TaskCLIP: Extend Large Vision-Language Model for Task Oriented Object Detection

Task-oriented object detection aims to find objects suitable for accomplishing specific tasks. As a challenging task, it requires simultaneous visual data processing and reasoning under ambiguous semantics. Recent solutions are mainly all-in-one models. However, the object detection backbones are pre-trained without text supervision. Thus, to incorporate task requirements, their intricate models undergo extensive learning on a highly imbalanced and scarce dataset, resulting in capped performance, laborious training, and poor generalizability. In contrast, we propose TaskCLIP, a more natural two-stage design composed of general object detection and task-guided object selection. Particularly for the latter, we resort to the recently successful large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as our backbone, which provides rich semantic knowledge and a uniform embedding space for images and texts. Nevertheless, the naive application of VLMs leads to sub-optimal quality, due to the misalignment between embeddings of object images and their visual attributes, which are mainly adjective phrases. To this end, we design a transformer-based aligner after the pre-trained VLMs to re-calibrate both embeddings. Finally, we employ a trainable score function to post-process the VLM matching results for object selection. Experimental results demonstrate that our TaskCLIP outperforms the state-of-the-art DETR-based model TOIST by 3.5% and only requires a single NVIDIA RTX 4090 for both training and inference.

HDReason: Algorithm-Hardware Codesign for Hyperdimensional Knowledge Graph Reasoning

In recent times, a plethora of hardware accelerators have been put forth for graph learning applications such as vertex classification and graph classification. However, previous works have paid little attention to Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC), a task that is well-known for its significantly higher algorithm complexity. The state-of-the-art KGC solutions based on graph convolution neural network (GCN) involve extensive vertex/relation embedding updates and complicated score functions, which are inherently cumbersome for acceleration. As a result, existing accelerator designs are no longer optimal, and a novel algorithm-hardware co-design for KG reasoning is needed. Recently, brain-inspired HyperDimensional Computing (HDC) has been introduced as a promising solution for lightweight machine learning, particularly for graph learning applications. In this paper, we leverage HDC for an intrinsically more efficient and acceleration-friendly KGC algorithm. We also co-design an acceleration framework named HDReason targeting FPGA platforms. On the algorithm level, HDReason achieves a balance between high reasoning accuracy, strong model interpretability, and less computation complexity. In terms of architecture, HDReason offers reconfigurability, high training throughput, and low energy consumption. When compared with NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU, the proposed accelerator achieves an average 10.6x speedup and 65x energy efficiency improvement. When conducting cross-models and cross-platforms comparison, HDReason yields an average 4.2x higher performance and 3.4x better energy efficiency with similar accuracy versus the state-of-the-art FPGA-based GCN training platform.

Middleware for LLMs: Tools Are Instrumental for Language Agents in Complex Environments

The applications of large language models (LLMs) have expanded well beyond the confines of text processing, signaling a new era where LLMs are envisioned as generalist language agents capable of operating within complex real-world environments. These environments are often highly expansive, making it impossible for the LLM to process them within its short-term memory. Motivated by recent research on extending the capabilities of LLMs with tools, this paper investigates the intriguing potential of tools to augment LLMs in handling such complexity. To this end, we design customized tools to aid in the proactive exploration within these massive environments. Such tools can serve as a middleware layer shielding the LLM from environmental complexity. In two representative complex environments -- knowledge bases (KBs) and databases -- we demonstrate the significant potential of augmenting language agents with tools in complex environments. Notably, equipped with these tools, GPT-4 achieves 2.8X the performance of the best baseline in tasks requiring access to database content and 2.2X in KB tasks. Our findings illuminate the path for advancing language agents in complex real-world applications.

CenterRadarNet: Joint 3D Object Detection and Tracking Framework using 4D FMCW Radar

Robust perception is a vital component for ensuring safe autonomous and assisted driving. Automotive radar (77 to 81 GHz), which offers weather-resilient sensing, provides a complementary capability to the vision- or LiDAR-based autonomous driving systems. Raw radio-frequency (RF) radar tensors contain rich spatiotemporal semantics besides 3D location information. The majority of previous methods take in 3D (Doppler-range-azimuth) RF radar tensors, allowing prediction of an object's location, heading angle, and size in bird's-eye-view (BEV). However, they lack the ability to at the same time infer objects' size, orientation, and identity in the 3D space. To overcome this limitation, we propose an efficient joint architecture called CenterRadarNet, designed to facilitate high-resolution representation learning from 4D (Doppler-range-azimuth-elevation) radar data for 3D object detection and re-identification (re-ID) tasks. As a single-stage 3D object detector, CenterRadarNet directly infers the BEV object distribution confidence maps, corresponding 3D bounding box attributes, and appearance embedding for each pixel. Moreover, we build an online tracker utilizing the learned appearance embedding for re-ID. CenterRadarNet achieves the state-of-the-art result on the K-Radar 3D object detection benchmark. In addition, we present the first 3D object-tracking result using radar on the K-Radar dataset V2. In diverse driving scenarios, CenterRadarNet shows consistent, robust performance, emphasizing its wide applicability.

VQPy: An Object-Oriented Approach to Modern Video Analytics

Video analytics is widely used in contemporary systems and services. At the forefront of video analytics are video queries that users develop to find objects of particular interest. Building upon the insight that video objects (e.g., human, animals, cars, etc.), the center of video analytics, are similar in spirit to objects modeled by traditional object-oriented languages, we propose to develop an object-oriented approach to video analytics. This approach, named VQPy, consists of a frontend$\unicode{x2015}$a Python variant with constructs that make it easy for users to express video objects and their interactions$\unicode{x2015}$as well as an extensible backend that can automatically construct and optimize pipelines based on video objects. We have implemented and open-sourced VQPy, which has been productized in Cisco as part of its DeepVision framework.

Ethosight: A Reasoning-Guided Iterative Learning System for Nuanced Perception based on Joint-Embedding & Contextual Label Affinity

Traditional computer vision models often require extensive manual effort for data acquisition, annotation and validation, particularly when detecting subtle behavioral nuances or events. The difficulty in distinguishing routine behaviors from potential risks in real-world applications, such as differentiating routine shopping from potential shoplifting, further complicates the process. Moreover, these models may demonstrate high false positive rates and imprecise event detection when exposed to real-world scenarios that differ significantly from the conditions of the training data. To overcome these hurdles, we present Ethosight, a novel zero-shot computer vision system. Ethosight initiates with a clean slate based on user requirements and semantic knowledge of interest. Using localized label affinity calculations and a reasoning-guided iterative learning loop, Ethosight infers scene details and iteratively refines the label set. Reasoning mechanisms can be derived from large language models like GPT4, symbolic reasoners like OpenNARS\cite{wang2013}\cite{wang2006}, or hybrid systems. Our evaluations demonstrate Ethosight's efficacy across 40 complex use cases, spanning domains such as health, safety, and security. Detailed results and case studies within the main body of this paper and an appendix underscore a promising trajectory towards enhancing the adaptability and resilience of computer vision models in detecting and extracting subtle and nuanced behaviors.

RecallM: An Architecture for Temporal Context Understanding and Question Answering

The ideal long-term memory mechanism for Large Language Model (LLM) based chatbots, would lay the foundation for continual learning, complex reasoning and allow sequential and temporal dependencies to be learnt. Creating this type of memory mechanism is an extremely challenging problem. In this paper we explore different methods of achieving the effect of long-term memory. We propose a new architecture focused on creating adaptable and updatable long-term memory for AGI systems. We demonstrate through various experiments the benefits of the RecallM architecture, particularly the improved temporal understanding of knowledge it provides.

EENet: Learning to Early Exit for Adaptive Inference

Budgeted adaptive inference with early exits is an emerging technique to improve the computational efficiency of deep neural networks (DNNs) for edge AI applications with limited resources at test time. This method leverages the fact that different test data samples may not require the same amount of computation for a correct prediction. By allowing early exiting from full layers of DNN inference for some test examples, we can reduce latency and improve throughput of edge inference while preserving performance. Although there have been numerous studies on designing specialized DNN architectures for training early-exit enabled DNN models, most of the existing work employ hand-tuned or manual rule-based early exit policies. In this study, we introduce a novel multi-exit DNN inference framework, coined as EENet, which leverages multi-objective learning to optimize the early exit policy for a trained multi-exit DNN under a given inference budget. This paper makes two novel contributions. First, we introduce the concept of early exit utility scores by combining diverse confidence measures with class-wise prediction scores to better estimate the correctness of test-time predictions at a given exit. Second, we train a lightweight, budget-driven, multi-objective neural network over validation predictions to learn the exit assignment scheduling for query examples at test time. The EENet early exit scheduler optimizes both the distribution of test samples to different exits and the selection of the exit utility thresholds such that the given inference budget is satisfied while the performance metric is maximized. Extensive experiments are conducted on five benchmarks, including three image datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet) and two NLP datasets (SST-2, AgNews). The results demonstrate the performance improvements of EENet compared to existing representative early exit techniques.

A Retrieve-and-Read Framework for Knowledge Graph Link Prediction

Knowledge graph (KG) link prediction aims to infer new facts based on existing facts in the KG. Recent studies have shown that using the graph neighborhood of a node via graph neural networks (GNNs) provides more useful information compared to just using the query information. Conventional GNNs for KG link prediction follow the standard message-passing paradigm on the entire KG, which leads to over-smoothing of representations and also limits their scalability. On a large scale, it becomes computationally expensive to aggregate useful information from the entire KG for inference. To address the limitations of existing KG link prediction frameworks, we propose a novel retrieve-and-read framework, which first retrieves a relevant subgraph context for the query and then jointly reasons over the context and the query with a high-capacity reader. As part of our exemplar instantiation for the new framework, we propose a novel Transformer-based GNN as the reader, which incorporates graph-based attention structure and cross-attention between query and context for deep fusion. This design enables the model to focus on salient context information relevant to the query. Empirical results on two standard KG link prediction datasets demonstrate the competitive performance of the proposed method.