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Bound states in the continuum (BICs) exhibit significant electric field confinement capabilities and have recently been employed to enhance nonlinear optics response at the nanoscale. In this study, we achieve substantial enhancement of third-harmonic generation (THG) and degenerate four-wave mixing (dFWM) by implementing Brillouin zone folding-induced BICs (BZF-BICs) in an air-hole type nonlinear metasurface. By introducing gap perturbations within the metasurface, guided modes below the light line can be folded into the light cone, resulting in three resonant modes: guided resonances (GRs), $\Gamma$-BICs, and BZF-BICs. Through the eigenvalue analysis and multipole decompositions, we establish their excitation conditions. With their resonantly enhanced local field, we successfully boost both THG and dFWM under $x$- and $y$- polarizations within the same metasurfaces. The simulated results indicate that the BZF-BICs provide the most significant enhancement of third-order nonlinear optical responses, with the output power of THG to 10$^{-4}$ W and dFWM output power of 10$^{-2}$ W under a moderate input power density of 1 MW/cm$^{2}$. These findings demonstrate that the BZF-BICs can offer an effective pathway for chip-scale nonlinear optical applications.

Integrating multimodal Electronic Health Records (EHR) data, such as numerical time series and free-text clinical reports, has great potential in predicting clinical outcomes. However, prior work has primarily focused on capturing temporal interactions within individual samples and fusing multimodal information, overlooking critical temporal patterns across patients. These patterns, such as trends in vital signs like abnormal heart rate or blood pressure, can indicate deteriorating health or an impending critical event. Similarly, clinical notes often contain textual descriptions that reflect these patterns. Identifying corresponding temporal patterns across different modalities is crucial for improving the accuracy of clinical outcome predictions, yet it remains a challenging task. To address this gap, we introduce a Cross-Modal Temporal Pattern Discovery (CTPD) framework, designed to efficiently extract meaningful cross-modal temporal patterns from multimodal EHR data. Our approach introduces shared initial temporal pattern representations which are refined using slot attention to generate temporal semantic embeddings. To ensure rich cross-modal temporal semantics in the learned patterns, we introduce a contrastive-based TPNCE loss for cross-modal alignment, along with two reconstruction losses to retain core information of each modality. Evaluations on two clinically critical tasks, 48-hour in-hospital mortality and 24-hour phenotype classification, using the MIMIC-III database demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing approaches., Comment: Technical report

Mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) is one of the most popular mathematical formulations with numerous applications. In practice, improving the performance of MILP solvers often requires a large amount of high-quality data, which can be challenging to collect. Researchers thus turn to generation techniques to generate additional MILP instances. However, existing approaches do not take into account specific block structures -- which are closely related to the problem formulations -- in the constraint coefficient matrices (CCMs) of MILPs. Consequently, they are prone to generate computationally trivial or infeasible instances due to the disruptions of block structures and thus problem formulations. To address this challenge, we propose a novel MILP generation framework, called Block Structure Decomposition (MILP-StuDio), to generate high-quality instances by preserving the block structures. Specifically, MILP-StuDio begins by identifying the blocks in CCMs and decomposing the instances into block units, which serve as the building blocks of MILP instances. We then design three operators to construct new instances by removing, substituting, and appending block units in the original instances, enabling us to generate instances with flexible sizes. An appealing feature of MILP-StuDio is its strong ability to preserve the feasibility and computational hardness of the generated instances. Experiments on the commonly-used benchmarks demonstrate that using instances generated by MILP-StuDio is able to significantly reduce over 10% of the solving time for learning-based solvers., Comment: Published in the 38th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024)

In large vision-language models (LVLMs), images serve as inputs that carry a wealth of information. As the idiom "A picture is worth a thousand words" implies, representing a single image in current LVLMs can require hundreds or even thousands of tokens. This results in significant computational costs, which grow quadratically as input image resolution increases, thereby severely impacting the efficiency of both training and inference. Previous approaches have attempted to reduce the number of image tokens either before or within the early layers of LVLMs. However, these strategies inevitably result in the loss of crucial image information, ultimately diminishing model performance. To address this challenge, we conduct an empirical study revealing that all visual tokens are necessary for LVLMs in the shallow layers, and token redundancy progressively increases in the deeper layers of the model. To this end, we propose PyramidDrop, a visual redundancy reduction strategy for LVLMs to boost their efficiency in both training and inference with neglectable performance loss. Specifically, we partition the LVLM into several stages and drop part of the image tokens at the end of each stage with a pre-defined ratio, creating pyramid-like visual tokens across model layers. The dropping is based on a lightweight similarity calculation with a negligible time overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PyramidDrop can achieve a 40% training time and 55% inference FLOPs acceleration of LLaVA-NeXT with comparable performance. Besides, the PyramidDrop could also serve as a plug-and-play strategy for inference acceleration without training, with better performance and lower inference cost than counterparts. We hope that the insights and approach introduced by PyramidDrop will inspire future research to further investigate the role of image tokens in LVLMs., Comment: 10 pages

Generation of plausible but incorrect factual information, often termed hallucination, has attracted significant research interest. Retrieval-augmented language model (RALM) -- which enhances models with up-to-date knowledge -- emerges as a promising method to reduce hallucination. However, existing RALMs may instead exacerbate hallucination when retrieving lengthy contexts. To address this challenge, we propose COFT, a novel \textbf{CO}arse-to-\textbf{F}ine highligh\textbf{T}ing method to focus on different granularity-level key texts, thereby avoiding getting lost in lengthy contexts. Specifically, COFT consists of three components: \textit{recaller}, \textit{scorer}, and \textit{selector}. First, \textit{recaller} applies a knowledge graph to extract potential key entities in a given context. Second, \textit{scorer} measures the importance of each entity by calculating its contextual weight. Finally, \textit{selector} selects high contextual weight entities with a dynamic threshold algorithm and highlights the corresponding paragraphs, sentences, or words in a coarse-to-fine manner. Extensive experiments on the knowledge hallucination benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of COFT, leading to a superior performance over $30\%$ in the F1 score metric. Moreover, COFT also exhibits remarkable versatility across various long-form tasks, such as reading comprehension and question answering.

We introduce D-FINE, a powerful real-time object detector that achieves outstanding localization precision by redefining the bounding box regression task in DETR models. D-FINE comprises two key components: Fine-grained Distribution Refinement (FDR) and Global Optimal Localization Self-Distillation (GO-LSD). FDR transforms the regression process from predicting fixed coordinates to iteratively refining probability distributions, providing a fine-grained intermediate representation that significantly enhances localization accuracy. GO-LSD is a bidirectional optimization strategy that transfers localization knowledge from refined distributions to shallower layers through self-distillation, while also simplifying the residual prediction tasks for deeper layers. Additionally, D-FINE incorporates lightweight optimizations in computationally intensive modules and operations, achieving a better balance between speed and accuracy. Specifically, D-FINE-L / X achieves 54.0% / 55.8% AP on the COCO dataset at 124 / 78 FPS on an NVIDIA T4 GPU. When pretrained on Objects365, D-FINE-L / X attains 57.1% / 59.3% AP, surpassing all existing real-time detectors. Furthermore, our method significantly enhances the performance of a wide range of DETR models by up to 5.3% AP with negligible extra parameters and training costs. Our code and pretrained models: https://github.com/Peterande/D-FINE.

Image/video coding has been a remarkable research area for both academia and industry for many years. Testing datasets, especially high-quality image/video datasets are desirable for the justified evaluation of coding-related research, practical applications, and standardization activities. We put forward a test dataset namely USTC-TD, which has been successfully adopted in the practical end-to-end image/video coding challenge of the IEEE International Conference on Visual Communications and lmage Processing (VCIP) in 2022 and 2023. USTC-TD contains 40 images at 4K spatial resolution and 10 video sequences at 1080p spatial resolution, featuring various content due to the diverse environmental factors (e.g. scene type, texture, motion, view) and the designed imaging factors (e.g. illumination, lens, shadow). We quantitatively evaluate USTC-TD on different image/video features (spatial, temporal, color, lightness), and compare it with the previous image/video test datasets, which verifies the wider coverage and more diversity of the proposed dataset. We also evaluate both classic standardized and recent learned image/video coding schemes on USTC-TD with PSNR and MS-SSIM, and provide an extensive benchmark for the evaluated schemes. Based on the characteristics and specific design of the proposed test dataset, we analyze the benchmark performance and shed light on the future research and development of image/video coding. All the data are released online: https://esakak.github.io/USTC-TD ., Comment: 23 pages. Project Page: https://esakak.github.io/USTC-TD

Interactive segmentation algorithms based on click points have garnered significant attention from researchers in recent years. However, existing studies typically use sparse click maps as model inputs to segment specific target objects, which primarily affect local regions and have limited abilities to focus on the whole target object, leading to increased times of clicks. In addition, most existing algorithms can not balance well between high performance and efficiency. To address this issue, we propose a click attention algorithm that expands the influence range of positive clicks based on the similarity between positively-clicked regions and the whole input. We also propose a discriminative affinity loss to reduce the attention coupling between positive and negative click regions to avoid an accuracy decrease caused by mutual interference between positive and negative clicks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach is superior to existing methods and achieves cutting-edge performance in fewer parameters. An interactive demo and all reproducible codes will be released at https://github.com/hahamyt/ClickAttention.

The emerging large models have achieved notable progress in the fields of natural language processing and computer vision. However, large models for neural video coding are still unexplored. In this paper, we try to explore how to build a large neural video coding model. Based on a small baseline model, we gradually scale up the model sizes of its different coding parts, including the motion encoder-decoder, motion entropy model, contextual encoder-decoder, contextual entropy model, and temporal context mining module, and analyze the influence of model sizes on video compression performance. Then, we explore to use different architectures, including CNN, mixed CNN-Transformer, and Transformer architectures, to implement the neural video coding model and analyze the influence of model architectures on video compression performance. Based on our exploration results, we design the first neural video coding model with more than 1 billion parameters -- NVC-1B. Experimental results show that our proposed large model achieves a significant video compression performance improvement over the small baseline model, and represents the state-of-the-art compression efficiency. We anticipate large models may bring up the video coding technologies to the next level.

Inter prediction is a key technology to reduce the temporal redundancy in video coding. In natural videos, there are usually multiple moving objects with variable velocity, resulting in complex motion fields that are difficult to represent compactly. In Versatile Video Coding (VVC), existing inter prediction methods usually assume uniform speed motion between consecutive frames and use the linear models for motion estimation (ME) and motion compensation (MC), which may not well handle the complex motion fields in the real world. To address these issues, we introduce a uniformly accelerated motion model (UAMM) to exploit motion-related elements (velocity, acceleration) of moving objects between the video frames, and further combine them to assist the inter prediction methods to handle the variable motion in the temporal domain. Specifically, first, the theory of UAMM is mentioned. Second, based on that, we propose the UAMM-based parameter derivation and extrapolation schemes in the coding process. Third, we integrate the UAMM into existing inter prediction modes (Merge, MMVD, CIIP) to achieve higher prediction accuracy. The proposed method is implemented into the VVC reference software, VTM version 12.0. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves up to 0.38% and on average 0.13% BD-rate reduction compared to the VTM anchor, under the Low-delay P configuration, with a slight increase of time complexity on the encoding/decoding side., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures

In-loop filtering (ILF) is a key technology for removing the artifacts in image/video coding standards. Recently, neural network-based in-loop filtering methods achieve remarkable coding gains beyond the capability of advanced video coding standards, which becomes a powerful coding tool candidate for future video coding standards. However, the utilization of deep neural networks brings heavy time and computational complexity, and high demands of high-performance hardware, which is challenging to apply to the general uses of coding scene. To address this limitation, inspired by explorations in image restoration, we propose an efficient and practical in-loop filtering scheme by adopting the Look-up Table (LUT). We train the DNN of in-loop filtering within a fixed filtering reference range, and cache the output values of the DNN into a LUT via traversing all possible inputs. At testing time in the coding process, the filtered pixel is generated by locating input pixels (to-be-filtered pixel with reference pixels) and interpolating cached filtered pixel values. To further enable the large filtering reference range with the limited storage cost of LUT, we introduce the enhanced indexing mechanism in the filtering process, and clipping/finetuning mechanism in the training. The proposed method is implemented into the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) reference software, VTM-11.0. Experimental results show that the ultrafast, very fast, and fast mode of the proposed method achieves on average 0.13%/0.34%/0.51%, and 0.10%/0.27%/0.39% BD-rate reduction, under the all intra (AI) and random access (RA) configurations. Especially, our method has friendly time and computational complexity, only 101%/102%-104%/108% time increase with 0.13-0.93 kMACs/pixel, and only 164-1148 KB storage cost for a single model. Our solution may shed light on the journey of practical neural network-based coding tool evolution., Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures

The increasing complexity of modern very-large-scale integration (VLSI) design highlights the significance of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) technologies. Chip placement is a critical step in the EDA workflow, which positions chip modules on the canvas with the goal of optimizing performance, power, and area (PPA) metrics of final chip designs. Recent advances have demonstrated the great potential of AI-based algorithms in enhancing chip placement. However, due to the lengthy workflow of chip design, the evaluations of these algorithms often focus on intermediate surrogate metrics, which are easy to compute but frequently reveal a substantial misalignment with the end-to-end performance (i.e., the final design PPA). To address this challenge, we introduce ChiPBench, which can effectively facilitate research in chip placement within the AI community. ChiPBench is a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the effectiveness of existing AI-based chip placement algorithms in improving final design PPA metrics. Specifically, we have gathered 20 circuits from various domains (e.g., CPU, GPU, and microcontrollers). These designs are compiled by executing the workflow from the verilog source code, which preserves necessary physical implementation kits, enabling evaluations for the placement algorithms on their impacts on the final design PPA. We executed six state-of-the-art AI-based chip placement algorithms on these designs and plugged the results of each single-point algorithm into the physical implementation workflow to obtain the final PPA results. Experimental results show that even if intermediate metric of a single-point algorithm is dominant, while the final PPA results are unsatisfactory. We believe that our benchmark will serve as an effective evaluation framework to bridge the gap between academia and industry., Comment: A comprehensive benchmark for AI-based chip placement algorithms using end-to-end performance metrics

One significant advantage of superconducting processors is their extensive design flexibility, which encompasses various types of qubits and interactions. Given the large number of tunable parameters of a processor, the ability to perform gradient optimization would be highly beneficial. Efficient backpropagation for gradient computation requires a tightly integrated software library, for which no open-source implementation is currently available. In this work, we introduce SuperGrad, a simulator that accelerates the design of superconducting quantum processors by incorporating gradient computation capabilities. SuperGrad offers a user-friendly interface for constructing Hamiltonians and computing both static and dynamic properties of composite systems. This differentiable simulation is valuable for a range of applications, including optimal control, design optimization, and experimental data fitting. In this paper, we demonstrate these applications through examples and code snippets., Comment: 23 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables, the code is available at https://github.com/iqubit-org/supergrad

In the context of medical decision making, counterfactual prediction enables clinicians to predict treatment outcomes of interest under alternative courses of therapeutic actions given observed patient history. In this work, we present G-Transformer for counterfactual outcome prediction under dynamic and time-varying treatment strategies. Our approach leverages a Transformer architecture to capture complex, long-range dependencies in time-varying covariates while enabling g-computation, a causal inference method for estimating the effects of dynamic treatment regimes. Specifically, we use a Transformer-based encoder architecture to estimate the conditional distribution of relevant covariates given covariate and treatment history at each time point, then produces Monte Carlo estimates of counterfactual outcomes by simulating forward patient trajectories under treatment strategies of interest. We evaluate G-Transformer extensively using two simulated longitudinal datasets from mechanistic models, and a real-world sepsis ICU dataset from MIMIC-IV. G-Transformer outperforms both classical and state-of-the-art counterfactual prediction models in these settings. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first Transformer-based architecture that supports g-computation for counterfactual outcome prediction under dynamic and time-varying treatment strategies.

The prosperity of machine learning has also brought people's concerns about data privacy. Among them, inference attacks can implement privacy breaches in various MLaaS scenarios and model training/prediction phases. Specifically, inference attacks can perform privacy inference on undisclosed target training sets based on outputs of the target model, including but not limited to statistics, membership, semantics, data representation, etc. For instance, infer whether the target data has the characteristics of AIDS. In addition, the rapid development of the machine learning community in recent years, especially the surge of model types and application scenarios, has further stimulated the inference attacks' research. Thus, studying inference attacks and analyzing them in depth is urgent and significant. However, there is still a gap in the systematic discussion of inference attacks from taxonomy, global perspective, attack, and defense perspectives. This survey provides an in-depth and comprehensive inference of attacks and corresponding countermeasures in ML-as-a-service based on taxonomy and the latest researches. Without compromising researchers' intuition, we first propose the 3MP taxonomy based on the community research status, trying to normalize the confusing naming system of inference attacks. Also, we analyze the pros and cons of each type of inference attack, their workflow, countermeasure, and how they interact with other attacks. In the end, we point out several promising directions for researchers from a more comprehensive and novel perspective.

Autoregressive next-token prediction is a standard pretraining method for large-scale language models, but its application to vision tasks is hindered by the non-sequential nature of image data, leading to cumulative errors. Most vision models employ masked autoencoder (MAE) based pretraining, which faces scalability issues. To address these challenges, we introduce \textbf{TokenUnify}, a novel pretraining method that integrates random token prediction, next-token prediction, and next-all token prediction. We provide theoretical evidence demonstrating that TokenUnify mitigates cumulative errors in visual autoregression. Cooperated with TokenUnify, we have assembled a large-scale electron microscopy (EM) image dataset with ultra-high resolution, ideal for creating spatially correlated long sequences. This dataset includes over 120 million annotated voxels, making it the largest neuron segmentation dataset to date and providing a unified benchmark for experimental validation. Leveraging the Mamba network inherently suited for long-sequence modeling on this dataset, TokenUnify not only reduces the computational complexity but also leads to a significant 45\% improvement in segmentation performance on downstream EM neuron segmentation tasks compared to existing methods. Furthermore, TokenUnify demonstrates superior scalability over MAE and traditional autoregressive methods, effectively bridging the gap between pretraining strategies for language and vision models. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/ydchen0806/TokenUnify}.

Active voltage control presents a promising avenue for relieving power congestion and enhancing voltage quality, taking advantage of the distributed controllable generators in the power network, such as roof-top photovoltaics. While Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) has emerged as a compelling approach to address this challenge, existing MARL approaches tend to overlook the constrained optimization nature of this problem, failing in guaranteeing safety constraints. In this paper, we formalize the active voltage control problem as a constrained Markov game and propose a safety-constrained MARL algorithm. We expand the primal-dual optimization RL method to multi-agent settings, and augment it with a novel approach of double safety estimation to learn the policy and to update the Lagrange-multiplier. In addition, we proposed different cost functions and investigated their influences on the behavior of our constrained MARL method. We evaluate our approach in the power distribution network simulation environment with real-world scale scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with the state-of-the-art MARL methods. This paper is published at \url{https://www.ijcai.org/Proceedings/2024/}., Comment: Accepted by IJCAI2024

Fluxonium qubits are recognized for their high coherence times and high operation fidelities, attributed to their unique design incorporating over 100 Josephson junctions per superconducting loop. However, this complexity poses significant fabrication challenges, particularly in achieving high yield and junction uniformity with traditional methods. Here, we introduce an overlap process for Josephson junction fabrication that achieves nearly 100% yield and maintains uniformity across a 2-inch wafer with less than 5% variation for the phase slip junction and less than 2% for the junction array. Our compact junction array design facilitates fluxonium qubits with energy relaxation times exceeding 1 millisecond at the flux frustration point, demonstrating consistency with state-of-the-art dielectric loss tangents and flux noise across multiple devices. This work suggests the scalability of high coherence fluxonium processors using CMOS-compatible processes, marking a significant step towards practical quantum computing.

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) provides a promising approach to avoid costly online interaction with the real environment. However, the performance of offline RL highly depends on the quality of the datasets, which may cause extrapolation error in the learning process. In many robotic applications, an inaccurate simulator is often available. However, the data directly collected from the inaccurate simulator cannot be directly used in offline RL due to the well-known exploration-exploitation dilemma and the dynamic gap between inaccurate simulation and the real environment. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach to combine the offline dataset and the inaccurate simulation data in a better manner. Specifically, we pre-train a generative adversarial network (GAN) model to fit the state distribution of the offline dataset. Given this, we collect data from the inaccurate simulator starting from the distribution provided by the generator and reweight the simulated data using the discriminator. Our experimental results in the D4RL benchmark and a real-world manipulation task confirm that our method can benefit more from both inaccurate simulator and limited offline datasets to achieve better performance than the state-of-the-art methods.

Feature compression, as an important branch of video coding for machines (VCM), has attracted significant attention and exploration. However, the existing methods mainly focus on intra-feature similarity, such as the Mean Squared Error (MSE) between the reconstructed and original features, while neglecting the importance of inter-feature relationships. In this paper, we analyze the inter-feature relationships, focusing on feature discriminability in machine vision and underscoring its significance in feature compression. To maintain the feature discriminability of reconstructed features, we introduce a discrimination metric for feature compression. The discrimination metric is designed to ensure that the distance between features of the same category is smaller than the distance between features of different categories. Furthermore, we explore the relationship between the discrimination metric and the discriminability of the original features. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed discrimination metric and reveal there exists a trade-off between the discrimination metric and the discriminability of the original features.

Click-point-based interactive segmentation has received widespread attention due to its efficiency. However, it's hard for existing algorithms to obtain precise and robust responses after multiple clicks. In this case, the segmentation results tend to have little change or are even worse than before. To improve the robustness of the response, we propose a structured click intent model based on graph neural networks, which adaptively obtains graph nodes via the global similarity of user-clicked Transformer tokens. Then the graph nodes will be aggregated to obtain structured interaction features. Finally, the dual cross-attention will be used to inject structured interaction features into vision Transformer features, thereby enhancing the control of clicks over segmentation results. Extensive experiments demonstrated the proposed algorithm can serve as a general structure in improving Transformer-based interactive segmenta?tion performance. The code and data will be released at https://github.com/hahamyt/scc., Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, submitted to NeurIPS 2024

Here we employ the quasi-bound state in the continuum (quasi-BIC) resonance in all-dielectric metasurfaces for efficient nonlinear processes in consideration of the backward frequency conversion. We theoretically study the second-harmonic generation (SHG) from symmetry-broken AlGaAs metasurfaces and reveal the efficiency enhancement empowered by high-$Q$ quasi-BIC resonances. By introducing the correction term of nonlinear polarization at the fundamental wave field to the conventional undepleted approximation, we uncover the effect of backward frequency conversion on the nonlinear conversation efficiency. The SHG efficiency as $2.45\times10^{-2}$ with the developed depleted model, shows a $14.3\%$ decrease compared with $2.86\times10^{-2}$ in conventional undepleted approximation, under the incident intensity of 10 MW/cm$^{2}$. Our results are of significant importance for designing efficient nonlinear metasurfaces supporting high-$Q$ resonances.

Cutting planes (cuts) play an important role in solving mixed-integer linear programs (MILPs), which formulate many important real-world applications. Cut selection heavily depends on (P1) which cuts to prefer and (P2) how many cuts to select. Although modern MILP solvers tackle (P1)-(P2) by human-designed heuristics, machine learning carries the potential to learn more effective heuristics. However, many existing learning-based methods learn which cuts to prefer, neglecting the importance of learning how many cuts to select. Moreover, we observe that (P3) what order of selected cuts to prefer significantly impacts the efficiency of MILP solvers as well. To address these challenges, we propose a novel hierarchical sequence/set model (HEM) to learn cut selection policies. Specifically, HEM is a bi-level model: (1) a higher-level module that learns how many cuts to select, (2) and a lower-level module -- that formulates the cut selection as a sequence/set to sequence learning problem -- to learn policies selecting an ordered subset with the cardinality determined by the higher-level module. To the best of our knowledge, HEM is the first data-driven methodology that well tackles (P1)-(P3) simultaneously. Experiments demonstrate that HEM significantly improves the efficiency of solving MILPs on eleven challenging MILP benchmarks, including two Huawei's real problems., Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2302.00244

Preference alignment is pivotal for empowering large language models (LLMs) to generate helpful and harmless responses. However, the performance of preference alignment is highly sensitive to the prevalent noise in the preference data. Recent efforts for this problem either marginally alleviate the impact of noise without the ability to actually reduce its presence, or rely on costly teacher LLMs prone to reward misgeneralization. To address these challenges, we propose the RObust Preference Optimization (ROPO) framework, an iterative alignment approach that integrates noise-tolerance and filtering of noisy samples without the aid of external models. Specifically, ROPO iteratively solves a constrained optimization problem, where we dynamically assign a quality-aware weight for each sample and constrain the sum of the weights to the number of samples we intend to retain. For noise-tolerant training and effective noise identification, we derive a robust loss by suppressing the gradients of samples with high uncertainty. We demonstrate both empirically and theoretically that the derived loss is critical for distinguishing noisy samples from clean ones. Furthermore, inspired by our derived loss, we propose a robustness-guided rejection sampling technique to compensate for the potential important information in discarded queries. Experiments on three widely-used datasets with Mistral-7B and Llama-2-7B demonstrate that ROPO significantly outperforms existing preference alignment methods, with its superiority growing as the noise rate increases.

While recent Transformer-based approaches have shown impressive performances on event-based object detection tasks, their high computational costs still diminish the low power consumption advantage of event cameras. Image-based works attempt to reduce these costs by introducing sparse Transformers. However, they display inadequate sparsity and adaptability when applied to event-based object detection, since these approaches cannot balance the fine granularity of token-level sparsification and the efficiency of window-based Transformers, leading to reduced performance and efficiency. Furthermore, they lack scene-specific sparsity optimization, resulting in information loss and a lower recall rate. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Scene Adaptive Sparse Transformer (SAST). SAST enables window-token co-sparsification, significantly enhancing fault tolerance and reducing computational overhead. Leveraging the innovative scoring and selection modules, along with the Masked Sparse Window Self-Attention, SAST showcases remarkable scene-aware adaptability: It focuses only on important objects and dynamically optimizes sparsity level according to scene complexity, maintaining a remarkable balance between performance and computational cost. The evaluation results show that SAST outperforms all other dense and sparse networks in both performance and efficiency on two large-scale event-based object detection datasets (1Mpx and Gen1). Code: https://github.com/Peterande/SAST

In modern video coding standards, block-based inter prediction is widely adopted, which brings high compression efficiency. However, in natural videos, there are usually multiple moving objects of arbitrary shapes, resulting in complex motion fields that are difficult to represent compactly. This problem has been tackled by more flexible block partitioning methods in the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard, but the more flexible partitions require more overhead bits to signal and still cannot be made arbitrarily shaped. To address this limitation, we propose an object segmentation-assisted inter prediction method (SAIP), where objects in the reference frames are segmented by some advanced technologies. With a proper indication, the object segmentation mask is translated from the reference frame to the current frame as the arbitrary-shaped partition of different regions without any extra signal. Using the segmentation mask, motion compensation is separately performed for different regions, achieving higher prediction accuracy. The segmentation mask is further used to code the motion vectors of different regions more efficiently. Moreover, the segmentation mask is considered in the joint rate-distortion optimization for motion estimation and partition estimation to derive the motion vector of different regions and partition more accurately. The proposed method is implemented into the VVC reference software, VTM version 12.0. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves up to 1.98%, 1.14%, 0.79%, and on average 0.82%, 0.49%, 0.37% BD-rate reduction for common test sequences, under the Low-delay P, Low-delay B, and Random Access configurations, respectively., Comment: 20 pages, 13 figures, accepted by IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting (TBC)