KITS: Inductive Spatio-Temporal Kriging with Increment Training Strategy

Sensors are commonly deployed to perceive the environment. However, due to the high cost, sensors are usually sparsely deployed. Kriging is the tailored task to infer the unobserved nodes (without sensors) using the observed source nodes (with sensors). The essence of kriging task is transferability. Recently, several inductive spatio-temporal kriging methods have been proposed based on graph neural networks, being trained based on a graph built on top of observed nodes via pretext tasks such as masking nodes out and reconstructing them. However, the graph in training is inevitably much sparser than the graph in inference that includes all the observed and unobserved nodes. The learned pattern cannot be well generalized for inference, denoted as graph gap. To address this issue, we first present a novel Increment training strategy: instead of masking nodes (and reconstructing them), we add virtual nodes into the training graph so as to mitigate the graph gap issue naturally. Nevertheless, the empty-shell virtual nodes without labels could have bad-learned features and lack supervision signals. To solve these issues, we pair each virtual node with its most similar observed node and fuse their features together; to enhance the supervision signal, we construct reliable pseudo labels for virtual nodes. As a result, the learned pattern of virtual nodes could be safely transferred to real unobserved nodes for reliable kriging. We name our new Kriging model with Increment Training Strategy as KITS. Extensive experiments demonstrate that KITS consistently outperforms existing kriging methods by large margins, e.g., the improvement over MAE score could be as high as 18.33%.

Reboost Large Language Model-based Text-to-SQL, Text-to-Python, and Text-to-Function -- with Real Applications in Traffic Domain

The previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) method achieved a remarkable execution accuracy on the Spider dataset, which is one of the largest and most diverse datasets in the Text-to-SQL domain. However, during our reproduction of the business dataset, we observed a significant drop in performance. We examined the differences in dataset complexity, as well as the clarity of questions' intentions, and assessed how those differences could impact the performance of prompting methods. Subsequently, We develop a more adaptable and more general prompting method, involving mainly query rewriting and SQL boosting, which respectively transform vague information into exact and precise information and enhance the SQL itself by incorporating execution feedback and the query results from the database content. In order to prevent information gaps, we include the comments, value types, and value samples for columns as part of the database description in the prompt. Our experiments with Large Language Models (LLMs) illustrate the significant performance improvement on the business dataset and prove the substantial potential of our method. In terms of execution accuracy on the business dataset, the SOTA method scored 21.05, while our approach scored 65.79. As a result, our approach achieved a notable performance improvement even when using a less capable pre-trained language model. Last but not least, we also explore the Text-to-Python and Text-to-Function options, and we deeply analyze the pros and cons among them, offering valuable insights to the community.

Decentralised, Scalable and Privacy-Preserving Synthetic Data Generation

Synthetic data is emerging as a promising way to harness the value of data, while reducing privacy risks. The potential of synthetic data is not limited to privacy-friendly data release, but also includes complementing real data in use-cases such as training machine learning algorithms that are more fair and robust to distribution shifts etc. There is a lot of interest in algorithmic advances in synthetic data generation for providing better privacy and statistical guarantees and for its better utilisation in machine learning pipelines. However, for responsible and trustworthy synthetic data generation, it is not sufficient to focus only on these algorithmic aspects and instead, a holistic view of the synthetic data generation pipeline must be considered. We build a novel system that allows the contributors of real data to autonomously participate in differentially private synthetic data generation without relying on a trusted centre. Our modular, general and scalable solution is based on three building blocks namely: Solid (Social Linked Data), MPC (Secure Multi-Party Computation) and Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). Solid is a specification that lets people store their data securely in decentralised data stores called Pods and control access to their data. MPC refers to the set of cryptographic methods for different parties to jointly compute a function over their inputs while keeping those inputs private. TEEs such as Intel SGX rely on hardware based features for confidentiality and integrity of code and data. We show how these three technologies can be effectively used to address various challenges in responsible and trustworthy synthetic data generation by ensuring: 1) contributor autonomy, 2) decentralisation, 3) privacy and 4) scalability. We support our claims with rigorous empirical results on simulated and real datasets and different synthetic data generation algorithms.

InstructDET: Diversifying Referring Object Detection with Generalized Instructions

We propose InstructDET, a data-centric method for referring object detection (ROD) that localizes target objects based on user instructions. While deriving from referring expressions (REC), the instructions we leverage are greatly diversified to encompass common user intentions related to object detection. For one image, we produce tremendous instructions that refer to every single object and different combinations of multiple objects. Each instruction and its corresponding object bounding boxes (bbxs) constitute one training data pair. In order to encompass common detection expressions, we involve emerging vision-language model (VLM) and large language model (LLM) to generate instructions guided by text prompts and object bbxs, as the generalizations of foundation models are effective to produce human-like expressions (e.g., describing object property, category, and relationship). We name our constructed dataset as InDET. It contains images, bbxs and generalized instructions that are from foundation models. Our InDET is developed from existing REC datasets and object detection datasets, with the expanding potential that any image with object bbxs can be incorporated through using our InstructDET method. By using our InDET dataset, we show that a conventional ROD model surpasses existing methods on standard REC datasets and our InDET test set. Our data-centric method InstructDET, with automatic data expansion by leveraging foundation models, directs a promising field that ROD can be greatly diversified to execute common object detection instructions.

DynVideo-E: Harnessing Dynamic NeRF for Large-Scale Motion- and View-Change Human-Centric Video Editing

Despite remarkable research advances in diffusion-based video editing, existing methods are limited to short-length videos due to the contradiction between long-range consistency and frame-wise editing. Recent approaches attempt to tackle this challenge by introducing video-2D representations to degrade video editing to image editing. However, they encounter significant difficulties in handling large-scale motion- and view-change videos especially for human-centric videos. This motivates us to introduce the dynamic Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) as the human-centric video representation to ease the video editing problem to a 3D space editing task. As such, editing can be performed in the 3D spaces and propagated to the entire video via the deformation field. To provide finer and direct controllable editing, we propose the image-based 3D space editing pipeline with a set of effective designs. These include multi-view multi-pose Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) from both 2D personalized diffusion priors and 3D diffusion priors, reconstruction losses on the reference image, text-guided local parts super-resolution, and style transfer for 3D background space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method, dubbed as DynVideo-E, significantly outperforms SOTA approaches on two challenging datasets by a large margin of 50% ~ 95% in terms of human preference. Compelling video comparisons are provided in the project page https://showlab.github.io/DynVideo-E/. Our code and data will be released to the community.

MotionDirector: Motion Customization of Text-to-Video Diffusion Models

Large-scale pre-trained diffusion models have exhibited remarkable capabilities in diverse video generations. Given a set of video clips of the same motion concept, the task of Motion Customization is to adapt existing text-to-video diffusion models to generate videos with this motion. For example, generating a video with a car moving in a prescribed manner under specific camera movements to make a movie, or a video illustrating how a bear would lift weights to inspire creators. Adaptation methods have been developed for customizing appearance like subject or style, yet unexplored for motion. It is straightforward to extend mainstream adaption methods for motion customization, including full model tuning, parameter-efficient tuning of additional layers, and Low-Rank Adaptions (LoRAs). However, the motion concept learned by these methods is often coupled with the limited appearances in the training videos, making it difficult to generalize the customized motion to other appearances. To overcome this challenge, we propose MotionDirector, with a dual-path LoRAs architecture to decouple the learning of appearance and motion. Further, we design a novel appearance-debiased temporal loss to mitigate the influence of appearance on the temporal training objective. Experimental results show the proposed method can generate videos of diverse appearances for the customized motions. Our method also supports various downstream applications, such as the mixing of different videos with their appearance and motion respectively, and animating a single image with customized motions. Our code and model weights will be released.

MeanAP-Guided Reinforced Active Learning for Object Detection

Active learning presents a promising avenue for training high-performance models with minimal labeled data, achieved by judiciously selecting the most informative instances to label and incorporating them into the task learner. Despite notable advancements in active learning for image recognition, metrics devised or learned to gauge the information gain of data, crucial for query strategy design, do not consistently align with task model performance metrics, such as Mean Average Precision (MeanAP) in object detection tasks. This paper introduces MeanAP-Guided Reinforced Active Learning for Object Detection (MAGRAL), a novel approach that directly utilizes the MeanAP metric of the task model to devise a sampling strategy employing a reinforcement learning-based sampling agent. Built upon LSTM architecture, the agent efficiently explores and selects subsequent training instances, and optimizes the process through policy gradient with MeanAP serving as reward. Recognizing the time-intensive nature of MeanAP computation at each step, we propose fast look-up tables to expedite agent training. We assess MAGRAL's efficacy across popular benchmarks, PASCAL VOC and MS COCO, utilizing different backbone architectures. Empirical findings substantiate MAGRAL's superiority over recent state-of-the-art methods, showcasing substantial performance gains. MAGRAL establishes a robust baseline for reinforced active object detection, signifying its potential in advancing the field.

Show-1: Marrying Pixel and Latent Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generation

Significant advancements have been achieved in the realm of large-scale pre-trained text-to-video Diffusion Models (VDMs). However, previous methods either rely solely on pixel-based VDMs, which come with high computational costs, or on latent-based VDMs, which often struggle with precise text-video alignment. In this paper, we are the first to propose a hybrid model, dubbed as Show-1, which marries pixel-based and latent-based VDMs for text-to-video generation. Our model first uses pixel-based VDMs to produce a low-resolution video of strong text-video correlation. After that, we propose a novel expert translation method that employs the latent-based VDMs to further upsample the low-resolution video to high resolution. Compared to latent VDMs, Show-1 can produce high-quality videos of precise text-video alignment; Compared to pixel VDMs, Show-1 is much more efficient (GPU memory usage during inference is 15G vs 72G). We also validate our model on standard video generation benchmarks. Our code and model weights are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/showlab/Show-1}.