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Jul 17

OntoKG: Ontology-Oriented Knowledge Graph Construction with Intrinsic-Relational Routing

Organizing a large-scale knowledge graph into a typed property graph requires structural decisions -- which entities become nodes, which properties become edges, and what schema governs these choices. Existing approaches embed these decisions in pipeline code or extract relations ad hoc, producing schemas that are tightly coupled to their construction process and difficult to reuse for downstream ontology-level tasks. We present an ontology-oriented approach in which the schema is designed from the outset for ontology analysis, entity disambiguation, ___domain customization, and LLM-guided extraction -- not merely as a byproduct of graph building. The core mechanism is intrinsic-relational routing, which classifies every property as either intrinsic or relational and routes it to the corresponding schema module. This routing produces a declarative schema that is portable across storage backends and independently reusable. We instantiate the approach on the January 2026 Wikidata dump. A rule-based cleaning stage identifies a 34.6M-entity core set from the full dump, followed by iterative intrinsic-relational routing that assigns each property to one of 94 modules organized into 8 categories. With tool-augmented LLM support and human review, the schema reaches 93.3% category coverage and 98.0% module assignment among classified entities. Exporting this schema yields a property graph with 34.0M nodes and 61.2M edges across 38 relationship types. We validate the ontology-oriented claim through five applications that consume the schema independently of the construction pipeline: ontology structure analysis, benchmark annotation auditing, entity disambiguation, ___domain customization, and LLM-guided extraction.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 2

Grounding Stylistic Domain Generalization with Quantitative Domain Shift Measures and Synthetic Scene Images

Domain Generalization (DG) is a challenging task in machine learning that requires a coherent ability to comprehend shifts across various domains through extraction of ___domain-invariant features. DG performance is typically evaluated by performing image classification in domains of various image styles. However, current methodology lacks quantitative understanding about shifts in stylistic ___domain, and relies on a vast amount of pre-training data, such as ImageNet1K, which are predominantly in photo-realistic style with weakly supervised class labels. Such a data-driven practice could potentially result in spurious correlation and inflated performance on DG benchmarks. In this paper, we introduce a new DG paradigm to address these risks. We first introduce two new quantitative measures ICV and IDD to describe ___domain shifts in terms of consistency of classes within one ___domain and similarity between two stylistic domains. We then present SuperMarioDomains (SMD), a novel synthetic multi-___domain dataset sampled from video game scenes with more consistent classes and sufficient dissimilarity compared to ImageNet1K. We demonstrate our DG method SMOS. SMOS first uses SMD to train a precursor model, which is then used to ground the training on a DG benchmark. We observe that SMOS contributes to state-of-the-art performance across five DG benchmarks, gaining large improvements to performances on abstract domains along with on-par or slight improvements to those on photo-realistic domains. Our qualitative analysis suggests that these improvements can be attributed to reduced distributional divergence between originally distant domains. Our data are available at https://github.com/fpsluozi/SMD-SMOS .

  • 6 authors
·
May 24, 2024

DSP-Reg: Domain-Sensitive Parameter Regularization for Robust Domain Generalization

Domain Generalization (DG) is a critical area that focuses on developing models capable of performing well on data from unseen distributions, which is essential for real-world applications. Existing approaches primarily concentrate on learning ___domain-invariant features, which assume that a model robust to variations in the source domains will generalize well to unseen target domains. However, these approaches neglect a deeper analysis at the parameter level, which makes the model hard to explicitly differentiate between parameters sensitive to ___domain shifts and those robust, potentially hindering its overall ability to generalize. In order to address these limitations, we first build a covariance-based parameter sensitivity analysis framework to quantify the sensitivity of each parameter in a model to ___domain shifts. By computing the covariance of parameter gradients across multiple source domains, we can identify parameters that are more susceptible to ___domain variations, which serves as our theoretical foundation. Based on this, we propose Domain-Sensitive Parameter Regularization (DSP-Reg), a principled framework that guides model optimization by a soft regularization technique that encourages the model to rely more on ___domain-invariant parameters while suppressing those that are ___domain-specific. This approach provides a more granular control over the model's learning process, leading to improved robustness and generalization to unseen domains. Extensive experiments on benchmarks, such as PACS, VLCS, OfficeHome, and DomainNet, demonstrate that DSP-Reg outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving an average accuracy of 66.7\% and surpassing all baselines.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 27

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Microprocessor Design Space Exploration

Microprocessor architects are increasingly resorting to ___domain-specific customization in the quest for high-performance and energy-efficiency. As the systems grow in complexity, fine-tuning architectural parameters across multiple sub-systems (e.g., datapath, memory blocks in different hierarchies, interconnects, compiler optimization, etc.) quickly results in a combinatorial explosion of design space. This makes ___domain-specific customization an extremely challenging task. Prior work explores using reinforcement learning (RL) and other optimization methods to automatically explore the large design space. However, these methods have traditionally relied on single-agent RL/ML formulations. It is unclear how scalable single-agent formulations are as we increase the complexity of the design space (e.g., full stack System-on-Chip design). Therefore, we propose an alternative formulation that leverages Multi-Agent RL (MARL) to tackle this problem. The key idea behind using MARL is an observation that parameters across different sub-systems are more or less independent, thus allowing a decentralized role assigned to each agent. We test this hypothesis by designing ___domain-specific DRAM memory controller for several workload traces. Our evaluation shows that the MARL formulation consistently outperforms single-agent RL baselines such as Proximal Policy Optimization and Soft Actor-Critic over different target objectives such as low power and latency. To this end, this work opens the pathway for new and promising research in MARL solutions for hardware architecture search.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 29, 2022

Instance-Aware Domain Generalization for Face Anti-Spoofing

Face anti-spoofing (FAS) based on ___domain generalization (DG) has been recently studied to improve the generalization on unseen scenarios. Previous methods typically rely on ___domain labels to align the distribution of each ___domain for learning ___domain-invariant representations. However, artificial ___domain labels are coarse-grained and subjective, which cannot reflect real ___domain distributions accurately. Besides, such ___domain-aware methods focus on ___domain-level alignment, which is not fine-grained enough to ensure that learned representations are insensitive to ___domain styles. To address these issues, we propose a novel perspective for DG FAS that aligns features on the instance level without the need for ___domain labels. Specifically, Instance-Aware Domain Generalization framework is proposed to learn the generalizable feature by weakening the features' sensitivity to instance-specific styles. Concretely, we propose Asymmetric Instance Adaptive Whitening to adaptively eliminate the style-sensitive feature correlation, boosting the generalization. Moreover, Dynamic Kernel Generator and Categorical Style Assembly are proposed to first extract the instance-specific features and then generate the style-diversified features with large style shifts, respectively, further facilitating the learning of style-insensitive features. Extensive experiments and analysis demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art competitors. Code will be publicly available at https://github.com/qianyuzqy/IADG.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 12, 2023

Tokenization Standards for Linguistic Integrity: Turkish as a Benchmark

Tokenization is a fundamental preprocessing step in NLP, directly impacting large language models' (LLMs) ability to capture syntactic, morphosyntactic, and semantic structures. This paper introduces a novel framework for systematically evaluating tokenization strategies, addressing challenges in morphologically rich and low-resource languages. Using a Turkish dataset of 6,200 multiple-choice questions from the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark, the framework assesses tokenizers across five key metrics: vocabulary size, token count, processing time, language-specific token percentages (\%TR), and token purity. These metrics provide a structured approach to evaluating how well tokenizers preserve linguistic structures. While \%TR measures the proportion of valid words in the target language, \%Pure assesses the alignment of tokens with meaningful linguistic units, such as roots and valid morphemes, minimizing semantic fragmentation. The findings reveal that \%TR, introduced as a critical metric, exhibits a stronger correlation with downstream performance (e.g., MMLU scores) than token purity, emphasizing its role in improving model accuracy. Additionally, larger model parameters do not necessarily yield better tokenization quality or enhanced results, highlighting the importance of tailored tokenization strategies that prioritize linguistic alignment. This framework sets a new standard for developing robust tokenization methods optimized for morphologically complex and low-resource languages. Future work will refine morphological analysis, explore ___domain-specific customizations, and conduct cross-linguistic evaluations to further enhance tokenization practices.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 10, 2025

Task Memory Engine: Spatial Memory for Robust Multi-Step LLM Agents

Large Language Models (LLMs) falter in multi-step interactions -- often hallucinating, repeating actions, or misinterpreting user corrections -- due to reliance on linear, unstructured context. This fragility stems from the lack of persistent memory to track evolving goals and task dependencies, undermining trust in autonomous agents. We introduce the Task Memory Engine (TME), a modular memory controller that transforms existing LLMs into robust, revision-aware agents without fine-tuning. TME implements a spatial memory framework that replaces flat context with graph-based structures to support consistent, multi-turn reasoning. Departing from linear concatenation and ReAct-style prompting, TME builds a dynamic task graph -- either a tree or directed acyclic graph (DAG) -- to map user inputs to subtasks, align them with prior context, and enable dependency-tracked revisions. Its Task Representation and Intent Management (TRIM) component models task semantics and user intent to ensure accurate interpretation. Across four multi-turn scenarios-trip planning, cooking, meeting scheduling, and shopping cart editing -- TME eliminates 100% of hallucinations and misinterpretations in three tasks, and reduces hallucinations by 66.7% and misinterpretations by 83.3% across 27 user turns, outperforming ReAct. TME's modular design supports plug-and-play deployment and ___domain-specific customization, adaptable to both personal assistants and enterprise automation. We release TME's codebase, benchmarks, and components as open-source resources, enabling researchers to develop reliable LLM agents. TME's scalable architecture addresses a critical gap in agent performance across complex, interactive settings.

  • 1 authors
·
May 25, 2025

The Finetuner's Fallacy: When to Pretrain with Your Finetuning Data

Real-world model deployments demand strong performance on narrow domains where data is often scarce. Typically, practitioners finetune models to specialize them, but this risks overfitting to the ___domain and forgetting general knowledge. We study a simple strategy, specialized pretraining (SPT), where a small ___domain dataset, typically reserved for finetuning, is repeated starting from pretraining as a fraction of the total tokens. Across three specialized domains (ChemPile, MusicPile, and ProofPile), SPT improves ___domain performance and preserves general capabilities after finetuning compared to standard pretraining. In our experiments, SPT reduces the pretraining tokens needed to reach a given ___domain performance by up to 1.75x. These gains grow when the target ___domain is underrepresented in the pretraining corpus: on domains far from web text, a 1B SPT model outperforms a 3B standard pretrained model. Beyond these empirical gains, we derive overfitting scaling laws to guide practitioners in selecting the optimal ___domain-data repetition for a given pretraining compute budget. Our observations reveal the finetuner's fallacy: while finetuning may appear to be the cheapest path to ___domain adaptation, introducing specialized ___domain data during pretraining stretches its utility. SPT yields better specialized ___domain performance (via reduced overfitting across repeated exposures) and better general ___domain performance (via reduced forgetting during finetuning), ultimately achieving stronger results with fewer parameters and less total compute when amortized over inference. To get the most out of ___domain data, incorporate it as early in training as possible.

  • 34 authors
·
Mar 20

A New Pipeline For Generating Instruction Dataset via RAG and Self Fine-Tuning

With the rapid development of large language models in recent years, there has been an increasing demand for ___domain-specific Agents that can cater to the unique needs of enterprises and organizations. Unlike general models, which strive for broad coverage, these specialized Agents rely on focused datasets tailored to their intended applications. This research proposes a pipeline that leverages the power of LLMs and the Retrieval-Augmented Generation related framework to construct high-quality instruction datasets for fine-tuning on specific domains using custom document collections. By ingesting ___domain-specific documents, the pipeline generates relevant and contextually appropriate instructions, thus effectively creating a comprehensive dataset for fine-tuning LLMs on the target ___domain. This approach overcomes the limitations of traditional dataset creation methods, which often rely on manual curation or web-scraping techniques that may introduce noise and irrelevant data. Notably, our pipeline offers a dynamic solution that can quickly adapt to updates or modifications in the ___domain-specific document collection, eliminating the need for complete retraining. Additionally, it addresses the challenge of data scarcity by enabling the generation of instruction datasets from a limited set of initial documents, rendering it suitable for unpopular or specialized domains where comprehensive datasets are scarce. As a case study, we apply this approach to the ___domain of psychiatry, a field requiring specialized knowledge and sensitive handling of patient information. The resulting fine-tuned LLM demonstrates showcases the viability of the proposed approach and underscores its potential for widespread adoption across various industries and domains where tailored, accurate, and contextually relevant language models are indispensable.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 11, 2024

Unknown Domain Inconsistency Minimization for Domain Generalization

The objective of ___domain generalization (DG) is to enhance the transferability of the model learned from a source ___domain to unobserved domains. To prevent overfitting to a specific ___domain, Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) reduces source ___domain's loss sharpness. Although SAM variants have delivered significant improvements in DG, we highlight that there's still potential for improvement in generalizing to unknown domains through the exploration on data space. This paper introduces an objective rooted in both parameter and data perturbed regions for ___domain generalization, coined Unknown Domain Inconsistency Minimization (UDIM). UDIM reduces the loss landscape inconsistency between source ___domain and unknown domains. As unknown domains are inaccessible, these domains are empirically crafted by perturbing instances from the source ___domain dataset. In particular, by aligning the loss landscape acquired in the source ___domain to the loss landscape of perturbed domains, we expect to achieve generalization grounded on these flat minima for the unknown domains. Theoretically, we validate that merging SAM optimization with the UDIM objective establishes an upper bound for the true objective of the DG task. In an empirical aspect, UDIM consistently outperforms SAM variants across multiple DG benchmark datasets. Notably, UDIM shows statistically significant improvements in scenarios with more restrictive ___domain information, underscoring UDIM's generalization capability in unseen domains. Our code is available at https://github.com/SJShin-AI/UDIM.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 12, 2024

M2QA: Multi-___domain Multilingual Question Answering

Generalization and robustness to input variation are core desiderata of machine learning research. Language varies along several axes, most importantly, language instance (e.g. French) and ___domain (e.g. news). While adapting NLP models to new languages within a single ___domain, or to new domains within a single language, is widely studied, research in joint adaptation is hampered by the lack of evaluation datasets. This prevents the transfer of NLP systems from well-resourced languages and domains to non-dominant language-___domain combinations. To address this gap, we introduce M2QA, a multi-___domain multilingual question answering benchmark. M2QA includes 13,500 SQuAD 2.0-style question-answer instances in German, Turkish, and Chinese for the domains of product reviews, news, and creative writing. We use M2QA to explore cross-lingual cross-___domain performance of fine-tuned models and state-of-the-art LLMs and investigate modular approaches to ___domain and language adaptation. We witness 1) considerable performance variations across ___domain-language combinations within model classes and 2) considerable performance drops between source and target language-___domain combinations across all model sizes. We demonstrate that M2QA is far from solved, and new methods to effectively transfer both linguistic and ___domain-specific information are necessary. We make M2QA publicly available at https://github.com/UKPLab/m2qa.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 1, 2024 1

Domain Specialization as the Key to Make Large Language Models Disruptive: A Comprehensive Survey

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP), providing a highly useful, task-agnostic foundation for a wide range of applications. However, directly applying LLMs to solve sophisticated problems in specific domains meets many hurdles, caused by the heterogeneity of ___domain data, the sophistication of ___domain knowledge, the uniqueness of ___domain objectives, and the diversity of the constraints (e.g., various social norms, cultural conformity, religious beliefs, and ethical standards in the ___domain applications). Domain specification techniques are key to make large language models disruptive in many applications. Specifically, to solve these hurdles, there has been a notable increase in research and practices conducted in recent years on the ___domain specialization of LLMs. This emerging field of study, with its substantial potential for impact, necessitates a comprehensive and systematic review to better summarize and guide ongoing work in this area. In this article, we present a comprehensive survey on ___domain specification techniques for large language models, an emerging direction critical for large language model applications. First, we propose a systematic taxonomy that categorizes the LLM ___domain-specialization techniques based on the accessibility to LLMs and summarizes the framework for all the subcategories as well as their relations and differences to each other. Second, we present an extensive taxonomy of critical application domains that can benefit dramatically from specialized LLMs, discussing their practical significance and open challenges. Last, we offer our insights into the current research status and future trends in this area.

  • 24 authors
·
May 29, 2023

DomainShuttle: Freeform Open Domain Subject-driven Text-to-video Generation

Open ___domain subject-driven text-to-video (S2V) generation has drawn significant interest in academia and industry. Open ___domain S2V mainly involves two scenarios: in-___domain, which requires retaining the reference subject features as much as possible, and cross-___domain, which preserves the intrinsic features of the subject while allowing subject-irrelevant properties to vary flexibly according to the text prompt. Existing methods primarily focus on maximizing subject fidelity in in-___domain scenarios, which limits their editability and adaptability in cross-___domain scenarios, such as novel styles, semantic combinations, or ___domain attributes. In this study, we propose that an ideal S2V method should flexibly shuttle between different domains, achieving strong performance in both in-___domain and cross-___domain scenarios. To this end, we propose DomainShuttle, which could achieve high fidelity and generative flexibility for open ___domain video personalization. Specifically, we introduce Domain-MoT, which decouples videos and reference features and introduces the ___domain-aware AdaLN for ___domain-specific modeling of reference images. We then introduce the Video-Reference DualRoPE scheme, which places reference image tokens and video tokens in separate RoPE spaces to enable precise subject-level spatial modeling, and Cross-Pair Consistent Loss, which aims to extract intrinsic subject features unaffected by irrelevant features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DomainShuttle achieves significant performance improvements over existing methods, exhibiting high subject fidelity and generative flexibility across diverse open ___domain application scenarios.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 23 1

AlignIT: Enhancing Prompt Alignment in Customization of Text-to-Image Models

We consider the problem of customizing text-to-image diffusion models with user-supplied reference images. Given new prompts, the existing methods can capture the key concept from the reference images but fail to align the generated image with the prompt. In this work, we seek to address this key issue by proposing new methods that can easily be used in conjunction with existing customization methods that optimize the embeddings/weights at various intermediate stages of the text encoding process. The first contribution of this paper is a dissection of the various stages of the text encoding process leading up to the conditioning vector for text-to-image models. We take a holistic view of existing customization methods and notice that key and value outputs from this process differs substantially from their corresponding baseline (non-customized) models (e.g., baseline stable diffusion). While this difference does not impact the concept being customized, it leads to other parts of the generated image not being aligned with the prompt. Further, we also observe that these keys and values allow independent control various aspects of the final generation, enabling semantic manipulation of the output. Taken together, the features spanning these keys and values, serve as the basis for our next contribution where we fix the aforementioned issues with existing methods. We propose a new post-processing algorithm, AlignIT, that infuses the keys and values for the concept of interest while ensuring the keys and values for all other tokens in the input prompt are unchanged. Our proposed method can be plugged in directly to existing customization methods, leading to a substantial performance improvement in the alignment of the final result with the input prompt while retaining the customization quality.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 27, 2024

When Large Language Models Meet Personalization: Perspectives of Challenges and Opportunities

The advent of large language models marks a revolutionary breakthrough in artificial intelligence. With the unprecedented scale of training and model parameters, the capability of large language models has been dramatically improved, leading to human-like performances in understanding, language synthesizing, and common-sense reasoning, etc. Such a major leap-forward in general AI capacity will change the pattern of how personalization is conducted. For one thing, it will reform the way of interaction between humans and personalization systems. Instead of being a passive medium of information filtering, large language models present the foundation for active user engagement. On top of such a new foundation, user requests can be proactively explored, and user's required information can be delivered in a natural and explainable way. For another thing, it will also considerably expand the scope of personalization, making it grow from the sole function of collecting personalized information to the compound function of providing personalized services. By leveraging large language models as general-purpose interface, the personalization systems may compile user requests into plans, calls the functions of external tools to execute the plans, and integrate the tools' outputs to complete the end-to-end personalization tasks. Today, large language models are still being developed, whereas the application in personalization is largely unexplored. Therefore, we consider it to be the right time to review the challenges in personalization and the opportunities to address them with LLMs. In particular, we dedicate this perspective paper to the discussion of the following aspects: the development and challenges for the existing personalization system, the newly emerged capabilities of large language models, and the potential ways of making use of large language models for personalization.

  • 12 authors
·
Jul 30, 2023

A Unified Data Augmentation Framework for Low-Resource Multi-Domain Dialogue Generation

Current state-of-the-art dialogue systems heavily rely on extensive training datasets. However, challenges arise in domains where ___domain-specific training datasets are insufficient or entirely absent. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel data Augmentation framework for Multi-Domain Dialogue Generation, referred to as AMD^2G. The AMD^2G framework consists of a data augmentation process and a two-stage training approach: ___domain-agnostic training and ___domain adaptation training. We posit that ___domain corpora are a blend of ___domain-agnostic and ___domain-specific features, with certain representation patterns shared among diverse domains. Domain-agnostic training aims to enable models to learn these common expressive patterns. To construct ___domain-agnostic dialogue corpora, we employ a \textbf{de-domaining} data processing technique used to remove ___domain-specific features. By mitigating the effects of ___domain-specific features, the model trained on the de-domained corpora can effectively learn common expression patterns in different domains. Subsequently, we adapt the learned ___domain-agnostic features to the target ___domain through ___domain adaptation training. We conduct experiments on Chinese dialogue datasets from five different domains and show that AMD^2G achieves superior performance compared to both direct training on the target ___domain corpus and collective training on all five ___domain corpora. Our work underscores AMD^2G as a viable alternative solution for low-resource multi-___domain dialogue generation. Code and data associated with our work are available on GitHub repository^{text 1}.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 14, 2024

Domain penalisation for improved Out-of-Distribution Generalisation

In the field of object detection, ___domain generalisation (DG) aims to ensure robust performance across diverse and unseen target domains by learning the robust ___domain-invariant features corresponding to the objects of interest across multiple source domains. While there are many approaches established for performing DG for the task of classification, there has been a very little focus on object detection. In this paper, we propose a ___domain penalisation (DP) framework for the task of object detection, where the data is assumed to be sampled from multiple source domains and tested on completely unseen test domains. We assign penalisation weights to each ___domain, with the values updated based on the detection networks performance on the respective source domains. By prioritising the domains that needs more attention, our approach effectively balances the training process. We evaluate our solution on the GWHD 2021 dataset, a component of the WiLDS benchmark and we compare against ERM and GroupDRO as these are primarily loss function based. Our extensive experimental results reveals that the proposed approach improves the accuracy by 0.3 percent and 0.5 percent on validation and test out-of-distribution (OOD) sets, respectively for FasterRCNN. We also compare the performance of our approach on FCOS detector and show that our approach improves the baseline OOD performance over the existing approaches by 1.3 percent and 1.4 percent on validation and test sets, respectively. This study underscores the potential of performance based ___domain penalisation in enhancing the generalisation ability of object detection models across diverse environments.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 3, 2024

Domain-Specific Data Synthesis for LLMs via Minimal Sufficient Representation Learning

Large Language Models have demonstrated remarkable progress in general-purpose capabilities and can achieve strong performance in specific domains through fine-tuning on ___domain-specific data. However, acquiring high-quality data for target domains remains a significant challenge. Existing data synthesis approaches follow a deductive paradigm, heavily relying on explicit ___domain descriptions expressed in natural language and careful prompt engineering, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios where domains are difficult to describe or formally articulate. In this work, we tackle the underexplored problem of ___domain-specific data synthesis through an inductive paradigm, where the target ___domain is defined only through a set of reference examples, particularly when ___domain characteristics are difficult to articulate in natural language. We propose a novel framework, DOMINO, that learns a minimal sufficient ___domain representation from reference samples and leverages it to guide the generation of ___domain-aligned synthetic data. DOMINO integrates prompt tuning with a contrastive disentanglement objective to separate ___domain-level patterns from sample-specific noise, mitigating overfitting while preserving core ___domain characteristics. Theoretically, we prove that DOMINO expands the support of the synthetic data distribution, ensuring greater diversity. Empirically, on challenging coding benchmarks where ___domain definitions are implicit, fine-tuning on data synthesized by DOMINO improves Pass@1 accuracy by up to 4.63\% over strong, instruction-tuned backbones, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness. This work establishes a new paradigm for ___domain-specific data synthesis, enabling practical and scalable ___domain adaptation without manual prompt design or natural language ___domain specifications.

  • 9 authors
·
May 28 2

Selecting and Merging: Towards Adaptable and Scalable Named Entity Recognition with Large Language Models

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is widely used to align large language models (LLMs) with information extraction (IE) tasks, such as named entity recognition (NER). However, annotating such fine-grained labels and training ___domain-specific models is costly. Existing works typically train a unified model across multiple domains, but such approaches lack adaptation and scalability since not all training data benefits target domains and scaling trained models remains challenging. We propose the SaM framework, which dynamically Selects and Merges expert models at inference time. Specifically, for a target ___domain, we select ___domain-specific experts pre-trained on existing domains based on (i) ___domain similarity to the target ___domain and (ii) performance on sampled instances, respectively. The experts are then merged to create task-specific models optimized for the target ___domain. By dynamically merging experts beneficial to target domains, we improve generalization across various domains without extra training. Additionally, experts can be added or removed conveniently, leading to great scalability. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate our framework's effectiveness, which outperforms the unified model by an average of 10%. We further provide insights into potential improvements, practical experience, and extensions of our framework.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 28, 2025 1

Contrastive Learning and Mixture of Experts Enables Precise Vector Embeddings

The advancement of transformer neural networks has significantly elevated the capabilities of sentence similarity models, particularly in creating effective vector representations of natural language inputs. However, these models face notable challenges in ___domain-specific contexts, especially in highly specialized scientific sub-fields. Traditional methods often struggle in this regime, either overgeneralizing similarities within a niche or being overly sensitive to minor differences, resulting in inaccurate text classification and subpar vector representation. In an era where retrieval augmentation and search are increasingly crucial, precise and concise numerical representations are essential. In this paper, we target this issue by assembling niche datasets using co-citations as a similarity metric, focusing on biomedical domains. We employ two key strategies for fine-tuning state-of-the-art models: 1. Domain-specific Fine-Tuning, which tailors pretrained models to a single ___domain, and 2. Universal Applicability with Mixture of Experts (MoE), adapting pretrained models with enforced routing for multiple domains simultaneously. Our training approach emphasizes the use of abstracts for faster training, incorporating Multiple Negative Rankings loss for efficient contrastive learning. Notably, our MoE variants, equipped with N experts, achieve the efficacy of N individual models, heralding a new era of versatile, One-Size-Fits-All transformer networks for various tasks. This methodology marks significant advancements in scientific text classification metrics and holds promise for enhancing vector database search and compilation.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 28, 2024

SaulLM-54B & SaulLM-141B: Scaling Up Domain Adaptation for the Legal Domain

In this paper, we introduce SaulLM-54B and SaulLM-141B, two large language models (LLMs) tailored for the legal sector. These models, which feature architectures of 54 billion and 141 billion parameters, respectively, are based on the Mixtral architecture. The development of SaulLM-54B and SaulLM-141B is guided by large-scale ___domain adaptation, divided into three strategies: (1) the exploitation of continued pretraining involving a base corpus that includes over 540 billion of legal tokens, (2) the implementation of a specialized legal instruction-following protocol, and (3) the alignment of model outputs with human preferences in legal interpretations. The integration of synthetically generated data in the second and third steps enhances the models' capabilities in interpreting and processing legal texts, effectively reaching state-of-the-art performance and outperforming previous open-source models on LegalBench-Instruct. This work explores the trade-offs involved in ___domain-specific adaptation at this scale, offering insights that may inform future studies on ___domain adaptation using strong decoder models. Building upon SaulLM-7B, this study refines the approach to produce an LLM better equipped for legal tasks. We are releasing base, instruct, and aligned versions on top of SaulLM-54B and SaulLM-141B under the MIT License to facilitate reuse and collaborative research.

  • 10 authors
·
Jul 28, 2024 2

Building Domain-Specific Small Language Models via Guided Data Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable success in supporting a wide range of knowledge-intensive tasks. In specialized domains, there is growing interest in leveraging LLMs to assist subject matter experts with ___domain-specific challenges. However, deploying LLMs as SaaS solutions raises data privacy concerns, while many open-source models demand significant computational resources for effective ___domain adaptation and deployment. A promising alternative is to develop smaller, ___domain-specialized LLMs, though this approach is often constrained by the lack of high-quality ___domain-specific training data. In this work, we address these limitations by presenting a cost-efficient and scalable training pipeline that combines guided synthetic data generation from a small seed corpus with bottom-up ___domain data curation. Our pipeline integrates Domain-Adaptive Pretraining (DAPT), Domain-specific Supervised Fine-tuning (DSFT), and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to train effective small-scale models for specialized use cases. We demonstrate this approach through DiagnosticSLM, a 3B-parameter ___domain-specific model tailored for fault diagnosis, root cause analysis, and repair recommendation in industrial settings. To evaluate model performance, we introduce four ___domain-specific benchmarks: multiple-choice questions (DiagnosticMCQ), question answering (DiagnosticQA), sentence completion (DiagnosticComp), and summarization (DiagnosticSum). DiagnosticSLM achieves up to 25% accuracy improvement over open-source models of comparable or larger size (2B-9B) on the MCQ task, while also outperforming or matching them in other tasks, demonstrating effective ___domain-specific reasoning and generalization capabilities.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 23, 2025

MarineEval: Assessing the Marine Intelligence of Vision-Language Models

We have witnessed promising progress led by large language models (LLMs) and further vision language models (VLMs) in handling various queries as a general-purpose assistant. VLMs, as a bridge to connect the visual world and language corpus, receive both visual content and various text-only user instructions to generate corresponding responses. Though great success has been achieved by VLMs in various fields, in this work, we ask whether the existing VLMs can act as ___domain experts, accurately answering marine questions, which require significant ___domain expertise and address special ___domain challenges/requirements. To comprehensively evaluate the effectiveness and explore the boundary of existing VLMs, we construct the first large-scale marine VLM dataset and benchmark called MarineEval, with 2,000 image-based question-answering pairs. During our dataset construction, we ensure the diversity and coverage of the constructed data: 7 task dimensions and 20 capacity dimensions. The ___domain requirements are specially integrated into the data construction and further verified by the corresponding marine ___domain experts. We comprehensively benchmark 17 existing VLMs on our MarineEval and also investigate the limitations of existing models in answering marine research questions. The experimental results reveal that existing VLMs cannot effectively answer the ___domain-specific questions, and there is still a large room for further performance improvements. We hope our new benchmark and observations will facilitate future research. Project Page: http://marineeval.hkustvgd.com/

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 24, 2025

AdaptDHM: Adaptive Distribution Hierarchical Model for Multi-Domain CTR Prediction

Large-scale commercial platforms usually involve numerous business domains for diverse business strategies and expect their recommendation systems to provide click-through rate (CTR) predictions for multiple domains simultaneously. Existing promising and widely-used multi-___domain models discover ___domain relationships by explicitly constructing ___domain-specific networks, but the computation and memory boost significantly with the increase of domains. To reduce computational complexity, manually grouping domains with particular business strategies is common in industrial applications. However, this pre-defined data partitioning way heavily relies on prior knowledge, and it may neglect the underlying data distribution of each ___domain, hence limiting the model's representation capability. Regarding the above issues, we propose an elegant and flexible multi-distribution modeling paradigm, named Adaptive Distribution Hierarchical Model (AdaptDHM), which is an end-to-end optimization hierarchical structure consisting of a clustering process and classification process. Specifically, we design a distribution adaptation module with a customized dynamic routing mechanism. Instead of introducing prior knowledge for pre-defined data allocation, this routing algorithm adaptively provides a distribution coefficient for each sample to determine which cluster it belongs to. Each cluster corresponds to a particular distribution so that the model can sufficiently capture the commonalities and distinctions between these distinct clusters. Extensive experiments on both public and large-scale Alibaba industrial datasets verify the effectiveness and efficiency of AdaptDHM: Our model achieves impressive prediction accuracy and its time cost during the training stage is more than 50% less than that of other models.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 22, 2022

Learn to Preserve and Diversify: Parameter-Efficient Group with Orthogonal Regularization for Domain Generalization

Domain generalization (DG) aims to avoid the performance degradation of the model when the distribution shift between the limited training data and unseen test data occurs. Recently, foundation models with enormous parameters have been pre-trained with huge datasets, demonstrating strong generalization ability and showing promising direction for solving the DG problem. However, fully Fine-Tuning (FT) the foundation models results in unsatisfactory out-of-distribution accuracy due to the destroyed pre-trained generalized features. Recently, Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) alleviates the above problem by fine-tuning a small portion of the model parameters while keeping the rest frozen, which achieves better generalization performance compared to FT. Nevertheless, PEFT still suffers from the issue of overfitting to the training domains. To address the above issue, we propose Parameter-Efficient Group with Orthogonal regularization (PEGO) for vision transformers, which effectively preserves the generalization ability of the pre-trained network and learns more diverse knowledge compared with conventional PEFT. Specifically, we inject a group of trainable Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules into the pre-trained model and propose an orthogonal regularization loss to enhance the generalization ability of the model. Our framework achieves SOTA performance on five DG benchmarks, while only requiring training a small number of parameters without adding additional testing cost.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 21, 2024

MetaGen Blended RAG: Higher Accuracy for Domain-Specific Q&A Without Fine-Tuning

Despite the widespread exploration of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), its deployment in enterprises for ___domain-specific datasets remains limited due to poor answer accuracy. These corpora, often shielded behind firewalls in private enterprise knowledge bases, having complex, ___domain-specific terminology, rarely seen by LLMs during pre-training; exhibit significant semantic variability across domains (like networking, military, or legal, etc.), or even within a single ___domain like medicine, and thus result in poor context precision for RAG systems. Currently, in such situations, fine-tuning or RAG with fine-tuning is attempted, but these approaches are slow, expensive, and lack generalization for accuracy as the new ___domain-specific data emerges. We propose an approach for Enterprise Search that focuses on enhancing the retriever for a ___domain-specific corpus through hybrid query indexes and metadata enrichment. This 'MetaGen Blended RAG' method constructs a metadata generation pipeline using key concepts, topics, and acronyms, and then creates a metadata-enriched hybrid index with boosted search queries. This approach avoids overfitting and generalizes effectively across domains. On the PubMedQA benchmark for the biomedical ___domain, the proposed method achieves 82% retrieval accuracy and 77% RAG accuracy, surpassing all previous RAG accuracy results without fine-tuning and sets a new benchmark for zero-shot results while outperforming much larger models like GPT3.5. The results are even comparable to the best fine-tuned models on this dataset, and we further demonstrate the robustness and scalability of the approach by evaluating it on other Q&A datasets like SQuAD, NQ etc.

  • 3 authors
·
May 23, 2025

Knowledgeable Preference Alignment for LLMs in Domain-specific Question Answering

Recently, the development of large language models (LLMs) has attracted wide attention in academia and industry. Deploying LLMs to real scenarios is one of the key directions in the current Internet industry. In this paper, we present a novel pipeline to apply LLMs for ___domain-specific question answering (QA) that incorporates ___domain knowledge graphs (KGs), addressing an important direction of LLM application. As a real-world application, the content generated by LLMs should be user-friendly to serve the customers. Additionally, the model needs to utilize ___domain knowledge properly to generate reliable answers. These two issues are the two major difficulties in the LLM application as vanilla fine-tuning can not adequately address them. We think both requirements can be unified as the model preference problem that needs to align with humans to achieve practical application. Thus, we introduce Knowledgeable Preference AlignmenT (KnowPAT), which constructs two kinds of preference set called style preference set and knowledge preference set respectively to tackle the two issues. Besides, we design a new alignment objective to align the LLM preference with human preference, aiming to train a better LLM for real-scenario ___domain-specific QA to generate reliable and user-friendly answers. Adequate experiments and comprehensive with 15 baseline methods demonstrate that our KnowPAT is an outperforming pipeline for real-scenario ___domain-specific QA with LLMs. Our code is open-source at https://github.com/zjukg/KnowPAT.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 11, 2023

SAMGPT: Text-free Graph Foundation Model for Multi-___domain Pre-training and Cross-___domain Adaptation

Graphs are able to model interconnected entities in many online services, supporting a wide range of applications on the Web. This raises an important question: How can we train a graph foundational model on multiple source domains and adapt to an unseen target ___domain? A major obstacle is that graphs from different domains often exhibit divergent characteristics. Some studies leverage large language models to align multiple domains based on textual descriptions associated with the graphs, limiting their applicability to text-attributed graphs. For text-free graphs, a few recent works attempt to align different feature distributions across domains, while generally neglecting structural differences. In this work, we propose a novel Structure Alignment framework for text-free Multi-___domain Graph Pre-Training and cross-___domain adaptation (SAMGPT). It is designed to learn multi-___domain knowledge from graphs originating in multiple source domains, which can then be adapted to address applications in an unseen target ___domain. Specifically, we introduce a set of structure tokens to harmonize structure-based aggregation across source domains during the pre-training phase. Next, for cross-___domain adaptation, we design dual prompts, namely, holistic prompts and specific prompts, which adapt unified multi-___domain structural knowledge and fine-grained, ___domain-specific information, respectively, to a target ___domain. Finally, we conduct comprehensive experiments on seven public datasets to evaluate and analyze the effectiveness of SAMGPT.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 7, 2025

Pareto Domain Adaptation

Domain adaptation (DA) attempts to transfer the knowledge from a labeled source ___domain to an unlabeled target ___domain that follows different distribution from the source. To achieve this, DA methods include a source classification objective to extract the source knowledge and a ___domain alignment objective to diminish the ___domain shift, ensuring knowledge transfer. Typically, former DA methods adopt some weight hyper-parameters to linearly combine the training objectives to form an overall objective. However, the gradient directions of these objectives may conflict with each other due to ___domain shift. Under such circumstances, the linear optimization scheme might decrease the overall objective value at the expense of damaging one of the training objectives, leading to restricted solutions. In this paper, we rethink the optimization scheme for DA from a gradient-based perspective. We propose a Pareto Domain Adaptation (ParetoDA) approach to control the overall optimization direction, aiming to cooperatively optimize all training objectives. Specifically, to reach a desirable solution on the target ___domain, we design a surrogate loss mimicking target classification. To improve target-prediction accuracy to support the mimicking, we propose a target-prediction refining mechanism which exploits ___domain labels via Bayes' theorem. On the other hand, since prior knowledge of weighting schemes for objectives is often unavailable to guide optimization to approach the optimal solution on the target ___domain, we propose a dynamic preference mechanism to dynamically guide our cooperative optimization by the gradient of the surrogate loss on a held-out unlabeled target dataset. Extensive experiments on image classification and semantic segmentation benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of ParetoDA

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 8, 2021

Crafting Distribution Shifts for Validation and Training in Single Source Domain Generalization

Single-source ___domain generalization attempts to learn a model on a source ___domain and deploy it to unseen target domains. Limiting access only to source ___domain data imposes two key challenges - how to train a model that can generalize and how to verify that it does. The standard practice of validation on the training distribution does not accurately reflect the model's generalization ability, while validation on the test distribution is a malpractice to avoid. In this work, we construct an independent validation set by transforming source ___domain images with a comprehensive list of augmentations, covering a broad spectrum of potential distribution shifts in target domains. We demonstrate a high correlation between validation and test performance for multiple methods and across various datasets. The proposed validation achieves a relative accuracy improvement over the standard validation equal to 15.4% or 1.6% when used for method selection or learning rate tuning, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce a novel family of methods that increase the shape bias through enhanced edge maps. To benefit from the augmentations during training and preserve the independence of the validation set, a k-fold validation process is designed to separate the augmentation types used in training and validation. The method that achieves the best performance on the augmented validation is selected from the proposed family. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on various standard benchmarks. Code at: https://github.com/NikosEfth/crafting-shifts

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 29, 2024

EvoCodeBench: An Evolving Code Generation Benchmark with Domain-Specific Evaluations

How to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) in code generation remains an open question. Existing benchmarks have two limitations - data leakage and lack of ___domain-specific evaluation. The former hurts the fairness of benchmarks, and the latter hinders practitioners from selecting superior LLMs for specific programming domains. To address these two limitations, we propose a new benchmark - EvoCodeBench, which has the following advances: (1) Evolving data. EvoCodeBench will be dynamically updated every period (e.g., 6 months) to avoid data leakage. This paper releases the first version - EvoCodeBench-2403, containing 275 samples from 25 repositories. (2) A ___domain taxonomy and ___domain labels. Based on the statistics of open-source communities, we design a programming ___domain taxonomy consisting of 10 popular domains. Based on the taxonomy, we annotate each sample in EvoCodeBench with a ___domain label. (3) Domain-specific evaluations. Besides the Pass@k, we compute the Domain-Specific Improvement (DSI) and define LLMs' comfort and strange domains. These evaluations help practitioners select superior LLMs in specific domains and discover the shortcomings of existing LLMs. We evaluate 8 popular LLMs (e.g., gpt-4, DeepSeek Coder) on EvoCodeBench and summarize some insights. EvoCodeBench reveals the actual abilities of these LLMs in real-world repositories. For example, the highest Pass@1 of gpt-4 on EvoCodeBench-2403 is only 20.74%. Besides, we evaluate LLMs in different domains and discover their comfort and strange domains. For example, gpt-4 performs best in most domains but falls behind others in the Internet ___domain. StarCoder 2-15B unexpectedly performs well in the Database ___domain and even outperforms 33B LLMs. EvoCodeBench has been released.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 30, 2024

Is Biomedical Specialization Still Worth It? Insights from Domain-Adaptive Language Modelling with a New French Health Corpus

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse domains, yet their adaptation to specialized fields remains challenging, particularly for non-English languages. This study investigates ___domain-adaptive pre-training (DAPT) as a strategy for specializing small to mid-sized LLMs in the French biomedical ___domain through continued pre-training. We address two key research questions: the viability of specialized continued pre-training for ___domain adaptation and the relationship between ___domain-specific performance gains and general capability degradation. Our contributions include the release of a fully open-licensed French biomedical corpus suitable for commercial and open-source applications, the training and release of specialized French biomedical LLMs, and novel insights for DAPT implementation. Our methodology encompasses the collection and refinement of high-quality French biomedical texts, the exploration of causal language modeling approaches using DAPT, and conducting extensive comparative evaluations. Our results cast doubt on the efficacy of DAPT, in contrast to previous works, but we highlight its viability in smaller-scale, resource-constrained scenarios under the right conditions. Findings in this paper further suggest that model merging post-DAPT is essential to mitigate generalization trade-offs, and in some cases even improves performance on specialized tasks at which the DAPT was directed.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 7

CodeLSI: Leveraging Foundation Models for Automated Code Generation with Low-Rank Optimization and Domain-Specific Instruction Tuning

Context: Automated code generation using Foundation Models (FMs) offers promising solutions for enhancing software development efficiency. However, challenges remain in ensuring ___domain specificity, cost-effectiveness, and security - especially when relying on third-party APIs. This paper introduces CodeLSI, a framework that combines low-rank optimization and ___domain-specific instruction tuning to address these challenges. Objectives: The aim of this study is to develop and evaluate CodeLSI, a novel approach for generating high-quality code tailored to specific domains, using FMs fine-tuned on company infrastructure without dependence on external APIs. Methods: CodeLSI applies low-rank adaptation techniques to reduce the computational cost of model pre-training and fine-tuning. Domain-specific instruction tuning is employed to align code generation with organizational needs. We implemented and tested the framework on real-world JavaScript coding tasks using datasets drawn from internal software projects. Results: Experimental evaluations show that CodeLSI produces high-quality, context aware code. It outperforms baseline models in terms of relevance, accuracy, and ___domain fit. The use of low-rank optimization significantly reduced resource requirements, enabling scalable training on company-owned infrastructure. Conclusion: CodeLSI demonstrates that combining low-rank optimization with ___domain specific tuning can enhance the practicality and performance of FMs for automated code generation. This approach provides a secure, cost-efficient alternative to commercial API based solutions and supports faster, more targeted innovation in software development.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 17, 2025

Beyond Finite Data: Towards Data-free Out-of-distribution Generalization via Extrapolation

Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization is a favorable yet challenging property for deep neural networks. The core challenges lie in the limited availability of source domains that help models learn an invariant representation from the spurious features. Various ___domain augmentation have been proposed but largely rely on interpolating existing domains and frequently face difficulties in creating truly "novel" domains. Humans, on the other hand, can easily extrapolate novel domains, thus, an intriguing question arises: How can neural networks extrapolate like humans and achieve OOD generalization? We introduce a novel approach to ___domain extrapolation that leverages reasoning ability and the extensive knowledge encapsulated within large language models (LLMs) to synthesize entirely new domains. Starting with the class of interest, we query the LLMs to extract relevant knowledge for these novel domains. We then bridge the gap between the text-centric knowledge derived from LLMs and the pixel input space of the model using text-to-image generation techniques. By augmenting the training set of ___domain generalization datasets with high-fidelity, photo-realistic images of these new domains, we achieve significant improvements over all existing methods, as demonstrated in both single and multi-___domain generalization across various benchmarks. With the ability to extrapolate any domains for any class, our method has the potential to learn a generalized model for any task without any data. To illustrate, we put forth a much more difficult setting termed, data-free ___domain generalization, that aims to learn a generalized model in the absence of any collected data. Our empirical findings support the above argument and our methods exhibit commendable performance in this setting, even surpassing the supervised setting by approximately 1-2\% on datasets such as VLCS.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 8, 2024

Generalized Face Anti-spoofing via Finer Domain Partition and Disentangling Liveness-irrelevant Factors

Face anti-spoofing techniques based on ___domain generalization have recently been studied widely. Adversarial learning and meta-learning techniques have been adopted to learn ___domain-invariant representations. However, prior approaches often consider the dataset gap as the primary factor behind ___domain shifts. This perspective is not fine-grained enough to reflect the intrinsic gap among the data accurately. In our work, we redefine domains based on identities rather than datasets, aiming to disentangle liveness and identity attributes. We emphasize ignoring the adverse effect of identity shift, focusing on learning identity-invariant liveness representations through orthogonalizing liveness and identity features. To cope with style shifts, we propose Style Cross module to expand the stylistic diversity and Channel-wise Style Attention module to weaken the sensitivity to style shifts, aiming to learn robust liveness representations. Furthermore, acknowledging the asymmetry between live and spoof samples, we introduce a novel contrastive loss, Asymmetric Augmented Instance Contrast. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance under cross-dataset and limited source dataset scenarios. Additionally, our method has good scalability when expanding diversity of identities. The codes will be released soon.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 11, 2024

Language Modelling Approaches to Adaptive Machine Translation

Consistency is a key requirement of high-quality translation. It is especially important to adhere to pre-approved terminology and adapt to corrected translations in ___domain-specific projects. Machine translation (MT) has achieved significant progress in the area of ___domain adaptation. However, in-___domain data scarcity is common in translation settings, due to the lack of specialised datasets and terminology, or inconsistency and inaccuracy of available in-___domain translations. In such scenarios where there is insufficient in-___domain data to fine-tune MT models, producing translations that are consistent with the relevant context is challenging. While real-time adaptation can make use of smaller amounts of in-___domain data to improve the translation on the fly, it remains challenging due to supported context limitations and efficiency constraints. Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown interesting capabilities of in-context learning, where they learn to replicate certain input-output text generation patterns, without further fine-tuning. Such capabilities have opened new horizons for ___domain-specific data augmentation and real-time adaptive MT. This work attempts to address two main relevant questions: 1) in scenarios involving human interaction and continuous feedback, can we employ language models to improve the quality of adaptive MT at inference time? and 2) in the absence of sufficient in-___domain data, can we use pre-trained large-scale language models to improve the process of MT ___domain adaptation?

  • 1 authors
·
Jan 25, 2024

SoMA: Singular Value Decomposed Minor Components Adaptation for Domain Generalizable Representation Learning

Domain generalization (DG) aims to adapt a model using one or multiple source domains to ensure robust performance in unseen target domains. Recently, Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) of foundation models has shown promising results in the context of DG problem. Nevertheless, existing PEFT methods still struggle to strike a balance between preserving generalizable components of the pre-trained model and learning task-specific features. To gain insights into the distribution of generalizable components, we begin by analyzing the pre-trained weights through the lens of singular value decomposition. Building on these insights, we introduce Singular Value Decomposed Minor Components Adaptation (SoMA), an approach that selectively tunes minor singular components while keeping the residual parts frozen. SoMA effectively retains the generalization ability of the pre-trained model while efficiently acquiring task-specific skills. Moreover, we freeze ___domain-generalizable blocks and employ an annealing weight decay strategy, thereby achieving an optimal balance in the delicate trade-off between generalizability and discriminability. SoMA attains state-of-the-art results on multiple benchmarks that span both ___domain generalized semantic segmentation to ___domain generalized object detection. In addition, our methods introduce no additional inference overhead or regularization loss, maintain compatibility with any backbone or head, and are designed to be versatile, allowing easy integration into a wide range of tasks.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 5, 2024

Mixture-of-Domain-Adapters: Decoupling and Injecting Domain Knowledge to Pre-trained Language Models Memories

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) demonstrate excellent abilities to understand texts in the generic ___domain while struggling in a specific ___domain. Although continued pre-training on a large ___domain-specific corpus is effective, it is costly to tune all the parameters on the ___domain. In this paper, we investigate whether we can adapt PLMs both effectively and efficiently by only tuning a few parameters. Specifically, we decouple the feed-forward networks (FFNs) of the Transformer architecture into two parts: the original pre-trained FFNs to maintain the old-___domain knowledge and our novel ___domain-specific adapters to inject ___domain-specific knowledge in parallel. Then we adopt a mixture-of-adapters gate to fuse the knowledge from different ___domain adapters dynamically. Our proposed Mixture-of-Domain-Adapters (MixDA) employs a two-stage adapter-tuning strategy that leverages both unlabeled data and labeled data to help the ___domain adaptation: i) ___domain-specific adapter on unlabeled data; followed by ii) the task-specific adapter on labeled data. MixDA can be seamlessly plugged into the pretraining-finetuning paradigm and our experiments demonstrate that MixDA achieves superior performance on in-___domain tasks (GLUE), out-of-___domain tasks (ChemProt, RCT, IMDB, Amazon), and knowledge-intensive tasks (KILT). Further analyses demonstrate the reliability, scalability, and efficiency of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/Amano-Aki/Mixture-of-Domain-Adapters.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 8, 2023

AnyMaker: Zero-shot General Object Customization via Decoupled Dual-Level ID Injection

Text-to-image based object customization, aiming to generate images with the same identity (ID) as objects of interest in accordance with text prompts and reference images, has made significant progress. However, recent customizing research is dominated by specialized tasks, such as human customization or virtual try-on, leaving a gap in general object customization. To this end, we introduce AnyMaker, an innovative zero-shot object customization framework capable of generating general objects with high ID fidelity and flexible text editability. The efficacy of AnyMaker stems from its novel general ID extraction, dual-level ID injection, and ID-aware decoupling. Specifically, the general ID extraction module extracts sufficient ID information with an ensemble of self-supervised models to tackle the diverse customization tasks for general objects. Then, to provide the diffusion UNet with the extracted ID as much while not damaging the text editability in the generation process, we design a global-local dual-level ID injection module, in which the global-level semantic ID is injected into text descriptions while the local-level ID details are injected directly into the model through newly added cross-attention modules. In addition, we propose an ID-aware decoupling module to disentangle ID-related information from non-ID elements in the extracted representations for high-fidelity generation of both identity and text descriptions. To validate our approach and boost the research of general object customization, we create the first large-scale general ID dataset, Multi-Category ID-Consistent (MC-IDC) dataset, with 315k text-image samples and 10k categories. Experiments show that AnyMaker presents remarkable performance in general object customization and outperforms specialized methods in corresponding tasks. Code and dataset will be released soon.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 17, 2024

Reasoning Meets Personalization: Unleashing the Potential of Large Reasoning Model for Personalized Generation

Personalization is a critical task in modern intelligent systems, with applications spanning diverse domains, including interactions with large language models (LLMs). Recent advances in reasoning capabilities have significantly enhanced LLMs, enabling unprecedented performance in tasks such as mathematics and coding. However, their potential for personalization tasks remains underexplored. In this paper, we present the first systematic evaluation of large reasoning models (LRMs) for personalization tasks. Surprisingly, despite generating more tokens, LRMs do not consistently outperform general-purpose LLMs, especially in retrieval-intensive scenarios where their advantages diminish. Our analysis identifies three key limitations: divergent thinking, misalignment of response formats, and ineffective use of retrieved information. To address these challenges, we propose Reinforced Reasoning for Personalization (\model), a novel framework that incorporates a hierarchical reasoning thought template to guide LRMs in generating structured outputs. Additionally, we introduce a reasoning process intervention method to enforce adherence to designed reasoning patterns, enhancing alignment. We also propose a cross-referencing mechanism to ensure consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing techniques.

  • 6 authors
·
May 23, 2025

POND: Multi-Source Time Series Domain Adaptation with Information-Aware Prompt Tuning

Time series ___domain adaptation stands as a pivotal and intricate challenge with diverse applications, including but not limited to human activity recognition, sleep stage classification, and machine fault diagnosis. Despite the numerous ___domain adaptation techniques proposed to tackle this complex problem, they primarily focus on ___domain adaptation from a single source ___domain. Yet, it is more crucial to investigate ___domain adaptation from multiple domains due to the potential for greater improvements. To address this, three important challenges need to be overcome: 1). The lack of exploration to utilize ___domain-specific information for ___domain adaptation, 2). The difficulty to learn ___domain-specific information that changes over time, and 3). The difficulty to evaluate learned ___domain-specific information. In order to tackle these challenges simultaneously, in this paper, we introduce PrOmpt-based domaiN Discrimination (POND), the first framework to utilize prompts for time series ___domain adaptation. Specifically, to address Challenge 1, we extend the idea of prompt tuning to time series analysis and learn prompts to capture common and ___domain-specific information from all source domains. To handle Challenge 2, we introduce a conditional module for each source ___domain to generate prompts from time series input data. For Challenge 3, we propose two criteria to select good prompts, which are used to choose the most suitable source ___domain for ___domain adaptation. The efficacy and robustness of our proposed POND model are extensively validated through experiments across 50 scenarios encompassing four datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed POND model outperforms all state-of-the-art comparison methods by up to 66% on the F1-score.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 19, 2023

Towards Unified Multi-Modal Personalization: Large Vision-Language Models for Generative Recommendation and Beyond

Developing a universal model that can effectively harness heterogeneous resources and respond to a wide range of personalized needs has been a longstanding community aspiration. Our daily choices, especially in domains like fashion and retail, are substantially shaped by multi-modal data, such as pictures and textual descriptions. These modalities not only offer intuitive guidance but also cater to personalized user preferences. However, the predominant personalization approaches mainly focus on the ID or text-based recommendation problem, failing to comprehend the information spanning various tasks or modalities. In this paper, our goal is to establish a Unified paradigm for Multi-modal Personalization systems (UniMP), which effectively leverages multi-modal data while eliminating the complexities associated with task- and modality-specific customization. We argue that the advancements in foundational generative modeling have provided the flexibility and effectiveness necessary to achieve the objective. In light of this, we develop a generic and extensible personalization generative framework, that can handle a wide range of personalized needs including item recommendation, product search, preference prediction, explanation generation, and further user-guided image generation. Our methodology enhances the capabilities of foundational language models for personalized tasks by seamlessly ingesting interleaved cross-modal user history information, ensuring a more precise and customized experience for users. To train and evaluate the proposed multi-modal personalized tasks, we also introduce a novel and comprehensive benchmark covering a variety of user requirements. Our experiments on the real-world benchmark showcase the model's potential, outperforming competitive methods specialized for each task.

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 15, 2024

Meta-DMoE: Adapting to Domain Shift by Meta-Distillation from Mixture-of-Experts

In this paper, we tackle the problem of ___domain shift. Most existing methods perform training on multiple source domains using a single model, and the same trained model is used on all unseen target domains. Such solutions are sub-optimal as each target ___domain exhibits its own specialty, which is not adapted. Furthermore, expecting single-model training to learn extensive knowledge from multiple source domains is counterintuitive. The model is more biased toward learning only ___domain-invariant features and may result in negative knowledge transfer. In this work, we propose a novel framework for unsupervised test-time adaptation, which is formulated as a knowledge distillation process to address ___domain shift. Specifically, we incorporate Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) as teachers, where each expert is separately trained on different source domains to maximize their specialty. Given a test-time target ___domain, a small set of unlabeled data is sampled to query the knowledge from MoE. As the source domains are correlated to the target domains, a transformer-based aggregator then combines the ___domain knowledge by examining the interconnection among them. The output is treated as a supervision signal to adapt a student prediction network toward the target ___domain. We further employ meta-learning to enforce the aggregator to distill positive knowledge and the student network to achieve fast adaptation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art and validates the effectiveness of each proposed component. Our code is available at https://github.com/n3il666/Meta-DMoE.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 7, 2022

ConES: Concept Embedding Search for Parameter Efficient Tuning Large Vision Language Models

Large pre-trained vision-language models have shown great prominence in transferring pre-acquired knowledge to various domains and downstream tasks with appropriate prompting or tuning. Existing prevalent tuning methods can be generally categorized into three genres: 1) prompt engineering by creating suitable prompt texts, which is time-consuming and requires ___domain expertise; 2) or simply fine-tuning the whole model, which is extremely inefficient; 3) prompt tuning through parameterized prompt embeddings with the text encoder. Nevertheless, all methods rely on the text encoder for bridging the modality gap between vision and language. In this work, we question the necessity of the cumbersome text encoder for a more lightweight and efficient tuning paradigm as well as more representative prompt embeddings closer to the image representations. To achieve this, we propose a Concept Embedding Search (ConES) approach by optimizing prompt embeddings -- without the need of the text encoder -- to capture the 'concept' of the image modality through a variety of task objectives. By dropping the text encoder, we are able to significantly speed up the learning process, \eg, from about an hour to just ten minutes in our experiments for personalized text-to-image generation without impairing the generation quality. Moreover, our proposed approach is orthogonal to current existing tuning methods since the searched concept embeddings can be further utilized in the next stage of fine-tuning the pre-trained large models for boosting performance. Extensive experiments show that our approach can beat the prompt tuning and textual inversion methods in a variety of downstream tasks including objection detection, instance segmentation, and image generation. Our approach also shows better generalization capability for unseen concepts in specialized domains, such as the medical ___domain.

  • 8 authors
·
May 30, 2023

GemNet-OC: Developing Graph Neural Networks for Large and Diverse Molecular Simulation Datasets

Recent years have seen the advent of molecular simulation datasets that are orders of magnitude larger and more diverse. These new datasets differ substantially in four aspects of complexity: 1. Chemical diversity (number of different elements), 2. system size (number of atoms per sample), 3. dataset size (number of data samples), and 4. ___domain shift (similarity of the training and test set). Despite these large differences, benchmarks on small and narrow datasets remain the predominant method of demonstrating progress in graph neural networks (GNNs) for molecular simulation, likely due to cheaper training compute requirements. This raises the question -- does GNN progress on small and narrow datasets translate to these more complex datasets? This work investigates this question by first developing the GemNet-OC model based on the large Open Catalyst 2020 (OC20) dataset. GemNet-OC outperforms the previous state-of-the-art on OC20 by 16% while reducing training time by a factor of 10. We then compare the impact of 18 model components and hyperparameter choices on performance in multiple datasets. We find that the resulting model would be drastically different depending on the dataset used for making model choices. To isolate the source of this discrepancy we study six subsets of the OC20 dataset that individually test each of the above-mentioned four dataset aspects. We find that results on the OC-2M subset correlate well with the full OC20 dataset while being substantially cheaper to train on. Our findings challenge the common practice of developing GNNs solely on small datasets, but highlight ways of achieving fast development cycles and generalizable results via moderately-sized, representative datasets such as OC-2M and efficient models such as GemNet-OC. Our code and pretrained model weights are open-sourced.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 6, 2022

SWAD: Domain Generalization by Seeking Flat Minima

Domain generalization (DG) methods aim to achieve generalizability to an unseen target ___domain by using only training data from the source domains. Although a variety of DG methods have been proposed, a recent study shows that under a fair evaluation protocol, called DomainBed, the simple empirical risk minimization (ERM) approach works comparable to or even outperforms previous methods. Unfortunately, simply solving ERM on a complex, non-convex loss function can easily lead to sub-optimal generalizability by seeking sharp minima. In this paper, we theoretically show that finding flat minima results in a smaller ___domain generalization gap. We also propose a simple yet effective method, named Stochastic Weight Averaging Densely (SWAD), to find flat minima. SWAD finds flatter minima and suffers less from overfitting than does the vanilla SWA by a dense and overfit-aware stochastic weight sampling strategy. SWAD shows state-of-the-art performances on five DG benchmarks, namely PACS, VLCS, OfficeHome, TerraIncognita, and DomainNet, with consistent and large margins of +1.6% averagely on out-of-___domain accuracy. We also compare SWAD with conventional generalization methods, such as data augmentation and consistency regularization methods, to verify that the remarkable performance improvements are originated from by seeking flat minima, not from better in-___domain generalizability. Last but not least, SWAD is readily adaptable to existing DG methods without modification; the combination of SWAD and an existing DG method further improves DG performances. Source code is available at https://github.com/khanrc/swad.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 2, 2021

DATID-3D: Diversity-Preserved Domain Adaptation Using Text-to-Image Diffusion for 3D Generative Model

Recent 3D generative models have achieved remarkable performance in synthesizing high resolution photorealistic images with view consistency and detailed 3D shapes, but training them for diverse domains is challenging since it requires massive training images and their camera distribution information. Text-guided ___domain adaptation methods have shown impressive performance on converting the 2D generative model on one ___domain into the models on other domains with different styles by leveraging the CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training), rather than collecting massive datasets for those domains. However, one drawback of them is that the sample diversity in the original generative model is not well-preserved in the ___domain-adapted generative models due to the deterministic nature of the CLIP text encoder. Text-guided ___domain adaptation will be even more challenging for 3D generative models not only because of catastrophic diversity loss, but also because of inferior text-image correspondence and poor image quality. Here we propose DATID-3D, a ___domain adaptation method tailored for 3D generative models using text-to-image diffusion models that can synthesize diverse images per text prompt without collecting additional images and camera information for the target ___domain. Unlike 3D extensions of prior text-guided ___domain adaptation methods, our novel pipeline was able to fine-tune the state-of-the-art 3D generator of the source ___domain to synthesize high resolution, multi-view consistent images in text-guided targeted domains without additional data, outperforming the existing text-guided ___domain adaptation methods in diversity and text-image correspondence. Furthermore, we propose and demonstrate diverse 3D image manipulations such as one-shot instance-selected adaptation and single-view manipulated 3D reconstruction to fully enjoy diversity in text.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 29, 2022

Self-Specialization: Uncovering Latent Expertise within Large Language Models

Recent works have demonstrated the effectiveness of self-alignment in which a large language model is, by itself, aligned to follow general instructions through the automatic generation of instructional data using a handful of human-written seeds. Instead of general alignment, in this work, we focus on self-alignment for expert ___domain specialization (e.g., biomedicine), discovering it to be very effective for improving zero-shot and few-shot performance in target domains of interest. As a preliminary, we first present the benchmark results of existing aligned models within a specialized ___domain, which reveals the marginal effect that "generic" instruction-following training has on downstream expert domains' performance. To remedy this, we explore self-specialization that leverages ___domain-specific unlabelled data and a few labeled seeds for the self-alignment process. When augmented with retrieval to reduce hallucination and enhance concurrency of the alignment, self-specialization offers an effective (and efficient) way of "carving out" an expert model out of a "generalist", pre-trained LLM where different domains of expertise are originally combined in a form of "superposition". Our experimental results on a biomedical ___domain show that our self-specialized model (30B) outperforms its base model, MPT-30B by a large margin and even surpasses larger popular models based on LLaMA-65B, highlighting its potential and practicality for specialization, especially considering its efficiency in terms of data and parameters.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 29, 2023