FlashST: A Simple and Universal Prompt-Tuning Framework for Traffic Prediction

The objective of traffic prediction is to accurately forecast and analyze the dynamics of transportation patterns, considering both space and time. However, the presence of distribution shift poses a significant challenge in this field, as existing models struggle to generalize well when faced with test data that significantly differs from the training distribution. To tackle this issue, this paper introduces a simple and universal spatio-temporal prompt-tuning framework-FlashST, which adapts pre-trained models to the specific characteristics of diverse downstream datasets, improving generalization in diverse traffic prediction scenarios. Specifically, the FlashST framework employs a lightweight spatio-temporal prompt network for in-context learning, capturing spatio-temporal invariant knowledge and facilitating effective adaptation to diverse scenarios. Additionally, we incorporate a distribution mapping mechanism to align the data distributions of pre-training and downstream data, facilitating effective knowledge transfer in spatio-temporal forecasting. Empirical evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our FlashST across different spatio-temporal prediction tasks using diverse urban datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/HKUDS/FlashST.

FPDIoU Loss: A Loss Function for Efficient Bounding Box Regression of Rotated Object Detection

Bounding box regression is one of the important steps of object detection. However, rotation detectors often involve a more complicated loss based on SkewIoU which is unfriendly to gradient-based training. Most of the existing loss functions for rotated object detection calculate the difference between two bounding boxes only focus on the deviation of area or each points distance (e.g., $\mathcal{L}_{Smooth-\ell 1}$, $\mathcal{L}_{RotatedIoU}$ and $\mathcal{L}_{PIoU}$). The calculation process of some loss functions is extremely complex (e.g. $\mathcal{L}_{KFIoU}$). In order to improve the efficiency and accuracy of bounding box regression for rotated object detection, we proposed a novel metric for arbitrary shapes comparison based on minimum points distance, which takes most of the factors from existing loss functions for rotated object detection into account, i.e., the overlap or nonoverlapping area, the central points distance and the rotation angle. We also proposed a loss function called $\mathcal{L}_{FPDIoU}$ based on four points distance for accurate bounding box regression focusing on faster and high quality anchor boxes. In the experiments, $FPDIoU$ loss has been applied to state-of-the-art rotated object detection (e.g., RTMDET, H2RBox) models training with three popular benchmarks of rotated object detection including DOTA, DIOR, HRSC2016 and two benchmarks of arbitrary orientation scene text detection including ICDAR 2017 RRC-MLT and ICDAR 2019 RRC-MLT, which achieves better performance than existing loss functions.

The RoboDrive Challenge: Drive Anytime Anywhere in Any Condition

In the realm of autonomous driving, robust perception under out-of-distribution conditions is paramount for the safe deployment of vehicles. Challenges such as adverse weather, sensor malfunctions, and environmental unpredictability can severely impact the performance of autonomous systems. The 2024 RoboDrive Challenge was crafted to propel the development of driving perception technologies that can withstand and adapt to these real-world variabilities. Focusing on four pivotal tasks -- BEV detection, map segmentation, semantic occupancy prediction, and multi-view depth estimation -- the competition laid down a gauntlet to innovate and enhance system resilience against typical and atypical disturbances. This year's challenge consisted of five distinct tracks and attracted 140 registered teams from 93 institutes across 11 countries, resulting in nearly one thousand submissions evaluated through our servers. The competition culminated in 15 top-performing solutions, which introduced a range of innovative approaches including advanced data augmentation, multi-sensor fusion, self-supervised learning for error correction, and new algorithmic strategies to enhance sensor robustness. These contributions significantly advanced the state of the art, particularly in handling sensor inconsistencies and environmental variability. Participants, through collaborative efforts, pushed the boundaries of current technologies, showcasing their potential in real-world scenarios. Extensive evaluations and analyses provided insights into the effectiveness of these solutions, highlighting key trends and successful strategies for improving the resilience of driving perception systems. This challenge has set a new benchmark in the field, providing a rich repository of techniques expected to guide future research in this field.

Masked Two-channel Decoupling Framework for Incomplete Multi-view Weak Multi-label Learning

Multi-view learning has become a popular research topic in recent years, but research on the cross-application of classic multi-label classification and multi-view learning is still in its early stages. In this paper, we focus on the complex yet highly realistic task of incomplete multi-view weak multi-label learning and propose a masked two-channel decoupling framework based on deep neural networks to solve this problem. The core innovation of our method lies in decoupling the single-channel view-level representation, which is common in deep multi-view learning methods, into a shared representation and a view-proprietary representation. We also design a cross-channel contrastive loss to enhance the semantic property of the two channels. Additionally, we exploit supervised information to design a label-guided graph regularization loss, helping the extracted embedding features preserve the geometric structure among samples. Inspired by the success of masking mechanisms in image and text analysis, we develop a random fragment masking strategy for vector features to improve the learning ability of encoders. Finally, it is important to emphasize that our model is fully adaptable to arbitrary view and label absences while also performing well on the ideal full data. We have conducted sufficient and convincing experiments to confirm the effectiveness and advancement of our model.

CDIMC-net: Cognitive Deep Incomplete Multi-view Clustering Network

In recent years, incomplete multi-view clustering, which studies the challenging multi-view clustering problem on missing views, has received growing research interests. Although a series of methods have been proposed to address this issue, the following problems still exist: 1) Almost all of the existing methods are based on shallow models, which is difficult to obtain discriminative common representations. 2) These methods are generally sensitive to noise or outliers since the negative samples are treated equally as the important samples. In this paper, we propose a novel incomplete multi-view clustering network, called Cognitive Deep Incomplete Multi-view Clustering Network (CDIMC-net), to address these issues. Specifically, it captures the high-level features and local structure of each view by incorporating the view-specific deep encoders and graph embedding strategy into a framework. Moreover, based on the human cognition, i.e., learning from easy to hard, it introduces a self-paced strategy to select the most confident samples for model training, which can reduce the negative influence of outliers. Experimental results on several incomplete datasets show that CDIMC-net outperforms the state-of-the-art incomplete multi-view clustering methods.

AlphaFin: Benchmarking Financial Analysis with Retrieval-Augmented Stock-Chain Framework

The task of financial analysis primarily encompasses two key areas: stock trend prediction and the corresponding financial question answering. Currently, machine learning and deep learning algorithms (ML&DL) have been widely applied for stock trend predictions, leading to significant progress. However, these methods fail to provide reasons for predictions, lacking interpretability and reasoning processes. Also, they can not integrate textual information such as financial news or reports. Meanwhile, large language models (LLMs) have remarkable textual understanding and generation ability. But due to the scarcity of financial training datasets and limited integration with real-time knowledge, LLMs still suffer from hallucinations and are unable to keep up with the latest information. To tackle these challenges, we first release AlphaFin datasets, combining traditional research datasets, real-time financial data, and handwritten chain-of-thought (CoT) data. It has a positive impact on training LLMs for completing financial analysis. We then use AlphaFin datasets to benchmark a state-of-the-art method, called Stock-Chain, for effectively tackling the financial analysis task, which integrates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on financial analysis.

QueryAgent: A Reliable and Efficient Reasoning Framework with Environmental Feedback based Self-Correction

Employing Large Language Models (LLMs) for semantic parsing has achieved remarkable success. However, we find existing methods fall short in terms of reliability and efficiency when hallucinations are encountered. In this paper, we address these challenges with a framework called QueryAgent, which solves a question step-by-step and performs step-wise self-correction. We introduce an environmental feedback-based self-correction method called ERASER. Unlike traditional approaches, ERASER leverages rich environmental feedback in the intermediate steps to perform selective and differentiated self-correction only when necessary. Experimental results demonstrate that QueryAgent notably outperforms all previous few-shot methods using only one example on GrailQA and GraphQ by 7.0 and 15.0 F1. Moreover, our approach exhibits superiority in terms of efficiency, including runtime, query overhead, and API invocation costs. By leveraging ERASER, we further improve another baseline (i.e., AgentBench) by approximately 10 points, revealing the strong transferability of our approach.

Call Me When Necessary: LLMs can Efficiently and Faithfully Reason over Structured Environments

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown potential in reasoning over structured environments, e.g., knowledge graph and table. Such tasks typically require multi-hop reasoning, i.e., match natural language utterance with instances in the environment. Previous methods leverage LLMs to incrementally build a reasoning path, where the LLMs either invoke tools or pick up schemas by step-by-step interacting with the environment. We propose Reasoning-Path-Editing (Readi), a novel framework where LLMs can efficiently and faithfully reason over structured environments. In Readi, LLMs initially generate a reasoning path given a query, and edit the path only when necessary. We instantiate the path on structured environments and provide feedback to edit the path if anything goes wrong. Experimental results on three KGQA datasets and two TableQA datasets show the effectiveness of Readi, significantly surpassing all LLM-based methods (by 9.1% on WebQSP, 12.4% on MQA-3H and 10.9% on WTQ), comparable with state-of-the-art fine-tuned methods (67% on CWQ and 74.7% on WebQSP) and substantially boosting the vanilla LLMs (by 14.9% on CWQ). Our code will be available upon publication.

Tracking Meets LoRA: Faster Training, Larger Model, Stronger Performance

Motivated by the Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) in large language models, we propose LoRAT, a method that unveils the power of larger Vision Transformers (ViT) for tracking within laboratory-level resources. The essence of our work lies in adapting LoRA, a technique that fine-tunes a small subset of model parameters without adding inference latency, to the domain of visual tracking. However, unique challenges and potential domain gaps make this transfer not as easy as the first intuition. Firstly, a transformer-based tracker constructs unshared position embedding for template and search image. This poses a challenge for the transfer of LoRA, usually requiring consistency in the design when applied to the pre-trained backbone, to downstream tasks. Secondly, the inductive bias inherent in convolutional heads diminishes the effectiveness of parameter-efficient fine-tuning in tracking models. To overcome these limitations, we first decouple the position embeddings in transformer-based trackers into shared spatial ones and independent type ones. The shared embeddings, which describe the absolute coordinates of multi-resolution images (namely, the template and search images), are inherited from the pre-trained backbones. In contrast, the independent embeddings indicate the sources of each token and are learned from scratch. Furthermore, we design an anchor-free head solely based on a multilayer perceptron (MLP) to adapt PETR, enabling better performance with less computational overhead. With our design, 1) it becomes practical to train trackers with the ViT-g backbone on GPUs with only memory of 25.8GB (batch size of 16); 2) we reduce the training time of the L-224 variant from 35.0 to 10.8 GPU hours; 3) we improve the LaSOT SUC score from 0.703 to 0.743 with the L-224 variant; 4) we fast the inference speed of the L-224 variant from 52 to 119 FPS. Code and models will be released.

UrbanGPT: Spatio-Temporal Large Language Models

Spatio-temporal prediction aims to forecast and gain insights into the ever-changing dynamics of urban environments across both time and space. Its purpose is to anticipate future patterns, trends, and events in diverse facets of urban life, including transportation, population movement, and crime rates. Although numerous efforts have been dedicated to developing neural network techniques for accurate predictions on spatio-temporal data, it is important to note that many of these methods heavily depend on having sufficient labeled data to generate precise spatio-temporal representations. Unfortunately, the issue of data scarcity is pervasive in practical urban sensing scenarios. Consequently, it becomes necessary to build a spatio-temporal model with strong generalization capabilities across diverse spatio-temporal learning scenarios. Taking inspiration from the remarkable achievements of large language models (LLMs), our objective is to create a spatio-temporal LLM that can exhibit exceptional generalization capabilities across a wide range of downstream urban tasks. To achieve this objective, we present the UrbanGPT, which seamlessly integrates a spatio-temporal dependency encoder with the instruction-tuning paradigm. This integration enables LLMs to comprehend the complex inter-dependencies across time and space, facilitating more comprehensive and accurate predictions under data scarcity. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct extensive experiments on various public datasets, covering different spatio-temporal prediction tasks. The results consistently demonstrate that our UrbanGPT, with its carefully designed architecture, consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. These findings highlight the potential of building large language models for spatio-temporal learning, particularly in zero-shot scenarios where labeled data is scarce.