CRAG -- Comprehensive RAG Benchmark

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has recently emerged as a promising solution to alleviate Large Language Model (LLM)'s deficiency in lack of knowledge. Existing RAG datasets, however, do not adequately represent the diverse and dynamic nature of real-world Question Answering (QA) tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Comprehensive RAG Benchmark (CRAG), a factual question answering benchmark of 4,409 question-answer pairs and mock APIs to simulate web and Knowledge Graph (KG) search. CRAG is designed to encapsulate a diverse array of questions across five domains and eight question categories, reflecting varied entity popularity from popular to long-tail, and temporal dynamisms ranging from years to seconds. Our evaluation on this benchmark highlights the gap to fully trustworthy QA. Whereas most advanced LLMs achieve <=34% accuracy on CRAG, adding RAG in a straightforward manner improves the accuracy only to 44%. State-of-the-art industry RAG solutions only answer 63% questions without any hallucination. CRAG also reveals much lower accuracy in answering questions regarding facts with higher dynamism, lower popularity, or higher complexity, suggesting future research directions. The CRAG benchmark laid the groundwork for a KDD Cup 2024 challenge, attracting thousands of participants and submissions within the first 50 days of the competition. We commit to maintaining CRAG to serve research communities in advancing RAG solutions and general QA solutions.

Opinion-Unaware Blind Image Quality Assessment using Multi-Scale Deep Feature Statistics

Deep learning-based methods have significantly influenced the blind image quality assessment (BIQA) field, however, these methods often require training using large amounts of human rating data. In contrast, traditional knowledge-based methods are cost-effective for training but face challenges in effectively extracting features aligned with human visual perception. To bridge these gaps, we propose integrating deep features from pre-trained visual models with a statistical analysis model into a Multi-scale Deep Feature Statistics (MDFS) model for achieving opinion-unaware BIQA (OU-BIQA), thereby eliminating the reliance on human rating data and significantly improving training efficiency. Specifically, we extract patch-wise multi-scale features from pre-trained vision models, which are subsequently fitted into a multivariate Gaussian (MVG) model. The final quality score is determined by quantifying the distance between the MVG model derived from the test image and the benchmark MVG model derived from the high-quality image set. A comprehensive series of experiments conducted on various datasets show that our proposed model exhibits superior consistency with human visual perception compared to state-of-the-art BIQA models. Furthermore, it shows improved generalizability across diverse target-specific BIQA tasks. Our code is available at: https://github.com/eezkni/MDFS

vHeat: Building Vision Models upon Heat Conduction

A fundamental problem in learning robust and expressive visual representations lies in efficiently estimating the spatial relationships of visual semantics throughout the entire image. In this study, we propose vHeat, a novel vision backbone model that simultaneously achieves both high computational efficiency and global receptive field. The essential idea, inspired by the physical principle of heat conduction, is to conceptualize image patches as heat sources and model the calculation of their correlations as the diffusion of thermal energy. This mechanism is incorporated into deep models through the newly proposed module, the Heat Conduction Operator (HCO), which is physically plausible and can be efficiently implemented using DCT and IDCT operations with a complexity of $\mathcal{O}(N^{1.5})$. Extensive experiments demonstrate that vHeat surpasses Vision Transformers (ViTs) across various vision tasks, while also providing higher inference speeds, reduced FLOPs, and lower GPU memory usage for high-resolution images. The code will be released at https://github.com/MzeroMiko/vHeat.

DynRefer: Delving into Region-level Multi-modality Tasks via Dynamic Resolution

Region-level multi-modality methods can translate referred image regions to human preferred language descriptions. Unfortunately, most of existing methods using fixed visual inputs remain lacking the resolution adaptability to find out precise language descriptions. In this study, we propose a dynamic resolution approach, referred to as DynRefer, to pursue high-accuracy region-level referring through mimicking the resolution adaptability of human visual cognition. DynRefer first implements stochastic vision-language alignment. It aligns desired language descriptions of multi-modality tasks with images of stochastic resolution, which are constructed by nesting a set of views around the referred region. DynRefer then implements dynamic multi-modality referring, which is realized by selecting views based on image and language priors. This allows the visual information used for referring to better match human preferences, thereby improving the representational adaptability of region-level multi-modality models. Extensive experiments show that DynRefer brings mutual improvement upon tasks including region-level captioning, open-vocabulary region recognition and attribute detection. Last but not least, DynRefer achieves new state-of-the-art on multiple region-level multi-modality tasks using a single model. Code is available at https://github.com/callsys/DynRefer.

Agent Design Pattern Catalogue: A Collection of Architectural Patterns for Foundation Model based Agents

Foundation model-enabled generative artificial intelligence facilitates the development and implementation of agents, which can leverage distinguished reasoning and language processing capabilities to takes a proactive, autonomous role to pursue users' goals. Nevertheless, there is a lack of systematic knowledge to guide practitioners in designing the agents considering challenges of goal-seeking (including generating instrumental goals and plans), such as hallucinations inherent in foundation models, explainability of reasoning process, complex accountability, etc. To address this issue, we have performed a systematic literature review to understand the state-of-the-art foundation model-based agents and the broader ecosystem. In this paper, we present a pattern catalogue consisting of 16 architectural patterns with analyses of the context, forces, and trade-offs as the outcomes from the previous literature review. The proposed catalogue can provide holistic guidance for the effective use of patterns, and support the architecture design of foundation model-based agents by facilitating goal-seeking and plan generation.

AdvLoRA: Adversarial Low-Rank Adaptation of Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are a significant technique for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). With the fast growth of AGI, the security problem become one of the most important challenges for VLMs. In this paper, through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the vulnerability of the conventional adaptation methods for VLMs, which may bring significant security risks. In addition, as the size of the VLMs increases, performing conventional adversarial adaptation techniques on VLMs results in high computational costs. To solve these problems, we propose a parameter-efficient \underline{Adv}ersarial adaptation method named \underline{AdvLoRA} by \underline{Lo}w-\underline{R}ank \underline{A}daptation. At first, we investigate and reveal the intrinsic low-rank property during the adversarial adaptation for VLMs. Different from LoRA, we improve the efficiency and robustness of adversarial adaptation by designing a novel reparameterizing method based on parameter clustering and parameter alignment. In addition, an adaptive parameter update strategy is proposed to further improve the robustness. By these settings, our proposed AdvLoRA alleviates the model security and high resource waste problems. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the AdvLoRA.

NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Short-form UGC Video Quality Assessment: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Shortform UGC Video Quality Assessment (S-UGC VQA), where various excellent solutions are submitted and evaluated on the collected dataset KVQ from popular short-form video platform, i.e., Kuaishou/Kwai Platform. The KVQ database is divided into three parts, including 2926 videos for training, 420 videos for validation, and 854 videos for testing. The purpose is to build new benchmarks and advance the development of S-UGC VQA. The competition had 200 participants and 13 teams submitted valid solutions for the final testing phase. The proposed solutions achieved state-of-the-art performances for S-UGC VQA. The project can be found at https://github.com/lixinustc/KVQChallenge-CVPR-NTIRE2024.

Controllable Dense Captioner with Multimodal Embedding Bridging

In this paper, we propose a controllable dense captioner (ControlCap), which accommodates user's intention to dense captioning by introducing linguistic guidance. ControlCap is defined as a multimodal embedding bridging architecture, which comprises multimodal embedding generation (MEG) module and bi-directional embedding bridging (BEB) module. While MEG module represents objects/regions by combining embeddings of detailed information with context-aware ones, it also endows ControlCap the adaptability to specialized controls by utilizing them as linguistic guidance. BEB module aligns the linguistic guidance with visual embeddings through borrowing/returning features from/to the visual domain and gathering such features to predict text descriptions. Experiments on Visual Genome and VG-COCO datasets show that ControlCap respectively outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 1.5% and 3.7% (mAP). Last but not least, with the capability of converting region-category pairs to region-text pairs, ControlCap is able to act as a powerful data engine for dense captioning. Code is available at https://github.com/callsys/ControlCap.

Causal Discovery by Kernel Deviance Measures with Heterogeneous Transforms

The discovery of causal relationships in a set of random variables is a fundamental objective of science and has also recently been argued as being an essential component towards real machine intelligence. One class of causal discovery techniques are founded based on the argument that there are inherent structural asymmetries between the causal and anti-causal direction which could be leveraged in determining the direction of causation. To go about capturing these discrepancies between cause and effect remains to be a challenge and many current state-of-the-art algorithms propose to compare the norms of the kernel mean embeddings of the conditional distributions. In this work, we argue that such approaches based on RKHS embeddings are insufficient in capturing principal markers of cause-effect asymmetry involving higher-order structural variabilities of the conditional distributions. We propose Kernel Intrinsic Invariance Measure with Heterogeneous Transform (KIIM-HT) which introduces a novel score measure based on heterogeneous transformation of RKHS embeddings to extract relevant higher-order moments of the conditional densities for causal discovery. Inference is made via comparing the score of each hypothetical cause-effect direction. Tests and comparisons on a synthetic dataset, a two-dimensional synthetic dataset and the real-world benchmark dataset T\"ubingen Cause-Effect Pairs verify our approach. In addition, we conduct a sensitivity analysis to the regularization parameter to faithfully compare previous work to our method and an experiment with trials on varied hyperparameter values to showcase the robustness of our algorithm.

Online Differentiable Clustering for Intent Learning in Recommendation

Mining users' intents plays a crucial role in sequential recommendation. The recent approach, ICLRec, was introduced to extract underlying users' intents using contrastive learning and clustering. While it has shown effectiveness, the existing method suffers from complex and cumbersome alternating optimization, leading to two main issues. Firstly, the separation of representation learning and clustering optimization within a generalized expectation maximization (EM) framework often results in sub-optimal performance. Secondly, performing clustering on the entire dataset hampers scalability for large-scale industry data. To address these challenges, we propose a novel intent learning method called \underline{ODCRec}, which integrates representation learning into an \underline{O}nline \underline{D}ifferentiable \underline{C}lustering framework for \underline{Rec}ommendation. Specifically, we encode users' behavior sequences and initialize the cluster centers as differentiable network parameters. Additionally, we design a clustering loss that guides the networks to differentiate between different cluster centers and pull similar samples towards their respective cluster centers. This allows simultaneous optimization of recommendation and clustering using mini-batch data. Moreover, we leverage the learned cluster centers as self-supervision signals for representation learning, resulting in further enhancement of recommendation performance. Extensive experiments conducted on open benchmarks and industry data validate the superiority, effectiveness, and efficiency of our proposed ODCRec method. Code is available at: https://github.com/yueliu1999/ELCRec.