In recent years, open-vocabulary (OV) dense visual prediction (such as OV object detection, semantic, instance and panoptic segmentations) has attracted increasing research attention. However, most of existing approaches are task-specific and individually tackle each task. In this paper, we propose a Unified Open-Vocabulary Network (UOVN) to jointly address four common dense prediction tasks. Compared with separate models, a unified network is more desirable for diverse industrial applications. Moreover, OV dense prediction training data is relatively less. Separate networks can only leverage task-relevant training data, while a unified approach can integrate diverse training data to boost individual tasks. We address two major challenges in unified OV prediction. Firstly, unlike unified methods for fixed-set predictions, OV networks are usually trained with multi-modal data. Therefore, we propose a multi-modal, multi-scale and multi-task (MMM) decoding mechanism to better leverage multi-modal data. Secondly, because UOVN uses data from different tasks for training, there are significant domain and task gaps. We present a UOVN training mechanism to reduce such gaps. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our UOVN.
We present a framework for model-free batch localization and SLAM. We use lifting functions to map a control-affine system into a high-dimensional space, where both the process model and the measurement model are rendered bilinear. During training, we solve a least-squares problem using groundtruth data to compute the high-dimensional model matrices associated with the lifted system purely from data. At inference time, we solve for the unknown robot trajectory and landmarks through an optimization problem, where constraints are introduced to keep the solution on the manifold of the lifting functions. The problem is efficiently solved using a sequential quadratic program (SQP), where the complexity of an SQP iteration scales linearly with the number of timesteps. Our algorithms, called Reduced Constrained Koopman Linearization Localization (RCKL-Loc) and Reduced Constrained Koopman Linearization SLAM (RCKL-SLAM), are validated experimentally in simulation and on two datasets: one with an indoor mobile robot equipped with a laser rangefinder that measures range to cylindrical landmarks, and one on a golf cart equipped with RFID range sensors. We compare RCKL-Loc and RCKL-SLAM with classic model-based nonlinear batch estimation. While RCKL-Loc and RCKL-SLAM have similar performance compared to their model-based counterparts, they outperform the model-based approaches when the prior model is imperfect, showing the potential benefit of the proposed data-driven technique.
Ising machines have emerged as a promising solution for rapidly solving NP-complete combinatorial optimization problems, surpassing the capabilities of traditional computing methods. By efficiently determining the ground state of the Hamiltonian during the annealing process, Ising machines can effectively complement CPUs in tackling optimization challenges. To realize these Ising machines, a bi-stable oscillator is essential to emulate the atomic spins and interactions of the Ising model. This study introduces a Josephson parametric oscillator (JPO)-based tile structure, serving as a fundamental unit for scalable superconductor-based Ising machines. Leveraging the bi-stable nature of JPOs, which are superconductor-based oscillators, the proposed machine can operate at frequencies of 7.5GHz while consuming significantly less power (by three orders of magnitude) than CMOS-based systems. Furthermore, the compatibility of the proposed tile structure with the Lechner-Hauke-Zoller (LHZ) architecture ensures its viability for large-scale integration. We conducted simulations of the tile in a noisy environment to validate its functionality. We verified its operational characteristics by comparing the results with the analytical solution of its Hamiltonian model. This verification demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of the JPO-based tile in implementing Ising machines, opening new avenues for efficient and scalable combinatorial optimization in quantum computing.
Similar to the revolution of open source code sharing, Artificial Intelligence (AI) model sharing is gaining increased popularity. However, the fast adaptation in the industry, lack of awareness, and ability to exploit the models make them significant attack vectors. By embedding malware in neurons, the malware can be delivered covertly, with minor or no impact on the neural network's performance. The covert attack will use the Least Significant Bits (LSB) weight attack since LSB has a minimal effect on the model accuracy, and as a result, the user will not notice it. Since there are endless ways to hide the attacks, we focus on a zero-trust prevention strategy based on AI model attack disarm and reconstruction. We proposed three types of model steganography weight disarm defense mechanisms. The first two are based on random bit substitution noise, and the other on model weight quantization. We demonstrate a 100\% prevention rate while the methods introduce a minimal decrease in model accuracy based on Qint8 and K-LRBP methods, which is an essential factor for improving AI security.
We propose a novel method for 3D object reconstruction from a sparse set of views captured from a 360-degree calibrated camera rig. We represent the object surface through a hybrid model that uses both an MLP-based neural representation and a triangle mesh. A key contribution in our work is a novel object-centric sampling scheme of the neural representation, where rays are shared among all views. This efficiently concentrates and reduces the number of samples used to update the neural model at each iteration. This sampling scheme relies on the mesh representation to ensure also that samples are well-distributed along its normals. The rendering is then performed efficiently by a differentiable renderer. We demonstrate that this sampling scheme results in a more effective training of the neural representation, does not require the additional supervision of segmentation masks, yields state of the art 3D reconstructions, and works with sparse views on the Google's Scanned Objects, Tank and Temples and MVMC Car datasets.
Vision transformer (ViT) and its variants have swept through visual learning leaderboards and offer state-of-the-art accuracy in tasks such as image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation by attending to different parts of the visual input and capturing long-range spatial dependencies. However, these models are large and computation-heavy. For instance, the recently proposed ViT-B model has 86M parameters making it impractical for deployment on resource-constrained devices. As a result, their deployment on mobile and edge scenarios is limited. In our work, we aim to take a step toward bringing vision transformers to the edge by utilizing popular model compression techniques such as distillation, pruning, and quantization. Our chosen application environment is an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that is battery-powered and memory-constrained, carrying a single-board computer on the scale of an NVIDIA Jetson Nano with 4GB of RAM. On the other hand, the UAV requires high accuracy close to that of state-of-the-art ViTs to ensure safe object avoidance in autonomous navigation, or correct localization of humans in search-and-rescue. Inference latency should also be minimized given the application requirements. Hence, our target is to enable rapid inference of a vision transformer on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano (4GB) with minimal accuracy loss. This allows us to deploy ViTs on resource-constrained devices, opening up new possibilities in surveillance, environmental monitoring, etc. Our implementation is made available at //github.com/chensy7/efficient-vit.
We present CM3Leon (pronounced "Chameleon"), a retrieval-augmented, token-based, decoder-only multi-modal language model capable of generating and infilling both text and images. CM3Leon uses the CM3 multi-modal architecture but additionally shows the extreme benefits of scaling up and tuning on more diverse instruction-style data. It is the first multi-modal model trained with a recipe adapted from text-only language models, including a large-scale retrieval-augmented pre-training stage and a second multi-task supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage. It is also a general-purpose model that can do both text-to-image and image-to-text generation, allowing us to introduce self-contained contrastive decoding methods that produce high-quality outputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this recipe is highly effective for multi-modal models. CM3Leon achieves state-of-the-art performance in text-to-image generation with 5x less training compute than comparable methods (zero-shot MS-COCO FID of 4.88). After SFT, CM3Leon can also demonstrate unprecedented levels of controllability in tasks ranging from language-guided image editing to image-controlled generation and segmentation.
We propose GAN-Supervised Learning, a framework for learning discriminative models and their GAN-generated training data jointly end-to-end. We apply our framework to the dense visual alignment problem. Inspired by the classic Congealing method, our GANgealing algorithm trains a Spatial Transformer to map random samples from a GAN trained on unaligned data to a common, jointly-learned target mode. We show results on eight datasets, all of which demonstrate our method successfully aligns complex data and discovers dense correspondences. GANgealing significantly outperforms past self-supervised correspondence algorithms and performs on-par with (and sometimes exceeds) state-of-the-art supervised correspondence algorithms on several datasets -- without making use of any correspondence supervision or data augmentation and despite being trained exclusively on GAN-generated data. For precise correspondence, we improve upon state-of-the-art supervised methods by as much as $3\times$. We show applications of our method for augmented reality, image editing and automated pre-processing of image datasets for downstream GAN training.
Knowledge graphs (KGs) serve as useful resources for various natural language processing applications. Previous KG completion approaches require a large number of training instances (i.e., head-tail entity pairs) for every relation. The real case is that for most of the relations, very few entity pairs are available. Existing work of one-shot learning limits method generalizability for few-shot scenarios and does not fully use the supervisory information; however, few-shot KG completion has not been well studied yet. In this work, we propose a novel few-shot relation learning model (FSRL) that aims at discovering facts of new relations with few-shot references. FSRL can effectively capture knowledge from heterogeneous graph structure, aggregate representations of few-shot references, and match similar entity pairs of reference set for every relation. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that FSRL outperforms the state-of-the-art.
Image-to-image translation aims to learn the mapping between two visual domains. There are two main challenges for many applications: 1) the lack of aligned training pairs and 2) multiple possible outputs from a single input image. In this work, we present an approach based on disentangled representation for producing diverse outputs without paired training images. To achieve diversity, we propose to embed images onto two spaces: a domain-invariant content space capturing shared information across domains and a domain-specific attribute space. Our model takes the encoded content features extracted from a given input and the attribute vectors sampled from the attribute space to produce diverse outputs at test time. To handle unpaired training data, we introduce a novel cross-cycle consistency loss based on disentangled representations. Qualitative results show that our model can generate diverse and realistic images on a wide range of tasks without paired training data. For quantitative comparisons, we measure realism with user study and diversity with a perceptual distance metric. We apply the proposed model to domain adaptation and show competitive performance when compared to the state-of-the-art on the MNIST-M and the LineMod datasets.
This paper presents a new multi-objective deep reinforcement learning (MODRL) framework based on deep Q-networks. We propose the use of linear and non-linear methods to develop the MODRL framework that includes both single-policy and multi-policy strategies. The experimental results on two benchmark problems including the two-objective deep sea treasure environment and the three-objective mountain car problem indicate that the proposed framework is able to converge to the optimal Pareto solutions effectively. The proposed framework is generic, which allows implementation of different deep reinforcement learning algorithms in different complex environments. This therefore overcomes many difficulties involved with standard multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) methods existing in the current literature. The framework creates a platform as a testbed environment to develop methods for solving various problems associated with the current MORL. Details of the framework implementation can be referred to //www.deakin.edu.au/~thanhthi/drl.htm.