Selective Hourglass Mapping for Universal Image Restoration Based on Diffusion Model

Universal image restoration is a practical and potential computer vision task for real-world applications. The main challenge of this task is handling the different degradation distributions at once. Existing methods mainly utilize task-specific conditions (e.g., prompt) to guide the model to learn different distributions separately, named multi-partite mapping. However, it is not suitable for universal model learning as it ignores the shared information between different tasks. In this work, we propose an advanced selective hourglass mapping strategy based on diffusion model, termed DiffUIR. Two novel considerations make our DiffUIR non-trivial. Firstly, we equip the model with strong condition guidance to obtain accurate generation direction of diffusion model (selective). More importantly, DiffUIR integrates a flexible shared distribution term (SDT) into the diffusion algorithm elegantly and naturally, which gradually maps different distributions into a shared one. In the reverse process, combined with SDT and strong condition guidance, DiffUIR iteratively guides the shared distribution to the task-specific distribution with high image quality (hourglass). Without bells and whistles, by only modifying the mapping strategy, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on five image restoration tasks, 22 benchmarks in the universal setting and zero-shot generalization setting. Surprisingly, by only using a lightweight model (only 0.89M), we could achieve outstanding performance. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/iSEE-Laboratory/DiffUIR

A Semantic Mention Graph Augmented Model for Document-Level Event Argument Extraction

Document-level Event Argument Extraction (DEAE) aims to identify arguments and their specific roles from an unstructured document. The advanced approaches on DEAE utilize prompt-based methods to guide pre-trained language models (PLMs) in extracting arguments from input documents. They mainly concentrate on establishing relations between triggers and entity mentions within documents, leaving two unresolved problems: a) independent modeling of entity mentions; b) document-prompt isolation. To this end, we propose a semantic mention Graph Augmented Model (GAM) to address these two problems in this paper. Firstly, GAM constructs a semantic mention graph that captures relations within and between documents and prompts, encompassing co-existence, co-reference and co-type relations. Furthermore, we introduce an ensembled graph transformer module to address mentions and their three semantic relations effectively. Later, the graph-augmented encoder-decoder module incorporates the relation-specific graph into the input embedding of PLMs and optimizes the encoder section with topology information, enhancing the relations comprehensively. Extensive experiments on the RAMS and WikiEvents datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, surpassing baseline methods and achieving a new state-of-the-art performance.

MamMIL: Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Images with State Space Models

Recently, pathological diagnosis, the gold standard for cancer diagnosis, has achieved superior performance by combining the Transformer with the multiple instance learning (MIL) framework using whole slide images (WSIs). However, the giga-pixel nature of WSIs poses a great challenge for the quadratic-complexity self-attention mechanism in Transformer to be applied in MIL. Existing studies usually use linear attention to improve computing efficiency but inevitably bring performance bottlenecks. To tackle this challenge, we propose a MamMIL framework for WSI classification by cooperating the selective structured state space model (i.e., Mamba) with MIL for the first time, enabling the modeling of instance dependencies while maintaining linear complexity. Specifically, to solve the problem that Mamba can only conduct unidirectional one-dimensional (1D) sequence modeling, we innovatively introduce a bidirectional state space model and a 2D context-aware block to enable MamMIL to learn the bidirectional instance dependencies with 2D spatial relationships. Experiments on two datasets show that MamMIL can achieve advanced classification performance with smaller memory footprints than the state-of-the-art MIL frameworks based on the Transformer. The code will be open-sourced if accepted.

Region-Transformer: Self-Attention Region Based Class-Agnostic Point Cloud Segmentation

Point cloud segmentation, which helps us understand the environment of specific structures and objects, can be performed in class-specific and class-agnostic ways. We propose a novel region-based transformer model called Region-Transformer for performing class-agnostic point cloud segmentation. The model utilizes a region-growth approach and self-attention mechanism to iteratively expand or contract a region by adding or removing points. It is trained on simulated point clouds with instance labels only, avoiding semantic labels. Attention-based networks have succeeded in many previous methods of performing point cloud segmentation. However, a region-growth approach with attention-based networks has yet to be used to explore its performance gain. To our knowledge, we are the first to use a self-attention mechanism in a region-growth approach. With the introduction of self-attention to region-growth that can utilize local contextual information of neighborhood points, our experiments demonstrate that the Region-Transformer model outperforms previous class-agnostic and class-specific methods on indoor datasets regarding clustering metrics. The model generalizes well to large-scale scenes. Key advantages include capturing long-range dependencies through self-attention, avoiding the need for semantic labels during training, and applicability to a variable number of objects. The Region-Transformer model represents a promising approach for flexible point cloud segmentation with applications in robotics, digital twinning, and autonomous vehicles.

Are Large Language Models Rational Investors?

Large Language Models (LLMs) are progressively being adopted in financial analysis to harness their extensive knowledge base for interpreting complex market data and trends. However, their application in the financial domain is challenged by intrinsic biases (i.e., risk-preference bias) and a superficial grasp of market intricacies, underscoring the need for a thorough assessment of their financial insight. This study introduces a novel framework, Financial Bias Indicators (FBI), to critically evaluate the financial rationality of LLMs, focusing on their ability to discern and navigate the subtleties of financial information and to identify any irrational biases that might skew market analysis. Our research adopts an innovative methodology to measure financial rationality, integrating principles of behavioral finance to scrutinize the biases and decision-making patterns of LLMs. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 19 leading LLMs, considering factors such as model scale, training datasets, input strategies, etc. The findings reveal varying degrees of financial irrationality among the models, influenced by their design and training. Models trained specifically on financial datasets might exhibit greater irrationality, and it's possible that even larger financial language models (FinLLMs) could display more biases than smaller, more generalized models. This outcomes provide profound insights into how these elements affect the financial rationality of LLMs, indicating that targeted training and structured input methods could improve model performance. This work enriches our understanding of LLMs' strengths and weaknesses in financial applications, laying the groundwork for the development of more dependable and rational financial analysis tools.

NetInfoF Framework: Measuring and Exploiting Network Usable Information

Given a node-attributed graph, and a graph task (link prediction or node classification), can we tell if a graph neural network (GNN) will perform well? More specifically, do the graph structure and the node features carry enough usable information for the task? Our goals are (1) to develop a fast tool to measure how much information is in the graph structure and in the node features, and (2) to exploit the information to solve the task, if there is enough. We propose NetInfoF, a framework including NetInfoF_Probe and NetInfoF_Act, for the measurement and the exploitation of network usable information (NUI), respectively. Given a graph data, NetInfoF_Probe measures NUI without any model training, and NetInfoF_Act solves link prediction and node classification, while two modules share the same backbone. In summary, NetInfoF has following notable advantages: (a) General, handling both link prediction and node classification; (b) Principled, with theoretical guarantee and closed-form solution; (c) Effective, thanks to the proposed adjustment to node similarity; (d) Scalable, scaling linearly with the input size. In our carefully designed synthetic datasets, NetInfoF correctly identifies the ground truth of NUI and is the only method being robust to all graph scenarios. Applied on real-world datasets, NetInfoF wins in 11 out of 12 times on link prediction compared to general GNN baselines.

DiffEditor: Boosting Accuracy and Flexibility on Diffusion-based Image Editing

Large-scale Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models have revolutionized image generation over the last few years. Although owning diverse and high-quality generation capabilities, translating these abilities to fine-grained image editing remains challenging. In this paper, we propose DiffEditor to rectify two weaknesses in existing diffusion-based image editing: (1) in complex scenarios, editing results often lack editing accuracy and exhibit unexpected artifacts; (2) lack of flexibility to harmonize editing operations, e.g., imagine new content. In our solution, we introduce image prompts in fine-grained image editing, cooperating with the text prompt to better describe the editing content. To increase the flexibility while maintaining content consistency, we locally combine stochastic differential equation (SDE) into the ordinary differential equation (ODE) sampling. In addition, we incorporate regional score-based gradient guidance and a time travel strategy into the diffusion sampling, further improving the editing quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can efficiently achieve state-of-the-art performance on various fine-grained image editing tasks, including editing within a single image (e.g., object moving, resizing, and content dragging) and across images (e.g., appearance replacing and object pasting). Our source code is released at https://github.com/MC-E/DragonDiffusion.

Efficient Non-Parametric Uncertainty Quantification for Black-Box Large Language Models and Decision Planning

Step-by-step decision planning with large language models (LLMs) is gaining attention in AI agent development. This paper focuses on decision planning with uncertainty estimation to address the hallucination problem in language models. Existing approaches are either white-box or computationally demanding, limiting use of black-box proprietary LLMs within budgets. The paper's first contribution is a non-parametric uncertainty quantification method for LLMs, efficiently estimating point-wise dependencies between input-decision on the fly with a single inference, without access to token logits. This estimator informs the statistical interpretation of decision trustworthiness. The second contribution outlines a systematic design for a decision-making agent, generating actions like ``turn on the bathroom light'' based on user prompts such as ``take a bath''. Users will be asked to provide preferences when more than one action has high estimated point-wise dependencies. In conclusion, our uncertainty estimation and decision-making agent design offer a cost-efficient approach for AI agent development.

360DVD: Controllable Panorama Video Generation with 360-Degree Video Diffusion Model

360-degree panoramic videos recently attract more interest in both studies and applications, courtesy of the heightened immersive experiences they engender. Due to the expensive cost of capturing 360-degree panoramic videos, generating desirable panoramic videos by given prompts is urgently required. Recently, the emerging text-to-video (T2V) diffusion methods demonstrate notable effectiveness in standard video generation. However, due to the significant gap in content and motion patterns between panoramic and standard videos, these methods encounter challenges in yielding satisfactory 360-degree panoramic videos. In this paper, we propose a controllable panorama video generation pipeline named 360-Degree Video Diffusion model (360DVD) for generating panoramic videos based on the given prompts and motion conditions. Concretely, we introduce a lightweight module dubbed 360-Adapter and assisted 360 Enhancement Techniques to transform pre-trained T2V models for 360-degree video generation. We further propose a new panorama dataset named WEB360 consisting of 360-degree video-text pairs for training 360DVD, addressing the absence of captioned panoramic video datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of 360DVD for panorama video generation. The code and dataset will be released soon.

Brain-Conditional Multimodal Synthesis: A Survey and Taxonomy

In the era of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC), conditional multimodal synthesis technologies (e.g., text-to-image, text-to-video, text-to-audio, etc) are gradually reshaping the natural content in the real world. The key to multimodal synthesis technology is to establish the mapping relationship between different modalities. Brain signals, serving as potential reflections of how the brain interprets external information, exhibit a distinctive One-to-Many correspondence with various external modalities. This correspondence makes brain signals emerge as a promising guiding condition for multimodal content synthesis. Brian-conditional multimodal synthesis refers to decoding brain signals back to perceptual experience, which is crucial for developing practical brain-computer interface systems and unraveling complex mechanisms underlying how the brain perceives and comprehends external stimuli. This survey comprehensively examines the emerging field of AIGC-based Brain-conditional Multimodal Synthesis, termed AIGC-Brain, to delineate the current landscape and future directions. To begin, related brain neuroimaging datasets, functional brain regions, and mainstream generative models are introduced as the foundation of AIGC-Brain decoding and analysis. Next, we provide a comprehensive taxonomy for AIGC-Brain decoding models and present task-specific representative work and detailed implementation strategies to facilitate comparison and in-depth analysis. Quality assessments are then introduced for both qualitative and quantitative evaluation. Finally, this survey explores insights gained, providing current challenges and outlining prospects of AIGC-Brain. Being the inaugural survey in this domain, this paper paves the way for the progress of AIGC-Brain research, offering a foundational overview to guide future work.