StimuVAR: Spatiotemporal Stimuli-aware Video Affective Reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Models

Predicting and reasoning how a video would make a human feel is crucial for developing socially intelligent systems. Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive video understanding capabilities, they tend to focus more on the semantic content of videos, often overlooking emotional stimuli. Hence, most existing MLLMs fall short in estimating viewers' emotional reactions and providing plausible explanations. To address this issue, we propose StimuVAR, a spatiotemporal Stimuli-aware framework for Video Affective Reasoning (VAR) with MLLMs. StimuVAR incorporates a two-level stimuli-aware mechanism: frame-level awareness and token-level awareness. Frame-level awareness involves sampling video frames with events that are most likely to evoke viewers' emotions. Token-level awareness performs tube selection in the token space to make the MLLM concentrate on emotion-triggered spatiotemporal regions. Furthermore, we create VAR instruction data to perform affective training, steering MLLMs' reasoning strengths towards emotional focus and thereby enhancing their affective reasoning ability. To thoroughly assess the effectiveness of VAR, we provide a comprehensive evaluation protocol with extensive metrics. StimuVAR is the first MLLM-based method for viewer-centered VAR. Experiments demonstrate its superiority in understanding viewers' emotional responses to videos and providing coherent and insightful explanations.

MedDet: Generative Adversarial Distillation for Efficient Cervical Disc Herniation Detection

Cervical disc herniation (CDH) is a prevalent musculoskeletal disorder that significantly impacts health and requires labor-intensive analysis from experts. Despite advancements in automated detection of medical imaging, two significant challenges hinder the real-world application of these methods. First, the computational complexity and resource demands present a significant gap for real-time application. Second, noise in MRI reduces the effectiveness of existing methods by distorting feature extraction. To address these challenges, we propose three key contributions: Firstly, we introduced MedDet, which leverages the multi-teacher single-student knowledge distillation for model compression and efficiency, meanwhile integrating generative adversarial training to enhance performance. Additionally, we customize the second-order nmODE to improve the model's resistance to noise in MRI. Lastly, we conducted comprehensive experiments on the CDH-1848 dataset, achieving up to a 5% improvement in mAP compared to previous methods. Our approach also delivers over 5 times faster inference speed, with approximately 67.8% reduction in parameters and 36.9% reduction in FLOPs compared to the teacher model. These advancements significantly enhance the performance and efficiency of automated CDH detection, demonstrating promising potential for future application in clinical practice. See project website https://steve-zeyu-zhang.github.io/MedDet

Passenger hazard perception based on EEG signals for highly automated driving vehicles

Enhancing the safety of autonomous vehicles is crucial, especially given recent accidents involving automated systems. As passengers in these vehicles, humans' sensory perception and decision-making can be integrated with autonomous systems to improve safety. This study explores neural mechanisms in passenger-vehicle interactions, leading to the development of a Passenger Cognitive Model (PCM) and the Passenger EEG Decoding Strategy (PEDS). Central to PEDS is a novel Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN) that captures spatial and temporal EEG data patterns. The CRNN, combined with stacking algorithms, achieves an accuracy of $85.0\% \pm 3.18\%$. Our findings highlight the predictive power of pre-event EEG data, enhancing the detection of hazardous scenarios and offering a network-driven framework for safer autonomous vehicles.

ESA: Annotation-Efficient Active Learning for Semantic Segmentation

Active learning enhances annotation efficiency by selecting the most revealing samples for labeling, thereby reducing reliance on extensive human input. Previous methods in semantic segmentation have centered on individual pixels or small areas, neglecting the rich patterns in natural images and the power of advanced pre-trained models. To address these challenges, we propose three key contributions: Firstly, we introduce Entity-Superpixel Annotation (ESA), an innovative and efficient active learning strategy which utilizes a class-agnostic mask proposal network coupled with super-pixel grouping to capture local structural cues. Additionally, our method selects a subset of entities within each image of the target domain, prioritizing superpixels with high entropy to ensure comprehensive representation. Simultaneously, it focuses on a limited number of key entities, thereby optimizing for efficiency. By utilizing an annotator-friendly design that capitalizes on the inherent structure of images, our approach significantly outperforms existing pixel-based methods, achieving superior results with minimal queries, specifically reducing click cost by 98% and enhancing performance by 1.71%. For instance, our technique requires a mere 40 clicks for annotation, a stark contrast to the 5000 clicks demanded by conventional methods.

Generative Diffusion Model-based Downscaling of Observed Sea Surface Height over Kuroshio Extension since 2000

Satellite altimetry has been widely utilized to monitor global sea surface dynamics, enabling investigation of upper ocean variability from basin-scale to localized eddy ranges. However, the sparse spatial resolution of observational altimetry limits our understanding of oceanic submesoscale variability, prevalent at horizontal scales below 0.25o resolution. Here, we introduce a state-of-the-art generative diffusion model to train high-resolution sea surface height (SSH) reanalysis data and demonstrate its advantage in observational SSH downscaling over the eddy-rich Kuroshio Extension region. The diffusion-based model effectively downscales raw satellite-interpolated data from 0.25o resolution to 1/16o, corresponding to approximately 12-km wavelength. This model outperforms other high-resolution reanalysis datasets and neural network-based methods. Also, it successfully reproduces the spatial patterns and power spectra of satellite along-track observations. Our diffusion-based results indicate that eddy kinetic energy at horizontal scales less than 250 km has intensified significantly since 2004 in the Kuroshio Extension region. These findings underscore the great potential of deep learning in reconstructing satellite altimetry and enhancing our understanding of ocean dynamics at eddy scales.

HeadGAP: Few-shot 3D Head Avatar via Generalizable Gaussian Priors

In this paper, we present a novel 3D head avatar creation approach capable of generalizing from few-shot in-the-wild data with high-fidelity and animatable robustness. Given the underconstrained nature of this problem, incorporating prior knowledge is essential. Therefore, we propose a framework comprising prior learning and avatar creation phases. The prior learning phase leverages 3D head priors derived from a large-scale multi-view dynamic dataset, and the avatar creation phase applies these priors for few-shot personalization. Our approach effectively captures these priors by utilizing a Gaussian Splatting-based auto-decoder network with part-based dynamic modeling. Our method employs identity-shared encoding with personalized latent codes for individual identities to learn the attributes of Gaussian primitives. During the avatar creation phase, we achieve fast head avatar personalization by leveraging inversion and fine-tuning strategies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model effectively exploits head priors and successfully generalizes them to few-shot personalization, achieving photo-realistic rendering quality, multi-view consistency, and stable animation.

SegStitch: Multidimensional Transformer for Robust and Efficient Medical Imaging Segmentation

Medical imaging segmentation plays a significant role in the automatic recognition and analysis of lesions. State-of-the-art methods, particularly those utilizing transformers, have been prominently adopted in 3D semantic segmentation due to their superior performance in scalability and generalizability. However, plain vision transformers encounter challenges due to their neglect of local features and their high computational complexity. To address these challenges, we introduce three key contributions: Firstly, we proposed SegStitch, an innovative architecture that integrates transformers with denoising ODE blocks. Instead of taking whole 3D volumes as inputs, we adapt axial patches and customize patch-wise queries to ensure semantic consistency. Additionally, we conducted extensive experiments on the BTCV and ACDC datasets, achieving improvements up to 11.48% and 6.71% respectively in mDSC, compared to state-of-the-art methods. Lastly, our proposed method demonstrates outstanding efficiency, reducing the number of parameters by 36.7% and the number of FLOPS by 10.7% compared to UNETR. This advancement holds promising potential for adapting our method to real-world clinical practice. The code will be available at https://github.com/goblin327/SegStitch

Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models

We present foundation language models developed to power Apple Intelligence features, including a ~3 billion parameter model designed to run efficiently on devices and a large server-based language model designed for Private Cloud Compute. These models are designed to perform a wide range of tasks efficiently, accurately, and responsibly. This report describes the model architecture, the data used to train the model, the training process, how the models are optimized for inference, and the evaluation results. We highlight our focus on Responsible AI and how the principles are applied throughout the model development.

Channel Shaping Using Beyond Diagonal Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface: Analysis, Optimization, and Enhanced Flexibility

This paper investigates the capability of a passive Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) to redistribute the singular values of point-to-point Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) channels for achieving power and rate gains. We depart from the conventional Diagonal (D)-RIS with diagonal phase shift matrix and adopt a Beyond Diagonal (BD) architecture that offers greater wave manipulation flexibility through element-wise connections. Specifically, we first provide shaping insights by characterizing the channel singular value regions attainable by D-RIS and BD-RIS via a novel geodesic optimization. Analytical singular value bounds are then derived to explore their shaping limits in typical deployment scenarios. As a side product, we tackle BD-RIS-aided MIMO rate maximization problem by a local-optimal Alternating Optimization (AO) and a shaping-inspired low-complexity approach. Results show that compared to D-RIS, BD-RIS significantly improves the dynamic range of all channel singular values, the trade-off in manipulating them, and thus the channel power and achievable rate. Those observations become more pronounced when the number of RIS elements and MIMO dimensions increase. Of particular interest, BD-RIS is shown to activate multi-stream transmission at lower transmit power than D-RIS, hence achieving the asymptotic Degrees of Freedom (DoF) at low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) thanks to its higher flexibility of shaping the distribution of channel singular values.

CodeV: Empowering LLMs for Verilog Generation through Multi-Level Summarization

The increasing complexity and high costs associated with modern processor design have led to a surge in demand for processor design automation. Instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in automatically generating code for general-purpose programming languages like Python. However, these methods fail on hardware description languages (HDLs) like Verilog due to the scarcity of high-quality instruction tuning data, as even advanced LLMs like GPT-3.5 exhibit limited performance on Verilog generation. Regarding this issue, we observe that (1) Verilog code collected from the real world has higher quality than those generated by LLMs. (2) LLMs like GPT-3.5 excel in summarizing Verilog code rather than generating it. Based on these observations, this paper introduces CodeV, a series of open-source instruction-tuned Verilog generation LLMs. Instead of generating descriptions first and then getting the corresponding code from advanced LLMs, we prompt the LLM with Verilog code and let the LLM generate the corresponding natural language description by multi-level summarization. Experimental results show that CodeV relatively surpasses the previous open-source SOTA by 14.4% (BetterV in VerilogEval) and 11.3% (RTLCoder in RTLLM) respectively, and also relatively outperforms previous commercial SOTA GPT-4 by 22.1% in VerilogEval.