The recent explosion of interest in multimodal applications has resulted in a wide selection of datasets and methods for representing and integrating information from different modalities. Despite these empirical advances, there remain fundamental research questions: How can we quantify the interactions that are necessary to solve a multimodal task? Subsequently, what are the most suitable multimodal models to capture these interactions? To answer these questions, we propose an information-theoretic approach to quantify the degree of redundancy, uniqueness, and synergy relating input modalities with an output task. We term these three measures as the PID statistics of a multimodal distribution (or PID for short), and introduce two new estimators for these PID statistics that scale to high-dimensional distributions. To validate PID estimation, we conduct extensive experiments on both synthetic datasets where the PID is known and on large-scale multimodal benchmarks where PID estimations are compared with human annotations. Finally, we demonstrate their usefulness in (1) quantifying interactions within multimodal datasets, (2) quantifying interactions captured by multimodal models, (3) principled approaches for model selection, and (4) three real-world case studies engaging with domain experts in pathology, mood prediction, and robotic perception where our framework helps to recommend strong multimodal models for each application.
Recently, Gaussian processes have been utilized to model the vector field of continuous dynamical systems. Bayesian inference for such models \cite{hegde2022variational} has been extensively studied and has been applied in tasks such as time series prediction, providing uncertain estimates. However, previous Gaussian Process Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) models may underperform on datasets with non-Gaussian process priors, as their constrained priors and mean-field posteriors may lack flexibility. To address this limitation, we incorporate normalizing flows to reparameterize the vector field of ODEs, resulting in a more flexible and expressive prior distribution. Additionally, due to the analytically tractable probability density functions of normalizing flows, we apply them to the posterior inference of GP ODEs, generating a non-Gaussian posterior. Through these dual applications of normalizing flows, our model improves accuracy and uncertainty estimates for Bayesian Gaussian Process ODEs. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated on simulated dynamical systems and real-world human motion data, including tasks such as time series prediction and missing data recovery. Experimental results indicate that our proposed method effectively captures model uncertainty while improving accuracy.
Automatically producing instructions to modify one's posture could open the door to endless applications, such as personalized coaching and in-home physical therapy. Tackling the reverse problem (i.e., refining a 3D pose based on some natural language feedback) could help for assisted 3D character animation or robot teaching, for instance. Although a few recent works explore the connections between natural language and 3D human pose, none focus on describing 3D body pose differences. In this paper, we tackle the problem of correcting 3D human poses with natural language. To this end, we introduce the PoseFix dataset, which consists of several thousand paired 3D poses and their corresponding text feedback, that describe how the source pose needs to be modified to obtain the target pose. We demonstrate the potential of this dataset on two tasks: (1) text-based pose editing, that aims at generating corrected 3D body poses given a query pose and a text modifier; and (2) correctional text generation, where instructions are generated based on the differences between two body poses.
The rise in popularity of ChatGPT and GPT-4 has significantly accelerated the development of large models, leading to the creation of numerous impressive large language models(LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs). These cutting-edge models owe their remarkable performance to high-quality data. However, the details of the training data used in leading paradigms are often kept confidential. This lack of transparency, coupled with the scarcity of open-source data, impedes further developments within the community. As a response, this paper presents "Wan Juan", a large-scale multimodal dataset composed of both Chinese and English data, collected from a wide range of web sources. The dataset incorporates text, image-text, and video modalities, with a total volume exceeding 2TB. It was utilized in the training of InternLM, a model that demonstrated significant advantages in multi-dimensional evaluations when compared to models of a similar scale. All data can be accessed at //opendatalab.org.cn/WanJuan1.0.
Video saliency prediction and detection are thriving research domains that enable computers to simulate the distribution of visual attention akin to how humans perceiving dynamic scenes. While many approaches have crafted task-specific training paradigms for either video saliency prediction or video salient object detection tasks, few attention has been devoted to devising a generalized saliency modeling framework that seamlessly bridges both these distinct tasks. In this study, we introduce the Unified Saliency Transformer (UniST) framework, which comprehensively utilizes the essential attributes of video saliency prediction and video salient object detection. In addition to extracting representations of frame sequences, a saliency-aware transformer is designed to learn the spatio-temporal representations at progressively increased resolutions, while incorporating effective cross-scale saliency information to produce a robust representation. Furthermore, a task-specific decoder is proposed to perform the final prediction for each task. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that explores designing a transformer structure for both saliency modeling tasks. Convincible experiments demonstrate that the proposed UniST achieves superior performance across seven challenging benchmarks for two tasks, and significantly outperforms the other state-of-the-art methods.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained prominence in the field of Legal Intelligence, offering potential applications in assisting legal professionals and laymen. However, the centralized training of these Legal LLMs raises data privacy concerns, as legal data is distributed among various institutions containing sensitive individual information. This paper addresses this challenge by exploring the integration of Legal LLMs with Federated Learning (FL) methodologies. By employing FL, Legal LLMs can be fine-tuned locally on devices or clients, and their parameters are aggregated and distributed on a central server, ensuring data privacy without directly sharing raw data. However, computation and communication overheads hinder the full fine-tuning of LLMs under the FL setting. Moreover, the distribution shift of legal data reduces the effectiveness of FL methods. To this end, in this paper, we propose the first Federated Legal Large Language Model (FedJudge) framework, which fine-tunes Legal LLMs efficiently and effectively. Specifically, FedJudge utilizes parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods to update only a few additional parameters during the FL training. Besides, we explore the continual learning methods to preserve the global model's important parameters when training local clients to mitigate the problem of data shifts. Extensive experimental results on three real-world datasets clearly validate the effectiveness of FedJudge. Code is released at //github.com/yuelinan/FedJudge.
Hand tracking is an important aspect of human-computer interaction and has a wide range of applications in extended reality devices. However, current hand motion capture methods suffer from various limitations. For instance, visual-based hand pose estimation is susceptible to self-occlusion and changes in lighting conditions, while IMU-based tracking gloves experience significant drift and are not resistant to external magnetic field interference. To address these issues, we propose a novel and low-cost hand-tracking glove that utilizes several MEMS-ultrasonic sensors attached to the fingers, to measure the distance matrix among the sensors. Our lightweight deep network then reconstructs the hand pose from the distance matrix. Our experimental results demonstrate that this approach is both accurate, size-agnostic, and robust to external interference. We also show the design logic for the sensor selection, sensor configurations, circuit diagram, as well as model architecture.
Face recognition technology has advanced significantly in recent years due largely to the availability of large and increasingly complex training datasets for use in deep learning models. These datasets, however, typically comprise images scraped from news sites or social media platforms and, therefore, have limited utility in more advanced security, forensics, and military applications. These applications require lower resolution, longer ranges, and elevated viewpoints. To meet these critical needs, we collected and curated the first and second subsets of a large multi-modal biometric dataset designed for use in the research and development (R&D) of biometric recognition technologies under extremely challenging conditions. Thus far, the dataset includes more than 350,000 still images and over 1,300 hours of video footage of approximately 1,000 subjects. To collect this data, we used Nikon DSLR cameras, a variety of commercial surveillance cameras, specialized long-rage R&D cameras, and Group 1 and Group 2 UAV platforms. The goal is to support the development of algorithms capable of accurately recognizing people at ranges up to 1,000 m and from high angles of elevation. These advances will include improvements to the state of the art in face recognition and will support new research in the area of whole-body recognition using methods based on gait and anthropometry. This paper describes methods used to collect and curate the dataset, and the dataset's characteristics at the current stage.
Designing and generating new data under targeted properties has been attracting various critical applications such as molecule design, image editing and speech synthesis. Traditional hand-crafted approaches heavily rely on expertise experience and intensive human efforts, yet still suffer from the insufficiency of scientific knowledge and low throughput to support effective and efficient data generation. Recently, the advancement of deep learning induces expressive methods that can learn the underlying representation and properties of data. Such capability provides new opportunities in figuring out the mutual relationship between the structural patterns and functional properties of the data and leveraging such relationship to generate structural data given the desired properties. This article provides a systematic review of this promising research area, commonly known as controllable deep data generation. Firstly, the potential challenges are raised and preliminaries are provided. Then the controllable deep data generation is formally defined, a taxonomy on various techniques is proposed and the evaluation metrics in this specific domain are summarized. After that, exciting applications of controllable deep data generation are introduced and existing works are experimentally analyzed and compared. Finally, the promising future directions of controllable deep data generation are highlighted and five potential challenges are identified.
The existence of representative datasets is a prerequisite of many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, the subsequent application of these models often involves scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. The reasons for this are manifold and range from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable use of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is a huge challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches, and eventually to increase the generalization capability of these models. Furthermore, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-based models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories integration, extraction and conformity. Special attention is given to applications in the field of autonomous driving.
The design of deep graph models still remains to be investigated and the crucial part is how to explore and exploit the knowledge from different hops of neighbors in an efficient way. In this paper, we propose a novel RNN-like deep graph neural network architecture by incorporating AdaBoost into the computation of network; and the proposed graph convolutional network called AdaGCN~(AdaBoosting Graph Convolutional Network) has the ability to efficiently extract knowledge from high-order neighbors and integrate knowledge from different hops of neighbors into the network in an AdaBoost way. We also present the architectural difference between AdaGCN and existing graph convolutional methods to show the benefits of our proposal. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art prediction performance and the computational advantage of our approach AdaGCN.