Making sense of multiple modalities can yield a more comprehensive description of real-world phenomena. However, learning the co-representation of diverse modalities is still a long-standing endeavor in emerging machine learning applications and research. Previous generative approaches for multimodal input approximate a joint-modality posterior by uni-modality posteriors as product-of-experts (PoE) or mixture-of-experts (MoE). We argue that these approximations lead to a defective bound for the optimization process and loss of semantic connection among modalities. This paper presents a novel variational method on sets called the Set Multimodal VAE (SMVAE) for learning a multimodal latent space while handling the missing modality problem. By modeling the joint-modality posterior distribution directly, the proposed SMVAE learns to exchange information between multiple modalities and compensate for the drawbacks caused by factorization. In public datasets of various domains, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is applicable to order-agnostic cross-modal generation while achieving outstanding performance compared to the state-of-the-art multimodal methods. The source code for our method is available online https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SMVAE-9B3C/.

异质的大数据在机器学习中构成了许多挑战。它的巨大规模，高维度和固有的不确定性使机器学习的几乎每个方面都变得困难，从提供足够的处理能力到保持模型准确性到保护隐私。但是，也许最引人注目的问题是，大数据通常散布在敏感的个人数据中。因此，我们提出了一个保护隐私的层次模糊神经网络（PP-HFNN），以应对这些技术挑战，同时也减轻了隐私问题。通过两阶段优化算法对网络进行训练，并且基于众所周知的交替方向方法，通过方案学习了层次级别低级别的参数，该方案不会向其他代理揭示本地数据。高级层次结构的协调通过交替优化方法来处理，该方法的收敛很快。整个训练过程是可扩展的，快速的，并且不会遭受基于后传播的方法等梯度消失的问题。对回归和分类任务进行的综合模拟证明了所提出的模型的有效性。

多目标自组织追求（SOP）问题已广泛应用，并被认为是一个充满挑战的分布式系统的自组织游戏，在该系统中，智能代理在其中合作追求具有部分观察的多个动态目标。这项工作为分散的多机构系统提出了一个框架，以提高智能代理的搜索和追求能力。我们将一个自组织的系统建模为可观察到的马尔可夫游戏（POMG），具有权力下放，部分观察和非通信的特征。然后将拟议的分布式算法：模糊自组织合作协同进化（FSC2）杠杆化，以解决多目标SOP中的三个挑战：分布式自组织搜索（SOS），分布式任务分配和分布式单目标追踪。 FSC2包括一种协调的多代理深钢筋学习方法，该方法使均匀的代理能够学习天然SOS模式。此外，我们提出了一种基于模糊的分布式任务分配方法，该方法将多目标SOP分解为几个单目标追求问题。合作进化原则用于协调每个单一目标问题的分布式追随者。因此，可以缓解POMG中固有的部分观察和分布式决策的不确定性。实验结果表明，在所有三个子任务中，分布式不传动的多机构协调都具有部分观察结果，而2048 FSC2代理可以执行有效的多目标SOP，其捕获率几乎为100％。

我们提出了一种可自行的方法Mask2Hand，该方法学会了解决从2D二进制式掩护的手动剪影/阴影中预测3D手姿势和形状的具有挑战性的任务，而无需其他手动注释的数据。鉴于摄像机空间中的固有摄像头参数和参数手模型，我们采用可区分的渲染技术将3D估计投影到2D二进制轮廓空间上。通过在渲染的轮廓和输入二进制面膜之间应用量身定制的损失组合，我们能够将自我借记机制集成到我们的端到端优化过程中，以限制全球网格注册和手部姿势估计。实验表明，我们的方法将单个二进制掩码作为输入，可以在不对齐和对齐设置作为需要RGB或深度输入的最新方法上实现可比的预测准确性。我们的代码可在https://github.com/lijenchang/mask2hand上找到。

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.

We present Muse, a text-to-image Transformer model that achieves state-of-the-art image generation performance while being significantly more efficient than diffusion or autoregressive models. Muse is trained on a masked modeling task in discrete token space: given the text embedding extracted from a pre-trained large language model (LLM), Muse is trained to predict randomly masked image tokens. Compared to pixel-space diffusion models, such as Imagen and DALL-E 2, Muse is significantly more efficient due to the use of discrete tokens and requiring fewer sampling iterations; compared to autoregressive models, such as Parti, Muse is more efficient due to the use of parallel decoding. The use of a pre-trained LLM enables fine-grained language understanding, translating to high-fidelity image generation and the understanding of visual concepts such as objects, their spatial relationships, pose, cardinality etc. Our 900M parameter model achieves a new SOTA on CC3M, with an FID score of 6.06. The Muse 3B parameter model achieves an FID of 7.88 on zero-shot COCO evaluation, along with a CLIP score of 0.32. Muse also directly enables a number of image editing applications without the need to fine-tune or invert the model: inpainting, outpainting, and mask-free editing. More results are available at https://muse-model.github.io

An unbiased scene graph generation (SGG) algorithm referred to as Skew Class-balanced Re-weighting (SCR) is proposed for considering the unbiased predicate prediction caused by the long-tailed distribution. The prior works focus mainly on alleviating the deteriorating performances of the minority predicate predictions, showing drastic dropping recall scores, i.e., losing the majority predicate performances. It has not yet correctly analyzed the trade-off between majority and minority predicate performances in the limited SGG datasets. In this paper, to alleviate the issue, the Skew Class-balanced Re-weighting (SCR) loss function is considered for the unbiased SGG models. Leveraged by the skewness of biased predicate predictions, the SCR estimates the target predicate weight coefficient and then re-weights more to the biased predicates for better trading-off between the majority predicates and the minority ones. Extensive experiments conducted on the standard Visual Genome dataset and Open Image V4 \& V6 show the performances and generality of the SCR with the traditional SGG models.

With the increasing ability of large language models (LLMs), in-context learning (ICL) has become a new paradigm for natural language processing (NLP), where LLMs make predictions only based on contexts augmented with a few training examples. It has been a new trend exploring ICL to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of LLMs. In this paper, we aim to survey and summarize the progress, challenges, and future work in ICL. We first present a formal definition of ICL and clarify its correlation to related studies. Then, we organize and discuss advanced techniques of ICL, including training strategies, prompting strategies, and so on. Finally, we present the challenges of ICL and provide potential directions for further research. We hope our work can encourage more research on uncovering how ICL works and improving ICL in future work.

Masked image modeling (MIM) has shown great promise for self-supervised learning (SSL) yet been criticized for learning inefficiency. We believe the insufficient utilization of training signals should be responsible. To alleviate this issue, we introduce a conceptually simple yet learning-efficient MIM training scheme, termed Disjoint Masking with Joint Distillation (DMJD). For disjoint masking (DM), we sequentially sample multiple masked views per image in a mini-batch with the disjoint regulation to raise the usage of tokens for reconstruction in each image while keeping the masking rate of each view. For joint distillation (JD), we adopt a dual branch architecture to respectively predict invisible (masked) and visible (unmasked) tokens with superior learning targets. Rooting in orthogonal perspectives for training efficiency improvement, DM and JD cooperatively accelerate the training convergence yet not sacrificing the model generalization ability. Concretely, DM can train ViT with half of the effective training epochs (3.7 times less time-consuming) to report competitive performance. With JD, our DMJD clearly improves the linear probing classification accuracy over ConvMAE by 5.8%. On fine-grained downstream tasks like semantic segmentation, object detection, etc., our DMJD also presents superior generalization compared with state-of-the-art SSL methods. The code and model will be made public at https://github.com/mx-mark/DMJD.

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we take the role of investigators who want to trace the attack and identify the source, that is, the particular model which the adversarial examples are generated from. Techniques derived would aid forensic investigation of attack incidents and serve as deterrence to potential attacks. We consider the buyers-seller setting where a machine learning model is to be distributed to various buyers and each buyer receives a slightly different copy with same functionality. A malicious buyer generates adversarial examples from a particular copy $\mathcal{M}_i$ and uses them to attack other copies. From these adversarial examples, the investigator wants to identify the source $\mathcal{M}_i$. To address this problem, we propose a two-stage separate-and-trace framework. The model separation stage generates multiple copies of a model for a same classification task. This process injects unique characteristics into each copy so that adversarial examples generated have distinct and traceable features. We give a parallel structure which embeds a ``tracer'' in each copy, and a noise-sensitive training loss to achieve this goal. The tracing stage takes in adversarial examples and a few candidate models, and identifies the likely source. Based on the unique features induced by the noise-sensitive loss function, we could effectively trace the potential adversarial copy by considering the output logits from each tracer. Empirical results show that it is possible to trace the origin of the adversarial example and the mechanism can be applied to a wide range of architectures and datasets.