OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
LiDAR SLAMMOT based on Confidence-guided Data Association
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

In the field of autonomous driving or robotics, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and multi-object tracking (MOT) are two fundamental problems and are generally applied separately. Solutions to SLAM and MOT usually rely on certain assumptions, such as the static environment assumption for SLAM and the accurate ego-vehicle pose assumption for MOT. But in complex dynamic environments, it is difficult or even impossible to meet these assumptions. Therefore, the SLAMMOT, i.e., simultaneous localization, mapping, and moving object tracking, integrated system of SLAM and object tracking, has emerged for autonomous vehicles in dynamic environments. However, many conventional SLAMMOT solutions directly perform data association on the predictions and detections for object tracking, but ignore their quality. In practice, inaccurate predictions caused by continuous multi-frame missed detections in temporary occlusion scenarios, may degrade the performance of tracking, thereby affecting SLAMMOT. To address this challenge, this paper presents a LiDAR SLAMMOT based on confidence-guided data association (Conf SLAMMOT) method, which tightly couples the LiDAR SLAM and the confidence-guided data association based multi-object tracking into a graph optimization backend for estimating the state of the ego-vehicle and objects simultaneously. The confidence of prediction and detection are applied in the factor graph-based multi-object tracking for its data association, which not only avoids the performance degradation caused by incorrect initial assignments in some filter-based methods but also handles issues such as continuous missed detection in tracking while also improving the overall performance of SLAMMOT. Various comparative experiments demonstrate the superior advantages of Conf SLAMMOT, especially in scenes with some missed detections.
Practitioners' Expectations on Log Anomaly Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Log anomaly detection has become a common practice for software engineers to analyze software system behavior. Despite significant research efforts in log anomaly detection over the past decade, it remains unclear what are practitioners' expectations on log anomaly detection and whether current research meets their needs. To fill this gap, we conduct an empirical study, surveying 312 practitioners from 36 countries about their expectations on log anomaly detection. In particular, we investigate various factors influencing practitioners' willingness to adopt log anomaly detection tools. We then perform a literature review on log anomaly detection, focusing on publications in premier venues from 2014 to 2024, to compare practitioners' needs with the current state of research. Based on this comparison, we highlight the directions for researchers to focus on to develop log anomaly detection techniques that better meet practitioners' expectations.
When Fine-Tuning LLMs Meets Data Privacy: An Empirical Study of Federated Learning in LLM-Based Program Repair
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Software systems have been evolving rapidly and inevitably introducing bugs at an increasing rate, leading to significant losses in resources consumed by software maintenance. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in enhancing software development and maintenance practices, particularly in automated program repair (APR) with improved accuracy and efficiency of bug fixing. However, LLM-based APR heavily relies on high-quality code repositories. A larger portion of existing code repositories are for private use and proprietary assets from various industries, reflecting more diversity and nuances in the data since real-world industries often have more extensive software development practices, which cannot be covered by merely public datasets. Therefore, utilizing private datasets shows significant potential in enhancing software development and maintenance. However, obtaining such data from various industries is hindered by data privacy concerns, as companies are reluctant to share their codebases. To address the gap, we investigate the use of federated learning as a privacy-preserving approach that enables private entities to fine-tune LLMs on proprietary and decentralized data, facilitating the collaboration between clients to fully utilize their data to help enhance software development and maintenance. Our evaluation reveals that federated fine-tuning can effectively enhance program repair capabilities. Notably, the impact of heterogeneous code on LLM fine-tuning is negligible, indicating that real-world industries can benefit from collaborative development regardless of diverse data distributions. Furthermore, each type of federated algorithm exhibits unique strengths across different LLMs, suggesting that fine-tuning for program repair can be enhanced by tailoring the optimization process to specific characteristics of different LLMs.
Gated Parametric Neuron for Spike-based Audio Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) aim to simulate real neural networks in the human brain with biologically plausible neurons. The leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) neuron is one of the most widely studied SNN architectures. However, it has the vanishing gradient problem when trained with backpropagation. Additionally, its neuronal parameters are often manually specified and fixed, in contrast to the heterogeneity of real neurons in the human brain. This paper proposes a gated parametric neuron (GPN) to process spatio-temporal information effectively with the gating mechanism. Compared with the LIF neuron, the GPN has two distinguishing advantages: 1) it copes well with the vanishing gradients by improving the flow of gradient propagation; and, 2) it learns spatio-temporal heterogeneous neuronal parameters automatically. Additionally, we use the same gate structure to eliminate initial neuronal parameter selection and design a hybrid recurrent neural network-SNN structure. Experiments on two spike-based audio datasets demonstrated that the GPN network outperformed several state-of-the-art SNNs, could mitigate vanishing gradients, and had spatio-temporal heterogeneous parameters. Our work shows the ability of SNNs to handle long-term dependencies and achieve high performance simultaneously.
One Shot, One Talk: Whole-body Talking Avatar from a Single Image
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Building realistic and animatable avatars still requires minutes of multi-view or monocular self-rotating videos, and most methods lack precise control over gestures and expressions. To push this boundary, we address the challenge of constructing a whole-body talking avatar from a single image. We propose a novel pipeline that tackles two critical issues: 1) complex dynamic modeling and 2) generalization to novel gestures and expressions. To achieve seamless generalization, we leverage recent pose-guided image-to-video diffusion models to generate imperfect video frames as pseudo-labels. To overcome the dynamic modeling challenge posed by inconsistent and noisy pseudo-videos, we introduce a tightly coupled 3DGS-mesh hybrid avatar representation and apply several key regularizations to mitigate inconsistencies caused by imperfect labels. Extensive experiments on diverse subjects demonstrate that our method enables the creation of a photorealistic, precisely animatable, and expressive whole-body talking avatar from just a single image.
DIR: Retrieval-Augmented Image Captioning with Comprehensive Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Image captioning models often suffer from performance degradation when applied to novel datasets, as they are typically trained on domain-specific data. To enhance generalization in out-of-domain scenarios, retrieval-augmented approaches have garnered increasing attention. However, current methods face two key challenges: (1) image features used for retrieval are often optimized based on ground-truth (GT) captions, which represent the image from a specific perspective and are influenced by annotator biases, and (2) they underutilize the full potential of retrieved text, typically relying on raw captions or parsed objects, which fail to capture the full semantic richness of the data. In this paper, we propose Dive Into Retrieval (DIR), a method designed to enhance both the image-to-text retrieval process and the utilization of retrieved text to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the visual content. Our approach introduces two key innovations: (1) diffusion-guided retrieval enhancement, where a pretrained diffusion model guides image feature learning by reconstructing noisy images, allowing the model to capture more comprehensive and fine-grained visual information beyond standard annotated captions; and (2) a high-quality retrieval database, which provides comprehensive semantic information to enhance caption generation, especially in out-of-domain scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DIR not only maintains competitive in-domain performance but also significantly improves out-of-domain generalization, all without increasing inference costs.
Object Tracking in a $360^o$ View: A Novel Perspective on Bridging the Gap to Biomedical Advancements
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Object tracking is a fundamental tool in modern innovation, with applications in defense systems, autonomous vehicles, and biomedical research. It enables precise identification, monitoring, and spatiotemporal analysis of objects across sequential frames, providing insights into dynamic behaviors. In cell biology, object tracking is vital for uncovering cellular mechanisms, such as migration, interactions, and responses to drugs or pathogens. These insights drive breakthroughs in understanding disease progression and therapeutic interventions. Over time, object tracking methods have evolved from traditional feature-based approaches to advanced machine learning and deep learning frameworks. While classical methods are reliable in controlled settings, they struggle in complex environments with occlusions, variable lighting, and high object density. Deep learning models address these challenges by delivering greater accuracy, adaptability, and robustness. This review categorizes object tracking techniques into traditional, statistical, feature-based, and machine learning paradigms, with a focus on biomedical applications. These methods are essential for tracking cells and subcellular structures, advancing our understanding of health and disease. Key performance metrics, including accuracy, efficiency, and adaptability, are discussed. The paper explores limitations of current methods and highlights emerging trends to guide the development of next-generation tracking systems for biomedical research and broader scientific domains.
Dense Dispersed Structured Light for Hyperspectral 3D Imaging of Dynamic Scenes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Hyperspectral 3D imaging captures both depth maps and hyperspectral images, enabling comprehensive geometric and material analysis. Recent methods achieve high spectral and depth accuracy; however, they require long acquisition times often over several minutes or rely on large, expensive systems, restricting their use to static scenes. We present Dense Dispersed Structured Light (DDSL), an accurate hyperspectral 3D imaging method for dynamic scenes that utilizes stereo RGB cameras and an RGB projector equipped with an affordable diffraction grating film. We design spectrally multiplexed DDSL patterns that significantly reduce the number of required projector patterns, thereby accelerating acquisition speed. Additionally, we formulate an image formation model and a reconstruction method to estimate a hyperspectral image and depth map from captured stereo images. As the first practical and accurate hyperspectral 3D imaging method for dynamic scenes, we experimentally demonstrate that DDSL achieves a spectral resolution of 15.5 nm full width at half maximum (FWHM), a depth error of 4 mm, and a frame rate of 6.6 fps.
Cross-Task Inconsistency Based Active Learning (CTIAL) for Emotion Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Emotion recognition is a critical component of affective computing. Training accurate machine learning models for emotion recognition typically requires a large amount of labeled data. Due to the subtleness and complexity of emotions, multiple evaluators are usually needed for each affective sample to obtain its ground-truth label, which is expensive. To save the labeling cost, this paper proposes an inconsistency-based active learning approach for cross-task transfer between emotion classification and estimation. Affective norms are utilized as prior knowledge to connect the label spaces of categorical and dimensional emotions. Then, the prediction inconsistency on the two tasks for the unlabeled samples is used to guide sample selection in active learning for the target task. Experiments on within-corpus and cross-corpus transfers demonstrated that cross-task inconsistency could be a very valuable metric in active learning. To our knowledge, this is the first work that utilizes prior knowledge on affective norms and data in a different task to facilitate active learning for a new task, even the two tasks are from different datasets.
Rectified Flow For Structure Based Drug Design
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Deep generative models have achieved tremendous success in structure-based drug design in recent years, especially for generating 3D ligand molecules that bind to specific protein pocket. Notably, diffusion models have transformed ligand generation by providing exceptional quality and creativity. However, traditional diffusion models are restricted by their conventional learning objectives, which limit their broader applicability. In this work, we propose a new framework FlowSBDD, which is based on rectified flow model, allows us to flexibly incorporate additional loss to optimize specific target and introduce additional condition either as an extra input condition or replacing the initial Gaussian distribution. Extensive experiments on CrossDocked2020 show that our approach could achieve state-of-the-art performance on generating high-affinity molecules while maintaining proper molecular properties without specifically designing binding site, with up to -8.50 Avg. Vina Dock score and 75.0% Diversity.
Divergent Ensemble Networks: Enhancing Uncertainty Estimation with Shared Representations and Independent Branching
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Ensemble learning has proven effective in improving predictive performance and estimating uncertainty in neural networks. However, conventional ensemble methods often suffer from redundant parameter usage and computational inefficiencies due to entirely independent network training. To address these challenges, we propose the Divergent Ensemble Network (DEN), a novel architecture that combines shared representation learning with independent branching. DEN employs a shared input layer to capture common features across all branches, followed by divergent, independently trainable layers that form an ensemble. This shared-to-branching structure reduces parameter redundancy while maintaining ensemble diversity, enabling efficient and scalable learning.
GraphOTTER: Evolving LLM-based Graph Reasoning for Complex Table Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Complex Table Question Answering involves providing accurate answers to specific questions based on intricate tables that exhibit complex layouts and flexible header locations. Despite considerable progress having been made in the LLM era, the reasoning processes of existing methods are often implicit, feeding the entire table into prompts, making it difficult to effectively filter out irrelevant information in the table. To this end, we propose GraphOTTER that explicitly establishes the reasoning process to pinpoint the correct answers. In particular, GraphOTTER leverages a graph-based representation, transforming the complex table into an undirected graph. It then conducts step-by-step reasoning on the graph, with each step guided by a set of pre-defined intermediate reasoning actions. As such, it constructs a clear reasoning path and effectively identifies the answer to a given question. Comprehensive experiments on two benchmark datasets and two LLM backbones demonstrate the effectiveness of GraphOTTER. Further analysis indicates that its success may be attributed to the ability to efficiently filter out irrelevant information, thereby focusing the reasoning process on the most pertinent data. Our code and experimental datasets are available at \url{https://github.com/JDing0521/GraphOTTER}.
Quantum Pointwise Convolution: A Flexible and Scalable Approach for Neural Network Enhancement
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In this study, we propose a novel architecture, the Quantum Pointwise Convolution, which incorporates pointwise convolution within a quantum neural network framework. Our approach leverages the strengths of pointwise convolution to efficiently integrate information across feature channels while adjusting channel outputs. By using quantum circuits, we map data to a higher-dimensional space, capturing more complex feature relationships. To address the current limitations of quantum machine learning in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era, we implement several design optimizations. These include amplitude encoding for data embedding, allowing more information to be processed with fewer qubits, and a weight-sharing mechanism that accelerates quantum pointwise convolution operations, reducing the need to retrain for each input pixels. In our experiments, we applied the quantum pointwise convolution layer to classification tasks on the FashionMNIST and CIFAR10 datasets, where our model demonstrated competitive performance compared to its classical counterpart. Furthermore, these optimizations not only improve the efficiency of the quantum pointwise convolutional layer but also make it more readily deployable in various CNN-based or deep learning models, broadening its potential applications across different architectures.
Concept Replacer: Replacing Sensitive Concepts in Diffusion Models via Precision Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

As large-scale diffusion models continue to advance, they excel at producing high-quality images but often generate unwanted content, such as sexually explicit or violent content. Existing methods for concept removal generally guide the image generation process but can unintentionally modify unrelated regions, leading to inconsistencies with the original model. We propose a novel approach for targeted concept replacing in diffusion models, enabling specific concepts to be removed without affecting non-target areas. Our method introduces a dedicated concept localizer for precisely identifying the target concept during the denoising process, trained with few-shot learning to require minimal labeled data. Within the identified region, we introduce a training-free Dual Prompts Cross-Attention (DPCA) module to substitute the target concept, ensuring minimal disruption to surrounding content. We evaluate our method on concept localization precision and replacement efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior precision in localizing target concepts and performs coherent concept replacement with minimal impact on non-target areas, outperforming existing approaches.
Revisiting Generative Policies: A Simpler Reinforcement Learning Algorithmic Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Generative models, particularly diffusion models, have achieved remarkable success in density estimation for multimodal data, drawing significant interest from the reinforcement learning (RL) community, especially in policy modeling in continuous action spaces. However, existing works exhibit significant variations in training schemes and RL optimization objectives, and some methods are only applicable to diffusion models. In this study, we compare and analyze various generative policy training and deployment techniques, identifying and validating effective designs for generative policy algorithms. Specifically, we revisit existing training objectives and classify them into two categories, each linked to a simpler approach. The first approach, Generative Model Policy Optimization (GMPO), employs a native advantage-weighted regression formulation as the training objective, which is significantly simpler than previous methods. The second approach, Generative Model Policy Gradient (GMPG), offers a numerically stable implementation of the native policy gradient method. We introduce a standardized experimental framework named GenerativeRL. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art performance on various offline-RL datasets, offering a unified and practical guideline for training and deploying generative policies.
Ponder & Press: Advancing Visual GUI Agent towards General Computer Control
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Most existing GUI agents typically depend on non-vision inputs like HTML source code or accessibility trees, limiting their flexibility across diverse software environments and platforms. Current multimodal large language models (MLLMs), which excel at using vision to ground real-world objects, offer a potential alternative. However, they often struggle with accurately localizing GUI elements -- a critical requirement for effective GUI automation -- due to the semantic gap between real-world objects and GUI elements. In this work, we introduce Ponder & Press, a divide-and-conquer framework for general computer control using only visual input. Our approach combines an general-purpose MLLM as an 'interpreter', responsible for translating high-level user instructions into detailed action descriptions, with a GUI-specific MLLM as a 'locator' that precisely locates GUI elements for action placement. By leveraging a purely visual input, our agent offers a versatile, human-like interaction paradigm applicable to a wide range of applications. Ponder & Press locator outperforms existing models by +22.5% on the ScreenSpot GUI grounding benchmark. Both offline and interactive agent benchmarks across various GUI environments -- including web pages, desktop software, and mobile UIs -- demonstrate that Ponder & Press framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting the potential of visual GUI agents. Refer to the project homepage https://invinciblewyq.github.io/ponder-press-page/