The reconstruction of images observed by subjects from fMRI data collected during visual stimuli has made strong progress in the past decade, thanks to the availability of extensive fMRI datasets and advancements in generative models for image generation. However, the application of visual reconstruction has remained limited. Reconstructing visual imagination presents a greater challenge, with potentially revolutionary applications ranging from aiding individuals with disabilities to verifying witness accounts in court. The primary hurdles in this field are the absence of data collection protocols for visual imagery and the lack of datasets on the subject. Traditionally, fMRI-to-image relies on data collected from subjects exposed to visual stimuli, which poses issues for generating visual imagery based on the difference of brain activity between visual stimulation and visual imagery. For the first time, we have compiled a substantial dataset (around 6h of scans) on visual imagery along with a proposed data collection protocol. We then train a modified version of an fMRI-to-image model and demonstrate the feasibility of reconstructing images from two modes of imagination: from memory and from pure imagination. The resulting pipeline we call Mind-to-Image marks a step towards creating a technology that allow direct reconstruction of visual imagery.
In distributed computing by mobile robots, robots are deployed over a region, continuous or discrete, operating through a sequence of \textit{look-compute-move} cycles. An extensive study has been carried out to understand the computational powers of different robot models. The models vary on the ability to 1)~remember constant size information and 2)~communicate constant size message. Depending on the abilities the different models are 1)~$\mathcal{OBLOT}$ (robots are oblivious and silent), 2)~$\mathcal{FSTA}$ (robots have finite states but silent), 3)~$\mathcal{FCOM}$ (robots are oblivious but can communicate constant size information) and, 4)~$\mathcal{LUMI}$ (robots have finite states and can communicate constant size information). Another factor that affects computational ability is the scheduler that decides the activation time of the robots. The main three schedulers are \textit{fully-synchronous}, \textit{semi-synchronous} and \textit{asynchronous}. Combining the models ($M$) with schedulers ($K$), we have twelve combinations $M^K$. In the euclidean domain, the comparisons between these twelve variants have been done in different works for transparent robots, opaque robots, and robots with limited visibility. There is a vacant space for similar works when robots are operating on discrete regions like networks. It demands separate research attention because there have been a series of works where robots operate on different networks, and there is a fundamental difference when robots are operating on a continuous domain versus a discrete domain in terms of robots' movement. This work contributes to filling the space by giving a full comparison table for all models with two synchronous schedulers: fully-synchronous and semi-synchronous.
Recent advances in 3D AIGC have shown promise in directly creating 3D objects from text and images, offering significant cost savings in animation and product design. However, detailed edit and customization of 3D assets remains a long-standing challenge. Specifically, 3D Generation methods lack the ability to follow finely detailed instructions as precisely as their 2D image creation counterparts. Imagine you can get a toy through 3D AIGC but with undesired accessories and dressing. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel pipeline called Tailor3D, which swiftly creates customized 3D assets from editable dual-side images. We aim to emulate a tailor's ability to locally change objects or perform overall style transfer. Unlike creating 3D assets from multiple views, using dual-side images eliminates conflicts on overlapping areas that occur when editing individual views. Specifically, it begins by editing the front view, then generates the back view of the object through multi-view diffusion. Afterward, it proceeds to edit the back views. Finally, a Dual-sided LRM is proposed to seamlessly stitch together the front and back 3D features, akin to a tailor sewing together the front and back of a garment. The Dual-sided LRM rectifies imperfect consistencies between the front and back views, enhancing editing capabilities and reducing memory burdens while seamlessly integrating them into a unified 3D representation with the LoRA Triplane Transformer. Experimental results demonstrate Tailor3D's effectiveness across various 3D generation and editing tasks, including 3D generative fill and style transfer. It provides a user-friendly, efficient solution for editing 3D assets, with each editing step taking only seconds to complete.
Participatory design initiatives, especially within the realm of digital civics, are often integrated and co-developed with the very citizens and communities they intend to assist. Digital civics research aims to create positive social change using a variety of digital technologies. These research projects commonly adopt various embedded processes, such as commissioning models \cite{dcitizensproj22}. Despite the adoption of this process within a range of domains, there isn't currently a framework for best practices and accountability procedures to ensure we engage with citizens ethically and ensure the sustainability of our projects. This workshop aims to provide a space to start collaboratively constructing a dynamic framework of best practices, laying the groundwork for the future of sustainable embedded research processes. The overarching goal is to foster discussions and share insights that contribute to developing effective practices, ensuring the longevity and impact of participatory digital civics projects.
The development of deep learning-based models for the compression of hyperspectral images (HSIs) has recently attracted great attention in remote sensing due to the sharp growing of hyperspectral data archives. Most of the existing models achieve either spectral or spatial compression, and do not jointly consider the spatio-spectral redundancies present in HSIs. To address this problem, in this paper we focus our attention on the High Fidelity Compression (HiFiC) model (which is proven to be highly effective for spatial compression problems) and adapt it to perform spatio-spectral compression of HSIs. In detail, we introduce two new models: i) HiFiC using Squeeze and Excitation (SE) blocks (denoted as HiFiC$_{SE}$); and ii) HiFiC with 3D convolutions (denoted as HiFiC$_{3D}$) in the framework of compression of HSIs. We analyze the effectiveness of HiFiC$_{SE}$ and HiFiC$_{3D}$ in compressing the spatio-spectral redundancies with channel attention and inter-dependency analysis. Experimental results show the efficacy of the proposed models in performing spatio-spectral compression, while reconstructing images at reduced bitrates with higher reconstruction quality. The code of the proposed models is publicly available at //git.tu-berlin.de/rsim/HSI-SSC .
Diffusion models have shown impressive performance in many domains, including image generation, time series prediction, and reinforcement learning. The algorithm demonstrates superior performance over the traditional GAN and transformer-based methods. However, the model's capability to follow natural language instructions (e.g., spatial relationships between objects, generating complex scenes) is still unsatisfactory. It has been an important research area to enhance such capability. Prior works have shown that using Reinforcement Learning can effectively train diffusion models to enhance fidelity on specific objectives. However, existing RL methods require collecting a large amount of data to train an effective reward model. They also don't receive feedback when the generated image is incorrect. In this work, we propose Iterative Prompt Relabeling (IPR), a novel algorithm that aligns images to text through iterative image sampling and prompt relabeling. IPR first samples a batch of images conditioned on the text then relabels the text prompts of unmatched text-image pairs with classifier feedback. We conduct thorough experiments on SDv2 and SDXL, testing their capability to follow instructions on spatial relations. With IPR, we improved up to 15.22% (absolute improvement) on the challenging spatial relation VISOR benchmark, demonstrating superior performance compared to previous RL methods.
Recent advancements in ultra-high-resolution unpaired image-to-image translation have aimed to mitigate the constraints imposed by limited GPU memory through patch-wise inference. Nonetheless, existing methods often compromise between the reduction of noticeable tiling artifacts and the preservation of color and hue contrast, attributed to the reliance on global image- or patch-level statistics in the instance normalization layers. In this study, we introduce a Dense Normalization (DN) layer designed to estimate pixel-level statistical moments. This approach effectively diminishes tiling artifacts while concurrently preserving local color and hue contrasts. To address the computational demands of pixel-level estimation, we further propose an efficient interpolation algorithm. Moreover, we invent a parallelism strategy that enables the DN layer to operate in a single pass. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method surpasses all existing approaches in performance. Notably, our DN layer is hyperparameter-free and can be seamlessly integrated into most unpaired image-to-image translation frameworks without necessitating retraining. Overall, our work paves the way for future exploration in handling images of arbitrary resolutions within the realm of unpaired image-to-image translation. Code is available at: //github.com/Kaminyou/Dense-Normalization.
Facial expression recognition (FER) has received considerable attention in computer vision, with "in-the-wild" environments such as human-computer interaction. However, FER images contain uncertainties such as occlusion, low resolution, pose variation, illumination variation, and subjectivity, which includes some expressions that do not match the target label. Consequently, little information is obtained from a noisy single image and it is not trusted. This could significantly degrade the performance of the FER task. To address this issue, we propose a batch transformer (BT), which consists of the proposed class batch attention (CBA) module, to prevent overfitting in noisy data and extract trustworthy information by training on features reflected from several images in a batch, rather than information from a single image. We also propose multi-level attention (MLA) to prevent overfitting the specific features by capturing correlations between each level. In this paper, we present a batch transformer network (BTN) that combines the above proposals. Experimental results on various FER benchmark datasets show that the proposed BTN consistently outperforms the state-ofthe-art in FER datasets. Representative results demonstrate the promise of the proposed BTN for FER.
The recent success of large language models (LLMs) trained on static, pre-collected, general datasets has sparked numerous research directions and applications. One such direction addresses the non-trivial challenge of integrating pre-trained LLMs into dynamic data distributions, task structures, and user preferences. Pre-trained LLMs, when tailored for specific needs, often experience significant performance degradation in previous knowledge domains -- a phenomenon known as "catastrophic forgetting". While extensively studied in the continual learning (CL) community, it presents new manifestations in the realm of LLMs. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of the current research progress on LLMs within the context of CL. This survey is structured into four main sections: we first describe an overview of continually learning LLMs, consisting of two directions of continuity: vertical continuity (or vertical continual learning), i.e., continual adaptation from general to specific capabilities, and horizontal continuity (or horizontal continual learning), i.e., continual adaptation across time and domains (Section 3). We then summarize three stages of learning LLMs in the context of modern CL: Continual Pre-Training (CPT), Domain-Adaptive Pre-training (DAP), and Continual Fine-Tuning (CFT) (Section 4). Then we provide an overview of evaluation protocols for continual learning with LLMs, along with the current available data sources (Section 5). Finally, we discuss intriguing questions pertaining to continual learning for LLMs (Section 6). The full list of papers examined in this survey is available at //github.com/Wang-ML-Lab/llm-continual-learning-survey.
While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a range of downstream tasks, a significant concern revolves around their propensity to exhibit hallucinations: LLMs occasionally generate content that diverges from the user input, contradicts previously generated context, or misaligns with established world knowledge. This phenomenon poses a substantial challenge to the reliability of LLMs in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we survey recent efforts on the detection, explanation, and mitigation of hallucination, with an emphasis on the unique challenges posed by LLMs. We present taxonomies of the LLM hallucination phenomena and evaluation benchmarks, analyze existing approaches aiming at mitigating LLM hallucination, and discuss potential directions for future research.
The advent of large language models marks a revolutionary breakthrough in artificial intelligence. With the unprecedented scale of training and model parameters, the capability of large language models has been dramatically improved, leading to human-like performances in understanding, language synthesizing, and common-sense reasoning, etc. Such a major leap-forward in general AI capacity will change the pattern of how personalization is conducted. For one thing, it will reform the way of interaction between humans and personalization systems. Instead of being a passive medium of information filtering, large language models present the foundation for active user engagement. On top of such a new foundation, user requests can be proactively explored, and user's required information can be delivered in a natural and explainable way. For another thing, it will also considerably expand the scope of personalization, making it grow from the sole function of collecting personalized information to the compound function of providing personalized services. By leveraging large language models as general-purpose interface, the personalization systems may compile user requests into plans, calls the functions of external tools to execute the plans, and integrate the tools' outputs to complete the end-to-end personalization tasks. Today, large language models are still being developed, whereas the application in personalization is largely unexplored. Therefore, we consider it to be the right time to review the challenges in personalization and the opportunities to address them with LLMs. In particular, we dedicate this perspective paper to the discussion of the following aspects: the development and challenges for the existing personalization system, the newly emerged capabilities of large language models, and the potential ways of making use of large language models for personalization.