Real-time Holistic Robot Pose Estimation with Unknown States

Estimating robot pose from RGB images is a crucial problem in computer vision and robotics. While previous methods have achieved promising performance, most of them presume full knowledge of robot internal states, e.g. ground-truth robot joint angles, which are not always available in real-world scenarios. On the other hand, existing approaches that estimate robot pose without joint state priors suffer from heavy computation burdens and thus cannot support real-time applications. This work addresses the urgent need for efficient robot pose estimation with unknown states. We propose an end-to-end pipeline for real-time, holistic robot pose estimation from a single RGB image, even in the absence of known robot states. Our method decomposes the problem into estimating camera-to-robot rotation, robot state parameters, keypoint locations, and root depth. We further design a corresponding neural network module for each task. This approach allows for learning multi-facet representations and facilitates sim-to-real transfer through self-supervised learning. Notably, our method achieves inference with a single feedforward, eliminating the need for costly test-time iterative optimization. As a result, it delivers a 12-time speed boost with state-of-the-art accuracy, enabling real-time holistic robot pose estimation for the first time. Code is available at https://oliverbansk.github.io/Holistic-Robot-Pose/.

SALAD-Bench: A Hierarchical and Comprehensive Safety Benchmark for Large Language Models

In the rapidly evolving landscape of Large Language Models (LLMs), ensuring robust safety measures is paramount. To meet this crucial need, we propose \emph{SALAD-Bench}, a safety benchmark specifically designed for evaluating LLMs, attack, and defense methods. Distinguished by its breadth, SALAD-Bench transcends conventional benchmarks through its large scale, rich diversity, intricate taxonomy spanning three levels, and versatile functionalities.SALAD-Bench is crafted with a meticulous array of questions, from standard queries to complex ones enriched with attack, defense modifications and multiple-choice. To effectively manage the inherent complexity, we introduce an innovative evaluators: the LLM-based MD-Judge for QA pairs with a particular focus on attack-enhanced queries, ensuring a seamless, and reliable evaluation. Above components extend SALAD-Bench from standard LLM safety evaluation to both LLM attack and defense methods evaluation, ensuring the joint-purpose utility. Our extensive experiments shed light on the resilience of LLMs against emerging threats and the efficacy of contemporary defense tactics. Data and evaluator are released under https://github.com/OpenSafetyLab/SALAD-BENCH.

LimSim++: A Closed-Loop Platform for Deploying Multimodal LLMs in Autonomous Driving

The emergence of Multimodal Large Language Models ((M)LLMs) has ushered in new avenues in artificial intelligence, particularly for autonomous driving by offering enhanced understanding and reasoning capabilities. This paper introduces LimSim++, an extended version of LimSim designed for the application of (M)LLMs in autonomous driving. Acknowledging the limitations of existing simulation platforms, LimSim++ addresses the need for a long-term closed-loop infrastructure supporting continuous learning and improved generalization in autonomous driving. The platform offers extended-duration, multi-scenario simulations, providing crucial information for (M)LLM-driven vehicles. Users can engage in prompt engineering, model evaluation, and framework enhancement, making LimSim++ a versatile tool for research and practice. This paper additionally introduces a baseline (M)LLM-driven framework, systematically validated through quantitative experiments across diverse scenarios. The open-source resources of LimSim++ are available at: https://pjlab-adg.github.io/limsim_plus/.

Safety of Multimodal Large Language Models on Images and Text

Attracted by the impressive power of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), the public is increasingly utilizing them to improve the efficiency of daily work. Nonetheless, the vulnerabilities of MLLMs to unsafe instructions bring huge safety risks when these models are deployed in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we systematically survey current efforts on the evaluation, attack, and defense of MLLMs' safety on images and text. We begin with introducing the overview of MLLMs on images and text and understanding of safety, which helps researchers know the detailed scope of our survey. Then, we review the evaluation datasets and metrics for measuring the safety of MLLMs. Next, we comprehensively present attack and defense techniques related to MLLMs' safety. Finally, we analyze several unsolved issues and discuss promising research directions.

InternLM-XComposer2: Mastering Free-form Text-Image Composition and Comprehension in Vision-Language Large Model

We introduce InternLM-XComposer2, a cutting-edge vision-language model excelling in free-form text-image composition and comprehension. This model goes beyond conventional vision-language understanding, adeptly crafting interleaved text-image content from diverse inputs like outlines, detailed textual specifications, and reference images, enabling highly customizable content creation. InternLM-XComposer2 proposes a Partial LoRA (PLoRA) approach that applies additional LoRA parameters exclusively to image tokens to preserve the integrity of pre-trained language knowledge, striking a balance between precise vision understanding and text composition with literary talent. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of InternLM-XComposer2 based on InternLM2-7B in producing high-quality long-text multi-modal content and its exceptional vision-language understanding performance across various benchmarks, where it not only significantly outperforms existing multimodal models but also matches or even surpasses GPT-4V and Gemini Pro in certain assessments. This highlights its remarkable proficiency in the realm of multimodal understanding. The InternLM-XComposer2 model series with 7B parameters are publicly available at https://github.com/InternLM/InternLM-XComposer.

CO2: Efficient Distributed Training with Full Communication-Computation Overlap

The fundamental success of large language models hinges upon the efficacious implementation of large-scale distributed training techniques. Nevertheless, building a vast, high-performance cluster featuring high-speed communication interconnectivity is prohibitively costly, and accessible only to prominent entities. In this work, we aim to lower this barrier and democratize large-scale training with limited bandwidth clusters. We propose a new approach called CO2 that introduces local-updating and asynchronous communication to the distributed data-parallel training, thereby facilitating the full overlap of COmunication with COmputation. CO2 is able to attain a high scalability even on extensive multi-node clusters constrained by very limited communication bandwidth. We further propose the staleness gap penalty and outer momentum clipping techniques together with CO2 to bolster its convergence and training stability. Besides, CO2 exhibits seamless integration with well-established ZeRO-series optimizers which mitigate memory consumption of model states with large model training. We also provide a mathematical proof of convergence, accompanied by the establishment of a stringent upper bound. Furthermore, we validate our findings through an extensive set of practical experiments encompassing a wide range of tasks in the fields of computer vision and natural language processing. These experiments serve to demonstrate the capabilities of CO2 in terms of convergence, generalization, and scalability when deployed across configurations comprising up to 128 A100 GPUs. The outcomes emphasize the outstanding capacity of CO2 to hugely improve scalability, no matter on clusters with 800Gbps RDMA or 80Gbps TCP/IP inter-node connections.

From GPT-4 to Gemini and Beyond: Assessing the Landscape of MLLMs on Generalizability, Trustworthiness and Causality through Four Modalities

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive abilities in generating reasonable responses with respect to multi-modal contents. However, there is still a wide gap between the performance of recent MLLM-based applications and the expectation of the broad public, even though the most powerful OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini have been deployed. This paper strives to enhance understanding of the gap through the lens of a qualitative study on the generalizability, trustworthiness, and causal reasoning capabilities of recent proprietary and open-source MLLMs across four modalities: ie, text, code, image, and video, ultimately aiming to improve the transparency of MLLMs. We believe these properties are several representative factors that define the reliability of MLLMs, in supporting various downstream applications. To be specific, we evaluate the closed-source GPT-4 and Gemini and 6 open-source LLMs and MLLMs. Overall we evaluate 230 manually designed cases, where the qualitative results are then summarized into 12 scores (ie, 4 modalities times 3 properties). In total, we uncover 14 empirical findings that are useful to understand the capabilities and limitations of both proprietary and open-source MLLMs, towards more reliable downstream multi-modal applications.

Cross-Modal Prototype based Multimodal Federated Learning under Severely Missing Modality

Multimodal federated learning (MFL) has emerged as a decentralized machine learning paradigm, allowing multiple clients with different modalities to collaborate on training a machine learning model across diverse data sources without sharing their private data. However, challenges, such as data heterogeneity and severely missing modalities, pose crucial hindrances to the robustness of MFL, significantly impacting the performance of global model. The absence of a modality introduces misalignment during the local training phase, stemming from zero-filling in the case of clients with missing modalities. Consequently, achieving robust generalization in global model becomes imperative, especially when dealing with clients that have incomplete data. In this paper, we propose Multimodal Federated Cross Prototype Learning (MFCPL), a novel approach for MFL under severely missing modalities by conducting the complete prototypes to provide diverse modality knowledge in modality-shared level with the cross-modal regularization and modality-specific level with cross-modal contrastive mechanism. Additionally, our approach introduces the cross-modal alignment to provide regularization for modality-specific features, thereby enhancing overall performance, particularly in scenarios involving severely missing modalities. Through extensive experiments on three multimodal datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of MFCPL in mitigating these challenges and improving the overall performance.

Scaling Up to Excellence: Practicing Model Scaling for Photo-Realistic Image Restoration In the Wild

We introduce SUPIR (Scaling-UP Image Restoration), a groundbreaking image restoration method that harnesses generative prior and the power of model scaling up. Leveraging multi-modal techniques and advanced generative prior, SUPIR marks a significant advance in intelligent and realistic image restoration. As a pivotal catalyst within SUPIR, model scaling dramatically enhances its capabilities and demonstrates new potential for image restoration. We collect a dataset comprising 20 million high-resolution, high-quality images for model training, each enriched with descriptive text annotations. SUPIR provides the capability to restore images guided by textual prompts, broadening its application scope and potential. Moreover, we introduce negative-quality prompts to further improve perceptual quality. We also develop a restoration-guided sampling method to suppress the fidelity issue encountered in generative-based restoration. Experiments demonstrate SUPIR's exceptional restoration effects and its novel capacity to manipulate restoration through textual prompts.

SEER: Facilitating Structured Reasoning and Explanation via Reinforcement Learning

Elucidating the reasoning process with structured explanations from question to answer is fundamentally crucial, as it significantly enhances the interpretability and trustworthiness of question-answering (QA) systems. However, structured explanations demand models to perform intricate structured reasoning, which poses great challenges. Most existing methods focus on single-step reasoning through supervised learning, ignoring logical dependencies between steps. Meanwhile, existing reinforcement learning (RL)-based methods overlook the structured relationships, impeding RL's potential in structured reasoning. In this paper, we propose SEER, a novel method that maximizes a structure-based return to facilitate structured reasoning and explanation. Our proposed structure-based return precisely describes the hierarchical and branching structure inherent in structured reasoning, effectively capturing the intricate relationships between states. We also introduce a fine-grained reward function to meticulously delineate diverse reasoning steps. Extensive experiments show that SEER significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving an absolute improvement of 6.9% over RL-based methods on EntailmentBank, a 4.4% average improvement on STREET benchmark, and exhibiting outstanding efficiency and cross-dataset generalization performance.