Chatting Makes Perfect -- Chat-based Image Retrieval

Chats emerge as an effective user-friendly approach for information retrieval, and are successfully employed in many domains, such as customer service, healthcare, and finance. However, existing image retrieval approaches typically address the case of a single query-to-image round, and the use of chats for image retrieval has been mostly overlooked. In this work, we introduce ChatIR: a chat-based image retrieval system that engages in a conversation with the user to elicit information, in addition to an initial query, in order to clarify the user's search intent. Motivated by the capabilities of today's foundation models, we leverage Large Language Models to generate follow-up questions to an initial image description. These questions form a dialog with the user in order to retrieve the desired image from a large corpus. In this study, we explore the capabilities of such a system tested on a large dataset and reveal that engaging in a dialog yields significant gains in image retrieval. We start by building an evaluation pipeline from an existing manually generated dataset and explore different modules and training strategies for ChatIR. Our comparison includes strong baselines derived from related applications trained with Reinforcement Learning. Our system is capable of retrieving the target image from a pool of 50K images with over 78% success rate after 5 dialogue rounds, compared to 75% when questions are asked by humans, and 64% for a single shot text-to-image retrieval. Extensive evaluations reveal the strong capabilities and examine the limitations of CharIR under different settings.

Fine-Grained Property Value Assessment using Probabilistic Disaggregation

The monetary value of a given piece of real estate, a parcel, is often readily available from a geographic information system. However, for many applications, such as insurance and urban planning, it is useful to have estimates of property value at much higher spatial resolutions. We propose a method to estimate the distribution over property value at the pixel level from remote sensing imagery. We evaluate on a real-world dataset of a major urban area. Our results show that the proposed approaches are capable of generating fine-level estimates of property values, significantly improving upon a diverse collection of baseline approaches.

An Efficient Machine Learning-based Channel Prediction Technique for OFDM Sub-Bands

The acquisition of accurate channel state information (CSI) is of utmost importance since it provides performance improvement of wireless communication systems. However, acquiring accurate CSI, which can be done through channel estimation or channel prediction, is an intricate task due to the complexity of the time-varying and frequency selectivity of the wireless environment. To this end, we propose an efficient machine learning (ML)-based technique for channel prediction in orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) sub-bands. The novelty of the proposed approach lies in the training of channel fading samples used to estimate future channel behaviour in selective fading.

Handheld Haptic Device with Coupled Bidirectional Input

Handheld kinesthetic haptic interfaces can provide greater mobility and richer tactile information as compared to traditional grounded devices. In this paper, we introduce a new handheld haptic interface which takes input using bidirectional coupled finger flexion. We present the device design motivation and design details and experimentally evaluate its performance in terms of transparency and rendering bandwidth using a handheld prototype device. In addition, we assess the device's functional performance through a user study comparing the proposed device to a commonly used grounded input device in a set of targeting and tracking tasks.

Incorporating L2 Phonemes Using Articulatory Features for Robust Speech Recognition

The limited availability of non-native speech datasets presents a major challenge in automatic speech recognition (ASR) to narrow the performance gap between native and non-native speakers. To address this, the focus of this study is on the efficient incorporation of the L2 phonemes, which in this work refer to Korean phonemes, through articulatory feature analysis. This not only enables accurate modeling of pronunciation variants but also allows for the utilization of both native Korean and English speech datasets. We employ the lattice-free maximum mutual information (LF-MMI) objective in an end-to-end manner, to train the acoustic model to align and predict one of multiple pronunciation candidates. Experimental results show that the proposed method improves ASR accuracy for Korean L2 speech by training solely on L1 speech data. Furthermore, fine-tuning on L2 speech improves recognition accuracy for both L1 and L2 speech without performance trade-offs.

Vocoder drift in x-vector-based speaker anonymization

State-of-the-art approaches to speaker anonymization typically employ some form of perturbation function to conceal speaker information contained within an x-vector embedding, then resynthesize utterances in the voice of a new pseudo-speaker using a vocoder. Strategies to improve the x-vector anonymization function have attracted considerable research effort, whereas vocoder impacts are generally neglected. In this paper, we show that the impact of the vocoder is substantial and sometimes dominant. The vocoder drift, namely the difference between the x-vector vocoder input and that which can be extracted subsequently from the output, is learnable and can hence be reversed by an attacker; anonymization can be undone and the level of privacy protection provided by such approaches might be weaker than previously thought. The findings call into question the focus upon x-vector anonymization, prompting the need for greater attention to vocoder impacts and stronger attack models alike.

PMC-VQA: Visual Instruction Tuning for Medical Visual Question Answering

In this paper, we focus on the problem of Medical Visual Question Answering (MedVQA), which is crucial in efficiently interpreting medical images with vital clinic-relevant information. Firstly, we reframe the problem of MedVQA as a generation task that naturally follows the human-machine interaction, we propose a generative-based model for medical visual understanding by aligning visual information from a pre-trained vision encoder with a large language model. Secondly, we establish a scalable pipeline to construct a large-scale medical visual question-answering dataset, named PMC-VQA, which contains 227k VQA pairs of 149k images that cover various modalities or diseases. Thirdly, we pre-train our proposed model on PMC-VQA and then fine-tune it on multiple public benchmarks, e.g., VQA-RAD and SLAKE, outperforming existing work by a large margin. Additionally, we propose a test set that has undergone manual verification, which is significantly more challenging, even the best models struggle to solve.

BeamSearchQA: Large Language Models are Strong Zero-Shot QA Solver

Open-domain question answering is a crucial task that often requires accessing external information. Existing methods typically adopt a single-turn retrieve-then-read approach, where relevant documents are first retrieved, and questions are then answered based on the retrieved information. However, there are cases where answering a question requires implicit knowledge that is not directly retrievable from the question itself. In this work, we propose a novel question-answering pipeline called eamSearchQA. Our approach leverages large language models(LLMs) to iteratively generate new questions about the original question, enabling an iterative reasoning process. By iteratively refining and expanding the scope of the question, our method aims to capture and utilize hidden knowledge that may not be directly obtainable through retrieval. We evaluate our approach on the widely-used open-domain NQ and WebQ datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that BeamSearchQA significantly outperforms other zero-shot baselines, indicating its effectiveness in tackling the challenges of open-domain question answering.

Revisiting Proprioceptive Sensing for Articulated Object Manipulation

Robots that assist humans will need to interact with articulated objects such as cabinets or microwaves. Early work on creating systems for doing so used proprioceptive sensing to estimate joint mechanisms during contact. However, nowadays, almost all systems use only vision and no longer consider proprioceptive information during contact. We believe that proprioceptive information during contact is a valuable source of information and did not find clear motivation for not using it in the literature. Therefore, in this paper, we create a system that, starting from a given grasp, uses proprioceptive sensing to open cabinets with a position-controlled robot and a parallel gripper. We perform a qualitative evaluation of this system, where we find that slip between the gripper and handle limits the performance. Nonetheless, we find that the system already performs quite well. This poses the question: should we make more use of proprioceptive information during contact in articulated object manipulation systems, or is it not worth the added complexity, and can we manage with vision alone? We do not have an answer to this question, but we hope to spark some discussion on the matter. The codebase and videos of the system are available at https://tlpss.github.io/revisiting-proprioception-for-articulated-manipulation/.

AssistGPT: A General Multi-modal Assistant that can Plan, Execute, Inspect, and Learn

Recent research on Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to remarkable advancements in general NLP AI assistants. Some studies have further explored the use of LLMs for planning and invoking models or APIs to address more general multi-modal user queries. Despite this progress, complex visual-based tasks still remain challenging due to the diverse nature of visual tasks. This diversity is reflected in two aspects: 1) Reasoning paths. For many real-life applications, it is hard to accurately decompose a query simply by examining the query itself. Planning based on the specific visual content and the results of each step is usually required. 2) Flexible inputs and intermediate results. Input forms could be flexible for in-the-wild cases, and involves not only a single image or video but a mixture of videos and images, e.g., a user-view image with some reference videos. Besides, a complex reasoning process will also generate diverse multimodal intermediate results, e.g., video narrations, segmented video clips, etc. To address such general cases, we propose a multi-modal AI assistant, AssistGPT, with an interleaved code and language reasoning approach called Plan, Execute, Inspect, and Learn (PEIL) to integrate LLMs with various tools. Specifically, the Planner is capable of using natural language to plan which tool in Executor should do next based on the current reasoning progress. Inspector is an efficient memory manager to assist the Planner to feed proper visual information into a specific tool. Finally, since the entire reasoning process is complex and flexible, a Learner is designed to enable the model to autonomously explore and discover the optimal solution. We conducted experiments on A-OKVQA and NExT-QA benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art results. Moreover, showcases demonstrate the ability of our system to handle questions far more complex than those found in the benchmarks.