OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
GRIN: GRadient-INformed MoE
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale more effectively than dense models due to sparse computation through expert routing, selectively activating only a small subset of expert modules. However, sparse computation challenges traditional training practices, as discrete expert routing hinders standard backpropagation and thus gradient-based optimization, which are the cornerstone of deep learning. To better pursue the scaling power of MoE, we introduce GRIN (GRadient-INformed MoE training), which incorporates sparse gradient estimation for expert routing and configures model parallelism to avoid token dropping. Applying GRIN to autoregressive language modeling, we develop a top-2 16$\times$3.8B MoE model. Our model, with only 6.6B activated parameters, outperforms a 7B dense model and matches the performance of a 14B dense model trained on the same data. Extensive evaluations across diverse tasks demonstrate the potential of GRIN to significantly enhance MoE efficacy, achieving 79.4 on MMLU, 83.7 on HellaSwag, 74.4 on HumanEval, and 58.9 on MATH.
Takin: A Cohort of Superior Quality Zero-shot Speech Generation Models
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

With the advent of the big data and large language model era, zero-shot personalized rapid customization has emerged as a significant trend. In this report, we introduce Takin AudioLLM, a series of techniques and models, mainly including Takin TTS, Takin VC, and Takin Morphing, specifically designed for audiobook production. These models are capable of zero-shot speech production, generating high-quality speech that is nearly indistinguishable from real human speech and facilitating individuals to customize the speech content according to their own needs. Specifically, we first introduce Takin TTS, a neural codec language model that builds upon an enhanced neural speech codec and a multi-task training framework, capable of generating high-fidelity natural speech in a zero-shot way. For Takin VC, we advocate an effective content and timbre joint modeling approach to improve the speaker similarity, while advocating for a conditional flow matching based decoder to further enhance its naturalness and expressiveness. Last, we propose the Takin Morphing system with highly decoupled and advanced timbre and prosody modeling approaches, which enables individuals to customize speech production with their preferred timbre and prosody in a precise and controllable manner. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness and robustness of our Takin AudioLLM series models. For detailed demos, please refer to https://everest-ai.github.io/takinaudiollm/.
Decoding Style: Efficient Fine-Tuning of LLMs for Image-Guided Outfit Recommendation with Preference
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Personalized outfit recommendation remains a complex challenge, demanding both fashion compatibility understanding and trend awareness. This paper presents a novel framework that harnesses the expressive power of large language models (LLMs) for this task, mitigating their "black box" and static nature through fine-tuning and direct feedback integration. We bridge the item visual-textual gap in items descriptions by employing image captioning with a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM). This enables the LLM to extract style and color characteristics from human-curated fashion images, forming the basis for personalized recommendations. The LLM is efficiently fine-tuned on the open-source Polyvore dataset of curated fashion images, optimizing its ability to recommend stylish outfits. A direct preference mechanism using negative examples is employed to enhance the LLM's decision-making process. This creates a self-enhancing AI feedback loop that continuously refines recommendations in line with seasonal fashion trends. Our framework is evaluated on the Polyvore dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness in two key tasks: fill-in-the-blank, and complementary item retrieval. These evaluations underline the framework's ability to generate stylish, trend-aligned outfit suggestions, continuously improving through direct feedback. The evaluation results demonstrated that our proposed framework significantly outperforms the base LLM, creating more cohesive outfits. The improved performance in these tasks underscores the proposed framework's potential to enhance the shopping experience with accurate suggestions, proving its effectiveness over the vanilla LLM based outfit generation.
NSSR-DIL: Null-Shot Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Identity Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The present State-of-the-Art (SotA) Image Super-Resolution (ISR) methods employ Deep Learning (DL) techniques using a large amount of image data. The primary limitation to extending the existing SotA ISR works for real-world instances is their computational and time complexities. In this paper, contrary to the existing methods, we present a novel and computationally efficient ISR algorithm that is independent of the image dataset to learn the ISR task. The proposed algorithm reformulates the ISR task from generating the Super-Resolved (SR) images to computing the inverse of the kernels that span the degradation space. We introduce Deep Identity Learning, exploiting the identity relation between the degradation and inverse degradation models. The proposed approach neither relies on the ISR dataset nor on a single input low-resolution (LR) image (like the self-supervised method i.e. ZSSR) to model the ISR task. Hence we term our model as Null-Shot Super-Resolution Using Deep Identity Learning (NSSR-DIL). The proposed NSSR-DIL model requires fewer computational resources, at least by an order of 10, and demonstrates a competitive performance on benchmark ISR datasets. Another salient aspect of our proposition is that the NSSR-DIL framework detours retraining the model and remains the same for varying scale factors like X2, X3, and X4. This makes our highly efficient ISR model more suitable for real-world applications.
LifeGPT: Topology-Agnostic Generative Pretrained Transformer Model for Cellular Automata
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Conway's Game of Life (Life), a well known algorithm within the broader class of cellular automata (CA), exhibits complex emergent dynamics, with extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. Modeling and predicting such intricate behavior without explicit knowledge of the system's underlying topology presents a significant challenge, motivating the development of algorithms that can generalize across various grid configurations and boundary conditions. We develop a decoder-only generative pretrained transformer (GPT) model to solve this problem, showing that our model can simulate Life on a toroidal grid with no prior knowledge on the size of the grid, or its periodic boundary conditions (LifeGPT). LifeGPT is topology-agnostic with respect to its training data and our results show that a GPT model is capable of capturing the deterministic rules of a Turing-complete system with near-perfect accuracy, given sufficiently diverse training data. We also introduce the idea of an `autoregressive autoregressor' to recursively implement Life using LifeGPT. Our results pave the path towards true universal computation within a large language model framework, synthesizing of mathematical analysis with natural language processing, and probing AI systems for situational awareness about the evolution of such algorithms without ever having to compute them. Similar GPTs could potentially solve inverse problems in multicellular self-assembly by extracting CA-compatible rulesets from real-world biological systems to create new predictive models, which would have significant consequences for the fields of bioinspired materials, tissue engineering, and architected materials design.
Democratizing MLLMs in Healthcare: TinyLLaVA-Med for Efficient Healthcare Diagnostics in Resource-Constrained Settings
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Deploying Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in healthcare is hindered by their high computational demands and significant memory requirements, which are particularly challenging for resource-constrained devices like the Nvidia Jetson Xavier. This problem is particularly evident in remote medical settings where advanced diagnostics are needed but resources are limited. In this paper, we introduce an optimization method for the general-purpose MLLM, TinyLLaVA, which we have adapted and renamed TinyLLaVA-Med. This adaptation involves instruction-tuning and fine-tuning TinyLLaVA on a medical dataset by drawing inspiration from the LLaVA-Med training pipeline. Our approach successfully minimizes computational complexity and power consumption, with TinyLLaVA-Med operating at 18.9W and using 11.9GB of memory, while achieving accuracies of 64.54% on VQA-RAD and 70.70% on SLAKE for closed-ended questions. Therefore, TinyLLaVA-Med achieves deployment viability in hardware-constrained environments with low computational resources, maintaining essential functionalities and delivering accuracies close to state-of-the-art models.
Qwen2.5-Coder Technical Report
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In this report, we introduce the Qwen2.5-Coder series, a significant upgrade from its predecessor, CodeQwen1.5. This series includes six models: Qwen2.5-Coder-(0.5B/1.5B/3B/7B/14B/32B). As a code-specific model, Qwen2.5-Coder is built upon the Qwen2.5 architecture and continues pretrained on a vast corpus of over 5.5 trillion tokens. Through meticulous data cleaning, scalable synthetic data generation, and balanced data mixing, Qwen2.5-Coder demonstrates impressive code generation capabilities while retaining general and math skills. These models have been evaluated on a wide range of code-related tasks, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across more than 10 benchmarks, including code generation, completion, reasoning, and repair, consistently outperforming larger models of the same model size. We believe that the release of the Qwen2.5-Coder series will advance research in code intelligence and, with its permissive licensing, support wider adoption by developers in real-world applications.
Architectural Co-LOD Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2024
Year: 2024

Managing the level-of-detail (LOD) in architectural models is crucial yet challenging, particularly for effective representation and visualization of buildings. Traditional approaches often fail to deliver controllable detail alongside semantic consistency, especially when dealing with noisy and inconsistent inputs. We address these limitations with \emph{Co-LOD}, a new approach specifically designed for effective LOD management in architectural modeling. Co-LOD employs shape co-analysis to standardize geometric structures across multiple buildings, facilitating the progressive and consistent generation of LODs. This method allows for precise detailing in both individual models and model collections, ensuring semantic integrity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Co-LOD effectively applies accurate LOD across a variety of architectural inputs, consistently delivering superior detail and quality in LOD representations.
An Outline for a Jupyter-Materials-Based Repository Website Focused on the Computational Sciences
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

As access to the internet has become increasingly ubiquitous, along with the reliability and speed of internet providers, so too has the implementation of internet-based learning tools. These tools provide students opportunities to do meaningful work away from university, however, often at a financial cost to universities and students. Moreover, limited and high-cost internet access in less-developed countries and remote areas acts as a barrier to implementing these tools in a meaningful way, leading to inequalities in both the quality of education and the opportunities provided. This paper outlines the development process, and benefits, of a low-cost and light-weight repository website centered around disseminating open-source textbooks and other supplemental learning materials for computational sciences using Jupyter Notebooks. The website focuses on allowing students to download their textbooks and other materials from a centralized location, to be used offline or with limited internet access. Internet access is not the only constraining factor; access to reasonably priced personal computers also limits the effectiveness of internet-based learning tools. As such, this paper will also explore the feasibility of integrating low-cost Raspberry Pi kits into this development process as a way of increasing the reach of an online repository of open-source Jupyter Notebook textbooks. While this paper focuses on Canadian universities and remote communities, many of the website's proposed applications are relevant worldwide.
Development of High-Performance DSP Algorithms on the European Rad-Hard NG-ULTRA SoC FPGA
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

The emergence of demanding space applications has modified the traditional landscape of computing systems in space. When reliability is a first-class concern, in addition to enhanced performance-per-Watt, radiation-hardened FPGAs are favored. In this context, the current paper evaluates the first European radiation-hardened SoC FPGA, i.e., NanoXplore's NG-ULTRA, for accelerating high-performance DSP algorithms from space applications. The proposed development & testing methodologies provide efficient implementations, while they also aim to test the new NG-ULTRA hardware and its associated software tools. The results show that NG-ULTRA achieves competitive resource utilization and performance, constituting it as a very promising device for space missions, especially for Europe.
Detecting LGBTQ+ Instances of Cyberbullying
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Social media continues to have an impact on the trajectory of humanity. However, its introduction has also weaponized keyboards, allowing the abusive language normally reserved for in-person bullying to jump onto the screen, i.e., cyberbullying. Cyberbullying poses a significant threat to adolescents globally, affecting the mental health and well-being of many. A group that is particularly at risk is the LGBTQ+ community, as researchers have uncovered a strong correlation between identifying as LGBTQ+ and suffering from greater online harassment. Therefore, it is critical to develop machine learning models that can accurately discern cyberbullying incidents as they happen to LGBTQ+ members. The aim of this study is to compare the efficacy of several transformer models in identifying cyberbullying targeting LGBTQ+ individuals. We seek to determine the relative merits and demerits of these existing methods in addressing complex and subtle kinds of cyberbullying by assessing their effectiveness with real social media data.
Self-Supervised Pre-training Tasks for an fMRI Time-series Transformer in Autism Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition that encompasses a wide variety of symptoms and degrees of impairment, which makes the diagnosis and treatment challenging. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been extensively used to study brain activity in ASD, and machine learning methods have been applied to analyze resting state fMRI (rs-fMRI) data. However, fewer studies have explored the recent transformer-based models on rs-fMRI data. Given the superiority of transformer models in capturing long-range dependencies in sequence data, we have developed a transformer-based self-supervised framework that directly analyzes time-series fMRI data without computing functional connectivity. To address over-fitting in small datasets and enhance the model performance, we propose self-supervised pre-training tasks to reconstruct the randomly masked fMRI time-series data, investigating the effects of various masking strategies. We then finetune the model for the ASD classification task and evaluate it using two public datasets and five-fold cross-validation with different amounts of training data. The experiments show that randomly masking entire ROIs gives better model performance than randomly masking time points in the pre-training step, resulting in an average improvement of 10.8% for AUC and 9.3% for subject accuracy compared with the transformer model trained from scratch across different levels of training data availability. Our code is available on GitHub.
Robust DOA Estimation Based on Dual Lawson Norm for RIS-Aided Wireless Communication Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) can actively perform beamforming and have become a crucial enabler for wireless systems in the future. The direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimates of RIS received signals can help design the reflection control matrix and improve communication quality. In this paper, we design a RIS-assisted system and propose a robust Lawson norm-based multiple-signal-classification (LN-MUSIC) DOA estimation algorithm for impulsive noise, which is divided into two parts. The first one, the non-convex Lawson norm is used as the error criterion along with a regularization constraint to formulate the optimization problem. Then, a Bregman distance based alternating direction method of multipliers is used to solve the problem and recover the desired signal. The second part is to use the multiple signal classification (MUSIC) to find out the DOAs of targets based on their sparsity in the spatial domain. In addition, we also propose a RIS control matrix optimization strategy that requires no channel state information, which effectively enhances the desired signals and improves the performance of the LN-MUSIC algorithm. A Cramer-Rao-lower-bound (CRLB) of the proposed DOA estimation algorithm is presented and verifies its feasibility. Simulated results show that the proposed robust DOA estimation algorithm based on the Lawson norm can effectively suppress the impact of large outliers caused by impulsive noise on the estimation results, outperforming existing methods.
Provable Privacy Guarantee for Individual Identities and Locations in Large-Scale Contact Tracing
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

The task of infectious disease contact tracing is crucial yet challenging, especially when meeting strict privacy requirements. Previous attempts in this area have had limitations in terms of applicable scenarios and efficiency. Our paper proposes a highly scalable, practical contact tracing system called PREVENT that can work with a variety of location collection methods to gain a comprehensive overview of a person's trajectory while ensuring the privacy of individuals being tracked, without revealing their plain text locations to any party, including servers. Our system is very efficient and can provide real-time query services for large-scale datasets with millions of locations. This is made possible by a newly designed secret-sharing based architecture that is tightly integrated into unique private space partitioning trees. Notably, our experimental results on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our system introduces negligible performance overhead compared to traditional contact tracing methods. PREVENT could be a game-changer in the fight against infectious diseases and set a new standard for privacy-preserving location tracking.
Look Through Masks: Towards Masked Face Recognition with De-Occlusion Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Many real-world applications today like video surveillance and urban governance need to address the recognition of masked faces, where content replacement by diverse masks often brings in incomplete appearance and ambiguous representation, leading to a sharp drop in accuracy. Inspired by recent progress on amodal perception, we propose to migrate the mechanism of amodal completion for the task of masked face recognition with an end-to-end de-occlusion distillation framework, which consists of two modules. The \textit{de-occlusion} module applies a generative adversarial network to perform face completion, which recovers the content under the mask and eliminates appearance ambiguity. The \textit{distillation} module takes a pre-trained general face recognition model as the teacher and transfers its knowledge to train a student for completed faces using massive online synthesized face pairs. Especially, the teacher knowledge is represented with structural relations among instances in multiple orders, which serves as a posterior regularization to enable the adaptation. In this way, the knowledge can be fully distilled and transferred to identify masked faces. Experiments on synthetic and realistic datasets show the efficacy of the proposed approach.
Mutual Information-based Representations Disentanglement for Unaligned Multimodal Language Sequences
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The key challenge in unaligned multimodal language sequences lies in effectively integrating information from various modalities to obtain a refined multimodal joint representation. Recently, the disentangle and fuse methods have achieved the promising performance by explicitly learning modality-agnostic and modality-specific representations and then fusing them into a multimodal joint representation. However, these methods often independently learn modality-agnostic representations for each modality and utilize orthogonal constraints to reduce linear correlations between modality-agnostic and modality-specific representations, neglecting to eliminate their nonlinear correlations. As a result, the obtained multimodal joint representation usually suffers from information redundancy, leading to overfitting and poor generalization of the models. In this paper, we propose a Mutual Information-based Representations Disentanglement (MIRD) method for unaligned multimodal language sequences, in which a novel disentanglement framework is designed to jointly learn a single modality-agnostic representation. In addition, the mutual information minimization constraint is employed to ensure superior disentanglement of representations, thereby eliminating information redundancy within the multimodal joint representation. Furthermore, the challenge of estimating mutual information caused by the limited labeled data is mitigated by introducing unlabeled data. Meanwhile, the unlabeled data also help to characterize the underlying structure of multimodal data, consequently further preventing overfitting and enhancing the performance of the models. Experimental results on several widely used benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
Domain-stratified Training for Cross-organ and Cross-scanner Adenocarcinoma Segmentation in the COSAS 2024 Challenge
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This manuscript presents an image segmentation algorithm developed for the Cross-Organ and Cross-Scanner Adenocarcinoma Segmentation (COSAS 2024) challenge. We adopted an organ-stratified and scanner-stratified approach to train multiple Upernet-based segmentation models and subsequently ensembled the results. Despite the challenges posed by the varying tumor characteristics across different organs and the differing imaging conditions of various scanners, our method achieved a final test score of 0.7643 for Task 1 and 0.8354 for Task 2. These results demonstrate the adaptability and efficacy of our approach across diverse conditions. Our model's ability to generalize across various datasets underscores its potential for real-world applications.