MaPLe: Multi-modal Prompt Learning

Pre-trained vision-language (V-L) models such as CLIP have shown excellent generalization ability to downstream tasks. However, they are sensitive to the choice of input text prompts and require careful selection of prompt templates to perform well. Inspired by the Natural Language Processing (NLP) literature, recent CLIP adaptation approaches learn prompts as the textual inputs to fine-tune CLIP for downstream tasks. We note that using prompting to adapt representations in a single branch of CLIP (language or vision) is sub-optimal since it does not allow the flexibility to dynamically adjust both representation spaces on a downstream task. In this work, we propose Multi-modal Prompt Learning (MaPLe) for both vision and language branches to improve alignment between the vision and language representations. Our design promotes strong coupling between the vision-language prompts to ensure mutual synergy and discourages learning independent uni-modal solutions. Further, we learn separate prompts across different early stages to progressively model the stage-wise feature relationships to allow rich context learning. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach on three representative tasks of generalization to novel classes, new target datasets and unseen domain shifts. Compared with the state-of-the-art method Co-CoOp, MaPLe exhibits favorable performance and achieves an absolute gain of 3.45% on novel classes and 2.72% on overall harmonic-mean, averaged over 11 diverse image recognition datasets. Our code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/muzairkhattak/multimodal-prompt-learning.Comment: Accepted at CVPR202

Fine-tuned CLIP Models are Efficient Video Learners

Large-scale multi-modal training with image-text pairs imparts strong generalization to CLIP model. Since training on a similar scale for videos is infeasible, recent approaches focus on the effective transfer of image-based CLIP to the video domain. In this pursuit, new parametric modules are added to learn temporal information and inter-frame relationships which require meticulous design efforts. Furthermore, when the resulting models are learned on videos, they tend to overfit on the given task distribution and lack in generalization aspect. This begs the following question: How to effectively transfer image-level CLIP representations to videos? In this work, we show that a simple Video Fine-tuned CLIP (ViFi-CLIP) baseline is generally sufficient to bridge the domain gap from images to videos. Our qualitative analysis illustrates that the frame-level processing from CLIP image-encoder followed by feature pooling and similarity matching with corresponding text embeddings helps in implicitly modeling the temporal cues within ViFi-CLIP. Such fine-tuning helps the model to focus on scene dynamics, moving objects and inter-object relationships. For low-data regimes where full fine-tuning is not viable, we propose a `bridge and prompt' approach that first uses fine-tuning to bridge the domain gap and then learns prompts on language and vision side to adapt CLIP representations. We extensively evaluate this simple yet strong baseline on zero-shot, base-to-novel generalization, few-shot and fully supervised settings across five video benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/muzairkhattak/ViFi-CLIP.Comment: Accepted at CVPR 202

First Class Futures: a Study of Update Strategies

Futures enable an efficient and easy to use programming paradigm for distributed applications. A natural way to benefit from distribution is to perform asynchronous invocations to methods or services. Upon invocation, a request is en-queued at the destination side and the caller can continue its execution. But a question remains: ``what if one wants to manipulate the result of an asynchronous invocation?'' First-class futures provide a transparent and easy-to-program answer: a future acts as the placeholder for the result of an asynchronous invocation and can be safely transmitted between processes while its result is not needed. Synchronization occurs automatically upon an access requiring the result. As references to futures disseminate, a strategy is necessary to propagate the result of each request to the processes that need it. This report studies the efficient transmission of results: it presents three main strategies in a semi-formal manner, and provides a cost analysis with some experiments to determine the efficiency of each strategy

The Impact of Corporate Strategy on the Capital Structure of Pakistani Companies (Diversification and Capital Structure)

Research into the capital structure of firms has been the subject of extensive empirical investigation. This study seeks to extend the debate by examining the endogenous influence of corporate strategy on financing decisions made by firms. Diversification is one of the corporate strategies that allow a company to enter business lines that are same or different from current operations as well as operate in several economic markets. Financial choices need to be evaluated because of their close interaction with management choices. Optimal capital structure plays a key role in achieving the overriding goal of financial management. The study sought to discover the impact of corporate diversification strategies on financial choices because study main focus is diversification strategy (A type of corporate strategy). For purposes of comparison, the current study used four of the nine Rumelt categories which correspond to Wrigley's original four, which were single product strategy, dominant strategy, related firm strategy and unrelated firm strategy. Panel data model was constructed and using a sample of 120 companies listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange and data was obtained for companies with seven years’ quarterly data annually from 2010 to 2017. Using empirical tests, we found no relationship between diversification and leverage. Our analysis suggests that Diversifications strategy impact on capital structure indicate that this focus of enquiry has considerable potential for further resolution of the capital structure puzzle

Asynchronous Components with Futures: Semantics and Proofs in Isabelle/HOL

International audienceComponents provide an easy to use programming paradigm allowing for better re-usability of application code. In the context of distributed programming, autonomous hierarchical components provide a simple model for creating efficient applications. This paper presents a model for distributed components communicating asynchronously using futures – placeholders for results. Our components communicate via asynchronous requests and replies where the requests are enqueued at the target component, and the invoker receives a future. Then, future references can be dispersed among components. When the result is available for a future, it needs to be transmitted to all interested components, as determined by a future update strategy. We present formal semantics of our component model incorporating formalisation of one such future update strategy. Our model has been mechanically formalised in Isabelle/HOL, together with the proof of properties. This approach validates the actual implementation of the future update strategy itself

A Survey of “Knowledge, Attitudes & Practices” of Islamic Banking Clients: An Evidence from FATA and PATA, Pakistan

Islamic banking & Finance and conventional banking are described as having the "same purpose but the essence and operations of Islamic banking are in accordance with Shariah law and have same "basic objectives" as other business and financial entities, i.e. "maximization of shareholder wealth". The speedy development of an Islamic banking system may improve financial insertion by providing an alternative to faith sensitive Muslims who are willingly excluded themselves from the system of conventional finance due to the nature of interest based. In Pakistan, the Islamic banking system eroding the growth of conventional banking so it’s worthy to explore the effect of religious belief the occurrence of a financial exclusion. The target population is from FATA and PATA maintain accounts at Islamic banks and conventional banks and a sample size of one hundred and fifty customers were picked up. The methodology focuses on the KAP Model (knowledge, attitude, practices), which indicates if attitude influences the association among “knowledge and practice” of an “Islamic banking”. Looking into KAP Analysis survey, through study result we find out that knowledge about Islamic banking and practices of Islamic banking are closely related. People having information about Islamic Banking and Products are more inclined towards Islamic Banking and people who don’t have much information are less interested in Islamic banking and Islamic products. KAP survey suggested that customers of conventional and Islamic banks are driven by the same motivating factors that have impact on their attitude. However, there have some likable factors that could be valued by “Islamic bank account holders only such as “variety of products & services, reliability, confidence in bank’s management, reputation and most important compliance with the Shariah rules in finance & investment.”. Low-cost services are some factors result in non-Muslims prefer Islamic Banking over the conventional banking

Quasi Variational Inclusions Involving Three Operators

In this paper, we consider some new classes of the quasi-variational inclusions involving three monotone operators. Some interesting problems such as variational inclusions involving sum of two monotone operators, difference of two monotone operators, system of absolute value equations, hemivariational inequalities and variational inequalities are the special cases of quasi variational inequalities. It is shown that quasi-variational inclusions are equivalent to the implicit fixed point problems. Some new iterative methods for solving quasi-variational inclusions and related optimization problems are suggested by using resolvent methods, resolvent equations and dynamical systems coupled with finite difference technique. Convergence analysis of these methods is investigated under monotonicity. Some special cases are discussed as applications of the main results