Xiaojin Zhang

Yulin Fei, Yuhui Gao, Xingyuan Xian et al.

With the rise of multimodal large language models, accurately extracting and understanding textual information from video content, referred to as video based optical character recognition (Video OCR), has become a crucial capability. This paper introduces a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the video OCR performance of multi-modal models in videos. Comprising 1,028 videos and 2,961 question-answer pairs, this benchmark proposes several key challenges through 6 distinct subtasks: (1) Recognition of text content itself and its basic visual attributes, (2)Semantic and Spatial Comprehension of OCR objects in videos (3) Dynamic Motion detection and Temporal Localization. We developed this benchmark using a semi-automated approach that integrates the OCR ability of image LLMs with manual refinement, balancing efficiency, cost, and data quality. Our resource aims to help advance research in video LLMs and underscores the need for improving OCR ability for video LLMs. The benchmark will be released on https://github.com/YuHuiGao/FG-Bench.git.

Hongze Li, Zesheng Zhou, Zhenbiao Cao et al.

Traditional Federated Domain Generalization (FedDG) methods focus on learning domain-invariant features or adapting to unseen target domains, often overlooking the unique knowledge embedded within the source domain, especially in strictly isolated federated learning environments. Through experimentation, we discovered a counterintuitive phenomenon.: features learned from a complete source domain have superior generalization capabilities compared to those learned directly from the target domain. This insight leads us to propose the Federated Source Domain Awareness Framework (FedSDAF), the first systematic approach to enhance FedDG by leveraging source domain-aware features. FedSDAF employs a dual-adapter architecture that decouples "local expertise" from "global generalization consensus". A Domain-Aware Adapter, retained locally, extracts and protects the unique discriminative knowledge of each source domain, while a Domain-Invariant Adapter, shared across clients, builds a robust global consensus. To enable knowledge exchange, we introduce a Bidirectional Knowledge Distillation mechanism that facilitates efficient dialogue between the adapters. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets (OfficeHome, PACS, VLCS, DomainNet) show that FedSDAF significantly outperforms existing FedDG methods.The source code is available at https://github.com/pizzareapers/FedSDAF.

Tao Fan, Hanlin Gu, Xuemei Cao et al.

Federated Foundation Models (FedFMs) represent a distributed learning paradigm that fuses general competences of foundation models as well as privacy-preserving capabilities of federated learning. This combination allows the large foundation models and the small local domain models at the remote clients to learn from each other in a teacher-student learning setting. This paper provides a comprehensive summary of the ten challenging problems inherent in FedFMs, encompassing foundational theory, utilization of private data, continual learning, unlearning, Non-IID and graph data, bidirectional knowledge transfer, incentive mechanism design, game mechanism design, model watermarking, and efficiency. The ten challenging problems manifest in five pivotal aspects: ``Foundational Theory," which aims to establish a coherent and unifying theoretical framework for FedFMs. ``Data," addressing the difficulties in leveraging domain-specific knowledge from private data while maintaining privacy; ``Heterogeneity," examining variations in data, model, and computational resources across clients; ``Security and Privacy," focusing on defenses against malicious attacks and model theft; and ``Efficiency," highlighting the need for improvements in training, communication, and parameter efficiency. For each problem, we offer a clear mathematical definition on the objective function, analyze existing methods, and discuss the key challenges and potential solutions. This in-depth exploration aims to advance the theoretical foundations of FedFMs, guide practical implementations, and inspire future research to overcome these obstacles, thereby enabling the robust, efficient, and privacy-preserving FedFMs in various real-world applications.

Shujian Jiao, Bingxuan Li, Lei Wang et al.

Proteins are essential to life's processes, underpinning evolution and diversity. Advances in sequencing technology have revealed millions of proteins, underscoring the need for sophisticated pre-trained protein models for biological analysis and AI development. Facebook's ESM2, the most advanced protein language model to date, leverages a masked prediction task for unsupervised learning, crafting amino acid representations with notable biochemical accuracy. Yet, it lacks in delivering functional protein insights, signaling an opportunity for enhancing representation quality.Our study addresses this gap by incorporating protein family classification into ESM2's training.This approach, augmented with Community Propagation-Based Clustering Algorithm, improves global protein representations, while a contextual prediction task fine-tunes local amino acid accuracy. Significantly, our model achieved state-of-the-art results in several downstream experiments, demonstrating the power of combining global and local methodologies to substantially boost protein representation quality.