pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Understanding Multimodal Deep Neural Networks: A Concept Selection View
Authors: Chenming Shang, Hengyuan Zhang, Hao Wen, Yujiu Yang
Date: 2024-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

The multimodal deep neural networks, represented by CLIP, have generated rich downstream applications owing to their excellent performance, thus making understanding the decision-making process of CLIP an essential research topic. Due to the complex structure and the massive pre-training data, it is often regarded as a black-box model that is too difficult to understand and interpret. Concept-based models map the black-box visual representations extracted by deep neural networks onto a set of human-understandable concepts and use the concepts to make predictions, enhancing the transparency of the decision-making process. However, these methods involve the datasets labeled with fine-grained attributes by expert knowledge, which incur high costs and introduce excessive human prior knowledge and bias. In this paper, we observe the long-tail distribution of concepts, based on which we propose a two-stage Concept Selection Model (CSM) to mine core concepts without introducing any human priors. The concept greedy rough selection algorithm is applied to extract head concepts, and then the concept mask fine selection method performs the extraction of core concepts. Experiments show that our approach achieves comparable performance to end-to-end black-box models, and human evaluation demonstrates that the concepts discovered by our method are interpretable and comprehensible for humans.
NeurIT: Pushing the Limit of Neural Inertial Tracking for Indoor Robotic IoT
Authors: Xinzhe Zheng, Sijie Ji, Yipeng Pan, Kaiwen Zhang, Chenshu Wu
Date: 2024-04-13 00:00:00

Inertial tracking is vital for robotic IoT and has gained popularity thanks to the ubiquity of low-cost Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) and deep learning-powered tracking algorithms. Existing works, however, have not fully utilized IMU measurements, particularly magnetometers, nor maximized the potential of deep learning to achieve the desired accuracy. To enhance the tracking accuracy for indoor robotic applications, we introduce NeurIT, a sequence-to-sequence framework that elevates tracking accuracy to a new level. NeurIT employs a Time-Frequency Block-recurrent Transformer (TF-BRT) at its core, combining the power of recurrent neural network (RNN) and Transformer to learn representative features in both time and frequency domains. To fully utilize IMU information, we strategically employ body-frame differentiation of the magnetometer, which considerably reduces the tracking error. NeurIT is implemented on a customized robotic platform and evaluated in various indoor environments. Experimental results demonstrate that NeurIT achieves a mere 1-meter tracking error over a 300-meter distance. Notably, it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 48.21% on unseen data. NeurIT also performs comparably to the visual-inertial approach (Tango Phone) in vision-favored conditions and surpasses it in plain environments. We believe NeurIT takes an important step forward toward practical neural inertial tracking for ubiquitous and scalable tracking of robotic things. NeurIT, including the source code and the dataset, is open-sourced here: https://github.com/NeurIT-Project/NeurIT.
ChimpVLM: Ethogram-Enhanced Chimpanzee Behaviour Recognition
Authors: Otto Brookes, Majid Mirmehdi, Hjalmar Kuhl, Tilo Burghardt
Date: 2024-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

We show that chimpanzee behaviour understanding from camera traps can be enhanced by providing visual architectures with access to an embedding of text descriptions that detail species behaviours. In particular, we present a vision-language model which employs multi-modal decoding of visual features extracted directly from camera trap videos to process query tokens representing behaviours and output class predictions. Query tokens are initialised using a standardised ethogram of chimpanzee behaviour, rather than using random or name-based initialisations. In addition, the effect of initialising query tokens using a masked language model fine-tuned on a text corpus of known behavioural patterns is explored. We evaluate our system on the PanAf500 and PanAf20K datasets and demonstrate the performance benefits of our multi-modal decoding approach and query initialisation strategy on multi-class and multi-label recognition tasks, respectively. Results and ablations corroborate performance improvements. We achieve state-of-the-art performance over vision and vision-language models in top-1 accuracy (+6.34%) on PanAf500 and overall (+1.1%) and tail-class (+2.26%) mean average precision on PanAf20K. We share complete source code and network weights for full reproducibility of results and easy utilisation.
Label-free Anomaly Detection in Aerial Agricultural Images with Masked Image Modeling
Authors: Sambal Shikhar, Anupam Sobti
Date: 2024-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Self-Supervised Learning

Detecting various types of stresses (nutritional, water, nitrogen, etc.) in agricultural fields is critical for farmers to ensure maximum productivity. However, stresses show up in different shapes and sizes across different crop types and varieties. Hence, this is posed as an anomaly detection task in agricultural images. Accurate anomaly detection in agricultural UAV images is vital for early identification of field irregularities. Traditional supervised learning faces challenges in adapting to diverse anomalies, necessitating extensive annotated data. In this work, we overcome this limitation with self-supervised learning using a masked image modeling approach. Masked Autoencoders (MAE) extract meaningful normal features from unlabeled image samples which produces high reconstruction error for the abnormal pixels during reconstruction. To remove the need of using only ``normal" data while training, we use an anomaly suppression loss mechanism that effectively minimizes the reconstruction of anomalous pixels and allows the model to learn anomalous areas without explicitly separating ``normal" images for training. Evaluation on the Agriculture-Vision data challenge shows a mIOU score improvement in comparison to prior state of the art in unsupervised and self-supervised methods. A single model generalizes across all the anomaly categories in the Agri-Vision Challenge Dataset
ChangeAnywhere: Sample Generation for Remote Sensing Change Detection via Semantic Latent Diffusion Model
Authors: Kai Tang, Jin Chen
Date: 2024-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Detection, Deep Learning

Remote sensing change detection (CD) is a pivotal technique that pinpoints changes on a global scale based on multi-temporal images. With the recent expansion of deep learning, supervised deep learning-based CD models have shown satisfactory performance. However, CD sample labeling is very time-consuming as it is densely labeled and requires expert knowledge. To alleviate this problem, we introduce ChangeAnywhere, a novel CD sample generation method using the semantic latent diffusion model and single-temporal images. Specifically, ChangeAnywhere leverages the relative ease of acquiring large single-temporal semantic datasets to generate large-scale, diverse, and semantically annotated bi-temporal CD datasets. ChangeAnywhere captures the two essentials of CD samples, i.e., change implies semantically different, and non-change implies reasonable change under the same semantic constraints. We generated ChangeAnywhere-100K, the largest synthesis CD dataset with 100,000 pairs of CD samples based on the proposed method. The ChangeAnywhere-100K significantly improved both zero-shot and few-shot performance on two CD benchmark datasets for various deep learning-based CD models, as demonstrated by transfer experiments. This paper delineates the enormous potential of ChangeAnywhere for CD sample generation and demonstrates the subsequent enhancement of model performance. Therefore, ChangeAnywhere offers a potent tool for remote sensing CD. All codes and pre-trained models will be available at https://github.com/tangkai-RS/ChangeAnywhere.
EIVEN: Efficient Implicit Attribute Value Extraction using Multimodal LLM
Authors: Henry Peng Zou, Gavin Heqing Yu, Ziwei Fan, Dan Bu, Han Liu, Peng Dai, Dongmei Jia, Cornelia Caragea
Date: 2024-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Attribute Value Extraction, Multimodal Attribute Value Extraction

In e-commerce, accurately extracting product attribute values from multimodal data is crucial for improving user experience and operational efficiency of retailers. However, previous approaches to multimodal attribute value extraction often struggle with implicit attribute values embedded in images or text, rely heavily on extensive labeled data, and can easily confuse similar attribute values. To address these issues, we introduce EIVEN, a data- and parameter-efficient generative framework that pioneers the use of multimodal LLM for implicit attribute value extraction. EIVEN leverages the rich inherent knowledge of a pre-trained LLM and vision encoder to reduce reliance on labeled data. We also introduce a novel Learning-by-Comparison technique to reduce model confusion by enforcing attribute value comparison and difference identification. Additionally, we construct initial open-source datasets for multimodal implicit attribute value extraction. Our extensive experiments reveal that EIVEN significantly outperforms existing methods in extracting implicit attribute values while requiring less labeled data.
Enhanced Hydrogen Evolution Activity of MOS$_2$-rGO Composite Synthesized via Hydrothermal Technique
Authors: Abhishek Sebastian, Pragna R
Date: 2024-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: X-Ray Diffraction (XRD)

Hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) has emerged as a promising technique for the production of clean and sustainable energy. In recent years, researchers have been exploring various materials for efficient HER activity. In this study, we report the synthesis of two different materials, namely MOS$_2$ and MoS$_2$-rGO, through a hydrothermal technique. X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, and Raman spectroscopy were used to characterize the materials. XRD analysis revealed the formation of hexagonal MOS$_2$ with a high degree of crystallinity. FTIR analysis confirmed the presence of Mo-S bonds, while Raman spectroscopy provided evidence for the formation of MOS$_2$.To evaluate the HER activity of the materials, linear sweep voltammetry (LSV) was performed. The results showed that MOS$_2$ and MOS$_2$-rGO had good HER activity with low onset potentials and high current densities. The MOS$_2$-rGO material showed improved HER activity compared to MOS$_2$, indicating the potential of graphene oxide as a co-catalyst to enhance the performance of MOS$_2$.
An evaluation framework for synthetic data generation models
Authors: Ioannis E. Livieris, Nikos Alimpertis, George Domalis, Dimitris Tsakalidis
Date: 2024-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Synthetic Data Generation

Nowadays, the use of synthetic data has gained popularity as a cost-efficient strategy for enhancing data augmentation for improving machine learning models performance as well as addressing concerns related to sensitive data privacy. Therefore, the necessity of ensuring quality of generated synthetic data, in terms of accurate representation of real data, consists of primary importance. In this work, we present a new framework for evaluating synthetic data generation models' ability for developing high-quality synthetic data. The proposed approach is able to provide strong statistical and theoretical information about the evaluation framework and the compared models' ranking. Two use case scenarios demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework for evaluating the ability of synthetic data generation models to generated high quality data. The implementation code can be found in https://github.com/novelcore/synthetic_data_evaluation_framework.
Voice Attribute Editing with Text Prompt
Authors: Zhengyan Sheng, Yang Ai, Li-Juan Liu, Jia Pan, Zhen-Hua Ling
Date: 2024-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

Despite recent advancements in speech generation with text prompt providing control over speech style, voice attributes in synthesized speech remain elusive and challenging to control. This paper introduces a novel task: voice attribute editing with text prompt, with the goal of making relative modifications to voice attributes according to the actions described in the text prompt. To solve this task, VoxEditor, an end-to-end generative model, is proposed. In VoxEditor, addressing the insufficiency of text prompt, a Residual Memory (ResMem) block is designed, that efficiently maps voice attributes and these descriptors into the shared feature space. Additionally, the ResMem block is enhanced with a voice attribute degree prediction (VADP) block to align voice attributes with corresponding descriptors, addressing the imprecision of text prompt caused by non-quantitative descriptions of voice attributes. We also establish the open-source VCTK-RVA dataset, which leads the way in manual annotations detailing voice characteristic differences among different speakers. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of our proposed method in terms of both objective and subjective metrics. The dataset and audio samples are available on the website.
On Speculative Decoding for Multimodal Large Language Models
Authors: Mukul Gagrani, Raghavv Goel, Wonseok Jeon, Junyoung Park, Mingu Lee, Christopher Lott
Date: 2024-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Inference with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is slow due to their large-language-model backbone which suffers from memory bandwidth bottleneck and generates tokens auto-regressively. In this paper, we explore the application of speculative decoding to enhance the inference efficiency of MLLMs, specifically the LLaVA 7B model. We show that a language-only model can serve as a good draft model for speculative decoding with LLaVA 7B, bypassing the need for image tokens and their associated processing components from the draft model. Our experiments across three different tasks show that speculative decoding can achieve a memory-bound speedup of up to 2.37$\times$ using a 115M parameter language model that we trained from scratch. Additionally, we introduce a compact LLaVA draft model incorporating an image adapter, which shows marginal performance gains in image captioning while maintaining comparable results in other tasks.
Assessing Economic Viability: A Comparative Analysis of Total Cost of Ownership for Domain-Adapted Large Language Models versus State-of-the-art Counterparts in Chip Design Coding Assistance
Authors: Amit Sharma, Teodor-Dumitru Ene, Kishor Kunal, Mingjie Liu, Zafar Hasan, Haoxing Ren
Date: 2024-04-12 00:00:00

This paper presents a comparative analysis of total cost of ownership (TCO) and performance between domain-adapted large language models (LLM) and state-of-the-art (SoTA) LLMs , with a particular emphasis on tasks related to coding assistance for chip design. We examine the TCO and performance metrics of a domain-adaptive LLM, ChipNeMo, against two leading LLMs, Claude 3 Opus and ChatGPT-4 Turbo, to assess their efficacy in chip design coding generation. Through a detailed evaluation of the accuracy of the model, training methodologies, and operational expenditures, this study aims to provide stakeholders with critical information to select the most economically viable and performance-efficient solutions for their specific needs. Our results underscore the benefits of employing domain-adapted models, such as ChipNeMo, that demonstrate improved performance at significantly reduced costs compared to their general-purpose counterparts. In particular, we reveal the potential of domain-adapted LLMs to decrease TCO by approximately 90%-95%, with the cost advantages becoming increasingly evident as the deployment scale expands. With expansion of deployment, the cost benefits of ChipNeMo become more pronounced, making domain-adaptive LLMs an attractive option for organizations with substantial coding needs supported by LLMs
Multi-fingered Robotic Hand Grasping in Cluttered Environments through Hand-object Contact Semantic Mapping
Authors: Lei Zhang, Kaixin Bai, Guowen Huang, Zhenshan Bing, Zhaopeng Chen, Alois Knoll, Jianwei Zhang
Date: 2024-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Dataset Generation, Diversity, Grasp Generation

The deep learning models has significantly advanced dexterous manipulation techniques for multi-fingered hand grasping. However, the contact information-guided grasping in cluttered environments remains largely underexplored. To address this gap, we have developed a method for generating multi-fingered hand grasp samples in cluttered settings through contact semantic map. We introduce a contact semantic conditional variational autoencoder network (CoSe-CVAE) for creating comprehensive contact semantic map from object point cloud. We utilize grasp detection method to estimate hand grasp poses from the contact semantic map. Finally, an unified grasp evaluation model is designed to assess grasp quality and collision probability, substantially improving the reliability of identifying optimal grasps in cluttered scenarios. Our grasp generation method has demonstrated remarkable success, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by at least 4.65% with 81.0% average grasping success rate in real-world single-object environment and 75.3% grasping success rate in cluttered scenes. We also proposed the multi-modal multi-fingered grasping dataset generation method. Our multi-fingered hand grasping dataset outperforms previous datasets in scene diversity, modality diversity. The dataset, code and supplementary materials can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/ffh-cluttered-grasping.
Vehicle-to-Vehicle Charging: Model, Complexity, and Heuristics
Authors: Cláudio Gomes, João Paulo Fernandes, Gabriel Falcao, Soummya Kar, Sridhar Tayur
Date: 2024-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, model

The rapid adoption of Electric Vehicles (EVs) poses challenges for electricity grids to accommodate or mitigate peak demand. Vehicle-to-Vehicle Charging (V2VC) has been recently adopted by popular EVs, posing new opportunities and challenges to the management and operation of EVs. We present a novel V2VC model that allows decision-makers to take V2VC into account when optimizing their EV operations. We show that optimizing V2VC is NP-Complete and find that even small problem instances are computationally challenging. We propose R-V2VC, a heuristic that takes advantage of the resulting totally unimodular constraint matrix to efficiently solve problems of realistic sizes. Our results demonstrate that R-V2VC presents a linear growth in the solution time as the problem size increases, while achieving solutions of optimal or near-optimal quality. R-V2VC can be used for real-world operations and to study what-if scenarios when evaluating the costs and benefits of V2VC.
Hindsight PRIORs for Reward Learning from Human Preferences
Authors: Mudit Verma, Katherine Metcalf
Date: 2024-04-12 00:00:00

Preference based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) removes the need to hand specify a reward function by learning a reward from preference feedback over policy behaviors. Current approaches to PbRL do not address the credit assignment problem inherent in determining which parts of a behavior most contributed to a preference, which result in data intensive approaches and subpar reward functions. We address such limitations by introducing a credit assignment strategy (Hindsight PRIOR) that uses a world model to approximate state importance within a trajectory and then guides rewards to be proportional to state importance through an auxiliary predicted return redistribution objective. Incorporating state importance into reward learning improves the speed of policy learning, overall policy performance, and reward recovery on both locomotion and manipulation tasks. For example, Hindsight PRIOR recovers on average significantly (p<0.05) more reward on MetaWorld (20%) and DMC (15%). The performance gains and our ablations demonstrate the benefits even a simple credit assignment strategy can have on reward learning and that state importance in forward dynamics prediction is a strong proxy for a state's contribution to a preference decision. Code repository can be found at https://github.com/apple/ml-rlhf-hindsight-prior.
Inverse Kinematics for Neuro-Robotic Grasping with Humanoid Embodied Agents
Authors: Jan-Gerrit Habekost, Connor Gäde, Philipp Allgeuer, Stefan Wermter
Date: 2024-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Motion Planning, Robotic Grasping

This paper introduces a novel zero-shot motion planning method that allows users to quickly design smooth robot motions in Cartesian space. A B\'ezier curve-based Cartesian plan is transformed into a joint space trajectory by our neuro-inspired inverse kinematics (IK) method CycleIK, for which we enable platform independence by scaling it to arbitrary robot designs. The motion planner is evaluated on the physical hardware of the two humanoid robots NICO and NICOL in a human-in-the-loop grasping scenario. Our method is deployed with an embodied agent that is a large language model (LLM) at its core. We generalize the embodied agent, that was introduced for NICOL, to also embody NICO. The agent can execute a discrete set of physical actions and allows the user to verbally instruct various different robots. We contribute a grasping primitive to its action space that allows for precise manipulation of household objects. The updated CycleIK method is compared to popular numerical IK solvers and state-of-the-art neural IK methods in simulation and is shown to be competitive with or outperform all evaluated methods when the algorithm runtime is very short. The grasping primitive is evaluated on both NICOL and NICO robots with a reported grasp success of 72% to 82% for each robot, respectively.
E3: Ensemble of Expert Embedders for Adapting Synthetic Image Detectors to New Generators Using Limited Data
Authors: Aref Azizpour, Tai D. Nguyen, Manil Shrestha, Kaidi Xu, Edward Kim, Matthew C. Stamm
Date: 2024-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Synthetic Image Detection, Transfer Learning

As generative AI progresses rapidly, new synthetic image generators continue to emerge at a swift pace. Traditional detection methods face two main challenges in adapting to these generators: the forensic traces of synthetic images from new techniques can vastly differ from those learned during training, and access to data for these new generators is often limited. To address these issues, we introduce the Ensemble of Expert Embedders (E3), a novel continual learning framework for updating synthetic image detectors. E3 enables the accurate detection of images from newly emerged generators using minimal training data. Our approach does this by first employing transfer learning to develop a suite of expert embedders, each specializing in the forensic traces of a specific generator. Then, all embeddings are jointly analyzed by an Expert Knowledge Fusion Network to produce accurate and reliable detection decisions. Our experiments demonstrate that E3 outperforms existing continual learning methods, including those developed specifically for synthetic image detection.