new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

byAK and the research community

Mar 11

Interact, Instruct to Improve: A LLM-Driven Parallel Actor-Reasoner Framework for Enhancing Autonomous Vehicle Interactions

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) have entered the commercialization stage, but their limited ability to interact and express intentions still poses challenges in interactions with Human-driven Vehicles (HVs). Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enable bidirectional human-machine communication, but the conflict between slow inference speed and the need for real-time decision-making challenges practical deployment. To address these issues, this paper introduces a parallel Actor-Reasoner framework designed to enable explicit bidirectional AV-HV interactions across multiple scenarios. First, by facilitating interactions between the LLM-driven Reasoner and heterogeneous simulated HVs during training, an interaction memory database, referred to as the Actor, is established. Then, by introducing the memory partition module and the two-layer memory retrieval module, the Actor's ability to handle heterogeneous HVs is significantly enhanced. Ablation studies and comparisons with other decision-making methods demonstrate that the proposed Actor-Reasoner framework significantly improves safety and efficiency. Finally, with the combination of the external Human-Machine Interface (eHMI) information derived from Reasoner's reasoning and the feasible action solutions retrieved from the Actor, the effectiveness of the proposed Actor-Reasoner is confirmed in multi-scenario field interactions. Our code is available at https://github.com/FanGShiYuu/Actor-Reasoner.

Interactive Natural Language Processing

Interactive Natural Language Processing (iNLP) has emerged as a novel paradigm within the field of NLP, aimed at addressing limitations in existing frameworks while aligning with the ultimate goals of artificial intelligence. This paradigm considers language models as agents capable of observing, acting, and receiving feedback iteratively from external entities. Specifically, language models in this context can: (1) interact with humans for better understanding and addressing user needs, personalizing responses, aligning with human values, and improving the overall user experience; (2) interact with knowledge bases for enriching language representations with factual knowledge, enhancing the contextual relevance of responses, and dynamically leveraging external information to generate more accurate and informed responses; (3) interact with models and tools for effectively decomposing and addressing complex tasks, leveraging specialized expertise for specific subtasks, and fostering the simulation of social behaviors; and (4) interact with environments for learning grounded representations of language, and effectively tackling embodied tasks such as reasoning, planning, and decision-making in response to environmental observations. This paper offers a comprehensive survey of iNLP, starting by proposing a unified definition and framework of the concept. We then provide a systematic classification of iNLP, dissecting its various components, including interactive objects, interaction interfaces, and interaction methods. We proceed to delve into the evaluation methodologies used in the field, explore its diverse applications, scrutinize its ethical and safety issues, and discuss prospective research directions. This survey serves as an entry point for researchers who are interested in this rapidly evolving area and offers a broad view of the current landscape and future trajectory of iNLP.

Interactive Medical Image Segmentation: A Benchmark Dataset and Baseline

Interactive Medical Image Segmentation (IMIS) has long been constrained by the limited availability of large-scale, diverse, and densely annotated datasets, which hinders model generalization and consistent evaluation across different models. In this paper, we introduce the IMed-361M benchmark dataset, a significant advancement in general IMIS research. First, we collect and standardize over 6.4 million medical images and their corresponding ground truth masks from multiple data sources. Then, leveraging the strong object recognition capabilities of a vision foundational model, we automatically generated dense interactive masks for each image and ensured their quality through rigorous quality control and granularity management. Unlike previous datasets, which are limited by specific modalities or sparse annotations, IMed-361M spans 14 modalities and 204 segmentation targets, totaling 361 million masks-an average of 56 masks per image. Finally, we developed an IMIS baseline network on this dataset that supports high-quality mask generation through interactive inputs, including clicks, bounding boxes, text prompts, and their combinations. We evaluate its performance on medical image segmentation tasks from multiple perspectives, demonstrating superior accuracy and scalability compared to existing interactive segmentation models. To facilitate research on foundational models in medical computer vision, we release the IMed-361M and model at https://github.com/uni-medical/IMIS-Bench.

Interactive3D: Create What You Want by Interactive 3D Generation

3D object generation has undergone significant advancements, yielding high-quality results. However, fall short of achieving precise user control, often yielding results that do not align with user expectations, thus limiting their applicability. User-envisioning 3D object generation faces significant challenges in realizing its concepts using current generative models due to limited interaction capabilities. Existing methods mainly offer two approaches: (i) interpreting textual instructions with constrained controllability, or (ii) reconstructing 3D objects from 2D images. Both of them limit customization to the confines of the 2D reference and potentially introduce undesirable artifacts during the 3D lifting process, restricting the scope for direct and versatile 3D modifications. In this work, we introduce Interactive3D, an innovative framework for interactive 3D generation that grants users precise control over the generative process through extensive 3D interaction capabilities. Interactive3D is constructed in two cascading stages, utilizing distinct 3D representations. The first stage employs Gaussian Splatting for direct user interaction, allowing modifications and guidance of the generative direction at any intermediate step through (i) Adding and Removing components, (ii) Deformable and Rigid Dragging, (iii) Geometric Transformations, and (iv) Semantic Editing. Subsequently, the Gaussian splats are transformed into InstantNGP. We introduce a novel (v) Interactive Hash Refinement module to further add details and extract the geometry in the second stage. Our experiments demonstrate that Interactive3D markedly improves the controllability and quality of 3D generation. Our project webpage is available at https://interactive-3d.github.io/.

FramePainter: Endowing Interactive Image Editing with Video Diffusion Priors

Interactive image editing allows users to modify images through visual interaction operations such as drawing, clicking, and dragging. Existing methods construct such supervision signals from videos, as they capture how objects change with various physical interactions. However, these models are usually built upon text-to-image diffusion models, so necessitate (i) massive training samples and (ii) an additional reference encoder to learn real-world dynamics and visual consistency. In this paper, we reformulate this task as an image-to-video generation problem, so that inherit powerful video diffusion priors to reduce training costs and ensure temporal consistency. Specifically, we introduce FramePainter as an efficient instantiation of this formulation. Initialized with Stable Video Diffusion, it only uses a lightweight sparse control encoder to inject editing signals. Considering the limitations of temporal attention in handling large motion between two frames, we further propose matching attention to enlarge the receptive field while encouraging dense correspondence between edited and source image tokens. We highlight the effectiveness and efficiency of FramePainter across various of editing signals: it domainantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods with far less training data, achieving highly seamless and coherent editing of images, \eg, automatically adjust the reflection of the cup. Moreover, FramePainter also exhibits exceptional generalization in scenarios not present in real-world videos, \eg, transform the clownfish into shark-like shape. Our code will be available at https://github.com/YBYBZhang/FramePainter.

Interactive Agents: Simulating Counselor-Client Psychological Counseling via Role-Playing LLM-to-LLM Interactions

Virtual counselors powered by large language models (LLMs) aim to create interactive support systems that effectively assist clients struggling with mental health challenges. To replicate counselor-client conversations, researchers have built an online mental health platform that allows professional counselors to provide clients with text-based counseling services for about an hour per session. Notwithstanding its effectiveness, challenges exist as human annotation is time-consuming, cost-intensive, privacy-protected, and not scalable. To address this issue and investigate the applicability of LLMs in psychological counseling conversation simulation, we propose a framework that employs two LLMs via role-playing for simulating counselor-client interactions. Our framework involves two LLMs, one acting as a client equipped with a specific and real-life user profile and the other playing the role of an experienced counselor, generating professional responses using integrative therapy techniques. We implement both the counselor and the client by zero-shot prompting the GPT-4 model. In order to assess the effectiveness of LLMs in simulating counselor-client interactions and understand the disparities between LLM- and human-generated conversations, we evaluate the synthetic data from various perspectives. We begin by assessing the client's performance through automatic evaluations. Next, we analyze and compare the disparities between dialogues generated by the LLM and those generated by professional counselors. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments to thoroughly examine the performance of our LLM-based counselor trained with synthetic interactive dialogues by benchmarking against state-of-the-art models for mental health.

Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon Interactive LLM Agents

Interactive digital agents (IDAs) leverage APIs of stateful digital environments to perform tasks in response to user requests. While IDAs powered by instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) can react to feedback from interface invocations in multi-step exchanges, they have not been trained in their respective digital environments. Prior methods accomplish less than half of tasks in sophisticated benchmarks such as AppWorld. We present a reinforcement learning (RL) approach that trains IDAs directly in their target environments. We formalize this training as a partially observable Markov decision process and derive LOOP, a data- and memory-efficient variant of proximal policy optimization. LOOP uses no value network and maintains exactly one copy of the underlying LLM in memory, making its implementation straightforward and as memory-efficient as fine-tuning a single LLM. A 32-billion-parameter agent trained with LOOP in the AppWorld environment outperforms the much larger OpenAI o1 agent by 9 percentage points (15% relative). To our knowledge, this is the first reported application of RL to IDAs that interact with a stateful, multi-domain, multi-app environment via direct API calls. Our analysis sheds light on the effectiveness of RL in this area, showing that the agent learns to consult the API documentation, avoid unwarranted assumptions, minimize confabulation, and recover from setbacks.

Interaction Dataset of Autonomous Vehicles with Traffic Lights and Signs

This paper presents the development of a comprehensive dataset capturing interactions between Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) and traffic control devices, specifically traffic lights and stop signs. Derived from the Waymo Motion dataset, our work addresses a critical gap in the existing literature by providing real-world trajectory data on how AVs navigate these traffic control devices. We propose a methodology for identifying and extracting relevant interaction trajectory data from the Waymo Motion dataset, incorporating over 37,000 instances with traffic lights and 44,000 with stop signs. Our methodology includes defining rules to identify various interaction types, extracting trajectory data, and applying a wavelet-based denoising method to smooth the acceleration and speed profiles and eliminate anomalous values, thereby enhancing the trajectory quality. Quality assessment metrics indicate that trajectories obtained in this study have anomaly proportions in acceleration and jerk profiles reduced to near-zero levels across all interaction categories. By making this dataset publicly available, we aim to address the current gap in datasets containing AV interaction behaviors with traffic lights and signs. Based on the organized and published dataset, we can gain a more in-depth understanding of AVs' behavior when interacting with traffic lights and signs. This will facilitate research on AV integration into existing transportation infrastructures and networks, supporting the development of more accurate behavioral models and simulation tools.

Signatures of the Shock Interaction as an Additional Power Source in the Nebular Spectra of SN 2023ixf

Red supergiants may lose significant mass through steady winds and episodic eruptions in the final 100-1000 years before the core collapses, shaping their circumstellar environment. Interaction between supernova (SN) ejecta and distant circumstellar material (CSM) can generate shocks, which can energize the ejecta and serve as a key power source during the nebular phase of the SN. In the present work, we investigate the nebular spectrum of SN 2023ixf, observed one year post-explosion (at +363 d) with the recently commissioned WEAVE instrument on the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope. This marks the first supernova spectrum captured with WEAVE. In this spectrum, Halpha exhibits a peculiar evolution, flanked by blueward and redward broad components centred at simpm 5650,km,s^{-1} from the rest velocity of Halpha, which are seen for only a few SNe to date. These features indicate energy deposition from shocks generated by the interaction of ejecta with a CSM expelled nearly 350 - 640 years pre-explosion. Comparisons of the +363 d spectrum with model spectra from the literature, that include varying shock powers, suggest a shock power of at least sim 5 times 10 ^{40},erg,s^{-1} at this epoch. Additionally, analysis of the [O I] doublet, along with other prominent emission lines, provides evidence for clumpiness, dust formation, and asymmetry within the ejecta and/or the surrounding CSM. These emission lines also helped to constrain the oxygen mass (approx0.19^{scriptscriptstyle +0.08}_{scriptscriptstyle -0.04} M_odot), He-core mass (<3 M_odot) and the zero-age main sequence mass (lesssim 12 M_odot) of the progenitor of SN 2023ixf. The comparison with other Type II SNe highlights SN 2023ixf's unique shock interaction signatures and evidence of dust formation, setting it apart in terms of evolution and dynamics.

GraCo: Granularity-Controllable Interactive Segmentation

Interactive Segmentation (IS) segments specific objects or parts in the image according to user input. Current IS pipelines fall into two categories: single-granularity output and multi-granularity output. The latter aims to alleviate the spatial ambiguity present in the former. However, the multi-granularity output pipeline suffers from limited interaction flexibility and produces redundant results. In this work, we introduce Granularity-Controllable Interactive Segmentation (GraCo), a novel approach that allows precise control of prediction granularity by introducing additional parameters to input. This enhances the customization of the interactive system and eliminates redundancy while resolving ambiguity. Nevertheless, the exorbitant cost of annotating multi-granularity masks and the lack of available datasets with granularity annotations make it difficult for models to acquire the necessary guidance to control output granularity. To address this problem, we design an any-granularity mask generator that exploits the semantic property of the pre-trained IS model to automatically generate abundant mask-granularity pairs without requiring additional manual annotation. Based on these pairs, we propose a granularity-controllable learning strategy that efficiently imparts the granularity controllability to the IS model. Extensive experiments on intricate scenarios at object and part levels demonstrate that our GraCo has significant advantages over previous methods. This highlights the potential of GraCo to be a flexible annotation tool, capable of adapting to diverse segmentation scenarios. The project page: https://zhao-yian.github.io/GraCo.

TETRIS: Towards Exploring the Robustness of Interactive Segmentation

Interactive segmentation methods rely on user inputs to iteratively update the selection mask. A click specifying the object of interest is arguably the most simple and intuitive interaction type, and thereby the most common choice for interactive segmentation. However, user clicking patterns in the interactive segmentation context remain unexplored. Accordingly, interactive segmentation evaluation strategies rely more on intuition and common sense rather than empirical studies (e.g., assuming that users tend to click in the center of the area with the largest error). In this work, we conduct a real user study to investigate real user clicking patterns. This study reveals that the intuitive assumption made in the common evaluation strategy may not hold. As a result, interactive segmentation models may show high scores in the standard benchmarks, but it does not imply that they would perform well in a real world scenario. To assess the applicability of interactive segmentation methods, we propose a novel evaluation strategy providing a more comprehensive analysis of a model's performance. To this end, we propose a methodology for finding extreme user inputs by a direct optimization in a white-box adversarial attack on the interactive segmentation model. Based on the performance with such adversarial user inputs, we assess the robustness of interactive segmentation models w.r.t click positions. Besides, we introduce a novel benchmark for measuring the robustness of interactive segmentation, and report the results of an extensive evaluation of dozens of models.

InteractDiffusion: Interaction Control in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have showcased incredible capabilities in generating coherent images based on textual descriptions, enabling vast applications in content generation. While recent advancements have introduced control over factors such as object localization, posture, and image contours, a crucial gap remains in our ability to control the interactions between objects in the generated content. Well-controlling interactions in generated images could yield meaningful applications, such as creating realistic scenes with interacting characters. In this work, we study the problems of conditioning T2I diffusion models with Human-Object Interaction (HOI) information, consisting of a triplet label (person, action, object) and corresponding bounding boxes. We propose a pluggable interaction control model, called InteractDiffusion that extends existing pre-trained T2I diffusion models to enable them being better conditioned on interactions. Specifically, we tokenize the HOI information and learn their relationships via interaction embeddings. A conditioning self-attention layer is trained to map HOI tokens to visual tokens, thereby conditioning the visual tokens better in existing T2I diffusion models. Our model attains the ability to control the interaction and location on existing T2I diffusion models, which outperforms existing baselines by a large margin in HOI detection score, as well as fidelity in FID and KID. Project page: https://jiuntian.github.io/interactdiffusion.

Exploring the cloud of feature interaction scores in a Rashomon set

Interactions among features are central to understanding the behavior of machine learning models. Recent research has made significant strides in detecting and quantifying feature interactions in single predictive models. However, we argue that the feature interactions extracted from a single pre-specified model may not be trustworthy since: a well-trained predictive model may not preserve the true feature interactions and there exist multiple well-performing predictive models that differ in feature interaction strengths. Thus, we recommend exploring feature interaction strengths in a model class of approximately equally accurate predictive models. In this work, we introduce the feature interaction score (FIS) in the context of a Rashomon set, representing a collection of models that achieve similar accuracy on a given task. We propose a general and practical algorithm to calculate the FIS in the model class. We demonstrate the properties of the FIS via synthetic data and draw connections to other areas of statistics. Additionally, we introduce a Halo plot for visualizing the feature interaction variance in high-dimensional space and a swarm plot for analyzing FIS in a Rashomon set. Experiments with recidivism prediction and image classification illustrate how feature interactions can vary dramatically in importance for similarly accurate predictive models. Our results suggest that the proposed FIS can provide valuable insights into the nature of feature interactions in machine learning models.

InterFormer: Real-time Interactive Image Segmentation

Interactive image segmentation enables annotators to efficiently perform pixel-level annotation for segmentation tasks. However, the existing interactive segmentation pipeline suffers from inefficient computations of interactive models because of the following two issues. First, annotators' later click is based on models' feedback of annotators' former click. This serial interaction is unable to utilize model's parallelism capabilities. Second, in each interaction step, the model handles the invariant image along with the sparse variable clicks, resulting in a process that's highly repetitive and redundant. For efficient computations, we propose a method named InterFormer that follows a new pipeline to address these issues. InterFormer extracts and preprocesses the computationally time-consuming part i.e. image processing from the existing process. Specifically, InterFormer employs a large vision transformer (ViT) on high-performance devices to preprocess images in parallel, and then uses a lightweight module called interactive multi-head self attention (I-MSA) for interactive segmentation. Furthermore, the I-MSA module's deployment on low-power devices extends the practical application of interactive segmentation. The I-MSA module utilizes the preprocessed features to efficiently response to the annotator inputs in real-time. The experiments on several datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of InterFormer, which outperforms previous interactive segmentation models in terms of computational efficiency and segmentation quality, achieve real-time high-quality interactive segmentation on CPU-only devices. The code is available at https://github.com/YouHuang67/InterFormer.

Interactive Segmentation as Gaussian Process Classification

Click-based interactive segmentation (IS) aims to extract the target objects under user interaction. For this task, most of the current deep learning (DL)-based methods mainly follow the general pipelines of semantic segmentation. Albeit achieving promising performance, they do not fully and explicitly utilize and propagate the click information, inevitably leading to unsatisfactory segmentation results, even at clicked points. Against this issue, in this paper, we propose to formulate the IS task as a Gaussian process (GP)-based pixel-wise binary classification model on each image. To solve this model, we utilize amortized variational inference to approximate the intractable GP posterior in a data-driven manner and then decouple the approximated GP posterior into double space forms for efficient sampling with linear complexity. Then, we correspondingly construct a GP classification framework, named GPCIS, which is integrated with the deep kernel learning mechanism for more flexibility. The main specificities of the proposed GPCIS lie in: 1) Under the explicit guidance of the derived GP posterior, the information contained in clicks can be finely propagated to the entire image and then boost the segmentation; 2) The accuracy of predictions at clicks has good theoretical support. These merits of GPCIS as well as its good generality and high efficiency are substantiated by comprehensive experiments on several benchmarks, as compared with representative methods both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Interactive Model Cards: A Human-Centered Approach to Model Documentation

Deep learning models for natural language processing (NLP) are increasingly adopted and deployed by analysts without formal training in NLP or machine learning (ML). However, the documentation intended to convey the model's details and appropriate use is tailored primarily to individuals with ML or NLP expertise. To address this gap, we conduct a design inquiry into interactive model cards, which augment traditionally static model cards with affordances for exploring model documentation and interacting with the models themselves. Our investigation consists of an initial conceptual study with experts in ML, NLP, and AI Ethics, followed by a separate evaluative study with non-expert analysts who use ML models in their work. Using a semi-structured interview format coupled with a think-aloud protocol, we collected feedback from a total of 30 participants who engaged with different versions of standard and interactive model cards. Through a thematic analysis of the collected data, we identified several conceptual dimensions that summarize the strengths and limitations of standard and interactive model cards, including: stakeholders; design; guidance; understandability & interpretability; sensemaking & skepticism; and trust & safety. Our findings demonstrate the importance of carefully considered design and interactivity for orienting and supporting non-expert analysts using deep learning models, along with a need for consideration of broader sociotechnical contexts and organizational dynamics. We have also identified design elements, such as language, visual cues, and warnings, among others, that support interactivity and make non-interactive content accessible. We summarize our findings as design guidelines and discuss their implications for a human-centered approach towards AI/ML documentation.

Interactive Path Reasoning on Graph for Conversational Recommendation

Traditional recommendation systems estimate user preference on items from past interaction history, thus suffering from the limitations of obtaining fine-grained and dynamic user preference. Conversational recommendation system (CRS) brings revolutions to those limitations by enabling the system to directly ask users about their preferred attributes on items. However, existing CRS methods do not make full use of such advantage -- they only use the attribute feedback in rather implicit ways such as updating the latent user representation. In this paper, we propose Conversational Path Reasoning (CPR), a generic framework that models conversational recommendation as an interactive path reasoning problem on a graph. It walks through the attribute vertices by following user feedback, utilizing the user preferred attributes in an explicit way. By leveraging on the graph structure, CPR is able to prune off many irrelevant candidate attributes, leading to better chance of hitting user preferred attributes. To demonstrate how CPR works, we propose a simple yet effective instantiation named SCPR (Simple CPR). We perform empirical studies on the multi-round conversational recommendation scenario, the most realistic CRS setting so far that considers multiple rounds of asking attributes and recommending items. Through extensive experiments on two datasets Yelp and LastFM, we validate the effectiveness of our SCPR, which significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art CRS methods EAR (arXiv:2002.09102) and CRM (arXiv:1806.03277). In particular, we find that the more attributes there are, the more advantages our method can achieve.

Interactive segmentation of medical images through fully convolutional neural networks

Image segmentation plays an essential role in medicine for both diagnostic and interventional tasks. Segmentation approaches are either manual, semi-automated or fully-automated. Manual segmentation offers full control over the quality of the results, but is tedious, time consuming and prone to operator bias. Fully automated methods require no human effort, but often deliver sub-optimal results without providing users with the means to make corrections. Semi-automated approaches keep users in control of the results by providing means for interaction, but the main challenge is to offer a good trade-off between precision and required interaction. In this paper we present a deep learning (DL) based semi-automated segmentation approach that aims to be a "smart" interactive tool for region of interest delineation in medical images. We demonstrate its use for segmenting multiple organs on computed tomography (CT) of the abdomen. Our approach solves some of the most pressing clinical challenges: (i) it requires only one to a few user clicks to deliver excellent 2D segmentations in a fast and reliable fashion; (ii) it can generalize to previously unseen structures and "corner cases"; (iii) it delivers results that can be corrected quickly in a smart and intuitive way up to an arbitrary degree of precision chosen by the user and (iv) ensures high accuracy. We present our approach and compare it to other techniques and previous work to show the advantages brought by our method.

INTRA: Interaction Relationship-aware Weakly Supervised Affordance Grounding

Affordance denotes the potential interactions inherent in objects. The perception of affordance can enable intelligent agents to navigate and interact with new environments efficiently. Weakly supervised affordance grounding teaches agents the concept of affordance without costly pixel-level annotations, but with exocentric images. Although recent advances in weakly supervised affordance grounding yielded promising results, there remain challenges including the requirement for paired exocentric and egocentric image dataset, and the complexity in grounding diverse affordances for a single object. To address them, we propose INTeraction Relationship-aware weakly supervised Affordance grounding (INTRA). Unlike prior arts, INTRA recasts this problem as representation learning to identify unique features of interactions through contrastive learning with exocentric images only, eliminating the need for paired datasets. Moreover, we leverage vision-language model embeddings for performing affordance grounding flexibly with any text, designing text-conditioned affordance map generation to reflect interaction relationship for contrastive learning and enhancing robustness with our text synonym augmentation. Our method outperformed prior arts on diverse datasets such as AGD20K, IIT-AFF, CAD and UMD. Additionally, experimental results demonstrate that our method has remarkable domain scalability for synthesized images / illustrations and is capable of performing affordance grounding for novel interactions and objects.

Learning Interactive Real-World Simulators

Generative models trained on internet data have revolutionized how text, image, and video content can be created. Perhaps the next milestone for generative models is to simulate realistic experience in response to actions taken by humans, robots, and other interactive agents. Applications of a real-world simulator range from controllable content creation in games and movies, to training embodied agents purely in simulation that can be directly deployed in the real world. We explore the possibility of learning a universal simulator (UniSim) of real-world interaction through generative modeling. We first make the important observation that natural datasets available for learning a real-world simulator are often rich along different axes (e.g., abundant objects in image data, densely sampled actions in robotics data, and diverse movements in navigation data). With careful orchestration of diverse datasets, each providing a different aspect of the overall experience, UniSim can emulate how humans and agents interact with the world by simulating the visual outcome of both high-level instructions such as "open the drawer" and low-level controls such as "move by x, y" from otherwise static scenes and objects. There are numerous use cases for such a real-world simulator. As an example, we use UniSim to train both high-level vision-language planners and low-level reinforcement learning policies, each of which exhibit zero-shot real-world transfer after training purely in a learned real-world simulator. We also show that other types of intelligence such as video captioning models can benefit from training with simulated experience in UniSim, opening up even wider applications. Video demos can be found at https://universal-simulator.github.io.

SketchDreamer: Interactive Text-Augmented Creative Sketch Ideation

Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) has shown remarkable progress in generating realistic images. However, in this paper, we take a step "backward" and address AIGC for the most rudimentary visual modality of human sketches. Our objective is on the creative nature of sketches, and that creative sketching should take the form of an interactive process. We further enable text to drive the sketch ideation process, allowing creativity to be freely defined, while simultaneously tackling the challenge of "I can't sketch". We present a method to generate controlled sketches using a text-conditioned diffusion model trained on pixel representations of images. Our proposed approach, referred to as SketchDreamer, integrates a differentiable rasteriser of Bezier curves that optimises an initial input to distil abstract semantic knowledge from a pretrained diffusion model. We utilise Score Distillation Sampling to learn a sketch that aligns with a given caption, which importantly enable both text and sketch to interact with the ideation process. Our objective is to empower non-professional users to create sketches and, through a series of optimisation processes, transform a narrative into a storyboard by expanding the text prompt while making minor adjustments to the sketch input. Through this work, we hope to aspire the way we create visual content, democratise the creative process, and inspire further research in enhancing human creativity in AIGC. The code is available at https://github.com/WinKawaks/SketchDreamer.

Pairing interacting protein sequences using masked language modeling

Predicting which proteins interact together from amino-acid sequences is an important task. We develop a method to pair interacting protein sequences which leverages the power of protein language models trained on multiple sequence alignments, such as MSA Transformer and the EvoFormer module of AlphaFold. We formulate the problem of pairing interacting partners among the paralogs of two protein families in a differentiable way. We introduce a method called DiffPALM that solves it by exploiting the ability of MSA Transformer to fill in masked amino acids in multiple sequence alignments using the surrounding context. MSA Transformer encodes coevolution between functionally or structurally coupled amino acids. We show that it captures inter-chain coevolution, while it was trained on single-chain data, which means that it can be used out-of-distribution. Relying on MSA Transformer without fine-tuning, DiffPALM outperforms existing coevolution-based pairing methods on difficult benchmarks of shallow multiple sequence alignments extracted from ubiquitous prokaryotic protein datasets. It also outperforms an alternative method based on a state-of-the-art protein language model trained on single sequences. Paired alignments of interacting protein sequences are a crucial ingredient of supervised deep learning methods to predict the three-dimensional structure of protein complexes. DiffPALM substantially improves the structure prediction of some eukaryotic protein complexes by AlphaFold-Multimer, without significantly deteriorating any of those we tested. It also achieves competitive performance with using orthology-based pairing.

TaleCrafter: Interactive Story Visualization with Multiple Characters

Accurate Story visualization requires several necessary elements, such as identity consistency across frames, the alignment between plain text and visual content, and a reasonable layout of objects in images. Most previous works endeavor to meet these requirements by fitting a text-to-image (T2I) model on a set of videos in the same style and with the same characters, e.g., the FlintstonesSV dataset. However, the learned T2I models typically struggle to adapt to new characters, scenes, and styles, and often lack the flexibility to revise the layout of the synthesized images. This paper proposes a system for generic interactive story visualization, capable of handling multiple novel characters and supporting the editing of layout and local structure. It is developed by leveraging the prior knowledge of large language and T2I models, trained on massive corpora. The system comprises four interconnected components: story-to-prompt generation (S2P), text-to-layout generation (T2L), controllable text-to-image generation (C-T2I), and image-to-video animation (I2V). First, the S2P module converts concise story information into detailed prompts required for subsequent stages. Next, T2L generates diverse and reasonable layouts based on the prompts, offering users the ability to adjust and refine the layout to their preference. The core component, C-T2I, enables the creation of images guided by layouts, sketches, and actor-specific identifiers to maintain consistency and detail across visualizations. Finally, I2V enriches the visualization process by animating the generated images. Extensive experiments and a user study are conducted to validate the effectiveness and flexibility of interactive editing of the proposed system.

RecurrentGPT: Interactive Generation of (Arbitrarily) Long Text

The fixed-size context of Transformer makes GPT models incapable of generating arbitrarily long text. In this paper, we introduce RecurrentGPT, a language-based simulacrum of the recurrence mechanism in RNNs. RecurrentGPT is built upon a large language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT and uses natural language to simulate the Long Short-Term Memory mechanism in an LSTM. At each timestep, RecurrentGPT generates a paragraph of text and updates its language-based long-short term memory stored on the hard drive and the prompt, respectively. This recurrence mechanism enables RecurrentGPT to generate texts of arbitrary length without forgetting. Since human users can easily observe and edit the natural language memories, RecurrentGPT is interpretable and enables interactive generation of long text. RecurrentGPT is an initial step towards next-generation computer-assisted writing systems beyond local editing suggestions. In addition to producing AI-generated content (AIGC), we also demonstrate the possibility of using RecurrentGPT as an interactive fiction that directly interacts with consumers. We call this usage of generative models by ``AI As Contents'' (AIAC), which we believe is the next form of conventional AIGC. We further demonstrate the possibility of using RecurrentGPT to create personalized interactive fiction that directly interacts with readers instead of interacting with writers. More broadly, RecurrentGPT demonstrates the utility of borrowing ideas from popular model designs in cognitive science and deep learning for prompting LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/aiwaves-cn/RecurrentGPT and an online demo is available at https://www.aiwaves.org/recurrentgpt.

Contextual Interaction via Primitive-based Adversarial Training For Compositional Zero-shot Learning

Compositional Zero-shot Learning (CZSL) aims to identify novel compositions via known attribute-object pairs. The primary challenge in CZSL tasks lies in the significant discrepancies introduced by the complex interaction between the visual primitives of attribute and object, consequently decreasing the classification performance towards novel compositions. Previous remarkable works primarily addressed this issue by focusing on disentangling strategy or utilizing object-based conditional probabilities to constrain the selection space of attributes. Unfortunately, few studies have explored the problem from the perspective of modeling the mechanism of visual primitive interactions. Inspired by the success of vanilla adversarial learning in Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning, we take a step further and devise a model-agnostic and Primitive-Based Adversarial training (PBadv) method to deal with this problem. Besides, the latest studies highlight the weakness of the perception of hard compositions even under data-balanced conditions. To this end, we propose a novel over-sampling strategy with object-similarity guidance to augment target compositional training data. We performed detailed quantitative analysis and retrieval experiments on well-established datasets, such as UT-Zappos50K, MIT-States, and C-GQA, to validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, and the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance demonstrates the superiority of our approach. The code is available at https://github.com/lisuyi/PBadv_czsl.

FVEL: Interactive Formal Verification Environment with Large Language Models via Theorem Proving

Formal verification (FV) has witnessed growing significance with current emerging program synthesis by the evolving large language models (LLMs). However, current formal verification mainly resorts to symbolic verifiers or hand-craft rules, resulting in limitations for extensive and flexible verification. On the other hand, formal languages for automated theorem proving, such as Isabelle, as another line of rigorous verification, are maintained with comprehensive rules and theorems. In this paper, we propose FVEL, an interactive Formal Verification Environment with LLMs. Specifically, FVEL transforms a given code to be verified into Isabelle, and then conducts verification via neural automated theorem proving with an LLM. The joined paradigm leverages the rigorous yet abundant formulated and organized rules in Isabelle and is also convenient for introducing and adjusting cutting-edge LLMs. To achieve this goal, we extract a large-scale FVELER3. The FVELER dataset includes code dependencies and verification processes that are formulated in Isabelle, containing 758 theories, 29,125 lemmas, and 200,646 proof steps in total with in-depth dependencies. We benchmark FVELER in the FVEL environment by first fine-tuning LLMs with FVELER and then evaluating them on Code2Inv and SV-COMP. The results show that FVEL with FVELER fine-tuned Llama3- 8B solves 17.39% (69 -> 81) more problems, and Mistral-7B 12% (75 -> 84) more problems in SV-COMP. And the proportion of proof errors is reduced. Project page: https://fveler.github.io/.

LLM Interactive Optimization of Open Source Python Libraries -- Case Studies and Generalization

With the advent of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3, a natural question is the extent to which these models can be utilized for source code optimization. This paper presents methodologically stringent case studies applied to well-known open source python libraries pillow and numpy. We find that contemporary LLM ChatGPT-4 (state September and October 2023) is surprisingly adept at optimizing energy and compute efficiency. However, this is only the case in interactive use, with a human expert in the loop. Aware of experimenter bias, we document our qualitative approach in detail, and provide transcript and source code. We start by providing a detailed description of our approach in conversing with the LLM to optimize the _getextrema function in the pillow library, and a quantitative evaluation of the performance improvement. To demonstrate qualitative replicability, we report further attempts on another locus in the pillow library, and one code locus in the numpy library, to demonstrate generalization within and beyond a library. In all attempts, the performance improvement is significant (factor up to 38). We have also not omitted reporting of failed attempts (there were none). We conclude that LLMs are a promising tool for code optimization in open source libraries, but that the human expert in the loop is essential for success. Nonetheless, we were surprised by how few iterations were required to achieve substantial performance improvements that were not obvious to the expert in the loop. We would like bring attention to the qualitative nature of this study, more robust quantitative studies would need to introduce a layer of selecting experts in a representative sample -- we invite the community to collaborate.

RLIF: Interactive Imitation Learning as Reinforcement Learning

Although reinforcement learning methods offer a powerful framework for automatic skill acquisition, for practical learning-based control problems in domains such as robotics, imitation learning often provides a more convenient and accessible alternative. In particular, an interactive imitation learning method such as DAgger, which queries a near-optimal expert to intervene online to collect correction data for addressing the distributional shift challenges that afflict na\"ive behavioral cloning, can enjoy good performance both in theory and practice without requiring manually specified reward functions and other components of full reinforcement learning methods. In this paper, we explore how off-policy reinforcement learning can enable improved performance under assumptions that are similar but potentially even more practical than those of interactive imitation learning. Our proposed method uses reinforcement learning with user intervention signals themselves as rewards. This relaxes the assumption that intervening experts in interactive imitation learning should be near-optimal and enables the algorithm to learn behaviors that improve over the potential suboptimal human expert. We also provide a unified framework to analyze our RL method and DAgger; for which we present the asymptotic analysis of the suboptimal gap for both methods as well as the non-asymptotic sample complexity bound of our method. We then evaluate our method on challenging high-dimensional continuous control simulation benchmarks as well as real-world robotic vision-based manipulation tasks. The results show that it strongly outperforms DAgger-like approaches across the different tasks, especially when the intervening experts are suboptimal. Code and videos can be found on the project website: rlif-page.github.io

Reconstructing Interacting Hands with Interaction Prior from Monocular Images

Reconstructing interacting hands from monocular images is indispensable in AR/VR applications. Most existing solutions rely on the accurate localization of each skeleton joint. However, these methods tend to be unreliable due to the severe occlusion and confusing similarity among adjacent hand parts. This also defies human perception because humans can quickly imitate an interaction pattern without localizing all joints. Our key idea is to first construct a two-hand interaction prior and recast the interaction reconstruction task as the conditional sampling from the prior. To expand more interaction states, a large-scale multimodal dataset with physical plausibility is proposed. Then a VAE is trained to further condense these interaction patterns as latent codes in a prior distribution. When looking for image cues that contribute to interaction prior sampling, we propose the interaction adjacency heatmap (IAH). Compared with a joint-wise heatmap for localization, IAH assigns denser visible features to those invisible joints. Compared with an all-in-one visible heatmap, it provides more fine-grained local interaction information in each interaction region. Finally, the correlations between the extracted features and corresponding interaction codes are linked by the ViT module. Comprehensive evaluations on benchmark datasets have verified the effectiveness of this framework. The code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/binghui-z/InterPrior_pytorch

Neural Interactive Keypoint Detection

This work proposes an end-to-end neural interactive keypoint detection framework named Click-Pose, which can significantly reduce more than 10 times labeling costs of 2D keypoint annotation compared with manual-only annotation. Click-Pose explores how user feedback can cooperate with a neural keypoint detector to correct the predicted keypoints in an interactive way for a faster and more effective annotation process. Specifically, we design the pose error modeling strategy that inputs the ground truth pose combined with four typical pose errors into the decoder and trains the model to reconstruct the correct poses, which enhances the self-correction ability of the model. Then, we attach an interactive human-feedback loop that allows receiving users' clicks to correct one or several predicted keypoints and iteratively utilizes the decoder to update all other keypoints with a minimum number of clicks (NoC) for efficient annotation. We validate Click-Pose in in-domain, out-of-domain scenes, and a new task of keypoint adaptation. For annotation, Click-Pose only needs 1.97 and 6.45 NoC@95 (at precision 95%) on COCO and Human-Art, reducing 31.4% and 36.3% efforts than the SOTA model (ViTPose) with manual correction, respectively. Besides, without user clicks, Click-Pose surpasses the previous end-to-end model by 1.4 AP on COCO and 3.0 AP on Human-Art. The code is available at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/Click-Pose.

Multi-interactive Feature Learning and a Full-time Multi-modality Benchmark for Image Fusion and Segmentation

Multi-modality image fusion and segmentation play a vital role in autonomous driving and robotic operation. Early efforts focus on boosting the performance for only one task, e.g., fusion or segmentation, making it hard to reach~`Best of Both Worlds'. To overcome this issue, in this paper, we propose a Multi-interactive Feature learning architecture for image fusion and Segmentation, namely SegMiF, and exploit dual-task correlation to promote the performance of both tasks. The SegMiF is of a cascade structure, containing a fusion sub-network and a commonly used segmentation sub-network. By slickly bridging intermediate features between two components, the knowledge learned from the segmentation task can effectively assist the fusion task. Also, the benefited fusion network supports the segmentation one to perform more pretentiously. Besides, a hierarchical interactive attention block is established to ensure fine-grained mapping of all the vital information between two tasks, so that the modality/semantic features can be fully mutual-interactive. In addition, a dynamic weight factor is introduced to automatically adjust the corresponding weights of each task, which can balance the interactive feature correspondence and break through the limitation of laborious tuning. Furthermore, we construct a smart multi-wave binocular imaging system and collect a full-time multi-modality benchmark with 15 annotated pixel-level categories for image fusion and segmentation. Extensive experiments on several public datasets and our benchmark demonstrate that the proposed method outputs visually appealing fused images and perform averagely 7.66% higher segmentation mIoU in the real-world scene than the state-of-the-art approaches. The source code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/JinyuanLiu-CV/SegMiF.

Strip-MLP: Efficient Token Interaction for Vision MLP

Token interaction operation is one of the core modules in MLP-based models to exchange and aggregate information between different spatial locations. However, the power of token interaction on the spatial dimension is highly dependent on the spatial resolution of the feature maps, which limits the model's expressive ability, especially in deep layers where the feature are down-sampled to a small spatial size. To address this issue, we present a novel method called Strip-MLP to enrich the token interaction power in three ways. Firstly, we introduce a new MLP paradigm called Strip MLP layer that allows the token to interact with other tokens in a cross-strip manner, enabling the tokens in a row (or column) to contribute to the information aggregations in adjacent but different strips of rows (or columns). Secondly, a Cascade Group Strip Mixing Module (CGSMM) is proposed to overcome the performance degradation caused by small spatial feature size. The module allows tokens to interact more effectively in the manners of within-patch and cross-patch, which is independent to the feature spatial size. Finally, based on the Strip MLP layer, we propose a novel Local Strip Mixing Module (LSMM) to boost the token interaction power in the local region. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Strip-MLP significantly improves the performance of MLP-based models on small datasets and obtains comparable or even better results on ImageNet. In particular, Strip-MLP models achieve higher average Top-1 accuracy than existing MLP-based models by +2.44\% on Caltech-101 and +2.16\% on CIFAR-100. The source codes will be available at~https://github.com/Med-Process/Strip_MLP{https://github.com/Med-Process/Strip\_MLP.

AGILE3D: Attention Guided Interactive Multi-object 3D Segmentation

During interactive segmentation, a model and a user work together to delineate objects of interest in a 3D point cloud. In an iterative process, the model assigns each data point to an object (or the background), while the user corrects errors in the resulting segmentation and feeds them back into the model. The current best practice formulates the problem as binary classification and segments objects one at a time. The model expects the user to provide positive clicks to indicate regions wrongly assigned to the background and negative clicks on regions wrongly assigned to the object. Sequentially visiting objects is wasteful since it disregards synergies between objects: a positive click for a given object can, by definition, serve as a negative click for nearby objects. Moreover, a direct competition between adjacent objects can speed up the identification of their common boundary. We introduce AGILE3D, an efficient, attention-based model that (1) supports simultaneous segmentation of multiple 3D objects, (2) yields more accurate segmentation masks with fewer user clicks, and (3) offers faster inference. Our core idea is to encode user clicks as spatial-temporal queries and enable explicit interactions between click queries as well as between them and the 3D scene through a click attention module. Every time new clicks are added, we only need to run a lightweight decoder that produces updated segmentation masks. In experiments with four different 3D point cloud datasets, AGILE3D sets a new state-of-the-art. Moreover, we also verify its practicality in real-world setups with real user studies.

Mobile-Env: An Evaluation Platform and Benchmark for Interactive Agents in LLM Era

Diverse evaluation benchmarks play a crucial role to assess a wide range of capabilities of large language models (LLM). Although plenty of endeavors have been dedicated to building valuable benchmarks, there is still little work aiming at evaluating the capability of LLM in multistep interactive environments. Noticing that LLM requires a text representation of the environment observations for interaction, we choose to fill such a blank by building a novel benchmark based on the information user interface (InfoUI). InfoUI consists of rich text contents and can be represented in some text formats, thus is suitable for the assessment of interaction ability of LLM. Additionally, the complex structures of InfoUI can further raise a challenge for LLM to understand structured texts rather than plain texts. An interaction platform is always used to evaluate an agent, however, there is still a lack of a satisfactory interaction platform dedicated to InfoUI. Consequently, we propose to build a novel easily-extendable, adaptable, and close-to-reality interaction platform, Mobile-Env, to provide a base for an appropriate benchmark. Based on Mobile-Env, an InfoUI task set WikiHow is then built to establish a benchmark for the multistep interaction capability of LLM in structured text-based environments. Agents based on a series of LLMs are tested on the task set to obtain an insight into the potential and challenge of LLM for InfoUI interaction. It is sincerely welcome that the community contribute new environments and new task sets for Mobile-Env to provide better test benchmarks and facilitate the development of the corresponding domains.

Chat with the Environment: Interactive Multimodal Perception Using Large Language Models

Programming robot behavior in a complex world faces challenges on multiple levels, from dextrous low-level skills to high-level planning and reasoning. Recent pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning ability in few-shot robotic planning. However, it remains challenging to ground LLMs in multimodal sensory input and continuous action output, while enabling a robot to interact with its environment and acquire novel information as its policies unfold. We develop a robot interaction scenario with a partially observable state, which necessitates a robot to decide on a range of epistemic actions in order to sample sensory information among multiple modalities, before being able to execute the task correctly. An interactive perception framework is therefore proposed with an LLM as its backbone, whose ability is exploited to instruct epistemic actions and to reason over the resulting multimodal sensations (vision, sound, haptics, proprioception), as well as to plan an entire task execution based on the interactively acquired information. Our study demonstrates that LLMs can provide high-level planning and reasoning skills and control interactive robot behavior in a multimodal environment, while multimodal modules with the context of the environmental state help ground the LLMs and extend their processing ability. The project website can be found at https://matcha-model.github.io{blue{https://matcha-model.github.io/}}.

ChatCAD: Interactive Computer-Aided Diagnosis on Medical Image using Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated their potential in clinical applications, providing valuable medical knowledge and advice. For example, a large dialog LLM like ChatGPT has successfully passed part of the US medical licensing exam. However, LLMs currently have difficulty processing images, making it challenging to interpret information from medical images, which are rich in information that supports clinical decisions. On the other hand, computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) networks for medical images have seen significant success in the medical field by using advanced deep-learning algorithms to support clinical decision-making. This paper presents a method for integrating LLMs into medical-image CAD networks. The proposed framework uses LLMs to enhance the output of multiple CAD networks, such as diagnosis networks, lesion segmentation networks, and report generation networks, by summarizing and reorganizing the information presented in natural language text format. The goal is to merge the strengths of LLMs' medical domain knowledge and logical reasoning with the vision understanding capability of existing medical-image CAD models to create a more user-friendly and understandable system for patients compared to conventional CAD systems. In the future, LLM's medical knowledge can be also used to improve the performance of vision-based medical-image CAD models.

Decoupled Iterative Refinement Framework for Interacting Hands Reconstruction from a Single RGB Image

Reconstructing interacting hands from a single RGB image is a very challenging task. On the one hand, severe mutual occlusion and similar local appearance between two hands confuse the extraction of visual features, resulting in the misalignment of estimated hand meshes and the image. On the other hand, there are complex spatial relationship between interacting hands, which significantly increases the solution space of hand poses and increases the difficulty of network learning. In this paper, we propose a decoupled iterative refinement framework to achieve pixel-alignment hand reconstruction while efficiently modeling the spatial relationship between hands. Specifically, we define two feature spaces with different characteristics, namely 2D visual feature space and 3D joint feature space. First, we obtain joint-wise features from the visual feature map and utilize a graph convolution network and a transformer to perform intra- and inter-hand information interaction in the 3D joint feature space, respectively. Then, we project the joint features with global information back into the 2D visual feature space in an obfuscation-free manner and utilize the 2D convolution for pixel-wise enhancement. By performing multiple alternate enhancements in the two feature spaces, our method can achieve an accurate and robust reconstruction of interacting hands. Our method outperforms all existing two-hand reconstruction methods by a large margin on the InterHand2.6M dataset.

iColoriT: Towards Propagating Local Hint to the Right Region in Interactive Colorization by Leveraging Vision Transformer

Point-interactive image colorization aims to colorize grayscale images when a user provides the colors for specific locations. It is essential for point-interactive colorization methods to appropriately propagate user-provided colors (i.e., user hints) in the entire image to obtain a reasonably colorized image with minimal user effort. However, existing approaches often produce partially colorized results due to the inefficient design of stacking convolutional layers to propagate hints to distant relevant regions. To address this problem, we present iColoriT, a novel point-interactive colorization Vision Transformer capable of propagating user hints to relevant regions, leveraging the global receptive field of Transformers. The self-attention mechanism of Transformers enables iColoriT to selectively colorize relevant regions with only a few local hints. Our approach colorizes images in real-time by utilizing pixel shuffling, an efficient upsampling technique that replaces the decoder architecture. Also, in order to mitigate the artifacts caused by pixel shuffling with large upsampling ratios, we present the local stabilizing layer. Extensive quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that our approach highly outperforms existing methods for point-interactive colorization, producing accurately colorized images with a user's minimal effort. Official codes are available at https://pmh9960.github.io/research/iColoriT

Tackling the Challenges in Scene Graph Generation with Local-to-Global Interactions

In this work, we seek new insights into the underlying challenges of the Scene Graph Generation (SGG) task. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Visual Genome dataset implies -- 1) Ambiguity: even if inter-object relationship contains the same object (or predicate), they may not be visually or semantically similar, 2) Asymmetry: despite the nature of the relationship that embodied the direction, it was not well addressed in previous studies, and 3) Higher-order contexts: leveraging the identities of certain graph elements can help to generate accurate scene graphs. Motivated by the analysis, we design a novel SGG framework, Local-to-Global Interaction Networks (LOGIN). Locally, interactions extract the essence between three instances of subject, object, and background, while baking direction awareness into the network by explicitly constraining the input order of subject and object. Globally, interactions encode the contexts between every graph component (i.e., nodes and edges). Finally, Attract & Repel loss is utilized to fine-tune the distribution of predicate embeddings. By design, our framework enables predicting the scene graph in a bottom-up manner, leveraging the possible complementariness. To quantify how much LOGIN is aware of relational direction, a new diagnostic task called Bidirectional Relationship Classification (BRC) is also proposed. Experimental results demonstrate that LOGIN can successfully distinguish relational direction than existing methods (in BRC task), while showing state-of-the-art results on the Visual Genome benchmark (in SGG task).

Proactive Interaction Framework for Intelligent Social Receptionist Robots

Proactive human-robot interaction (HRI) allows the receptionist robots to actively greet people and offer services based on vision, which has been found to improve acceptability and customer satisfaction. Existing approaches are either based on multi-stage decision processes or based on end-to-end decision models. However, the rule-based approaches require sedulous expert efforts and only handle minimal pre-defined scenarios. On the other hand, existing works with end-to-end models are limited to very general greetings or few behavior patterns (typically less than 10). To address those challenges, we propose a new end-to-end framework, the TransFormer with Visual Tokens for Human-Robot Interaction (TFVT-HRI). The proposed framework extracts visual tokens of relative objects from an RGB camera first. To ensure the correct interpretation of the scenario, a transformer decision model is then employed to process the visual tokens, which is augmented with the temporal and spatial information. It predicts the appropriate action to take in each scenario and identifies the right target. Our data is collected from an in-service receptionist robot in an office building, which is then annotated by experts for appropriate proactive behavior. The action set includes 1000+ diverse patterns by combining language, emoji expression, and body motions. We compare our model with other SOTA end-to-end models on both offline test sets and online user experiments in realistic office building environments to validate this framework. It is demonstrated that the decision model achieves SOTA performance in action triggering and selection, resulting in more humanness and intelligence when compared with the previous reactive reception policies.