Social interaction is a fundamental aspect of human behavior and communication. The way individuals position themselves in relation to others, also known as proxemics, conveys social cues and affects the dynamics of social interaction. We present a novel approach that learns a 3D proxemics prior of two people in close social interaction. Since collecting a large 3D dataset of interacting people is a challenge, we rely on 2D image collections where social interactions are abundant. We achieve this by reconstructing pseudo-ground truth 3D meshes of interacting people from images with an optimization approach using existing ground-truth contact maps. We then model the proxemics using a novel denoising diffusion model called BUDDI that learns the joint distribution of two people in close social interaction directly in the SMPL-X parameter space. Sampling from our generative proxemics model produces realistic 3D human interactions, which we validate through a user study. Additionally, we introduce a new optimization method that uses the diffusion prior to reconstruct two people in close proximity from a single image without any contact annotation. Our approach recovers more accurate and plausible 3D social interactions from noisy initial estimates and outperforms state-of-the-art methods. See our project site for code, data, and model: muelea.github.io/buddi.
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generalizability, such as understanding arbitrary entities and relations. Instruction tuning has proven effective for distilling LLMs into more cost-efficient models such as Alpaca and Vicuna. Yet such student models still trail the original LLMs by large margins in downstream applications. In this paper, we explore targeted distillation with mission-focused instruction tuning to train student models that can excel in a broad application class such as open information extraction. Using named entity recognition (NER) for case study, we show how ChatGPT can be distilled into much smaller UniversalNER models for open NER. For evaluation, we assemble the largest NER benchmark to date, comprising 43 datasets across 9 diverse domains such as biomedicine, programming, social media, law, finance. Without using any direct supervision, UniversalNER attains remarkable NER accuracy across tens of thousands of entity types, outperforming general instruction-tuned models such as Alpaca and Vicuna by over 30 absolute F1 points in average. With a tiny fraction of parameters, UniversalNER not only acquires ChatGPT's capability in recognizing arbitrary entity types, but also outperforms its NER accuracy by 7-9 absolute F1 points in average. Remarkably, UniversalNER even outperforms by a large margin state-of-the-art multi-task instruction-tuned systems such as InstructUIE, which uses supervised NER examples. We also conduct thorough ablation studies to assess the impact of various components in our distillation approach. We will release the distillation recipe, data, and UniversalNER models to facilitate future research on targeted distillation.
Object-centric representation is an essential abstraction for forward prediction. Most existing forward models learn this representation through extensive supervision (e.g., object class and bounding box) although such ground-truth information is not readily accessible in reality. To address this, we introduce KINet (Keypoint Interaction Network) -- an end-to-end unsupervised framework to reason about object interactions based on a keypoint representation. Using visual observations, our model learns to associate objects with keypoint coordinates and discovers a graph representation of the system as a set of keypoint embeddings and their relations. It then learns an action-conditioned forward model using contrastive estimation to predict future keypoint states. By learning to perform physical reasoning in the keypoint space, our model automatically generalizes to scenarios with a different number of objects, novel backgrounds, and unseen object geometries. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in accurately performing forward prediction and learning plannable object-centric representations for downstream robotic pushing manipulation tasks.
Humanitarian organizations provide aid to people in need. To use their limited budget efficiently, their distribution processes must ensure that legitimate recipients cannot receive more aid than they are entitled to. Thus, it is essential that recipients can register at most once per aid program. Taking the International Committee of the Red Cross's aid distribution registration process as a use case, we identify the requirements to detect double registration without creating new risks for aid recipients. We then design Janus, which combines privacy-enhancing technologies with biometrics to prevent double registration in a safe manner. Janus does not create plaintext biometric databases and reveals only one bit of information at registration time (whether the user registering is present in the database or not). We implement and evaluate three instantiations of Janus based on secure multiparty computation, somewhat homomorphic encryption, and trusted execution environments. We demonstrate that they support the privacy, accuracy, and performance needs of humanitarian organizations. We compare Janus with existing alternatives and show it is the first system that provides the accuracy our scenario requires while providing strong protection.
Conventional detectors suffer from performance degradation when dealing with long-tailed data due to a classification bias towards the majority head categories. In this paper, we contend that the learning bias originates from two factors: 1) the unequal competition arising from the imbalanced distribution of foreground categories, and 2) the lack of sample diversity in tail categories. To tackle these issues, we introduce a unified framework called BAlanced CLassification (BACL), which enables adaptive rectification of inequalities caused by disparities in category distribution and dynamic intensification of sample diversities in a synchronized manner. Specifically, a novel foreground classification balance loss (FCBL) is developed to ameliorate the domination of head categories and shift attention to difficult-to-differentiate categories by introducing pairwise class-aware margins and auto-adjusted weight terms, respectively. This loss prevents the over-suppression of tail categories in the context of unequal competition. Moreover, we propose a dynamic feature hallucination module (FHM), which enhances the representation of tail categories in the feature space by synthesizing hallucinated samples to introduce additional data variances. In this divide-and-conquer approach, BACL sets a new state-of-the-art on the challenging LVIS benchmark with a decoupled training pipeline, surpassing vanilla Faster R-CNN with ResNet-50-FPN by 5.8% AP and 16.1% AP for overall and tail categories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BACL consistently achieves performance improvements across various datasets with different backbones and architectures. Code and models are available at //github.com/Tianhao-Qi/BACL.
Practitioners and academics have long appreciated the benefits that experimentation brings to firms. For web-facing firms running online A/B tests, however, it still remains challenging in balancing covariate information when experimental subjects arrive sequentially. In this paper, we study a novel online experimental design problem, which we refer to as the "Online Blocking Problem." In this problem, experimental subjects with heterogeneous covariate information arrive sequentially and must be immediately assigned into either the control or the treatment group, with an objective of minimizing the total discrepancy, which is defined as the minimum weight perfect matching between the two groups. To solve this problem, we propose a novel experimental design approach, which we refer to as the "Pigeonhole Design." The pigeonhole design first partitions the covariate space into smaller spaces, which we refer to as pigeonholes, and then, when the experimental subjects arrive at each pigeonhole, balances the number of control and treatment subjects for each pigeonhole. We analyze the theoretical performance of the pigeonhole design and show its effectiveness by comparing against two well-known benchmark designs: the match-pair design and the completely randomized design. We identify scenarios when the pigeonhole design demonstrates more benefits over the benchmark design. To conclude, we conduct extensive simulations using Yahoo! data to show a 10.2% reduction in variance if we use the pigeonhole design to estimate the average treatment effect.
Conversational engagement estimation is posed as a regression problem, entailing the identification of the favorable attention and involvement of the participants in the conversation. This task arises as a crucial pursuit to gain insights into human's interaction dynamics and behavior patterns within a conversation. In this research, we introduce a dilated convolutional Transformer for modeling and estimating human engagement in the MULTIMEDIATE 2023 competition. Our proposed system surpasses the baseline models, exhibiting a noteworthy $7$\% improvement on test set and $4$\% on validation set. Moreover, we employ different modality fusion mechanism and show that for this type of data, a simple concatenated method with self-attention fusion gains the best performance.
Convolutional neural networks have made significant progresses in edge detection by progressively exploring the context and semantic features. However, local details are gradually suppressed with the enlarging of receptive fields. Recently, vision transformer has shown excellent capability in capturing long-range dependencies. Inspired by this, we propose a novel transformer-based edge detector, \emph{Edge Detection TransformER (EDTER)}, to extract clear and crisp object boundaries and meaningful edges by exploiting the full image context information and detailed local cues simultaneously. EDTER works in two stages. In Stage I, a global transformer encoder is used to capture long-range global context on coarse-grained image patches. Then in Stage II, a local transformer encoder works on fine-grained patches to excavate the short-range local cues. Each transformer encoder is followed by an elaborately designed Bi-directional Multi-Level Aggregation decoder to achieve high-resolution features. Finally, the global context and local cues are combined by a Feature Fusion Module and fed into a decision head for edge prediction. Extensive experiments on BSDS500, NYUDv2, and Multicue demonstrate the superiority of EDTER in comparison with state-of-the-arts.
Traffic forecasting is an important factor for the success of intelligent transportation systems. Deep learning models including convolution neural networks and recurrent neural networks have been applied in traffic forecasting problems to model the spatial and temporal dependencies. In recent years, to model the graph structures in the transportation systems as well as the contextual information, graph neural networks (GNNs) are introduced as new tools and have achieved the state-of-the-art performance in a series of traffic forecasting problems. In this survey, we review the rapidly growing body of recent research using different GNNs, e.g., graph convolutional and graph attention networks, in various traffic forecasting problems, e.g., road traffic flow and speed forecasting, passenger flow forecasting in urban rail transit systems, demand forecasting in ride-hailing platforms, etc. We also present a collection of open data and source resources for each problem, as well as future research directions. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first comprehensive survey that explores the application of graph neural networks for traffic forecasting problems. We have also created a public Github repository to update the latest papers, open data and source resources.
Distant supervision can effectively label data for relation extraction, but suffers from the noise labeling problem. Recent works mainly perform soft bag-level noise reduction strategies to find the relatively better samples in a sentence bag, which is suboptimal compared with making a hard decision of false positive samples in sentence level. In this paper, we introduce an adversarial learning framework, which we named DSGAN, to learn a sentence-level true-positive generator. Inspired by Generative Adversarial Networks, we regard the positive samples generated by the generator as the negative samples to train the discriminator. The optimal generator is obtained until the discrimination ability of the discriminator has the greatest decline. We adopt the generator to filter distant supervision training dataset and redistribute the false positive instances into the negative set, in which way to provide a cleaned dataset for relation classification. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision relation extraction comparing to state-of-the-art systems.
Image segmentation is still an open problem especially when intensities of the interested objects are overlapped due to the presence of intensity inhomogeneity (also known as bias field). To segment images with intensity inhomogeneities, a bias correction embedded level set model is proposed where Inhomogeneities are Estimated by Orthogonal Primary Functions (IEOPF). In the proposed model, the smoothly varying bias is estimated by a linear combination of a given set of orthogonal primary functions. An inhomogeneous intensity clustering energy is then defined and membership functions of the clusters described by the level set function are introduced to rewrite the energy as a data term of the proposed model. Similar to popular level set methods, a regularization term and an arc length term are also included to regularize and smooth the level set function, respectively. The proposed model is then extended to multichannel and multiphase patterns to segment colourful images and images with multiple objects, respectively. It has been extensively tested on both synthetic and real images that are widely used in the literature and public BrainWeb and IBSR datasets. Experimental results and comparison with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate that advantages of the proposed model in terms of bias correction and segmentation accuracy.