Recent advancements in Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and related rationale-based works have significantly improved the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in complex reasoning tasks. With the evolution of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), enhancing their capability to tackle complex multimodal reasoning problems is a crucial frontier. However, incorporating multimodal rationales in CoT has yet to be thoroughly investigated. We propose the Image-of-Thought (IoT) prompting method, which helps MLLMs to extract visual rationales step-by-step. Specifically, IoT prompting can automatically design critical visual information extraction operations based on the input images and questions. Each step of visual information refinement identifies specific visual rationales that support answers to complex visual reasoning questions. Beyond the textual CoT, IoT simultaneously utilizes visual and textual rationales to help MLLMs understand complex multimodal information. IoT prompting has improved zero-shot visual reasoning performance across various visual understanding tasks in different MLLMs. Moreover, the step-by-step visual feature explanations generated by IoT prompting elucidate the visual reasoning process, aiding in analyzing the cognitive processes of large multimodal models
Automated Vehicle (AV) validation based on simulated testing requires unbiased evaluation and high efficiency. One effective solution is to increase the exposure to risky rare events while reweighting the probability measure. However, characterizing the distribution of risky events is particularly challenging due to the paucity of samples and the temporality of continuous scenario variables. To solve it, we devise a method to represent, generate, and reweight the distribution of risky rare events. We decompose the temporal evolution of continuous variables into distribution components based on conditional probability. By introducing the Risk Indicator Function, the distribution of risky rare events is theoretically precipitated out of naturalistic driving distribution. This targeted distribution is practically generated via Normalizing Flow, which achieves exact and tractable probability evaluation of intricate distribution. The rare event distribution is then demonstrated as the advantageous Importance Sampling distribution. We also promote the technique of temporal Importance Sampling. The combined method, named as TrimFlow, is executed to estimate the collision rate of Car-following scenarios as a tentative practice. The results showed that sampling background vehicle maneuvers from rare event distribution could evolve testing scenarios to hazardous states. TrimFlow reduced 86.1% of tests compared to generating testing scenarios according to their exposure in the naturalistic driving environment. In addition, the TrimFlow method is not limited to one specific type of functional scenario.
Despite the substantial advancements in Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models, their susceptibility to adversarial attacks poses a significant challenge. Existing work rarely studies the transferability of attacks on VLP models, resulting in a substantial performance gap from white-box attacks. We observe that prior work overlooks the interaction mechanisms between modalities, which plays a crucial role in understanding the intricacies of VLP models. In response, we propose a novel attack, called Collaborative Multimodal Interaction Attack (CMI-Attack), leveraging modality interaction through embedding guidance and interaction enhancement. Specifically, attacking text at the embedding level while preserving semantics, as well as utilizing interaction image gradients to enhance constraints on perturbations of texts and images. Significantly, in the image-text retrieval task on Flickr30K dataset, CMI-Attack raises the transfer success rates from ALBEF to TCL, $\text{CLIP}_{\text{ViT}}$ and $\text{CLIP}_{\text{CNN}}$ by 8.11%-16.75% over state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, CMI-Attack also demonstrates superior performance in cross-task generalization scenarios. Our work addresses the underexplored realm of transfer attacks on VLP models, shedding light on the importance of modality interaction for enhanced adversarial robustness.
Domain-specific Entity Recognition holds significant importance in legal contexts, serving as a fundamental task that supports various applications such as question-answering systems, text summarization, machine translation, sentiment analysis, and information retrieval specifically within case law documents. Recent advancements have highlighted the efficacy of Large Language Models in natural language processing tasks, demonstrating their capability to accurately detect and classify domain-specific facts (entities) from specialized texts like clinical and financial documents. This research investigates the application of Large Language Models in identifying domain-specific entities (e.g., courts, petitioner, judge, lawyer, respondents, FIR nos.) within case law documents, with a specific focus on their aptitude for handling domain-specific language complexity and contextual variations. The study evaluates the performance of state-of-the-art Large Language Model architectures, including Large Language Model Meta AI 3, Mistral, and Gemma, in the context of extracting judicial facts tailored to Indian judicial texts. Mistral and Gemma emerged as the top-performing models, showcasing balanced precision and recall crucial for accurate entity identification. These findings confirm the value of Large Language Models in judicial documents and demonstrate how they can facilitate and quicken scientific research by producing precise, organised data outputs that are appropriate for in-depth examination.
Data augmentation is widely applied and has shown its benefits in different machine learning tasks. However, as recently observed in some downstream tasks, data augmentation may introduce an unfair impact on classifications. While it can improve the performance of some classes, it can actually be detrimental for other classes, which can be problematic in some application domains. In this paper, to counteract this phenomenon, we propose a FAir Classification approach with a Two-player game (FACT). We first formulate the training of a classifier with data augmentation as a fair optimization problem, which can be further written as an adversarial two-player game. Following this formulation, we propose a novel multiplicative weight optimization algorithm, for which we theoretically prove that it can converge to a solution that is fair over classes. Interestingly, our formulation also reveals that this fairness issue over classes is not due to data augmentation only, but is in fact a general phenomenon. Our empirical experiments demonstrate that the performance of our learned classifiers is indeed more fairly distributed over classes in five datasets, with only limited impact on the average accuracy.
Large language models (LLMs) propel the prosperity of interactive AI applications showcased by ChatGPT that demand timely response of inference services. However, LLM inference is computation intensive and memory intensive, and improper parameter configuration at LLM platforms may exacerbate the inference time. In this paper, we analyze the impact of LLM output token distribution on the inference queueing delay, where the max-token clipping and the batched inference are considered. By formulating an M/G/1 model, we observe that enforcing a maximum output token limit on a very small fraction of inference requests can significantly reduce the queueing delay, and our model facilitates the selection of the optimal limit. For the batch inference, we model the service process as a bulk queue in which the batch processing time is affected by the batch size and the maximum token size inside this batch jointly. The queueing delays of the batching of all buffered requests (dynamic batching), the batching of constant number of requests (fixed batching), and the batching without intra-batch waiting (elastic batching) are derived. Experimental results show that our mathematical models coincide with the event-driven simulations well.
Multimodal emotion recognition has recently gained much attention since it can leverage diverse and complementary relationships over multiple modalities (e.g., audio, visual, biosignals, etc.), and can provide some robustness to noisy modalities. Most state-of-the-art methods for audio-visual (A-V) fusion rely on recurrent networks or conventional attention mechanisms that do not effectively leverage the complementary nature of A-V modalities. In this paper, we focus on dimensional emotion recognition based on the fusion of facial and vocal modalities extracted from videos. Specifically, we propose a joint cross-attention model that relies on the complementary relationships to extract the salient features across A-V modalities, allowing for accurate prediction of continuous values of valence and arousal. The proposed fusion model efficiently leverages the inter-modal relationships, while reducing the heterogeneity between the features. In particular, it computes the cross-attention weights based on correlation between the combined feature representation and individual modalities. By deploying the combined A-V feature representation into the cross-attention module, the performance of our fusion module improves significantly over the vanilla cross-attention module. Experimental results on validation-set videos from the AffWild2 dataset indicate that our proposed A-V fusion model provides a cost-effective solution that can outperform state-of-the-art approaches. The code is available on GitHub: //github.com/praveena2j/JointCrossAttentional-AV-Fusion.
The existing works on object-level language grounding with 3D objects mostly focus on improving performance by utilizing the off-the-shelf pre-trained models to capture features, such as viewpoint selection or geometric priors. However, they have failed to consider exploring the cross-modal representation of language-vision alignment in the cross-domain field. To answer this problem, we propose a novel method called Domain Adaptation for Language Grounding (DA4LG) with 3D objects. Specifically, the proposed DA4LG consists of a visual adapter module with multi-task learning to realize vision-language alignment by comprehensive multimodal feature representation. Experimental results demonstrate that DA4LG competitively performs across visual and non-visual language descriptions, independent of the completeness of observation. DA4LG achieves state-of-the-art performance in the single-view setting and multi-view setting with the accuracy of 83.8% and 86.8% respectively in the language grounding benchmark SNARE. The simulation experiments show the well-practical and generalized performance of DA4LG compared to the existing methods. Our project is available at //sites.google.com/view/da4lg.
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.
This paper provides a comprehensive overview of recent advancements in autonomous electric vehicles (AEVs) within the specified region. It elaborates on the progress and comparative analysis of diverse subsystems, including energy storage, cell balancing for battery systems, vehicle charger layouts, electric vehicle motor mechanisms, and braking systems. Furthermore, this paper showcases several prototype autonomous electric vehicles as conclusive study findings.
As one of the most advanced techniques in AI, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques can offer reliable and up-to-date external knowledge, providing huge convenience for numerous tasks. Particularly in the era of AI-generated content (AIGC), the powerful capacity of retrieval in RAG in providing additional knowledge enables retrieval-augmented generation to assist existing generative AI in producing high-quality outputs. Recently, large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated revolutionary abilities in language understanding and generation, while still facing inherent limitations, such as hallucinations and out-of-date internal knowledge. Given the powerful abilities of RAG in providing the latest and helpful auxiliary information, retrieval-augmented large language models have emerged to harness external and authoritative knowledge bases, rather than solely relying on the model's internal knowledge, to augment the generation quality of LLMs. In this survey, we comprehensively review existing research studies in retrieval-augmented large language models (RA-LLMs), covering three primary technical perspectives: architectures, training strategies, and applications. As the preliminary knowledge, we briefly introduce the foundations and recent advances of LLMs. Then, to illustrate the practical significance of RAG for LLMs, we categorize mainstream relevant work by application areas, detailing specifically the challenges of each and the corresponding capabilities of RA-LLMs. Finally, to deliver deeper insights, we discuss current limitations and several promising directions for future research.