VIGC: Visual Instruction Generation and Correction

The integration of visual encoders and large language models (LLMs) has driven recent progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, the scarcity of high-quality instruction-tuning data for vision-language tasks remains a challenge. The current leading paradigm, such as LLaVA, relies on language-only GPT-4 to generate data, which requires pre-annotated image captions and detection bounding boxes, suffering from understanding image details. A practical solution to this problem would be to utilize the available multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to generate instruction data for vision-language tasks. However, it's worth noting that the currently accessible MLLMs are not as powerful as their LLM counterparts, as they tend to produce inadequate responses and generate false information. As a solution for addressing the current issue, this paper proposes the Visual Instruction Generation and Correction (VIGC) framework that enables multimodal large language models to generate instruction-tuning data and progressively enhance its quality on-the-fly. Specifically, Visual Instruction Generation (VIG) guides the vision-language model to generate diverse instruction-tuning data. To ensure generation quality, Visual Instruction Correction (VIC) adopts an iterative update mechanism to correct any inaccuracies in data produced by VIG, effectively reducing the risk of hallucination. Leveraging the diverse, high-quality data generated by VIGC, we finetune mainstream models and validate data quality based on various evaluations. Experimental results demonstrate that VIGC not only compensates for the shortcomings of language-only data generation methods, but also effectively enhances the benchmark performance. The models, datasets, and code are available at https://opendatalab.github.io/VIGC.

Factor Graph Neural Networks

In recent years, we have witnessed a surge of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), most of which can learn powerful representations in an end-to-end fashion with great success in many real-world applications. They have resemblance to Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGMs), but break free from some limitations of PGMs. By aiming to provide expressive methods for representation learning instead of computing marginals or most likely configurations, GNNs provide flexibility in the choice of information flowing rules while maintaining good performance. Despite their success and inspirations, they lack efficient ways to represent and learn higher-order relations among variables/nodes. More expressive higher-order GNNs which operate on k-tuples of nodes need increased computational resources in order to process higher-order tensors. We propose Factor Graph Neural Networks (FGNNs) to effectively capture higher-order relations for inference and learning. To do so, we first derive an efficient approximate Sum-Product loopy belief propagation inference algorithm for discrete higher-order PGMs. We then neuralize the novel message passing scheme into a Factor Graph Neural Network (FGNN) module by allowing richer representations of the message update rules; this facilitates both efficient inference and powerful end-to-end learning. We further show that with a suitable choice of message aggregation operators, our FGNN is also able to represent Max-Product belief propagation, providing a single family of architecture that can represent both Max and Sum-Product loopy belief propagation. Our extensive experimental evaluation on synthetic as well as real datasets demonstrates the potential of the proposed model.

Contact-aware Shaping and Maintenance of Deformable Linear Objects With Fixtures

Studying the manipulation of deformable linear objects has significant practical applications in industry, including car manufacturing, textile production, and electronics automation. However, deformable linear object manipulation poses a significant challenge in developing planning and control algorithms, due to the precise and continuous control required to effectively manipulate the deformable nature of these objects. In this paper, we propose a new framework to control and maintain the shape of deformable linear objects with two robot manipulators utilizing environmental contacts. The framework is composed of a shape planning algorithm which automatically generates appropriate positions to place fixtures, and an object-centered skill engine which includes task and motion planning to control the motion and force of both robots based on the object status. The status of the deformable linear object is estimated online utilizing visual as well as force information. The framework manages to handle a cable routing task in real-world experiments with two Panda robots and especially achieves contact-aware and flexible clip fixing with challenging fixtures.

SoK: Privacy-Preserving Data Synthesis

As the prevalence of data analysis grows, safeguarding data privacy has become a paramount concern. Consequently, there has been an upsurge in the development of mechanisms aimed at privacy-preserving data analyses. However, these approaches are task-specific; designing algorithms for new tasks is a cumbersome process. As an alternative, one can create synthetic data that is (ideally) devoid of private information. This paper focuses on privacy-preserving data synthesis (PPDS) by providing a comprehensive overview, analysis, and discussion of the field. Specifically, we put forth a master recipe that unifies two prominent strands of research in PPDS: statistical methods and deep learning (DL)-based methods. Under the master recipe, we further dissect the statistical methods into choices of modeling and representation, and investigate the DL-based methods by different generative modeling principles. To consolidate our findings, we provide comprehensive reference tables, distill key takeaways, and identify open problems in the existing literature. In doing so, we aim to answer the following questions: What are the design principles behind different PPDS methods? How can we categorize these methods, and what are the advantages and disadvantages associated with each category? Can we provide guidelines for method selection in different real-world scenarios? We proceed to benchmark several prominent DL-based methods on the task of private image synthesis and conclude that DP-MERF is an all-purpose approach. Finally, upon systematizing the work over the past decade, we identify future directions and call for actions from researchers.

Learning optimal controllers: a dynamical motion primitive approach

Real-time computation of optimal control is a challenging problem and, to solve this difficulty, many frameworks proposed to use learning techniques to learn (possibly sub-optimal) controllers and enable their usage in an online fashion. Among these techniques, the optimal motion framework is a simple, yet powerful technique, that obtained success in many complex real-world applications. The main idea of this approach is to take advantage of dynamic motion primitives, a widely used tool in robotics to learn trajectories from demonstrations. While usually these demonstrations come from humans, the optimal motion framework is based on demonstrations coming from optimal solutions, such as the ones obtained by numeric solvers. As usual in many learning techniques, a drawback of this approach is that it is hard to estimate the suboptimality of learned solutions, since finding easily computable and non-trivial upper bounds to the error between an optimal solution and a learned solution is, in general, unfeasible. However, we show in this paper that it is possible to estimate this error for a broad class of problems. Furthermore, we apply this estimation technique to achieve a novel and more efficient sampling scheme to be used within the optimal motion framework, enabling the usage of this framework in some scenarios where the computational resources are limited.

Case Study-Based Approach of Quantum Machine Learning in Cybersecurity: Quantum Support Vector Machine for Malware Classification and Protection

Quantum machine learning (QML) is an emerging field of research that leverages quantum computing to improve the classical machine learning approach to solve complex real world problems. QML has the potential to address cybersecurity related challenges. Considering the novelty and complex architecture of QML, resources are not yet explicitly available that can pave cybersecurity learners to instill efficient knowledge of this emerging technology. In this research, we design and develop QML-based ten learning modules covering various cybersecurity topics by adopting student centering case-study based learning approach. We apply one subtopic of QML on a cybersecurity topic comprised of pre-lab, lab, and post-lab activities towards providing learners with hands-on QML experiences in solving real-world security problems. In order to engage and motivate students in a learning environment that encourages all students to learn, pre-lab offers a brief introduction to both the QML subtopic and cybersecurity problem. In this paper, we utilize quantum support vector machine (QSVM) for malware classification and protection where we use open source Pennylane QML framework on the drebin215 dataset. We demonstrate our QSVM model and achieve an accuracy of 95% in malware classification and protection. We will develop all the modules and introduce them to the cybersecurity community in the coming days.

Software Supply Chain Vulnerabilities Detection in Source Code: Performance Comparison between Traditional and Quantum Machine Learning Algorithms

The software supply chain (SSC) attack has become one of the crucial issues that are being increased rapidly with the advancement of the software development domain. In general, SSC attacks execute during the software development processes lead to vulnerabilities in software products targeting downstream customers and even involved stakeholders. Machine Learning approaches are proven in detecting and preventing software security vulnerabilities. Besides, emerging quantum machine learning can be promising in addressing SSC attacks. Considering the distinction between traditional and quantum machine learning, performance could be varies based on the proportions of the experimenting dataset. In this paper, we conduct a comparative analysis between quantum neural networks (QNN) and conventional neural networks (NN) with a software supply chain attack dataset known as ClaMP. Our goal is to distinguish the performance between QNN and NN and to conduct the experiment, we develop two different models for QNN and NN by utilizing Pennylane for quantum and TensorFlow and Keras for traditional respectively. We evaluated the performance of both models with different proportions of the ClaMP dataset to identify the f1 score, recall, precision, and accuracy. We also measure the execution time to check the efficiency of both models. The demonstration result indicates that execution time for QNN is slower than NN with a higher percentage of datasets. Due to recent advancements in QNN, a large level of experiments shall be carried out to understand both models accurately in our future research.

DC-CCL: Device-Cloud Collaborative Controlled Learning for Large Vision Models

Many large vision models have been deployed on the cloud for real-time services. Meanwhile, fresh samples are continuously generated on the served mobile device. How to leverage the device-side samples to improve the cloud-side large model becomes a practical requirement, but falls into the dilemma of no raw sample up-link and no large model down-link. Specifically, the user may opt out of sharing raw samples with the cloud due to the concern of privacy or communication overhead, while the size of some large vision models far exceeds the mobile device's runtime capacity. In this work, we propose a device-cloud collaborative controlled learning framework, called DC-CCL, enabling a cloud-side large vision model that cannot be directly deployed on the mobile device to still benefit from the device-side local samples. In particular, DC-CCL vertically splits the base model into two submodels, one large submodel for learning from the cloud-side samples and the other small submodel for learning from the device-side samples and performing device-cloud knowledge fusion. Nevertheless, on-device training of the small submodel requires the output of the cloud-side large submodel to compute the desired gradients. DC-CCL thus introduces a light-weight model to mimic the large cloud-side submodel with knowledge distillation, which can be offloaded to the mobile device to control its small submodel's optimization direction. Given the decoupling nature of two submodels in collaborative learning, DC-CCL also allows the cloud to take a pre-trained model and the mobile device to take another model with a different backbone architecture.

Traffic State Estimation with Anisotropic Gaussian Processes from Vehicle Trajectories

Accurately monitoring road traffic state and speed is crucial for various applications, including travel time prediction, traffic control, and traffic safety. However, the lack of sensors often results in incomplete traffic state data, making it challenging to obtain reliable information for decision-making. This paper proposes a novel method for imputing traffic state data using Gaussian processes (GP) to address this issue. We propose a kernel rotation re-parametrization scheme that transforms a standard isotropic GP kernel into an anisotropic kernel, which can better model the propagation of traffic waves in traffic flow data. This method can be applied to impute traffic state data from fixed sensors or probe vehicles. Moreover, the rotated GP method provides statistical uncertainty quantification for the imputed traffic state, making it more reliable. We also extend our approach to a multi-output GP, which allows for simultaneously estimating the traffic state for multiple lanes. We evaluate our method using real-world traffic data from the Next Generation simulation (NGSIM) and HighD programs. Considering current and future mixed traffic of connected vehicles (CVs) and human-driven vehicles (HVs), we experiment with the traffic state estimation scheme from 5% to 50% available trajectories, mimicking different CV penetration rates in a mixed traffic environment. Results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of estimation accuracy, efficiency, and robustness.