The current optical communication systems minimize bit or symbol errors without considering the semantic meaning behind digital bits, thus transmitting a lot of unnecessary information. We propose and experimentally demonstrate a semantic optical fiber communication (SOFC) system. Instead of encoding information into bits for transmission, semantic information is extracted from the source using deep learning. The generated semantic symbols are then directly transmitted through an optical fiber. Compared with the bit-based structure, the SOFC system achieved higher information compression and a more stable performance, especially in the low received optical power regime, and enhanced the robustness against optical link impairments. This work introduces an intelligent optical communication system at the human analytical thinking level, which is a significant step toward a breakthrough in the current optical communication architecture.

The ultimate goal of artificial intelligence is to mimic the human brain to perform decision-making and control directly from high-dimensional sensory input. All-optical diffractive neural networks provide a promising solution for realizing artificial intelligence with high-speed and low-power consumption. To date, most of the reported diffractive neural networks focus on single or multiple tasks that do not involve interaction with the environment, such as object recognition and image classification, while the networks that can perform decision-making and control, to our knowledge, have not been developed yet. Here, we propose to use deep reinforcement learning to realize diffractive neural networks that enable imitating the human-level capability of decision-making and control. Such networks allow for finding optimal control policies through interaction with the environment and can be readily realized with the dielectric metasurfaces. The superior performances of these networks are verified by engaging three types of classic games, Tic-Tac-Toe, Super Mario Bros., and Car Racing, and achieving the same or even higher levels comparable to human players. Our work represents a solid step of advancement in diffractive neural networks, which promises a fundamental shift from the target-driven control of a pre-designed state for simple recognition or classification tasks to the high-level sensory capability of artificial intelligence. It may find exciting applications in autonomous driving, intelligent robots, and intelligent manufacturing.

Given the success with in-context learning of large pre-trained language models, we introduce in-context learning distillation to transfer in-context few-shot learning ability from large models to smaller models. We propose to combine in-context learning objectives with language modeling objectives to distill both the ability to read in-context examples and task knowledge to the smaller models. We perform in-context learning distillation under two different few-shot learning paradigms: Meta In-context Tuning (Meta-ICT) and Multitask In-context Tuning (Multitask-ICT). Multitask-ICT performs better on multitask few-shot learning but also requires more computation than Meta-ICT. Our method shows consistent improvements for both Meta-ICT and Multitask-ICT on two benchmarks: LAMA and CrossFit. Our extensive experiments and analysis reveal that in-context learning objectives and language modeling objectives are complementary under the Multitask-ICT paradigm. In-context learning objectives achieve the best performance when combined with language modeling objectives.

The discovery of utility-driven patterns is a useful and difficult research topic. It can extract significant and interesting information from specific and varied databases, increasing the value of the services provided. In practice, the measure of utility is often used to demonstrate the importance, profit, or risk of an object or a pattern. In the database, although utility is a flexible criterion for each pattern, it is a more absolute criterion due to the neglect of utility sharing. This leads to the derived patterns only exploring partial and local knowledge from a database. Utility occupancy is a recently proposed model that considers the problem of mining with high utility but low occupancy. However, existing studies are concentrated on itemsets that do not reveal the temporal relationship of object occurrences. Therefore, this paper towards sequence utility maximization. We first define utility occupancy on sequence data and raise the problem of High Utility-Occupancy Sequential Pattern Mining (HUOSPM). Three dimensions, including frequency, utility, and occupancy, are comprehensively evaluated in HUOSPM. An algorithm called Sequence Utility Maximization with Utility occupancy measure (SUMU) is proposed. Furthermore, two data structures for storing related information about a pattern, Utility-Occupancy-List-Chain (UOL-Chain) and Utility-Occupancy-Table (UO-Table) with six associated upper bounds, are designed to improve efficiency. Empirical experiments are carried out to evaluate the novel algorithm's efficiency and effectiveness. The influence of different upper bounds and pruning strategies is analyzed and discussed. The comprehensive results suggest that the work of our algorithm is intelligent and effective.

State-of-the-art 3D semantic segmentation models are trained on the off-the-shelf public benchmarks, but they often face the major challenge when these well-trained models are deployed to a new domain. In this paper, we propose an Active-and-Adaptive Segmentation (ADAS) baseline to enhance the weak cross-domain generalization ability of a well-trained 3D segmentation model, and bridge the point distribution gap between domains. Specifically, before the cross-domain adaptation stage begins, ADAS performs an active sampling operation to select a maximally-informative subset from both source and target domains for effective adaptation, reducing the adaptation difficulty under 3D scenarios. Benefiting from the rise of multi-modal 2D-3D datasets, ADAS utilizes a cross-modal attention-based feature fusion module that can extract a representative pair of image features and point features to achieve a bi-directional image-point feature interaction for better safe adaptation. Experimentally, ADAS is verified to be effective in many cross-domain settings including: 1) Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA), which means that all samples from target domain are unlabeled; 2) Unsupervised Few-shot Domain Adaptation (UFDA) which means that only a few unlabeled samples are available in the unlabeled target domain; 3) Active Domain Adaptation (ADA) which means that the selected target samples by ADAS are manually annotated. Their results demonstrate that ADAS achieves a significant accuracy gain by easily coupling ADAS with self-training methods or off-the-shelf UDA works.

Determining causal effects of temporal multi-intervention assists decision-making. Restricted by time-varying bias, selection bias, and interactions of multiple interventions, the disentanglement and estimation of multiple treatment effects from individual temporal data is still rare. To tackle these challenges, we propose a comprehensive framework of temporal counterfactual forecasting from an individual multiple treatment perspective (TCFimt). TCFimt constructs adversarial tasks in a seq2seq framework to alleviate selection and time-varying bias and designs a contrastive learning-based block to decouple a mixed treatment effect into separated main treatment effects and causal interactions which further improves estimation accuracy. Through implementing experiments on two real-world datasets from distinct fields, the proposed method shows satisfactory performance in predicting future outcomes with specific treatments and in choosing optimal treatment type and timing than state-of-the-art methods.

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.

Attention-based neural networks, such as Transformers, have become ubiquitous in numerous applications, including computer vision, natural language processing, and time-series analysis. In all kinds of attention networks, the attention maps are crucial as they encode semantic dependencies between input tokens. However, most existing attention networks perform modeling or reasoning based on representations, wherein the attention maps of different layers are learned separately without explicit interactions. In this paper, we propose a novel and generic evolving attention mechanism, which directly models the evolution of inter-token relationships through a chain of residual convolutional modules. The major motivations are twofold. On the one hand, the attention maps in different layers share transferable knowledge, thus adding a residual connection can facilitate the information flow of inter-token relationships across layers. On the other hand, there is naturally an evolutionary trend among attention maps at different abstraction levels, so it is beneficial to exploit a dedicated convolution-based module to capture this process. Equipped with the proposed mechanism, the convolution-enhanced evolving attention networks achieve superior performance in various applications, including time-series representation, natural language understanding, machine translation, and image classification. Especially on time-series representation tasks, Evolving Attention-enhanced Dilated Convolutional (EA-DC-) Transformer outperforms state-of-the-art models significantly, achieving an average of 17% improvement compared to the best SOTA. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that explicitly models the layer-wise evolution of attention maps. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/pkuyym/EvolvingAttention

Large deep learning models have achieved remarkable success in many scenarios. However, training large models is usually challenging, e.g., due to the high computational cost, the unstable and painfully slow optimization procedure, and the vulnerability to overfitting. To alleviate these problems, this work studies a divide-and-conquer strategy, i.e., dividing a large model into smaller modules, training them independently, and reassembling the trained modules to obtain the target model. This approach is promising since it avoids directly training large models from scratch. Nevertheless, implementing this idea is non-trivial, as it is difficult to ensure the compatibility of the independently trained modules. In this paper, we present an elegant solution to address this issue, i.e., we introduce a global, shared meta model to implicitly link all the modules together. This enables us to train highly compatible modules that collaborate effectively when they are assembled together. We further propose a module incubation mechanism that enables the meta model to be designed as an extremely shallow network. As a result, the additional overhead introduced by the meta model is minimalized. Though conceptually simple, our method significantly outperforms end-to-end (E2E) training in terms of both final accuracy and training efficiency. For example, on top of ViT-Huge, it improves the accuracy by 2.7% compared to the E2E baseline on ImageNet-1K, while saving the training cost by 43% in the meantime. Code is available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/Model-Assembling.

We study a challenging task, conditional human motion generation, which produces plausible human motion sequences according to various conditional inputs, such as action classes or textual descriptors. Since human motions are highly diverse and have a property of quite different distribution from conditional modalities, such as textual descriptors in natural languages, it is hard to learn a probabilistic mapping from the desired conditional modality to the human motion sequences. Besides, the raw motion data from the motion capture system might be redundant in sequences and contain noises; directly modeling the joint distribution over the raw motion sequences and conditional modalities would need a heavy computational overhead and might result in artifacts introduced by the captured noises. To learn a better representation of the various human motion sequences, we first design a powerful Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) and arrive at a representative and low-dimensional latent code for a human motion sequence. Then, instead of using a diffusion model to establish the connections between the raw motion sequences and the conditional inputs, we perform a diffusion process on the motion latent space. Our proposed Motion Latent-based Diffusion model (MLD) could produce vivid motion sequences conforming to the given conditional inputs and substantially reduce the computational overhead in both the training and inference stages. Extensive experiments on various human motion generation tasks demonstrate that our MLD achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods among extensive human motion generation tasks, with two orders of magnitude faster than previous diffusion models on raw motion sequences.