PORCA: Root Cause Analysis with Partially

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) aims at identifying the underlying causes of system faults by uncovering and analyzing the causal structure from complex systems. It has been widely used in many application domains. Reliable diagnostic conclusions are of great importance in mitigating system failures and financial losses. However, previous studies implicitly assume a full observation of the system, which neglect the effect of partial observation (i.e., missing nodes and latent malfunction). As a result, they fail in deriving reliable RCA results. In this paper, we unveil the issues of unobserved confounders and heterogeneity in partial observation and come up with a new problem of root cause analysis with partially observed data. To achieve this, we propose PORCA, a novel RCA framework which can explore reliable root causes under both unobserved confounders and unobserved heterogeneity. PORCA leverages magnified score-based causal discovery to efficiently optimize acyclic directed mixed graph under unobserved confounders. In addition, we also develop a heterogeneity-aware scheduling strategy to provide adaptive sample weights. Extensive experimental results on one synthetic and two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed framework.

HYPERmotion: Learning Hybrid Behavior Planning for Autonomous Loco-manipulation

Enabling robots to autonomously perform hybrid motions in diverse environments can be beneficial for long-horizon tasks such as material handling, household chores, and work assistance. This requires extensive exploitation of intrinsic motion capabilities, extraction of affordances from rich environmental information, and planning of physical interaction behaviors. Despite recent progress has demonstrated impressive humanoid whole-body control abilities, they struggle to achieve versatility and adaptability for new tasks. In this work, we propose HYPERmotion, a framework that learns, selects and plans behaviors based on tasks in different scenarios. We combine reinforcement learning with whole-body optimization to generate motion for 38 actuated joints and create a motion library to store the learned skills. We apply the planning and reasoning features of the large language models (LLMs) to complex loco-manipulation tasks, constructing a hierarchical task graph that comprises a series of primitive behaviors to bridge lower-level execution with higher-level planning. By leveraging the interaction of distilled spatial geometry and 2D observation with a visual language model (VLM) to ground knowledge into a robotic morphology selector to choose appropriate actions in single- or dual-arm, legged or wheeled locomotion. Experiments in simulation and real-world show that learned motions can efficiently adapt to new tasks, demonstrating high autonomy from free-text commands in unstructured scenes. Videos and website: hy-motion.github.io/

A Blueprint Architecture of Compound AI Systems for Enterprise

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable capabilities surpassing conventional NLP challenges, creating opportunities for use in production use cases. Towards this goal, there is a notable shift to building compound AI systems, wherein LLMs are integrated into an expansive software infrastructure with many components like models, retrievers, databases and tools. In this paper, we introduce a blueprint architecture for compound AI systems to operate in enterprise settings cost-effectively and feasibly. Our proposed architecture aims for seamless integration with existing compute and data infrastructure, with ``stream'' serving as the key orchestration concept to coordinate data and instructions among agents and other components. Task and data planners, respectively, break down, map, and optimize tasks and data to available agents and data sources defined in respective registries, given production constraints such as accuracy and latency.

Towards RGB-NIR Cross-modality Image Registration and Beyond

This paper focuses on the area of RGB(visible)-NIR(near-infrared) cross-modality image registration, which is crucial for many downstream vision tasks to fully leverage the complementary information present in visible and infrared images. In this field, researchers face two primary challenges - the absence of a correctly-annotated benchmark with viewpoint variations for evaluating RGB-NIR cross-modality registration methods and the problem of inconsistent local features caused by the appearance discrepancy between RGB-NIR cross-modality images. To address these challenges, we first present the RGB-NIR Image Registration (RGB-NIR-IRegis) benchmark, which, for the first time, enables fair and comprehensive evaluations for the task of RGB-NIR cross-modality image registration. Evaluations of previous methods highlight the significant challenges posed by our RGB-NIR-IRegis benchmark, especially on RGB-NIR image pairs with viewpoint variations. To analyze the causes of the unsatisfying performance, we then design several metrics to reveal the toxic impact of inconsistent local features between visible and infrared images on the model performance. This further motivates us to develop a baseline method named Semantic Guidance Transformer (SGFormer), which utilizes high-level semantic guidance to mitigate the negative impact of local inconsistent features. Despite the simplicity of our motivation, extensive experimental results show the effectiveness of our method.

Instruction Tuning with Retrieval-based Examples Ranking for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) identifies sentiment information related to specific aspects and provides deeper market insights to businesses and organizations. With the emergence of large language models (LMs), recent studies have proposed using fixed examples for instruction tuning to reformulate ABSA as a generation task. However, the performance is sensitive to the selection of in-context examples; several retrieval methods are based on surface similarity and are independent of the LM generative objective. This study proposes an instruction learning method with retrieval-based example ranking for ABSA tasks. For each target sample, an LM was applied as a scorer to estimate the likelihood of the output given the input and a candidate example as the prompt, and training examples were labeled as positive or negative by ranking the scores. An alternating training schema is proposed to train both the retriever and LM. Instructional prompts can be constructed using high-quality examples. The LM is used for both scoring and inference, improving the generation efficiency without incurring additional computational costs or training difficulties. Extensive experiments on three ABSA subtasks verified the effectiveness of the proposed method, demonstrating its superiority over various strong baseline models. Code and data are released at https://github.com/zgMin/IT-RER-ABSA.

Diagnosing the Compositional Knowledge of Vision Language Models from a Game-Theoretic View

Compositional reasoning capabilities are usually considered as fundamental skills to characterize human perception. Recent studies show that current Vision Language Models (VLMs) surprisingly lack sufficient knowledge with respect to such capabilities. To this end, we propose to thoroughly diagnose the composition representations encoded by VLMs, systematically revealing the potential cause for this weakness. Specifically, we propose evaluation methods from a novel game-theoretic view to assess the vulnerability of VLMs on different aspects of compositional understanding, e.g., relations and attributes. Extensive experimental results demonstrate and validate several insights to understand the incapabilities of VLMs on compositional reasoning, which provide useful and reliable guidance for future studies. The deliverables will be updated at https://vlms-compositionality-gametheory.github.io/.

DuetSim: Building User Simulator with Dual Large Language Models for Task-Oriented Dialogues

User Simulators play a pivotal role in training and evaluating task-oriented dialogue systems. Traditional user simulators typically rely on human-engineered agendas, resulting in generated responses that often lack diversity and spontaneity. Although large language models (LLMs) exhibit a remarkable capacity for generating coherent and contextually appropriate utterances, they may fall short when tasked with generating responses that effectively guide users towards their goals, particularly in dialogues with intricate constraints and requirements. This paper introduces DuetSim, a novel framework designed to address the intricate demands of task-oriented dialogues by leveraging LLMs. DuetSim stands apart from conventional approaches by employing two LLMs in tandem: one dedicated to response generation and the other focused on verification. This dual LLM approach empowers DuetSim to produce responses that not only exhibit diversity but also demonstrate accuracy and are preferred by human users. We validate the efficacy of our method through extensive experiments conducted on the MultiWOZ dataset, highlighting improvements in response quality and correctness, largely attributed to the incorporation of the second LLM. Our code is accessible at: https://github.com/suntea233/DuetSim.

Enhancing Semantics in Multimodal Chain of Thought via Soft Negative Sampling

Chain of thought (CoT) has proven useful for problems requiring complex reasoning. Many of these problems are both textual and multimodal. Given the inputs in different modalities, a model generates a rationale and then uses it to answer a question. Because of the hallucination issue, the generated soft negative rationales with high textual quality but illogical semantics do not always help improve answer accuracy. This study proposes a rationale generation method using soft negative sampling (SNSE-CoT) to mitigate hallucinations in multimodal CoT. Five methods were applied to generate soft negative samples that shared highly similar text but had different semantics from the original. Bidirectional margin loss (BML) was applied to introduce them into the traditional contrastive learning framework that involves only positive and negative samples. Extensive experiments on the ScienceQA dataset demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method. Code and data are released at https://github.com/zgMin/SNSE-CoT.

Rethinking Prior Information Generation with CLIP for Few-Shot Segmentation

Few-shot segmentation remains challenging due to the limitations of its labeling information for unseen classes. Most previous approaches rely on extracting high-level feature maps from the frozen visual encoder to compute the pixel-wise similarity as a key prior guidance for the decoder. However, such a prior representation suffers from coarse granularity and poor generalization to new classes since these high-level feature maps have obvious category bias. In this work, we propose to replace the visual prior representation with the visual-text alignment capacity to capture more reliable guidance and enhance the model generalization. Specifically, we design two kinds of training-free prior information generation strategy that attempts to utilize the semantic alignment capability of the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training model (CLIP) to locate the target class. Besides, to acquire more accurate prior guidance, we build a high-order relationship of attention maps and utilize it to refine the initial prior information. Experiments on both the PASCAL-5{i} and COCO-20{i} datasets show that our method obtains a clearly substantial improvement and reaches the new state-of-the-art performance.

SoftMCL: Soft Momentum Contrastive Learning for Fine-grained Sentiment-aware Pre-training

The pre-training for language models captures general language understanding but fails to distinguish the affective impact of a particular context to a specific word. Recent works have sought to introduce contrastive learning (CL) for sentiment-aware pre-training in acquiring affective information. Nevertheless, these methods present two significant limitations. First, the compatibility of the GPU memory often limits the number of negative samples, hindering the opportunities to learn good representations. In addition, using only a few sentiment polarities as hard labels, e.g., positive, neutral, and negative, to supervise CL will force all representations to converge to a few points, leading to the issue of latent space collapse. This study proposes a soft momentum contrastive learning (SoftMCL) for fine-grained sentiment-aware pre-training. Instead of hard labels, we introduce valence ratings as soft-label supervision for CL to fine-grained measure the sentiment similarities between samples. The proposed SoftMCL is conducted on both the word- and sentence-level to enhance the model's ability to learn affective information. A momentum queue was introduced to expand the contrastive samples, allowing storing and involving more negatives to overcome the limitations of hardware platforms. Extensive experiments were conducted on four different sentiment-related tasks, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed SoftMCL method. The code and data of the proposed SoftMCL is available at: https://www.github.com/wangjin0818/SoftMCL/.