Recently, Transformer-based text detection techniques have sought to predict polygons by encoding the coordinates of individual boundary vertices using distinct query features. However, this approach incurs a significant memory overhead and struggles to effectively capture the intricate relationships between vertices belonging to the same instance. Consequently, irregular text layouts often lead to the prediction of outlined vertices, diminishing the quality of results. To address these challenges, we present an innovative approach rooted in Sparse R-CNN: a cascade decoding pipeline for polygon prediction. Our method ensures precision by iteratively refining polygon predictions, considering both the scale and location of preceding results. Leveraging this stabilized regression pipeline, even employing just a single feature vector to guide polygon instance regression yields promising detection results. Simultaneously, the leverage of instance-level feature proposal substantially enhances memory efficiency (>50% less vs. the state-of-the-art method DPText-DETR) and reduces inference speed (>40% less vs. DPText-DETR) with minor performance drop on benchmarks.
We present Multi-EuP, a new multilingual benchmark dataset, comprising 22K multi-lingual documents collected from the European Parliament, spanning 24 languages. This dataset is designed to investigate fairness in a multilingual information retrieval (IR) context to analyze both language and demographic bias in a ranking context. It boasts an authentic multilingual corpus, featuring topics translated into all 24 languages, as well as cross-lingual relevance judgments. Furthermore, it offers rich demographic information associated with its documents, facilitating the study of demographic bias. We report the effectiveness of Multi-EuP for benchmarking both monolingual and multilingual IR. We also conduct a preliminary experiment on language bias caused by the choice of tokenization strategy.
Crash fault tolerant (CFT) consensus algorithms are commonly used in scenarios where system components are trusted, such as enterprise settings. CFT algorithms offer high throughput and low latency, making them an attractive option for centralized operations that require fault tolerance. However, CFT consensus is vulnerable to Byzantine faults, which can be introduced by a single corrupt component. Such faults can break consensus in the system. Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus algorithms withstand Byzantine faults, but they are not as competitive with CFT algorithms in terms of performance. In this work, we explore a middle ground between BFT and CFT consensus by exploring the role of accountability in CFT protocols. That is, if a CFT protocol node breaks protocol and affects consensus safety, we aim to identify which node was the culprit. Based on Raft, one of the most popular CFT algorithms, we present Raft-Forensics, which provides accountability over Byzantine faults. We theoretically prove that if two honest components fail to reach consensus, the Raft-Forensics auditing algorithm finds the adversarial component that caused the inconsistency. In an empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that Raft-Forensics performs similarly to Raft and significantly better than state-of-the-art BFT algorithms. With 256 byte messages, Raft-Forensics achieves peak throughput 87.8% of vanilla Raft at 46% higher latency, while state-of-the-art BFT protocol Dumbo-NG only achieves 18.9% peak throughput at nearly $6\times$ higher latency.
This paper explores the development of UniFolding, a sample-efficient, scalable, and generalizable robotic system for unfolding and folding various garments. UniFolding employs the proposed UFONet neural network to integrate unfolding and folding decisions into a single policy model that is adaptable to different garment types and states. The design of UniFolding is based on a garment's partial point cloud, which aids in generalization and reduces sensitivity to variations in texture and shape. The training pipeline prioritizes low-cost, sample-efficient data collection. Training data is collected via a human-centric process with offline and online stages. The offline stage involves human unfolding and folding actions via Virtual Reality, while the online stage utilizes human-in-the-loop learning to fine-tune the model in a real-world setting. The system is tested on two garment types: long-sleeve and short-sleeve shirts. Performance is evaluated on 20 shirts with significant variations in textures, shapes, and materials. More experiments and videos can be found in the supplementary materials and on the website: //unifolding.robotflow.ai
With the exponential surge in diverse multi-modal data, traditional uni-modal retrieval methods struggle to meet the needs of users demanding access to data from various modalities. To address this, cross-modal retrieval has emerged, enabling interaction across modalities, facilitating semantic matching, and leveraging complementarity and consistency between different modal data. Although prior literature undertook a review of the cross-modal retrieval field, it exhibits numerous deficiencies pertaining to timeliness, taxonomy, and comprehensiveness. This paper conducts a comprehensive review of cross-modal retrieval's evolution, spanning from shallow statistical analysis techniques to vision-language pre-training models. Commencing with a comprehensive taxonomy grounded in machine learning paradigms, mechanisms, and models, the paper then delves deeply into the principles and architectures underpinning existing cross-modal retrieval methods. Furthermore, it offers an overview of widely used benchmarks, metrics, and performances. Lastly, the paper probes the prospects and challenges that confront contemporary cross-modal retrieval, while engaging in a discourse on potential directions for further progress in the field. To facilitate the research on cross-modal retrieval, we develop an open-source code repository at //github.com/BMC-SDNU/Cross-Modal-Retrieval.
Knowledge graph reasoning (KGR), aiming to deduce new facts from existing facts based on mined logic rules underlying knowledge graphs (KGs), has become a fast-growing research direction. It has been proven to significantly benefit the usage of KGs in many AI applications, such as question answering and recommendation systems, etc. According to the graph types, the existing KGR models can be roughly divided into three categories, \textit{i.e.,} static models, temporal models, and multi-modal models. The early works in this domain mainly focus on static KGR and tend to directly apply general knowledge graph embedding models to the reasoning task. However, these models are not suitable for more complex but practical tasks, such as inductive static KGR, temporal KGR, and multi-modal KGR. To this end, multiple works have been developed recently, but no survey papers and open-source repositories comprehensively summarize and discuss models in this important direction. To fill the gap, we conduct a survey for knowledge graph reasoning tracing from static to temporal and then to multi-modal KGs. Concretely, the preliminaries, summaries of KGR models, and typical datasets are introduced and discussed consequently. Moreover, we discuss the challenges and potential opportunities. The corresponding open-source repository is shared on GitHub: //github.com/LIANGKE23/Awesome-Knowledge-Graph-Reasoning.
Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) is a increasingly popular technique that aims to represent entities and relations of knowledge graphs into low-dimensional semantic spaces for a wide spectrum of applications such as link prediction, knowledge reasoning and knowledge completion. In this paper, we provide a systematic review of existing KGE techniques based on representation spaces. Particularly, we build a fine-grained classification to categorise the models based on three mathematical perspectives of the representation spaces: (1) Algebraic perspective, (2) Geometric perspective, and (3) Analytical perspective. We introduce the rigorous definitions of fundamental mathematical spaces before diving into KGE models and their mathematical properties. We further discuss different KGE methods over the three categories, as well as summarise how spatial advantages work over different embedding needs. By collating the experimental results from downstream tasks, we also explore the advantages of mathematical space in different scenarios and the reasons behind them. We further state some promising research directions from a representation space perspective, with which we hope to inspire researchers to design their KGE models as well as their related applications with more consideration of their mathematical space properties.
Multi-label text classification refers to the problem of assigning each given document its most relevant labels from the label set. Commonly, the metadata of the given documents and the hierarchy of the labels are available in real-world applications. However, most existing studies focus on only modeling the text information, with a few attempts to utilize either metadata or hierarchy signals, but not both of them. In this paper, we bridge the gap by formalizing the problem of metadata-aware text classification in a large label hierarchy (e.g., with tens of thousands of labels). To address this problem, we present the MATCH solution -- an end-to-end framework that leverages both metadata and hierarchy information. To incorporate metadata, we pre-train the embeddings of text and metadata in the same space and also leverage the fully-connected attentions to capture the interrelations between them. To leverage the label hierarchy, we propose different ways to regularize the parameters and output probability of each child label by its parents. Extensive experiments on two massive text datasets with large-scale label hierarchies demonstrate the effectiveness of MATCH over state-of-the-art deep learning baselines.
Lots of learning tasks require dealing with graph data which contains rich relation information among elements. Modeling physics system, learning molecular fingerprints, predicting protein interface, and classifying diseases require that a model to learn from graph inputs. In other domains such as learning from non-structural data like texts and images, reasoning on extracted structures, like the dependency tree of sentences and the scene graph of images, is an important research topic which also needs graph reasoning models. Graph neural networks (GNNs) are connectionist models that capture the dependence of graphs via message passing between the nodes of graphs. Unlike standard neural networks, graph neural networks retain a state that can represent information from its neighborhood with an arbitrary depth. Although the primitive graph neural networks have been found difficult to train for a fixed point, recent advances in network architectures, optimization techniques, and parallel computation have enabled successful learning with them. In recent years, systems based on graph convolutional network (GCN) and gated graph neural network (GGNN) have demonstrated ground-breaking performance on many tasks mentioned above. In this survey, we provide a detailed review over existing graph neural network models, systematically categorize the applications, and propose four open problems for future research.
We introduce a multi-task setup of identifying and classifying entities, relations, and coreference clusters in scientific articles. We create SciERC, a dataset that includes annotations for all three tasks and develop a unified framework called Scientific Information Extractor (SciIE) for with shared span representations. The multi-task setup reduces cascading errors between tasks and leverages cross-sentence relations through coreference links. Experiments show that our multi-task model outperforms previous models in scientific information extraction without using any domain-specific features. We further show that the framework supports construction of a scientific knowledge graph, which we use to analyze information in scientific literature.
In order to answer natural language questions over knowledge graphs, most processing pipelines involve entity and relation linking. Traditionally, entity linking and relation linking has been performed either as dependent sequential tasks or independent parallel tasks. In this paper, we propose a framework called "EARL", which performs entity linking and relation linking as a joint single task. EARL uses a graph connection based solution to the problem. We model the linking task as an instance of the Generalised Travelling Salesman Problem (GTSP) and use GTSP approximate algorithm solutions. We later develop EARL which uses a pair-wise graph-distance based solution to the problem.The system determines the best semantic connection between all keywords of the question by referring to a knowledge graph. This is achieved by exploiting the "connection density" between entity candidates and relation candidates. The "connection density" based solution performs at par with the approximate GTSP solution.We have empirically evaluated the framework on a dataset with 5000 questions. Our system surpasses state-of-the-art scores for entity linking task by reporting an accuracy of 0.65 to 0.40 from the next best entity linker.