Learning representations through self-supervision on unlabeled data has proven highly effective for understanding diverse images. However, remote sensing images often have complex and densely populated scenes with multiple land objects and no clear foreground objects. This intrinsic property generates high object density, resulting in false positive pairs or missing contextual information in self-supervised learning. To address these problems, we propose a context-enhanced masked image modeling method (CtxMIM), a simple yet efficient MIM-based self-supervised learning for remote sensing image understanding. CtxMIM formulates original image patches as a reconstructive template and employs a Siamese framework to operate on two sets of image patches. A context-enhanced generative branch is introduced to provide contextual information through context consistency constraints in the reconstruction. With the simple and elegant design, CtxMIM encourages the pre-training model to learn object-level or pixel-level features on a large-scale dataset without specific temporal or geographical constraints. Finally, extensive experiments show that features learned by CtxMIM outperform fully supervised and state-of-the-art self-supervised learning methods on various downstream tasks, including land cover classification, semantic segmentation, object detection, and instance segmentation. These results demonstrate that CtxMIM learns impressive remote sensing representations with high generalization and transferability. Code and data will be made public available.
Existing 3D object detection suffers from expensive annotation costs and poor transferability to unknown data due to the domain gap, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims to generalize detection models trained in labeled source domains to perform robustly on unexplored target domains, providing a promising solution for cross-domain 3D object detection. Although Self-Training (ST) based cross-domain 3D detection methods with the assistance of pseudo-labeling techniques have achieved remarkable progress, they still face the issue of low-quality pseudo-labels when there are significant domain disparities due to the absence of a process for feature distribution alignment. While Adversarial Learning (AL) based methods can effectively align the feature distributions of the source and target domains, the inability to obtain labels in the target domain forces the adoption of asymmetric optimization losses, resulting in a challenging issue of source domain bias. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel unsupervised domain adaptation framework for 3D object detection via collaborating ST and AL, dubbed as STAL3D, unleashing the complementary advantages of pseudo labels and feature distribution alignment. Additionally, a Background Suppression Adversarial Learning (BS-AL) module and a Scale Filtering Module (SFM) are designed tailored for 3D cross-domain scenes, effectively alleviating the issues of the large proportion of background interference and source domain size bias. Our STAL3D achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple cross-domain tasks and even surpasses the Oracle results on Waymo $\rightarrow$ KITTI and Waymo $\rightarrow$ KITTI-rain.
Empathetic response generation is a desirable aspect of conversational agents, crucial for facilitating engaging and emotionally intelligent multi-turn conversations between humans and machines. Leveraging large language models for this task has shown promising results, yet challenges persist in ensuring both the empathetic quality of the responses and retention of the generalization performance of the models. In this paper, we propose a novel approach where we construct theory-driven preference datasets and use them to align LLMs with preference optimization algorithms to address these challenges. To measure empathetic response generation, we employ the EmpatheticDialogues dataset, assessing empathy with the diff-EPITOME and BERTscore metrics, and evaluate the generalization performance on the MMLU benchmark. We make all datasets, source code, and models publicly available.
Video understanding requires the extraction of rich spatio-temporal representations, which transformer models achieve through self-attention. Unfortunately, self-attention poses a computational burden. In NLP, Mamba has surfaced as an efficient alternative for transformers. However, Mamba's successes do not trivially extend to computer vision tasks, including those in video analysis. In this paper, we theoretically analyze the differences between self-attention and Mamba. We identify two limitations in Mamba's token processing: historical decay and element contradiction. We propose VideoMambaPro (VMP) that solves the identified limitations by adding masked backward computation and elemental residual connections to a VideoMamba backbone. VideoMambaPro shows state-of-the-art video action recognition performance compared to transformer models, and surpasses VideoMamba by clear margins: 7.9% and 8.1% top-1 on Kinetics-400 and Something-Something V2, respectively. Our VideoMambaPro-M model achieves 91.9% top-1 on Kinetics-400, only 0.2% below InternVideo2-6B but with only 1.2% of its parameters. The combination of high performance and efficiency makes VideoMambaPro an interesting alternative for transformer models.
Neuron-level interpretations aim to explain network behaviors and properties by investigating neurons responsive to specific perceptual or structural input patterns. Although there is emerging work in the vision and language domains, none is explored for acoustic models. To bridge the gap, we introduce $\textit{AND}$, the first $\textbf{A}$udio $\textbf{N}$etwork $\textbf{D}$issection framework that automatically establishes natural language explanations of acoustic neurons based on highly-responsive audio. $\textit{AND}$ features the use of LLMs to summarize mutual acoustic features and identities among audio. Extensive experiments are conducted to verify $\textit{AND}$'s precise and informative descriptions. In addition, we demonstrate a potential use of $\textit{AND}$ for audio machine unlearning by conducting concept-specific pruning based on the generated descriptions. Finally, we highlight two acoustic model behaviors with analysis by $\textit{AND}$: (i) models discriminate audio with a combination of basic acoustic features rather than high-level abstract concepts; (ii) training strategies affect model behaviors and neuron interpretability -- supervised training guides neurons to gradually narrow their attention, while self-supervised learning encourages neurons to be polysemantic for exploring high-level features.
Augmented video presentation tools provide a natural way for presenters to interact with their content, resulting in engaging experiences for remote audiences, such as when a presenter uses hand gestures to manipulate and direct attention to visual aids overlaid on their webcam feed. However, authoring and customizing these presentations can be challenging, particularly when presenting dynamic data visualization (i.e., animated charts). To this end, we introduce VisConductor, an authoring and presentation tool that equips presenters with the ability to configure gestures that control affect-varying visualization animation, foreshadow visualization transitions, direct attention to notable data points, and animate the disclosure of annotations. These gestures are integrated into configurable widgets, allowing presenters to trigger content transformations by executing gestures within widget boundaries, with feedback visible only to them. Altogether, our palette of widgets provides a level of flexibility appropriate for improvisational presentations and ad-hoc content transformations, such as when responding to audience engagement. To evaluate VisConductor, we conducted two studies focusing on presenters (N = 11) and audience members (N = 11). Our findings indicate that our approach taken with VisConductor can facilitate interactive and engaging remote presentations with dynamic visual aids. Reflecting on our findings, we also offer insights to inform the future of augmented video presentation tools.
Automating the annotation of scanned documents is challenging, requiring a balance between computational efficiency and accuracy. DocParseNet addresses this by combining deep learning and multi-modal learning to process both text and visual data. This model goes beyond traditional OCR and semantic segmentation, capturing the interplay between text and images to preserve contextual nuances in complex document structures. Our evaluations show that DocParseNet significantly outperforms conventional models, achieving mIoU scores of 49.12 on validation and 49.78 on the test set. This reflects a 58% accuracy improvement over state-of-the-art baseline models and an 18% gain compared to the UNext baseline. Remarkably, DocParseNet achieves these results with only 2.8 million parameters, reducing the model size by approximately 25 times and speeding up training by 5 times compared to other models. These metrics, coupled with a computational efficiency of 0.034 TFLOPs (BS=1), highlight DocParseNet's high performance in document annotation. The model's adaptability and scalability make it well-suited for real-world corporate document processing applications. The code is available at //github.com/ahmad-shirazi/DocParseNet
Autoencoders are popular neural networks that are able to compress high dimensional data to extract relevant latent information. TabNet is a state-of-the-art neural network model designed for tabular data that utilizes an autoencoder architecture for training. Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) is an emerging distributed machine learning paradigm that allows multiple parties to train a model collaboratively on vertically partitioned data while maintaining data privacy. The existing design of training autoencoders in VFL is to train a separate autoencoder in each participant and aggregate the latent representation later. This design could potentially break important correlations between feature data of participating parties, as each autoencoder is trained on locally available features while disregarding the features of others. In addition, traditional autoencoders are not specifically designed for tabular data, which is ubiquitous in VFL settings. Moreover, the impact of client failures during training on the model robustness is under-researched in the VFL scene. In this paper, we propose TabVFL, a distributed framework designed to improve latent representation learning using the joint features of participants. The framework (i) preserves privacy by mitigating potential data leakage with the addition of a fully-connected layer, (ii) conserves feature correlations by learning one latent representation vector, and (iii) provides enhanced robustness against client failures during training phase. Extensive experiments on five classification datasets show that TabVFL can outperform the prior work design, with 26.12% of improvement on f1-score.
Neuron-level interpretations aim to explain network behaviors and properties by investigating neurons responsive to specific perceptual or structural input patterns. Although there is emerging work in the vision and language domains, none is explored for acoustic models. To bridge the gap, we introduce $\textit{AND}$, the first $\textbf{A}$udio $\textbf{N}$etwork $\textbf{D}$issection framework that automatically establishes natural language explanations of acoustic neurons based on highly-responsive audio. $\textit{AND}$ features the use of LLMs to summarize mutual acoustic features and identities among audio. Extensive experiments are conducted to verify $\textit{AND}$'s precise and informative descriptions. In addition, we demonstrate a potential use of $\textit{AND}$ for audio machine unlearning by conducting concept-specific pruning based on the generated descriptions. Finally, we highlight two acoustic model behaviors with analysis by $\textit{AND}$: (i) models discriminate audio with a combination of basic acoustic features rather than high-level abstract concepts; (ii) training strategies affect model behaviors and neuron interpretability -- supervised training guides neurons to gradually narrow their attention, while self-supervised learning encourages neurons to be polysemantic for exploring high-level features.
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.
Distant supervision can effectively label data for relation extraction, but suffers from the noise labeling problem. Recent works mainly perform soft bag-level noise reduction strategies to find the relatively better samples in a sentence bag, which is suboptimal compared with making a hard decision of false positive samples in sentence level. In this paper, we introduce an adversarial learning framework, which we named DSGAN, to learn a sentence-level true-positive generator. Inspired by Generative Adversarial Networks, we regard the positive samples generated by the generator as the negative samples to train the discriminator. The optimal generator is obtained until the discrimination ability of the discriminator has the greatest decline. We adopt the generator to filter distant supervision training dataset and redistribute the false positive instances into the negative set, in which way to provide a cleaned dataset for relation classification. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision relation extraction comparing to state-of-the-art systems.