Daily Papers

Existing oriented object detection methods commonly use metric AP_{50} to measure the performance of the model. We argue that AP_{50} is inherently unsuitable for oriented object detection due to its large tolerance in angle deviation. Therefore, we advocate using high-precision metric, e.g. AP_{75}, to measure the performance of models. In this paper, we propose an Aspect Ratio Sensitive Oriented Object Detector with Transformer, termed ARS-DETR, which exhibits a competitive performance in high-precision oriented object detection. Specifically, a new angle classification method, calling Aspect Ratio aware Circle Smooth Label (AR-CSL), is proposed to smooth the angle label in a more reasonable way and discard the hyperparameter that introduced by previous work (e.g. CSL). Then, a rotated deformable attention module is designed to rotate the sampling points with the corresponding angles and eliminate the misalignment between region features and sampling points. Moreover, a dynamic weight coefficient according to the aspect ratio is adopted to calculate the angle loss. Comprehensive experiments on several challenging datasets show that our method achieves competitive performance on the high-precision oriented object detection task.

Sentiment analysis is a highly subjective and challenging task. Its complexity further increases when applied to the Arabic language, mainly because of the large variety of dialects that are unstandardized and widely used in the Web, especially in social media. While many datasets have been released to train sentiment classifiers in Arabic, most of these datasets contain shallow annotation, only marking the sentiment of the text unit, as a word, a sentence or a document. In this paper, we present the Arabic Sentiment Twitter Dataset for the Levantine dialect (ArSenTD-LEV). Based on findings from analyzing tweets from the Levant region, we created a dataset of 4,000 tweets with the following annotations: the overall sentiment of the tweet, the target to which the sentiment was expressed, how the sentiment was expressed, and the topic of the tweet. Results confirm the importance of these annotations at improving the performance of a baseline sentiment classifier. They also confirm the gap of training in a certain domain, and testing in another domain.

This research utilized three types of artificial neural network (ANN) methodologies, namely Backpropagation Neural Network (BPNN) with varied training, transfer, divide, and learning functions; Radial Basis Function Neural Network (RBFNN); and General Regression Neural Network (GRNN), to forecast the severity of stem rust. It considered parameters such as mean maximum temperature, mean minimum temperature, mean rainfall, mean average temperature, mean relative humidity, and different wheat varieties. The statistical analysis revealed that GRNN demonstrated effective predictive capability and required less training time compared to the other models. Additionally, the results indicated that total seasonal rainfall positively influenced the development of wheat stem rust. Keywords: Wheat stem rust, Back propagation neural network, Radial Basis Function Neural Network, General Regression Neural Network.

Image classification, a pivotal task in multiple industries, faces computational challenges due to the burgeoning volume of visual data. This research addresses these challenges by introducing two quantum machine learning models that leverage the principles of quantum mechanics for effective computations. Our first model, a hybrid quantum neural network with parallel quantum circuits, enables the execution of computations even in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum era, where circuits with a large number of qubits are currently infeasible. This model demonstrated a record-breaking classification accuracy of 99.21% on the full MNIST dataset, surpassing the performance of known quantum-classical models, while having eight times fewer parameters than its classical counterpart. Also, the results of testing this hybrid model on a Medical MNIST (classification accuracy over 99%), and on CIFAR-10 (classification accuracy over 82%), can serve as evidence of the generalizability of the model and highlights the efficiency of quantum layers in distinguishing common features of input data. Our second model introduces a hybrid quantum neural network with a Quanvolutional layer, reducing image resolution via a convolution process. The model matches the performance of its classical counterpart, having four times fewer trainable parameters, and outperforms a classical model with equal weight parameters. These models represent advancements in quantum machine learning research and illuminate the path towards more accurate image classification systems.

Humans perceive the world by concurrently processing and fusing high-dimensional inputs from multiple modalities such as vision and audio. Machine perception models, in stark contrast, are typically modality-specific and optimised for unimodal benchmarks, and hence late-stage fusion of final representations or predictions from each modality (`late-fusion') is still a dominant paradigm for multimodal video classification. Instead, we introduce a novel transformer based architecture that uses `fusion bottlenecks' for modality fusion at multiple layers. Compared to traditional pairwise self-attention, our model forces information between different modalities to pass through a small number of bottleneck latents, requiring the model to collate and condense the most relevant information in each modality and only share what is necessary. We find that such a strategy improves fusion performance, at the same time reducing computational cost. We conduct thorough ablation studies, and achieve state-of-the-art results on multiple audio-visual classification benchmarks including Audioset, Epic-Kitchens and VGGSound. All code and models will be released.

Access to real-world medical data is often restricted due to privacy regulations, posing a significant barrier to the advancement of healthcare research. Synthetic data offers a promising alternative; however, generating realistic, clinically valid, and privacy-conscious records remains a major challenge. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new opportunities for structured data generation; however, existing approaches frequently lack systematic prompting strategies and comprehensive, multi-dimensional evaluation frameworks. In this paper, we present SynLLM, a modular framework for generating high-quality synthetic medical tabular data using 20 state-of-the-art open-source LLMs, including LLaMA, Mistral, and GPT variants, guided by structured prompts. We propose four distinct prompt types, ranging from example-driven to rule-based constraints, that encode schema, metadata, and domain knowledge to control generation without model fine-tuning. Our framework features a comprehensive evaluation pipeline that rigorously assesses generated data across statistical fidelity, clinical consistency, and privacy preservation. We evaluate SynLLM across three public medical datasets, including Diabetes, Cirrhosis, and Stroke, using 20 open-source LLMs. Our results show that prompt engineering significantly impacts data quality and privacy risk, with rule-based prompts achieving the best privacy-quality balance. SynLLM establishes that, when guided by well-designed prompts and evaluated with robust, multi-metric criteria, LLMs can generate synthetic medical data that is both clinically plausible and privacy-aware, paving the way for safer and more effective data sharing in healthcare research.

Linear Transformers and State Space Models have emerged as efficient alternatives to softmax Transformers for causal sequence modeling, enabling parallel training via matrix multiplication and efficient RNN-style inference. However, despite their success in causal tasks, no unified framework exists for applying Linear Transformers to bidirectional sequence modeling. We introduce LION, the first framework to systematically extend Linear Transformers to the bidirectional setting. LION generalizes three core representations commonly used in the causal case - full Linear Attention , bidirectional RNN, and chunkwise parallel form - to the bidirectional setting. These forms are theoretically equivalent and enable models to exploit the strengths of each during training and inference. We prove that a broad class of Linear Transformers can be extended using LION and validate our framework via three core examples based on the choice of decay type: LION-LIT, the bidirectional extension of arXiv:2006.16236; LION-D, based on arXiv:2307.08621; and LION-S, a variant using selective decay arXiv:2103.02143, arXiv:2312.0075. Across standard bidirectional tasks, LION enables models to match or exceed the performance of softmax Transformers, while offering significantly faster training and more efficient inference than existing State Space Models.

Although Answer Set Programming (ASP) allows constraining neural-symbolic (NeSy) systems, its employment is hindered by the prohibitive costs of computing stable models and the CPU-bound nature of state-of-the-art solvers. To this end, we propose Answer Set Networks (ASN), a NeSy solver. Based on Graph Neural Networks (GNN), ASNs are a scalable approach to ASP-based Deep Probabilistic Logic Programming (DPPL). Specifically, we show how to translate ASPs into ASNs and demonstrate how ASNs can efficiently solve the encoded problem by leveraging GPU's batching and parallelization capabilities. Our experimental evaluations demonstrate that ASNs outperform state-of-the-art CPU-bound NeSy systems on multiple tasks. Simultaneously, we make the following two contributions based on the strengths of ASNs. Namely, we are the first to show the finetuning of Large Language Models (LLM) with DPPLs, employing ASNs to guide the training with logic. Further, we show the "constitutional navigation" of drones, i.e., encoding public aviation laws in an ASN for routing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in uncertain environments.

Ensuring that Software Requirements Specifications (SRS) align with higher-level organizational or national requirements is vital, particularly in regulated environments such as finance and aerospace. In these domains, maintaining consistency, adhering to regulatory frameworks, minimizing errors, and meeting critical expectations are essential for the reliable functioning of systems. The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) highlights their immense potential, yet there remains considerable scope for improvement in retrieving relevant information and enhancing reasoning capabilities. This study demonstrates that integrating a robust Graph-RAG framework with advanced prompt engineering techniques, such as Chain of Thought and Tree of Thought, can significantly enhance performance. Compared to baseline RAG methods and simple prompting strategies, this approach delivers more accurate and context-aware results. While this method demonstrates significant improvements in performance, it comes with challenges. It is both costly and more complex to implement across diverse contexts, requiring careful adaptation to specific scenarios. Additionally, its effectiveness heavily relies on having complete and accurate input data, which may not always be readily available, posing further limitations to its scalability and practicality.

This paper introduces an innovative approach using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines with Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance information retrieval and query response systems for university-related question answering. By systematically extracting data from the university official webpage and employing advanced prompt engineering techniques, we generate accurate, contextually relevant responses to user queries. We developed a comprehensive university benchmark, UniversityQuestionBench (UQB), to rigorously evaluate our system performance, based on common key metrics in the filed of RAG pipelines, assessing accuracy and reliability through various metrics and real-world scenarios. Our experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in the precision and relevance of generated responses, enhancing user experience and reducing the time required to obtain relevant answers. In summary, this paper presents a novel application of RAG pipelines and LLMs, supported by a meticulously prepared university benchmark, offering valuable insights into advanced AI techniques for academic data retrieval and setting the stage for future research in this domain.

Many people are interested in ChatGPT since it has become a prominent AIGC model that provides high-quality responses in various contexts, such as software development and maintenance. Misuse of ChatGPT might cause significant issues, particularly in public safety and education, despite its immense potential. The majority of researchers choose to publish their work on Arxiv. The effectiveness and originality of future work depend on the ability to detect AI components in such contributions. To address this need, this study will analyze a method that can see purposely manufactured content that academic organizations use to post on Arxiv. For this study, a dataset was created using physics, mathematics, and computer science articles. Using the newly built dataset, the following step is to put originality.ai through its paces. The statistical analysis shows that Originality.ai is very accurate, with a rate of 98%.

Large language models (LLMs) have exerted a considerable impact on diverse language-related tasks in recent years. Their demonstrated state-of-the-art performance is achieved through methodologies such as zero-shot or few-shot prompting. These models undergo training on extensive datasets that encompass segments of the Internet and subsequently undergo fine-tuning tailored to specific tasks. Notably, they exhibit proficiency in tasks such as translation, summarization, question answering, and creative writing, even in the absence of explicit training for those particular tasks. While they have shown substantial improvement in the multilingual tasks their performance in the code switching, especially for machine translation remains relatively uncharted. In this paper, we present an extensive study on the code switching task specifically for the machine translation task comparing multiple LLMs. Our results indicate that despite the LLMs having promising results in the certain tasks, the models with relatively lesser complexity outperform the multilingual large language models in the machine translation task. We posit that the efficacy of multilingual large language models in contextual code switching is constrained by their training methodologies. In contrast, relatively smaller models, when trained and fine-tuned on bespoke datasets, may yield superior results in comparison to the majority of multilingual models.

Since ChatGPT has emerged as a major AIGC model, providing high-quality responses across a wide range of applications (including software development and maintenance), it has attracted much interest from many individuals. ChatGPT has great promise, but there are serious problems that might arise from its misuse, especially in the realms of education and public safety. Several AIGC detectors are available, and they have all been tested on genuine text. However, more study is needed to see how effective they are for multi-domain ChatGPT material. This study aims to fill this need by creating a multi-domain dataset for testing the state-of-the-art APIs and tools for detecting artificially generated information used by universities and other research institutions. A large dataset consisting of articles, abstracts, stories, news, and product reviews was created for this study. The second step is to use the newly created dataset to put six tools through their paces. Six different artificial intelligence (AI) text identification systems, including "GPTkit," "GPTZero," "Originality," "Sapling," "Writer," and "Zylalab," have accuracy rates between 55.29 and 97.0%. Although all the tools fared well in the evaluations, originality was particularly effective across the board.

There has been a rapidly growing interest in Automatic Symptom Detection (ASD) and Automatic Diagnosis (AD) systems in the machine learning research literature, aiming to assist doctors in telemedicine services. These systems are designed to interact with patients, collect evidence about their symptoms and relevant antecedents, and possibly make predictions about the underlying diseases. Doctors would review the interactions, including the evidence and the predictions, collect if necessary additional information from patients, before deciding on next steps. Despite recent progress in this area, an important piece of doctors' interactions with patients is missing in the design of these systems, namely the differential diagnosis. Its absence is largely due to the lack of datasets that include such information for models to train on. In this work, we present a large-scale synthetic dataset of roughly 1.3 million patients that includes a differential diagnosis, along with the ground truth pathology, symptoms and antecedents for each patient. Unlike existing datasets which only contain binary symptoms and antecedents, this dataset also contains categorical and multi-choice symptoms and antecedents useful for efficient data collection. Moreover, some symptoms are organized in a hierarchy, making it possible to design systems able to interact with patients in a logical way. As a proof-of-concept, we extend two existing AD and ASD systems to incorporate the differential diagnosis, and provide empirical evidence that using differentials as training signals is essential for the efficiency of such systems or for helping doctors better understand the reasoning of those systems.

A major challenge in text-video and text-audio retrieval is the lack of large-scale training data. This is unlike image-captioning, where datasets are in the order of millions of samples. To close this gap we propose a new video mining pipeline which involves transferring captions from image captioning datasets to video clips with no additional manual effort. Using this pipeline, we create a new large-scale, weakly labelled audio-video captioning dataset consisting of millions of paired clips and captions. We show that training a multimodal transformed based model on this data achieves competitive performance on video retrieval and video captioning, matching or even outperforming HowTo100M pretraining with 20x fewer clips. We also show that our mined clips are suitable for text-audio pretraining, and achieve state of the art results for the task of audio retrieval.

The overestimation bias is one of the major impediments to accurate off-policy learning. This paper investigates a novel way to alleviate the overestimation bias in a continuous control setting. Our method---Truncated Quantile Critics, TQC,---blends three ideas: distributional representation of a critic, truncation of critics prediction, and ensembling of multiple critics. Distributional representation and truncation allow for arbitrary granular overestimation control, while ensembling provides additional score improvements. TQC outperforms the current state of the art on all environments from the continuous control benchmark suite, demonstrating 25% improvement on the most challenging Humanoid environment.

The objective of this paper is to learn representations of speaker identity without access to manually annotated data. To do so, we develop a self-supervised learning objective that exploits the natural cross-modal synchrony between faces and audio in video. The key idea behind our approach is to tease apart--without annotation--the representations of linguistic content and speaker identity. We construct a two-stream architecture which: (1) shares low-level features common to both representations; and (2) provides a natural mechanism for explicitly disentangling these factors, offering the potential for greater generalisation to novel combinations of content and identity and ultimately producing speaker identity representations that are more robust. We train our method on a large-scale audio-visual dataset of talking heads `in the wild', and demonstrate its efficacy by evaluating the learned speaker representations for standard speaker recognition performance.

We propose and investigate an identity sensitive joint embedding of face and voice. Such an embedding enables cross-modal retrieval from voice to face and from face to voice. We make the following four contributions: first, we show that the embedding can be learnt from videos of talking faces, without requiring any identity labels, using a form of cross-modal self-supervision; second, we develop a curriculum learning schedule for hard negative mining targeted to this task, that is essential for learning to proceed successfully; third, we demonstrate and evaluate cross-modal retrieval for identities unseen and unheard during training over a number of scenarios and establish a benchmark for this novel task; finally, we show an application of using the joint embedding for automatically retrieving and labelling characters in TV dramas.

Most existing datasets for speaker identification contain samples obtained under quite constrained conditions, and are usually hand-annotated, hence limited in size. The goal of this paper is to generate a large scale text-independent speaker identification dataset collected 'in the wild'. We make two contributions. First, we propose a fully automated pipeline based on computer vision techniques to create the dataset from open-source media. Our pipeline involves obtaining videos from YouTube; performing active speaker verification using a two-stream synchronization Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and confirming the identity of the speaker using CNN based facial recognition. We use this pipeline to curate VoxCeleb which contains hundreds of thousands of 'real world' utterances for over 1,000 celebrities. Our second contribution is to apply and compare various state of the art speaker identification techniques on our dataset to establish baseline performance. We show that a CNN based architecture obtains the best performance for both identification and verification.

We present a method for 3D object detection and pose estimation from a single image. In contrast to current techniques that only regress the 3D orientation of an object, our method first regresses relatively stable 3D object properties using a deep convolutional neural network and then combines these estimates with geometric constraints provided by a 2D object bounding box to produce a complete 3D bounding box. The first network output estimates the 3D object orientation using a novel hybrid discrete-continuous loss, which significantly outperforms the L2 loss. The second output regresses the 3D object dimensions, which have relatively little variance compared to alternatives and can often be predicted for many object types. These estimates, combined with the geometric constraints on translation imposed by the 2D bounding box, enable us to recover a stable and accurate 3D object pose. We evaluate our method on the challenging KITTI object detection benchmark both on the official metric of 3D orientation estimation and also on the accuracy of the obtained 3D bounding boxes. Although conceptually simple, our method outperforms more complex and computationally expensive approaches that leverage semantic segmentation, instance level segmentation and flat ground priors and sub-category detection. Our discrete-continuous loss also produces state of the art results for 3D viewpoint estimation on the Pascal 3D+ dataset.

Accurate reconstruction of both the geometric and topological details of a 3D object from a single 2D image embodies a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Existing explicit/implicit solutions to this problem struggle to recover self-occluded geometry and/or faithfully reconstruct topological shape structures. To resolve this dilemma, we introduce LIST, a novel neural architecture that leverages local and global image features to accurately reconstruct the geometric and topological structure of a 3D object from a single image. We utilize global 2D features to predict a coarse shape of the target object and then use it as a base for higher-resolution reconstruction. By leveraging both local 2D features from the image and 3D features from the coarse prediction, we can predict the signed distance between an arbitrary point and the target surface via an implicit predictor with great accuracy. Furthermore, our model does not require camera estimation or pixel alignment. It provides an uninfluenced reconstruction from the input-view direction. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis, we show the superiority of our model in reconstructing 3D objects from both synthetic and real-world images against the state of the art.

This research paper investigates the effectiveness of simple linear models versus complex machine learning techniques in breast cancer diagnosis, emphasizing the importance of interpretability and computational efficiency in the medical domain. We focus on Logistic Regression (LR), Decision Trees (DT), and Support Vector Machines (SVM) and optimize their performance using the UCI Machine Learning Repository dataset. Our findings demonstrate that the simpler linear model, LR, outperforms the more complex DT and SVM techniques, with a test score mean of 97.28%, a standard deviation of 1.62%, and a computation time of 35.56 ms. In comparison, DT achieved a test score mean of 93.73%, and SVM had a test score mean of 96.44%. The superior performance of LR can be attributed to its simplicity and interpretability, which provide a clear understanding of the relationship between input features and the outcome. This is particularly valuable in the medical domain, where interpretability is crucial for decision-making. Moreover, the computational efficiency of LR offers advantages in terms of scalability and real-world applicability. The results of this study highlight the power of simplicity in the context of breast cancer diagnosis and suggest that simpler linear models like LR can be more effective, interpretable, and computationally efficient than their complex counterparts, making them a more suitable choice for medical applications.

Federated learning and gossip learning are emerging methodologies designed to mitigate data privacy concerns by retaining training data on client devices and exclusively sharing locally-trained machine learning (ML) models with others. The primary distinction between the two lies in their approach to model aggregation: federated learning employs a centralized parameter server, whereas gossip learning adopts a fully decentralized mechanism, enabling direct model exchanges among nodes. This decentralized nature often positions gossip learning as less efficient compared to federated learning. Both methodologies involve a critical step: computing a representation of received ML models and integrating this representation into the existing model. Conventionally, this representation is derived by averaging the received models, exemplified by the FedAVG algorithm. Our findings suggest that this averaging approach inherently introduces a potential delay in model convergence. We identify the underlying cause and refer to it as the "vanishing variance" problem, where averaging across uncorrelated ML models undermines the optimal variance established by the Xavier weight initialization. Unlike federated learning where the central server ensures model correlation, and unlike traditional gossip learning which circumvents this problem through model partitioning and sampling, our research introduces a variance-corrected model averaging algorithm. This novel algorithm preserves the optimal variance needed during model averaging, irrespective of network topology or non-IID data distributions. Our extensive simulation results demonstrate that our approach enables gossip learning to achieve convergence efficiency comparable to that of federated learning.

Text-to-image generation is a significant domain in modern computer vision and has achieved substantial improvements through the evolution of generative architectures. Among these, there are diffusion-based models that have demonstrated essential quality enhancements. These models are generally split into two categories: pixel-level and latent-level approaches. We present Kandinsky1, a novel exploration of latent diffusion architecture, combining the principles of the image prior models with latent diffusion techniques. The image prior model is trained separately to map text embeddings to image embeddings of CLIP. Another distinct feature of the proposed model is the modified MoVQ implementation, which serves as the image autoencoder component. Overall, the designed model contains 3.3B parameters. We also deployed a user-friendly demo system that supports diverse generative modes such as text-to-image generation, image fusion, text and image fusion, image variations generation, and text-guided inpainting/outpainting. Additionally, we released the source code and checkpoints for the Kandinsky models. Experimental evaluations demonstrate a FID score of 8.03 on the COCO-30K dataset, marking our model as the top open-source performer in terms of measurable image generation quality.

We introduce [Cosmos-Predict2.5], the latest generation of the Cosmos World Foundation Models for Physical AI. Built on a flow-based architecture, [Cosmos-Predict2.5] unifies Text2World, Image2World, and Video2World generation in a single model and leverages [Cosmos-Reason1], a Physical AI vision-language model, to provide richer text grounding and finer control of world simulation. Trained on 200M curated video clips and refined with reinforcement learning-based post-training, [Cosmos-Predict2.5] achieves substantial improvements over [Cosmos-Predict1] in video quality and instruction alignment, with models released at 2B and 14B scales. These capabilities enable more reliable synthetic data generation, policy evaluation, and closed-loop simulation for robotics and autonomous systems. We further extend the family with [Cosmos-Transfer2.5], a control-net style framework for Sim2Real and Real2Real world translation. Despite being 3.5times smaller than [Cosmos-Transfer1], it delivers higher fidelity and robust long-horizon video generation. Together, these advances establish [Cosmos-Predict2.5] and [Cosmos-Transfer2.5] as versatile tools for scaling embodied intelligence. To accelerate research and deployment in Physical AI, we release source code, pretrained checkpoints, and curated benchmarks under the NVIDIA Open Model License at https://github.com/nvidia-cosmos/cosmos-predict2.5 and https://github.com/nvidia-cosmos/cosmos-transfer2.5. We hope these open resources lower the barrier to adoption and foster innovation in building the next generation of embodied intelligence.

Segmenting long videos into chapters enables users to quickly navigate to the information of their interest. This important topic has been understudied due to the lack of publicly released datasets. To address this issue, we present VidChapters-7M, a dataset of 817K user-chaptered videos including 7M chapters in total. VidChapters-7M is automatically created from videos online in a scalable manner by scraping user-annotated chapters and hence without any additional manual annotation. We introduce the following three tasks based on this data. First, the video chapter generation task consists of temporally segmenting the video and generating a chapter title for each segment. To further dissect the problem, we also define two variants of this task: video chapter generation given ground-truth boundaries, which requires generating a chapter title given an annotated video segment, and video chapter grounding, which requires temporally localizing a chapter given its annotated title. We benchmark both simple baselines and state-of-the-art video-language models for these three tasks. We also show that pretraining on VidChapters-7M transfers well to dense video captioning tasks in both zero-shot and finetuning settings, largely improving the state of the art on the YouCook2 and ViTT benchmarks. Finally, our experiments reveal that downstream performance scales well with the size of the pretraining dataset. Our dataset, code, and models are publicly available at https://antoyang.github.io/vidchapters.html.

Recent advancements in large vision-language models (VLMs) have primarily focused on English, with limited attention given to other languages. To address this gap, we introduce MEENA (also known as PersianMMMU), the first dataset designed to evaluate Persian VLMs across scientific, reasoning, and human-level understanding tasks. Our dataset comprises approximately 7,500 Persian and 3,000 English questions, covering a wide range of topics such as reasoning, mathematics, physics, diagrams, charts, and Persian art and literature. Key features of MEENA include: (1) diverse subject coverage spanning various educational levels, from primary to upper secondary school, (2) rich metadata, including difficulty levels and descriptive answers, (3) original Persian data that preserves cultural nuances, (4) a bilingual structure to assess cross-linguistic performance, and (5) a series of diverse experiments assessing various capabilities, including overall performance, the model's ability to attend to images, and its tendency to generate hallucinations. We hope this benchmark contributes to enhancing VLM capabilities beyond English.

Distinction of OFDM signals from single carrier signals is highly important for adaptive receiver algorithms and signal identification applications. OFDM signals exhibit Gaussian characteristics in time domain and fourth order cumulants of Gaussian distributed signals vanish in contrary to the cumulants of other signals. Thus fourth order cumulants can be utilized for OFDM signal identification. In this paper, first, formulations of the estimates of the fourth order cumulants for OFDM signals are provided. Then it is shown these estimates are affected significantly from the wireless channel impairments, frequency offset, phase offset and sampling mismatch. To overcome these problems, a general chi-square constant false alarm rate Gaussianity test which employs estimates of cumulants and their covariances is adapted to the specific case of wireless OFDM signals. Estimation of the covariance matrix of the fourth order cumulants are greatly simplified peculiar to the OFDM signals. A measurement setup is developed to analyze the performance of the identification method and for comparison purposes. A parametric measurement analysis is provided depending on modulation order, signal to noise ratio, number of symbols, and degree of freedom of the underlying test. The proposed method outperforms statistical tests which are based on fixed thresholds or empirical values, while a priori information requirement and complexity of the proposed method are lower than the coherent identification techniques.

Diffusion models excel in noise-to-data generation tasks, providing a mapping from a Gaussian distribution to a more complex data distribution. However they struggle to model translations between complex distributions, limiting their effectiveness in data-to-data tasks. While Bridge Matching (BM) models address this by finding the translation between data distributions, their application to time-correlated data sequences remains unexplored. This is a critical limitation for video generation and manipulation tasks, where maintaining temporal coherence is particularly important. To address this gap, we propose Time-Correlated Video Bridge Matching (TCVBM), a framework that extends BM to time-correlated data sequences in the video domain. TCVBM explicitly models inter-sequence dependencies within the diffusion bridge, directly incorporating temporal correlations into the sampling process. We compare our approach to classical methods based on bridge matching and diffusion models for three video-related tasks: frame interpolation, image-to-video generation, and video super-resolution. TCVBM achieves superior performance across multiple quantitative metrics, demonstrating enhanced generation quality and reconstruction fidelity.

In this study, a natural language processing-based (NLP-based) method is proposed for the sector-wise automatic classification of ad texts created on online advertising platforms. Our data set consists of approximately 21,000 labeled advertising texts from 12 different sectors. In the study, the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model, which is a transformer-based language model that is recently used in fields such as text classification in the natural language processing literature, was used. The classification efficiencies obtained using a pre-trained BERT model for the Turkish language are shown in detail.

Foundation models have achieved remarkable success across video, image, and language domains. By scaling up the number of parameters and training datasets, these models acquire generalizable world knowledge and often surpass task-specific approaches. However, such progress has yet to extend to the domain of physics simulation. A primary bottleneck is data scarcity: while millions of images, videos, and textual resources are readily available on the internet, the largest physics simulation datasets contain only tens of thousands of samples. This data limitation hinders the use of large models, as overfitting becomes a major concern. As a result, physics applications typically rely on small models, which struggle with long-range prediction due to limited context understanding. Additionally, unlike images, videos, or text-which typically exhibit fixed granularity-physics datasets often vary drastically in scale, amplifying the challenges of scaling up multitask training. We introduce PhysiX, the first large-scale foundation model for physics simulation. PhysiX is a 4.5B parameter autoregressive generative model. It uses a discrete tokenizer to encode physical processes at different scales into a sequence of discrete tokens, and employs an autoregressive next-token prediction objective to model such processes in the token space. To mitigate the rounding error in the discretization process, PhysiX incorporates a specialized refinement module. Through extensive experiments, we show that PhysiX effectively addresses the data bottleneck, outperforming task-specific baselines under comparable settings as well as the previous absolute state-of-the-art approaches on The Well benchmark. Our results indicate that knowledge learned from natural videos can be successfully transferred to physics simulation, and that joint training across diverse simulation tasks enables synergistic learning.

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a widely adopted approach to mitigate the limitations of large language models (LLMs) in answering domain-specific questions. Previous research has predominantly focused on improving the accuracy and quality of retrieved data chunks to enhance the overall performance of the generation pipeline. However, despite ongoing advancements, the critical issue of retrieving irrelevant information -- which can impair the ability of the model to utilize its internal knowledge effectively -- has received minimal attention. In this work, we investigate the impact of retrieving irrelevant information in open-domain question answering, highlighting its significant detrimental effect on the quality of LLM outputs. To address this challenge, we propose the Context Awareness Gate (CAG) architecture, a novel mechanism that dynamically adjusts the LLMs' input prompt based on whether the user query necessitates external context retrieval. Additionally, we introduce the Vector Candidates method, a core mathematical component of CAG that is statistical, LLM-independent, and highly scalable. We further examine the distributions of relationships between contexts and questions, presenting a statistical analysis of these distributions. This analysis can be leveraged to enhance the context retrieval process in Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems.

A large body of research in continual learning is devoted to overcoming the catastrophic forgetting of neural networks by designing new algorithms that are robust to the distribution shifts. However, the majority of these works are strictly focused on the "algorithmic" part of continual learning for a "fixed neural network architecture", and the implications of using different architectures are mostly neglected. Even the few existing continual learning methods that modify the model assume a fixed architecture and aim to develop an algorithm that efficiently uses the model throughout the learning experience. However, in this work, we show that the choice of architecture can significantly impact the continual learning performance, and different architectures lead to different trade-offs between the ability to remember previous tasks and learning new ones. Moreover, we study the impact of various architectural decisions, and our findings entail best practices and recommendations that can improve the continual learning performance.

In recent years, vision-language research has shifted to study tasks which require more complex reasoning, such as interactive question answering, visual common sense reasoning, and question-answer plausibility prediction. However, the datasets used for these problems fail to capture the complexity of real inputs and multimodal environments, such as ambiguous natural language requests and diverse digital domains. We introduce Mobile app Tasks with Iterative Feedback (MoTIF), a dataset with natural language commands for the greatest number of interactive environments to date. MoTIF is the first to contain natural language requests for interactive environments that are not satisfiable, and we obtain follow-up questions on this subset to enable research on task uncertainty resolution. We perform initial feasibility classification experiments and only reach an F1 score of 37.3, verifying the need for richer vision-language representations and improved architectures to reason about task feasibility.

We present app.build (https://github.com/appdotbuild/agent/), an open-source framework that improves LLM-based application generation through systematic validation and structured environments. Our approach combines multi-layered validation pipelines, stack-specific orchestration, and model-agnostic architecture, implemented across three reference stacks. Through evaluation on 30 generation tasks, we demonstrate that comprehensive validation achieves 73.3% viability rate with 30% reaching perfect quality scores, while open-weights models achieve 80.8% of closed-model performance when provided structured environments. The open-source framework has been adopted by the community, with over 3,000 applications generated to date. This work demonstrates that scaling reliable AI agents requires scaling environments, not just models -- providing empirical insights and complete reference implementations for production-oriented agent systems.

The very challenging task of learning solution operators of PDEs on arbitrary domains accurately and efficiently is of vital importance to engineering and industrial simulations. Despite the existence of many operator learning algorithms to approximate such PDEs, we find that accurate models are not necessarily computationally efficient and vice versa. We address this issue by proposing a geometry aware operator transformer (GAOT) for learning PDEs on arbitrary domains. GAOT combines novel multiscale attentional graph neural operator encoders and decoders, together with geometry embeddings and (vision) transformer processors to accurately map information about the domain and the inputs into a robust approximation of the PDE solution. Multiple innovations in the implementation of GAOT also ensure computational efficiency and scalability. We demonstrate this significant gain in both accuracy and efficiency of GAOT over several baselines on a large number of learning tasks from a diverse set of PDEs, including achieving state of the art performance on a large scale three-dimensional industrial CFD dataset.

Tumor documentation in Germany is largely done manually, requiring reading patient records and entering data into structured databases. Large language models (LLMs) could potentially enhance this process by improving efficiency and reliability. This evaluation tests eleven different open source LLMs with sizes ranging from 1-70 billion model parameters on three basic tasks of the tumor documentation process: identifying tumor diagnoses, assigning ICD-10 codes, and extracting the date of first diagnosis. For evaluating the LLMs on these tasks, a dataset of annotated text snippets based on anonymized doctors' notes from urology was prepared. Different prompting strategies were used to investigate the effect of the number of examples in few-shot prompting and to explore the capabilities of the LLMs in general. The models Llama 3.1 8B, Mistral 7B, and Mistral NeMo 12 B performed comparably well in the tasks. Models with less extensive training data or having fewer than 7 billion parameters showed notably lower performance, while larger models did not display performance gains. Examples from a different medical domain than urology could also improve the outcome in few-shot prompting, which demonstrates the ability of LLMs to handle tasks needed for tumor documentation. Open source LLMs show a strong potential for automating tumor documentation. Models from 7-12 billion parameters could offer an optimal balance between performance and resource efficiency. With tailored fine-tuning and well-designed prompting, these models might become important tools for clinical documentation in the future. The code for the evaluation is available from https://github.com/stefan-m-lenz/UroLlmEval. We also release the dataset as a new valuable resource that addresses the shortage of authentic and easily accessible benchmarks in German-language medical NLP.

Human intelligence, the most evident and accessible form of source of reasoning, hosted by biological hardware, has evolved and been refined over thousands of years, positioning itself today to create new artificial forms and preparing to self--design their evolutionary path forward. Beginning with the advent of foundation models, the rate at which human and artificial intelligence interact with each other has surpassed any anticipated quantitative figures. The close engagement led to both bits of intelligence to be impacted in various ways, which naturally resulted in complex confluences that warrant close scrutiny. In the sequel, we shall explore the interplay between human and machine intelligence, focusing on the crucial role humans play in developing ethical, responsible, and robust intelligent systems. We slightly delve into interesting aspects of implementation inspired by the mechanisms underlying neuroscience and human cognition. Additionally, we propose future perspectives, capitalizing on the advantages of symbiotic designs to suggest a human-centered direction for next-generation AI development. We finalize this evolving document with a few thoughts and open questions yet to be addressed by the broader community.

This work explores the hypothesis that subjectively attributed meaning constitutes the phenomenal content of conscious experience. That is, phenomenal content is semantic. This form of subjective meaning manifests as an intrinsic and non-representational character of qualia. Empirically, subjective meaning is ubiquitous in conscious experiences. We point to phenomenological studies that lend evidence to support this. Furthermore, this notion of meaning closely relates to what Frege refers to as "sense", in metaphysics and philosophy of language. It also aligns with Peirce's "interpretant", in semiotics. We discuss how Frege's sense can also be extended to the raw feels of consciousness. Sense and reference both play a role in phenomenal experience. Moreover, within the context of the mind-matter relation, we provide a formalization of subjective meaning associated to one's mental representations. Identifying the precise maps between the physical and mental domains, we argue that syntactic and semantic structures transcend language, and are realized within each of these domains. Formally, meaning is a relational attribute, realized via a map that interprets syntactic structures of a formal system within an appropriate semantic space. The image of this map within the mental domain is what is relevant for experience, and thus comprises the phenomenal content of qualia. We conclude with possible implications this may have for experience-based theories of consciousness.

This paper describes the Ubenwa CryCeleb dataset - a labeled collection of infant cries - and the accompanying CryCeleb 2023 task, which is a public speaker verification challenge based on cry sounds. We released more than 6 hours of manually segmented cry sounds from 786 newborns for academic use, aiming to encourage research in infant cry analysis. The inaugural public competition attracted 59 participants, 11 of whom improved the baseline performance. The top-performing system achieved a significant improvement scoring 25.8% equal error rate, which is still far from the performance of state-of-the-art adult speaker verification systems. Therefore, we believe there is room for further research on this dataset, potentially extending beyond the verification task.

In this work, we introduce Vid2Seq, a multi-modal single-stage dense event captioning model pretrained on narrated videos which are readily-available at scale. The Vid2Seq architecture augments a language model with special time tokens, allowing it to seamlessly predict event boundaries and textual descriptions in the same output sequence. Such a unified model requires large-scale training data, which is not available in current annotated datasets. We show that it is possible to leverage unlabeled narrated videos for dense video captioning, by reformulating sentence boundaries of transcribed speech as pseudo event boundaries, and using the transcribed speech sentences as pseudo event captions. The resulting Vid2Seq model pretrained on the YT-Temporal-1B dataset improves the state of the art on a variety of dense video captioning benchmarks including YouCook2, ViTT and ActivityNet Captions. Vid2Seq also generalizes well to the tasks of video paragraph captioning and video clip captioning, and to few-shot settings. Our code is publicly available at https://antoyang.github.io/vid2seq.html.

Our goal in this paper is the adaptation of image-text models for long video retrieval. Recent works have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in video retrieval by adopting CLIP, effectively hitchhiking on the image-text representation for video tasks. However, there has been limited success in learning temporal aggregation that outperform mean-pooling the image-level representations extracted per frame by CLIP. We find that the simple yet effective baseline of weighted-mean of frame embeddings via query-scoring is a significant improvement above all prior temporal modelling attempts and mean-pooling. In doing so, we provide an improved baseline for others to compare to and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of this simple baseline on a suite of long video retrieval benchmarks.

Vision-language navigation (VLN), in which an agent follows language instruction in a visual environment, has been studied under the premise that the input command is fully feasible in the environment. Yet in practice, a request may not be possible due to language ambiguity or environment changes. To study VLN with unknown command feasibility, we introduce a new dataset Mobile app Tasks with Iterative Feedback (MoTIF), where the goal is to complete a natural language command in a mobile app. Mobile apps provide a scalable domain to study real downstream uses of VLN methods. Moreover, mobile app commands provide instruction for interactive navigation, as they result in action sequences with state changes via clicking, typing, or swiping. MoTIF is the first to include feasibility annotations, containing both binary feasibility labels and fine-grained labels for why tasks are unsatisfiable. We further collect follow-up questions for ambiguous queries to enable research on task uncertainty resolution. Equipped with our dataset, we propose the new problem of feasibility prediction, in which a natural language instruction and multimodal app environment are used to predict command feasibility. MoTIF provides a more realistic app dataset as it contains many diverse environments, high-level goals, and longer action sequences than prior work. We evaluate interactive VLN methods using MoTIF, quantify the generalization ability of current approaches to new app environments, and measure the effect of task feasibility on navigation performance.

Recent video and language pretraining frameworks lack the ability to generate sentences. We present Multimodal Video Generative Pretraining (MV-GPT), a new pretraining framework for learning from unlabelled videos which can be effectively used for generative tasks such as multimodal video captioning. Unlike recent video-language pretraining frameworks, our framework trains both a multimodal video encoder and a sentence decoder jointly. To overcome the lack of captions in unlabelled videos, we leverage the future utterance as an additional text source and propose a bidirectional generation objective -- we generate future utterances given the present mulitmodal context, and also the present utterance given future observations. With this objective, we train an encoder-decoder model end-to-end to generate a caption from raw pixels and transcribed speech directly. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance for multimodal video captioning on four standard benchmarks, as well as for other video understanding tasks such as VideoQA, video retrieval and action classification.

Our objective in this work is video-text retrieval - in particular a joint embedding that enables efficient text-to-video retrieval. The challenges in this area include the design of the visual architecture and the nature of the training data, in that the available large scale video-text training datasets, such as HowTo100M, are noisy and hence competitive performance is achieved only at scale through large amounts of compute. We address both these challenges in this paper. We propose an end-to-end trainable model that is designed to take advantage of both large-scale image and video captioning datasets. Our model is an adaptation and extension of the recent ViT and Timesformer architectures, and consists of attention in both space and time. The model is flexible and can be trained on both image and video text datasets, either independently or in conjunction. It is trained with a curriculum learning schedule that begins by treating images as 'frozen' snapshots of video, and then gradually learns to attend to increasing temporal context when trained on video datasets. We also provide a new video-text pretraining dataset WebVid-2M, comprised of over two million videos with weak captions scraped from the internet. Despite training on datasets that are an order of magnitude smaller, we show that this approach yields state-of-the-art results on standard downstream video-retrieval benchmarks including MSR-VTT, MSVD, DiDeMo and LSMDC.

Our objective in this work is long range understanding of the narrative structure of movies. Instead of considering the entire movie, we propose to learn from the `key scenes' of the movie, providing a condensed look at the full storyline. To this end, we make the following three contributions: (i) We create the Condensed Movies Dataset (CMD) consisting of the key scenes from over 3K movies: each key scene is accompanied by a high level semantic description of the scene, character face-tracks, and metadata about the movie. The dataset is scalable, obtained automatically from YouTube, and is freely available for anybody to download and use. It is also an order of magnitude larger than existing movie datasets in the number of movies; (ii) We provide a deep network baseline for text-to-video retrieval on our dataset, combining character, speech and visual cues into a single video embedding; and finally (iii) We demonstrate how the addition of context from other video clips improves retrieval performance.

The goal of this paper is to label all the animal individuals present in every frame of a video. Unlike previous methods that have principally concentrated on labelling face tracks, we aim to label individuals even when their faces are not visible. We make the following contributions: (i) we introduce a 'Count, Crop and Recognise' (CCR) multistage recognition process for frame level labelling. The Count and Recognise stages involve specialised CNNs for the task, and we show that this simple staging gives a substantial boost in performance; (ii) we compare the recall using frame based labelling to both face and body track based labelling, and demonstrate the advantage of frame based with CCR for the specified goal; (iii) we introduce a new dataset for chimpanzee recognition in the wild; and (iv) we apply a high-granularity visualisation technique to further understand the learned CNN features for the recognition of chimpanzee individuals.

The objective of this paper is speaker recognition under noisy and unconstrained conditions. We make two key contributions. First, we introduce a very large-scale audio-visual speaker recognition dataset collected from open-source media. Using a fully automated pipeline, we curate VoxCeleb2 which contains over a million utterances from over 6,000 speakers. This is several times larger than any publicly available speaker recognition dataset. Second, we develop and compare Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models and training strategies that can effectively recognise identities from voice under various conditions. The models trained on the VoxCeleb2 dataset surpass the performance of previous works on a benchmark dataset by a significant margin.

Physical AI needs to be trained digitally first. It needs a digital twin of itself, the policy model, and a digital twin of the world, the world model. In this paper, we present the Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform to help developers build customized world models for their Physical AI setups. We position a world foundation model as a general-purpose world model that can be fine-tuned into customized world models for downstream applications. Our platform covers a video curation pipeline, pre-trained world foundation models, examples of post-training of pre-trained world foundation models, and video tokenizers. To help Physical AI builders solve the most critical problems of our society, we make our platform open-source and our models open-weight with permissive licenses available via https://github.com/NVIDIA/Cosmos.

The VoxCeleb Speaker Recognition Challenges (VoxSRC) were a series of challenges and workshops that ran annually from 2019 to 2023. The challenges primarily evaluated the tasks of speaker recognition and diarisation under various settings including: closed and open training data; as well as supervised, self-supervised, and semi-supervised training for domain adaptation. The challenges also provided publicly available training and evaluation datasets for each task and setting, with new test sets released each year. In this paper, we provide a review of these challenges that covers: what they explored; the methods developed by the challenge participants and how these evolved; and also the current state of the field for speaker verification and diarisation. We chart the progress in performance over the five installments of the challenge on a common evaluation dataset and provide a detailed analysis of how each year's special focus affected participants' performance. This paper is aimed both at researchers who want an overview of the speaker recognition and diarisation field, and also at challenge organisers who want to benefit from the successes and avoid the mistakes of the VoxSRC challenges. We end with a discussion of the current strengths of the field and open challenges. Project page : https://mm.kaist.ac.kr/datasets/voxceleb/voxsrc/workshop.html

Position information is essential for language modeling. In softmax transformers, Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) encode positions through fixed-angle rotations, while in linear transformers, order is handled via input-dependent (selective) gating that decays past key-value associations. Selectivity has generally been shown to improve language-related tasks. Inspired by this, we introduce Selective RoPE, an input-dependent rotary embedding mechanism, that generalizes RoPE, and enables rotation in arbitrary angles for both linear and softmax transformers. We show that softmax attention already performs a hidden form of these rotations on query-key pairs, uncovering an implicit positional structure. We further show that in state-space models and gated linear transformers, the real part manages forgetting while the imaginary part encodes positions through rotations. We validate our method by equipping gated transformers with Selective RoPE, demonstrating that its input-dependent rotations improve performance in language modeling and on difficult sequence tasks like copying, state tracking, and retrieval.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are set to transform how machines process and generate human-like responses by integrating diverse modalities such as text, images, and code. Yet, effectively harnessing their capabilities hinges on optimal prompt engineering. We present a comprehensive experimental evaluation of seven prompt engineering methods applied to 13 open-source MLLMs over 24 tasks spanning Reasoning and Compositionality, Multimodal Understanding and Alignment, Complex Code Generation and Execution, and Knowledge Retrieval and Integration. Our approach stratifies models by parameter count into Small (<4B), Medium (4B-10B), and Large (>10B) categories and compares prompting techniques including Zero-Shot, One-Shot, Few-Shot, Chain-of-Thought, Analogical, Generated Knowledge, and Tree-of-Thought. While Large MLLMs excel in structured tasks such as code generation, achieving accuracies up to 96.88% under Few-Shot prompting, all models struggle with complex reasoning and abstract understanding, often yielding accuracies below 60% and high hallucination rates. Structured reasoning prompts frequently increased hallucination up to 75% in small models and led to longer response times (over 20 seconds in Large MLLMs), while simpler prompting methods provided more concise and efficient outputs. No single prompting method uniformly optimises all task types. Instead, adaptive strategies combining example-based guidance with selective structured reasoning are essential to enhance robustness, efficiency, and factual accuracy. Our findings offer practical recommendations for prompt engineering and support more reliable deployment of MLLMs across applications including AI-assisted coding, knowledge retrieval, and multimodal content understanding.

While large-scale image-text pretrained models such as CLIP have been used for multiple video-level tasks on trimmed videos, their use for temporal localization in untrimmed videos is still a relatively unexplored task. We design a new approach for this called UnLoc, which uses pretrained image and text towers, and feeds tokens to a video-text fusion model. The output of the fusion module are then used to construct a feature pyramid in which each level connects to a head to predict a per-frame relevancy score and start/end time displacements. Unlike previous works, our architecture enables Moment Retrieval, Temporal Localization, and Action Segmentation with a single stage model, without the need for action proposals, motion based pretrained features or representation masking. Unlike specialized models, we achieve state of the art results on all three different localization tasks with a unified approach. Code will be available at: https://github.com/google-research/scenic.

Video understanding has seen significant progress in recent years, with models' performance on perception from short clips continuing to rise. Yet, multiple recent benchmarks, such as LVBench, Neptune, and ActivityNet-RTL, show performance wanes for tasks requiring complex reasoning on videos as queries grow more complex and videos grow longer. In this work, we ask: can existing perception capabilities be leveraged to successfully perform more complex video reasoning? In particular, we develop a large language model agent given access to video modules as subagents or tools. Rather than following a fixed procedure to solve queries as in previous work such as Visual Programming, ViperGPT, and MoReVQA, the agent uses the results of each call to a module to determine subsequent steps. Inspired by work in the textual reasoning domain, we introduce a critic to distinguish between instances of successful and unsuccessful sequences from the agent. We show that the combination of our agent and critic achieve strong performance on the previously-mentioned datasets.

Recent advancements in language models have started a new era of superior information retrieval and content generation, with embedding models playing an important role in optimizing data representation efficiency and performance. While benchmarks like the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) have standardized the evaluation of general domain embedding models, a gap remains in specialized fields such as chemistry, which require tailored approaches due to domain-specific challenges. This paper introduces a novel benchmark, the Chemical Text Embedding Benchmark (ChemTEB), designed specifically for the chemical sciences. ChemTEB addresses the unique linguistic and semantic complexities of chemical literature and data, offering a comprehensive suite of tasks on chemical domain data. Through the evaluation of 34 open-source and proprietary models using this benchmark, we illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of current methodologies in processing and understanding chemical information. Our work aims to equip the research community with a standardized, domain-specific evaluation framework, promoting the development of more precise and efficient NLP models for chemistry-related applications. Furthermore, it provides insights into the performance of generic models in a domain-specific context. ChemTEB comes with open-source code and data, contributing further to its accessibility and utility.

Automatically generating data visualizations in response to human utterances on datasets necessitates a deep semantic understanding of the data utterance, including implicit and explicit references to data attributes, visualization tasks, and necessary data preparation steps. Natural Language Interfaces (NLIs) for data visualization have explored ways to infer such information, yet challenges persist due to inherent uncertainty in human speech. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) provide an avenue to address these challenges, but their ability to extract the relevant semantic information remains unexplored. In this study, we evaluate four publicly available LLMs (GPT-4, Gemini-Pro, Llama3, and Mixtral), investigating their ability to comprehend utterances even in the presence of uncertainty and identify the relevant data context and visual tasks. Our findings reveal that LLMs are sensitive to uncertainties in utterances. Despite this sensitivity, they are able to extract the relevant data context. However, LLMs struggle with inferring visualization tasks. Based on these results, we highlight future research directions on using LLMs for visualization generation.

Generating Audio Description (AD) for movies is a challenging task that requires fine-grained visual understanding and an awareness of the characters and their names. Currently, visual language models for AD generation are limited by a lack of suitable training data, and also their evaluation is hampered by using performance measures not specialized to the AD domain. In this paper, we make three contributions: (i) We propose two approaches for constructing AD datasets with aligned video data, and build training and evaluation datasets using these. These datasets will be publicly released; (ii) We develop a Q-former-based architecture which ingests raw video and generates AD, using frozen pre-trained visual encoders and large language models; and (iii) We provide new evaluation metrics to benchmark AD quality that are well-matched to human performance. Taken together, we improve the state of the art on AD generation.

This paper addresses the task of video question answering (videoQA) via a decomposed multi-stage, modular reasoning framework. Previous modular methods have shown promise with a single planning stage ungrounded in visual content. However, through a simple and effective baseline, we find that such systems can lead to brittle behavior in practice for challenging videoQA settings. Thus, unlike traditional single-stage planning methods, we propose a multi-stage system consisting of an event parser, a grounding stage, and a final reasoning stage in conjunction with an external memory. All stages are training-free, and performed using few-shot prompting of large models, creating interpretable intermediate outputs at each stage. By decomposing the underlying planning and task complexity, our method, MoReVQA, improves over prior work on standard videoQA benchmarks (NExT-QA, iVQA, EgoSchema, ActivityNet-QA) with state-of-the-art results, and extensions to related tasks (grounded videoQA, paragraph captioning).

The escalating reliance on revolutionary online web services has introduced heightened security risks, with persistent challenges posed by phishing despite extensive security measures. Traditional phishing systems, reliant on machine learning and manual features, struggle with evolving tactics. Recent advances in deep learning offer promising avenues for tackling novel phishing challenges and malicious URLs. This paper introduces a two-phase stack generalized model named AntiPhishStack, designed to detect phishing sites. The model leverages the learning of URLs and character-level TF-IDF features symmetrically, enhancing its ability to combat emerging phishing threats. In Phase I, features are trained on a base machine learning classifier, employing K-fold cross-validation for robust mean prediction. Phase II employs a two-layered stacked-based LSTM network with five adaptive optimizers for dynamic compilation, ensuring premier prediction on these features. Additionally, the symmetrical predictions from both phases are optimized and integrated to train a meta-XGBoost classifier, contributing to a final robust prediction. The significance of this work lies in advancing phishing detection with AntiPhishStack, operating without prior phishing-specific feature knowledge. Experimental validation on two benchmark datasets, comprising benign and phishing or malicious URLs, demonstrates the model's exceptional performance, achieving a notable 96.04% accuracy compared to existing studies. This research adds value to the ongoing discourse on symmetry and asymmetry in information security and provides a forward-thinking solution for enhancing network security in the face of evolving cyber threats.

With the advent of large language models and large-scale robotic datasets, there has been tremendous progress in high-level decision-making for object manipulation. These generic models are able to interpret complex tasks using language commands, but they often have difficulties generalizing to out-of-distribution objects due to the inability of low-level action primitives. In contrast, existing task-specific models excel in low-level manipulation of unknown objects, but only work for a single type of action. To bridge this gap, we present M2T2, a single model that supplies different types of low-level actions that work robustly on arbitrary objects in cluttered scenes. M2T2 is a transformer model which reasons about contact points and predicts valid gripper poses for different action modes given a raw point cloud of the scene. Trained on a large-scale synthetic dataset with 128K scenes, M2T2 achieves zero-shot sim2real transfer on the real robot, outperforming the baseline system with state-of-the-art task-specific models by about 19% in overall performance and 37.5% in challenging scenes where the object needs to be re-oriented for collision-free placement. M2T2 also achieves state-of-the-art results on a subset of language conditioned tasks in RLBench. Videos of robot experiments on unseen objects in both real world and simulation are available on our project website https://m2-t2.github.io.

Audio Description (AD) is the task of generating descriptions of visual content, at suitable time intervals, for the benefit of visually impaired audiences. For movies, this presents notable challenges -- AD must occur only during existing pauses in dialogue, should refer to characters by name, and ought to aid understanding of the storyline as a whole. To this end, we develop a new model for automatically generating movie AD, given CLIP visual features of the frames, the cast list, and the temporal locations of the speech; addressing all three of the 'who', 'when', and 'what' questions: (i) who -- we introduce a character bank consisting of the character's name, the actor that played the part, and a CLIP feature of their face, for the principal cast of each movie, and demonstrate how this can be used to improve naming in the generated AD; (ii) when -- we investigate several models for determining whether an AD should be generated for a time interval or not, based on the visual content of the interval and its neighbours; and (iii) what -- we implement a new vision-language model for this task, that can ingest the proposals from the character bank, whilst conditioning on the visual features using cross-attention, and demonstrate how this improves over previous architectures for AD text generation in an apples-to-apples comparison.

In a multi-task learning (MTL) setting, a single model is trained to tackle a diverse set of tasks jointly. Despite rapid progress in the field, MTL remains challenging due to optimization issues such as conflicting and dominating gradients. In this work, we propose using a condition number of a linear system of gradients as a stability criterion of an MTL optimization. We theoretically demonstrate that a condition number reflects the aforementioned optimization issues. Accordingly, we present Aligned-MTL, a novel MTL optimization approach based on the proposed criterion, that eliminates instability in the training process by aligning the orthogonal components of the linear system of gradients. While many recent MTL approaches guarantee convergence to a minimum, task trade-offs cannot be specified in advance. In contrast, Aligned-MTL provably converges to an optimal point with pre-defined task-specific weights, which provides more control over the optimization result. Through experiments, we show that the proposed approach consistently improves performance on a diverse set of MTL benchmarks, including semantic and instance segmentation, depth estimation, surface normal estimation, and reinforcement learning. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/SamsungLabs/MTL .

Understanding verbs is crucial to modelling how people and objects interact with each other and the environment through space and time. Recently, state-of-the-art video-language models based on CLIP have been shown to have limited verb understanding and to rely extensively on nouns, restricting their performance in real-world video applications that require action and temporal understanding. In this work, we improve verb understanding for CLIP-based video-language models by proposing a new Verb-Focused Contrastive (VFC) framework. This consists of two main components: (1) leveraging pretrained large language models (LLMs) to create hard negatives for cross-modal contrastive learning, together with a calibration strategy to balance the occurrence of concepts in positive and negative pairs; and (2) enforcing a fine-grained, verb phrase alignment loss. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results for zero-shot performance on three downstream tasks that focus on verb understanding: video-text matching, video question-answering and video classification. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work which proposes a method to alleviate the verb understanding problem, and does not simply highlight it.

The objective of this paper is an automatic Audio Description (AD) model that ingests movies and outputs AD in text form. Generating high-quality movie AD is challenging due to the dependency of the descriptions on context, and the limited amount of training data available. In this work, we leverage the power of pretrained foundation models, such as GPT and CLIP, and only train a mapping network that bridges the two models for visually-conditioned text generation. In order to obtain high-quality AD, we make the following four contributions: (i) we incorporate context from the movie clip, AD from previous clips, as well as the subtitles; (ii) we address the lack of training data by pretraining on large-scale datasets, where visual or contextual information is unavailable, e.g. text-only AD without movies or visual captioning datasets without context; (iii) we improve on the currently available AD datasets, by removing label noise in the MAD dataset, and adding character naming information; and (iv) we obtain strong results on the movie AD task compared with previous methods.

Task planning can require defining myriad domain knowledge about the world in which a robot needs to act. To ameliorate that effort, large language models (LLMs) can be used to score potential next actions during task planning, and even generate action sequences directly, given an instruction in natural language with no additional domain information. However, such methods either require enumerating all possible next steps for scoring, or generate free-form text that may contain actions not possible on a given robot in its current context. We present a programmatic LLM prompt structure that enables plan generation functional across situated environments, robot capabilities, and tasks. Our key insight is to prompt the LLM with program-like specifications of the available actions and objects in an environment, as well as with example programs that can be executed. We make concrete recommendations about prompt structure and generation constraints through ablation experiments, demonstrate state of the art success rates in VirtualHome household tasks, and deploy our method on a physical robot arm for tabletop tasks. Website at progprompt.github.io

Large multilingual language models such as mBERT or XLM-R enable zero-shot cross-lingual transfer in various IR and NLP tasks. Cao et al. (2020) proposed a data- and compute-efficient method for cross-lingual adjustment of mBERT that uses a small parallel corpus to make embeddings of related words across languages similar to each other. They showed it to be effective in NLI for five European languages. In contrast we experiment with a typologically diverse set of languages (Spanish, Russian, Vietnamese, and Hindi) and extend their original implementations to new tasks (XSR, NER, and QA) and an additional training regime (continual learning). Our study reproduced gains in NLI for four languages, showed improved NER, XSR, and cross-lingual QA results in three languages (though some cross-lingual QA gains were not statistically significant), while mono-lingual QA performance never improved and sometimes degraded. Analysis of distances between contextualized embeddings of related and unrelated words (across languages) showed that fine-tuning leads to "forgetting" some of the cross-lingual alignment information. Based on this observation, we further improved NLI performance using continual learning.

Research on offline signature verification has explored a large variety of methods on multiple signature datasets, which are collected under controlled conditions. However, these datasets may not fully reflect the characteristics of the signatures in some practical use cases. Real-world signatures extracted from the formal documents may contain different types of occlusions, for example, stamps, company seals, ruling lines, and signature boxes. Moreover, they may have very high intra-class variations, where even genuine signatures resemble forgeries. In this paper, we address a real-world writer independent offline signature verification problem, in which, a bank's customers' transaction request documents that contain their occluded signatures are compared with their clean reference signatures. Our proposed method consists of two main components, a stamp cleaning method based on CycleGAN and signature representation based on CNNs. We extensively evaluate different verification setups, fine-tuning strategies, and signature representation approaches to have a thorough analysis of the problem. Moreover, we conduct a human evaluation to show the challenging nature of the problem. We run experiments both on our custom dataset, as well as on the publicly available Tobacco-800 dataset. The experimental results validate the difficulty of offline signature verification on real-world documents. However, by employing the stamp cleaning process, we improve the signature verification performance significantly.

Recent Text-to-Image (T2I) generation models such as Stable Diffusion and Imagen have made significant progress in generating high-resolution images based on text descriptions. However, many generated images still suffer from issues such as artifacts/implausibility, misalignment with text descriptions, and low aesthetic quality. Inspired by the success of Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) for large language models, prior works collected human-provided scores as feedback on generated images and trained a reward model to improve the T2I generation. In this paper, we enrich the feedback signal by (i) marking image regions that are implausible or misaligned with the text, and (ii) annotating which words in the text prompt are misrepresented or missing on the image. We collect such rich human feedback on 18K generated images and train a multimodal transformer to predict the rich feedback automatically. We show that the predicted rich human feedback can be leveraged to improve image generation, for example, by selecting high-quality training data to finetune and improve the generative models, or by creating masks with predicted heatmaps to inpaint the problematic regions. Notably, the improvements generalize to models (Muse) beyond those used to generate the images on which human feedback data were collected (Stable Diffusion variants).

We present a framework that formulates visual question answering as modular code generation. In contrast to prior work on modular approaches to VQA, our approach requires no additional training and relies on pre-trained language models (LMs), visual models pre-trained on image-caption pairs, and fifty VQA examples used for in-context learning. The generated Python programs invoke and compose the outputs of the visual models using arithmetic and conditional logic. Our approach improves accuracy on the COVR dataset by at least 3% and on the GQA dataset by roughly 2% compared to the few-shot baseline that does not employ code generation.

Speech emotion recognition (SER) models typically rely on costly human-labeled data for training, making scaling methods to large speech datasets and nuanced emotion taxonomies difficult. We present LanSER, a method that enables the use of unlabeled data by inferring weak emotion labels via pre-trained large language models through weakly-supervised learning. For inferring weak labels constrained to a taxonomy, we use a textual entailment approach that selects an emotion label with the highest entailment score for a speech transcript extracted via automatic speech recognition. Our experimental results show that models pre-trained on large datasets with this weak supervision outperform other baseline models on standard SER datasets when fine-tuned, and show improved label efficiency. Despite being pre-trained on labels derived only from text, we show that the resulting representations appear to model the prosodic content of speech.

In this study, we propose a simple method for fault-tolerant Strassen-like matrix multiplications. The proposed method is based on using two distinct Strassen-like algorithms instead of replicating a given one. We have realized that using two different algorithms, new check relations arise resulting in more local computations. These local computations are found using computer aided search. To improve performance, special parity (extra) sub-matrix multiplications (PSMMs) are generated (two of them) at the expense of increasing communication/computation cost of the system. Our preliminary results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms a Strassen-like algorithm with two copies and secures a very close performance to three copy version using only 2 PSMMs, reducing the total number of compute nodes by around 24\% i.e., from 21 to 16.

Pre-trained language models have been recently shown to benefit task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. Despite their success, existing methods often formulate this task as a cascaded generation problem which can lead to error accumulation across different sub-tasks and greater data annotation overhead. In this study, we present PPTOD, a unified plug-and-play model for task-oriented dialogue. In addition, we introduce a new dialogue multi-task pre-training strategy that allows the model to learn the primary TOD task completion skills from heterogeneous dialog corpora. We extensively test our model on three benchmark TOD tasks, including end-to-end dialogue modelling, dialogue state tracking, and intent classification. Experimental results show that PPTOD achieves new state of the art on all evaluated tasks in both high-resource and low-resource scenarios. Furthermore, comparisons against previous SOTA methods show that the responses generated by PPTOD are more factually correct and semantically coherent as judged by human annotators.

Modern image inpainting systems, despite the significant progress, often struggle with large missing areas, complex geometric structures, and high-resolution images. We find that one of the main reasons for that is the lack of an effective receptive field in both the inpainting network and the loss function. To alleviate this issue, we propose a new method called large mask inpainting (LaMa). LaMa is based on i) a new inpainting network architecture that uses fast Fourier convolutions (FFCs), which have the image-wide receptive field; ii) a high receptive field perceptual loss; iii) large training masks, which unlocks the potential of the first two components. Our inpainting network improves the state-of-the-art across a range of datasets and achieves excellent performance even in challenging scenarios, e.g. completion of periodic structures. Our model generalizes surprisingly well to resolutions that are higher than those seen at train time, and achieves this at lower parameter&time costs than the competitive baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/saic-mdal/lama.