Bringing Robots Home: The Rise of AI Robots in Consumer Electronics

On March 18, 2024, NVIDIA unveiled Project GR00T, a general-purpose multimodal generative AI model designed specifically for training humanoid robots. Preceding this event, Tesla's unveiling of the Optimus Gen 2 humanoid robot on December 12, 2023, underscored the profound impact robotics is poised to have on reshaping various facets of our daily lives. While robots have long dominated industrial settings, their presence within our homes is a burgeoning phenomenon. This can be attributed, in part, to the complexities of domestic environments and the challenges of creating robots that can seamlessly integrate into our daily routines.

Progressive trajectory matching for medical dataset distillation

It is essential but challenging to share medical image datasets due to privacy issues, which prohibit building foundation models and knowledge transfer. In this paper, we propose a novel dataset distillation method to condense the original medical image datasets into a synthetic one that preserves useful information for building an analysis model without accessing the original datasets. Existing methods tackle only natural images by randomly matching parts of the training trajectories of the model parameters trained by the whole real datasets. However, through extensive experiments on medical image datasets, the training process is extremely unstable and achieves inferior distillation results. To solve these barriers, we propose to design a novel progressive trajectory matching strategy to improve the training stability for medical image dataset distillation. Additionally, it is observed that improved stability prevents the synthetic dataset diversity and final performance improvements. Therefore, we propose a dynamic overlap mitigation module that improves the synthetic dataset diversity by dynamically eliminating the overlap across different images and retraining parts of the synthetic images for better convergence. Finally, we propose a new medical image dataset distillation benchmark of various modalities and configurations to promote fair evaluations. It is validated that our proposed method achieves 8.33% improvement over previous state-of-the-art methods on average, and 11.7% improvement when ipc=2 (i.e., image per class is 2). Codes and benchmarks will be released.

BadEdit: Backdooring large language models by model editing

Mainstream backdoor attack methods typically demand substantial tuning data for poisoning, limiting their practicality and potentially degrading the overall performance when applied to Large Language Models (LLMs). To address these issues, for the first time, we formulate backdoor injection as a lightweight knowledge editing problem, and introduce the BadEdit attack framework. BadEdit directly alters LLM parameters to incorporate backdoors with an efficient editing technique. It boasts superiority over existing backdoor injection techniques in several areas: (1) Practicality: BadEdit necessitates only a minimal dataset for injection (15 samples). (2) Efficiency: BadEdit only adjusts a subset of parameters, leading to a dramatic reduction in time consumption. (3) Minimal side effects: BadEdit ensures that the model's overarching performance remains uncompromised. (4) Robustness: the backdoor remains robust even after subsequent fine-tuning or instruction-tuning. Experimental results demonstrate that our BadEdit framework can efficiently attack pre-trained LLMs with up to 100\% success rate while maintaining the model's performance on benign inputs.

DDSB: An Unsupervised and Training-free Method for Phase Detection in Echocardiography

Accurate identification of End-Diastolic (ED) and End-Systolic (ES) frames is key for cardiac function assessment through echocardiography. However, traditional methods face several limitations: they require extensive amounts of data, extensive annotations by medical experts, significant training resources, and often lack robustness. Addressing these challenges, we proposed an unsupervised and training-free method, our novel approach leverages unsupervised segmentation to enhance fault tolerance against segmentation inaccuracies. By identifying anchor points and analyzing directional deformation, we effectively reduce dependence on the accuracy of initial segmentation images and enhance fault tolerance, all while improving robustness. Tested on Echo-dynamic and CAMUS datasets, our method achieves comparable accuracy to learning-based models without their associated drawbacks. The code is available at https://github.com/MRUIL/DDSB

EMIE-MAP: Large-Scale Road Surface Reconstruction Based on Explicit Mesh and Implicit Encoding

Road surface reconstruction plays a vital role in autonomous driving systems, enabling road lane perception and high-precision mapping. Recently, neural implicit encoding has achieved remarkable results in scene representation, particularly in the realistic rendering of scene textures. However, it faces challenges in directly representing geometric information for large-scale scenes. To address this, we propose EMIE-MAP, a novel method for large-scale road surface reconstruction based on explicit mesh and implicit encoding. The road geometry is represented using explicit mesh, where each vertex stores implicit encoding representing the color and semantic information. To overcome the difficulty in optimizing road elevation, we introduce a trajectory-based elevation initialization and an elevation residual learning method based on Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP). Additionally, by employing implicit encoding and multi-camera color MLPs decoding, we achieve separate modeling of scene physical properties and camera characteristics, allowing surround-view reconstruction compatible with different camera models. Our method achieves remarkable road surface reconstruction performance in a variety of real-world challenging scenarios.

NEDS-SLAM: A Novel Neural Explicit Dense Semantic SLAM Framework using 3D Gaussian Splatting

We propose NEDS-SLAM, an Explicit Dense semantic SLAM system based on 3D Gaussian representation, that enables robust 3D semantic mapping, accurate camera tracking, and high-quality rendering in real-time. In the system, we propose a Spatially Consistent Feature Fusion model to reduce the effect of erroneous estimates from pre-trained segmentation head on semantic reconstruction, achieving robust 3D semantic Gaussian mapping. Additionally, we employ a lightweight encoder-decoder to compress the high-dimensional semantic features into a compact 3D Gaussian representation, mitigating the burden of excessive memory consumption. Furthermore, we leverage the advantage of 3D Gaussian splatting, which enables efficient and differentiable novel view rendering, and propose a Virtual Camera View Pruning method to eliminate outlier GS points, thereby effectively enhancing the quality of scene representations. Our NEDS-SLAM method demonstrates competitive performance over existing dense semantic SLAM methods in terms of mapping and tracking accuracy on Replica and ScanNet datasets, while also showing excellent capabilities in 3D dense semantic mapping.

Magic Tokens: Select Diverse Tokens for Multi-modal Object Re-Identification

Single-modal object re-identification (ReID) faces great challenges in maintaining robustness within complex visual scenarios. In contrast, multi-modal object ReID utilizes complementary information from diverse modalities, showing great potentials for practical applications. However, previous methods may be easily affected by irrelevant backgrounds and usually ignore the modality gaps. To address above issues, we propose a novel learning framework named \textbf{EDITOR} to select diverse tokens from vision Transformers for multi-modal object ReID. We begin with a shared vision Transformer to extract tokenized features from different input modalities. Then, we introduce a Spatial-Frequency Token Selection (SFTS) module to adaptively select object-centric tokens with both spatial and frequency information. Afterwards, we employ a Hierarchical Masked Aggregation (HMA) module to facilitate feature interactions within and across modalities. Finally, to further reduce the effect of backgrounds, we propose a Background Consistency Constraint (BCC) and an Object-Centric Feature Refinement (OCFR). They are formulated as two new loss functions, which improve the feature discrimination with background suppression. As a result, our framework can generate more discriminative features for multi-modal object ReID. Extensive experiments on three multi-modal ReID benchmarks verify the effectiveness of our methods. The code is available at https://github.com/924973292/EDITOR.

Rethinking Low-quality Optical Flow in Unsupervised Surgical Instrument Segmentation

Video-based surgical instrument segmentation plays an important role in robot-assisted surgeries. Unlike supervised settings, unsupervised segmentation relies heavily on motion cues, which are challenging to discern due to the typically lower quality of optical flow in surgical footage compared to natural scenes. This presents a considerable burden for the advancement of unsupervised segmentation techniques. In our work, we address the challenge of enhancing model performance despite the inherent limitations of low-quality optical flow. Our methodology employs a three-pronged approach: extracting boundaries directly from the optical flow, selectively discarding frames with inferior flow quality, and employing a fine-tuning process with variable frame rates. We thoroughly evaluate our strategy on the EndoVis2017 VOS dataset and Endovis2017 Challenge dataset, where our model demonstrates promising results, achieving a mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) of 0.75 and 0.72, respectively. Our findings suggest that our approach can greatly decrease the need for manual annotations in clinical environments and may facilitate the annotation process for new datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/wpr1018001/Rethinking-Low-quality-Optical-Flow.git

Improving Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback Using Contrastive Rewards

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is the mainstream paradigm used to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Yet existing RLHF heavily relies on accurate and informative reward models, which are vulnerable and sensitive to noise from various sources, e.g. human labeling errors, making the pipeline fragile. In this work, we improve the effectiveness of the reward model by introducing a penalty term on the reward, named as \textit{contrastive rewards}. %Contrastive rewards Our approach involves two steps: (1) an offline sampling step to obtain responses to prompts that serve as baseline calculation and (2) a contrastive reward calculated using the baseline responses and used in the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) step. We show that contrastive rewards enable the LLM to penalize reward uncertainty, improve robustness, encourage improvement over baselines, calibrate according to task difficulty, and reduce variance in PPO. We show empirically contrastive rewards can improve RLHF substantially, evaluated by both GPTs and humans, and our method consistently outperforms strong baselines.

Steering LLMs Towards Unbiased Responses: A Causality-Guided Debiasing Framework

Large language models (LLMs) can easily generate biased and discriminative responses. As LLMs tap into consequential decision-making (e.g., hiring and healthcare), it is of crucial importance to develop strategies to mitigate these biases. This paper focuses on social bias, tackling the association between demographic information and LLM outputs. We propose a causality-guided debiasing framework that utilizes causal understandings of (1) the data-generating process of the training corpus fed to LLMs, and (2) the internal reasoning process of LLM inference, to guide the design of prompts for debiasing LLM outputs through selection mechanisms. Our framework unifies existing de-biasing prompting approaches such as inhibitive instructions and in-context contrastive examples, and sheds light on new ways of debiasing by encouraging bias-free reasoning. Our strong empirical performance on real-world datasets demonstrates that our framework provides principled guidelines on debiasing LLM outputs even with only the black-box access.