Hieu Le

Haoyu Wu, Jingyi Xu, Hieu Le et al.

Token merging can effectively accelerate various vision systems by processing groups of similar tokens only once and sharing the results across them. However, existing token grouping methods are often ad hoc and random, disregarding the actual content of the samples. We show that preserving high-information tokens during merging - those essential for semantic fidelity and structural details - significantly improves sample quality, producing finer details and more coherent, realistic generations. Despite being simple and intuitive, this approach remains underexplored. To do so, we propose an importance-based token merging method that prioritizes the most critical tokens in computational resource allocation, leveraging readily available importance scores, such as those from classifier-free guidance in diffusion models. Experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms baseline methods across multiple applications, including text-to-image synthesis, multi-view image generation, and video generation with various model architectures such as Stable Diffusion, Zero123++, AnimateDiff, or PixArt-$α$.

An Wang, Ao Liu, Hieu Hanh Le et al.

Entity-relation extraction aims to jointly solve named entity recognition (NER) and relation extraction (RE). Recent approaches use either one-way sequential information propagation in a pipeline manner or two-way implicit interaction with a shared encoder. However, they still suffer from poor information interaction due to the gap between the different task forms of NER and RE, raising a controversial question whether RE is really beneficial to NER. Motivated by this, we propose a novel and unified cascade framework that combines the advantages of both sequential information propagation and implicit interaction. Meanwhile, it eliminates the gap between the two tasks by reformulating entity-relation extraction as unified span-extraction tasks. Specifically, we propose a selection recurrent network as a shared encoder to encode task-specific independent and shared representations and design two sequential information propagation strategies to realize the sequential information flow between NER and RE. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approaches can achieve state-of-the-art results on two common benchmarks, ACE05 and SciERC, and effectively model the multi-task interaction, which realizes significant mutual benefits of NER and RE.