3D Scene Graph Guided Vision-Language Pre-training

3D vision-language (VL) reasoning has gained significant attention due to its potential to bridge the 3D physical world with natural language descriptions. Existing approaches typically follow task-specific, highly specialized paradigms. Therefore, these methods focus on a limited range of reasoning sub-tasks and rely heavily on the hand-crafted modules and auxiliary losses. This highlights the need for a simpler, unified and general-purpose model. In this paper, we leverage the inherent connection between 3D scene graphs and natural language, proposing a 3D scene graph-guided vision-language pre-training (VLP) framework. Our approach utilizes modality encoders, graph convolutional layers and cross-attention layers to learn universal representations that adapt to a variety of 3D VL reasoning tasks, thereby eliminating the need for task-specific designs. The pre-training objectives include: 1) Scene graph-guided contrastive learning, which leverages the strong correlation between 3D scene graphs and natural language to align 3D objects with textual features at various fine-grained levels; and 2) Masked modality learning, which uses cross-modality information to reconstruct masked words and 3D objects. Instead of directly reconstructing the 3D point clouds of masked objects, we use position clues to predict their semantic categories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our pre-training model, when fine-tuned on several downstream tasks, achieves performance comparable to or better than existing methods in tasks such as 3D visual grounding, 3D dense captioning, and 3D question answering.

Nd-BiMamba2: A Unified Bidirectional Architecture for Multi-Dimensional Data Processing

Deep learning models often require specially designed architectures to process data of different dimensions, such as 1D time series, 2D images, and 3D volumetric data. Existing bidirectional models mainly focus on sequential data, making it difficult to scale effectively to higher dimensions. To address this issue, we propose a novel multi-dimensional bidirectional neural network architecture, named Nd-BiMamba2, which efficiently handles 1D, 2D, and 3D data. Nd-BiMamba2 is based on the Mamba2 module and introduces innovative bidirectional processing mechanisms and adaptive padding strategies to capture bidirectional information in multi-dimensional data while maintaining computational efficiency. Unlike existing methods that require designing specific architectures for different dimensional data, Nd-BiMamba2 adopts a unified architecture with a modular design, simplifying development and maintenance costs. To verify the portability and flexibility of Nd-BiMamba2, we successfully exported it to ONNX and TorchScript and tested it on different hardware platforms (e.g., CPU, GPU, and mobile devices). Experimental results show that Nd-BiMamba2 runs efficiently on multiple platforms, demonstrating its potential in practical applications. The code is open-source: https://github.com/Human9000/nd-Mamba2-torch

Morph: A Motion-free Physics Optimization Framework for Human Motion Generation

Human motion generation plays a vital role in applications such as digital humans and humanoid robot control. However, most existing approaches disregard physics constraints, leading to the frequent production of physically implausible motions with pronounced artifacts such as floating and foot sliding. In this paper, we propose \textbf{Morph}, a \textbf{Mo}tion-f\textbf{r}ee \textbf{ph}ysics optimization framework, comprising a Motion Generator and a Motion Physics Refinement module, for enhancing physical plausibility without relying on costly real-world motion data. Specifically, the Motion Generator is responsible for providing large-scale synthetic motion data, while the Motion Physics Refinement Module utilizes these synthetic data to train a motion imitator within a physics simulator, enforcing physical constraints to project the noisy motions into a physically-plausible space. These physically refined motions, in turn, are used to fine-tune the Motion Generator, further enhancing its capability. Experiments on both text-to-motion and music-to-dance generation tasks demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art motion generation quality while improving physical plausibility drastically.

Reflections from the 2024 Large Language Model (LLM) Hackathon for Applications in Materials Science and Chemistry

Here, we present the outcomes from the second Large Language Model (LLM) Hackathon for Applications in Materials Science and Chemistry, which engaged participants across global hybrid locations, resulting in 34 team submissions. The submissions spanned seven key application areas and demonstrated the diverse utility of LLMs for applications in (1) molecular and material property prediction; (2) molecular and material design; (3) automation and novel interfaces; (4) scientific communication and education; (5) research data management and automation; (6) hypothesis generation and evaluation; and (7) knowledge extraction and reasoning from scientific literature. Each team submission is presented in a summary table with links to the code and as brief papers in the appendix. Beyond team results, we discuss the hackathon event and its hybrid format, which included physical hubs in Toronto, Montreal, San Francisco, Berlin, Lausanne, and Tokyo, alongside a global online hub to enable local and virtual collaboration. Overall, the event highlighted significant improvements in LLM capabilities since the previous year's hackathon, suggesting continued expansion of LLMs for applications in materials science and chemistry research. These outcomes demonstrate the dual utility of LLMs as both multipurpose models for diverse machine learning tasks and platforms for rapid prototyping custom applications in scientific research.

AdaSociety: An Adaptive Environment with Social Structures for Multi-Agent Decision-Making

Traditional interactive environments limit agents' intelligence growth with fixed tasks. Recently, single-agent environments address this by generating new tasks based on agent actions, enhancing task diversity. We consider the decision-making problem in multi-agent settings, where tasks are further influenced by social connections, affecting rewards and information access. However, existing multi-agent environments lack a combination of adaptive physical surroundings and social connections, hindering the learning of intelligent behaviors. To address this, we introduce AdaSociety, a customizable multi-agent environment featuring expanding state and action spaces, alongside explicit and alterable social structures. As agents progress, the environment adaptively generates new tasks with social structures for agents to undertake. In AdaSociety, we develop three mini-games showcasing distinct social structures and tasks. Initial results demonstrate that specific social structures can promote both individual and collective benefits, though current reinforcement learning and LLM-based algorithms show limited effectiveness in leveraging social structures to enhance performance. Overall, AdaSociety serves as a valuable research platform for exploring intelligence in diverse physical and social settings. The code is available at https://github.com/bigai-ai/AdaSociety.

Against Multifaceted Graph Heterogeneity via Asymmetric Federated Prompt Learning

Federated Graph Learning (FGL) aims to collaboratively and privately optimize graph models on divergent data for different tasks. A critical challenge in FGL is to enable effective yet efficient federated optimization against multifaceted graph heterogeneity to enhance mutual performance. However, existing FGL works primarily address graph data heterogeneity and perform incapable of graph task heterogeneity. To address the challenge, we propose a Federated Graph Prompt Learning (FedGPL) framework to efficiently enable prompt-based asymmetric graph knowledge transfer between multifaceted heterogeneous federated participants. Generally, we establish a split federated framework to preserve universal and domain-specific graph knowledge, respectively. Moreover, we develop two algorithms to eliminate task and data heterogeneity for advanced federated knowledge preservation. First, a Hierarchical Directed Transfer Aggregator (HiDTA) delivers cross-task beneficial knowledge that is hierarchically distilled according to the directional transferability. Second, a Virtual Prompt Graph (VPG) adaptively generates graph structures to enhance data utility by distinguishing dominant subgraphs and neutralizing redundant ones. We conduct theoretical analyses and extensive experiments to demonstrate the significant accuracy and efficiency effectiveness of FedGPL against multifaceted graph heterogeneity compared to state-of-the-art baselines on large-scale federated graph datasets.

Improve Dense Passage Retrieval with Entailment Tuning

Retrieval module can be plugged into many downstream NLP tasks to improve their performance, such as open-domain question answering and retrieval-augmented generation. The key to a retrieval system is to calculate relevance scores to query and passage pairs. However, the definition of relevance is often ambiguous. We observed that a major class of relevance aligns with the concept of entailment in NLI tasks. Based on this observation, we designed a method called entailment tuning to improve the embedding of dense retrievers. Specifically, we unify the form of retrieval data and NLI data using existence claim as a bridge. Then, we train retrievers to predict the claims entailed in a passage with a variant task of masked prediction. Our method can be efficiently plugged into current dense retrieval methods, and experiments show the effectiveness of our method.

A Prompt-Guided Spatio-Temporal Transformer Model for National-Wide Nuclear Radiation Forecasting

Nuclear radiation (NR), which refers to the energy emitted from atomic nuclei during decay, poses substantial risks to human health and environmental safety. Accurate forecasting of nuclear radiation levels is crucial for informed decision-making by both individuals and governments. However, this task is challenging due to the imbalanced distribution of monitoring stations over a wide spatial range and the non-stationary radiation variation patterns. In this study, we introduce NRFormer, an innovative framework tailored for national-wide prediction of nuclear radiation variations. By integrating a non-stationary temporal attention module, an imbalance-aware spatial attention module, and a radiation propagation prompting module, NRFormer collectively captures complex spatio-temporal dynamics of nuclear radiation. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework against seven baselines. This research not only enhances the accuracy and reliability in nuclear radiation forecasting but also contributes to advancing emergency response strategies and monitoring systems, thereby safeguarding environmental and public health.

FairMindSim: Alignment of Behavior, Emotion, and Belief in Humans and LLM Agents Amid Ethical Dilemmas

AI alignment is a pivotal issue concerning AI control and safety. It should consider not only value-neutral human preferences but also moral and ethical considerations. In this study, we introduced FairMindSim, which simulates the moral dilemma through a series of unfair scenarios. We used LLM agents to simulate human behavior, ensuring alignment across various stages. To explore the various socioeconomic motivations, which we refer to as beliefs, that drive both humans and LLM agents as bystanders to intervene in unjust situations involving others, and how these beliefs interact to influence individual behavior, we incorporated knowledge from relevant sociological fields and proposed the Belief-Reward Alignment Behavior Evolution Model (BREM) based on the recursive reward model (RRM). Our findings indicate that, behaviorally, GPT-4o exhibits a stronger sense of social justice, while humans display a richer range of emotions. Additionally, we discussed the potential impact of emotions on behavior. This study provides a theoretical foundation for applications in aligning LLMs with altruistic values.

BlockFound: Customized blockchain foundation model for anomaly detection

We propose BlockFound, a customized foundation model for anomaly blockchain transaction detection. Unlike existing methods that rely on rule-based systems or directly apply off-the-shelf large language models, BlockFound introduces a series of customized designs to model the unique data structure of blockchain transactions. First, a blockchain transaction is multi-modal, containing blockchain-specific tokens, texts, and numbers. We design a modularized tokenizer to handle these multi-modal inputs, balancing the information across different modalities. Second, we design a customized mask language learning mechanism for pretraining with RoPE embedding and FlashAttention for handling longer sequences. After training the foundation model, we further design a novel detection method for anomaly detection. Extensive evaluations on Ethereum and Solana transactions demonstrate BlockFound's exceptional capability in anomaly detection while maintaining a low false positive rate. Remarkably, BlockFound is the only method that successfully detects anomalous transactions on Solana with high accuracy, whereas all other approaches achieved very low or zero detection recall scores. This work not only provides new foundation models for blockchain but also sets a new benchmark for applying LLMs in blockchain data.