End-to-end (E2E) task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems are prone to fall into the so-called 'likelihood trap', resulting in generated responses which are dull, repetitive, and often inconsistent with dialogue history. Comparing ranked lists of multiple generated responses against the 'gold response' (from training data) reveals a wide diversity in response quality, with many good responses placed lower in the ranked list. The main challenge, addressed in this work, is then how to reach beyond greedily generated system responses, that is, how to obtain and select such high-quality responses from the list of overgenerated responses at inference without availability of the gold response. To this end, we propose a simple yet effective reranking method which aims to select high-quality items from the lists of responses initially overgenerated by the system. The idea is to use any sequence-level (similarity) scoring function to divide the semantic space of responses into high-scoring versus low-scoring partitions. At training, the high-scoring partition comprises all generated responses whose similarity to the gold response is higher than the similarity of the greedy response to the gold response. At inference, the aim is to estimate the probability that each overgenerated response belongs to the high-scoring partition, given only previous dialogue history. We validate the robustness and versatility of our proposed method on the standard MultiWOZ dataset: our methods improve a state-of-the-art E2E ToD system by 2.4 BLEU, 3.2 ROUGE, and 2.8 METEOR scores, achieving new peak results. Additional experiments on the BiTOD dataset and human evaluation further ascertain the generalisability and effectiveness of the proposed framework.

We study the uniform-in-time propagation of chaos for mean field Langevin dynamics with convex mean field potenital. Convergences in both Wasserstein-$2$ distance and relative entropy are established. We do not require the mean field potenital functional to bear either small mean field interaction or displacement convexity, which are common constraints in the literature. In particular, it allows us to study the efficiency of the noisy gradient descent algorithm for training two-layer neural networks.

Masked image modeling (MIM) performs strongly in pre-training large vision Transformers (ViTs). However, small models that are critical for real-world applications cannot or only marginally benefit from this pre-training approach. In this paper, we explore distillation techniques to transfer the success of large MIM-based pre-trained models to smaller ones. We systematically study different options in the distillation framework, including distilling targets, losses, input, network regularization, sequential distillation, etc, revealing that: 1) Distilling token relations is more effective than CLS token- and feature-based distillation; 2) An intermediate layer of the teacher network as target perform better than that using the last layer when the depth of the student mismatches that of the teacher; 3) Weak regularization is preferred; etc. With these findings, we achieve significant fine-tuning accuracy improvements over the scratch MIM pre-training on ImageNet-1K classification, using all the ViT-Tiny, ViT-Small, and ViT-base models, with +4.2%/+2.4%/+1.4% gains, respectively. Our TinyMIM model of base size achieves 52.2 mIoU in AE20K semantic segmentation, which is +4.1 higher than the MAE baseline. Our TinyMIM model of tiny size achieves 79.6% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K image classification, which sets a new record for small vision models of the same size and computation budget. This strong performance suggests an alternative way for developing small vision Transformer models, that is, by exploring better training methods rather than introducing inductive biases into architectures as in most previous works. Code is available at https://github.com/OliverRensu/TinyMIM.

The recent increase in public and academic interest in preserving biodiversity has led to the growth of the field of conservation technology. This field involves designing and constructing tools that utilize technology to aid in the conservation of wildlife. In this article, we will use case studies to demonstrate the importance of designing conservation tools with human-wildlife interaction in mind and provide a framework for creating successful tools. These case studies include a range of complexities, from simple cat collars to machine learning and game theory methodologies. Our goal is to introduce and inform current and future researchers in the field of conservation technology and provide references for educating the next generation of conservation technologists. Conservation technology not only has the potential to benefit biodiversity but also has broader impacts on fields such as sustainability and environmental protection. By using innovative technologies to address conservation challenges, we can find more effective and efficient solutions to protect and preserve our planet's resources.

Different people speak with diverse personalized speaking styles. Although existing one-shot talking head methods have made significant progress in lip sync, natural facial expressions, and stable head motions, they still cannot generate diverse speaking styles in the final talking head videos. To tackle this problem, we propose a one-shot style-controllable talking face generation framework. In a nutshell, we aim to attain a speaking style from an arbitrary reference speaking video and then drive the one-shot portrait to speak with the reference speaking style and another piece of audio. Specifically, we first develop a style encoder to extract dynamic facial motion patterns of a style reference video and then encode them into a style code. Afterward, we introduce a style-controllable decoder to synthesize stylized facial animations from the speech content and style code. In order to integrate the reference speaking style into generated videos, we design a style-aware adaptive transformer, which enables the encoded style code to adjust the weights of the feed-forward layers accordingly. Thanks to the style-aware adaptation mechanism, the reference speaking style can be better embedded into synthesized videos during decoding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is capable of generating talking head videos with diverse speaking styles from only one portrait image and an audio clip while achieving authentic visual effects. Project Page: https://github.com/FuxiVirtualHuman/styletalk.

Decompilation aims to transform a low-level program language (LPL) (eg., binary file) into its functionally-equivalent high-level program language (HPL) (e.g., C/C++). It is a core technology in software security, especially in vulnerability discovery and malware analysis. In recent years, with the successful application of neural machine translation (NMT) models in natural language processing (NLP), researchers have tried to build neural decompilers by borrowing the idea of NMT. They formulate the decompilation process as a translation problem between LPL and HPL, aiming to reduce the human cost required to develop decompilation tools and improve their generalizability. However, state-of-the-art learning-based decompilers do not cope well with compiler-optimized binaries. Since real-world binaries are mostly compiler-optimized, decompilers that do not consider optimized binaries have limited practical significance. In this paper, we propose a novel learning-based approach named NeurDP, that targets compiler-optimized binaries. NeurDP uses a graph neural network (GNN) model to convert LPL to an intermediate representation (IR), which bridges the gap between source code and optimized binary. We also design an Optimized Translation Unit (OTU) to split functions into smaller code fragments for better translation performance. Evaluation results on datasets containing various types of statements show that NeurDP can decompile optimized binaries with 45.21% higher accuracy than state-of-the-art neural decompilation frameworks.

Driven by improved architectures and better representation learning frameworks, the field of visual recognition has enjoyed rapid modernization and performance boost in the early 2020s. For example, modern ConvNets, represented by ConvNeXt, have demonstrated strong performance in various scenarios. While these models were originally designed for supervised learning with ImageNet labels, they can also potentially benefit from self-supervised learning techniques such as masked autoencoders (MAE). However, we found that simply combining these two approaches leads to subpar performance. In this paper, we propose a fully convolutional masked autoencoder framework and a new Global Response Normalization (GRN) layer that can be added to the ConvNeXt architecture to enhance inter-channel feature competition. This co-design of self-supervised learning techniques and architectural improvement results in a new model family called ConvNeXt V2, which significantly improves the performance of pure ConvNets on various recognition benchmarks, including ImageNet classification, COCO detection, and ADE20K segmentation. We also provide pre-trained ConvNeXt V2 models of various sizes, ranging from an efficient 3.7M-parameter Atto model with 76.7% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, to a 650M Huge model that achieves a state-of-the-art 88.9% accuracy using only public training data.

In this paper, we propose a novel framework dubbed peer learning to deal with the problem of biased scene graph generation (SGG). This framework uses predicate sampling and consensus voting (PSCV) to encourage different peers to learn from each other, improving model diversity and mitigating bias in SGG. To address the heavily long-tailed distribution of predicate classes, we propose to use predicate sampling to divide and conquer this issue. As a result, the model is less biased and makes more balanced predicate predictions. Specifically, one peer may not be sufficiently diverse to discriminate between different levels of predicate distributions. Therefore, we sample the data distribution based on frequency of predicates into sub-distributions, selecting head, body, and tail classes to combine and feed to different peers as complementary predicate knowledge during the training process. The complementary predicate knowledge of these peers is then ensembled utilizing a consensus voting strategy, which simulates a civilized voting process in our society that emphasizes the majority opinion and diminishes the minority opinion. This approach ensures that the learned representations of each peer are optimally adapted to the various data distributions. Extensive experiments on the Visual Genome dataset demonstrate that PSCV outperforms previous methods. We have established a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) on the SGCls task by achieving a mean of \textbf{31.6}.

Audio-Visual scene understanding is a challenging problem due to the unstructured spatial-temporal relations that exist in the audio signals and spatial layouts of different objects and various texture patterns in the visual images. Recently, many studies have focused on abstracting features from convolutional neural networks while the learning of explicit semantically relevant frames of sound signals and visual images has been overlooked. To this end, we present an end-to-end framework, namely attentional graph convolutional network (AGCN), for structure-aware audio-visual scene representation. First, the spectrogram of sound and input image is processed by a backbone network for feature extraction. Then, to build multi-scale hierarchical information of input features, we utilize an attention fusion mechanism to aggregate features from multiple layers of the backbone network. Notably, to well represent the salient regions and contextual information of audio-visual inputs, the salient acoustic graph (SAG) and contextual acoustic graph (CAG), salient visual graph (SVG), and contextual visual graph (CVG) are constructed for the audio-visual scene representation. Finally, the constructed graphs pass through a graph convolutional network for structure-aware audio-visual scene recognition. Extensive experimental results on the audio, visual and audio-visual scene recognition datasets show that promising results have been achieved by the AGCN methods. Visualizing graphs on the spectrograms and images have been presented to show the effectiveness of proposed CAG/SAG and CVG/SVG that could focus on the salient and semantic relevant regions.

We consider the problem of estimating a multivariate function $f_0$ of bounded variation (BV), from noisy observations $y_i = f_0(x_i) + z_i$ made at random design points $x_i \in \mathbb{R}^d$, $i=1,\ldots,n$. We study an estimator that forms the Voronoi diagram of the design points, and then solves an optimization problem that regularizes according to a certain discrete notion of total variation (TV): the sum of weighted absolute differences of parameters $\theta_i,\theta_j$ (which estimate the function values $f_0(x_i),f_0(x_j)$) at all neighboring cells $i,j$ in the Voronoi diagram. This is seen to be equivalent to a variational optimization problem that regularizes according to the usual continuum (measure-theoretic) notion of TV, once we restrict the domain to functions that are piecewise constant over the Voronoi diagram. The regression estimator under consideration hence performs (shrunken) local averaging over adaptively formed unions of Voronoi cells, and we refer to it as the Voronoigram, following the ideas in Koenker (2005), and drawing inspiration from Tukey's regressogram (Tukey, 1961). Our contributions in this paper span both the conceptual and theoretical frontiers: we discuss some of the unique properties of the Voronoigram in comparison to TV-regularized estimators that use other graph-based discretizations; we derive the asymptotic limit of the Voronoi TV functional; and we prove that the Voronoigram is minimax rate optimal (up to log factors) for estimating BV functions that are essentially bounded.