Kai Li

Kai Li, Yi Luo

Audio restoration has become increasingly significant in modern society, not only due to the demand for high-quality auditory experiences enabled by advanced playback devices, but also because the growing capabilities of generative audio models necessitate high-fidelity audio. Typically, audio restoration is defined as a task of predicting undistorted audio from damaged input, often trained using a GAN framework to balance perception and distortion. Since audio degradation is primarily concentrated in mid- and high-frequency ranges, especially due to codecs, a key challenge lies in designing a generator capable of preserving low-frequency information while accurately reconstructing high-quality mid- and high-frequency content. Inspired by recent advancements in high-sample-rate music separation, speech enhancement, and audio codec models, we propose Apollo, a generative model designed for high-sample-rate audio restoration. Apollo employs an explicit frequency band split module to model the relationships between different frequency bands, allowing for more coherent and higher-quality restored audio. Evaluated on the MUSDB18-HQ and MoisesDB datasets, Apollo consistently outperforms existing SR-GAN models across various bit rates and music genres, particularly excelling in complex scenarios involving mixtures of multiple instruments and vocals. Apollo significantly improves music restoration quality while maintaining computational efficiency. The source code for Apollo is publicly available at https://github.com/JusperLee/Apollo.

James Liu, Guangxuan Xiao, Kai Li et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically trained in two phases: pre-training on large internet-scale datasets, and fine-tuning for downstream tasks. Given the higher computational demand of pre-training, it's intuitive to assume that fine-tuning adds less new information to the model, and is thus more compressible. We explore this assumption by decomposing the weights of fine-tuned models into their pre-trained components and an additional delta. We introduce a simple method, BitDelta, which successfully quantizes this delta down to 1 bit without compromising performance. This interesting finding not only highlights the potential redundancy of information added during fine-tuning, but also has significant implications for the multi-tenant serving and multi-tenant storage of fine-tuned models. By enabling the use of a single high-precision base model accompanied by multiple 1-bit deltas, BitDelta dramatically reduces GPU memory requirements by more than 10x, which can also be translated to enhanced generation latency in multi-tenant settings. We validate BitDelta through experiments across Llama-2 and Mistral model families, and on models up to 70B parameters, showcasing minimal performance degradation over all tested settings.

Sara Bunian, Kai Li, Chaima Jemmali et al.

Searching for relative mobile user interface (UI) design examples can aid interface designers in gaining inspiration and comparing design alternatives. However, finding such design examples is challenging, especially as current search systems rely on only text-based queries and do not consider the UI structure and content into account. This paper introduces VINS, a visual search framework, that takes as input a UI image (wireframe, high-fidelity) and retrieves visually similar design examples. We first survey interface designers to better understand their example finding process. We then develop a large-scale UI dataset that provides an accurate specification of the interface's view hierarchy (i.e., all the UI components and their specific location). By utilizing this dataset, we propose an object-detection based image retrieval framework that models the UI context and hierarchical structure. The framework achieves a mean Average Precision of 76.39\% for the UI detection and high performance in querying similar UI designs.

Lu Jin, Xiangbo Shu, Kai Li et al.

Hashing has attracted increasing research attentions in recent years due to its high efficiency of computation and storage in image retrieval. Recent works have demonstrated the superiority of simultaneous feature representations and hash functions learning with deep neural networks. However, most existing deep hashing methods directly learn the hash functions by encoding the global semantic information, while ignoring the local spatial information of images. The loss of local spatial structure makes the performance bottleneck of hash functions, therefore limiting its application for accurate similarity retrieval. In this work, we propose a novel Deep Ordinal Hashing (DOH) method, which learns ordinal representations by leveraging the ranking structure of feature space from both local and global views. In particular, to effectively build the ranking structure, we propose to learn the rank correlation space by exploiting the local spatial information from Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) and the global semantic information from the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) simultaneously. More specifically, an effective spatial attention model is designed to capture the local spatial information by selectively learning well-specified locations closely related to target objects. In such hashing framework,the local spatial and global semantic nature of images are captured in an end-to-end ranking-to-hashing manner. Experimental results conducted on three widely-used datasets demonstrate that the proposed DOH method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art hashing methods.

Jun Ye, Hao Hu, Kai Li et al.

With the prevalence of the commodity depth cameras, the new paradigm of user interfaces based on 3D motion capturing and recognition have dramatically changed the way of interactions between human and computers. Human action recognition, as one of the key components in these devices, plays an important role to guarantee the quality of user experience. Although the model-driven methods have achieved huge success, they cannot provide a scalable solution for efficiently storing, retrieving and recognizing actions in the large-scale applications. These models are also vulnerable to the temporal translation and warping, as well as the variations in motion scales and execution rates. To address these challenges, we propose to treat the 3D human action recognition as a video-level hashing problem and propose a novel First-Take-All (FTA) Hashing algorithm capable of hashing the entire video into hash codes of fixed length. We demonstrate that this FTA algorithm produces a compact representation of the video invariant to the above mentioned variations, through which action recognition can be solved by an efficient nearest neighbor search by the Hamming distance between the FTA hash codes. Experiments on the public 3D human action datasets shows that the FTA algorithm can reach a recognition accuracy higher than 80%, with about 15 bits per frame considering there are 65 frames per video over the datasets.

Kai Li, Guojun Qi, Jun Ye et al.

The era of Big Data has spawned unprecedented interests in developing hashing algorithms for efficient storage and fast nearest neighbor search. Most existing work learn hash functions that are numeric quantizations of feature values in projected feature space. In this work, we propose a novel hash learning framework that encodes feature's rank orders instead of numeric values in a number of optimal low-dimensional ranking subspaces. We formulate the ranking subspace learning problem as the optimization of a piece-wise linear convex-concave function and present two versions of our algorithm: one with independent optimization of each hash bit and the other exploiting a sequential learning framework. Our work is a generalization of the Winner-Take-All (WTA) hash family and naturally enjoys all the numeric stability benefits of rank correlation measures while being optimized to achieve high precision at very short code length. We compare with several state-of-the-art hashing algorithms in both supervised and unsupervised domain, showing superior performance in a number of data sets.