Llama SLayer 8B: Shallow Layers Hold the Key to Knowledge Injection

As a manner to augment pre-trained large language models (LLM), knowledge injection is critical to develop vertical domain large models and has been widely studied. Although most current approaches, including parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) and block expansion methods, uniformly apply knowledge across all LLM layers, it raises the question: are all layers equally crucial for knowledge injection? We begin by evaluating the importance of each layer in finding the optimal layer range for knowledge injection. Intuitively, the more important layers should play a more critical role in knowledge injection and deserve a denser injection. We observe performance dips in question-answering benchmarks after the removal or expansion of the shallow layers, and the degradation shrinks as the layer gets deeper, indicating that the shallow layers hold the key to knowledge injection. This insight leads us to propose the S strategy, a post-pretraining strategy of selectively enhancing shallow layers while pruning the less effective deep ones. Based on this strategy, we introduce Llama Slayer-8B and Llama Slayer-8B-Instruct. We experimented on the corpus of code $\&$ math and demonstrated the effectiveness of our strategy. Further experiments across different LLM, Mistral-7B, and a legal corpus confirmed the general applicability of the approach, underscoring its wide-ranging efficacy. Our code is available at: \https://github.com/txchen-USTC/Llama-Slayer

Image Copy Detection for Diffusion Models

Images produced by diffusion models are increasingly popular in digital artwork and visual marketing. However, such generated images might replicate content from existing ones and pose the challenge of content originality. Existing Image Copy Detection (ICD) models, though accurate in detecting hand-crafted replicas, overlook the challenge from diffusion models. This motivates us to introduce ICDiff, the first ICD specialized for diffusion models. To this end, we construct a Diffusion-Replication (D-Rep) dataset and correspondingly propose a novel deep embedding method. D-Rep uses a state-of-the-art diffusion model (Stable Diffusion V1.5) to generate 40, 000 image-replica pairs, which are manually annotated into 6 replication levels ranging from 0 (no replication) to 5 (total replication). Our method, PDF-Embedding, transforms the replication level of each image-replica pair into a probability density function (PDF) as the supervision signal. The intuition is that the probability of neighboring replication levels should be continuous and smooth. Experimental results show that PDF-Embedding surpasses protocol-driven methods and non-PDF choices on the D-Rep test set. Moreover, by utilizing PDF-Embedding, we find that the replication ratios of well-known diffusion models against an open-source gallery range from 10% to 20%.

Mixture-of-Noises Enhanced Forgery-Aware Predictor for Multi-Face Manipulation Detection and Localization

With the advancement of face manipulation technology, forgery images in multi-face scenarios are gradually becoming a more complex and realistic challenge. Despite this, detection and localization methods for such multi-face manipulations remain underdeveloped. Traditional manipulation localization methods either indirectly derive detection results from localization masks, resulting in limited detection performance, or employ a naive two-branch structure to simultaneously obtain detection and localization results, which cannot effectively benefit the localization capability due to limited interaction between two tasks. This paper proposes a new framework, namely MoNFAP, specifically tailored for multi-face manipulation detection and localization. The MoNFAP primarily introduces two novel modules: the Forgery-aware Unified Predictor (FUP) Module and the Mixture-of-Noises Module (MNM). The FUP integrates detection and localization tasks using a token learning strategy and multiple forgery-aware transformers, which facilitates the use of classification information to enhance localization capability. Besides, motivated by the crucial role of noise information in forgery detection, the MNM leverages multiple noise extractors based on the concept of the mixture of experts to enhance the general RGB features, further boosting the performance of our framework. Finally, we establish a comprehensive benchmark for multi-face detection and localization and the proposed \textit{MoNFAP} achieves significant performance. The codes will be made available.

Learning Solution-Aware Transformers for Efficiently Solving Quadratic Assignment Problem

Recently various optimization problems, such as Mixed Integer Linear Programming Problems (MILPs), have undergone comprehensive investigation, leveraging the capabilities of machine learning. This work focuses on learning-based solutions for efficiently solving the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAPs), which stands as a formidable challenge in combinatorial optimization. While many instances of simpler problems admit fully polynomial-time approximate solution (FPTAS), QAP is shown to be strongly NP-hard. Even finding a FPTAS for QAP is difficult, in the sense that the existence of a FPTAS implies $P = NP$. Current research on QAPs suffer from limited scale and computational inefficiency. To attack the aforementioned issues, we here propose the first solution of its kind for QAP in the learn-to-improve category. This work encodes facility and location nodes separately, instead of forming computationally intensive association graphs prevalent in current approaches. This design choice enables scalability to larger problem sizes. Furthermore, a \textbf{S}olution \textbf{AW}are \textbf{T}ransformer (SAWT) architecture integrates the incumbent solution matrix with the attention score to effectively capture higher-order information of the QAPs. Our model's effectiveness is validated through extensive experiments on self-generated QAP instances of varying sizes and the QAPLIB benchmark.

AnyPattern: Towards In-context Image Copy Detection

This paper explores in-context learning for image copy detection (ICD), i.e., prompting an ICD model to identify replicated images with new tampering patterns without the need for additional training. The prompts (or the contexts) are from a small set of image-replica pairs that reflect the new patterns and are used at inference time. Such in-context ICD has good realistic value, because it requires no fine-tuning and thus facilitates fast reaction against the emergence of unseen patterns. To accommodate the "seen $\rightarrow$ unseen" generalization scenario, we construct the first large-scale pattern dataset named AnyPattern, which has the largest number of tamper patterns ($90$ for training and $10$ for testing) among all the existing ones. We benchmark AnyPattern with popular ICD methods and reveal that existing methods barely generalize to novel patterns. We further propose a simple in-context ICD method named ImageStacker. ImageStacker learns to select the most representative image-replica pairs and employs them as the pattern prompts in a stacking manner (rather than the popular concatenation manner). Experimental results show (1) training with our large-scale dataset substantially benefits pattern generalization ($+26.66 \%$ $\mu AP$), (2) the proposed ImageStacker facilitates effective in-context ICD (another round of $+16.75 \%$ $\mu AP$), and (3) AnyPattern enables in-context ICD, i.e., without such a large-scale dataset, in-context learning does not emerge even with our ImageStacker. Beyond the ICD task, we also demonstrate how AnyPattern can benefit artists, i.e., the pattern retrieval method trained on AnyPattern can be generalized to identify style mimicry by text-to-image models. The project is publicly available at https://anypattern.github.io.

Transformer based Pluralistic Image Completion with Reduced Information Loss

Transformer based methods have achieved great success in image inpainting recently. However, we find that these solutions regard each pixel as a token, thus suffering from an information loss issue from two aspects: 1) They downsample the input image into much lower resolutions for efficiency consideration. 2) They quantize $256^3$ RGB values to a small number (such as 512) of quantized color values. The indices of quantized pixels are used as tokens for the inputs and prediction targets of the transformer. To mitigate these issues, we propose a new transformer based framework called "PUT". Specifically, to avoid input downsampling while maintaining computation efficiency, we design a patch-based auto-encoder P-VQVAE. The encoder converts the masked image into non-overlapped patch tokens and the decoder recovers the masked regions from the inpainted tokens while keeping the unmasked regions unchanged. To eliminate the information loss caused by input quantization, an Un-quantized Transformer is applied. It directly takes features from the P-VQVAE encoder as input without any quantization and only regards the quantized tokens as prediction targets. Furthermore, to make the inpainting process more controllable, we introduce semantic and structural conditions as extra guidance. Extensive experiments show that our method greatly outperforms existing transformer based methods on image fidelity and achieves much higher diversity and better fidelity than state-of-the-art pluralistic inpainting methods on complex large-scale datasets (e.g., ImageNet). Codes are available at https://github.com/liuqk3/PUT.

MiM-ISTD: Mamba-in-Mamba for Efficient Infrared Small Target Detection

Recently, infrared small target detection (ISTD) has made significant progress, thanks to the development of basic models. Specifically, the structures combining convolutional networks with transformers can successfully extract both local and global features. However, the disadvantage of the transformer is also inherited, i.e., the quadratic computational complexity to the length of the sequence. Inspired by the recent basic model with linear complexity for long-distance modeling, called Mamba, we explore the potential of this state space model for ISTD task in terms of effectiveness and efficiency in the paper. However, directly applying Mamba achieves poor performance since local features, which are critical to detecting small targets, cannot be fully exploited. Instead, we tailor a Mamba-in-Mamba (MiM-ISTD) structure for efficient ISTD. Specifically, we treat the local patches as "visual sentences" and use the Outer Mamba to explore the global information. We then decompose each visual sentence into sub-patches as "visual words" and use the Inner Mamba to further explore the local information among words in the visual sentence with negligible computational costs. By aggregating the word and sentence features, the MiM-ISTD can effectively explore both global and local information. Experiments on NUAA-SIRST and IRSTD-1k show the superior accuracy and efficiency of our method. Specifically, MiM-ISTD is $10 \times$ faster than the SOTA method and reduces GPU memory usage by 73.4$\%$ when testing on $2048 \times 2048$ image, overcoming the computation and memory constraints on high-resolution infrared images. Source code is available at https://github.com/txchen-USTC/MiM-ISTD.

Bootstrapping Audio-Visual Segmentation by Strengthening Audio Cues

How to effectively interact audio with vision has garnered considerable interest within the multi-modality research field. Recently, a novel audio-visual segmentation (AVS) task has been proposed, aiming to segment the sounding objects in video frames under the guidance of audio cues. However, most existing AVS methods are hindered by a modality imbalance where the visual features tend to dominate those of the audio modality, due to a unidirectional and insufficient integration of audio cues. This imbalance skews the feature representation towards the visual aspect, impeding the learning of joint audio-visual representations and potentially causing segmentation inaccuracies. To address this issue, we propose AVSAC. Our approach features a Bidirectional Audio-Visual Decoder (BAVD) with integrated bidirectional bridges, enhancing audio cues and fostering continuous interplay between audio and visual modalities. This bidirectional interaction narrows the modality imbalance, facilitating more effective learning of integrated audio-visual representations. Additionally, we present a strategy for audio-visual frame-wise synchrony as fine-grained guidance of BAVD. This strategy enhances the share of auditory components in visual features, contributing to a more balanced audio-visual representation learning. Extensive experiments show that our method attains new benchmarks in AVS performance.

TCI-Former: Thermal Conduction-Inspired Transformer for Infrared Small Target Detection

Infrared small target detection (ISTD) is critical to national security and has been extensively applied in military areas. ISTD aims to segment small target pixels from background. Most ISTD networks focus on designing feature extraction blocks or feature fusion modules, but rarely describe the ISTD process from the feature map evolution perspective. In the ISTD process, the network attention gradually shifts towards target areas. We abstract this process as the directional movement of feature map pixels to target areas through convolution, pooling and interactions with surrounding pixels, which can be analogous to the movement of thermal particles constrained by surrounding variables and particles. In light of this analogy, we propose Thermal Conduction-Inspired Transformer (TCI-Former) based on the theoretical principles of thermal conduction. According to thermal conduction differential equation in heat dynamics, we derive the pixel movement differential equation (PMDE) in the image domain and further develop two modules: Thermal Conduction-Inspired Attention (TCIA) and Thermal Conduction Boundary Module (TCBM). TCIA incorporates finite difference method with PMDE to reach a numerical approximation so that target body features can be extracted. To further remove errors in boundary areas, TCBM is designed and supervised by boundary masks to refine target body features with fine boundary details. Experiments on IRSTD-1k and NUAA-SIRST demonstrate the superiority of our method.

SimAC: A Simple Anti-Customization Method against Text-to-Image Synthesis of Diffusion Models

Despite the success of diffusion-based customization methods on visual content creation, increasing concerns have been raised about such techniques from both privacy and political perspectives. To tackle this issue, several anti-customization methods have been proposed in very recent months, predominantly grounded in adversarial attacks. Unfortunately, most of these methods adopt straightforward designs, such as end-to-end optimization with a focus on adversarially maximizing the original training loss, thereby neglecting nuanced internal properties intrinsic to the diffusion model, and even leading to ineffective optimization in some diffusion time steps. In this paper, we strive to bridge this gap by undertaking a comprehensive exploration of these inherent properties, to boost the performance of current anti-customization approaches. Two aspects of properties are investigated: 1) We examine the relationship between time step selection and the model's perception in the frequency domain of images and find that lower time steps can give much more contributions to adversarial noises. This inspires us to propose an adaptive greedy search for optimal time steps that seamlessly integrates with existing anti-customization methods. 2) We scrutinize the roles of features at different layers during denoising and devise a sophisticated feature-based optimization framework for anti-customization. Experiments on facial benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly increases identity disruption, thereby enhancing user privacy and security.