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Dec 30

Implicit Neural Spatial Representations for Time-dependent PDEs

Implicit Neural Spatial Representation (INSR) has emerged as an effective representation of spatially-dependent vector fields. This work explores solving time-dependent PDEs with INSR. Classical PDE solvers introduce both temporal and spatial discretizations. Common spatial discretizations include meshes and meshless point clouds, where each degree-of-freedom corresponds to a location in space. While these explicit spatial correspondences are intuitive to model and understand, these representations are not necessarily optimal for accuracy, memory usage, or adaptivity. Keeping the classical temporal discretization unchanged (e.g., explicit/implicit Euler), we explore INSR as an alternative spatial discretization, where spatial information is implicitly stored in the neural network weights. The network weights then evolve over time via time integration. Our approach does not require any training data generated by existing solvers because our approach is the solver itself. We validate our approach on various PDEs with examples involving large elastic deformations, turbulent fluids, and multi-scale phenomena. While slower to compute than traditional representations, our approach exhibits higher accuracy and lower memory consumption. Whereas classical solvers can dynamically adapt their spatial representation only by resorting to complex remeshing algorithms, our INSR approach is intrinsically adaptive. By tapping into the rich literature of classic time integrators, e.g., operator-splitting schemes, our method enables challenging simulations in contact mechanics and turbulent flows where previous neural-physics approaches struggle. Videos and codes are available on the project page: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/cg/INSR-PDE/

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 30, 2022

Deep Stochastic Kinematic Models for Probabilistic Motion Forecasting in Traffic

In trajectory forecasting tasks for traffic, future output trajectories can be computed by advancing the ego vehicle's state with predicted actions according to a kinematics model. By unrolling predicted trajectories via time integration and models of kinematic dynamics, predicted trajectories should not only be kinematically feasible but also relate uncertainty from one timestep to the next. While current works in probabilistic prediction do incorporate kinematic priors for mean trajectory prediction, variance is often left as a learnable parameter, despite uncertainty in one time step being inextricably tied to uncertainty in the previous time step. In this paper, we show simple and differentiable analytical approximations describing the relationship between variance at one timestep and that at the next with the kinematic bicycle model. These approximations can be easily incorporated with negligible additional overhead into any existing trajectory forecasting framework utilizing probabilistic predictions, whether it is autoregressive or one-shot prediction. In our results, we find that encoding the relationship between variance across timesteps works especially well in unoptimal settings, such as with small or noisy datasets. We observe up to a 50% performance boost in partial dataset settings and up to an 8% performance boost in large-scale learning compared to previous kinematic prediction methods on SOTA trajectory forecasting architectures out-of-the-box, with no fine-tuning. In this paper, we show four analytical formulations of probabilistic kinematic priors which can be used for any Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)-based deep learning models, quantify the error bound on linear approximations applied during trajectory unrolling, and show results to evaluate each formulation in trajectory forecasting.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 3, 2024

\texttt{simple-idealized-1d-nlse}: Pseudo-Spectral Solver for the 1D Nonlinear Schrödinger Equation

We present an open-source Python implementation of an idealized high-order pseudo-spectral solver for the one-dimensional nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation (NLSE). The solver combines Fourier spectral spatial discretization with an adaptive eighth-order Dormand-Prince time integration scheme to achieve machine-precision conservation of mass and near-perfect preservation of momentum and energy for smooth solutions. The implementation accurately reproduces fundamental NLSE phenomena including soliton collisions with analytically predicted phase shifts, Akhmediev breather dynamics, and the development of modulation instability from noisy initial conditions. Four canonical test cases validate the numerical scheme: single soliton propagation, two-soliton elastic collision, breather evolution, and noise-seeded modulation instability. The solver employs a 2/3 dealiasing rule with exponential filtering to prevent aliasing errors from the cubic nonlinearity. Statistical analysis using Shannon, R\'enyi, and Tsallis entropies quantifies the spatio-temporal complexity of solutions, while phase space representations reveal the underlying coherence structure. The implementation prioritizes code transparency and educational accessibility over computational performance, providing a valuable pedagogical tool for exploring nonlinear wave dynamics. Complete source code, documentation, and example configurations are freely available, enabling reproducible computational experiments across diverse physical contexts where the NLSE governs wave evolution, including nonlinear optics, Bose-Einstein condensates, and ocean surface waves.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 6

AI-Trader: Benchmarking Autonomous Agents in Real-Time Financial Markets

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential as autonomous agents, approaching human-expert performance through advanced reasoning and tool orchestration. However, decision-making in fully dynamic and live environments remains highly challenging, requiring real-time information integration and adaptive responses. While existing efforts have explored live evaluation mechanisms in structured tasks, a critical gap remains in systematic benchmarking for real-world applications, particularly in finance where stringent requirements exist for live strategic responsiveness. To address this gap, we introduce AI-Trader, the first fully-automated, live, and data-uncontaminated evaluation benchmark for LLM agents in financial decision-making. AI-Trader spans three major financial markets: U.S. stocks, A-shares, and cryptocurrencies, with multiple trading granularities to simulate live financial environments. Our benchmark implements a revolutionary fully autonomous minimal information paradigm where agents receive only essential context and must independently search, verify, and synthesize live market information without human intervention. We evaluate six mainstream LLMs across three markets and multiple trading frequencies. Our analysis reveals striking findings: general intelligence does not automatically translate to effective trading capability, with most agents exhibiting poor returns and weak risk management. We demonstrate that risk control capability determines cross-market robustness, and that AI trading strategies achieve excess returns more readily in highly liquid markets than policy-driven environments. These findings expose critical limitations in current autonomous agents and provide clear directions for future improvements. The code and evaluation data are open-sourced to foster community research: https://github.com/HKUDS/AI-Trader.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 30

Overview of the SDSS-IV MaNGA Survey: Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory

We present an overview of a new integral field spectroscopic survey called MaNGA (Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory), one of three core programs in the fourth-generation Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-IV) that began on 2014 July 1. MaNGA will investigate the internal kinematic structure and composition of gas and stars in an unprecedented sample of 10,000 nearby galaxies. We summarize essential characteristics of the instrument and survey design in the context of MaNGA's key science goals and present prototype observations to demonstrate MaNGA's scientific potential. MaNGA employs dithered observations with 17 fiber-bundle integral field units that vary in diameter from 12" (19 fibers) to 32" (127 fibers). Two dual-channel spectrographs provide simultaneous wavelength coverage over 3600-10300 A at R~2000. With a typical integration time of 3 hr, MaNGA reaches a target r-band signal-to-noise ratio of 4-8 (per A, per 2" fiber) at 23 AB mag per sq. arcsec, which is typical for the outskirts of MaNGA galaxies. Targets are selected with stellar mass greater than 1e9 Msun using SDSS-I redshifts and i-band luminosity to achieve uniform radial coverage in terms of the effective radius, an approximately flat distribution in stellar mass, and a sample spanning a wide range of environments. Analysis of our prototype observations demonstrates MaNGA's ability to probe gas ionization, shed light on recent star formation and quenching, enable dynamical modeling, decompose constituent components, and map the composition of stellar populations. MaNGA's spatially resolved spectra will enable an unprecedented study of the astrophysics of nearby galaxies in the coming 6 yr.

  • 68 authors
·
Dec 3, 2014

Coherent Structures Governing Transport at Turbulent Interfaces

In an experiment on a turbulent jet, we detect interfacial turbulent layers in a frame that moves, on average, along with the \tnti. This significantly prolongs the observation time of scalar and velocity structures and enables the measurement of two types of Lagrangian coherent structures. One structure, the finite-time Lyapunov field (FTLE), quantifies advective transport barriers of fluid parcels while the other structure highlights barriers of diffusive momentum transport. These two complementary structures depend on large-scale and small-scale motion and are therefore associated with the growth of the turbulent region through engulfment or nibbling, respectively. We detect the \tnti\ from cluster analysis, where we divide the measured scalar field into four clusters. Not only the \tnti\ can be found this way, but also the next, internal, turbulent-turbulent interface. Conditional averages show that these interfaces are correlated with barriers of advective and diffusive transport when the Lagrangian integration time is smaller than the integral time scale. Diffusive structures decorrelate faster since they have a smaller timescale. Conditional averages of these structures at internal turbulent-turbulent interfaces show the same pattern with a more pronounced jump at the interface indicative of a shear layer. This is quite an unexpected outcome, as the internal interface is now defined not by the presence or absence of vorticity, but by conditional vorticity corresponding to two uniform concentration zones. The long-time diffusive momentum flux along Lagrangian paths represents the growth of the turbulent flow into the irrotational domain, a direct demonstration of nibbling. The diffusive flux parallel to the \tnti\ appears to be concentrated in a diffusive superlayer whose width is comparable with the Taylor microscale, which is relatively invariant in time.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 17, 2024

Scaling External Knowledge Input Beyond Context Windows of LLMs via Multi-Agent Collaboration

With the rapid advancement of post-training techniques for reasoning and information seeking, large language models (LLMs) can incorporate a large quantity of retrieved knowledge to solve complex tasks. However, the limited context window of LLMs obstructs scaling the amount of external knowledge input, prohibiting further improvement, especially for tasks requiring significant amount of external knowledge. Existing context window extension methods inevitably cause information loss. LLM-based multi-agent methods emerge as a new paradigm to handle massive input in a distributional manner, where we identify two core bottlenecks in existing knowledge synchronization and reasoning processes. In this work, we develop a multi-agent framework, ExtAgents, to overcome the bottlenecks and enable better scalability in inference-time knowledge integration without longer-context training. Benchmarked with our enhanced multi-hop question answering test, $boldsymbol{inftyBench+}, and other public test sets including long survey generation, ExtAgents significantly enhances the performance over existing non-training methods with the same amount of external knowledge input, regardless of whether it falls within or exceeds the context window$. Moreover, the method maintains high efficiency due to high parallelism. Further study in the coordination of LLM agents on increasing external knowledge input could benefit real-world applications.

  • 7 authors
·
May 27 2

Augmenting LLMs for General Time Series Understanding and Prediction

Time series data is fundamental to decision-making in many crucial domains including healthcare, finance, and environmental science. However, analyzing this data often requires incorporating unstructured contextual information, answering domain-specific questions, and generating natural language explanations -- capabilities that traditional time series models lack due to their inability to process text. While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at contextual reasoning and knowledge integration, they struggle with numerical time series due to inefficient text-based representations and limited exposure to temporal data during pretraining. We address this gap by augmenting an LLM with specialized time series perception through a patch-based encoder-decoder architecture. We train this Time Series-augmented LLM (TsLLM) on a large corpus of over 2 million interleaved time series and text examples spanning diverse analysis tasks: forecasting with contextual information, time series question-answering, pattern explanation, classification with natural language outputs, and report generation. This training enables TsLLM to leverage both its language understanding and newly acquired temporal reasoning capabilities. While not designed to surpass specialized models on traditional benchmarks, TsLLM demonstrates strong performance on tasks requiring the integration of time series analysis with natural language -- capabilities that existing approaches cannot provide. Our work establishes a new paradigm for time series analysis that bridges numerical computation and natural language understanding, democratizing access to sophisticated temporal reasoning through natural language interaction.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 1

Adapting LLMs to Time Series Forecasting via Temporal Heterogeneity Modeling and Semantic Alignment

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language processing due to their strong generalization and sequence modeling capabilities. However, their direct application to time series forecasting remains challenging due to two fundamental issues: the inherent heterogeneity of temporal patterns and the modality gap between continuous numerical signals and discrete language representations. In this work, we propose TALON, a unified framework that enhances LLM-based forecasting by modeling temporal heterogeneity and enforcing semantic alignment. Specifically, we design a Heterogeneous Temporal Encoder that partitions multivariate time series into structurally coherent segments, enabling localized expert modeling across diverse temporal patterns. To bridge the modality gap, we introduce a Semantic Alignment Module that aligns temporal features with LLM-compatible representations, enabling effective integration of time series into language-based models while eliminating the need for handcrafted prompts during inference. Extensive experiments on seven real-world benchmarks demonstrate that TALON achieves superior performance across all datasets, with average MSE improvements of up to 11\% over recent state-of-the-art methods. These results underscore the effectiveness of incorporating both pattern-aware and semantic-aware designs when adapting LLMs for time series forecasting. The code is available at: https://github.com/syrGitHub/TALON.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 10

Small but Mighty: Enhancing Time Series Forecasting with Lightweight LLMs

While LLMs have demonstrated remarkable potential in time series forecasting, their practical deployment remains constrained by excessive computational demands and memory footprints. Existing LLM-based approaches typically suffer from three critical limitations: Inefficient parameter utilization in handling numerical time series patterns; Modality misalignment between continuous temporal signals and discrete text embeddings; and Inflexibility for real-time expert knowledge integration. We present SMETimes, the first systematic investigation of sub-3B parameter SLMs for efficient and accurate time series forecasting. Our approach centers on three key innovations: A statistically-enhanced prompting mechanism that bridges numerical time series with textual semantics through descriptive statistical features; A adaptive fusion embedding architecture that aligns temporal patterns with language model token spaces through learnable parameters; And a dynamic mixture-of-experts framework enabled by SLMs' computational efficiency, adaptively combining base predictions with domain-specific models. Extensive evaluations across seven benchmark datasets demonstrate that our 3B-parameter SLM achieves state-of-the-art performance on five primary datasets while maintaining 3.8x faster training and 5.2x lower memory consumption compared to 7B-parameter LLM baselines. Notably, the proposed model exhibits better learning capabilities, achieving 12.3% lower MSE than conventional LLM. Ablation studies validate that our statistical prompting and cross-modal fusion modules respectively contribute 15.7% and 18.2% error reduction in long-horizon forecasting tasks. By redefining the efficiency-accuracy trade-off landscape, this work establishes SLMs as viable alternatives to resource-intensive LLMs for practical time series forecasting. Code and models are available at https://github.com/xiyan1234567/SMETimes.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 5

AstroM$^3$: A self-supervised multimodal model for astronomy

While machine-learned models are now routinely employed to facilitate astronomical inquiry, model inputs tend to be limited to a primary data source (namely images or time series) and, in the more advanced approaches, some metadata. Yet with the growing use of wide-field, multiplexed observational resources, individual sources of interest often have a broad range of observational modes available. Here we construct an astronomical multimodal dataset and propose AstroM^3, a self-supervised pre-training approach that enables a model to learn from multiple modalities simultaneously. Specifically, we extend the CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining) model to a trimodal setting, allowing the integration of time-series photometry data, spectra, and astrophysical metadata. In a fine-tuning supervised setting, our results demonstrate that CLIP pre-training improves classification performance for time-series photometry, where accuracy increases from 84.6% to 91.5%. Furthermore, CLIP boosts classification accuracy by up to 12.6% when the availability of labeled data is limited, showing the effectiveness of leveraging larger corpora of unlabeled data. In addition to fine-tuned classification, we can use the trained model in other downstream tasks that are not explicitly contemplated during the construction of the self-supervised model. In particular we show the efficacy of using the learned embeddings for misclassifications identification, similarity search, and anomaly detection. One surprising highlight is the "rediscovery" of Mira subtypes and two Rotational variable subclasses using manifold learning and dimension reduction algorithm. To our knowledge this is the first construction of an n>2 mode model in astronomy. Extensions to n>3 modes is naturally anticipated with this approach.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 13, 2024

Discovery of interpretable structural model errors by combining Bayesian sparse regression and data assimilation: A chaotic Kuramoto-Sivashinsky test case

Models of many engineering and natural systems are imperfect. The discrepancy between the mathematical representations of a true physical system and its imperfect model is called the model error. These model errors can lead to substantial differences between the numerical solutions of the model and the state of the system, particularly in those involving nonlinear, multi-scale phenomena. Thus, there is increasing interest in reducing model errors, particularly by leveraging the rapidly growing observational data to understand their physics and sources. Here, we introduce a framework named MEDIDA: Model Error Discovery with Interpretability and Data Assimilation. MEDIDA only requires a working numerical solver of the model and a small number of noise-free or noisy sporadic observations of the system. In MEDIDA, first the model error is estimated from differences between the observed states and model-predicted states (the latter are obtained from a number of one-time-step numerical integrations from the previous observed states). If observations are noisy, a data assimilation (DA) technique such as ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) is employed to provide the analysis state of the system, which is then used to estimate the model error. Finally, an equation-discovery technique, here the relevance vector machine (RVM), a sparsity-promoting Bayesian method, is used to identify an interpretable, parsimonious, and closed-form representation of the model error. Using the chaotic Kuramoto-Sivashinsky (KS) system as the test case, we demonstrate the excellent performance of MEDIDA in discovering different types of structural/parametric model errors, representing different types of missing physics, using noise-free and noisy observations.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 1, 2021

SAVEn-Vid: Synergistic Audio-Visual Integration for Enhanced Understanding in Long Video Context

Endeavors have been made to explore Large Language Models for video analysis (Video-LLMs), particularly in understanding and interpreting long videos. However, existing Video-LLMs still face challenges in effectively integrating the rich and diverse audio-visual information inherent in long videos, which is crucial for comprehensive understanding. This raises the question: how can we leverage embedded audio-visual information to enhance long video understanding? Therefore, (i) we introduce SAVEn-Vid, the first-ever long audio-visual video dataset comprising over 58k audio-visual instructions. (ii) From the model perspective, we propose a time-aware Audio-Visual Large Language Model (AV-LLM), SAVEnVideo, fine-tuned on SAVEn-Vid. (iii) Besides, we present AVBench, a benchmark containing 2,500 QAs designed to evaluate models on enhanced audio-visual comprehension tasks within long video, challenging their ability to handle intricate audio-visual interactions. Experiments on AVBench reveal the limitations of current AV-LLMs. Experiments also demonstrate that SAVEnVideo outperforms the best Video-LLM by 3.61% on the zero-shot long video task (Video-MME) and surpasses the leading audio-visual LLM by 1.29% on the zero-shot audio-visual task (Music-AVQA). Consequently, at the 7B parameter scale, SAVEnVideo can achieve state-of-the-art performance. Our dataset and code will be released at https://ljungang.github.io/SAVEn-Vid/ upon acceptance.

  • 9 authors
·
Nov 25, 2024

Dynamic real-time risk analytics of uncontrollable states in complex internet of things systems, cyber risk at the edge

The Internet of Things (IoT) triggers new types of cyber risks. Therefore, the integration of new IoT devices and services requires a self-assessment of IoT cyber security posture. By security posture this article refers to the cybersecurity strength of an organisation to predict, prevent and respond to cyberthreats. At present, there is a gap in the state of the art, because there are no self-assessment methods for quantifying IoT cyber risk posture. To address this gap, an empirical analysis is performed of 12 cyber risk assessment approaches. The results and the main findings from the analysis is presented as the current and a target risk state for IoT systems, followed by conclusions and recommendations on a transformation roadmap, describing how IoT systems can achieve the target state with a new goal-oriented dependency model. By target state, we refer to the cyber security target that matches the generic security requirements of an organisation. The research paper studies and adapts four alternatives for IoT risk assessment and identifies the goal-oriented dependency modelling as a dominant approach among the risk assessment models studied. The new goal-oriented dependency model in this article enables the assessment of uncontrollable risk states in complex IoT systems and can be used for a quantitative self-assessment of IoT cyber risk posture.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 12, 2019

Real-Time Iteration Scheme for Diffusion Policy

Diffusion Policies have demonstrated impressive performance in robotic manipulation tasks. However, their long inference time, resulting from an extensive iterative denoising process, and the need to execute an action chunk before the next prediction to maintain consistent actions limit their applicability to latency-critical tasks or simple tasks with a short cycle time. While recent methods explored distillation or alternative policy structures to accelerate inference, these often demand additional training, which can be resource-intensive for large robotic models. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach inspired by the Real-Time Iteration (RTI) Scheme, a method from optimal control that accelerates optimization by leveraging solutions from previous time steps as initial guesses for subsequent iterations. We explore the application of this scheme in diffusion inference and propose a scaling-based method to effectively handle discrete actions, such as grasping, in robotic manipulation. The proposed scheme significantly reduces runtime computational costs without the need for distillation or policy redesign. This enables a seamless integration into many pre-trained diffusion-based models, in particular, to resource-demanding large models. We also provide theoretical conditions for the contractivity which could be useful for estimating the initial denoising step. Quantitative results from extensive simulation experiments show a substantial reduction in inference time, with comparable overall performance compared with Diffusion Policy using full-step denoising. Our project page with additional resources is available at: https://rti-dp.github.io/.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 7

Test-Time Training Done Right

Test-Time Training (TTT) models context dependencies by adapting part of the model's weights (referred to as fast weights) during inference. This fast weight, akin to recurrent states in RNNs, stores temporary memories of past tokens in the current sequence. Existing TTT methods struggled to show effectiveness in handling long-context data, due to their inefficiency on modern GPUs. The TTT layers in many of these approaches operate with extremely low FLOPs utilization (often <5%) because they deliberately apply small online minibatch sizes (e.g., updating fast weights every 16 or 64 tokens). Moreover, a small minibatch implies fine-grained block-wise causal dependencies in the data, unsuitable for data beyond 1D ordered sequences, like sets or N-dimensional grids such as images or videos. In contrast, we pursue the opposite direction by using an extremely large chunk update, ranging from 2K to 1M tokens across tasks of varying modalities, which we refer to as Large Chunk Test-Time Training (LaCT). It improves hardware utilization by orders of magnitude, and more importantly, facilitates scaling of nonlinear state size (up to 40% of model parameters), hence substantially improving state capacity, all without requiring cumbersome and error-prone kernel implementations. It also allows easy integration of sophisticated optimizers, e.g. Muon for online updates. We validate our approach across diverse modalities and tasks, including novel view synthesis with image set, language models, and auto-regressive video diffusion. Our approach can scale up to 14B-parameter AR video diffusion model on sequences up to 56K tokens. In our longest sequence experiment, we perform novel view synthesis with 1 million context length. We hope this work will inspire and accelerate new research in the field of long-context modeling and test-time training. Website: https://tianyuanzhang.com/projects/ttt-done-right

  • 9 authors
·
May 29

SalesRLAgent: A Reinforcement Learning Approach for Real-Time Sales Conversion Prediction and Optimization

Current approaches to sales conversation analysis and conversion prediction typically rely on Large Language Models (LLMs) combined with basic retrieval augmented generation (RAG). These systems, while capable of answering questions, fail to accurately predict conversion probability or provide strategic guidance in real time. In this paper, we present SalesRLAgent, a novel framework leveraging specialized reinforcement learning to predict conversion probability throughout sales conversations. Unlike systems from Kapa.ai, Mendable, Inkeep, and others that primarily use off-the-shelf LLMs for content generation, our approach treats conversion prediction as a sequential decision problem, training on synthetic data generated using GPT-4O to develop a specialized probability estimation model. Our system incorporates Azure OpenAI embeddings (3072 dimensions), turn-by-turn state tracking, and meta-learning capabilities to understand its own knowledge boundaries. Evaluations demonstrate that SalesRLAgent achieves 96.7% accuracy in conversion prediction, outperforming LLM-only approaches by 34.7% while offering significantly faster inference (85ms vs 3450ms for GPT-4). Furthermore, integration with existing sales platforms shows a 43.2% increase in conversion rates when representatives utilize our system's real-time guidance. SalesRLAgent represents a fundamental shift from content generation to strategic sales intelligence, providing moment-by-moment conversion probability estimation with actionable insights for sales professionals.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 29

What Constitutes Good Contrastive Learning in Time-Series Forecasting?

In recent years, the introduction of self-supervised contrastive learning (SSCL) has demonstrated remarkable improvements in representation learning across various domains, including natural language processing and computer vision. By leveraging the inherent benefits of self-supervision, SSCL enables the pre-training of representation models using vast amounts of unlabeled data. Despite these advances, there remains a significant gap in understanding the impact of different SSCL strategies on time series forecasting performance, as well as the specific benefits that SSCL can bring. This paper aims to address these gaps by conducting a comprehensive analysis of the effectiveness of various training variables, including different SSCL algorithms, learning strategies, model architectures, and their interplay. Additionally, to gain deeper insights into the improvements brought about by SSCL in the context of time-series forecasting, a qualitative analysis of the empirical receptive field is performed. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that the end-to-end training of a Transformer model using the Mean Squared Error (MSE) loss and SSCL emerges as the most effective approach in time series forecasting. Notably, the incorporation of the contrastive objective enables the model to prioritize more pertinent information for forecasting, such as scale and periodic relationships. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the benefits of SSCL in time series forecasting and provide valuable insights for future research in this area. Our codes are available at https://github.com/chiyuzhang94/contrastive_learning_time-series_e2e.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 21, 2023

Large Scale Diffusion Distillation via Score-Regularized Continuous-Time Consistency

This work represents the first effort to scale up continuous-time consistency distillation to general application-level image and video diffusion models. Although continuous-time consistency model (sCM) is theoretically principled and empirically powerful for accelerating academic-scale diffusion, its applicability to large-scale text-to-image and video tasks remains unclear due to infrastructure challenges in Jacobian-vector product (JVP) computation and the limitations of standard evaluation benchmarks. We first develop a parallelism-compatible FlashAttention-2 JVP kernel, enabling sCM training on models with over 10 billion parameters and high-dimensional video tasks. Our investigation reveals fundamental quality limitations of sCM in fine-detail generation, which we attribute to error accumulation and the "mode-covering" nature of its forward-divergence objective. To remedy this, we propose the score-regularized continuous-time consistency model (rCM), which incorporates score distillation as a long-skip regularizer. This integration complements sCM with the "mode-seeking" reverse divergence, effectively improving visual quality while maintaining high generation diversity. Validated on large-scale models (Cosmos-Predict2, Wan2.1) up to 14B parameters and 5-second videos, rCM matches or surpasses the state-of-the-art distillation method DMD2 on quality metrics while offering notable advantages in diversity, all without GAN tuning or extensive hyperparameter searches. The distilled models generate high-fidelity samples in only 1sim4 steps, accelerating diffusion sampling by 15timessim50times. These results position rCM as a practical and theoretically grounded framework for advancing large-scale diffusion distillation.

Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Time-Stepping in the Chaotic Gravitational Three-Body Problem

Many problems in astrophysics cover multiple orders of magnitude in spatial and temporal scales. While simulating systems that experience rapid changes in these conditions, it is essential to adapt the (time-) step size to capture the behavior of the system during those rapid changes and use a less accurate time step at other, less demanding, moments. We encounter three problems with traditional methods. Firstly, making such changes requires expert knowledge of the astrophysics as well as of the details of the numerical implementation. Secondly, some parameters that determine the time-step size are fixed throughout the simulation, which means that they do not adapt to the rapidly changing conditions of the problem. Lastly, we would like the choice of time-step size to balance accuracy and computation effort. We address these challenges with Reinforcement Learning by training it to select the time-step size dynamically. We use the integration of a system of three equal-mass bodies that move due to their mutual gravity as an example of its application. With our method, the selected integration parameter adapts to the specific requirements of the problem, both in terms of computation time and accuracy while eliminating the expert knowledge needed to set up these simulations. Our method produces results competitive to existing methods and improve the results found with the most commonly-used values of time-step parameter. This method can be applied to other integrators without further retraining. We show that this extrapolation works for variable time-step integrators but does not perform to the desired accuracy for fixed time-step integrators.

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 18

HERBench: A Benchmark for Multi-Evidence Integration in Video Question Answering

Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) are rapidly improving, yet current Video Question Answering (VideoQA) benchmarks often allow questions to be answered from a single salient cue, under-testing reasoning that must aggregate multiple, temporally separated visual evidence. We present HERBench, a VideoQA benchmark purpose-built to assess multi-evidence integration across time. Each question requires aggregating at least three non-overlapping evidential cues across distinct video segments, so neither language priors nor a single snapshot can suffice. HERBench comprises 26K five-way multiple-choice questions organized into twelve compositional tasks that probe identity binding, cross-entity relations, temporal ordering, co-occurrence verification, and counting. To make evidential demand measurable, we introduce the Minimum Required Frame-Set (MRFS), the smallest number of frames a model must fuse to answer correctly, and show that HERBench imposes substantially higher demand than prior datasets (mean MRFS 5.5 vs. 2.6-4.2). Evaluating 13 state-of-the-art Video-LLMs on HERBench reveals pervasive failures: accuracies of 31-42% are only slightly above the 20% random-guess baseline. We disentangle this failure into two critical bottlenecks: (1) a retrieval deficit, where frame selectors overlook key evidence, and (2) a fusion deficit, where models fail to integrate information even when all necessary evidence is provided. By making cross-time evidence both unavoidable and quantifiable, HERBench establishes a principled target for advancing robust, compositional video understanding.

Insight-bgu INSIGHT Lab
·
Dec 16 3

TFB: Towards Comprehensive and Fair Benchmarking of Time Series Forecasting Methods

Time series are generated in diverse domains such as economic, traffic, health, and energy, where forecasting of future values has numerous important applications. Not surprisingly, many forecasting methods are being proposed. To ensure progress, it is essential to be able to study and compare such methods empirically in a comprehensive and reliable manner. To achieve this, we propose TFB, an automated benchmark for Time Series Forecasting (TSF) methods. TFB advances the state-of-the-art by addressing shortcomings related to datasets, comparison methods, and evaluation pipelines: 1) insufficient coverage of data domains, 2) stereotype bias against traditional methods, and 3) inconsistent and inflexible pipelines. To achieve better domain coverage, we include datasets from 10 different domains: traffic, electricity, energy, the environment, nature, economic, stock markets, banking, health, and the web. We also provide a time series characterization to ensure that the selected datasets are comprehensive. To remove biases against some methods, we include a diverse range of methods, including statistical learning, machine learning, and deep learning methods, and we also support a variety of evaluation strategies and metrics to ensure a more comprehensive evaluations of different methods. To support the integration of different methods into the benchmark and enable fair comparisons, TFB features a flexible and scalable pipeline that eliminates biases. Next, we employ TFB to perform a thorough evaluation of 21 Univariate Time Series Forecasting (UTSF) methods on 8,068 univariate time series and 14 Multivariate Time Series Forecasting (MTSF) methods on 25 datasets. The benchmark code and data are available at https://github.com/decisionintelligence/TFB. We have also launched an online time series leaderboard: https://decisionintelligence.github.io/OpenTS/OpenTS-Bench/.

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 29, 2024

HyperAttention: Long-context Attention in Near-Linear Time

We present an approximate attention mechanism named HyperAttention to address the computational challenges posed by the growing complexity of long contexts used in Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent work suggests that in the worst-case scenario, quadratic time is necessary unless the entries of the attention matrix are bounded or the matrix has low stable rank. We introduce two parameters which measure: (1) the max column norm in the normalized attention matrix, and (2) the ratio of row norms in the unnormalized attention matrix after detecting and removing large entries. We use these fine-grained parameters to capture the hardness of the problem. Despite previous lower bounds, we are able to achieve a linear time sampling algorithm even when the matrix has unbounded entries or a large stable rank, provided the above parameters are small. HyperAttention features a modular design that easily accommodates integration of other fast low-level implementations, particularly FlashAttention. Empirically, employing Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) to identify large entries, HyperAttention outperforms existing methods, giving significant speed improvements compared to state-of-the-art solutions like FlashAttention. We validate the empirical performance of HyperAttention on a variety of different long-context length datasets. For example, HyperAttention makes the inference time of ChatGLM2 50\% faster on 32k context length while perplexity increases from 5.6 to 6.3. On larger context length, e.g., 131k, with causal masking, HyperAttention offers 5-fold speedup on a single attention layer.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 9, 2023 2

Exact Diffusion Inversion via Bi-directional Integration Approximation

Recently, various methods have been proposed to address the inconsistency issue of DDIM inversion to enable image editing, such as EDICT [36] and Null-text inversion [22]. However, the above methods introduce considerable computational overhead. In this paper, we propose a new technique, named bi-directional integration approximation (BDIA), to perform exact diffusion inversion with neglible computational overhead. Suppose we would like to estimate the next diffusion state z_{i-1} at timestep t_i with the historical information (i,z_i) and (i+1,z_{i+1}). We first obtain the estimated Gaussian noise boldsymbol{epsilon}(z_i,i), and then apply the DDIM update procedure twice for approximating the ODE integration over the next time-slot [t_i, t_{i-1}] in the forward manner and the previous time-slot [t_i, t_{t+1}] in the backward manner. The DDIM step for the previous time-slot is used to refine the integration approximation made earlier when computing z_i. A nice property of BDIA-DDIM is that the update expression for z_{i-1} is a linear combination of (z_{i+1}, z_i, boldsymbol{epsilon}(z_i,i)). This allows for exact backward computation of z_{i+1} given (z_i, z_{i-1}), thus leading to exact diffusion inversion. It is demonstrated with experiments that (round-trip) BDIA-DDIM is particularly effective for image editing. Our experiments further show that BDIA-DDIM produces markedly better image sampling qualities than DDIM for text-to-image generation. BDIA can also be applied to improve the performance of other ODE solvers in addition to DDIM. In our work, it is found that applying BDIA to the EDM sampling procedure produces consistently better performance over four pre-trained models.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 10, 2023

Sample-efficient Integration of New Modalities into Large Language Models

Multimodal foundation models can process several modalities. However, since the space of possible modalities is large and evolving over time, training a model from scratch to encompass all modalities is unfeasible. Moreover, integrating a modality into a pre-existing foundation model currently requires a significant amount of paired data, which is often not available for low-resource modalities. In this paper, we introduce a method for sample-efficient modality integration (SEMI) into Large Language Models (LLMs). To this end, we devise a hypernetwork that can adapt a shared projector -- placed between modality-specific encoders and an LLM -- to any modality. The hypernetwork, trained on high-resource modalities (i.e., text, speech, audio, video), is conditioned on a few samples from any arbitrary modality at inference time to generate a suitable adapter. To increase the diversity of training modalities, we artificially multiply the number of encoders through isometric transformations. We find that SEMI achieves a significant boost in sample efficiency during few-shot integration of new modalities (i.e., satellite images, astronomical images, inertial measurements, and molecules) with encoders of arbitrary embedding dimensionality. For instance, to reach the same accuracy as 32-shot SEMI, training the projector from scratch needs 64times more data. As a result, SEMI holds promise to extend the modality coverage of foundation models.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 4

Time-IMM: A Dataset and Benchmark for Irregular Multimodal Multivariate Time Series

Time series data in real-world applications such as healthcare, climate modeling, and finance are often irregular, multimodal, and messy, with varying sampling rates, asynchronous modalities, and pervasive missingness. However, existing benchmarks typically assume clean, regularly sampled, unimodal data, creating a significant gap between research and real-world deployment. We introduce Time-IMM, a dataset specifically designed to capture cause-driven irregularity in multimodal multivariate time series. Time-IMM represents nine distinct types of time series irregularity, categorized into trigger-based, constraint-based, and artifact-based mechanisms. Complementing the dataset, we introduce IMM-TSF, a benchmark library for forecasting on irregular multimodal time series, enabling asynchronous integration and realistic evaluation. IMM-TSF includes specialized fusion modules, including a timestamp-to-text fusion module and a multimodality fusion module, which support both recency-aware averaging and attention-based integration strategies. Empirical results demonstrate that explicitly modeling multimodality on irregular time series data leads to substantial gains in forecasting performance. Time-IMM and IMM-TSF provide a foundation for advancing time series analysis under real-world conditions. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/blacksnail789521/Time-IMM, and the benchmark library can be accessed at https://github.com/blacksnail789521/IMM-TSF. Project page: https://blacksnail789521.github.io/time-imm-project-page/

A Digital Twin Framework for Physical-Virtual Integration in V2X-Enabled Connected Vehicle Corridors

Transportation Cyber-Physical Systems (T-CPS) enhance safety and mobility by integrating cyber and physical transportation systems. A key component of T-CPS is the Digital Twin (DT), a virtual representation that enables simulation, analysis, and optimization through real-time data exchange and communication. Although existing studies have explored DTs for vehicles, communications, pedestrians, and traffic, real-world validations and implementations of DTs that encompass infrastructure, vehicles, signals, communications, and more remain limited due to several challenges. These include accessing real-world connected infrastructure, integrating heterogeneous, multi-sourced data, ensuring real-time data processing, and synchronizing the digital and physical systems. To address these challenges, this study develops a traffic DT based on a real-world connected vehicle corridor. Leveraging the Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) infrastructure in the corridor, along with communication, computing, and simulation technologies, the proposed DT accurately replicates physical vehicle behaviors, signal timing, communications, and traffic patterns within the virtual environment. Building upon the previous data pipeline, the digital system ensures robust synchronization with the physical environment. Moreover, the DT's scalable and redundant architecture enhances data integrity, making it capable of supporting future large-scale C-V2X deployments. Furthermore, its ability to provide feedback to the physical system is demonstrated through applications such as signal timing adjustments, vehicle advisory messages, and incident notifications. The proposed DT is a vital tool in T-CPS, enabling real-time traffic monitoring, prediction, and optimization to enhance the reliability and safety of transportation systems.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 30, 2024

Time Series Analysis for Education: Methods, Applications, and Future Directions

Recent advancements in the collection and analysis of sequential educational data have brought time series analysis to a pivotal position in educational research, highlighting its essential role in facilitating data-driven decision-making. However, there is a lack of comprehensive summaries that consolidate these advancements. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to provide a comprehensive review of time series analysis techniques specifically within the educational context. We begin by exploring the landscape of educational data analytics, categorizing various data sources and types relevant to education. We then review four prominent time series methods-forecasting, classification, clustering, and anomaly detection-illustrating their specific application points in educational settings. Subsequently, we present a range of educational scenarios and applications, focusing on how these methods are employed to address diverse educational tasks, which highlights the practical integration of multiple time series methods to solve complex educational problems. Finally, we conclude with a discussion on future directions, including personalized learning analytics, multimodal data fusion, and the role of large language models (LLMs) in educational time series. The contributions of this paper include a detailed taxonomy of educational data, a synthesis of time series techniques with specific educational applications, and a forward-looking perspective on emerging trends and future research opportunities in educational analysis. The related papers and resources are available and regularly updated at the project page.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 25, 2024

PanGu-Draw: Advancing Resource-Efficient Text-to-Image Synthesis with Time-Decoupled Training and Reusable Coop-Diffusion

Current large-scale diffusion models represent a giant leap forward in conditional image synthesis, capable of interpreting diverse cues like text, human poses, and edges. However, their reliance on substantial computational resources and extensive data collection remains a bottleneck. On the other hand, the integration of existing diffusion models, each specialized for different controls and operating in unique latent spaces, poses a challenge due to incompatible image resolutions and latent space embedding structures, hindering their joint use. Addressing these constraints, we present "PanGu-Draw", a novel latent diffusion model designed for resource-efficient text-to-image synthesis that adeptly accommodates multiple control signals. We first propose a resource-efficient Time-Decoupling Training Strategy, which splits the monolithic text-to-image model into structure and texture generators. Each generator is trained using a regimen that maximizes data utilization and computational efficiency, cutting data preparation by 48% and reducing training resources by 51%. Secondly, we introduce "Coop-Diffusion", an algorithm that enables the cooperative use of various pre-trained diffusion models with different latent spaces and predefined resolutions within a unified denoising process. This allows for multi-control image synthesis at arbitrary resolutions without the necessity for additional data or retraining. Empirical validations of Pangu-Draw show its exceptional prowess in text-to-image and multi-control image generation, suggesting a promising direction for future model training efficiencies and generation versatility. The largest 5B T2I PanGu-Draw model is released on the Ascend platform. Project page: https://pangu-draw.github.io

  • 10 authors
·
Dec 27, 2023 1

GBT-SAM: Adapting a Foundational Deep Learning Model for Generalizable Brain Tumor Segmentation via Efficient Integration of Multi-Parametric MRI Data

Gliomas are aggressive brain tumors that require accurate imaging-based diagnosis, with segmentation playing a critical role in evaluating morphology and treatment decisions. Manual delineation of gliomas is time-consuming and prone to variability, motivating the use of deep learning to improve consistency and alleviate clinical workload. However, existing methods often fail to fully exploit the information available in multi-parametric MRI (mp-MRI), particularly inter-slice contextual features, and typically require considerable computational resources while lacking robustness across tumor type variations. We present GBT-SAM, a parameter-efficient deep learning framework that adapts the Segment Anything Model (SAM), a large-scale vision model, to volumetric mp-MRI data. GBT-SAM reduces input complexity by selecting fewer than 2.6\% of slices per scan while incorporating all four MRI modalities, preserving essential tumor-related information with minimal cost. Furthermore, our model is trained by a two-step fine-tuning strategy that incorporates a depth-aware module to capture inter-slice correlations and lightweight adaptation layers, resulting in just 6.5M trainable parameters, which is the lowest among SAM-based approaches. GBT-SAM achieves a Dice Score of 93.54 on the BraTS Adult Glioma dataset and demonstrates robust performance on Meningioma, Pediatric Glioma, and Sub-Saharan Glioma datasets. These results highlight GBT-SAM's potential as a computationally efficient and domain-robust framework for brain tumor segmentation using mp-MRI. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/vpulab/med-sam-brain .

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 6

Design, Integration, and Field Evaluation of a Robotic Blossom Thinning System for Tree Fruit Crops

The US apple industry relies heavily on semi-skilled manual labor force for essential field operations such as training, pruning, blossom and green fruit thinning, and harvesting. Blossom thinning is one of the crucial crop load management practices to achieve desired crop load, fruit quality, and return bloom. While several techniques such as chemical, and mechanical thinning are available for large-scale blossom thinning such approaches often yield unpredictable thinning results and may cause damage the canopy, spurs, and leaf tissue. Hence, growers still depend on laborious, labor intensive and expensive manual hand blossom thinning for desired thinning outcomes. This research presents a robotic solution for blossom thinning in apple orchards using a computer vision system with artificial intelligence, a six degrees of freedom robotic manipulator, and an electrically actuated miniature end-effector for robotic blossom thinning. The integrated robotic system was evaluated in a commercial apple orchard which showed promising results for targeted and selective blossom thinning. Two thinning approaches, center and boundary thinning, were investigated to evaluate the system ability to remove varying proportion of flowers from apple flower clusters. During boundary thinning the end effector was actuated around the cluster boundary while center thinning involved end-effector actuation only at the cluster centroid for a fixed duration of 2 seconds. The boundary thinning approach thinned 67.2% of flowers from the targeted clusters with a cycle time of 9.0 seconds per cluster, whereas center thinning approach thinned 59.4% of flowers with a cycle time of 7.2 seconds per cluster. When commercially adopted, the proposed system could help address problems faced by apple growers with current hand, chemical, and mechanical blossom thinning approaches.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 10, 2023

MOAT: Evaluating LMMs for Capability Integration and Instruction Grounding

Large multimodal models (LMMs) have demonstrated significant potential as generalists in vision-language (VL) tasks. However, there remains a significant gap between state-of-the-art LMMs and human performance when it comes to complex tasks that require a combination of fundamental VL capabilities, as well as tasks involving the grounding of complex instructions. To thoroughly investigate the human-LMM gap and its underlying causes, we propose MOAT, a diverse benchmark with complex real-world VL tasks that are challenging for LMMs. Specifically, the tasks in MOAT require LMMs to engage in generalist problem solving by integrating fundamental VL capabilities such as reading text, counting, understanding spatial relations, grounding textual and visual instructions, etc. All these abilities fit into a taxonomy proposed by us that contains 10 fundamental VL capabilities, enabling MOAT to provide a fine-grained view of LMMs' strengths and weaknesses. Besides, MOAT is the first benchmark to explicitly evaluate LMMs' ability to ground complex text and visual instructions, which is essential to many real-world applications. We evaluate over 20 proprietary and open source LMMs, as well as humans, on MOAT, and found that humans achieved 82.7% accuracy while the best performing LMM (OpenAI o1) achieved only 38.8%. To guide future model development, we analyze common trends in our results and discuss the underlying causes of observed performance gaps between LMMs and humans, focusing on which VL capability forms the bottleneck in complex tasks, whether test time scaling improves performance on MOAT, and how tiling harms LMMs' capability to count. Code and data are available at https://cambrian-yzt.github.io/MOAT.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 12

Text-Tuple-Table: Towards Information Integration in Text-to-Table Generation via Global Tuple Extraction

The task of condensing large chunks of textual information into concise and structured tables has gained attention recently due to the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their potential benefit for downstream tasks, such as text summarization and text mining. Previous approaches often generate tables that directly replicate information from the text, limiting their applicability in broader contexts, as text-to-table generation in real-life scenarios necessitates information extraction, reasoning, and integration. However, there is a lack of both datasets and methodologies towards this task. In this paper, we introduce LiveSum, a new benchmark dataset created for generating summary tables of competitions based on real-time commentary texts. We evaluate the performances of state-of-the-art LLMs on this task in both fine-tuning and zero-shot settings, and additionally propose a novel pipeline called T^3(Text-Tuple-Table) to improve their performances. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that LLMs still struggle with this task even after fine-tuning, while our approach can offer substantial performance gains without explicit training. Further analyses demonstrate that our method exhibits strong generalization abilities, surpassing previous approaches on several other text-to-table datasets. Our code and data can be found at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/LiveSum-TTT.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 22, 2024

RT-DETRv4: Painlessly Furthering Real-Time Object Detection with Vision Foundation Models

Real-time object detection has achieved substantial progress through meticulously designed architectures and optimization strategies. However, the pursuit of high-speed inference via lightweight network designs often leads to degraded feature representation, which hinders further performance improvements and practical on-device deployment. In this paper, we propose a cost-effective and highly adaptable distillation framework that harnesses the rapidly evolving capabilities of Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) to enhance lightweight object detectors. Given the significant architectural and learning objective disparities between VFMs and resource-constrained detectors, achieving stable and task-aligned semantic transfer is challenging. To address this, on one hand, we introduce a Deep Semantic Injector (DSI) module that facilitates the integration of high-level representations from VFMs into the deep layers of the detector. On the other hand, we devise a Gradient-guided Adaptive Modulation (GAM) strategy, which dynamically adjusts the intensity of semantic transfer based on gradient norm ratios. Without increasing deployment and inference overhead, our approach painlessly delivers striking and consistent performance gains across diverse DETR-based models, underscoring its practical utility for real-time detection. Our new model family, RT-DETRv4, achieves state-of-the-art results on COCO, attaining AP scores of 49.7/53.5/55.4/57.0 at corresponding speeds of 273/169/124/78 FPS.

  • 8 authors
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Oct 29

FNSPID: A Comprehensive Financial News Dataset in Time Series

Financial market predictions utilize historical data to anticipate future stock prices and market trends. Traditionally, these predictions have focused on the statistical analysis of quantitative factors, such as stock prices, trading volumes, inflation rates, and changes in industrial production. Recent advancements in large language models motivate the integrated financial analysis of both sentiment data, particularly market news, and numerical factors. Nonetheless, this methodology frequently encounters constraints due to the paucity of extensive datasets that amalgamate both quantitative and qualitative sentiment analyses. To address this challenge, we introduce a large-scale financial dataset, namely, Financial News and Stock Price Integration Dataset (FNSPID). It comprises 29.7 million stock prices and 15.7 million time-aligned financial news records for 4,775 S&P500 companies, covering the period from 1999 to 2023, sourced from 4 stock market news websites. We demonstrate that FNSPID excels existing stock market datasets in scale and diversity while uniquely incorporating sentiment information. Through financial analysis experiments on FNSPID, we propose: (1) the dataset's size and quality significantly boost market prediction accuracy; (2) adding sentiment scores modestly enhances performance on the transformer-based model; (3) a reproducible procedure that can update the dataset. Completed work, code, documentation, and examples are available at github.com/Zdong104/FNSPID. FNSPID offers unprecedented opportunities for the financial research community to advance predictive modeling and analysis.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 8, 2024

Entanglement Purification in Quantum Networks: Guaranteed Improvement and Optimal Time

While the concept of entanglement purification protocols (EPPs) is straightforward, the integration of EPPs in network architectures requires careful performance evaluations and optimizations that take into account realistic conditions and imperfections, especially probabilistic entanglement generation and quantum memory decoherence. It is important to understand what is guaranteed to be improved from successful EPP with arbitrary non-identical input, which determines whether we want to perform the EPP at all. When successful EPP can offer improvement, the time to perform the EPP should also be optimized to maximize the improvement. In this work, we study the guaranteed improvement and optimal time for the CNOT-based recurrence EPP, previously shown to be optimal in various scenarios. We firstly prove guaranteed improvement for multiple figures of merit, including fidelity and several entanglement measures when compared to practical baselines as functions of input states. However, it is noteworthy that the guaranteed improvement we prove does not imply the universality of the EPP as introduced in arXiv:2407.21760. Then we prove robust, parameter-independent optimal time for typical error models and figures of merit. We further explore memory decoherence described by continuous-time Pauli channels, and demonstrate the phenomenon of optimal time transition when the memory decoherence error pattern changes. Our work deepens the understanding of EPP performance in realistic scenarios and offers insights into optimizing quantum networks that integrate EPPs.

  • 5 authors
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May 4

DCT-HistoTransformer: Efficient Lightweight Vision Transformer with DCT Integration for histopathological image analysis

In recent years, the integration of advanced imaging techniques and deep learning methods has significantly advanced computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems for breast cancer detection and classification. Transformers, which have shown great promise in computer vision, are now being applied to medical image analysis. However, their application to histopathological images presents challenges due to the need for extensive manual annotations of whole-slide images (WSIs), as these models require large amounts of data to work effectively, which is costly and time-consuming. Furthermore, the quadratic computational cost of Vision Transformers (ViTs) is particularly prohibitive for large, high-resolution histopathological images, especially on edge devices with limited computational resources. In this study, we introduce a novel lightweight breast cancer classification approach using transformers that operates effectively without large datasets. By incorporating parallel processing pathways for Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) Attention and MobileConv, we convert image data from the spatial domain to the frequency domain to utilize the benefits such as filtering out high frequencies in the image, which reduces computational cost. This demonstrates the potential of our approach to improve breast cancer classification in histopathological images, offering a more efficient solution with reduced reliance on extensive annotated datasets. Our proposed model achieves an accuracy of 96.00% pm 0.48% for binary classification and 87.85% pm 0.93% for multiclass classification, which is comparable to state-of-the-art models while significantly reducing computational costs. This demonstrates the potential of our approach to improve breast cancer classification in histopathological images, offering a more efficient solution with reduced reliance on extensive annotated datasets.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 24, 2024

VECTOR: Velocity-Enhanced GRU Neural Network for Real-Time 3D UAV Trajectory Prediction

This paper tackles the challenge of real-time 3D trajectory prediction for UAVs, which is critical for applications such as aerial surveillance and defense. Existing prediction models that rely primarily on position data struggle with accuracy, especially when UAV movements fall outside the position domain used in training. Our research identifies a gap in utilizing velocity estimates, first-order dynamics, to better capture the dynamics and enhance prediction accuracy and generalizability in any position domain. To bridge this gap, we propose a new trajectory prediction method using Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) within sequence-based neural networks. Unlike traditional methods that rely on RNNs or transformers, this approach forecasts future velocities and positions based on historical velocity data instead of positions. This is designed to enhance prediction accuracy and scalability, overcoming challenges faced by conventional models in handling complex UAV dynamics. The methodology employs both synthetic and real-world 3D UAV trajectory data, capturing a wide range of flight patterns, speeds, and agility. Synthetic data is generated using the Gazebo simulator and PX4 Autopilot, while real-world data comes from the UZH-FPV and Mid-Air drone racing datasets. The GRU-based models significantly outperform state-of-the-art RNN approaches, with a mean square error (MSE) as low as 2 x 10^-8. Overall, our findings confirm the effectiveness of incorporating velocity data in improving the accuracy of UAV trajectory predictions across both synthetic and real-world scenarios, in and out of position data distributions. Finally, we open-source our 5000 trajectories dataset and a ROS 2 package to facilitate the integration with existing ROS-based UAV systems.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 24, 2024

Alt-MoE:A Scalable Framework for Bidirectional Multimodal Alignment and Efficient Knowledge Integration

Multimodal learning has advanced significantly by aligning different modalities within shared latent spaces, enabling tasks such as cross-modal understanding and generation. Current alignment strategies in multimodal learning primarily include direct alignment using pre-trained or unified encoders and single-directional alignment via modality-specific connectors. Direct alignment struggles to fully leverage rich intra-modal knowledge, often requiring extensive training data to achieve cross-modal representation. Meanwhile, single-directional alignment methods, despite leveraging pre-trained knowledge, restrict task adaptability and hinder the model's ability to capture bidirectional relationships, leading to incomplete knowledge fusion and underutilization of complementary modality-specific information. To address these limitations, we introduce Alt-MoE, a scalable multimodal alignment framework that employs a mixture of experts (MoE) model as a multi-directional connector across modalities. By utilizing a sequential alternating one-way alignment strategy, Alt-MoE iteratively refines the model to achieve bidirectional alignment. Alt-MoE operates in latent space, enabling efficient vector pre-storage and real-time retrieval via MoE, optimizing large-scale data processing. Extensive empirical studies demonstrate that Alt-MoE achieves competitive performance on cross-modal retrieval and visual question answering by integrating diverse modality-specific knowledge, generalizing to unseen data, and easily scaling to new tasks and modalities through dynamic adjustment of MoE capacity and expert activation.

  • 11 authors
·
Sep 9, 2024

System Design for an Integrated Lifelong Reinforcement Learning Agent for Real-Time Strategy Games

As Artificial and Robotic Systems are increasingly deployed and relied upon for real-world applications, it is important that they exhibit the ability to continually learn and adapt in dynamically-changing environments, becoming Lifelong Learning Machines. Continual/lifelong learning (LL) involves minimizing catastrophic forgetting of old tasks while maximizing a model's capability to learn new tasks. This paper addresses the challenging lifelong reinforcement learning (L2RL) setting. Pushing the state-of-the-art forward in L2RL and making L2RL useful for practical applications requires more than developing individual L2RL algorithms; it requires making progress at the systems-level, especially research into the non-trivial problem of how to integrate multiple L2RL algorithms into a common framework. In this paper, we introduce the Lifelong Reinforcement Learning Components Framework (L2RLCF), which standardizes L2RL systems and assimilates different continual learning components (each addressing different aspects of the lifelong learning problem) into a unified system. As an instantiation of L2RLCF, we develop a standard API allowing easy integration of novel lifelong learning components. We describe a case study that demonstrates how multiple independently-developed LL components can be integrated into a single realized system. We also introduce an evaluation environment in order to measure the effect of combining various system components. Our evaluation environment employs different LL scenarios (sequences of tasks) consisting of Starcraft-2 minigames and allows for the fair, comprehensive, and quantitative comparison of different combinations of components within a challenging common evaluation environment.

  • 19 authors
·
Dec 8, 2022

KiloNeuS: A Versatile Neural Implicit Surface Representation for Real-Time Rendering

NeRF-based techniques fit wide and deep multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) to a continuous radiance field that can be rendered from any unseen viewpoint. However, the lack of surface and normals definition and high rendering times limit their usage in typical computer graphics applications. Such limitations have recently been overcome separately, but solving them together remains an open problem. We present KiloNeuS, a neural representation reconstructing an implicit surface represented as a signed distance function (SDF) from multi-view images and enabling real-time rendering by partitioning the space into thousands of tiny MLPs fast to inference. As we learn the implicit surface locally using independent models, resulting in a globally coherent geometry is non-trivial and needs to be addressed during training. We evaluate rendering performance on a GPU-accelerated ray-caster with in-shader neural network inference, resulting in an average of 46 FPS at high resolution, proving a satisfying tradeoff between storage costs and rendering quality. In fact, our evaluation for rendering quality and surface recovery shows that KiloNeuS outperforms its single-MLP counterpart. Finally, to exhibit the versatility of KiloNeuS, we integrate it into an interactive path-tracer taking full advantage of its surface normals. We consider our work a crucial first step toward real-time rendering of implicit neural representations under global illumination.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 22, 2022

YOLO26: Key Architectural Enhancements and Performance Benchmarking for Real-Time Object Detection

This study presents a comprehensive analysis of Ultralytics YOLO26, highlighting its key architectural enhancements and performance benchmarking for real-time object detection. YOLO26, released in September 2025, stands as the newest and most advanced member of the YOLO family, purpose-built to deliver efficiency, accuracy, and deployment readiness on edge and low-power devices. The paper sequentially details architectural innovations of YOLO26, including the removal of Distribution Focal Loss (DFL), adoption of end-to-end NMS-free inference, integration of ProgLoss and Small-Target-Aware Label Assignment (STAL), and the introduction of the MuSGD optimizer for stable convergence. Beyond architecture, the study positions YOLO26 as a multi-task framework, supporting object detection, instance segmentation, pose/keypoints estimation, oriented detection, and classification. We present performance benchmarks of YOLO26 on edge devices such as NVIDIA Jetson Nano and Orin, comparing its results with YOLOv8, YOLOv11, YOLOv12, YOLOv13, and transformer-based detectors(RF-DETR and RT-DETR). This paper further explores real-time deployment pathways, flexible export options (ONNX, TensorRT, CoreML, TFLite), and quantization for INT8/FP16. Practical use cases of YOLO26 across robotics, manufacturing, and IoT are highlighted to demonstrate cross-industry adaptability. Finally, insights on deployment efficiency and broader implications are discussed, with future directions for YOLO26 and the YOLO lineage outlined.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 29

MPTSNet: Integrating Multiscale Periodic Local Patterns and Global Dependencies for Multivariate Time Series Classification

Multivariate Time Series Classification (MTSC) is crucial in extensive practical applications, such as environmental monitoring, medical EEG analysis, and action recognition. Real-world time series datasets typically exhibit complex dynamics. To capture this complexity, RNN-based, CNN-based, Transformer-based, and hybrid models have been proposed. Unfortunately, current deep learning-based methods often neglect the simultaneous construction of local features and global dependencies at different time scales, lacking sufficient feature extraction capabilities to achieve satisfactory classification accuracy. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Multiscale Periodic Time Series Network (MPTSNet), which integrates multiscale local patterns and global correlations to fully exploit the inherent information in time series. Recognizing the multi-periodicity and complex variable correlations in time series, we use the Fourier transform to extract primary periods, enabling us to decompose data into multiscale periodic segments. Leveraging the inherent strengths of CNN and attention mechanism, we introduce the PeriodicBlock, which adaptively captures local patterns and global dependencies while offering enhanced interpretability through attention integration across different periodic scales. The experiments on UEA benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed MPTSNet outperforms 21 existing advanced baselines in the MTSC tasks.

  • 3 authors
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Mar 7

RLEEGNet: Integrating Brain-Computer Interfaces with Adaptive AI for Intuitive Responsiveness and High-Accuracy Motor Imagery Classification

Current approaches to prosthetic control are limited by their reliance on traditional methods, which lack real-time adaptability and intuitive responsiveness. These limitations are particularly pronounced in assistive technologies designed for individuals with diverse cognitive states and motor intentions. In this paper, we introduce a framework that leverages Reinforcement Learning (RL) with Deep Q-Networks (DQN) for classification tasks. Additionally, we present a preprocessing technique using the Common Spatial Pattern (CSP) for multiclass motor imagery (MI) classification in a One-Versus-The-Rest (OVR) manner. The subsequent 'csp space' transformation retains the temporal dimension of EEG signals, crucial for extracting discriminative features. The integration of DQN with a 1D-CNN-LSTM architecture optimizes the decision-making process in real-time, thereby enhancing the system's adaptability to the user's evolving needs and intentions. We elaborate on the data processing methods for two EEG motor imagery datasets. Our innovative model, RLEEGNet, incorporates a 1D-CNN-LSTM architecture as the Online Q-Network within the DQN, facilitating continuous adaptation and optimization of control strategies through feedback. This mechanism allows the system to learn optimal actions through trial and error, progressively improving its performance. RLEEGNet demonstrates high accuracy in classifying MI-EEG signals, achieving as high as 100% accuracy in MI tasks across both the GigaScience (3-class) and BCI-IV-2a (4-class) datasets. These results highlight the potential of combining DQN with a 1D-CNN-LSTM architecture to significantly enhance the adaptability and responsiveness of BCI systems.

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 8, 2024

MindSearch: Mimicking Human Minds Elicits Deep AI Searcher

Information seeking and integration is a complex cognitive task that consumes enormous time and effort. Inspired by the remarkable progress of Large Language Models, recent works attempt to solve this task by combining LLMs and search engines. However, these methods still obtain unsatisfying performance due to three challenges: (1) complex requests often cannot be accurately and completely retrieved by the search engine once (2) corresponding information to be integrated is spread over multiple web pages along with massive noise, and (3) a large number of web pages with long contents may quickly exceed the maximum context length of LLMs. Inspired by the cognitive process when humans solve these problems, we introduce MindSearch to mimic the human minds in web information seeking and integration, which can be instantiated by a simple yet effective LLM-based multi-agent framework. The WebPlanner models the human mind of multi-step information seeking as a dynamic graph construction process: it decomposes the user query into atomic sub-questions as nodes in the graph and progressively extends the graph based on the search result from WebSearcher. Tasked with each sub-question, WebSearcher performs hierarchical information retrieval with search engines and collects valuable information for WebPlanner. The multi-agent design of MindSearch enables the whole framework to seek and integrate information parallelly from larger-scale (e.g., more than 300) web pages in 3 minutes, which is worth 3 hours of human effort. MindSearch demonstrates significant improvement in the response quality in terms of depth and breadth, on both close-set and open-set QA problems. Besides, responses from MindSearch based on InternLM2.5-7B are preferable by humans to ChatGPT-Web and Perplexity.ai applications, which implies that MindSearch can already deliver a competitive solution to the proprietary AI search engine.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 29, 2024 4

Scaling up Multi-Turn Off-Policy RL and Multi-Agent Tree Search for LLM Step-Provers

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into automated theorem proving has shown immense promise, yet is fundamentally constrained by challenges in scaling up both training-time reinforcement learning (RL) and inference-time compute. This paper introduces BFS-Prover-V2, a system designed to address this dual scaling problem. We present two primary innovations. The first is a novel multi-turn off-policy RL framework for continually improving the performance of LLM step-prover at training time. This framework, inspired by the principles of AlphaZero, utilizes a multi-stage expert iteration pipeline featuring adaptive tactic-level data filtering and periodic retraining to surmount the performance plateaus that typically curtail long-term RL in LLM-based agents. The second innovation is a planner-enhanced multi-agent search architecture that scales reasoning capabilities at inference time. This architecture employs a general reasoning model as a high-level planner to iteratively decompose complex theorems into a sequence of simpler subgoals. This hierarchical approach substantially reduces the search space, enabling a team of parallel prover agents to collaborate efficiently by leveraging a shared proof cache. We demonstrate that this dual approach to scaling yields state-of-the-art results on established formal mathematics benchmarks. BFS-Prover-V2 achieves 95.08\% and 41.4\% on the MiniF2F and ProofNet test sets respectively. While demonstrated in the domain of formal mathematics, the RL and inference techniques presented in this work are of broader interest and may be applied to other domains requiring long-horizon multi-turn reasoning and complex search.

Retro*: Optimizing LLMs for Reasoning-Intensive Document Retrieval

With the growing popularity of LLM agents and RAG, it has become increasingly important to retrieve documents that are essential for solving a task, even when their connection to the task is indirect or implicit. Addressing this problem requires fine-grained reasoning to accurately assess the relevance between the task and each candidate document. This capability, however, poses a significant challenge for existing IR techniques. Despite recent progress in reasoning-enhanced IR, existing approaches still face significant challenges in applicability, scalability, and efficiency. In this work, we propose Retro*, a novel approach for reasoning-intensive document retrieval. Our method introduces a rubric-based relevance scoring mechanism, enabling the model to reason about the relationship between a task and a document based on explicitly defined criteria, whereby producing a fine-grained, interpretable relevance score. Retro* also supports test-time scaling by combining multiple reasoning trajectories via score integration, which produces more reliable relevance estimates. To optimize Retro*'s reasoning capabilities, we introduce a novel reinforcement learning algorithm tailored for its relevance scoring mechanism, which employs two composite rewards to fully exploit the trajectories of each training sample. Our experiments show that Retro* outperforms existing document retrieval methods with notable advantages, leading to state-of-the-art performance on the BRIGHT benchmark.

  • 6 authors
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Sep 29

AGENTiGraph: An Interactive Knowledge Graph Platform for LLM-based Chatbots Utilizing Private Data

Large Language Models~(LLMs) have demonstrated capabilities across various applications but face challenges such as hallucination, limited reasoning abilities, and factual inconsistencies, especially when tackling complex, domain-specific tasks like question answering~(QA). While Knowledge Graphs~(KGs) have been shown to help mitigate these issues, research on the integration of LLMs with background KGs remains limited. In particular, user accessibility and the flexibility of the underlying KG have not been thoroughly explored. We introduce AGENTiGraph (Adaptive Generative ENgine for Task-based Interaction and Graphical Representation), a platform for knowledge management through natural language interaction. It integrates knowledge extraction, integration, and real-time visualization. AGENTiGraph employs a multi-agent architecture to dynamically interpret user intents, manage tasks, and integrate new knowledge, ensuring adaptability to evolving user requirements and data contexts. Our approach demonstrates superior performance in knowledge graph interactions, particularly for complex domain-specific tasks. Experimental results on a dataset of 3,500 test cases show AGENTiGraph significantly outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot baselines, achieving 95.12\% accuracy in task classification and 90.45\% success rate in task execution. User studies corroborate its effectiveness in real-world scenarios. To showcase versatility, we extended AGENTiGraph to legislation and healthcare domains, constructing specialized KGs capable of answering complex queries in legal and medical contexts.

  • 13 authors
·
Oct 15, 2024

BioMARS: A Multi-Agent Robotic System for Autonomous Biological Experiments

Large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) have the potential to transform biological research by enabling autonomous experimentation. Yet, their application remains constrained by rigid protocol design, limited adaptability to dynamic lab conditions, inadequate error handling, and high operational complexity. Here we introduce BioMARS (Biological Multi-Agent Robotic System), an intelligent platform that integrates LLMs, VLMs, and modular robotics to autonomously design, plan, and execute biological experiments. BioMARS uses a hierarchical architecture: the Biologist Agent synthesizes protocols via retrieval-augmented generation; the Technician Agent translates them into executable robotic pseudo-code; and the Inspector Agent ensures procedural integrity through multimodal perception and anomaly detection. The system autonomously conducts cell passaging and culture tasks, matching or exceeding manual performance in viability, consistency, and morphological integrity. It also supports context-aware optimization, outperforming conventional strategies in differentiating retinal pigment epithelial cells. A web interface enables real-time human-AI collaboration, while a modular backend allows scalable integration with laboratory hardware. These results highlight the feasibility of generalizable, AI-driven laboratory automation and the transformative role of language-based reasoning in biological research.

  • 10 authors
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Jul 2

RaceVLA: VLA-based Racing Drone Navigation with Human-like Behaviour

RaceVLA presents an innovative approach for autonomous racing drone navigation by leveraging Visual-Language-Action (VLA) to emulate human-like behavior. This research explores the integration of advanced algorithms that enable drones to adapt their navigation strategies based on real-time environmental feedback, mimicking the decision-making processes of human pilots. The model, fine-tuned on a collected racing drone dataset, demonstrates strong generalization despite the complexity of drone racing environments. RaceVLA outperforms OpenVLA in motion (75.0 vs 60.0) and semantic generalization (45.5 vs 36.3), benefiting from the dynamic camera and simplified motion tasks. However, visual (79.6 vs 87.0) and physical (50.0 vs 76.7) generalization were slightly reduced due to the challenges of maneuvering in dynamic environments with varying object sizes. RaceVLA also outperforms RT-2 across all axes - visual (79.6 vs 52.0), motion (75.0 vs 55.0), physical (50.0 vs 26.7), and semantic (45.5 vs 38.8), demonstrating its robustness for real-time adjustments in complex environments. Experiments revealed an average velocity of 1.04 m/s, with a maximum speed of 2.02 m/s, and consistent maneuverability, demonstrating RaceVLA's ability to handle high-speed scenarios effectively. These findings highlight the potential of RaceVLA for high-performance navigation in competitive racing contexts. The RaceVLA codebase, pretrained weights, and dataset are available at this http URL: https://racevla.github.io/

  • 7 authors
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Mar 4

Weight-Entanglement Meets Gradient-Based Neural Architecture Search

Weight sharing is a fundamental concept in neural architecture search (NAS), enabling gradient-based methods to explore cell-based architecture spaces significantly faster than traditional blackbox approaches. In parallel, weight entanglement has emerged as a technique for intricate parameter sharing among architectures within macro-level search spaces. %However, the macro structure of such spaces poses compatibility challenges for gradient-based NAS methods. %As a result, blackbox optimization methods have been commonly employed, particularly in conjunction with supernet training, to maintain search efficiency. %Due to the inherent differences in the structure of these search spaces, these Since weight-entanglement poses compatibility challenges for gradient-based NAS methods, these two paradigms have largely developed independently in parallel sub-communities. This paper aims to bridge the gap between these sub-communities by proposing a novel scheme to adapt gradient-based methods for weight-entangled spaces. This enables us to conduct an in-depth comparative assessment and analysis of the performance of gradient-based NAS in weight-entangled search spaces. Our findings reveal that this integration of weight-entanglement and gradient-based NAS brings forth the various benefits of gradient-based methods (enhanced performance, improved supernet training properties and superior any-time performance), while preserving the memory efficiency of weight-entangled spaces. The code for our work is openly accessible https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TangleNAS-527C{here}

  • 4 authors
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Dec 16, 2023

On Neural Differential Equations

The conjoining of dynamical systems and deep learning has become a topic of great interest. In particular, neural differential equations (NDEs) demonstrate that neural networks and differential equation are two sides of the same coin. Traditional parameterised differential equations are a special case. Many popular neural network architectures, such as residual networks and recurrent networks, are discretisations. NDEs are suitable for tackling generative problems, dynamical systems, and time series (particularly in physics, finance, ...) and are thus of interest to both modern machine learning and traditional mathematical modelling. NDEs offer high-capacity function approximation, strong priors on model space, the ability to handle irregular data, memory efficiency, and a wealth of available theory on both sides. This doctoral thesis provides an in-depth survey of the field. Topics include: neural ordinary differential equations (e.g. for hybrid neural/mechanistic modelling of physical systems); neural controlled differential equations (e.g. for learning functions of irregular time series); and neural stochastic differential equations (e.g. to produce generative models capable of representing complex stochastic dynamics, or sampling from complex high-dimensional distributions). Further topics include: numerical methods for NDEs (e.g. reversible differential equations solvers, backpropagation through differential equations, Brownian reconstruction); symbolic regression for dynamical systems (e.g. via regularised evolution); and deep implicit models (e.g. deep equilibrium models, differentiable optimisation). We anticipate this thesis will be of interest to anyone interested in the marriage of deep learning with dynamical systems, and hope it will provide a useful reference for the current state of the art.

  • 1 authors
·
Feb 4, 2022

A LoRA-Based Approach to Fine-Tuning LLMs for Educational Guidance in Resource-Constrained Settings

The current study describes a cost-effective method for adapting large language models (LLMs) for academic advising with study-abroad contexts in mind and for application in low-resource methods for acculturation. With the Mistral-7B-Instruct model applied with a Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) method and a 4-bit quantization method, the model underwent training in two distinct stages related to this study's purpose to enhance domain specificity while maintaining computational efficiency. In Phase 1, the model was conditioned with a synthetic dataset via the Gemini Pro API, and in Phase 2, it was trained with manually curated datasets from the StudyAbroadGPT project to achieve enhanced, contextualized responses. Technical innovations entailed memory-efficient quantization, parameter-efficient adaptation, and continuous training analytics via Weights & Biases. After training, this study demonstrated a reduction in training loss by 52.7%, 92% accuracy in domain-specific recommendations, achieved 95% markdown-based formatting support, and a median run-rate of 100 samples per second on off-the-shelf GPU equipment. These findings support the effective application of instruction-tuned LLMs within educational advisers, especially in low-resource institutional scenarios. Limitations included decreased generalizability and the application of a synthetically generated dataset, but this framework is scalable for adding new multilingual-augmented and real-time academic advising processes. Future directions may include plans for the integration of retrieval-augmented generation, applying dynamic quantization routines, and connecting to real-time academic databases to increase adaptability and accuracy.

  • 2 authors
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Apr 22

GDRNPP: A Geometry-guided and Fully Learning-based Object Pose Estimator

6D pose estimation of rigid objects is a long-standing and challenging task in computer vision. Recently, the emergence of deep learning reveals the potential of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to predict reliable 6D poses. Given that direct pose regression networks currently exhibit suboptimal performance, most methods still resort to traditional techniques to varying degrees. For example, top-performing methods often adopt an indirect strategy by first establishing 2D-3D or 3D-3D correspondences followed by applying the RANSAC-based PnP or Kabsch algorithms, and further employing ICP for refinement. Despite the performance enhancement, the integration of traditional techniques makes the networks time-consuming and not end-to-end trainable. Orthogonal to them, this paper introduces a fully learning-based object pose estimator. In this work, we first perform an in-depth investigation of both direct and indirect methods and propose a simple yet effective Geometry-guided Direct Regression Network (GDRN) to learn the 6D pose from monocular images in an end-to-end manner. Afterwards, we introduce a geometry-guided pose refinement module, enhancing pose accuracy when extra depth data is available. Guided by the predicted coordinate map, we build an end-to-end differentiable architecture that establishes robust and accurate 3D-3D correspondences between the observed and rendered RGB-D images to refine the pose. Our enhanced pose estimation pipeline GDRNPP (GDRN Plus Plus) conquered the leaderboard of the BOP Challenge for two consecutive years, becoming the first to surpass all prior methods that relied on traditional techniques in both accuracy and speed. The code and models are available at https://github.com/shanice-l/gdrnpp_bop2022.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 24, 2021

Butter: Frequency Consistency and Hierarchical Fusion for Autonomous Driving Object Detection

Hierarchical feature representations play a pivotal role in computer vision, particularly in object detection for autonomous driving. Multi-level semantic understanding is crucial for accurately identifying pedestrians, vehicles, and traffic signs in dynamic environments. However, existing architectures, such as YOLO and DETR, struggle to maintain feature consistency across different scales while balancing detection precision and computational efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose Butter, a novel object detection framework designed to enhance hierarchical feature representations for improving detection robustness. Specifically, Butter introduces two key innovations: Frequency-Adaptive Feature Consistency Enhancement (FAFCE) Component, which refines multi-scale feature consistency by leveraging adaptive frequency filtering to enhance structural and boundary precision, and Progressive Hierarchical Feature Fusion Network (PHFFNet) Module, which progressively integrates multi-level features to mitigate semantic gaps and strengthen hierarchical feature learning. Through extensive experiments on BDD100K, KITTI, and Cityscapes, Butter demonstrates superior feature representation capabilities, leading to notable improvements in detection accuracy while reducing model complexity. By focusing on hierarchical feature refinement and integration, Butter provides an advanced approach to object detection that achieves a balance between accuracy, deployability, and computational efficiency in real-time autonomous driving scenarios. Our model and implementation are publicly available at https://github.com/Aveiro-Lin/Butter, facilitating further research and validation within the autonomous driving community.

  • 10 authors
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Jul 12

Scaling Laws in Scientific Discovery with AI and Robot Scientists

Scientific discovery is poised for rapid advancement through advanced robotics and artificial intelligence. Current scientific practices face substantial limitations as manual experimentation remains time-consuming and resource-intensive, while multidisciplinary research demands knowledge integration beyond individual researchers' expertise boundaries. Here, we envision an autonomous generalist scientist (AGS) concept combines agentic AI and embodied robotics to automate the entire research lifecycle. This system could dynamically interact with both physical and virtual environments while facilitating the integration of knowledge across diverse scientific disciplines. By deploying these technologies throughout every research stage -- spanning literature review, hypothesis generation, experimentation, and manuscript writing -- and incorporating internal reflection alongside external feedback, this system aims to significantly reduce the time and resources needed for scientific discovery. Building on the evolution from virtual AI scientists to versatile generalist AI-based robot scientists, AGS promises groundbreaking potential. As these autonomous systems become increasingly integrated into the research process, we hypothesize that scientific discovery might adhere to new scaling laws, potentially shaped by the number and capabilities of these autonomous systems, offering novel perspectives on how knowledge is generated and evolves. The adaptability of embodied robots to extreme environments, paired with the flywheel effect of accumulating scientific knowledge, holds the promise of continually pushing beyond both physical and intellectual frontiers.

  • 10 authors
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Mar 28 2

Online Language Splatting

To enable AI agents to interact seamlessly with both humans and 3D environments, they must not only perceive the 3D world accurately but also align human language with 3D spatial representations. While prior work has made significant progress by integrating language features into geometrically detailed 3D scene representations using 3D Gaussian Splatting (GS), these approaches rely on computationally intensive offline preprocessing of language features for each input image, limiting adaptability to new environments. In this work, we introduce Online Language Splatting, the first framework to achieve online, near real-time, open-vocabulary language mapping within a 3DGS-SLAM system without requiring pre-generated language features. The key challenge lies in efficiently fusing high-dimensional language features into 3D representations while balancing the computation speed, memory usage, rendering quality and open-vocabulary capability. To this end, we innovatively design: (1) a high-resolution CLIP embedding module capable of generating detailed language feature maps in 18ms per frame, (2) a two-stage online auto-encoder that compresses 768-dimensional CLIP features to 15 dimensions while preserving open-vocabulary capabilities, and (3) a color-language disentangled optimization approach to improve rendering quality. Experimental results show that our online method not only surpasses the state-of-the-art offline methods in accuracy but also achieves more than 40x efficiency boost, demonstrating the potential for dynamic and interactive AI applications.

  • 6 authors
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Mar 12

Global Context with Discrete Diffusion in Vector Quantised Modelling for Image Generation

The integration of Vector Quantised Variational AutoEncoder (VQ-VAE) with autoregressive models as generation part has yielded high-quality results on image generation. However, the autoregressive models will strictly follow the progressive scanning order during the sampling phase. This leads the existing VQ series models to hardly escape the trap of lacking global information. Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM) in the continuous domain have shown a capability to capture the global context, while generating high-quality images. In the discrete state space, some works have demonstrated the potential to perform text generation and low resolution image generation. We show that with the help of a content-rich discrete visual codebook from VQ-VAE, the discrete diffusion model can also generate high fidelity images with global context, which compensates for the deficiency of the classical autoregressive model along pixel space. Meanwhile, the integration of the discrete VAE with the diffusion model resolves the drawback of conventional autoregressive models being oversized, and the diffusion model which demands excessive time in the sampling process when generating images. It is found that the quality of the generated images is heavily dependent on the discrete visual codebook. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed Vector Quantised Discrete Diffusion Model (VQ-DDM) is able to achieve comparable performance to top-tier methods with low complexity. It also demonstrates outstanding advantages over other vectors quantised with autoregressive models in terms of image inpainting tasks without additional training.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 3, 2021

Clustered Retrieved Augmented Generation (CRAG)

Providing external knowledge to Large Language Models (LLMs) is a key point for using these models in real-world applications for several reasons, such as incorporating up-to-date content in a real-time manner, providing access to domain-specific knowledge, and contributing to hallucination prevention. The vector database-based Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approach has been widely adopted to this end. Thus, any part of external knowledge can be retrieved and provided to some LLM as the input context. Despite RAG approach's success, it still might be unfeasible for some applications, because the context retrieved can demand a longer context window than the size supported by LLM. Even when the context retrieved fits into the context window size, the number of tokens might be expressive and, consequently, impact costs and processing time, becoming impractical for most applications. To address these, we propose CRAG, a novel approach able to effectively reduce the number of prompting tokens without degrading the quality of the response generated compared to a solution using RAG. Through our experiments, we show that CRAG can reduce the number of tokens by at least 46\%, achieving more than 90\% in some cases, compared to RAG. Moreover, the number of tokens with CRAG does not increase considerably when the number of reviews analyzed is higher, unlike RAG, where the number of tokens is almost 9x higher when there are 75 reviews compared to 4 reviews.

  • 2 authors
·
May 24, 2024