Multi-Agent Continuous Control with Generative Flow NetworksShuang Luo, Yinchuan Li, Shunyu Liu et al.
Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) aim to generate diverse trajectories from a distribution in which the final states of the trajectories are proportional to the reward, serving as a powerful alternative to reinforcement learning for exploratory control tasks. However, the individual-flow matching constraint in GFlowNets limits their applications for multi-agent systems, especially continuous joint-control problems. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Agent generative Continuous Flow Networks (MACFN) method to enable multiple agents to perform cooperative exploration for various compositional continuous objects. Technically, MACFN trains decentralized individual-flow-based policies in a centralized global-flow-based matching fashion. During centralized training, MACFN introduces a continuous flow decomposition network to deduce the flow contributions of each agent in the presence of only global rewards. Then agents can deliver actions solely based on their assigned local flow in a decentralized way, forming a joint policy distribution proportional to the rewards. To guarantee the expressiveness of continuous flow decomposition, we theoretically derive a consistency condition on the decomposition network. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method yields results superior to the state-of-the-art counterparts and better exploration capability. Our code is available at https://github.com/isluoshuang/MACFN.
19.9CLFeb 19, 2024
Model Tailor: Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Multi-modal Large Language ModelsDidi Zhu, Zhongyi Sun, Zexi Li et al.
Catastrophic forgetting emerges as a critical challenge when fine-tuning multi-modal large language models (MLLMs), where improving performance on unseen tasks often leads to a significant performance drop on the original tasks. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of catastrophic forgetting in MLLMs and introduces a post-training adjustment method called Model Tailor. Our method primarily preserves the pre-trained parameters while replacing a small number ($\leq$ 10\%) of fine-tuned parameters, maintaining $\sim$ 99\% effectiveness on original tasks versus pre-training, and achieving $\sim$ 97\% on new tasks compared to standard fine-tuning. Specifically, we derive a sparse mask to identify the "model patch", based on a fusion strategy that integrates salience and sensitivity analysis. Subsequently, a compensation mechanism is introduced to "decorate the patch", enhancing the model's performance on both target and original tasks. Additionally, our method is adaptable to multi-task scenarios. Through extensive experiments on InstructBLIP and LLaVA-1.5 in both image captioning and visual question answering tasks, our approach demonstrates significant task adaptability while preserving inherent pre-trained capabilities.
From Chaos to Clarity: Time Series Anomaly Detection in Astronomical ObservationsXinli Hao, Yile Chen, Chen Yang et al.
With the development of astronomical facilities, large-scale time series data observed by these facilities is being collected. Analyzing anomalies in these astronomical observations is crucial for uncovering potential celestial events and physical phenomena, thus advancing the scientific research process. However, existing time series anomaly detection methods fall short in tackling the unique characteristics of astronomical observations where each star is inherently independent but interfered by random concurrent noise, resulting in a high rate of false alarms. To overcome the challenges, we propose AERO, a novel two-stage framework tailored for unsupervised anomaly detection in astronomical observations. In the first stage, we employ a Transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture to learn the normal temporal patterns on each variate (i.e., star) in alignment with the characteristic of variate independence. In the second stage, we enhance the graph neural network with a window-wise graph structure learning to tackle the occurrence of concurrent noise characterized by spatial and temporal randomness. In this way, AERO is not only capable of distinguishing normal temporal patterns from potential anomalies but also effectively differentiating concurrent noise, thus decreasing the number of false alarms. We conducted extensive experiments on three synthetic datasets and three real-world datasets. The results demonstrate that AERO outperforms the compared baselines. Notably, compared to the state-of-the-art model, AERO improves the F1-score by up to 8.76% and 2.63% on synthetic and real-world datasets respectively.