A Summarized History-based Dialogue System for Amnesia-Free Prompt Updates

In today's society, information overload presents challenges in providing optimal recommendations. Consequently, the importance of dialogue systems that can discern and provide the necessary information through dialogue is increasingly recognized. However, some concerns existing dialogue systems rely on pre-trained models and need help to cope with real-time or insufficient information. To address these concerns, models that allow the addition of missing information to dialogue robots are being proposed. Yet, maintaining the integrity of previous conversation history while integrating new data remains a formidable challenge. This paper presents a novel system for dialogue robots designed to remember user-specific characteristics by retaining past conversation history even as new information is added.

ScatterFormer: Efficient Voxel Transformer with Scattered Linear Attention

Window-based transformers have demonstrated strong ability in large-scale point cloud understanding by capturing context-aware representations with affordable attention computation in a more localized manner. However, because of the sparse nature of point clouds, the number of voxels per window varies significantly. Current methods partition the voxels in each window into multiple subsets of equal size, which cost expensive overhead in sorting and padding the voxels, making them run slower than sparse convolution based methods. In this paper, we present ScatterFormer, which, for the first time to our best knowledge, could directly perform attention on voxel sets with variable length. The key of ScatterFormer lies in the innovative Scatter Linear Attention (SLA) module, which leverages the linear attention mechanism to process in parallel all voxels scattered in different windows. Harnessing the hierarchical computation units of the GPU and matrix blocking algorithm, we reduce the latency of the proposed SLA module to less than 1 ms on moderate GPUs. Besides, we develop a cross-window interaction module to simultaneously enhance the local representation and allow the information flow across windows, eliminating the need for window shifting. Our proposed ScatterFormer demonstrates 73 mAP (L2) on the large-scale Waymo Open Dataset and 70.5 NDS on the NuScenes dataset, running at an outstanding detection rate of 28 FPS. Code is available at https://github.com/skyhehe123/ScatterFormer

Masked Contrastive Reconstruction for Cross-modal Medical Image-Report Retrieval

Cross-modal medical image-report retrieval task plays a significant role in clinical diagnosis and various medical generative tasks. Eliminating heterogeneity between different modalities to enhance semantic consistency is the key challenge of this task. The current Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) models, with cross-modal contrastive learning and masked reconstruction as joint training tasks, can effectively enhance the performance of cross-modal retrieval. This framework typically employs dual-stream inputs, using unmasked data for cross-modal contrastive learning and masked data for reconstruction. However, due to task competition and information interference caused by significant differences between the inputs of the two proxy tasks, the effectiveness of representation learning for intra-modal and cross-modal features is limited. In this paper, we propose an efficient VLP framework named Masked Contrastive and Reconstruction (MCR), which takes masked data as the sole input for both tasks. This enhances task connections, reducing information interference and competition between them, while also substantially decreasing the required GPU memory and training time. Moreover, we introduce a new modality alignment strategy named Mapping before Aggregation (MbA). Unlike previous methods, MbA maps different modalities to a common feature space before conducting local feature aggregation, thereby reducing the loss of fine-grained semantic information necessary for improved modality alignment. Additionally, due to using only masked input, our method significantly reduces the gpu memory and time required for training. Qualitative and quantitative experiments conducted on the MIMIC-CXR dataset validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance in medical cross-modal retrieval tasks.

Joint Learning Neuronal Skeleton and Brain Circuit Topology with Permutation Invariant Encoders for Neuron Classification

Determining the types of neurons within a nervous system plays a significant role in the analysis of brain connectomics and the investigation of neurological diseases. However, the efficiency of utilizing anatomical, physiological, or molecular characteristics of neurons is relatively low and costly. With the advancements in electron microscopy imaging and analysis techniques for brain tissue, we are able to obtain whole-brain connectome consisting neuronal high-resolution morphology and connectivity information. However, few models are built based on such data for automated neuron classification. In this paper, we propose NeuNet, a framework that combines morphological information of neurons obtained from skeleton and topological information between neurons obtained from neural circuit. Specifically, NeuNet consists of three components, namely Skeleton Encoder, Connectome Encoder, and Readout Layer. Skeleton Encoder integrates the local information of neurons in a bottom-up manner, with a one-dimensional convolution in neural skeleton's point data; Connectome Encoder uses a graph neural network to capture the topological information of neural circuit; finally, Readout Layer fuses the above two information and outputs classification results. We reprocess and release two new datasets for neuron classification task from volume electron microscopy(VEM) images of human brain cortex and Drosophila brain. Experiments on these two datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of our model with accuracy of 0.9169 and 0.9363, respectively. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/WHUminghui/NeuNet.

Tensor Networks for Explainable Machine Learning in Cybersecurity

In this paper we show how tensor networks help in developing explainability of machine learning algorithms. Specifically, we develop an unsupervised clustering algorithm based on Matrix Product States (MPS) and apply it in the context of a real use-case of adversary-generated threat intelligence. Our investigation proves that MPS rival traditional deep learning models such as autoencoders and GANs in terms of performance, while providing much richer model interpretability. Our approach naturally facilitates the extraction of feature-wise probabilities, Von Neumann Entropy, and mutual information, offering a compelling narrative for classification of anomalies and fostering an unprecedented level of transparency and interpretability, something fundamental to understand the rationale behind artificial intelligence decisions.

FILP-3D: Enhancing 3D Few-shot Class-incremental Learning with Pre-trained Vision-Language Models

Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) aims to mitigate the catastrophic forgetting issue when a model is incrementally trained on limited data. While the Contrastive Vision-Language Pre-Training (CLIP) model has been effective in addressing 2D few/zero-shot learning tasks, its direct application to 3D FSCIL faces limitations. These limitations arise from feature space misalignment and significant noise in real-world scanned 3D data. To address these challenges, we introduce two novel components: the Redundant Feature Eliminator (RFE) and the Spatial Noise Compensator (SNC). RFE aligns the feature spaces of input point clouds and their embeddings by performing a unique dimensionality reduction on the feature space of pre-trained models (PTMs), effectively eliminating redundant information without compromising semantic integrity. On the other hand, SNC is a graph-based 3D model designed to capture robust geometric information within point clouds, thereby augmenting the knowledge lost due to projection, particularly when processing real-world scanned data. Considering the imbalance in existing 3D datasets, we also propose new evaluation metrics that offer a more nuanced assessment of a 3D FSCIL model. Traditional accuracy metrics are proved to be biased; thus, our metrics focus on the model's proficiency in learning new classes while maintaining the balance between old and new classes. Experimental results on both established 3D FSCIL benchmarks and our dataset demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

Joint Learning for Scattered Point Cloud Understanding with Hierarchical Self-Distillation

Numerous point-cloud understanding techniques focus on whole entities and have succeeded in obtaining satisfactory results and limited sparsity tolerance. However, these methods are generally sensitive to incomplete point clouds that are scanned with flaws or large gaps. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose an end-to-end architecture that compensates for and identifies partial point clouds on the fly. First, we propose a cascaded solution that integrates both the upstream and downstream networks simultaneously, allowing the task-oriented downstream to identify the points generated by the completion-oriented upstream. These two streams complement each other, resulting in improved performance for both completion and downstream-dependent tasks. Second, to explicitly understand the predicted points' pattern, we introduce hierarchical self-distillation (HSD), which can be applied to arbitrary hierarchy-based point cloud methods. HSD ensures that the deepest classifier with a larger perceptual field and longer code length provides additional regularization to intermediate ones rather than simply aggregating the multi-scale features, and therefore maximizing the mutual information between a teacher and students. We show the advantage of the self-distillation process in the hyperspaces based on the information bottleneck principle. On the classification task, our proposed method performs competitively on the synthetic dataset and achieves superior results on the challenging real-world benchmark when compared to the state-of-the-art models. Additional experiments also demonstrate the superior performance and generality of our framework on the part segmentation task.

Multi-Prompts Learning with Cross-Modal Alignment for Attribute-based Person Re-Identification

The fine-grained attribute descriptions can significantly supplement the valuable semantic information for person image, which is vital to the success of person re-identification (ReID) task. However, current ReID algorithms typically failed to effectively leverage the rich contextual information available, primarily due to their reliance on simplistic and coarse utilization of image attributes. Recent advances in artificial intelligence generated content have made it possible to automatically generate plentiful fine-grained attribute descriptions and make full use of them. Thereby, this paper explores the potential of using the generated multiple person attributes as prompts in ReID tasks with off-the-shelf (large) models for more accurate retrieval results. To this end, we present a new framework called Multi-Prompts ReID (MP-ReID), based on prompt learning and language models, to fully dip fine attributes to assist ReID task. Specifically, MP-ReID first learns to hallucinate diverse, informative, and promptable sentences for describing the query images. This procedure includes (i) explicit prompts of which attributes a person has and furthermore (ii) implicit learnable prompts for adjusting/conditioning the criteria used towards this person identity matching. Explicit prompts are obtained by ensembling generation models, such as ChatGPT and VQA models. Moreover, an alignment module is designed to fuse multi-prompts (i.e., explicit and implicit ones) progressively and mitigate the cross-modal gap. Extensive experiments on the existing attribute-involved ReID datasets, namely, Market1501 and DukeMTMC-reID, demonstrate the effectiveness and rationality of the proposed MP-ReID solution.

DXAI: Explaining Classification by Image Decomposition

We propose a new way to explain and to visualize neural network classification through a decomposition-based explainable AI (DXAI). Instead of providing an explanation heatmap, our method yields a decomposition of the image into class-agnostic and class-distinct parts, with respect to the data and chosen classifier. Following a fundamental signal processing paradigm of analysis and synthesis, the original image is the sum of the decomposed parts. We thus obtain a radically different way of explaining classification. The class-agnostic part ideally is composed of all image features which do not posses class information, where the class-distinct part is its complementary. This new visualization can be more helpful and informative in certain scenarios, especially when the attributes are dense, global and additive in nature, for instance, when colors or textures are essential for class distinction. Code is available at https://github.com/dxai2024/dxai.

Efficient Two-Phase Offline Deep Reinforcement Learning from Preference Feedback

In this work, we consider the offline preference-based reinforcement learning problem. We focus on the two-phase learning approach that is prevalent in previous reinforcement learning from human preference works. We find a challenge in applying two-phase learning in the offline PBRL setting that the learned utility model can be too hard for the learning agent to optimize during the second learning phase. To overcome the challenge, we propose a two-phasing learning approach under behavior regularization through action clipping. The insight is that the state-actions which are poorly covered by the dataset can only provide limited information and increase the complexity of the problem in the second learning phase. Our method ignores such state-actions during the second learning phase to achieve higher learning efficiency. We empirically verify that our method has high learning efficiency on a variety of datasets in robotic control environments.