Ke Lin

Yuanyang Yin, Yaqi Zhao, Yajie Zhang et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities by integrating visual and textual inputs, yet modality alignment remains one of the most challenging aspects. Current MLLMs typically rely on simple adapter architectures and pretraining approaches to bridge vision encoders with large language models (LLM), guided by image-level supervision. We identify this paradigm often leads to suboptimal alignment between modalities, significantly constraining the LLM's ability to properly interpret and reason with visual features particularly for smaller language models. This limitation degrades overall performance-particularly for smaller language models where capacity constraints are more pronounced and adaptation capabilities are limited. To address this fundamental limitation, we propose Supervised Embedding Alignment (SEA), a token-level supervision alignment method that enables more precise visual-text alignment during pretraining. SEA introduces minimal computational overhead while preserving language capabilities and substantially improving cross-modal understanding. Our comprehensive analyses reveal critical insights into the adapter's role in multimodal integration, and extensive experiments demonstrate that SEA consistently improves performance across various model sizes, with smaller models benefiting the most (average performance gain of 7.61% for Gemma-2B). This work establishes a foundation for developing more effective alignment strategies for future multimodal systems.

Ke Lin, Yong A, Zhuoxin Gan et al.

Weight sharing based and predictor based methods are two major types of fast neural architecture search methods. In this paper, we propose to jointly use weight sharing and predictor in a unified framework. First, we construct a SuperNet in a weight-sharing way and probabilisticly sample architectures from the SuperNet. To increase the correctness of the evaluation of architectures, besides direct evaluation using the inherited weights, we further apply a few-shot predictor to assess the architecture on the other hand. The final evaluation of the architecture is the combination of direct evaluation, the prediction from the predictor and the cost of the architecture. We regard the evaluation as a reward and apply a self-critical policy gradient approach to update the architecture probabilities. To further reduce the side effects of weight sharing, we propose a weakly weight sharing method by introducing another HyperNet. We conduct experiments on datasets including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet under NATS-Bench, DARTS and MobileNet search space. The proposed WPNAS method achieves state-of-the-art performance on these datasets.

Ke Lin, Yasir Glani, Ping Luo

Secure multi-party computation (MPC) facilitates privacy-preserving computation between multiple parties without leaking private information. While most secure deep learning techniques utilize MPC operations to achieve feasible privacy-preserving machine learning on downstream tasks, the overhead of the computation and communication still hampers their practical application. This work proposes a low-latency secret-sharing-based MPC design that reduces unnecessary communication rounds during the execution of MPC protocols. We also present a method for improving the computation of commonly used nonlinear functions in deep learning by integrating multivariate multiplication and coalescing different packets into one to maximize network utilization. Our experimental results indicate that our method is effective in a variety of settings, with a speedup in communication latency of $10\sim20\%$.

Yiyang Luo, Ke Lin, Chao Gu et al.

The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) in generating content raises concerns about text copyright. Watermarking methods, particularly logit-based approaches, embed imperceptible identifiers into text to address these challenges. However, the widespread usage of watermarking across diverse LLMs has led to an inevitable issue known as watermark collision during common tasks, such as paraphrasing or translation. In this paper, we introduce watermark collision as a novel and general philosophy for watermark attacks, aimed at enhancing attack performance on top of any other attacking methods. We also provide a comprehensive demonstration that watermark collision poses a threat to all logit-based watermark algorithms, impacting not only specific attack scenarios but also downstream applications.

Ke Lin, Zhuoxin Gan, Liwei Wang

This report describes our model for VATEX Captioning Challenge 2020. First, to gather information from multiple domains, we extract motion, appearance, semantic and audio features. Then we design a feature attention module to attend on different feature when decoding. We apply two types of decoders, top-down and X-LAN and ensemble these models to get the final result. The proposed method outperforms official baseline with a significant gap. We achieve 76.0 CIDEr and 50.0 CIDEr on English and Chinese private test set. We rank 2nd on both English and Chinese private test leaderboard.