Integrating adversarial machine learning with Question Answering (QA) systems has emerged as a critical area for understanding the vulnerabilities and robustness of these systems. This article aims to comprehensively review adversarial example-generation techniques in the QA field, including textual and multimodal contexts. We examine the techniques employed through systematic categorization, providing a comprehensive, structured review. Beginning with an overview of traditional QA models, we traverse the adversarial example generation by exploring rule-based perturbations and advanced generative models. We then extend our research to include multimodal QA systems, analyze them across various methods, and examine generative models, seq2seq architectures, and hybrid methodologies. Our research grows to different defense strategies, adversarial datasets, and evaluation metrics and illustrates the comprehensive literature on adversarial QA. Finally, the paper considers the future landscape of adversarial question generation, highlighting potential research directions that can advance textual and multimodal QA systems in the context of adversarial challenges.
Semantic segmentation of remote sensing images plays a vital role in a wide range of Earth Observation (EO) applications, such as land use land cover mapping, environment monitoring, and sustainable development. Driven by rapid developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI), deep learning (DL) has emerged as the mainstream tool for semantic segmentation and achieved many breakthroughs in the field of remote sensing. However, the existing DL-based methods mainly focus on unimodal visual data while ignoring the rich multimodal information involved in the real world, usually demonstrating weak reliability and generlization. Inspired by the success of Vision Transformers and large language models, we propose a novel metadata-collaborative multimodal segmentation network (MetaSegNet) that applies vision-language representation learning for semantic segmentation of remote sensing images. Unlike the common model structure that only uses unimodal visual data, we extract the key characteristic (i.e. the climate zone) from freely available remote sensing image metadata and transfer it into knowledge-based text prompts via the generic ChatGPT. Then, we construct an image encoder, a text encoder and a crossmodal attention fusion subnetwork to extract the image and text feature and apply image-text interaction. Benefiting from such a design, the proposed MetaSegNet demonstrates superior generalization and achieves competitive accuracy with state-of-the-art semantic segmentation methods on the large-scale OpenEarthMap dataset (68.6% mIoU) and Potsdam dataset (93.3% mean F1 score) as well as LoveDA dataset (52.2% mIoU).
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated an impressive ability to synthesize plausible and fluent text. However they remain vulnerable to hallucinations, and thus their outputs generally require manual human verification for high-stakes applications, which can be time-consuming and difficult. This paper proposes symbolically grounded generation (SymGen) as a simple approach for enabling easier validation of an LLM's output. SymGen prompts an LLM to interleave its regular output text with explicit symbolic references to fields present in some conditioning data (e.g., a table in JSON format). The references can be used to display the provenance of different spans of text in the generation, reducing the effort required for manual verification. Across data-to-text and question answering experiments, we find that LLMs are able to directly output text that makes use of symbolic references while maintaining fluency and accuracy.
Researchers have proposed to use data of human preference feedback to fine-tune text-to-image generative models. However, the scalability of human feedback collection has been limited by its reliance on manual annotation. Therefore, we develop and test a method to automatically annotate user preferences from their spontaneous facial expression reaction to the generated images. We collect a dataset of Facial Expression Reaction to Generated Images (FERGI) and show that the activations of multiple facial action units (AUs) are highly correlated with user evaluations of the generated images. Specifically, AU4 (brow lowerer) is most consistently reflective of negative evaluations of the generated image. This can be useful in two ways. Firstly, we can automatically annotate user preferences between image pairs with substantial difference in AU4 responses to them with an accuracy significantly outperforming state-of-the-art scoring models. Secondly, directly integrating the AU4 responses with the scoring models improves their consistency with human preferences. Additionally, the AU4 response best reflects the user's evaluation of the image fidelity, making it complementary to the state-of-the-art scoring models, which are generally better at reflecting image-text alignment. Finally, this method of automatic annotation with facial expression analysis can be potentially generalized to other generation tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/ShuangquanFeng/FERGI, and the dataset is also available at the same link for research purposes.
Foundation models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) have demonstrated promise in generic object segmentation. However, directly applying SAM to surgical instrument segmentation presents key challenges. First, SAM relies on per-frame point-or-box prompts which complicate surgeon-computer interaction. Also, SAM yields suboptimal performance on segmenting surgical instruments, owing to insufficient surgical data in its pre-training as well as the complex structure and fine-grained details of various surgical instruments. To address these challenges, in this paper, we investigate text promptable surgical instrument segmentation and propose SP-SAM (SurgicalPart-SAM), a novel efficient-tuning approach that integrates surgical instrument structure knowledge with the generic segmentation knowledge of SAM. Specifically, we achieve this by proposing (1) collaborative prompts in the text form "[part name] of [instrument category name]" that decompose instruments into fine-grained parts; (2) a Cross-Modal Prompt Encoder that encodes text prompts jointly with visual embeddings into discriminative part-level representations; and (3) a Part-to-Whole Selective Fusion and a Hierarchical Decoding strategy that selectively assemble the part-level representations into a whole for accurate instrument segmentation. Built upon them, SP-SAM acquires a better capability to comprehend surgical instrument structures and distinguish between various categories. Extensive experiments on both the EndoVis2018 and EndoVis2017 datasets demonstrate SP-SAM's state-of-the-art performance with minimal tunable parameters. Code is at https://github.com/wenxi-yue/SurgicalPart-SAM.
Text sentiment transfer aims to flip the sentiment polarity of a sentence (positive to negative or vice versa) while preserving its sentiment-independent content. Although current models show good results at changing the sentiment, content preservation in transferred sentences is insufficient. In this paper, we present a sentiment transfer model based on polarity-aware denoising, which accurately controls the sentiment attributes in generated text, preserving the content to a great extent and helping to balance the style-content trade-off. Our proposed model is structured around two key stages in the sentiment transfer process: better representation learning using a shared encoder and sentiment-controlled generation using separate sentiment-specific decoders. Empirical results show that our methods outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of content preservation while staying competitive in terms of style transfer accuracy and fluency.
Blind Image Quality Assessment (BIQA) is essential for automatically evaluating the perceptual quality of visual signals without access to the references. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive analysis and discussion of recent developments in the field of BIQA. We have covered various aspects, including hand-crafted BIQAs that focus on distortion-specific and general-purpose methods, as well as deep-learned BIQAs that employ supervised and unsupervised learning techniques. Additionally, we have explored multimodal quality assessment methods that consider interactions between visual and audio modalities, as well as visual and text modalities. Finally, we have offered insights into representative BIQA databases, including both synthetic and authentic distortions. We believe this survey provides valuable understandings into the latest developments and emerging trends for the visual quality community.
Information extraction (IE) aims to extract structural knowledge (such as entities, relations, and events) from plain natural language texts. Recently, generative Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in text understanding and generation, allowing for generalization across various domains and tasks. As a result, numerous works have been proposed to harness abilities of LLMs and offer viable solutions for IE tasks based on a generative paradigm. To conduct a comprehensive systematic review and exploration of LLM efforts for IE tasks, in this study, we survey the most recent advancements in this field. We first present an extensive overview by categorizing these works in terms of various IE subtasks and learning paradigms, then we empirically analyze the most advanced methods and discover the emerging trend of IE tasks with LLMs. Based on thorough review conducted, we identify several insights in technique and promising research directions that deserve further exploration in future studies. We maintain a public repository and consistently update related resources at: \url{https://github.com/quqxui/Awesome-LLM4IE-Papers}.
We present CLIPSwarm, an algorithm to generate robot swarm formations from natural language descriptions. CLIPSwarm receives an input text and finds the position of the robots to form a shape that corresponds to the given text. To do so, we implement a variation of the Montecarlo particle filter to obtain a matching formation iteratively. In every iteration, we generate a set of new formations and evaluate their Clip Similarity with the given text, selecting the best formations according to this metric. This metric is obtained using Clip, [1], an existing foundation model trained to encode images and texts into vectors within a common latent space. The comparison between these vectors determines how likely the given text describes the shapes. Our initial proof of concept shows the potential of this solution to generate robot swarm formations just from natural language descriptions and demonstrates a novel application of foundation models, such as CLIP, in the field of multi-robot systems. In this first approach, we create formations using a Convex-Hull approach. Next steps include more robust and generic representation and optimization steps in the process of obtaining a suitable swarm formation.
Text-to-video (T2V) generation is a rapidly growing research area that aims to translate the scenes, objects, and actions within complex video text into a sequence of coherent visual frames. We present FlowZero, a novel framework that combines Large Language Models (LLMs) with image diffusion models to generate temporally-coherent videos. FlowZero uses LLMs to understand complex spatio-temporal dynamics from text, where LLMs can generate a comprehensive dynamic scene syntax (DSS) containing scene descriptions, object layouts, and background motion patterns. These elements in DSS are then used to guide the image diffusion model for video generation with smooth object motions and frame-to-frame coherence. Moreover, FlowZero incorporates an iterative self-refinement process, enhancing the alignment between the spatio-temporal layouts and the textual prompts for the videos. To enhance global coherence, we propose enriching the initial noise of each frame with motion dynamics to control the background movement and camera motion adaptively. By using spatio-temporal syntaxes to guide the diffusion process, FlowZero achieves improvement in zero-shot video synthesis, generating coherent videos with vivid motion.