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The drastic increase in language models&#39; parameters has led to a new trend of deploying models in cloud servers, raising growing concerns about private inference for Transformer-based models. Existing two-party privacy-preserving techniques, however, only take into account natural language understanding (NLU) scenarios. Private inference in natural language generation (NLG), crucial for applications like translation and code completion, remains underexplored. In addition, previous privacy-preserving techniques suffer from convergence issues during model training and exhibit poor inference speed when used with NLG models due to the neglect of time-consuming operations in auto-regressive generations. To address these issues, we propose a fast private text generation framework for Transformer-based language models, namely MERGE. MERGE reuses the output hidden state as the word embedding to bypass the embedding computation and reorganize the linear operations in the Transformer module to accelerate the forward procedure. Extensive experiments show that MERGE achieves a 26.5x speedup to the vanilla encrypted model under the sequence length 512, and reduces 80% communication cost, with an up to 10x speedup to state-of-the-art approximated models.

AAAI 2024

MERGE: Fast Private Text Generation

privacy

generation

language models

The drastic increase in language models' parameters has led to a new trend of deploying models in cloud servers, raising growing concerns about private inference for Transformer-based models. Existing two-party privacy-preserving techniques, however, only take into account natural language understanding (NLU) scenarios. Private inference in natural language generation (NLG), crucial for applications like translation and code completion, remains underexplored. In addition, previous privacy-preserving techniques suffer from convergence issues during model training and exhibit poor inference speed when used with NLG models due to the neglect of time-consuming operations in auto-regressive generations. To address these issues, we propose a fast private text generation framework for Transformer-based language models, namely MERGE. MERGE reuses the output hidden state as the word embedding to bypass the embedding computation and reorganize the linear operations in the Transformer module to accelerate the forward procedure. Extensive experiments show that MERGE achieves a 26.5x speedup to the vanilla encrypted model under the sequence length 512, and reduces 80% communication cost, with an up to 10x speedup to state-of-the-art approximated models.

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.<br><br><br><br>

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

Anomaly inspection plays an important role in industrial manufacture. Existing anomaly inspection methods are limited in their performance due to insufficient anomaly data. Although anomaly generation methods have been proposed to augment the anomaly data, they either suffer from poor generation authenticity or inaccurate alignment between the generated anomalies and masks. To address the above problems, we propose AnomalyDiffusion, a novel diffusion-based few-shot anomaly generation model, which utilizes the strong prior information of latent diffusion model learned from large-scale dataset to enhance the generation authenticity under few-shot training data. Firstly, we propose Spatial Anomaly Embedding, which consists of a learnable anomaly embedding and a spatial embedding encoded from an anomaly mask, disentangling the anomaly information into anomaly appearance and location information. Moreover, to improve the alignment between the generated anomalies and the anomaly masks, we introduce a novel Adaptive Attention Re-weighting Mechanism. Based on the disparities between the generated anomaly image and normal sample, it dynamically guides the model to focus more on the areas with less noticeable generated anomalies, enabling generation of accurately-matched anomalous image-mask pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in generation authenticity and diversity, and effectively improves the performance of downstream anomaly inspection tasks.

AnomalyDiffusion: Few-Shot Anomaly Image Generation with Diffusion Model

We study the problem of extracting emotions and the causes behind these emotions in conversations.
Existing methods either tackle them separately or jointly model them at the coarse-grained level of emotions (fewer emotion categories) and causes (utterance-level causes). 
In this work, we aim to jointly extract more fine-grained emotions and causes.
We construct a fine-grained dataset FG-RECCON, includes 16 fine-grained emotion categories and span-level causes.
To further improve the fine-grained extraction performance, we propose to utilize the casual discourse knowledge in a knowledge distillation way.
Specifically, the teacher model learns to predict causal connective words between utterances, and then guides the student model in identifying both the fine-grained emotion labels and causal spans.
Experimental results demonstrate that our distillation method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both RECCON and FG-RECCON dataset.

From Coarse to Fine: A Distillation Method for Fine-Grained Emotion-Causal Span Pair Extraction in Conversation

While semi-supervised learning (SSL) has yielded promising results, the more realistic SSL scenario remains to be explored, in which the unlabeled data exhibits extremely high recognition difficulty, e.g., fine-grained visual classification in the context of SSL (SS-FGVC). The increased recognition difficulty on fine-grained unlabeled data spells disaster for pseudo-labeling accuracy, resulting in poor performance of the SSL model. To tackle this challenge, we propose Soft Label Selection with Confidence-Aware Clustering based on Class Transition Tracking (SoC) by reconstructing the pseudo-label selection process by jointly optimizing Expansion Objective and Shrinkage Objective, which is based on a soft label manner. Respectively, the former objective encourages soft labels to absorb more candidate classes to ensure the attendance of ground-truth class, while the latter  encourages soft labels to reject more noisy classes, which is theoretically proved to be equivalent to entropy minimization. In comparisons with various state-of-the-art methods, our approach demonstrates its superior performance in SS-FGVC. Checkpoints and source code are available at https://github.com/NJUyued/SoC4SS-FGVC.

Roll with the Punches: Expansion and Shrinkage of Soft Label Selection for Semi-supervised Fine-Grained Learning

High-definition (HD) map construction requires a comprehensive understanding of traffic environments, encompassing centimeter-level localization and rich semantic information. Previous works face challenges in redundant point representation or high-complexity curve modeling. In this paper, we present a flexible yet effective map element detector that synthesizes hierarchical information with a compact Douglas-Peucker (DP) point representation in a transformer architecture for robust and reliable predictions. Specifically, our proposed representation approximates class-agnostic map elements with DP points, which are sparsely located in crucial positions of structures and can get rid of redundancy and complexity. Besides, we design a position constraint with uncertainty to avoid potential ambiguities. Moreover, pairwise-point shape matching constraints are proposed to balance local structural information of different scales. Experiments on the public nuScenes dataset demonstrate that our method overwhelms current SOTAs. Extensive ablation studies validate each component of our methods. Codes will be released at https://github.com/sweety121/DPFormer.

Compact HD Map Construction via Douglas-Peucker Point Transformer

In 3D Visual Question Answering (3D VQA), the scarcity of fully annotated data and limited visual content diversity hampers the generalization to novel scenes and 3D concepts (e.g., only around 800 scenes are utilized in ScanQA and SQA dataset). Current approaches resort supplement 3D reasoning with 2D information. However, these methods face challenges: either they use top-down 2D views that introduce overly complex and sometimes question-irrelevant visual clues, or they rely on globally aggregated scene/image-level representations from 2D VLMs, losing the fine-grained vision-language correlations. To overcome these limitations, our approach utilizes question-conditional 2D view selection procedure, pinpointing semantically relevant 2D inputs for crucial visual clues. We then integrate this 2D knowledge into the 3D-VQA system via a two-branch Transformer structure. This structure, featuring a Twin-Transformer design, compactly combines 2D and 3D modalities and captures fine-grained correlations between modalities, allowing them mutually augmenting each other. Integrating proposed mechanisms above, we present BridgeQA, that offers a fresh perspective on multi-modal transformer-based architectures for 3D-VQA. Experiments validate that BridgeQA achieves state-of-the-art on 3D-VQA datasets and significantly outperforms existing solutions. Code is available at https://github.com/matthewdm0816/BridgeQA.

Bridging the Gap between 2D and 3D Visual Question Answering: A Fusion Approach for 3D VQA

Hyperspectral image super-resolution (HISR) is a technique that can break through the limitation of imaging mechanism to obtain the hyperspectral image (HSI) with high spatial resolution. Although some progress has been achieved by existing methods, most of them directly learn the spatial-spectral joint mapping between the observed images and the target high-resolution HSI (HrHSI), failing to fully reserve the spectral distribution of low-resolution HSI (LrHSI) and the spatial distribution of high-resolution multispectral imagery (HrMSI). To this end, we propose a spatial-spectral-bilateral cycle-diffusion framework (S2CycleDiff) for HISR, which can step-wise generate the HrHSI with high spatial-spectral fidelity by learning the conditional distribution of spatial and spectral super-resolution processes bilaterally. Specifically, a customized conditional cycle-diffusion framework is designed as the backbone to achieve the spatial-spectral-bilateral super-resolution by repeated refinement, wherein the spatial/spectral guided pyramid denoising (SGPD) module seperately takes HrMSI and LrHSI as the guiding factors to achieve the spatial details injection and spectral correction. The outputs of the conditional cycle-diffusion framework are fed into a complementary fusion block to integrate the spatial and spectral details to generate the desired HrHSI. Experiments have been conducted on three widely used datasets to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over state-of-the-art HISR methods. The code is available at https://github.com/Jiahuiqu/S2CycleDiff.

S2CycleDiff: Spatial-Spectral-Bilateral Cycle-Diffusion Framework for Hyperspectral Image Super-resolution

Recent works have successfully extended large-scale text-to-image models to the video domain, producing promising results but at a high computational cost and requiring a large amount of video data. In this work, we introduce ConditionVideo, a training-free approach to text-to-video generation based on the provided condition, video, and input text, by leveraging the power of off-the-shelf text-to-image generation methods (e.g., Stable Diffusion). ConditionVideo generates realistic dynamic videos from random noise or given scene videos. Our method explicitly disentangles the motion representation into condition-guided and scenery motion components. To this end, the ConditionVideo model is designed with a UNet branch and a control branch. To improve temporal coherence, we introduce sparse bi-directional spatial-temporal attention (sBiST-Attn). The 3D control network extends the conventional 2D controlnet model, aiming to strengthen conditional generation accuracy by additionally leveraging the bi-directional frames in the temporal domain. Our method exhibits superior performance in terms of frame consistency, clip score, and conditional accuracy, outperforming other compared methods.

ConditionVideo: Training-Free Condition-Guided Video Generation

Novel class discover(NCD) aims to identify new classes undefined during model training phase with tht help of knowledge of known classes. Many methods have been proposed and notably enhanced performance on NCD tasks. However, there has been no work done in discovering new classes based on medical images and disease categories, which is crucial for understanding and diagnosing specific diseases. Moreover, most of the existing methods only utilize information from image modality and use labels as the only supervisory information. In this paper, we propose a multimodal novel class discovery method based on paired image-texts, inspired by the low classification accuracy of chest X-ray images and the relatively higher accuracy of the paired text. Specifically, we first pretrain the image encoder and text encoder base on multimodal contrastive learning instead of supervised learning on the labeled set. Then, we generate pseudo labels on the image branch and text branch. We use intra-modal consistency as a measure of pseudo label quality and weight the pseudo labels of two branches using consistency to generate the final pseudo labels for training. We conduct experiments on eight subset splits of MIMIC-CXR-JPG dataset. Our method improves the clustering performance of unlabeled classes by about 10% on average compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Novel Class Discovery in Chest X-rays via Paired Images and Text

Deep learning methods have achieved outstanding performance in various signal tasks. However, due to degraded signals in real electromagnetic environment, it is crucial to seek methods that can improve the representation of signal features. In this paper, a Singular Value decomposition-based Attention, SVA is proposed to explore structure of signal data for adaptively enhancing intrinsic feature. Using a deep neural network as a base model, SVA performs feature semantic subspace learning through a decomposition layer and combines it with an attention layer to achieve adaptive enhancement of signal features. Moreover, we consider the gradient explosion problem brought by SVA and optimize SVA to improve the stability of training. Extensive experimental results demon-strate that applying SVA to a generalized classification model can significantly improve its ability in representations, making its recognition performance competitive with, or even better than, the state-of-the-art task-specific models.

Harnessing the Power of SVD: An SVA Module for Enhanced Signal Classification

Face reenactment is challenging due to the need to establish dense correspondence between various face representations for motion transfer. Recent studies have utilized Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) as fundamental representation, which further enhanced the performance of multi-view face reenactment in photo-realism and 3D consistency. However, establishing dense correspondence between different face NeRFs is non-trivial, because implicit representations lack ground-truth correspondence annotations like mesh-based 3D parametric models (e.g., 3DMM) with index-aligned vertexes. Although aligning 3DMM space with NeRF-based face representations can realize motion control, it is sub-optimal for their limited face-only modeling and low identity fidelity. Therefore, we are inspired to ask: Can we learn the dense correspondence between different NeRF-based face representations without a 3D parametric model prior? To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework, which adopts tri-planes as fundamental NeRF representation and decomposes face tri-planes into three components: canonical tri-planes, identity deformations, and motion. In terms of motion control, our key contribution is proposing a Plane Dictionary (PlaneDict) module, which efficiently maps the motion conditions to a linear weighted addition of learnable orthogonal plane bases. To the best of our knowledge, our framework is the first method that achieves one-shot multi-view face reenactment without a 3D parametric model prior. Extensive experiments demonstrate that we produce better results in fine-grained motion control and identity preservation than previous methods.

MERGE: Fast Private Text Generation

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AnomalyDiffusion: Few-Shot Anomaly Image Generation with Diffusion Model

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