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Qing-Guo Chen

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12 papers

2 author rows

ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

CHATS: Combining Human-Aligned Optimization and Test-Time Sampling for Text-to-Image Generation

Minghao Fu 0001
Guo-Hua Wang
Liangfu Cao
Qing-Guo Chen
Zhao Xu
Weihua Luo
Kaifu Zhang

Diffusion models have emerged as a dominant approach for text-to-image generation. Key components such as the human preference alignment and classifier-free guidance play a crucial role in ensuring generation quality. However, their independent application in current text-to-image models continues to face significant challenges in achieving strong text-image alignment, high generation quality, and consistency with human aesthetic standards. In this work, we for the first time, explore facilitating the collaboration of human performance alignment and test-time sampling to unlock the potential of text-to-image models. Consequently, we introduce CHATS (Combining Human-Aligned optimization and Test-time Sampling), a novel generative framework that separately models the preferred and dispreferred distributions and employs a proxy-prompt-based sampling strategy to utilize the useful information contained in both distributions. We observe that CHATS exhibits exceptional data efficiency, achieving strong performance with only a small, high-quality funetuning dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CHATS surpasses traditional preference alignment methods, setting new state-of-the-art across various standard benchmarks. The code is publicly available at github. com/AIDC-AI/CHATS.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Meissonic: Revitalizing Masked Generative Transformers for Efficient High-Resolution Text-to-Image Synthesis

Jinbin Bai
Tian Ye 0001
Wei Chow
Enxin Song
Qing-Guo Chen
Xiangtai Li
Zhen Dong 0003
Lei Zhu 0003

We present Meissonic, which elevates non-autoregressive text-to-image Masked Image Modeling (MIM) to a level comparable with state-of-the-art diffusion models like SDXL. By incorporating a comprehensive suite of architectural innovations, advanced positional encoding strategies, and optimized sampling conditions, Meissonic substantially improves MIM's performance and efficiency. Additionally, we leverage high-quality training data, integrate micro-conditions informed by human preference scores, and employ feature compression layers to further enhance image fidelity and resolution. Our model not only matches but often exceeds the performance of existing methods in generating high-quality, high-resolution images. Extensive experiments validate Meissonic’s capabilities, demonstrating its potential as a new standard in text-to-image synthesis.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Multi-Label Test-Time Adaptation with Bound Entropy Minimization

Xiangyu Wu
Feng Yu 0030
Yang Yang 0128
Qing-Guo Chen
Jianfeng Lu 0003

Mainstream test-time adaptation (TTA) techniques endeavor to mitigate distribution shifts via entropy minimization for multi-class classification, inherently increasing the probability of the most confident class. However, when encountering multi-label instances, the primary challenge stems from the varying number of labels per image, and prioritizing only the highest probability class inevitably undermines the adaptation of other positive labels. To address this issue, we investigate TTA within multi-label scenario (ML--TTA), developing Bound Entropy Minimization (BEM) objective to simultaneously increase the confidence of multiple top predicted labels. Specifically, to determine the number of labels for each augmented view, we retrieve a paired caption with yielded textual labels for that view. These labels are allocated to both the view and caption, called weak label set and strong label set with the same size k. Following this, the proposed BEM considers the highest top-k predicted labels from view and caption as a single entity, respectively, learning both view and caption prompts concurrently. By binding top-k predicted labels, BEM overcomes the limitation of vanilla entropy minimization, which exclusively optimizes the most confident class. Across the MSCOCO, VOC, and NUSWIDE multi-label datasets, our ML--TTA framework equipped with BEM exhibits superior performance compared to the latest SOTA methods, across various model architectures, prompt initialization, and varying label scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/Jinx630/ML-TTA.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Parrot: Multilingual Visual Instruction Tuning

Hai-Long Sun
Da-Wei Zhou 0001
Yang Li
Shiyin Lu
Chao Yi
Qing-Guo Chen
Zhao Xu
Weihua Luo

The rapid development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), such as GPT-4, marks a significant step toward artificial general intelligence. Existing methods typically align vision encoders with LLMs via supervised fine-tuning (SFT), but this often deteriorates their ability to handle multiple languages as training progresses. We empirically observe that imbalanced SFT datasets, largely English-centric, degrade performance on non-English languages due to the failure in multilingual token alignment. To address this, we propose Parrot, a novel approach that leverages textual guidance for visual token alignment at the language level. Parrot conditions visual tokens on diverse language inputs and uses Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to align multilingual tokens. By computing cross-attention between initial visual features and textual embeddings, we select the most relevant experts, converting visual tokens into language-specific representations. Additionally, we introduce the Massive Multilingual Multimodal Benchmark (MMMB), a new benchmark comprising 6 languages, 15 categories, and 12, 000 questions, to assess multilingual capabilities. Parrot achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the multilingual benchmarks and a wide range of multimodal tasks. Code and dataset are available at: https: //github. com/AIDC-AI/Parrot.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

ZooProbe: A Data Engine for Evaluating, Exploring, and Evolving Large-scale Training Data for Multimodal LLMs

Yi-Kai Zhang
Shiyin Lu
Qing-Guo Chen
De-Chuan Zhan
Han-Jia Ye

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are thriving through continuous fine-tuning by LLMs. Driven by the law that "scale is everything", MLLMs expand their training sets during version iterations. In this paper, we propose a large-scale training data engine built around an evaluating-exploring-evolving (E3) loop. Evaluating the data provides insights into its characteristics. Exploring quality rules helps identify which data enhances training. Together, these processes facilitate the systematic evolution of new, high-quality data. With the E3 loop, we introduce ZooProbe, an efficient data engine for MLLMs. First, the problem of data expansion is formalized as a tree of sampling and growth. ZooProbe introduces a small-scale model *zoo* to obtain comprehensive evaluations for child datasets. From multiple perspectives, visual, textual, and multimodal models cover over 50 dimensions of intrinsic and meta attributes, such as object and topic distribution, and higher-level properties, like annotation quality and scene complexity. ZooProbe constructs based on A$^\star$ search, modeling the heuristic function as a quality estimate from data evaluation results. It dynamically explores the rule of data quality based on the model state of the *probe* datasets. Additionally, it evolves new targeted data with identified high-quality rules. We also develop an extra heuristic quality ranker with the data utilized and discarded during the expansion. Our experiments show that ZooProbe significantly breaks the scaling law in multimodal instruction fine-tuning at scales of 260$k$ and below. ZooProbe generates high-quality data that accelerates MLLM training and enhances performance, automating the evolution of large-scale training data.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Advancing Tool-Augmented Large Language Models: Integrating Insights from Errors in Inference Trees

Sijia Chen
Yibo Wang
Yi-Feng Wu
Qing-Guo Chen
Zhao Xu
Weihua Luo
Kaifu Zhang
Lijun Zhang

Tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) leverage tools, often in the form of APIs, to improve their reasoning capabilities on complex tasks. This enables them to act as intelligent agents interacting with the real world. The recently introduced ToolLLaMA model by Qin et al. [2023] utilizes the depth-first search-based decision tree (DFSDT) mechanism for multi-step reasoning with $16000+$ real-world APIs, effectively enhancing the performance of tool-augmented LLMs compared to traditional chain reasoning mechanisms. However, their approach only employs successful paths from decision trees (also called inference trees) for supervised fine-tuning (SFT), missing out on the potential learning opportunities from failed paths. Inspired by this, we propose an inference trajectory optimization framework based on preference learning to address this limitation. We first introduce a novel method for constructing step-wise preference data from tree-like expert trajectories, which leverages the previously ignored failed explorations in the decision trees. In the subsequent training phase, we first fine-tune the LLM with successful tool-usage expert trajectories and then apply direct preference optimization (DPO) with the preference data to update the LLM's policy, resulting in our ToolPrefer-LLaMA (TP-LLaMA) model. This approach not only enhances the utilization of original expert data but also broadens the learning space of the model. Our experiments demonstrate that by obtaining insights from errors in inference trees, TP-LLaMA significantly outperforms the baselines across almost all test scenarios by a large margin and exhibits better generalization capabilities with unseen APIs. At the same time, TP-LLaMA has also demonstrated superior reasoning efficiency compared to the baselines, making it more suitable for complex tool-usage reasoning tasks.

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IJCAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

TAI++: Text as Image for Multi-Label Image Classification by Co-Learning Transferable Prompt

Xiangyu Wu
Qing-Yuan Jiang
Yang Yang
Yi-Feng Wu
Qing-Guo Chen
Jianfeng Lu

The recent introduction of prompt tuning based on pre-trained vision-language models has dramatically improved the performance of multi-label image classification. However, some existing strategies that have been explored still have drawbacks, i. e. , either exploiting massive labeled visual data at a high cost or using text data only for text prompt tuning and thus failing to learn the diversity of visual knowledge. Hence, the application scenarios of these methods are limited. In this paper, we propose a pseudo-visual prompt (PVP) module for implicit visual prompt tuning to address this problem. Specifically, we first learn the pseudo-visual prompt for each category, mining diverse visual knowledge by the well-aligned space of pre-trained vision-language models. Then, a co-learning strategy with a dual-adapter module is designed to transfer visual knowledge from pseudo-visual prompt to text prompt, enhancing their visual representation abilities. Experimental results on VOC2007, MS-COCO, and NUSWIDE datasets demonstrate that our method can surpass state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods across various settings for multi-label image classification tasks. The code is available at https: //github. com/njustkmg/PVP.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Wings: Learning Multimodal LLMs without Text-only Forgetting

Yi-Kai Zhang
Shiyin Lu
Yang Li
Yanqing Ma
Qing-Guo Chen
Zhao Xu
Weihua Luo
Kaifu Zhang

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), initiated with a trained LLM, first align images with text and then fine-tune on multimodal mixed inputs. However, during the continued training, the MLLM catastrophically forgets the text-only instructions that the initial LLM masters. In this paper, we present Wings, a novel MLLM that excels in both text-only and multimodal instructions. By examining attention across layers of MLLM, we find that text-only forgetting is related to the attention shifts from pre-image to post-image text. From that, we construct an additional Low-Rank Residual Attention (LoRRA) block that acts as the "modality learner" to expand the learnable space and compensate for the attention shift. The complementary learners, like "wings" on either side, are connected in parallel to each layer's attention block. The LoRRA mirrors the structure of attention but utilizes low-rank connections to ensure efficiency. Initially, image and text inputs are aligned with visual learners operating alongside the main attention, balancing focus on visual elements. Later, textual learners are integrated with token-wise routing, blending the outputs of both modality learners collaboratively. Our experimental results demonstrate that Wings outperforms equally-scaled MLLMs in both text-only and visual question-answering tasks. Wings with compensation of learners addresses text-only forgetting during visual modality expansion in general MLLMs.

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AAAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Deep Time-Stream Framework for Click-through Rate Prediction by Tracking Interest Evolution

Shu-Ting Shi
Wenhao Zheng
Jun Tang
Qing-Guo Chen
Yao Hu
Jianke Zhu
Ming Li

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is an essential task in industrial applications such as video recommendation. Recently, deep learning models have been proposed to learn the representation of users’ overall interests, while ignoring the fact that interests may dynamically change over time. We argue that it is necessary to consider the continuous-time information in CTR models to track user interest trend from rich historical behaviors. In this paper, we propose a novel Deep Time-Stream framework (DTS) which introduces the time information by an ordinary differential equations (ODE). DTS continuously models the evolution of interests using a neural network, and thus is able to tackle the challenge of dynamically representing users’ interests based on their historical behaviors. In addition, our framework can be seamlessly applied to any existing deep CTR models by leveraging the additional Time-Stream Module, while no changes are made to the original CTR models. Experiments on public dataset as well as real industry dataset with billions of samples demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed approaches, which achieve superior performance compared with existing methods.

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AAAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Multi-View Partial Multi-Label Learning with Graph-Based Disambiguation

Ze-Sen Chen
Xuan Wu
Qing-Guo Chen
Yao Hu
Min-Ling Zhang

In multi-view multi-label learning (MVML), each training example is represented by different feature vectors and associated with multiple labels simultaneously. Nonetheless, the labeling quality of training examples is tend to be affected by annotation noises. In this paper, the problem of multi-view partial multi-label learning (MVPML) is studied, where the set of associated labels are assumed to be candidate ones and only partially valid. To solve the MVPML problem, a two-stage graph-based disambiguation approach is proposed. Firstly, the ground-truth labels of each training example are estimated by disambiguating the candidate labels with fused similarity graph. After that, the predictive model for each label is learned from embedding features generated from disambiguation-guided clustering analysis. Extensive experimental studies clearly validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in solving the MVPML problem.

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IJCAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Multi-View Active Learning for Video Recommendation

Jia-Jia Cai
Jun Tang
Qing-Guo Chen
Yao Hu
Xiaobo Wang
Sheng-Jun Huang

On many video websites, the recommendation is implemented as a prediction problem of video-user pairs, where the videos are represented by text features extracted from the metadata. However, the metadata is manually annotated by users and is usually missing for online videos. To train an effective recommender system with lower annotation cost, we propose an active learning approach to fully exploit the visual view of videos, while querying as few annotations as possible from the text view. On one hand, a joint model is proposed to learn the mapping from visual view to text view by simultaneously aligning the two views and minimizing the classification loss. On the other hand, a novel strategy based on prediction inconsistency and watching frequency is proposed to actively select the most important videos for metadata querying. Experiments on both classification datasets and real video recommendation tasks validate that the proposed approach can significantly reduce the annotation cost.

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IJCAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Multi-View Multi-Label Learning with View-Specific Information Extraction

Xuan Wu
Qing-Guo Chen
Yao Hu
Dengbao Wang
Xiaodong Chang
Xiaobo Wang
Min-Ling Zhang

Multi-view multi-label learning serves an important framework to learn from objects with diverse representations and rich semantics. Existing multi-view multi-label learning techniques focus on exploiting shared subspace for fusing multi-view representations, where helpful view-specific information for discriminative modeling is usually ignored. In this paper, a novel multi-view multi-label learning approach named SIMM is proposed which leverages shared subspace exploitation and view-specific information extraction. For shared subspace exploitation, SIMM jointly minimizes confusion adversarial loss and multi-label loss to utilize shared information from all views. For view-specific information extraction, SIMM enforces an orthogonal constraint w. r. t. the shared subspace to utilize view-specific discriminative information. Extensive experiments on real-world data sets clearly show the favorable performance of SIMM against other state-of-the-art multi-view multi-label learning approaches.

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