Jinfeng Bai

Yuxiang Wei, Yabo Zhang, Zhilong Ji et al. · microsoft-research

In addition to the unprecedented ability in imaginary creation, large text-to-image models are expected to take customized concepts in image generation. Existing works generally learn such concepts in an optimization-based manner, yet bringing excessive computation or memory burden. In this paper, we instead propose a learning-based encoder, which consists of a global and a local mapping networks for fast and accurate customized text-to-image generation. In specific, the global mapping network projects the hierarchical features of a given image into multiple new words in the textual word embedding space, i.e., one primary word for well-editable concept and other auxiliary words to exclude irrelevant disturbances (e.g., background). In the meantime, a local mapping network injects the encoded patch features into cross attention layers to provide omitted details, without sacrificing the editability of primary concepts. We compare our method with existing optimization-based approaches on a variety of user-defined concepts, and demonstrate that our method enables high-fidelity inversion and more robust editability with a significantly faster encoding process. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/csyxwei/ELITE.

Zixian Guo, Bowen Dong, Zhilong Ji et al.

Prompt tuning has been employed as an efficient way to adapt large vision-language pre-trained models (e.g. CLIP) to various downstream tasks in data-limited or label-limited settings. Nonetheless, visual data (e.g., images) is by default prerequisite for learning prompts in existing methods. In this work, we advocate that the effectiveness of image-text contrastive learning in aligning the two modalities (for training CLIP) further makes it feasible to treat texts as images for prompt tuning and introduce TaI prompting. In contrast to the visual data, text descriptions are easy to collect, and their class labels can be directly derived. Particularly, we apply TaI prompting to multi-label image recognition, where sentences in the wild serve as alternatives to images for prompt tuning. Moreover, with TaI, double-grained prompt tuning (TaI-DPT) is further presented to extract both coarse-grained and fine-grained embeddings for enhancing the multi-label recognition performance. Experimental results show that our proposed TaI-DPT outperforms zero-shot CLIP by a large margin on multiple benchmarks, e.g., MS-COCO, VOC2007, and NUS-WIDE, while it can be combined with existing methods of prompting from images to improve recognition performance further. Code is released at https://github.com/guozix/TaI-DPT.

Yabo Zhang, Mingshuai Yao, Yuxiang Wei et al.

One-shot generative domain adaption aims to transfer a pre-trained generator on one domain to a new domain using one reference image only. However, it remains very challenging for the adapted generator (i) to generate diverse images inherited from the pre-trained generator while (ii) faithfully acquiring the domain-specific attributes and styles of the reference image. In this paper, we present a novel one-shot generative domain adaption method, i.e., DiFa, for diverse generation and faithful adaptation. For global-level adaptation, we leverage the difference between the CLIP embedding of reference image and the mean embedding of source images to constrain the target generator. For local-level adaptation, we introduce an attentive style loss which aligns each intermediate token of adapted image with its corresponding token of the reference image. To facilitate diverse generation, selective cross-domain consistency is introduced to select and retain the domain-sharing attributes in the editing latent $\mathcal{W}+$ space to inherit the diversity of pre-trained generator. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-arts both quantitatively and qualitatively, especially for the cases of large domain gaps. Moreover, our DiFa can easily be extended to zero-shot generative domain adaption with appealing results. Code is available at https://github.com/1170300521/DiFa.

Zhongqi Wang, Jie Zhang, Zhilong Ji et al.

With the development of deep generative models, recent years have seen great success of Chinese landscape painting generation. However, few works focus on controllable Chinese landscape painting generation due to the lack of data and limited modeling capabilities. In this work, we propose a controllable Chinese landscape painting generation method named CCLAP, which can generate painting with specific content and style based on Latent Diffusion Model. Specifically, it consists of two cascaded modules, i.e., content generator and style aggregator. The content generator module guarantees the content of generated paintings specific to the input text. While the style aggregator module is to generate paintings of a style corresponding to a reference image. Moreover, a new dataset of Chinese landscape paintings named CLAP is collected for comprehensive evaluation. Both the qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, especially in artfully-composed and artistic conception. Codes are available at https://github.com/Robin-WZQ/CCLAP.

Zhen Yang, Ming Ding, Qingsong Lv et al.

Previous studies have typically assumed that large language models are unable to accurately perform arithmetic operations, particularly multiplication of >8 digits, and operations involving decimals and fractions, without the use of calculator tools. This paper aims to challenge this misconception. With sufficient training data, a 2 billion-parameter language model can accurately perform multi-digit arithmetic operations with almost 100% accuracy without data leakage, significantly surpassing GPT-4 (whose multi-digit multiplication accuracy is only 4.3%). We also demonstrate that our MathGLM, fine-tuned from GLM-10B on a dataset with additional multi-step arithmetic operations and math problems described in text, achieves similar performance to GPT-4 on a 5,000-samples Chinese math problem test set. Our code and data are public at https://github.com/THUDM/MathGLM.

Bohan Li, Ye Yuan, Dingkang Liang et al.

Recently, most handwritten mathematical expression recognition (HMER) methods adopt the encoder-decoder networks, which directly predict the markup sequences from formula images with the attention mechanism. However, such methods may fail to accurately read formulas with complicated structure or generate long markup sequences, as the attention results are often inaccurate due to the large variance of writing styles or spatial layouts. To alleviate this problem, we propose an unconventional network for HMER named Counting-Aware Network (CAN), which jointly optimizes two tasks: HMER and symbol counting. Specifically, we design a weakly-supervised counting module that can predict the number of each symbol class without the symbol-level position annotations, and then plug it into a typical attention-based encoder-decoder model for HMER. Experiments on the benchmark datasets for HMER validate that both joint optimization and counting results are beneficial for correcting the prediction errors of encoder-decoder models, and CAN consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. In particular, compared with an encoder-decoder model for HMER, the extra time cost caused by the proposed counting module is marginal. The source code is available at https://github.com/LBH1024/CAN.

Jiaxin Wen, Pei Ke, Hao Sun et al.

The open-endedness of large language models (LLMs) combined with their impressive capabilities may lead to new safety issues when being exploited for malicious use. While recent studies primarily focus on probing toxic outputs that can be easily detected with existing toxicity classifiers, we show that LLMs can generate diverse implicit toxic outputs that are exceptionally difficult to detect via simply zero-shot prompting. Moreover, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL) based attacking method to further induce the implicit toxicity in LLMs. Specifically, we optimize the language model with a reward that prefers implicit toxic outputs to explicit toxic and non-toxic ones. Experiments on five widely-adopted toxicity classifiers demonstrate that the attack success rate can be significantly improved through RL fine-tuning. For instance, the RL-finetuned LLaMA-13B model achieves an attack success rate of 90.04% on BAD and 62.85% on Davinci003. Our findings suggest that LLMs pose a significant threat in generating undetectable implicit toxic outputs. We further show that fine-tuning toxicity classifiers on the annotated examples from our attacking method can effectively enhance their ability to detect LLM-generated implicit toxic language. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/thu-coai/Implicit-Toxicity.

Chengfei Li, Shuhao Deng, Yaoping Wang et al.

This paper introduces a new corpus of Mandarin-English code-switching speech recognition--TALCS corpus, suitable for training and evaluating code-switching speech recognition systems. TALCS corpus is derived from real online one-to-one English teaching scenes in TAL education group, which contains roughly 587 hours of speech sampled at 16 kHz. To our best knowledge, TALCS corpus is the largest well labeled Mandarin-English code-switching open source automatic speech recognition (ASR) dataset in the world. In this paper, we will introduce the recording procedure in detail, including audio capturing devices and corpus environments. And the TALCS corpus is freely available for download under the permissive license1. Using TALCS corpus, we conduct ASR experiments in two popular speech recognition toolkits to make a baseline system, including ESPnet and Wenet. The Mixture Error Rate (MER) performance in the two speech recognition toolkits is compared in TALCS corpus. The experimental results implies that the quality of audio recordings and transcriptions are promising and the baseline system is workable.

Bo Chen, Zhiwei Hu, Zhilong Ji et al.

Referring image segmentation aims to segment the target object described by a given natural language expression. Typically, referring expressions contain complex relationships between the target and its surrounding objects. The main challenge of this task is to understand the visual and linguistic content simultaneously and to find the referred object accurately among all instances in the image. Currently, the most effective way to solve the above problem is to obtain aligned multi-modal features by computing the correlation between visual and linguistic feature modalities under the supervision of the ground-truth mask. However, existing paradigms have difficulty in thoroughly understanding visual and linguistic content due to the inability to perceive information directly about surrounding objects that refer to the target. This prevents them from learning aligned multi-modal features, which leads to inaccurate segmentation. To address this issue, we present a position-aware contrastive alignment network (PCAN) to enhance the alignment of multi-modal features by guiding the interaction between vision and language through prior position information. Our PCAN consists of two modules: 1) Position Aware Module (PAM), which provides position information of all objects related to natural language descriptions, and 2) Contrastive Language Understanding Module (CLUM), which enhances multi-modal alignment by comparing the features of the referred object with those of related objects. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate our PCAN performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods. Our code will be made publicly available.

Zhiwei Hu, Bo Chen, Yuan Gao et al.

The task of referring video object segmentation aims to segment the object in the frames of a given video to which the referring expressions refer. Previous methods adopt multi-stage approach and design complex pipelines to obtain promising results. Recently, the end-to-end method based on Transformer has proved its superiority. In this work, we draw on the advantages of the above methods to provide a simple and effective pipeline for RVOS. Firstly, We improve the state-of-the-art one-stage method ReferFormer to obtain mask sequences that are strongly correlated with language descriptions. Secondly, based on a reliable and high-quality keyframe, we leverage the superior performance of video object segmentation model to further enhance the quality and temporal consistency of the mask results. Our single model reaches 70.3 J &F on the Referring Youtube-VOS validation set and 63.0 on the test set. After ensemble, we achieve 64.1 on the final leaderboard, ranking 1st place on CVPR2022 Referring Youtube-VOS challenge. Code will be available at https://github.com/Zhiweihhh/cvpr2022-rvos-challenge.git.

Changzhen Li, Jie Zhang, Yang Wei et al.

Vision Transformers have achieved great success in computer visions, delivering exceptional performance across various tasks. However, their inherent reliance on sequential input enforces the manual partitioning of images into patch sequences, which disrupts the image's inherent structural and semantic continuity. To handle this, we propose a novel Pattern Transformer (Patternformer) to adaptively convert images to pattern sequences for Transformer input. Specifically, we employ the Convolutional Neural Network to extract various patterns from the input image, with each channel representing a unique pattern that is fed into the succeeding Transformer as a visual token. By enabling the network to optimize these patterns, each pattern concentrates on its local region of interest, thereby preserving its intrinsic structural and semantic information. Only employing the vanilla ResNet and Transformer, we have accomplished state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, and have achieved competitive results on ImageNet.

Jiajun Zhang, Boyu Chen, Zhilong Ji et al.

This paper describes the approach we have taken in the challenge. We still adopted the two-stage scheme same as the last champion, that is, detection first and segmentation followed. We trained more powerful detector and segmentor separately. Besides, we also perform pseudo-label training on the test set, based on student-teacher framework and end-to-end transformer based object detection. The method ranks first on the 2nd Unidentified Video Objects (UVO) challenge, achieving AR@100 of 46.8, 64.7 and 32.2 in the limited data frame track, unlimited data frame track and video track respectively.

Yuting Nie, Junhong Zhao, Wei-Qiang Zhang et al.

Language identification is the task of automatically determining the identity of a language conveyed by a spoken segment. It has a profound impact on the multilingual interoperability of an intelligent speech system. Despite language identification attaining high accuracy on medium or long utterances(>3s), the performance on short utterances (<=1s) is still far from satisfactory. We propose a BERT-based language identification system (BERT-LID) to improve language identification performance, especially on short-duration speech segments. We extend the original BERT model by taking the phonetic posteriorgrams (PPG) derived from the front-end phone recognizer as input. Then we deployed the optimal deep classifier followed by it for language identification. Our BERT-LID model can improve the baseline accuracy by about 6.5% on long-segment identification and 19.9% on short-segment identification, demonstrating our BERT-LID's effectiveness to language identification.

Shuhao Deng, Chengfei Li, Jinfeng Bai et al.

Code-switching automatic speech recognition becomes one of the most challenging and the most valuable scenarios of automatic speech recognition, due to the code-switching phenomenon between multilingual language and the frequent occurrence of code-switching phenomenon in daily life. The ISCSLP 2022 Chinese-English Code-Switching Automatic Speech Recognition (CSASR) Challenge aims to promote the development of code-switching automatic speech recognition. The ISCSLP 2022 CSASR challenge provided two training sets, TAL_CSASR corpus and MagicData-RAMC corpus, a development and a test set for participants, which are used for CSASR model training and evaluation. Along with the challenge, we also provide the baseline system performance for reference. As a result, more than 40 teams participated in this challenge, and the winner team achieved 16.70% Mixture Error Rate (MER) performance on the test set and has achieved 9.8% MER absolute improvement compared with the baseline system. In this paper, we will describe the datasets, the associated baselines system and the requirements, and summarize the CSASR challenge results and major techniques and tricks used in the submitted systems.

Xiaolong Tang, Meina Kan, Shiguang Shan et al.

Predicting the trajectories of road agents is essential for autonomous driving systems. The recent mainstream methods follow a static paradigm, which predicts the future trajectory by using a fixed duration of historical frames. These methods make the predictions independently even at adjacent time steps, which leads to potential instability and temporal inconsistency. As successive time steps have largely overlapping historical frames, their forecasting should have intrinsic correlation, such as overlapping predicted trajectories should be consistent, or be different but share the same motion goal depending on the road situation. Motivated by this, in this work, we introduce HPNet, a novel dynamic trajectory forecasting method. Aiming for stable and accurate trajectory forecasting, our method leverages not only historical frames including maps and agent states, but also historical predictions. Specifically, we newly design a Historical Prediction Attention module to automatically encode the dynamic relationship between successive predictions. Besides, it also extends the attention range beyond the currently visible window benefitting from the use of historical predictions. The proposed Historical Prediction Attention together with the Agent Attention and Mode Attention is further formulated as the Triple Factorized Attention module, serving as the core design of HPNet.Experiments on the Argoverse and INTERACTION datasets show that HPNet achieves state-of-the-art performance, and generates accurate and stable future trajectories. Our code are available at https://github.com/XiaolongTang23/HPNet.

Haoyu Wang, Siyuan Wang, Wei-Qiang Zhang et al.

Multilingual self-supervised speech representation models have greatly enhanced the speech recognition performance for low-resource languages, and the compression of these huge models has also become a crucial prerequisite for their industrial application. In this paper, we propose DistilXLSR, a distilled cross-lingual speech representation model. By randomly shuffling the phonemes of existing speech, we reduce the linguistic information and distill cross-lingual models using only English data. We also design a layer-jumping initialization method to fully leverage the teacher's pre-trained weights. Experiments on 2 kinds of teacher models and 15 low-resource languages show that our method can reduce the parameters by 50% while maintaining cross-lingual representation ability. Our method is proven to be generalizable to various languages/teacher models and has the potential to improve the cross-lingual performance of the English pre-trained models.

Zhuang Liu, Zhichao Zhao, Ye Yuan et al.

In this technical report, we briefly introduce the solution of our team ''summer'' for Atomospheric Turbulence Mitigation in UG$^2$+ Challenge in CVPR 2022. In this task, we propose a unified end-to-end framework to reconstruct a high quality image from distorted frames, which is mainly consists of a Restormer-based image reconstruction module and a NIMA-based image quality assessment module. Our framework is efficient and generic, which is adapted to both hot-air image and text pattern. Moreover, we elaborately synthesize more than 10 thousands of images to simulate atmospheric turbulence. And these images improve the robustness of the model. Finally, we achieve the average accuracy of 98.53\% on the reconstruction result of the text patterns, ranking 1st on the final leaderboard.

Shuo Yin, Weihao You, Zhilong Ji et al.

The tool-use Large Language Models (LLMs) that integrate with external Python interpreters have significantly enhanced mathematical reasoning capabilities for open-source LLMs, while tool-free methods chose another track: augmenting math reasoning data. However, a great method to integrate the above two research paths and combine their advantages remains to be explored. In this work, we firstly include new math questions via multi-perspective data augmenting methods and then synthesize code-nested solutions to them. The open LLMs (i.e., Llama-2) are finetuned on the augmented dataset to get the resulting models, MuMath-Code ($μ$-Math-Code). During the inference phase, our MuMath-Code generates code and interacts with the external python interpreter to get the execution results. Therefore, MuMath-Code leverages the advantages of both the external tool and data augmentation. To fully leverage the advantages of our augmented data, we propose a two-stage training strategy: In Stage-1, we finetune Llama-2 on pure CoT data to get an intermediate model, which then is trained on the code-nested data in Stage-2 to get the resulting MuMath-Code. Our MuMath-Code-7B achieves 83.8 on GSM8K and 52.4 on MATH, while MuMath-Code-70B model achieves new state-of-the-art performance among open methods -- achieving 90.7% on GSM8K and 55.1% on MATH. Extensive experiments validate the combination of tool use and data augmentation, as well as our two-stage training strategy. We release the proposed dataset along with the associated code for public use.

Yufei Cai, Yuxiang Wei, Zhilong Ji et al.

Customized text-to-image generation, which aims to learn user-specified concepts with a few images, has drawn significant attention recently. However, existing methods usually suffer from overfitting issues and entangle the subject-unrelated information (e.g., background and pose) with the learned concept, limiting the potential to compose concept into new scenes. To address these issues, we propose the DETEX, a novel approach that learns the disentangled concept embedding for flexible customized text-to-image generation. Unlike conventional methods that learn a single concept embedding from the given images, our DETEX represents each image using multiple word embeddings during training, i.e., a learnable image-shared subject embedding and several image-specific subject-unrelated embeddings. To decouple irrelevant attributes (i.e., background and pose) from the subject embedding, we further present several attribute mappers that encode each image as several image-specific subject-unrelated embeddings. To encourage these unrelated embeddings to capture the irrelevant information, we incorporate them with corresponding attribute words and propose a joint training strategy to facilitate the disentanglement. During inference, we only use the subject embedding for image generation, while selectively using image-specific embeddings to retain image-specified attributes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the subject embedding obtained by our method can faithfully represent the target concept, while showing superior editability compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Our code will be made published available.

Zhong-Zhi Li, Ming-Liang Zhang, Fei Yin et al.

Due to the rapid advancements in multimodal large language models, evaluating their multimodal mathematical capabilities continues to receive wide attention. Despite the datasets like MathVista proposed benchmarks for assessing mathematical capabilities in multimodal scenarios, there is still a lack of corresponding evaluation tools and datasets for fine-grained assessment in the context of K12 education in Chinese language. To systematically evaluate the capability of multimodal large models in solving Chinese multimodal mathematical problems, we propose a Chinese Multi-modal Math Skill Evaluation Benchmark, named CMMaTH, contraining 23k multimodal K12 math related questions, forming the largest Chinese multimodal mathematical problem benchmark to date. CMMaTH questions from elementary to high school levels, provide increased diversity in problem types, solution objectives, visual elements, detailed knowledge points, and standard solution annotations. We have constructed an open-source tool GradeGPT integrated with the CMMaTH dataset, facilitating stable, rapid, and cost-free model evaluation. Our data and code are available.

Yuxiang Wei, Zhilong Ji, Jinfeng Bai et al.

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have shown significant success in personalized text-to-image generation, which aims to generate novel images with human identities indicated by the reference images. Despite promising identity fidelity has been achieved by several tuning-free methods, they usually suffer from overfitting issues. The learned identity tends to entangle with irrelevant information, resulting in unsatisfied text controllability, especially on faces. In this work, we present MasterWeaver, a test-time tuning-free method designed to generate personalized images with both faithful identity fidelity and flexible editability. Specifically, MasterWeaver adopts an encoder to extract identity features and steers the image generation through additional introduced cross attention. To improve editability while maintaining identity fidelity, we propose an editing direction loss for training, which aligns the editing directions of our MasterWeaver with those of the original T2I model. Additionally, a face-augmented dataset is constructed to facilitate disentangled identity learning, and further improve the editability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our MasterWeaver can not only generate personalized images with faithful identity, but also exhibit superiority in text controllability. Our code can be found at https://github.com/csyxwei/MasterWeaver.

Yuxiang Wei, Zhilong Ji, Xiaohe Wu et al.

Despite the progress in semantic image synthesis, it remains a challenging problem to generate photo-realistic parts from input semantic map. Integrating part segmentation map can undoubtedly benefit image synthesis, but is bothersome and inconvenient to be provided by users. To improve part synthesis, this paper presents to infer Parts from Object ShapE (iPOSE) and leverage it for improving semantic image synthesis. However, albeit several part segmentation datasets are available, part annotations are still not provided for many object categories in semantic image synthesis. To circumvent it, we resort to few-shot regime to learn a PartNet for predicting the object part map with the guidance of pre-defined support part maps. PartNet can be readily generalized to handle a new object category when a small number (e.g., 3) of support part maps for this category are provided. Furthermore, part semantic modulation is presented to incorporate both inferred part map and semantic map for image synthesis. Experiments show that our iPOSE not only generates objects with rich part details, but also enables to control the image synthesis flexibly. And our iPOSE performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods in terms of quantitative and qualitative evaluation. Our code will be publicly available at https://github.com/csyxwei/iPOSE.

Tianlun Zheng, Zhineng Chen, Jinfeng Bai et al.

Text irregularities pose significant challenges to scene text recognizers. Thin-Plate Spline (TPS)-based rectification is widely regarded as an effective means to deal with them. Currently, the calculation of TPS transformation parameters purely depends on the quality of regressed text borders. It ignores the text content and often leads to unsatisfactory rectified results for severely distorted text. In this work, we introduce TPS++, an attention-enhanced TPS transformation that incorporates the attention mechanism to text rectification for the first time. TPS++ formulates the parameter calculation as a joint process of foreground control point regression and content-based attention score estimation, which is computed by a dedicated designed gated-attention block. TPS++ builds a more flexible content-aware rectifier, generating a natural text correction that is easier to read by the subsequent recognizer. Moreover, TPS++ shares the feature backbone with the recognizer in part and implements the rectification at feature-level rather than image-level, incurring only a small overhead in terms of parameters and inference time. Experiments on public benchmarks show that TPS++ consistently improves the recognition and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy. Meanwhile, it generalizes well on different backbones and recognizers. Code is at https://github.com/simplify23/TPS_PP.

Yuchen Su, Zhineng Chen, Yongkun Du et al.

Connected component (CC) is a proper text shape representation that aligns with human reading intuition. However, CC-based text detection methods have recently faced a developmental bottleneck that their time-consuming post-processing is difficult to eliminate. To address this issue, we introduce an explicit relational reasoning network (ERRNet) to elegantly model the component relationships without post-processing. Concretely, we first represent each text instance as multiple ordered text components, and then treat these components as objects in sequential movement. In this way, scene text detection can be innovatively viewed as a tracking problem. From this perspective, we design an end-to-end tracking decoder to achieve a CC-based method dispensing with post-processing entirely. Additionally, we observe that there is an inconsistency between classification confidence and localization quality, so we propose a Polygon Monte-Carlo method to quickly and accurately evaluate the localization quality. Based on this, we introduce a position-supervised classification loss to guide the task-aligned learning of ERRNet. Experiments on challenging benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our ERRNet. It consistently achieves state-of-the-art accuracy while holding highly competitive inference speed.