LMMs-Eval: Reality Check on the Evaluation of Large Multimodal Models

The advances of large foundation models necessitate wide-coverage, low-cost, and zero-contamination benchmarks. Despite continuous exploration of language model evaluations, comprehensive studies on the evaluation of Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) remain limited. In this work, we introduce LMMS-EVAL, a unified and standardized multimodal benchmark framework with over 50 tasks and more than 10 models to promote transparent and reproducible evaluations. Although LMMS-EVAL offers comprehensive coverage, we find it still falls short in achieving low cost and zero contamination. To approach this evaluation trilemma, we further introduce LMMS-EVAL LITE, a pruned evaluation toolkit that emphasizes both coverage and efficiency. Additionally, we present Multimodal LIVEBENCH that utilizes continuously updating news and online forums to assess models' generalization abilities in the wild, featuring a low-cost and zero-contamination evaluation approach. In summary, our work highlights the importance of considering the evaluation trilemma and provides practical solutions to navigate the trade-offs in evaluating large multi-modal models, paving the way for more effective and reliable benchmarking of LMMs. We opensource our codebase and maintain leaderboard of LIVEBENCH at https://github.com/EvolvingLMMs-Lab/lmms-eval and https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmms-lab/LiveBench.

A Survey of Defenses against AI-generated Visual Media: Detection, Disruption, and Authentication

Deep generative models have demonstrated impressive performance in various computer vision applications, including image synthesis, video generation, and medical analysis. Despite their significant advancements, these models may be used for malicious purposes, such as misinformation, deception, and copyright violation. In this paper, we provide a systematic and timely review of research efforts on defenses against AI-generated visual media, covering detection, disruption, and authentication. We review existing methods and summarize the mainstream defense-related tasks within a unified passive and proactive framework. Moreover, we survey the derivative tasks concerning the trustworthiness of defenses, such as their robustness and fairness. For each task, we formulate its general pipeline and propose a taxonomy based on methodological strategies that are uniformly applicable to the primary subtasks. Additionally, we summarize the commonly used evaluation datasets, criteria, and metrics. Finally, by analyzing the reviewed studies, we provide insights into current research challenges and suggest possible directions for future research.

SAGDFN: A Scalable Adaptive Graph Diffusion Forecasting Network for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting is essential for our daily activities and precise modeling of the complex correlations and shared patterns among multiple time series is essential for improving forecasting performance. Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Networks (STGNNs) are widely used in multivariate time series forecasting tasks and have achieved promising performance on multiple real-world datasets for their ability to model the underlying complex spatial and temporal dependencies. However, existing studies have mainly focused on datasets comprising only a few hundred sensors due to the heavy computational cost and memory cost of spatial-temporal GNNs. When applied to larger datasets, these methods fail to capture the underlying complex spatial dependencies and exhibit limited scalability and performance. To this end, we present a Scalable Adaptive Graph Diffusion Forecasting Network (SAGDFN) to capture complex spatial-temporal correlation for large-scale multivariate time series and thereby, leading to exceptional performance in multivariate time series forecasting tasks. The proposed SAGDFN is scalable to datasets of thousands of nodes without the need of prior knowledge of spatial correlation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAGDFN achieves comparable performance with state-of-the-art baselines on one real-world dataset of 207 nodes and outperforms all state-of-the-art baselines by a significant margin on three real-world datasets of 2000 nodes.

NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Night Photography Rendering

This paper presents a review of the NTIRE 2024 challenge on night photography rendering. The goal of the challenge was to find solutions that process raw camera images taken in nighttime conditions, and thereby produce a photo-quality output images in the standard RGB (sRGB) space. Unlike the previous year's competition, the challenge images were collected with a mobile phone and the speed of algorithms was also measured alongside the quality of their output. To evaluate the results, a sufficient number of viewers were asked to assess the visual quality of the proposed solutions, considering the subjective nature of the task. There were 2 nominations: quality and efficiency. Top 5 solutions in terms of output quality were sorted by evaluation time (see Fig. 1). The top ranking participants' solutions effectively represent the state-of-the-art in nighttime photography rendering. More results can be found at https://nightimaging.org.

UrbanLLM: Autonomous Urban Activity Planning and Management with Large Language Models

Location-based services play an critical role in improving the quality of our daily lives. Despite the proliferation of numerous specialized AI models within spatio-temporal context of location-based services, these models struggle to autonomously tackle problems regarding complex urban planing and management. To bridge this gap, we introduce UrbanLLM, a fine-tuned large language model (LLM) designed to tackle diverse problems in urban scenarios. UrbanLLM functions as a problem-solver by decomposing urban-related queries into manageable sub-tasks, identifying suitable spatio-temporal AI models for each sub-task, and generating comprehensive responses to the given queries. Our experimental results indicate that UrbanLLM significantly outperforms other established LLMs, such as Llama and the GPT series, in handling problems concerning complex urban activity planning and management. UrbanLLM exhibits considerable potential in enhancing the effectiveness of solving problems in urban scenarios, reducing the workload and reliance for human experts.

Style Transfer with Multi-iteration Preference Optimization

Numerous recent techniques for text style transfer characterize their approaches as variants of reinforcement learning and preference optimization. In this work, we consider the relationship between these approaches and a class of optimization approaches developed primarily for (non-neural) statistical machine translation, formerly known as 'tuning'. Inspired by these techniques from the past, we improve upon established preference optimization approaches, incorporating multiple iterations of exploration and optimization, and choosing contrastive examples by following a 'hope' vs 'fear' sampling strategy. Cognizant of the difference between machine translation and style transfer, however, we further tailor our framework with a new pseudo-parallel generation method and a dynamic weighted reward aggregation method to tackle the lack of parallel data and the need for a multi-objective reward. We evaluate our model on two commonly used text style transfer datasets. Through automatic and human evaluation results we show the effectiveness and the superiority of our model compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

FFAM: Feature Factorization Activation Map for Explanation of 3D Detectors

LiDAR-based 3D object detection has made impressive progress recently, yet most existing models are black-box, lacking interpretability. Previous explanation approaches primarily focus on analyzing image-based models and are not readily applicable to LiDAR-based 3D detectors. In this paper, we propose a feature factorization activation map (FFAM) to generate high-quality visual explanations for 3D detectors. FFAM employs non-negative matrix factorization to generate concept activation maps and subsequently aggregates these maps to obtain a global visual explanation. To achieve object-specific visual explanations, we refine the global visual explanation using the feature gradient of a target object. Additionally, we introduce a voxel upsampling strategy to align the scale between the activation map and input point cloud. We qualitatively and quantitatively analyze FFAM with multiple detectors on several datasets. Experimental results validate the high-quality visual explanations produced by FFAM. The Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/Say2L/FFAM.git}.

4D Panoptic Scene Graph Generation

We are living in a three-dimensional space while moving forward through a fourth dimension: time. To allow artificial intelligence to develop a comprehensive understanding of such a 4D environment, we introduce 4D Panoptic Scene Graph (PSG-4D), a new representation that bridges the raw visual data perceived in a dynamic 4D world and high-level visual understanding. Specifically, PSG-4D abstracts rich 4D sensory data into nodes, which represent entities with precise location and status information, and edges, which capture the temporal relations. To facilitate research in this new area, we build a richly annotated PSG-4D dataset consisting of 3K RGB-D videos with a total of 1M frames, each of which is labeled with 4D panoptic segmentation masks as well as fine-grained, dynamic scene graphs. To solve PSG-4D, we propose PSG4DFormer, a Transformer-based model that can predict panoptic segmentation masks, track masks along the time axis, and generate the corresponding scene graphs via a relation component. Extensive experiments on the new dataset show that our method can serve as a strong baseline for future research on PSG-4D. In the end, we provide a real-world application example to demonstrate how we can achieve dynamic scene understanding by integrating a large language model into our PSG-4D system.

MIPI 2024 Challenge on Nighttime Flare Removal: Methods and Results

The increasing demand for computational photography and imaging on mobile platforms has led to the widespread development and integration of advanced image sensors with novel algorithms in camera systems. However, the scarcity of high-quality data for research and the rare opportunity for in-depth exchange of views from industry and academia constrain the development of mobile intelligent photography and imaging (MIPI). Building on the achievements of the previous MIPI Workshops held at ECCV 2022 and CVPR 2023, we introduce our third MIPI challenge including three tracks focusing on novel image sensors and imaging algorithms. In this paper, we summarize and review the Nighttime Flare Removal track on MIPI 2024. In total, 170 participants were successfully registered, and 14 teams submitted results in the final testing phase. The developed solutions in this challenge achieved state-of-the-art performance on Nighttime Flare Removal. More details of this challenge and the link to the dataset can be found at https://mipi-challenge.org/MIPI2024/.

Authorship Style Transfer with Policy Optimization

Authorship style transfer aims to rewrite a given text into a specified target while preserving the original meaning in the source. Existing approaches rely on the availability of a large number of target style exemplars for model training. However, these overlook cases where a limited number of target style examples are available. The development of parameter-efficient transfer learning techniques and policy optimization (PO) approaches suggest lightweight PO is a feasible approach to low-resource style transfer. In this work, we propose a simple two step tune-and-optimize technique for low-resource textual style transfer. We apply our technique to authorship transfer as well as a larger-data native language style task and in both cases find it outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models.