Improving Vision-and-Language Reasoning via Spatial Relations Modeling

Visual commonsense reasoning (VCR) is a challenging multi-modal task, which requires high-level cognition and commonsense reasoning ability about the real world. In recent years, large-scale pre-training approaches have been developed and promoted the state-of-the-art performance of VCR. However, the existing approaches almost employ the BERT-like objectives to learn multi-modal representations. These objectives motivated from the text-domain are insufficient for the excavation on the complex scenario of visual modality. Most importantly, the spatial distribution of the visual objects is basically neglected. To address the above issue, we propose to construct the spatial relation graph based on the given visual scenario. Further, we design two pre-training tasks named object position regression (OPR) and spatial relation classification (SRC) to learn to reconstruct the spatial relation graph respectively. Quantitative analysis suggests that the proposed method can guide the representations to maintain more spatial context and facilitate the attention on the essential visual regions for reasoning. We achieve the state-of-the-art results on VCR and two other vision-and-language reasoning tasks VQA, and NLVR.

What a Whole Slide Image Can Tell? Subtype-guided Masked Transformer for Pathological Image Captioning

Pathological captioning of Whole Slide Images (WSIs), though is essential in computer-aided pathological diagnosis, has rarely been studied due to the limitations in datasets and model training efficacy. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm Subtype-guided Masked Transformer (SGMT) for pathological captioning based on Transformers, which treats a WSI as a sequence of sparse patches and generates an overall caption sentence from the sequence. An accompanying subtype prediction is introduced into SGMT to guide the training process and enhance the captioning accuracy. We also present an Asymmetric Masked Mechansim approach to tackle the large size constraint of pathological image captioning, where the numbers of sequencing patches in SGMT are sampled differently in the training and inferring phases, respectively. Experiments on the PatchGastricADC22 dataset demonstrate that our approach effectively adapts to the task with a transformer-based model and achieves superior performance than traditional RNN-based methods. Our codes are to be made available for further research and development.

Assessing and Enhancing Robustness of Deep Learning Models with Corruption Emulation in Digital Pathology

Deep learning in digital pathology brings intelligence and automation as substantial enhancements to pathological analysis, the gold standard of clinical diagnosis. However, multiple steps from tissue preparation to slide imaging introduce various image corruptions, making it difficult for deep neural network (DNN) models to achieve stable diagnostic results for clinical use. In order to assess and further enhance the robustness of the models, we analyze the physical causes of the full-stack corruptions throughout the pathological life-cycle and propose an Omni-Corruption Emulation (OmniCE) method to reproduce 21 types of corruptions quantified with 5-level severity. We then construct three OmniCE-corrupted benchmark datasets at both patch level and slide level and assess the robustness of popular DNNs in classification and segmentation tasks. Further, we explore to use the OmniCE-corrupted datasets as augmentation data for training and experiments to verify that the generalization ability of the models has been significantly enhanced.

Discovering Fatigued Movements for Virtual Character Animation

Virtual character animation and movement synthesis have advanced rapidly during recent years, especially through a combination of extensive motion capture datasets and machine learning. A remaining challenge is interactively simulating characters that fatigue when performing extended motions, which is indispensable for the realism of generated animations. However, capturing such movements is problematic, as performing movements like backflips with fatigued variations up to exhaustion raises capture cost and risk of injury. Surprisingly, little research has been done on faithful fatigue modeling. To address this, we propose a deep reinforcement learning-based approach, which -- for the first time in literature -- generates control policies for full-body physically simulated agents aware of cumulative fatigue. For this, we first leverage Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GAIL) to learn an expert policy for the skill; Second, we learn a fatigue policy by limiting the generated constant torque bounds based on endurance time to non-linear, state- and time-dependent limits in the joint-actuation space using a Three-Compartment Controller (3CC) model. Our results demonstrate that agents can adapt to different fatigue and rest rates interactively, and discover realistic recovery strategies without the need for any captured data of fatigued movement.

MiChao-HuaFen 1.0: A Specialized Pre-trained Corpus Dataset for Domain-specific Large Models

With the advancement of deep learning technologies, general-purpose large models such as GPT-4 have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across various domains. Nevertheless, there remains a demand for high-quality, domain-specific outputs in areas like healthcare, law, and finance. This paper first evaluates the existing large models for specialized domains and discusses their limitations. To cater to the specific needs of certain domains, we introduce the ``MiChao-HuaFen 1.0'' pre-trained corpus dataset, tailored for the news and governmental sectors. The dataset, sourced from publicly available internet data from 2022, underwent multiple rounds of cleansing and processing to ensure high quality and reliable origins, with provisions for consistent and stable updates. This dataset not only supports the pre-training of large models for Chinese vertical domains but also aids in propelling deep learning research and applications in related fields.

Neural-Singular-Hessian: Implicit Neural Representation of Unoriented Point Clouds by Enforcing Singular Hessian

Neural implicit representation is a promising approach for reconstructing surfaces from point clouds. Existing methods combine various regularization terms, such as the Eikonal and Laplacian energy terms, to enforce the learned neural function to possess the properties of a Signed Distance Function (SDF). However, inferring the actual topology and geometry of the underlying surface from poor-quality unoriented point clouds remains challenging. In accordance with Differential Geometry, the Hessian of the SDF is singular for points within the differential thin-shell space surrounding the surface. Our approach enforces the Hessian of the neural implicit function to have a zero determinant for points near the surface. This technique aligns the gradients for a near-surface point and its on-surface projection point, producing a rough but faithful shape within just a few iterations. By annealing the weight of the singular-Hessian term, our approach ultimately produces a high-fidelity reconstruction result. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively suppresses ghost geometry and recovers details from unoriented point clouds with better expressiveness than existing fitting-based methods.

Rethinking the Localization in Weakly Supervised Object Localization

Weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) is one of the most popular and challenging tasks in computer vision. This task is to localize the objects in the images given only the image-level supervision. Recently, dividing WSOL into two parts (class-agnostic object localization and object classification) has become the state-of-the-art pipeline for this task. However, existing solutions under this pipeline usually suffer from the following drawbacks: 1) they are not flexible since they can only localize one object for each image due to the adopted single-class regression (SCR) for localization; 2) the generated pseudo bounding boxes may be noisy, but the negative impact of such noise is not well addressed. To remedy these drawbacks, we first propose to replace SCR with a binary-class detector (BCD) for localizing multiple objects, where the detector is trained by discriminating the foreground and background. Then we design a weighted entropy (WE) loss using the unlabeled data to reduce the negative impact of noisy bounding boxes. Extensive experiments on the popular CUB-200-2011 and ImageNet-1K datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Xiezhi: An Ever-Updating Benchmark for Holistic Domain Knowledge Evaluation

New Natural Langauge Process~(NLP) benchmarks are urgently needed to align with the rapid development of large language models (LLMs). We present Xiezhi, the most comprehensive evaluation suite designed to assess holistic domain knowledge. Xiezhi comprises multiple-choice questions across 516 diverse disciplines ranging from 13 different subjects with 249,587 questions and accompanied by Xiezhi-Specialty and Xiezhi-Interdiscipline, both with 15k questions. We conduct evaluation of the 47 cutting-edge LLMs on Xiezhi. Results indicate that LLMs exceed average performance of humans in science, engineering, agronomy, medicine, and art, but fall short in economics, jurisprudence, pedagogy, literature, history, and management. We anticipate Xiezhi will help analyze important strengths and shortcomings of LLMs, and the benchmark is released in~\url{https://github.com/MikeGu721/XiezhiBenchmark}.

Mesh-MLP: An all-MLP Architecture for Mesh Classification and Semantic Segmentation

With the rapid development of geometric deep learning techniques, many mesh-based convolutional operators have been proposed to bridge irregular mesh structures and popular backbone networks. In this paper, we show that while convolutions are helpful, a simple architecture based exclusively on multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) is competent enough to deal with mesh classification and semantic segmentation. Our new network architecture, named Mesh-MLP, takes mesh vertices equipped with the heat kernel signature (HKS) and dihedral angles as the input, replaces the convolution module of a ResNet with Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP), and utilizes layer normalization (LN) to perform the normalization of the layers. The all-MLP architecture operates in an end-to-end fashion and does not include a pooling module. Extensive experimental results on the mesh classification/segmentation tasks validate the effectiveness of the all-MLP architecture.