LOBG:Less Overfitting for Better Generalization in Vision-Language Model

Existing prompt learning methods in Vision-Language Models (VLM) have effectively enhanced the transfer capability of VLM to downstream tasks, but they suffer from a significant decline in generalization due to severe overfitting. To address this issue, we propose a framework named LOBG for vision-language models. Specifically, we use CLIP to filter out fine-grained foreground information that might cause overfitting, thereby guiding prompts with basic visual concepts. To further mitigate overfitting, we devel oped a structural topology preservation (STP) loss at the feature level, which endows the feature space with overall plasticity, allowing effective reshaping of the feature space during optimization. Additionally, we employed hierarchical logit distilation (HLD) at the output level to constrain outputs, complementing STP at the output end. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves generalization capability and alleviates overfitting compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

Prompt-Agnostic Adversarial Perturbation for Customized Diffusion Models

Diffusion models have revolutionized customized text-to-image generation, allowing for efficient synthesis of photos from personal data with textual descriptions. However, these advancements bring forth risks including privacy breaches and unauthorized replication of artworks. Previous researches primarily center around using prompt-specific methods to generate adversarial examples to protect personal images, yet the effectiveness of existing methods is hindered by constrained adaptability to different prompts. In this paper, we introduce a Prompt-Agnostic Adversarial Perturbation (PAP) method for customized diffusion models. PAP first models the prompt distribution using a Laplace Approximation, and then produces prompt-agnostic perturbations by maximizing a disturbance expectation based on the modeled distribution. This approach effectively tackles the prompt-agnostic attacks, leading to improved defense stability. Extensive experiments in face privacy and artistic style protection, demonstrate the superior generalization of our method in comparison to existing techniques.

Overview of AI-Debater 2023: The Challenges of Argument Generation Tasks

In this paper we present the results of the AI-Debater 2023 Challenge held by the Chinese Conference on Affect Computing (CCAC 2023), and introduce the related datasets. We organize two tracks to handle the argumentative generation tasks in different scenarios, namely, Counter-Argument Generation (Track 1) and Claim-based Argument Generation (Track 2). Each track is equipped with its distinct dataset and baseline model respectively. In total, 32 competing teams register for the challenge, from which we received 11 successful submissions. In this paper, we will present the results of the challenge and a summary of the systems, highlighting commonalities and innovations among participating systems. Datasets and baseline models of the AI-Debater 2023 Challenge have been already released and can be accessed through the official website of the challenge.

Beyond Prompt Learning: Continual Adapter for Efficient Rehearsal-Free Continual Learning

The problem of Rehearsal-Free Continual Learning (RFCL) aims to continually learn new knowledge while preventing forgetting of the old knowledge, without storing any old samples and prototypes. The latest methods leverage large-scale pre-trained models as the backbone and use key-query matching to generate trainable prompts to learn new knowledge. However, the domain gap between the pre-training dataset and the downstream datasets can easily lead to inaccuracies in key-query matching prompt selection when directly generating queries using the pre-trained model, which hampers learning new knowledge. Thus, in this paper, we propose a beyond prompt learning approach to the RFCL task, called Continual Adapter (C-ADA). It mainly comprises a parameter-extensible continual adapter layer (CAL) and a scaling and shifting (S&S) module in parallel with the pre-trained model. C-ADA flexibly extends specific weights in CAL to learn new knowledge for each task and freezes old weights to preserve prior knowledge, thereby avoiding matching errors and operational inefficiencies introduced by key-query matching. To reduce the gap, C-ADA employs an S&S module to transfer the feature space from pre-trained datasets to downstream datasets. Moreover, we propose an orthogonal loss to mitigate the interaction between old and new knowledge. Our approach achieves significantly improved performance and training speed, outperforming the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) method. Additionally, we conduct experiments on domain-incremental learning, surpassing the SOTA, and demonstrating the generality of our approach in different settings.

Projecting Points to Axes: Oriented Object Detection via Point-Axis Representation

This paper introduces the point-axis representation for oriented object detection, emphasizing its flexibility and geometrically intuitive nature with two key components: points and axes. 1) Points delineate the spatial extent and contours of objects, providing detailed shape descriptions. 2) Axes define the primary directionalities of objects, providing essential orientation cues crucial for precise detection. The point-axis representation decouples location and rotation, addressing the loss discontinuity issues commonly encountered in traditional bounding box-based approaches. For effective optimization without introducing additional annotations, we propose the max-projection loss to supervise point set learning and the cross-axis loss for robust axis representation learning. Further, leveraging this representation, we present the Oriented DETR model, seamlessly integrating the DETR framework for precise point-axis prediction and end-to-end detection. Experimental results demonstrate significant performance improvements in oriented object detection tasks.

SPEAR: Receiver-to-Receiver Acoustic Neural Warping Field

We present SPEAR, a continuous receiver-to-receiver acoustic neural warping field for spatial acoustic effects prediction in an acoustic 3D space with a single stationary audio source. Unlike traditional source-to-receiver modelling methods that require prior space acoustic properties knowledge to rigorously model audio propagation from source to receiver, we propose to predict by warping the spatial acoustic effects from one reference receiver position to another target receiver position, so that the warped audio essentially accommodates all spatial acoustic effects belonging to the target position. SPEAR can be trained in a data much more readily accessible manner, in which we simply ask two robots to independently record spatial audio at different positions. We further theoretically prove the universal existence of the warping field if and only if one audio source presents. Three physical principles are incorporated to guide SPEAR network design, leading to the learned warping field physically meaningful. We demonstrate SPEAR superiority on both synthetic, photo-realistic and real-world dataset, showing the huge potential of SPEAR to various down-stream robotic tasks.

Continual Novel Class Discovery via Feature Enhancement and Adaptation

Continual Novel Class Discovery (CNCD) aims to continually discover novel classes without labels while maintaining the recognition capability for previously learned classes. The main challenges faced by CNCD include the feature-discrepancy problem, the inter-session confusion problem, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel Feature Enhancement and Adaptation method for the CNCD to tackle the above challenges, which consists of a guide-to-novel framework, a centroid-to-samples similarity constraint (CSS), and a boundary-aware prototype constraint (BAP). More specifically, the guide-to-novel framework is established to continually discover novel classes under the guidance of prior distribution. Afterward, the CSS is designed to constrain the relationship between centroid-to-samples similarities of different classes, thereby enhancing the distinctiveness of features among novel classes. Finally, the BAP is proposed to keep novel class features aware of the positions of other class prototypes during incremental sessions, and better adapt novel class features to the shared feature space. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method, especially in more challenging protocols with more incremental sessions.

I2CANSAY:Inter-Class Analogical Augmentation and Intra-Class Significance Analysis for Non-Exemplar Online Task-Free Continual Learning

Online task-free continual learning (OTFCL) is a more challenging variant of continual learning which emphasizes the gradual shift of task boundaries and learns in an online mode. Existing methods rely on a memory buffer composed of old samples to prevent forgetting. However,the use of memory buffers not only raises privacy concerns but also hinders the efficient learning of new samples. To address this problem, we propose a novel framework called I2CANSAY that gets rid of the dependence on memory buffers and efficiently learns the knowledge of new data from one-shot samples. Concretely, our framework comprises two main modules. Firstly, the Inter-Class Analogical Augmentation (ICAN) module generates diverse pseudo-features for old classes based on the inter-class analogy of feature distributions for different new classes, serving as a substitute for the memory buffer. Secondly, the Intra-Class Significance Analysis (ISAY) module analyzes the significance of attributes for each class via its distribution standard deviation, and generates the importance vector as a correction bias for the linear classifier, thereby enhancing the capability of learning from new samples. We run our experiments on four popular image classification datasets: CoRe50, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and CUB-200, our approach outperforms the prior state-of-the-art by a large margin.

CEAT: Continual Expansion and Absorption Transformer for Non-Exemplar Class-Incremental Learning

In real-world applications, dynamic scenarios require the models to possess the capability to learn new tasks continuously without forgetting the old knowledge. Experience-Replay methods store a subset of the old images for joint training. In the scenario of more strict privacy protection, storing the old images becomes infeasible, which leads to a more severe plasticity-stability dilemma and classifier bias. To meet the above challenges, we propose a new architecture, named continual expansion and absorption transformer~(CEAT). The model can learn the novel knowledge by extending the expanded-fusion layers in parallel with the frozen previous parameters. After the task ends, we losslessly absorb the extended parameters into the backbone to ensure that the number of parameters remains constant. To improve the learning ability of the model, we designed a novel prototype contrastive loss to reduce the overlap between old and new classes in the feature space. Besides, to address the classifier bias towards the new classes, we propose a novel approach to generate the pseudo-features to correct the classifier. We experiment with our methods on three standard Non-Exemplar Class-Incremental Learning~(NECIL) benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model gets a significant improvement compared with the previous works and achieves 5.38%, 5.20%, and 4.92% improvement on CIFAR-100, TinyImageNet, and ImageNet-Subset.

Emerging Synergies Between Large Language Models and Machine Learning in Ecommerce Recommendations

With the boom of e-commerce and web applications, recommender systems have become an important part of our daily lives, providing personalized recommendations based on the user's preferences. Although deep neural networks (DNNs) have made significant progress in improving recommendation systems by simulating the interaction between users and items and incorporating their textual information, these DNN-based approaches still have some limitations, such as the difficulty of effectively understanding users' interests and capturing textual information. It is not possible to generalize to different seen/unseen recommendation scenarios and reason about their predictions. At the same time, the emergence of large language models (LLMs), represented by ChatGPT and GPT-4, has revolutionized the fields of natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) due to their superior capabilities in the basic tasks of language understanding and generation, and their impressive generalization and reasoning capabilities. As a result, recent research has sought to harness the power of LLM to improve recommendation systems. Given the rapid development of this research direction in the field of recommendation systems, there is an urgent need for a systematic review of existing LLM-driven recommendation systems for researchers and practitioners in related fields to gain insight into. More specifically, we first introduced a representative approach to learning user and item representations using LLM as a feature encoder. We then reviewed the latest advances in LLMs techniques for collaborative filtering enhanced recommendation systems from the three paradigms of pre-training, fine-tuning, and prompting. Finally, we had a comprehensive discussion on the future direction of this emerging field.