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Wenqiao Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Wenqiao Zhang.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources
arXiv2024

De-fine: Decomposing and Refining Visual Programs with Auto-Feedback

Visual programming, a modular and generalizable paradigm, integrates different modules and Python operators to solve various vision-language tasks. Unlike end-to-end models that need task-specific data, it advances in performing visual processing and reasoning in an unsupervised manner. Current visual programming methods generate programs in a single pass for each task where the ability to evaluate and optimize based on feedback, unfortunately, is lacking, which consequentially limits their effectiveness for complex, multi-step problems. Drawing inspiration from benders decomposition, we introduce De-fine, a training-free framework that automatically decomposes complex tasks into simpler subtasks and refines programs through auto-feedback. This model-agnostic approach can improve logical reasoning performance by integrating the strengths of multiple models. Our experiments across various visual tasks show that De-fine creates more robust programs. Moreover, viewing each feedback module as an independent agent will yield fresh prospects for the field of agent research.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2024

Fact :Teaching MLLMs with Faithful, Concise and Transferable Rationales

The remarkable performance of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has unequivocally demonstrated their proficient understanding capabilities in handling a wide array of visual tasks. Nevertheless, the opaque nature of their black-box reasoning processes persists as an enigma, rendering them uninterpretable and struggling with hallucination. Their ability to execute intricate compositional reasoning tasks is also constrained, culminating in a stagnation of learning progression for these models. In this work, we introduce Fact, a novel paradigm designed to generate multimodal rationales that are faithful, concise, and transferable for teaching MLLMs. This paradigm utilizes verifiable visual programming to generate executable code guaranteeing faithfulness and precision. Subsequently, through a series of operations including pruning, merging, and bridging, the rationale enhances its conciseness. Furthermore, we filter rationales that can be transferred to end-to-end paradigms from programming paradigms to guarantee transferability. Empirical evidence from experiments demonstrates the superiority of our method across models of varying parameter sizes, significantly enhancing their compositional reasoning and generalization ability. Our approach also reduces hallucinations owing to its high correlation between images and text.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2024

Semantic Codebook Learning for Dynamic Recommendation Models

Dynamic sequential recommendation (DSR) can generate model parameters based on user behavior to improve the personalization of sequential recommendation under various user preferences. However, it faces the challenges of large parameter search space and sparse and noisy user-item interactions, which reduces the applicability of the generated model parameters. The Semantic Codebook Learning for Dynamic Recommendation Models (SOLID) framework presents a significant advancement in DSR by effectively tackling these challenges. By transforming item sequences into semantic sequences and employing a dual parameter model, SOLID compresses the parameter generation search space and leverages homogeneity within the recommendation system. The introduction of the semantic metacode and semantic codebook, which stores disentangled item representations, ensures robust and accurate parameter generation. Extensive experiments demonstrates that SOLID consistently outperforms existing DSR, delivering more accurate, stable, and robust recommendations.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2024

Fine-tuning Multimodal LLMs to Follow Zero-shot Demonstrative Instructions

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been utilizing Visual Prompt Generators (VPGs) to convert visual features into tokens that LLMs can recognize. This is achieved by training the VPGs on millions of image-caption pairs, where the VPG-generated tokens of images are fed into a frozen LLM to generate the corresponding captions. However, this image-captioning based training objective inherently biases the VPG to concentrate solely on the primary visual contents sufficient for caption generation, often neglecting other visual details. This shortcoming results in MLLMs' underperformance in comprehending demonstrative instructions consisting of multiple, interleaved, and multimodal instructions that demonstrate the required context to complete a task. To address this issue, we introduce a generic and lightweight Visual Prompt Generator Complete module (VPG-C), which can infer and complete the missing details essential for comprehending demonstrative instructions. Further, we propose a synthetic discriminative training strategy to fine-tune VPG-C, eliminating the need for supervised demonstrative instructions. As for evaluation, we build DEMON, a comprehensive benchmark for demonstrative instruction understanding. Synthetically trained with the proposed strategy, VPG-C achieves significantly stronger zero-shot performance across all tasks of DEMON. Further evaluation on the MME and OwlEval benchmarks also demonstrate the superiority of VPG-C. Our benchmark, code, and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/DCDmllm/Cheetah.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2024

DuetRAG: Collaborative Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods augment the input of Large Language Models (LLMs) with relevant retrieved passages, reducing factual errors in knowledge-intensive tasks. However, contemporary RAG approaches suffer from irrelevant knowledge retrieval issues in complex domain questions (e.g., HotPot QA) due to the lack of corresponding domain knowledge, leading to low-quality generations. To address this issue, we propose a novel Collaborative Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework, DuetRAG. Our bootstrapping philosophy is to simultaneously integrate the domain fintuning and RAG models to improve the knowledge retrieval quality, thereby enhancing generation quality. Finally, we demonstrate DuetRAG' s matches with expert human researchers on HotPot QA.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2024

MART: Learning Hierarchical Music Audio Representations with Part-Whole Transformer

Recent research in self-supervised contrastive learning of music representations has demonstrated remarkable results across diverse downstream tasks. However, a prevailing trend in existing methods involves representing equally-sized music clips in either waveform or spectrogram formats, often overlooking the intrinsic part-whole hierarchies within music. In our quest to comprehend the bottom-up structure of music, we introduce MART, a hierarchical music representation learning approach that facilitates feature interactions among cropped music clips while considering their part-whole hierarchies. Specifically, we propose a hierarchical part-whole transformer to capture the structural relationships between music clips in a part-whole hierarchy. Furthermore, a hierarchical contrastive learning objective is crafted to align part-whole music representations at adjacent levels, progressively establishing a multi-hierarchy representation space. The effectiveness of our music representation learning from part-whole hierarchies has been empirically validated across multiple downstream tasks, including music classification and cover song identification.

cs.SD↗
arXiv2024

HyperLLaVA: Dynamic Visual and Language Expert Tuning for Multimodal Large Language Models

Recent advancements indicate that scaling up Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) effectively enhances performance on downstream multimodal tasks. The prevailing MLLM paradigm, \emph{e.g.}, LLaVA, transforms visual features into text-like tokens using a \emph{static} vision-language mapper, thereby enabling \emph{static} LLMs to develop the capability to comprehend visual information through visual instruction tuning. Although promising, the \emph{static} tuning strategy~\footnote{The static tuning refers to the trained model with static parameters.} that shares the same parameters may constrain performance across different downstream multimodal tasks. In light of this, we introduce HyperLLaVA, which involves adaptive tuning of the projector and LLM parameters, in conjunction with a dynamic visual expert and language expert, respectively. These experts are derived from HyperNetworks, which generates adaptive parameter shifts through visual and language guidance, enabling dynamic projector and LLM modeling in two-stage training. Our experiments demonstrate that our solution significantly surpasses LLaVA on existing MLLM benchmarks, including MME, MMBench, SEED-Bench, and LLaVA-Bench. ~\footnote{Our project is available on the link https://github.com/DCDmllm/HyperLLaVA}.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2023

METER: A Dynamic Concept Adaptation Framework for Online Anomaly Detection

Real-time analytics and decision-making require online anomaly detection (OAD) to handle drifts in data streams efficiently and effectively. Unfortunately, existing approaches are often constrained by their limited detection capacity and slow adaptation to evolving data streams, inhibiting their efficacy and efficiency in handling concept drift, which is a major challenge in evolving data streams. In this paper, we introduce METER, a novel dynamic concept adaptation framework that introduces a new paradigm for OAD. METER addresses concept drift by first training a base detection model on historical data to capture recurring central concepts, and then learning to dynamically adapt to new concepts in data streams upon detecting concept drift. Particularly, METER employs a novel dynamic concept adaptation technique that leverages a hypernetwork to dynamically generate the parameter shift of the base detection model, providing a more effective and efficient solution than conventional retraining or fine-tuning approaches. Further, METER incorporates a lightweight drift detection controller, underpinned by evidential deep learning, to support robust and interpretable concept drift detection. We conduct an extensive experimental evaluation, and the results show that METER significantly outperforms existing OAD approaches in various application scenarios.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

Revisiting the Domain Shift and Sample Uncertainty in Multi-source Active Domain Transfer

Active Domain Adaptation (ADA) aims to maximally boost model adaptation in a new target domain by actively selecting a limited number of target data to annotate.This setting neglects the more practical scenario where training data are collected from multiple sources. This motivates us to target a new and challenging setting of knowledge transfer that extends ADA from a single source domain to multiple source domains, termed Multi-source Active Domain Adaptation (MADA). Not surprisingly, we find that most traditional ADA methods cannot work directly in such a setting, mainly due to the excessive domain gap introduced by all the source domains and thus their uncertainty-aware sample selection can easily become miscalibrated under the multi-domain shifts. Considering this, we propose a Dynamic integrated uncertainty valuation framework(Detective) that comprehensively consider the domain shift between multi-source domains and target domain to detect the informative target samples. Specifically, the leverages a dynamic Domain Adaptation(DA) model that learns how to adapt the model's parameters to fit the union of multi-source domains. This enables an approximate single-source domain modeling by the dynamic model. We then comprehensively measure both domain uncertainty and predictive uncertainty in the target domain to detect informative target samples using evidential deep learning, thereby mitigating uncertainty miscalibration. Furthermore, we introduce a contextual diversity-aware calculator to enhance the diversity of the selected samples. Experiments demonstrate that our solution outperforms existing methods by a considerable margin on three domain adaptation benchmarks.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2023

Gradient-Regulated Meta-Prompt Learning for Generalizable Vision-Language Models

Prompt tuning, a recently emerging paradigm, enables the powerful vision-language pre-training models to adapt to downstream tasks in a parameter -- and data -- efficient way, by learning the ``soft prompts'' to condition frozen pre-training models. Though effective, it is particularly problematic in the few-shot scenario, where prompt tuning performance is sensitive to the initialization and requires a time-consuming process to find a good initialization, thus restricting the fast adaptation ability of the pre-training models. In addition, prompt tuning could undermine the generalizability of the pre-training models, because the learnable prompt tokens are easy to overfit to the limited training samples. To address these issues, we introduce a novel Gradient-RegulAted Meta-prompt learning (GRAM) framework that jointly meta-learns an efficient soft prompt initialization for better adaptation and a lightweight gradient regulating function for strong cross-domain generalizability in a meta-learning paradigm using only the unlabeled image-text pre-training data. Rather than designing a specific prompt tuning method, our GRAM can be easily incorporated into various prompt tuning methods in a model-agnostic way, and comprehensive experiments show that GRAM brings about consistent improvement for them in several settings (i.e., few-shot learning, cross-domain generalization, cross-dataset generalization, etc.) over 11 datasets. Further, experiments show that GRAM enables the orthogonal methods of textual and visual prompt tuning to work in a mutually-enhanced way, offering better generalizability beyond the uni-modal prompt tuning methods.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Denoising Multi-modal Sequential Recommenders with Contrastive Learning

There is a rapidly-growing research interest in engaging users with multi-modal data for accurate user modeling on recommender systems. Existing multimedia recommenders have achieved substantial improvements by incorporating various modalities and devising delicate modules. However, when users decide to interact with items, most of them do not fully read the content of all modalities. We refer to modalities that directly cause users' behaviors as point-of-interests, which are important aspects to capture users' interests. In contrast, modalities that do not cause users' behaviors are potential noises and might mislead the learning of a recommendation model. Not surprisingly, little research in the literature has been devoted to denoising such potential noises due to the inaccessibility of users' explicit feedback on their point-of-interests. To bridge the gap, we propose a weakly-supervised framework based on contrastive learning for denoising multi-modal recommenders (dubbed Demure). In a weakly-supervised manner, Demure circumvents the requirement of users' explicit feedback and identifies the noises by analyzing the modalities of all interacted items from a given user.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2023

Learning in Imperfect Environment: Multi-Label Classification with Long-Tailed Distribution and Partial Labels

Conventional multi-label classification (MLC) methods assume that all samples are fully labeled and identically distributed. Unfortunately, this assumption is unrealistic in large-scale MLC data that has long-tailed (LT) distribution and partial labels (PL). To address the problem, we introduce a novel task, Partial labeling and Long-Tailed Multi-Label Classification (PLT-MLC), to jointly consider the above two imperfect learning environments. Not surprisingly, we find that most LT-MLC and PL-MLC approaches fail to solve the PLT-MLC, resulting in significant performance degradation on the two proposed PLT-MLC benchmarks. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end learning framework: \textbf{CO}rrection $\rightarrow$ \textbf{M}odificat\textbf{I}on $\rightarrow$ balan\textbf{C}e, abbreviated as \textbf{\method{}}. Our bootstrapping philosophy is to simultaneously correct the missing labels (Correction) with convinced prediction confidence over a class-aware threshold and to learn from these recall labels during training. We next propose a novel multi-focal modifier loss that simultaneously addresses head-tail imbalance and positive-negative imbalance to adaptively modify the attention to different samples (Modification) under the LT class distribution. In addition, we develop a balanced training strategy by distilling the model's learning effect from head and tail samples, and thus design a balanced classifier (Balance) conditioned on the head and tail learning effect to maintain stable performance for all samples. Our experimental study shows that the proposed \method{} significantly outperforms general MLC, LT-MLC and PL-MLC methods in terms of effectiveness and robustness on our newly created PLT-MLC datasets.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

Toward Cohort Intelligence: A Universal Cohort Representation Learning Framework for Electronic Health Record Analysis

Electronic Health Records (EHR) are generated from clinical routine care recording valuable information of broad patient populations, which provide plentiful opportunities for improving patient management and intervention strategies in clinical practice. To exploit the enormous potential of EHR data, a popular EHR data analysis paradigm in machine learning is EHR representation learning, which first leverages the individual patient's EHR data to learn informative representations by a backbone, and supports diverse health-care downstream tasks grounded on the representations. Unfortunately, such a paradigm fails to access the in-depth analysis of patients' relevance, which is generally known as cohort studies in clinical practice. Specifically, patients in the same cohort tend to share similar characteristics, implying their resemblance in medical conditions such as symptoms or diseases. In this paper, we propose a universal COhort Representation lEarning (CORE) framework to augment EHR utilization by leveraging the fine-grained cohort information among patients. In particular, CORE first develops an explicit patient modeling task based on the prior knowledge of patients' diagnosis codes, which measures the latent relevance among patients to adaptively divide the cohorts for each patient. Based on the constructed cohorts, CORE recodes the pre-extracted EHR data representation from intra- and inter-cohort perspectives, yielding augmented EHR data representation learning. CORE is readily applicable to diverse backbone models, serving as a universal plug-in framework to infuse cohort information into healthcare methods for boosted performance. We conduct an extensive experimental evaluation on two real-world datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of CORE.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

CAusal and collaborative proxy-tasKs lEarning for Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation

Semi-supervised domain adaptation (SSDA) adapts a learner to a new domain by effectively utilizing source domain data and a few labeled target samples. It is a practical yet under-investigated research topic. In this paper, we analyze the SSDA problem from two perspectives that have previously been overlooked, and correspondingly decompose it into two \emph{key subproblems}: \emph{robust domain adaptation (DA) learning} and \emph{maximal cross-domain data utilization}. \textbf{(i)} From a causal theoretical view, a robust DA model should distinguish the invariant ``concept'' (key clue to image label) from the nuisance of confounding factors across domains. To achieve this goal, we propose to generate \emph{concept-invariant samples} to enable the model to classify the samples through causal intervention, yielding improved generalization guarantees; \textbf{(ii)} Based on the robust DA theory, we aim to exploit the maximal utilization of rich source domain data and a few labeled target samples to boost SSDA further. Consequently, we propose a collaboratively debiasing learning framework that utilizes two complementary semi-supervised learning (SSL) classifiers to mutually exchange their unbiased knowledge, which helps unleash the potential of source and target domain training data, thereby producing more convincing pseudo-labels. Such obtained labels facilitate cross-domain feature alignment and duly improve the invariant concept learning. In our experimental study, we show that the proposed model significantly outperforms SOTA methods in terms of effectiveness and generalisability on SSDA datasets.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Variational Cross-Graph Reasoning and Adaptive Structured Semantics Learning for Compositional Temporal Grounding

Temporal grounding is the task of locating a specific segment from an untrimmed video according to a query sentence. This task has achieved significant momentum in the computer vision community as it enables activity grounding beyond pre-defined activity classes by utilizing the semantic diversity of natural language descriptions. The semantic diversity is rooted in the principle of compositionality in linguistics, where novel semantics can be systematically described by combining known words in novel ways (compositional generalization). However, existing temporal grounding datasets are not carefully designed to evaluate the compositional generalizability. To systematically benchmark the compositional generalizability of temporal grounding models, we introduce a new Compositional Temporal Grounding task and construct two new dataset splits, i.e., Charades-CG and ActivityNet-CG. When evaluating the state-of-the-art methods on our new dataset splits, we empirically find that they fail to generalize to queries with novel combinations of seen words. We argue that the inherent structured semantics inside the videos and language is the crucial factor to achieve compositional generalization. Based on this insight, we propose a variational cross-graph reasoning framework that explicitly decomposes video and language into hierarchical semantic graphs, respectively, and learns fine-grained semantic correspondence between the two graphs. Furthermore, we introduce a novel adaptive structured semantics learning approach to derive the structure-informed and domain-generalizable graph representations, which facilitate the fine-grained semantic correspondence reasoning between the two graphs. Extensive experiments validate the superior compositional generalizability of our approach.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2022

HERO: HiErarchical spatio-tempoRal reasOning with Contrastive Action Correspondence for End-to-End Video Object Grounding

Video Object Grounding (VOG) is the problem of associating spatial object regions in the video to a descriptive natural language query. This is a challenging vision-language task that necessitates constructing the correct cross-modal correspondence and modeling the appropriate spatio-temporal context of the query video and caption, thereby localizing the specific objects accurately. In this paper, we tackle this task by a novel framework called HiErarchical spatio-tempoRal reasOning (HERO) with contrastive action correspondence. We study the VOG task at two aspects that prior works overlooked: (1) Contrastive Action Correspondence-aware Retrieval. Notice that the fine-grained video semantics (e.g., multiple actions) is not totally aligned with the annotated language query (e.g., single action), we first introduce the weakly-supervised contrastive learning that classifies the video as action-consistent and action-independent frames relying on the video-caption action semantic correspondence. Such a design can build the fine-grained cross-modal correspondence for more accurate subsequent VOG. (2) Hierarchical Spatio-temporal Modeling Improvement. While transformer-based VOG models present their potential in sequential modality (i.e., video and caption) modeling, existing evidence also indicates that the transformer suffers from the issue of the insensitive spatio-temporal locality. Motivated by that, we carefully design the hierarchical reasoning layers to decouple fully connected multi-head attention and remove the redundant interfering correlations. Furthermore, our proposed pyramid and shifted alignment mechanisms are effective to improve the cross-modal information utilization of neighborhood spatial regions and temporal frames. We conducted extensive experiments to show our HERO outperforms existing techniques by achieving significant improvement on two benchmark datasets.

cs.MM↗
arXiv2022

Dilated Context Integrated Network with Cross-Modal Consensus for Temporal Emotion Localization in Videos

Understanding human emotions is a crucial ability for intelligent robots to provide better human-robot interactions. The existing works are limited to trimmed video-level emotion classification, failing to locate the temporal window corresponding to the emotion. In this paper, we introduce a new task, named Temporal Emotion Localization in videos~(TEL), which aims to detect human emotions and localize their corresponding temporal boundaries in untrimmed videos with aligned subtitles. TEL presents three unique challenges compared to temporal action localization: 1) The emotions have extremely varied temporal dynamics; 2) The emotion cues are embedded in both appearances and complex plots; 3) The fine-grained temporal annotations are complicated and labor-intensive. To address the first two challenges, we propose a novel dilated context integrated network with a coarse-fine two-stream architecture. The coarse stream captures varied temporal dynamics by modeling multi-granularity temporal contexts. The fine stream achieves complex plots understanding by reasoning the dependency between the multi-granularity temporal contexts from the coarse stream and adaptively integrates them into fine-grained video segment features. To address the third challenge, we introduce a cross-modal consensus learning paradigm, which leverages the inherent semantic consensus between the aligned video and subtitle to achieve weakly-supervised learning. We contribute a new testing set with 3,000 manually-annotated temporal boundaries so that future research on the TEL problem can be quantitatively evaluated. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our approach on temporal emotion localization. The repository of this work is at https://github.com/YYJMJC/Temporal-Emotion-Localization-in-Videos.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2022

BOSS: Bottom-up Cross-modal Semantic Composition with Hybrid Counterfactual Training for Robust Content-based Image Retrieval

Content-Based Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to search for a target image by concurrently comprehending the composition of an example image and a complementary text, which potentially impacts a wide variety of real-world applications, such as internet search and fashion retrieval. In this scenario, the input image serves as an intuitive context and background for the search, while the corresponding language expressly requests new traits on how specific characteristics of the query image should be modified in order to get the intended target image. This task is challenging since it necessitates learning and understanding the composite image-text representation by incorporating cross-granular semantic updates. In this paper, we tackle this task by a novel \underline{\textbf{B}}ottom-up cr\underline{\textbf{O}}ss-modal \underline{\textbf{S}}emantic compo\underline{\textbf{S}}ition (\textbf{BOSS}) with Hybrid Counterfactual Training framework, which sheds new light on the CIR task by studying it from two previously overlooked perspectives: \emph{implicitly bottom-up composition of visiolinguistic representation} and \emph{explicitly fine-grained correspondence of query-target construction}. On the one hand, we leverage the implicit interaction and composition of cross-modal embeddings from the bottom local characteristics to the top global semantics, preserving and transforming the visual representation conditioned on language semantics in several continuous steps for effective target image search. On the other hand, we devise a hybrid counterfactual training strategy that can reduce the model's ambiguity for similar queries.

cs.AI↗