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Tag Archive for: changyou chen

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Changyou Chen works at University at Buffalo.

Posts

Bayesian Data Reweighting Improves Multimodal Retrieval for Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering

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Multimodal retrievers are essential for knowledge-based visual question answering, where they retrieve external evidence for image-question pairs. However, existing contrastive training methods typically treat all unmatched query-document pairs as equally informative negatives, which is problematic because many unmatched documents may still be semantically relevant or partially useful. We propose Bayesian Data Reweighting, a probabilistic framework that models query-document importance as latent variables and adaptively infers posterior weights to downweight likely false negatives. With closed-form posterior updates under conjugate priors and stochastic EM optimization, our method consistently improves retrieval accuracy across three retrievers and seven knowledge-based VQA benchmarks.

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Uncertainty-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Multimodal Large Language Models

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Knowledge distillation establishes a learning paradigm that leverages both data supervision and teacher guidance. However, determining the optimal balance between learning from data and learning from the teacher is challenging, as some samples may be noisy while others are subject to teacher uncertainty. This motivates the need for adaptively balancing data and teacher supervision. We propose Beta-weighted Knowledge Distillation (Beta-KD), an uncertainty-aware distillation framework that adaptively modulates how much the student relies on teacher guidance. Specifically, we formulate teacher-student learning from a unified Bayesian perspective and interpret teacher supervision as a Gibbs prior over student activations. This yields a closed-form, uncertainty-aware weighting mechanism and supports arbitrary distillation objectives and their combinations. Extensive experiments are conducted on multimodal VQA benchmarks by distilling a student Vision-Language Model from a large teacher VLM. The results demonstrate that Beta-KD consistently outperforms existing knowledge distillation methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Jingchensun/beta-kd.

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Training Small AI Models Without Blindly Trusting Big Teacher Models

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Machine learning is shifting from learning from data alone to learning from both data and teacher models. Beta-KD uses uncertainty-aware Bayesian weighting to train compact multimodal AI without blindly trusting every teacher signal.

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Uncertainty-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Multimodal Large Language Models

/in /by

Knowledge distillation establishes a learning paradigm that leverages both data supervision and teacher guidance. However, determining the optimal balance between learning from data and learning from the teacher is challenging, as some samples may be noisy while others are subject to teacher uncertainty. This motivates the need for adaptively balancing data and teacher supervision. We propose Beta-weighted Knowledge Distillation (Beta-KD), an uncertainty-aware distillation framework that adaptively modulates how much the student relies on teacher guidance. Specifically, we formulate teacher–student learning from a unified Bayesian perspective and interpret teacher supervision as a Gibbs prior over student activations. This yields a closed-form, uncertainty-aware weighting mechanism and supports arbitrary distillation objectives and their combinations. Extensive experiments on multimodal VQA benchmarks demonstrate that distilling student Vision-Language Models from a large teacher VLM consistently improves performance. The results show that Beta-KD outperforms existing knowledge distillation methods.

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CLAP-S: Support Set Based Adaptation for Downstream Fiber-optic Acoustic Recognition

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Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP) models have demonstrated unprecedented performance in various acoustic signal recognition tasks. Fiber-optic-based acoustic recognition is one of the most important downstream tasks and plays a significant role in environmental sensing. Adapting CLAP for fiber-optic acoustic recognition has become an active research area. As a non-conventional acoustic sensor, fiberoptic acoustic recognition presents a challenging, domain-specific, low-shot deployment environment with significant domain shifts due to unique frequency response and noise characteristics. To address these challenges, we propose a support-based adaptation method, CLAP-S, which linearly interpolates a CLAP Adapter with the Support Set, leveraging both implicit knowledge through fine-tuning and explicit knowledge retrieved from memory for cross-domain generalization. Experimental results show that our method delivers competitive performance on both laboratory recorded fiber-optic ESC-50 datasets and a real-world fiber optic gunshot-firework dataset. Our research also provides valuable insights for other downstream acoustic recognition tasks.

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CLAP-S: Support Set Based Adaptation for Downstream Fiber-optic Acoustic Recognition

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Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP) models have demonstrated unprecedented performance in various acoustic signal recognition tasks. Fiber optic-based acoustic recognition is one of the most important downstream tasks and plays a significant role in environmental sensing. Adapting CLAP for fiber-optic acoustic recognition has become an active research area. As a non-conventional acoustic sensor, fiber-optic acoustic recognition presents a challenging, domain-specific, low-shot deployment environment with significant domain shifts due to unique frequency response and noise characteristics. To address these challenges, we propose a support-based adaptation method, CLAP-S, which linearly interpolates a CLAP Adapter with the Support Set, leveraging both implicit knowledge through fine-tuning and explicit knowledge retrieved from memory for cross-domain generalization. Experimental results show that our method delivers competitive performance on both laboratory-recorded fiber-optic ESC-50 datasets and a real-world fiber-optic gunshot-firework dataset. Our research also provides valuable insights for other downstream acoustic recognition tasks.

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