HAP: Structure-Aware Masked Image Modeling for Human-Centric Perception

Model pre-training is essential in human-centric perception. In this paper, we first introduce masked image modeling (MIM) as a pre-training approach for this task. Upon revisiting the MIM training strategy, we reveal that human structure priors offer significant potential. Motivated by this insight, we further incorporate an intuitive human structure prior - human parts - into pre-training. Specifically, we employ this prior to guide the mask sampling process. Image patches, corresponding to human part regions, have high priority to be masked out. This encourages the model to concentrate more on body structure information during pre-training, yielding substantial benefits across a range of human-centric perception tasks. To further capture human characteristics, we propose a structure-invariant alignment loss that enforces different masked views, guided by the human part prior, to be closely aligned for the same image. We term the entire method as HAP. HAP simply uses a plain ViT as the encoder yet establishes new state-of-the-art performance on 11 human-centric benchmarks, and on-par result on one dataset. For example, HAP achieves 78.1% mAP on MSMT17 for person re-identification, 86.54% mA on PA-100K for pedestrian attribute recognition, 78.2% AP on MS COCO for 2D pose estimation, and 56.0 PA-MPJPE on 3DPW for 3D pose and shape estimation.

FLEEK: Factual Error Detection and Correction with Evidence Retrieved from External Knowledge

Detecting factual errors in textual information, whether generated by large language models (LLM) or curated by humans, is crucial for making informed decisions. LLMs' inability to attribute their claims to external knowledge and their tendency to hallucinate makes it difficult to rely on their responses. Humans, too, are prone to factual errors in their writing. Since manual detection and correction of factual errors is labor-intensive, developing an automatic approach can greatly reduce human effort. We present FLEEK, a prototype tool that automatically extracts factual claims from text, gathers evidence from external knowledge sources, evaluates the factuality of each claim, and suggests revisions for identified errors using the collected evidence. Initial empirical evaluation on fact error detection (77-85\% F1) shows the potential of FLEEK. A video demo of FLEEK can be found at https://youtu.be/NapJFUlkPdQ.

Precedent-Enhanced Legal Judgment Prediction with LLM and Domain-Model Collaboration

Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) has become an increasingly crucial task in Legal AI, i.e., predicting the judgment of the case in terms of case fact description. Precedents are the previous legal cases with similar facts, which are the basis for the judgment of the subsequent case in national legal systems. Thus, it is worthwhile to explore the utilization of precedents in the LJP. Recent advances in deep learning have enabled a variety of techniques to be used to solve the LJP task. These can be broken down into two categories: large language models (LLMs) and domain-specific models. LLMs are capable of interpreting and generating complex natural language, while domain models are efficient in learning task-specific information. In this paper, we propose the precedent-enhanced LJP framework (PLJP), a system that leverages the strength of both LLM and domain models in the context of precedents. Specifically, the domain models are designed to provide candidate labels and find the proper precedents efficiently, and the large models will make the final prediction with an in-context precedents comprehension. Experiments on the real-world dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our PLJP. Moreover, our work shows a promising direction for LLM and domain-model collaboration that can be generalized to other vertical domains.

A Chinese Prompt Attack Dataset for LLMs with Evil Content

Large Language Models (LLMs) present significant priority in text understanding and generation. However, LLMs suffer from the risk of generating harmful contents especially while being employed to applications. There are several black-box attack methods, such as Prompt Attack, which can change the behaviour of LLMs and induce LLMs to generate unexpected answers with harmful contents. Researchers are interested in Prompt Attack and Defense with LLMs, while there is no publicly available dataset to evaluate the abilities of defending prompt attack. In this paper, we introduce a Chinese Prompt Attack Dataset for LLMs, called CPAD. Our prompts aim to induce LLMs to generate unexpected outputs with several carefully designed prompt attack approaches and widely concerned attacking contents. Different from previous datasets involving safety estimation, We construct the prompts considering three dimensions: contents, attacking methods and goals, thus the responses can be easily evaluated and analysed. We run several well-known Chinese LLMs on our dataset, and the results show that our prompts are significantly harmful to LLMs, with around 70% attack success rate. We will release CPAD to encourage further studies on prompt attack and defense.

Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models: A Survey

This paper surveys research works in the quickly advancing field of instruction tuning (IT), a crucial technique to enhance the capabilities and controllability of large language models (LLMs). Instruction tuning refers to the process of further training LLMs on a dataset consisting of \textsc{(instruction, output)} pairs in a supervised fashion, which bridges the gap between the next-word prediction objective of LLMs and the users' objective of having LLMs adhere to human instructions. In this work, we make a systematic review of the literature, including the general methodology of IT, the construction of IT datasets, the training of IT models, and applications to different modalities, domains and applications, along with an analysis on aspects that influence the outcome of IT (e.g., generation of instruction outputs, size of the instruction dataset, etc). We also review the potential pitfalls of IT along with criticism against it, along with efforts pointing out current deficiencies of existing strategies and suggest some avenues for fruitful research.

MEDOE: A Multi-Expert Decoder and Output Ensemble Framework for Long-tailed Semantic Segmentation

Long-tailed distribution of semantic categories, which has been often ignored in conventional methods, causes unsatisfactory performance in semantic segmentation on tail categories. In this paper, we focus on the problem of long-tailed semantic segmentation. Although some long-tailed recognition methods (e.g., re-sampling/re-weighting) have been proposed in other problems, they can probably compromise crucial contextual information and are thus hardly adaptable to the problem of long-tailed semantic segmentation. To address this issue, we propose MEDOE, a novel framework for long-tailed semantic segmentation via contextual information ensemble-and-grouping. The proposed two-sage framework comprises a multi-expert decoder (MED) and a multi-expert output ensemble (MOE). Specifically, the MED includes several "experts". Based on the pixel frequency distribution, each expert takes the dataset masked according to the specific categories as input and generates contextual information self-adaptively for classification; The MOE adopts learnable decision weights for the ensemble of the experts' outputs. As a model-agnostic framework, our MEDOE can be flexibly and efficiently coupled with various popular deep neural networks (e.g., DeepLabv3+, OCRNet, and PSPNet) to improve their performance in long-tailed semantic segmentation. Experimental results show that the proposed framework outperforms the current methods on both Cityscapes and ADE20K datasets by up to 1.78% in mIoU and 5.89% in mAcc.

Hierarchical Topological Ordering with Conditional Independence Test for Limited Time Series

Learning directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to identify causal relations underlying observational data is crucial but also poses significant challenges. Recently, topology-based methods have emerged as a two-step approach to discovering DAGs by first learning the topological ordering of variables and then eliminating redundant edges, while ensuring that the graph remains acyclic. However, one limitation is that these methods would generate numerous spurious edges that require subsequent pruning. To overcome this limitation, in this paper, we propose an improvement to topology-based methods by introducing limited time series data, consisting of only two cross-sectional records that need not be adjacent in time and are subject to flexible timing. By incorporating conditional instrumental variables as exogenous interventions, we aim to identify descendant nodes for each variable. Following this line, we propose a hierarchical topological ordering algorithm with conditional independence test (HT-CIT), which enables the efficient learning of sparse DAGs with a smaller search space compared to other popular approaches. The HT-CIT algorithm greatly reduces the number of edges that need to be pruned. Empirical results from synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed HT-CIT algorithm.

Boosting 3-DoF Ground-to-Satellite Camera Localization Accuracy via Geometry-Guided Cross-View Transformer

Image retrieval-based cross-view localization methods often lead to very coarse camera pose estimation, due to the limited sampling density of the database satellite images. In this paper, we propose a method to increase the accuracy of a ground camera's location and orientation by estimating the relative rotation and translation between the ground-level image and its matched/retrieved satellite image. Our approach designs a geometry-guided cross-view transformer that combines the benefits of conventional geometry and learnable cross-view transformers to map the ground-view observations to an overhead view. Given the synthesized overhead view and observed satellite feature maps, we construct a neural pose optimizer with strong global information embedding ability to estimate the relative rotation between them. After aligning their rotations, we develop an uncertainty-guided spatial correlation to generate a probability map of the vehicle locations, from which the relative translation can be determined. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art. Notably, the likelihood of restricting the vehicle lateral pose to be within 1m of its Ground Truth (GT) value on the cross-view KITTI dataset has been improved from $35.54\%$ to $76.44\%$, and the likelihood of restricting the vehicle orientation to be within $1^{\circ}$ of its GT value has been improved from $19.64\%$ to $99.10\%$.

DisCover: Disentangled Music Representation Learning for Cover Song Identification

In the field of music information retrieval (MIR), cover song identification (CSI) is a challenging task that aims to identify cover versions of a query song from a massive collection. Existing works still suffer from high intra-song variances and inter-song correlations, due to the entangled nature of version-specific and version-invariant factors in their modeling. In this work, we set the goal of disentangling version-specific and version-invariant factors, which could make it easier for the model to learn invariant music representations for unseen query songs. We analyze the CSI task in a disentanglement view with the causal graph technique, and identify the intra-version and inter-version effects biasing the invariant learning. To block these effects, we propose the disentangled music representation learning framework (DisCover) for CSI. DisCover consists of two critical components: (1) Knowledge-guided Disentanglement Module (KDM) and (2) Gradient-based Adversarial Disentanglement Module (GADM), which block intra-version and inter-version biased effects, respectively. KDM minimizes the mutual information between the learned representations and version-variant factors that are identified with prior domain knowledge. GADM identifies version-variant factors by simulating the representation transitions between intra-song versions, and exploits adversarial distillation for effect blocking. Extensive comparisons with best-performing methods and in-depth analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of DisCover and the and necessity of disentanglement for CSI.