The Role of Visual Modality in Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning: Challenges and Insights

Recent research has increasingly focused on multimodal mathematical reasoning, particularly emphasizing the creation of relevant datasets and benchmarks. Despite this, the role of visual information in reasoning has been underexplored. Our findings show that existing multimodal mathematical models minimally leverage visual information, and model performance remains largely unaffected by changes to or removal of images in the dataset. We attribute this to the dominance of textual information and answer options that inadvertently guide the model to correct answers. To improve evaluation methods, we introduce the HC-M3D dataset, specifically designed to require image reliance for problem-solving and to challenge models with similar, yet distinct, images that change the correct answer. In testing leading models, their failure to detect these subtle visual differences suggests limitations in current visual perception capabilities. Additionally, we observe that the common approach of improving general VQA capabilities by combining various types of image encoders does not contribute to math reasoning performance. This finding also presents a challenge to enhancing visual reliance during math reasoning. Our benchmark and code would be available at \href{https://github.com/Yufang-Liu/visual_modality_role}{https://github.com/Yufang-Liu/visual\_modality\_role}.

Diffusion-based Virtual Staining from Polarimetric Mueller Matrix Imaging

Polarization, as a new optical imaging tool, has been explored to assist in the diagnosis of pathology. Moreover, converting the polarimetric Mueller Matrix (MM) to standardized stained images becomes a promising approach to help pathologists interpret the results. However, existing methods for polarization-based virtual staining are still in the early stage, and the diffusion-based model, which has shown great potential in enhancing the fidelity of the generated images, has not been studied yet. In this paper, a Regulated Bridge Diffusion Model (RBDM) for polarization-based virtual staining is proposed. RBDM utilizes the bidirectional bridge diffusion process to learn the mapping from polarization images to other modalities such as H\&E and fluorescence. And to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, we conduct the experiment on our manually collected dataset, which consists of 18,000 paired polarization, fluorescence and H\&E images, due to the unavailability of the public dataset. The experiment results show that our model greatly outperforms other benchmark methods. Our dataset and code will be released upon acceptance.

EAGLE: Elevating Geometric Reasoning through LLM-empowered Visual Instruction Tuning

Multi-modal Large Language Models have recently experienced rapid developments and excel in various multi-modal tasks. However, they still struggle with mathematical geometric problem solving, which requires exceptional visual perception proficiency. Existing MLLMs mostly optimize the LLM backbone to acquire geometric reasoning capabilities, while rarely emphasizing improvements in visual comprehension. In this paper, we first investigate the visual perception performance of MLLMs when facing geometric diagrams. Our findings reveal that current MLLMs severely suffer from inaccurate geometric perception and hallucinations. To address these limitations, we propose EAGLE, a novel two-stage end-to-end visual enhancement MLLM framework designed to ElevAte Geometric reasoning through LLM-Empowered visual instruction tuning. Specifically, in the preliminary stage, we feed geometric image-caption pairs into our MLLM that contains a fully fine-tuning CLIP ViT and a frozen LLM, aiming to endow our model with basic geometric knowledge. In the subsequent advanced stage, we incorporate LoRA modules into the vision encoder and unfreeze the LLM backbone. This enables the model to leverage the inherent CoT rationales within question-answer pairs, guiding the MLLM to focus on nuanced visual cues and enhancing its overall perceptual capacity. Moreover, we optimize the cross-modal projector in both stages to foster adaptive visual-linguistic alignments. After the two-stage visual enhancement, we develop the geometry expert model EAGLE-7B. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our model. For example, on the GeoQA benchmark, EAGLE-7B not only surpasses the exemplary G-LLaVA 7B model by 2.9%, but also marginally outperforms the larger G-LLaVA 13B model. On the MathVista benchmark, EAGLE-7B achieves remarkable 3.8% improvements compared with the proprietary model GPT-4V.

Teach CLIP to Develop a Number Sense for Ordinal Regression

Ordinal regression is a fundamental problem within the field of computer vision, with customised well-trained models on specific tasks. While pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) have exhibited impressive performance on various vision tasks, their potential for ordinal regression has received less exploration. In this study, we first investigate CLIP's potential for ordinal regression, from which we expect the model could generalise to different ordinal regression tasks and scenarios. Unfortunately, vanilla CLIP fails on this task, since current VLMs have a well-documented limitation of encapsulating compositional concepts such as number sense. We propose a simple yet effective method called NumCLIP to improve the quantitative understanding of VLMs. We disassemble the exact image to number-specific text matching problem into coarse classification and fine prediction stages. We discretize and phrase each numerical bin with common language concept to better leverage the available pre-trained alignment in CLIP. To consider the inherent continuous property of ordinal regression, we propose a novel fine-grained cross-modal ranking-based regularisation loss specifically designed to keep both semantic and ordinal alignment in CLIP's feature space. Experimental results on three general ordinal regression tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of NumCLIP, with 10% and 3.83% accuracy improvement on historical image dating and image aesthetics assessment task, respectively. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/xmed-lab/NumCLIP.

MIPI 2024 Challenge on Few-shot RAW Image Denoising: 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 Few-shot RAW Image Denoising track on MIPI 2024. In total, 165 participants were successfully registered, and 7 teams submitted results in the final testing phase. The developed solutions in this challenge achieved state-of-the-art erformance on Few-shot RAW Image Denoising. More details of this challenge and the link to the dataset can be found at https://mipichallenge.org/MIPI2024.

Toward Efficient Visual Gyroscopes: Spherical Moments, Harmonics Filtering, and Masking Techniques for Spherical Camera Applications

Unlike a traditional gyroscope, a visual gyroscope estimates camera rotation through images. The integration of omnidirectional cameras, offering a larger field of view compared to traditional RGB cameras, has proven to yield more accurate and robust results. However, challenges arise in situations that lack features, have substantial noise causing significant errors, and where certain features in the images lack sufficient strength, leading to less precise prediction results. Here, we address these challenges by introducing a novel visual gyroscope, which combines an analytical method with a neural network approach to provide a more efficient and accurate rotation estimation from spherical images. The presented method relies on three key contributions: an adapted analytical approach to compute the spherical moments coefficients, introduction of masks for better global feature representation, and the use of a multilayer perceptron to adaptively choose the best combination of masks and filters. Experimental results demonstrate superior performance of the proposed approach in terms of accuracy. The paper emphasizes the advantages of integrating machine learning to optimize analytical solutions, discusses limitations, and suggests directions for future research.

Sign Language Production with Latent Motion Transformer

Sign Language Production (SLP) is the tough task of turning sign language into sign videos. The main goal of SLP is to create these videos using a sign gloss. In this research, we've developed a new method to make high-quality sign videos without using human poses as a middle step. Our model works in two main parts: first, it learns from a generator and the video's hidden features, and next, it uses another model to understand the order of these hidden features. To make this method even better for sign videos, we make several significant improvements. (i) In the first stage, we take an improved 3D VQ-GAN to learn downsampled latent representations. (ii) In the second stage, we introduce sequence-to-sequence attention to better leverage conditional information. (iii) The separated two-stage training discards the realistic visual semantic of the latent codes in the second stage. To endow the latent sequences semantic information, we extend the token-level autoregressive latent codes learning with perceptual loss and reconstruction loss for the prior model with visual perception. Compared with previous state-of-the-art approaches, our model performs consistently better on two word-level sign language datasets, i.e., WLASL and NMFs-CSL.

ASTER: Automatic Speech Recognition System Accessibility Testing for Stutterers

The popularity of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems nowadays leads to an increasing need for improving their accessibility. Handling stuttering speech is an important feature for accessible ASR systems. To improve the accessibility of ASR systems for stutterers, we need to expose and analyze the failures of ASR systems on stuttering speech. The speech datasets recorded from stutterers are not diverse enough to expose most of the failures. Furthermore, these datasets lack ground truth information about the non-stuttered text, rendering them unsuitable as comprehensive test suites. Therefore, a methodology for generating stuttering speech as test inputs to test and analyze the performance of ASR systems is needed. However, generating valid test inputs in this scenario is challenging. The reason is that although the generated test inputs should mimic how stutterers speak, they should also be diverse enough to trigger more failures. To address the challenge, we propose ASTER, a technique for automatically testing the accessibility of ASR systems. ASTER can generate valid test cases by injecting five different types of stuttering. The generated test cases can both simulate realistic stuttering speech and expose failures in ASR systems. Moreover, ASTER can further enhance the quality of the test cases with a multi-objective optimization-based seed updating algorithm. We implemented ASTER as a framework and evaluated it on four open-source ASR models and three commercial ASR systems. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of ASTER and find that it significantly increases the word error rate, match error rate, and word information loss in the evaluated ASR systems. Additionally, our user study demonstrates that the generated stuttering audio is indistinguishable from real-world stuttering audio clips.

Inferring Attracting Basins of Power System with Machine Learning

Power systems dominated by renewable energy encounter frequently large, random disturbances, and a critical challenge faced in power-system management is how to anticipate accurately whether the perturbed systems will return to the functional state after the transient or collapse. Whereas model-based studies show that the key to addressing the challenge lies in the attracting basins of the functional and dysfunctional states in the phase space, the finding of the attracting basins for realistic power systems remains a challenge, as accurate models describing the system dynamics are generally unavailable. Here we propose a new machine learning technique, namely balanced reservoir computing, to infer the attracting basins of a typical power system based on measured data. Specifically, trained by the time series of a handful of perturbation events, we demonstrate that the trained machine can predict accurately whether the system will return to the functional state in response to a large, random perturbation, thereby reconstructing the attracting basin of the functional state. The working mechanism of the new machine is analyzed, and it is revealed that the success of the new machine is attributed to the good balance between the echo and fading properties of the reservoir network; the effect of noisy signals on the prediction performance is also investigated, and a stochastic-resonance-like phenomenon is observed. Finally, we demonstrate that the new technique can be also utilized to infer the attracting basins of coexisting attractors in typical chaotic systems.

Vector Quantized Diffusion Model with CodeUnet for Text-to-Sign Pose Sequences Generation

Sign Language Production (SLP) aims to translate spoken languages into sign sequences automatically. The core process of SLP is to transform sign gloss sequences into their corresponding sign pose sequences (G2P). Most existing G2P models usually perform this conditional long-range generation in an autoregressive manner, which inevitably leads to an accumulation of errors. To address this issue, we propose a vector quantized diffusion method for conditional pose sequences generation, called PoseVQ-Diffusion, which is an iterative non-autoregressive method. Specifically, we first introduce a vector quantized variational autoencoder (Pose-VQVAE) model to represent a pose sequence as a sequence of latent codes. Then we model the latent discrete space by an extension of the recently developed diffusion architecture. To better leverage the spatial-temporal information, we introduce a novel architecture, namely CodeUnet, to generate higher quality pose sequence in the discrete space. Moreover, taking advantage of the learned codes, we develop a novel sequential k-nearest-neighbours method to predict the variable lengths of pose sequences for corresponding gloss sequences. Consequently, compared with the autoregressive G2P models, our model has a faster sampling speed and produces significantly better results. Compared with previous non-autoregressive G2P methods, PoseVQ-Diffusion improves the predicted results with iterative refinements, thus achieving state-of-the-art results on the SLP evaluation benchmark.