Pre-trained language models achieve superior performance, but they are computationally expensive due to their large size. Techniques such as pruning and knowledge distillation (KD) have been developed to reduce their size and latency. In most structural pruning methods, the pruning units, such as attention heads and feed-forward hidden dimensions, only span a small model structure space and limit the structures that the pruning algorithm can explore. In this work, we propose Gradient-based Intra-attention pruning (GRAIN), which inspects fine intra-attention structures, and allows different heads to have different sizes. Intra-attention pruning greatly expands the searching space of model structures and yields highly heterogeneous structures. We further propose structure regularization to encourage generating more regular structures, which achieves higher speedups than heterogeneous ones. We also integrate KD into the pruning process with a gradient separation strategy to reduce the interference of KD with the pruning process. GRAIN is evaluated on a variety of tasks. Results show that it notably outperforms other methods at the same or similar model size. Even under extreme compression where only $3\%$ weights in transformers remain, the pruned model is still competitive.

Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) has become a representative foundation model in the natural language processing field. Most PLMs are trained with linguistic-agnostic pre-training tasks on the surface form of the text, such as the masked language model (MLM). To further empower the PLMs with richer linguistic features, in this paper, we aim to propose a simple but effective way to learn linguistic features for pre-trained language models. We propose LERT, a pre-trained language model that is trained on three types of linguistic features along with the original MLM pre-training task, using a linguistically-informed pre-training (LIP) strategy. We carried out extensive experiments on ten Chinese NLU tasks, and the experimental results show that LERT could bring significant improvements over various comparable baselines. Furthermore, we also conduct analytical experiments in various linguistic aspects, and the results prove that the design of LERT is valid and effective. Resources are available at https://github.com/ymcui/LERT

对象检测是一项基本的计算机视觉任务，用于在给定图像中loccal和分类对象。大多数最先进的检测方法都利用固定数量的建议作为对象候选物的中间表示，在推理过程中无法适应不同的计算约束。在本文中，我们提出了一种简单而有效的方法，该方法通过生成动态提案以进行对象检测来适应不同的计算资源。我们首先设计一个模块来制作一个基于查询的模型，以便能够使用不同数量的建议进行推断。此外，我们将其扩展到动态模型，以根据输入图像选择建议数量，从而大大降低了计算成本。我们的方法在广泛的检测模型中实现了显着的加速，包括两阶段和基于查询的模型，同时获得相似甚至更好的准确性。

多语言预训练的语言模型在跨语言任务上表现出了令人印象深刻的表现。它极大地促进了自然语言处理在低资源语言上的应用。但是，当前的多语言模型仍然有些语言表现不佳。在本文中，我们提出了Cino（中国少数族裔训练的语言模型），这是一种用于中国少数语言的多语言预训练的语言模型。它涵盖了标准的中文，Yue中文和其他六种少数民族语言。为了评估多语言模型在少数族裔语言上的跨语性能力，我们从Wikipedia和新闻网站收集文档，并构建两个文本分类数据集，WCM（Wiki-Chinese-Minority）和CMNEWS（中国最少的新闻）。我们表明，Cino在各种分类任务上的表现明显优于基准。Cino模型和数据集可在http://cino.hfl-rc.com上公开获得。

来自变压器（BERT）的双向编码器表示显示了各种NLP任务的奇妙改进，并且已经提出了其连续的变体来进一步提高预先训练的语言模型的性能。在本文中，我们的目标是首先介绍中国伯特的全文掩蔽（WWM）策略，以及一系列中国预培训的语言模型。然后我们还提出了一种简单但有效的型号，称为Macbert，这在几种方面提高了罗伯塔。特别是，我们提出了一种称为MLM作为校正（MAC）的新掩蔽策略。为了展示这些模型的有效性，我们创建了一系列中国预先培训的语言模型，作为我们的基线，包括BERT，Roberta，Electra，RBT等。我们对十个中国NLP任务进行了广泛的实验，以评估创建的中国人托管语言模型以及提议的麦克白。实验结果表明，Macbert可以在许多NLP任务上实现最先进的表演，我们还通过几种可能有助于未来的研究的调查结果来消融细节。我们开源我们的预先培训的语言模型，以进一步促进我们的研究界。资源可用：https://github.com/ymcui/chinese-bert-wwm

A recent study has shown a phenomenon called neural collapse in that the within-class means of features and the classifier weight vectors converge to the vertices of a simplex equiangular tight frame at the terminal phase of training for classification. In this paper, we explore the corresponding structures of the last-layer feature centers and classifiers in semantic segmentation. Based on our empirical and theoretical analysis, we point out that semantic segmentation naturally brings contextual correlation and imbalanced distribution among classes, which breaks the equiangular and maximally separated structure of neural collapse for both feature centers and classifiers. However, such a symmetric structure is beneficial to discrimination for the minor classes. To preserve these advantages, we introduce a regularizer on feature centers to encourage the network to learn features closer to the appealing structure in imbalanced semantic segmentation. Experimental results show that our method can bring significant improvements on both 2D and 3D semantic segmentation benchmarks. Moreover, our method ranks 1st and sets a new record (+6.8% mIoU) on the ScanNet200 test leaderboard. Code will be available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/Imbalanced-Learning.

When using LiDAR semantic segmentation models for safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving, it is essential to understand and improve their robustness with respect to a large range of LiDAR corruptions. In this paper, we aim to comprehensively analyze the robustness of LiDAR semantic segmentation models under various corruptions. To rigorously evaluate the robustness and generalizability of current approaches, we propose a new benchmark called SemanticKITTI-C, which features 16 out-of-domain LiDAR corruptions in three groups, namely adverse weather, measurement noise and cross-device discrepancy. Then, we systematically investigate 11 LiDAR semantic segmentation models, especially spanning different input representations (e.g., point clouds, voxels, projected images, and etc.), network architectures and training schemes. Through this study, we obtain two insights: 1) We find out that the input representation plays a crucial role in robustness. Specifically, under specific corruptions, different representations perform variously. 2) Although state-of-the-art methods on LiDAR semantic segmentation achieve promising results on clean data, they are less robust when dealing with noisy data. Finally, based on the above observations, we design a robust LiDAR segmentation model (RLSeg) which greatly boosts the robustness with simple but effective modifications. It is promising that our benchmark, comprehensive analysis, and observations can boost future research in robust LiDAR semantic segmentation for safety-critical applications.

Real-world robotic grasping can be done robustly if a complete 3D Point Cloud Data (PCD) of an object is available. However, in practice, PCDs are often incomplete when objects are viewed from few and sparse viewpoints before the grasping action, leading to the generation of wrong or inaccurate grasp poses. We propose a novel grasping strategy, named 3DSGrasp, that predicts the missing geometry from the partial PCD to produce reliable grasp poses. Our proposed PCD completion network is a Transformer-based encoder-decoder network with an Offset-Attention layer. Our network is inherently invariant to the object pose and point's permutation, which generates PCDs that are geometrically consistent and completed properly. Experiments on a wide range of partial PCD show that 3DSGrasp outperforms the best state-of-the-art method on PCD completion tasks and largely improves the grasping success rate in real-world scenarios. The code and dataset will be made available upon acceptance.

Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) are emerging in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis because of their strong capability of generating high-fidelity samples. However, their iterative refinement process in high-dimensional data space results in slow inference speed, which restricts their application in real-time systems. Previous works have explored speeding up by minimizing the number of inference steps but at the cost of sample quality. In this work, to improve the inference speed for DDPM-based TTS model while achieving high sample quality, we propose ResGrad, a lightweight diffusion model which learns to refine the output spectrogram of an existing TTS model (e.g., FastSpeech 2) by predicting the residual between the model output and the corresponding ground-truth speech. ResGrad has several advantages: 1) Compare with other acceleration methods for DDPM which need to synthesize speech from scratch, ResGrad reduces the complexity of task by changing the generation target from ground-truth mel-spectrogram to the residual, resulting into a more lightweight model and thus a smaller real-time factor. 2) ResGrad is employed in the inference process of the existing TTS model in a plug-and-play way, without re-training this model. We verify ResGrad on the single-speaker dataset LJSpeech and two more challenging datasets with multiple speakers (LibriTTS) and high sampling rate (VCTK). Experimental results show that in comparison with other speed-up methods of DDPMs: 1) ResGrad achieves better sample quality with the same inference speed measured by real-time factor; 2) with similar speech quality, ResGrad synthesizes speech faster than baseline methods by more than 10 times. Audio samples are available at https://resgrad1.github.io/.

Crowdsourcing, in which human intelligence and productivity is dynamically mobilized to tackle tasks too complex for automation alone to handle, has grown to be an important research topic and inspired new businesses (e.g., Uber, Airbnb). Over the years, crowdsourcing has morphed from providing a platform where workers and tasks can be matched up manually into one which leverages data-driven algorithmic management approaches powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to achieve increasingly sophisticated optimization objectives. In this paper, we provide a survey presenting a unique systematic overview on how AI can empower crowdsourcing - which we refer to as AI-Empowered Crowdsourcing(AIEC). We propose a taxonomy which divides algorithmic crowdsourcing into three major areas: 1) task delegation, 2) motivating workers, and 3) quality control, focusing on the major objectives which need to be accomplished. We discuss the limitations and insights, and curate the challenges of doing research in each of these areas to highlight promising future research directions.