Bo Xiong

Karttikeya Mangalam, Haoqi Fan, Yanghao Li et al.

We present Reversible Vision Transformers, a memory efficient architecture design for visual recognition. By decoupling the GPU memory requirement from the depth of the model, Reversible Vision Transformers enable scaling up architectures with efficient memory usage. We adapt two popular models, namely Vision Transformer and Multiscale Vision Transformers, to reversible variants and benchmark extensively across both model sizes and tasks of image classification, object detection and video classification. Reversible Vision Transformers achieve a reduced memory footprint of up to 15.5x at roughly identical model complexity, parameters and accuracy, demonstrating the promise of reversible vision transformers as an efficient backbone for hardware resource limited training regimes. Finally, we find that the additional computational burden of recomputing activations is more than overcome for deeper models, where throughput can increase up to 2.3x over their non-reversible counterparts. Full code and trained models are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/slowfast. A simpler, easy to understand and modify version is also available at https://github.com/karttikeya/minREV

Yookoon Park, Mahmoud Azab, Bo Xiong et al. · cmu

Cross-modal contrastive learning has led the recent advances in multimodal retrieval with its simplicity and effectiveness. In this work, however, we reveal that cross-modal contrastive learning suffers from incorrect normalization of the sum retrieval probabilities of each text or video instance. Specifically, we show that many test instances are either over- or under-represented during retrieval, significantly hurting the retrieval performance. To address this problem, we propose Normalized Contrastive Learning (NCL) which utilizes the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm to compute the instance-wise biases that properly normalize the sum retrieval probabilities of each instance so that every text and video instance is fairly represented during cross-modal retrieval. Empirical study shows that NCL brings consistent and significant gains in text-video retrieval on different model architectures, with new state-of-the-art multimodal retrieval metrics on the ActivityNet, MSVD, and MSR-VTT datasets without any architecture engineering.

Yuchen Liu, Natasha Ong, Kaiyan Peng et al. · meta-ai

We present Multiscale Multiview Vision Transformers (MMViT), which introduces multiscale feature maps and multiview encodings to transformer models. Our model encodes different views of the input signal and builds several channel-resolution feature stages to process the multiple views of the input at different resolutions in parallel. At each scale stage, we use a cross-attention block to fuse information across different views. This enables the MMViT model to acquire complex high-dimensional representations of the input at different resolutions. The proposed model can serve as a backbone model in multiple domains. We demonstrate the effectiveness of MMViT on audio and image classification tasks, achieving state-of-the-art results.

Bo Xiong, Mojtaba Nayyer, Shirui Pan et al.

Link prediction on knowledge graphs (KGs) has been extensively studied on binary relational KGs, wherein each fact is represented by a triple. A significant amount of important knowledge, however, is represented by hyper-relational facts where each fact is composed of a primal triple and a set of qualifiers comprising a key-value pair that allows for expressing more complicated semantics. Although some recent works have proposed to embed hyper-relational KGs, these methods fail to capture essential inference patterns of hyper-relational facts such as qualifier monotonicity, qualifier implication, and qualifier mutual exclusion, limiting their generalization capability. To unlock this, we present \emph{ShrinkE}, a geometric hyper-relational KG embedding method aiming to explicitly model these patterns. ShrinkE models the primal triple as a spatial-functional transformation from the head into a relation-specific box. Each qualifier ``shrinks'' the box to narrow down the possible answer set and, thus, realizes qualifier monotonicity. The spatial relationships between the qualifier boxes allow for modeling core inference patterns of qualifiers such as implication and mutual exclusion. Experimental results demonstrate ShrinkE's superiority on three benchmarks of hyper-relational KGs.

Bo Xiong, Mojtaba Nayyeri, Ming Jin et al.

Geometric relational embeddings map relational data as geometric objects that combine vector information suitable for machine learning and structured/relational information for structured/relational reasoning, typically in low dimensions. Their preservation of relational structures and their appealing properties and interpretability have led to their uptake for tasks such as knowledge graph completion, ontology and hierarchy reasoning, logical query answering, and hierarchical multi-label classification. We survey methods that underly geometric relational embeddings and categorize them based on (i) the embedding geometries that are used to represent the data; and (ii) the relational reasoning tasks that they aim to improve. We identify the desired properties (i.e., inductive biases) of each kind of embedding and discuss some potential future work.

Zifeng Ding, Heling Cai, Jingpei Wu et al.

Modeling evolving knowledge over temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) has become a heated topic. Various methods have been proposed to forecast links on TKGs. Most of them are embedding-based, where hidden representations are learned to represent knowledge graph (KG) entities and relations based on the observed graph contexts. Although these methods show strong performance on traditional TKG forecasting (TKGF) benchmarks, they face a strong challenge in modeling the unseen zero-shot relations that have no prior graph context. In this paper, we try to mitigate this problem as follows. We first input the text descriptions of KG relations into large language models (LLMs) for generating relation representations, and then introduce them into embedding-based TKGF methods. LLM-empowered representations can capture the semantic information in the relation descriptions. This makes the relations, whether seen or unseen, with similar semantic meanings stay close in the embedding space, enabling TKGF models to recognize zero-shot relations even without any observed graph context. Experimental results show that our approach helps TKGF models to achieve much better performance in forecasting the facts with previously unseen relations, while still maintaining their ability in link forecasting regarding seen relations.

Dongzhuoran Zhou, Hui Yang, Bo Xiong et al.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved significant success in various applications. Most GNNs learn the node features with information aggregation of its neighbors and feature transformation in each layer. However, the node features become indistinguishable after many layers, leading to performance deterioration: a significant limitation known as over-smoothing. Past work adopted various techniques for addressing this issue, such as normalization and skip-connection of layer-wise output. After the study, we found that the information aggregations in existing work are all contracted aggregations, with the intrinsic property that features will inevitably converge to the same single point after many layers. To this end, we propose the aggregation over compacted manifolds method (ACM) that replaces the existing information aggregation with aggregation over compact manifolds, a special type of manifold, which avoids contracted aggregations. In this work, we theoretically analyze contracted aggregation and its properties. We also provide an extensive empirical evaluation that shows ACM can effectively alleviate over-smoothing and outperforms the state-of-the-art. The code can be found in https://github.com/DongzhuoranZhou/ACM.git.

Yunjie He, Mojtaba Nayyeri, Bo Xiong et al.

Answering first-order logical (FOL) queries over knowledge graphs (KG) remains a challenging task mainly due to KG incompleteness. Query embedding approaches this problem by computing the low-dimensional vector representations of entities, relations, and logical queries. KGs exhibit relational patterns such as symmetry and composition and modeling the patterns can further enhance the performance of query embedding models. However, the role of such patterns in answering FOL queries by query embedding models has not been yet studied in the literature. In this paper, we fill in this research gap and empower FOL queries reasoning with pattern inference by introducing an inductive bias that allows for learning relation patterns. To this end, we develop a novel query embedding method, RoConE, that defines query regions as geometric cones and algebraic query operators by rotations in complex space. RoConE combines the advantages of Cone as a well-specified geometric representation for query embedding, and also the rotation operator as a powerful algebraic operation for pattern inference. Our experimental results on several benchmark datasets confirm the advantage of relational patterns for enhancing logical query answering task.

Yuqicheng Zhu, Nico Potyka, Jiarong Pan et al.

Knowledge graph embeddings (KGE) apply machine learning methods on knowledge graphs (KGs) to provide non-classical reasoning capabilities based on similarities and analogies. The learned KG embeddings are typically used to answer queries by ranking all potential answers, but rankings often lack a meaningful probabilistic interpretation - lower-ranked answers do not necessarily have a lower probability of being true. This limitation makes it difficult to quantify uncertainty of model's predictions, posing challenges for the application of KGE methods in high-stakes domains like medicine. We address this issue by applying the theory of conformal prediction that allows generating answer sets, which contain the correct answer with probabilistic guarantees. We explain how conformal prediction can be used to generate such answer sets for link prediction tasks. Our empirical evaluation on four benchmark datasets using six representative KGE methods validates that the generated answer sets satisfy the probabilistic guarantees given by the theory of conformal prediction. We also demonstrate that the generated answer sets often have a sensible size and that the size adapts well with respect to the difficulty of the query.

Bo Xiong, Mojtaba Nayyeri, Linhao Luo et al.

Reasoning with knowledge graphs (KGs) has primarily focused on triple-shaped facts. Recent advancements have been explored to enhance the semantics of these facts by incorporating more potent representations, such as hyper-relational facts. However, these approaches are limited to \emph{atomic facts}, which describe a single piece of information. This paper extends beyond \emph{atomic facts} and delves into \emph{nested facts}, represented by quoted triples where subjects and objects are triples themselves (e.g., ((\emph{BarackObama}, \emph{holds\_position}, \emph{President}), \emph{succeed\_by}, (\emph{DonaldTrump}, \emph{holds\_position}, \emph{President}))). These nested facts enable the expression of complex semantics like \emph{situations} over time and \emph{logical patterns} over entities and relations. In response, we introduce NestE, a novel KG embedding approach that captures the semantics of both atomic and nested factual knowledge. NestE represents each atomic fact as a $1\times3$ matrix, and each nested relation is modeled as a $3\times3$ matrix that rotates the $1\times3$ atomic fact matrix through matrix multiplication. Each element of the matrix is represented as a complex number in the generalized 4D hypercomplex space, including (spherical) quaternions, hyperbolic quaternions, and split-quaternions. Through thorough analysis, we demonstrate the embedding's efficacy in capturing diverse logical patterns over nested facts, surpassing the confines of first-order logic-like expressions. Our experimental results showcase NestE's significant performance gains over current baselines in triple prediction and conditional link prediction. The code and pre-trained models are open available at https://github.com/xiongbo010/NestE.

Xinyuan Wang, Changqing Su, Bo Xiong

Sparse-view CT reconstruction, aimed at reducing X-ray radiation risks, frequently suffers from image quality degradation, manifested as noise and artifacts. Existing post-processing and dual-domain techniques, although effective in radiation reduction, often lead to over-smoothed results, compromising diagnostic clarity. Addressing this, we introduce TD-Net, a pioneering tri-domain approach that unifies sinogram, image, and frequency domain optimizations. By incorporating Frequency Supervision Module(FSM), TD-Net adeptly preserves intricate details, overcoming the prevalent over-smoothing issue. Extensive evaluations demonstrate TD-Net's superior performance in reconstructing high-quality CT images from sparse views, efficiently balancing radiation safety and image fidelity. The enhanced capabilities of TD-Net in varied noise scenarios highlight its potential as a breakthrough in medical imaging.

Chao-Yuan Wu, Yanghao Li, Karttikeya Mangalam et al.

While today's video recognition systems parse snapshots or short clips accurately, they cannot connect the dots and reason across a longer range of time yet. Most existing video architectures can only process <5 seconds of a video without hitting the computation or memory bottlenecks. In this paper, we propose a new strategy to overcome this challenge. Instead of trying to process more frames at once like most existing methods, we propose to process videos in an online fashion and cache "memory" at each iteration. Through the memory, the model can reference prior context for long-term modeling, with only a marginal cost. Based on this idea, we build MeMViT, a Memory-augmented Multiscale Vision Transformer, that has a temporal support 30x longer than existing models with only 4.5% more compute; traditional methods need >3,000% more compute to do the same. On a wide range of settings, the increased temporal support enabled by MeMViT brings large gains in recognition accuracy consistently. MeMViT obtains state-of-the-art results on the AVA, EPIC-Kitchens-100 action classification, and action anticipation datasets. Code and models are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/memvit.

Yanghao Li, Chao-Yuan Wu, Haoqi Fan et al.

In this paper, we study Multiscale Vision Transformers (MViTv2) as a unified architecture for image and video classification, as well as object detection. We present an improved version of MViT that incorporates decomposed relative positional embeddings and residual pooling connections. We instantiate this architecture in five sizes and evaluate it for ImageNet classification, COCO detection and Kinetics video recognition where it outperforms prior work. We further compare MViTv2s' pooling attention to window attention mechanisms where it outperforms the latter in accuracy/compute. Without bells-and-whistles, MViTv2 has state-of-the-art performance in 3 domains: 88.8% accuracy on ImageNet classification, 58.7 boxAP on COCO object detection as well as 86.1% on Kinetics-400 video classification. Code and models are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/mvit.

Bo Xiong, Changqing Su, Zihan Lin et al.

Computed Tomography (CT) with its remarkable capability for three-dimensional imaging from multiple projections, enjoys a broad range of applications in clinical diagnosis, scientific observation, and industrial detection. Neural Adaptive Tomography (NeAT) is a recently proposed 3D rendering method based on neural radiance field for CT, and it demonstrates superior performance compared to traditional methods. However, it still faces challenges when dealing with the substantial perturbations and pose shifts encountered in CT scanning processes. Here, we propose a neural rendering method for CT reconstruction, named Iterative Neural Adaptive Tomography (INeAT), which incorporates iterative posture optimization to effectively counteract the influence of posture perturbations in data, particularly in cases involving significant posture variations. Through the implementation of a posture feedback optimization strategy, INeAT iteratively refines the posture corresponding to the input images based on the reconstructed 3D volume. We demonstrate that INeAT achieves artifact-suppressed and resolution-enhanced reconstruction in scenarios with significant pose disturbances. Furthermore, we show that our INeAT maintains comparable reconstruction performance to stable-state acquisitions even using data from unstable-state acquisitions, which significantly reduces the time required for CT scanning and relaxes the stringent requirements on imaging hardware systems, underscoring its immense potential for applications in short-time and low-cost CT technology.

Cosimo Gregucci, Bo Xiong, Daniel Hernandez et al.

Complex query answering (CQA) on knowledge graphs (KGs) is gaining momentum as a challenging reasoning task. In this paper, we show that the current benchmarks for CQA might not be as complex as we think, as the way they are built distorts our perception of progress in this field. For example, we find that in these benchmarks, most queries (up to 98% for some query types) can be reduced to simpler problems, e.g., link prediction, where only one link needs to be predicted. The performance of state-of-the-art CQA models decreases significantly when such models are evaluated on queries that cannot be reduced to easier types. Thus, we propose a set of more challenging benchmarks composed of queries that require models to reason over multiple hops and better reflect the construction of real-world KGs. In a systematic empirical investigation, the new benchmarks show that current methods leave much to be desired from current CQA methods.

Joongwon Kim, Anirudh Goyal, Aston Zhang et al.

Preference learning is a widely adopted post-training technique that aligns large language models (LLMs) to human preferences and improves specific downstream task capabilities. In this work we systematically investigate how specific attributes of preference datasets affect the alignment and downstream performance of LLMs in instruction-following tasks. We use a novel synthetic data generation pipeline to generate 48,000 unique instruction-following prompts with combinations of 23 verifiable constraints that enable fine-grained and automated quality assessments of model responses. With our synthetic prompts, we use two preference dataset curation methods - rejection sampling (RS) and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) - to obtain pairs of (chosen, rejected) responses. Then, we perform experiments investigating the effects of (1) the presence of shared prefixes between the chosen and rejected responses, (2) the contrast and quality of the chosen, rejected responses and (3) the complexity of the training prompts. Our experiments reveal that shared prefixes in preference pairs, as generated by MCTS, provide marginal but consistent improvements and greater stability across challenging training configurations. High-contrast preference pairs generally outperform low-contrast pairs; however, combining both often yields the best performance by balancing diversity and learning efficiency. Additionally, training on prompts of moderate difficulty leads to better generalization across tasks, even for more complex evaluation scenarios, compared to overly challenging prompts. Our findings provide actionable insights into optimizing preference data curation for instruction-following tasks, offering a scalable and effective framework for enhancing LLM training and alignment.

Junjia Wang, Bo Xiong, You Zhou et al.

The emergence of virtual staining technology provides a rapid and efficient alternative for researchers in tissue pathology. It enables the utilization of unlabeled microscopic samples to generate virtual replicas of chemically stained histological slices, or facilitate the transformation of one staining type into another. The remarkable performance of generative networks, such as CycleGAN, offers an unsupervised learning approach for virtual coloring, overcoming the limitations of high-quality paired data required in supervised learning. Nevertheless, large-scale color transformation necessitates processing large field-of-view images in patches, often resulting in significant boundary inconsistency and artifacts. Additionally, the transformation between different colorized modalities typically needs further efforts to modify loss functions and tune hyperparameters for independent training of networks. In this study, we introduce a general virtual staining framework that is adaptable to various conditions. We propose a loss function based on the value mapping constraint to ensure the accuracy of virtual coloring between different pathological modalities, termed the Value Mapping Generative Adversarial Network (VM-GAN). Meanwhile, we present a confidence-based tiling method to address the challenge of boundary inconsistency arising from patch-wise processing. Experimental results on diverse data with varying staining protocols demonstrate that our method achieves superior quantitative indicators and improved visual perception.

Yuqicheng Zhu, Daniel Hernández, Yuan He et al.

Uncertainty quantification in Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) methods is crucial for ensuring the reliability of downstream applications. A recent work applies conformal prediction to KGE methods, providing uncertainty estimates by generating a set of answers that is guaranteed to include the true answer with a predefined confidence level. However, existing methods provide probabilistic guarantees averaged over a reference set of queries and answers (marginal coverage guarantee). In high-stakes applications such as medical diagnosis, a stronger guarantee is often required: the predicted sets must provide consistent coverage per query (conditional coverage guarantee). We propose CondKGCP, a novel method that approximates predicate-conditional coverage guarantees while maintaining compact prediction sets. CondKGCP merges predicates with similar vector representations and augments calibration with rank information. We prove the theoretical guarantees and demonstrate empirical effectiveness of CondKGCP by comprehensive evaluations.

Bo Xiong, Nico Potyka, Trung-Kien Tran et al.

Recently, increasing efforts are put into learning continual representations for symbolic knowledge bases (KBs). However, these approaches either only embed the data-level knowledge (ABox) or suffer from inherent limitations when dealing with concept-level knowledge (TBox), i.e., they cannot faithfully model the logical structure present in the KBs. We present BoxEL, a geometric KB embedding approach that allows for better capturing the logical structure (i.e., ABox and TBox axioms) in the description logic EL++. BoxEL models concepts in a KB as axis-parallel boxes that are suitable for modeling concept intersection, entities as points inside boxes, and relations between concepts/entities as affine transformations. We show theoretical guarantees (soundness) of BoxEL for preserving logical structure. Namely, the learned model of BoxEL embedding with loss 0 is a (logical) model of the KB. Experimental results on (plausible) subsumption reasonings and a real-world application for protein-protein prediction show that BoxEL outperforms traditional knowledge graph embedding methods as well as state-of-the-art EL++ embedding approaches.

Bo Xiong, Shichao Zhu, Nico Potyka et al.

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) are powerful frameworks for learning embeddings of graph-structured data. GCNs are traditionally studied through the lens of Euclidean geometry. Recent works find that non-Euclidean Riemannian manifolds provide specific inductive biases for embedding hierarchical or spherical data. However, they cannot align well with data of mixed graph topologies. We consider a larger class of pseudo-Riemannian manifolds that generalize hyperboloid and sphere. We develop new geodesic tools that allow for extending neural network operations into geodesically disconnected pseudo-Riemannian manifolds. As a consequence, we derive a pseudo-Riemannian GCN that models data in pseudo-Riemannian manifolds of constant nonzero curvature in the context of graph neural networks. Our method provides a geometric inductive bias that is sufficiently flexible to model mixed heterogeneous topologies like hierarchical graphs with cycles. We demonstrate the representational capabilities of this method by applying it to the tasks of graph reconstruction, node classification and link prediction on a series of standard graphs with mixed topologies. Empirical results demonstrate that our method outperforms Riemannian counterparts when embedding graphs of complex topologies.

Danna Gurari, Kun He, Bo Xiong et al.

We propose the ambiguity problem for the foreground object segmentation task and motivate the importance of estimating and accounting for this ambiguity when designing vision systems. Specifically, we distinguish between images which lead multiple annotators to segment different foreground objects (ambiguous) versus minor inter-annotator differences of the same object. Taking images from eight widely used datasets, we crowdsource labeling the images as "ambiguous" or "not ambiguous" to segment in order to construct a new dataset we call STATIC. Using STATIC, we develop a system that automatically predicts which images are ambiguous. Experiments demonstrate the advantage of our prediction system over existing saliency-based methods on images from vision benchmarks and images taken by blind people who are trying to recognize objects in their environment. Finally, we introduce a crowdsourcing system to achieve cost savings for collecting the diversity of all valid "ground truth" foreground object segmentations by collecting extra segmentations only when ambiguity is expected. Experiments show our system eliminates up to 47% of human effort compared to existing crowdsourcing methods with no loss in capturing the diversity of ground truths.