In this paper, we introduce the FOCAL (Ford-OLIVES Collaboration on Active Learning) dataset which enables the study of the impact of annotation-cost within a video active learning setting. Annotation-cost refers to the time it takes an annotator to label and quality-assure a given video sequence. A practical motivation for active learning research is to minimize annotation-cost by selectively labeling informative samples that will maximize performance within a given budget constraint. However, previous work in video active learning lacks real-time annotation labels for accurately assessing cost minimization and instead operates under the assumption that annotation-cost scales linearly with the amount of data to annotate. This assumption does not take into account a variety of real-world confounding factors that contribute to a nonlinear cost such as the effect of an assistive labeling tool and the variety of interactions within a scene such as occluded objects, weather, and motion of objects. FOCAL addresses this discrepancy by providing real annotation-cost labels for 126 video sequences across 69 unique city scenes with a variety of weather, lighting, and seasonal conditions. We also introduce a set of conformal active learning algorithms that take advantage of the sequential structure of video data in order to achieve a better trade-off between annotation-cost and performance while also reducing floating point operations (FLOPS) overhead by at least 77.67%. We show how these approaches better reflect how annotations on videos are done in practice through a sequence selection framework. We further demonstrate the advantage of these approaches by introducing two performance-cost metrics and show that the best conformal active learning method is cheaper than the best traditional active learning method by 113 hours.
In this paper, we exploit a fundamental principle of analog electronic circuitry, Kirchhoff's current law, to introduce a unique class of neural network models that we refer to as KirchhoffNet. KirchhoffNet establishes close connections with message passing neural networks and continuous-depth networks. We demonstrate that even in the absence of any traditional layers (such as convolution, pooling, or linear layers), KirchhoffNet attains 98.86% test accuracy on the MNIST dataset, comparable with state of the art (SOTA) results. What makes KirchhoffNet more intriguing is its potential in the realm of hardware. Contemporary deep neural networks are conventionally deployed on GPUs. In contrast, KirchhoffNet can be physically realized by an analog electronic circuit. Moreover, we justify that irrespective of the number of parameters within a KirchhoffNet, its forward calculation can always be completed within 1/f seconds, with f representing the hardware's clock frequency. This characteristic introduces a promising technology for implementing ultra-large-scale neural networks.
In this paper, we first assess and harness various Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) in the context of Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation (DGSS). Driven by the motivation that Leveraging Stronger pre-trained models and Fewer trainable parameters for Superior generalizability, we introduce a robust fine-tuning approach, namely Rein, to parameter-efficiently harness VFMs for DGSS. Built upon a set of trainable tokens, each linked to distinct instances, Rein precisely refines and forwards the feature maps from each layer to the next layer within the backbone. This process produces diverse refinements for different categories within a single image. With fewer trainable parameters, Rein efficiently fine-tunes VFMs for DGSS tasks, surprisingly surpassing full parameter fine-tuning. Extensive experiments across various settings demonstrate that Rein significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Remarkably, with just an extra 1% of trainable parameters within the frozen backbone, Rein achieves a mIoU of 68.1% on the Cityscapes, without accessing any real urban-scene datasets.Code is available at //github.com/w1oves/Rein.git.
We study the ability of LLMs to generate feedback for scientific papers and develop MARG, a feedback generation approach using multiple LLM instances that engage in internal discussion. By distributing paper text across agents, MARG can consume the full text of papers beyond the input length limitations of the base LLM, and by specializing agents and incorporating sub-tasks tailored to different comment types (experiments, clarity, impact) it improves the helpfulness and specificity of feedback. In a user study, baseline methods using GPT-4 were rated as producing generic or very generic comments more than half the time, and only 1.7 comments per paper were rated as good overall in the best baseline. Our system substantially improves the ability of GPT-4 to generate specific and helpful feedback, reducing the rate of generic comments from 60% to 29% and generating 3.7 good comments per paper (a 2.2x improvement).
In this paper, we present Flock, a cloud-native streaming query engine that leverages the on-demand elasticity of Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platforms to perform real-time data analytics. Traditional server-centric deployments often suffer from resource under- or over-provisioning, leading to resource wastage or performance degradation. Flock addresses these issues by providing more fine-grained elasticity that can dynamically match the per-query basis with continuous scaling, and its billing methods are more fine-grained with millisecond granularity, making it a low-cost solution for stream processing. Our approach, payload invocation, eliminates the need for external storage services and eliminates the requirement for a query coordinator in the data architecture. Our evaluation shows that Flock significantly outperforms state-of-the-art systems in terms of cost, especially on ARM processors, making it a promising solution for real-time data analytics on FaaS platforms.
In this paper, we raise a new issue on Unidentified Foreground Object (UFO) detection in 3D point clouds, which is a crucial technology in autonomous driving in the wild. UFO detection is challenging in that existing 3D object detectors encounter extremely hard challenges in both 3D localization and Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection. To tackle these challenges, we suggest a new UFO detection framework including three tasks: evaluation protocol, methodology, and benchmark. The evaluation includes a new approach to measure the performance on our goal, i.e. both localization and OOD detection of UFOs. The methodology includes practical techniques to enhance the performance of our goal. The benchmark is composed of the KITTI Misc benchmark and our additional synthetic benchmark for modeling a more diverse range of UFOs. The proposed framework consistently enhances performance by a large margin across all four baseline detectors: SECOND, PointPillars, PV-RCNN, and PartA2, giving insight for future work on UFO detection in the wild.
In this paper, we address the challenge of image resolution variation for the Segment Anything Model (SAM). SAM, known for its zero-shot generalizability, exhibits a performance degradation when faced with datasets with varying image sizes. Previous approaches tend to resize the image to a fixed size or adopt structure modifications, hindering the preservation of SAM's rich prior knowledge. Besides, such task-specific tuning necessitates a complete retraining of the model, which is cost-expensive and unacceptable for deployment in the downstream tasks. In this paper, we reformulate this issue as a length extrapolation problem, where token sequence length varies while maintaining a consistent patch size for images of different sizes. To this end, we propose Scalable Bias-Mode Attention Mask (BA-SAM) to enhance SAM's adaptability to varying image resolutions while eliminating the need for structure modifications. Firstly, we introduce a new scaling factor to ensure consistent magnitude in the attention layer's dot product values when the token sequence length changes. Secondly, we present a bias-mode attention mask that allows each token to prioritize neighboring information, mitigating the impact of untrained distant information. Our BA-SAM demonstrates efficacy in two scenarios: zero-shot and fine-tuning. Extensive evaluation on diverse datasets, including DIS5K, DUTS, ISIC, COD10K, and COCO, reveals its ability to significantly mitigate performance degradation in the zero-shot setting and achieve state-of-the-art performance with minimal fine-tuning. Furthermore, we propose a generalized model and benchmark, showcasing BA-SAM's generalizability across all four datasets simultaneously.
Gait datasets are essential for gait research. However, this paper observes that present benchmarks, whether conventional constrained or emerging real-world datasets, fall short regarding covariate diversity. To bridge this gap, we undertake an arduous 20-month effort to collect a cross-covariate gait recognition (CCGR) dataset. The CCGR dataset has 970 subjects and about 1.6 million sequences; almost every subject has 33 views and 53 different covariates. Compared to existing datasets, CCGR has both population and individual-level diversity. In addition, the views and covariates are well labeled, enabling the analysis of the effects of different factors. CCGR provides multiple types of gait data, including RGB, parsing, silhouette, and pose, offering researchers a comprehensive resource for exploration. In order to delve deeper into addressing cross-covariate gait recognition, we propose parsing-based gait recognition (ParsingGait) by utilizing the newly proposed parsing data. We have conducted extensive experiments. Our main results show: 1) Cross-covariate emerges as a pivotal challenge for practical applications of gait recognition. 2) ParsingGait demonstrates remarkable potential for further advancement. 3) Alarmingly, existing SOTA methods achieve less than 43% accuracy on the CCGR, highlighting the urgency of exploring cross-covariate gait recognition. Link: //github.com/ShinanZou/CCGR.
We present CoDEx, a set of knowledge graph completion datasets extracted from Wikidata and Wikipedia that improve upon existing knowledge graph completion benchmarks in scope and level of difficulty. In terms of scope, CoDEx comprises three knowledge graphs varying in size and structure, multilingual descriptions of entities and relations, and tens of thousands of hard negative triples that are plausible but verified to be false. To characterize CoDEx, we contribute thorough empirical analyses and benchmarking experiments. First, we analyze each CoDEx dataset in terms of logical relation patterns. Next, we report baseline link prediction and triple classification results on CoDEx for five extensively tuned embedding models. Finally, we differentiate CoDEx from the popular FB15K-237 knowledge graph completion dataset by showing that CoDEx covers more diverse and interpretable content, and is a more difficult link prediction benchmark. Data, code, and pretrained models are available at //bit.ly/2EPbrJs.
We consider an interesting problem-salient instance segmentation in this paper. Other than producing bounding boxes, our network also outputs high-quality instance-level segments. Taking into account the category-independent property of each target, we design a single stage salient instance segmentation framework, with a novel segmentation branch. Our new branch regards not only local context inside each detection window but also its surrounding context, enabling us to distinguish the instances in the same scope even with obstruction. Our network is end-to-end trainable and runs at a fast speed (40 fps when processing an image with resolution 320x320). We evaluate our approach on a publicly available benchmark and show that it outperforms other alternative solutions. We also provide a thorough analysis of the design choices to help readers better understand the functions of each part of our network. The source code can be found at \url{//github.com/RuochenFan/S4Net}.
We study the problem of learning to reason in large scale knowledge graphs (KGs). More specifically, we describe a novel reinforcement learning framework for learning multi-hop relational paths: we use a policy-based agent with continuous states based on knowledge graph embeddings, which reasons in a KG vector space by sampling the most promising relation to extend its path. In contrast to prior work, our approach includes a reward function that takes the accuracy, diversity, and efficiency into consideration. Experimentally, we show that our proposed method outperforms a path-ranking based algorithm and knowledge graph embedding methods on Freebase and Never-Ending Language Learning datasets.