Daily Papers

Contrastive learning-based video-language representation learning approaches, e.g., CLIP, have achieved outstanding performance, which pursue semantic interaction upon pre-defined video-text pairs. To clarify this coarse-grained global interaction and move a step further, we have to encounter challenging shell-breaking interactions for fine-grained cross-modal learning. In this paper, we creatively model video-text as game players with multivariate cooperative game theory to wisely handle the uncertainty during fine-grained semantic interaction with diverse granularity, flexible combination, and vague intensity. Concretely, we propose Hierarchical Banzhaf Interaction (HBI) to value possible correspondence between video frames and text words for sensitive and explainable cross-modal contrast. To efficiently realize the cooperative game of multiple video frames and multiple text words, the proposed method clusters the original video frames (text words) and computes the Banzhaf Interaction between the merged tokens. By stacking token merge modules, we achieve cooperative games at different semantic levels. Extensive experiments on commonly used text-video retrieval and video-question answering benchmarks with superior performances justify the efficacy of our HBI. More encouragingly, it can also serve as a visualization tool to promote the understanding of cross-modal interaction, which have a far-reaching impact on the community. Project page is available at https://jpthu17.github.io/HBI/.

Human-Scene Interaction (HSI) is a vital component of fields like embodied AI and virtual reality. Despite advancements in motion quality and physical plausibility, two pivotal factors, versatile interaction control and the development of a user-friendly interface, require further exploration before the practical application of HSI. This paper presents a unified HSI framework, UniHSI, which supports unified control of diverse interactions through language commands. This framework is built upon the definition of interaction as Chain of Contacts (CoC): steps of human joint-object part pairs, which is inspired by the strong correlation between interaction types and human-object contact regions. Based on the definition, UniHSI constitutes a Large Language Model (LLM) Planner to translate language prompts into task plans in the form of CoC, and a Unified Controller that turns CoC into uniform task execution. To facilitate training and evaluation, we collect a new dataset named ScenePlan that encompasses thousands of task plans generated by LLMs based on diverse scenarios. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in versatile task execution and generalizability to real scanned scenes. The project page is at https://github.com/OpenRobotLab/UniHSI .

Early diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and subjective cognitive decline (SCD) utilizing multi-modal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a pivotal area of research. While various regional and connectivity features from functional MRI (fMRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) have been employed to develop diagnosis models, most studies integrate these features without adequately addressing their alignment and interactions. This limits the potential to fully exploit the synergistic contributions of combined features and modalities. To solve this gap, our study introduces a novel Hierarchical Alignments and Hierarchical Interactions (HA-HI) method for MCI and SCD classification, leveraging the combined strengths of fMRI and DTI. HA-HI efficiently learns significant MCI- or SCD- related regional and connectivity features by aligning various feature types and hierarchically maximizing their interactions. Furthermore, to enhance the interpretability of our approach, we have developed the Synergistic Activation Map (SAM) technique, revealing the critical brain regions and connections that are indicative of MCI/SCD. Comprehensive evaluations on the ADNI dataset and our self-collected data demonstrate that HA-HI outperforms other existing methods in diagnosing MCI and SCD, making it a potentially vital and interpretable tool for early detection. The implementation of this method is publicly accessible at https://github.com/ICI-BCI/Dual-MRI-HA-HI.git.

Recent advancements in LLM-based multi-agent (LLM-MA) systems have shown promise, yet significant challenges remain in managing communication and refinement when agents collaborate on complex tasks. In this paper, we propose Talk Structurally, Act Hierarchically (TalkHier), a novel framework that introduces a structured communication protocol for context-rich exchanges and a hierarchical refinement system to address issues such as incorrect outputs, falsehoods, and biases. TalkHier surpasses various types of SoTA, including inference scaling model (OpenAI-o1), open-source multi-agent models (e.g., AgentVerse), and majority voting strategies on current LLM and single-agent baselines (e.g., ReAct, GPT4o), across diverse tasks, including open-domain question answering, domain-specific selective questioning, and practical advertisement text generation. These results highlight its potential to set a new standard for LLM-MA systems, paving the way for more effective, adaptable, and collaborative multi-agent frameworks. The code is available https://github.com/sony/talkhier.

Higher-order interactions (HOIs) are ubiquitous in real-world complex systems and applications. Investigation of deep learning for HOIs, thus, has become a valuable agenda for the data mining and machine learning communities. As networks of HOIs are expressed mathematically as hypergraphs, hypergraph neural networks (HNNs) have emerged as a powerful tool for representation learning on hypergraphs. Given the emerging trend, we present the first survey dedicated to HNNs, with an in-depth and step-by-step guide. Broadly, the present survey overviews HNN architectures, training strategies, and applications. First, we break existing HNNs down into four design components: (i) input features, (ii) input structures, (iii) message-passing schemes, and (iv) training strategies. Second, we examine how HNNs address and learn HOIs with each of their components. Third, we overview the recent applications of HNNs in recommendation, bioinformatics and medical science, time series analysis, and computer vision. Lastly, we conclude with a discussion on limitations and future directions.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is widely used in Large Language Model (LLM) alignment. Traditional RL can be modeled as a dataflow, where each node represents computation of a neural network (NN) and each edge denotes data dependencies between the NNs. RLHF complicates the dataflow by expanding each node into a distributed LLM training or generation program, and each edge into a many-to-many multicast. Traditional RL frameworks execute the dataflow using a single controller to instruct both intra-node computation and inter-node communication, which can be inefficient in RLHF due to large control dispatch overhead for distributed intra-node computation. Existing RLHF systems adopt a multi-controller paradigm, which can be inflexible due to nesting distributed computation and data communication. We propose HybridFlow, which combines single-controller and multi-controller paradigms in a hybrid manner to enable flexible representation and efficient execution of the RLHF dataflow. We carefully design a set of hierarchical APIs that decouple and encapsulate computation and data dependencies in the complex RLHF dataflow, allowing efficient operation orchestration to implement RLHF algorithms and flexible mapping of the computation onto various devices. We further design a 3D-HybridEngine for efficient actor model resharding between training and generation phases, with zero memory redundancy and significantly reduced communication overhead. Our experimental results demonstrate 1.53times~20.57times throughput improvement when running various RLHF algorithms using HybridFlow, as compared with state-of-the-art baselines. HybridFlow source code will be available at https://github.com/volcengine/verl.

Finding new drugs is getting harder and harder. One of the hopes of drug discovery is to use machine learning models to predict molecular properties. That is why models for molecular property prediction are being developed and tested on benchmarks such as MoleculeNet. However, existing benchmarks are unrealistic and are too different from applying the models in practice. We have created a new practical Lo-Hi benchmark consisting of two tasks: Lead Optimization (Lo) and Hit Identification (Hi), corresponding to the real drug discovery process. For the Hi task, we designed a novel molecular splitting algorithm that solves the Balanced Vertex Minimum k-Cut problem. We tested state-of-the-art and classic ML models, revealing which works better under practical settings. We analyzed modern benchmarks and showed that they are unrealistic and overoptimistic. Review: https://openreview.net/forum?id=H2Yb28qGLV Lo-Hi benchmark: https://github.com/SteshinSS/lohi_neurips2023 Lo-Hi splitter library: https://github.com/SteshinSS/lohi_splitter

Clustering aims to group unlabelled samples based on their similarities. It has become a significant tool for the analysis of high-dimensional data. However, most of the clustering methods merely generate pseudo labels and thus are unable to simultaneously present the similarities between different clusters and outliers. This paper proposes a new framework called High-dimensional Clustering onto Hamiltonian Cycle (HCHC) to solve the above problems. First, HCHC combines global structure with local structure in one objective function for deep clustering, improving the labels as relative probabilities, to mine the similarities between different clusters while keeping the local structure in each cluster. Then, the anchors of different clusters are sorted on the optimal Hamiltonian cycle generated by the cluster similarities and mapped on the circumference of a circle. Finally, a sample with a higher probability of a cluster will be mapped closer to the corresponding anchor. In this way, our framework allows us to appreciate three aspects visually and simultaneously - clusters (formed by samples with high probabilities), cluster similarities (represented as circular distances), and outliers (recognized as dots far away from all clusters). The experiments illustrate the superiority of HCHC.

Networks provide a powerful formalism for modeling complex systems by using a model of pairwise interactions. But much of the structure within these systems involves interactions that take place among more than two nodes at once; for example, communication within a group rather than person-to person, collaboration among a team rather than a pair of coauthors, or biological interaction between a set of molecules rather than just two. Such higher-order interactions are ubiquitous, but their empirical study has received limited attention, and little is known about possible organizational principles of such structures. Here we study the temporal evolution of 19 datasets with explicit accounting for higher-order interactions. We show that there is a rich variety of structure in our datasets but datasets from the same system types have consistent patterns of higher-order structure. Furthermore, we find that tie strength and edge density are competing positive indicators of higher-order organization, and these trends are consistent across interactions involving differing numbers of nodes. To systematically further the study of theories for such higher-order structures, we propose higher-order link prediction as a benchmark problem to assess models and algorithms that predict higher-order structure. We find a fundamental differences from traditional pairwise link prediction, with a greater role for local rather than long-range information in predicting the appearance of new interactions.

In many natural and engineered systems, unknown quantum channels act on a subsystem that cannot be directly controlled and measured, but is instead learned through a controllable subsystem that weakly interacts with it. We study quantum channel discrimination (QCD) under these restrictions, which we call hidden system QCD (HQCD). We find that sequential protocols achieve perfect discrimination and saturate the Heisenberg limit. In contrast, depth-1 parallel and multi-shot protocols cannot solve HQCD. This suggests that sequential protocols are superior in experimentally realistic situations.

The fundamental trade-off between robustness and tunability is a central challenge in the pursuit of quantum simulation and fault-tolerant quantum computation. In particular, many emerging quantum architectures are designed to achieve high coherence at the expense of having fixed spectra and consequently limited types of controllable interactions. Here, by adiabatically transforming fixed-frequency superconducting circuits into modifiable Floquet qubits, we demonstrate an XXZ Heisenberg interaction with fully adjustable anisotropy. This interaction model is on one hand the basis for many-body quantum simulation of spin systems, and on the other hand the primitive for an expressive quantum gate set. To illustrate the robustness and versatility of our Floquet protocol, we tailor the Heisenberg Hamiltonian and implement two-qubit iSWAP, CZ, and SWAP gates with estimated fidelities of 99.32(3)%, 99.72(2)%, and 98.93(5)%, respectively. In addition, we implement a Heisenberg interaction between higher energy levels and employ it to construct a three-qubit CCZ gate with a fidelity of 96.18(5)%. Importantly, the protocol is applicable to various fixed-frequency high-coherence platforms, thereby unlocking a suite of essential interactions for high-performance quantum information processing. From a broader perspective, our work provides compelling avenues for future exploration of quantum electrodynamics and optimal control using the Floquet framework.

High-frequency trading (HFT) that executes algorithmic trading in short time scales, has recently occupied the majority of cryptocurrency market. Besides traditional quantitative trading methods, reinforcement learning (RL) has become another appealing approach for HFT due to its terrific ability of handling high-dimensional financial data and solving sophisticated sequential decision-making problems, e.g., hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) has shown its promising performance on second-level HFT by training a router to select only one sub-agent from the agent pool to execute the current transaction. However, existing RL methods for HFT still have some defects: 1) standard RL-based trading agents suffer from the overfitting issue, preventing them from making effective policy adjustments based on financial context; 2) due to the rapid changes in market conditions, investment decisions made by an individual agent are usually one-sided and highly biased, which might lead to significant loss in extreme markets. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel Memory Augmented Context-aware Reinforcement learning method On HFT, a.k.a. MacroHFT, which consists of two training phases: 1) we first train multiple types of sub-agents with the market data decomposed according to various financial indicators, specifically market trend and volatility, where each agent owns a conditional adapter to adjust its trading policy according to market conditions; 2) then we train a hyper-agent to mix the decisions from these sub-agents and output a consistently profitable meta-policy to handle rapid market fluctuations, equipped with a memory mechanism to enhance the capability of decision-making. Extensive experiments on various cryptocurrency markets demonstrate that MacroHFT can achieve state-of-the-art performance on minute-level trading tasks.

In bipartite networks, community structures are restricted to being disassortative, in that nodes of one type are grouped according to common patterns of connection with nodes of the other type. This makes the stochastic block model (SBM), a highly flexible generative model for networks with block structure, an intuitive choice for bipartite community detection. However, typical formulations of the SBM do not make use of the special structure of bipartite networks. Here we introduce a Bayesian nonparametric formulation of the SBM and a corresponding algorithm to efficiently find communities in bipartite networks which parsimoniously chooses the number of communities. The biSBM improves community detection results over general SBMs when data are noisy, improves the model resolution limit by a factor of 2, and expands our understanding of the complicated optimization landscape associated with community detection tasks. A direct comparison of certain terms of the prior distributions in the biSBM and a related high-resolution hierarchical SBM also reveals a counterintuitive regime of community detection problems, populated by smaller and sparser networks, where nonhierarchical models outperform their more flexible counterpart.

Recent years have witnessed a surge in the development of protein foundation models, significantly improving performance in protein prediction and generative tasks ranging from 3D structure prediction and protein design to conformational dynamics. However, the capabilities and limitations associated with these models remain poorly understood due to the absence of a unified evaluation framework. To fill this gap, we introduce ProteinBench, a holistic evaluation framework designed to enhance the transparency of protein foundation models. Our approach consists of three key components: (i) A taxonomic classification of tasks that broadly encompass the main challenges in the protein domain, based on the relationships between different protein modalities; (ii) A multi-metric evaluation approach that assesses performance across four key dimensions: quality, novelty, diversity, and robustness; and (iii) In-depth analyses from various user objectives, providing a holistic view of model performance. Our comprehensive evaluation of protein foundation models reveals several key findings that shed light on their current capabilities and limitations. To promote transparency and facilitate further research, we release the evaluation dataset, code, and a public leaderboard publicly for further analysis and a general modular toolkit. We intend for ProteinBench to be a living benchmark for establishing a standardized, in-depth evaluation framework for protein foundation models, driving their development and application while fostering collaboration within the field.

About 90% of the computing resources available to the LHCb experiment has been spent to produce simulated data samples for Run 2 of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The upgraded LHCb detector will be able to collect larger data samples, requiring many more simulated events to analyze the data to be collected in Run 3. Simulation is a key necessity of analysis to interpret signal, reject background and measure efficiencies. The needed simulation will far exceed the pledged resources, requiring an evolution in technologies and techniques to produce these simulated data samples. In this contribution, we discuss Lamarr, a Gaudi-based framework to speed-up the simulation production parameterizing both the detector response and the reconstruction algorithms of the LHCb experiment. Deep Generative Models powered by several algorithms and strategies are employed to effectively parameterize the high-level response of the single components of the LHCb detector, encoding within neural networks the experimental errors and uncertainties introduced in the detection and reconstruction phases. Where possible, models are trained directly on real data, statistically subtracting any background components by applying appropriate reweighing procedures. Embedding Lamarr in the general LHCb Gauss Simulation framework allows to combine its execution with any of the available generators in a seamless way. The resulting software package enables a simulation process independent of the detailed simulation used to date.

Hierarchical organization is fundamental to biological systems and human societies, yet artificial intelligence systems often rely on monolithic architectures that limit adaptability and scalability. Current hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) approaches typically restrict hierarchies to two levels or require centralized training, which limits their practical applicability. We introduce TAME Agent Framework (TAG), a framework for constructing fully decentralized hierarchical multi-agent systems.TAG enables hierarchies of arbitrary depth through a novel LevelEnv concept, which abstracts each hierarchy level as the environment for the agents above it. This approach standardizes information flow between levels while preserving loose coupling, allowing for seamless integration of diverse agent types. We demonstrate the effectiveness of TAG by implementing hierarchical architectures that combine different RL agents across multiple levels, achieving improved performance over classical multi-agent RL baselines on standard benchmarks. Our results show that decentralized hierarchical organization enhances both learning speed and final performance, positioning TAG as a promising direction for scalable multi-agent systems.

Network binarization emerges as one of the most promising compression approaches offering extraordinary computation and memory savings by minimizing the bit-width. However, recent research has shown that applying existing binarization algorithms to diverse tasks, architectures, and hardware in realistic scenarios is still not straightforward. Common challenges of binarization, such as accuracy degradation and efficiency limitation, suggest that its attributes are not fully understood. To close this gap, we present BiBench, a rigorously designed benchmark with in-depth analysis for network binarization. We first carefully scrutinize the requirements of binarization in the actual production and define evaluation tracks and metrics for a comprehensive and fair investigation. Then, we evaluate and analyze a series of milestone binarization algorithms that function at the operator level and with extensive influence. Our benchmark reveals that 1) the binarized operator has a crucial impact on the performance and deployability of binarized networks; 2) the accuracy of binarization varies significantly across different learning tasks and neural architectures; 3) binarization has demonstrated promising efficiency potential on edge devices despite the limited hardware support. The results and analysis also lead to a promising paradigm for accurate and efficient binarization. We believe that BiBench will contribute to the broader adoption of binarization and serve as a foundation for future research. The code for our BiBench is released https://github.com/htqin/BiBench .

This work is the first to openly reproduce the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) scaling behaviors reported in OpenAI's seminal TL;DR summarization work. We create an RLHF pipeline from scratch, enumerate over 20 key implementation details, and share key insights during the reproduction. Our RLHF-trained Pythia models demonstrate significant gains in response quality that scale with model size, with our 2.8B, 6.9B models outperforming OpenAI's released 1.3B checkpoint. We publicly release the trained model checkpoints and code to facilitate further research and accelerate progress in the field (https://github.com/vwxyzjn/summarize_from_feedback_details).