Data-Efficient Massive Tool Retrieval: A Reinforcement Learning Approach for Query-Tool Alignment with Language Models

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) integrated with external tools and APIs have successfully addressed complex tasks by using in-context learning or fine-tuning. Despite this progress, the vast scale of tool retrieval remains challenging due to stringent input length constraints. In response, we propose a pre-retrieval strategy from an extensive repository, effectively framing the problem as the massive tool retrieval (MTR) task. We introduce the MTRB (massive tool retrieval benchmark) to evaluate real-world tool-augmented LLM scenarios with a large number of tools. This benchmark is designed for low-resource scenarios and includes a diverse collection of tools with descriptions refined for consistency and clarity. It consists of three subsets, each containing 90 test samples and 10 training samples. To handle the low-resource MTR task, we raise a new query-tool alignment (QTA) framework leverages LLMs to enhance query-tool alignment by rewriting user queries through ranking functions and the direct preference optimization (DPO) method. This approach consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art models in top-5 and top-10 retrieval tasks across the MTRB benchmark, with improvements up to 93.28% based on the metric Sufficiency@k, which measures the adequacy of tool retrieval within the first k results. Furthermore, ablation studies validate the efficacy of our framework, highlighting its capacity to optimize performance even with limited annotated samples. Specifically, our framework achieves up to 78.53% performance improvement in Sufficiency@k with just a single annotated sample. Additionally, QTA exhibits strong cross-dataset generalizability, emphasizing its potential for real-world applications.

Advancing Generalized Transfer Attack with Initialization Derived Bilevel Optimization and Dynamic Sequence Truncation

Transfer attacks generate significant interest for real-world black-box applications by crafting transferable adversarial examples through surrogate models. Whereas, existing works essentially directly optimize the single-level objective w.r.t. the surrogate model, which always leads to poor interpretability of attack mechanism and limited generalization performance over unknown victim models. In this work, we propose the \textbf{B}il\textbf{E}vel \textbf{T}ransfer \textbf{A}ttac\textbf{K} (BETAK) framework by establishing an initialization derived bilevel optimization paradigm, which explicitly reformulates the nested constraint relationship between the Upper-Level (UL) pseudo-victim attacker and the Lower-Level (LL) surrogate attacker. Algorithmically, we introduce the Hyper Gradient Response (HGR) estimation as an effective feedback for the transferability over pseudo-victim attackers, and propose the Dynamic Sequence Truncation (DST) technique to dynamically adjust the back-propagation path for HGR and reduce computational overhead simultaneously. Meanwhile, we conduct detailed algorithmic analysis and provide convergence guarantee to support non-convexity of the LL surrogate attacker. Extensive evaluations demonstrate substantial improvement of BETAK (e.g., $\mathbf{53.41}$\% increase of attack success rates against IncRes-v$2_{ens}$) against different victims and defense methods in targeted and untargeted attack scenarios. The source code is available at https://github.com/callous-youth/BETAK.

CSCNET: Class-Specified Cascaded Network for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning

Attribute and object (A-O) disentanglement is a fundamental and critical problem for Compositional Zero-shot Learning (CZSL), whose aim is to recognize novel A-O compositions based on foregone knowledge. Existing methods based on disentangled representation learning lose sight of the contextual dependency between the A-O primitive pairs. Inspired by this, we propose a novel A-O disentangled framework for CZSL, namely Class-specified Cascaded Network (CSCNet). The key insight is to firstly classify one primitive and then specifies the predicted class as a priori for guiding another primitive recognition in a cascaded fashion. To this end, CSCNet constructs Attribute-to-Object and Object-to-Attribute cascaded branches, in addition to a composition branch modeling the two primitives as a whole. Notably, we devise a parametric classifier (ParamCls) to improve the matching between visual and semantic embeddings. By improving the A-O disentanglement, our framework achieves superior results than previous competitive methods.

Towards Robust Image Stitching: An Adaptive Resistance Learning against Compatible Attacks

Image stitching seamlessly integrates images captured from varying perspectives into a single wide field-of-view image. Such integration not only broadens the captured scene but also augments holistic perception in computer vision applications. Given a pair of captured images, subtle perturbations and distortions which go unnoticed by the human visual system tend to attack the correspondence matching, impairing the performance of image stitching algorithms. In light of this challenge, this paper presents the first attempt to improve the robustness of image stitching against adversarial attacks. Specifically, we introduce a stitching-oriented attack~(SoA), tailored to amplify the alignment loss within overlapping regions, thereby targeting the feature matching procedure. To establish an attack resistant model, we delve into the robustness of stitching architecture and develop an adaptive adversarial training~(AAT) to balance attack resistance with stitching precision. In this way, we relieve the gap between the routine adversarial training and benign models, ensuring resilience without quality compromise. Comprehensive evaluation across real-world and synthetic datasets validate the deterioration of SoA on stitching performance. Furthermore, AAT emerges as a more robust solution against adversarial perturbations, delivering superior stitching results. Code is available at:https://github.com/Jzy2017/TRIS.

From Text to Pixels: A Context-Aware Semantic Synergy Solution for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

With the rapid progression of deep learning technologies, multi-modality image fusion has become increasingly prevalent in object detection tasks. Despite its popularity, the inherent disparities in how different sources depict scene content make fusion a challenging problem. Current fusion methodologies identify shared characteristics between the two modalities and integrate them within this shared domain using either iterative optimization or deep learning architectures, which often neglect the intricate semantic relationships between modalities, resulting in a superficial understanding of inter-modal connections and, consequently, suboptimal fusion outcomes. To address this, we introduce a text-guided multi-modality image fusion method that leverages the high-level semantics from textual descriptions to integrate semantics from infrared and visible images. This method capitalizes on the complementary characteristics of diverse modalities, bolstering both the accuracy and robustness of object detection. The codebook is utilized to enhance a streamlined and concise depiction of the fused intra- and inter-domain dynamics, fine-tuned for optimal performance in detection tasks. We present a bilevel optimization strategy that establishes a nexus between the joint problem of fusion and detection, optimizing both processes concurrently. Furthermore, we introduce the first dataset of paired infrared and visible images accompanied by text prompts, paving the way for future research. Extensive experiments on several datasets demonstrate that our method not only produces visually superior fusion results but also achieves a higher detection mAP over existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art results.

Learn from the Past: A Proxy based Adversarial Defense Framework to Boost Robustness

In light of the vulnerability of deep learning models to adversarial samples and the ensuing security issues, a range of methods, including Adversarial Training (AT) as a prominent representative, aimed at enhancing model robustness against various adversarial attacks, have seen rapid development. However, existing methods essentially assist the current state of target model to defend against parameter-oriented adversarial attacks with explicit or implicit computation burdens, which also suffers from unstable convergence behavior due to inconsistency of optimization trajectories. Diverging from previous work, this paper reconsiders the update rule of target model and corresponding deficiency to defend based on its current state. By introducing the historical state of the target model as a proxy, which is endowed with much prior information for defense, we formulate a two-stage update rule, resulting in a general adversarial defense framework, which we refer to as `LAST' ({\bf L}earn from the P{\bf ast}). Besides, we devise a Self Distillation (SD) based defense objective to constrain the update process of the proxy model without the introduction of larger teacher models. Experimentally, we demonstrate consistent and significant performance enhancements by refining a series of single-step and multi-step AT methods (e.g., up to $\bf 9.2\%$ and $\bf 20.5\%$ improvement of Robust Accuracy (RA) on CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 datasets, respectively) across various datasets, backbones and attack modalities, and validate its ability to enhance training stability and ameliorate catastrophic overfitting issues meanwhile.

Diving into Darkness: A Dual-Modulated Framework for High-Fidelity Super-Resolution in Ultra-Dark Environments

Super-resolution tasks oriented to images captured in ultra-dark environments is a practical yet challenging problem that has received little attention. Due to uneven illumination and low signal-to-noise ratio in dark environments, a multitude of problems such as lack of detail and color distortion may be magnified in the super-resolution process compared to normal-lighting environments. Consequently, conventional low-light enhancement or super-resolution methods, whether applied individually or in a cascaded manner for such problem, often encounter limitations in recovering luminance, color fidelity, and intricate details. To conquer these issues, this paper proposes a specialized dual-modulated learning framework that, for the first time, attempts to deeply dissect the nature of the low-light super-resolution task. Leveraging natural image color characteristics, we introduce a self-regularized luminance constraint as a prior for addressing uneven lighting. Expanding on this, we develop Illuminance-Semantic Dual Modulation (ISDM) components to enhance feature-level preservation of illumination and color details. Besides, instead of deploying naive up-sampling strategies, we design the Resolution-Sensitive Merging Up-sampler (RSMU) module that brings together different sampling modalities as substrates, effectively mitigating the presence of artifacts and halos. Comprehensive experiments showcases the applicability and generalizability of our approach to diverse and challenging ultra-low-light conditions, outperforming state-of-the-art methods with a notable improvement (i.e., $\uparrow$5\% in PSNR, and $\uparrow$43\% in LPIPS). Especially noteworthy is the 19-fold increase in the RMSE score, underscoring our method's exceptional generalization across different darkness levels. The code will be available online upon publication of the paper.

Trash to Treasure: Low-Light Object Detection via Decomposition-and-Aggregation

Object detection in low-light scenarios has attracted much attention in the past few years. A mainstream and representative scheme introduces enhancers as the pre-processing for regular detectors. However, because of the disparity in task objectives between the enhancer and detector, this paradigm cannot shine at its best ability. In this work, we try to arouse the potential of enhancer + detector. Different from existing works, we extend the illumination-based enhancers (our newly designed or existing) as a scene decomposition module, whose removed illumination is exploited as the auxiliary in the detector for extracting detection-friendly features. A semantic aggregation module is further established for integrating multi-scale scene-related semantic information in the context space. Actually, our built scheme successfully transforms the "trash" (i.e., the ignored illumination in the detector) into the "treasure" for the detector. Plenty of experiments are conducted to reveal our superiority against other state-of-the-art methods. The code will be public if it is accepted.

Hybrid-Supervised Dual-Search: Leveraging Automatic Learning for Loss-free Multi-Exposure Image Fusion

Multi-exposure image fusion (MEF) has emerged as a prominent solution to address the limitations of digital imaging in representing varied exposure levels. Despite its advancements, the field grapples with challenges, notably the reliance on manual designs for network structures and loss functions, and the constraints of utilizing simulated reference images as ground truths. Consequently, current methodologies often suffer from color distortions and exposure artifacts, further complicating the quest for authentic image representation. In addressing these challenges, this paper presents a Hybrid-Supervised Dual-Search approach for MEF, dubbed HSDS-MEF, which introduces a bi-level optimization search scheme for automatic design of both network structures and loss functions. More specifically, we harnesses a unique dual research mechanism rooted in a novel weighted structure refinement architecture search. Besides, a hybrid supervised contrast constraint seamlessly guides and integrates with searching process, facilitating a more adaptive and comprehensive search for optimal loss functions. We realize the state-of-the-art performance in comparison to various competitive schemes, yielding a 10.61% and 4.38% improvement in Visual Information Fidelity (VIF) for general and no-reference scenarios, respectively, while providing results with high contrast, rich details and colors.

AdvMono3D: Advanced Monocular 3D Object Detection with Depth-Aware Robust Adversarial Training

Monocular 3D object detection plays a pivotal role in the field of autonomous driving and numerous deep learning-based methods have made significant breakthroughs in this area. Despite the advancements in detection accuracy and efficiency, these models tend to fail when faced with such attacks, rendering them ineffective. Therefore, bolstering the adversarial robustness of 3D detection models has become a crucial issue that demands immediate attention and innovative solutions. To mitigate this issue, we propose a depth-aware robust adversarial training method for monocular 3D object detection, dubbed DART3D. Specifically, we first design an adversarial attack that iteratively degrades the 2D and 3D perception capabilities of 3D object detection models(IDP), serves as the foundation for our subsequent defense mechanism. In response to this attack, we propose an uncertainty-based residual learning method for adversarial training. Our adversarial training approach capitalizes on the inherent uncertainty, enabling the model to significantly improve its robustness against adversarial attacks. We conducted extensive experiments on the KITTI 3D datasets, demonstrating that DART3D surpasses direct adversarial training (the most popular approach) under attacks in 3D object detection $AP_{R40}$ of car category for the Easy, Moderate, and Hard settings, with improvements of 4.415%, 4.112%, and 3.195%, respectively.