Qiang Wang

Shuhan Qi, Shuhao Zhang, Qiang Wang et al.

Value-decomposition methods, which reduce the difficulty of a multi-agent system by decomposing the joint state-action space into local observation-action spaces, have become popular in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). However, value-decomposition methods still have the problems of tremendous sample consumption for training and lack of active exploration. In this paper, we propose a scalable value-decomposition exploration (SVDE) method, which includes a scalable training mechanism, intrinsic reward design, and explorative experience replay. The scalable training mechanism asynchronously decouples strategy learning with environmental interaction, so as to accelerate sample generation in a MapReduce manner. For the problem of lack of exploration, an intrinsic reward design and explorative experience replay are proposed, so as to enhance exploration to produce diverse samples and filter non-novel samples, respectively. Empirically, our method achieves the best performance on almost all maps compared to other popular algorithms in a set of StarCraft II micromanagement games. A data-efficiency experiment also shows the acceleration of SVDE for sample collection and policy convergence, and we demonstrate the effectiveness of factors in SVDE through a set of ablation experiments.

Guopeng Li, Qiang Wang, Ke Yan et al.

Most knowledge distillation (KD) methodologies predominantly focus on teacher-student pairs with similar architectures, such as both being convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, the potential and flexibility of KD can be greatly improved by expanding it to novel Cross-Architecture KD (CAKD), where the knowledge of homogeneous and heterogeneous teachers can be transferred flexibly to a given student. The primary challenge in CAKD lies in the substantial feature gaps between heterogeneous models, originating from the distinction of their inherent inductive biases and module functions. To this end, we introduce an assistant model as a bridge to facilitate smooth feature knowledge transfer between heterogeneous teachers and students. More importantly, within our proposed design principle, the assistant model combines the advantages of cross-architecture inductive biases and module functions by merging convolution and attention modules derived from both student and teacher module functions. Furthermore, we observe that heterogeneous features exhibit diverse spatial distributions in CAKD, hindering the effectiveness of conventional pixel-wise mean squared error (MSE) loss. Therefore, we leverage a spatial-agnostic InfoNCE loss to align features after spatial smoothing, thereby improving the feature alignments in CAKD. Our proposed method is evaluated across some homogeneous model pairs and arbitrary heterogeneous combinations of CNNs, ViTs, and MLPs, achieving state-of-the-art performance for distilled models with a maximum gain of 11.47% on CIFAR-100 and 3.67% on ImageNet-1K. Our code and models will be released.

Yi Liu, Xiao Xu, Zeyu Xu et al.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable breakthroughs in recent years, enabling a diverse array of applications in everyday life. However, the substantial computational and storage demands of VLMs pose significant challenges for their efficient deployment on mobile devices, which represent the most ubiquitous and accessible computing platforms today. In this work, we introduce MagicVL-2B, a novel VLM meticulously optimized for flagship smartphones. MagicVL-2B leverages a lightweight visual encoder with fewer than 100M parameters and features a redesigned dynamic resolution scheme that adaptively generates image tokens without excessive modification of image dimensions. To further enhance the performance of this compact encoder within VLMs, we propose a multimodal curriculum learning strategy that incrementally increases task difficulty and data information density throughout training. This approach substantially improves the model's performance across a variety of sub-tasks. Extensive evaluations on standard VLM benchmarks demonstrate that MagicVL-2B matches the accuracy of current state-of-the-art models while reducing on-device power consumption by 41.1%. These results establish MagicVL-2B as a practical and robust solution for real-world mobile vision-language applications, enabling advanced multimodal intelligence to run directly on smartphones.

Qiang Wang, Susan Fernandes, Gareth O. S. Williams et al.

Autofluorescence lifetime images reveal unique characteristics of endogenous fluorescence in biological samples. Comprehensive understanding and clinical diagnosis rely on co-registration with the gold standard, histology images, which is extremely challenging due to the difference of both images. Here, we show an unsupervised image-to-image translation network that significantly improves the success of the co-registration using a conventional optimisation-based regression network, applicable to autofluorescence lifetime images at different emission wavelengths. A preliminary blind comparison by experienced researchers shows the superiority of our method on co-registration. The results also indicate that the approach is applicable to various image formats, like fluorescence intensity images. With the registration, stitching outcomes illustrate the distinct differences of the spectral lifetime across an unstained tissue, enabling macro-level rapid visual identification of lung cancer and cellular-level characterisation of cell variants and common types. The approach could be effortlessly extended to lifetime images beyond this range and other staining technologies.