Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Do chatbots establish “humanness” in the customer purchase journey? An investigation through explanatory sequential design

Abstract Chatbots incorporate various behavioral and psychological marketing elements to satisfy customers at various stages of their purchase journey. This research follows the foundations of the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) and examines how cognitive and peripheral cues impact experiential dimensions, leading to chatbot user recommendation intentions. The study introduced warmth and competence as mediating variables in both the purchase and postpurchase stages, utilizing a robust explanatory sequential mixed‐method research design. The researchers tested and validated the proposed conceptual model using a 3 × 3 factorial design, collecting 354 responses in the purchase stage and 286 responses in the postpurchase stage. In the second stage, they conducted in‐depth qualitative interviews (Study 2) to gain further insights into the validity of the experimental research (Study 1). The results obtained from Study 1 revealed that “cognitive cues” and “competence” significantly influence recommendation intentions among chatbot users. On the other hand, “peripheral cues” and warmth significantly contribute to positive experiences encountered during the purchase stage. The researchers further identified 69 thematic codes through exploratory research, providing a deeper understanding of the variables. Theoretically, this study extends the ELM by introducing new dimensions to human‐machine interactions at the heart of digital transformation. From a managerial standpoint, the study emphasizes the significance of adding a “humanness” element in chatbot development to create more engaging and positive customer experiences actively.
When edge intelligence meets cognitive buildings: The COGITO platform

Future buildings are complex systems that aim at improving the quality of life of their inhabitants and increasing safeness, security, and efficiency. In order to reach these goals, they require their own self-management and self-adaptation capabilities, thus becoming cognitive entities. However, developing cognitive buildings that exploit advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques in a distributed fashion is still a challenge. Indeed, they need to continuously collect and process a variety of environmental parameters, learn and predict the users’ needs and preferences, and then control a large number of heterogeneous devices. These operations may leverage the dynamic availability of edge and cloud computing resources. This paper discusses the challenges and requirements tied to the development of cognitive buildings and proposes COGITO, an Internet of Things platform specifically suited to design and implement cognitive buildings. COGITO enables edge intelligence and the exploitation of all the available resources in the computing continuum between the edge and the cloud. All of this is to support holistic services that guarantee energy efficiency, security, and user comfort. For validation purposes, a case study involving the use of COGITO in an office building is presented, together with a performance evaluation analysis.
SeaThru-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields in Scattering Media

Research on neural radiance fields (NeRFs) for novel view generation is exploding with new models and extensions. However, a question that remains unanswered is what happens in underwater or foggy scenes where the medium strongly influences the appearance of objects. Thus far, NeRF and its variants have ignored these cases. However, since the NeRF framework is based on volumetric rendering, it has inherent capability to account for the medium's effects, once modeled appropriately. We develop a new rendering model for NeRFs in scattering media, which is based on the SeaThru image formation model, and suggest a suitable architecture for learning both scene information and medium parameters. We demonstrate the strength of our method using simulated and real-world scenes, correctly rendering novel photorealistic views underwater. Even more excitingly, we can render clear views of these scenes, removing the medium between the camera and the scene and reconstructing the appearance and depth of far objects, which are severely occluded by the medium. Our code and unique datasets are available on the project's website.
PIP-Net: Patch-Based Intuitive Prototypes for Interpretable Image Classification

Interpretable methods based on prototypical patches recognize various components in an image in order to explain their reasoning to humans. However, existing prototype-based methods can learn prototypes that are not in line with human visual perception, i.e., the same prototype can refer to different concepts in the real world, making interpretation not intuitive. Driven by the principle of explainability-by-design, we introduce PIP-Net (Patch-based Intuitive Prototypes Network): an interpretable image classification model that learns prototypical parts in a self-supervised fashion which correlate better with human vision. PIP-Net can be interpreted as a sparse scoring sheet where the presence of a prototypical part in an image adds evidence for a class. The model can also abstain from a decision for out-of-distribution data by saying “I haven't seen this before”. We only use image-level labels and do not rely on any part annotations. PIP-Net is globally interpretable since the set of learned prototypes shows the entire reasoning of the model. A smaller local explanation locates the relevant prototypes in one image. We show that our prototypes correlate with ground-truth object parts, indicating that PIP-Net closes the “semantic gap” between latent space and pixel space. Hence, our PIP-Net with interpretable prototypes enables users to interpret the decision making process in an intuitive, faithful and semantically meaningful way. Code is available at https://github.com/M-Nauta/PIPNet.
RangeViT: Towards Vision Transformers for 3D Semantic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving

Casting semantic segmentation of outdoor LiDAR point clouds as a 2D problem, e.g., via range projection, is an effective and popular approach.These projection-based methods usually benefit from fast computations and, when combined with techniques which use other point cloud representations, achieve state-of-the-art results.Today, projection-based methods leverage 2D CNNs but recent advances in computer vision show that vision transformers (ViTs) have achieved state-of-the-art results in many imagebased benchmarks.In this work, we question if projectionbased methods for 3D semantic segmentation can benefit from these latest improvements on ViTs.We answer positively but only after combining them with three key ingredients: (a) ViTs are notoriously hard to train and require a lot of training data to learn powerful representations.By preserving the same backbone architecture as for RGB images, we can exploit the knowledge from long training on large image collections that are much cheaper to acquire and annotate than point clouds.We reach our best results with pre-trained ViTs on large image datasets.(b) We compensate ViTs' lack of inductive bias by substituting a tailored convolutional stem for the classical linear embedding layer.(c) We refine pixel-wise predictions with a convolutional decoder and a skip connection from the convolutional stem to combine low-level but fine-grained features of the the convolutional stem with the high-level but coarse predictions of the ViT encoder.With these ingredients, we show that our method, called RangeViT, outperforms existing projection-based methods on nuScenes and SemanticKITTI.The code is available at https:// github.com/valeoai/rangevit.
Multi-Level Logit Distillation

Knowledge Distillation (KD) aims at distilling the knowledge from the large teacher model to a lightweight student model. Mainstream KD methods can be divided into two categories, logit distillation, and feature distillation. The former is easy to implement, but inferior in performance, while the latter is not applicable to some practical circumstances due to concerns such as privacy and safety. Towards this dilemma, in this paper, we explore a stronger logit distillation method via making better utilization of logit outputs. Concretely, we propose a simple yet effective approach to logit distillation via multi-level prediction alignment. Through this framework, the prediction alignment is not only conducted at the instance level, but also at the batch and class level, through which the student model learns instance prediction, input correlation, and category correlation simultaneously. In addition, a prediction augmentation mechanism based on model calibration further boosts the performance. Extensive experiment results validate that our method enjoys consistently higher performance than previous logit distillation methods, and even reaches competitive performance with mainstream feature distillation methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Jin-Ying/Multi-Level-Logit-Distillation.
DETR with Additional Global Aggregation for Cross-domain Weakly Supervised Object Detection

This paper presents a DETR-based method for cross-domain weakly supervised object detection (CDWSOD), aiming at adapting the detector from source to target domain through weak supervision. We think DETR has strong potential for CDWSOD due to an insight: the encoder and the decoder in DETR are both based on the attention mechanism and are thus capable of aggregating semantics across the entire image. The aggregation results, i.e., image-level predictions, can naturally exploit the weak supervision for domain alignment. Such motivated, we propose DETR with additional Global Aggregation (DETR-GA), a CDWSOD detector that simultaneously makes “instance-level + image-level” predictions and utilizes “strong + weak” supervisions. The key point of DETR-GA is very simple: for the encoder / decoder, we respectively add multiple class queries / a foreground query to aggregate the semantics into image-level predictions. Our query-based aggregation has two advantages. First, in the encoder, the weakly-supervised class queries are capable of roughly locating the corresponding positions and excluding the distraction from non-relevant regions. Second, through our design, the object queries and the foreground query in the decoder share consensus on the class semantics, therefore making the strong and weak supervision mutually benefit each other for domain alignment. Extensive experiments on four popular cross-domain benchmarks show that DETR-GA significantly improves cross-domain detection accuracy (e.g., 29.0% → 79.4% mAP on PASCAL VOC → Clipart <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">all</inf> dataset) and advances the states of the art.
On the Effectiveness of Partial Variance Reduction in Federated Learning with Heterogeneous Data

Data heterogeneity across clients is a key challenge in federated learning. Prior works address this by either aligning client and server models or using control variates to correct client model drift. Although these methods achieve fast convergence in convex or simple non-convex problems, the performance in over-parameterized models such as deep neural networks is lacking. In this paper, we first revisit the widely used FedAvg algorithm in a deep neural network to understand how data heterogeneity influences the gradient updates across the neural network layers. We observe that while the feature extraction layers are learned efficiently by FedAvg, the substantial diversity of the final classification layers across clients impedes the performance. Motivated by this, we propose to correct model drift by variance reduction only on the final layers. We demonstrate that this significantly outperforms existing benchmarks at a similar or lower communication cost. We furthermore provide proof for the convergence rate of our algorithm.
Hierarchical Semantic Contrast for Scene-aware Video Anomaly Detection

Increasing scene-awareness is a key challenge in video anomaly detection (VAD). In this work, we propose a hierarchical semantic contrast (HSC) method to learn a scene-aware VAD model from normal videos. We first incorporate foreground object and background scene features with high-level semantics by taking advantage of pre-trained video parsing models. Then, building upon the autoencoder-based reconstruction framework, we introduce both scene-level and object-level contrastive learning to enforce the encoded latent features to be compact within the same semantic classes while being separable across different classes. This hierarchical semantic contrast strategy helps to deal with the diversity of normal patterns and also increases their discrimination ability. Moreover, for the sake of tackling rare normal activities, we design a skeleton-based motion augmentation to increase samples and refine the model further. Extensive experiments on three public datasets and scene-dependent mixture datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
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 and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/muzairkhattak/ViFi-CLIP.
Generative Bias for Robust Visual Question Answering

The task of Visual Question Answering (VQA) is known to be plagued by the issue of VQA models exploiting biases within the dataset to make its final prediction. Various previous ensemble based debiasing methods have been proposed where an additional model is purposefully trained to be biased in order to train a robust target model. However, these methods compute the bias for a model simply from the label statistics of the training data or from single modal branches. In this work, in order to better learn the bias a target VQA model suffers from, we propose a generative method to train the bias model directly from the target model, called GenB. In particular, GenB employs a generative network to learn the bias in the target model through a combination of the adversarial objective and knowledge distillation. We then debias our target model with GenB as a bias model, and show through extensive experiments the effects of our method on various VQA bias datasets including VQA-CP2, VQA-CP1, GQA-OOD, and VQA-CE, and show state-of-the-art results with the LXMERT architecture on VQA-CP2.
Visual Programming: Compositional visual reasoning without training

We present Visprog, a neuro-symbolic approach to solving complex and compositional visual tasks given natural language instructions. Visprog avoids the need for any task-specific training. Instead, it uses the incontext learning ability of large language models to generate python-like modular programs, which are then executed to get both the solution and a comprehensive and interpretable rationale. Each line of the generated program may invoke one of several off-the-shelf computer vision models, image processing subroutines, or python functions to produce intermediate outputs that may be consumed by subsequent parts of the program. We demonstrate the flexibility of VIsPROG on 4 diverse tasks - compositional visual question answering, zero-shot reasoning on image pairs, factual knowledge object tagging, and language-guided image editing. We believe neuro-symbolic approaches like Visprog are an exciting avenue to easily and effectively expand the scope of AI systems to serve the long tail of complex tasks that people may wish to perform.
PCR: Proxy-Based Contrastive Replay for Online Class-Incremental Continual Learning

Online class-incremental continual learning is a specific task of continual learning. It aims to continuously learn new classes from data stream and the samples of data stream are seen only once, which suffers from the catastrophic forgetting issue, i.e., forgetting historical knowledge of old classes. Existing replay-based methods effectively alleviate this issue by saving and replaying part of old data in a proxy-based or contrastive-based replay manner. Although these two replay manners are effective, the former would incline to new classes due to class imbalance issues, and the latter is unstable and hard to converge because of the limited number of samples. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of these two replay manners and find that they can be complementary. Inspired by this finding, we propose a novel replay-based method called proxy-based contrastive replay (PCR). The key operation is to replace the contrastive samples of anchors with corresponding proxies in the contrastive-based way. It alleviates the phenomenon of catastrophic forgetting by effectively addressing the imbalance issue, as well as keeps a faster convergence of the model. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world benchmark datasets, and empirical results consistently demonstrate the superiority of PCR over various state-of-the-art methods <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> https://github.com/FelixHuiweiLin/PCR.
DistilPose: Tokenized Pose Regression with Heatmap Distillation

In the field of human pose estimation, regression-based methods have been dominated in terms of speed, while heatmap-based methods are far ahead in terms of performance. How to take advantage of both schemes remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a novel human pose estimation framework termed DistilPose, which bridges the gaps between heatmap-based and regression-based methods. Specifically, DistilPose maximizes the transfer of knowledge from the teacher model (heatmap-based) to the student model (regression-based) through Token-distilling Encoder (TDE) and Simulated Heatmaps. TDE aligns the feature spaces of heatmap-based and regression-based models by introducing tokenization, while Simulated Heatmaps transfer explicit guidance (distribution and confidence) from teacher heatmaps into student models. Extensive experiments show that the proposed DistilPose can significantly improve the performance of the regression-based models while maintaining efficiency. Specifically, on the MSCOCO validation dataset, DistilPose-S obtains 71.6% mAP with 5.36M parameters, 2.38 GFLOPs, and 40.2 FPS, which saves 12.95×, 7.16× computational cost and is 4.9× faster than its teacher model with only 0.9 points performance drop. Furthermore, DistilPose-L obtains 74.4% mAP on MSCOCO validation dataset, achieving a new state-of-the-art among predominant regression-based models. Code will be available at https://github.com/yshMars/DistilPose.
DiGeo: Discriminative Geometry-Aware Learning for Generalized Few-Shot Object Detection

Generalized few-shot object detection aims to achieve precise detection on both base classes with abundant annotations and novel classes with limited training data. Existing approaches enhance few-shot generalization with the sacrifice of base-class performance, or maintain high precision in base-class detection with limited improvement in novel-class adaptation. In this paper, we point out the reason is insufficient Discriminative feature learning for all of the classes. As such, we propose a new training framework, DiGeo, to learn Geometry-aware features of interclass separation and intra-class compactness. To guide the separation of feature clusters, we derive an offline simplex equiangular tight frame (ETF) classifier whose weights serve as class centers and are maximally and equally separated. To tighten the cluster for each class, we include adaptive class-specific margins into the classification loss and encourage the features close to the class centers. Experimental studies on two few-shot benchmark datasets (VOC, COCO) and one long-tail dataset (LVIS) demonstrate that, with a single model, our method can effectively improve generalization on novel classes without hurting the detection of base classes. Our code can be found here.
Neural Video Compression with Diverse Contexts

For any video codecs, the coding efficiency highly relies on whether the current signal to be encoded can find the relevant contexts from the previous reconstructed signals. Traditional codec has verified more contexts bring substantial coding gain, but in a time-consuming manner. However, for the emerging neural video codec (NVC), its contexts are still limited, leading to low compression ratio. To boost NVC, this paper proposes increasing the context diversity in both temporal and spatial dimensions. First, we guide the model to learn hierarchical quality patterns across frames, which enriches long-term and yet highquality temporal contexts. Furthermore, to tap the potential of optical flow-based coding framework, we introduce a group-based offset diversity where the cross-group interaction is proposed for better context mining. In addition, this paper also adopts a quadtree-based partition to increase spatial context diversity when encoding the latent representation in parallel. Experiments show that our codec obtains 23.5% bitrate saving over previous SOTA NVC. Better yet, our codec has surpassed the under-developing next generation traditional codec/ECM in both RGB and YUV420 colorspaces, in terms of PSNR. The codes are at https://github.com/microsoft/DCVC.