Pretraining Large Language Models (LLMs) on large corpora of textual data is now a standard paradigm. When using these LLMs for many downstream applications, it is common to additionally bake in new knowledge (e.g., time-critical news, or private domain knowledge) into the pretrained model either through RAG-based-prompting, or fine-tuning. However, the optimal methodology for the model to gain such new knowledge remains an open question. In this paper, we present Retrieval Augmented FineTuning (RAFT), a training recipe that improves the model's ability to answer questions in a "open-book" in-domain settings. In RAFT, given a question, and a set of retrieved documents, we train the model to ignore those documents that don't help in answering the question, which we call, distractor documents. RAFT accomplishes this by citing verbatim the right sequence from the relevant document that would help answer the question. This coupled with RAFT's chain-of-thought-style response helps improve the model's ability to reason. In domain-specific RAG, RAFT consistently improves the model's performance across PubMed, HotpotQA, and Gorilla datasets, presenting a post-training recipe to improve pre-trained LLMs to in-domain RAG. RAFT's code and demo are open-sourced at github.com/ShishirPatil/gorilla.
While we enjoy the richness and informativeness of multimodal data, it also introduces interference and redundancy of information. To achieve optimal domain interpretation with limited resources, we propose CSDNet, a lightweight \textbf{C}ross \textbf{S}hallow and \textbf{D}eep Perception \textbf{Net}work designed to integrate two modalities with less coherence, thereby discarding redundant information or even modality. We implement our CSDNet for Salient Object Detection (SOD) task in robotic perception. The proposed method capitalises on spatial information prescreening and implicit coherence navigation across shallow and deep layers of the depth-thermal (D-T) modality, prioritising integration over fusion to maximise the scene interpretation. To further refine the descriptive capabilities of the encoder for the less-known D-T modalities, we also propose SAMAEP to guide an effective feature mapping to the generalised feature space. Our approach is tested on the VDT-2048 dataset, leveraging the D-T modality outperforms those of SOTA methods using RGB-T or RGB-D modalities for the first time, achieves comparable performance with the RGB-D-T triple-modality benchmark method with 5.97 times faster at runtime and demanding 0.0036 times fewer FLOPs. Demonstrates the proposed CSDNet effectively integrates the information from the D-T modality. The code will be released upon acceptance.
3D correspondence, i.e., a pair of 3D points, is a fundamental concept in computer vision. A set of 3D correspondences, when equipped with compatibility edges, forms a correspondence graph. This graph is a critical component in several state-of-the-art 3D point cloud registration approaches, e.g., the one based on maximal cliques (MAC). However, its properties have not been well understood. So we present the first study that introduces graph signal processing into the domain of correspondence graph. We exploit the generalized degree signal on correspondence graph and pursue sampling strategies that preserve high-frequency components of this signal. To address time-consuming singular value decomposition in deterministic sampling, we resort to a stochastic approximate sampling strategy. As such, the core of our method is the stochastic spectral sampling of correspondence graph. As an application, we build a complete 3D registration algorithm termed as FastMAC, that reaches real-time speed while leading to little to none performance drop. Through extensive experiments, we validate that FastMAC works for both indoor and outdoor benchmarks. For example, FastMAC can accelerate MAC by 80 times while maintaining high registration success rate on KITTI. Codes are publicly available at https://github.com/Forrest-110/FastMAC.
Adversarial attacks present a significant security risk to image recognition tasks. Defending against these attacks in a real-life setting can be compared to the way antivirus software works, with a key consideration being how well the defense can adapt to new and evolving attacks. Another important factor is the resources involved in terms of time and cost for training defense models and updating the model database. Training many models that are specific to each type of attack can be time-consuming and expensive. Ideally, we should be able to train one single model that can handle a wide range of attacks. It appears that a defense method based on image-to-image translation may be capable of this. The proposed versatile defense approach in this paper only requires training one model to effectively resist various unknown adversarial attacks. The trained model has successfully improved the classification accuracy from nearly zero to an average of 86%, performing better than other defense methods proposed in prior studies. When facing the PGD attack and the MI-FGSM attack, versatile defense model even outperforms the attack-specific models trained based on these two attacks. The robustness check also shows that our versatile defense model performs stably regardless with the attack strength.
We introduce a large-scale dataset named MultiGripperGrasp for robotic grasping. Our dataset contains 30.4M grasps from 11 grippers for 345 objects. These grippers range from two-finger grippers to five-finger grippers, including a human hand. All grasps in the dataset are verified in Isaac Sim to classify them as successful and unsuccessful grasps. Additionally, the object fall-off time for each grasp is recorded as a grasp quality measurement. Furthermore, the grippers in our dataset are aligned according to the orientation and position of their palms, allowing us to transfer grasps from one gripper to another. The grasp transfer significantly increases the number of successful grasps for each gripper in the dataset. Our dataset is useful to study generalized grasp planning and grasp transfer across different grippers.
In the context of single domain generalisation, the objective is for models that have been exclusively trained on data from a single domain to demonstrate strong performance when confronted with various unfamiliar domains. In this paper, we introduce a novel model referred to as Contrastive Uncertainty Domain Generalisation Network (CUDGNet). The key idea is to augment the source capacity in both input and label spaces through the fictitious domain generator and jointly learn the domain invariant representation of each class through contrastive learning. Extensive experiments on two Single Source Domain Generalisation (SSDG) datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which surpasses the state-of-the-art single-DG methods by up to $7.08\%$. Our method also provides efficient uncertainty estimation at inference time from a single forward pass through the generator subnetwork.
Data augmentation is an area of research which has seen active development in many machine learning fields, such as in image-based learning models, reinforcement learning for self driving vehicles, and general noise injection for point cloud data. However, convincing methods for general time series data augmentation still leaves much to be desired, especially since the methods developed for these models do not readily cross-over. Three common approaches for time series data augmentation include: (i) Constructing a physics-based model and then imbuing uncertainty over the coefficient space (for example), (ii) Adding noise to the observed data set(s), and, (iii) Having access to ample amounts of time series data sets from which a robust generative neural network model can be trained. However, for many practical problems that work with time series data in the industry: (i) One usually does not have access to a robust physical model, (ii) The addition of noise can in of itself require large or difficult assumptions (for example, what probability distribution should be used? Or, how large should the noise variance be?), and, (iii) In practice, it can be difficult to source a large representative time series data base with which to train the neural network model for the underlying problem. In this paper, we propose a methodology which attempts to simultaneously tackle all three of these previous limitations to a large extent. The method relies upon the well-studied matrix differential geometry of the Stiefel manifold, as it proposes a simple way in which time series signals can placed on, and then smoothly perturbed over the manifold. We attempt to clarify how this method works by showcasing several potential use cases which in particular work to take advantage of the unique properties of this underlying manifold.
This paper proposes a novel edge computing enabled real-time video analysis system for intelligent visual devices. The proposed system consists of a tracking-assisted object detection module (TAODM) and a region of interesting module (ROIM). TAODM adaptively determines the offloading decision to process each video frame locally with a tracking algorithm or to offload it to the edge server inferred by an object detection model. ROIM determines each offloading frame's resolution and detection model configuration to ensure that the analysis results can return in time. TAODM and ROIM interact jointly to filter the repetitive spatial-temporal semantic information to maximize the processing rate while ensuring high video analysis accuracy. Unlike most existing works, this paper investigates the real-time video analysis systems where the intelligent visual device connects to the edge server through a wireless network with fluctuating network conditions. We decompose the real-time video analysis problem into the offloading decision and configurations selection sub-problems. To solve these two sub-problems, we introduce a double deep Q network (DDQN) based offloading approach and a contextual multi-armed bandit (CMAB) based adaptive configurations selection approach, respectively. A DDQN-CMAB reinforcement learning (DCRL) training framework is further developed to integrate these two approaches to improve the overall video analyzing performance. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed solution, and demonstrate its superiority over counterparts.
Prior efforts in light-weight model development mainly centered on CNN and Transformer-based designs yet faced persistent challenges. CNNs adept at local feature extraction compromise resolution while Transformers offer global reach but escalate computational demands $\mathcal{O}(N^2)$. This ongoing trade-off between accuracy and efficiency remains a significant hurdle. Recently, state space models (SSMs), such as Mamba, have shown outstanding performance and competitiveness in various tasks such as language modeling and computer vision, while reducing the time complexity of global information extraction to $\mathcal{O}(N)$. Inspired by this, this work proposes to explore the potential of visual state space models in light-weight model design and introduce a novel efficient model variant dubbed EfficientVMamba. Concretely, our EfficientVMamba integrates a atrous-based selective scan approach by efficient skip sampling, constituting building blocks designed to harness both global and local representational features. Additionally, we investigate the integration between SSM blocks and convolutions, and introduce an efficient visual state space block combined with an additional convolution branch, which further elevate the model performance. Experimental results show that, EfficientVMamba scales down the computational complexity while yields competitive results across a variety of vision tasks. For example, our EfficientVMamba-S with $1.3$G FLOPs improves Vim-Ti with $1.5$G FLOPs by a large margin of $5.6\%$ accuracy on ImageNet. Code is available at: \url{https://github.com/TerryPei/EfficientVMamba}.
Machine Learning (ML) is becoming increasingly important for IoT-based applications. However, the dynamic and ad-hoc nature of many IoT ecosystems poses unique challenges to the efficacy of ML algorithms. One such challenge is data incompleteness, which is manifested as missing sensor readings. Many factors, including sensor failures and/or network disruption, can cause data incompleteness. Furthermore, most IoT systems are severely power-constrained. It is important that we build IoT-based ML systems that are robust against data incompleteness while simultaneously being energy efficient. This paper presents an empirical study of SECOE - a recent technique for alleviating data incompleteness in IoT - with respect to its energy bottlenecks. Towards addressing the energy bottlenecks of SECOE, we propose ENAMLE - a proactive, energy-aware technique for mitigating the impact of concurrent missing data. ENAMLE is unique in the sense that it builds an energy-aware ensemble of sub-models, each trained with a subset of sensors chosen carefully based on their correlations. Furthermore, at inference time, ENAMLE adaptively alters the number of the ensemble of models based on the amount of missing data rate and the energy-accuracy trade-off. ENAMLE's design includes several novel mechanisms for minimizing energy consumption while maintaining accuracy. We present extensive experimental studies on two distinct datasets that demonstrate the energy efficiency of ENAMLE and its ability to alleviate sensor failures.