Ming Chen

Bo Qin, Aixin Jia, Qiang Wang et al.

This paper describes the submission of the RoyalFlush neural machine translation system for the WMT 2022 translation efficiency task. Unlike the commonly used autoregressive translation system, we adopted a two-stage translation paradigm called Hybrid Regression Translation (HRT) to combine the advantages of autoregressive and non-autoregressive translation. Specifically, HRT first autoregressively generates a discontinuous sequence (e.g., make a prediction every $k$ tokens, $k>1$) and then fills in all previously skipped tokens at once in a non-autoregressive manner. Thus, we can easily trade off the translation quality and speed by adjusting $k$. In addition, by integrating other modeling techniques (e.g., sequence-level knowledge distillation and deep-encoder-shallow-decoder layer allocation strategy) and a mass of engineering efforts, HRT improves 80\% inference speed and achieves equivalent translation performance with the same-capacity AT counterpart. Our fastest system reaches 6k+ words/second on the GPU latency setting, estimated to be about 3.1x faster than the last year's winner.

Qiang Wang, Rongxiang Weng, Ming Chen

K-Nearest Neighbor Neural Machine Translation (kNN-MT) successfully incorporates external corpus by retrieving word-level representations at test time. Generally, kNN-MT borrows the off-the-shelf context representation in the translation task, e.g., the output of the last decoder layer, as the query vector of the retrieval task. In this work, we highlight that coupling the representations of these two tasks is sub-optimal for fine-grained retrieval. To alleviate it, we leverage supervised contrastive learning to learn the distinctive retrieval representation derived from the original context representation. We also propose a fast and effective approach to constructing hard negative samples. Experimental results on five domains show that our approach improves the retrieval accuracy and BLEU score compared to vanilla kNN-MT.

Ranfei Chen, Ming Chen

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have emerged as a new architecture following auto regressive models. Their denoising process offers a powerful generative advantage, but they present significant challenges in learning and understanding numerically sensitive mathematical and order-sensitive logical tasks. Current training methods, including pre-training, fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning, focus primarily on improving general knowledge retention and reasoning abilities, but lack a comprehensive understanding of mathematical and logical patterns. We propose DSFT, a simple yet effective Diffusion SFT strategy, by adjusting the masking strategy and loss function, guiding models to understand mathematical and logical patterns. This strategy can be flexibly combined with pre-training, reinforcement learning, and other training methods. Validated on models such as LLaDA and Dream series, we prove that DSFT on small-scale data can achieve improvements of 5-10% and approximately 2% on mathematical and logical problems, respectively. This inspiring masking approach offers insights for future learning of specific patterns, which can be easily and efficiently combined with other training methods and applied to various dLLMs. Our code is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DSFT-0FFB/

Ming Chen, Yuxuan Cheng, Xinwei He et al.

Integrating visible and infrared images into one high-quality image, also known as visible and infrared image fusion, is a challenging yet critical task for many downstream vision tasks. Most existing works utilize pretrained deep neural networks or design sophisticated frameworks with strong priors for this task, which may be unsuitable or lack flexibility. This paper presents SimpleFusion, a simple yet effective framework for visible and infrared image fusion. Our framework follows the decompose-and-fusion paradigm, where the visible and the infrared images are decomposed into reflectance and illumination components via Retinex theory and followed by the fusion of these corresponding elements. The whole framework is designed with two plain convolutional neural networks without downsampling, which can perform image decomposition and fusion efficiently. Moreover, we introduce decomposition loss and a detail-to-semantic loss to preserve the complementary information between the two modalities for fusion. We conduct extensive experiments on the challenging benchmarks, verifying the superiority of our method over previous state-of-the-arts. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/hxwxss/SimpleFusion-A-Simple-Fusion-Framework-for-Infrared-and-Visible-Images}{https://github.com/hxwxss/SimpleFusion-A-Simple-Fusion-Framework-for-Infrared-and-Visible-Images}

Ming Chen, Zhewei Wei, Bolin Ding et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNN) is an emerging field for learning on non-Euclidean data. Recently, there has been increased interest in designing GNN that scales to large graphs. Most existing methods use "graph sampling" or "layer-wise sampling" techniques to reduce training time. However, these methods still suffer from degrading performance and scalability problems when applying to graphs with billions of edges. This paper presents GBP, a scalable GNN that utilizes a localized bidirectional propagation process from both the feature vectors and the training/testing nodes. Theoretical analysis shows that GBP is the first method that achieves sub-linear time complexity for both the precomputation and the training phases. An extensive empirical study demonstrates that GBP achieves state-of-the-art performance with significantly less training/testing time. Most notably, GBP can deliver superior performance on a graph with over 60 million nodes and 1.8 billion edges in less than half an hour on a single machine. The codes of GBP can be found at https://github.com/chennnM/GBP .

Christian Bock, François-Xavier Aubet, Jan Gasthaus et al.

We propose r-ssGPFA, an unsupervised online anomaly detection model for uni- and multivariate time series building on the efficient state space formulation of Gaussian processes. For high-dimensional time series, we propose an extension of Gaussian process factor analysis to identify the common latent processes of the time series, allowing us to detect anomalies efficiently in an interpretable manner. We gain explainability while speeding up computations by imposing an orthogonality constraint on the mapping from the latent to the observed. Our model's robustness is improved by using a simple heuristic to skip Kalman updates when encountering anomalous observations. We investigate the behaviour of our model on synthetic data and show on standard benchmark datasets that our method is competitive with state-of-the-art methods while being computationally cheaper.

Yunhe Gao, Rui Huang, Yiwei Yang et al.

Radiotherapy is a treatment where radiation is used to eliminate cancer cells. The delineation of organs-at-risk (OARs) is a vital step in radiotherapy treatment planning to avoid damage to healthy organs. For nasopharyngeal cancer, more than 20 OARs are needed to be precisely segmented in advance. The challenge of this task lies in complex anatomical structure, low-contrast organ contours, and the extremely imbalanced size between large and small organs. Common segmentation methods that treat them equally would generally lead to inaccurate small-organ labeling. We propose a novel two-stage deep neural network, FocusNetv2, to solve this challenging problem by automatically locating, ROI-pooling, and segmenting small organs with specifically designed small-organ localization and segmentation sub-networks while maintaining the accuracy of large organ segmentation. In addition to our original FocusNet, we employ a novel adversarial shape constraint on small organs to ensure the consistency between estimated small-organ shapes and organ shape prior knowledge. Our proposed framework is extensively tested on both self-collected dataset of 1,164 CT scans and the MICCAI Head and Neck Auto Segmentation Challenge 2015 dataset, which shows superior performance compared with state-of-the-art head and neck OAR segmentation methods.

Chunyan Ji, Ming Chen, Bin Li et al.

We propose an approach of graph convolutional networks for robust infant cry classification. We construct non-fully connected graphs based on the similarities among the relevant nodes in both supervised and semi-supervised node classification with convolutional neural networks to consider the short-term and long-term effects of infant cry signals related to inner-class and inter-class messages. The approach captures the diversity of variations within infant cries, especially for limited training samples. The effectiveness of this approach is evaluated on Baby Chillanto Database and Baby2020 database. With as limited as 20% of labeled training data, our model outperforms that of CNN model with 80% labeled training data and the accuracy stably improves as the number of labeled training samples increases. The best results give significant improvements of 7.36% and 3.59% compared with the results of the CNN models on Baby Chillanto database and Baby2020 database respectively.

Yunhe Gao, Rui Huang, Ming Chen et al.

In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep neural network for solving the problem of imbalanced large and small organ segmentation in head and neck (HaN) CT images. To conduct radiotherapy planning for nasopharyngeal cancer, more than 10 organs-at-risk (normal organs) need to be precisely segmented in advance. However, the size ratio between large and small organs in the head could reach hundreds. Directly using such imbalanced organ annotations to train deep neural networks generally leads to inaccurate small-organ label maps. We propose a novel end-to-end deep neural network to solve this challenging problem by automatically locating, ROI-pooling, and segmenting small organs with specifically designed small-organ sub-networks while maintaining the accuracy of large organ segmentation. A strong main network with densely connected atrous spatial pyramid pooling and squeeze-and-excitation modules is used for segmenting large organs, where large organs' label maps are directly output. For small organs, their probabilistic locations instead of label maps are estimated by the main network. High-resolution and multi-scale feature volumes for each small organ are ROI-pooled according to their locations and are fed into small-organ networks for accurate segmenting small organs. Our proposed network is extensively tested on both collected real data and the \emph{MICCAI Head and Neck Auto Segmentation Challenge 2015} dataset, and shows superior performance compared with state-of-the-art segmentation methods.