Jiawei Huang

Rongjie Huang, Mingze Li, Dongchao Yang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities across a variety of domains and tasks, challenging our understanding of learning and cognition. Despite the recent success, current LLMs are not capable of processing complex audio information or conducting spoken conversations (like Siri or Alexa). In this work, we propose a multi-modal AI system named AudioGPT, which complements LLMs (i.e., ChatGPT) with 1) foundation models to process complex audio information and solve numerous understanding and generation tasks; and 2) the input/output interface (ASR, TTS) to support spoken dialogue. With an increasing demand to evaluate multi-modal LLMs of human intention understanding and cooperation with foundation models, we outline the principles and processes and test AudioGPT in terms of consistency, capability, and robustness. Experimental results demonstrate the capabilities of AudioGPT in solving AI tasks with speech, music, sound, and talking head understanding and generation in multi-round dialogues, which empower humans to create rich and diverse audio content with unprecedented ease. Our system is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/AIGC-Audio/AudioGPT}.

Junyi Ma, Xieyuanli Chen, Jiawei Huang et al.

Understanding how the surrounding environment changes is crucial for performing downstream tasks safely and reliably in autonomous driving applications. Recent occupancy estimation techniques using only camera images as input can provide dense occupancy representations of large-scale scenes based on the current observation. However, they are mostly limited to representing the current 3D space and do not consider the future state of surrounding objects along the time axis. To extend camera-only occupancy estimation into spatiotemporal prediction, we propose Cam4DOcc, a new benchmark for camera-only 4D occupancy forecasting, evaluating the surrounding scene changes in a near future. We build our benchmark based on multiple publicly available datasets, including nuScenes, nuScenes-Occupancy, and Lyft-Level5, which provides sequential occupancy states of general movable and static objects, as well as their 3D backward centripetal flow. To establish this benchmark for future research with comprehensive comparisons, we introduce four baseline types from diverse camera-based perception and prediction implementations, including a static-world occupancy model, voxelization of point cloud prediction, 2D-3D instance-based prediction, and our proposed novel end-to-end 4D occupancy forecasting network. Furthermore, the standardized evaluation protocol for preset multiple tasks is also provided to compare the performance of all the proposed baselines on present and future occupancy estimation with respect to objects of interest in autonomous driving scenarios. The dataset and our implementation of all four baselines in the proposed Cam4DOcc benchmark will be released here: https://github.com/haomo-ai/Cam4DOcc.

Ruomin Huang, Jiawei Huang, Wenjie Liu et al.

Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization (\textsf{WDRO}) is a popular model to enhance the robustness of machine learning with ambiguous data. However, the complexity of \textsf{WDRO} can be prohibitive in practice since solving its ``minimax'' formulation requires a great amount of computation. Recently, several fast \textsf{WDRO} training algorithms for some specific machine learning tasks (e.g., logistic regression) have been developed. However, the research on designing efficient algorithms for general large-scale \textsf{WDRO}s is still quite limited, to the best of our knowledge. \textit{Coreset} is an important tool for compressing large dataset, and thus it has been widely applied to reduce the computational complexities for many optimization problems. In this paper, we introduce a unified framework to construct the $ε$-coreset for the general \textsf{WDRO} problems. Though it is challenging to obtain a conventional coreset for \textsf{WDRO} due to the uncertainty issue of ambiguous data, we show that we can compute a ``dual coreset'' by using the strong duality property of \textsf{WDRO}. Also, the error introduced by the dual coreset can be theoretically guaranteed for the original \textsf{WDRO} objective. To construct the dual coreset, we propose a novel grid sampling approach that is particularly suitable for the dual formulation of \textsf{WDRO}. Finally, we implement our coreset approach and illustrate its effectiveness for several \textsf{WDRO} problems in the experiments.

Ningning Ma, Xiangyu Zhang, Jiawei Huang et al.

We present a conceptually simple, flexible and effective framework for weight generating networks. Our approach is general that unifies two current distinct and extremely effective SENet and CondConv into the same framework on weight space. The method, called WeightNet, generalizes the two methods by simply adding one more grouped fully-connected layer to the attention activation layer. We use the WeightNet, composed entirely of (grouped) fully-connected layers, to directly output the convolutional weight. WeightNet is easy and memory-conserving to train, on the kernel space instead of the feature space. Because of the flexibility, our method outperforms existing approaches on both ImageNet and COCO detection tasks, achieving better Accuracy-FLOPs and Accuracy-Parameter trade-offs. The framework on the flexible weight space has the potential to further improve the performance. Code is available at https://github.com/megvii-model/WeightNet.

Jiawei Huang, Bingcong Li, Christoph Dann et al.

Sample efficiency is critical for online Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). While existing works investigate sample-efficient online exploration strategies, the potential of utilizing misspecified yet relevant reward models to accelerate learning remains underexplored. This paper studies how to transfer knowledge from those imperfect reward models in online RLHF. We start by identifying a novel property due to KL-regularization in the RLHF objective: \emph{a policy's coverability of the optimal policy is captured by its sub-optimality}. Building on this insight, we propose novel transfer learning principles and a theoretical algorithm -- \emph{\textbf{T}ransfer \textbf{P}olicy \textbf{O}ptimization (\textbf{TPO})} -- with provable benefits compared to standard online learning. Empirically, inspired by our theoretical findings, we develop a win-rate-based transfer policy selection strategy with improved computational efficiency. Moreover, our empirical transfer learning technique is modular and can be integrated with various policy optimization methods, such as DPO, IPO and XPO, to further enhance their performance. We validate the effectiveness of our method through experiments on summarization tasks.

Jiawei Huang, Jinglin Chen, Li Zhao et al.

Deployment efficiency is an important criterion for many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL). Despite the community's increasing interest, there lacks a formal theoretical formulation for the problem. In this paper, we propose such a formulation for deployment-efficient RL (DE-RL) from an "optimization with constraints" perspective: we are interested in exploring an MDP and obtaining a near-optimal policy within minimal \emph{deployment complexity}, whereas in each deployment the policy can sample a large batch of data. Using finite-horizon linear MDPs as a concrete structural model, we reveal the fundamental limit in achieving deployment efficiency by establishing information-theoretic lower bounds, and provide algorithms that achieve the optimal deployment efficiency. Moreover, our formulation for DE-RL is flexible and can serve as a building block for other practically relevant settings; we give "Safe DE-RL" and "Sample-Efficient DE-RL" as two examples, which may be worth future investigation.

Jiawei Huang, Wenjie Liu, Hu Ding

Real-world datasets often contain outliers, and the presence of outliers can make the clustering problems to be much more challenging. In this paper, we propose a simple uniform sampling framework for solving three representative center-based clustering with outliers problems: $k$-center/median/means clustering with outliers. Our analysis is fundamentally different from the previous (uniform and non-uniform) sampling based ideas. To explain the effectiveness of uniform sampling in theory, we introduce a measure of "significance" and prove that the performance of our framework depends on the significance degree of the given instance. In particular, the sample size can be independent of the input data size $n$ and the dimensionality $d$, if we assume the given instance is "significant", which is in fact a fairly reasonable assumption in practice. Due to its simplicity, the uniform sampling approach also enjoys several significant advantages over the non-uniform sampling approaches in practice. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that systematically studies the effectiveness of uniform sampling from both theoretical and experimental aspects.

Yen-Chang Hsu, Zheng Xu, Zsolt Kira et al.

This work proposed a novel learning objective to train a deep neural network to perform end-to-end image pixel clustering. We applied the approach to instance segmentation, which is at the intersection of image semantic segmentation and object detection. We utilize the most fundamental property of instance labeling -- the pairwise relationship between pixels -- as the supervision to formulate the learning objective, then apply it to train a fully convolutional network (FCN) for learning to perform pixel-wise clustering. The resulting clusters can be used as the instance labeling directly. To support labeling of an unlimited number of instance, we further formulate ideas from graph coloring theory into the proposed learning objective. The evaluation on the Cityscapes dataset demonstrates strong performance and therefore proof of the concept. Moreover, our approach won the second place in the lane detection competition of 2017 CVPR Autonomous Driving Challenge, and was the top performer without using external data.