Differentiable Gaussian Representation for Incomplete CT Reconstruction

Incomplete Computed Tomography (CT) benefits patients by reducing radiation exposure. However, reconstructing high-fidelity images from limited views or angles remains challenging due to the ill-posed nature of the problem. Deep Learning Reconstruction (DLR) methods have shown promise in enhancing image quality, but the paradox between training data diversity and high generalization ability remains unsolved. In this paper, we propose a novel Gaussian Representation for Incomplete CT Reconstruction (GRCT) without the usage of any neural networks or full-dose CT data. Specifically, we model the 3D volume as a set of learnable Gaussians, which are optimized directly from the incomplete sinogram. Our method can be applied to multiple views and angles without changing the architecture. Additionally, we propose a differentiable Fast CT Reconstruction method for efficient clinical usage. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and settings demonstrate significant improvements in reconstruction quality metrics and high efficiency. We plan to release our code as open-source.

Swiss Army Knife: Synergizing Biases in Knowledge from Vision Foundation Models for Multi-Task Learning

Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) have demonstrated outstanding performance on numerous downstream tasks. However, due to their inherent representation biases originating from different training paradigms, VFMs exhibit advantages and disadvantages across distinct vision tasks. Although amalgamating the strengths of multiple VFMs for downstream tasks is an intuitive strategy, effectively exploiting these biases remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel and versatile "Swiss Army Knife" (SAK) solution, which adaptively distills knowledge from a committee of VFMs to enhance multi-task learning. Unlike existing methods that use a single backbone for knowledge transfer, our approach preserves the unique representation bias of each teacher by collaborating the lightweight Teacher-Specific Adapter Path modules with the Teacher-Agnostic Stem. Through dynamic selection and combination of representations with Mixture-of-Representations Routers, our SAK is capable of synergizing the complementary strengths of multiple VFMs. Extensive experiments show that our SAK remarkably outperforms prior state of the arts in multi-task learning by 10% on the NYUD-v2 benchmark, while also providing a flexible and robust framework that can readily accommodate more advanced model designs.

Learning Multiple Representations with Inconsistency-Guided Detail Regularization for Mask-Guided Matting

Mask-guided matting networks have achieved significant improvements and have shown great potential in practical applications in recent years. However, simply learning matting representation from synthetic and lack-of-real-world-diversity matting data, these approaches tend to overfit low-level details in wrong regions, lack generalization to objects with complex structures and real-world scenes such as shadows, as well as suffer from interference of background lines or textures. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel auxiliary learning framework for mask-guided matting models, incorporating three auxiliary tasks: semantic segmentation, edge detection, and background line detection besides matting, to learn different and effective representations from different types of data and annotations. Our framework and model introduce the following key aspects: (1) to learn real-world adaptive semantic representation for objects with diverse and complex structures under real-world scenes, we introduce extra semantic segmentation and edge detection tasks on more diverse real-world data with segmentation annotations; (2) to avoid overfitting on low-level details, we propose a module to utilize the inconsistency between learned segmentation and matting representations to regularize detail refinement; (3) we propose a novel background line detection task into our auxiliary learning framework, to suppress interference of background lines or textures. In addition, we propose a high-quality matting benchmark, Plant-Mat, to evaluate matting methods on complex structures. Extensively quantitative and qualitative results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art mask-guided methods.

YOLO-MED : Multi-Task Interaction Network for Biomedical Images

Object detection and semantic segmentation are pivotal components in biomedical image analysis. Current single-task networks exhibit promising outcomes in both detection and segmentation tasks. Multi-task networks have gained prominence due to their capability to simultaneously tackle segmentation and detection tasks, while also accelerating the segmentation inference. Nevertheless, recent multi-task networks confront distinct limitations such as the difficulty in striking a balance between accuracy and inference speed. Additionally, they often overlook the integration of cross-scale features, which is especially important for biomedical image analysis. In this study, we propose an efficient end-to-end multi-task network capable of concurrently performing object detection and semantic segmentation called YOLO-Med. Our model employs a backbone and a neck for multi-scale feature extraction, complemented by the inclusion of two task-specific decoders. A cross-scale task-interaction module is employed in order to facilitate information fusion between various tasks. Our model exhibits promising results in balancing accuracy and speed when evaluated on the Kvasir-seg dataset and a private biomedical image dataset.

Task Indicating Transformer for Task-conditional Dense Predictions

The task-conditional model is a distinctive stream for efficient multi-task learning. Existing works encounter a critical limitation in learning task-agnostic and task-specific representations, primarily due to shortcomings in global context modeling arising from CNN-based architectures, as well as a deficiency in multi-scale feature interaction within the decoder. In this paper, we introduce a novel task-conditional framework called Task Indicating Transformer (TIT) to tackle this challenge. Our approach designs a Mix Task Adapter module within the transformer block, which incorporates a Task Indicating Matrix through matrix decomposition, thereby enhancing long-range dependency modeling and parameter-efficient feature adaptation by capturing intra- and inter-task features. Moreover, we propose a Task Gate Decoder module that harnesses a Task Indicating Vector and gating mechanism to facilitate adaptive multi-scale feature refinement guided by task embeddings. Experiments on two public multi-task dense prediction benchmarks, NYUD-v2 and PASCAL-Context, demonstrate that our approach surpasses state-of-the-art task-conditional methods.

Federated Multi-Task Learning on Non-IID Data Silos: An Experimental Study

The innovative Federated Multi-Task Learning (FMTL) approach consolidates the benefits of Federated Learning (FL) and Multi-Task Learning (MTL), enabling collaborative model training on multi-task learning datasets. However, a comprehensive evaluation method, integrating the unique features of both FL and MTL, is currently absent in the field. This paper fills this void by introducing a novel framework, FMTL-Bench, for systematic evaluation of the FMTL paradigm. This benchmark covers various aspects at the data, model, and optimization algorithm levels, and comprises seven sets of comparative experiments, encapsulating a wide array of non-independent and identically distributed (Non-IID) data partitioning scenarios. We propose a systematic process for comparing baselines of diverse indicators and conduct a case study on communication expenditure, time, and energy consumption. Through our exhaustive experiments, we aim to provide valuable insights into the strengths and limitations of existing baseline methods, contributing to the ongoing discourse on optimal FMTL application in practical scenarios. The source code will be made available for results replication.

Towards Hetero-Client Federated Multi-Task Learning

Federated Learning (FL) enables joint training across distributed clients using their local data privately. Federated Multi-Task Learning (FMTL) builds on FL to handle multiple tasks, assuming model congruity that identical model architecture is deployed in each client. To relax this assumption and thus extend real-world applicability, we introduce a novel problem setting, Hetero-Client Federated Multi-Task Learning (HC-FMTL), to accommodate diverse task setups. The main challenge of HC-FMTL is the model incongruity issue that invalidates conventional aggregation methods. It also escalates the difficulties in accurate model aggregation to deal with data and task heterogeneity inherent in FMTL. To address these challenges, we propose the FedHCA$^2$ framework, which allows for federated training of personalized models by modeling relationships among heterogeneous clients. Drawing on our theoretical insights into the difference between multi-task and federated optimization, we propose the Hyper Conflict-Averse Aggregation scheme to mitigate conflicts during encoder updates. Additionally, inspired by task interaction in MTL, the Hyper Cross Attention Aggregation scheme uses layer-wise cross attention to enhance decoder interactions while alleviating model incongruity. Moreover, we employ learnable Hyper Aggregation Weights for each client to customize personalized parameter updates. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of FedHCA$^2$ in various HC-FMTL scenarios compared to representative methods. Our code will be made publicly available.

Prompt Guided Transformer for Multi-Task Dense Prediction

Task-conditional architecture offers advantage in parameter efficiency but falls short in performance compared to state-of-the-art multi-decoder methods. How to trade off performance and model parameters is an important and difficult problem. In this paper, we introduce a simple and lightweight task-conditional model called Prompt Guided Transformer (PGT) to optimize this challenge. Our approach designs a Prompt-conditioned Transformer block, which incorporates task-specific prompts in the self-attention mechanism to achieve global dependency modeling and parameter-efficient feature adaptation across multiple tasks. This block is integrated into both the shared encoder and decoder, enhancing the capture of intra- and inter-task features. Moreover, we design a lightweight decoder to further reduce parameter usage, which accounts for only 2.7% of the total model parameters. Extensive experiments on two multi-task dense prediction benchmarks, PASCAL-Context and NYUD-v2, demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results among task-conditional methods while using fewer parameters, and maintains a significant balance between performance and parameter size.

ERNIE-ViLG 2.0: Improving Text-to-Image Diffusion Model with Knowledge-Enhanced Mixture-of-Denoising-Experts

Recent progress in diffusion models has revolutionized the popular technology of text-to-image generation. While existing approaches could produce photorealistic high-resolution images with text conditions, there are still several open problems to be solved, which limits the further improvement of image fidelity and text relevancy. In this paper, we propose ERNIE-ViLG 2.0, a large-scale Chinese text-to-image diffusion model, which progressively upgrades the quality of generated images~by: (1) incorporating fine-grained textual and visual knowledge of key elements in the scene, and (2) utilizing different denoising experts at different denoising stages. With the proposed mechanisms, ERNIE-ViLG 2.0 not only achieves the state-of-the-art on MS-COCO with zero-shot FID score of 6.75, but also significantly outperforms recent models in terms of image fidelity and image-text alignment, with side-by-side human evaluation on the bilingual prompt set ViLG-300.

ERNIE-Search: Bridging Cross-Encoder with Dual-Encoder via Self On-the-fly Distillation for Dense Passage Retrieval

Neural retrievers based on pre-trained language models (PLMs), such as dual-encoders, have achieved promising performance on the task of open-domain question answering (QA). Their effectiveness can further reach new state-of-the-arts by incorporating cross-architecture knowledge distillation. However, most of the existing studies just directly apply conventional distillation methods. They fail to consider the particular situation where the teacher and student have different structures. In this paper, we propose a novel distillation method that significantly advances cross-architecture distillation for dual-encoders. Our method 1) introduces a self on-the-fly distillation method that can effectively distill late interaction (i.e., ColBERT) to vanilla dual-encoder, and 2) incorporates a cascade distillation process to further improve the performance with a cross-encoder teacher. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate that our proposed solution outperforms strong baselines and establish a new state-of-the-art on open-domain QA benchmarks.