Audio-visual Segmentation (AVS) is conceptualized as a conditional generation task, where audio is considered as the conditional variable for segmenting the sound producer(s). In this case, audio should be extensively explored to maximize its contribution for the final segmentation task. We propose a contrastive conditional latent diffusion model for audio-visual segmentation (AVS) to thoroughly investigate the impact of audio, where the correlation between audio and the final segmentation map is modeled to guarantee the strong correlation between them. To achieve semantic-correlated representation learning, our framework incorporates a latent diffusion model. The diffusion model learns the conditional generation process of the ground-truth segmentation map, resulting in ground-truth aware inference during the denoising process at the test stage. As our model is conditional, it is vital to ensure that the conditional variable contributes to the model output. We thus extensively model the contribution of the audio signal by minimizing the density ratio between the conditional probability of the multimodal data, e.g. conditioned on the audio-visual data, and that of the unimodal data, e.g. conditioned on the audio data only. In this way, our latent diffusion model via density ratio optimization explicitly maximizes the contribution of audio for AVS, which can then be achieved with contrastive learning as a constraint, where the diffusion part serves as the main objective to achieve maximum likelihood estimation, and the density ratio optimization part imposes the constraint. By adopting this latent diffusion model via contrastive learning, we effectively enhance the contribution of audio for AVS. The effectiveness of our solution is validated through experimental results on the benchmark dataset. Code and results are online via our project page: https://github.com/OpenNLPLab/DiffusionAVS.

The interest in linear complexity models for large language models is on the rise, although their scaling capacity remains uncertain.In this study, we present the scaling laws for linear complexity language models to establish a foundation for their scalability.Specifically, we examine the scaling behaviors of three efficient linear architectures.These include TNL (Qin et al., 2024c), a linear attention model with data-independent decay; HGRN2 (Qin et al., 2024e), a linear RNN with data-dependent decay; and cosFormer2 (Qin et al., 2022b(Qin et al., , 2024a)), a linear attention model without decay.We also include LLaMA as a baseline architecture for comparison with softmax attention.These models were trained with six variants, ranging from 70M to 7B parameters on a 300B-token corpus, and evaluated with a total of 1,376 intermediate checkpoints on various downstream tasks.These tasks include validation loss, commonsense reasoning, and information retrieval and generation.The study reveals that existing linear complexity language models exhibit similar scaling capabilities as conventional transformer-based models while also demonstrating superior linguistic proficiency and knowledge retention.

The fundamental success of large language models hinges upon the efficacious implementation of large-scale distributed training techniques. Nevertheless, building a vast, high-performance cluster featuring high-speed communication interconnectivity is prohibitively costly, and accessible only to prominent entities. In this work, we aim to lower this barrier and democratize large-scale training with limited bandwidth clusters. We propose a new approach called CO2 that introduces local-updating and asynchronous communication to the distributed data-parallel training, thereby facilitating the full overlap of COmmunication with COmputation. CO2 is able to attain a high scalability even on extensive multi-node clusters constrained by very limited communication bandwidth. We further propose the staleness gap penalty and outer momentum clipping techniques together with CO2 to bolster its convergence and training stability. Besides, CO2 exhibits seamless integration with well-established ZeRO-series optimizers which mitigate memory consumption of model states with large model training. We also provide a mathematical proof of convergence, accompanied by the establishment of a stringent upper bound. Furthermore, we validate our findings through an extensive set of practical experiments encompassing a wide range of tasks in the fields of computer vision and natural language processing. These experiments serve to demonstrate the capabilities of CO2 in terms of convergence, generalization, and scalability when deployed across configurations comprising up to 128 A100 GPUs. The outcomes emphasize the outstanding capacity of CO2 to hugely improve scalability, no matter on clusters with 800Gbps RDMA or 80Gbps TCP/IP inter-node connections.

We present Lightning Attention, the first linear attention implementation that maintains a constant training speed for various sequence lengths under fixed memory consumption. Due to the issue with cumulative summation operations (cumsum), previous linear attention implementations cannot achieve their theoretical advantage in a casual setting. However, this issue can be effectively solved by utilizing different attention calculation strategies to compute the different parts of attention. Specifically, we split the attention calculation into intra-blocks and inter-blocks and use conventional attention computation for intra-blocks and linear attention kernel tricks for inter-blocks. This eliminates the need for cumsum in the linear attention calculation. Furthermore, a tiling technique is adopted through both forward and backward procedures to take full advantage of the GPU hardware. To enhance accuracy while preserving efficacy, we introduce TransNormerLLM (TNL), a new architecture that is tailored to our lightning attention. We conduct rigorous testing on standard and self-collected datasets with varying model sizes and sequence lengths. TNL is notably more efficient than other language models. In addition, benchmark results indicate that TNL performs on par with state-of-the-art LLMs utilizing conventional transformer structures. The source code is released at github.com/OpenNLPLab/TransnormerLLM.

We explore a new task for audio-visual-language modeling called fine-grained audible video description (FAVD). It aims to provide detailed textual descriptions for the given audible videos, including the appearance and spatial locations of each object, the actions of moving objects, and the sounds in videos. Existing visual-language modeling tasks often concentrate on visual cues in videos while undervaluing the language and audio modalities. On the other hand, FAVD requires not only audio-visual-language modeling skills but also paragraph-level language generation abilities. We construct the first fine-grained audible video description benchmark (FAVDBench) to facilitate this research. For each video clip, we first provide a one-sentence summary of the video, i.e., the caption, followed by 4–6 sentences describing the visual details and 1–2 audio-related descriptions at the end. The descriptions are provided in both English and Chinese. We create two new metrics for this task: an EntityScore to gauge the completeness of entities in the visual descriptions, and an AudioScore to assess the audio descriptions. As a preliminary approach to this task, we propose an audio-visual-language transformer that extends existing video captioning model with an additional audio branch. We combine the masked language modeling and auto-regressive language modeling losses to optimize our model so that it can produce paragraph-level descriptions. We illustrate the efficiency of our model in audio-visual-language modeling by evaluating it against the proposed benchmark using both conventional captioning metrics and our proposed metrics. We further put our benchmark to the test in video generation models, demonstrating that employing fine-grained video descriptions can create more intricate videos than using captions. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/OpenNLPLab/FAVDBench. Our online benchmark is available at www.avlbench.opennlplab.cn.