This paper focuses on designing efficient models with low parameters and FLOPs for dense predictions. Even though CNN-based lightweight methods have achieved stunning results after years of research, trading-off model accuracy and constrained resources still need further improvements. This work rethinks the essential unity of efficient Inverted Residual Block in MobileNetv2 and effective Transformer in ViT, inductively abstracting a general concept of Meta-Mobile Block, and we argue that the specific instantiation is very important to model performance though sharing the same framework. Motivated by this phenomenon, we deduce a simple yet efficient modern \textbf{I}nverted \textbf{R}esidual \textbf{M}obile \textbf{B}lock (iRMB) for mobile applications, which absorbs CNN-like efficiency to model short-distance dependency and Transformer-like dynamic modeling capability to learn long-distance interactions. Furthermore, we design a ResNet-like 4-phase \textbf{E}fficient \textbf{MO}del (EMO) based only on a series of iRMBs for dense applications. Massive experiments on ImageNet-1K, COCO2017, and ADE20K benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our EMO over state-of-the-art methods, \eg, our EMO-1M/2M/5M achieve 71.5, 75.1, and 78.4 Top-1 that surpass \textbf{SoTA} CNN-/Transformer-based models, while trading-off the model accuracy and efficiency well.

There is increasing adoption of artificial intelligence in drug discovery. However, existing works use machine learning to mainly utilize the chemical structures of molecules yet ignore the vast textual knowledge available in chemistry. Incorporating textual knowledge enables us to realize new drug design objectives, adapt to text-based instructions, and predict complex biological activities. We present a multi-modal molecule structure-text model, MoleculeSTM, by jointly learning molecule's chemical structures and textual descriptions via a contrastive learning strategy. To train MoleculeSTM, we construct the largest multi-modal dataset to date, namely PubChemSTM, with over 280K chemical structure-text pairs. To demonstrate the effectiveness and utility of MoleculeSTM, we design two challenging zero-shot tasks based on text instructions, including structure-text retrieval and molecule editing. MoleculeSTM possesses two main properties: open vocabulary and compositionality via natural language. In experiments, MoleculeSTM obtains the state-of-the-art generalization ability to novel biochemical concepts across various benchmarks.

Egocentric 3D human pose estimation with a single head-mounted fisheye camera has recently attracted attention due to its numerous applications in virtual and augmented reality. Existing methods still struggle in challenging poses where the human body is highly occluded or is closely interacting with the scene. To address this issue, we propose a scene-aware egocentric pose estimation method that guides the prediction of the egocentric pose with scene constraints. To this end, we propose an egocentric depth estimation network to predict the scene depth map from a wide-view egocentric fisheye camera while mitigating the occlusion of the human body with a depth-inpainting network. Next, we propose a scene-aware pose estimation network that projects the 2D image features and estimated depth map of the scene into a voxel space and regresses the 3D pose with a V2V network. The voxel-based feature representation provides the direct geometric connection between 2D image features and scene geometry, and further facilitates the V2V network to constrain the predicted pose based on the estimated scene geometry. To enable the training of the aforementioned networks, we also generated a synthetic dataset, called EgoGTA, and an in-the-wild dataset based on EgoPW, called EgoPW-Scene. The experimental results of our new evaluation sequences show that the predicted 3D egocentric poses are accurate and physically plausible in terms of human-scene interaction, demonstrating that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods both quantitatively and qualitatively.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

Transformer models have achieved superior performance in various natural language processing tasks. However, the quadratic computational cost of the attention mechanism limits its practicality for long sequences. There are existing attention variants that improve the computational efficiency, but they have limited ability to effectively compute global information. In parallel to Transformer models, state space models (SSMs) are tailored for long sequences, but they are not flexible enough to capture complicated local information. We propose SPADE, short for $\underline{\textbf{S}}$tate s$\underline{\textbf{P}}$ace $\underline{\textbf{A}}$ugmente$\underline{\textbf{D}}$ Transform$\underline{\textbf{E}}$r. Specifically, we augment a SSM into the bottom layer of SPADE, and we employ efficient local attention methods for the other layers. The SSM augments global information, which complements the lack of long-range dependency issue in local attention methods. Experimental results on the Long Range Arena benchmark and language modeling tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. To further demonstrate the scalability of SPADE, we pre-train large encoder-decoder models and present fine-tuning results on natural language understanding and natural language generation tasks.

Knowledge distillation is often used to transfer knowledge from a strong teacher model to a relatively weak student model. Traditional knowledge distillation methods include response-based methods and feature-based methods. Response-based methods are used the most widely but suffer from lower upper limit of model performance, while feature-based methods have constraints on the vocabularies and tokenizers. In this paper, we propose a tokenizer-free method liberal feature-based distillation (LEAD). LEAD aligns the distribution between teacher model and student model, which is effective, extendable, portable and has no requirements on vocabularies, tokenizer, or model architecture. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of LEAD on several widely-used benchmarks, including MS MARCO Passage, TREC Passage 19, TREC Passage 20, MS MARCO Document, TREC Document 19 and TREC Document 20.

The security of artificial intelligence (AI) is an important research area towards safe, reliable, and trustworthy AI systems. To accelerate the research on AI security, the Artificial Intelligence Security Competition (AISC) was organized by the Zhongguancun Laboratory, China Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team, Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Tsinghua University, and RealAI as part of the Zhongguancun International Frontier Technology Innovation Competition (https://www.zgc-aisc.com/en). The competition consists of three tracks, including Deepfake Security Competition, Autonomous Driving Security Competition, and Face Recognition Security Competition. This report will introduce the competition rules of these three tracks and the solutions of top-ranking teams in each track.

This paper revisits building machine learning algorithms that involve interactions between entities, such as those between financial assets in an actively managed portfolio, or interactions between users in a social network. Our goal is to forecast the future evolution of ensembles of multivariate time series in such applications (e.g., the future return of a financial asset or the future popularity of a Twitter account). Designing ML algorithms for such systems requires addressing the challenges of high-dimensional interactions and non-linearity. Existing approaches usually adopt an ad-hoc approach to integrating high-dimensional techniques into non-linear models and recent studies have shown these approaches have questionable efficacy in time-evolving interacting systems. To this end, we propose a novel framework, which we dub as the additive influence model. Under our modeling assumption, we show that it is possible to decouple the learning of high-dimensional interactions from the learning of non-linear feature interactions. To learn the high-dimensional interactions, we leverage kernel-based techniques, with provable guarantees, to embed the entities in a low-dimensional latent space. To learn the non-linear feature-response interactions, we generalize prominent machine learning techniques, including designing a new statistically sound non-parametric method and an ensemble learning algorithm optimized for vector regressions. Extensive experiments on two common applications demonstrate that our new algorithms deliver significantly stronger forecasting power compared to standard and recently proposed methods.

Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) facilitates the open-domain discovery of textual facts. However, the prevailing solutions evaluate OpenIE models on in-domain test sets aside from the training corpus, which certainly violates the initial task principle of domain-independence. In this paper, we propose to advance OpenIE towards a more realistic scenario: generalizing over unseen target domains with different data distributions from the source training domains, termed Generalized OpenIE. For this purpose, we first introduce GLOBE, a large-scale human-annotated multi-domain OpenIE benchmark, to examine the robustness of recent OpenIE models to domain shifts, and the relative performance degradation of up to 70% implies the challenges of generalized OpenIE. Then, we propose DragonIE, which explores a minimalist graph expression of textual fact: directed acyclic graph, to improve the OpenIE generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DragonIE beats the previous methods in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings by as much as 6.0% in F1 score absolutely, but there is still ample room for improvement.

We explore the downstream task performances for graph neural network (GNN) self-supervised learning (SSL) methods trained on subgraphs extracted from relational databases (RDBs). Intuitively, this joint use of SSL and GNNs should allow to leverage more of the available data, which could translate to better results. However, we found that naively porting contrastive SSL techniques can cause ``negative transfer'': linear evaluation on fixed representations from a pretrained model performs worse than on representations from the randomly-initialized model. Based on the conjecture that contrastive SSL conflicts with the message passing layers of the GNN, we propose InfoNode: a contrastive loss aiming to maximize the mutual information between a node's initial- and final-layer representation. The primary empirical results support our conjecture and the effectiveness of InfoNode.