Memory-updated-based Framework for 100% Reliable Flexible Flat Cables Insertion

Automatic assembly lines have increasingly replaced human labor in various tasks; however, the automation of Flexible Flat Cable (FFC) insertion remains unrealized due to its high requirement for effective feedback and dynamic operation, limiting approximately 11% of global industrial capacity. Despite lots of approaches, like vision-based tactile sensors and reinforcement learning, having been proposed, the implementation of human-like high-reliable insertion (i.e., with a 100% success rate in completed insertion) remains a big challenge. Drawing inspiration from human behavior in FFC insertion, which involves sensing three-dimensional forces, translating them into physical concepts, and continuously improving estimates, we propose a novel framework. This framework includes a sensing module for collecting three-dimensional tactile data, a perception module for interpreting this data into meaningful physical signals, and a memory module based on Bayesian theory for reliability estimation and control. This strategy enables the robot to accurately assess its physical state and generate reliable status estimations and corrective actions. Experimental results demonstrate that the robot using this framework can detect alignment errors of 0.5 mm with an accuracy of 97.92% and then achieve a 100% success rate in all completed tests after a few iterations. This work addresses the challenges of unreliable perception and control in complex insertion tasks, highlighting the path toward the development of fully automated production lines.

LLaVA-Critic: Learning to Evaluate Multimodal Models

We introduce LLaVA-Critic, the first open-source large multimodal model (LMM) designed as a generalist evaluator to assess performance across a wide range of multimodal tasks. LLaVA-Critic is trained using a high-quality critic instruction-following dataset that incorporates diverse evaluation criteria and scenarios. Our experiments demonstrate the model's effectiveness in two key areas: (1) LMM-as-a-Judge, where LLaVA-Critic provides reliable evaluation scores, performing on par with or surpassing GPT models on multiple evaluation benchmarks; and (2) Preference Learning, where it generates reward signals for preference learning, enhancing model alignment capabilities. This work underscores the potential of open-source LMMs in self-critique and evaluation, setting the stage for future research into scalable, superhuman alignment feedback mechanisms for LMMs.

F3T: A soft tactile unit with 3D force and temperature mathematical decoupling ability for robots

The human skin exhibits remarkable capability to perceive contact forces and environmental temperatures, providing intricate information essential for nuanced manipulation. Despite recent advancements in soft tactile sensors, a significant challenge remains in accurately decoupling signals - specifically, separating force from directional orientation and temperature - resulting in fail to meet the advanced application requirements of robots. This research proposes a multi-layered soft sensor unit (F3T) designed to achieve isolated measurements and mathematical decoupling of normal pressure, omnidirectional tangential forces, and temperature. We developed a circular coaxial magnetic film featuring a floating-mountain multi-layer capacitor, facilitating the physical decoupling of normal and tangential forces in all directions. Additionally, we incorporated an ion gel-based temperature sensing film atop the tactile sensor. This sensor is resilient to external pressure and deformation, enabling it to measure temperature and, crucially, eliminate capacitor errors induced by environmental temperature changes. This innovative design allows for the decoupled measurement of multiple signals, paving the way for advancements in higher-level robot motion control, autonomous decision-making, and task planning.

LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer

We present LLaVA-OneVision, a family of open large multimodal models (LMMs) developed by consolidating our insights into data, models, and visual representations in the LLaVA-NeXT blog series. Our experimental results demonstrate that LLaVA-OneVision is the first single model that can simultaneously push the performance boundaries of open LMMs in three important computer vision scenarios: single-image, multi-image, and video scenarios. Importantly, the design of LLaVA-OneVision allows strong transfer learning across different modalities/scenarios, yielding new emerging capabilities. In particular, strong video understanding and cross-scenario capabilities are demonstrated through task transfer from images to videos.

FPL+: Filtered Pseudo Label-based Unsupervised Cross-Modality Adaptation for 3D Medical Image Segmentation

Adapting a medical image segmentation model to a new domain is important for improving its cross-domain transferability, and due to the expensive annotation process, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) is appealing where only unlabeled images are needed for the adaptation. Existing UDA methods are mainly based on image or feature alignment with adversarial training for regularization, and they are limited by insufficient supervision in the target domain. In this paper, we propose an enhanced Filtered Pseudo Label (FPL+)-based UDA method for 3D medical image segmentation. It first uses cross-domain data augmentation to translate labeled images in the source domain to a dual-domain training set consisting of a pseudo source-domain set and a pseudo target-domain set. To leverage the dual-domain augmented images to train a pseudo label generator, domain-specific batch normalization layers are used to deal with the domain shift while learning the domain-invariant structure features, generating high-quality pseudo labels for target-domain images. We then combine labeled source-domain images and target-domain images with pseudo labels to train a final segmentor, where image-level weighting based on uncertainty estimation and pixel-level weighting based on dual-domain consensus are proposed to mitigate the adverse effect of noisy pseudo labels. Experiments on three public multi-modal datasets for Vestibular Schwannoma, brain tumor and whole heart segmentation show that our method surpassed ten state-of-the-art UDA methods, and it even achieved better results than fully supervised learning in the target domain in some cases.

InstructME: An Instruction Guided Music Edit And Remix Framework with Latent Diffusion Models

Music editing primarily entails the modification of instrument tracks or remixing in the whole, which offers a novel reinterpretation of the original piece through a series of operations. These music processing methods hold immense potential across various applications but demand substantial expertise. Prior methodologies, although effective for image and audio modifications, falter when directly applied to music. This is attributed to music's distinctive data nature, where such methods can inadvertently compromise the intrinsic harmony and coherence of music. In this paper, we develop InstructME, an Instruction guided Music Editing and remixing framework based on latent diffusion models. Our framework fortifies the U-Net with multi-scale aggregation in order to maintain consistency before and after editing. In addition, we introduce chord progression matrix as condition information and incorporate it in the semantic space to improve melodic harmony while editing. For accommodating extended musical pieces, InstructME employs a chunk transformer, enabling it to discern long-term temporal dependencies within music sequences. We tested InstructME in instrument-editing, remixing, and multi-round editing. Both subjective and objective evaluations indicate that our proposed method significantly surpasses preceding systems in music quality, text relevance and harmony. Demo samples are available at https://musicedit.github.io/

2020 CATARACTS Semantic Segmentation Challenge

Surgical scene segmentation is essential for anatomy and instrument localization which can be further used to assess tissue-instrument interactions during a surgical procedure. In 2017, the Challenge on Automatic Tool Annotation for cataRACT Surgery (CATARACTS) released 50 cataract surgery videos accompanied by instrument usage annotations. These annotations included frame-level instrument presence information. In 2020, we released pixel-wise semantic annotations for anatomy and instruments for 4670 images sampled from 25 videos of the CATARACTS training set. The 2020 CATARACTS Semantic Segmentation Challenge, which was a sub-challenge of the 2020 MICCAI Endoscopic Vision (EndoVis) Challenge, presented three sub-tasks to assess participating solutions on anatomical structure and instrument segmentation. Their performance was assessed on a hidden test set of 531 images from 10 videos of the CATARACTS test set.

Multi-Rate Nyquist-SCM for C-Band 100Gbit/s Signal over 50km Dispersion-Uncompensated Link

In this paper, to the best of our knowledge, we propose the first multi-rate Nyquist-subcarriers modulation (SCM) for C-band 100Gbit/s signal transmission over 50km dispersion-uncompensated link. Chromatic dispersion (CD) introduces severe spectral nulls on optical double-sideband signal, which greatly degrades the performance of intensity-modulation and direct-detection systems. In the previous works, high-complexity digital signal processing (DSP) is required to resist the CD-caused spectral nulls. Based on the characteristics of dispersive channel, Nyquist-SCM with multi-rate subcarriers is proposed to keep away from the CD-caused spectral nulls flexibly. Signal on each subcarrier can be individually recovered by a DSP with an acceptable complexity, including the feed-forward equalizer with no more than 31 taps, a two-tap post filter, and maximum likelihood sequence estimation with one memory length. Combining with entropy loading based on probabilistic constellation shaping to maximize the capacity-reach, the C-band 100Gbit/s multi-rate Nyquist-SCM signal over 50km dispersion-uncompensated link can achieve 7% hard-decision forward error correction limit and average normalized generalized mutual information of 0.967. In conclusion, the multi-rate Nyquist-SCM shows great potentials in solving the CD-caused spectral distortions.

Annotation-Efficient Learning for Medical Image Segmentation based on Noisy Pseudo Labels and Adversarial Learning

Despite that deep learning has achieved state-of-the-art performance for medical image segmentation, its success relies on a large set of manually annotated images for training that are expensive to acquire. In this paper, we propose an annotation-efficient learning framework for segmentation tasks that avoids annotations of training images, where we use an improved Cycle-Consistent Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to learn from a set of unpaired medical images and auxiliary masks obtained either from a shape model or public datasets. We first use the GAN to generate pseudo labels for our training images under the implicit high-level shape constraint represented by a Variational Auto-encoder (VAE)-based discriminator with the help of the auxiliary masks, and build a Discriminator-guided Generator Channel Calibration (DGCC) module which employs our discriminator's feedback to calibrate the generator for better pseudo labels. To learn from the pseudo labels that are noisy, we further introduce a noise-robust iterative learning method using noise-weighted Dice loss. We validated our framework with two situations: objects with a simple shape model like optic disc in fundus images and fetal head in ultrasound images, and complex structures like lung in X-Ray images and liver in CT images. Experimental results demonstrated that 1) Our VAE-based discriminator and DGCC module help to obtain high-quality pseudo labels. 2) Our proposed noise-robust learning method can effectively overcome the effect of noisy pseudo labels. 3) The segmentation performance of our method without using annotations of training images is close or even comparable to that of learning from human annotations.

Robust Medical Instrument Segmentation Challenge 2019

Intraoperative tracking of laparoscopic instruments is often a prerequisite for computer and robotic-assisted interventions. While numerous methods for detecting, segmenting and tracking of medical instruments based on endoscopic video images have been proposed in the literature, key limitations remain to be addressed: Firstly, robustness, that is, the reliable performance of state-of-the-art methods when run on challenging images (e.g. in the presence of blood, smoke or motion artifacts). Secondly, generalization; algorithms trained for a specific intervention in a specific hospital should generalize to other interventions or institutions. In an effort to promote solutions for these limitations, we organized the Robust Medical Instrument Segmentation (ROBUST-MIS) challenge as an international benchmarking competition with a specific focus on the robustness and generalization capabilities of algorithms. For the first time in the field of endoscopic image processing, our challenge included a task on binary segmentation and also addressed multi-instance detection and segmentation. The challenge was based on a surgical data set comprising 10,040 annotated images acquired from a total of 30 surgical procedures from three different types of surgery. The validation of the competing methods for the three tasks (binary segmentation, multi-instance detection and multi-instance segmentation) was performed in three different stages with an increasing domain gap between the training and the test data. The results confirm the initial hypothesis, namely that algorithm performance degrades with an increasing domain gap. While the average detection and segmentation quality of the best-performing algorithms is high, future research should concentrate on detection and segmentation of small, crossing, moving and transparent instrument(s) (parts).