SemiETS: Integrating Spatial and Content Consistencies for Semi-Supervised End-to-end Text Spotting

Most previous scene text spotting methods rely on high-quality manual annotations to achieve promising performance. To reduce their expensive costs, we study semi-supervised text spotting (SSTS) to exploit useful information from unlabeled images. However, directly applying existing semi-supervised methods of general scenes to SSTS will face new challenges: 1) inconsistent pseudo labels between detection and recognition tasks, and 2) sub-optimal supervisions caused by inconsistency between teacher/student. Thus, we propose a new Semi-supervised framework for End-to-end Text Spotting, namely SemiETS that leverages the complementarity of text detection and recognition. Specifically, it gradually generates reliable hierarchical pseudo labels for each task, thereby reducing noisy labels. Meanwhile, it extracts important information in locations and transcriptions from bidirectional flows to improve consistency. Extensive experiments on three datasets under various settings demonstrate the effectiveness of SemiETS on arbitrary-shaped text. For example, it outperforms previous state-of-the-art SSL methods by a large margin on end-to-end spotting (+8.7%, +5.6%, and +2.6% H-mean under 0.5%, 1%, and 2% labeled data settings on Total-Text, respectively). More importantly, it still improves upon a strongly supervised text spotter trained with plenty of labeled data by 2.0%. Compelling domain adaptation ability shows practical potential. Moreover, our method demonstrates consistent improvement on different text spotters.

Organ-aware Multi-scale Medical Image Segmentation Using Text Prompt Engineering

Accurate segmentation is essential for effective treatment planning and disease monitoring. Existing medical image segmentation methods predominantly rely on uni-modal visual inputs, such as images or videos, requiring labor-intensive manual annotations. Additionally, medical imaging techniques capture multiple intertwined organs within a single scan, further complicating segmentation accuracy. To address these challenges, MedSAM, a large-scale medical segmentation model based on the Segment Anything Model (SAM), was developed to enhance segmentation accuracy by integrating image features with user-provided prompts. While MedSAM has demonstrated strong performance across various medical segmentation tasks, it primarily relies on geometric prompts (e.g., points and bounding boxes) and lacks support for text-based prompts, which could help specify subtle or ambiguous anatomical structures. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Organ-aware Multi-scale Text-guided Medical Image Segmentation Model (OMT-SAM) for multi-organ segmentation. Our approach introduces CLIP encoders as a novel image-text prompt encoder, operating with the geometric prompt encoder to provide informative contextual guidance. We pair descriptive textual prompts with corresponding images, processing them through pre-trained CLIP encoders and a cross-attention mechanism to generate fused image-text embeddings. Additionally, we extract multi-scale visual features from MedSAM, capturing fine-grained anatomical details at different levels of granularity. We evaluate OMT-SAM on the FLARE 2021 dataset, benchmarking its performance against existing segmentation methods. Empirical results demonstrate that OMT-SAM achieves a mean Dice Similarity Coefficient of 0.937, outperforming MedSAM (0.893) and other segmentation models, highlighting its superior capability in handling complex medical image segmentation tasks.

HIF: Height Interval Filtering for Efficient Dynamic Points Removal

3D point cloud mapping plays a essential role in localization and autonomous navigation. However, dynamic objects often leave residual traces during the map construction process, which undermine the performance of subsequent tasks. Therefore, dynamic object removal has become a critical challenge in point cloud based map construction within dynamic scenarios. Existing approaches, however, often incur significant computational overhead, making it difficult to meet the real-time processing requirements. To address this issue, we introduce the Height Interval Filtering (HIF) method. This approach constructs pillar-based height interval representations to probabilistically model the vertical dimension, with interval probabilities updated through Bayesian inference. It ensures real-time performance while achieving high accuracy and improving robustness in complex environments. Additionally, we propose a low-height preservation strategy that enhances the detection of unknown spaces, reducing misclassification in areas blocked by obstacles (occluded regions). Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that HIF delivers a 7.7 times improvement in time efficiency with comparable accuracy to existing SOTA methods. The code will be publicly available.

E4: Energy-Efficient DNN Inference for Edge Video Analytics Via Early-Exit and DVFS

Deep neural network (DNN) models are increasingly popular in edge video analytic applications. However, the compute-intensive nature of DNN models pose challenges for energy-efficient inference on resource-constrained edge devices. Most existing solutions focus on optimizing DNN inference latency and accuracy, often overlooking energy efficiency. They also fail to account for the varying complexity of video frames, leading to sub-optimal performance in edge video analytics. In this paper, we propose an Energy-Efficient Early-Exit (E4) framework that enhances DNN inference efficiency for edge video analytics by integrating a novel early-exit mechanism with dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) governors. It employs an attention-based cascade module to analyze video frame diversity and automatically determine optimal DNN exit points. Additionally, E4 features a just-in-time (JIT) profiler that uses coordinate descent search to co-optimize CPU and GPU clock frequencies for each layer before the DNN exit points. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that E4 outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to 2.8x speedup and 26% average energy saving while maintaining high accuracy.

MedUnifier: Unifying Vision-and-Language Pre-training on Medical Data with Vision Generation Task using Discrete Visual Representations

Despite significant progress in Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP), current approaches predominantly emphasize feature extraction and cross-modal comprehension, with limited attention to generating or transforming visual content. This gap hinders the model's ability to synthesize coherent and novel visual representations from textual prompts, thereby reducing the effectiveness of multi-modal learning. In this work, we propose MedUnifier, a unified VLP framework tailored for medical data. MedUnifier seamlessly integrates text-grounded image generation capabilities with multi-modal learning strategies, including image-text contrastive alignment, image-text matching and image-grounded text generation. Unlike traditional methods that reply on continuous visual representations, our approach employs visual vector quantization, which not only facilitates a more cohesive learning strategy for cross-modal understanding but also enhances multi-modal generation quality by effectively leveraging discrete representations. Our framework's effectiveness is evidenced by the experiments on established benchmarks, including uni-modal tasks (supervised fine-tuning), cross-modal tasks (image-text retrieval and zero-shot image classification), and multi-modal tasks (medical report generation, image synthesis), where it achieves state-of-the-art performance across various tasks. MedUnifier also offers a highly adaptable tool for a wide range of language and vision tasks in healthcare, marking advancement toward the development of a generalizable AI model for medical applications.

NavG: Risk-Aware Navigation in Crowded Environments Based on Reinforcement Learning with Guidance Points

Motion planning in navigation systems is highly susceptible to upstream perceptual errors, particularly in human detection and tracking. To mitigate this issue, the concept of guidance points--a novel directional cue within a reinforcement learning-based framework--is introduced. A structured method for identifying guidance points is developed, consisting of obstacle boundary extraction, potential guidance point detection, and redundancy elimination. To integrate guidance points into the navigation pipeline, a perception-to-planning mapping strategy is proposed, unifying guidance points with other perceptual inputs and enabling the RL agent to effectively leverage the complementary relationships among raw laser data, human detection and tracking, and guidance points. Qualitative and quantitative simulations demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves the highest success rate and near-optimal travel times, greatly improving both safety and efficiency. Furthermore, real-world experiments in dynamic corridors and lobbies validate the robot's ability to confidently navigate around obstacles and robustly avoid pedestrians.

Enhanced Photovoltaic Power Forecasting: An iTransformer and LSTM-Based Model Integrating Temporal and Covariate Interactions

Accurate photovoltaic (PV) power forecasting is critical for integrating renewable energy sources into the grid, optimizing real-time energy management, and ensuring energy reliability amidst increasing demand. However, existing models often struggle with effectively capturing the complex relationships between target variables and covariates, as well as the interactions between temporal dynamics and multivariate data, leading to suboptimal forecasting accuracy. To address these challenges, we propose a novel model architecture that leverages the iTransformer for feature extraction from target variables and employs long short-term memory (LSTM) to extract features from covariates. A cross-attention mechanism is integrated to fuse the outputs of both models, followed by a Kolmogorov-Arnold network (KAN) mapping for enhanced representation. The effectiveness of the proposed model is validated using publicly available datasets from Australia, with experiments conducted across four seasons. Results demonstrate that the proposed model effectively capture seasonal variations in PV power generation and improve forecasting accuracy.

R-CoT: Reverse Chain-of-Thought Problem Generation for Geometric Reasoning in Large Multimodal Models

Existing Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) struggle with mathematical geometric reasoning due to a lack of high-quality image-text paired data. Current geometric data generation approaches, which apply preset templates to generate geometric data or use Large Language Models (LLMs) to rephrase questions and answers (Q&A), unavoidably limit data accuracy and diversity. To synthesize higher-quality data, we propose a two-stage Reverse Chain-of-Thought (R-CoT) geometry problem generation pipeline. First, we introduce GeoChain to produce high-fidelity geometric images and corresponding descriptions highlighting relations among geometric elements. We then design a Reverse A&Q method that reasons step-by-step based on the descriptions and generates questions in reverse from the reasoning results. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method brings significant and consistent improvements on multiple LMM baselines, achieving new performance records in the 2B, 7B, and 8B settings. Notably, R-CoT-8B significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art open-source mathematical models by 16.6% on MathVista and 9.2% on GeoQA, while also surpassing the closed-source model GPT-4o by an average of 13% across both datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/dle666/R-CoT.

Measuring Spiritual Values and Bias of Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have become integral tool for users from various backgrounds. LLMs, trained on vast corpora, reflect the linguistic and cultural nuances embedded in their pre-training data. However, the values and perspectives inherent in this data can influence the behavior of LLMs, leading to potential biases. As a result, the use of LLMs in contexts involving spiritual or moral values necessitates careful consideration of these underlying biases. Our work starts with verification of our hypothesis by testing the spiritual values of popular LLMs. Experimental results show that LLMs' spiritual values are quite diverse, as opposed to the stereotype of atheists or secularists. We then investigate how different spiritual values affect LLMs in social-fairness scenarios e.g., hate speech identification). Our findings reveal that different spiritual values indeed lead to different sensitivity to different hate target groups. Furthermore, we propose to continue pre-training LLMs on spiritual texts, and empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in mitigating spiritual bias.

Debiasing Federated Learning with Correlated Client Participation

In cross-device federated learning (FL) with millions of mobile clients, only a small subset of clients participate in training in every communication round, and Federated Averaging (FedAvg) is the most popular algorithm in practice. Existing analyses of FedAvg usually assume the participating clients are independently sampled in each round from a uniform distribution, which does not reflect real-world scenarios. This paper introduces a theoretical framework that models client participation in FL as a Markov chain to study optimization convergence when clients have non-uniform and correlated participation across rounds. We apply this framework to analyze a more general and practical pattern: every client must wait a minimum number of $R$ rounds (minimum separation) before re-participating. We theoretically prove and empirically observe that increasing minimum separation reduces the bias induced by intrinsic non-uniformity of client availability in cross-device FL systems. Furthermore, we develop an effective debiasing algorithm for FedAvg that provably converges to the unbiased optimal solution under arbitrary minimum separation and unknown client availability distribution.