We formulate a data independent latent space regularisation constraint for general unsupervised autoencoders. The regularisation rests on sampling the autoencoder Jacobian in Legendre nodes, being the centre of the Gauss-Legendre quadrature. Revisiting this classic enables to prove that regularised autoencoders ensure a one-to-one re-embedding of the initial data manifold to its latent representation. Demonstrations show that prior proposed regularisation strategies, such as contractive autoencoding, cause topological defects already for simple examples, and so do convolutional based (variational) autoencoders. In contrast, topological preservation is ensured already by standard multilayer perceptron neural networks when being regularised due to our contribution. This observation extends through the classic FashionMNIST dataset up to real world encoding problems for MRI brain scans, suggesting that, across disciplines, reliable low dimensional representations of complex high-dimensional datasets can be delivered due to this regularisation technique.
Existing industrial anomaly detection (IAD) methods predict anomaly scores for both anomaly detection and localization. However, they struggle to perform a multi-turn dialog and detailed descriptions for anomaly regions, e.g., color, shape, and categories of industrial anomalies. Recently, large multimodal (i.e., vision and language) models (LMMs) have shown eminent perception abilities on multiple vision tasks such as image captioning, visual understanding, visual reasoning, etc., making it a competitive potential choice for more comprehensible anomaly detection. However, the knowledge about anomaly detection is absent in existing general LMMs, while training a specific LMM for anomaly detection requires a tremendous amount of annotated data and massive computation resources. In this paper, we propose a novel large multi-modal model by applying vision experts for industrial anomaly detection (dubbed Myriad), which leads to definite anomaly detection and high-quality anomaly description. Specifically, we adopt MiniGPT-4 as the base LMM and design an Expert Perception module to embed the prior knowledge from vision experts as tokens which are intelligible to Large Language Models (LLMs). To compensate for the errors and confusions of vision experts, we introduce a domain adapter to bridge the visual representation gaps between generic and industrial images. Furthermore, we propose a Vision Expert Instructor, which enables the Q-Former to generate IAD domain vision-language tokens according to vision expert prior. Extensive experiments on MVTec-AD and VisA benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed method not only performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods under the 1-class and few-shot settings, but also provide definite anomaly prediction along with detailed descriptions in IAD domain.
Computing properties of molecular systems rely on estimating expectations of the (unnormalized) Boltzmann distribution. Molecular dynamics (MD) is a broadly adopted technique to approximate such quantities. However, stable simulations rely on very small integration time-steps ($10^{-15}\,\mathrm{s}$), whereas convergence of some moments, e.g. binding free energy or rates, might rely on sampling processes on time-scales as long as $10^{-1}\, \mathrm{s}$, and these simulations must be repeated for every molecular system independently. Here, we present Implict Transfer Operator (ITO) Learning, a framework to learn surrogates of the simulation process with multiple time-resolutions. We implement ITO with denoising diffusion probabilistic models with a new SE(3) equivariant architecture and show the resulting models can generate self-consistent stochastic dynamics across multiple time-scales, even when the system is only partially observed. Finally, we present a coarse-grained CG-SE3-ITO model which can quantitatively model all-atom molecular dynamics using only coarse molecular representations. As such, ITO provides an important step towards multiple time- and space-resolution acceleration of MD. Code is available at \href{//github.com/olsson-group/ito}{//github.com/olsson-group/ito}.
Image-based Reinforcement Learning is a practical yet challenging task. A major hurdle lies in extracting control-centric representations while disregarding irrelevant information. While approaches that follow the bisimulation principle exhibit the potential in learning state representations to address this issue, they still grapple with the limited expressive capacity of latent dynamics and the inadaptability to sparse reward environments. To address these limitations, we introduce ReBis, which aims to capture control-centric information by integrating reward-free control information alongside reward-specific knowledge. ReBis utilizes a transformer architecture to implicitly model the dynamics and incorporates block-wise masking to eliminate spatiotemporal redundancy. Moreover, ReBis combines bisimulation-based loss with asymmetric reconstruction loss to prevent feature collapse in environments with sparse rewards. Empirical studies on two large benchmarks, including Atari games and DeepMind Control Suit, demonstrate that ReBis has superior performance compared to existing methods, proving its effectiveness.
Document understanding tasks, in particular, Visually-rich Document Entity Retrieval (VDER), have gained significant attention in recent years thanks to their broad applications in enterprise AI. However, publicly available data have been scarce for these tasks due to strict privacy constraints and high annotation costs. To make things worse, the non-overlapping entity spaces from different datasets hinder the knowledge transfer between document types. In this paper, we propose a method to collect massive-scale and weakly labeled data from the web to benefit the training of VDER models. The collected dataset, named DocumentNet, does not depend on specific document types or entity sets, making it universally applicable to all VDER tasks. The current DocumentNet consists of 30M documents spanning nearly 400 document types organized in a four-level ontology. Experiments on a set of broadly adopted VDER tasks show significant improvements when DocumentNet is incorporated into the pre-training for both classic and few-shot learning settings. With the recent emergence of large language models (LLMs), DocumentNet provides a large data source to extend their multi-modal capabilities for VDER.
Perceiving and manipulating 3D articulated objects in diverse environments is essential for home-assistant robots. Recent studies have shown that point-level affordance provides actionable priors for downstream manipulation tasks. However, existing works primarily focus on single-object scenarios with homogeneous agents, overlooking the realistic constraints imposed by the environment and the agent's morphology, e.g., occlusions and physical limitations. In this paper, we propose an environment-aware affordance framework that incorporates both object-level actionable priors and environment constraints. Unlike object-centric affordance approaches, learning environment-aware affordance faces the challenge of combinatorial explosion due to the complexity of various occlusions, characterized by their quantities, geometries, positions and poses. To address this and enhance data efficiency, we introduce a novel contrastive affordance learning framework capable of training on scenes containing a single occluder and generalizing to scenes with complex occluder combinations. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in learning affordance considering environment constraints. Project page at //chengkaiacademycity.github.io/EnvAwareAfford/
Owing to the recent developments in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLM), conversational agents are becoming increasingly popular and accepted. They provide a human touch by interacting in ways familiar to us and by providing support as virtual companions. Therefore, it is important to understand the user's emotions in order to respond considerately. Compared to the standard problem of emotion recognition, conversational agents face an additional constraint in that recognition must be real-time. Studies on model architectures using audio, visual, and textual modalities have mainly focused on emotion classification using full video sequences that do not provide online features. In this work, we present a novel paradigm for contextualized Emotion Recognition using Graph Convolutional Network with Reinforcement Learning (conER-GRL). Conversations are partitioned into smaller groups of utterances for effective extraction of contextual information. The system uses Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) to extract multimodal features from these groups of utterances. More importantly, Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents are cascade trained to capture the complex dependencies of emotion features in interactive scenarios. Comparing the results of the conER-GRL model with other state-of-the-art models on the benchmark dataset IEMOCAP demonstrates the advantageous capabilities of the conER-GRL architecture in recognizing emotions in real-time from multimodal conversational signals.
Graph classification aims to perform accurate information extraction and classification over graphstructured data. In the past few years, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved satisfactory performance on graph classification tasks. However, most GNNs based methods focus on designing graph convolutional operations and graph pooling operations, overlooking that collecting or labeling graph-structured data is more difficult than grid-based data. We utilize meta-learning for fewshot graph classification to alleviate the scarce of labeled graph samples when training new tasks.More specifically, to boost the learning of graph classification tasks, we leverage GNNs as graph embedding backbone and meta-learning as training paradigm to capture task-specific knowledge rapidly in graph classification tasks and transfer them to new tasks. To enhance the robustness of meta-learner, we designed a novel step controller driven by Reinforcement Learning. The experiments demonstrate that our framework works well compared to baselines.
Named entity recognition (NER) is the task to identify text spans that mention named entities, and to classify them into predefined categories such as person, location, organization etc. NER serves as the basis for a variety of natural language applications such as question answering, text summarization, and machine translation. Although early NER systems are successful in producing decent recognition accuracy, they often require much human effort in carefully designing rules or features. In recent years, deep learning, empowered by continuous real-valued vector representations and semantic composition through nonlinear processing, has been employed in NER systems, yielding stat-of-the-art performance. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review on existing deep learning techniques for NER. We first introduce NER resources, including tagged NER corpora and off-the-shelf NER tools. Then, we systematically categorize existing works based on a taxonomy along three axes: distributed representations for input, context encoder, and tag decoder. Next, we survey the most representative methods for recent applied techniques of deep learning in new NER problem settings and applications. Finally, we present readers with the challenges faced by NER systems and outline future directions in this area.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.
State-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) benefits a lot from multi-task learning (MTL), which learns multiple related tasks simultaneously to obtain shared or mutually related representations for different tasks. The most widely-used MTL CNN structure is based on an empirical or heuristic split on a specific layer (e.g., the last convolutional layer) to minimize different task-specific losses. However, this heuristic sharing/splitting strategy may be harmful to the final performance of one or multiple tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel CNN structure for MTL, which enables automatic feature fusing at every layer. Specifically, we first concatenate features from different tasks according to their channel dimension, and then formulate the feature fusing problem as discriminative dimensionality reduction. We show that this discriminative dimensionality reduction can be done by 1x1 Convolution, Batch Normalization, and Weight Decay in one CNN, which we refer to as Neural Discriminative Dimensionality Reduction (NDDR). We perform ablation analysis in details for different configurations in training the network. The experiments carried out on different network structures and different task sets demonstrate the promising performance and desirable generalizability of our proposed method.