pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A process algebraic framework for multi-agent dynamic epistemic systems
Authors: Alessandro Aldini
Date: 2024-07-24 00:00:00

This paper combines the classical model of labeled transition systems with the epistemic model for reasoning about knowledge. The result is a unifying framework for modeling and analyzing multi-agent, knowledge-based, dynamic systems. On the modeling side, we propose a process algebraic, agent-oriented specification language that makes such a framework easy to use for practical purposes. On the verification side, we define a modal logic encompassing temporal and epistemic operators.
LAMBDA: A Large Model Based Data Agent
Authors: Maojun Sun, Ruijian Han, Binyan Jiang, HouDuo Qi, Defeng Sun, Yancheng Yuan, Jian Huang
Date: 2024-07-24 00:00:00
Tasks: model

We introduce LArge Model Based Data Agent (LAMBDA), a novel open-source, code-free multi-agent data analysis system that leverages the power of large language models. LAMBDA is designed to address data analysis challenges in data-driven applications through innovatively designed data agents using natural language. At the core of LAMBDA are two key agent roles: the programmer and the inspector, which are engineered to work together seamlessly. Specifically, the programmer generates code based on the user's instructions and domain-specific knowledge, while the inspector debugs the code when necessary. To ensure robustness and handle adverse scenarios, LAMBDA features a user interface that allows direct user intervention. Moreover, LAMBDA can flexibly integrate external models and algorithms through our proposed Knowledge Integration Mechanism, catering to the needs of customized data analysis. LAMBDA has demonstrated strong performance on various data analysis tasks. It has the potential to enhance data analysis paradigms by seamlessly integrating human and artificial intelligence, making it more accessible, effective, and efficient for users from diverse backgrounds. The strong performance of LAMBDA in solving data analysis problems is demonstrated using real-world data examples. The code for LAMBDA is available at https://github.com/AMA-CMFAI/LAMBDA and videos of three case studies can be viewed at https://www.polyu.edu.hk/ama/cmfai/lambda.html.
SFPrompt: Communication-Efficient Split Federated Fine-Tuning for Large Pre-Trained Models over Resource-Limited Devices
Authors: Linxiao Cao, Yifei Zhu, Wei Gong
Date: 2024-07-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

Large pre-trained models have exhibited remarkable achievements across various domains. The substantial training costs associated with these models have led to wide studies of fine-tuning for effectively harnessing their capabilities in solving downstream tasks. Yet, conventional fine-tuning approaches become infeasible when the model lacks access to downstream data due to privacy concerns. Naively integrating fine-tuning approaches with the emerging federated learning frameworks incurs substantial communication overhead and exerts high demand on local computing resources, making it impractical for common resource-limited devices. In this paper, we introduce SFPrompt, an innovative privacy-preserving fine-tuning method tailored for the federated setting where direct uploading of raw data is prohibited and local devices are resource-constrained to run a complete pre-trained model. In essence, SFPrompt judiciously combines split learning with federated learning to handle these challenges. Specifically, the pre-trained model is first partitioned into client and server components, thereby streamlining the client-side model and substantially alleviating computational demands on local resources. SFPrompt then introduces soft prompts into the federated model to enhance the fine-tuning performance. To further reduce communication costs, a novel dataset pruning algorithm and a local-loss update strategy are devised during the fine-tuning process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SFPrompt delivers competitive performance as the federated full fine-tuning approach while consuming a mere 0.46% of local computing resources and incurring 53% less communication cost.
Sparse vs Contiguous Adversarial Pixel Perturbations in Multimodal Models: An Empirical Analysis
Authors: Cristian-Alexandru Botocan, Raphael Meier, Ljiljana Dolamic
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00

Assessing the robustness of multimodal models against adversarial examples is an important aspect for the safety of its users. We craft L0-norm perturbation attacks on the preprocessed input images. We launch them in a black-box setup against four multimodal models and two unimodal DNNs, considering both targeted and untargeted misclassification. Our attacks target less than 0.04% of perturbed image area and integrate different spatial positioning of perturbed pixels: sparse positioning and pixels arranged in different contiguous shapes (row, column, diagonal, and patch). To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to assess the robustness of three state-of-the-art multimodal models (ALIGN, AltCLIP, GroupViT) against different sparse and contiguous pixel distribution perturbations. The obtained results indicate that unimodal DNNs are more robust than multimodal models. Furthermore, models using CNN-based Image Encoder are more vulnerable than models with ViT - for untargeted attacks, we obtain a 99% success rate by perturbing less than 0.02% of the image area.
Trajectory-aligned Space-time Tokens for Few-shot Action Recognition
Authors: Pulkit Kumar, Namitha Padmanabhan, Luke Luo, Sai Saketh Rambhatla, Abhinav Shrivastava
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Disentanglement, Few-Shot action recognition, Few Shot Action Recognition, Representation Learning

We propose a simple yet effective approach for few-shot action recognition, emphasizing the disentanglement of motion and appearance representations. By harnessing recent progress in tracking, specifically point trajectories and self-supervised representation learning, we build trajectory-aligned tokens (TATs) that capture motion and appearance information. This approach significantly reduces the data requirements while retaining essential information. To process these representations, we use a Masked Space-time Transformer that effectively learns to aggregate information to facilitate few-shot action recognition. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on few-shot action recognition across multiple datasets. Our project page is available at https://www.cs.umd.edu/~pulkit/tats
RegionDrag: Fast Region-Based Image Editing with Diffusion Models
Authors: Jingyi Lu, Xinghui Li, Kai Han
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00

Point-drag-based image editing methods, like DragDiffusion, have attracted significant attention. However, point-drag-based approaches suffer from computational overhead and misinterpretation of user intentions due to the sparsity of point-based editing instructions. In this paper, we propose a region-based copy-and-paste dragging method, RegionDrag, to overcome these limitations. RegionDrag allows users to express their editing instructions in the form of handle and target regions, enabling more precise control and alleviating ambiguity. In addition, region-based operations complete editing in one iteration and are much faster than point-drag-based methods. We also incorporate the attention-swapping technique for enhanced stability during editing. To validate our approach, we extend existing point-drag-based datasets with region-based dragging instructions. Experimental results demonstrate that RegionDrag outperforms existing point-drag-based approaches in terms of speed, accuracy, and alignment with user intentions. Remarkably, RegionDrag completes the edit on an image with a resolution of 512x512 in less than 2 seconds, which is more than 100x faster than DragDiffusion, while achieving better performance. Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/regiondrag.
VGGHeads: 3D Multi Head Alignment with a Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset
Authors: Orest Kupyn, Eugene Khvedchenia, Christian Rupprecht
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Head Detection, Keypoint Estimation, Synthetic Data Generation

Human head detection, keypoint estimation, and 3D head model fitting are essential tasks with many applications. However, traditional real-world datasets often suffer from bias, privacy, and ethical concerns, and they have been recorded in laboratory environments, which makes it difficult for trained models to generalize. Here, we introduce \method -- a large-scale synthetic dataset generated with diffusion models for human head detection and 3D mesh estimation. Our dataset comprises over 1 million high-resolution images, each annotated with detailed 3D head meshes, facial landmarks, and bounding boxes. Using this dataset, we introduce a new model architecture capable of simultaneous head detection and head mesh reconstruction from a single image in a single step. Through extensive experimental evaluations, we demonstrate that models trained on our synthetic data achieve strong performance on real images. Furthermore, the versatility of our dataset makes it applicable across a broad spectrum of tasks, offering a general and comprehensive representation of human heads.
RefMask3D: Language-Guided Transformer for 3D Referring Segmentation
Authors: Shuting He, Henghui Ding
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D visual grounding, Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Visual Grounding

3D referring segmentation is an emerging and challenging vision-language task that aims to segment the object described by a natural language expression in a point cloud scene. The key challenge behind this task is vision-language feature fusion and alignment. In this work, we propose RefMask3D to explore the comprehensive multi-modal feature interaction and understanding. First, we propose a Geometry-Enhanced Group-Word Attention to integrate language with geometrically coherent sub-clouds through cross-modal group-word attention, which effectively addresses the challenges posed by the sparse and irregular nature of point clouds. Then, we introduce a Linguistic Primitives Construction to produce semantic primitives representing distinct semantic attributes, which greatly enhance the vision-language understanding at the decoding stage. Furthermore, we introduce an Object Cluster Module that analyzes the interrelationships among linguistic primitives to consolidate their insights and pinpoint common characteristics, helping to capture holistic information and enhance the precision of target identification. The proposed RefMask3D achieves new state-of-the-art performance on 3D referring segmentation, 3D visual grounding, and also 2D referring image segmentation. Especially, RefMask3D outperforms previous state-of-the-art method by a large margin of 3.16% mIoU} on the challenging ScanRefer dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/heshuting555/RefMask3D.
BIV-Priv-Seg: Locating Private Content in Images Taken by People With Visual Impairments
Authors: Yu-Yun Tseng, Tanusree Sharma, Lotus Zhang, Abigale Stangl, Leah Findlater, Yang Wang, Danna Gurari
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Localization

Individuals who are blind or have low vision (BLV) are at a heightened risk of sharing private information if they share photographs they have taken. To facilitate developing technologies that can help them preserve privacy, we introduce BIV-Priv-Seg, the first localization dataset originating from people with visual impairments that shows private content. It contains 1,028 images with segmentation annotations for 16 private object categories. We first characterize BIV-Priv-Seg and then evaluate modern models' performance for locating private content in the dataset. We find modern models struggle most with locating private objects that are not salient, small, and lack text as well as recognizing when private content is absent from an image. We facilitate future extensions by sharing our new dataset with the evaluation server at https://vizwiz.org/tasks-and-datasets/object-localization.
CodedVO: Coded Visual Odometry
Authors: Sachin Shah, Naitri Rajyaguru, Chahat Deep Singh, Christopher Metzler, Yiannis Aloimonos
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Monocular Visual Odometry, Visual Odometry

Autonomous robots often rely on monocular cameras for odometry estimation and navigation. However, the scale ambiguity problem presents a critical barrier to effective monocular visual odometry. In this paper, we present CodedVO, a novel monocular visual odometry method that overcomes the scale ambiguity problem by employing custom optics to physically encode metric depth information into imagery. By incorporating this information into our odometry pipeline, we achieve state-of-the-art performance in monocular visual odometry with a known scale. We evaluate our method in diverse indoor environments and demonstrate its robustness and adaptability. We achieve a 0.08m average trajectory error in odometry evaluation on the ICL-NUIM indoor odometry dataset.
Geometry Fidelity for Spherical Images
Authors: Anders Christensen, Nooshin Mojab, Khushman Patel, Karan Ahuja, Zeynep Akata, Ole Winther, Mar Gonzalez-Franco, Andrea Colaco
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00

Spherical or omni-directional images offer an immersive visual format appealing to a wide range of computer vision applications. However, geometric properties of spherical images pose a major challenge for models and metrics designed for ordinary 2D images. Here, we show that direct application of Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) is insufficient for quantifying geometric fidelity in spherical images. We introduce two quantitative metrics accounting for geometric constraints, namely Omnidirectional FID (OmniFID) and Discontinuity Score (DS). OmniFID is an extension of FID tailored to additionally capture field-of-view requirements of the spherical format by leveraging cubemap projections. DS is a kernel-based seam alignment score of continuity across borders of 2D representations of spherical images. In experiments, OmniFID and DS quantify geometry fidelity issues that are undetected by FID.
XS-VID: An Extremely Small Video Object Detection Dataset
Authors: Jiahao Guo, Ziyang Xu, Lianjun Wu, Fei Gao, Wenyu Liu, Xinggang Wang
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Discovery, Small Object Detection, Video Object Detection

Small Video Object Detection (SVOD) is a crucial subfield in modern computer vision, essential for early object discovery and detection. However, existing SVOD datasets are scarce and suffer from issues such as insufficiently small objects, limited object categories, and lack of scene diversity, leading to unitary application scenarios for corresponding methods. To address this gap, we develop the XS-VID dataset, which comprises aerial data from various periods and scenes, and annotates eight major object categories. To further evaluate existing methods for detecting extremely small objects, XS-VID extensively collects three types of objects with smaller pixel areas: extremely small (\textit{es}, $0\sim12^2$), relatively small (\textit{rs}, $12^2\sim20^2$), and generally small (\textit{gs}, $20^2\sim32^2$). XS-VID offers unprecedented breadth and depth in covering and quantifying minuscule objects, significantly enriching the scene and object diversity in the dataset. Extensive validations on XS-VID and the publicly available VisDrone2019VID dataset show that existing methods struggle with small object detection and significantly underperform compared to general object detectors. Leveraging the strengths of previous methods and addressing their weaknesses, we propose YOLOFT, which enhances local feature associations and integrates temporal motion features, significantly improving the accuracy and stability of SVOD. Our datasets and benchmarks are available at \url{https://gjhhust.github.io/XS-VID/}.
$\mathbb{X}$-Sample Contrastive Loss: Improving Contrastive Learning with Sample Similarity Graphs
Authors: Vlad Sobal, Mark Ibrahim, Randall Balestriero, Vivien Cabannes, Diane Bouchacourt, Pietro Astolfi, Kyunghyun Cho, Yann Lecun
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning

Learning good representations involves capturing the diverse ways in which data samples relate. Contrastive loss - an objective matching related samples - underlies methods from self-supervised to multimodal learning. Contrastive losses, however, can be viewed more broadly as modifying a similarity graph to indicate how samples should relate in the embedding space. This view reveals a shortcoming in contrastive learning: the similarity graph is binary, as only one sample is the related positive sample. Crucially, similarities \textit{across} samples are ignored. Based on this observation, we revise the standard contrastive loss to explicitly encode how a sample relates to others. We experiment with this new objective, called $\mathbb{X}$-Sample Contrastive, to train vision models based on similarities in class or text caption descriptions. Our study spans three scales: ImageNet-1k with 1 million, CC3M with 3 million, and CC12M with 12 million samples. The representations learned via our objective outperform both contrastive self-supervised and vision-language models trained on the same data across a range of tasks. When training on CC12M, we outperform CLIP by $0.6\%$ on both ImageNet and ImageNet Real. Our objective appears to work particularly well in lower-data regimes, with gains over CLIP of $16.8\%$ on ImageNet and $18.1\%$ on ImageNet Real when training with CC3M. Finally, our objective seems to encourage the model to learn representations that separate objects from their attributes and backgrounds, with gains of $3.3$-$5.6$\% over CLIP on ImageNet9. We hope the proposed solution takes a small step towards developing richer learning objectives for understanding sample relations in foundation models.
Estimating Earthquake Magnitude in Sentinel-1 Imagery via Ranking
Authors: Daniele Rege Cambrin, Isaac Corley, Paolo Garza, Peyman Najafirad
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Earth Observation, Metric Learning

Earthquakes are commonly estimated using physical seismic stations, however, due to the installation requirements and costs of these stations, global coverage quickly becomes impractical. An efficient and lower-cost alternative is to develop machine learning models to globally monitor earth observation data to pinpoint regions impacted by these natural disasters. However, due to the small amount of historically recorded earthquakes, this becomes a low-data regime problem requiring algorithmic improvements to achieve peak performance when learning to regress earthquake magnitude. In this paper, we propose to pose the estimation of earthquake magnitudes as a metric-learning problem, training models to not only estimate earthquake magnitude from Sentinel-1 satellite imagery but to additionally rank pairwise samples. Our experiments show at max a 30%+ improvement in MAE over prior regression-only based methods, particularly transformer-based architectures.
Efficient Inference of Vision Instruction-Following Models with Elastic Cache
Authors: Zuyan Liu, Benlin Liu, Jiahui Wang, Yuhao Dong, Guangyi Chen, Yongming Rao, Ranjay Krishna, Jiwen Lu
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following, Text Generation

In the field of instruction-following large vision-language models (LVLMs), the efficient deployment of these models faces challenges, notably due to the high memory demands of their key-value (KV) caches. Conventional cache management strategies for LLMs focus on cache eviction, which often fails to address the specific needs of multimodal instruction-following models. Recognizing this gap, in this paper, we introduce Elastic Cache, a novel approach that benefits from applying distinct acceleration methods for instruction encoding and output generation stages. We investigate the metrics of importance in different stages and propose an importance-driven cache merging strategy to prune redundancy caches. Instead of discarding less important caches, our strategy identifies important key/value vectors as anchor points. Surrounding less important caches are then merged with these anchors, enhancing the preservation of contextual information in the KV caches while yielding an arbitrary acceleration ratio. For instruction encoding, we utilize the frequency to evaluate the importance of caches. Regarding output generation, we prioritize tokens based on their distance with an offset, by which both the initial and most recent tokens are retained. Results on a range of LVLMs demonstrate that Elastic Cache not only boosts efficiency but also notably outperforms existing pruning methods in language generation across various tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/liuzuyan/ElasticCache
Keypoint Promptable Re-Identification
Authors: Vladimir Somers, Christophe De Vleeschouwer, Alexandre Alahi
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Metric Learning, Occluded Person Re-Identification, Person Re-Identification, Person Retrieval, Pose Tracking

Occluded Person Re-Identification (ReID) is a metric learning task that involves matching occluded individuals based on their appearance. While many studies have tackled occlusions caused by objects, multi-person occlusions remain less explored. In this work, we identify and address a critical challenge overlooked by previous occluded ReID methods: the Multi-Person Ambiguity (MPA) arising when multiple individuals are visible in the same bounding box, making it impossible to determine the intended ReID target among the candidates. Inspired by recent work on prompting in vision, we introduce Keypoint Promptable ReID (KPR), a novel formulation of the ReID problem that explicitly complements the input bounding box with a set of semantic keypoints indicating the intended target. Since promptable re-identification is an unexplored paradigm, existing ReID datasets lack the pixel-level annotations necessary for prompting. To bridge this gap and foster further research on this topic, we introduce Occluded-PoseTrack ReID, a novel ReID dataset with keypoints labels, that features strong inter-person occlusions. Furthermore, we release custom keypoint labels for four popular ReID benchmarks. Experiments on person retrieval, but also on pose tracking, demonstrate that our method systematically surpasses previous state-of-the-art approaches on various occluded scenarios. Our code, dataset and annotations are available at https://github.com/VlSomers/keypoint_promptable_reidentification.