arXiv subjects

Jiang Bian

Publications and source records attributed to Jiang Bian.

At least 181 records · Page 10Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

BGDB: Bernoulli-Gaussian Decision Block with Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models

Generative models can enhance discriminative classifiers by constructing complex feature spaces, thereby improving performance on intricate datasets. Conventional methods typically augment datasets with more detailed feature representations or increase dimensionality to make nonlinear data linearly separable. Utilizing a generative model solely for feature space processing falls short of unlocking its full potential within a classifier and typically lacks a solid theoretical foundation. We base our approach on a novel hypothesis: the probability information (logit) derived from a single model training can be used to generate the equivalent of multiple training sessions. Leveraging the central limit theorem, this synthesized probability information is anticipated to converge toward the true probability more accurately. To achieve this goal, we propose the Bernoulli-Gaussian Decision Block (BGDB), a novel module inspired by the Central Limit Theorem and the concept that the mean of multiple Bernoulli trials approximates the probability of success in a single trial. Specifically, we utilize Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (IDDPM) to model the probability of Bernoulli Trials. Our approach shifts the focus from reconstructing features to reconstructing logits, transforming the logit from a single iteration into logits analogous to those from multiple experiments. We provide the theoretical foundations of our approach through mathematical analysis and validate its effectiveness through experimental evaluation using various datasets for multiple imaging tasks, including both classification and segmentation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

WeatherReal: A Benchmark Based on In-Situ Observations for Evaluating Weather Models

In recent years, AI-based weather forecasting models have matched or even outperformed numerical weather prediction systems. However, most of these models have been trained and evaluated on reanalysis datasets like ERA5. These datasets, being products of numerical models, often diverge substantially from actual observations in some crucial variables like near-surface temperature, wind, precipitation and clouds - parameters that hold significant public interest. To address this divergence, we introduce WeatherReal, a novel benchmark dataset for weather forecasting, derived from global near-surface in-situ observations. WeatherReal also features a publicly accessible quality control and evaluation framework. This paper details the sources and processing methodologies underlying the dataset, and further illustrates the advantage of in-situ observations in capturing hyper-local and extreme weather through comparative analyses and case studies. Using WeatherReal, we evaluated several data-driven models and compared them with leading numerical models. Our work aims to advance the AI-based weather forecasting research towards a more application-focused and operation-ready approach.

physics.ao-ph↗

arXiv2024

Compositional 3D-aware Video Generation with LLM Director

Significant progress has been made in text-to-video generation through the use of powerful generative models and large-scale internet data. However, substantial challenges remain in precisely controlling individual concepts within the generated video, such as the motion and appearance of specific characters and the movement of viewpoints. In this work, we propose a novel paradigm that generates each concept in 3D representation separately and then composes them with priors from Large Language Models (LLM) and 2D diffusion models. Specifically, given an input textual prompt, our scheme consists of three stages: 1) We leverage LLM as the director to first decompose the complex query into several sub-prompts that indicate individual concepts within the video~(\textit{e.g.}, scene, objects, motions), then we let LLM to invoke pre-trained expert models to obtain corresponding 3D representations of concepts. 2) To compose these representations, we prompt multi-modal LLM to produce coarse guidance on the scales and coordinates of trajectories for the objects. 3) To make the generated frames adhere to natural image distribution, we further leverage 2D diffusion priors and use Score Distillation Sampling to refine the composition. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can generate high-fidelity videos from text with diverse motion and flexible control over each concept. Project page: \url{https://aka.ms/c3v}.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

MoESys: A Distributed and Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Training and Inference System for Internet Services

While modern internet services, such as chatbots, search engines, and online advertising, demand the use of large-scale deep neural networks (DNNs), distributed training and inference over heterogeneous computing systems are desired to facilitate these DNN models. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) is one the most common strategies to lower the cost of training subject to the overall size of models/data through gating and parallelism in a divide-and-conquer fashion. While DeepSpeed has made efforts in carrying out large-scale MoE training over heterogeneous infrastructures, the efficiency of training and inference could be further improved from several system aspects, including load balancing, communication/computation efficiency, and memory footprint limits. In this work, we present a novel MoESys that boosts efficiency in both large-scale training and inference. Specifically, in the training procedure, the proposed MoESys adopts an Elastic MoE training strategy with 2D prefetch and Fusion communication over Hierarchical storage, so as to enjoy efficient parallelisms. For scalable inference in a single node, especially when the model size is larger than GPU memory, MoESys builds the CPU-GPU memory jointly into a ring of sections to load the model, and executes the computation tasks across the memory sections in a round-robin manner for efficient inference. We carried out extensive experiments to evaluate MoESys, where MoESys successfully trains a Unified Feature Optimization (UFO) model with a Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts model of 12B parameters in 8 days on 48 A100 GPU cards. The comparison against the state-of-the-art shows that MoESys outperformed DeepSpeed with 33% higher throughput (tokens per second) in training and 13% higher throughput in inference in general. Particularly, under unbalanced MoE Tasks, e.g., UFO, MoESys achieved 64% higher throughput with 18% lower memory footprints.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2024

Towards Data-Centric Automatic R&D

The progress of humanity is driven by those successful discoveries accompanied by countless failed experiments. Researchers often seek the potential research directions by reading and then verifying them through experiments. The process imposes a significant burden on researchers. In the past decade, the data-driven black-box deep learning method has demonstrated its effectiveness in a wide range of real-world scenarios, which exacerbates the experimental burden of researchers and thus renders the potential successful discoveries veiled. Therefore, automating such a research and development (R&D) process is an urgent need. In this paper, we serve as the first effort to formalize the goal by proposing a Real-world Data-centric automatic R&D Benchmark, namely RD2Bench. RD2Bench benchmarks all the operations in data-centric automatic R&D (D-CARD) as a whole to navigate future work toward our goal directly. We focus on evaluating the interaction and synergistic effects of various model capabilities and aiding in selecting well-performing trustworthy models. Although RD2Bench is very challenging to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) large language model (LLM) named GPT-4, indicating ample research opportunities and more research efforts, LLMs possess promising potential to bring more significant development to D-CARD: They are able to implement some simple methods without adopting any additional techniques. We appeal to future work to take developing techniques for tackling automatic R&D into consideration, thus bringing the opportunities of the potential revolutionary upgrade to human productivity.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Collaborative Evolving Strategy for Automatic Data-Centric Development

Artificial Intelligence (AI) significantly influences many fields, largely thanks to the vast amounts of high-quality data for machine learning models. The emphasis is now on a data-centric AI strategy, prioritizing data development over model design progress. Automating this process is crucial. In this paper, we serve as the first work to introduce the automatic data-centric development (AD^2) task and outline its core challenges, which require domain-experts-like task scheduling and implementation capability, largely unexplored by previous work. By leveraging the strong complex problem-solving capabilities of large language models (LLMs), we propose an LLM-based autonomous agent, equipped with a strategy named Collaborative Knowledge-STudying-Enhanced Evolution by Retrieval (Co-STEER), to simultaneously address all the challenges. Specifically, our proposed Co-STEER agent enriches its domain knowledge through our proposed evolving strategy and develops both its scheduling and implementation skills by accumulating and retrieving domain-specific practical experience. With an improved schedule, the capability for implementation accelerates. Simultaneously, as implementation feedback becomes more thorough, the scheduling accuracy increases. These two capabilities evolve together through practical feedback, enabling a collaborative evolution process. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our Co-STEER agent breaks new ground in AD^2 research, possesses strong evolvable schedule and implementation ability, and demonstrates the significant effectiveness of its components. Our Co-STEER paves the way for AD^2 advancements.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

UF-HOBI at "Discharge Me!": A Hybrid Solution for Discharge Summary Generation Through Prompt-based Tuning of GatorTronGPT Models

Automatic generation of discharge summaries presents significant challenges due to the length of clinical documentation, the dispersed nature of patient information, and the diverse terminology used in healthcare. This paper presents a hybrid solution for generating discharge summary sections as part of our participation in the "Discharge Me!" Challenge at the BioNLP 2024 Shared Task. We developed a two-stage generation method using both extractive and abstractive techniques, in which we first apply name entity recognition (NER) to extract key clinical concepts, which are then used as input for a prompt-tuning-based GatorTronGPT model to generate coherent text for two important sections including "Brief Hospital Course" and "Discharge Instructions". Our system was ranked 5th in this challenge, achieving an overall score of 0.284. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our hybrid solution in improving the quality of automated discharge section generation.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Towards Automated Data Sciences with Natural Language and SageCopilot: Practices and Lessons Learned

While the field of NL2SQL has made significant advancements in translating natural language instructions into executable SQL scripts for data querying and processing, achieving full automation within the broader data science pipeline - encompassing data querying, analysis, visualization, and reporting - remains a complex challenge. This study introduces SageCopilot, an advanced, industry-grade system system that automates the data science pipeline by integrating Large Language Models (LLMs), Autonomous Agents (AutoAgents), and Language User Interfaces (LUIs). Specifically, SageCopilot incorporates a two-phase design: an online component refining users' inputs into executable scripts through In-Context Learning (ICL) and running the scripts for results reporting & visualization, and an offline preparing demonstrations requested by ICL in the online phase. A list of trending strategies such as Chain-of-Thought and prompt-tuning have been used to augment SageCopilot for enhanced performance. Through rigorous testing and comparative analysis against prompt-based solutions, SageCopilot has been empirically validated to achieve superior end-to-end performance in generating or executing scripts and offering results with visualization, backed by real-world datasets. Our in-depth ablation studies highlight the individual contributions of various components and strategies used by SageCopilot to the end-to-end correctness for data sciences.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Hard Prompts Made Interpretable: Sparse Entropy Regularization for Prompt Tuning with RL

With the advent of foundation models, prompt tuning has positioned itself as an important technique for directing model behaviors and eliciting desired responses. Prompt tuning regards selecting appropriate keywords included into the input, thereby adapting to the downstream task without adjusting or fine-tuning the model parameters. There is a wide range of work in prompt tuning, from approaches that directly harness the backpropagated gradient signals from the model, to those employing black-box optimization such as reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Our primary focus is on RLPrompt, which aims to find optimal prompt tokens leveraging soft Q-learning. While the results show promise, we have observed that the prompts frequently appear unnatural, which impedes their interpretability. We address this limitation by using sparse Tsallis entropy regularization, a principled approach to filtering out unlikely tokens from consideration. We extensively evaluate our approach across various tasks, including few-shot text classification, unsupervised text style transfer, and textual inversion from images. The results indicate a notable improvement over baselines, highlighting the efficacy of our approach in addressing the challenges of prompt tuning. Moreover, we show that the prompts discovered using our method are more natural and interpretable compared to those from other baselines.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Low latency carbon budget analysis reveals a large decline of the land carbon sink in 2023

In 2023, the CO2 growth rate was 3.37 +/- 0.11 ppm at Mauna Loa, 86% above the previous year, and hitting a record high since observations began in 1958, while global fossil fuel CO2 emissions only increased by 0.6 +/- 0.5%. This implies an unprecedented weakening of land and ocean sinks, and raises the question of where and why this reduction happened. Here we show a global net land CO2 sink of 0.44 +/- 0.21 GtC yr-1, the weakest since 2003. We used dynamic global vegetation models, satellites fire emissions, an atmospheric inversion based on OCO-2 measurements, and emulators of ocean biogeochemical and data driven models to deliver a fast-track carbon budget in 2023. Those models ensured consistency with previous carbon budgets. Regional flux anomalies from 2015-2022 are consistent between top-down and bottom-up approaches, with the largest abnormal carbon loss in the Amazon during the drought in the second half of 2023 (0.31 +/- 0.19 GtC yr-1), extreme fire emissions of 0.58 +/- 0.10 GtC yr-1 in Canada and a loss in South-East Asia (0.13 +/- 0.12 GtC yr-1). Since 2015, land CO2 uptake north of 20 degree N declined by half to 1.13 +/- 0.24 GtC yr-1 in 2023. Meanwhile, the tropics recovered from the 2015-16 El Nino carbon loss, gained carbon during the La Nina years (2020-2023), then switched to a carbon loss during the 2023 El Nino (0.56 +/- 0.23 GtC yr-1). The ocean sink was stronger than normal in the equatorial eastern Pacific due to reduced upwelling from La Nina's retreat in early 2023 and the development of El Nino later. Land regions exposed to extreme heat in 2023 contributed a gross carbon loss of 1.73 GtC yr-1, indicating that record warming in 2023 had a strong negative impact on the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems to mitigate climate change.

physics.ao-ph↗

arXiv2024

From Supervised to Generative: A Novel Paradigm for Tabular Deep Learning with Large Language Models

Tabular data is foundational to predictive modeling in various crucial industries, including healthcare, finance, retail, sustainability, etc. Despite the progress made in specialized models, there is an increasing demand for universal models that can transfer knowledge, generalize from limited data, and follow human instructions. These are challenges that current tabular deep learning approaches have not fully tackled. Here we introduce Generative Tabular Learning (GTL), a novel framework that integrates the advanced functionalities of large language models (LLMs)-such as prompt-based zero-shot generalization and in-context learning-into tabular deep learning. GTL capitalizes on the pre-training of LLMs on diverse tabular data, enhancing their understanding of domain-specific knowledge, numerical sequences, and statistical dependencies critical for accurate predictions. Our empirical study spans 384 public datasets, rigorously analyzing GTL's convergence and scaling behaviors and assessing the impact of varied data templates. The GTL-enhanced LLaMA-2 model demonstrates superior zero-shot and in-context learning capabilities across numerous classification and regression tasks. Notably, it achieves this without fine-tuning, outperforming traditional methods and rivaling state-of-the-art models like GPT-4 in certain cases. Through GTL, we not only foster a deeper integration of LLMs' sophisticated abilities into tabular data comprehension and application but also offer a new training resource and a test bed for LLMs to enhance their ability to comprehend tabular data. To facilitate reproducible research, we release our code, data, and model checkpoints at https://github.com/microsoft/Industrial-Foundation-Models.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

NuTime: Numerically Multi-Scaled Embedding for Large-Scale Time-Series Pretraining

Recent research on time-series self-supervised models shows great promise in learning semantic representations. However, it has been limited to small-scale datasets, e.g., thousands of temporal sequences. In this work, we make key technical contributions that are tailored to the numerical properties of time-series data and allow the model to scale to large datasets, e.g., millions of temporal sequences. We adopt the Transformer architecture by first partitioning the input into non-overlapping windows. Each window is then characterized by its normalized shape and two scalar values denoting the mean and standard deviation within each window. To embed scalar values that may possess arbitrary numerical amplitudes in a high-dimensional space, we propose a numerically multi-scaled embedding module enumerating all possible numerical scales for the scalars. The model undergoes pretraining with a simple contrastive objective on a large-scale dataset over a million sequences collected by merging existing public data. We study its transfer performance on a number of univariate and multivariate classification tasks, few shot learning, unsupervised clustering and anomaly detection benchmarks. Our method exhibits remarkable improvement against previous pretraining approaches and establishes the new state of the art, even compared with domain-specific non-learning-based methods. Code is available at: \url{https://github.com/chenguolin/NuTime}.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

When Search Engine Services meet Large Language Models: Visions and Challenges

Combining Large Language Models (LLMs) with search engine services marks a significant shift in the field of services computing, opening up new possibilities to enhance how we search for and retrieve information, understand content, and interact with internet services. This paper conducts an in-depth examination of how integrating LLMs with search engines can mutually benefit both technologies. We focus on two main areas: using search engines to improve LLMs (Search4LLM) and enhancing search engine functions using LLMs (LLM4Search). For Search4LLM, we investigate how search engines can provide diverse high-quality datasets for pre-training of LLMs, how they can use the most relevant documents to help LLMs learn to answer queries more accurately, how training LLMs with Learning-To-Rank (LTR) tasks can enhance their ability to respond with greater precision, and how incorporating recent search results can make LLM-generated content more accurate and current. In terms of LLM4Search, we examine how LLMs can be used to summarize content for better indexing by search engines, improve query outcomes through optimization, enhance the ranking of search results by analyzing document relevance, and help in annotating data for learning-to-rank tasks in various learning contexts. However, this promising integration comes with its challenges, which include addressing potential biases and ethical issues in training models, managing the computational and other costs of incorporating LLMs into search services, and continuously updating LLM training with the ever-changing web content. We discuss these challenges and chart out required research directions to address them. We also discuss broader implications for service computing, such as scalability, privacy concerns, and the need to adapt search engine architectures for these advanced models.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

Large Language Model as a Universal Clinical Multi-task Decoder

The development of effective machine learning methodologies for enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of clinical systems is crucial. Despite significant research efforts, managing a plethora of diversified clinical tasks and adapting to emerging new tasks remain significant challenges. This paper presents a novel paradigm that employs a pre-trained large language model as a universal clinical multi-task decoder. This approach leverages the flexibility and diversity of language expressions to handle task topic variations and associated arguments. The introduction of a new task simply requires the addition of a new instruction template. We validate this framework across hundreds of tasks, demonstrating its robustness in facilitating multi-task predictions, performing on par with traditional multi-task learning and single-task learning approaches. Moreover, it shows exceptional adaptability to new tasks, with impressive zero-shot performance in some instances and superior data efficiency in few-shot scenarios. This novel approach offers a unified solution to manage a wide array of new and emerging tasks in clinical applications.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Make Your Actor Talk: Generalizable and High-Fidelity Lip Sync with Motion and Appearance Disentanglement

We aim to edit the lip movements in talking video according to the given speech while preserving the personal identity and visual details. The task can be decomposed into two sub-problems: (1) speech-driven lip motion generation and (2) visual appearance synthesis. Current solutions handle the two sub-problems within a single generative model, resulting in a challenging trade-off between lip-sync quality and visual details preservation. Instead, we propose to disentangle the motion and appearance, and then generate them one by one with a speech-to-motion diffusion model and a motion-conditioned appearance generation model. However, there still remain challenges in each stage, such as motion-aware identity preservation in (1) and visual details preservation in (2). Therefore, to preserve personal identity, we adopt landmarks to represent the motion, and further employ a landmark-based identity loss. To capture motion-agnostic visual details, we use separate encoders to encode the lip, non-lip appearance and motion, and then integrate them with a learned fusion module. We train MyTalk on a large-scale and diverse dataset. Experiments show that our method generalizes well to the unknown, even out-of-domain person, in terms of both lip sync and visual detail preservation. We encourage the readers to watch the videos on our project page (https://Ingrid789.github.io/MyTalk/).

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Mildly Constrained Evaluation Policy for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) methodologies enforce constraints on the policy to adhere closely to the behavior policy, thereby stabilizing value learning and mitigating the selection of out-of-distribution (OOD) actions during test time. Conventional approaches apply identical constraints for both value learning and test time inference. However, our findings indicate that the constraints suitable for value estimation may in fact be excessively restrictive for action selection during test time. To address this issue, we propose a \textit{Mildly Constrained Evaluation Policy (MCEP)} for test time inference with a more constrained \textit{target policy} for value estimation. Since the \textit{target policy} has been adopted in various prior approaches, MCEP can be seamlessly integrated with them as a plug-in. We instantiate MCEP based on TD3BC (Fujimoto & Gu, 2021), AWAC (Nair et al., 2020) and DQL (Wang et al., 2023) algorithms. The empirical results on D4RL MuJoCo locomotion, high-dimensional humanoid and a set of 16 robotic manipulation tasks show that the MCEP brought significant performance improvement on classic offline RL methods and can further improve SOTA methods. The codes are open-sourced at \url{https://github.com/egg-west/MCEP.git}.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Position: Rethinking Post-Hoc Search-Based Neural Approaches for Solving Large-Scale Traveling Salesman Problems

Recent advancements in solving large-scale traveling salesman problems (TSP) utilize the heatmap-guided Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) paradigm, where machine learning (ML) models generate heatmaps, indicating the probability distribution of each edge being part of the optimal solution, to guide MCTS in solution finding. However, our theoretical and experimental analysis raises doubts about the effectiveness of ML-based heatmap generation. In support of this, we demonstrate that a simple baseline method can outperform complex ML approaches in heatmap generation. Furthermore, we question the practical value of the heatmap-guided MCTS paradigm. To substantiate this, our findings show its inferiority to the LKH-3 heuristic despite the paradigm's reliance on problem-specific, hand-crafted strategies. For the future, we suggest research directions focused on developing more theoretically sound heatmap generation methods and exploring autonomous, generalizable ML approaches for combinatorial problems. The code is available for review: https://github.com/xyfffff/rethink_mcts_for_tsp.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

TiC: Exploring Vision Transformer in Convolution

While models derived from Vision Transformers (ViTs) have been phonemically surging, pre-trained models cannot seamlessly adapt to arbitrary resolution images without altering the architecture and configuration, such as sampling the positional encoding, limiting their flexibility for various vision tasks. For instance, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) based on ViT-Huge requires all input images to be resized to 1024$\times$1024. To overcome this limitation, we propose the Multi-Head Self-Attention Convolution (MSA-Conv) that incorporates Self-Attention within generalized convolutions, including standard, dilated, and depthwise ones. Enabling transformers to handle images of varying sizes without retraining or rescaling, the use of MSA-Conv further reduces computational costs compared to global attention in ViT, which grows costly as image size increases. Later, we present the Vision Transformer in Convolution (TiC) as a proof of concept for image classification with MSA-Conv, where two capacity enhancing strategies, namely Multi-Directional Cyclic Shifted Mechanism and Inter-Pooling Mechanism, have been proposed, through establishing long-distance connections between tokens and enlarging the effective receptive field. Extensive experiments have been carried out to validate the overall effectiveness of TiC. Additionally, ablation studies confirm the performance improvement made by MSA-Conv and the two capacity enhancing strategies separately. Note that our proposal aims at studying an alternative to the global attention used in ViT, while MSA-Conv meets our goal by making TiC comparable to state-of-the-art on ImageNet-1K. Code will be released at https://github.com/zs670980918/MSA-Conv.

cs.CV↗