Diffusion-Driven Semantic Communication for Generative Models with Bandwidth Constraints

Diffusion models have been extensively utilized in AI-generated content (AIGC) in recent years, thanks to the superior generation capabilities. Combining with semantic communications, diffusion models are used for tasks such as denoising, data reconstruction, and content generation. However, existing diffusion-based generative models do not consider the stringent bandwidth limitation, which limits its application in wireless communication. This paper introduces a diffusion-driven semantic communication framework with advanced VAE-based compression for bandwidth-constrained generative model. Our designed architecture utilizes the diffusion model, where the signal transmission process through the wireless channel acts as the forward process in diffusion. To reduce bandwidth requirements, we incorporate a downsampling module and a paired upsampling module based on a variational auto-encoder with reparameterization at the receiver to ensure that the recovered features conform to the Gaussian distribution. Furthermore, we derive the loss function for our proposed system and evaluate its performance through comprehensive experiments. Our experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in pixel-level metrics such as peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and semantic metrics like learned perceptual image patch similarity (LPIPS). These enhancements are more profound regarding the compression rates and SNR compared to deep joint source-channel coding (DJSCC).

IDAT: A Multi-Modal Dataset and Toolkit for Building and Evaluating Interactive Task-Solving Agents

Seamless interaction between AI agents and humans using natural language remains a key goal in AI research. This paper addresses the challenges of developing interactive agents capable of understanding and executing grounded natural language instructions through the IGLU competition at NeurIPS. Despite advancements, challenges such as a scarcity of appropriate datasets and the need for effective evaluation platforms persist. We introduce a scalable data collection tool for gathering interactive grounded language instructions within a Minecraft-like environment, resulting in a Multi-Modal dataset with around 9,000 utterances and over 1,000 clarification questions. Additionally, we present a Human-in-the-Loop interactive evaluation platform for qualitative analysis and comparison of agent performance through multi-turn communication with human annotators. We offer to the community these assets referred to as IDAT (IGLU Dataset And Toolkit) which aim to advance the development of intelligent, interactive AI agents and provide essential resources for further research.

C-MASS: Combinatorial Mobility-Aware Sensor Scheduling for Collaborative Perception with Second-Order Topology Approximation

Collaborative Perception (CP) has been a promising solution to address occlusions in the traffic environment by sharing sensor data among collaborative vehicles (CoV) via vehicle-to-everything (V2X) network. With limited wireless bandwidth, CP necessitates task-oriented and receiver-aware sensor scheduling to prioritize important and complementary sensor data. However, due to vehicular mobility, it is challenging and costly to obtain the up-to-date perception topology, i.e., whether a combination of CoVs can jointly detect an object. In this paper, we propose a combinatorial mobility-aware sensor scheduling (C-MASS) framework for CP with minimal communication overhead. Specifically, detections are replayed with sensor data from individual CoVs and pairs of CoVs to maintain an empirical perception topology up to the second order, which approximately represents the complete perception topology. A hybrid greedy algorithm is then proposed to solve a variant of the budgeted maximum coverage problem with a worst-case performance guarantee. The C-MASS scheduling algorithm adapts the greedy algorithm by incorporating the topological uncertainty and the unexplored time of CoVs to balance exploration and exploitation, addressing the mobility challenge. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate the near-optimality of the proposed C-MASS framework in both edge-assisted and distributed CP configurations. The weighted recall improvements over object-level CP are 5.8% and 4.2%, respectively. Compared to distance-based and area-based greedy heuristics, the gaps to the offline optimal solutions are reduced by up to 75% and 71%, respectively.

PathGen-1.6M: 1.6 Million Pathology Image-text Pairs Generation through Multi-agent Collaboration

Vision Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP have attracted substantial attention in pathology, serving as backbones for applications such as zero-shot image classification and Whole Slide Image (WSI) analysis. Additionally, they can function as vision encoders when combined with large language models (LLMs) to support broader capabilities. Current efforts to train pathology VLMs rely on pathology image-text pairs from platforms like PubMed, YouTube, and Twitter, which provide limited, unscalable data with generally suboptimal image quality. In this work, we leverage large-scale WSI datasets like TCGA to extract numerous high-quality image patches. We then train a large multimodal model to generate captions for these images, creating PathGen-1.6M, a dataset containing 1.6 million high-quality image-caption pairs. Our approach involves multiple agent models collaborating to extract representative WSI patches, generating and refining captions to obtain high-quality image-text pairs. Extensive experiments show that integrating these generated pairs with existing datasets to train a pathology-specific CLIP model, PathGen-CLIP, significantly enhances its ability to analyze pathological images, with substantial improvements across nine pathology-related zero-shot image classification tasks and three whole-slide image tasks. Furthermore, we construct 200K instruction-tuning data based on PathGen-1.6M and integrate PathGen-CLIP with the Vicuna LLM to create more powerful multimodal models through instruction tuning. Overall, we provide a scalable pathway for high-quality data generation in pathology, paving the way for next-generation general pathology models.

Dynamic Scheduling for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications Enhanced Federated Learning

Leveraging the computing and sensing capabilities of vehicles, vehicular federated learning (VFL) has been applied to edge training for connected vehicles. The dynamic and interconnected nature of vehicular networks presents unique opportunities to harness direct vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, enhancing VFL training efficiency. In this paper, we formulate a stochastic optimization problem to optimize the VFL training performance, considering the energy constraints and mobility of vehicles, and propose a V2V-enhanced dynamic scheduling (VEDS) algorithm to solve it. The model aggregation requirements of VFL and the limited transmission time due to mobility result in a stepwise objective function, which presents challenges in solving the problem. We thus propose a derivative-based drift-plus-penalty method to convert the long-term stochastic optimization problem to an online mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem, and provide a theoretical analysis to bound the performance gap between the online solution and the offline optimal solution. Further analysis of the scheduling priority reduces the original problem into a set of convex optimization problems, which are efficiently solved using the interior-point method. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with the state-of-the-art benchmarks, the proposed algorithm enhances the image classification accuracy on the CIFAR-10 dataset by 3.18% and reduces the average displacement errors on the Argoverse trajectory prediction dataset by 10.21%.

Task-Oriented Wireless Communications for Collaborative Perception in Intelligent Unmanned Systems

Collaborative Perception (CP) has shown great potential to achieve more holistic and reliable environmental perception in intelligent unmanned systems (IUSs). However, implementing CP still faces key challenges due to the characteristics of the CP task and the dynamics of wireless channels. In this article, a task-oriented wireless communication framework is proposed to jointly optimize the communication scheme and the CP procedure. We first propose channel-adaptive compression and robust fusion approaches to extract and exploit the most valuable semantic information under wireless communication constraints. We then propose a task-oriented distributed scheduling algorithm to identify the best collaborators for CP under dynamic environments. The main idea is learning while scheduling, where the collaboration utility is effectively learned with low computation and communication overhead. Case studies are carried out in connected autonomous driving scenarios to verify the proposed framework. Finally, we identify several future research directions.

PathMMU: A Massive Multimodal Expert-Level Benchmark for Understanding and Reasoning in Pathology

The emergence of large multimodal models has unlocked remarkable potential in AI, particularly in pathology. However, the lack of specialized, high-quality benchmark impeded their development and precise evaluation. To address this, we introduce PathMMU, the largest and highest-quality expert-validated pathology benchmark for LMMs. It comprises 33,573 multimodal multi-choice questions and 21,599 images from various sources, and an explanation for the correct answer accompanies each question. The construction of PathMMU capitalizes on the robust capabilities of GPT-4V, utilizing approximately 30,000 gathered image-caption pairs to generate Q\&As. Significantly, to maximize PathMMU's authority, we invite six pathologists to scrutinize each question under strict standards in PathMMU's validation and test sets, while simultaneously setting an expert-level performance benchmark for PathMMU. We conduct extensive evaluations, including zero-shot assessments of 14 open-sourced and three closed-sourced LMMs and their robustness to image corruption. We also fine-tune representative LMMs to assess their adaptability to PathMMU. The empirical findings indicate that advanced LMMs struggle with the challenging PathMMU benchmark, with the top-performing LMM, GPT-4V, achieving only a 51.7\% zero-shot performance, significantly lower than the 71.4\% demonstrated by human pathologists. After fine-tuning, even open-sourced LMMs can surpass GPT-4V with a performance of over 60\%, but still fall short of the expertise shown by pathologists. We hope that the PathMMU will offer valuable insights and foster the development of more specialized, next-generation LLMs for pathology.

Mobility Accelerates Learning: Convergence Analysis on Hierarchical Federated Learning in Vehicular Networks

Hierarchical federated learning (HFL) enables distributed training of models across multiple devices with the help of several edge servers and a cloud edge server in a privacy-preserving manner. In this paper, we consider HFL with highly mobile devices, mainly targeting at vehicular networks. Through convergence analysis, we show that mobility influences the convergence speed by both fusing the edge data and shuffling the edge models. While mobility is usually considered as a challenge from the perspective of communication, we prove that it increases the convergence speed of HFL with edge-level heterogeneous data, since more diverse data can be incorporated. Furthermore, we demonstrate that a higher speed leads to faster convergence, since it accelerates the fusion of data. Simulation results show that mobility increases the model accuracy of HFL by up to 15.1% when training a convolutional neural network on the CIFAR-10 dataset.

Benchmarking PathCLIP for Pathology Image Analysis

Accurate image classification and retrieval are of importance for clinical diagnosis and treatment decision-making. The recent contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) model has shown remarkable proficiency in understanding natural images. Drawing inspiration from CLIP, PathCLIP is specifically designed for pathology image analysis, utilizing over 200,000 image and text pairs in training. While the performance the PathCLIP is impressive, its robustness under a wide range of image corruptions remains unknown. Therefore, we conduct an extensive evaluation to analyze the performance of PathCLIP on various corrupted images from the datasets of Osteosarcoma and WSSS4LUAD. In our experiments, we introduce seven corruption types including brightness, contrast, Gaussian blur, resolution, saturation, hue, and markup at four severity levels. Through experiments, we find that PathCLIP is relatively robustness to image corruptions and surpasses OpenAI-CLIP and PLIP in zero-shot classification. Among the seven corruptions, blur and resolution can cause server performance degradation of the PathCLIP. This indicates that ensuring the quality of images is crucial before conducting a clinical test. Additionally, we assess the robustness of PathCLIP in the task of image-image retrieval, revealing that PathCLIP performs less effectively than PLIP on Osteosarcoma but performs better on WSSS4LUAD under diverse corruptions. Overall, PathCLIP presents impressive zero-shot classification and retrieval performance for pathology images, but appropriate care needs to be taken when using it. We hope this study provides a qualitative impression of PathCLIP and helps understand its differences from other CLIP models.

MUFFIN: Curating Multi-Faceted Instructions for Improving Instruction-Following

In the realm of large language models (LLMs), enhancing instruction-following capability often involves curating expansive training data. This is achieved through two primary schemes: i) Scaling-Inputs: Amplifying (input, output) pairs per task instruction, aiming for better instruction adherence. ii) Scaling Input-Free Tasks: Enlarging tasks, each composed of an (instruction, output) pair (without requiring a separate input anymore). However, LLMs under Scaling-Inputs tend to be overly sensitive to inputs, leading to misinterpretation or non-compliance with instructions. Conversely, Scaling Input-Free Tasks demands a substantial number of tasks but is less effective in instruction following when dealing with instances in Scaling-Inputs. This work introduces MUFFIN, a new scheme of instruction-following dataset curation. Specifically, we automatically Scale Tasks per Input by diversifying these tasks with various input facets. Experimental results across four zero-shot benchmarks, spanning both Scaling-Inputs and Scaling Input-Free Tasks schemes, reveal that LLMs, at various scales, trained on MUFFIN generally demonstrate superior instruction-following capabilities compared to those trained on the two aforementioned schemes.