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Jie Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Jie Zhang.

At least 631 records · Page 35Linked to original sources

Symbol: Generating Flexible Black-Box Optimizers through Symbolic Equation Learning

Recent Meta-learning for Black-Box Optimization (MetaBBO) methods harness neural networks to meta-learn configurations of traditional black-box optimizers. Despite their success, they are inevitably restricted by the limitations of predefined hand-crafted optimizers. In this paper, we present \textsc{Symbol}, a novel framework that promotes the automated discovery of black-box optimizers through symbolic equation learning. Specifically, we propose a Symbolic Equation Generator (SEG) that allows closed-form optimization rules to be dynamically generated for specific tasks and optimization steps. Within \textsc{Symbol}, we then develop three distinct strategies based on reinforcement learning, so as to meta-learn the SEG efficiently. Extensive experiments reveal that the optimizers generated by \textsc{Symbol} not only surpass the state-of-the-art BBO and MetaBBO baselines, but also exhibit exceptional zero-shot generalization abilities across entirely unseen tasks with different problem dimensions, population sizes, and optimization horizons. Furthermore, we conduct in-depth analyses of our \textsc{Symbol} framework and the optimization rules that it generates, underscoring its desirable flexibility and interpretability.

cs.LG↗

PRIME: Protect Your Videos From Malicious Editing

With the development of generative models, the quality of generated content keeps increasing. Recently, open-source models have made it surprisingly easy to manipulate and edit photos and videos, with just a few simple prompts. While these cutting-edge technologies have gained popularity, they have also given rise to concerns regarding the privacy and portrait rights of individuals. Malicious users can exploit these tools for deceptive or illegal purposes. Although some previous works focus on protecting photos against generative models, we find there are still gaps between protecting videos and images in the aspects of efficiency and effectiveness. Therefore, we introduce our protection method, PRIME, to significantly reduce the time cost and improve the protection performance. Moreover, to evaluate our proposed protection method, we consider both objective metrics and human subjective metrics. Our evaluation results indicate that PRIME only costs 8.3% GPU hours of the cost of the previous state-of-the-art method and achieves better protection results on both human evaluation and objective metrics. Code can be found in https://github.com/GuanlinLee/prime.

cs.CV↗

Multi-granularity Correspondence Learning from Long-term Noisy Videos

Existing video-language studies mainly focus on learning short video clips, leaving long-term temporal dependencies rarely explored due to over-high computational cost of modeling long videos. To address this issue, one feasible solution is learning the correspondence between video clips and captions, which however inevitably encounters the multi-granularity noisy correspondence (MNC) problem. To be specific, MNC refers to the clip-caption misalignment (coarse-grained) and frame-word misalignment (fine-grained), hindering temporal learning and video understanding. In this paper, we propose NOise Robust Temporal Optimal traNsport (Norton) that addresses MNC in a unified optimal transport (OT) framework. In brief, Norton employs video-paragraph and clip-caption contrastive losses to capture long-term dependencies based on OT. To address coarse-grained misalignment in video-paragraph contrast, Norton filters out the irrelevant clips and captions through an alignable prompt bucket and realigns asynchronous clip-caption pairs based on transport distance. To address the fine-grained misalignment, Norton incorporates a soft-maximum operator to identify crucial words and key frames. Additionally, Norton exploits the potential faulty negative samples in clip-caption contrast by rectifying the alignment target with OT assignment to ensure precise temporal modeling. Extensive experiments on video retrieval, videoQA, and action segmentation verify the effectiveness of our method. Code is available at https://lin-yijie.github.io/projects/Norton.

cs.CV↗

From GPT-4 to Gemini and Beyond: Assessing the Landscape of MLLMs on Generalizability, Trustworthiness and Causality through Four Modalities

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive abilities in generating reasonable responses with respect to multi-modal contents. However, there is still a wide gap between the performance of recent MLLM-based applications and the expectation of the broad public, even though the most powerful OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini have been deployed. This paper strives to enhance understanding of the gap through the lens of a qualitative study on the generalizability, trustworthiness, and causal reasoning capabilities of recent proprietary and open-source MLLMs across four modalities: ie, text, code, image, and video, ultimately aiming to improve the transparency of MLLMs. We believe these properties are several representative factors that define the reliability of MLLMs, in supporting various downstream applications. To be specific, we evaluate the closed-source GPT-4 and Gemini and 6 open-source LLMs and MLLMs. Overall we evaluate 230 manually designed cases, where the qualitative results are then summarized into 12 scores (ie, 4 modalities times 3 properties). In total, we uncover 14 empirical findings that are useful to understand the capabilities and limitations of both proprietary and open-source MLLMs, towards more reliable downstream multi-modal applications.

cs.CV↗

CBVS: A Large-Scale Chinese Image-Text Benchmark for Real-World Short Video Search Scenarios

Vision-Language Models pre-trained on large-scale image-text datasets have shown superior performance in downstream tasks such as image retrieval. Most of the images for pre-training are presented in the form of open domain common-sense visual elements. Differently, video covers in short video search scenarios are presented as user-originated contents that provide important visual summaries of videos. In addition, a portion of the video covers come with manually designed cover texts that provide semantic complements. In order to fill in the gaps in short video cover data, we establish the first large-scale cover-text benchmark for Chinese short video search scenarios. Specifically, we release two large-scale datasets CBVS-5M/10M to provide short video covers, and the manual fine-labeling dataset CBVS-20K to provide real user queries, which serves as an image-text benchmark test in the Chinese short video search field. To integrate the semantics of cover text in the case of modality missing, we propose UniCLIP where cover texts play a guiding role during training, however are not relied upon by inference. Extensive evaluation on CBVS-20K demonstrates the excellent performance of our proposal. UniCLIP has been deployed to Tencent's online video search systems with hundreds of millions of visits and achieved significant gains. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/QQBrowserVideoSearch/CBVS-UniCLIP.

cs.CV↗

Adversarial speech for voice privacy protection from Personalized Speech generation

The rapid progress in personalized speech generation technology, including personalized text-to-speech (TTS) and voice conversion (VC), poses a challenge in distinguishing between generated and real speech for human listeners, resulting in an urgent demand in protecting speakers' voices from malicious misuse. In this regard, we propose a speaker protection method based on adversarial attacks. The proposed method perturbs speech signals by minimally altering the original speech while rendering downstream speech generation models unable to accurately generate the voice of the target speaker. For validation, we employ the open-source pre-trained YourTTS model for speech generation and protect the target speaker's speech in the white-box scenario. Automatic speaker verification (ASV) evaluations were carried out on the generated speech as the assessment of the voice protection capability. Our experimental results show that we successfully perturbed the speaker encoder of the YourTTS model using the gradient-based I-FGSM adversarial perturbation method. Furthermore, the adversarial perturbation is effective in preventing the YourTTS model from generating the speech of the target speaker. Audio samples can be found in https://voiceprivacy.github.io/Adeversarial-Speech-with-YourTTS.

eess.AS↗

Hierarchical Compositional Representations for Few-shot Action Recognition

Recently action recognition has received more and more attention for its comprehensive and practical applications in intelligent surveillance and human-computer interaction. However, few-shot action recognition has not been well explored and remains challenging because of data scarcity. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical compositional representations (HCR) learning approach for few-shot action recognition. Specifically, we divide a complicated action into several sub-actions by carefully designed hierarchical clustering and further decompose the sub-actions into more fine-grained spatially attentional sub-actions (SAS-actions). Although there exist large differences between base classes and novel classes, they can share similar patterns in sub-actions or SAS-actions. Furthermore, we adopt the Earth Mover's Distance in the transportation problem to measure the similarity between video samples in terms of sub-action representations. It computes the optimal matching flows between sub-actions as distance metric, which is favorable for comparing fine-grained patterns. Extensive experiments show our method achieves the state-of-the-art results on HMDB51, UCF101 and Kinetics datasets.

cs.CV↗

OTAS: An Elastic Transformer Serving System via Token Adaptation

Transformer model empowered architectures have become a pillar of cloud services that keeps reshaping our society. However, the dynamic query loads and heterogeneous user requirements severely challenge current transformer serving systems, which rely on pre-training multiple variants of a foundation model, i.e., with different sizes, to accommodate varying service demands. Unfortunately, such a mechanism is unsuitable for large transformer models due to the additional training costs and excessive I/O delay. In this paper, we introduce OTAS, the first elastic serving system specially tailored for transformer models by exploring lightweight token management. We develop a novel idea called token adaptation that adds prompting tokens to improve accuracy and removes redundant tokens to accelerate inference. To cope with fluctuating query loads and diverse user requests, we enhance OTAS with application-aware selective batching and online token adaptation. OTAS first batches incoming queries with similar service-level objectives to improve the ingress throughput. Then, to strike a tradeoff between the overhead of token increment and the potentials for accuracy improvement, OTAS adaptively adjusts the token execution strategy by solving an optimization problem. We implement and evaluate a prototype of OTAS with multiple datasets, which show that OTAS improves the system utility by at least 18.2%.

cs.DC↗

Electromagnetically Induced Transparency in Strongly Relativistic Regime

Stable transport of laser beams in highly over-dense plasmas is of significance in fast ignition of inertial confinement fusion, relativistic electrons generation, and powerful electromagnetic emission, but hard to realize. Early in 1996, Harris proposed an electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) mechanism, analogous to the concept in atom physics, to transport a low-frequency (LF) laser in over-dense plasmas aided by a high-frequency pump laser. However, subsequent investigations show that EIT cannot occur in real plasmas with boundaries. Here, our particle-in-cell simulations show that EIT can occur in strongly-relativistic regime and results in stable propagation of a LF laser in bounded plasmas with tens of its critical density. A relativistic three-wave coupling model is developed, and the criteria and frequency passband for EIT occurrence are presented. The passband is sufficiently wide in strongly-relativistic regime, allowing EIT to work sustainably. Nevertheless, it is narrowed to nearly an isolated point in weakly-relativistic regime, which can explain the quenching of EIT in bounded plasmas found in previous investigations.

physics.plasm-ph↗

SAME: Sample Reconstruction against Model Extraction Attacks

While deep learning models have shown significant performance across various domains, their deployment needs extensive resources and advanced computing infrastructure. As a solution, Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) has emerged, lowering the barriers for users to release or productize their deep learning models. However, previous studies have highlighted potential privacy and security concerns associated with MLaaS, and one primary threat is model extraction attacks. To address this, there are many defense solutions but they suffer from unrealistic assumptions and generalization issues, making them less practical for reliable protection. Driven by these limitations, we introduce a novel defense mechanism, SAME, based on the concept of sample reconstruction. This strategy imposes minimal prerequisites on the defender's capabilities, eliminating the need for auxiliary Out-of-Distribution (OOD) datasets, user query history, white-box model access, and additional intervention during model training. It is compatible with existing active defense methods. Our extensive experiments corroborate the superior efficacy of SAME over state-of-the-art solutions. Our code is available at https://github.com/xythink/SAME.

cs.CR↗

Multichannel AV-wav2vec2: A Framework for Learning Multichannel Multi-Modal Speech Representation

Self-supervised speech pre-training methods have developed rapidly in recent years, which show to be very effective for many near-field single-channel speech tasks. However, far-field multichannel speech processing is suffering from the scarcity of labeled multichannel data and complex ambient noises. The efficacy of self-supervised learning for far-field multichannel and multi-modal speech processing has not been well explored. Considering that visual information helps to improve speech recognition performance in noisy scenes, in this work we propose a multichannel multi-modal speech self-supervised learning framework AV-wav2vec2, which utilizes video and multichannel audio data as inputs. First, we propose a multi-path structure to process multichannel audio streams and a visual stream in parallel, with intra- and inter-channel contrastive losses as training targets to fully exploit the spatiotemporal information in multichannel speech data. Second, based on contrastive learning, we use additional single-channel audio data, which is trained jointly to improve the performance of speech representation. Finally, we use a Chinese multichannel multi-modal dataset in real scenarios to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method on audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR), automatic speech recognition (ASR), visual speech recognition (VSR) and audio-visual speaker diarization (AVSD) tasks.

eess.AS↗

Frequency-Adaptive Pan-Sharpening with Mixture of Experts

Pan-sharpening involves reconstructing missing high-frequency information in multi-spectral images with low spatial resolution, using a higher-resolution panchromatic image as guidance. Although the inborn connection with frequency domain, existing pan-sharpening research has not almost investigated the potential solution upon frequency domain. To this end, we propose a novel Frequency Adaptive Mixture of Experts (FAME) learning framework for pan-sharpening, which consists of three key components: the Adaptive Frequency Separation Prediction Module, the Sub-Frequency Learning Expert Module, and the Expert Mixture Module. In detail, the first leverages the discrete cosine transform to perform frequency separation by predicting the frequency mask. On the basis of generated mask, the second with low-frequency MOE and high-frequency MOE takes account for enabling the effective low-frequency and high-frequency information reconstruction. Followed by, the final fusion module dynamically weights high-frequency and low-frequency MOE knowledge to adapt to remote sensing images with significant content variations. Quantitative and qualitative experiments over multiple datasets demonstrate that our method performs the best against other state-of-the-art ones and comprises a strong generalization ability for real-world scenes. Code will be made publicly at \url{https://github.com/alexhe101/FAME-Net}.

cs.CV↗

Enhancing RAW-to-sRGB with Decoupled Style Structure in Fourier Domain

RAW to sRGB mapping, which aims to convert RAW images from smartphones into RGB form equivalent to that of Digital Single-Lens Reflex (DSLR) cameras, has become an important area of research. However, current methods often ignore the difference between cell phone RAW images and DSLR camera RGB images, a difference that goes beyond the color matrix and extends to spatial structure due to resolution variations. Recent methods directly rebuild color mapping and spatial structure via shared deep representation, limiting optimal performance. Inspired by Image Signal Processing (ISP) pipeline, which distinguishes image restoration and enhancement, we present a novel Neural ISP framework, named FourierISP. This approach breaks the image down into style and structure within the frequency domain, allowing for independent optimization. FourierISP is comprised of three subnetworks: Phase Enhance Subnet for structural refinement, Amplitude Refine Subnet for color learning, and Color Adaptation Subnet for blending them in a smooth manner. This approach sharpens both color and structure, and extensive evaluations across varied datasets confirm that our approach realizes state-of-the-art results. Code will be available at ~\url{https://github.com/alexhe101/FourierISP}.

cs.CV↗

Boosting Pruned Networks with Linear Over-parameterization

Structured pruning compresses neural networks by reducing channels (filters) for fast inference and low footprint at run-time. To restore accuracy after pruning, fine-tuning is usually applied to pruned networks. However, too few remaining parameters in pruned networks inevitably bring a great challenge to fine-tuning to restore accuracy. To address this challenge, we propose a novel method that first linearly over-parameterizes the compact layers in pruned networks to enlarge the number of fine-tuning parameters and then re-parameterizes them to the original layers after fine-tuning. Specifically, we equivalently expand the convolution/linear layer with several consecutive convolution/linear layers that do not alter the current output feature maps. Furthermore, we utilize similarity-preserving knowledge distillation that encourages the over-parameterized block to learn the immediate data-to-data similarities of the corresponding dense layer to maintain its feature learning ability. The proposed method is comprehensively evaluated on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet which significantly outperforms the vanilla fine-tuning strategy, especially for large pruning ratio.

cs.CV↗

What Are the Causes of Super Activity of Solar Active Regions?

Flare productivity varies among solar active regions (ARs). This study analyzed 20 ARs of contrasting sunspot areas and flare productivities to understand the super flare productivity of certain ARs. We used the flare index (FI) as an indicator of flare activity. We examined the pattern of morphological evolution of magnetic features. Further, we derived a set of magnetic feature parameters to quantitatively characterize ARs. Our study found that the correlation coefficient is the highest (r = 0.78) between FI and the length of the strong gradient polarity inversion line (SgPIL), while the coefficient is the lowest (r = 0.14) between FI and the total unsigned magnetic flux. For the selected ARs, this study also found that the super flare productive ARs have SgPILs (R value) longer (greater) than 50 Mm (4.5). These results suggest that flare productivity is mainly controlled by the size of the subregion that comprises close interaction of opposite magnetic polarities and is weakly correlated with the size of the whole ARs. Further, even though magnetic flux emergence is important, this study shows that it alone is insufficient to increase flare productivity. New emergence can drive either the interaction of like or opposite magnetic polarities of nonconjugate pairs (i.e., polarities not from the same bipole). In the former case, the magnetic configuration remains simple, and flare productivity would be low. In the latter case, the convergence of opposite magnetic fluxes of nonconjugate pairs results in a magnetic configuration with long SgPIL and an increase in flare productivity.

astro-ph.SR↗

ParsNets: A Parsimonious Orthogonal and Low-Rank Linear Networks for Zero-Shot Learning

This paper provides a novel parsimonious yet efficient design for zero-shot learning (ZSL), dubbed ParsNets, where we are interested in learning a composition of on-device friendly linear networks, each with orthogonality and low-rankness properties, to achieve equivalent or even better performance against existing deep models. Concretely, we first refactor the core module of ZSL, i.e., visual-semantics mapping function, into several base linear networks that correspond to diverse components of the semantic space, where the complex nonlinearity can be collapsed into simple local linearities. Then, to facilitate the generalization of local linearities, we construct a maximal margin geometry on the learned features by enforcing low-rank constraints on intra-class samples and high-rank constraints on inter-class samples, resulting in orthogonal subspaces for different classes and each subspace lies on a compact manifold. To enhance the model's adaptability and counterbalance over/under-fittings in ZSL, a set of sample-wise indicators is employed to select a sparse subset from these base linear networks to form a composite semantic predictor for each sample. Notably, maximal margin geometry can guarantee the diversity of features, and meanwhile, local linearities guarantee efficiency. Thus, our ParsNets can generalize better to unseen classes and can be deployed flexibly on resource-constrained devices. Theoretical explanations and extensive experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

cs.CV↗

Personalization as a Shortcut for Few-Shot Backdoor Attack against Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Although recent personalization methods have democratized high-resolution image synthesis by enabling swift concept acquisition with minimal examples and lightweight computation, they also present an exploitable avenue for high accessible backdoor attacks. This paper investigates a critical and unexplored aspect of text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models - their potential vulnerability to backdoor attacks via personalization. Our study focuses on a zero-day backdoor vulnerability prevalent in two families of personalization methods, epitomized by Textual Inversion and DreamBooth.Compared to traditional backdoor attacks, our proposed method can facilitate more precise, efficient, and easily accessible attacks with a lower barrier to entry. We provide a comprehensive review of personalization in T2I diffusion models, highlighting the operation and exploitation potential of this backdoor vulnerability. To be specific, by studying the prompt processing of Textual Inversion and DreamBooth, we have devised dedicated backdoor attacks according to the different ways of dealing with unseen tokens and analyzed the influence of triggers and concept images on the attack effect. Through comprehensive empirical study, we endorse the utilization of the nouveau-token backdoor attack due to its impressive effectiveness, stealthiness, and integrity, markedly outperforming the legacy-token backdoor attack.

cs.CV↗

Long-term and Real-time High-speed Underwater Wireless Optical Communications in Deep Sea

Seafloor observation network can perform all-weather, long-term, continuous, real-time, and in-situ observation of the ocean by combing various observation methods including cabled seafloor nodes, self-contained nodes, as well as mobile platforms, where reliable and long-term high-speed underwater wireless communication becomes an essential demand. Recently, underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) has emerged as a highly promising solution and is rapidly becoming a research hotspot for meeting this requirement. In this article, we demonstrate the experiment and application of high-speed UWOC system for deep sea seafloor observation network. To the best of our knowledge this is the first long-term real-time deep-sea UWOC link with bitrate as high as 125 Mbps. Between 30 m distance and at a depth of 1650 m, two-way Ethernet UWOC links are realized with 125 Mbps direction-adjustable green light link and 6.25 Mbps non-line-of-sight (NLOS) blue light link. High quality video transmission of 8K 30 FPS and 4K 120 FPS are realized through high-speed 125 Mbps green light link, with 100% peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) agreement, showing the capability of transmitting high-quality videos lossless. The 30-day long-term measurement results show that the BER performance of both 125 Mbps and 6.25 Mbps links is lower than 10-5, proving the stability and reliability of this UWOC system at depth of 1650 m. The maximum transmission distance for the green and blue light links are estimated to be 117.7 and 128.3 m with considering the geometry loss, which can be extended to 231.6 and 337.5 m without geometry loss. As the first long-term and real-time UWOC system in deep sea, we believe this demonstration can provide valuable experience for further UWOC studies and converged ocean observation networking with cabled and cable-less observation platforms.

cs.NI↗