Pose estimation is a crucial task in computer vision and robotics, enabling the tracking and manipulation of objects in images or videos. While several datasets exist for pose estimation, there is a lack of large-scale datasets specifically focusing on cluttered scenes with occlusions. We introduce PACE (Pose Annotations in Cluttered Environments), a large-scale benchmark designed to advance the development and evaluation of pose estimation methods in cluttered scenarios. PACE consists of 54,945 frames with 257,673 annotations across 300 videos, covering 576 objects from 44 categories and featuring a mix of rigid and articulated items in cluttered scenes. To annotate the real-world data efficiently, we developed an innovative annotation system utilizing a calibrated 3-camera setup. We test state-of-the-art algorithms in PACE along two tracks: pose estimation, and object pose tracking, revealing the benchmark's challenges and research opportunities. Our code and data is available on //github.com/qq456cvb/PACE.
As an emerging task that integrates perception and reasoning, topology reasoning in autonomous driving scenes has recently garnered widespread attention. However, existing work often emphasizes "perception over reasoning": they typically boost reasoning performance by enhancing the perception of lanes and directly adopt MLP to learn lane topology from lane query. This paradigm overlooks the geometric features intrinsic to the lanes themselves and are prone to being influenced by inherent endpoint shifts in lane detection. To tackle this issue, we propose an interpretable method for lane topology reasoning based on lane geometric distance and lane query similarity, named TopoLogic. This method mitigates the impact of endpoint shifts in geometric space, and introduces explicit similarity calculation in semantic space as a complement. By integrating results from both spaces, our methods provides more comprehensive information for lane topology. Ultimately, our approach significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods on the mainstream benchmark OpenLane-V2 (23.9 v.s. 10.9 in TOP$_{ll}$ and 44.1 v.s. 39.8 in OLS on subset_A. Additionally, our proposed geometric distance topology reasoning method can be incorporated into well-trained models without re-training, significantly boost the performance of lane topology reasoning. The code is released at //github.com/Franpin/TopoLogic.
Customizing diffusion models to generate identity-preserving images from user-provided reference images is an intriguing new problem. The prevalent approaches typically require training on extensive domain-specific images to achieve identity preservation, which lacks flexibility across different use cases. To address this issue, we exploit classifier guidance, a training-free technique that steers diffusion models using an existing classifier, for personalized image generation. Our study shows that based on a recent rectified flow framework, the major limitation of vanilla classifier guidance in requiring a special classifier can be resolved with a simple fixed-point solution, allowing flexible personalization with off-the-shelf image discriminators. Moreover, its solving procedure proves to be stable when anchored to a reference flow trajectory, with a convergence guarantee. The derived method is implemented on rectified flow with different off-the-shelf image discriminators, delivering advantageous personalization results for human faces, live subjects, and certain objects. Code is available at //github.com/feifeiobama/RectifID.
Advances in latent diffusion models (LDMs) have revolutionized high-resolution image generation, but the design space of the autoencoder that is central to these systems remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce LiteVAE, a family of autoencoders for LDMs that leverage the 2D discrete wavelet transform to enhance scalability and computational efficiency over standard variational autoencoders (VAEs) with no sacrifice in output quality. We also investigate the training methodologies and the decoder architecture of LiteVAE and propose several enhancements that improve the training dynamics and reconstruction quality. Our base LiteVAE model matches the quality of the established VAEs in current LDMs with a six-fold reduction in encoder parameters, leading to faster training and lower GPU memory requirements, while our larger model outperforms VAEs of comparable complexity across all evaluated metrics (rFID, LPIPS, PSNR, and SSIM).
Graph generation has been dominated by autoregressive models due to their simplicity and effectiveness, despite their sensitivity to ordering. Yet diffusion models have garnered increasing attention, as they offer comparable performance while being permutation-invariant. Current graph diffusion models generate graphs in a one-shot fashion, but they require extra features and thousands of denoising steps to achieve optimal performance. We introduce PARD, a Permutation-invariant Auto Regressive Diffusion model that integrates diffusion models with autoregressive methods. PARD harnesses the effectiveness and efficiency of the autoregressive model while maintaining permutation invariance without ordering sensitivity. Specifically, we show that contrary to sets, elements in a graph are not entirely unordered and there is a unique partial order for nodes and edges. With this partial order, PARD generates a graph in a block-by-block, autoregressive fashion, where each block's probability is conditionally modeled by a shared diffusion model with an equivariant network. To ensure efficiency while being expressive, we further propose a higher-order graph transformer, which integrates transformer with PPGN. Like GPT, we extend the higher-order graph transformer to support parallel training of all blocks. Without any extra features, PARD achieves state-of-the-art performance on molecular and non-molecular datasets, and scales to large datasets like MOSES containing 1.9M molecules. Pard is open-sourced at //github.com/LingxiaoShawn/Pard.
Before deploying outputs from foundation models in high-stakes tasks, it is imperative to ensure that they align with human values. For instance, in radiology report generation, reports generated by a vision-language model must align with human evaluations before their use in medical decision-making. This paper presents Conformal Alignment, a general framework for identifying units whose outputs meet a user-specified alignment criterion. It is guaranteed that on average, a prescribed fraction of selected units indeed meet the alignment criterion, regardless of the foundation model or the data distribution. Given any pre-trained model and new units with model-generated outputs, Conformal Alignment leverages a set of reference data with ground-truth alignment status to train an alignment predictor. It then selects new units whose predicted alignment scores surpass a data-dependent threshold, certifying their corresponding outputs as trustworthy. Through applications to question answering and radiology report generation, we demonstrate that our method is able to accurately identify units with trustworthy outputs via lightweight training over a moderate amount of reference data. En route, we investigate the informativeness of various features in alignment prediction and combine them with standard models to construct the alignment predictor.
The advent of artificial intelligence has led to a growing emphasis on data-driven modeling in macroeconomics, with agent-based modeling (ABM) emerging as a prominent bottom-up simulation paradigm. In ABM, agents (e.g., households, firms) interact within a macroeconomic environment, collectively generating market dynamics. Existing agent modeling typically employs predetermined rules or learning-based neural networks for decision-making. However, customizing each agent presents significant challenges, complicating the modeling of agent heterogeneity. Additionally, the influence of multi-period market dynamics and multifaceted macroeconomic factors are often overlooked in decision-making processes. In this work, we introduce EconAgent, a large language model-empowered agent with human-like characteristics for macroeconomic simulation. We first construct a simulation environment that incorporates various market dynamics driven by agents' decisions regarding work and consumption. Through the perception module, we create heterogeneous agents with distinct decision-making mechanisms. Furthermore, we model the impact of macroeconomic trends using a memory module, which allows agents to reflect on past individual experiences and market dynamics. Simulation experiments show that EconAgent can make realistic decisions, leading to more reasonable macroeconomic phenomena compared to existing rule-based or learning-based agents. Our codes are released at //github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/ACL24-EconAgent.
Graphs are used widely to model complex systems, and detecting anomalies in a graph is an important task in the analysis of complex systems. Graph anomalies are patterns in a graph that do not conform to normal patterns expected of the attributes and/or structures of the graph. In recent years, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been studied extensively and have successfully performed difficult machine learning tasks in node classification, link prediction, and graph classification thanks to the highly expressive capability via message passing in effectively learning graph representations. To solve the graph anomaly detection problem, GNN-based methods leverage information about the graph attributes (or features) and/or structures to learn to score anomalies appropriately. In this survey, we review the recent advances made in detecting graph anomalies using GNN models. Specifically, we summarize GNN-based methods according to the graph type (i.e., static and dynamic), the anomaly type (i.e., node, edge, subgraph, and whole graph), and the network architecture (e.g., graph autoencoder, graph convolutional network). To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the first comprehensive review of graph anomaly detection methods based on GNNs.
The existence of representative datasets is a prerequisite of many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, the subsequent application of these models often involves scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. The reasons for this are manifold and range from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable use of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is a huge challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches, and eventually to increase the generalization capability of these models. Furthermore, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-based models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories integration, extraction and conformity. Special attention is given to applications in the field of autonomous driving.
Fine-grained image analysis (FGIA) is a longstanding and fundamental problem in computer vision and pattern recognition, and underpins a diverse set of real-world applications. The task of FGIA targets analyzing visual objects from subordinate categories, e.g., species of birds or models of cars. The small inter-class and large intra-class variation inherent to fine-grained image analysis makes it a challenging problem. Capitalizing on advances in deep learning, in recent years we have witnessed remarkable progress in deep learning powered FGIA. In this paper we present a systematic survey of these advances, where we attempt to re-define and broaden the field of FGIA by consolidating two fundamental fine-grained research areas -- fine-grained image recognition and fine-grained image retrieval. In addition, we also review other key issues of FGIA, such as publicly available benchmark datasets and related domain-specific applications. We conclude by highlighting several research directions and open problems which need further exploration from the community.
Visual dialogue is a challenging task that needs to extract implicit information from both visual (image) and textual (dialogue history) contexts. Classical approaches pay more attention to the integration of the current question, vision knowledge and text knowledge, despising the heterogeneous semantic gaps between the cross-modal information. In the meantime, the concatenation operation has become de-facto standard to the cross-modal information fusion, which has a limited ability in information retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel Knowledge-Bridge Graph Network (KBGN) model by using graph to bridge the cross-modal semantic relations between vision and text knowledge in fine granularity, as well as retrieving required knowledge via an adaptive information selection mode. Moreover, the reasoning clues for visual dialogue can be clearly drawn from intra-modal entities and inter-modal bridges. Experimental results on VisDial v1.0 and VisDial-Q datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms exiting models with state-of-the-art results.