Video-language pre-training has advanced the performance of various downstream video-language tasks. However, most previous methods directly inherit or adapt typical image-language pre-training paradigms to video-language pre-training, thus not fully exploiting the unique characteristic of video, i.e., temporal. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Temporal-Aware video-language pre-training framework, HiTeA, with two novel pre-training tasks for modeling cross-modal alignment between moments and texts as well as the temporal relations of video-text pairs. Specifically, we propose a cross-modal moment exploration task to explore moments in videos, which results in detailed video moment representation. Besides, the inherent temporal relations are captured by aligning video-text pairs as a whole in different time resolutions with multi-modal temporal relation exploration task. Furthermore, we introduce the shuffling test to evaluate the temporal reliance of datasets and video-language pre-training models. We achieve state-of-the-art results on 15 well-established video-language understanding and generation tasks, especially on temporal-oriented datasets (e.g., SSv2-Template and SSv2-Label) with 8.6% and 11.1% improvement respectively. HiTeA also demonstrates strong generalization ability when directly transferred to downstream tasks in a zero-shot manner. Models and demo will be available on ModelScope.

Multilingual BERT (mBERT) has demonstrated considerable cross-lingual syntactic ability, whereby it enables effective zero-shot cross-lingual transfer of syntactic knowledge. The transfer is more successful between some languages, but it is not well understood what leads to this variation and whether it fairly reflects difference between languages. In this work, we investigate the distributions of grammatical relations induced from mBERT in the context of 24 typologically different languages. We demonstrate that the distance between the distributions of different languages is highly consistent with the syntactic difference in terms of linguistic formalisms. Such difference learnt via self-supervision plays a crucial role in the zero-shot transfer performance and can be predicted by variation in morphosyntactic properties between languages. These results suggest that mBERT properly encodes languages in a way consistent with linguistic diversity and provide insights into the mechanism of cross-lingual transfer.

In recent years, vision-centric perception has flourished in various autonomous driving tasks, including 3D detection, semantic map construction, motion forecasting, and depth estimation. Nevertheless, the latency of vision-centric approaches is too high for practical deployment (e.g., most camera-based 3D detectors have a runtime greater than 300ms). To bridge the gap between ideal research and real-world applications, it is necessary to quantify the trade-off between performance and efficiency. Traditionally, autonomous-driving perception benchmarks perform the offline evaluation, neglecting the inference time delay. To mitigate the problem, we propose the Autonomous-driving StreAming Perception (ASAP) benchmark, which is the first benchmark to evaluate the online performance of vision-centric perception in autonomous driving. On the basis of the 2Hz annotated nuScenes dataset, we first propose an annotation-extending pipeline to generate high-frame-rate labels for the 12Hz raw images. Referring to the practical deployment, the Streaming Perception Under constRained-computation (SPUR) evaluation protocol is further constructed, where the 12Hz inputs are utilized for streaming evaluation under the constraints of different computational resources. In the ASAP benchmark, comprehensive experiment results reveal that the model rank alters under different constraints, suggesting that the model latency and computation budget should be considered as design choices to optimize the practical deployment. To facilitate further research, we establish baselines for camera-based streaming 3D detection, which consistently enhance the streaming performance across various hardware. ASAP project page: https://github.com/JeffWang987/ASAP.

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.

3D point clouds are rich in geometric structure information, while 2D images contain important and continuous texture information. Combining 2D information to achieve better 3D semantic segmentation has become mainstream in 3D scene understanding. Albeit the success, it still remains elusive how to fuse and process the cross-dimensional features from these two distinct spaces. Existing state-of-the-art usually exploit bidirectional projection methods to align the cross-dimensional features and realize both 2D & 3D semantic segmentation tasks. However, to enable bidirectional mapping, this framework often requires a symmetrical 2D-3D network structure, thus limiting the network's flexibility. Meanwhile, such dual-task settings may distract the network easily and lead to over-fitting in the 3D segmentation task. As limited by the network's inflexibility, fused features can only pass through a decoder network, which affects model performance due to insufficient depth. To alleviate these drawbacks, in this paper, we argue that despite its simplicity, projecting unidirectionally multi-view 2D deep semantic features into the 3D space aligned with 3D deep semantic features could lead to better feature fusion. On the one hand, the unidirectional projection enforces our model focused more on the core task, i.e., 3D segmentation; on the other hand, unlocking the bidirectional to unidirectional projection enables a deeper cross-domain semantic alignment and enjoys the flexibility to fuse better and complicated features from very different spaces. In joint 2D-3D approaches, our proposed method achieves superior performance on the ScanNetv2 benchmark for 3D semantic segmentation.

Although physics-informed neural networks(PINNs) have progressed a lot in many real applications recently, there remains problems to be further studied, such as achieving more accurate results, taking less training time, and quantifying the uncertainty of the predicted results. Recent advances in PINNs have indeed significantly improved the performance of PINNs in many aspects, but few have considered the effect of variance in the training process. In this work, we take into consideration the effect of variance and propose our VI-PINNs to give better predictions. We output two values in the final layer of the network to represent the predicted mean and variance respectively, and the latter is used to represent the uncertainty of the output. A modified negative log-likelihood loss and an auxiliary task are introduced for fast and accurate training. We perform several experiments on a wide range of different problems to highlight the advantages of our approach. The results convey that our method not only gives more accurate predictions but also converges faster.

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.

We introduce CAMRL, the first curriculum-based asymmetric multi-task learning (AMTL) algorithm for dealing with multiple reinforcement learning (RL) tasks altogether. To mitigate the negative influence of customizing the one-off training order in curriculum-based AMTL, CAMRL switches its training mode between parallel single-task RL and asymmetric multi-task RL (MTRL), according to an indicator regarding the training time, the overall performance, and the performance gap among tasks. To leverage the multi-sourced prior knowledge flexibly and to reduce negative transfer in AMTL, we customize a composite loss with multiple differentiable ranking functions and optimize the loss through alternating optimization and the Frank-Wolfe algorithm. The uncertainty-based automatic adjustment of hyper-parameters is also applied to eliminate the need of laborious hyper-parameter analysis during optimization. By optimizing the composite loss, CAMRL predicts the next training task and continuously revisits the transfer matrix and network weights. We have conducted experiments on a wide range of benchmarks in multi-task RL, covering Gym-minigrid, Meta-world, Atari video games, vision-based PyBullet tasks, and RLBench, to show the improvements of CAMRL over the corresponding single-task RL algorithm and state-of-the-art MTRL algorithms. The code is available at: https://github.com/huanghanchi/CAMRL

Generating consistent and high-quality images from given texts is essential for visual-language understanding. Although impressive results have been achieved in generating high-quality images, text-image consistency is still a major concern in existing GAN-based methods. Particularly, the most popular metric $R$-precision may not accurately reflect the text-image consistency, often resulting in very misleading semantics in the generated images. Albeit its significance, how to design a better text-image consistency metric surprisingly remains under-explored in the community. In this paper, we make a further step forward to develop a novel CLIP-based metric termed as Semantic Similarity Distance ($SSD$), which is both theoretically founded from a distributional viewpoint and empirically verified on benchmark datasets. Benefiting from the proposed metric, we further design the Parallel Deep Fusion Generative Adversarial Networks (PDF-GAN) that aims at improving text-image consistency by fusing semantic information at different granularities and capturing accurate semantics. Equipped with two novel plug-and-play components: Hard-Negative Sentence Constructor and Semantic Projection, the proposed PDF-GAN can mitigate inconsistent semantics and bridge the text-image semantic gap. A series of experiments show that, as opposed to current state-of-the-art methods, our PDF-GAN can lead to significantly better text-image consistency while maintaining decent image quality on the CUB and COCO datasets.

深层神经网络（DNN）容易受到精心设计的扰动的影响，无论是依赖还是独立于图像。后一个称为通用对抗扰动（UAP），对于模型鲁棒性分析非常有吸引力，因为其对输入的独立性揭示了模型的内在特征。相对而言，另一个有趣的观察结果是神经塌陷（NC），这意味着特征变异性可能在训练的末端阶段崩溃。由此激励，我们建议通过攻击NC现象发生的层来生成UAP。由于NC，拟议的攻击可以收集其周围的所有自然图像特征，因此称为功能收集UAP（FG-UAP）。我们评估了我们提出的算法对丰富实验的有效性，包括未靶向和有针对性的通用攻击，有限的数据集中的攻击以及基于转移的黑盒攻击，包括视觉变形金刚，据信更强大的视觉变压器。此外，我们通过分析标签和提取的对抗性示例的标签和提取特征来研究FG-UAP，发现在模型损坏后，崩溃现象变得更强大。接受纸张时，该代码将发布。