arXiv subjects

Qi Qian

Publications and source records attributed to Qi Qian.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Text-Guided Mixup Towards Long-Tailed Image Categorization

In many real-world applications, the frequency distribution of class labels for training data can exhibit a long-tailed distribution, which challenges traditional approaches of training deep neural networks that require heavy amounts of balanced data. Gathering and labeling data to balance out the class label distribution can be both costly and time-consuming. Many existing solutions that enable ensemble learning, re-balancing strategies, or fine-tuning applied to deep neural networks are limited by the inert problem of few class samples across a subset of classes. Recently, vision-language models like CLIP have been observed as effective solutions to zero-shot or few-shot learning by grasping a similarity between vision and language features for image and text pairs. Considering that large pre-trained vision-language models may contain valuable side textual information for minor classes, we propose to leverage text supervision to tackle the challenge of long-tailed learning. Concretely, we propose a novel text-guided mixup technique that takes advantage of the semantic relations between classes recognized by the pre-trained text encoder to help alleviate the long-tailed problem. Our empirical study on benchmark long-tailed tasks demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposal with a theoretical guarantee. Our code is available at https://github.com/rsamf/text-guided-mixup.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Online Zero-Shot Classification with CLIP

Vision-language pre-training such as CLIP enables zero-shot transfer that can classify images according to the candidate class names. While CLIP demonstrates an impressive zero-shot performance on diverse downstream tasks, the distribution from the target data has not been leveraged sufficiently. In this work, we study a novel online zero-shot transfer scenario, where each image arrives in a random order for classification and is visited only once to obtain prediction immediately without storing its representation. Compared with the vanilla zero-shot classification, the proposed framework preserves its flexibility for online service while considering the statistics of the arrived images as the side information to capture the distribution of target data, which can help improve the performance of real-world applications. To tackle the challenge of effective online optimization, we first develop online label learning to model the target data distribution. Then, the proxy of each class in the vision space is further optimized with the proposed online proxy learning method to mitigate the modality gap between images and text. The convergence of both online strategies can be theoretically guaranteed. By combining the predicted label from the online label learning and proxy learning, our online zero-shot transfer method (OnZeta) achieves $78.94\%$ accuracy on ImageNet without accessing the entire data set. Moreover, extensive experiments on other 13 downstream tasks with different vision encoders show a more than $3\%$ improvement on average, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposal. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/idstcv/OnZeta}.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

SeA: Semantic Adversarial Augmentation for Last Layer Features from Unsupervised Representation Learning

Deep features extracted from certain layers of a pre-trained deep model show superior performance over the conventional hand-crafted features. Compared with fine-tuning or linear probing that can explore diverse augmentations, \eg, random crop/flipping, in the original input space, the appropriate augmentations for learning with fixed deep features are more challenging and have been less investigated, which degenerates the performance. To unleash the potential of fixed deep features, we propose a novel semantic adversarial augmentation (SeA) in the feature space for optimization. Concretely, the adversarial direction implied by the gradient will be projected to a subspace spanned by other examples to preserve the semantic information. Then, deep features will be perturbed with the semantic direction, and augmented features will be applied to learn the classifier. Experiments are conducted on $11$ benchmark downstream classification tasks with $4$ popular pre-trained models. Our method is $2\%$ better than the deep features without SeA on average. Moreover, compared to the expensive fine-tuning that is expected to give good performance, SeA shows a comparable performance on $6$ out of $11$ tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposal in addition to its efficiency. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/idstcv/SeA}.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

mPLUG-Owl3: Towards Long Image-Sequence Understanding in Multi-Modal Large Language Models

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in executing instructions for a variety of single-image tasks. Despite this progress, significant challenges remain in modeling long image sequences. In this work, we introduce the versatile multi-modal large language model, mPLUG-Owl3, which enhances the capability for long image-sequence understanding in scenarios that incorporate retrieved image-text knowledge, interleaved image-text, and lengthy videos. Specifically, we propose novel hyper attention blocks to efficiently integrate vision and language into a common language-guided semantic space, thereby facilitating the processing of extended multi-image scenarios. Extensive experimental results suggest that mPLUG-Owl3 achieves state-of-the-art performance among models with a similar size on single-image, multi-image, and video benchmarks. Moreover, we propose a challenging long visual sequence evaluation named Distractor Resistance to assess the ability of models to maintain focus amidst distractions. Finally, with the proposed architecture, mPLUG-Owl3 demonstrates outstanding performance on ultra-long visual sequence inputs. We hope that mPLUG-Owl3 can contribute to the development of more efficient and powerful multimodal large language models.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Searching for Best Practices in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques have proven to be effective in integrating up-to-date information, mitigating hallucinations, and enhancing response quality, particularly in specialized domains. While many RAG approaches have been proposed to enhance large language models through query-dependent retrievals, these approaches still suffer from their complex implementation and prolonged response times. Typically, a RAG workflow involves multiple processing steps, each of which can be executed in various ways. Here, we investigate existing RAG approaches and their potential combinations to identify optimal RAG practices. Through extensive experiments, we suggest several strategies for deploying RAG that balance both performance and efficiency. Moreover, we demonstrate that multimodal retrieval techniques can significantly enhance question-answering capabilities about visual inputs and accelerate the generation of multimodal content using a "retrieval as generation" strategy.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Efficient Personalized Text-to-image Generation by Leveraging Textual Subspace

Personalized text-to-image generation has attracted unprecedented attention in the recent few years due to its unique capability of generating highly-personalized images via using the input concept dataset and novel textual prompt. However, previous methods solely focus on the performance of the reconstruction task, degrading its ability to combine with different textual prompt. Besides, optimizing in the high-dimensional embedding space usually leads to unnecessary time-consuming training process and slow convergence. To address these issues, we propose an efficient method to explore the target embedding in a textual subspace, drawing inspiration from the self-expressiveness property. Additionally, we propose an efficient selection strategy for determining the basis vectors of the textual subspace. The experimental evaluations demonstrate that the learned embedding can not only faithfully reconstruct input image, but also significantly improves its alignment with novel input textual prompt. Furthermore, we observe that optimizing in the textual subspace leads to an significant improvement of the robustness to the initial word, relaxing the constraint that requires users to input the most relevant initial word. Our method opens the door to more efficient representation learning for personalized text-to-image generation.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Multi-Modal Proxy Learning Towards Personalized Visual Multiple Clustering

Multiple clustering has gained significant attention in recent years due to its potential to reveal multiple hidden structures of data from different perspectives. The advent of deep multiple clustering techniques has notably advanced the performance by uncovering complex patterns and relationships within large datasets. However, a major challenge arises as users often do not need all the clusterings that algorithms generate, and figuring out the one needed requires a substantial understanding of each clustering result. Traditionally, aligning a user's brief keyword of interest with the corresponding vision components was challenging, but the emergence of multi-modal and large language models (LLMs) has begun to bridge this gap. In response, given unlabeled target visual data, we propose Multi-MaP, a novel method employing a multi-modal proxy learning process. It leverages CLIP encoders to extract coherent text and image embeddings, with GPT-4 integrating users' interests to formulate effective textual contexts. Moreover, reference word constraint and concept-level constraint are designed to learn the optimal text proxy according to the user's interest. Multi-MaP not only adeptly captures a user's interest via a keyword but also facilitates identifying relevant clusterings. Our extensive experiments show that Multi-MaP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in all benchmark multi-clustering vision tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Alexander-Yao/Multi-MaP.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

mPLUG-Owl: Modularization Empowers Large Language Models with Multimodality

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive zero-shot abilities on a variety of open-ended tasks, while recent research has also explored the use of LLMs for multi-modal generation. In this study, we introduce mPLUG-Owl, a novel training paradigm that equips LLMs with multi-modal abilities through modularized learning of foundation LLM, a visual knowledge module, and a visual abstractor module. This approach can support multiple modalities and facilitate diverse unimodal and multimodal abilities through modality collaboration. The training paradigm of mPLUG-Owl involves a two-stage method for aligning image and text, which learns visual knowledge with the assistance of LLM while maintaining and even improving the generation abilities of LLM. In the first stage, the visual knowledge module and abstractor module are trained with a frozen LLM module to align the image and text. In the second stage, language-only and multi-modal supervised datasets are used to jointly fine-tune a low-rank adaption (LoRA) module on LLM and the abstractor module by freezing the visual knowledge module. We carefully build a visually-related instruction evaluation set OwlEval. Experimental results show that our model outperforms existing multi-modal models, demonstrating mPLUG-Owl's impressive instruction and visual understanding ability, multi-turn conversation ability, and knowledge reasoning ability. Besides, we observe some unexpected and exciting abilities such as multi-image correlation and scene text understanding, which makes it possible to leverage it for harder real scenarios, such as vision-only document comprehension. Our code, pre-trained model, instruction-tuned models, and evaluation set are available at https://github.com/X-PLUG/mPLUG-Owl. The online demo is available at https://www.modelscope.cn/studios/damo/mPLUG-Owl.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

mPLUG-PaperOwl: Scientific Diagram Analysis with the Multimodal Large Language Model

Recently, the strong text creation ability of Large Language Models(LLMs) has given rise to many tools for assisting paper reading or even writing. However, the weak diagram analysis abilities of LLMs or Multimodal LLMs greatly limit their application scenarios, especially for scientific academic paper writing. In this work, towards a more versatile copilot for academic paper writing, we mainly focus on strengthening the multi-modal diagram analysis ability of Multimodal LLMs. By parsing Latex source files of high-quality papers, we carefully build a multi-modal diagram understanding dataset M-Paper. By aligning diagrams in the paper with related paragraphs, we construct professional diagram analysis samples for training and evaluation. M-Paper is the first dataset to support joint comprehension of multiple scientific diagrams, including figures and tables in the format of images or Latex codes. Besides, to better align the copilot with the user's intention, we introduce the `outline' as the control signal, which could be directly given by the user or revised based on auto-generated ones. Comprehensive experiments with a state-of-the-art Mumtimodal LLM demonstrate that training on our dataset shows stronger scientific diagram understanding performance, including diagram captioning, diagram analysis, and outline recommendation. The dataset, code, and model are available at https://github.com/X-PLUG/mPLUG-DocOwl/tree/main/PaperOwl.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2023

Stable Cluster Discrimination for Deep Clustering

Deep clustering can optimize representations of instances (i.e., representation learning) and explore the inherent data distribution (i.e., clustering) simultaneously, which demonstrates a superior performance over conventional clustering methods with given features. However, the coupled objective implies a trivial solution that all instances collapse to the uniform features. To tackle the challenge, a two-stage training strategy is developed for decoupling, where it introduces an additional pre-training stage for representation learning and then fine-tunes the obtained model for clustering. Meanwhile, one-stage methods are developed mainly for representation learning rather than clustering, where various constraints for cluster assignments are designed to avoid collapsing explicitly. Despite the success of these methods, an appropriate learning objective tailored for deep clustering has not been investigated sufficiently. In this work, we first show that the prevalent discrimination task in supervised learning is unstable for one-stage clustering due to the lack of ground-truth labels and positive instances for certain clusters in each mini-batch. To mitigate the issue, a novel stable cluster discrimination (SeCu) task is proposed and a new hardness-aware clustering criterion can be obtained accordingly. Moreover, a global entropy constraint for cluster assignments is studied with efficient optimization. Extensive experiments are conducted on benchmark data sets and ImageNet. SeCu achieves state-of-the-art performance on all of them, which demonstrates the effectiveness of one-stage deep clustering. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/idstcv/SeCu}.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

mPLUG-Owl2: Revolutionizing Multi-modal Large Language Model with Modality Collaboration

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive instruction abilities across various open-ended tasks. However, previous methods primarily focus on enhancing multi-modal capabilities. In this work, we introduce a versatile multi-modal large language model, mPLUG-Owl2, which effectively leverages modality collaboration to improve performance in both text and multi-modal tasks. mPLUG-Owl2 utilizes a modularized network design, with the language decoder acting as a universal interface for managing different modalities. Specifically, mPLUG-Owl2 incorporates shared functional modules to facilitate modality collaboration and introduces a modality-adaptive module that preserves modality-specific features. Extensive experiments reveal that mPLUG-Owl2 is capable of generalizing both text tasks and multi-modal tasks and achieving state-of-the-art performances with a single generic model. Notably, mPLUG-Owl2 is the first MLLM model that demonstrates the modality collaboration phenomenon in both pure-text and multi-modal scenarios, setting a pioneering path in the development of future multi-modal foundation models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Intra-Modal Proxy Learning for Zero-Shot Visual Categorization with CLIP

Vision-language pre-training methods, e.g., CLIP, demonstrate an impressive zero-shot performance on visual categorizations with the class proxy from the text embedding of the class name. However, the modality gap between the text and vision space can result in a sub-optimal performance. We theoretically show that the gap cannot be reduced sufficiently by minimizing the contrastive loss in CLIP and the optimal proxy for vision tasks may reside only in the vision space. Therefore, given unlabeled target vision data, we propose to learn the vision proxy directly with the help from the text proxy for zero-shot transfer. Moreover, according to our theoretical analysis, strategies are developed to further refine the pseudo label obtained by the text proxy to facilitate the intra-modal proxy learning (InMaP) for vision. Experiments on extensive downstream tasks confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposal. Concretely, InMaP can obtain the vision proxy within one minute on a single GPU while improving the zero-shot accuracy from $77.02\%$ to $80.21\%$ on ImageNet with ViT-L/14@336 pre-trained by CLIP. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/idstcv/InMaP}.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

UReader: Universal OCR-free Visually-situated Language Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Model

Text is ubiquitous in our visual world, conveying crucial information, such as in documents, websites, and everyday photographs. In this work, we propose UReader, a first exploration of universal OCR-free visually-situated language understanding based on the Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM). By leveraging the shallow text recognition ability of the MLLM, we only finetuned 1.2% parameters and the training cost is much lower than previous work following domain-specific pretraining and finetuning paradigms. Concretely, UReader is jointly finetuned on a wide range of Visually-situated Language Understanding tasks via a unified instruction format. To enhance the visual text and semantic understanding, we further apply two auxiliary tasks with the same format, namely text reading and key points generation tasks. We design a shape-adaptive cropping module before the encoder-decoder architecture of MLLM to leverage the frozen low-resolution vision encoder for processing high-resolution images. Without downstream finetuning, our single model achieves state-of-the-art ocr-free performance in 8 out of 10 visually-situated language understanding tasks, across 5 domains: documents, tables, charts, natural images, and webpage screenshots. Codes and instruction-tuning datasets will be released.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Improved Visual Fine-tuning with Natural Language Supervision

Fine-tuning a visual pre-trained model can leverage the semantic information from large-scale pre-training data and mitigate the over-fitting problem on downstream vision tasks with limited training examples. While the problem of catastrophic forgetting in pre-trained backbone has been extensively studied for fine-tuning, its potential bias from the corresponding pre-training task and data, attracts less attention. In this work, we investigate this problem by demonstrating that the obtained classifier after fine-tuning will be close to that induced by the pre-trained model. To reduce the bias in the classifier effectively, we introduce a reference distribution obtained from a fixed text classifier, which can help regularize the learned vision classifier. The proposed method, Text Supervised fine-tuning (TeS), is evaluated with diverse pre-trained vision models including ResNet and ViT, and text encoders including BERT and CLIP, on 11 downstream tasks. The consistent improvement with a clear margin over distinct scenarios confirms the effectiveness of our proposal. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/idstcv/TeS}.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Graph Convolution Based Efficient Re-Ranking for Visual Retrieval

Visual retrieval tasks such as image retrieval and person re-identification (Re-ID) aim at effectively and thoroughly searching images with similar content or the same identity. After obtaining retrieved examples, re-ranking is a widely adopted post-processing step to reorder and improve the initial retrieval results by making use of the contextual information from semantically neighboring samples. Prevailing re-ranking approaches update distance metrics and mostly rely on inefficient crosscheck set comparison operations while computing expanded neighbors based distances. In this work, we present an efficient re-ranking method which refines initial retrieval results by updating features. Specifically, we reformulate re-ranking based on Graph Convolution Networks (GCN) and propose a novel Graph Convolution based Re-ranking (GCR) for visual retrieval tasks via feature propagation. To accelerate computation for large-scale retrieval, a decentralized and synchronous feature propagation algorithm which supports parallel or distributed computing is introduced. In particular, the plain GCR is extended for cross-camera retrieval and an improved feature propagation formulation is presented to leverage affinity relationships across different cameras. It is also extended for video-based retrieval, and Graph Convolution based Re-ranking for Video (GCRV) is proposed by mathematically deriving a novel profile vector generation method for the tracklet. Without bells and whistles, the proposed approaches achieve state-of-the-art performances on seven benchmark datasets from three different tasks, i.e., image retrieval, person Re-ID and video-based person Re-ID.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Youku-mPLUG: A 10 Million Large-scale Chinese Video-Language Dataset for Pre-training and Benchmarks

To promote the development of Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) and multimodal Large Language Model (LLM) in the Chinese community, we firstly release the largest public Chinese high-quality video-language dataset named Youku-mPLUG, which is collected from Youku, a well-known Chinese video-sharing website, with strict criteria of safety, diversity, and quality. Youku-mPLUG contains 10 million Chinese video-text pairs filtered from 400 million raw videos across a wide range of 45 diverse categories for large-scale pre-training. In addition, to facilitate a comprehensive evaluation of video-language models, we carefully build the largest human-annotated Chinese benchmarks covering three popular video-language tasks of cross-modal retrieval, video captioning, and video category classification. Youku-mPLUG can enable researchers to conduct more in-depth multimodal research and develop better applications in the future. Furthermore, we release popular video-language pre-training models, ALPRO and mPLUG-2, and our proposed modularized decoder-only model mPLUG-video pre-trained on Youku-mPLUG. Experiments show that models pre-trained on Youku-mPLUG gain up to 23.1% improvement in video category classification. Besides, mPLUG-video achieves a new state-of-the-art result on these benchmarks with 80.5% top-1 accuracy in video category classification and 68.9 CIDEr score in video captioning, respectively. Finally, we scale up mPLUG-video based on the frozen Bloomz with only 1.7% trainable parameters as Chinese multimodal LLM, and demonstrate impressive instruction and video understanding ability. The zero-shot instruction understanding experiment indicates that pretraining with Youku-mPLUG can enhance the ability to comprehend overall and detailed visual semantics, recognize scene text, and leverage open-domain knowledge.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

ChatPLUG: Open-Domain Generative Dialogue System with Internet-Augmented Instruction Tuning for Digital Human

In this paper, we present ChatPLUG, a Chinese open-domain dialogue system for digital human applications that instruction finetunes on a wide range of dialogue tasks in a unified internet-augmented format. Different from other open-domain dialogue models that focus on large-scale pre-training and scaling up model size or dialogue corpus, we aim to build a powerful and practical dialogue system for digital human with diverse skills and good multi-task generalization by internet-augmented instruction tuning. To this end, we first conduct large-scale pre-training on both common document corpus and dialogue data with curriculum learning, so as to inject various world knowledge and dialogue abilities into ChatPLUG. Then, we collect a wide range of dialogue tasks spanning diverse features of knowledge, personality, multi-turn memory, and empathy, on which we further instruction tune \modelname via unified natural language instruction templates. External knowledge from an internet search is also used during instruction finetuning for alleviating the problem of knowledge hallucinations. We show that \modelname outperforms state-of-the-art Chinese dialogue systems on both automatic and human evaluation, and demonstrates strong multi-task generalization on a variety of text understanding and generation tasks. In addition, we deploy \modelname to real-world applications such as Smart Speaker and Instant Message applications with fast inference. Our models and code will be made publicly available on ModelScope: https://modelscope.cn/models/damo/ChatPLUG-3.7B and Github: https://github.com/X-PLUG/ChatPLUG .

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Signatures of Chiral Superconductivity in Chiral Molecule Intercalated Tantalum Disulfide

Chiral superconductors, a unique class of unconventional superconductors in which the complex superconducting order parameter winds clockwise or counter-clockwise in the momentum space, represent a topologically non-trivial system with direct implications for topological quantum computing. Intrinsic chiral superconductors are extremely rare, with only a few arguable examples including heavy fermion metals (UTe$_2$, UPt$_3$) and perovskite superconductor Sr$_2$RuO$_4$. Chiral molecules with neither mirror nor inversion symmetry have been widely investigated, in which the spin degeneracy may be lifted by the molecular chirality. Thus, a combination of superconductivity with chiral molecules may lead to a spin-polarized ground state for realizing chiral superconductivity. Herein we report the first investigation of unconventional superconductivity in chiral molecule intercalated tantalum disulfide (TaS$_2$) and reveal key signatures of chiral superconductivity. Little-Parks measurements demonstrate a robust and reproducible half-flux quantum phase shift in both left- and right-handed chiral molecule intercalated TaS$_2$, which is absent in pristine TaS$_2$ or achiral molecule intercalated TaS$_2$, highlighting the essential role of molecular chirality in inducing unconventional superconductivity. The robust half-flux quantum phase shift demonstrates unconventional superconductivity and constitutes strong evidence supporting a chiral superconducting ordering parameter. Critical current measurements at lower temperature reveal a peculiar asymmetric phase shift under opposite supercurrent, with a relative phase difference approaching the unity of π at below 0.5 K, further supporting topologically non-trivial superconductivity. Our study signifies the potential of hybrid superlattices with intriguing coupling between the crystalline atomic layers and the self-assembled molecular layers.

cond-mat.supr-con↗