In this work, we introduce Semantic Pyramid AutoEncoder (SPAE) for enabling frozen LLMs to perform both understanding and generation tasks involving non-linguistic modalities such as images or videos. SPAE converts between raw pixels and interpretable lexical tokens (or words) extracted from the LLM's vocabulary. The resulting tokens capture both the semantic meaning and the fine-grained details needed for visual reconstruction, effectively translating the visual content into a language comprehensible to the LLM, and empowering it to perform a wide array of multimodal tasks. Our approach is validated through in-context learning experiments with frozen PaLM 2 and GPT 3.5 on a diverse set of image understanding and generation tasks. Our method marks the first successful attempt to enable a frozen LLM to generate image content while surpassing state-of-the-art performance in image understanding tasks, under the same setting, by over 25%.
As it is hard to calibrate single-view RGB images in the wild, existing 3D human mesh reconstruction (3DHMR) methods either use a constant large focal length or estimate one based on the background environment context, which can not tackle the problem of the torso, limb, hand or face distortion caused by perspective camera projection when the camera is close to the human body. The naive focal length assumptions can harm this task with the incorrectly formulated projection matrices. To solve this, we propose Zolly, the first 3DHMR method focusing on perspective-distorted images. Our approach begins with analysing the reason for perspective distortion, which we find is mainly caused by the relative location of the human body to the camera center. We propose a new camera model and a novel 2D representation, termed distortion image, which describes the 2D dense distortion scale of the human body. We then estimate the distance from distortion scale features rather than environment context features. Afterwards, we integrate the distortion feature with image features to reconstruct the body mesh. To formulate the correct projection matrix and locate the human body position, we simultaneously use perspective and weak-perspective projection loss. Since existing datasets could not handle this task, we propose the first synthetic dataset PDHuman and extend two real-world datasets tailored for this task, all containing perspective-distorted human images. Extensive experiments show that Zolly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on both perspective-distorted datasets and the standard benchmark (3DPW).
Smart homes are powered by numerous programmable IoT platforms. Despite tremendous innovations, these platforms often suffer from safety and security issues. One class of defense solutions dynamically enforces safety and security policies, which essentially capture the expected behavior of the IoT system. While many proposed works were built on this runtime approach, they all are under-vetted. The primary reason lies in their evaluation approach. They are mostly self-evaluated in isolation using a virtual testbed combined with manually orchestrated test scenarios that rely on user interactions with the platform's UI. Such hand-crafted and non-uniform evaluation setups are limiting not only the reproducibility but also a comparative analysis of their efficacy results. Closing this gap in the traditional way requires a huge upfront manual effort, which causes the researchers turn away from any large-scale comparative empirical evaluation. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a highly-automated uniform evaluation platform, dubbed VetIoT, to vet the defense solutions that hinge on runtime policy enforcement. Given a defense solution, VetIoT easily instantiates a virtual testbed inside which the solution is empirically evaluated. VetIoT replaces manual UI-based interactions with an automated event simulator and manual inspection of test outcomes with an automated comparator. We developed a fully-functional prototype of VetIoT and applied it on three runtime policy enforcement solutions: Expat, Patriot, and IoTguard. VetIoT reproduced their individual prior results and assessed their efficacy results via stress testing and differential testing. We believe VetIoT can foster future research/evaluation.
Recently, the fast development of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT has significantly advanced NLP tasks by enhancing the capabilities of conversational models. However, the application of LLMs in the recommendation domain has not been thoroughly investigated. To bridge this gap, we propose LLMRec, a LLM-based recommender system designed for benchmarking LLMs on various recommendation tasks. Specifically, we benchmark several popular off-the-shelf LLMs, such as ChatGPT, LLaMA, ChatGLM, on five recommendation tasks, including rating prediction, sequential recommendation, direct recommendation, explanation generation, and review summarization. Furthermore, we investigate the effectiveness of supervised finetuning to improve LLMs' instruction compliance ability. The benchmark results indicate that LLMs displayed only moderate proficiency in accuracy-based tasks such as sequential and direct recommendation. However, they demonstrated comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods in explainability-based tasks. We also conduct qualitative evaluations to further evaluate the quality of contents generated by different models, and the results show that LLMs can truly understand the provided information and generate clearer and more reasonable results. We aspire that this benchmark will serve as an inspiration for researchers to delve deeper into the potential of LLMs in enhancing recommendation performance. Our codes, processed data and benchmark results are available at //github.com/williamliujl/LLMRec.
PDDLStream solvers have recently emerged as viable solutions for Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) problems, extending PDDL to problems with continuous action spaces. Prior work has shown how PDDLStream problems can be reduced to a sequence of PDDL planning problems, which can then be solved using off-the-shelf planners. However, this approach can suffer from long runtimes. In this paper we propose LAZY, a solver for PDDLStream problems that maintains a single integrated search over action skeletons, which gets progressively more geometrically informed, as samples of possible motions are lazily drawn during motion planning. We explore how learned models of goal-directed policies and current motion sampling data can be incorporated in LAZY to adaptively guide the task planner. We show that this leads to significant speed-ups in the search for a feasible solution evaluated over unseen test environments of varying numbers of objects, goals, and initial conditions. We evaluate our TAMP approach by comparing to existing solvers for PDDLStream problems on a range of simulated 7DoF rearrangement/manipulation problems.
3D Morphable Models (3DMMs) demonstrate great potential for reconstructing faithful and animatable 3D facial surfaces from a single image. The facial surface is influenced by the coarse shape, as well as the static detail (e,g., person-specific appearance) and dynamic detail (e.g., expression-driven wrinkles). Previous work struggles to decouple the static and dynamic details through image-level supervision, leading to reconstructions that are not realistic. In this paper, we aim at high-fidelity 3D face reconstruction and propose HiFace to explicitly model the static and dynamic details. Specifically, the static detail is modeled as the linear combination of a displacement basis, while the dynamic detail is modeled as the linear interpolation of two displacement maps with polarized expressions. We exploit several loss functions to jointly learn the coarse shape and fine details with both synthetic and real-world datasets, which enable HiFace to reconstruct high-fidelity 3D shapes with animatable details. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that HiFace presents state-of-the-art reconstruction quality and faithfully recovers both the static and dynamic details. Our project page can be found at //project-hiface.github.io.
Building AIs with adaptive behaviors in human-AI cooperation stands as a pivotal focus in AGI research. Current methods for developing cooperative agents predominantly rely on learning-based methods, where policy generalization heavily hinges on past interactions with specific teammates. These approaches constrain the agent's capacity to recalibrate its strategy when confronted with novel teammates. We propose \textbf{ProAgent}, a novel framework that harnesses large language models (LLMs) to fashion a \textit{pro}active \textit{agent} empowered with the ability to anticipate teammates' forthcoming decisions and formulate enhanced plans for itself. ProAgent excels at cooperative reasoning with the capacity to dynamically adapt its behavior to enhance collaborative efforts with teammates. Moreover, the ProAgent framework exhibits a high degree of modularity and interpretability, facilitating seamless integration to address a wide array of coordination scenarios. Experimental evaluations conducted within the framework of \textit{Overcook-AI} unveil the remarkable performance superiority of ProAgent, outperforming five methods based on self-play and population-based training in cooperation with AI agents. Further, when cooperating with human proxy models, its performance exhibits an average improvement exceeding 10\% compared to the current state-of-the-art, COLE. The advancement was consistently observed across diverse scenarios involving interactions with both AI agents of varying characteristics and human counterparts. These findings inspire future research for human-robot collaborations. For a hands-on demonstration, please visit \url{//pku-proagent.github.io}.
RNN-based methods have faced challenges in the Long-term Time Series Forecasting (LTSF) domain when dealing with excessively long look-back windows and forecast horizons. Consequently, the dominance in this domain has shifted towards Transformer, MLP, and CNN approaches. The substantial number of recurrent iterations are the fundamental reasons behind the limitations of RNNs in LTSF. To address these issues, we propose two novel strategies to reduce the number of iterations in RNNs for LTSF tasks: Segment-wise Iterations and Parallel Multi-step Forecasting (PMF). RNNs that combine these strategies, namely SegRNN, significantly reduce the required recurrent iterations for LTSF, resulting in notable improvements in forecast accuracy and inference speed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SegRNN not only outperforms SOTA Transformer-based models but also reduces runtime and memory usage by more than 78%. These achievements provide strong evidence that RNNs continue to excel in LTSF tasks and encourage further exploration of this domain with more RNN-based approaches. The source code is coming soon.
In recent years, several Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WS3) methods have been proposed that use class activation maps (CAMs) generated by a classifier to produce pseudo-ground truths for training segmentation models. While CAMs are good at highlighting discriminative regions (DR) of an image, they are known to disregard regions of the object that do not contribute to the classifier's prediction, termed non-discriminative regions (NDR). In contrast, attribution methods such as saliency maps provide an alternative approach for assigning a score to every pixel based on its contribution to the classification prediction. This paper provides a comprehensive comparison between saliencies and CAMs for WS3. Our study includes multiple perspectives on understanding their similarities and dissimilarities. Moreover, we provide new evaluation metrics that perform a comprehensive assessment of WS3 performance of alternative methods w.r.t. CAMs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of saliencies in addressing the limitation of CAMs through our empirical studies on benchmark datasets. Furthermore, we propose random cropping as a stochastic aggregation technique that improves the performance of saliency, making it a strong alternative to CAM for WS3.
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved great success in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks under the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm. With large quantities of parameters, PLMs are computation-intensive and resource-hungry. Hence, model pruning has been introduced to compress large-scale PLMs. However, most prior approaches only consider task-specific knowledge towards downstream tasks, but ignore the essential task-agnostic knowledge during pruning, which may cause catastrophic forgetting problem and lead to poor generalization ability. To maintain both task-agnostic and task-specific knowledge in our pruned model, we propose ContrAstive Pruning (CAP) under the paradigm of pre-training and fine-tuning. It is designed as a general framework, compatible with both structured and unstructured pruning. Unified in contrastive learning, CAP enables the pruned model to learn from the pre-trained model for task-agnostic knowledge, and fine-tuned model for task-specific knowledge. Besides, to better retain the performance of the pruned model, the snapshots (i.e., the intermediate models at each pruning iteration) also serve as effective supervisions for pruning. Our extensive experiments show that adopting CAP consistently yields significant improvements, especially in extremely high sparsity scenarios. With only 3% model parameters reserved (i.e., 97% sparsity), CAP successfully achieves 99.2% and 96.3% of the original BERT performance in QQP and MNLI tasks. In addition, our probing experiments demonstrate that the model pruned by CAP tends to achieve better generalization ability.
Machine learning techniques have deeply rooted in our everyday life. However, since it is knowledge- and labor-intensive to pursue good learning performance, human experts are heavily involved in every aspect of machine learning. In order to make machine learning techniques easier to apply and reduce the demand for experienced human experts, automated machine learning (AutoML) has emerged as a hot topic with both industrial and academic interest. In this paper, we provide an up to date survey on AutoML. First, we introduce and define the AutoML problem, with inspiration from both realms of automation and machine learning. Then, we propose a general AutoML framework that not only covers most existing approaches to date but also can guide the design for new methods. Subsequently, we categorize and review the existing works from two aspects, i.e., the problem setup and the employed techniques. Finally, we provide a detailed analysis of AutoML approaches and explain the reasons underneath their successful applications. We hope this survey can serve as not only an insightful guideline for AutoML beginners but also an inspiration for future research.