Xue Wang

Yi-Fan Zhang, Qingsong Wen, Xue Wang et al.

Online updating of time series forecasting models aims to address the concept drifting problem by efficiently updating forecasting models based on streaming data. Many algorithms are designed for online time series forecasting, with some exploiting cross-variable dependency while others assume independence among variables. Given every data assumption has its own pros and cons in online time series modeling, we propose \textbf{On}line \textbf{e}nsembling \textbf{Net}work (OneNet). It dynamically updates and combines two models, with one focusing on modeling the dependency across the time dimension and the other on cross-variate dependency. Our method incorporates a reinforcement learning-based approach into the traditional online convex programming framework, allowing for the linear combination of the two models with dynamically adjusted weights. OneNet addresses the main shortcoming of classical online learning methods that tend to be slow in adapting to the concept drift. Empirical results show that OneNet reduces online forecasting error by more than $\mathbf{50\%}$ compared to the State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) method. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/yfzhang114/OneNet}.

Yi-Fan Zhang, Xue Wang, Kexin Jin et al.

Many recent machine learning tasks focus to develop models that can generalize to unseen distributions. Domain generalization (DG) has become one of the key topics in various fields. Several literatures show that DG can be arbitrarily hard without exploiting target domain information. To address this issue, test-time adaptive (TTA) methods are proposed. Existing TTA methods require offline target data or extra sophisticated optimization procedures during the inference stage. In this work, we adopt Non-Parametric Classifier to perform the test-time Adaptation (AdaNPC). In particular, we construct a memory that contains the feature and label pairs from training domains. During inference, given a test instance, AdaNPC first recalls K closed samples from the memory to vote for the prediction, and then the test feature and predicted label are added to the memory. In this way, the sample distribution in the memory can be gradually changed from the training distribution towards the test distribution with very little extra computation cost. We theoretically justify the rationality behind the proposed method. Besides, we test our model on extensive numerical experiments. AdaNPC significantly outperforms competitive baselines on various DG benchmarks. In particular, when the adaptation target is a series of domains, the adaptation accuracy of AdaNPC is 50% higher than advanced TTA methods. The code is available at https://github.com/yfzhang114/AdaNPC.

YiFan Zhang, Xue Wang, Jian Liang et al.

A fundamental challenge for machine learning models is how to generalize learned models for out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Among various approaches, exploiting invariant features by Domain Adversarial Training (DAT) received widespread attention. Despite its success, we observe training instability from DAT, mostly due to over-confident domain discriminator and environment label noise. To address this issue, we proposed Environment Label Smoothing (ELS), which encourages the discriminator to output soft probability, which thus reduces the confidence of the discriminator and alleviates the impact of noisy environment labels. We demonstrate, both experimentally and theoretically, that ELS can improve training stability, local convergence, and robustness to noisy environment labels. By incorporating ELS with DAT methods, we are able to yield state-of-art results on a wide range of domain generalization/adaptation tasks, particularly when the environment labels are highly noisy.

YiFan Zhang, Xue Wang, Tian Zhou et al.

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is essential for the reliability of ML models. Most existing methods for OOD detection learn a fixed decision criterion from a given in-distribution dataset and apply it universally to decide if a data point is OOD. Recent work~\cite{fang2022is} shows that given only in-distribution data, it is impossible to reliably detect OOD data without extra assumptions. Motivated by the theoretical result and recent exploration of test-time adaptation methods, we propose a Non-Parametric Test Time \textbf{Ada}ptation framework for \textbf{O}ut-Of-\textbf{D}istribution \textbf{D}etection (\abbr). Unlike conventional methods, \abbr utilizes online test samples for model adaptation during testing, enhancing adaptability to changing data distributions. The framework incorporates detected OOD instances into decision-making, reducing false positive rates, particularly when ID and OOD distributions overlap significantly. We demonstrate the effectiveness of \abbr through comprehensive experiments on multiple OOD detection benchmarks, extensive empirical studies show that \abbr significantly improves the performance of OOD detection over state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, \abbr reduces the false positive rate (FPR95) by $23.23\%$ on the CIFAR-10 benchmarks and $38\%$ on the ImageNet-1k benchmarks compared to the advanced methods. Lastly, we theoretically verify the effectiveness of \abbr.

Yi-Fan Zhang, Tao Yu, Haochen Tian et al. · pku

Despite notable advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), most state-of-the-art models have not undergone thorough alignment with human preferences. This gap exists because current alignment research has primarily achieved progress in specific areas (e.g., hallucination reduction), while the broader question of whether aligning models with human preferences can systematically enhance MLLM capability remains largely unexplored. To this end, we introduce MM-RLHF, a dataset containing $\mathbf{120k}$ fine-grained, human-annotated preference comparison pairs. This dataset represents a substantial advancement over existing resources, offering superior size, diversity, annotation granularity, and quality. Leveraging this dataset, we propose several key innovations to improve both the quality of reward models and the efficiency of alignment algorithms. Notably, we introduce a Critique-Based Reward Model, which generates critiques of model outputs before assigning scores, offering enhanced interpretability and more informative feedback compared to traditional scalar reward mechanisms. Additionally, we propose Dynamic Reward Scaling, a method that adjusts the loss weight of each sample according to the reward signal, thereby optimizing the use of high-quality comparison pairs. Our approach is rigorously evaluated across $\mathbf{10}$ distinct dimensions and $\mathbf{27}$ benchmarks, with results demonstrating significant and consistent improvements in model performance. Specifically, fine-tuning LLaVA-ov-7B with MM-RLHF and our alignment algorithm leads to a $\mathbf{19.5}$% increase in conversational abilities and a $\mathbf{60}$% improvement in safety. We have open-sourced the preference dataset, reward model, training and evaluation code, as well as reward modeling and safety benchmarks. For more details, please visit our project page: https://mm-rlhf.github.io.

Haiming Yao, Wei Luo, Tao Zhou et al.

Raman scattering is based on molecular vibration spectroscopy and provides a powerful technology for pathogenic bacteria diagnosis using the unique molecular fingerprint information of a substance. The integration of deep learning technology has significantly improved the efficiency and accuracy of intelligent Raman spectroscopy (RS) recognition. However, the current RS recognition methods based on deep neural networks still require the annotation of a large amount of spectral data, which is labor-intensive. This paper presents a novel annotation-efficient Self-Calibrated Dual Contrasting (SCDC) method for RS recognition that operates effectively with few or no annotation. Our core motivation is to represent the spectrum from two different perspectives in two distinct subspaces: embedding and category. The embedding perspective captures instance-level information, while the category perspective reflects category-level information. Accordingly, we have implemented a dual contrastive learning approach from two perspectives to obtain discriminative representations, which are applicable for Raman spectroscopy recognition under both unsupervised and semi-supervised learning conditions. Furthermore, a self-calibration mechanism is proposed to enhance robustness. Validation of the identification task on three large-scale bacterial Raman spectroscopy datasets demonstrates that our SCDC method achieves robust recognition performance with very few (5$\%$ or 10$\%$) or no annotations, highlighting the potential of the proposed method for biospectral identification in annotation-efficient clinical scenarios.