TriHelper: Zero-Shot Object Navigation with Dynamic Assistance

Navigating toward specific objects in unknown environments without additional training, known as Zero-Shot object navigation, poses a significant challenge in the field of robotics, which demands high levels of auxiliary information and strategic planning. Traditional works have focused on holistic solutions, overlooking the specific challenges agents encounter during navigation such as collision, low exploration efficiency, and misidentification of targets. To address these challenges, our work proposes TriHelper, a novel framework designed to assist agents dynamically through three primary navigation challenges: collision, exploration, and detection. Specifically, our framework consists of three innovative components: (i) Collision Helper, (ii) Exploration Helper, and (iii) Detection Helper. These components work collaboratively to solve these challenges throughout the navigation process. Experiments on the Habitat-Matterport 3D (HM3D) and Gibson datasets demonstrate that TriHelper significantly outperforms all existing baseline methods in Zero-Shot object navigation, showcasing superior success rates and exploration efficiency. Our ablation studies further underscore the effectiveness of each helper in addressing their respective challenges, notably enhancing the agent's navigation capabilities. By proposing TriHelper, we offer a fresh perspective on advancing the object navigation task, paving the way for future research in the domain of Embodied AI and visual-based navigation.

Typographic Attacks in Large Multimodal Models Can be Alleviated by More Informative Prompts

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) rely on pre-trained Vision Language Models (VLMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform amazing emergent abilities on various multimodal tasks in the joint space of vision and language. However, the Typographic Attack, which shows disruption to VLMs, has also been certified as a security vulnerability to LMMs. In this work, we first comprehensively investigate the distractibility of LMMs by typography. In particular, we introduce the Typographic Dataset designed to evaluate distractibility across various multi-modal subtasks, such as object recognition, visual attributes detection, enumeration, arithmetic computation, and commonsense reasoning. To further study the effect of typographic patterns on performance, we also scrutinize the effect of tuning various typographic factors, encompassing font size, color, opacity, and spatial positioning of typos. We discover that LMMs can partially distinguish visual contents and typos when confronting typographic attacks, which suggests that embeddings from vision encoders contain enough information to distinguish visual contents and typos in images. Inspired by such phenomena, we demonstrate that CLIP's performance of zero-shot classification on typo-ridden images can be significantly improved by providing more informative texts to match images. Furthermore, we also prove that LMMs can utilize more informative prompts to leverage information in embeddings to differentiate between visual content and typos. Finally, we propose a prompt information enhancement method that can effectively mitigate the effects of typography.

Pursing the Sparse Limitation of Spiking Deep Learning Structures

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), a novel brain-inspired algorithm, are garnering increased attention for their superior computation and energy efficiency over traditional artificial neural networks (ANNs). To facilitate deployment on memory-constrained devices, numerous studies have explored SNN pruning. However, these efforts are hindered by challenges such as scalability challenges in more complex architectures and accuracy degradation. Amidst these challenges, the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) emerges as a promising pruning strategy. It posits that within dense neural networks, there exist winning tickets or subnetworks that are sparser but do not compromise performance. To explore a more structure-sparse and energy-saving model, we investigate the unique synergy of SNNs with LTH and design two novel spiking winning tickets to push the boundaries of sparsity within SNNs. Furthermore, we introduce an innovative algorithm capable of simultaneously identifying both weight and patch-level winning tickets, enabling the achievement of sparser structures without compromising on the final model's performance. Through comprehensive experiments on both RGB-based and event-based datasets, we demonstrate that our spiking lottery ticket achieves comparable or superior performance even when the model structure is extremely sparse.

Gaining the Sparse Rewards by Exploring Binary Lottery Tickets in Spiking Neural Network

Spiking Neural Network (SNN) as a brain-inspired strategy receives lots of attention because of the high-sparsity and low-power properties derived from its inherent spiking information state. To further improve the efficiency of SNN, some works declare that the Lottery Tickets (LTs) Hypothesis, which indicates that the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) contains a subnetwork without sacrificing the performance of the original network, also exists in SNN. However, the spiking information handled by SNN has a natural similarity and affinity with binarization in sparsification. Therefore, to further explore SNN efficiency, this paper focuses on (1) the presence or absence of LTs in the binary SNN, and (2) whether the spiking mechanism is a superior strategy in terms of handling binary information compared to simple model binarization. To certify these consumptions, a sparse training method is proposed to find Binary Weights Spiking Lottery Tickets (BinW-SLT) under different network structures. Through comprehensive evaluations, we show that BinW-SLT could attain up to +5.86% and +3.17% improvement on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 compared with binary LTs, as well as achieve 1.86x and 8.92x energy saving compared with full-precision SNN and ANN.