pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
GFlow: Recovering 4D World from Monocular Video
Authors: Shizun Wang, Xingyi Yang, Qiuhong Shen, Zhenxiang Jiang, Xinchao Wang
Date: 2024-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: 4D reconstruction, Novel View Synthesis, Optical Flow Estimation

Recovering 4D world from monocular video is a crucial yet challenging task. Conventional methods usually rely on the assumptions of multi-view videos, known camera parameters, or static scenes. In this paper, we relax all these constraints and tackle a highly ambitious but practical task: With only one monocular video without camera parameters, we aim to recover the dynamic 3D world alongside the camera poses. To solve this, we introduce GFlow, a new framework that utilizes only 2D priors (depth and optical flow) to lift a video to a 4D scene, as a flow of 3D Gaussians through space and time. GFlow starts by segmenting the video into still and moving parts, then alternates between optimizing camera poses and the dynamics of the 3D Gaussian points. This method ensures consistency among adjacent points and smooth transitions between frames. Since dynamic scenes always continually introduce new visual content, we present prior-driven initialization and pixel-wise densification strategy for Gaussian points to integrate new content. By combining all those techniques, GFlow transcends the boundaries of 4D recovery from causal videos; it naturally enables tracking of points and segmentation of moving objects across frames. Additionally, GFlow estimates the camera poses for each frame, enabling novel view synthesis by changing camera pose. This capability facilitates extensive scene-level or object-level editing, highlighting GFlow's versatility and effectiveness. Visit our project page at: https://littlepure2333.github.io/GFlow
ViG: Linear-complexity Visual Sequence Learning with Gated Linear Attention
Authors: Bencheng Liao, Xinggang Wang, Lianghui Zhu, Qian Zhang, Chang Huang
Date: 2024-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Representation Learning

Recently, linear complexity sequence modeling networks have achieved modeling capabilities similar to Vision Transformers on a variety of computer vision tasks, while using fewer FLOPs and less memory. However, their advantage in terms of actual runtime speed is not significant. To address this issue, we introduce Gated Linear Attention (GLA) for vision, leveraging its superior hardware-awareness and efficiency. We propose direction-wise gating to capture 1D global context through bidirectional modeling and a 2D gating locality injection to adaptively inject 2D local details into 1D global context. Our hardware-aware implementation further merges forward and backward scanning into a single kernel, enhancing parallelism and reducing memory cost and latency. The proposed model, ViG, offers a favorable trade-off in accuracy, parameters, and FLOPs on ImageNet and downstream tasks, outperforming popular Transformer and CNN-based models. Notably, ViG-S matches DeiT-B's accuracy while using only 27% of the parameters and 20% of the FLOPs, running 2$\times$ faster on $224\times224$ images. At $1024\times1024$ resolution, ViG-T uses 5.2$\times$ fewer FLOPs, saves 90% GPU memory, runs 4.8$\times$ faster, and achieves 20.7% higher top-1 accuracy than DeiT-T. These results position ViG as an efficient and scalable solution for visual representation learning. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/hustvl/ViG}.
Why are Visually-Grounded Language Models Bad at Image Classification?
Authors: Yuhui Zhang, Alyssa Unell, Xiaohan Wang, Dhruba Ghosh, Yuchang Su, Ludwig Schmidt, Serena Yeung-Levy
Date: 2024-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

Image classification is one of the most fundamental capabilities of machine vision intelligence. In this work, we revisit the image classification task using visually-grounded language models (VLMs) such as GPT-4V and LLaVA. We find that existing proprietary and public VLMs, despite often using CLIP as a vision encoder and having many more parameters, significantly underperform CLIP on standard image classification benchmarks like ImageNet. To understand the reason, we explore several hypotheses concerning the inference algorithms, training objectives, and data processing in VLMs. Our analysis reveals that the primary cause is data-related: critical information for image classification is encoded in the VLM's latent space but can only be effectively decoded with enough training data. Specifically, there is a strong correlation between the frequency of class exposure during VLM training and instruction-tuning and the VLM's performance in those classes; when trained with sufficient data, VLMs can match the accuracy of state-of-the-art classification models. Based on these findings, we enhance a VLM by integrating classification-focused datasets into its training, and demonstrate that the enhanced classification performance of the VLM transfers to its general capabilities, resulting in an improvement of 11.8% on the newly collected ImageWikiQA dataset.
Don't Forget to Connect! Improving RAG with Graph-based Reranking
Authors: Jialin Dong, Bahare Fatemi, Bryan Perozzi, Lin F. Yang, Anton Tsitsulin
Date: 2024-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstract Meaning Representation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, RAG, Reranking, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has greatly improved the performance of Large Language Model (LLM) responses by grounding generation with context from existing documents. These systems work well when documents are clearly relevant to a question context. But what about when a document has partial information, or less obvious connections to the context? And how should we reason about connections between documents? In this work, we seek to answer these two core questions about RAG generation. We introduce G-RAG, a reranker based on graph neural networks (GNNs) between the retriever and reader in RAG. Our method combines both connections between documents and semantic information (via Abstract Meaning Representation graphs) to provide a context-informed ranker for RAG. G-RAG outperforms state-of-the-art approaches while having smaller computational footprint. Additionally, we assess the performance of PaLM 2 as a reranker and find it to significantly underperform G-RAG. This result emphasizes the importance of reranking for RAG even when using Large Language Models.
RACCooN: A Versatile Instructional Video Editing Framework with Auto-Generated Narratives
Authors: Jaehong Yoon, Shoubin Yu, Mohit Bansal
Date: 2024-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Video Editing

Recent video generative models primarily rely on carefully written text prompts for specific tasks, like inpainting or style editing. They require labor-intensive textual descriptions for input videos, hindering their flexibility to adapt personal/raw videos to user specifications. This paper proposes RACCooN, a versatile and user-friendly video-to-paragraph-to-video generative framework that supports multiple video editing capabilities such as removal, addition, and modification, through a unified pipeline. RACCooN consists of two principal stages: Video-to-Paragraph (V2P) and Paragraph-to-Video (P2V). In the V2P stage, we automatically describe video scenes in well-structured natural language, capturing both the holistic context and focused object details. Subsequently, in the P2V stage, users can optionally refine these descriptions to guide the video diffusion model, enabling various modifications to the input video, such as removing, changing subjects, and/or adding new objects. The proposed approach stands out from other methods through several significant contributions: (1) RACCooN suggests a multi-granular spatiotemporal pooling strategy to generate well-structured video descriptions, capturing both the broad context and object details without requiring complex human annotations, simplifying precise video content editing based on text for users. (2) Our video generative model incorporates auto-generated narratives or instructions to enhance the quality and accuracy of the generated content. (3) RACCooN also plans to imagine new objects in a given video, so users simply prompt the model to receive a detailed video editing plan for complex video editing. The proposed framework demonstrates impressive versatile capabilities in video-to-paragraph generation, video content editing, and can be incorporated into other SoTA video generative models for further enhancement.
WIDIn: Wording Image for Domain-Invariant Representation in Single-Source Domain Generalization
Authors: Jiawei Ma, Yulei Niu, Shiyuan Huang, Guangxing Han, Shih-Fu Chang
Date: 2024-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Image Description, Single-Source Domain Generalization

Language has been useful in extending the vision encoder to data from diverse distributions without empirical discovery in training domains. However, as the image description is mostly at coarse-grained level and ignores visual details, the resulted embeddings are still ineffective in overcoming complexity of domains at inference time. We present a self-supervision framework WIDIn, Wording Images for Domain-Invariant representation, to disentangle discriminative visual representation, by only leveraging data in a single domain and without any test prior. Specifically, for each image, we first estimate the language embedding with fine-grained alignment, which can be consequently used to adaptively identify and then remove domain-specific counterpart from the raw visual embedding. WIDIn can be applied to both pretrained vision-language models like CLIP, and separately trained uni-modal models like MoCo and BERT. Experimental studies on three domain generalization datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
A Review and Implementation of Object Detection Models and Optimizations for Real-time Medical Mask Detection during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Authors: Ioanna Gogou, Dimitrios Koutsomitropoulos
Date: 2024-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Transfer Learning

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are commonly used for the problem of object detection thanks to their increased accuracy. Nevertheless, the performance of CNN-based detection models is ambiguous when detection speed is considered. To the best of our knowledge, there has not been sufficient evaluation of the available methods in terms of the speed/accuracy trade-off in related literature. This work assesses the most fundamental object detection models on the Common Objects in Context (COCO) dataset with respect to this trade-off, their memory consumption, and computational and storage cost. Next, we select a highly efficient model called YOLOv5 to train on the topical and unexplored dataset of human faces with medical masks, the Properly-Wearing Masked Faces Dataset (PWMFD), and analyze the benefits of specific optimization techniques for real-time medical mask detection: transfer learning, data augmentations, and a Squeeze-and-Excitation attention mechanism. Using our findings in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, we propose an optimized model based on YOLOv5s using transfer learning for the detection of correctly and incorrectly worn medical masks that surpassed more than two times in speed (69 frames per second) the state-of-the-art model SE-YOLOv3 on the PWMFD dataset while maintaining the same level of mean Average Precision (67%).
Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) Challenge 2024: Meningioma Radiotherapy Planning Automated Segmentation
Authors: Dominic LaBella, Katherine Schumacher, Michael Mix, Kevin Leu, Shan McBurney-Lin, Pierre Nedelec, Javier Villanueva-Meyer, Jonathan Shapey, Tom Vercauteren, Kazumi Chia, Omar Al-Salihi, Justin Leu, Lia Halasz, Yury Velichko, Chunhao Wang, John Kirkpatrick, Scott Floyd, Zachary J. Reitman, Trey Mullikin, Ulas Bagci, Sean Sachdev, Jona A. Hattangadi-Gluth, Tyler Seibert, Nikdokht Farid, Connor Puett, Matthew W. Pease, Kevin Shiue, Syed Muhammad Anwar, Shahriar Faghani, Muhammad Ammar Haider, Pranav Warman, Jake Albrecht, András Jakab, Mana Moassefi, Verena Chung, Alejandro Aristizabal, Alexandros Karargyris, Hasan Kassem, Sarthak Pati, Micah Sheller, Christina Huang, Aaron Coley, Siddharth Ghanta, Alex Schneider, Conrad Sharp, Rachit Saluja, Florian Kofler, Philipp Lohmann, Phillipp Vollmuth, Louis Gagnon, Maruf Adewole, Hongwei Bran Li, Anahita Fathi Kazerooni, Nourel Hoda Tahon, Udunna Anazodo, Ahmed W. Moawad, Bjoern Menze, Marius George Linguraru, Mariam Aboian, Benedikt Wiestler, Ujjwal Baid, Gian-Marco Conte, Andreas M. Rauschecker, Ayman Nada, Aly H. Abayazeed, Raymond Huang, Maria Correia de Verdier, Jeffrey D. Rudie, Spyridon Bakas, Evan Calabrese
Date: 2024-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Tumor Segmentation, Segmentation, Tumor Segmentation

The 2024 Brain Tumor Segmentation Meningioma Radiotherapy (BraTS-MEN-RT) challenge aims to advance automated segmentation algorithms using the largest known multi-institutional dataset of radiotherapy planning brain MRIs with expert-annotated target labels for patients with intact or postoperative meningioma that underwent either conventional external beam radiotherapy or stereotactic radiosurgery. Each case includes a defaced 3D post-contrast T1-weighted radiotherapy planning MRI in its native acquisition space, accompanied by a single-label "target volume" representing the gross tumor volume (GTV) and any at-risk postoperative site. Target volume annotations adhere to established radiotherapy planning protocols, ensuring consistency across cases and institutions. For preoperative meningiomas, the target volume encompasses the entire GTV and associated nodular dural tail, while for postoperative cases, it includes at-risk resection cavity margins as determined by the treating institution. Case annotations were reviewed and approved by expert neuroradiologists and radiation oncologists. Participating teams will develop, containerize, and evaluate automated segmentation models using this comprehensive dataset. Model performance will be assessed using an adapted lesion-wise Dice Similarity Coefficient and the 95% Hausdorff distance. The top-performing teams will be recognized at the Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention Conference in October 2024. BraTS-MEN-RT is expected to significantly advance automated radiotherapy planning by enabling precise tumor segmentation and facilitating tailored treatment, ultimately improving patient outcomes.
OwLore: Outlier-weighed Layerwise Sampled Low-Rank Projection for Memory-Efficient LLM Fine-tuning
Authors: Pengxiang Li, Lu Yin, Xiaowei Gao, Shiwei Liu
Date: 2024-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: MMLU

The rapid advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized various natural language processing tasks. However, the substantial size of LLMs presents significant challenges in training or fine-tuning. While parameter-efficient approaches such as low-rank adaptation (LoRA) have gained popularity, they often compromise performance compared to full-rank fine-tuning. In this paper, we propose Outlier-weighed Layerwise Sampled Low-Rank Projection (OwLore), a new memory-efficient fine-tuning approach, inspired by the layerwise outlier distribution of LLMs. Unlike LoRA, which adds extra adapters to all layers, OwLore strategically assigns higher sampling probabilities to layers with more outliers, selectively sampling only a few layers and fine-tuning their pre-trained weights. To further increase the number of fine-tuned layers without a proportional rise in memory costs, we incorporate gradient low-rank projection, further boosting the approach's performance. Our extensive experiments across various architectures, including LLaMa2, LLaMa3, and Mistral, demonstrate that OwLore consistently outperforms baseline approaches, including full fine-tuning. Specifically, it achieves up to a 1.1% average accuracy gain on the Commonsense Reasoning benchmark, a 3.0% improvement on MMLU, and a notable 10% boost on MT-Bench, while being more memory efficient. OwLore allows us to fine-tune LLaMa2-7B with only 21GB of memory. Code is available at https://github.com/pixeli99/OwLore.
LLaMA-NAS: Efficient Neural Architecture Search for Large Language Models
Authors: Anthony Sarah, Sharath Nittur Sridhar, Maciej Szankin, Sairam Sundaresan
Date: 2024-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search, Quantization, Sentiment Analysis

The abilities of modern large language models (LLMs) in solving natural language processing, complex reasoning, sentiment analysis and other tasks have been extraordinary which has prompted their extensive adoption. Unfortunately, these abilities come with very high memory and computational costs which precludes the use of LLMs on most hardware platforms. To mitigate this, we propose an effective method of finding Pareto-optimal network architectures based on LLaMA2-7B using one-shot NAS. In particular, we fine-tune LLaMA2-7B only once and then apply genetic algorithm-based search to find smaller, less computationally complex network architectures. We show that, for certain standard benchmark tasks, the pre-trained LLaMA2-7B network is unnecessarily large and complex. More specifically, we demonstrate a 1.5x reduction in model size and 1.3x speedup in throughput for certain tasks with negligible drop in accuracy. In addition to finding smaller, higher-performing network architectures, our method does so more effectively and efficiently than certain pruning or sparsification techniques. Finally, we demonstrate how quantization is complementary to our method and that the size and complexity of the networks we find can be further decreased using quantization. We believe that our work provides a way to automatically create LLMs which can be used on less expensive and more readily available hardware platforms.
PromptWizard: Task-Aware Prompt Optimization Framework
Authors: Eshaan Agarwal, Joykirat Singh, Vivek Dani, Raghav Magazine, Tanuja Ganu, Akshay Nambi
Date: 2024-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Diversity, Prompt Engineering

Large language models (LLMs) have transformed AI across diverse domains, with prompting being central to their success in guiding model outputs. However, manual prompt engineering is both labor-intensive and domain-specific, necessitating the need for automated solutions. We introduce PromptWizard, a novel, fully automated framework for discrete prompt optimization, utilizing a self-evolving, self-adapting mechanism. Through a feedback-driven critique and synthesis process, PromptWizard achieves an effective balance between exploration and exploitation, iteratively refining both prompt instructions and in-context examples to generate human-readable, task-specific prompts. This guided approach systematically improves prompt quality, resulting in superior performance across 45 tasks. PromptWizard excels even with limited training data, smaller LLMs, and various LLM architectures. Additionally, our cost analysis reveals a substantial reduction in API calls, token usage, and overall cost, demonstrating PromptWizard's efficiency, scalability, and advantages over existing prompt optimization strategies.
Bridging the Gap: Dynamic Learning Strategies for Improving Multilingual Performance in LLMs
Authors: Somnath Kumar, Vaibhav Balloli, Mercy Ranjit, Kabir Ahuja, Tanuja Ganu, Sunayana Sitaram, Kalika Bali, Akshay Nambi
Date: 2024-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Large language models (LLMs) are at the forefront of transforming numerous domains globally. However, their inclusivity and effectiveness remain limited for non-Latin scripts and low-resource languages. This paper tackles the imperative challenge of enhancing the multilingual performance of LLMs without extensive training or fine-tuning. Through systematic investigation and evaluation of diverse languages using popular question-answering (QA) datasets, we present novel techniques that unlock the true potential of LLMs in a polyglot landscape. Our approach encompasses three key strategies that yield significant improvements in multilingual proficiency. First, by meticulously optimizing prompts tailored for polyglot LLMs, we unlock their latent capabilities, resulting in substantial performance boosts across languages. Second, we introduce a new hybrid approach that synergizes LLM Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) with multilingual embeddings and achieves improved multilingual task performance. Finally, we introduce a novel learning approach that dynamically selects the optimal prompt strategy, LLM model, and embedding model per query at run-time. This dynamic adaptation maximizes the efficacy of LLMs across languages, outperforming best static and random strategies. Additionally, our approach adapts configurations in both offline and online settings, and can seamlessly adapt to new languages and datasets, leading to substantial advancements in multilingual understanding and generation across diverse languages.
MMCTAgent: Multi-modal Critical Thinking Agent Framework for Complex Visual Reasoning
Authors: Somnath Kumar, Yash Gadhia, Tanuja Ganu, Akshay Nambi
Date: 2024-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Video Understanding, Visual Question Answering, Visual Reasoning

Recent advancements in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly improved their performance in tasks combining vision and language. However, challenges persist in detailed multi-modal understanding, comprehension of complex tasks, and reasoning over multi-modal information. This paper introduces MMCTAgent, a novel multi-modal critical thinking agent framework designed to address the inherent limitations of current MLLMs in complex visual reasoning tasks. Inspired by human cognitive processes and critical thinking, MMCTAgent iteratively analyzes multi-modal information, decomposes queries, plans strategies, and dynamically evolves its reasoning. Additionally, MMCTAgent incorporates critical thinking elements such as verification of final answers and self-reflection through a novel approach that defines a vision-based critic and identifies task-specific evaluation criteria, thereby enhancing its decision-making abilities. Through rigorous evaluations across various image and video understanding benchmarks, we demonstrate that MMCTAgent (with and without the critic) outperforms both foundational MLLMs and other tool-augmented pipelines.
A System for Automatic English Text Expansion
Authors: Silvia García Méndez, Milagros Fernández Gavilanes, Enrique Costa Montenegro, Jonathan Juncal Martínez, Francisco Javier González Castaño, Ehud Reiter
Date: 2024-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: News Generation, Text Generation

We present an automatic text expansion system to generate English sentences, which performs automatic Natural Language Generation (NLG) by combining linguistic rules with statistical approaches. Here, "automatic" means that the system can generate coherent and correct sentences from a minimum set of words. From its inception, the design is modular and adaptable to other languages. This adaptability is one of its greatest advantages. For English, we have created the highly precise aLexiE lexicon with wide coverage, which represents a contribution on its own. We have evaluated the resulting NLG library in an Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) proof of concept, both directly (by regenerating corpus sentences) and manually (from annotations) using a popular corpus in the NLG field. We performed a second analysis by comparing the quality of text expansion in English to Spanish, using an ad-hoc Spanish-English parallel corpus. The system might also be applied to other domains such as report and news generation.