De-Chuan Zhan

Da-Wei Zhou, Fu-Yun Wang, Han-Jia Ye et al.

Novel classes frequently arise in our dynamically changing world, e.g., new users in the authentication system, and a machine learning model should recognize new classes without forgetting old ones. This scenario becomes more challenging when new class instances are insufficient, which is called few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL). Current methods handle incremental learning retrospectively by making the updated model similar to the old one. By contrast, we suggest learning prospectively to prepare for future updates, and propose ForwArd Compatible Training (FACT) for FSCIL. Forward compatibility requires future new classes to be easily incorporated into the current model based on the current stage data, and we seek to realize it by reserving embedding space for future new classes. In detail, we assign virtual prototypes to squeeze the embedding of known classes and reserve for new ones. Besides, we forecast possible new classes and prepare for the updating process. The virtual prototypes allow the model to accept possible updates in the future, which act as proxies scattered among embedding space to build a stronger classifier during inference. FACT efficiently incorporates new classes with forward compatibility and meanwhile resists forgetting of old ones. Extensive experiments validate FACT's state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at: https://github.com/zhoudw-zdw/CVPR22-Fact

Fu-Yun Wang, Da-Wei Zhou, Han-Jia Ye et al.

The ability to learn new concepts continually is necessary in this ever-changing world. However, deep neural networks suffer from catastrophic forgetting when learning new categories. Many works have been proposed to alleviate this phenomenon, whereas most of them either fall into the stability-plasticity dilemma or take too much computation or storage overhead. Inspired by the gradient boosting algorithm to gradually fit the residuals between the target model and the previous ensemble model, we propose a novel two-stage learning paradigm FOSTER, empowering the model to learn new categories adaptively. Specifically, we first dynamically expand new modules to fit the residuals between the target and the output of the original model. Next, we remove redundant parameters and feature dimensions through an effective distillation strategy to maintain the single backbone model. We validate our method FOSTER on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet-100/1000 under different settings. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at: https://github.com/G-U-N/ECCV22-FOSTER.

Da-Wei Zhou, Qi-Wei Wang, Zhi-Hong Qi et al.

Deep models, e.g., CNNs and Vision Transformers, have achieved impressive achievements in many vision tasks in the closed world. However, novel classes emerge from time to time in our ever-changing world, requiring a learning system to acquire new knowledge continually. Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) enables the learner to incorporate the knowledge of new classes incrementally and build a universal classifier among all seen classes. Correspondingly, when directly training the model with new class instances, a fatal problem occurs -- the model tends to catastrophically forget the characteristics of former ones, and its performance drastically degrades. There have been numerous efforts to tackle catastrophic forgetting in the machine learning community. In this paper, we survey comprehensively recent advances in class-incremental learning and summarize these methods from several aspects. We also provide a rigorous and unified evaluation of 17 methods in benchmark image classification tasks to find out the characteristics of different algorithms empirically. Furthermore, we notice that the current comparison protocol ignores the influence of memory budget in model storage, which may result in unfair comparison and biased results. Hence, we advocate fair comparison by aligning the memory budget in evaluation, as well as several memory-agnostic performance measures. The source code is available at https://github.com/zhoudw-zdw/CIL_Survey/

Da-Wei Zhou, Qi-Wei Wang, Han-Jia Ye et al.

Real-world applications require the classification model to adapt to new classes without forgetting old ones. Correspondingly, Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to train a model with limited memory size to meet this requirement. Typical CIL methods tend to save representative exemplars from former classes to resist forgetting, while recent works find that storing models from history can substantially boost the performance. However, the stored models are not counted into the memory budget, which implicitly results in unfair comparisons. We find that when counting the model size into the total budget and comparing methods with aligned memory size, saving models do not consistently work, especially for the case with limited memory budgets. As a result, we need to holistically evaluate different CIL methods at different memory scales and simultaneously consider accuracy and memory size for measurement. On the other hand, we dive deeply into the construction of the memory buffer for memory efficiency. By analyzing the effect of different layers in the network, we find that shallow and deep layers have different characteristics in CIL. Motivated by this, we propose a simple yet effective baseline, denoted as MEMO for Memory-efficient Expandable MOdel. MEMO extends specialized layers based on the shared generalized representations, efficiently extracting diverse representations with modest cost and maintaining representative exemplars. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets validate MEMO's competitive performance. Code is available at: https://github.com/wangkiw/ICLR23-MEMO

Da-Wei Zhou, Zi-Wen Cai, Han-Jia Ye et al.

Class-incremental learning (CIL) aims to adapt to emerging new classes without forgetting old ones. Traditional CIL models are trained from scratch to continually acquire knowledge as data evolves. Recently, pre-training has achieved substantial progress, making vast pre-trained models (PTMs) accessible for CIL. Contrary to traditional methods, PTMs possess generalizable embeddings, which can be easily transferred for CIL. In this work, we revisit CIL with PTMs and argue that the core factors in CIL are adaptivity for model updating and generalizability for knowledge transferring. 1) We first reveal that frozen PTM can already provide generalizable embeddings for CIL. Surprisingly, a simple baseline (SimpleCIL) which continually sets the classifiers of PTM to prototype features can beat state-of-the-art even without training on the downstream task. 2) Due to the distribution gap between pre-trained and downstream datasets, PTM can be further cultivated with adaptivity via model adaptation. We propose AdaPt and mERge (APER), which aggregates the embeddings of PTM and adapted models for classifier construction. APER is a general framework that can be orthogonally combined with any parameter-efficient tuning method, which holds the advantages of PTM's generalizability and adapted model's adaptivity. 3) Additionally, considering previous ImageNet-based benchmarks are unsuitable in the era of PTM due to data overlapping, we propose four new benchmarks for assessment, namely ImageNet-A, ObjectNet, OmniBenchmark, and VTAB. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of APER with a unified and concise framework. Code is available at https://github.com/zhoudw-zdw/RevisitingCIL

Han-Jia Ye, Huai-Hong Yin, De-Chuan Zhan et al.

The widespread enthusiasm for deep learning has recently expanded into the domain of tabular data. Recognizing that the advancement in deep tabular methods is often inspired by classical methods, e.g., integration of nearest neighbors into neural networks, we investigate whether these classical methods can be revitalized with modern techniques. We revisit a differentiable version of $K$-nearest neighbors (KNN) -- Neighbourhood Components Analysis (NCA) -- originally designed to learn a linear projection to capture semantic similarities between instances, and seek to gradually add modern deep learning techniques on top. Surprisingly, our implementation of NCA using SGD and without dimensionality reduction already achieves decent performance on tabular data, in contrast to the results of using existing toolboxes like scikit-learn. Further equipping NCA with deep representations and additional training stochasticity significantly enhances its capability, being on par with the leading tree-based method CatBoost and outperforming existing deep tabular models in both classification and regression tasks on 300 datasets. We conclude our paper by analyzing the factors behind these improvements, including loss functions, prediction strategies, and deep architectures. The code is available at https://github.com/qile2000/LAMDA-TALENT.

Zhi-Hong Qi, Da-Wei Zhou, Yiran Yao et al.

In our ever-evolving world, new data exhibits a long-tailed distribution, such as e-commerce platform reviews. This necessitates continuous model learning imbalanced data without forgetting, addressing the challenge of long-tailed class-incremental learning (LTCIL). Existing methods often rely on retraining linear classifiers with former data, which is impractical in real-world settings. In this paper, we harness the potent representation capabilities of pre-trained models and introduce AdaPtive Adapter RouTing (APART) as an exemplar-free solution for LTCIL. To counteract forgetting, we train inserted adapters with frozen pre-trained weights for deeper adaptation and maintain a pool of adapters for selection during sequential model updates. Additionally, we present an auxiliary adapter pool designed for effective generalization, especially on minority classes. Adaptive instance routing across these pools captures crucial correlations, facilitating a comprehensive representation of all classes. Consequently, APART tackles the imbalance problem as well as catastrophic forgetting in a unified framework. Extensive benchmark experiments validate the effectiveness of APART. Code is available at: https://github.com/vita-qzh/APART

Yi-Kai Zhang, Lu Ren, Chao Yi et al.

The rapid expansion of foundation pre-trained models and their fine-tuned counterparts has significantly contributed to the advancement of machine learning. Leveraging pre-trained models to extract knowledge and expedite learning in real-world tasks, known as "Model Reuse", has become crucial in various applications. Previous research focuses on reusing models within a certain aspect, including reusing model weights, structures, and hypothesis spaces. This paper introduces ZhiJian, a comprehensive and user-friendly toolbox for model reuse, utilizing the PyTorch backend. ZhiJian presents a novel paradigm that unifies diverse perspectives on model reuse, encompassing target architecture construction with PTM, tuning target model with PTM, and PTM-based inference. This empowers deep learning practitioners to explore downstream tasks and identify the complementary advantages among different methods. ZhiJian is readily accessible at https://github.com/zhangyikaii/lamda-zhijian facilitating seamless utilization of pre-trained models and streamlining the model reuse process for researchers and developers.

Lu Han, Xu-Yang Chen, Han-Jia Ye et al.

Recent advances in deep learning have significantly elevated weather prediction models. However, these models often falter in real-world scenarios due to their sensitivity to spatial-temporal shifts. This issue is particularly acute in weather forecasting, where models are prone to overfit to local and temporal variations, especially when tasked with fine-grained predictions. In this paper, we address these challenges by developing a robust precipitation forecasting model that demonstrates resilience against such spatial-temporal discrepancies. We introduce Temporal Frame Interpolation (TFI), a novel technique that enhances the training dataset by generating synthetic samples through interpolating adjacent frames from satellite imagery and ground radar data, thus improving the model's robustness against frame noise. Moreover, we incorporate a unique Multi-Level Dice (ML-Dice) loss function, leveraging the ordinal nature of rainfall intensities to improve the model's performance. Our approach has led to significant improvements in forecasting precision, culminating in our model securing \textit{1st place} in the transfer learning leaderboard of the \textit{Weather4cast'23} competition. This achievement not only underscores the effectiveness of our methodologies but also establishes a new standard for deep learning applications in weather forecasting. Our code and weights have been public on \url{https://github.com/Secilia-Cxy/UNetTFI}.

Lu Han, Han-Jia Ye, De-Chuan Zhan

Multivariate time series data comprises various channels of variables. The multivariate forecasting models need to capture the relationship between the channels to accurately predict future values. However, recently, there has been an emergence of methods that employ the Channel Independent (CI) strategy. These methods view multivariate time series data as separate univariate time series and disregard the correlation between channels. Surprisingly, our empirical results have shown that models trained with the CI strategy outperform those trained with the Channel Dependent (CD) strategy, usually by a significant margin. Nevertheless, the reasons behind this phenomenon have not yet been thoroughly explored in the literature. This paper provides comprehensive empirical and theoretical analyses of the characteristics of multivariate time series datasets and the CI/CD strategy. Our results conclude that the CD approach has higher capacity but often lacks robustness to accurately predict distributionally drifted time series. In contrast, the CI approach trades capacity for robust prediction. Practical measures inspired by these analyses are proposed to address the capacity and robustness dilemma, including a modified CD method called Predict Residuals with Regularization (PRReg) that can surpass the CI strategy. We hope our findings can raise awareness among researchers about the characteristics of multivariate time series and inspire the construction of better forecasting models.

Hanye Zhao, Xiaoshen Han, Zhengbang Zhu et al.

With the great success of diffusion models (DMs) in generating realistic synthetic vision data, many researchers have investigated their potential in decision-making and control. Most of these works utilized DMs to sample directly from the trajectory space, where DMs can be viewed as a combination of dynamics models and policies. In this work, we explore how to decouple DMs' ability as dynamics models in fully offline settings, allowing the learning policy to roll out trajectories. As DMs learn the data distribution from the dataset, their intrinsic policy is actually the behavior policy induced from the dataset, which results in a mismatch between the behavior policy and the learning policy. We propose Dynamics Diffusion, short as DyDiff, which can inject information from the learning policy to DMs iteratively. DyDiff ensures long-horizon rollout accuracy while maintaining policy consistency and can be easily deployed on model-free algorithms. We provide theoretical analysis to show the advantage of DMs on long-horizon rollout over models and demonstrate the effectiveness of DyDiff in the context of offline reinforcement learning, where the rollout dataset is provided but no online environment for interaction.

Zhi-Kai Chen, Jun-Peng Jiang, Jun-Jie Tao et al.

Users increasingly expect image generation models to quickly adapt to highly diverse and personalized requirements, such as producing images with distinctive styles or characteristics. Traditional approaches rely on fine-tuning, which is costly and difficult to scale. To cope with these limitations, the community has accumulated a growing library of fine-tuned modules and adapters, where each component targets specific generation needs and collectively serves as a foundation for handling new demands. This naturally raises a question: instead of repeatedly training new models, can we systematically exploit this expanding ecosystem to better fulfill user instructions? To this end, we present Polaris, an intelligent retrieval framework that automatically selects and integrates suitable models from the model library based on a user's instructions. The key insight is that harnessing such a massive and heterogeneous pool requires not only finding the most relevant modules among thousands of candidates, but also aligning them effectively for instruction-driven generation and editing. Polaris addresses this challenge by indexing over 6,500 checkpoints and 75,000 adapters, and retrieving the most relevant components given a user's input and instruction. In doing so, it delivers scalable, controllable, and well-aligned generation -- without any additional training.

Yi-Kai Zhang, Ting-Ji Huang, Yao-Xiang Ding et al.

Figuring out which Pre-Trained Model (PTM) from a model zoo fits the target task is essential to take advantage of plentiful model resources. With the availability of numerous heterogeneous PTMs from diverse fields, efficiently selecting the most suitable PTM is challenging due to the time-consuming costs of carrying out forward or backward passes over all PTMs. In this paper, we propose Model Spider, which tokenizes both PTMs and tasks by summarizing their characteristics into vectors to enable efficient PTM selection. By leveraging the approximated performance of PTMs on a separate set of training tasks, Model Spider learns to construct tokens and measure the fitness score between a model-task pair via their tokens. The ability to rank relevant PTMs higher than others generalizes to new tasks. With the top-ranked PTM candidates, we further learn to enrich task tokens with their PTM-specific semantics to re-rank the PTMs for better selection. Model Spider balances efficiency and selection ability, making PTM selection like a spider preying on a web. Model Spider demonstrates promising performance in various configurations of model zoos.

Hai-Long Sun, Da-Wei Zhou, De-Chuan Zhan et al.

While traditional machine learning can effectively tackle a wide range of problems, it primarily operates within a closed-world setting, which presents limitations when dealing with streaming data. As a solution, incremental learning emerges to address real-world scenarios involving new data's arrival. Recently, pre-training has made significant advancements and garnered the attention of numerous researchers. The strong performance of these pre-trained models (PTMs) presents a promising avenue for developing continual learning algorithms that can effectively adapt to real-world scenarios. Consequently, exploring the utilization of PTMs in incremental learning has become essential. This paper introduces a pre-trained model-based continual learning toolbox known as PILOT. On the one hand, PILOT implements some state-of-the-art class-incremental learning algorithms based on pre-trained models, such as L2P, DualPrompt, and CODA-Prompt. On the other hand, PILOT also fits typical class-incremental learning algorithms (e.g., DER, FOSTER, and MEMO) within the context of pre-trained models to evaluate their effectiveness.

Xin-Chun Li, Yi-Chu Xu, Shaoming Song et al.

Federated Learning (FL) fuses collaborative models from local nodes without centralizing users' data. The permutation invariance property of neural networks and the non-i.i.d. data across clients make the locally updated parameters imprecisely aligned, disabling the coordinate-based parameter averaging. Traditional neurons do not explicitly consider position information. Hence, we propose Position-Aware Neurons (PANs) as an alternative, fusing position-related values (i.e., position encodings) into neuron outputs. PANs couple themselves to their positions and minimize the possibility of dislocation, even updating on heterogeneous data. We turn on/off PANs to disable/enable the permutation invariance property of neural networks. PANs are tightly coupled with positions when applied to FL, making parameters across clients pre-aligned and facilitating coordinate-based parameter averaging. PANs are algorithm-agnostic and could universally improve existing FL algorithms. Furthermore, "FL with PANs" is simple to implement and computationally friendly.

Xin-Chun Li, Wen-Shu Fan, Shaoming Song et al.

Knowledge Distillation (KD) aims at transferring the knowledge of a well-performed neural network (the {\it teacher}) to a weaker one (the {\it student}). A peculiar phenomenon is that a more accurate model doesn't necessarily teach better, and temperature adjustment can neither alleviate the mismatched capacity. To explain this, we decompose the efficacy of KD into three parts: {\it correct guidance}, {\it smooth regularization}, and {\it class discriminability}. The last term describes the distinctness of {\it wrong class probabilities} that the teacher provides in KD. Complex teachers tend to be over-confident and traditional temperature scaling limits the efficacy of {\it class discriminability}, resulting in less discriminative wrong class probabilities. Therefore, we propose {\it Asymmetric Temperature Scaling (ATS)}, which separately applies a higher/lower temperature to the correct/wrong class. ATS enlarges the variance of wrong class probabilities in the teacher's label and makes the students grasp the absolute affinities of wrong classes to the target class as discriminative as possible. Both theoretical analysis and extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of ATS. The demo developed in Mindspore is available at https://gitee.com/lxcnju/ats-mindspore and will be available at https://gitee.com/mindspore/models/tree/master/research/cv/ats.

Han-Jia Ye, Si-Yang Liu, Hao-Run Cai et al.

Tabular data is prevalent across diverse domains in machine learning. With the rapid progress of deep tabular prediction methods, especially pretrained (foundation) models, there is a growing need to evaluate these methods systematically and to understand their behavior. We present an extensive study on TALENT, a collection of 300+ datasets spanning broad ranges of size, feature composition (numerical/categorical mixes), domains, and output types (binary, multi--class, regression). Our evaluation shows that ensembling benefits both tree-based and neural approaches. Traditional gradient-boosted trees remain very strong baselines, yet recent pretrained tabular models now match or surpass them on many tasks, narrowing--but not eliminating--the historical advantage of tree ensembles. Despite architectural diversity, top performance concentrates within a small subset of models, providing practical guidance for method selection. To explain these outcomes, we quantify dataset heterogeneity by learning from meta-features and early training dynamics to predict later validation behavior. This dynamics-aware analysis indicates that heterogeneity--such as the interplay of categorical and numerical attributes--largely determines which family of methods is favored. Finally, we introduce a two-level design beyond the 300 common-size datasets: a compact TALENT-tiny core (45 datasets) for rapid, reproducible evaluation, and a TALENT-extension suite targeting high-dimensional, many-class, and very large-scale settings for stress testing. In summary, these results offer actionable insights into the strengths, limitations, and future directions for improving deep tabular learning.

Han-Jia Ye, Su Lu, De-Chuan Zhan

The knowledge of a well-trained deep neural network (a.k.a. the "teacher") is valuable for learning similar tasks. Knowledge distillation extracts knowledge from the teacher and integrates it with the target model (a.k.a. the "student"), which expands the student's knowledge and improves its learning efficacy. Instead of enforcing the teacher to work on the same task as the student, we borrow the knowledge from a teacher trained from a general label space -- in this "Generalized Knowledge Distillation (GKD)", the classes of the teacher and the student may be the same, completely different, or partially overlapped. We claim that the comparison ability between instances acts as an essential factor threading knowledge across tasks, and propose the RElationship FacIlitated Local cLassifiEr Distillation (REFILLED) approach, which decouples the GKD flow of the embedding and the top-layer classifier. In particular, different from reconciling the instance-label confidence between models, REFILLED requires the teacher to reweight the hard tuples pushed forward by the student and then matches the similarity comparison levels between instances. An embedding-induced classifier based on the teacher model supervises the student's classification confidence and adaptively emphasizes the most related supervision from the teacher. REFILLED demonstrates strong discriminative ability when the classes of the teacher vary from the same to a fully non-overlapped set w.r.t. the student. It also achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard knowledge distillation, one-step incremental learning, and few-shot learning tasks.

Jia-Qi Yang, De-Chuan Zhan

Predicting conversion rate (e.g., the probability that a user will purchase an item) is a fundamental problem in machine learning based recommender systems. However, accurate conversion labels are revealed after a long delay, which harms the timeliness of recommender systems. Previous literature concentrates on utilizing early conversions to mitigate such a delayed feedback problem. In this paper, we show that post-click user behaviors are also informative to conversion rate prediction and can be used to improve timeliness. We propose a generalized delayed feedback model (GDFM) that unifies both post-click behaviors and early conversions as stochastic post-click information, which could be utilized to train GDFM in a streaming manner efficiently. Based on GDFM, we further establish a novel perspective that the performance gap introduced by delayed feedback can be attributed to a temporal gap and a sampling gap. Inspired by our analysis, we propose to measure the quality of post-click information with a combination of temporal distance and sample complexity. The training objective is re-weighted accordingly to highlight informative and timely signals. We validate our analysis on public datasets, and experimental performance confirms the effectiveness of our method.

Shenghua Wan, Yucen Wang, Minghao Shao et al.

Model-based imitation learning (MBIL) is a popular reinforcement learning method that improves sample efficiency on high-dimension input sources, such as images and videos. Following the convention of MBIL research, existing algorithms are highly deceptive by task-irrelevant information, especially moving distractors in videos. To tackle this problem, we propose a new algorithm - named Separated Model-based Adversarial Imitation Learning (SeMAIL) - decoupling the environment dynamics into two parts by task-relevant dependency, which is determined by agent actions, and training separately. In this way, the agent can imagine its trajectories and imitate the expert behavior efficiently in task-relevant state space. Our method achieves near-expert performance on various visual control tasks with complex observations and the more challenging tasks with different backgrounds from expert observations.

Qi-Le Zhou, Han-Jia Ye, Le-Ye Wang et al.

Fine-tuning a pre-trained deep neural network has become a successful paradigm in various machine learning tasks. However, such a paradigm becomes particularly challenging with tabular data when there are discrepancies between the feature sets of pre-trained models and the target tasks. In this paper, we propose TabToken, a method aims at enhancing the quality of feature tokens (i.e., embeddings of tabular features). TabToken allows for the utilization of pre-trained models when the upstream and downstream tasks share overlapping features, facilitating model fine-tuning even with limited training examples. Specifically, we introduce a contrastive objective that regularizes the tokens, capturing the semantics within and across features. During the pre-training stage, the tokens are learned jointly with top-layer deep models such as transformer. In the downstream task, tokens of the shared features are kept fixed while TabToken efficiently fine-tunes the remaining parts of the model. TabToken not only enables knowledge transfer from a pre-trained model to tasks with heterogeneous features, but also enhances the discriminative ability of deep tabular models in standard classification and regression tasks.

Shaowei Zhang, Jiahan Cao, Lei Yuan et al.

In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (CMARL), it is critical for agents to achieve a balance between self-exploration and team collaboration. However, agents can hardly accomplish the team task without coordination and they would be trapped in a local optimum where easy cooperation is accessed without enough individual exploration. Recent works mainly concentrate on agents' coordinated exploration, which brings about the exponentially grown exploration of the state space. To address this issue, we propose Self-Motivated Multi-Agent Exploration (SMMAE), which aims to achieve success in team tasks by adaptively finding a trade-off between self-exploration and team cooperation. In SMMAE, we train an independent exploration policy for each agent to maximize their own visited state space. Each agent learns an adjustable exploration probability based on the stability of the joint team policy. The experiments on highly cooperative tasks in StarCraft II micromanagement benchmark (SMAC) demonstrate that SMMAE can explore task-related states more efficiently, accomplish coordinated behaviours and boost the learning performance.

Han-Jia Ye, Qi-Le Zhou, Huai-Hong Yin et al.

Pre-training is prevalent in deep learning for vision and text data, leveraging knowledge from other datasets to enhance downstream tasks. However, for tabular data, the inherent heterogeneity in attribute and label spaces across datasets complicates the learning of shareable knowledge. We propose Tabular data Pre-Training via Meta-representation (TabPTM), aiming to pre-train a general tabular model over diverse datasets. The core idea is to embed data instances into a shared feature space, where each instance is represented by its distance to a fixed number of nearest neighbors and their labels. This ''meta-representation'' transforms heterogeneous tasks into homogeneous local prediction problems, enabling the model to infer labels (or scores for each label) based on neighborhood information. As a result, the pre-trained TabPTM can be applied directly to new datasets, regardless of their diverse attributes and labels, without further fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on 101 datasets confirm TabPTM's effectiveness in both classification and regression tasks, with and without fine-tuning.

Xin-Chun Li, Jin-Lin Tang, Shaoming Song et al.

Keyword spotting (KWS) aims to discriminate a specific wake-up word from other signals precisely and efficiently for different users. Recent works utilize various deep networks to train KWS models with all users' speech data centralized without considering data privacy. Federated KWS (FedKWS) could serve as a solution without directly sharing users' data. However, the small amount of data, different user habits, and various accents could lead to fatal problems, e.g., overfitting or weight divergence. Hence, we propose several strategies to encourage the model not to overfit user-specific information in FedKWS. Specifically, we first propose an adversarial learning strategy, which updates the downloaded global model against an overfitted local model and explicitly encourages the global model to capture user-invariant information. Furthermore, we propose an adaptive local training strategy, letting clients with more training data and more uniform class distributions undertake more local update steps. Equivalently, this strategy could weaken the negative impacts of those users whose data is less qualified. Our proposed FedKWS-UI could explicitly and implicitly learn user-invariant information in FedKWS. Abundant experimental results on federated Google Speech Commands verify the effectiveness of FedKWS-UI.

Han-Jia Ye, Yi Shi, De-Chuan Zhan

Rich semantics inside an image result in its ambiguous relationship with others, i.e., two images could be similar in one condition but dissimilar in another. Given triplets like "aircraft" is similar to "bird" than "train", Weakly Supervised Conditional Similarity Learning (WS-CSL) learns multiple embeddings to match semantic conditions without explicit condition labels such as "can fly". However, similarity relationships in a triplet are uncertain except providing a condition. For example, the previous comparison becomes invalid once the conditional label changes to "is vehicle". To this end, we introduce a novel evaluation criterion by predicting the comparison's correctness after assigning the learned embeddings to their optimal conditions, which measures how much WS-CSL could cover latent semantics as the supervised model. Furthermore, we propose the Distance Induced Semantic COndition VERification Network (DiscoverNet), which characterizes the instance-instance and triplets-condition relations in a "decompose-and-fuse" manner. To make the learned embeddings cover all semantics, DiscoverNet utilizes a set module or an additional regularizer over the correspondence between a triplet and a condition. DiscoverNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks like UT-Zappos-50k and Celeb-A w.r.t. different criteria.

Lu Han, Han-Jia Ye, De-Chuan Zhan

When there are unlabeled Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) data from other classes, Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods suffer from severe performance degradation and even get worse than merely training on labeled data. In this paper, we empirically analyze Pseudo-Labeling (PL) in class-mismatched SSL. PL is a simple and representative SSL method that transforms SSL problems into supervised learning by creating pseudo-labels for unlabeled data according to the model's prediction. We aim to answer two main questions: (1) How do OOD data influence PL? (2) What is the proper usage of OOD data with PL? First, we show that the major problem of PL is imbalanced pseudo-labels on OOD data. Second, we find that OOD data can help classify In-Distribution (ID) data given their OOD ground truth labels. Based on the findings, we propose to improve PL in class-mismatched SSL with two components -- Re-balanced Pseudo-Labeling (RPL) and Semantic Exploration Clustering (SEC). RPL re-balances pseudo-labels of high-confidence data, which simultaneously filters out OOD data and addresses the imbalance problem. SEC uses balanced clustering on low-confidence data to create pseudo-labels on extra classes, simulating the process of training with ground truth. Experiments show that our method achieves steady improvement over supervised baseline and state-of-the-art performance under all class mismatch ratios on different benchmarks.

Jia-Qi Yang, De-Chuan Zhan, Le Gan

Research has shown that deep networks tend to be overly optimistic about their predictions, leading to an underestimation of prediction errors. Due to the limited nature of data, existing studies have proposed various methods based on model prediction probabilities to bin the data and evaluate calibration error. We propose a more generalized definition of calibration error called Partitioned Calibration Error (PCE), revealing that the key difference among these calibration error metrics lies in how the data space is partitioned. We put forth an intuitive proposition that an accurate model should be calibrated across any partition, suggesting that the input space partitioning can extend beyond just the partitioning of prediction probabilities, and include partitions directly related to the input. Through semantic-related partitioning functions, we demonstrate that the relationship between model accuracy and calibration lies in the granularity of the partitioning function. This highlights the importance of partitioning criteria for training a calibrated and accurate model. To validate the aforementioned analysis, we propose a method that involves jointly learning a semantic aware grouping function based on deep model features and logits to partition the data space into subsets. Subsequently, a separate calibration function is learned for each subset. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves significant performance improvements across multiple datasets and network architectures, thus highlighting the importance of the partitioning function for calibration.

Bowen Zheng, Da-Wei Zhou, Han-Jia Ye et al.

Learning new classes without forgetting is crucial for real-world applications for a classification model. Vision Transformers (ViT) recently achieve remarkable performance in Class Incremental Learning (CIL). Previous works mainly focus on block design and model expansion for ViTs. However, in this paper, we find that when the ViT is incrementally trained, the attention layers gradually lose concentration on local features. We call this interesting phenomenon as \emph{Locality Degradation} in ViTs for CIL. Since the low-level local information is crucial to the transferability of the representation, it is beneficial to preserve the locality in attention layers. In this paper, we encourage the model to preserve more local information as the training procedure goes on and devise a Locality-Preserved Attention (LPA) layer to emphasize the importance of local features. Specifically, we incorporate the local information directly into the vanilla attention and control the initial gradients of the vanilla attention by weighting it with a small initial value. Extensive experiments show that the representations facilitated by LPA capture more low-level general information which is easier to transfer to follow-up tasks. The improved model gets consistently better performance on CIFAR100 and ImageNet100.

Lu Han, Han-Jia Ye, De-Chuan Zhan

Self-supervised learning aims to learn a embedding space where semantically similar samples are close. Contrastive learning methods pull views of samples together and push different samples away, which utilizes semantic invariance of augmentation but ignores the relationship between samples. To better exploit the power of augmentation, we observe that semantically similar samples are more likely to have similar augmented views. Therefore, we can take the augmented views as a special description of a sample. In this paper, we model such a description as the augmentation distribution and we call it augmentation feature. The similarity in augmentation feature reflects how much the views of two samples overlap and is related to their semantical similarity. Without computational burdens to explicitly estimate values of the augmentation feature, we propose Augmentation Component Analysis (ACA) with a contrastive-like loss to learn principal components and an on-the-fly projection loss to embed data. ACA equals an efficient dimension reduction by PCA and extracts low-dimensional embeddings, theoretically preserving the similarity of augmentation distribution between samples. Empirical results show our method can achieve competitive results against various traditional contrastive learning methods on different benchmarks.

Su Lu, Han-Jia Ye, De-Chuan Zhan

The outpouring of various pre-trained models empowers knowledge distillation by providing abundant teacher resources, but there lacks a developed mechanism to utilize these teachers adequately. With a massive model repository composed of teachers pre-trained on diverse tasks, we must surmount two obstacles when using knowledge distillation to learn a new task. First, given a fixed computing budget, it is not affordable to try each teacher and train the student repeatedly, making it necessary to seek out the most contributive teacher precisely and efficiently. Second, semantic gaps exist between the teachers and the target student since they are trained on different tasks. Thus, we need to extract knowledge from a general label space that may be different from the student's. Faced with these two challenges, we study a new setting named selective cross-task distillation that includes teacher assessment and generalized knowledge reuse. We bridge the teacher's label space and the student's label space through optimal transport. The transportation cost from the teacher's prediction to the student's prediction measures the relatedness between two tasks and acts as an objective for distillation. Our method reuses cross-task knowledge from a distinct label space and efficiently assesses teachers without enumerating the model repository. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Zhen-Hao Xie, Yan Wang, Hao Sun et al.

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) requires a learning system to learn new classes while retaining previously learned knowledge. However, in real-world scenarios such as autonomous driving, a system trained on urban roads in sunny weather may later need to operate in rural or highway environments with different traffic patterns and weather conditions. This requires the model not only to overcome catastrophic forgetting, but also to effectively handle domain shifts. In this paper, we propose CrOss-sample Relational Fusion (CORF), a unified framework to address domain shift and catastrophic forgetting simultaneously. To enhance generalizability, we perform selective refinement of training samples by leveraging spatial contribution maps to highlight semantically informative regions. Furthermore, we incorporate predictive confidence to adaptively weigh samples, thereby facilitating the learning of domain-agnostic representations. To alleviate forgetting, we propose a cascaded distillation framework that captures cross-sample relational dependencies across multiple feature hierarchies, enabling multi-grained knowledge transfer from previous tasks. CORF can be seamlessly integrated into existing CIL algorithms to enhance their generalizability, achieving competitive performance across various benchmark datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/LAMDA-CL/TMM26-CORF .

Da-Wei Zhou, Hai-Long Sun, Jingyi Ning et al.

Nowadays, real-world applications often face streaming data, which requires the learning system to absorb new knowledge as data evolves. Continual Learning (CL) aims to achieve this goal and meanwhile overcome the catastrophic forgetting of former knowledge when learning new ones. Typical CL methods build the model from scratch to grow with incoming data. However, the advent of the pre-trained model (PTM) era has sparked immense research interest, particularly in leveraging PTMs' robust representational capabilities. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the latest advancements in PTM-based CL. We categorize existing methodologies into three distinct groups, providing a comparative analysis of their similarities, differences, and respective advantages and disadvantages. Additionally, we offer an empirical study contrasting various state-of-the-art methods to highlight concerns regarding fairness in comparisons. The source code to reproduce these evaluations is available at: https://github.com/sun-hailong/LAMDA-PILOT

Da-Wei Zhou, Hai-Long Sun, Han-Jia Ye et al.

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) requires a learning system to continually learn new classes without forgetting. Despite the strong performance of Pre-Trained Models (PTMs) in CIL, a critical issue persists: learning new classes often results in the overwriting of old ones. Excessive modification of the network causes forgetting, while minimal adjustments lead to an inadequate fit for new classes. As a result, it is desired to figure out a way of efficient model updating without harming former knowledge. In this paper, we propose ExpAndable Subspace Ensemble (EASE) for PTM-based CIL. To enable model updating without conflict, we train a distinct lightweight adapter module for each new task, aiming to create task-specific subspaces. These adapters span a high-dimensional feature space, enabling joint decision-making across multiple subspaces. As data evolves, the expanding subspaces render the old class classifiers incompatible with new-stage spaces. Correspondingly, we design a semantic-guided prototype complement strategy that synthesizes old classes' new features without using any old class instance. Extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets verify EASE's state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at: https://github.com/sun-hailong/CVPR24-Ease

Yi-Kai Zhang, Zhiyuan Yao, Hongyan Hao et al.

Policy gradient methods rely on a baseline to measure the relative advantage of an action, ensuring the model reinforces behaviors that outperform its current average capability. In the training of Large Language Models (LLMs) using Actor-Critic methods (e.g., PPO), this baseline is typically estimated by a Value Model (Critic) often as large as the policy model itself. However, as the policy continuously evolves, the value model requires expensive, synchronous incremental training to accurately track the shifting capabilities of the policy. To avoid this overhead, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) eliminates the coupled value model by using the average reward of a group of rollouts as the baseline; yet, this approach necessitates extensive sampling to maintain estimation stability. In this paper, we propose $V_0$, a Generalist Value Model capable of estimating the expected performance of any model on unseen prompts without requiring parameter updates. We reframe value estimation by treating the policy's dynamic capability as an explicit context input; specifically, we leverage a history of instruction-performance pairs to dynamically profile the model, departing from the traditional paradigm that relies on parameter fitting to perceive capability shifts. Focusing on value estimation at State Zero (i.e., the initial prompt, hence $V_0$), our model serves as a critical resource scheduler. During GRPO training, $V_0$ predicts success rates prior to rollout, allowing for efficient sampling budget allocation; during deployment, it functions as a router, dispatching instructions to the most cost-effective and suitable model. Empirical results demonstrate that $V_0$ significantly outperforms heuristic budget allocation and achieves a Pareto-optimal trade-off between performance and cost in LLM routing tasks.

Zhen-Hao Xie, Jun-Tao Tang, Yu-Cheng Shi et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve strong performance through instruction tuning, but real-world deployment requires them to continually expand their capabilities, making Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning (MCIT) essential. Recent methods leverage sparse expert routing to promote task specialization, but we find that the expert routing process suffers from drift as the data distribution evolves. For example, a grounding query that previously activated localization experts may instead be routed to irrelevant experts after learning OCR tasks. Meanwhile, the grounding-related experts can be overwritten by new tasks and lose their original functionality. Such failure reflects two problems: router drift, where expert selection becomes inconsistent over time, and expert drift, where shared experts are overwritten across tasks. Therefore, we propose StAbilized Mixture-of-Experts (SAME) for MCIT. To address router drift, SAME stabilizes expert selection by decomposing routing dynamics into orthogonal subspaces and updating only task-relevant directions. To mitigate expert drift, we regulate expert updates via curvature-aware scaling using historical input covariance in a rehearsal-free manner. SAME also introduces adaptive expert activation to freeze selected experts during training, reducing redundant computation and cross-task interference. Extensive experiments demonstrate its SOTA performance.

Lan Li, Tao Hu, Da-Wei Zhou et al.

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to continually learn new categories without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. Vision-language models such as CLIP offer strong transferable representations via multi-modal supervision, making them promising for CIL. However, applying CLIP to CIL poses two major challenges: (1) adapting to downstream tasks often requires additional learnable modules, increasing model complexity and susceptibility to forgetting; and (2) while multi-modal representations offer complementary strengths, existing methods have yet to fully realize their potential in effectively integrating visual and textual modalities. To address these issues, we propose BOFA (Bridge-layer Orthogonal Fusion for Adaptation), a novel framework for CIL. BOFA confines all model adaptation exclusively to CLIP's existing cross-modal bridge-layer, thereby adding no extra parameters or inference cost. To prevent forgetting within this layer, it leverages Orthogonal Low-Rank Fusion, a mechanism that constrains parameter updates to a low-rank ``safe subspace" mathematically constructed to be orthogonal to past task features. This ensures stable knowledge accumulation without data replay. Furthermore, BOFA employs a cross-modal hybrid prototype that synergizes stable textual prototypes with visual counterparts derived from our stably adapted bridge-layer, enhancing classification performance. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks show that BOFA achieves superior accuracy and efficiency compared to existing methods.

Qi-Wei Wang, Da-Wei Zhou, Yi-Kai Zhang et al.

Real-world scenarios are usually accompanied by continuously appearing classes with scare labeled samples, which require the machine learning model to incrementally learn new classes and maintain the knowledge of base classes. In this Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) scenario, existing methods either introduce extra learnable components or rely on a frozen feature extractor to mitigate catastrophic forgetting and overfitting problems. However, we find a tendency for existing methods to misclassify the samples of new classes into base classes, which leads to the poor performance of new classes. In other words, the strong discriminability of base classes distracts the classification of new classes. To figure out this intriguing phenomenon, we observe that although the feature extractor is only trained on base classes, it can surprisingly represent the semantic similarity between the base and unseen new classes. Building upon these analyses, we propose a simple yet effective Training-frEE calibratioN (TEEN) strategy to enhance the discriminability of new classes by fusing the new prototypes (i.e., mean features of a class) with weighted base prototypes. In addition to standard benchmarks in FSCIL, TEEN demonstrates remarkable performance and consistent improvements over baseline methods in the few-shot learning scenario. Code is available at: https://github.com/wangkiw/TEEN

Lu Han, Xu-Yang Chen, Han-Jia Ye et al.

Multivariate time series forecasting plays a crucial role in various fields such as finance, traffic management, energy, and healthcare. Recent studies have highlighted the advantages of channel independence to resist distribution drift but neglect channel correlations, limiting further enhancements. Several methods utilize mechanisms like attention or mixer to address this by capturing channel correlations, but they either introduce excessive complexity or rely too heavily on the correlation to achieve satisfactory results under distribution drifts, particularly with a large number of channels. Addressing this gap, this paper presents an efficient MLP-based model, the Series-cOre Fused Time Series forecaster (SOFTS), which incorporates a novel STar Aggregate-Redistribute (STAR) module. Unlike traditional approaches that manage channel interactions through distributed structures, \textit{e.g.}, attention, STAR employs a centralized strategy to improve efficiency and reduce reliance on the quality of each channel. It aggregates all series to form a global core representation, which is then dispatched and fused with individual series representations to facilitate channel interactions effectively.SOFTS achieves superior performance over existing state-of-the-art methods with only linear complexity. The broad applicability of the STAR module across different forecasting models is also demonstrated empirically. For further research and development, we have made our code publicly available at https://github.com/Secilia-Cxy/SOFTS.

Yizhi Zhou, Jia-Qi Yang, De-Chuan Zhan et al.

Music Recommendation Systems (MRSs) are a cornerstone of modern streaming platforms. Existing recommendation models, spanning both recall and ranking stages, predominantly rely on collaborative filtering, which fails to exploit the intrinsic characteristics of audio and consequently leads to suboptimal performance, particularly in cold-start scenarios. However, existing music recommendation datasets often lack rich multimodal information, such as raw audio signals and descriptive textual metadata. Moreover, current recommender system evaluation frameworks remain inadequate, as they neither fully leverage multimodal information nor support a diverse range of algorithms, especially multimodal methods. To address these limitations, we propose TASTE, a comprehensive dataset and benchmarking framework designed to highlight the role of multimodal information in music recommendation. Our dataset integrates both audio and textual modalities. By leveraging recent large-scale self-supervised music encoders, we demonstrate the substantial value of the extracted audio representations across recommendation tasks, including candidate recall and CTR. In addition, we introduce the \textbf{MuQ-token} method, which enables more efficient integration of multi-layer audio features. This method consistently outperforms other feature integration techniques across various settings. Overall, our results not only validate the effectiveness of content-driven approaches but also provide a highly effective and reusable multimodal foundation for future research. Code is available at https://github.com/zreach/TASTE

Xunlan Zhou, Xuanlin Chen, Shaowei Zhang et al.

Designing dense reward functions is pivotal for efficient robotic Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, most dense rewards rely on manual engineering, which fundamentally limits the scalability and automation of reinforcement learning. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer a promising path to reward design, naive VLM rewards often misalign with task progress, struggle with spatial grounding, and show limited understanding of task semantics. To address these issues, we propose MARVL-Multi-stAge guidance for Robotic manipulation via Vision-Language models. MARVL fine-tunes a VLM for spatial and semantic consistency and decomposes tasks into multi-stage subtasks with task direction projection for trajectory sensitivity. Empirically, MARVL significantly outperforms existing VLM-reward methods on the Meta-World benchmark, demonstrating superior sample efficiency and robustness on sparse-reward manipulation tasks.

Chao Yi, Lu Ren, De-Chuan Zhan et al.

CLIP showcases exceptional cross-modal matching capabilities due to its training on image-text contrastive learning tasks. However, without specific optimization for unimodal scenarios, its performance in single-modality feature extraction might be suboptimal. Despite this, some studies have directly used CLIP's image encoder for tasks like few-shot classification, introducing a misalignment between its pre-training objectives and feature extraction methods. This inconsistency can diminish the quality of the image's feature representation, adversely affecting CLIP's effectiveness in target tasks. In this paper, we view text features as precise neighbors of image features in CLIP's space and present a novel CrOss-moDal nEighbor Representation(CODER) based on the distance structure between images and their neighbor texts. This feature extraction method aligns better with CLIP's pre-training objectives, thereby fully leveraging CLIP's robust cross-modal capabilities. The key to construct a high-quality CODER lies in how to create a vast amount of high-quality and diverse texts to match with images. We introduce the Auto Text Generator(ATG) to automatically generate the required texts in a data-free and training-free manner. We apply CODER to CLIP's zero-shot and few-shot image classification tasks. Experiment results across various datasets and models confirm CODER's effectiveness. Code is available at:https://github.com/YCaigogogo/CVPR24-CODER.

Jia-Qi Yang, Chenglei Dai, Dan OU et al.

With the advancement of multimedia internet, the impact of visual characteristics on the decision of users to click or not within the online retail industry is increasingly significant. Thus, incorporating visual features is a promising direction for further performance improvements in click-through rate (CTR). However, experiments on our production system revealed that simply injecting the image embeddings trained with established pre-training methods only has marginal improvements. We believe that the main advantage of existing image feature pre-training methods lies in their effectiveness for cross-modal predictions. However, this differs significantly from the task of CTR prediction in recommendation systems. In recommendation systems, other modalities of information (such as text) can be directly used as features in downstream models. Even if the performance of cross-modal prediction tasks is excellent, it is challenging to provide significant information gain for the downstream models. We argue that a visual feature pre-training method tailored for recommendation is necessary for further improvements beyond existing modality features. To this end, we propose an effective user intention reconstruction module to mine visual features related to user interests from behavior histories, which constructs a many-to-one correspondence. We further propose a contrastive training method to learn the user intentions and prevent the collapse of embedding vectors. We conduct extensive experimental evaluations on public datasets and our production system to verify that our method can learn users' visual interests. Our method achieves $0.46\%$ improvement in offline AUC and $0.88\%$ improvement in Taobao GMV (Cross Merchandise Volume) with p-value$<$0.01.

Hai-Long Sun, Da-Wei Zhou, Hanbin Zhao et al.

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) requires models to continually acquire knowledge of new classes without forgetting old ones. Despite Pre-trained Models (PTMs) have shown excellent performance in CIL, catastrophic forgetting still occurs as the model learns new concepts. Existing work seeks to utilize lightweight components to adjust the PTM, while the forgetting phenomenon still comes from {\em parameter and retrieval} levels. Specifically, iterative updates of the model result in parameter drift, while mistakenly retrieving irrelevant modules leads to the mismatch during inference. To this end, we propose MOdel Surgery (MOS) to rescue the model from forgetting previous knowledge. By training task-specific adapters, we continually adjust the PTM to downstream tasks. To mitigate parameter-level forgetting, we present an adapter merging approach to learn task-specific adapters, which aims to bridge the gap between different components while reserve task-specific information. Besides, to address retrieval-level forgetting, we introduce a training-free self-refined adapter retrieval mechanism during inference, which leverages the model's inherent ability for better adapter retrieval. By jointly rectifying the model with those steps, MOS can robustly resist catastrophic forgetting in the learning process. Extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets validate MOS's state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at: https://github.com/sun-hailong/AAAI25-MOS

Chao Yi, Yu-Hang He, De-Chuan Zhan et al.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) excel in zero-shot image classification by pairing images with textual category names. The expanding variety of Pre-Trained VLMs enhances the likelihood of identifying a suitable VLM for specific tasks. To better reuse the VLM resource and fully leverage its potential on different zero-shot image classification tasks, a promising strategy is selecting appropriate Pre-Trained VLMs from the VLM Zoo, relying solely on the text data of the target dataset without access to the dataset's images. In this paper, we analyze two inherent challenges in assessing the ability of a VLM in this Language-Only VLM selection: the "Modality Gap" - the disparity in VLM's embeddings across two different modalities, making text a less reliable substitute for images; and the "Capability Gap" - the discrepancy between the VLM's overall ranking and its ranking for target dataset, hindering direct prediction of a model's dataset-specific performance from its general performance. We propose VLM Selection With gAp Bridging (SWAB) to mitigate the negative impact of two gaps. SWAB first adopts optimal transport to capture the relevance between open-source and target datasets with a transportation matrix. It then uses this matrix to transfer useful statistics of VLMs from open-source datasets to the target dataset for bridging two gaps. By bridging two gaps to obtain better substitutes for test images, SWAB can accurately predict the performance ranking of different VLMs on the target task without the need for the dataset's images. Experiments across various VLMs and image classification datasets validate SWAB's effectiveness.

Yi-Kai Zhang, De-Chuan Zhan, Han-Jia Ye

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated human-like instruction-following abilities, particularly those exceeding 100 billion parameters. The combined capability of some smaller, resource-friendly LLMs can address most of the instructions that larger LLMs excel at. In this work, we explore how to route the best-performing LLM for each instruction to achieve better overall performance. We develop a new paradigm, constructing capability instructions with model capability representation, user instruction, and performance inquiry prompts to assess the performance. To learn from capability instructions, we introduce a new end-to-end framework called Model Selection with Aptitude Test (Model-SAT), which generates positive and negative samples based on what different models perform well or struggle with. Model-SAT uses a model capability encoder that extends its model representation to a lightweight LLM. Our experiments show that Model-SAT understands the performance dimensions of candidate models and provides the probabilities of their capability to handle various instructions. Additionally, during deployment, a new model can quickly infer its aptitude test results across 50 tasks, each with 20 shots. Model-SAT performs state-of-the-art model routing without candidate inference and in real-world new model-released scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/Now-Join-Us/CIT-LLM-Routing

Yi-Kai Zhang, Yueqing Sun, Hongyan Hao et al.

In Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), constructing a robust advantage baseline is critical for policy gradients, effectively guiding the policy model to reinforce desired behaviors. Recent research has introduced Generalist Value Models (such as $V_0$), which achieve pre-trained value estimation by explicitly encoding model capabilities in-context, eliminating the need to synchronously update the value model alongside the policy model. In this paper, we propose $V_{0.5}$, which adaptively fuses the baseline predicted by such value model (acting as a prior) with the empirical mean derived from sparse rollouts. This constructs a robust baseline that balances computational efficiency with extremely low variance. Specifically, we introduce a real-time statistical testing and dynamic budget allocation. This balances the high variance caused by sparse sampling against the systematic bias (or hallucinations) inherent in the value model's prior. By constructing a hypothesis test to evaluate the prior's reliability in real-time, the system dynamically allocates additional rollout budget on demand. This mechanism minimizes the baseline estimator's Mean Squared Error (MSE), guaranteeing stable policy gradients, even under extreme sparsity with a group size of 4. Extensive evaluations across six mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that $V_{0.5}$ significantly outperforms GRPO and DAPO, achieving faster convergence and over some 10% performance improvement.

Bowen Zheng, Da-Wei Zhou, Han-Jia Ye et al.

The ability to learn new concepts while preserve the learned knowledge is desirable for learning systems in Class-Incremental Learning (CIL). Recently, feature expansion of the model become a prevalent solution for CIL, where the old features are fixed during the training of the new task while new features are expanded for the new tasks. However, such task-specific features learned from the new task may collide with the old features, leading to misclassification between tasks. Therefore, the expanded model is often encouraged to capture diverse features from the new task, aiming to avoid such collision. However, the existing solution is largely restricted to the samples from the current task, because of the poor accessibility to previous samples. To promote the learning and transferring of diverse features across tasks, we propose a framework called Task-Agnostic Guided Feature Expansion (TagFex). Firstly, it captures task-agnostic features continually with a separate model, providing extra task-agnostic features for subsequent tasks. Secondly, to obtain useful features from the task-agnostic model for the current task, it aggregates the task-agnostic features with the task-specific feature using a merge attention. Then the aggregated feature is transferred back into the task-specific feature for inference, helping the task-specific model capture diverse features. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness and superiority of TagFex on various CIL settings. Code is available at https://github.com/bwnzheng/TagFex_CVPR2025.

Yichu Xu, Xin-Chun Li, Le Gan et al.

Merging models becomes a fundamental procedure in some applications that consider model efficiency and robustness. The training randomness or Non-I.I.D. data poses a huge challenge for averaging-based model fusion. Previous research efforts focus on element-wise regularization or neural permutations to enhance model averaging while overlooking weight scope variations among models, which can significantly affect merging effectiveness. In this paper, we reveal variations in weight scope under different training conditions, shedding light on its influence on model merging. Fortunately, the parameters in each layer basically follow the Gaussian distribution, which inspires a novel and simple regularization approach named Weight Scope Alignment (WSA). It contains two key components: 1) leveraging a target weight scope to guide the model training process for ensuring weight scope matching in the subsequent model merging. 2) fusing the weight scope of two or more models into a unified one for multi-stage model fusion. We extend the WSA regularization to two different scenarios, including Mode Connectivity and Federated Learning. Abundant experimental studies validate the effectiveness of our approach.

Da-Wei Zhou, Kai-Wen Li, Jingyi Ning et al.

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) enables learning systems to continuously adapt to evolving data streams. With the advancement of pre-training, leveraging pre-trained vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) offers a promising starting point for CIL. However, CLIP makes decisions by matching visual embeddings to class names, overlooking the rich contextual information conveyed through language. For instance, the concept of ``cat'' can be decomposed into features like tail, fur, and face for recognition. Besides, since the model is continually updated, these detailed features are overwritten in CIL, requiring external knowledge for compensation. In this paper, we introduce ExterNal knowledGe INjEction (ENGINE) for CLIP-based CIL. To enhance knowledge transfer from outside the dataset, we propose a dual-branch injection tuning framework that encodes informative knowledge from both visual and textual modalities. The visual branch is enhanced with data augmentation to enrich the visual features, while the textual branch leverages GPT-4 to rewrite discriminative descriptors. In addition to this on-the-fly knowledge injection, we also implement post-tuning knowledge by re-ranking the prediction results during inference. With the injected knowledge, the model can better capture informative features for downstream tasks as data evolves. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of ENGINE. Code is available at: https://github.com/LAMDA-CL/ICCV25-ENGINE

Lu Han, Yu Liu, Qiwen Deng et al.

Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) have achieved remarkable success through large-scale pretraining. However, their design primarily targets real-valued series, limiting their ability to handle general forecasting tasks involving diverse and often heterogeneous covariates--such as categorical variables and multimodal data (e.g., images, text)--which are typically task-specific and difficult to leverage during pretraining. To address this gap, we propose Unified Covariate Adaptation (UniCA), a framework to bridge TSFMs with general covariate-aware forecasting. UniCA first performs covariate homogenization to transform heterogeneous covariates into high-level homogeneous series representations and then fuses them via a unified attention-based fusion mechanism. UniCA is compatible and universal for adaptation with both homogeneous and heterogeneous covariates, incorporating extra covariate information while preserving the generalization ability of TSFMs.Extensive experiments on multiple unimodal and multimodal covariate-aware forecasting benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of UniCA, highlighting the promise of covariate-aware TSFM adaptation in real-world forecasting scenarios. Codes are released on https://github.com/hanlu-nju/UniCA.