Multiple pedestrian tracking faces the challenge of tracking pedestrians in the presence of occlusion. Existing methods suffer from inaccurate motion estimation, appearance feature extraction, and association due to occlusion, leading to inadequate Identification F1-Score (IDF1), excessive ID switches (IDSw), and insufficient association accuracy and recall (AssA and AssR). We found that the main reason is abnormal detections caused by partial occlusion. In this paper, we suggest that the key insight is explicit motion estimation, reliable appearance features, and fair association in occlusion scenes. Specifically, we propose an adaptive occlusion-aware multiple pedestrian tracker, OccluTrack. We first introduce an abnormal motion suppression mechanism into the Kalman Filter to adaptively detect and suppress outlier motions caused by partial occlusion. Second, we propose a pose-guided re-ID module to extract discriminative part features for partially occluded pedestrians. Last, we design a new occlusion-aware association method towards fair IoU and appearance embedding distance measurement for occluded pedestrians. Extensive evaluation results demonstrate that our OccluTrack outperforms state-of-the-art methods on MOT-Challenge datasets. Particularly, the improvements on IDF1, IDSw, AssA, and AssR demonstrate the effectiveness of our OccluTrack on tracking and association performance.
Autoregressive models, despite their commendable performance in a myriad of generative tasks, face challenges stemming from their inherently sequential structure. Inference on these models, by design, harnesses a temporal dependency, where the current token's probability distribution is conditioned on preceding tokens. This inherent characteristic severely impedes computational efficiency during inference as a typical inference request can require more than thousands of tokens, where generating each token requires a load of entire model weights, making the inference more memory-bound. The large overhead becomes profound in real deployment where requests arrive randomly, necessitating various generation lengths. Existing solutions, such as dynamic batching and concurrent instances, introduce significant response delays and bandwidth contention, falling short of achieving optimal latency and throughput. To address these shortcomings, we propose Flover -- a temporal fusion framework for efficiently inferring multiple requests in parallel. We deconstruct the general generation pipeline into pre-processing and token generation, and equip the framework with a dedicated work scheduler for fusing the generation process temporally across all requests. By orchestrating the token-level parallelism, Flover exhibits optimal hardware efficiency and significantly spares the system resources. By further employing a fast buffer reordering algorithm that allows memory eviction of finished tasks, it brings over 11x inference speedup on GPT and 16x on LLAMA compared to the cutting-edge solutions provided by NVIDIA FasterTransformer. Crucially, by leveraging the advanced tensor parallel technique, Flover proves efficacious across diverse computational landscapes, from single-GPU setups to distributed scenarios, thereby offering robust performance optimization that adapts to variable use cases.
Submarine cables constitute the backbone of the Internet. However, these critical infrastructure components are vulnerable to several natural and man-made threats, and during failures, are difficult to repair in their remote oceanic environments. In spite of their crucial role, we have a limited understanding of the impact of submarine cable failures on global connectivity, particularly on the higher layers of the Internet. In this paper, we present Nautilus, a framework for cross-layer cartography of submarine cables and IP links. Using a corpus of public datasets and Internet cartographic techniques, Nautilus identifies IP links that are likely traversing submarine cables and maps them to one or more potential cables. Nautilus also gives each IP to cable assignment a prediction score that reflects the confidence in the mapping. Nautilus generates a mapping for 3.05 million and 1.43 million IPv4 and IPv6 links respectively, covering 91% of all active cables. In the absence of ground truth data, we validate Nautilus mapping using three techniques: analyzing past cable failures, using targeted traceroute measurements, and comparing with public network maps of two operators.
A major bottleneck to scaling-up training of self-driving perception systems are the human annotations required for supervision. A promising alternative is to leverage "auto-labelling" offboard perception models that are trained to automatically generate annotations from raw LiDAR point clouds at a fraction of the cost. Auto-labels are most commonly generated via a two-stage approach -- first objects are detected and tracked over time, and then each object trajectory is passed to a learned refinement model to improve accuracy. Since existing refinement models are overly complex and lack advanced temporal reasoning capabilities, in this work we propose LabelFormer, a simple, efficient, and effective trajectory-level refinement approach. Our approach first encodes each frame's observations separately, then exploits self-attention to reason about the trajectory with full temporal context, and finally decodes the refined object size and per-frame poses. Evaluation on both urban and highway datasets demonstrates that LabelFormer outperforms existing works by a large margin. Finally, we show that training on a dataset augmented with auto-labels generated by our method leads to improved downstream detection performance compared to existing methods. Please visit the project website for details //waabi.ai/labelformer
The rapid advancement of chat-based language models has led to remarkable progress in complex task-solving. However, their success heavily relies on human input to guide the conversation, which can be challenging and time-consuming. This paper explores the potential of building scalable techniques to facilitate autonomous cooperation among communicative agents, and provides insight into their "cognitive" processes. To address the challenges of achieving autonomous cooperation, we propose a novel communicative agent framework named role-playing. Our approach involves using inception prompting to guide chat agents toward task completion while maintaining consistency with human intentions. We showcase how role-playing can be used to generate conversational data for studying the behaviors and capabilities of a society of agents, providing a valuable resource for investigating conversational language models. In particular, we conduct comprehensive studies on instruction-following cooperation in multi-agent settings. Our contributions include introducing a novel communicative agent framework, offering a scalable approach for studying the cooperative behaviors and capabilities of multi-agent systems, and open-sourcing our library to support research on communicative agents and beyond: //github.com/camel-ai/camel.
The problem of spurious programs is a longstanding challenge when training a semantic parser from weak supervision. To eliminate such programs that have wrong semantics but correct denotation, existing methods focus on exploiting similarities between examples based on domain-specific knowledge. In this paper, we propose a domain-agnostic filtering mechanism based on program execution results. Specifically, for each program obtained through the search process, we first construct a representation that captures the program's semantics as execution results under various inputs. Then, we run a majority vote on these representations to identify and filter out programs with significantly different semantics from the other programs. In particular, our method is orthogonal to the program search process so that it can easily augment any of the existing weakly supervised semantic parsing frameworks. Empirical evaluations on the Natural Language Visual Reasoning and WikiTableQuestions demonstrate that applying our method to the existing semantic parsers induces significantly improved performances.
Adopting a two-stage paradigm of pretraining followed by fine-tuning, Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved substantial advancements in the field of natural language processing. However, in real-world scenarios, data labels are often noisy due to the complex annotation process, making it essential to develop strategies for fine-tuning PLMs with such noisy labels. To this end, we introduce an innovative approach for fine-tuning PLMs using noisy labels, which incorporates the guidance of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. This guidance assists in accurately distinguishing between clean and noisy samples and provides supplementary information beyond the noisy labels, thereby boosting the learning process during fine-tuning PLMs. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world noisy datasets further demonstrate the superior advantages of our framework over the state-of-the-art baselines.
Laughter is a unique expression, essential to affirmative social interactions of humans. Although current 3D talking head generation methods produce convincing verbal articulations, they often fail to capture the vitality and subtleties of laughter and smiles despite their importance in social context. In this paper, we introduce a novel task to generate 3D talking heads capable of both articulate speech and authentic laughter. Our newly curated dataset comprises 2D laughing videos paired with pseudo-annotated and human-validated 3D FLAME parameters and vertices. Given our proposed dataset, we present a strong baseline with a two-stage training scheme: the model first learns to talk and then acquires the ability to express laughter. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method performs favorably compared to existing approaches in both talking head generation and expressing laughter signals. We further explore potential applications on top of our proposed method for rigging realistic avatars.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown remarkable performance in image generation. However, GAN training suffers from the problem of instability. One of the main approaches to address this problem is to modify the loss function, often using regularization terms in addition to changing the type of adversarial losses. This paper focuses on directly regularizing the adversarial loss function. We propose a method that applies flooding, an overfitting suppression method in supervised learning, to GANs to directly prevent the discriminator's loss from becoming excessively low. Flooding requires tuning the flood level, but when applied to GANs, we propose that the appropriate range of flood level settings is determined by the adversarial loss function, supported by theoretical analysis of GANs using the binary cross entropy loss. We experimentally verify that flooding stabilizes GAN training and can be combined with other stabilization techniques. We also reveal that by restricting the discriminator's loss to be no greater than flood level, the training proceeds stably even when the flood level is somewhat high.
Knowledge plays a critical role in artificial intelligence. Recently, the extensive success of pre-trained language models (PLMs) has raised significant attention about how knowledge can be acquired, maintained, updated and used by language models. Despite the enormous amount of related studies, there still lacks a unified view of how knowledge circulates within language models throughout the learning, tuning, and application processes, which may prevent us from further understanding the connections between current progress or realizing existing limitations. In this survey, we revisit PLMs as knowledge-based systems by dividing the life circle of knowledge in PLMs into five critical periods, and investigating how knowledge circulates when it is built, maintained and used. To this end, we systematically review existing studies of each period of the knowledge life cycle, summarize the main challenges and current limitations, and discuss future directions.
We investigate the problem of automatically determining what type of shoe left an impression found at a crime scene. This recognition problem is made difficult by the variability in types of crime scene evidence (ranging from traces of dust or oil on hard surfaces to impressions made in soil) and the lack of comprehensive databases of shoe outsole tread patterns. We find that mid-level features extracted by pre-trained convolutional neural nets are surprisingly effective descriptors for this specialized domains. However, the choice of similarity measure for matching exemplars to a query image is essential to good performance. For matching multi-channel deep features, we propose the use of multi-channel normalized cross-correlation and analyze its effectiveness. Our proposed metric significantly improves performance in matching crime scene shoeprints to laboratory test impressions. We also show its effectiveness in other cross-domain image retrieval problems: matching facade images to segmentation labels and aerial photos to map images. Finally, we introduce a discriminatively trained variant and fine-tune our system through our proposed metric, obtaining state-of-the-art performance.