Neural Architecture Search (NAS) effectively discovers new Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures, particularly for accuracy optimization. However, prior approaches often require resource-intensive training on super networks or extensive architecture evaluations, limiting practical applications. To address these challenges, we propose MicroNAS, a hardware-aware zero-shot NAS framework designed for microcontroller units (MCUs) in edge computing. MicroNAS considers target hardware optimality during the search, utilizing specialized performance indicators to identify optimal neural architectures without high computational costs. Compared to previous works, MicroNAS achieves up to 1104x improvement in search efficiency and discovers models with over 3.23x faster MCU inference while maintaining similar accuracy
Articulated objects like cabinets and doors are widespread in daily life. However, directly manipulating 3D articulated objects is challenging because they have diverse geometrical shapes, semantic categories, and kinetic constraints. Prior works mostly focused on recognizing and manipulating articulated objects with specific joint types. They can either estimate the joint parameters or distinguish suitable grasp poses to facilitate trajectory planning. Although these approaches have succeeded in certain types of articulated objects, they lack generalizability to unseen objects, which significantly impedes their application in broader scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of Generalizable Articulation Modeling and Manipulating for Articulated Objects (GAMMA), which learns both articulation modeling and grasp pose affordance from diverse articulated objects with different categories. In addition, GAMMA adopts adaptive manipulation to iteratively reduce the modeling errors and enhance manipulation performance. We train GAMMA with the PartNet-Mobility dataset and evaluate with comprehensive experiments in SAPIEN simulation and real-world Franka robot. Results show that GAMMA significantly outperforms SOTA articulation modeling and manipulation algorithms in unseen and cross-category articulated objects. We will open-source all codes and datasets in both simulation and real robots for reproduction in the final version. Images and videos are published on the project website at: //sites.google.com/view/gamma-articulation
In this work, we present DeepEraser, an effective deep network for generic text removal. DeepEraser utilizes a recurrent architecture that erases the text in an image via iterative operations. Our idea comes from the process of erasing pencil script, where the text area designated for removal is subject to continuous monitoring and the text is attenuated progressively, ensuring a thorough and clean erasure. Technically, at each iteration, an innovative erasing module is deployed, which not only explicitly aggregates the previous erasing progress but also mines additional semantic context to erase the target text. Through iterative refinements, the text regions are progressively replaced with more appropriate content and finally converge to a relatively accurate status. Furthermore, a custom mask generation strategy is introduced to improve the capability of DeepEraser for adaptive text removal, as opposed to indiscriminately removing all the text in an image. Our DeepEraser is notably compact with only 1.4M parameters and trained in an end-to-end manner. To verify its effectiveness, extensive experiments are conducted on several prevalent benchmarks, including SCUT-Syn, SCUT-EnsText, and Oxford Synthetic text dataset. The quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of our DeepEraser over the state-of-the-art methods, as well as its strong generalization ability in custom mask text removal. The codes and pre-trained models are available at //github.com/fh2019ustc/DeepEraser
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) paves the way for the automatic definition of Neural Network (NN) architectures, attracting increasing research attention and offering solutions in various scenarios. This study introduces a novel NAS solution, called Flat Neural Architecture Search (FlatNAS), which explores the interplay between a novel figure of merit based on robustness to weight perturbations and single NN optimization with Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM). FlatNAS is the first work in the literature to systematically explore flat regions in the loss landscape of NNs in a NAS procedure, while jointly optimizing their performance on in-distribution data, their out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness, and constraining the number of parameters in their architecture. Differently from current studies primarily concentrating on OOD algorithms, FlatNAS successfully evaluates the impact of NN architectures on OOD robustness, a crucial aspect in real-world applications of machine and deep learning. FlatNAS achieves a good trade-off between performance, OOD generalization, and the number of parameters, by using only in-distribution data in the NAS exploration. The OOD robustness of the NAS-designed models is evaluated by focusing on robustness to input data corruptions, using popular benchmark datasets in the literature.
The limited scale of current 3D shape datasets hinders the advancements in 3D shape understanding, and motivates multi-modal learning approaches which transfer learned knowledge from data-abundant 2D image and language modalities to 3D shapes. However, even though the image and language representations have been aligned by cross-modal models like CLIP, we find that the image modality fails to contribute as much as the language in existing multi-modal 3D representation learning methods. This is attributed to the domain shift in the 2D images and the distinct focus of each modality. To more effectively leverage both modalities in the pre-training, we introduce TriAdapter Multi-Modal Learning (TAMM) -- a novel two-stage learning approach based on three synergetic adapters. First, our CLIP Image Adapter mitigates the domain gap between 3D-rendered images and natural images, by adapting the visual representations of CLIP for synthetic image-text pairs. Subsequently, our Dual Adapters decouple the 3D shape representation space into two complementary sub-spaces: one focusing on visual attributes and the other for semantic understanding, which ensure a more comprehensive and effective multi-modal pre-training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TAMM consistently enhances 3D representations for a wide range of 3D encoder architectures, pre-training datasets, and downstream tasks. Notably, we boost the zero-shot classification accuracy on Objaverse-LVIS from 46.8 to 50.7, and improve the 5-way 10-shot linear probing classification accuracy on ModelNet40 from 96.1 to 99.0. Project page: \url{//alanzhangcs.github.io/tamm-page}.
Despite achieving rapid developments and with widespread applications, Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) confront a serious challenge of being prone to generating hallucinations. An over-reliance on linguistic priors has been identified as a key factor leading to these hallucinations. In this paper, we propose to alleviate this problem by introducing a novel image-biased decoding (IBD) technique. Our method derives the next-token probability distribution by contrasting predictions from a conventional LVLM with those of an image-biased LVLM, thereby amplifying the correct information highly correlated with image content while mitigating the hallucinatory errors caused by excessive dependence on text. We further conduct a comprehensive statistical analysis to validate the reliability of our method, and design an adaptive adjustment strategy to achieve robust and flexible handling under varying conditions. Experimental results across multiple evaluation metrics verify that our method, despite not requiring additional training data and only with a minimal increase in model parameters, can significantly reduce hallucinations in LVLMs and enhance the truthfulness of the generated response.
There are still many challenges in Federated Learning (FL). First, during the model update process, the model parameters on the local user need to be sent to the server for aggregation. This involves the consumption of network bandwidth, especially when the number of users participating in FL is large. High communication costs may limit the application of FL in certain scenarios. Secondly, since users participating in FL usually have different data distributions, this heterogeneity of data may lead to poor model performance or even failure to converge. Third, privacy and security issues are also challenges that need to be addressed in FL. There is still a risk of information leakage during model aggregation. Malicious users may obtain sensitive information by analyzing communications during model updates or aggregation processes. To address these challenges, we propose HyperFedNet (HFN), an innovative approach that leverages hypernetwork. HFN introduces a paradigm shift in transmission aggregation within FL. Unlike traditional FL methods that transmit a large number of parameters from the main network, HFN reduces the communication burden and improves security by transmitting a compact set of hypernetwork parameters. After the parameters of the hypernetwork are deployed locally to the user, the local database features quantified by the embedding vector can be used as input, and parameters can be dynamically generated for the FL main network through user forward propagation. HFN efficiently reduces communication costs while improving accuracy. Extensive experimentation demonstrates that HFN outperforms traditional FL methods significantly. By seamlessly integrating this concept into the conventional FL algorithm, we achieve even more impressive results compared to the original approach.
This paper introduces the task of Auditory Referring Multi-Object Tracking (AR-MOT), which dynamically tracks specific objects in a video sequence based on audio expressions and appears as a challenging problem in autonomous driving. Due to the lack of semantic modeling capacity in audio and video, existing works have mainly focused on text-based multi-object tracking, which often comes at the cost of tracking quality, interaction efficiency, and even the safety of assistance systems, limiting the application of such methods in autonomous driving. In this paper, we delve into the problem of AR-MOT from the perspective of audio-video fusion and audio-video tracking. We put forward EchoTrack, an end-to-end AR-MOT framework with dual-stream vision transformers. The dual streams are intertwined with our Bidirectional Frequency-domain Cross-attention Fusion Module (Bi-FCFM), which bidirectionally fuses audio and video features from both frequency- and spatiotemporal domains. Moreover, we propose the Audio-visual Contrastive Tracking Learning (ACTL) regime to extract homogeneous semantic features between expressions and visual objects by learning homogeneous features between different audio and video objects effectively. Aside from the architectural design, we establish the first set of large-scale AR-MOT benchmarks, including Echo-KITTI, Echo-KITTI+, and Echo-BDD. Extensive experiments on the established benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed EchoTrack model and its components. The source code and datasets will be made publicly available at //github.com/lab206/EchoTrack.
Diffusion models (DMs) have shown great potential for high-quality image synthesis. However, when it comes to producing images with complex scenes, how to properly describe both image global structures and object details remains a challenging task. In this paper, we present Frido, a Feature Pyramid Diffusion model performing a multi-scale coarse-to-fine denoising process for image synthesis. Our model decomposes an input image into scale-dependent vector quantized features, followed by a coarse-to-fine gating for producing image output. During the above multi-scale representation learning stage, additional input conditions like text, scene graph, or image layout can be further exploited. Thus, Frido can be also applied for conditional or cross-modality image synthesis. We conduct extensive experiments over various unconditioned and conditional image generation tasks, ranging from text-to-image synthesis, layout-to-image, scene-graph-to-image, to label-to-image. More specifically, we achieved state-of-the-art FID scores on five benchmarks, namely layout-to-image on COCO and OpenImages, scene-graph-to-image on COCO and Visual Genome, and label-to-image on COCO. Code is available at //github.com/davidhalladay/Frido.
Neural architecture-based recommender systems have achieved tremendous success in recent years. However, when dealing with highly sparse data, they still fall short of expectation. Self-supervised learning (SSL), as an emerging technique to learn with unlabeled data, recently has drawn considerable attention in many fields. There is also a growing body of research proceeding towards applying SSL to recommendation for mitigating the data sparsity issue. In this survey, a timely and systematical review of the research efforts on self-supervised recommendation (SSR) is presented. Specifically, we propose an exclusive definition of SSR, on top of which we build a comprehensive taxonomy to divide existing SSR methods into four categories: contrastive, generative, predictive, and hybrid. For each category, the narrative unfolds along its concept and formulation, the involved methods, and its pros and cons. Meanwhile, to facilitate the development and evaluation of SSR models, we release an open-source library SELFRec, which incorporates multiple benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics, and has implemented a number of state-of-the-art SSR models for empirical comparison. Finally, we shed light on the limitations in the current research and outline the future research directions.
We present MMKG, a collection of three knowledge graphs that contain both numerical features and (links to) images for all entities as well as entity alignments between pairs of KGs. Therefore, multi-relational link prediction and entity matching communities can benefit from this resource. We believe this data set has the potential to facilitate the development of novel multi-modal learning approaches for knowledge graphs.We validate the utility ofMMKG in the sameAs link prediction task with an extensive set of experiments. These experiments show that the task at hand benefits from learning of multiple feature types.