inspire the machine learning community to develop more robust models. This collaborative approach will enhance the capabilities and applications of our datasets within both fields.

Test-time Adaptation for Cross-modal Retrieval with Query Shift

The success of most existing cross-modal retrieval methods heavily relies on the assumption that the given queries follow the same distribution of the source domain. However, such an assumption is easily violated in real-world scenarios due to the complexity and diversity of queries, thus leading to the query shift problem. Specifically, query shift refers to the online query stream originating from the domain that follows a different distribution with the source one. In this paper, we observe that query shift would not only diminish the uniformity (namely, within-modality scatter) of the query modality but also amplify the gap between query and gallery modalities. Based on the observations, we propose a novel method dubbed Test-time adaptation for Cross-modal Retrieval (TCR). In brief, TCR employs a novel module to refine the query predictions (namely, retrieval results of the query) and a joint objective to prevent query shift from disturbing the common space, thus achieving online adaptation for the cross-modal retrieval models with query shift. Expensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed TCR against query shift. The code will be released upon acceptance.

Hierarchical Sparse Representation Clustering for High-Dimensional Data Streams

Data stream clustering reveals patterns within continuously arriving, potentially unbounded data sequences. Numerous data stream algorithms have been proposed to cluster data streams. The existing data stream clustering algorithms still face significant challenges when addressing high-dimensional data streams. First, it is intractable to measure the similarities among high-dimensional data objects via Euclidean distances when constructing and merging microclusters. Second, these algorithms are highly sensitive to the noise contained in high-dimensional data streams. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical sparse representation clustering (HSRC) method for clustering high-dimensional data streams. HSRC first employs an $l_1$-minimization technique to learn an affinity matrix for data objects in individual landmark windows with fixed sizes, where the number of neighboring data objects is automatically selected. This approach ensures that highly correlated data samples within clusters are grouped together. Then, HSRC applies a spectral clustering technique to the affinity matrix to generate microclusters. These microclusters are subsequently merged into macroclusters based on their sparse similarity degrees (SSDs). Additionally, HSRC introduces sparsity residual values (SRVs) to adaptively select representative data objects from the current landmark window. These representatives serve as dictionary samples for the next landmark window. Finally, HSRC refines each macrocluster through fine-tuning. In particular, HSRC enables the detection of outliers in high-dimensional data streams via the associated SRVs. The experimental results obtained on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of HSRC.

DEAL: Disentangle and Localize Concept-level Explanations for VLMs

Large pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have become ubiquitous foundational components of other models and downstream tasks. Although powerful, our empirical results reveal that such models might not be able to identify fine-grained concepts. Specifically, the explanations of VLMs with respect to fine-grained concepts are entangled and mislocalized. To address this issue, we propose to DisEntAngle and Localize (DEAL) the concept-level explanations for VLMs without human annotations. The key idea is encouraging the concept-level explanations to be distinct while maintaining consistency with category-level explanations. We conduct extensive experiments and ablation studies on a wide range of benchmark datasets and vision-language models. Our empirical results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the concept-level explanations of the model in terms of disentanglability and localizability. Surprisingly, the improved explainability alleviates the model's reliance on spurious correlations, which further benefits the prediction accuracy.

Adaptive Cascading Network for Continual Test-Time Adaptation

We study the problem of continual test-time adaption where the goal is to adapt a source pre-trained model to a sequence of unlabelled target domains at test time. Existing methods on test-time training suffer from several limitations: (1) Mismatch between the feature extractor and classifier; (2) Interference between the main and self-supervised tasks; (3) Lack of the ability to quickly adapt to the current distribution. In light of these challenges, we propose a cascading paradigm that simultaneously updates the feature extractor and classifier at test time, mitigating the mismatch between them and enabling long-term model adaptation. The pre-training of our model is structured within a meta-learning framework, thereby minimizing the interference between the main and self-supervised tasks and encouraging fast adaptation in the presence of limited unlabelled data. Additionally, we introduce innovative evaluation metrics, average accuracy and forward transfer, to effectively measure the model's adaptation capabilities in dynamic, real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate the superiority of our approach in a range of tasks including image classification, text classification, and speech recognition.

Beyond the Federation: Topology-aware Federated Learning for Generalization to Unseen Clients

Federated Learning is widely employed to tackle distributed sensitive data. Existing methods primarily focus on addressing in-federation data heterogeneity. However, we observed that they suffer from significant performance degradation when applied to unseen clients for out-of-federation (OOF) generalization. The recent attempts to address generalization to unseen clients generally struggle to scale up to large-scale distributed settings due to high communication or computation costs. Moreover, methods that scale well often demonstrate poor generalization capability. To achieve OOF-resiliency in a scalable manner, we propose Topology-aware Federated Learning (TFL) that leverages client topology - a graph representing client relationships - to effectively train robust models against OOF data. We formulate a novel optimization problem for TFL, consisting of two key modules: Client Topology Learning, which infers the client relationships in a privacy-preserving manner, and Learning on Client Topology, which leverages the learned topology to identify influential clients and harness this information into the FL optimization process to efficiently build robust models. Empirical evaluation on a variety of real-world datasets verifies TFL's superior OOF robustness and scalability.

A Survey on Deep Clustering: From the Prior Perspective

Facilitated by the powerful feature extraction ability of neural networks, deep clustering has achieved great success in analyzing high-dimensional and complex real-world data. The performance of deep clustering methods is affected by various factors such as network structures and learning objectives. However, as pointed out in this survey, the essence of deep clustering lies in the incorporation and utilization of prior knowledge, which is largely ignored by existing works. From pioneering deep clustering methods based on data structure assumptions to recent contrastive clustering methods based on data augmentation invariances, the development of deep clustering intrinsically corresponds to the evolution of prior knowledge. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of deep clustering methods by categorizing them into six types of prior knowledge. We find that in general the prior innovation follows two trends, namely, i) from mining to constructing, and ii) from internal to external. Besides, we provide a benchmark on five widely-used datasets and analyze the performance of methods with diverse priors. By providing a novel prior knowledge perspective, we hope this survey could provide some novel insights and inspire future research in the deep clustering community.

Multimodal Fusion on Low-quality Data: A Comprehensive Survey

Multimodal fusion focuses on integrating information from multiple modalities with the goal of more accurate prediction, which has achieved remarkable progress in a wide range of scenarios, including autonomous driving and medical diagnosis. However, the reliability of multimodal fusion remains largely unexplored especially under low-quality data settings. This paper surveys the common challenges and recent advances of multimodal fusion in the wild and presents them in a comprehensive taxonomy. From a data-centric view, we identify four main challenges that are faced by multimodal fusion on low-quality data, namely (1) noisy multimodal data that are contaminated with heterogeneous noises, (2) incomplete multimodal data that some modalities are missing, (3) imbalanced multimodal data that the qualities or properties of different modalities are significantly different and (4) quality-varying multimodal data that the quality of each modality dynamically changes with respect to different samples. This new taxonomy will enable researchers to understand the state of the field and identify several potential directions. We also provide discussion for the open problems in this field together with interesting future research directions.

PointCloud-Text Matching: Benchmark Datasets and a Baseline

In this paper, we present and study a new instance-level retrieval task: PointCloud-Text Matching~(PTM), which aims to find the exact cross-modal instance that matches a given point-cloud query or text query. PTM could be applied to various scenarios, such as indoor/urban-canyon localization and scene retrieval. However, there exists no suitable and targeted dataset for PTM in practice. Therefore, we construct three new PTM benchmark datasets, namely 3D2T-SR, 3D2T-NR, and 3D2T-QA. We observe that the data is challenging and with noisy correspondence due to the sparsity, noise, or disorder of point clouds and the ambiguity, vagueness, or incompleteness of texts, which make existing cross-modal matching methods ineffective for PTM. To tackle these challenges, we propose a PTM baseline, named Robust PointCloud-Text Matching method (RoMa). RoMa consists of two modules: a Dual Attention Perception module (DAP) and a Robust Negative Contrastive Learning module (RNCL). Specifically, DAP leverages token-level and feature-level attention to adaptively focus on useful local and global features, and aggregate them into common representations, thereby reducing the adverse impact of noise and ambiguity. To handle noisy correspondence, RNCL divides negative pairs, which are much less error-prone than positive pairs, into clean and noisy subsets, and assigns them forward and reverse optimization directions respectively, thus enhancing robustness against noisy correspondence. We conduct extensive experiments on our benchmarks and demonstrate the superiority of our RoMa.