In contemporary design practices, the integration of computer vision and generative artificial intelligence (genAI) represents a transformative shift towards more interactive and inclusive processes. These technologies offer new dimensions of image analysis and generation, which are particularly relevant in the context of urban landscape reconstruction. This paper presents a novel workflow encapsulated within a prototype application, designed to leverage the synergies between advanced image segmentation and diffusion models for a comprehensive approach to urban design. Our methodology encompasses the OneFormer model for detailed image segmentation and the Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL) diffusion model, implemented through ControlNet, for generating images from textual descriptions. Validation results indicated a high degree of performance by the prototype application, showcasing significant accuracy in both object detection and text-to-image generation. This was evidenced by superior Intersection over Union (IoU) and CLIP scores across iterative evaluations for various categories of urban landscape features. Preliminary testing included utilising UrbanGenAI as an educational tool enhancing the learning experience in design pedagogy, and as a participatory instrument facilitating community-driven urban planning. Early results suggested that UrbanGenAI not only advances the technical frontiers of urban landscape reconstruction but also provides significant pedagogical and participatory planning benefits. The ongoing development of UrbanGenAI aims to further validate its effectiveness across broader contexts and integrate additional features such as real-time feedback mechanisms and 3D modelling capabilities. Keywords: generative AI; panoptic image segmentation; diffusion models; urban landscape design; design pedagogy; co-design
As technological advancements continue to expand the capabilities of multi unmanned-aerial-vehicle systems (mUAV), human operators face challenges in scalability and efficiency due to the complex cognitive load and operations associated with motion adjustments and team coordination. Such cognitive demands limit the feasible size of mUAV teams and necessitate extensive operator training, impeding broader adoption. This paper developed a Hand Gesture Based Interactive Control (HGIC), a novel interface system that utilize computer vision techniques to intuitively translate hand gestures into modular commands for robot teaming. Through learning control models, these commands enable efficient and scalable mUAV motion control and adjustments. HGIC eliminates the need for specialized hardware and offers two key benefits: 1) Minimal training requirements through natural gestures; and 2) Enhanced scalability and efficiency via adaptable commands. By reducing the cognitive burden on operators, HGIC opens the door for more effective large-scale mUAV applications in complex, dynamic, and uncertain scenarios. HGIC will be open-sourced after the paper being published online for the research community, aiming to drive forward innovations in human-mUAV interactions.
Cooking recipes are challenging to translate to robot plans as they feature rich linguistic complexity, temporally-extended interconnected tasks, and an almost infinite space of possible actions. Our key insight is that combining a source of cooking domain knowledge with a formalism that captures the temporal richness of cooking recipes could enable the extraction of unambiguous, robot-executable plans. In this work, we use Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) as a formal language expressive enough to model the temporal nature of cooking recipes. Leveraging a pretrained Large Language Model (LLM), we present Cook2LTL, a system that translates instruction steps from an arbitrary cooking recipe found on the internet to a set of LTL formulae, grounding high-level cooking actions to a set of primitive actions that are executable by a manipulator in a kitchen environment. Cook2LTL makes use of a caching scheme that dynamically builds a queryable action library at runtime. We instantiate Cook2LTL in a realistic simulation environment (AI2-THOR), and evaluate its performance across a series of cooking recipes. We demonstrate that our system significantly decreases LLM API calls (-51%), latency (-59%), and cost (-42%) compared to a baseline that queries the LLM for every newly encountered action at runtime.
Infrared-visible object detection aims to achieve robust even full-day object detection by fusing the complementary information of infrared and visible images. However, highly dynamically variable complementary characteristics and commonly existing modality misalignment make the fusion of complementary information difficult. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Adaptive Multispectral Detection Transformer (DAMSDet) to simultaneously address these two challenges. Specifically, we propose a Modality Competitive Query Selection strategy to provide useful prior information. This strategy can dynamically select basic salient modality feature representation for each object. To effectively mine the complementary information and adapt to misalignment situations, we propose a Multispectral Deformable Cross-attention module to adaptively sample and aggregate multi-semantic level features of infrared and visible images for each object. In addition, we further adopt the cascade structure of DETR to better mine complementary information. Experiments on four public datasets of different scenes demonstrate significant improvements compared to other state-of-the-art methods. The code will be released at //github.com/gjj45/DAMSDet.
Amidst task-specific learning-based control synthesis frameworks that achieve impressive empirical results, a unified framework that systematically constructs an optimal policy for sufficiently solving a general notion of a task is absent. Hence, we propose a theoretical framework for a task-centered control synthesis leveraging two critical ideas: 1) oracle-guided policy optimization for the non-limiting integration of sub-optimal task-based priors to guide the policy optimization and 2) task-vital multimodality to break down solving a task into executing a sequence of behavioral modes. The proposed approach results in highly agile parkour and diving on a 16-DoF dynamic bipedal robot. The obtained policy advances indefinitely on a track, performing leaps and jumps of varying lengths and heights for the parkour task. Corresponding to the dive task, the policy demonstrates front, back, and side flips from various initial heights. Finally, we introduce a novel latent mode space reachability analysis to study our policies' versatility and generalization by computing a feasible mode set function through which we certify a set of failure-free modes for our policy to perform at any given state.
ChipNeMo aims to explore the applications of large language models (LLMs) for industrial chip design. Instead of directly deploying off-the-shelf commercial or open-source LLMs, we instead adopt the following domain adaptation techniques: domain-adaptive tokenization, domain-adaptive continued pretraining, model alignment with domain-specific instructions, and domain-adapted retrieval models. We evaluate these methods on three selected LLM applications for chip design: an engineering assistant chatbot, EDA script generation, and bug summarization and analysis. Our evaluations demonstrate that domain-adaptive pretraining of language models, can lead to superior performance in domain related downstream tasks compared to their base LLaMA2 counterparts, without degradations in generic capabilities. In particular, our largest model, ChipNeMo-70B, outperforms the highly capable GPT-4 on two of our use cases, namely engineering assistant chatbot and EDA scripts generation, while exhibiting competitive performance on bug summarization and analysis. These results underscore the potential of domain-specific customization for enhancing the effectiveness of large language models in specialized applications.
Neural machine translation (NMT) has progressed rapidly in the past few years, promising improvements and quality translations for different languages. Evaluation of this task is crucial to determine the quality of the translation. Overall, insufficient emphasis is placed on the actual sense of the translation in traditional methods. We propose a bidirectional semantic-based evaluation method designed to assess the sense distance of the translation from the source text. This approach employs the comprehensive multilingual encyclopedic dictionary BabelNet. Through the calculation of the semantic distance between the source and its back translation of the output, our method introduces a quantifiable approach that empowers sentence comparison on the same linguistic level. Factual analysis shows a strong correlation between the average evaluation scores generated by our method and the human assessments across various machine translation systems for English-German language pair. Finally, our method proposes a new multilingual approach to rank MT systems without the need for parallel corpora.
The rapid development of deep learning has made a great progress in segmentation, one of the fundamental tasks of computer vision. However, the current segmentation algorithms mostly rely on the availability of pixel-level annotations, which are often expensive, tedious, and laborious. To alleviate this burden, the past years have witnessed an increasing attention in building label-efficient, deep-learning-based segmentation algorithms. This paper offers a comprehensive review on label-efficient segmentation methods. To this end, we first develop a taxonomy to organize these methods according to the supervision provided by different types of weak labels (including no supervision, coarse supervision, incomplete supervision and noisy supervision) and supplemented by the types of segmentation problems (including semantic segmentation, instance segmentation and panoptic segmentation). Next, we summarize the existing label-efficient segmentation methods from a unified perspective that discusses an important question: how to bridge the gap between weak supervision and dense prediction -- the current methods are mostly based on heuristic priors, such as cross-pixel similarity, cross-label constraint, cross-view consistency, cross-image relation, etc. Finally, we share our opinions about the future research directions for label-efficient deep segmentation.
The incredible development of federated learning (FL) has benefited various tasks in the domains of computer vision and natural language processing, and the existing frameworks such as TFF and FATE has made the deployment easy in real-world applications. However, federated graph learning (FGL), even though graph data are prevalent, has not been well supported due to its unique characteristics and requirements. The lack of FGL-related framework increases the efforts for accomplishing reproducible research and deploying in real-world applications. Motivated by such strong demand, in this paper, we first discuss the challenges in creating an easy-to-use FGL package and accordingly present our implemented package FederatedScope-GNN (FS-G), which provides (1) a unified view for modularizing and expressing FGL algorithms; (2) comprehensive DataZoo and ModelZoo for out-of-the-box FGL capability; (3) an efficient model auto-tuning component; and (4) off-the-shelf privacy attack and defense abilities. We validate the effectiveness of FS-G by conducting extensive experiments, which simultaneously gains many valuable insights about FGL for the community. Moreover, we employ FS-G to serve the FGL application in real-world E-commerce scenarios, where the attained improvements indicate great potential business benefits. We publicly release FS-G, as submodules of FederatedScope, at //github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope to promote FGL's research and enable broad applications that would otherwise be infeasible due to the lack of a dedicated package.
Hierarchical structures are popular in recent vision transformers, however, they require sophisticated designs and massive datasets to work well. In this paper, we explore the idea of nesting basic local transformers on non-overlapping image blocks and aggregating them in a hierarchical way. We find that the block aggregation function plays a critical role in enabling cross-block non-local information communication. This observation leads us to design a simplified architecture that requires minor code changes upon the original vision transformer. The benefits of the proposed judiciously-selected design are threefold: (1) NesT converges faster and requires much less training data to achieve good generalization on both ImageNet and small datasets like CIFAR; (2) when extending our key ideas to image generation, NesT leads to a strong decoder that is 8$\times$ faster than previous transformer-based generators; and (3) we show that decoupling the feature learning and abstraction processes via this nested hierarchy in our design enables constructing a novel method (named GradCAT) for visually interpreting the learned model. Source code is available //github.com/google-research/nested-transformer.
The cross-domain recommendation technique is an effective way of alleviating the data sparsity in recommender systems by leveraging the knowledge from relevant domains. Transfer learning is a class of algorithms underlying these techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel transfer learning approach for cross-domain recommendation by using neural networks as the base model. We assume that hidden layers in two base networks are connected by cross mappings, leading to the collaborative cross networks (CoNet). CoNet enables dual knowledge transfer across domains by introducing cross connections from one base network to another and vice versa. CoNet is achieved in multi-layer feedforward networks by adding dual connections and joint loss functions, which can be trained efficiently by back-propagation. The proposed model is evaluated on two real-world datasets and it outperforms baseline models by relative improvements of 3.56\% in MRR and 8.94\% in NDCG, respectively.