Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Point-Query Quadtree for Crowd Counting, Localization, and More

We show that crowd counting can be viewed as a decomposable point querying process. This formulation enables arbitrary points as input and jointly reasons whether the points are crowd and where they locate. The querying processing, however, raises an underlying problem on the number of necessary querying points. Too few imply underestimation; too many increase computational overhead. To address this dilemma, we introduce a decomposable structure, i.e., the point-query quadtree, and propose a new counting model, termed Point quEry Transformer (PET). PET implements decomposable point querying via data-dependent quadtree splitting, where each querying point could split into four new points when necessary, thus enabling dynamic processing of sparse and dense regions. Such a querying process yields an intuitive, universal modeling of crowd as both the input and output are interpretable and steerable. We demonstrate the applications of PET on a number of crowd-related tasks, including fully-supervised crowd counting and localization, partial annotation learning, and point annotation refinement, and also report state-of-the-art performance. For the first time, we show that a single counting model can address multiple crowd-related tasks across different learning paradigms. Code is available at https://github.com/cxliu0/PET.
Coarse-to-Fine: Learning Compact Discriminative Representation for Single-Stage Image Retrieval

Image retrieval targets to find images from a database that are visually similar to the query image. Two-stage methods following retrieve-and-rerank paradigm have achieved excellent performance, but their separate local and global modules are inefficient to real-world applications. To better trade-off retrieval efficiency and accuracy, some approaches fuse global and local feature into a joint representation to perform single-stage image retrieval. However, they are still challenging due to various situations to tackle, e.g., background, occlusion and viewpoint. In this work, we design a Coarse-to-Fine framework to learn Compact Discriminative representation (CFCD) for end-to-end single-stage image retrieval-requiring only image-level labels. Specifically, we first design a novel adaptive softmax-based loss which dynamically tunes its scale and margin within each mini-batch and increases them progressively to strengthen supervision during training and intraclass compactness. Furthermore, we propose a mechanism which attentively selects prominent local descriptors and infuse fine-grained semantic relations into the global representation by a hard negative sampling strategy to optimize inter-class distinctiveness at a global scale. Extensive experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method, which achieves state-of-the-art single-stage image retrieval performance on benchmarks such as Revisited Oxford and Revisited Paris. Code is available at https://github.com/bassyess/CFCD.
Distribution Shift Matters for Knowledge Distillation with Webly Collected Images

Knowledge distillation aims to learn a lightweight student network from a pre-trained teacher network. In practice, existing knowledge distillation methods are usually infeasible when the original training data is unavailable due to some privacy issues and data management considerations. Therefore, data-free knowledge distillation approaches proposed to collect training instances from the Internet. However, most of them have ignored the common distribution shift between the instances from original training data and webly collected data, affecting the reliability of the trained student network. To solve this problem, we propose a novel method dubbed "Knowledge Distillation between Different Distributions" (KD <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sup> ), which consists of three components. Specifically, we first dynamically select useful training instances from the webly collected data according to the combined predictions of teacher network and student network. Subsequently, we align both the weighted features and classifier parameters of the two networks for knowledge memorization. Meanwhile, we also build a new contrastive learning block called MixDistribution to generate perturbed data with a new distribution for instance alignment, so that the student network can further learn a distribution-invariant representation. Intensive experiments on various benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed KD <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sup> can outperform the state-of-the-art data-free knowledge distillation approaches.
Multiple Instance Learning Framework with Masked Hard Instance Mining for Whole Slide Image Classification

The whole slide image (WSI) classification is often formulated as a multiple instance learning (MIL) problem. Since the positive tissue is only a small fraction of the gigapixel WSI, existing MIL methods intuitively focus on identifying salient instances via attention mechanisms. However, this leads to a bias towards easy-to-classify instances while neglecting hard-to-classify instances. Some literature has revealed that hard examples are beneficial for modeling a discriminative boundary accurately. By applying such an idea at the instance level, we elaborate a novel MIL framework with masked hard instance mining (MHIM-MIL), which uses a Siamese structure (Teacher-Student) with a consistency constraint to explore the potential hard instances. With several instance masking strategies based on attention scores, MHIM-MIL employs a momentum teacher to implicitly mine hard instances for training the student model, which can be any attention-based MIL model. This counter-intuitive strategy essentially enables the student to learn a better discriminating boundary. Moreover, the student is used to update the teacher with an exponential moving average (EMA), which in turn identifies new hard instances for subsequent training iterations and stabilizes the optimization. Experimental results on the CAMELYON-16 and TCGA Lung Cancer datasets demonstrate that MHIM-MIL outperforms other latest methods in terms of performance and training cost. The code is available at: https://github.com/DearCaat/MHIM-MIL.
UniVTG: Towards Unified Video-Language Temporal Grounding

Video Temporal Grounding (VTG), which aims to ground target clips from videos (such as consecutive intervals or disjoint shots) according to custom language queries (e.g., sentences or words), is key for video browsing on social media. Most methods in this direction develop task-specific models that are trained with type-specific labels, such as moment retrieval (time interval) and highlight detection (worthiness curve), which limits their abilities to generalize to various VTG tasks and labels. In this paper, we propose to Unify the diverse VTG labels and tasks, dubbed UniVTG, along three directions: Firstly, we revisit a wide range of VTG labels and tasks and define a unified formulation. Based on this, we develop data annotation schemes to create scalable pseudo supervision. Secondly, we develop an effective and flexible grounding model capable of addressing each task and making full use of each label. Lastly, thanks to the unified framework, we are able to unlock temporal grounding pretraining from large-scale diverse labels and develop stronger grounding abilities e.g., zero-shot grounding. Extensive experiments on three tasks (moment retrieval, highlight detection and video summarization) across seven datasets (QVHighlights, Charades-STA, TACoS, Ego4D, YouTube Highlights, TVSum, and QFVS) demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of our proposed framework. The codes are available at https://github.com/showlab/UniVTG.
A Simple Framework for Open-Vocabulary Segmentation and Detection

We present OpenSeeD, a simple Open-vocabulary Segmentation and Detection framework that jointly learns from different segmentation and detection datasets. To bridge the gap of vocabulary and annotation granularity, we first introduce a pre-trained text encoder to encode all the visual concepts in two tasks and learn a common semantic space for them. This gives us reasonably good results compared with the counterparts trained on segmentation task only. To further reconcile them, we identify two discrepancies: i) task discrepancy – segmentation requires extracting masks for both foreground objects and background stuff, while detection merely cares about the former; ii) data discrepancy – box and mask annotations are with different spatial granularity, and thus not directly interchangeable. To address these issues, we propose a decoupled decoding to reduce the interference between foreground/background and a conditioned mask decoding to assist in generating masks for given boxes. To this end, we develop a simple encoder-decoder model encompassing all three techniques and train it jointly on COCO and Objects365. After pre-training, our model exhibits competitive or stronger zero-shot transferability for both segmentation and detection. Specifically, OpenSeeD beats the state-of-the-art method for open-vocabulary instance and panoptic segmentation across 5 datasets, and outperforms previous work for open-vocabulary detection on LVIS and ODinW under similar settings. When transferred to specific tasks, our model achieves new SoTA for panoptic segmentation on COCO and ADE20K, and instance segmentation on ADE20K and Cityscapes (The bottom row in Fig. 1 shows a comparison of the performance of OpenSeeD and previous SoTA methods). Finally, we note that OpenSeeD is the first to explore the potential of joint training on segmentation and detection, and hope it can be received as a strong baseline for developing a single model for both tasks in the open world. Code will be released at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/OpenSeeD.
RbA: Segmenting Unknown Regions Rejected by All

Standard semantic segmentation models owe their success to curated datasets with a fixed set of semantic categories, without contemplating the possibility of identifying unknown objects from novel categories. Existing methods in outlier detection suffer from a lack of smoothness and objectness in their predictions, due to limitations of the per-pixel classification paradigm. Furthermore, additional training for detecting outliers harms the performance of known classes. In this paper, we explore another paradigm with region-level classification to better segment unknown objects. We show that the object queries in mask classification tend to behave like one vs. all classifiers. Based on this finding, we propose a novel outlier scoring function called RbA by defining the event of being an outlier as being rejected by all known classes. Our extensive experiments show that mask classification improves the performance of the existing outlier detection methods, and the best results are achieved with the proposed RbA. We also propose an objective to optimize RbA using minimal outlier supervision. Further fine-tuning with outliers improves the unknown performance, and unlike previous methods, it does not degrade the inlier performance. Project page: https://kuis-ai.github.io/RbA
Generalized Differentiable RANSAC

We propose ▽-RANSAC, a generalized differentiable RANSAC that allows learning the entire randomized robust estimation pipeline. The proposed approach enables the use of relaxation techniques for estimating the gradients in the sampling distribution, which are then propagated through a differentiable solver. The trainable quality function marginalizes over the scores from all the models estimated within ▽-RANSAC to guide the network learning accurate and useful inlier probabilities or to train feature detection and matching networks. Our method directly maximizes the probability of drawing a good hypothesis, allowing us to learn better sampling distributions. We test ▽-RANSAC on various real-world scenarios on fundamental and essential matrix estimation, and 3D point cloud registration, outdoors and indoors, with handcrafted and learning-based features. It is superior to the state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy while running at a similar speed to its less accurate alternatives. The code and trained models are available at https://github.com/weitong8591/differentiable_ransac.
Uncertainty-aware Unsupervised Multi-Object Tracking

Without manually annotated identities, unsupervised multi-object trackers are inferior to learning reliable feature embeddings. It causes the similarity-based inter-frame association stage also be error-prone, where an uncertainty problem arises. The frame-by-frame accumulated uncertainty prevents trackers from learning the consistent feature embedding against time variation. To avoid this uncertainty problem, recent self-supervised techniques are adopted, whereas they failed to capture temporal relations. The inter-frame uncertainty still exists. In fact, this paper argues that though the uncertainty problem is inevitable, it is possible to leverage the uncertainty itself to improve the learned consistency in turn. Specifically, an uncertainty-based metric is developed to verify and rectify the risky associations. The resulting accurate pseudo-tracklets boost learning the feature consistency. And accurate tracklets can incorporate temporal information into spatial transformation. This paper proposes a tracklet-guided augmentation strategy to simulate the tracklet’s motion, which adopts a hierarchical uncertainty-based sampling mechanism for hard sample mining. The ultimate unsupervised MOT framework, namely U2MOT, is proven effective on MOT-Challenges and VisDrone-MOT benchmark. U2MOT achieves a SOTA performance among the published supervised and unsupervised trackers.
CMDA: Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation for Nighttime Semantic Segmentation

Most nighttime semantic segmentation studies are based on domain adaptation approaches and image input. However, limited by the low dynamic range of conventional cameras, images fail to capture structural details and boundary information in low-light conditions. Event cameras, as a new form of vision sensors, are complementary to conventional cameras with their high dynamic range. To this end, we propose a novel unsupervised Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation (CMDA) framework to leverage multi-modality (Images and Events) information for nighttime semantic segmentation, with only labels on daytime images. In CMDA, we design the Image Motion-Extractor to extract motion information and the Image Content-Extractor to extract content information from images, in order to bridge the gap between different modalities (Images ⇌ Events) and domains (Day ⇌ Night). Besides, we introduce the first image-event nighttime semantic segmentation dataset. Extensive experiments on both the public image dataset and the proposed image-event dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. We open-source our code, models, and dataset at https://github.com/XiaRho/CMDA.
NeuRBF: A Neural Fields Representation with Adaptive Radial Basis Functions

We present a novel type of neural fields that uses general radial bases for signal representation. State-of-the-art neural fields typically rely on grid-based representations for storing local neural features and N-dimensional linear kernels for interpolating features at continuous query points. The spatial positions of their neural features are fixed on grid nodes and cannot well adapt to target signals. Our method instead builds upon general radial bases with flexible kernel position and shape, which have higher spatial adaptivity and can more closely fit target signals. To further improve the channel-wise capacity of radial basis functions, we propose to compose them with multi-frequency sinusoid functions. This technique extends a radial basis to multiple Fourier radial bases of different frequency bands without requiring extra parameters, facilitating the representation of details. Moreover, by marrying adaptive radial bases with grid-based ones, our hybrid combination inherits both adaptivity and interpolation smoothness. We carefully designed weighting schemes to let radial bases adapt to different types of signals effectively. Our experiments on 2D image and 3D signed distance field representation demonstrate the higher accuracy and compactness of our method than prior arts. When applied to neural radiance field reconstruction, our method achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality, with small model size and comparable training speed.
ALWOD: Active Learning for Weakly-Supervised Object Detection

Object detection (OD), a crucial vision task, remains challenged by the lack of large training datasets with precise object localization labels. In this work, we propose ALWOD, a new framework that addresses this problem by fusing active learning (AL) with weakly and semi-supervised object detection paradigms. Because the performance of AL critically depends on the model initialization, we propose a new auxiliary image generator strategy that utilizes an extremely small labeled set, coupled with a large weakly tagged set of images, as a warm-start for AL. We then propose a new AL acquisition function, another critical factor in AL success, that leverages the student-teacher OD pair disagreement and uncertainty to effectively propose the most informative images to annotate. Finally, to complete the AL loop, we introduce a new labeling task delegated to human annotators, based on selection and correction of model-proposed detections, which is both rapid and effective in labeling the informative images. We demonstrate, across several challenging benchmarks, that ALWOD significantly narrows the gap between the ODs trained on few partially labeled but strategically selected image instances and those that rely on the fullylabeled data. Our code is publicly available on https://github.com/seqam-lab/ALWOD.
Full-Body Articulated Human-Object Interaction

Fine-grained capture of 3D Human-Object Interactions (HOIs) enhances human activity comprehension and supports various downstream visual tasks. However, previous models often assume that humans interact with rigid objects using only a few body parts, constraining their applicability. In this paper, we address the intricate challenge of Full-Body Articulated Human-Object Interaction (f-AHOI), where complete human bodies interact with articulated objects having interconnected movable joints. We introduce CHAIRS, an extensive motion-captured f-AHOI dataset comprising 17.3 hours of diverse interactions involving 46 participants and 81 articulated as well as rigid sittable objects. The CHAIRS provides 3D meshes of both humans and articulated objects throughout the interactive sequences, offering realistic and physically plausible full-body interactions. We demonstrate the utility of CHAIRS through object pose estimation. Leveraging the geometric relationships inherent in HOI, we propose a pioneering model that employs human pose estimation to address articulated object pose and shape estimation within whole-body interactions. Given an image and an estimated human pose, our model reconstructs the object’s pose and shape, refining the reconstruction based on a learned interaction prior. Across two evaluation scenarios, our model significantly outperforms baseline methods. Additionally, we showcase the significance of CHAIRS in a downstream task involving human pose generation conditioned on interacting with articulated objects. We anticipate that the availability of CHAIRS will advance the community’s understanding of finer-grained interactions.
Hallucination-minimized Data-to-answer Framework for Financial Decision-makers

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been applied to build several automation and personalized question-answering prototypes so far. However, scaling such prototypes to robust products with minimized hallucinations or fake responses still remains an open challenge, especially in niche data-table heavy domains such as financial decision making. In this work, we present a novel Langchain-based framework that transforms data tables into hierarchical textual "data chunks" to enable a wide variety of actionable question answering. First, the user-queries are classified by intention followed by automated retrieval of the most relevant data chunks to generate customized LLM prompts per query. Next, the custom prompts and their responses undergo multi-metric scoring to assess for hallucinations and response confidence. The proposed system is optimized with user-query intention classification, advanced prompting, data scaling capabilities and it achieves over $ 90\%$ confidence scores for a variety of user-queries responses ranging from {What, Where, Why, How, predict, trend, anomalies, exceptions} that are crucial for financial decision making applications. The proposed data to answers framework can be extended to other analytical domains such as sales and payroll to ensure optimal hallucination control guardrails.
Role of AI Enabled Smart Meters to Enhance Customer Satisfaction

The critical role that smart meters with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities play in transforming the energy sector and promoting higher levels of consumer satisfaction is examined in this review article. Smart meters have become essential elements in the rapidly changing digital energy market, utilizing AI technology to provide customers and utilities with previously unheard-of advantages. This paper offers a thorough examination of the ways in which AI-powered smart meters enhance energy management, boost operational effectiveness, and eventually improve the general consumer experience. Between 2018 and Oct 2022, data for this study was collected from several databases. The combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and smart meters will be crucial in building a more efficient, customer-focused, and sustainable energy environment as technology develops. Utility companies must embrace this change if they are to meet and surpass customer expectations in an increasingly digital environment, as well as do so as a matter of strategy.
LambdaKG: A Library for Pre-trained Language Model-Based Knowledge Graph Embeddings

Xin Xie, Zhoubo Li, Xiaohan Wang, ZeKun Xi, Ningyu Zhang. Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations. 2023.
MasakhaNEWS: News Topic Classification for African languages

David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Marek Masiak, Israel Abebe Azime, Jesujoba Alabi, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Christine Mwase, Odunayo Ogundepo, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Akintunde Oladipo, Doreen Nixdorf, Chris Chinenye Emezue, Sana Al-azzawi, Blessing Sibanda, Davis David, Lolwethu Ndolela, Jonathan Mukiibi, Tunde Ajayi, Tatiana Moteu, Brian Odhiambo, Abraham Owodunni, Nnaemeka Obiefuna, Muhidin Mohamed, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Teshome Mulugeta Ababu, Saheed Abdullahi Salahudeen, Mesay Gemeda Yigezu, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Idris Abdulmumin, Mahlet Taye, Oluwabusayo Awoyomi, Iyanuoluwa Shode, Tolulope Adelani, Habiba Abdulganiyu, Abdul-Hakeem Omotayo, Adetola Adeeko, Abeeb Afolabi, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Olanrewaju Samuel, Clemencia Siro, Wangari Kimotho, Onyekachi Ogbu, Chinedu Mbonu, Chiamaka Chukwuneke, Samuel Fanijo, Jessica Ojo, Oyinkansola Awosan, Tadesse Kebede, Toadoum Sari Sakayo, Pamela Nyatsine, Freedmore Sidume, Oreen Yousuf, Mardiyyah Oduwole, Kanda Tshinu, Ussen Kimanuka, Thina Diko, Siyanda Nxakama, Sinodos Nigusse, Abdulmejid Johar, Shafie Mohamed, Fuad Mire Hassan, Moges Ahmed Mehamed, Evrard Ngabire, Jules Jules, Ivan Ssenkungu, Pontus Stenetorp. Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2023.