Remote sensing image change caption (RSICC) aims to provide natural language descriptions for bi-temporal remote sensing images. Since Change Caption (CC) task requires both spatial and temporal features, previous works follow an encoder-fusion-decoder architecture. They use an image encoder to extract spatial features and the fusion module to integrate spatial features and extract temporal features, which leads to increasingly complex manual design of the fusion module. In this paper, we introduce a novel video model-based paradigm without design of the fusion module and propose a Mask-enhanced Video model for Change Caption (MV-CC). Specifically, we use the off-the-shelf video encoder to simultaneously extract the temporal and spatial features of bi-temporal images. Furthermore, the types of changes in the CC are set based on specific task requirements, and to enable the model to better focus on the regions of interest, we employ masks obtained from the Change Detection (CD) method to explicitly guide the CC model. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can obtain better performance compared with other state-of-the-art RSICC methods. The code is available at //github.com/liuruixun/MV-CC.
Unknown Object Detection (UOD) aims to identify objects of unseen categories, differing from the traditional detection paradigm limited by the closed-world assumption. A key component of UOD is learning a generalized representation, i.e. objectness for both known and unknown categories to distinguish and localize objects from the background in a class-agnostic manner. However, previous methods obtain supervision signals for learning objectness in isolation from either localization or classification information, leading to poor performance for UOD. To address this issue, we propose a transformer-based UOD framework, UN-DETR. Based on this, we craft Instance Presence Score (IPS) to represent the probability of an object's presence. For the purpose of information complementarity, IPS employs a strategy of joint supervised learning, integrating attributes representing general objectness from the positional and the categorical latent space as supervision signals. To enhance IPS learning, we introduce a one-to-many assignment strategy to incorporate more supervision. Then, we propose Unbiased Query Selection to provide premium initial query vectors for the decoder. Additionally, we propose an IPS-guided post-process strategy to filter redundant boxes and correct classification predictions for known and unknown objects. Finally, we pretrain the entire UN-DETR in an unsupervised manner, in order to obtain objectness prior. Our UN-DETR is comprehensively evaluated on multiple UOD and known detection benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness and achieving state-of-the-art performance.
We propose the VLR-Bench, a visual question answering (VQA) benchmark for evaluating vision language models (VLMs) based on retrieval augmented generation (RAG). Unlike existing evaluation datasets for external knowledge-based VQA, the proposed VLR-Bench includes five input passages. This allows testing of the ability to determine which passage is useful for answering a given query, a capability lacking in previous research. In this context, we constructed a dataset of 32,000 automatically generated instruction-following examples, which we denote as VLR-IF. This dataset is specifically designed to enhance the RAG capabilities of VLMs by enabling them to learn how to generate appropriate answers based on input passages. We evaluated the validity of the proposed benchmark and training data and verified its performance using the state-of-the-art Llama3-based VLM, the Llava-Llama-3 model. The proposed VLR-Bench and VLR-IF datasets are publicly available online.
Controllable person image generation aims to generate a person image conditioned on reference images, allowing precise control over the person's appearance or pose. However, prior methods often distort fine-grained textural details from the reference image, despite achieving high overall image quality. We attribute these distortions to inadequate attention to corresponding regions in the reference image. To address this, we thereby propose learning flow fields in attention (Leffa), which explicitly guides the target query to attend to the correct reference key in the attention layer during training. Specifically, it is realized via a regularization loss on top of the attention map within a diffusion-based baseline. Our extensive experiments show that Leffa achieves state-of-the-art performance in controlling appearance (virtual try-on) and pose (pose transfer), significantly reducing fine-grained detail distortion while maintaining high image quality. Additionally, we show that our loss is model-agnostic and can be used to improve the performance of other diffusion models.
Visible-infrared person re-identification (VIReID) retrieves pedestrian images with the same identity across different modalities. Existing methods learn visual content solely from images, lacking the capability to sense high-level semantics. In this paper, we propose an Embedding and Enriching Explicit Semantics (EEES) framework to learn semantically rich cross-modality pedestrian representations. Our method offers several contributions. First, with the collaboration of multiple large language-vision models, we develop Explicit Semantics Embedding (ESE), which automatically supplements language descriptions for pedestrians and aligns image-text pairs into a common space, thereby learning visual content associated with explicit semantics. Second, recognizing the complementarity of multi-view information, we present Cross-View Semantics Compensation (CVSC), which constructs multi-view image-text pair representations, establishes their many-to-many matching, and propagates knowledge to single-view representations, thus compensating visual content with its missing cross-view semantics. Third, to eliminate noisy semantics such as conflicting color attributes in different modalities, we design Cross-Modality Semantics Purification (CMSP), which constrains the distance between inter-modality image-text pair representations to be close to that between intra-modality image-text pair representations, further enhancing the modality-invariance of visual content. Finally, experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed EEES.
The automatic generation of RTL code (e.g., Verilog) through natural language instructions has emerged as a promising direction with the advancement of large language models (LLMs). However, producing RTL code that is both syntactically and functionally correct remains a significant challenge. Existing single-LLM-agent approaches face substantial limitations because they must navigate between various programming languages and handle intricate generation, verification, and modification tasks. To address these challenges, this paper introduces MAGE, the first open-source multi-agent AI system designed for robust and accurate Verilog RTL code generation. We propose a novel high-temperature RTL candidate sampling and debugging system that effectively explores the space of code candidates and significantly improves the quality of the candidates. Furthermore, we design a novel Verilog-state checkpoint checking mechanism that enables early detection of functional errors and delivers precise feedback for targeted fixes, significantly enhancing the functional correctness of the generated RTL code. MAGE achieves a 95.7% rate of syntactic and functional correctness code generation on VerilogEval-Human 2 benchmark, surpassing the state-of-the-art Claude-3.5-sonnet by 23.3 %, demonstrating a robust and reliable approach for AI-driven RTL design workflows.
Integrating inertial measurement units (IMUs) with large language models (LLMs) expands the potential of multimodal AI, enabling more nuanced human activity analysis. In this paper, we introduce LLaSA (Large Language and Sensor Assistant), a multimodal large language model built on LIMU-BERT and Llama, designed to interpret and answer queries related to human activities and motion analysis, leveraging sensor data and contextual reasoning. To develop LLaSA, we introduce two key datasets: SensorCaps, a comprehensive collection of 35,960 IMU-derived narratives with handcrafted features, and OpenSQA, an instruction-following dataset containing 179,727 question-answer pairs aware of the sensor and human activity context. These datasets provide diverse and rich inputs to train LLaSA for complex sensor-based queries. To optimize LLaSA's performance, we apply a unique hyperparameter tuning method, which significantly enhances its effectiveness in contextual question-answering tasks. Extensive evaluations, including a human-led assessment of the question-answering, demonstrate that LLaSA achieves superior data interpretation and context-aware responses compared to GPT-3.5-Turbo and Vicuna-1.5-13b-16K. These contributions advance the frontier of sensor-aware LLMs and create new opportunities for impactful multimodal research in healthcare, sports science, and human-computer interactions. Our code repository and datasets can be found at //github.com/BASHLab/LLaSA.
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has substantially influenced natural language processing, demonstrating exceptional results across various tasks. In this study, we employ ``Introspective Tips" to facilitate LLMs in self-optimizing their decision-making. By introspectively examining trajectories, LLM refines its policy by generating succinct and valuable tips. Our method enhances the agent's performance in both few-shot and zero-shot learning situations by considering three essential scenarios: learning from the agent's past experiences, integrating expert demonstrations, and generalizing across diverse games. Importantly, we accomplish these improvements without fine-tuning the LLM parameters; rather, we adjust the prompt to generalize insights from the three aforementioned situations. Our framework not only supports but also emphasizes the advantage of employing LLM in in-contxt decision-making. Experiments involving over 100 games in TextWorld illustrate the superior performance of our approach.
Generative commonsense reasoning which aims to empower machines to generate sentences with the capacity of reasoning over a set of concepts is a critical bottleneck for text generation. Even the state-of-the-art pre-trained language generation models struggle at this task and often produce implausible and anomalous sentences. One reason is that they rarely consider incorporating the knowledge graph which can provide rich relational information among the commonsense concepts. To promote the ability of commonsense reasoning for text generation, we propose a novel knowledge graph augmented pre-trained language generation model KG-BART, which encompasses the complex relations of concepts through the knowledge graph and produces more logical and natural sentences as output. Moreover, KG-BART can leverage the graph attention to aggregate the rich concept semantics that enhances the model generalization on unseen concept sets. Experiments on benchmark CommonGen dataset verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach by comparing with several strong pre-trained language generation models, particularly KG-BART outperforms BART by 5.80, 4.60, in terms of BLEU-3, 4. Moreover, we also show that the generated context by our model can work as background scenarios to benefit downstream commonsense QA tasks.
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.
Retrieving object instances among cluttered scenes efficiently requires compact yet comprehensive regional image representations. Intuitively, object semantics can help build the index that focuses on the most relevant regions. However, due to the lack of bounding-box datasets for objects of interest among retrieval benchmarks, most recent work on regional representations has focused on either uniform or class-agnostic region selection. In this paper, we first fill the void by providing a new dataset of landmark bounding boxes, based on the Google Landmarks dataset, that includes $94k$ images with manually curated boxes from $15k$ unique landmarks. Then, we demonstrate how a trained landmark detector, using our new dataset, can be leveraged to index image regions and improve retrieval accuracy while being much more efficient than existing regional methods. In addition, we further introduce a novel regional aggregated selective match kernel (R-ASMK) to effectively combine information from detected regions into an improved holistic image representation. R-ASMK boosts image retrieval accuracy substantially at no additional memory cost, while even outperforming systems that index image regions independently. Our complete image retrieval system improves upon the previous state-of-the-art by significant margins on the Revisited Oxford and Paris datasets. Code and data will be released.