pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Spark of Vision-Language Intelligence: 2-Dimensional Autoregressive Transformer for Efficient Finegrained Image Generation
Authors: Liang Chen, Sinan Tan, Zefan Cai, Weichu Xie, Haozhe Zhao, Yichi Zhang, Junyang Lin, Jinze Bai, Tianyu Liu, Baobao Chang
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Quantization

This work tackles the information loss bottleneck of vector-quantization (VQ) autoregressive image generation by introducing a novel model architecture called the 2-Dimensional Autoregression (DnD) Transformer. The DnD-Transformer predicts more codes for an image by introducing a new autoregression direction, \textit{model depth}, along with the sequence length direction. Compared to traditional 1D autoregression and previous work utilizing similar 2D image decomposition such as RQ-Transformer, the DnD-Transformer is an end-to-end model that can generate higher quality images with the same backbone model size and sequence length, opening a new optimization perspective for autoregressive image generation. Furthermore, our experiments reveal that the DnD-Transformer's potential extends beyond generating natural images. It can even generate images with rich text and graphical elements in a self-supervised manner, demonstrating an understanding of these combined modalities. This has not been previously demonstrated for popular vision generative models such as diffusion models, showing a spark of vision-language intelligence when trained solely on images. Code, datasets and models are open at https://github.com/chenllliang/DnD-Transformer.
Social Media Authentication and Combating Deepfakes using Semi-fragile Invisible Image Watermarking
Authors: Aakash Varma Nadimpalli, Ajita Rattani
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: DeepFake Detection, Face Swapping

With the significant advances in deep generative models for image and video synthesis, Deepfakes and manipulated media have raised severe societal concerns. Conventional machine learning classifiers for deepfake detection often fail to cope with evolving deepfake generation technology and are susceptible to adversarial attacks. Alternatively, invisible image watermarking is being researched as a proactive defense technique that allows media authentication by verifying an invisible secret message embedded in the image pixels. A handful of invisible image watermarking techniques introduced for media authentication have proven vulnerable to basic image processing operations and watermark removal attacks. In response, we have proposed a semi-fragile image watermarking technique that embeds an invisible secret message into real images for media authentication. Our proposed watermarking framework is designed to be fragile to facial manipulations or tampering while being robust to benign image-processing operations and watermark removal attacks. This is facilitated through a unique architecture of our proposed technique consisting of critic and adversarial networks that enforce high image quality and resiliency to watermark removal efforts, respectively, along with the backbone encoder-decoder and the discriminator networks. Thorough experimental investigations on SOTA facial Deepfake datasets demonstrate that our proposed model can embed a $64$-bit secret as an imperceptible image watermark that can be recovered with a high-bit recovery accuracy when benign image processing operations are applied while being non-recoverable when unseen Deepfake manipulations are applied. In addition, our proposed watermarking technique demonstrates high resilience to several white-box and black-box watermark removal attacks. Thus, obtaining state-of-the-art performance.
The potential of LLM-generated reports in DevSecOps
Authors: Nikolaos Lykousas, Vasileios Argyropoulos, Fran Casino
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00

Alert fatigue is a common issue faced by software teams using the DevSecOps paradigm. The overwhelming number of warnings and alerts generated by security and code scanning tools, particularly in smaller teams where resources are limited, leads to desensitization and diminished responsiveness to security warnings, potentially exposing systems to vulnerabilities. This paper explores the potential of LLMs in generating actionable security reports that emphasize the financial impact and consequences of detected security issues, such as credential leaks, if they remain unaddressed. A survey conducted among developers indicates that LLM-generated reports significantly enhance the likelihood of immediate action on security issues by providing clear, comprehensive, and motivating insights. Integrating these reports into DevSecOps workflows can mitigate attention saturation and alert fatigue, ensuring that critical security warnings are addressed effectively.
Auction-Based Regulation for Artificial Intelligence
Authors: Marco Bornstein, Zora Che, Suhas Julapalli, Abdirisak Mohamed, Amrit Singh Bedi, Furong Huang
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Misinformation

In an era of "moving fast and breaking things", regulators have moved slowly to pick up the safety, bias, and legal debris left in the wake of broken Artificial Intelligence (AI) deployment. While there is much-warranted discussion about how to address the safety, bias, and legal woes of state-of-the-art AI models, rigorous and realistic mathematical frameworks to regulate AI are lacking. Our paper addresses this challenge, proposing an auction-based regulatory mechanism that provably incentivizes devices (i) to deploy compliant models and (ii) to participate in the regulation process. We formulate AI regulation as an all-pay auction where enterprises submit models for approval. The regulator enforces compliance thresholds and further rewards models exhibiting higher compliance than their peers. We derive Nash Equilibria demonstrating that rational agents will submit models exceeding the prescribed compliance threshold. Empirical results show that our regulatory auction boosts compliance rates by 20% and participation rates by 15% compared to baseline regulatory mechanisms, outperforming simpler frameworks that merely impose minimum compliance standards.
Enhancing LLM Fine-tuning for Text-to-SQLs by SQL Quality Measurement
Authors: Shouvon Sarker, Xishuang Dong, Xiangfang Li, Lijun Qian
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Queries, valid

Text-to-SQLs enables non-expert users to effortlessly retrieve desired information from relational databases using natural language queries. While recent advancements, particularly with Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT and T5, have shown impressive performance on large-scale benchmarks such as BIRD, current state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLM-based Text-to-SQLs models often require significant efforts to develop auxiliary tools like SQL classifiers to achieve high performance. This paper proposed a novel approach that only needs SQL Quality Measurement to enhance LLMs-based Text-to-SQLs performance. It establishes a SQL quality evaluation mechanism to assess the generated SQL queries against predefined criteria and actual database responses. This feedback loop enables continuous learning and refinement of model outputs based on both syntactic correctness and semantic accuracy. The proposed method undergoes comprehensive validation on the BIRD benchmark, assessing Execution Accuracy (EX) and Valid Efficiency Score (VES) across various Text-to-SQLs difficulty levels. Experimental results reveal competitive performance in both EX and VES compared to SOTA models like GPT4 and T5.
Flash-Splat: 3D Reflection Removal with Flash Cues and Gaussian Splats
Authors: Mingyang Xie, Haoming Cai, Sachin Shah, Yiran Xu, Brandon Y. Feng, Jia-Bin Huang, Christopher A. Metzler
Date: 2024-10-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Inverse Rendering, Novel View Synthesis, Reflection Removal

We introduce a simple yet effective approach for separating transmitted and reflected light. Our key insight is that the powerful novel view synthesis capabilities provided by modern inverse rendering methods (e.g.,~3D Gaussian splatting) allow one to perform flash/no-flash reflection separation using unpaired measurements -- this relaxation dramatically simplifies image acquisition over conventional paired flash/no-flash reflection separation methods. Through extensive real-world experiments, we demonstrate our method, Flash-Splat, accurately reconstructs both transmitted and reflected scenes in 3D. Our method outperforms existing 3D reflection separation methods, which do not leverage illumination control, by a large margin. Our project webpage is at https://flash-splat.github.io/.
Interpreting and Editing Vision-Language Representations to Mitigate Hallucinations
Authors: Nick Jiang, Anish Kachinthaya, Suzie Petryk, Yossi Gandelsman
Date: 2024-10-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Zero Shot Segmentation

We investigate the internal representations of vision-language models (VLMs) to address hallucinations, a persistent challenge despite advances in model size and training. We project VLMs' internal image representations to their language vocabulary and observe more confident output probabilities on real objects than hallucinated objects. We additionally use these output probabilities to spatially localize real objects. Building on this approach, we introduce a knowledge erasure algorithm that removes hallucinations by linearly orthogonalizing image features with respect to hallucinated object features. We show that targeted edits to a model's latent representations can reduce hallucinations by up to 25.7% on the COCO2014 dataset while preserving performance. Our findings demonstrate how a deeper understanding of VLMs' latent representations can enhance reliability and enable novel capabilities, such as zero-shot segmentation.
Loong: Generating Minute-level Long Videos with Autoregressive Language Models
Authors: Yuqing Wang, Tianwei Xiong, Daquan Zhou, Zhijie Lin, Yang Zhao, Bingyi Kang, Jiashi Feng, Xihui Liu
Date: 2024-10-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Generation

It is desirable but challenging to generate content-rich long videos in the scale of minutes. Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) have achieved great success in generating coherent and long sequences of tokens in the domain of natural language processing, while the exploration of autoregressive LLMs for video generation is limited to generating short videos of several seconds. In this work, we conduct a deep analysis of the challenges that prevent autoregressive LLM-based video generators from generating long videos. Based on the observations and analysis, we propose Loong, a new autoregressive LLM-based video generator that can generate minute-long videos. Specifically, we model the text tokens and video tokens as a unified sequence for autoregressive LLMs and train the model from scratch. We propose progressive short-to-long training with a loss re-weighting scheme to mitigate the loss imbalance problem for long video training. We further investigate inference strategies, including video token re-encoding and sampling strategies, to diminish error accumulation during inference. Our proposed Loong can be trained on 10-second videos and be extended to generate minute-level long videos conditioned on text prompts, as demonstrated by the results. More samples are available at: https://epiphqny.github.io/Loong-video.
Contrastive Localized Language-Image Pre-Training
Authors: Hong-You Chen, Zhengfeng Lai, Haotian Zhang, Xinze Wang, Marcin Eichner, Keen You, Meng Cao, BoWen Zhang, Yinfei Yang, Zhe Gan
Date: 2024-10-03 00:00:00

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has been a celebrated method for training vision encoders to generate image/text representations facilitating various applications. Recently, CLIP has been widely adopted as the vision backbone of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to connect image inputs for language interactions. The success of CLIP as a vision-language foundation model relies on aligning web-crawled noisy text annotations at image levels. Nevertheless, such criteria may become insufficient for downstream tasks in need of fine-grained vision representations, especially when region-level understanding is demanding for MLLMs. In this paper, we improve the localization capability of CLIP with several advances. We propose a pre-training method called Contrastive Localized Language-Image Pre-training (CLOC) by complementing CLIP with region-text contrastive loss and modules. We formulate a new concept, promptable embeddings, of which the encoder produces image embeddings easy to transform into region representations given spatial hints. To support large-scale pre-training, we design a visually-enriched and spatially-localized captioning framework to effectively generate region-text pseudo-labels at scale. By scaling up to billions of annotated images, CLOC enables high-quality regional embeddings for image region recognition and retrieval tasks, and can be a drop-in replacement of CLIP to enhance MLLMs, especially on referring and grounding tasks.
DivScene: Benchmarking LVLMs for Object Navigation with Diverse Scenes and Objects
Authors: Zhaowei Wang, Hongming Zhang, Tianqing Fang, Ye Tian, Yue Yang, Kaixin Ma, Xiaoman Pan, Yangqiu Song, Dong Yu
Date: 2024-10-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Imitation Learning, Language Modelling

Object navigation in unknown environments is crucial for deploying embodied agents in real-world applications. While we have witnessed huge progress due to large-scale scene datasets, faster simulators, and stronger models, previous studies mainly focus on limited scene types and target objects. In this paper, we study a new task of navigating to diverse target objects in a large number of scene types. To benchmark the problem, we present a large-scale scene dataset, DivScene, which contains 4,614 scenes across 81 different types. With the dataset, we build an end-to-end embodied agent, NatVLM, by fine-tuning a Large Vision Language Model (LVLM) through imitation learning. The LVLM is trained to take previous observations from the environment and generate the next actions. We also introduce CoT explanation traces of the action prediction for better performance when tuning LVLMs. Our extensive experiments find that we can build a performant LVLM-based agent through imitation learning on the shortest paths constructed by a BFS planner without any human supervision. Our agent achieves a success rate that surpasses GPT-4o by over 20%. Meanwhile, we carry out various analyses showing the generalization ability of our agent. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/zhaowei-wang-nlp/DivScene.
AlzhiNet: Traversing from 2DCNN to 3DCNN, Towards Early Detection and Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease
Authors: Romoke Grace Akindele, Samuel Adebayo, Paul Shekonya Kanda, Ming Yu
Date: 2024-10-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder with increasing prevalence among the aging population, necessitating early and accurate diagnosis for effective disease management. In this study, we present a novel hybrid deep learning framework that integrates both 2D Convolutional Neural Networks (2D-CNN) and 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (3D-CNN), along with a custom loss function and volumetric data augmentation, to enhance feature extraction and improve classification performance in AD diagnosis. According to extensive experiments, AlzhiNet outperforms standalone 2D and 3D models, highlighting the importance of combining these complementary representations of data. The depth and quality of 3D volumes derived from the augmented 2D slices also significantly influence the model's performance. The results indicate that carefully selecting weighting factors in hybrid predictions is imperative for achieving optimal results. Our framework has been validated on the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) from Kaggle and MIRIAD datasets, obtaining accuracies of 98.9% and 99.99%, respectively, with an AUC of 100%. Furthermore, AlzhiNet was studied under a variety of perturbation scenarios on the Alzheimer's Kaggle dataset, including Gaussian noise, brightness, contrast, salt and pepper noise, color jitter, and occlusion. The results obtained show that AlzhiNet is more robust to perturbations than ResNet-18, making it an excellent choice for real-world applications. This approach represents a promising advancement in the early diagnosis and treatment planning for Alzheimer's disease.
Video Instruction Tuning With Synthetic Data
Authors: Yuanhan Zhang, Jinming Wu, Wei Li, Bo Li, Zejun Ma, Ziwei Liu, Chunyuan Li
Date: 2024-10-03 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Question Answering (3D-QA), Instruction Following, Multiple-choice, Open-Ended Question Answering, Question Answering, Video Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA), Zero-Shot Video Question Answer

The development of video large multimodal models (LMMs) has been hindered by the difficulty of curating large amounts of high-quality raw data from the web. To address this, we propose an alternative approach by creating a high-quality synthetic dataset specifically for video instruction-following, namely LLaVA-Video-178K. This dataset includes key tasks such as detailed captioning, open-ended question-answering (QA), and multiple-choice QA. By training on this dataset, in combination with existing visual instruction tuning data, we introduce LLaVA-Video, a new video LMM. Our experiments demonstrate that LLaVA-Video achieves strong performance across various video benchmarks, highlighting the effectiveness of our dataset. We plan to release the dataset, its generation pipeline, and the model checkpoints.
LLaVA-Critic: Learning to Evaluate Multimodal Models
Authors: Tianyi Xiong, Xiyao Wang, Dong Guo, Qinghao Ye, Haoqi Fan, Quanquan Gu, Heng Huang, Chunyuan Li
Date: 2024-10-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Instruction Following

We introduce LLaVA-Critic, the first open-source large multimodal model (LMM) designed as a generalist evaluator to assess performance across a wide range of multimodal tasks. LLaVA-Critic is trained using a high-quality critic instruction-following dataset that incorporates diverse evaluation criteria and scenarios. Our experiments demonstrate the model's effectiveness in two key areas: (1) LMM-as-a-Judge, where LLaVA-Critic provides reliable evaluation scores, performing on par with or surpassing GPT models on multiple evaluation benchmarks; and (2) Preference Learning, where it generates reward signals for preference learning, enhancing model alignment capabilities. This work underscores the potential of open-source LMMs in self-critique and evaluation, setting the stage for future research into scalable, superhuman alignment feedback mechanisms for LMMs.
ControlAR: Controllable Image Generation with Autoregressive Models
Authors: Zongming Li, Tianheng Cheng, Shoufa Chen, Peize Sun, Haocheng Shen, Longjin Ran, Xiaoxin Chen, Wenyu Liu, Xinggang Wang
Date: 2024-10-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Autoregressive (AR) models have reformulated image generation as next-token prediction, demonstrating remarkable potential and emerging as strong competitors to diffusion models. However, control-to-image generation, akin to ControlNet, remains largely unexplored within AR models. Although a natural approach, inspired by advancements in Large Language Models, is to tokenize control images into tokens and prefill them into the autoregressive model before decoding image tokens, it still falls short in generation quality compared to ControlNet and suffers from inefficiency. To this end, we introduce ControlAR, an efficient and effective framework for integrating spatial controls into autoregressive image generation models. Firstly, we explore control encoding for AR models and propose a lightweight control encoder to transform spatial inputs (e.g., canny edges or depth maps) into control tokens. Then ControlAR exploits the conditional decoding method to generate the next image token conditioned on the per-token fusion between control and image tokens, similar to positional encodings. Compared to prefilling tokens, using conditional decoding significantly strengthens the control capability of AR models but also maintains the model's efficiency. Furthermore, the proposed ControlAR surprisingly empowers AR models with arbitrary-resolution image generation via conditional decoding and specific controls. Extensive experiments can demonstrate the controllability of the proposed ControlAR for the autoregressive control-to-image generation across diverse inputs, including edges, depths, and segmentation masks. Furthermore, both quantitative and qualitative results indicate that ControlAR surpasses previous state-of-the-art controllable diffusion models, e.g., ControlNet++. Code, models, and demo will soon be available at https://github.com/hustvl/ControlAR.
Lie Algebra Canonicalization: Equivariant Neural Operators under arbitrary Lie Groups
Authors: Zakhar Shumaylov, Peter Zaika, James Rowbottom, Ferdia Sherry, Melanie Weber, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb
Date: 2024-10-03 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Inductive Bias

The quest for robust and generalizable machine learning models has driven recent interest in exploiting symmetries through equivariant neural networks. In the context of PDE solvers, recent works have shown that Lie point symmetries can be a useful inductive bias for Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) through data and loss augmentation. Despite this, directly enforcing equivariance within the model architecture for these problems remains elusive. This is because many PDEs admit non-compact symmetry groups, oftentimes not studied beyond their infinitesimal generators, making them incompatible with most existing equivariant architectures. In this work, we propose Lie aLgebrA Canonicalization (LieLAC), a novel approach that exploits only the action of infinitesimal generators of the symmetry group, circumventing the need for knowledge of the full group structure. To achieve this, we address existing theoretical issues in the canonicalization literature, establishing connections with frame averaging in the case of continuous non-compact groups. Operating within the framework of canonicalization, LieLAC can easily be integrated with unconstrained pre-trained models, transforming inputs to a canonical form before feeding them into the existing model, effectively aligning the input for model inference according to allowed symmetries. LieLAC utilizes standard Lie group descent schemes, achieving equivariance in pre-trained models. Finally, we showcase LieLAC's efficacy on tasks of invariant image classification and Lie point symmetry equivariant neural PDE solvers using pre-trained models.