pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Retail-GPT: leveraging Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for building E-commerce Chat Assistants
Authors: Bruno Amaral Teixeira de Freitas, Roberto de Alencar Lotufo
Date: 2024-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

This work presents Retail-GPT, an open-source RAG-based chatbot designed to enhance user engagement in retail e-commerce by guiding users through product recommendations and assisting with cart operations. The system is cross-platform and adaptable to various e-commerce domains, avoiding reliance on specific chat applications or commercial activities. Retail-GPT engages in human-like conversations, interprets user demands, checks product availability, and manages cart operations, aiming to serve as a virtual sales agent and test the viability of such assistants across different retail businesses.
Prefix Guidance: A Steering Wheel for Large Language Models to Defend Against Jailbreak Attacks
Authors: Jiawei Zhao, Kejiang Chen, Xiaojian Yuan, Weiming Zhang
Date: 2024-08-15 00:00:00

In recent years, the rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has achieved remarkable performance across various tasks. However, research indicates that LLMs are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, where adversaries can induce the generation of harmful content through meticulously crafted prompts. This vulnerability poses significant challenges to the secure use and promotion of LLMs. Existing defense methods offer protection from different perspectives but often suffer from insufficient effectiveness or a significant impact on the model's capabilities. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-play and easy-to-deploy jailbreak defense framework, namely Prefix Guidance (PG), which guides the model to identify harmful prompts by directly setting the first few tokens of the model's output. This approach combines the model's inherent security capabilities with an external classifier to defend against jailbreak attacks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of PG across three models and five attack methods. Compared to baselines, our approach is generally more effective on average. Additionally, results on the Just-Eval benchmark further confirm PG's superiority to preserve the model's performance. our code is available at https://github.com/weiyezhimeng/Prefix-Guidance.
Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Survey
Authors: Boci Peng, Yun Zhu, Yongchao Liu, Xiaohe Bo, Haizhou Shi, Chuntao Hong, Yan Zhang, Siliang Tang
Date: 2024-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation, Survey

Recently, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has achieved remarkable success in addressing the challenges of Large Language Models (LLMs) without necessitating retraining. By referencing an external knowledge base, RAG refines LLM outputs, effectively mitigating issues such as ``hallucination'', lack of domain-specific knowledge, and outdated information. However, the complex structure of relationships among different entities in databases presents challenges for RAG systems. In response, GraphRAG leverages structural information across entities to enable more precise and comprehensive retrieval, capturing relational knowledge and facilitating more accurate, context-aware responses. Given the novelty and potential of GraphRAG, a systematic review of current technologies is imperative. This paper provides the first comprehensive overview of GraphRAG methodologies. We formalize the GraphRAG workflow, encompassing Graph-Based Indexing, Graph-Guided Retrieval, and Graph-Enhanced Generation. We then outline the core technologies and training methods at each stage. Additionally, we examine downstream tasks, application domains, evaluation methodologies, and industrial use cases of GraphRAG. Finally, we explore future research directions to inspire further inquiries and advance progress in the field. In order to track recent progress in this field, we set up a repository at \url{https://github.com/pengboci/GraphRAG-Survey}.
Criticality Leveraged Adversarial Training (CLAT) for Boosted Performance via Parameter Efficiency
Authors: Bhavna Gopal, Huanrui Yang, Jingyang Zhang, Mark Horton, Yiran Chen
Date: 2024-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness

Adversarial training enhances neural network robustness but suffers from a tendency to overfit and increased generalization errors on clean data. This work introduces CLAT, an innovative approach that mitigates adversarial overfitting by introducing parameter efficiency into the adversarial training process, improving both clean accuracy and adversarial robustness. Instead of tuning the entire model, CLAT identifies and fine-tunes robustness-critical layers - those predominantly learning non-robust features - while freezing the remaining model to enhance robustness. It employs dynamic critical layer selection to adapt to changes in layer criticality throughout the fine-tuning process. Empirically, CLAT can be applied on top of existing adversarial training methods, significantly reduces the number of trainable parameters by approximately 95%, and achieves more than a 2% improvement in adversarial robustness compared to baseline methods.
SANER: Annotation-free Societal Attribute Neutralizer for Debiasing CLIP
Authors: Yusuke Hirota, Min-Hung Chen, Chien-Yi Wang, Yuta Nakashima, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang, Ryo Hachiuma
Date: 2024-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

Large-scale vision-language models, such as CLIP, are known to contain societal bias regarding protected attributes (e.g., gender, age). This paper aims to address the problems of societal bias in CLIP. Although previous studies have proposed to debias societal bias through adversarial learning or test-time projecting, our comprehensive study of these works identifies two critical limitations: 1) loss of attribute information when it is explicitly disclosed in the input and 2) use of the attribute annotations during debiasing process. To mitigate societal bias in CLIP and overcome these limitations simultaneously, we introduce a simple-yet-effective debiasing method called SANER (societal attribute neutralizer) that eliminates attribute information from CLIP text features only of attribute-neutral descriptions. Experimental results show that SANER, which does not require attribute annotations and preserves original information for attribute-specific descriptions, demonstrates superior debiasing ability than the existing methods.
MeshFormer: High-Quality Mesh Generation with 3D-Guided Reconstruction Model
Authors: Minghua Liu, Chong Zeng, Xinyue Wei, Ruoxi Shi, Linghao Chen, Chao Xu, Mengqi Zhang, Zhaoning Wang, Xiaoshuai Zhang, Isabella Liu, Hongzhi Wu, Hao Su
Date: 2024-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Image to 3D, Inductive Bias, Text to 3D

Open-world 3D reconstruction models have recently garnered significant attention. However, without sufficient 3D inductive bias, existing methods typically entail expensive training costs and struggle to extract high-quality 3D meshes. In this work, we introduce MeshFormer, a sparse-view reconstruction model that explicitly leverages 3D native structure, input guidance, and training supervision. Specifically, instead of using a triplane representation, we store features in 3D sparse voxels and combine transformers with 3D convolutions to leverage an explicit 3D structure and projective bias. In addition to sparse-view RGB input, we require the network to take input and generate corresponding normal maps. The input normal maps can be predicted by 2D diffusion models, significantly aiding in the guidance and refinement of the geometry's learning. Moreover, by combining Signed Distance Function (SDF) supervision with surface rendering, we directly learn to generate high-quality meshes without the need for complex multi-stage training processes. By incorporating these explicit 3D biases, MeshFormer can be trained efficiently and deliver high-quality textured meshes with fine-grained geometric details. It can also be integrated with 2D diffusion models to enable fast single-image-to-3D and text-to-3D tasks. Project page: https://meshformer3d.github.io
LongVILA: Scaling Long-Context Visual Language Models for Long Videos
Authors: Yukang Chen, Fuzhao Xue, Dacheng Li, Qinghao Hu, Ligeng Zhu, Xiuyu Li, Yunhao Fang, Haotian Tang, Shang Yang, Zhijian Liu, Ethan He, Hongxu Yin, Pavlo Molchanov, Jan Kautz, Linxi Fan, Yuke Zhu, Yao Lu, Song Han
Date: 2024-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Captioning, Video Question Answering, Video Understanding

Long-context capability is critical for multi-modal foundation models, especially for long video understanding. We introduce LongVILA, a full-stack solution for long-context visual-language models by co-designing the algorithm and system. For model training, we upgrade existing VLMs to support long video understanding by incorporating two additional stages, i.e., long context extension and long video supervised fine-tuning. However, training on long video is computationally and memory intensive. We introduce the long-context Multi-Modal Sequence Parallelism (MM-SP) system that efficiently parallelizes long video training and inference, enabling 2M context length training on 256 GPUs without any gradient checkpointing. LongVILA efficiently extends the number of video frames of VILA from 8 to 2048, achieving 99.8% accuracy in 6,000-frame (more than 1 million tokens) video needle-in-a-haystack. LongVILA-7B demonstrates strong accuracy on 9 popular video benchmarks, e.g. 65.1% VideoMME with subtitle. Besides, MM-SP is 2.1x - 5.7x faster than ring style sequence parallelism and 1.1x - 1.4x faster than Megatron with a hybrid context and tensor parallelism. Moreover, it seamlessly integrates with Hugging Face Transformers.
Assessment of Spectral based Solutions for the Detection of Floating Marine Debris
Authors: Muhammad Alì, Francesca Razzano, Sergio Vitale, Giampaolo Ferraioli, Vito Pascazio, Gilda Schirinzi, Silvia Ullo
Date: 2024-08-19 00:00:00

Typically, the detection of marine debris relies on in-situ campaigns that are characterized by huge human effort and limited spatial coverage. Following the need of a rapid solution for the detection of floating plastic, methods based on remote sensing data have been proposed recently. Their main limitation is represented by the lack of a general reference for evaluating performance. Recently, the Marine Debris Archive (MARIDA) has been released as a standard dataset to develop and evaluate Machine Learning (ML) algorithms for detection of Marine Plastic Debris. The MARIDA dataset has been created for simplifying the comparison between detection solutions with the aim of stimulating the research in the field of marine environment preservation. In this work, an assessment of spectral based solutions is proposed by evaluating performance on MARIDA dataset. The outcome highlights the need of precise reference for fair evaluation.
NeuFlow v2: High-Efficiency Optical Flow Estimation on Edge Devices
Authors: Zhiyong Zhang, Aniket Gupta, Huaizu Jiang, Hanumant Singh
Date: 2024-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation

Real-time high-accuracy optical flow estimation is crucial for various real-world applications. While recent learning-based optical flow methods have achieved high accuracy, they often come with significant computational costs. In this paper, we propose a highly efficient optical flow method that balances high accuracy with reduced computational demands. Building upon NeuFlow v1, we introduce new components including a much more light-weight backbone and a fast refinement module. Both these modules help in keeping the computational demands light while providing close to state of the art accuracy. Compares to other state of the art methods, our model achieves a 10x-70x speedup while maintaining comparable performance on both synthetic and real-world data. It is capable of running at over 20 FPS on 512x384 resolution images on a Jetson Orin Nano. The full training and evaluation code is available at https://github.com/neufieldrobotics/NeuFlow_v2.
LoopSplat: Loop Closure by Registering 3D Gaussian Splats
Authors: Liyuan Zhu, Yue Li, Erik Sandström, Shengyu Huang, Konrad Schindler, Iro Armeni
Date: 2024-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, Point Cloud Registration, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) based on 3D Gaussian Splats (3DGS) has recently shown promise towards more accurate, dense 3D scene maps. However, existing 3DGS-based methods fail to address the global consistency of the scene via loop closure and/or global bundle adjustment. To this end, we propose LoopSplat, which takes RGB-D images as input and performs dense mapping with 3DGS submaps and frame-to-model tracking. LoopSplat triggers loop closure online and computes relative loop edge constraints between submaps directly via 3DGS registration, leading to improvements in efficiency and accuracy over traditional global-to-local point cloud registration. It uses a robust pose graph optimization formulation and rigidly aligns the submaps to achieve global consistency. Evaluation on the synthetic Replica and real-world TUM-RGBD, ScanNet, and ScanNet++ datasets demonstrates competitive or superior tracking, mapping, and rendering compared to existing methods for dense RGB-D SLAM. Code is available at loopsplat.github.io.
Structure-preserving Image Translation for Depth Estimation in Colonoscopy Video
Authors: Shuxian Wang, Akshay Paruchuri, Zhaoxi Zhang, Sarah McGill, Roni Sengupta
Date: 2024-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Monocular Depth Estimation, Translation

Monocular depth estimation in colonoscopy video aims to overcome the unusual lighting properties of the colonoscopic environment. One of the major challenges in this area is the domain gap between annotated but unrealistic synthetic data and unannotated but realistic clinical data. Previous attempts to bridge this domain gap directly target the depth estimation task itself. We propose a general pipeline of structure-preserving synthetic-to-real (sim2real) image translation (producing a modified version of the input image) to retain depth geometry through the translation process. This allows us to generate large quantities of realistic-looking synthetic images for supervised depth estimation with improved generalization to the clinical domain. We also propose a dataset of hand-picked sequences from clinical colonoscopies to improve the image translation process. We demonstrate the simultaneous realism of the translated images and preservation of depth maps via the performance of downstream depth estimation on various datasets.
Multi-Scale Representation Learning for Image Restoration with State-Space Model
Authors: Yuhong He, Long Peng, Qiaosi Yi, Chen Wu, Lu Wang
Date: 2024-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Restoration, Mamba, Rain Removal, Representation Learning

Image restoration endeavors to reconstruct a high-quality, detail-rich image from a degraded counterpart, which is a pivotal process in photography and various computer vision systems. In real-world scenarios, different types of degradation can cause the loss of image details at various scales and degrade image contrast. Existing methods predominantly rely on CNN and Transformer to capture multi-scale representations. However, these methods are often limited by the high computational complexity of Transformers and the constrained receptive field of CNN, which hinder them from achieving superior performance and efficiency in image restoration. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Multi-Scale State-Space Model-based (MS-Mamba) for efficient image restoration that enhances the capacity for multi-scale representation learning through our proposed global and regional SSM modules. Additionally, an Adaptive Gradient Block (AGB) and a Residual Fourier Block (RFB) are proposed to improve the network's detail extraction capabilities by capturing gradients in various directions and facilitating learning details in the frequency domain. Extensive experiments on nine public benchmarks across four classic image restoration tasks, image deraining, dehazing, denoising, and low-light enhancement, demonstrate that our proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art performance while maintaining low computational complexity. The source code will be publicly available.
$R^2$-Mesh: Reinforcement Learning Powered Mesh Reconstruction via Geometry and Appearance Refinement
Authors: Haoyang Wang, LiMing Liu, Quanlu Jia, Jiangkai Wu, Haodan Zhang, Peiheng Wang, Xinggong Zhang
Date: 2024-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF

Mesh reconstruction based on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) is popular in a variety of applications such as computer graphics, virtual reality, and medical imaging due to its efficiency in handling complex geometric structures and facilitating real-time rendering. However, existing works often fail to capture fine geometric details accurately and struggle with optimizing rendering quality. To address these challenges, we propose a novel algorithm that progressively generates and optimizes meshes from multi-view images. Our approach initiates with the training of a NeRF model to establish an initial Signed Distance Field (SDF) and a view-dependent appearance field. Subsequently, we iteratively refine the SDF through a differentiable mesh extraction method, continuously updating both the vertex positions and their connectivity based on the loss from mesh differentiable rasterization, while also optimizing the appearance representation. To further leverage high-fidelity and detail-rich representations from NeRF, we propose an online-learning strategy based on Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) to enhance viewpoints by adaptively incorporating images rendered by the initial NeRF model into the training dataset. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method delivers highly competitive and robust performance in both mesh rendering quality and geometric quality.
Perceptual Depth Quality Assessment of Stereoscopic Omnidirectional Images
Authors: Wei Zhou, Zhou Wang
Date: 2024-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Quality Assessment

Depth perception plays an essential role in the viewer experience for immersive virtual reality (VR) visual environments. However, previous research investigations in the depth quality of 3D/stereoscopic images are rather limited, and in particular, are largely lacking for 3D viewing of 360-degree omnidirectional content. In this work, we make one of the first attempts to develop an objective quality assessment model named depth quality index (DQI) for efficient no-reference (NR) depth quality assessment of stereoscopic omnidirectional images. Motivated by the perceptual characteristics of the human visual system (HVS), the proposed DQI is built upon multi-color-channel, adaptive viewport selection, and interocular discrepancy features. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art image quality assessment (IQA) and depth quality assessment (DQA) approaches in predicting the perceptual depth quality when tested using both single-viewport and omnidirectional stereoscopic image databases. Furthermore, we demonstrate that combining the proposed depth quality model with existing IQA methods significantly boosts the performance in predicting the overall quality of 3D omnidirectional images.
UNINEXT-Cutie: The 1st Solution for LSVOS Challenge RVOS Track
Authors: Hao Fang, Feiyu Pan, Xiankai Lu, Wei zhang, Runmin Cong
Date: 2024-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Referring Video Object Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Object Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

Referring video object segmentation (RVOS) relies on natural language expressions to segment target objects in video. In this year, LSVOS Challenge RVOS Track replaced the origin YouTube-RVOS benchmark with MeViS. MeViS focuses on referring the target object in a video through its motion descriptions instead of static attributes, posing a greater challenge to RVOS task. In this work, we integrate strengths of that leading RVOS and VOS models to build up a simple and effective pipeline for RVOS. Firstly, We finetune the state-of-the-art RVOS model to obtain mask sequences that are correlated with language descriptions. Secondly, based on a reliable and high-quality key frames, we leverage VOS model to enhance the quality and temporal consistency of the mask results. Finally, we further improve the performance of the RVOS model using semi-supervised learning. Our solution achieved 62.57 J&F on the MeViS test set and ranked 1st place for 6th LSVOS Challenge RVOS Track.
Video Object Segmentation via SAM 2: The 4th Solution for LSVOS Challenge VOS Track
Authors: Feiyu Pan, Hao Fang, Runmin Cong, Wei zhang, Xiankai Lu
Date: 2024-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Object Segmentation, Video Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

Video Object Segmentation (VOS) task aims to segmenting a particular object instance throughout the entire video sequence given only the object mask of the first frame. Recently, Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2) is proposed, which is a foundation model towards solving promptable visual segmentation in images and videos. SAM 2 builds a data engine, which improves model and data via user interaction, to collect the largest video segmentation dataset to date. SAM 2 is a simple transformer architecture with streaming memory for real-time video processing, which trained on the date provides strong performance across a wide range of tasks. In this work, we evaluate the zero-shot performance of SAM 2 on the more challenging VOS datasets MOSE and LVOS. Without fine-tuning on the training set, SAM 2 achieved 75.79 J&F on the test set and ranked 4th place for 6th LSVOS Challenge VOS Track.
Learning Precise Affordances from Egocentric Videos for Robotic Manipulation
Authors: Gen Li, Nikolaos Tsagkas, Jifei Song, Ruaridh Mon-Williams, Sethu Vijayakumar, Kun Shao, Laura Sevilla-Lara
Date: 2024-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Grasp Generation

Affordance, defined as the potential actions that an object offers, is crucial for robotic manipulation tasks. A deep understanding of affordance can lead to more intelligent AI systems. For example, such knowledge directs an agent to grasp a knife by the handle for cutting and by the blade when passing it to someone. In this paper, we present a streamlined affordance learning system that encompasses data collection, effective model training, and robot deployment. First, we collect training data from egocentric videos in an automatic manner. Different from previous methods that focus only on the object graspable affordance and represent it as coarse heatmaps, we cover both graspable (e.g., object handles) and functional affordances (e.g., knife blades, hammer heads) and extract data with precise segmentation masks. We then propose an effective model, termed Geometry-guided Affordance Transformer (GKT), to train on the collected data. GKT integrates an innovative Depth Feature Injector (DFI) to incorporate 3D shape and geometric priors, enhancing the model's understanding of affordances. To enable affordance-oriented manipulation, we further introduce Aff-Grasp, a framework that combines GKT with a grasp generation model. For comprehensive evaluation, we create an affordance evaluation dataset with pixel-wise annotations, and design real-world tasks for robot experiments. The results show that GKT surpasses the state-of-the-art by 15.9% in mIoU, and Aff-Grasp achieves high success rates of 95.5% in affordance prediction and 77.1% in successful grasping among 179 trials, including evaluations with seen, unseen objects, and cluttered scenes.