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Autonomous agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs) that devise plans and tackle real-world challenges have gained prominence.However, tailoring these agents for specialized domains like quantitative investment remains a formidable task. The core challenge involves efficiently building and integrating a domain-specific knowledge base for the agent's learning process. This paper introduces a principled framework to address this challenge, comprising a two-layer loop.In the inner loop, the agent refines its responses by drawing from its knowledge base, while in the outer loop, these responses are tested in real-world scenarios to automatically enhance the knowledge base with new insights.We demonstrate that our approach enables the agent to progressively approximate optimal behavior with provable efficiency.Furthermore, we instantiate this framework through an autonomous agent for mining trading signals named QuantAgent. Empirical results showcase QuantAgent's capability in uncovering viable financial signals and enhancing the accuracy of financial forecasts.

One of the most important tasks in quantitative investment research is mining new alphas (effective trading signals or factors). Traditional alpha mining methods, either hand-crafted factor synthesizing or algorithmic factor mining (e.g., search with genetic programming), have inherent limitations, especially in implementing the ideas of quants. In this work, we propose a new alpha mining paradigm by introducing human-AI interaction, and a novel prompt engineering algorithmic framework to implement this paradigm by leveraging the power of large language models. Moreover, we develop Alpha-GPT, a new interactive alpha mining system framework that provides a heuristic way to ``understand'' the ideas of quant researchers and outputs creative, insightful, and effective alphas. We demonstrate the effectiveness and advantage of Alpha-GPT via a number of alpha mining experiments.

Although large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant success in various tasks, they often struggle with hallucination problems, especially in scenarios requiring deep and responsible reasoning. These issues could be partially addressed by introducing external knowledge graphs (KG) in LLM reasoning. In this paper, we propose a new LLM-KG integrating paradigm ``$\hbox{LLM}\otimes\hbox{KG}$'' which treats the LLM as an agent to interactively explore related entities and relations on KGs and perform reasoning based on the retrieved knowledge. We further implement this paradigm by introducing a new approach called Think-on-Graph (ToG), in which the LLM agent iteratively executes beam search on KG, discovers the most promising reasoning paths, and returns the most likely reasoning results. We use a number of well-designed experiments to examine and illustrate the following advantages of ToG: 1) compared with LLMs, ToG has better deep reasoning power; 2) ToG has the ability of knowledge traceability and knowledge correctability by leveraging LLMs reasoning and expert feedback; 3) ToG provides a flexible plug-and-play framework for different LLMs, KGs and prompting strategies without any additional training cost; 4) the performance of ToG with small LLM models could exceed large LLM such as GPT-4 in certain scenarios and this reduces the cost of LLM deployment and application. As a training-free method with lower computational cost and better generality, ToG achieves overall SOTA in 6 out of 9 datasets where most previous SOTAs rely on additional training., Comment: Accepted by ICLR 2024

Recent DEtection TRansformer-based (DETR) models have obtained remarkable performance. Its success cannot be achieved without the re-introduction of multi-scale feature fusion in the encoder. However, the excessively increased tokens in multi-scale features, especially for about 75\% of low-level features, are quite computationally inefficient, which hinders real applications of DETR models. In this paper, we present Lite DETR, a simple yet efficient end-to-end object detection framework that can effectively reduce the GFLOPs of the detection head by 60\% while keeping 99\% of the original performance. Specifically, we design an efficient encoder block to update high-level features (corresponding to small-resolution feature maps) and low-level features (corresponding to large-resolution feature maps) in an interleaved way. In addition, to better fuse cross-scale features, we develop a key-aware deformable attention to predict more reliable attention weights. Comprehensive experiments validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed Lite DETR, and the efficient encoder strategy can generalize well across existing DETR-based models. The code will be available in \url{https://github.com/IDEA-Research/Lite-DETR}., Comment: CVPR 2023

We present a mask-piloted Transformer which improves masked-attention in Mask2Former for image segmentation. The improvement is based on our observation that Mask2Former suffers from inconsistent mask predictions between consecutive decoder layers, which leads to inconsistent optimization goals and low utilization of decoder queries. To address this problem, we propose a mask-piloted training approach, which additionally feeds noised ground-truth masks in masked-attention and trains the model to reconstruct the original ones. Compared with the predicted masks used in mask-attention, the ground-truth masks serve as a pilot and effectively alleviate the negative impact of inaccurate mask predictions in Mask2Former. Based on this technique, our \M achieves a remarkable performance improvement on all three image segmentation tasks (instance, panoptic, and semantic), yielding $+2.3$AP and $+1.6$mIoU on the Cityscapes instance and semantic segmentation tasks with a ResNet-50 backbone. Our method also significantly speeds up the training, outperforming Mask2Former with half of the number of training epochs on ADE20K with both a ResNet-50 and a Swin-L backbones. Moreover, our method only introduces little computation during training and no extra computation during inference. Our code will be released at \url{https://github.com/IDEA-Research/MP-Former}., Comment: CVPR 2023

Autoencoding has achieved great empirical success as a framework for learning generative models for natural images. Autoencoders often use generic deep networks as the encoder or decoder, which are difficult to interpret, and the learned representations lack clear structure. In this work, we make the explicit assumption that the image distribution is generated from a multi-stage sparse deconvolution. The corresponding inverse map, which we use as an encoder, is a multi-stage convolution sparse coding (CSC), with each stage obtained from unrolling an optimization algorithm for solving the corresponding (convexified) sparse coding program. To avoid computational difficulties in minimizing distributional distance between the real and generated images, we utilize the recent closed-loop transcription (CTRL) framework that optimizes the rate reduction of the learned sparse representations. Conceptually, our method has high-level connections to score-matching methods such as diffusion models. Empirically, our framework demonstrates competitive performance on large-scale datasets, such as ImageNet-1K, compared to existing autoencoding and generative methods under fair conditions. Even with simpler networks and fewer computational resources, our method demonstrates high visual quality in regenerated images. More surprisingly, the learned autoencoder performs well on unseen datasets. Our method enjoys several side benefits, including more structured and interpretable representations, more stable convergence, and scalability to large datasets. Our method is arguably the first to demonstrate that a concatenation of multiple convolution sparse coding/decoding layers leads to an interpretable and effective autoencoder for modeling the distribution of large-scale natural image datasets., Comment: 20 pages

Quantitative investment (``quant'') is an interdisciplinary field combining financial engineering, computer science, mathematics, statistics, etc. Quant has become one of the mainstream investment methodologies over the past decades, and has experienced three generations: Quant 1.0, trading by mathematical modeling to discover mis-priced assets in markets; Quant 2.0, shifting quant research pipeline from small ``strategy workshops'' to large ``alpha factories''; Quant 3.0, applying deep learning techniques to discover complex nonlinear pricing rules. Despite its advantage in prediction, deep learning relies on extremely large data volume and labor-intensive tuning of ``black-box'' neural network models. To address these limitations, in this paper, we introduce Quant 4.0 and provide an engineering perspective for next-generation quant. Quant 4.0 has three key differentiating components. First, automated AI changes quant pipeline from traditional hand-craft modeling to the state-of-the-art automated modeling, practicing the philosophy of ``algorithm produces algorithm, model builds model, and eventually AI creates AI''. Second, explainable AI develops new techniques to better understand and interpret investment decisions made by machine learning black-boxes, and explains complicated and hidden risk exposures. Third, knowledge-driven AI is a supplement to data-driven AI such as deep learning and it incorporates prior knowledge into modeling to improve investment decision, in particular for quantitative value investing. Moreover, we discuss how to build a system that practices the Quant 4.0 concept. Finally, we propose ten challenging research problems for quant technology, and discuss potential solutions, research directions, and future trends.

In this paper we present Mask DINO, a unified object detection and segmentation framework. Mask DINO extends DINO (DETR with Improved Denoising Anchor Boxes) by adding a mask prediction branch which supports all image segmentation tasks (instance, panoptic, and semantic). It makes use of the query embeddings from DINO to dot-product a high-resolution pixel embedding map to predict a set of binary masks. Some key components in DINO are extended for segmentation through a shared architecture and training process. Mask DINO is simple, efficient, and scalable, and it can benefit from joint large-scale detection and segmentation datasets. Our experiments show that Mask DINO significantly outperforms all existing specialized segmentation methods, both on a ResNet-50 backbone and a pre-trained model with SwinL backbone. Notably, Mask DINO establishes the best results to date on instance segmentation (54.5 AP on COCO), panoptic segmentation (59.4 PQ on COCO), and semantic segmentation (60.8 mIoU on ADE20K) among models under one billion parameters. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/IDEACVR/MaskDINO}.

We present DINO (\textbf{D}ETR with \textbf{I}mproved de\textbf{N}oising anch\textbf{O}r boxes), a state-of-the-art end-to-end object detector. % in this paper. DINO improves over previous DETR-like models in performance and efficiency by using a contrastive way for denoising training, a mixed query selection method for anchor initialization, and a look forward twice scheme for box prediction. DINO achieves $49.4$AP in $12$ epochs and $51.3$AP in $24$ epochs on COCO with a ResNet-50 backbone and multi-scale features, yielding a significant improvement of $\textbf{+6.0}$\textbf{AP} and $\textbf{+2.7}$\textbf{AP}, respectively, compared to DN-DETR, the previous best DETR-like model. DINO scales well in both model size and data size. Without bells and whistles, after pre-training on the Objects365 dataset with a SwinL backbone, DINO obtains the best results on both COCO \texttt{val2017} ($\textbf{63.2}$\textbf{AP}) and \texttt{test-dev} (\textbf{$\textbf{63.3}$AP}). Compared to other models on the leaderboard, DINO significantly reduces its model size and pre-training data size while achieving better results. Our code will be available at \url{https://github.com/IDEACVR/DINO}.

This paper presents a comprehensive survey of vision-language (VL) intelligence from the perspective of time. This survey is inspired by the remarkable progress in both computer vision and natural language processing, and recent trends shifting from single modality processing to multiple modality comprehension. We summarize the development in this field into three time periods, namely task-specific methods, vision-language pre-training (VLP) methods, and larger models empowered by large-scale weakly-labeled data. We first take some common VL tasks as examples to introduce the development of task-specific methods. Then we focus on VLP methods and comprehensively review key components of the model structures and training methods. After that, we show how recent work utilizes large-scale raw image-text data to learn language-aligned visual representations that generalize better on zero or few shot learning tasks. Finally, we discuss some potential future trends towards modality cooperation, unified representation, and knowledge incorporation. We believe that this review will be of help for researchers and practitioners of AI and ML, especially those interested in computer vision and natural language processing.

We present in this paper a novel denoising training method to speedup DETR (DEtection TRansformer) training and offer a deepened understanding of the slow convergence issue of DETR-like methods. We show that the slow convergence results from the instability of bipartite graph matching which causes inconsistent optimization goals in early training stages. To address this issue, except for the Hungarian loss, our method additionally feeds ground-truth bounding boxes with noises into Transformer decoder and trains the model to reconstruct the original boxes, which effectively reduces the bipartite graph matching difficulty and leads to a faster convergence. Our method is universal and can be easily plugged into any DETR-like methods by adding dozens of lines of code to achieve a remarkable improvement. As a result, our DN-DETR results in a remarkable improvement ($+1.9$AP) under the same setting and achieves the best result (AP $43.4$ and $48.6$ with $12$ and $50$ epochs of training respectively) among DETR-like methods with ResNet-$50$ backbone. Compared with the baseline under the same setting, DN-DETR achieves comparable performance with $50\%$ training epochs. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/FengLi-ust/DN-DETR}., Comment: Extended version from CVPR 2022

Machine learning has been highly successful in data-intensive applications but is often hampered when the data set is small. Recently, Few-Shot Learning (FSL) is proposed to tackle this problem. Using prior knowledge, FSL can rapidly generalize to new tasks containing only a few samples with supervised information. In this paper, we conduct a thorough survey to fully understand FSL. Starting from a formal definition of FSL, we distinguish FSL from several relevant machine learning problems. We then point out that the core issue in FSL is that the empirical risk minimized is unreliable. Based on how prior knowledge can be used to handle this core issue, we categorize FSL methods from three perspectives: (i) data, which uses prior knowledge to augment the supervised experience; (ii) model, which uses prior knowledge to reduce the size of the hypothesis space; and (iii) algorithm, which uses prior knowledge to alter the search for the best hypothesis in the given hypothesis space. With this taxonomy, we review and discuss the pros and cons of each category. Promising directions, in the aspects of the FSL problem setups, techniques, applications and theories, are also proposed to provide insights for future research.

Convolutional sparse coding (CSC) can learn representative shift-invariant patterns from multiple kinds of data. However, existing CSC methods can only model noises from Gaussian distribution, which is restrictive and unrealistic. In this paper, we propose a general CSC model capable of dealing with complicated unknown noise. The noise is now modeled by Gaussian mixture model, which can approximate any continuous probability density function. We use the expectation-maximization algorithm to solve the problem and design an efficient method for the weighted CSC problem in maximization step. The crux is to speed up the convolution in the frequency domain while keeping the other computation involving weight matrix in the spatial domain. Besides, we simultaneously update the dictionary and codes by nonconvex accelerated proximal gradient algorithm without bringing in extra alternating loops. The resultant method obtains comparable time and space complexity compared with existing CSC methods. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real noisy biomedical data sets validate that our method can model noise effectively and obtain high-quality filters and representation.

Convolutional sparse coding (CSC) has been popularly used for the learning of shift-invariant dictionaries in image and signal processing. However, existing methods have limited scalability. In this paper, instead of convolving with a dictionary shared by all samples, we propose the use of a sample-dependent dictionary in which filters are obtained as linear combinations of a small set of base filters learned from the data. This added flexibility allows a large number of sample-dependent patterns to be captured, while the resultant model can still be efficiently learned by online learning. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms existing CSC algorithms with significantly reduced time and space requirements., Comment: Accepted by ICML-2018

Convolutional sparse coding (CSC) improves sparse coding by learning a shift-invariant dictionary from the data. However, existing CSC algorithms operate in the batch mode and are expensive, in terms of both space and time, on large datasets. In this paper, we alleviate these problems by using online learning. The key is a reformulation of the CSC objective so that convolution can be handled easily in the frequency domain and much smaller history matrices are needed. We use the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to solve the resulting optimization problem and the ADMM subproblems have efficient closed-form solutions. Theoretical analysis shows that the learned dictionary converges to a stationary point of the optimization problem. Extensive experiments show that convergence of the proposed method is much faster and its reconstruction performance is also better. Moreover, while existing CSC algorithms can only run on a small number of images, the proposed method can handle at least ten times more images.