Daily Papers

A triangular mesh is one of the most popular 3D data representations. As such, the deployment of deep neural networks for mesh processing is widely spread and is increasingly attracting more attention. However, neural networks are prone to adversarial attacks, where carefully crafted inputs impair the model's functionality. The need to explore these vulnerabilities is a fundamental factor in the future development of 3D-based applications. Recently, mesh attacks were studied on the semantic level, where classifiers are misled to produce wrong predictions. Nevertheless, mesh surfaces possess complex geometric attributes beyond their semantic meaning, and their analysis often includes the need to encode and reconstruct the geometry of the shape. We propose a novel framework for a geometric adversarial attack on a 3D mesh autoencoder. In this setting, an adversarial input mesh deceives the autoencoder by forcing it to reconstruct a different geometric shape at its output. The malicious input is produced by perturbing a clean shape in the spectral domain. Our method leverages the spectral decomposition of the mesh along with additional mesh-related properties to obtain visually credible results that consider the delicacy of surface distortions. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/StolikTomer/SAGA.

This paper presents a Surface-Aligned Gaussian representation for creating animatable human avatars from monocular videos,aiming at improving the novel view and pose synthesis performance while ensuring fast training and real-time rendering. Recently,3DGS has emerged as a more efficient and expressive alternative to NeRF, and has been used for creating dynamic human avatars. However,when applied to the severely ill-posed task of monocular dynamic reconstruction, the Gaussians tend to overfit the constantly changing regions such as clothes wrinkles or shadows since these regions cannot provide consistent supervision, resulting in noisy geometry and abrupt deformation that typically fail to generalize under novel views and poses.To address these limitations, we present SAGA,i.e.,Surface-Aligned Gaussian Avatar,which aligns the Gaussians with a mesh to enforce well-defined geometry and consistent deformation, thereby improving generalization under novel views and poses. Unlike existing strict alignment methods that suffer from limited expressive power and low realism,SAGA employs a two-stage alignment strategy where the Gaussians are first adhered on while then detached from the mesh, thus facilitating both good geometry and high expressivity. In the Adhered Stage, we improve the flexibility of Adhered-on-Mesh Gaussians by allowing them to flow on the mesh, in contrast to existing methods that rigidly bind Gaussians to fixed location. In the second Detached Stage, we introduce a Gaussian-Mesh Alignment regularization, which allows us to unleash the expressivity by detaching the Gaussians but maintain the geometric alignment by minimizing their location and orientation offsets from the bound triangles. Finally, since the Gaussians may drift outside the bound triangles during optimization, an efficient Walking-on-Mesh strategy is proposed to dynamically update the bound triangles.

We argue that there are many notions of 'similarity' and that models, like humans, should be able to adapt to these dynamically. This contrasts with most representation learning methods, supervised or self-supervised, which learn a fixed embedding function and hence implicitly assume a single notion of similarity. For instance, models trained on ImageNet are biased towards object categories, while a user might prefer the model to focus on colors, textures or specific elements in the scene. In this paper, we propose the GeneCIS ('genesis') benchmark, which measures models' ability to adapt to a range of similarity conditions. Extending prior work, our benchmark is designed for zero-shot evaluation only, and hence considers an open-set of similarity conditions. We find that baselines from powerful CLIP models struggle on GeneCIS and that performance on the benchmark is only weakly correlated with ImageNet accuracy, suggesting that simply scaling existing methods is not fruitful. We further propose a simple, scalable solution based on automatically mining information from existing image-caption datasets. We find our method offers a substantial boost over the baselines on GeneCIS, and further improves zero-shot performance on related image retrieval benchmarks. In fact, though evaluated zero-shot, our model surpasses state-of-the-art supervised models on MIT-States. Project page at https://sgvaze.github.io/genecis/.

Training of a tokenizer plays an important role in the performance of deep learning models. This research aims to understand the performance of tokenizers in five state-of-the-art (SOTA) large language models (LLMs) in the Assamese language of India. The research is important to understand the multi-lingual support for a low-resourced language such as Assamese. Our research reveals that the tokenizer of SUTRA from Two AI performs the best with an average Normalized Sequence Length (NSL) value of 0.45, closely followed by the tokenizer of GPT-4o from Open AI with an average NSL value of 0.54, followed by Gemma 2, Meta Llama 3.1, and Mistral Large Instruct 2407 with an average NSL value of 0.82, 1.4, and 1.48 respectively.

Unsupervised domain translation (UDT) aims to find functions that convert samples from one domain (e.g., sketches) to another domain (e.g., photos) without changing the high-level semantic meaning (also referred to as ``content''). The translation functions are often sought by probability distribution matching of the transformed source domain and target domain. CycleGAN stands as arguably the most representative approach among this line of work. However, it was noticed in the literature that CycleGAN and variants could fail to identify the desired translation functions and produce content-misaligned translations. This limitation arises due to the presence of multiple translation functions -- referred to as ``measure-preserving automorphism" (MPA) -- in the solution space of the learning criteria. Despite awareness of such identifiability issues, solutions have remained elusive. This study delves into the core identifiability inquiry and introduces an MPA elimination theory. Our analysis shows that MPA is unlikely to exist, if multiple pairs of diverse cross-domain conditional distributions are matched by the learning function. Our theory leads to a UDT learner using distribution matching over auxiliary variable-induced subsets of the domains -- other than over the entire data domains as in the classical approaches. The proposed framework is the first to rigorously establish translation identifiability under reasonable UDT settings, to our best knowledge. Experiments corroborate with our theoretical claims.

The ability to identify whether or not a test sample belongs to one of the semantic classes in a classifier's training set is critical to practical deployment of the model. This task is termed open-set recognition (OSR) and has received significant attention in recent years. In this paper, we first demonstrate that the ability of a classifier to make the 'none-of-above' decision is highly correlated with its accuracy on the closed-set classes. We find that this relationship holds across loss objectives and architectures, and further demonstrate the trend both on the standard OSR benchmarks as well as on a large-scale ImageNet evaluation. Second, we use this correlation to boost the performance of a maximum logit score OSR 'baseline' by improving its closed-set accuracy, and with this strong baseline achieve state-of-the-art on a number of OSR benchmarks. Similarly, we boost the performance of the existing state-of-the-art method by improving its closed-set accuracy, but the resulting discrepancy with the strong baseline is marginal. Our third contribution is to present the 'Semantic Shift Benchmark' (SSB), which better respects the task of detecting semantic novelty, in contrast to other forms of distribution shift also considered in related sub-fields, such as out-of-distribution detection. On this new evaluation, we again demonstrate that there is negligible difference between the strong baseline and the existing state-of-the-art. Project Page: https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/research/osr/

Machine learning systems deployed in the wild are often trained on a source distribution but deployed on a different target distribution. Unlabeled data can be a powerful point of leverage for mitigating these distribution shifts, as it is frequently much more available than labeled data and can often be obtained from distributions beyond the source distribution as well. However, existing distribution shift benchmarks with unlabeled data do not reflect the breadth of scenarios that arise in real-world applications. In this work, we present the WILDS 2.0 update, which extends 8 of the 10 datasets in the WILDS benchmark of distribution shifts to include curated unlabeled data that would be realistically obtainable in deployment. These datasets span a wide range of applications (from histology to wildlife conservation), tasks (classification, regression, and detection), and modalities (photos, satellite images, microscope slides, text, molecular graphs). The update maintains consistency with the original WILDS benchmark by using identical labeled training, validation, and test sets, as well as the evaluation metrics. On these datasets, we systematically benchmark state-of-the-art methods that leverage unlabeled data, including domain-invariant, self-training, and self-supervised methods, and show that their success on WILDS is limited. To facilitate method development and evaluation, we provide an open-source package that automates data loading and contains all of the model architectures and methods used in this paper. Code and leaderboards are available at https://wilds.stanford.edu.

Characterizing materials with electron micrographs poses significant challenges for automated labeling due to the complex nature of nanomaterial structures. To address this, we introduce a fully automated, end-to-end pipeline that leverages recent advances in Generative AI. It is designed for analyzing and understanding the microstructures of semiconductor materials with effectiveness comparable to that of human experts, contributing to the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in nanomaterial identification. Our approach utilizes Large MultiModal Models (LMMs) such as GPT-4V, alongside text-to-image models like DALLE-3. We integrate a GPT-4 guided Visual Question Answering (VQA) method to analyze nanomaterial images, generate synthetic nanomaterial images via DALLE-3, and employ in-context learning with few-shot prompting in GPT-4V for accurate nanomaterial identification. Our method surpasses traditional techniques by enhancing the precision of nanomaterial identification and optimizing the process for high-throughput screening.

We present the Process Engineering Operations Assistant (PEOA), an AI-driven framework designed to solve complex problems in the chemical and process industries. The framework employs a modular architecture orchestrated by a meta-agent, which serves as the central coordinator, managing an action generator and instruction-tuned small-scale language models (expert models). The action generator decomposes complex problems into sub-tasks and identifies suitable expert models to execute each, delivering precise solutions for multi-step problem-solving. Key techniques include advanced knowledge modeling using property graphs for improved information retrieval, facilitating more accurate and contextually relevant solutions. Additionally, the framework utilizes a teacher-student transfer-learning approach with GPT-4 (Omni) to fine-tune the action generator and expert models for domain adaptation, alongside an iterative problem-solving mechanism with sophisticated error handling. Custom datasets were developed to evaluate the framework against leading proprietary language models on various engineering tasks. The results demonstrate the framework effectiveness in automating calculations, accelerating prototyping, and providing AI-augmented decision support for industrial processes, marking a significant advancement in process engineering capabilities.

Transformer-based deep neural networks have revolutionized the field of molecular-related prediction tasks by treating molecules as symbolic sequences. These models have been successfully applied in various organic chemical applications by pretraining them with extensive compound libraries and subsequently fine-tuning them with smaller in-house datasets for specific tasks. However, many conventional methods primarily focus on single molecules, with limited exploration of pretraining for reactions involving multiple molecules. In this paper, we propose ReactionT5, a novel model that leverages pretraining on the Open Reaction Database (ORD), a publicly available large-scale resource. We further fine-tune this model for yield prediction and product prediction tasks, demonstrating its impressive performance even with limited fine-tuning data compared to traditional models. The pre-trained ReactionT5 model is publicly accessible on the Hugging Face platform.

Despite recent advancements in speech recognition, there are still difficulties in accurately transcribing conversational and emotional speech in noisy and reverberant acoustic environments. This poses a particular challenge in the search and rescue (SAR) domain, where transcribing conversations among rescue team members is crucial to support real-time decision-making. The scarcity of speech data and associated background noise in SAR scenarios make it difficult to deploy robust speech recognition systems. To address this issue, we have created and made publicly available a German speech dataset called RescueSpeech. This dataset includes real speech recordings from simulated rescue exercises. Additionally, we have released competitive training recipes and pre-trained models. Our study indicates that the current level of performance achieved by state-of-the-art methods is still far from being acceptable.

Multiple business scenarios require an automated generation of descriptive human-readable text from structured input data. Hence, fact-to-text generation systems have been developed for various downstream tasks like generating soccer reports, weather and financial reports, medical reports, person biographies, etc. Unfortunately, previous work on fact-to-text (F2T) generation has focused primarily on English mainly due to the high availability of relevant datasets. Only recently, the problem of cross-lingual fact-to-text (XF2T) was proposed for generation across multiple languages alongwith a dataset, XALIGN for eight languages. However, there has been no rigorous work on the actual XF2T generation problem. We extend XALIGN dataset with annotated data for four more languages: Punjabi, Malayalam, Assamese and Oriya. We conduct an extensive study using popular Transformer-based text generation models on our extended multi-lingual dataset, which we call XALIGNV2. Further, we investigate the performance of different text generation strategies: multiple variations of pretraining, fact-aware embeddings and structure-aware input encoding. Our extensive experiments show that a multi-lingual mT5 model which uses fact-aware embeddings with structure-aware input encoding leads to best results on average across the twelve languages. We make our code, dataset and model publicly available, and hope that this will help advance further research in this critical area.

Overparameterized neural networks can be highly accurate on average on an i.i.d. test set yet consistently fail on atypical groups of the data (e.g., by learning spurious correlations that hold on average but not in such groups). Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) allows us to learn models that instead minimize the worst-case training loss over a set of pre-defined groups. However, we find that naively applying group DRO to overparameterized neural networks fails: these models can perfectly fit the training data, and any model with vanishing average training loss also already has vanishing worst-case training loss. Instead, the poor worst-case performance arises from poor generalization on some groups. By coupling group DRO models with increased regularization---a stronger-than-typical L2 penalty or early stopping---we achieve substantially higher worst-group accuracies, with 10-40 percentage point improvements on a natural language inference task and two image tasks, while maintaining high average accuracies. Our results suggest that regularization is important for worst-group generalization in the overparameterized regime, even if it is not needed for average generalization. Finally, we introduce a stochastic optimization algorithm, with convergence guarantees, to efficiently train group DRO models.

Distribution shifts -- where the training distribution differs from the test distribution -- can substantially degrade the accuracy of machine learning (ML) systems deployed in the wild. Despite their ubiquity in the real-world deployments, these distribution shifts are under-represented in the datasets widely used in the ML community today. To address this gap, we present WILDS, a curated benchmark of 10 datasets reflecting a diverse range of distribution shifts that naturally arise in real-world applications, such as shifts across hospitals for tumor identification; across camera traps for wildlife monitoring; and across time and location in satellite imaging and poverty mapping. On each dataset, we show that standard training yields substantially lower out-of-distribution than in-distribution performance. This gap remains even with models trained by existing methods for tackling distribution shifts, underscoring the need for new methods for training models that are more robust to the types of distribution shifts that arise in practice. To facilitate method development, we provide an open-source package that automates dataset loading, contains default model architectures and hyperparameters, and standardizes evaluations. Code and leaderboards are available at https://wilds.stanford.edu.

LLMs are increasingly transforming our digital ecosystem, but they often inherit societal biases learned from their training data, for instance stereotypes associating certain attributes with specific identity groups. While whether and how these biases are mitigated may depend on the specific use cases, being able to effectively detect instances of stereotype perpetuation is a crucial first step. Current methods to assess presence of stereotypes in generated language rely on simple template or co-occurrence based measures, without accounting for the variety of sentential contexts they manifest in. We argue that understanding the sentential context is crucial for detecting instances of generalization. We distinguish two types of generalizations: (1) language that merely mentions the presence of a generalization ("people think the French are very rude"), and (2) language that reinforces such a generalization ("as French they must be rude"), from non-generalizing context ("My French friends think I am rude"). For meaningful stereotype evaluations, we need to reliably distinguish such instances of generalizations. We introduce the new task of detecting generalization in language, and build GeniL, a multilingual dataset of over 50K sentences from 9 languages (English, Arabic, Bengali, Spanish, French, Hindi, Indonesian, Malay, and Portuguese) annotated for instances of generalizations. We demonstrate that the likelihood of a co-occurrence being an instance of generalization is usually low, and varies across different languages, identity groups, and attributes. We build classifiers to detect generalization in language with an overall PR-AUC of 58.7, with varying degrees of performance across languages. Our research provides data and tools to enable a nuanced understanding of stereotype perpetuation, a crucial step towards more inclusive and responsible language technologies.

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to classify unlabelled images from both `seen' and `unseen' classes by transferring knowledge from a set of labelled `seen' class images. A key theme in existing GCD approaches is adapting large-scale pre-trained models for the GCD task. An alternate perspective, however, is to adapt the data representation itself for better alignment with the pre-trained model. As such, in this paper, we introduce a two-stage adaptation approach termed SPTNet, which iteratively optimizes model parameters (i.e., model-finetuning) and data parameters (i.e., prompt learning). Furthermore, we propose a novel spatial prompt tuning method (SPT) which considers the spatial property of image data, enabling the method to better focus on object parts, which can transfer between seen and unseen classes. We thoroughly evaluate our SPTNet on standard benchmarks and demonstrate that our method outperforms existing GCD methods. Notably, we find our method achieves an average accuracy of 61.4% on the SSB, surpassing prior state-of-the-art methods by approximately 10%. The improvement is particularly remarkable as our method yields extra parameters amounting to only 0.117% of those in the backbone architecture. Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/sptnet.

Models trained on one set of domains often suffer performance drops on unseen domains, e.g., when wildlife monitoring models are deployed in new camera locations. In this work, we study principles for designing data augmentations for out-of-domain (OOD) generalization. In particular, we focus on real-world scenarios in which some domain-dependent features are robust, i.e., some features that vary across domains are predictive OOD. For example, in the wildlife monitoring application above, image backgrounds vary across camera locations but indicate habitat type, which helps predict the species of photographed animals. Motivated by theoretical analysis on a linear setting, we propose targeted augmentations, which selectively randomize spurious domain-dependent features while preserving robust ones. We prove that targeted augmentations improve OOD performance, allowing models to generalize better with fewer domains. In contrast, existing approaches such as generic augmentations, which fail to randomize domain-dependent features, and domain-invariant augmentations, which randomize all domain-dependent features, both perform poorly OOD. In experiments on three real-world datasets, we show that targeted augmentations set new states-of-the-art for OOD performance by 3.2-15.2%.

Multiple critical scenarios (like Wikipedia text generation given English Infoboxes) need automated generation of descriptive text in low resource (LR) languages from English fact triples. Previous work has focused on English fact-to-text (F2T) generation. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no previous attempt on cross-lingual alignment or generation for LR languages. Building an effective cross-lingual F2T (XF2T) system requires alignment between English structured facts and LR sentences. We propose two unsupervised methods for cross-lingual alignment. We contribute XALIGN, an XF2T dataset with 0.45M pairs across 8 languages, of which 5402 pairs have been manually annotated. We also train strong baseline XF2T generation models on the XAlign dataset.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to perform well at a variety of syntactic, discourse, and reasoning tasks. While LLMs are increasingly deployed in many forms including conversational agents that interact with humans, we lack a grounded benchmark to measure how well LLMs understand social language. Here, we introduce a new theory-driven benchmark, SocKET, that contains 58 NLP tasks testing social knowledge which we group into five categories: humor & sarcasm, offensiveness, sentiment & emotion, and trustworthiness. In tests on the benchmark, we demonstrate that current models attain only moderate performance but reveal significant potential for task transfer among different types and categories of tasks, which were predicted from theory. Through zero-shot evaluations, we show that pretrained models already possess some innate but limited capabilities of social language understanding and training on one category of tasks can improve zero-shot testing on others. Our benchmark provides a systematic way to analyze model performance on an important dimension of language and points to clear room for improvement to build more socially-aware LLMs. The associated resources are released at https://github.com/minjechoi/SOCKET.

As one promising way to inquire about any particular information through a dialog with the bot, question answering dialog systems have gained increasing research interests recently. Designing interactive QA systems has always been a challenging task in natural language processing and used as a benchmark to evaluate a machine's ability of natural language understanding. However, such systems often struggle when the question answering is carried out in multiple turns by the users to seek more information based on what they have already learned, thus, giving rise to another complicated form called Conversational Question Answering (CQA). CQA systems are often criticized for not understanding or utilizing the previous context of the conversation when answering the questions. To address the research gap, in this paper, we explore how to integrate conversational history into the neural machine comprehension system. On one hand, we introduce a framework based on a publically available pre-trained language model called BERT for incorporating history turns into the system. On the other hand, we propose a history selection mechanism that selects the turns that are relevant and contributes the most to answer the current question. Experimentation results revealed that our framework is comparable in performance with the state-of-the-art models on the QuAC leader board. We also conduct a number of experiments to show the side effects of using entire context information which brings unnecessary information and noise signals resulting in a decline in the model's performance.

In this paper, we introduce the first and largest Hindi text corpus, named BHAAV, which means emotions in Hindi, for analyzing emotions that a writer expresses through his characters in a story, as perceived by a narrator/reader. The corpus consists of 20,304 sentences collected from 230 different short stories spanning across 18 genres such as Inspirational and Mystery. Each sentence has been annotated into one of the five emotion categories - anger, joy, suspense, sad, and neutral, by three native Hindi speakers with at least ten years of formal education in Hindi. We also discuss challenges in the annotation of low resource languages such as Hindi, and discuss the scope of the proposed corpus along with its possible uses. We also provide a detailed analysis of the dataset and train strong baseline classifiers reporting their performances.

Diffusion-based image generation models have achieved great success in recent years by showing the capability of synthesizing high-quality content. However, these models contain a huge number of parameters, resulting in a significantly large model size. Saving and transferring them is a major bottleneck for various applications, especially those running on resource-constrained devices. In this work, we develop a novel weight quantization method that quantizes the UNet from Stable Diffusion v1.5 to 1.99 bits, achieving a model with 7.9X smaller size while exhibiting even better generation quality than the original one. Our approach includes several novel techniques, such as assigning optimal bits to each layer, initializing the quantized model for better performance, and improving the training strategy to dramatically reduce quantization error. Furthermore, we extensively evaluate our quantized model across various benchmark datasets and through human evaluation to demonstrate its superior generation quality.

Diffusion-based text-to-image generative models, e.g., Stable Diffusion, have revolutionized the field of content generation, enabling significant advancements in areas like image editing and video synthesis. Despite their formidable capabilities, these models are not without their limitations. It is still challenging to synthesize an image that aligns well with the input text, and multiple runs with carefully crafted prompts are required to achieve satisfactory results. To mitigate these limitations, numerous studies have endeavored to fine-tune the pre-trained diffusion models, i.e., UNet, utilizing various technologies. Yet, amidst these efforts, a pivotal question of text-to-image diffusion model training has remained largely unexplored: Is it possible and feasible to fine-tune the text encoder to improve the performance of text-to-image diffusion models? Our findings reveal that, instead of replacing the CLIP text encoder used in Stable Diffusion with other large language models, we can enhance it through our proposed fine-tuning approach, TextCraftor, leading to substantial improvements in quantitative benchmarks and human assessments. Interestingly, our technique also empowers controllable image generation through the interpolation of different text encoders fine-tuned with various rewards. We also demonstrate that TextCraftor is orthogonal to UNet finetuning, and can be combined to further improve generative quality.

In the rapidly evolving realm of artificial intelligence, deploying large language models (LLMs) poses increasingly pressing computational and environmental challenges. This paper introduces MELODI - Monitoring Energy Levels and Optimization for Data-driven Inference - a multifaceted framework crafted to monitor and analyze the energy consumed during LLM inference processes. MELODI enables detailed observations of power consumption dynamics and facilitates the creation of a comprehensive dataset reflective of energy efficiency across varied deployment scenarios. The dataset, generated using MELODI, encompasses a broad spectrum of LLM deployment frameworks, multiple language models, and extensive prompt datasets, enabling a comparative analysis of energy use. Using the dataset, we investigate how prompt attributes, including length and complexity, correlate with energy expenditure. Our findings indicate substantial disparities in energy efficiency, suggesting ample scope for optimization and adoption of sustainable measures in LLM deployment. Our contribution lies not only in the MELODI framework but also in the novel dataset, a resource that can be expanded by other researchers. Thus, MELODI is a foundational tool and dataset for advancing research into energy-conscious LLM deployment, steering the field toward a more sustainable future.

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has brought to light promising language generation capabilities, particularly in performing tasks like complex reasoning and creative writing. Consequently, distillation through imitation of teacher responses has emerged as a popular technique to transfer knowledge from LLMs to more accessible, Small Language Models (SLMs). While this works well for simpler tasks, there is a substantial performance gap on tasks requiring intricate language comprehension and creativity, such as humor generation. We hypothesize that this gap may stem from the fact that creative tasks might be hard to learn by imitation alone and explore whether an approach, involving supplementary guidance from the teacher, could yield higher performance. To address this, we study the effect of assigning a dual role to the LLM - as a "teacher" generating data, as well as a "critic" evaluating the student's performance. Our experiments on humor generation reveal that the incorporation of feedback significantly narrows the performance gap between SLMs and their larger counterparts compared to merely relying on imitation. As a result, our research highlights the potential of using feedback as an additional dimension to data when transferring complex language abilities via distillation.

Style transfer driven by text prompts paved a new path for creatively stylizing the images without collecting an actual style image. Despite having promising results, with text-driven stylization, the user has no control over the stylization. If a user wants to create an artistic image, the user requires fine control over the stylization of various entities individually in the content image, which is not addressed by the current state-of-the-art approaches. On the other hand, diffusion style transfer methods also suffer from the same issue because the regional stylization control over the stylized output is ineffective. To address this problem, We propose a new method Multi-Object Segmented Arbitrary Stylization Using CLIP (MOSAIC), that can apply styles to different objects in the image based on the context extracted from the input prompt. Text-based segmentation and stylization modules which are based on vision transformer architecture, were used to segment and stylize the objects. Our method can extend to any arbitrary objects, styles and produce high-quality images compared to the current state of art methods. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to perform text-guided arbitrary object-wise stylization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through qualitative and quantitative analysis, showing that it can generate visually appealing stylized images with enhanced control over stylization and the ability to generalize to unseen object classes.

Project Aria pushes the frontiers of Egocentric AI with large-scale real-world data collection using purposely designed glasses with privacy first approach. To protect the privacy of bystanders being recorded by the glasses, our research protocols are designed to ensure recorded video is processed by an AI anonymization model that removes bystander faces and vehicle license plates. Detected face and license plate regions are processed with a Gaussian blur such that these personal identification information (PII) regions are obscured. This process helps to ensure that anonymized versions of the video is retained for research purposes. In Project Aria, we have developed a state-of-the-art anonymization system EgoBlur. In this paper, we present extensive analysis of EgoBlur on challenging datasets comparing its performance with other state-of-the-art systems from industry and academia including extensive Responsible AI analysis on recently released Casual Conversations V2 dataset.

Multi-task learning (MTL), instruction tuning, and prompting have recently been shown to improve the generalizability of large language models to new tasks. However, the benefits of such methods are less well-documented in smaller language models, with some studies finding contradictory results. In this work, we explore and isolate the effects of (i) model size, (ii) general purpose MTL, (iii) in-domain MTL, (iv) instruction tuning, and (v) few-shot fine-tuning for models with fewer than 500 million parameters. Our experiments in the zero-shot setting demonstrate that models gain 31% relative improvement, on average, from general purpose MTL, with an additional 37.6% relative gain from in-domain MTL. Contradictory to prior works on large models, we find that instruction tuning provides a modest 2% performance improvement for small models.

Quantum circuits -- built from local unitary gates and local measurements -- are a new playground for quantum many-body physics and a tractable setting to explore universal collective phenomena far-from-equilibrium. These models have shed light on longstanding questions about thermalization and chaos, and on the underlying universal dynamics of quantum information and entanglement. In addition, such models generate new sets of questions and give rise to phenomena with no traditional analog, such as new dynamical phases in quantum systems that are monitored by an external observer. Quantum circuit dynamics is also topical in view of experimental progress in building digital quantum simulators that allow control of precisely these ingredients. Randomness in the circuit elements allows a high level of theoretical control, with a key theme being mappings between real-time quantum dynamics and effective classical lattice models or dynamical processes. Many of the universal phenomena that can be identified in this tractable setting apply to much wider classes of more structured many-body dynamics.

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a model-agnostic technique to improve model quality while having a fixed capacity budget. It is a commonly used technique for model compression, where a larger capacity teacher model with better quality is used to train a more compact student model with better inference efficiency. Through distillation, one hopes to benefit from student's compactness, without sacrificing too much on model quality. Despite the large success of knowledge distillation, better understanding of how it benefits student model's training dynamics remains under-explored. In this paper, we categorize teacher's knowledge into three hierarchical levels and study its effects on knowledge distillation: (1) knowledge of the `universe', where KD brings a regularization effect through label smoothing; (2) domain knowledge, where teacher injects class relationships prior to student's logit layer geometry; and (3) instance specific knowledge, where teacher rescales student model's per-instance gradients based on its measurement on the event difficulty. Using systematic analyses and extensive empirical studies on both synthetic and real-world datasets, we confirm that the aforementioned three factors play a major role in knowledge distillation. Furthermore, based on our findings, we diagnose some of the failure cases of applying KD from recent studies.

We introduce OpenFlamingo, a family of autoregressive vision-language models ranging from 3B to 9B parameters. OpenFlamingo is an ongoing effort to produce an open-source replication of DeepMind's Flamingo models. On seven vision-language datasets, OpenFlamingo models average between 80 - 89% of corresponding Flamingo performance. This technical report describes our models, training data, hyperparameters, and evaluation suite. We share our models and code at https://github.com/mlfoundations/open_flamingo.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly prevalent in conversational systems due to their advanced understanding and generative capabilities in general contexts. However, their effectiveness in task-oriented dialogues (TOD), which requires not only response generation but also effective dialogue state tracking (DST) within specific tasks and domains, remains less satisfying. In this work, we propose a novel approach FnCTOD for solving DST with LLMs through function calling. This method improves zero-shot DST, allowing adaptation to diverse domains without extensive data collection or model tuning. Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves exceptional performance with both modestly sized open-source and also proprietary LLMs: with in-context prompting it enables various 7B or 13B parameter models to surpass the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) achieved by ChatGPT, and improves ChatGPT's performance beating the SOTA by 5.6% Avg. JGA. Individual model results for GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 are boosted by 4.8% and 14%, respectively. We also show that by fine-tuning on a small collection of diverse task-oriented dialogues, we can equip modestly sized models, specifically a 13B parameter LLaMA2-Chat model, with function-calling capabilities and DST performance comparable to ChatGPT while maintaining their chat capabilities. We plan to open-source experimental code and model.

SpeechBrain is an open-source Conversational AI toolkit based on PyTorch, focused particularly on speech processing tasks such as speech recognition, speech enhancement, speaker recognition, text-to-speech, and much more. It promotes transparency and replicability by releasing both the pre-trained models and the complete "recipes" of code and algorithms required for training them. This paper presents SpeechBrain 1.0, a significant milestone in the evolution of the toolkit, which now has over 200 recipes for speech, audio, and language processing tasks, and more than 100 models available on Hugging Face. SpeechBrain 1.0 introduces new technologies to support diverse learning modalities, Large Language Model (LLM) integration, and advanced decoding strategies, along with novel models, tasks, and modalities. It also includes a new benchmark repository, offering researchers a unified platform for evaluating models across diverse tasks.

The 1^{st} Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision (MaCVi) 2023 focused on maritime computer vision for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV), and organized several subchallenges in this domain: (i) UAV-based Maritime Object Detection, (ii) UAV-based Maritime Object Tracking, (iii) USV-based Maritime Obstacle Segmentation and (iv) USV-based Maritime Obstacle Detection. The subchallenges were based on the SeaDronesSee and MODS benchmarks. This report summarizes the main findings of the individual subchallenges and introduces a new benchmark, called SeaDronesSee Object Detection v2, which extends the previous benchmark by including more classes and footage. We provide statistical and qualitative analyses, and assess trends in the best-performing methodologies of over 130 submissions. The methods are summarized in the appendix. The datasets, evaluation code and the leaderboard are publicly available at https://seadronessee.cs.uni-tuebingen.de/macvi.

We introduce Pixtral-12B, a 12--billion-parameter multimodal language model. Pixtral-12B is trained to understand both natural images and documents, achieving leading performance on various multimodal benchmarks, surpassing a number of larger models. Unlike many open-source models, Pixtral is also a cutting-edge text model for its size, and does not compromise on natural language performance to excel in multimodal tasks. Pixtral uses a new vision encoder trained from scratch, which allows it to ingest images at their natural resolution and aspect ratio. This gives users flexibility on the number of tokens used to process an image. Pixtral is also able to process any number of images in its long context window of 128K tokens. Pixtral 12B substanially outperforms other open models of similar sizes (Llama-3.2 11B \& Qwen-2-VL 7B). It also outperforms much larger open models like Llama-3.2 90B while being 7x smaller. We further contribute an open-source benchmark, MM-MT-Bench, for evaluating vision-language models in practical scenarios, and provide detailed analysis and code for standardized evaluation protocols for multimodal LLMs. Pixtral-12B is released under Apache 2.0 license.

Egocentric, multi-modal data as available on future augmented reality (AR) devices provides unique challenges and opportunities for machine perception. These future devices will need to be all-day wearable in a socially acceptable form-factor to support always available, context-aware and personalized AI applications. Our team at Meta Reality Labs Research built the Aria device, an egocentric, multi-modal data recording and streaming device with the goal to foster and accelerate research in this area. In this paper, we describe the Aria device hardware including its sensor configuration and the corresponding software tools that enable recording and processing of such data.

AI is undergoing a paradigm shift with the rise of models (e.g., BERT, DALL-E, GPT-3) that are trained on broad data at scale and are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks. We call these models foundation models to underscore their critically central yet incomplete character. This report provides a thorough account of the opportunities and risks of foundation models, ranging from their capabilities (e.g., language, vision, robotics, reasoning, human interaction) and technical principles(e.g., model architectures, training procedures, data, systems, security, evaluation, theory) to their applications (e.g., law, healthcare, education) and societal impact (e.g., inequity, misuse, economic and environmental impact, legal and ethical considerations). Though foundation models are based on standard deep learning and transfer learning, their scale results in new emergent capabilities,and their effectiveness across so many tasks incentivizes homogenization. Homogenization provides powerful leverage but demands caution, as the defects of the foundation model are inherited by all the adapted models downstream. Despite the impending widespread deployment of foundation models, we currently lack a clear understanding of how they work, when they fail, and what they are even capable of due to their emergent properties. To tackle these questions, we believe much of the critical research on foundation models will require deep interdisciplinary collaboration commensurate with their fundamentally sociotechnical nature.

Interactive 3D segmentation in radiance fields is an appealing task since its importance in 3D scene understanding and manipulation. However, existing methods face challenges in either achieving fine-grained, multi-granularity segmentation or contending with substantial computational overhead, inhibiting real-time interaction. In this paper, we introduce Segment Any 3D GAussians (SAGA), a novel 3D interactive segmentation approach that seamlessly blends a 2D segmentation foundation model with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), a recent breakthrough of radiance fields. SAGA efficiently embeds multi-granularity 2D segmentation results generated by the segmentation foundation model into 3D Gaussian point features through well-designed contrastive training. Evaluation on existing benchmarks demonstrates that SAGA can achieve competitive performance with state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, SAGA achieves multi-granularity segmentation and accommodates various prompts, including points, scribbles, and 2D masks. Notably, SAGA can finish the 3D segmentation within milliseconds, achieving nearly 1000x acceleration compared to previous SOTA. The project page is at https://jumpat.github.io/SAGA.

In this paper, we propose the Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Network (SAGAN) which allows attention-driven, long-range dependency modeling for image generation tasks. Traditional convolutional GANs generate high-resolution details as a function of only spatially local points in lower-resolution feature maps. In SAGAN, details can be generated using cues from all feature locations. Moreover, the discriminator can check that highly detailed features in distant portions of the image are consistent with each other. Furthermore, recent work has shown that generator conditioning affects GAN performance. Leveraging this insight, we apply spectral normalization to the GAN generator and find that this improves training dynamics. The proposed SAGAN achieves the state-of-the-art results, boosting the best published Inception score from 36.8 to 52.52 and reducing Frechet Inception distance from 27.62 to 18.65 on the challenging ImageNet dataset. Visualization of the attention layers shows that the generator leverages neighborhoods that correspond to object shapes rather than local regions of fixed shape.