Optimizing rgb-d semantic segmentation through multi-modal interaction and pooling attention

Semantic segmentation of RGB-D images involves understanding the appearance and spatial relationships of objects within a scene, which requires careful consideration of various factors. However, in indoor environments, the simple input of RGB and depth images often results in a relatively limited acquisition of semantic and spatial information, leading to suboptimal segmentation outcomes. To address this, we propose the Multi-modal Interaction and Pooling Attention Network (MIPANet), a novel approach designed to harness the interactive synergy between RGB and depth modalities, optimizing the utilization of complementary information. Specifically, we incorporate a Multi-modal Interaction Fusion Module (MIM) into the deepest layers of the network. This module is engineered to facilitate the fusion of RGB and depth information, allowing for mutual enhancement and correction. Additionally, we introduce a Pooling Attention Module (PAM) at various stages of the encoder. This module serves to amplify the features extracted by the network and integrates the module's output into the decoder in a targeted manner, significantly improving semantic segmentation performance. Our experimental results demonstrate that MIPANet outperforms existing methods on two indoor scene datasets, NYUDv2 and SUN-RGBD, underscoring its effectiveness in enhancing RGB-D semantic segmentation.

Quality and Quantity: Unveiling a Million High-Quality Images for Text-to-Image Synthesis in Fashion Design

The fusion of AI and fashion design has emerged as a promising research area. However, the lack of extensive, interrelated data on clothing and try-on stages has hindered the full potential of AI in this domain. Addressing this, we present the Fashion-Diffusion dataset, a product of multiple years' rigorous effort. This dataset, the first of its kind, comprises over a million high-quality fashion images, paired with detailed text descriptions. Sourced from a diverse range of geographical locations and cultural backgrounds, the dataset encapsulates global fashion trends. The images have been meticulously annotated with fine-grained attributes related to clothing and humans, simplifying the fashion design process into a Text-to-Image (T2I) task. The Fashion-Diffusion dataset not only provides high-quality text-image pairs and diverse human-garment pairs but also serves as a large-scale resource about humans, thereby facilitating research in T2I generation. Moreover, to foster standardization in the T2I-based fashion design field, we propose a new benchmark comprising multiple datasets for evaluating the performance of fashion design models. This work represents a significant leap forward in the realm of AI-driven fashion design, setting a new standard for future research in this field.

PsyBench: a balanced and in-depth Psychological Chinese Evaluation Benchmark for Foundation Models

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming prevalent in various fields, there is an urgent need for improved NLP benchmarks that encompass all the necessary knowledge of individual discipline. Many contemporary benchmarks for foundational models emphasize a broad range of subjects but often fall short in presenting all the critical subjects and encompassing necessary professional knowledge of them. This shortfall has led to skewed results, given that LLMs exhibit varying performance across different subjects and knowledge areas. To address this issue, we present psybench, the first comprehensive Chinese evaluation suite that covers all the necessary knowledge required for graduate entrance exams. psybench offers a deep evaluation of a model's strengths and weaknesses in psychology through multiple-choice questions. Our findings show significant differences in performance across different sections of a subject, highlighting the risk of skewed results when the knowledge in test sets is not balanced. Notably, only the ChatGPT model reaches an average accuracy above $70\%$, indicating that there is still plenty of room for improvement. We expect that psybench will help to conduct thorough evaluations of base models' strengths and weaknesses and assist in practical application in the field of psychology.

Disentangled Counterfactual Learning for Physical Audiovisual Commonsense Reasoning

In this paper, we propose a Disentangled Counterfactual Learning~(DCL) approach for physical audiovisual commonsense reasoning. The task aims to infer objects' physics commonsense based on both video and audio input, with the main challenge is how to imitate the reasoning ability of humans. Most of the current methods fail to take full advantage of different characteristics in multi-modal data, and lacking causal reasoning ability in models impedes the progress of implicit physical knowledge inferring. To address these issues, our proposed DCL method decouples videos into static (time-invariant) and dynamic (time-varying) factors in the latent space by the disentangled sequential encoder, which adopts a variational autoencoder (VAE) to maximize the mutual information with a contrastive loss function. Furthermore, we introduce a counterfactual learning module to augment the model's reasoning ability by modeling physical knowledge relationships among different objects under counterfactual intervention. Our proposed method is a plug-and-play module that can be incorporated into any baseline. In experiments, we show that our proposed method improves baseline methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Andy20178/DCL.

On the Convergence and Sample Complexity Analysis of Deep Q-Networks with $ε$-Greedy Exploration

This paper provides a theoretical understanding of Deep Q-Network (DQN) with the $\varepsilon$-greedy exploration in deep reinforcement learning. Despite the tremendous empirical achievement of the DQN, its theoretical characterization remains underexplored. First, the exploration strategy is either impractical or ignored in the existing analysis. Second, in contrast to conventional Q-learning algorithms, the DQN employs the target network and experience replay to acquire an unbiased estimation of the mean-square Bellman error (MSBE) utilized in training the Q-network. However, the existing theoretical analysis of DQNs lacks convergence analysis or bypasses the technical challenges by deploying a significantly overparameterized neural network, which is not computationally efficient. This paper provides the first theoretical convergence and sample complexity analysis of the practical setting of DQNs with $\epsilon$-greedy policy. We prove an iterative procedure with decaying $\epsilon$ converges to the optimal Q-value function geometrically. Moreover, a higher level of $\epsilon$ values enlarges the region of convergence but slows down the convergence, while the opposite holds for a lower level of $\epsilon$ values. Experiments justify our established theoretical insights on DQNs.

Offline Imitation Learning with Variational Counterfactual Reasoning

In offline Imitation Learning (IL), an agent aims to learn an optimal expert behavior policy without additional online environment interactions. However, in many real-world scenarios, such as robotics manipulation, the offline dataset is collected from suboptimal behaviors without rewards. Due to the scarce expert data, the agents usually suffer from simply memorizing poor trajectories and are vulnerable to the variations in the environments, lacking the capability of generalizing to new environments. To effectively remove spurious features that would otherwise bias the agent and hinder generalization, we propose a framework named \underline{O}ffline \underline{I}mitation \underline{L}earning with \underline{C}ounterfactual data \underline{A}ugmentation (OILCA). In particular, we leverage the identifiable variational autoencoder to generate \textit{counterfactual} samples. We theoretically analyze the counterfactual identification and the improvement of generalization. Moreover, we conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms various baselines on both \textsc{DeepMind Control Suite} benchmark for in-distribution robustness and \textsc{CausalWorld} benchmark for out-of-distribution generalization.

Lightweight In-Context Tuning for Multimodal Unified Models

In-context learning (ICL) involves reasoning from given contextual examples. As more modalities comes, this procedure is becoming more challenging as the interleaved input modalities convolutes the understanding process. This is exemplified by the observation that multimodal models often struggle to effectively extrapolate from contextual examples to perform ICL. To address these challenges, we introduce MultiModal In-conteXt Tuning (M$^2$IXT), a lightweight module to enhance the ICL capabilities of multimodal unified models. The proposed M$^2$IXT module perceives an expandable context window to incorporate various labeled examples of multiple modalities (e.g., text, image, and coordinates). It can be prepended to various multimodal unified models (e.g., OFA, Unival, LLaVA) of different architectures and trained via a mixed-tasks strategy to enable rapid few-shot adaption on multiple tasks and datasets. When tuned on as little as 50K multimodal data, M$^2$IXT can boost the few-shot ICL performance significantly (e.g., 18\% relative increase for OFA), and obtained state-of-the-art results across an array of tasks including visual question answering, image captioning, visual grounding, and visual entailment, while being considerably small in terms of model parameters (e.g., $\sim$$20\times$ smaller than Flamingo or MMICL), highlighting the flexibility and effectiveness of M$^2$IXT as a multimodal in-context learner.