Complex knowledge base question answering can be achieved by converting questions into sequences of predefined actions. However, there is a significant semantic and structural gap between natural language and action sequences, which makes this conversion difficult. In this paper, we introduce an alignment-enhanced complex question answering framework, called ALCQA, which mitigates this gap through question-to-action alignment and question-to-question alignment. We train a question rewriting model to align the question and each action, and utilize a pretrained language model to implicitly align the question and KG artifacts. Moreover, considering that similar questions correspond to similar action sequences, we retrieve top-k similar question-answer pairs at the inference stage through question-to-question alignment and propose a novel reward-guided action sequence selection strategy to select from candidate action sequences. We conduct experiments on CQA and WQSP datasets, and the results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods and obtains a 9.88\% improvements in the F1 metric on CQA dataset. Our source code is available at https://github.com/TTTTTTTTy/ALCQA.

To facilitate research on text generation, this paper presents a comprehensive and unified library, TextBox 2.0, focusing on the use of pre-trained language models (PLMs). To be comprehensive, our library covers $13$ common text generation tasks and their corresponding $83$ datasets and further incorporates $45$ PLMs covering general, translation, Chinese, dialogue, controllable, distilled, prompting, and lightweight PLMs. We also implement $4$ efficient training strategies and provide $4$ generation objectives for pre-training new PLMs from scratch. To be unified, we design the interfaces to support the entire research pipeline (from data loading to training and evaluation), ensuring that each step can be fulfilled in a unified way. Despite the rich functionality, it is easy to use our library, either through the friendly Python API or command line. To validate the effectiveness of our library, we conduct extensive experiments and exemplify four types of research scenarios. The project is released at the link: https://github.com/RUCAIBox/TextBox.

Medical image quality assessment (MIQA) is a vital prerequisite in various medical image analysis applications. Most existing MIQA algorithms are fully supervised that request a large amount of annotated data. However, annotating medical images is time-consuming and labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised anomaly-aware framework with test-time clustering for optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) image quality assessment in a setting wherein only a set of high-quality samples are accessible in the training phase. Specifically, a feature-embedding-based low-quality representation module is proposed to quantify the quality of OCTA images and then to discriminate between outstanding quality and non-outstanding quality. Within the non-outstanding quality class, to further distinguish gradable images from ungradable ones, we perform dimension reduction and clustering of multi-scale image features extracted by the trained OCTA quality representation network. Extensive experiments are conducted on one publicly accessible dataset sOCTA-3*3-10k, with superiority of our proposed framework being successfully established.

Weakly-supervised learning (WSL) has been proposed to alleviate the conflict between data annotation cost and model performance through employing sparsely-grained (i.e., point-, box-, scribble-wise) supervision and has shown promising performance, particularly in the image segmentation field. However, it is still a very challenging problem due to the limited supervision, especially when only a small number of labeled samples are available. Additionally, almost all existing WSL segmentation methods are designed for star-convex structures which are very different from curvilinear structures such as vessels and nerves. In this paper, we propose a novel sparsely annotated segmentation framework for curvilinear structures, named YoloCurvSeg, based on image synthesis. A background generator delivers image backgrounds that closely match real distributions through inpainting dilated skeletons. The extracted backgrounds are then combined with randomly emulated curves generated by a Space Colonization Algorithm-based foreground generator and through a multilayer patch-wise contrastive learning synthesizer. In this way, a synthetic dataset with both images and curve segmentation labels is obtained, at the cost of only one or a few noisy skeleton annotations. Finally, a segmenter is trained with the generated dataset and possibly an unlabeled dataset. The proposed YoloCurvSeg is evaluated on four publicly available datasets (OCTA500, CORN, DRIVE and CHASEDB1) and the results show that YoloCurvSeg outperforms state-of-the-art WSL segmentation methods by large margins. With only one noisy skeleton annotation (respectively 0.14%, 0.02%, 1.4%, and 0.65% of the full annotation), YoloCurvSeg achieves more than 97% of the fully-supervised performance on each dataset. Code and datasets will be released at https://github.com/llmir/YoloCurvSeg.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are popular weapons for modeling relational data. Existing GNNs are not specified for attribute-incomplete graphs, making missing attribute imputation a burning issue. Until recently, many works notice that GNNs are coupled with spectral concentration, which means the spectrum obtained by GNNs concentrates on a local part in spectral domain, e.g., low-frequency due to oversmoothing issue. As a consequence, GNNs may be seriously flawed for reconstructing graph attributes as graph spectral concentration tends to cause a low imputation precision. In this work, we present a regularized graph autoencoder for graph attribute imputation, named MEGAE, which aims at mitigating spectral concentration problem by maximizing the graph spectral entropy. Notably, we first present the method for estimating graph spectral entropy without the eigen-decomposition of Laplacian matrix and provide the theoretical upper error bound. A maximum entropy regularization then acts in the latent space, which directly increases the graph spectral entropy. Extensive experiments show that MEGAE outperforms all the other state-of-the-art imputation methods on a variety of benchmark datasets.

While many systems have been developed to train Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), efficient model inference and evaluation remain to be addressed. For instance, using the widely adopted node-wise approach, model evaluation can account for up to 94% of the time in the end-to-end training process due to neighbor explosion, which means that a node accesses its multi-hop neighbors. On the other hand, layer-wise inference avoids the neighbor explosion problem by conducting inference layer by layer such that the nodes only need their one-hop neighbors in each layer. However, implementing layer-wise inference requires substantial engineering efforts because users need to manually decompose a GNN model into layers for computation and split workload into batches to fit into device memory. In this paper, we develop Deep Graph Inference (DGI) -- a system for easy and efficient GNN model inference, which automatically translates the training code of a GNN model for layer-wise execution. DGI is general for various GNN models and different kinds of inference requests, and supports out-of-core execution on large graphs that cannot fit in CPU memory. Experimental results show that DGI consistently outperforms layer-wise inference across different datasets and hardware settings, and the speedup can be over 1,000x.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

There has been a rapid development and interest in adversarial training and defenses in the machine learning community in the recent years. One line of research focuses on improving the performance and efficiency of adversarial robustness certificates for neural networks \cite{gowal:19, wong_zico:18, raghunathan:18, WengTowardsFC:18, wong:scalable:18, singh:convex_barrier:19, Huang_etal:19, single-neuron-relax:20, Zhang2020TowardsSA}. While each providing a certification to lower (or upper) bound the true distortion under adversarial attacks via relaxation, less studied was the tightness of relaxation. In this paper, we analyze a family of linear outer approximation based certificate methods via a meta algorithm, IBP-Lin. The aforementioned works often lack quantitative analysis to answer questions such as how does the performance of the certificate method depend on the network configuration and the choice of approximation parameters. Under our framework, we make a first attempt at answering these questions, which reveals that the tightness of linear approximation based certification can depend heavily on the configuration of the trained networks.

立体声匹配是许多视觉和机器人应用程序的基本构建块。信息性和简洁的成本量表示对于高准确性和效率的立体声匹配至关重要。在本文中，我们提出了一种新颖的成本量构建方法，称为“注意串联量”（ACV），该方法从相关线索中产生了注意力权重，以抑制冗余信息并增强串联体积中与匹配相关的信息。 ACV可以无缝嵌入大多数立体声匹配网络中，所得网络可以使用更轻巧的聚合网络，同时获得更高的精度。我们进一步设计了快速版本的ACV版本以实现实时性能，名为FAST-ACV，它产生了很高的可能性差异假设，以及来自低分辨率相关线索的相应注意力权重，可显着降低计算和记忆成本，同时保持令人满意的精度。我们快速ACV的核心思想是音量注意传播（VAP），它可以自动从上采样相关量中选择准确的相关值，并将这些准确的值传播到周围环境像素具有模棱两可的相关线索。此外，我们分别基于我们的ACV和Fast-ACV设计了高度准确的网络ACVNET和实时网络快速ACVNET，该网络在几个基准上实现了最新性能（即，我们的ACVNET排名第二，第二名在Kitti 2015和场景流以及所有已发布方法中的Kitti 2012和Eth3d的第三次；我们的快速ACVNET几乎优于现场流的所有最新实时方法，Kitti 2012和2015年，与此同时，与此同时更好的概括能力）

在过去的几年中，用于计算机视觉的深度学习技术的快速发展极大地促进了医学图像细分的性能（Mediseg）。但是，最近的梅赛格出版物通常集中于主要贡献的演示（例如，网络体系结构，培训策略和损失功能），同时不知不觉地忽略了一些边缘实施细节（也称为“技巧”），导致了潜在的问题，导致了潜在的问题。不公平的实验结果比较。在本文中，我们为不同的模型实施阶段（即，预培训模型，数据预处理，数据增强，模型实施，模型推断和结果后处理）收集了一系列Mediseg技巧，并在实验中探索了有效性这些技巧在一致的基线模型上。与仅关注分割模型的优点和限制分析的纸驱动调查相比，我们的工作提供了大量的可靠实验，并且在技术上更可操作。通过对代表性2D和3D医疗图像数据集的广泛实验结果，我们明确阐明了这些技巧的效果。此外，根据调查的技巧，我们还开源了一个强大的梅德西格存储库，其每个组件都具有插件的优势。我们认为，这项里程碑的工作不仅完成了对最先进的Mediseg方法的全面和互补的调查，而且还提供了解决未来医学图像处理挑战的实用指南，包括但不限于小型数据集学习，课程不平衡学习，多模式学习和领域适应。该代码已在以下网址发布：https：//github.com/hust-linyi/mediseg