Daily Papers

Restoring facial details from low-quality (LQ) images has remained a challenging problem due to its ill-posedness induced by various degradations in the wild. The existing codebook prior mitigates the ill-posedness by leveraging an autoencoder and learned codebook of high-quality (HQ) features, achieving remarkable quality. However, existing approaches in this paradigm frequently depend on a single encoder pre-trained on HQ data for restoring HQ images, disregarding the domain gap between LQ and HQ images. As a result, the encoding of LQ inputs may be insufficient, resulting in suboptimal performance. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel dual-branch framework named DAEFR. Our method introduces an auxiliary LQ branch that extracts crucial information from the LQ inputs. Additionally, we incorporate association training to promote effective synergy between the two branches, enhancing code prediction and output quality. We evaluate the effectiveness of DAEFR on both synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating its superior performance in restoring facial details. Project page: https://liagm.github.io/DAEFR/

Online multi-object tracking has been recently dominated by tracking-by-detection (TbD) methods, where recent advances rely on increasingly sophisticated heuristics for tracklet representation, feature fusion, and multi-stage matching. The key strength of TbD lies in its modular design, enabling the integration of specialized off-the-shelf models like motion predictors and re-identification. However, the extensive usage of human-crafted rules for temporal associations makes these methods inherently limited in their ability to capture the complex interplay between various tracking cues. In this work, we introduce CAMEL, a novel association module for Context-Aware Multi-Cue ExpLoitation, that learns resilient association strategies directly from data, breaking free from hand-crafted heuristics while maintaining TbD's valuable modularity. At its core, CAMEL employs two transformer-based modules and relies on a novel association-centric training scheme to effectively model the complex interactions between tracked targets and their various association cues. Unlike end-to-end detection-by-tracking approaches, our method remains lightweight and fast to train while being able to leverage external off-the-shelf models. Our proposed online tracking pipeline, CAMELTrack, achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple tracking benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/TrackingLaboratory/CAMELTrack.

To promote the developments of object detection, tracking and counting algorithms in drone-captured videos, we construct a benchmark with a new drone-captured largescale dataset, named as DroneCrowd, formed by 112 video clips with 33,600 HD frames in various scenarios. Notably, we annotate 20,800 people trajectories with 4.8 million heads and several video-level attributes. Meanwhile, we design the Space-Time Neighbor-Aware Network (STNNet) as a strong baseline to solve object detection, tracking and counting jointly in dense crowds. STNNet is formed by the feature extraction module, followed by the density map estimation heads, and localization and association subnets. To exploit the context information of neighboring objects, we design the neighboring context loss to guide the association subnet training, which enforces consistent relative position of nearby objects in temporal domain. Extensive experiments on our DroneCrowd dataset demonstrate that STNNet performs favorably against the state-of-the-arts.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over long documents typically involves splitting the text into smaller chunks, which serve as the basic units for retrieval. However, due to dependencies across the original document, contextual information is often essential for accurately interpreting each chunk. To address this, prior work has explored encoding longer context windows to produce embeddings for longer chunks. Despite these efforts, gains in retrieval and downstream tasks remain limited. This is because (1) longer chunks strain the capacity of embedding models due to the increased amount of information they must encode, and (2) many real-world applications still require returning localized evidence due to constraints on model or human bandwidth. We propose an alternative approach to this challenge by representing short chunks in a way that is conditioned on a broader context window to enhance retrieval performance -- i.e., situating a chunk's meaning within its context. We further show that existing embedding models are not well-equipped to encode such situated context effectively, and thus introduce a new training paradigm and develop the situated embedding models (SitEmb). To evaluate our method, we curate a book-plot retrieval dataset specifically designed to assess situated retrieval capabilities. On this benchmark, our SitEmb-v1 model based on BGE-M3 substantially outperforms state-of-the-art embedding models, including several with up to 7-8B parameters, with only 1B parameters. Our 8B SitEmb-v1.5 model further improves performance by over 10% and shows strong results across different languages and several downstream applications.

Normalizing flows are powerful non-parametric statistical models that function as a hybrid between density estimators and generative models. Current learning algorithms for normalizing flows assume that data points are sampled independently, an assumption that is frequently violated in practice, which may lead to erroneous density estimation and data generation. We propose a likelihood objective of normalizing flows incorporating dependencies between the data points, for which we derive a flexible and efficient learning algorithm suitable for different dependency structures. We show that respecting dependencies between observations can improve empirical results on both synthetic and real-world data, and leads to higher statistical power in a downstream application to genome-wide association studies.

Most existing multi-object tracking methods typically learn visual tracking features via maximizing dis-similarities of different instances and minimizing similarities of the same instance. While such a feature learning scheme achieves promising performance, learning discriminative features solely based on visual information is challenging especially in case of environmental interference such as occlusion, blur and domain variance. In this work, we argue that multi-modal language-driven features provide complementary information to classical visual features, thereby aiding in improving the robustness to such environmental interference. To this end, we propose a new multi-object tracking framework, named LG-MOT, that explicitly leverages language information at different levels of granularity (scene-and instance-level) and combines it with standard visual features to obtain discriminative representations. To develop LG-MOT, we annotate existing MOT datasets with scene-and instance-level language descriptions. We then encode both instance-and scene-level language information into high-dimensional embeddings, which are utilized to guide the visual features during training. At inference, our LG-MOT uses the standard visual features without relying on annotated language descriptions. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks, MOT17, DanceTrack and SportsMOT, reveal the merits of the proposed contributions leading to state-of-the-art performance. On the DanceTrack test set, our LG-MOT achieves an absolute gain of 2.2\% in terms of target object association (IDF1 score), compared to the baseline using only visual features. Further, our LG-MOT exhibits strong cross-domain generalizability. The dataset and code will be available at https://github.com/WesLee88524/LG-MOT.

This paper introduces our solution, XM-ALIGN (Unified Cross-Modal Embedding Alignment Framework), proposed for the FAME challenge at ICASSP 2026. Our framework combines explicit and implicit alignment mechanisms, significantly improving cross-modal verification performance in both "heard" and "unheard" languages. By extracting feature embeddings from both face and voice encoders and jointly optimizing them using a shared classifier, we employ mean squared error (MSE) as the embedding alignment loss to ensure tight alignment between modalities. Additionally, data augmentation strategies are applied during model training to enhance generalization. Experimental results show that our approach demonstrates superior performance on the MAV-Celeb dataset. The code will be released at https://github.com/PunkMale/XM-ALIGN.

In this work, we share our experience on tele-knowledge pre-training for fault analysis, a crucial task in telecommunication applications that requires a wide range of knowledge normally found in both machine log data and product documents. To organize this knowledge from experts uniformly, we propose to create a Tele-KG (tele-knowledge graph). Using this valuable data, we further propose a tele-domain language pre-training model TeleBERT and its knowledge-enhanced version, a tele-knowledge re-training model KTeleBERT. which includes effective prompt hints, adaptive numerical data encoding, and two knowledge injection paradigms. Concretely, our proposal includes two stages: first, pre-training TeleBERT on 20 million tele-related corpora, and then re-training it on 1 million causal and machine-related corpora to obtain KTeleBERT. Our evaluation on multiple tasks related to fault analysis in tele-applications, including root-cause analysis, event association prediction, and fault chain tracing, shows that pre-training a language model with tele-domain data is beneficial for downstream tasks. Moreover, the KTeleBERT re-training further improves the performance of task models, highlighting the effectiveness of incorporating diverse tele-knowledge into the model.

Several pre-training objectives, such as masked language modeling (MLM), have been proposed to pre-train language models (e.g. BERT) with the aim of learning better language representations. However, to the best of our knowledge, no previous work so far has investigated how different pre-training objectives affect what BERT learns about linguistics properties. We hypothesize that linguistically motivated objectives such as MLM should help BERT to acquire better linguistic knowledge compared to other non-linguistically motivated objectives that are not intuitive or hard for humans to guess the association between the input and the label to be predicted. To this end, we pre-train BERT with two linguistically motivated objectives and three non-linguistically motivated ones. We then probe for linguistic characteristics encoded in the representation of the resulting models. We find strong evidence that there are only small differences in probing performance between the representations learned by the two different types of objectives. These surprising results question the dominant narrative of linguistically informed pre-training.

Agricultural applications such as yield prediction, precision agriculture and automated harvesting need systems able to infer the crop state from low-cost sensing devices. Proximal sensing using affordable cameras combined with computer vision has seen a promising alternative, strengthened after the advent of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as an alternative for challenging pattern recognition problems in natural images. Considering fruit growing monitoring and automation, a fundamental problem is the detection, segmentation and counting of individual fruits in orchards. Here we show that for wine grapes, a crop presenting large variability in shape, color, size and compactness, grape clusters can be successfully detected, segmented and tracked using state-of-the-art CNNs. In a test set containing 408 grape clusters from images taken on a trellis-system based vineyard, we have reached an F 1 -score up to 0.91 for instance segmentation, a fine separation of each cluster from other structures in the image that allows a more accurate assessment of fruit size and shape. We have also shown as clusters can be identified and tracked along video sequences recording orchard rows. We also present a public dataset containing grape clusters properly annotated in 300 images and a novel annotation methodology for segmentation of complex objects in natural images. The presented pipeline for annotation, training, evaluation and tracking of agricultural patterns in images can be replicated for different crops and production systems. It can be employed in the development of sensing components for several agricultural and environmental applications.

Simple Online and Realtime Tracking (SORT) is a pragmatic approach to multiple object tracking with a focus on simple, effective algorithms. In this paper, we integrate appearance information to improve the performance of SORT. Due to this extension we are able to track objects through longer periods of occlusions, effectively reducing the number of identity switches. In spirit of the original framework we place much of the computational complexity into an offline pre-training stage where we learn a deep association metric on a large-scale person re-identification dataset. During online application, we establish measurement-to-track associations using nearest neighbor queries in visual appearance space. Experimental evaluation shows that our extensions reduce the number of identity switches by 45%, achieving overall competitive performance at high frame rates.

Many image-based perception tasks can be formulated as detecting, associating and tracking semantic keypoints, e.g., human body pose estimation and tracking. In this work, we present a general framework that jointly detects and forms spatio-temporal keypoint associations in a single stage, making this the first real-time pose detection and tracking algorithm. We present a generic neural network architecture that uses Composite Fields to detect and construct a spatio-temporal pose which is a single, connected graph whose nodes are the semantic keypoints (e.g., a person's body joints) in multiple frames. For the temporal associations, we introduce the Temporal Composite Association Field (TCAF) which requires an extended network architecture and training method beyond previous Composite Fields. Our experiments show competitive accuracy while being an order of magnitude faster on multiple publicly available datasets such as COCO, CrowdPose and the PoseTrack 2017 and 2018 datasets. We also show that our method generalizes to any class of semantic keypoints such as car and animal parts to provide a holistic perception framework that is well suited for urban mobility such as self-driving cars and delivery robots.

The recent advancements in generative language models have demonstrated their ability to memorize knowledge from documents and recall knowledge to respond to user queries effectively. Building upon this capability, we propose to enable multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to memorize and recall images within their parameters. Given a user query for visual content, the MLLM is anticipated to "recall" the relevant image from its parameters as the response. Achieving this target presents notable challenges, including inbuilt visual memory and visual recall schemes within MLLMs. To address these challenges, we introduce a generative cross-modal retrieval framework, which assigns unique identifier strings to represent images and involves two training steps: learning to memorize and learning to retrieve. The first step focuses on training the MLLM to memorize the association between images and their respective identifiers. The latter step teaches the MLLM to generate the corresponding identifier of the target image, given the textual query input. By memorizing images in MLLMs, we introduce a new paradigm to cross-modal retrieval, distinct from previous discriminative approaches. The experiments demonstrate that the generative paradigm performs effectively and efficiently even with large-scale image candidate sets.

Word embedding pioneered by Mikolov et al. is a staple technique for word representations in natural language processing (NLP) research which has also found popularity in music information retrieval tasks. Depending on the type of text data for word embedding, however, vocabulary size and the degree of musical pertinence can significantly vary. In this work, we (1) train the distributed representation of words using combinations of both general text data and music-specific data and (2) evaluate the system in terms of how they associate listening contexts with musical compositions.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) face an inherent trade-off between faithfulness and creativity, as different tasks require varying degrees of associative reasoning. However, existing methods lack the flexibility to modulate this reasoning strength, limiting MLLMs' adaptability across factual and creative scenarios. To bridge this gap, we propose equipping MLLMs with mechanisms that enable flexible control over associative reasoning. We begin by investigating the internal mechanisms underlying associative behavior in MLLMs and find that: (1) middle layers play a pivotal role in shaping model's associative tendencies, (2) modifying representations in these layers effectively regulates associative reasoning strength, and (3) hallucinations can be exploited to derive steering vectors that guide this modulation. Building on these findings, we introduce Flexible Association Control (FlexAC), a lightweight and training-free framework for modulating associative behavior in MLLMs. FlexAC first induces hallucination-guided intermediate representations to encode associative directions. Then, it selects high-association instances to construct effective associative steering vectors, whose strengths are adaptively calibrated to balance creative guidance with output stability. Finally, recognizing the multi-dimensional nature of associative reasoning, FlexAC incorporates task-specific associative vectors derived from a forward pass on a few target-domain samples, enabling models to follow diverse associative directions and better adapt to creative tasks. Notably, our method achieves up to a 5.8x improvement in creativity on Creation-MMBench and a 29% reduction in hallucination rate on CHAIR, surpassing existing baselines and demonstrating its effectiveness in enabling flexible control over associative reasoning in MLLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/ylhz/FlexAC.

Contrastive Learning (CL) has attracted enormous attention due to its remarkable capability in unsupervised representation learning. However, recent works have revealed the vulnerability of CL to backdoor attacks: the feature extractor could be misled to embed backdoored data close to an attack target class, thus fooling the downstream predictor to misclassify it as the target. Existing attacks usually adopt a fixed trigger pattern and poison the training set with trigger-injected data, hoping for the feature extractor to learn the association between trigger and target class. However, we find that such fixed trigger design fails to effectively associate trigger-injected data with target class in the embedding space due to special CL mechanisms, leading to a limited attack success rate (ASR). This phenomenon motivates us to find a better backdoor trigger design tailored for CL framework. In this paper, we propose a bi-level optimization approach to achieve this goal, where the inner optimization simulates the CL dynamics of a surrogate victim, and the outer optimization enforces the backdoor trigger to stay close to the target throughout the surrogate CL procedure. Extensive experiments show that our attack can achieve a higher attack success rate (e.g., 99% ASR on ImageNet-100) with a very low poisoning rate (1%). Besides, our attack can effectively evade existing state-of-the-art defenses. Code is available at: https://github.com/SWY666/SSL-backdoor-BLTO.

Novel object captioning (NOC) aims to describe images containing objects without observing their ground truth captions during training. Due to the absence of caption annotation, captioning models cannot be directly optimized via sequence-to-sequence training or CIDEr optimization. As a result, we present Paraphrasing-to-Captioning (P2C), a two-stage learning framework for NOC, which would heuristically optimize the output captions via paraphrasing. With P2C, the captioning model first learns paraphrasing from a language model pre-trained on text-only corpus, allowing expansion of the word bank for improving linguistic fluency. To further enforce the output caption sufficiently describing the visual content of the input image, we perform self-paraphrasing for the captioning model with fidelity and adequacy objectives introduced. Since no ground truth captions are available for novel object images during training, our P2C leverages cross-modality (image-text) association modules to ensure the above caption characteristics can be properly preserved. In the experiments, we not only show that our P2C achieves state-of-the-art performances on nocaps and COCO Caption datasets, we also verify the effectiveness and flexibility of our learning framework by replacing language and cross-modality association models for NOC. Implementation details and code are available in the supplementary materials.

Although Kolmogorov-Arnold based interpretable networks (KAN) have strong theoretical expressiveness, they face significant parameter explosion and high-frequency feature capture challenges in high-dimensional tasks. To address this issue, we propose the Kolmogorov-Arnold-Fourier Network (KAF), which effectively integrates trainable Random Fourier Features (RFF) and a novel hybrid GELU-Fourier activation mechanism to balance parameter efficiency and spectral representation capabilities. Our key technical contributions include: (1) merging KAN's dual-matrix structure through matrix association properties to substantially reduce parameters; (2) introducing learnable RFF initialization strategies to eliminate spectral distortion in high-dimensional approximation tasks; (3) implementing an adaptive hybrid activation function that progressively enhances frequency representation during the training process. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our KAF across various domains including vision, NLP, audio processing, and differential equation-solving tasks, effectively combining theoretical interpretability with practical utility and computational efficiency.

Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) is an emerging technology for earthquake monitoring and subsurface imaging. The recorded seismic signals by DAS have several distinct characteristics, such as unknown coupling effects, strong anthropogenic noise, and ultra-dense spatial sampling. These aspects differ from conventional seismic data recorded by seismic networks, making it challenging to utilize DAS at present for seismic monitoring. New data analysis algorithms are needed to extract useful information from DAS data. Previous studies on conventional seismic data demonstrated that deep learning models could achieve performance close to human analysts in picking seismic phases. However, phase picking on DAS data is still a difficult problem due to the lack of manual labels. Further, the differences in mathematical structure between these two data formats, i.e., ultra-dense DAS arrays and sparse seismic networks, make model fine-tuning or transfer learning difficult to implement on DAS data. In this work, we design a new approach using semi-supervised learning to solve the phase-picking task on DAS arrays. We use a pre-trained PhaseNet model as a teacher network to generate noisy labels of P and S arrivals on DAS data and apply the Gaussian mixture model phase association (GaMMA) method to refine these noisy labels to build training datasets. We develop a new deep learning model, PhaseNet-DAS, to process the 2D spatial-temporal data of DAS arrays and train the model on DAS data. The new deep learning model achieves high picking accuracy and good earthquake detection performance. We then apply the model to process continuous data and build earthquake catalogs directly from DAS recording. Our approach using semi-supervised learning provides a way to build effective deep learning models for DAS, which have the potential to improve earthquake monitoring using large-scale fiber networks.

In this paper, we study the localization problem in dense urban settings. In such environments, Global Navigation Satellite Systems fail to provide good accuracy due to low likelihood of line-of-sight (LOS) links between the receiver (Rx) to be located and the satellites, due to the presence of obstacles like the buildings. Thus, one has to resort to other technologies, which can reliably operate under non-line-of-sight (NLOS) conditions. Recently, we proposed a Received Signal Strength (RSS) fingerprint and convolutional neural network-based algorithm, LocUNet, and demonstrated its state-of-the-art localization performance with respect to the widely adopted k-nearest neighbors (kNN) algorithm, and to state-of-the-art time of arrival (ToA) ranging-based methods. In the current work, we first recognize LocUNet's ability to learn the underlying prior distribution of the Rx position or Rx and transmitter (Tx) association preferences from the training data, and attribute its high performance to these. Conversely, we demonstrate that classical methods based on probabilistic approach, can greatly benefit from an appropriate incorporation of such prior information. Our studies also numerically prove LocUNet's close to optimal performance in many settings, by comparing it with the theoretically optimal formulations.

The segmentation of forest LiDAR 3D point clouds, including both individual tree and semantic segmentation, is fundamental for advancing forest management and ecological research. However, current approaches often struggle with the complexity and variability of natural forest environments. We present ForestFormer3D, a new unified and end-to-end framework designed for precise individual tree and semantic segmentation. ForestFormer3D incorporates ISA-guided query point selection, a score-based block merging strategy during inference, and a one-to-many association mechanism for effective training. By combining these new components, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance for individual tree segmentation on the newly introduced FOR-instanceV2 dataset, which spans diverse forest types and regions. Additionally, ForestFormer3D generalizes well to unseen test sets (Wytham woods and LAUTx), showcasing its robustness across different forest conditions and sensor modalities. The FOR-instanceV2 dataset and the ForestFormer3D code are publicly available at https://bxiang233.github.io/FF3D/.

This study conducts a thorough evaluation of text augmentation techniques across a variety of datasets and natural language processing (NLP) tasks to address the lack of reliable, generalized evidence for these methods. It examines the effectiveness of these techniques in augmenting training sets to improve performance in tasks such as topic classification, sentiment analysis, and offensive language detection. The research emphasizes not only the augmentation methods, but also the strategic order in which real and augmented instances are introduced during training. A major contribution is the development and evaluation of Modified Cyclical Curriculum Learning (MCCL) for augmented datasets, which represents a novel approach in the field. Results show that specific augmentation methods, especially when integrated with MCCL, significantly outperform traditional training approaches in NLP model performance. These results underscore the need for careful selection of augmentation techniques and sequencing strategies to optimize the balance between speed and quality improvement in various NLP tasks. The study concludes that the use of augmentation methods, especially in conjunction with MCCL, leads to improved results in various classification tasks, providing a foundation for future advances in text augmentation strategies in NLP.

Inspired by the success of large language models (LLMs), there is growing research interest in developing LLMs in the medical domain to assist clinicians. However, for hospitals, using closed-source commercial LLMs involves privacy issues, and developing open-source public LLMs requires large-scale computational resources, which are usually limited, especially in resource-efficient regions and low-income countries. We propose an open-source Small Language and Vision Assistant (SLaVA-CXR) that can be used for Chest X-Ray report automation. To efficiently train a small assistant, we first propose the Re^3Training method, which simulates the cognitive development of radiologists and optimizes the model in the Recognition, Reasoning, and Reporting training manner. Then, we introduce a data synthesis method, RADEX, which can generate a high-quality and diverse training corpus with privacy regulation compliance. The extensive experiments show that our SLaVA-CXR built on a 2.7B backbone not only outperforms but also achieves 6 times faster inference efficiency than previous state-of-the-art larger models.

Training models with varying capacities can be advantageous for deploying them in different scenarios. While high-capacity models offer better performance, low-capacity models require fewer computing resources for training and inference. In this work, we propose a novel one-stop training framework to jointly train high-capacity and low-capactiy models. This framework consists of two composite model architectures and a joint training algorithm called Two-Stage Joint-Training (TSJT). Unlike knowledge distillation, where multiple capacity models are trained from scratch separately, our approach integrates supervisions from different capacity models simultaneously, leading to faster and more efficient convergence. Extensive experiments on the multilingual machine translation benchmark WMT10 show that our method outperforms low-capacity baseline models and achieves comparable or better performance on high-capacity models. Notably, the analysis demonstrates that our method significantly influences the initial training process, leading to more efficient convergence and superior solutions.

In this paper, we introduce analytic federated learning (AFL), a new training paradigm that brings analytical (i.e., closed-form) solutions to the federated learning (FL) community. Our AFL draws inspiration from analytic learning -- a gradient-free technique that trains neural networks with analytical solutions in one epoch. In the local client training stage, the AFL facilitates a one-epoch training, eliminating the necessity for multi-epoch updates. In the aggregation stage, we derive an absolute aggregation (AA) law. This AA law allows a single-round aggregation, removing the need for multiple aggregation rounds. More importantly, the AFL exhibits a weight-invariant property, meaning that regardless of how the full dataset is distributed among clients, the aggregated result remains identical. This could spawn various potentials, such as data heterogeneity invariance, client-number invariance, absolute convergence, and being hyperparameter-free (our AFL is the first hyperparameter-free method in FL history). We conduct experiments across various FL settings including extremely non-IID ones, and scenarios with a large number of clients (e.g., ge 1000). In all these settings, our AFL constantly performs competitively while existing FL techniques encounter various obstacles. Code is available at https://github.com/ZHUANGHP/Analytic-federated-learning

Recent work has shown exciting promise in updating large language models with new memories, so as to replace obsolete information or add specialized knowledge. However, this line of work is predominantly limited to updating single associations. We develop MEMIT, a method for directly updating a language model with many memories, demonstrating experimentally that it can scale up to thousands of associations for GPT-J (6B) and GPT-NeoX (20B), exceeding prior work by orders of magnitude. Our code and data are at https://memit.baulab.info.

Artificial neural networks (ANN) are inspired by human learning. However, unlike human education, classical ANN does not use a curriculum. Curriculum Learning (CL) refers to the process of ANN training in which examples are used in a meaningful order. When using CL, training begins with a subset of the dataset and new samples are added throughout the training, or training begins with the entire dataset and the number of samples used is reduced. With these changes in training dataset size, better results can be obtained with curriculum, anti-curriculum, or random-curriculum methods than the vanilla method. However, a generally efficient CL method for various architectures and data sets is not found. In this paper, we propose cyclical curriculum learning (CCL), in which the data size used during training changes cyclically rather than simply increasing or decreasing. Instead of using only the vanilla method or only the curriculum method, using both methods cyclically like in CCL provides more successful results. We tested the method on 18 different data sets and 15 architectures in image and text classification tasks and obtained more successful results than no-CL and existing CL methods. We also have shown theoretically that it is less erroneous to apply CL and vanilla cyclically instead of using only CL or only vanilla method. The code of Cyclical Curriculum is available at https://github.com/CyclicalCurriculum/Cyclical-Curriculum.

Data quality is crucial for the successful training, generalization and performance of artificial intelligence models. Furthermore, it is known that the leading approaches in artificial intelligence are notoriously data-hungry. In this paper, we propose the use of small training datasets towards faster training. Specifically, we provide a novel topological method based on morphisms between persistence modules to measure the training data quality with respect to the complete dataset. This way, we can provide an explanation of why the chosen training dataset will lead to poor performance.

Recent advances in foundation models have highlighted the significant benefits of multi-stage training, with a particular emphasis on the emergence of mid-training as a vital stage that bridges pre-training and post-training. Mid-training is distinguished by its use of intermediate data and computational resources, systematically enhancing specified capabilities such as mathematics, coding, reasoning, and long-context extension, while maintaining foundational competencies. This survey provides a formal definition of mid-training for large language models (LLMs) and investigates optimization frameworks that encompass data curation, training strategies, and model architecture optimization. We analyze mainstream model implementations in the context of objective-driven interventions, illustrating how mid-training serves as a distinct and critical stage in the progressive development of LLM capabilities. By clarifying the unique contributions of mid-training, this survey offers a comprehensive taxonomy and actionable insights, supporting future research and innovation in the advancement of LLMs.

Grounding natural language instructions on the web to perform previously unseen tasks enables accessibility and automation. We introduce a task and dataset to train AI agents from open-domain, step-by-step instructions originally written for people. We build RUSS (Rapid Universal Support Service) to tackle this problem. RUSS consists of two models: First, a BERT-LSTM with pointers parses instructions to ThingTalk, a domain-specific language we design for grounding natural language on the web. Then, a grounding model retrieves the unique IDs of any webpage elements requested in ThingTalk. RUSS may interact with the user through a dialogue (e.g. ask for an address) or execute a web operation (e.g. click a button) inside the web runtime. To augment training, we synthesize natural language instructions mapped to ThingTalk. Our dataset consists of 80 different customer service problems from help websites, with a total of 741 step-by-step instructions and their corresponding actions. RUSS achieves 76.7% end-to-end accuracy predicting agent actions from single instructions. It outperforms state-of-the-art models that directly map instructions to actions without ThingTalk. Our user study shows that RUSS is preferred by actual users over web navigation.

Recently, pre-trained models have achieved state-of-the-art results in various language understanding tasks, which indicates that pre-training on large-scale corpora may play a crucial role in natural language processing. Current pre-training procedures usually focus on training the model with several simple tasks to grasp the co-occurrence of words or sentences. However, besides co-occurring, there exists other valuable lexical, syntactic and semantic information in training corpora, such as named entity, semantic closeness and discourse relations. In order to extract to the fullest extent, the lexical, syntactic and semantic information from training corpora, we propose a continual pre-training framework named ERNIE 2.0 which builds and learns incrementally pre-training tasks through constant multi-task learning. Experimental results demonstrate that ERNIE 2.0 outperforms BERT and XLNet on 16 tasks including English tasks on GLUE benchmarks and several common tasks in Chinese. The source codes and pre-trained models have been released at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/ERNIE.

In modern recommendation systems, the standard pipeline involves training machine learning models on historical data to predict user behaviors and improve recommendations continuously. However, these data training loops can introduce interference in A/B tests, where data generated by control and treatment algorithms, potentially with different distributions, are combined. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel approach called weighted training. This approach entails training a model to predict the probability of each data point appearing in either the treatment or control data and subsequently applying weighted losses during model training. We demonstrate that this approach achieves the least variance among all estimators that do not cause shifts in the training distributions. Through simulation studies, we demonstrate the lower bias and variance of our approach compared to other methods.

ELECTRA pre-trains language models by detecting tokens in a sequence that have been replaced by an auxiliary model. Although ELECTRA offers a significant boost in efficiency, its potential is constrained by the training cost brought by the auxiliary model. Notably, this model, which is jointly trained with the main model, only serves to assist the training of the main model and is discarded post-training. This results in a substantial amount of training cost being expended in vain. To mitigate this issue, we propose Fast-ELECTRA, which leverages an existing language model as the auxiliary model. To construct a learning curriculum for the main model, we smooth its output distribution via temperature scaling following a descending schedule. Our approach rivals the performance of state-of-the-art ELECTRA-style pre-training methods, while significantly eliminating the computation and memory cost brought by the joint training of the auxiliary model. Our method also reduces the sensitivity to hyper-parameters and enhances the pre-training stability.

The growing popularity of data mining catalyses the researchers to explore various exciting aspects of education. Early prediction of student performance is an emerging area among them. The researchers have used various predictors in performance modelling studies. Although prior cognition can affect student performance, establishing their relationship is still an open research challenge. Quantifying the knowledge from readily available data is the major challenge here. We have proposed a semantic approach for this purpose. Association mining on nearly 0.35 million observations establishes that prior cognition impacts the student performance. The proposed approach of measuring domain knowledge can help the early performance modelling studies to use it as a predictor.

We adapt the greedy Stack-LSTM dependency parser of Dyer et al. (2015) to support a training-with-exploration procedure using dynamic oracles(Goldberg and Nivre, 2013) instead of cross-entropy minimization. This form of training, which accounts for model predictions at training time rather than assuming an error-free action history, improves parsing accuracies for both English and Chinese, obtaining very strong results for both languages. We discuss some modifications needed in order to get training with exploration to work well for a probabilistic neural-network.

In order for large language model (LLM)-based assistants to effectively adapt to evolving information needs, it must be possible to update their factual knowledge through continued training on new data. The standard recipe for doing so involves continued pre-training on new documents followed by instruction-tuning on question-answer (QA) pairs. However, we find that LLMs trained with this recipe struggle to answer questions, even though the perplexity of documents is minimized. We found that QA pairs are generally straightforward, while documents are more complex, weaving many factual statements together in an intricate manner. Therefore, we hypothesize that it is beneficial to expose LLMs to QA pairs before continued pre-training on documents so that the process of encoding knowledge from complex documents takes into account how this knowledge is accessed through questions. Based on this, we propose pre-instruction-tuning (PIT), a method that instruction-tunes on questions prior to training on documents. This contrasts with standard instruction-tuning, which learns how to extract knowledge after training on documents. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate that PIT significantly enhances the ability of LLMs to absorb knowledge from new documents, outperforming standard instruction-tuning by 17.8%.

Dataset Distillation is used to create a concise, yet informative, synthetic dataset that can replace the original dataset for training purposes. Some leading methods in this domain prioritize long-range matching, involving the unrolling of training trajectories with a fixed number of steps (NS) on the synthetic dataset to align with various expert training trajectories. However, traditional long-range matching methods possess an overfitting-like problem, the fixed step size NS forces synthetic dataset to distortedly conform seen expert training trajectories, resulting in a loss of generality-especially to those from unencountered architecture. We refer to this as the Accumulated Mismatching Problem (AMP), and propose a new approach, Automatic Training Trajectories (ATT), which dynamically and adaptively adjusts trajectory length NS to address the AMP. Our method outperforms existing methods particularly in tests involving cross-architectures. Moreover, owing to its adaptive nature, it exhibits enhanced stability in the face of parameter variations.