Daily Papers

We present a learning-based approach to reconstruct buildings as 3D polygonal meshes from airborne LiDAR point clouds. What makes 3D building reconstruction from airborne LiDAR hard is the large diversity of building designs and especially roof shapes, the low and varying point density across the scene, and the often incomplete coverage of building facades due to occlusions by vegetation or to the viewing angle of the sensor. To cope with the diversity of shapes and inhomogeneous and incomplete object coverage, we introduce a generative model that directly predicts 3D polygonal meshes from input point clouds. Our autoregressive model, called Point2Building, iteratively builds up the mesh by generating sequences of vertices and faces. This approach enables our model to adapt flexibly to diverse geometries and building structures. Unlike many existing methods that rely heavily on pre-processing steps like exhaustive plane detection, our model learns directly from the point cloud data, thereby reducing error propagation and increasing the fidelity of the reconstruction. We experimentally validate our method on a collection of airborne LiDAR data of Zurich, Berlin and Tallinn. Our method shows good generalization to diverse urban styles.

The cultural heritage buildings (CHB), which are part of mankind's history and identity, are in constant danger of damage or in extreme situations total destruction. That being said, it's of utmost importance to preserve them by identifying the existent, or presumptive, defects using novel methods so that renovation processes can be done in a timely manner and with higher accuracy. The main goal of this research is to use new deep learning (DL) methods in the process of preserving CHBs (situated in Iran); a goal that has been neglected especially in developing countries such as Iran, as these countries still preserve their CHBs using manual, and even archaic, methods that need direct human supervision. Having proven their effectiveness and performance when it comes to processing images, the convolutional neural networks (CNN) are a staple in computer vision (CV) literacy and this paper is not exempt. When lacking enough CHB images, training a CNN from scratch would be very difficult and prone to overfitting; that's why we opted to use a technique called transfer learning (TL) in which we used pre-trained ResNet, MobileNet, and Inception networks, for classification. Even more, the Grad-CAM was utilized to localize the defects to some extent. The final results were very favorable based on those of similar research. The final proposed model can pave the way for moving from manual to unmanned CHB conservation, hence an increase in accuracy and a decrease in human-induced errors.

Monitoring of land cover and land use is crucial in natural resources management. Automatic visual mapping can carry enormous economic value for agriculture, forestry, or public administration. Satellite or aerial images combined with computer vision and deep learning enable precise assessment and can significantly speed up change detection. Aerial imagery usually provides images with much higher pixel resolution than satellite data allowing more detailed mapping. However, there is still a lack of aerial datasets made for the segmentation, covering rural areas with a resolution of tens centimeters per pixel, manual fine labels, and highly publicly important environmental instances like buildings, woods, water, or roads. Here we introduce LandCover.ai (Land Cover from Aerial Imagery) dataset for semantic segmentation. We collected images of 216.27 sq. km rural areas across Poland, a country in Central Europe, 39.51 sq. km with resolution 50 cm per pixel and 176.76 sq. km with resolution 25 cm per pixel and manually fine annotated four following classes of objects: buildings, woodlands, water, and roads. Additionally, we report simple benchmark results, achieving 85.56% of mean intersection over union on the test set. It proves that the automatic mapping of land cover is possible with a relatively small, cost-efficient, RGB-only dataset. The dataset is publicly available at https://landcover.ai.linuxpolska.com/

Buildings are significant contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for 26% of global energy sector emissions in 2022. Meeting net zero goals requires a rapid reduction in building emissions, both directly from the buildings and indirectly from the production of electricity and heat used in buildings. National energy planning for net zero demands both detailed and comprehensive building energy consumption data. However, geo-located building-level energy data is rarely available in Europe, with analysis typically relying on anonymised, simulated or low-resolution data. To address this problem, we introduce a dataset of Neighbourhood Energy, Buildings, and Urban Landscapes (NEBULA) for modelling domestic energy consumption for small neighbourhoods (5-150 households). NEBULA integrates data on building characteristics, climate, urbanisation, environment, and socio-demographics and contains 609,964 samples across England and Wales.

Buildings are primary components of cities, often featuring repeated elements such as windows and doors. Traditional 3D building asset creation is labor-intensive and requires specialized skills to develop design rules. Recent generative models for building creation often overlook these patterns, leading to low visual fidelity and limited scalability. Drawing inspiration from procedural modeling techniques used in the gaming and visual effects industry, our method, Proc-GS, integrates procedural code into the 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) framework, leveraging their advantages in high-fidelity rendering and efficient asset management from both worlds. By manipulating procedural code, we can streamline this process and generate an infinite variety of buildings. This integration significantly reduces model size by utilizing shared foundational assets, enabling scalable generation with precise control over building assembly. We showcase the potential for expansive cityscape generation while maintaining high rendering fidelity and precise control on both real and synthetic cases.

Outdoor-to-indoor (OtI) signal propagation further challenges the already tight link budgets at millimeter-wave (mmWave). To gain insight into OtI mmWave scenarios at 28 GHz, we conducted an extensive measurement campaign consisting of over 2,200 link measurements. In total, 43 OtI scenarios were measured in West Harlem, New York City, covering seven highly diverse buildings. The measured OtI path gain can vary by up to 40 dB for a given link distance, and the empirical path gain model for all data shows an average of 30 dB excess loss over free space at distances beyond 50 m, with an RMS fitting error of 11.7 dB. The type of glass is found to be the single dominant feature for OtI loss, with 20 dB observed difference between empirical path gain models for scenarios with low-loss and high-loss glass. The presence of scaffolding, tree foliage, or elevated subway tracks, as well as difference in floor height are each found to have an impact between 5-10 dB. We show that for urban buildings with high-loss glass, OtI coverage can support 500 Mbps for 90% of indoor user equipment (UEs) with a base station (BS) antenna placed up to 49 m away. For buildings with low-loss glass, such as our case study covering multiple classrooms of a public school, data rates over 2.5/1.2 Gbps are possible from a BS 68/175 m away from the school building, when a line-of-sight path is available. We expect these results to be useful for the deployment of mmWave networks in dense urban environments as well as the development of relevant scheduling and beam management algorithms.

We study pursuit-evasion games in highly occluded urban environments, e.g. tall buildings in a city, where a scout (quadrotor) tracks multiple dynamic targets on the ground. We show that we can build a neural radiance field (NeRF) representation of the city -- online -- using RGB and depth images from different vantage points. This representation is used to calculate the information gain to both explore unknown parts of the city and track the targets -- thereby giving a completely first-principles approach to actively tracking dynamic targets. We demonstrate, using a custom-built simulator using Open Street Maps data of Philadelphia and New York City, that we can explore and locate 20 stationary targets within 300 steps. This is slower than a greedy baseline, which does not use active perception. But for dynamic targets that actively hide behind occlusions, we show that our approach maintains, at worst, a tracking error of 200m; the greedy baseline can have a tracking error as large as 600m. We observe a number of interesting properties in the scout's policies, e.g., it switches its attention to track a different target periodically, as the quality of the NeRF representation improves over time, the scout also becomes better in terms of target tracking. Code is available at https://github.com/grasp-lyrl/ActiveScout.

Mapping buildings and roads automatically with remote sensing typically requires high-resolution imagery, which is expensive to obtain and often sparsely available. In this work we demonstrate how multiple 10 m resolution Sentinel-2 images can be used to generate 50 cm resolution building and road segmentation masks. This is done by training a `student' model with access to Sentinel-2 images to reproduce the predictions of a `teacher' model which has access to corresponding high-resolution imagery. While the predictions do not have all the fine detail of the teacher model, we find that we are able to retain much of the performance: for building segmentation we achieve 79.0\% mIoU, compared to the high-resolution teacher model accuracy of 85.5\% mIoU. We also describe two related methods that work on Sentinel-2 imagery: one for counting individual buildings which achieves R^2 = 0.91 against true counts and one for predicting building height with 1.5 meter mean absolute error. This work opens up new possibilities for using freely available Sentinel-2 imagery for a range of tasks that previously could only be done with high-resolution satellite imagery.

Coarse architectural models are often generated at scales ranging from individual buildings to scenes for downstream applications such as Digital Twin City, Metaverse, LODs, etc. Such piece-wise planar models can be abstracted as twins from 3D dense reconstructions. However, these models typically lack realistic texture relative to the real building or scene, making them unsuitable for vivid display or direct reference. In this paper, we present TwinTex, the first automatic texture mapping framework to generate a photo-realistic texture for a piece-wise planar proxy. Our method addresses most challenges occurring in such twin texture generation. Specifically, for each primitive plane, we first select a small set of photos with greedy heuristics considering photometric quality, perspective quality and facade texture completeness. Then, different levels of line features (LoLs) are extracted from the set of selected photos to generate guidance for later steps. With LoLs, we employ optimization algorithms to align texture with geometry from local to global. Finally, we fine-tune a diffusion model with a multi-mask initialization component and a new dataset to inpaint the missing region. Experimental results on many buildings, indoor scenes and man-made objects of varying complexity demonstrate the generalization ability of our algorithm. Our approach surpasses state-of-the-art texture mapping methods in terms of high-fidelity quality and reaches a human-expert production level with much less effort. Project page: https://vcc.tech/research/2023/TwinTex.

Today's architectural engineering and construction (AEC) software require a learning curve to generate a three-dimension building representation. This limits the ability to quickly validate the volumetric implications of an initial design idea communicated via a single sketch. Allowing designers to translate a single sketch to a 3D building will enable owners to instantly visualize 3D project information without the cognitive load required. If previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) data-driven methods for single view reconstruction (SVR) showed outstanding results in the reconstruction process from a single image or sketch, they lacked specific applications, analysis, and experiments in the AEC. Therefore, this research addresses this gap, introducing the first deep learning method focused only on buildings that aim to convert a single sketch to a 3D building mesh: Vitruvio. Vitruvio adapts Occupancy Network for SVR tasks on a specific building dataset (Manhattan 1K). This adaptation brings two main improvements. First, it accelerates the inference process by more than 26% (from 0.5s to 0.37s). Second, it increases the reconstruction accuracy (measured by the Chamfer Distance) by 18%. During this adaptation in the AEC domain, we evaluate the effect of the building orientation in the learning procedure since it constitutes an important design factor. While aligning all the buildings to a canonical pose improved the overall quantitative metrics, it did not capture fine-grain details in more complex building shapes (as shown in our qualitative analysis). Finally, Vitruvio outputs a 3D-printable building mesh with arbitrary topology and genus from a single perspective sketch, providing a step forward to allow owners and designers to communicate 3D information via a 2D, effective, intuitive, and universal communication medium: the sketch.

In this paper, we provide two case studies to demonstrate how artificial intelligence can empower civil engineering. In the first case, a machine learning-assisted framework, BRAILS, is proposed for city-scale building information modeling. Building information modeling (BIM) is an efficient way of describing buildings, which is essential to architecture, engineering, and construction. Our proposed framework employs deep learning technique to extract visual information of buildings from satellite/street view images. Further, a novel machine learning (ML)-based statistical tool, SURF, is proposed to discover the spatial patterns in building metadata. The second case focuses on the task of soft-story building classification. Soft-story buildings are a type of buildings prone to collapse during a moderate or severe earthquake. Hence, identifying and retrofitting such buildings is vital in the current earthquake preparedness efforts. For this task, we propose an automated deep learning-based procedure for identifying soft-story buildings from street view images at a regional scale. We also create a large-scale building image database and a semi-automated image labeling approach that effectively annotates new database entries. Through extensive computational experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The generation of large-scale urban layouts has garnered substantial interest across various disciplines. Prior methods have utilized procedural generation requiring manual rule coding or deep learning needing abundant data. However, prior approaches have not considered the context-sensitive nature of urban layout generation. Our approach addresses this gap by leveraging a canonical graph representation for the entire city, which facilitates scalability and captures the multi-layer semantics inherent in urban layouts. We introduce a novel graph-based masked autoencoder (GMAE) for city-scale urban layout generation. The method encodes attributed buildings, city blocks, communities and cities into a unified graph structure, enabling self-supervised masked training for graph autoencoder. Additionally, we employ scheduled iterative sampling for 2.5D layout generation, prioritizing the generation of important city blocks and buildings. Our approach achieves good realism, semantic consistency, and correctness across the heterogeneous urban styles in 330 US cities. Codes and datasets are released at https://github.com/Arking1995/COHO.

The intelligent interpretation of buildings plays a significant role in urban planning and management, macroeconomic analysis, population dynamics, etc. Remote sensing image building interpretation primarily encompasses building extraction and change detection. However, current methodologies often treat these two tasks as separate entities, thereby failing to leverage shared knowledge. Moreover, the complexity and diversity of remote sensing image scenes pose additional challenges, as most algorithms are designed to model individual small datasets, thus lacking cross-scene generalization. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive remote sensing image building understanding model, termed RSBuilding, developed from the perspective of the foundation model. RSBuilding is designed to enhance cross-scene generalization and task universality. Specifically, we extract image features based on the prior knowledge of the foundation model and devise a multi-level feature sampler to augment scale information. To unify task representation and integrate image spatiotemporal clues, we introduce a cross-attention decoder with task prompts. Addressing the current shortage of datasets that incorporate annotations for both tasks, we have developed a federated training strategy to facilitate smooth model convergence even when supervision for some tasks is missing, thereby bolstering the complementarity of different tasks. Our model was trained on a dataset comprising up to 245,000 images and validated on multiple building extraction and change detection datasets. The experimental results substantiate that RSBuilding can concurrently handle two structurally distinct tasks and exhibits robust zero-shot generalization capabilities.

Thermal comfort inside buildings is a well-studied field where human judgment for thermal comfort is collected and may be used for automatic thermal comfort estimation. However, indoor scenarios are rather static in terms of thermal state changes and, thus, cannot be applied to dynamic conditions, e.g., inside a vehicle. In this work, we present our findings of a gap between building and in-vehicle scenarios regarding thermal comfort estimation. We provide evidence by comparing deep neural classifiers for thermal comfort estimation for indoor and in-vehicle conditions. Further, we introduce a temporal dataset for indoor predictions incorporating 31 input signals and self-labeled user ratings by 18 subjects in a self-built climatic chamber. For in-vehicle scenarios, we acquired a second dataset featuring human judgments from 20 subjects in a BMW 3 Series. Our experimental results indicate superior performance for estimations from time series data over single vector input. Leveraging modern machine learning architectures enables us to recognize human thermal comfort states and estimate future states automatically. We provide details on training a recurrent network-based classifier and perform an initial performance benchmark of the proposed dataset. Ultimately, we compare our collected dataset to publicly available thermal comfort datasets.

The transition to renewable energy, particularly solar, is key to mitigating climate change. Google's Solar API aids this transition by estimating solar potential from aerial imagery, but its impact is constrained by geographical coverage. This paper proposes expanding the API's reach using satellite imagery, enabling global solar potential assessment. We tackle challenges involved in building a Digital Surface Model (DSM) and roof instance segmentation from lower resolution and single oblique views using deep learning models. Our models, trained on aligned satellite and aerial datasets, produce 25cm DSMs and roof segments. With ~1m DSM MAE on buildings, ~5deg roof pitch error and ~56% IOU on roof segmentation, they significantly enhance the Solar API's potential to promote solar adoption.

Building extraction - needed for inventory management and planning of urban environment - is affected by the misalignment between labels and off-nadir source imagery in training data. Teacher-Student learning of noise-tolerant convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is the existing solution, but the Student networks typically have lower accuracy and cannot surpass the Teacher's performance. This paper proposes a supervised domain adaptation (SDA) of encoder-decoder networks (EDNs) between noisy and clean datasets to tackle the problem. EDNs are configured with high-performing lightweight encoders such as EfficientNet, ResNeSt, and MobileViT. The proposed method is compared against the existing Teacher-Student learning methods like knowledge distillation (KD) and deep mutual learning (DML) with three newly developed datasets. The methods are evaluated for different urban buildings (low-rise, mid-rise, high-rise, and skyscrapers), where misalignment increases with the increase in building height and spatial resolution. For a robust experimental design, 43 lightweight CNNs, five optimisers, nine loss functions, and seven EDNs are benchmarked to obtain the best-performing EDN for SDA. The SDA of the best-performing EDN from our study significantly outperformed KD and DML with up to 0.943, 0.868, 0.912, and 0.697 F1 scores in the low-rise, mid-rise, high-rise, and skyscrapers respectively. The proposed method and the experimental findings will be beneficial in training robust CNNs for building extraction.

Building extraction is an essential component of study in the science of remote sensing, and applications for building extraction heavily rely on semantic segmentation of high-resolution remote sensing imagery. Semantic information extraction gap constraints in the present deep learning based approaches, however can result in inadequate segmentation outcomes. To address this issue and extract buildings with high accuracy, various efficientNet backbone based U-Net++ has been proposed in this study. The designed network, based on U-Net, can improve the sensitivity of the model by deep supervision, voluminous redesigned skip-connections and hence reducing the influence of irrelevant feature areas in the background. Various effecientNet backbone based encoders have been employed when training the network to enhance the capacity of the model to extract more relevant feature. According on the experimental findings, the suggested model significantly outperforms previous cutting-edge approaches. Among the 5 efficientNet variation Unet++ based on efficientb4 achieved the best result by scoring mean accuracy of 92.23%, mean iou of 88.32%, and mean precision of 93.2% on publicly available Massachusetts building dataset and thus showing the promises of the model for automatic building extraction from high resolution satellite images.

Most image completion methods produce only one result for each masked input, although there may be many reasonable possibilities. In this paper, we present an approach for pluralistic image completion -- the task of generating multiple and diverse plausible solutions for image completion. A major challenge faced by learning-based approaches is that usually only one ground truth training instance per label. As such, sampling from conditional VAEs still leads to minimal diversity. To overcome this, we propose a novel and probabilistically principled framework with two parallel paths. One is a reconstructive path that utilizes the only one given ground truth to get prior distribution of missing parts and rebuild the original image from this distribution. The other is a generative path for which the conditional prior is coupled to the distribution obtained in the reconstructive path. Both are supported by GANs. We also introduce a new short+long term attention layer that exploits distant relations among decoder and encoder features, improving appearance consistency. When tested on datasets with buildings (Paris), faces (CelebA-HQ), and natural images (ImageNet), our method not only generated higher-quality completion results, but also with multiple and diverse plausible outputs.

Foundation models that incorporate language, vision, and more recently actions have revolutionized the ability to harness internet scale data to reason about useful tasks. However, one of the key challenges of training embodied foundation models is the lack of data grounded in the physical world. In this paper, we propose AutoRT, a system that leverages existing foundation models to scale up the deployment of operational robots in completely unseen scenarios with minimal human supervision. AutoRT leverages vision-language models (VLMs) for scene understanding and grounding, and further uses large language models (LLMs) for proposing diverse and novel instructions to be performed by a fleet of robots. Guiding data collection by tapping into the knowledge of foundation models enables AutoRT to effectively reason about autonomy tradeoffs and safety while significantly scaling up data collection for robot learning. We demonstrate AutoRT proposing instructions to over 20 robots across multiple buildings and collecting 77k real robot episodes via both teleoperation and autonomous robot policies. We experimentally show that such "in-the-wild" data collected by AutoRT is significantly more diverse, and that AutoRT's use of LLMs allows for instruction following data collection robots that can align to human preferences.

Deploying robots in open-ended unstructured environments such as homes has been a long-standing research problem. However, robots are often studied only in closed-off lab settings, and prior mobile manipulation work is restricted to pick-move-place, which is arguably just the tip of the iceberg in this area. In this paper, we introduce Open-World Mobile Manipulation System, a full-stack approach to tackle realistic articulated object operation, e.g. real-world doors, cabinets, drawers, and refrigerators in open-ended unstructured environments. The robot utilizes an adaptive learning framework to initially learns from a small set of data through behavior cloning, followed by learning from online practice on novel objects that fall outside the training distribution. We also develop a low-cost mobile manipulation hardware platform capable of safe and autonomous online adaptation in unstructured environments with a cost of around 20,000 USD. In our experiments we utilize 20 articulate objects across 4 buildings in the CMU campus. With less than an hour of online learning for each object, the system is able to increase success rate from 50% of BC pre-training to 95% using online adaptation. Video results at https://open-world-mobilemanip.github.io/

With ChatGPT-like large language models (LLM) prevailing in the community, how to evaluate the ability of LLMs is an open question. Existing evaluation methods suffer from following shortcomings: (1) constrained evaluation abilities, (2) vulnerable benchmarks, (3) unobjective metrics. We suggest that task-based evaluation, where LLM agents complete tasks in a simulated environment, is a one-for-all solution to solve above problems. We present AgentSims, an easy-to-use infrastructure for researchers from all disciplines to test the specific capacities they are interested in. Researchers can build their evaluation tasks by adding agents and buildings on an interactive GUI or deploy and test new support mechanisms, i.e. memory, planning and tool-use systems, by a few lines of codes. Our demo is available at https://agentsims.com .

Modeling and designing urban building layouts is of significant interest in computer vision, computer graphics, and urban applications. A building layout consists of a set of buildings in city blocks defined by a network of roads. We observe that building layouts are discrete structures, consisting of multiple rows of buildings of various shapes, and are amenable to skeletonization for mapping arbitrary city block shapes to a canonical form. Hence, we propose a fully automatic approach to building layout generation using graph attention networks. Our method generates realistic urban layouts given arbitrary road networks, and enables conditional generation based on learned priors. Our results, including user study, demonstrate superior performance as compared to prior layout generation networks, support arbitrary city block and varying building shapes as demonstrated by generating layouts for 28 large cities.

We present MapReader, a free, open-source software library written in Python for analyzing large map collections (scanned or born-digital). This library transforms the way historians can use maps by turning extensive, homogeneous map sets into searchable primary sources. MapReader allows users with little or no computer vision expertise to i) retrieve maps via web-servers; ii) preprocess and divide them into patches; iii) annotate patches; iv) train, fine-tune, and evaluate deep neural network models; and v) create structured data about map content. We demonstrate how MapReader enables historians to interpret a collection of approx16K nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey map sheets (approx30.5M patches), foregrounding the challenge of translating visual markers into machine-readable data. We present a case study focusing on British rail infrastructure and buildings as depicted on these maps. We also show how the outputs from the MapReader pipeline can be linked to other, external datasets, which we use to evaluate as well as enrich and interpret the results. We release approx62K manually annotated patches used here for training and evaluating the models.

Visual scene understanding is the core task in making any crucial decision in any computer vision system. Although popular computer vision datasets like Cityscapes, MS-COCO, PASCAL provide good benchmarks for several tasks (e.g. image classification, segmentation, object detection), these datasets are hardly suitable for post disaster damage assessments. On the other hand, existing natural disaster datasets include mainly satellite imagery which have low spatial resolution and a high revisit period. Therefore, they do not have a scope to provide quick and efficient damage assessment tasks. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV) can effortlessly access difficult places during any disaster and collect high resolution imagery that is required for aforementioned tasks of computer vision. To address these issues we present a high resolution UAV imagery, FloodNet, captured after the hurricane Harvey. This dataset demonstrates the post flooded damages of the affected areas. The images are labeled pixel-wise for semantic segmentation task and questions are produced for the task of visual question answering. FloodNet poses several challenges including detection of flooded roads and buildings and distinguishing between natural water and flooded water. With the advancement of deep learning algorithms, we can analyze the impact of any disaster which can make a precise understanding of the affected areas. In this paper, we compare and contrast the performances of baseline methods for image classification, semantic segmentation, and visual question answering on our dataset.

We present xBD, a new, large-scale dataset for the advancement of change detection and building damage assessment for humanitarian assistance and disaster recovery research. Natural disaster response requires an accurate understanding of damaged buildings in an affected region. Current response strategies require in-person damage assessments within 24-48 hours of a disaster. Massive potential exists for using aerial imagery combined with computer vision algorithms to assess damage and reduce the potential danger to human life. In collaboration with multiple disaster response agencies, xBD provides pre- and post-event satellite imagery across a variety of disaster events with building polygons, ordinal labels of damage level, and corresponding satellite metadata. Furthermore, the dataset contains bounding boxes and labels for environmental factors such as fire, water, and smoke. xBD is the largest building damage assessment dataset to date, containing 850,736 building annotations across 45,362 km2 of imagery.

After a hurricane, damage assessment is critical to emergency managers for efficient response and resource allocation. One way to gauge the damage extent is to quantify the number of flooded/damaged buildings, which is traditionally done by ground survey. This process can be labor-intensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose to improve the efficiency of building damage assessment by applying image classification algorithms to post-hurricane satellite imagery. At the known building coordinates (available from public data), we extract square-sized images from the satellite imagery to create training, validation, and test datasets. Each square-sized image contains a building to be classified as either 'Flooded/Damaged' (labeled by volunteers in a crowd-sourcing project) or 'Undamaged'. We design and train a convolutional neural network from scratch and compare it with an existing neural network used widely for common object classification. We demonstrate the promise of our damage annotation model (over 97% accuracy) in the case study of building damage assessment in the Greater Houston area affected by 2017 Hurricane Harvey.

We present a scalable, bottom-up and intrinsically diverse data collection scheme that can be used for high-level reasoning with long and medium horizons and that has 2.2x higher throughput compared to traditional narrow top-down step-by-step collection. We collect realistic data by performing any user requests within the entirety of 3 office buildings and using multiple robot and human embodiments. With this data, we show that models trained on all embodiments perform better than ones trained on the robot data only, even when evaluated solely on robot episodes. We find that for a fixed collection budget it is beneficial to take advantage of cheaper human collection along with robot collection. We release a large and highly diverse (29,520 unique instructions) dataset dubbed RoboVQA containing 829,502 (video, text) pairs for robotics-focused visual question answering. We also demonstrate how evaluating real robot experiments with an intervention mechanism enables performing tasks to completion, making it deployable with human oversight even if imperfect while also providing a single performance metric. We demonstrate a single video-conditioned model named RoboVQA-VideoCoCa trained on our dataset that is capable of performing a variety of grounded high-level reasoning tasks in broad realistic settings with a cognitive intervention rate 46% lower than the zero-shot state of the art visual language model (VLM) baseline and is able to guide real robots through long-horizon tasks. The performance gap with zero-shot state-of-the-art models indicates that a lot of grounded data remains to be collected for real-world deployment, emphasizing the critical need for scalable data collection approaches. Finally, we show that video VLMs significantly outperform single-image VLMs with an average error rate reduction of 19% across all VQA tasks. Data and videos available at https://robovqa.github.io

Single-stream architectures using Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones show great potential for real-time UAV tracking recently. However, frequent occlusions from obstacles like buildings and trees expose a major drawback: these models often lack strategies to handle occlusions effectively. New methods are needed to enhance the occlusion resilience of single-stream ViT models in aerial tracking. In this work, we propose to learn Occlusion-Robust Representations (ORR) based on ViTs for UAV tracking by enforcing an invariance of the feature representation of a target with respect to random masking operations modeled by a spatial Cox process. Hopefully, this random masking approximately simulates target occlusions, thereby enabling us to learn ViTs that are robust to target occlusion for UAV tracking. This framework is termed ORTrack. Additionally, to facilitate real-time applications, we propose an Adaptive Feature-Based Knowledge Distillation (AFKD) method to create a more compact tracker, which adaptively mimics the behavior of the teacher model ORTrack according to the task's difficulty. This student model, dubbed ORTrack-D, retains much of ORTrack's performance while offering higher efficiency. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our method, demonstrating its state-of-the-art performance. Codes is available at https://github.com/wuyou3474/ORTrack.

Accurate completion and denoising of roof height maps are crucial to reconstructing high-quality 3D buildings. Repairing sparse points can enhance low-cost sensor use and reduce UAV flight overlap. RoofDiffusion is a new end-to-end self-supervised diffusion technique for robustly completing, in particular difficult, roof height maps. RoofDiffusion leverages widely-available curated footprints and can so handle up to 99\% point sparsity and 80\% roof area occlusion (regional incompleteness). A variant, No-FP RoofDiffusion, simultaneously predicts building footprints and heights. Both quantitatively outperform state-of-the-art unguided depth completion and representative inpainting methods for Digital Elevation Models (DEM), on both a roof-specific benchmark and the BuildingNet dataset. Qualitative assessments show the effectiveness of RoofDiffusion for datasets with real-world scans including AHN3, Dales3D, and USGS 3DEP LiDAR. Tested with the leading City3D algorithm, preprocessing height maps with RoofDiffusion noticeably improves 3D building reconstruction. RoofDiffusion is complemented by a new dataset of 13k complex roof geometries, focusing on long-tail issues in remote sensing; a novel simulation of tree occlusion; and a wide variety of large-area roof cut-outs for data augmentation and benchmarking.

In recent years, extensive research has focused on 3D natural scene generation, but the domain of 3D city generation has not received as much exploration. This is due to the greater challenges posed by 3D city generation, mainly because humans are more sensitive to structural distortions in urban environments. Additionally, generating 3D cities is more complex than 3D natural scenes since buildings, as objects of the same class, exhibit a wider range of appearances compared to the relatively consistent appearance of objects like trees in natural scenes. To address these challenges, we propose CityDreamer, a compositional generative model designed specifically for unbounded 3D cities, which separates the generation of building instances from other background objects, such as roads, green lands, and water areas, into distinct modules. Furthermore, we construct two datasets, OSM and GoogleEarth, containing a vast amount of real-world city imagery to enhance the realism of the generated 3D cities both in their layouts and appearances. Through extensive experiments, CityDreamer has proven its superiority over state-of-the-art methods in generating a wide range of lifelike 3D cities.

Existing deep learning-based cross-view geo-localization methods primarily focus on improving the accuracy of cross-domain image matching, rather than enabling models to comprehensively capture contextual information around the target and minimize the cost of localization errors. To support systematic research into this Distance-Aware Cross-View Geo-Localization (DACVGL) problem, we construct Distance-Aware Campus (DA-Campus), the first benchmark that pairs multi-view imagery with precise distance annotations across three spatial resolutions. Based on DA-Campus, we formulate DACVGL as a hierarchical retrieval problem across different domains. Our study further reveals that, due to the inherent complexity of spatial relationships among buildings, this problem can only be addressed via a contrastive learning paradigm, rather than conventional metric learning. To tackle this challenge, we propose Dynamic Contrastive Learning (DyCL), a novel framework that progressively aligns feature representations according to hierarchical spatial margins. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DyCL is highly complementary to existing multi-scale metric learning methods and yields substantial improvements in both hierarchical retrieval performance and overall cross-view geo-localization accuracy. Our code and benchmark are publicly available at https://github.com/anocodetest1/DyCL.

Embodied artificial intelligence emphasizes the role of an agent's body in generating human-like behaviors. The recent efforts on EmbodiedAI pay a lot of attention to building up machine learning models to possess perceiving, planning, and acting abilities, thereby enabling real-time interaction with the world. However, most works focus on bounded indoor environments, such as navigation in a room or manipulating a device, with limited exploration of embodying the agents in open-world scenarios. That is, embodied intelligence in the open and outdoor environment is less explored, for which one potential reason is the lack of high-quality simulators, benchmarks, and datasets. To address it, in this paper, we construct a benchmark platform for embodied intelligence evaluation in real-world city environments. Specifically, we first construct a highly realistic 3D simulation environment based on the real buildings, roads, and other elements in a real city. In this environment, we combine historically collected data and simulation algorithms to conduct simulations of pedestrian and vehicle flows with high fidelity. Further, we designed a set of evaluation tasks covering different EmbodiedAI abilities. Moreover, we provide a complete set of input and output interfaces for access, enabling embodied agents to easily take task requirements and current environmental observations as input and then make decisions and obtain performance evaluations. On the one hand, it expands the capability of existing embodied intelligence to higher levels. On the other hand, it has a higher practical value in the real world and can support more potential applications for artificial general intelligence. Based on this platform, we evaluate some popular large language models for embodied intelligence capabilities of different dimensions and difficulties.

Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to adapt a pre-trained model to the target domain in a batch-by-batch manner during inference. While label distributions often exhibit imbalances in real-world scenarios, most previous TTA approaches typically assume that both source and target domain datasets have balanced label distribution. Due to the fact that certain classes appear more frequently in certain domains (e.g., buildings in cities, trees in forests), it is natural that the label distribution shifts as the domain changes. However, we discover that the majority of existing TTA methods fail to address the coexistence of covariate and label shifts. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel label shift adapter that can be incorporated into existing TTA approaches to deal with label shifts during the TTA process effectively. Specifically, we estimate the label distribution of the target domain to feed it into the label shift adapter. Subsequently, the label shift adapter produces optimal parameters for the target label distribution. By predicting only the parameters for a part of the pre-trained source model, our approach is computationally efficient and can be easily applied, regardless of the model architectures. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that integrating our strategy with TTA approaches leads to substantial performance improvements under the joint presence of label and covariate shifts.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is currently the richest publicly available information source on geographic entities (e.g., buildings and roads) worldwide. However, using OSM entities in machine learning models and other applications is challenging due to the large scale of OSM, the extreme heterogeneity of entity annotations, and a lack of a well-defined ontology to describe entity semantics and properties. This paper presents GeoVectors - a unique, comprehensive world-scale linked open corpus of OSM entity embeddings covering the entire OSM dataset and providing latent representations of over 980 million geographic entities in 180 countries. The GeoVectors corpus captures semantic and geographic dimensions of OSM entities and makes these entities directly accessible to machine learning algorithms and semantic applications. We create a semantic description of the GeoVectors corpus, including identity links to the Wikidata and DBpedia knowledge graphs to supply context information. Furthermore, we provide a SPARQL endpoint - a semantic interface that offers direct access to the semantic and latent representations of geographic entities in OSM.

We introduce CARLA, an open-source simulator for autonomous driving research. CARLA has been developed from the ground up to support development, training, and validation of autonomous urban driving systems. In addition to open-source code and protocols, CARLA provides open digital assets (urban layouts, buildings, vehicles) that were created for this purpose and can be used freely. The simulation platform supports flexible specification of sensor suites and environmental conditions. We use CARLA to study the performance of three approaches to autonomous driving: a classic modular pipeline, an end-to-end model trained via imitation learning, and an end-to-end model trained via reinforcement learning. The approaches are evaluated in controlled scenarios of increasing difficulty, and their performance is examined via metrics provided by CARLA, illustrating the platform's utility for autonomous driving research. The supplementary video can be viewed at https://youtu.be/Hp8Dz-Zek2E

Unsupervised domain adaptation for semantic segmentation (DASS) aims to transfer knowledge from a label-rich source domain to a target domain with no labels. Two key approaches in DASS are (1) vision-only approaches using masking or multi-resolution crops, and (2) language-based approaches that use generic class-wise prompts informed by target domain (e.g. "a {snowy} photo of a {class}"). However, the former is susceptible to noisy pseudo-labels that are biased to the source domain. The latter does not fully capture the intricate spatial relationships of objects -- key for dense prediction tasks. To this end, we propose LangDA. LangDA addresses these challenges by, first, learning contextual relationships between objects via VLM-generated scene descriptions (e.g. "a pedestrian is on the sidewalk, and the street is lined with buildings."). Second, LangDA aligns the entire image features with text representation of this context-aware scene caption and learns generalized representations via text. With this, LangDA sets the new state-of-the-art across three DASS benchmarks, outperforming existing methods by 2.6%, 1.4% and 3.9%.

3D Content Generation is at the heart of many computer graphics applications, including video gaming, film-making, virtual and augmented reality, etc. This paper proposes a novel deep-learning based approach for automatically generating interactive and playable 3D game scenes, all from the user's casual prompts such as a hand-drawn sketch. Sketch-based input offers a natural, and convenient way to convey the user's design intention in the content creation process. To circumvent the data-deficient challenge in learning (i.e. the lack of large training data of 3D scenes), our method leverages a pre-trained 2D denoising diffusion model to generate a 2D image of the scene as the conceptual guidance. In this process, we adopt the isometric projection mode to factor out unknown camera poses while obtaining the scene layout. From the generated isometric image, we use a pre-trained image understanding method to segment the image into meaningful parts, such as off-ground objects, trees, and buildings, and extract the 2D scene layout. These segments and layouts are subsequently fed into a procedural content generation (PCG) engine, such as a 3D video game engine like Unity or Unreal, to create the 3D scene. The resulting 3D scene can be seamlessly integrated into a game development environment and is readily playable. Extensive tests demonstrate that our method can efficiently generate high-quality and interactive 3D game scenes with layouts that closely follow the user's intention.

3D scene generation has garnered growing attention in recent years and has made significant progress. Generating 4D cities is more challenging than 3D scenes due to the presence of structurally complex, visually diverse objects like buildings and vehicles, and heightened human sensitivity to distortions in urban environments. To tackle these issues, we propose CityDreamer4D, a compositional generative model specifically tailored for generating unbounded 4D cities. Our main insights are 1) 4D city generation should separate dynamic objects (e.g., vehicles) from static scenes (e.g., buildings and roads), and 2) all objects in the 4D scene should be composed of different types of neural fields for buildings, vehicles, and background stuff. Specifically, we propose Traffic Scenario Generator and Unbounded Layout Generator to produce dynamic traffic scenarios and static city layouts using a highly compact BEV representation. Objects in 4D cities are generated by combining stuff-oriented and instance-oriented neural fields for background stuff, buildings, and vehicles. To suit the distinct characteristics of background stuff and instances, the neural fields employ customized generative hash grids and periodic positional embeddings as scene parameterizations. Furthermore, we offer a comprehensive suite of datasets for city generation, including OSM, GoogleEarth, and CityTopia. The OSM dataset provides a variety of real-world city layouts, while the Google Earth and CityTopia datasets deliver large-scale, high-quality city imagery complete with 3D instance annotations. Leveraging its compositional design, CityDreamer4D supports a range of downstream applications, such as instance editing, city stylization, and urban simulation, while delivering state-of-the-art performance in generating realistic 4D cities.

This study seeks to automate camera movement control for filming existing subjects into attractive videos, contrasting with the creation of non-existent content by directly generating the pixels. We select drone videos as our test case due to their rich and challenging motion patterns, distinctive viewing angles, and precise controls. Existing AI videography methods struggle with limited appearance diversity in simulation training, high costs of recording expert operations, and difficulties in designing heuristic-based goals to cover all scenarios. To avoid these issues, we propose a scalable method that involves collecting real-world training data to improve diversity, extracting camera trajectories automatically to minimize annotation costs, and training an effective architecture that does not rely on heuristics. Specifically, we collect 99k high-quality trajectories by running 3D reconstruction on online videos, connecting camera poses from consecutive frames to formulate 3D camera paths, and using Kalman filter to identify and remove low-quality data. Moreover, we introduce DVGFormer, an auto-regressive transformer that leverages the camera path and images from all past frames to predict camera movement in the next frame. We evaluate our system across 38 synthetic natural scenes and 7 real city 3D scans. We show that our system effectively learns to perform challenging camera movements such as navigating through obstacles, maintaining low altitude to increase perceived speed, and orbiting towers and buildings, which are very useful for recording high-quality videos. Data and code are available at dvgformer.github.io.

Object extraction and segmentation from remote sensing (RS) images is a critical yet challenging task in urban environment monitoring. Urban morphology is inherently complex, with irregular objects of diverse shapes and varying scales. These challenges are amplified by heterogeneity and scale disparities across RS data sources, including sensors, platforms, and modalities, making accurate object segmentation particularly demanding. While the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has shown significant potential in segmenting complex scenes, its performance in handling form-varying objects remains limited due to manual-interactive prompting. To this end, we propose UrbanSAM, a customized version of SAM specifically designed to analyze complex urban environments while tackling scaling effects from remotely sensed observations. Inspired by multi-resolution analysis (MRA) theory, UrbanSAM incorporates a novel learnable prompter equipped with a Uscaling-Adapter that adheres to the invariance criterion, enabling the model to capture multiscale contextual information of objects and adapt to arbitrary scale variations with theoretical guarantees. Furthermore, features from the Uscaling-Adapter and the trunk encoder are aligned through a masked cross-attention operation, allowing the trunk encoder to inherit the adapter's multiscale aggregation capability. This synergy enhances the segmentation performance, resulting in more powerful and accurate outputs, supported by the learned adapter. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the flexibility and superior segmentation performance of the proposed UrbanSAM on a global-scale dataset, encompassing scale-varying urban objects such as buildings, roads, and water.

Disaster events occur around the world and cause significant damage to human life and property. Earth observation (EO) data enables rapid and comprehensive building damage assessment (BDA), an essential capability in the aftermath of a disaster to reduce human casualties and to inform disaster relief efforts. Recent research focuses on the development of AI models to achieve accurate mapping of unseen disaster events, mostly using optical EO data. However, solutions based on optical data are limited to clear skies and daylight hours, preventing a prompt response to disasters. Integrating multimodal (MM) EO data, particularly the combination of optical and SAR imagery, makes it possible to provide all-weather, day-and-night disaster responses. Despite this potential, the development of robust multimodal AI models has been constrained by the lack of suitable benchmark datasets. In this paper, we present a BDA dataset using veRy-hIGH-resoluTion optical and SAR imagery (BRIGHT) to support AI-based all-weather disaster response. To the best of our knowledge, BRIGHT is the first open-access, globally distributed, event-diverse MM dataset specifically curated to support AI-based disaster response. It covers five types of natural disasters and two types of man-made disasters across 12 regions worldwide, with a particular focus on developing countries where external assistance is most needed. The optical and SAR imagery in BRIGHT, with a spatial resolution between 0.3-1 meters, provides detailed representations of individual buildings, making it ideal for precise BDA. In our experiments, we have tested seven advanced AI models trained with our BRIGHT to validate the transferability and robustness. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/ChenHongruixuan/BRIGHT. BRIGHT also serves as the official dataset for the 2025 IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest.

Recent advancements in text-to-image generation have significantly enhanced the quality of synthesized images. Despite this progress, evaluations predominantly focus on aesthetic appeal or alignment with text prompts. Consequently, there is limited understanding of whether these models can accurately represent a wide variety of realistic visual entities - a task requiring real-world knowledge. To address this gap, we propose a benchmark focused on evaluating Knowledge-InTensive image generaTion on real-world ENtities (i.e., KITTEN). Using KITTEN, we conduct a systematic study on the fidelity of entities in text-to-image generation models, focusing on their ability to generate a wide range of real-world visual entities, such as landmark buildings, aircraft, plants, and animals. We evaluate the latest text-to-image models and retrieval-augmented customization models using both automatic metrics and carefully-designed human evaluations, with an emphasis on the fidelity of entities in the generated images. Our findings reveal that even the most advanced text-to-image models often fail to generate entities with accurate visual details. Although retrieval-augmented models can enhance the fidelity of entity by incorporating reference images during testing, they often over-rely on these references and struggle to produce novel configurations of the entity as requested in creative text prompts.

We propose GroundUp, the first sketch-based ideation tool for 3D city massing of urban areas. We focus on early-stage urban design, where sketching is a common tool and the design starts from balancing building volumes (masses) and open spaces. With Human-Centered AI in mind, we aim to help architects quickly revise their ideas by easily switching between 2D sketches and 3D models, allowing for smoother iteration and sharing of ideas. Inspired by feedback from architects and existing workflows, our system takes as a first input a user sketch of multiple buildings in a top-down view. The user then draws a perspective sketch of the envisioned site. Our method is designed to exploit the complementarity of information in the two sketches and allows users to quickly preview and adjust the inferred 3D shapes. Our model has two main components. First, we propose a novel sketch-to-depth prediction network for perspective sketches that exploits top-down sketch shapes. Second, we use depth cues derived from the perspective sketch as a condition to our diffusion model, which ultimately completes the geometry in a top-down view. Thus, our final 3D geometry is represented as a heightfield, allowing users to construct the city `from the ground up'.

Semantic segmentation techniques for extracting building footprints from high-resolution remote sensing images have been widely used in many fields such as urban planning. However, large-scale building extraction demands higher diversity in training samples. In this paper, we construct a Global Building Semantic Segmentation (GBSS) dataset (The dataset will be released), which comprises 116.9k pairs of samples (about 742k buildings) from six continents. There are significant variations of building samples in terms of size and style, so the dataset can be a more challenging benchmark for evaluating the generalization and robustness of building semantic segmentation models. We validated through quantitative and qualitative comparisons between different datasets, and further confirmed the potential application in the field of transfer learning by conducting experiments on subsets.

The auto-management of vehicle entrance and parking in any organization is a complex challenge encompassing record-keeping, efficiency, and security concerns. Manual methods for tracking vehicles and finding parking spaces are slow and a waste of time. To solve the problem of auto management of vehicle entrance and parking, we have utilized state-of-the-art deep learning models and automated the process of vehicle entrance and parking into any organization. To ensure security, our system integrated vehicle detection, license number plate verification, and face detection and recognition models to ensure that the person and vehicle are registered with the organization. We have trained multiple deep-learning models for vehicle detection, license number plate detection, face detection, and recognition, however, the YOLOv8n model outperformed all the other models. Furthermore, License plate recognition is facilitated by Google's Tesseract-OCR Engine. By integrating these technologies, the system offers efficient vehicle detection, precise identification, streamlined record keeping, and optimized parking slot allocation in buildings, thereby enhancing convenience, accuracy, and security. Future research opportunities lie in fine-tuning system performance for a wide range of real-world applications.

We study building embodied agents for open-ended creative tasks. While existing methods build instruction-following agents that can perform diverse open-ended tasks, none of them demonstrates creativity -- the ability to give novel and diverse task solutions implicit in the language instructions. This limitation comes from their inability to convert abstract language instructions into concrete task goals in the environment and perform long-horizon planning for such complicated goals. Given the observation that humans perform creative tasks with the help of imagination, we propose a class of solutions for creative agents, where the controller is enhanced with an imaginator that generates detailed imaginations of task outcomes conditioned on language instructions. We introduce several approaches to implementing the components of creative agents. We implement the imaginator with either a large language model for textual imagination or a diffusion model for visual imagination. The controller can either be a behavior-cloning policy learned from data or a pre-trained foundation model generating executable codes in the environment. We benchmark creative tasks with the challenging open-world game Minecraft, where the agents are asked to create diverse buildings given free-form language instructions. In addition, we propose novel evaluation metrics for open-ended creative tasks utilizing GPT-4V, which holds many advantages over existing metrics. We perform a detailed experimental analysis of creative agents, showing that creative agents are the first AI agents accomplishing diverse building creation in the survival mode of Minecraft. Our benchmark and models are open-source for future research on creative agents (https://github.com/PKU-RL/Creative-Agents).

Whereas machine learning models typically learn language by directly training on language tasks (e.g., next-word prediction), language emerges in human children as a byproduct of solving non-language tasks (e.g., acquiring food). Motivated by this observation, we ask: can embodied reinforcement learning (RL) agents also indirectly learn language from non-language tasks? Learning to associate language with its meaning requires a dynamic environment with varied language. Therefore, we investigate this question in a multi-task environment with language that varies across the different tasks. Specifically, we design an office navigation environment, where the agent's goal is to find a particular office, and office locations differ in different buildings (i.e., tasks). Each building includes a floor plan with a simple language description of the goal office's location, which can be visually read as an RGB image when visited. We find RL agents indeed are able to indirectly learn language. Agents trained with current meta-RL algorithms successfully generalize to reading floor plans with held-out layouts and language phrases, and quickly navigate to the correct office, despite receiving no direct language supervision.

Humans are able to categorize images very efficiently, in particular to detect the presence of an animal very quickly. Recently, deep learning algorithms based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved higher than human accuracy for a wide range of visual categorization tasks. However, the tasks on which these artificial networks are typically trained and evaluated tend to be highly specialized and do not generalize well, e.g., accuracy drops after image rotation. In this respect, biological visual systems are more flexible and efficient than artificial systems for more general tasks, such as recognizing an animal. To further the comparison between biological and artificial neural networks, we re-trained the standard VGG 16 CNN on two independent tasks that are ecologically relevant to humans: detecting the presence of an animal or an artifact. We show that re-training the network achieves a human-like level of performance, comparable to that reported in psychophysical tasks. In addition, we show that the categorization is better when the outputs of the models are combined. Indeed, animals (e.g., lions) tend to be less present in photographs that contain artifacts (e.g., buildings). Furthermore, these re-trained models were able to reproduce some unexpected behavioral observations from human psychophysics, such as robustness to rotation (e.g., an upside-down or tilted image) or to a grayscale transformation. Finally, we quantified the number of CNN layers required to achieve such performance and showed that good accuracy for ultrafast image categorization can be achieved with only a few layers, challenging the belief that image recognition requires deep sequential analysis of visual objects.

While state of the art image segmentation models typically output segmentations in raster format, applications in geographic information systems often require vector polygons. To help bridge the gap between deep network output and the format used in downstream tasks, we add a frame field output to a deep segmentation model for extracting buildings from remote sensing images. We train a deep neural network that aligns a predicted frame field to ground truth contours. This additional objective improves segmentation quality by leveraging multi-task learning and provides structural information that later facilitates polygonization; we also introduce a polygonization algorithm that utilizes the frame field along with the raster segmentation. Our code is available at https://github.com/Lydorn/Polygonization-by-Frame-Field-Learning.

In this paper, we propose the problem of collaborative perception, where robots can combine their local observations with those of neighboring agents in a learnable way to improve accuracy on a perception task. Unlike existing work in robotics and multi-agent reinforcement learning, we formulate the problem as one where learned information must be shared across a set of agents in a bandwidth-sensitive manner to optimize for scene understanding tasks such as semantic segmentation. Inspired by networking communication protocols, we propose a multi-stage handshake communication mechanism where the neural network can learn to compress relevant information needed for each stage. Specifically, a target agent with degraded sensor data sends a compressed request, the other agents respond with matching scores, and the target agent determines who to connect with (i.e., receive information from). We additionally develop the AirSim-CP dataset and metrics based on the AirSim simulator where a group of aerial robots perceive diverse landscapes, such as roads, grasslands, buildings, etc. We show that for the semantic segmentation task, our handshake communication method significantly improves accuracy by approximately 20% over decentralized baselines, and is comparable to centralized ones using a quarter of the bandwidth.

We address the dual problems of novel view synthesis and environment reconstruction from hand-held RGBD sensors. Our contributions include 1) modeling highly specular objects, 2) modeling inter-reflections and Fresnel effects, and 3) enabling surface light field reconstruction with the same input needed to reconstruct shape alone. In cases where scene surface has a strong mirror-like material component, we generate highly detailed environment images, revealing room composition, objects, people, buildings, and trees visible through windows. Our approach yields state of the art view synthesis techniques, operates on low dynamic range imagery, and is robust to geometric and calibration errors.

We present a new dataset, Functional Map of the World (fMoW), which aims to inspire the development of machine learning models capable of predicting the functional purpose of buildings and land use from temporal sequences of satellite images and a rich set of metadata features. The metadata provided with each image enables reasoning about location, time, sun angles, physical sizes, and other features when making predictions about objects in the image. Our dataset consists of over 1 million images from over 200 countries. For each image, we provide at least one bounding box annotation containing one of 63 categories, including a "false detection" category. We present an analysis of the dataset along with baseline approaches that reason about metadata and temporal views. Our data, code, and pretrained models have been made publicly available.

Given appropriate representations of the semantic relations between carpenter and wood and between mason and stone (for example, vectors in a vector space model), a suitable algorithm should be able to recognize that these relations are highly similar (carpenter is to wood as mason is to stone; the relations are analogous). Likewise, with representations of dog, house, and kennel, an algorithm should be able to recognize that the semantic composition of dog and house, dog house, is highly similar to kennel (dog house and kennel are synonymous). It seems that these two tasks, recognizing relations and compositions, are closely connected. However, up to now, the best models for relations are significantly different from the best models for compositions. In this paper, we introduce a dual-space model that unifies these two tasks. This model matches the performance of the best previous models for relations and compositions. The dual-space model consists of a space for measuring domain similarity and a space for measuring function similarity. Carpenter and wood share the same domain, the domain of carpentry. Mason and stone share the same domain, the domain of masonry. Carpenter and mason share the same function, the function of artisans. Wood and stone share the same function, the function of materials. In the composition dog house, kennel has some domain overlap with both dog and house (the domains of pets and buildings). The function of kennel is similar to the function of house (the function of shelters). By combining domain and function similarities in various ways, we can model relations, compositions, and other aspects of semantics.

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential in robotic applications by providing essential general knowledge for situations that can not be pre-programmed beforehand. Generally speaking, mobile robots need to understand maps to execute tasks such as localization or navigation. In this letter, we address the problem of enabling LLMs to comprehend Area Graph, a text-based map representation, in order to enhance their applicability in the field of mobile robotics. Area Graph is a hierarchical, topometric semantic map representation utilizing polygons to demark areas such as rooms, corridors or buildings. In contrast to commonly used map representations, such as occupancy grid maps or point clouds, osmAG (Area Graph in OpensStreetMap format) is stored in a XML textual format naturally readable by LLMs. Furthermore, conventional robotic algorithms such as localization and path planning are compatible with osmAG, facilitating this map representation comprehensible by LLMs, traditional robotic algorithms and humans. Our experiments show that with a proper map representation, LLMs possess the capability to understand maps and answer queries based on that understanding. Following simple fine-tuning of LLaMA2 models, it surpassed ChatGPT-3.5 in tasks involving topology and hierarchy understanding. Our dataset, dataset generation code, fine-tuned LoRA adapters can be accessed at https://github.com/xiefujing/LLM-osmAG-Comprehension.

This paper proposes an assistive system for architects that converts a large-scale point cloud into a standardized digital representation of a building for Building Information Modeling (BIM) applications. The process is known as Scan-to-BIM, which requires many hours of manual work even for a single building floor by a professional architect. Given its challenging nature, the paper focuses on helping architects on the Scan-to-BIM process, instead of replacing them. Concretely, we propose an assistive Scan-to-BIM system that takes the raw sensor data and edit history (including the current BIM model), then auto-regressively predicts a sequence of model editing operations as APIs of a professional BIM software (i.e., Autodesk Revit). The paper also presents the first building-scale Scan2BIM dataset that contains a sequence of model editing operations as the APIs of Autodesk Revit. The dataset contains 89 hours of Scan2BIM modeling processes by professional architects over 16 scenes, spanning over 35,000 m^2. We report our system's reconstruction quality with standard metrics, and we introduce a novel metric that measures how natural the order of reconstructed operations is. A simple modification to the reconstruction module helps improve performance, and our method is far superior to two other baselines in the order metric. We will release data, code, and models at a-scan2bim.github.io.

In this paper, we study the localization problem in dense urban settings. In such environments, Global Navigation Satellite Systems fail to provide good accuracy due to low likelihood of line-of-sight (LOS) links between the receiver (Rx) to be located and the satellites, due to the presence of obstacles like the buildings. Thus, one has to resort to other technologies, which can reliably operate under non-line-of-sight (NLOS) conditions. Recently, we proposed a Received Signal Strength (RSS) fingerprint and convolutional neural network-based algorithm, LocUNet, and demonstrated its state-of-the-art localization performance with respect to the widely adopted k-nearest neighbors (kNN) algorithm, and to state-of-the-art time of arrival (ToA) ranging-based methods. In the current work, we first recognize LocUNet's ability to learn the underlying prior distribution of the Rx position or Rx and transmitter (Tx) association preferences from the training data, and attribute its high performance to these. Conversely, we demonstrate that classical methods based on probabilistic approach, can greatly benefit from an appropriate incorporation of such prior information. Our studies also numerically prove LocUNet's close to optimal performance in many settings, by comparing it with the theoretically optimal formulations.

There has been considerable recent interest in scoring properties on the basis of eviction risk. The success of methods for eviction prediction is typically evaluated using different measures of predictive accuracy. However, the underlying goal of such prediction is to direct appropriate assistance to households that may be at greater risk so they remain stably housed. Thus, we must ask the question of how useful such predictions are in targeting outreach efforts - informing action. In this paper, we investigate this question using a novel dataset that matches information on properties, evictions, and owners. We perform an eviction prediction task to produce risk scores and then use these risk scores to plan targeted outreach policies. We show that the risk scores are, in fact, useful, enabling a theoretical team of caseworkers to reach more eviction-prone properties in the same amount of time, compared to outreach policies that are either neighborhood-based or focus on buildings with a recent history of evictions. We also discuss the importance of neighborhood and ownership features in both risk prediction and targeted outreach.

Despite the remarkable progress in synthetic aperture radar automatic target recognition (SAR ATR), recent efforts have concentrated on detecting and classifying a specific category, e.g., vehicles, ships, airplanes, or buildings. One of the fundamental limitations of the top-performing SAR ATR methods is that the learning paradigm is supervised, task-specific, limited-category, closed-world learning, which depends on massive amounts of accurately annotated samples that are expensively labeled by expert SAR analysts and have limited generalization capability and scalability. In this work, we make the first attempt towards building a foundation model for SAR ATR, termed SARATR-X. SARATR-X learns generalizable representations via self-supervised learning (SSL) and provides a cornerstone for label-efficient model adaptation to generic SAR target detection and classification tasks. Specifically, SARATR-X is trained on 0.18 M unlabelled SAR target samples, which are curated by combining contemporary benchmarks and constitute the largest publicly available dataset till now. Considering the characteristics of SAR images, a backbone tailored for SAR ATR is carefully designed, and a two-step SSL method endowed with multi-scale gradient features was applied to ensure the feature diversity and model scalability of SARATR-X. The capabilities of SARATR-X are evaluated on classification under few-shot and robustness settings and detection across various categories and scenes, and impressive performance is achieved, often competitive with or even superior to prior fully supervised, semi-supervised, or self-supervised algorithms. Our SARATR-X and the curated dataset are released at https://github.com/waterdisappear/SARATR-X to foster research into foundation models for SAR image interpretation.

The field of vision-language models (VLMs), which take images and texts as inputs and output texts, is rapidly evolving and has yet to reach consensus on several key aspects of the development pipeline, including data, architecture, and training methods. This paper can be seen as a tutorial for building a VLM. We begin by providing a comprehensive overview of the current state-of-the-art approaches, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each, addressing the major challenges in the field, and suggesting promising research directions for underexplored areas. We then walk through the practical steps to build Idefics3-8B, a powerful VLM that significantly outperforms its predecessor Idefics2-8B, while being trained efficiently, exclusively on open datasets, and using a straightforward pipeline. These steps include the creation of Docmatix, a dataset for improving document understanding capabilities, which is 240 times larger than previously available datasets. We release the model along with the datasets created for its training.

Vision-language models have made significant strides recently, demonstrating superior performance across a range of tasks, e.g. optical character recognition and complex diagram analysis. Building on this trend, we introduce a new vision-language model, POINTS1.5, designed to excel in various real-world applications. POINTS1.5 is an enhancement of POINTS1.0 and incorporates several key innovations: i) We replace the original CLIP vision encoder, which had a fixed image resolution, with a NaViT-style vision encoder that supports native dynamic high resolution. This allows POINTS1.5 to process images of any resolution without needing to split them into tiles. ii) We add bilingual support to POINTS1.5, significantly enhancing its capability in Chinese. Due to the scarcity of open-source Chinese datasets for vision-language models, we collect numerous images from the Internet and annotate them using a combination of manual and automatic methods. iii) We propose a set of rigorous filtering methods for visual instruction tuning datasets. We comprehensively evaluate all these filtering methods, and choose the most effective ones to obtain the final visual instruction tuning set. Thanks to these innovations, POINTS1.5 significantly outperforms POINTS1.0 and demonstrates strong performance across a range of real-world applications. Notably, POINTS1.5-7B is trained on fewer than 4 billion tokens and ranks first on the OpenCompass leaderboard among models with fewer than 10 billion parameters

With generative AI advances, the exciting potential for autonomous agents to manage daily tasks via natural language commands has emerged. However, cur rent agents are primarily created and tested in simplified synthetic environments, substantially limiting real-world scenario representation. In this paper, we build an environment for agent command and control that is highly realistic and reproducible. Specifically, we focus on agents that perform tasks on websites, and we create an environment with fully functional websites from four common domains: e-commerce, social forum discussions, collaborative software development, and content management. Our environment is enriched with tools (e.g., a map) and external knowledge bases (e.g., user manuals) to encourage human-like task-solving. Building upon our environment, we release a set of benchmark tasks focusing on evaluating the functional correctness of task completions. The tasks in our benchmark are diverse, long-horizon, and are designed to emulate tasks that humans routinely perform on the internet. We design and implement several autonomous agents, integrating recent techniques such as reasoning before acting. The results demonstrate that solving complex tasks is challenging: our best GPT-4-based agent only achieves an end-to-end task success rate of 10.59%. These results highlight the need for further development of robust agents, that current state-of-the-art LMs are far from perfect performance in these real-life tasks, and that WebArena can be used to measure such progress. Our code, data, environment reproduction resources, and video demonstrations are publicly available at https://webarena.dev/.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable prowess in generating contextually coherent responses, yet their fixed context windows pose fundamental challenges for maintaining consistency over prolonged multi-session dialogues. We introduce Mem0, a scalable memory-centric architecture that addresses this issue by dynamically extracting, consolidating, and retrieving salient information from ongoing conversations. Building on this foundation, we further propose an enhanced variant that leverages graph-based memory representations to capture complex relational structures among conversational elements. Through comprehensive evaluations on LOCOMO benchmark, we systematically compare our approaches against six baseline categories: (i) established memory-augmented systems, (ii) retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with varying chunk sizes and k-values, (iii) a full-context approach that processes the entire conversation history, (iv) an open-source memory solution, (v) a proprietary model system, and (vi) a dedicated memory management platform. Empirical results show that our methods consistently outperform all existing memory systems across four question categories: single-hop, temporal, multi-hop, and open-domain. Notably, Mem0 achieves 26% relative improvements in the LLM-as-a-Judge metric over OpenAI, while Mem0 with graph memory achieves around 2% higher overall score than the base configuration. Beyond accuracy gains, we also markedly reduce computational overhead compared to full-context method. In particular, Mem0 attains a 91% lower p95 latency and saves more than 90% token cost, offering a compelling balance between advanced reasoning capabilities and practical deployment constraints. Our findings highlight critical role of structured, persistent memory mechanisms for long-term conversational coherence, paving the way for more reliable and efficient LLM-driven AI agents.

Recent studies have shown that large language models' (LLMs) mathematical problem-solving capabilities can be enhanced by integrating external tools, such as code interpreters, and employing multi-turn Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. While current methods focus on synthetic data generation and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), this paper studies the complementary direct preference learning approach to further improve model performance. However, existing direct preference learning algorithms are originally designed for the single-turn chat task, and do not fully address the complexities of multi-turn reasoning and external tool integration required for tool-integrated mathematical reasoning tasks. To fill in this gap, we introduce a multi-turn direct preference learning framework, tailored for this context, that leverages feedback from code interpreters and optimizes trajectory-level preferences. This framework includes multi-turn DPO and multi-turn KTO as specific implementations. The effectiveness of our framework is validated through training of various language models using an augmented prompt set from the GSM8K and MATH datasets. Our results demonstrate substantial improvements: a supervised fine-tuned Gemma-1.1-it-7B model's performance increased from 77.5% to 83.9% on GSM8K and from 46.1% to 51.2% on MATH. Similarly, a Gemma-2-it-9B model improved from 84.1% to 86.3% on GSM8K and from 51.0% to 54.5% on MATH.

Building articulated objects is a key challenge in computer vision. Existing methods often fail to effectively integrate information across different object states, limiting the accuracy of part-mesh reconstruction and part dynamics modeling, particularly for complex multi-part articulated objects. We introduce ArtGS, a novel approach that leverages 3D Gaussians as a flexible and efficient representation to address these issues. Our method incorporates canonical Gaussians with coarse-to-fine initialization and updates for aligning articulated part information across different object states, and employs a skinning-inspired part dynamics modeling module to improve both part-mesh reconstruction and articulation learning. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets, including a new benchmark for complex multi-part objects, demonstrate that ArtGS achieves state-of-the-art performance in joint parameter estimation and part mesh reconstruction. Our approach significantly improves reconstruction quality and efficiency, especially for multi-part articulated objects. Additionally, we provide comprehensive analyses of our design choices, validating the effectiveness of each component to highlight potential areas for future improvement.

This paper introduces foundational resources and models for natural language processing (NLP) of historical Turkish, a domain that has remained underexplored in computational linguistics. We present the first named entity recognition (NER) dataset, HisTR and the first Universal Dependencies treebank, OTA-BOUN for a historical form of the Turkish language along with transformer-based models trained using these datasets for named entity recognition, dependency parsing, and part-of-speech tagging tasks. Additionally, we introduce Ottoman Text Corpus (OTC), a clean corpus of transliterated historical Turkish texts that spans a wide range of historical periods. Our experimental results show significant improvements in the computational analysis of historical Turkish, achieving promising results in tasks that require understanding of historical linguistic structures. They also highlight existing challenges, such as domain adaptation and language variations across time periods. All of the presented resources and models are made available at https://huggingface.co/bucolin to serve as a benchmark for future progress in historical Turkish NLP.

This paper explores the rapidly evolving ecosystem of publicly available AI models, and their potential implications on the security and safety landscape. As AI models become increasingly prevalent, understanding their potential risks and vulnerabilities is crucial. We review the current security and safety scenarios while highlighting challenges such as tracking issues, remediation, and the apparent absence of AI model lifecycle and ownership processes. Comprehensive strategies to enhance security and safety for both model developers and end-users are proposed. This paper aims to provide some of the foundational pieces for more standardized security, safety, and transparency in the development and operation of AI models and the larger open ecosystems and communities forming around them.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive planning abilities in single-agent embodied tasks across various domains. However, their capacity for planning and communication in multi-agent cooperation remains unclear, even though these are crucial skills for intelligent embodied agents. In this paper, we present a novel framework that utilizes LLMs for multi-agent cooperation and tests it in various embodied environments. Our framework enables embodied agents to plan, communicate, and cooperate with other embodied agents or humans to accomplish long-horizon tasks efficiently. We demonstrate that recent LLMs, such as GPT-4, can surpass strong planning-based methods and exhibit emergent effective communication using our framework without requiring fine-tuning or few-shot prompting. We also discover that LLM-based agents that communicate in natural language can earn more trust and cooperate more effectively with humans. Our research underscores the potential of LLMs for embodied AI and lays the foundation for future research in multi-agent cooperation. Videos can be found on the project website https://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/Co-LLM-Agents/.

Existing LMs struggle with proof-oriented programming due to data scarcity, which manifest in two key ways: (1) a lack of sufficient corpora for proof-oriented programming languages such as F*, and (2) the absence of large-scale, project-level proof-oriented implementations that can teach the model the intricate reasoning process when performing proof-oriented programming. We present the first on synthetic data augmentation for project level proof oriented programming for both generation and repair. Our method addresses data scarcity by synthesizing basic proof-oriented programming problems for proficiency in that language; incorporating diverse coding data for reasoning capability elicitation and creating new proofs and repair data within existing repositories. This approach enables language models to both synthesize and repair proofs for function- and repository-level code. We show that our fine-tuned 14B parameter model, PoPilot, can exceed the performance of the models that outperforms GPT-4o in project-level proof-oriented programming by 64% relative margin, and can improve GPT-4o's performance by 54% by repairing its outputs over GPT-4o's self-repair.

Open Japanese large language models (LLMs) have been trained on the Japanese portions of corpora such as CC-100, mC4, and OSCAR. However, these corpora were not created for the quality of Japanese texts. This study builds a large Japanese web corpus by extracting and refining text from the Common Crawl archive (21 snapshots of approximately 63.4 billion pages crawled between 2020 and 2023). This corpus consists of approximately 312.1 billion characters (approximately 173 million pages), which is the largest of all available training corpora for Japanese LLMs, surpassing CC-100 (approximately 25.8 billion characters), mC4 (approximately 239.7 billion characters) and OSCAR 23.10 (approximately 74 billion characters). To confirm the quality of the corpus, we performed continual pre-training on Llama 2 7B, 13B, 70B, Mistral 7B v0.1, and Mixtral 8x7B Instruct as base LLMs and gained consistent (6.6-8.1 points) improvements on Japanese benchmark datasets. We also demonstrate that the improvement on Llama 2 13B brought from the presented corpus was the largest among those from other existing corpora.

Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) have become the mainstream choice for fewshot and zeroshot learning thanks to the universality of text generation. Many users, however, do not need the broad capabilities of generative LLMs when they only want to automate a classification task. Smaller BERT-like models can also learn universal tasks, which allow them to do any text classification task without requiring fine-tuning (zeroshot classification) or to learn new tasks with only a few examples (fewshot), while being significantly more efficient than generative LLMs. This paper (1) explains how Natural Language Inference (NLI) can be used as a universal classification task that follows similar principles as instruction fine-tuning of generative LLMs, (2) provides a step-by-step guide with reusable Jupyter notebooks for building a universal classifier, and (3) shares the resulting universal classifier that is trained on 33 datasets with 389 diverse classes. Parts of the code we share has been used to train our older zeroshot classifiers that have been downloaded more than 55 million times via the Hugging Face Hub as of December 2023. Our new classifier improves zeroshot performance by 9.4%.

The sparsely-gated Mixture of Experts (MoE) can magnify a network capacity with a little computational complexity. In this work, we investigate how multi-lingual Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) networks can be scaled up with a simple routing algorithm in order to achieve better accuracy. More specifically, we apply the sparsely-gated MoE technique to two types of networks: Sequence-to-Sequence Transformer (S2S-T) and Transformer Transducer (T-T). We demonstrate through a set of ASR experiments on multiple language data that the MoE networks can reduce the relative word error rates by 16.3% and 4.6% with the S2S-T and T-T, respectively. Moreover, we thoroughly investigate the effect of the MoE on the T-T architecture in various conditions: streaming mode, non-streaming mode, the use of language ID and the label decoder with the MoE.

Many learning algorithms such as kernel machines, nearest neighbors, clustering, or anomaly detection, are based on the concept of 'distance' or 'similarity'. Before similarities are used for training an actual machine learning model, we would like to verify that they are bound to meaningful patterns in the data. In this paper, we propose to make similarities interpretable by augmenting them with an explanation in terms of input features. We develop BiLRP, a scalable and theoretically founded method to systematically decompose similarity scores on pairs of input features. Our method can be expressed as a composition of LRP explanations, which were shown in previous works to scale to highly nonlinear functions. Through an extensive set of experiments, we demonstrate that BiLRP robustly explains complex similarity models, e.g. built on VGG-16 deep neural network features. Additionally, we apply our method to an open problem in digital humanities: detailed assessment of similarity between historical documents such as astronomical tables. Here again, BiLRP provides insight and brings verifiability into a highly engineered and problem-specific similarity model.

Building Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents is a promising research direction, which simulates human interaction with computers or mobile phones to perform diverse GUI tasks. However, a major challenge in developing generalized GUI agents is the lack of sufficient trajectory data across various operating systems and applications, mainly due to the high cost of manual annotations. In this paper, we propose the TongUI framework that builds generalized GUI agents by learning from rich multimodal web tutorials. Concretely, we crawl and process online GUI tutorials (such as videos and articles) into GUI agent trajectory data, through which we produce the GUI-Net dataset containing 143K trajectory data across five operating systems and more than 200 applications. We develop the TongUI agent by fine-tuning Qwen2.5-VL-3B/7B models on GUI-Net, which show remarkable performance improvements on commonly used grounding and navigation benchmarks, outperforming baseline agents about 10\% on multiple benchmarks, showing the effectiveness of the GUI-Net dataset and underscoring the significance of our TongUI framework. We will fully open-source the code, the GUI-Net dataset, and the trained models soon.

Instruction tuning is crucial for enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve real-world tasks. Prior work has shown the effectiveness of instruction-tuning data synthesized solely from LLMs, raising a fundamental question: Do we still need human-originated signals for instruction tuning? This work answers the question affirmatively: we build state-of-the-art instruction-tuning datasets sourced from human-written instructions, by simply pairing them with LLM-generated responses. LLMs fine-tuned on our datasets consistently outperform those fine-tuned on existing ones. Our data construction approach can be easily adapted to other languages; we build datasets for Japanese and confirm that LLMs tuned with our data reach state-of-the-art performance. Analyses suggest that instruction-tuning in a new language allows LLMs to follow instructions, while the tuned models exhibit a notable lack of culture-specific knowledge in that language. The datasets and fine-tuned models will be publicly available. Our datasets, synthesized with open-weight LLMs, are openly distributed under permissive licenses, allowing for diverse use cases.

The increasing complexity of AI systems has made understanding their behavior a critical challenge. Numerous methods have been developed to attribute model behavior to three key aspects: input features, training data, and internal model components. However, these attribution methods are studied and applied rather independently, resulting in a fragmented landscape of approaches and terminology. This position paper argues that feature, data, and component attribution methods share fundamental similarities, and bridging them can benefit interpretability research. We conduct a detailed analysis of successful methods across three domains and present a unified view to demonstrate that these seemingly distinct methods employ similar approaches, such as perturbations, gradients, and linear approximations, differing primarily in their perspectives rather than core techniques. Our unified perspective enhances understanding of existing attribution methods, identifies shared concepts and challenges, makes this field more accessible to newcomers, and highlights new directions not only for attribution and interpretability but also for broader AI research, including model editing, steering, and regulation.

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrated transformative capabilities in many applications that require automatically generating responses based on human instruction. However, the major challenge for building LLMs, particularly in Indic languages, is the availability of high-quality data for building foundation LLMs. In this paper, we are proposing a large pre-train dataset in Hindi useful for the Indic language Hindi. We have collected the data span across several domains including major dialects in Hindi. The dataset contains 1.28 billion Hindi tokens. We have explained our pipeline including data collection, pre-processing, and availability for LLM pre-training. The proposed approach can be easily extended to other Indic and low-resource languages and will be available freely for LLM pre-training and LLM research purposes.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has gained increasing popularity as a promising framework for scaling up large language models (LLMs). However, training MoE from scratch in a large-scale setting still suffers from data-hungry and instability problems. Motivated by this limit, we investigate building MoE models from existing dense large language models. Specifically, based on the well-known LLaMA-2 7B model, we obtain an MoE model by: (1) Expert Construction, which partitions the parameters of original Feed-Forward Networks (FFNs) into multiple experts; (2) Continual Pre-training, which further trains the transformed MoE model and additional gate networks. In this paper, we comprehensively explore different methods for expert construction and various data sampling strategies for continual pre-training. After these stages, our LLaMA-MoE models could maintain language abilities and route the input tokens to specific experts with part of the parameters activated. Empirically, by training 200B tokens, LLaMA-MoE-3.5B models significantly outperform dense models that contain similar activation parameters. The source codes and models are available at https://github.com/pjlab-sys4nlp/llama-moe .

Document-level Relation Extraction (DocRE) is the task of extracting all semantic relationships from a document. While studies have been conducted on English DocRE, limited attention has been given to DocRE in non-English languages. This work delves into effectively utilizing existing English resources to promote DocRE studies in non-English languages, with Japanese as the representative case. As an initial attempt, we construct a dataset by transferring an English dataset to Japanese. However, models trained on such a dataset suffer from low recalls. We investigate the error cases and attribute the failure to different surface structures and semantics of documents translated from English and those written by native speakers. We thus switch to explore if the transferred dataset can assist human annotation on Japanese documents. In our proposal, annotators edit relation predictions from a model trained on the transferred dataset. Quantitative analysis shows that relation recommendations suggested by the model help reduce approximately 50% of the human edit steps compared with the previous approach. Experiments quantify the performance of existing DocRE models on our collected dataset, portraying the challenges of Japanese and cross-lingual DocRE.

Maritime transportation is paramount in achieving global economic growth, entailing concurrent ecological obligations in sustainability and safeguarding endangered marine species, most notably preserving large whale populations. In this regard, the Automatic Identification System (AIS) data plays a significant role by offering real-time streaming data on vessel movement, allowing enhanced traffic monitoring. This study explores using AIS data to prevent vessel-to-whale collisions by forecasting long-term vessel trajectories from engineered AIS data sequences. For such a task, we have developed an encoder-decoder model architecture using Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Networks (Bi-LSTM) to predict the next 12 hours of vessel trajectories using 1 to 3 hours of AIS data as input. We feed the model with probabilistic features engineered from historical AIS data that refer to each trajectory's potential route and destination. The model then predicts the vessel's trajectory, considering these additional features by leveraging convolutional layers for spatial feature learning and a position-aware attention mechanism that increases the importance of recent timesteps of a sequence during temporal feature learning. The probabilistic features have an F1 Score of approximately 85% and 75% for each feature type, respectively, demonstrating their effectiveness in augmenting information to the neural network. We test our model on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, a region known to be the habitat of North Atlantic Right Whales (NARW). Our model achieved a high R2 score of over 98% using various techniques and features. It stands out among other approaches as it can make complex decisions during turnings and path selection. Our study highlights the potential of data engineering and trajectory forecasting models for marine life species preservation.

The advancements in data acquisition, storage, and processing techniques have resulted in the rapid growth of heterogeneous medical data. Integrating radiological scans, histopathology images, and molecular information with clinical data is essential for developing a holistic understanding of the disease and optimizing treatment. The need for integrating data from multiple sources is further pronounced in complex diseases such as cancer for enabling precision medicine and personalized treatments. This work proposes Multimodal Integration of Oncology Data System (MINDS) - a flexible, scalable, and cost-effective metadata framework for efficiently fusing disparate data from public sources such as the Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC) into an interconnected, patient-centric framework. MINDS offers an interface for exploring relationships across data types and building cohorts for developing large-scale multimodal machine learning models. By harmonizing multimodal data, MINDS aims to potentially empower researchers with greater analytical ability to uncover diagnostic and prognostic insights and enable evidence-based personalized care. MINDS tracks granular end-to-end data provenance, ensuring reproducibility and transparency. The cloud-native architecture of MINDS can handle exponential data growth in a secure, cost-optimized manner while ensuring substantial storage optimization, replication avoidance, and dynamic access capabilities. Auto-scaling, access controls, and other mechanisms guarantee pipelines' scalability and security. MINDS overcomes the limitations of existing biomedical data silos via an interoperable metadata-driven approach that represents a pivotal step toward the future of oncology data integration.

Estimating the transferability of publicly available pretrained models to a target task has assumed an important place for transfer learning tasks in recent years. Existing efforts propose metrics that allow a user to choose one model from a pool of pre-trained models without having to fine-tune each model individually and identify one explicitly. With the growth in the number of available pre-trained models and the popularity of model ensembles, it also becomes essential to study the transferability of multiple-source models for a given target task. The few existing efforts study transferability in such multi-source ensemble settings using just the outputs of the classification layer and neglect possible domain or task mismatch. Moreover, they overlook the most important factor while selecting the source models, viz., the cohesiveness factor between them, which can impact the performance and confidence in the prediction of the ensemble. To address these gaps, we propose a novel Optimal tranSport-based suBmOdular tRaNsferability metric (OSBORN) to estimate the transferability of an ensemble of models to a downstream task. OSBORN collectively accounts for image domain difference, task difference, and cohesiveness of models in the ensemble to provide reliable estimates of transferability. We gauge the performance of OSBORN on both image classification and semantic segmentation tasks. Our setup includes 28 source datasets, 11 target datasets, 5 model architectures, and 2 pre-training methods. We benchmark our method against current state-of-the-art metrics MS-LEEP and E-LEEP, and outperform them consistently using the proposed approach.

Matrix manifolds, such as manifolds of Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices and Grassmann manifolds, appear in many applications. Recently, by applying the theory of gyrogroups and gyrovector spaces that is a powerful framework for studying hyperbolic geometry, some works have attempted to build principled generalizations of Euclidean neural networks on matrix manifolds. However, due to the lack of many concepts in gyrovector spaces for the considered manifolds, e.g., the inner product and gyroangles, techniques and mathematical tools provided by these works are still limited compared to those developed for studying hyperbolic geometry. In this paper, we generalize some notions in gyrovector spaces for SPD and Grassmann manifolds, and propose new models and layers for building neural networks on these manifolds. We show the effectiveness of our approach in two applications, i.e., human action recognition and knowledge graph completion.

The existing search tools for exploring the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) can be quite rich and empowering (e.g., similar and trending operators), but researchers are not yet allowed to fully leverage semantic search. For example, a query for "results from the Planck mission" should be able to distinguish between all the various meanings of Planck (person, mission, constant, institutions and more) without further clarification from the user. At ADS, we are applying modern machine learning and natural language processing techniques to our dataset of recent astronomy publications to train astroBERT, a deeply contextual language model based on research at Google. Using astroBERT, we aim to enrich the ADS dataset and improve its discoverability, and in particular we are developing our own named entity recognition tool. We present here our preliminary results and lessons learned.

Building open-domain chatbots is a challenging area for machine learning research. While prior work has shown that scaling neural models in the number of parameters and the size of the data they are trained on gives improved results, we show that other ingredients are important for a high-performing chatbot. Good conversation requires a number of skills that an expert conversationalist blends in a seamless way: providing engaging talking points and listening to their partners, and displaying knowledge, empathy and personality appropriately, while maintaining a consistent persona. We show that large scale models can learn these skills when given appropriate training data and choice of generation strategy. We build variants of these recipes with 90M, 2.7B and 9.4B parameter models, and make our models and code publicly available. Human evaluations show our best models are superior to existing approaches in multi-turn dialogue in terms of engagingness and humanness measurements. We then discuss the limitations of this work by analyzing failure cases of our models.

Psychological research results have confirmed that people can have different emotional reactions to different visual stimuli. Several papers have been published on the problem of visual emotion analysis. In particular, attempts have been made to analyze and predict people's emotional reaction towards images. To this end, different kinds of hand-tuned features are proposed. The results reported on several carefully selected and labeled small image data sets have confirmed the promise of such features. While the recent successes of many computer vision related tasks are due to the adoption of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), visual emotion analysis has not achieved the same level of success. This may be primarily due to the unavailability of confidently labeled and relatively large image data sets for visual emotion analysis. In this work, we introduce a new data set, which started from 3+ million weakly labeled images of different emotions and ended up 30 times as large as the current largest publicly available visual emotion data set. We hope that this data set encourages further research on visual emotion analysis. We also perform extensive benchmarking analyses on this large data set using the state of the art methods including CNNs.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have emerged as a promising solution for universal embedding tasks, yet adapting their generative nature for discriminative representation learning remains a significant challenge. The dominant paradigm of large-scale contrastive pre-training suffers from critical inefficiencies, including prohibitive computational costs and a failure to leverage the intrinsic, instruction-following capabilities of MLLMs. To overcome these limitations, we propose an efficient framework for universal multimodal embeddings, which bridges this gap by centering on two synergistic components. First, our hierarchical embedding prompt template employs a two-level instruction architecture that forces the model to produce discriminative representations. Building on this strong foundation, our second component, self-aware hard negative sampling, redefines the fine-tuning process by leveraging the model's own understanding to efficiently mine challenging negatives while actively filtering out potential false negatives. Our comprehensive experiments show that our hierarchical prompt achieves zero-shot performance competitive with contrastively trained baselines and enhances the fine-tuning process by lifting a simple in-batch negative baseline by 4.8 points on the MMEB benchmark. We further boost the performance via our self-aware hard negative sampling, achieving the state-of-the-art performance without the contrative pre-training. Our work presents an effective and efficient pathway to adapt MLLMs for universal embedding tasks, significantly reducing training time.

Integrating robotics into everyday scenarios like tutoring or physical training requires robots capable of adaptive, socially engaging, and goal-oriented interactions. While Large Language Models show promise in human-like communication, their standalone use is hindered by memory constraints and contextual incoherence. This work presents a multimodal, cognitively inspired framework that enhances LLM-based autonomous decision-making in social and task-oriented Human-Robot Interaction. Specifically, we develop an LLM-based agent for a robot trainer, balancing social conversation with task guidance and goal-driven motivation. To further enhance autonomy and personalization, we introduce a memory system for selecting, storing and retrieving experiences, facilitating generalized reasoning based on knowledge built across different interactions. A preliminary HRI user study and offline experiments with a synthetic dataset validate our approach, demonstrating the system's ability to manage complex interactions, autonomously drive training tasks, and build and retrieve contextual memories, advancing socially intelligent robotics.

Simulation agents are essential for designing and testing systems that interact with humans, such as autonomous vehicles (AVs). These agents serve various purposes, from benchmarking AV performance to stress-testing the system's limits, but all use cases share a key requirement: reliability. A simulation agent should behave as intended by the designer, minimizing unintended actions like collisions that can compromise the signal-to-noise ratio of analyses. As a foundation for reliable sim agents, we propose scaling self-play to thousands of scenarios on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset under semi-realistic limits on human perception and control. Training from scratch on a single GPU, our agents nearly solve the full training set within a day. They generalize effectively to unseen test scenes, achieving a 99.8% goal completion rate with less than 0.8% combined collision and off-road incidents across 10,000 held-out scenarios. Beyond in-distribution generalization, our agents show partial robustness to out-of-distribution scenes and can be fine-tuned in minutes to reach near-perfect performance in those cases. Demonstrations of agent behaviors can be found at this link. We open-source both the pre-trained agents and the complete code base. Demonstrations of agent behaviors can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/reliable-sim-agents.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are pivotal in image classification tasks due to their robust feature extraction capabilities. However, their high computational and memory requirements pose challenges for deployment in resource-constrained environments. This paper introduces a methodology to construct lightweight CNNs while maintaining competitive accuracy. The approach integrates two stages of training; dual-input-output model and transfer learning with progressive unfreezing. The dual-input-output model train on original and augmented datasets, enhancing robustness. Progressive unfreezing is applied to the unified model to optimize pre-learned features during fine-tuning, enabling faster convergence and improved model accuracy. The methodology was evaluated on three benchmark datasets; handwritten digit MNIST, fashion MNIST, and CIFAR-10. The proposed model achieved a state-of-the-art accuracy of 99% on the handwritten digit MNIST and 89% on fashion MNIST, with only 14,862 parameters and a model size of 0.17 MB. While performance on CIFAR-10 was comparatively lower (65% with less than 20,00 parameters), the results highlight the scalability of this method. The final model demonstrated fast inference times and low latency, making it suitable for real-time applications. Future directions include exploring advanced augmentation techniques, improving architectural scalability for complex datasets, and extending the methodology to tasks beyond classification. This research underscores the potential for creating efficient, scalable, and task-specific CNNs for diverse applications.

Question answering systems provide short, precise, and specific answers to questions. So far, many robust question answering systems have been developed for English, while some languages with fewer resources, like Persian, have few numbers of standard dataset. In this study, a comprehensive open-domain dataset is presented for Persian. This dataset is called NextQuAD and has 7,515 contexts, including 23,918 questions and answers. Then, a BERT-based question answering model has been applied to this dataset using two pre-trained language models, including ParsBERT and XLM-RoBERTa. The results of these two models have been ensembled using mean logits. Evaluation on the development set shows 0.95 Exact Match (EM) and 0.97 Fl_score. Also, to compare the NextQuAD with other Persian datasets, our trained model on the NextQuAD, is evaluated on two other datasets named PersianQA and ParSQuAD. Comparisons show that the proposed model increased EM by 0.39 and 0.14 respectively in PersianQA and ParSQuAD-manual, while a slight EM decline of 0.007 happened in ParSQuAD-automatic.

Data de-identification makes it possible to glean insights from data while preserving user privacy. The use of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) allow for the execution of de-identification applications on the cloud without the need for a user to trust the third-party application provider. In this paper, we present SPIDEr - Secure Pipeline for Information De-Identification with End-to-End Encryption, our implementation of an end-to-end encrypted data de-identification pipeline. SPIDEr supports classical anonymisation techniques such as suppression, pseudonymisation, generalisation, and aggregation, as well as techniques that offer a formal privacy guarantee such as k-anonymisation and differential privacy. To enable scalability and improve performance on constrained TEE hardware, we enable batch processing of data for differential privacy computations. We present our design of the control flows for end-to-end secure execution of de-identification operations within a TEE. As part of the control flow for running SPIDEr within the TEE, we perform attestation, a process that verifies that the software binaries were properly instantiated on a known, trusted platform.

Specializing LLMs in various domain-specific tasks has emerged as a critical step towards achieving high performance. However, the construction and annotation of datasets in specific domains are always very costly. Apart from using superior and expensive closed-source LLM APIs to construct datasets, some open-source models have become strong enough to handle dataset construction in many scenarios. Thus, we present a family of data augmentation models designed to significantly improve the efficiency for model fine-tuning. These models, trained based on sufficiently small LLMs, support key functionalities with low inference costs: instruction expansion, instruction refinement, and instruction-response pair expansion. To fulfill this goal, we first construct an automatic data collection system with seed datasets generated from both public repositories and our in-house datasets. This system leverages powerful LLMs to expand, refine and re-write the instructions and responses, incorporating quality assessment techniques. Following this, we introduce the training process of our models, which effectively distills task-solving and text synthesis abilities from teacher LLMs. Finally, we demonstrate how we integrate these functionalities into a machine learning platform to support low-cost LLM fine-tuning from both dataset preparation and training perspectives for users. Experiments and an application study prove the effectiveness of our approach.

This paper is an opinion paper that looks at the future of computing in the age of Generative \& Agentic AI. Current software systems are static and inflexible, leading to significant challenges in translating human goals into computational actions. "Living software systems" powered by generative AI offer a solution to this fundamental problem in computing. Traditional software development involves multiple layers of imperfect translation, from business requirements to code, resulting in rigid systems that struggle to adapt to changing user needs and contexts. Generative AI, particularly large language models, can serve as a universal translator between human intent and computer operations. This approach enables the creation of more flexible, context-aware systems that can dynamically evolve to meet user goals. Two pathways for implementing living software systems are explored: using generative AI to accelerate traditional software development, and leveraging agentic AI to create truly adaptive systems. New skills like Prompt Engineering are necessary. By reimagining software as a living, adaptable entity, we can create computing interfaces that are more intuitive, powerful, and responsive to human needs.

The rapid growth in the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI Agents as part of software development and deployment is revolutionizing the information technology landscape. While code generation receives significant attention, a higher-impact application lies in using AI agents for operational resilience of cloud services, which currently require significant human effort and domain knowledge. There is a growing interest in AI for IT Operations (AIOps) which aims to automate complex operational tasks, like fault localization and root cause analysis, thereby reducing human intervention and customer impact. However, achieving the vision of autonomous and self-healing clouds though AIOps is hampered by the lack of standardized frameworks for building, evaluating, and improving AIOps agents. This vision paper lays the groundwork for such a framework by first framing the requirements and then discussing design decisions that satisfy them. We also propose AIOpsLab, a prototype implementation leveraging agent-cloud-interface that orchestrates an application, injects real-time faults using chaos engineering, and interfaces with an agent to localize and resolve the faults. We report promising results and lay the groundwork to build a modular and robust framework for building, evaluating, and improving agents for autonomous clouds.

State-of-the-art results in large language models (LLMs) often rely on scale, which becomes computationally expensive. This has sparked a research agenda to reduce these models' parameter counts and computational costs without significantly impacting their performance. Our study focuses on transformer-based LLMs, specifically targeting the computationally intensive feedforward networks (FFNs), which are less studied than attention blocks. We consider three structured linear parameterizations of the FFN using efficient low-rank and block-diagonal matrices. In contrast to many previous works that examined these approximations, our study i) explores these structures from a training-from-scratch perspective, ii) scales up to 1.3B parameters, and iii) is conducted within recent Transformer-based LLMs rather than convolutional architectures. We demonstrate that these structures can lead to actual computational gains in various scenarios, including online decoding when using a pre-merge technique. Additionally, we propose a novel training regime, called self-guided training, aimed at improving the poor training dynamics that these approximations exhibit when used from initialization. Interestingly, the scaling performance of structured matrices is explored, revealing steeper curves in scaling training FLOPs, along with a favorable scaling trend in the overtraining regime. Specifically, we show that wide and structured networks can utilize training FLOPs more efficiently, with fewer parameters and lower loss than dense models at their optimal trade-off. Our code is available at https://github.com/CLAIRE-Labo/StructuredFFN/tree/main.

We present the "Spanish Built Factual Freectianary 2.0" (Spanish-BFF-2) as the second iteration of an AI-generated Spanish dictionary. Previously, we developed the inaugural version of this unique free dictionary employing GPT-3. In this study, we aim to improve the dictionary by using GPT-4-turbo instead. Furthermore, we explore improvements made to the initial version and compare the performance of both models.

The translation of gender-neutral person-referring terms (e.g., the students) is often non-trivial. Translating from English into German poses an interesting case -- in German, person-referring nouns are usually gender-specific, and if the gender of the referent(s) is unknown or diverse, the generic masculine (die Studenten (m.)) is commonly used. This solution, however, reduces the visibility of other genders, such as women and non-binary people. To counteract gender discrimination, a societal movement towards using gender-fair language exists (e.g., by adopting neosystems). However, gender-fair German is currently barely supported in machine translation (MT), requiring post-editing or manual translations. We address this research gap by studying gender-fair language in English-to-German MT. Concretely, we enrich a community-created gender-fair language dictionary and sample multi-sentence test instances from encyclopedic text and parliamentary speeches. Using these novel resources, we conduct the first benchmark study involving two commercial systems and six neural MT models for translating words in isolation and natural contexts across two domains. Our findings show that most systems produce mainly masculine forms and rarely gender-neutral variants, highlighting the need for future research. We release code and data at https://github.com/g8a9/building-bridges-gender-fair-german-mt.

Neural Architecture Search is a costly practice. The fact that a search space can span a vast number of design choices with each architecture evaluation taking nontrivial overhead makes it hard for an algorithm to sufficiently explore candidate networks. In this paper, we propose AutoBuild, a scheme which learns to align the latent embeddings of operations and architecture modules with the ground-truth performance of the architectures they appear in. By doing so, AutoBuild is capable of assigning interpretable importance scores to architecture modules, such as individual operation features and larger macro operation sequences such that high-performance neural networks can be constructed without any need for search. Through experiments performed on state-of-the-art image classification, segmentation, and Stable Diffusion models, we show that by mining a relatively small set of evaluated architectures, AutoBuild can learn to build high-quality architectures directly or help to reduce search space to focus on relevant areas, finding better architectures that outperform both the original labeled ones and ones found by search baselines. Code available at https://github.com/Ascend-Research/AutoBuild

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become more integrated into our daily lives, it is crucial to identify and mitigate their risks, especially when the risks can have profound impacts on human users and societies. Guardrails, which filter the inputs or outputs of LLMs, have emerged as a core safeguarding technology. This position paper takes a deep look at current open-source solutions (Llama Guard, Nvidia NeMo, Guardrails AI), and discusses the challenges and the road towards building more complete solutions. Drawing on robust evidence from previous research, we advocate for a systematic approach to construct guardrails for LLMs, based on comprehensive consideration of diverse contexts across various LLMs applications. We propose employing socio-technical methods through collaboration with a multi-disciplinary team to pinpoint precise technical requirements, exploring advanced neural-symbolic implementations to embrace the complexity of the requirements, and developing verification and testing to ensure the utmost quality of the final product.

Question answering (QA) is the task of answering questions posed in natural language with free-form natural language answers extracted from a given passage. In the OpenQA variant, only a question text is given, and the system must retrieve relevant passages from an unstructured knowledge source and use them to provide answers, which is the case in the mainstream QA systems on the Web. QA systems currently are mostly limited to the English language due to the lack of large-scale labeled QA datasets in non-English languages. In this paper, we show that effective, low-cost OpenQA systems can be developed for low-resource contexts. The key ingredients are (1) weak supervision using machine-translated labeled datasets and (2) a relevant unstructured knowledge source in the target language context. Furthermore, we show that only a few hundred gold assessment examples are needed to reliably evaluate these systems. We apply our method to Turkish as a challenging case study, since English and Turkish are typologically very distinct and Turkish has limited resources for QA. We present SQuAD-TR, a machine translation of SQuAD2.0, and we build our OpenQA system by adapting ColBERT-QA and retraining it over Turkish resources and SQuAD-TR using two versions of Wikipedia dumps spanning two years. We obtain a performance improvement of 24-32% in the Exact Match (EM) score and 22-29% in the F1 score compared to the BM25-based and DPR-based baseline QA reader models. Our results show that SQuAD-TR makes OpenQA feasible for Turkish, which we hope encourages researchers to build OpenQA systems in other low-resource languages. We make all the code, models, and the dataset publicly available at https://github.com/boun-tabi/SQuAD-TR.

A race is underway to embed advanced AI capabilities into products. These product copilots enable users to ask questions in natural language and receive relevant responses that are specific to the user's context. In fact, virtually every large technology company is looking to add these capabilities to their software products. However, for most software engineers, this is often their first encounter with integrating AI-powered technology. Furthermore, software engineering processes and tools have not caught up with the challenges and scale involved with building AI-powered applications. In this work, we present the findings of an interview study with 26 professional software engineers responsible for building product copilots at various companies. From our interviews, we found pain points at every step of the engineering process and the challenges that strained existing development practices. We then conducted group brainstorming sessions to collaborative on opportunities and tool designs for the broader software engineering community.

Building LLMs for languages other than English is in great demand due to the unavailability and performance of multilingual LLMs, such as understanding the local context. The problem is critical for low-resource languages due to the need for instruction sets. In a multilingual country like India, there is a need for LLMs supporting Indic languages to provide generative AI and LLM-based technologies and services to its citizens. This paper presents our approach of i) generating a large Odia instruction set, including domain knowledge data suitable for LLM fine-tuning, and ii) building a Llama2-finetuned model tailored for enhanced performance in the Odia domain. The proposed work will help researchers build an instruction set and LLM, particularly for Indic languages. We will release the model and instruction set for the public for research and noncommercial purposes.

Building open-ended learning agents involves challenges in pre-trained language model (LLM) and reinforcement learning (RL) approaches. LLMs struggle with context-specific real-time interactions, while RL methods face efficiency issues for exploration. To this end, we propose OpenContra, a co-training framework that cooperates LLMs and GRL to construct an open-ended agent capable of comprehending arbitrary human instructions. The implementation comprises two stages: (1) fine-tuning an LLM to translate human instructions into structured goals, and curriculum training a goal-conditioned RL policy to execute arbitrary goals; (2) collaborative training to make the LLM and RL policy learn to adapt each, achieving open-endedness on instruction space. We conduct experiments on Contra, a battle royale FPS game with a complex and vast goal space. The results show that an agent trained with OpenContra comprehends arbitrary human instructions and completes goals with a high completion ratio, which proves that OpenContra may be the first practical solution for constructing open-ended embodied agents.

Recently, Stitchable Neural Networks (SN-Net) is proposed to stitch some pre-trained networks for quickly building numerous networks with different complexity and performance trade-offs. In this way, the burdens of designing or training the variable-sized networks, which can be used in application scenarios with diverse resource constraints, are alleviated. However, SN-Net still faces a few challenges. 1) Stitching from multiple independently pre-trained anchors introduces high storage resource consumption. 2) SN-Net faces challenges to build smaller models for low resource constraints. 3). SN-Net uses an unlearned initialization method for stitch layers, limiting the final performance. To overcome these challenges, motivated by the recently proposed Learngene framework, we propose a novel method called Learngene Pool. Briefly, Learngene distills the critical knowledge from a large pre-trained model into a small part (termed as learngene) and then expands this small part into a few variable-sized models. In our proposed method, we distill one pretrained large model into multiple small models whose network blocks are used as learngene instances to construct the learngene pool. Since only one large model is used, we do not need to store more large models as SN-Net and after distilling, smaller learngene instances can be created to build small models to satisfy low resource constraints. We also insert learnable transformation matrices between the instances to stitch them into variable-sized models to improve the performance of these models. Exhaustive experiments have been implemented and the results validate the effectiveness of the proposed Learngene Pool compared with SN-Net.

Building AIs with adaptive behaviors in human-AI cooperation stands as a pivotal focus in AGI research. Current methods for developing cooperative agents predominantly rely on learning-based methods, where policy generalization heavily hinges on past interactions with specific teammates. These approaches constrain the agent's capacity to recalibrate its strategy when confronted with novel teammates. We propose ProAgent, a novel framework that harnesses large language models (LLMs) to fashion a proactive agent empowered with the ability to anticipate teammates' forthcoming decisions and formulate enhanced plans for itself. ProAgent excels at cooperative reasoning with the capacity to dynamically adapt its behavior to enhance collaborative efforts with teammates. Moreover, the ProAgent framework exhibits a high degree of modularity and interpretability, facilitating seamless integration to address a wide array of coordination scenarios. Experimental evaluations conducted within the framework of Overcook-AI unveil the remarkable performance superiority of ProAgent, outperforming five methods based on self-play and population-based training in cooperation with AI agents. Further, when cooperating with human proxy models, its performance exhibits an average improvement exceeding 10\% compared to the current state-of-the-art, COLE. The advancement was consistently observed across diverse scenarios involving interactions with both AI agents of varying characteristics and human counterparts. These findings inspire future research for human-robot collaborations. For a hands-on demonstration, please visit https://pku-proagent.github.io.

Although AI systems have been applied in various fields and achieved impressive performance, their safety and reliability are still a big concern. This is especially important for safety-critical tasks. One shared characteristic of these critical tasks is their risk sensitivity, where small mistakes can cause big consequences and even endanger life. There are several factors that could be guidelines for the successful deployment of AI systems in sensitive tasks: (i) failure detection and out-of-distribution (OOD) detection; (ii) overfitting identification; (iii) uncertainty quantification for predictions; (iv) robustness to data perturbations. These factors are also challenges of current AI systems, which are major blocks for building safe and reliable AI. Specifically, the current AI algorithms are unable to identify common causes for failure detection. Furthermore, additional techniques are required to quantify the quality of predictions. All these contribute to inaccurate uncertainty quantification, which lowers trust in predictions. Hence obtaining accurate model uncertainty quantification and its further improvement are challenging. To address these issues, many techniques have been proposed, such as regularization methods and learning strategies. As vision and language are the most typical data type and have many open source benchmark datasets, this thesis will focus on vision-language data processing for tasks like classification, image captioning, and vision question answering. In this thesis, we aim to build a safeguard by further developing current techniques to ensure the accurate model uncertainty for safety-critical tasks.

Neural machine translation (NMT) has achieved great successes with large datasets, so NMT is more premised on high-resource languages. This continuously underpins the low resource languages such as Luganda due to the lack of high-quality parallel corpora, so even 'Google translate' does not serve Luganda at the time of this writing. In this paper, we build a parallel corpus with 41,070 pairwise sentences for Luganda and English which is based on three different open-sourced corpora. Then, we train NMT models with hyper-parameter search on the dataset. Experiments gave us a BLEU score of 21.28 from Luganda to English and 17.47 from English to Luganda. Some translation examples show high quality of the translation. We believe that our model is the first Luganda-English NMT model. The bilingual dataset we built will be available to the public.

Building Natural Language Understanding (NLU) capabilities for Indic languages, which have a collective speaker base of more than one billion speakers is absolutely crucial. In this work, we aim to improve the NLU capabilities of Indic languages by making contributions along 3 important axes (i) monolingual corpora (ii) NLU testsets (iii) multilingual LLMs focusing on Indic languages. Specifically, we curate the largest monolingual corpora, IndicCorp, with 20.9B tokens covering 24 languages from 4 language families - a 2.3x increase over prior work, while supporting 12 additional languages. Next, we create a human-supervised benchmark, IndicXTREME, consisting of nine diverse NLU tasks covering 20 languages. Across languages and tasks, IndicXTREME contains a total of 105 evaluation sets, of which 52 are new contributions to the literature. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort towards creating a standard benchmark for Indic languages that aims to test the multilingual zero-shot capabilities of pretrained language models. Finally, we train IndicBERT v2, a state-of-the-art model supporting all the languages. Averaged across languages and tasks, the model achieves an absolute improvement of 2 points over a strong baseline. The data and models are available at https://github.com/AI4Bharat/IndicBERT.

For companies with customer service, mapping intents inside their conversational data is crucial in building applications based on natural language understanding (NLU). Nevertheless, there is no established automated technique to gather the intents from noisy online chats or voice transcripts. Simple clustering approaches are not suited to intent-sparse dialogues. To solve this intent-landscape task, we propose an unsupervised pipeline that extracts the intents and the taxonomy of intents from real-world dialogues. Our pipeline mines intent-span candidates with an extractive Question-Answering Electra model and leverages sentence embeddings to apply a low-level density clustering followed by a top-level hierarchical clustering. Our results demonstrate the generalization ability of an ELECTRA large model fine-tuned on the SQuAD2 dataset to understand dialogues. With the right prompting question, this model achieves a rate of linguistic validation on intent spans beyond 85%. We furthermore reconstructed the intent schemes of five domains from the MultiDoGo dataset with an average recall of 94.3%.

Dialogue systems without consistent responses are not fascinating. In this study, we build a dialogue system that can respond based on a given character setting (persona) to bring consistency. Considering the trend of the rapidly increasing scale of language models, we propose an approach that uses prompt-tuning, which has low learning costs, on pre-trained large-scale language models. The results of automatic and manual evaluations in English and Japanese show that it is possible to build a dialogue system with more natural and personalized responses using less computational resources than fine-tuning.

Recent open-domain dialogue models have brought numerous breakthroughs. However, building a chat system is not scalable since it often requires a considerable volume of human-human dialogue data, especially when enforcing features such as persona, style, or safety. In this work, we study the challenge of imposing roles on open-domain dialogue systems, with the goal of making the systems maintain consistent roles while conversing naturally with humans. To accomplish this, the system must satisfy a role specification that includes certain conditions on the stated features as well as a system policy on whether or not certain types of utterances are allowed. For this, we propose an efficient data collection framework leveraging in-context few-shot learning of large-scale language models for building role-satisfying dialogue dataset from scratch. We then compare various architectures for open-domain dialogue systems in terms of meeting role specifications while maintaining conversational abilities. Automatic and human evaluations show that our models return few out-of-bounds utterances, keeping competitive performance on general metrics. We release a Korean dialogue dataset we built for further research.

Mahjong is a popular multi-player imperfect-information game developed in China in the late 19th-century, with some very challenging features for AI research. Sanma, being a 3-player variant of the Japanese Riichi Mahjong, possesses unique characteristics including fewer tiles and, consequently, a more aggressive playing style. It is thus challenging and of great research interest in its own right, but has not yet been explored. In this paper, we present Meowjong, an AI for Sanma using deep reinforcement learning. We define an informative and compact 2-dimensional data structure for encoding the observable information in a Sanma game. We pre-train 5 convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for Sanma's 5 actions -- discard, Pon, Kan, Kita and Riichi, and enhance the major action's model, namely the discard model, via self-play reinforcement learning using the Monte Carlo policy gradient method. Meowjong's models achieve test accuracies comparable with AIs for 4-player Mahjong through supervised learning, and gain a significant further enhancement from reinforcement learning. Being the first ever AI in Sanma, we claim that Meowjong stands as a state-of-the-art in this game.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs), such as BERT and GPT, have revolutionized the field of NLP, not only in the general domain but also in the biomedical domain. Most prior efforts in building biomedical PLMs have resorted simply to domain adaptation and focused mainly on English. In this work we introduce eHealth, a Chinese biomedical PLM built from scratch with a new pre-training framework. This new framework pre-trains eHealth as a discriminator through both token- and sequence-level discrimination. The former is to detect input tokens corrupted by a generator and recover their original identities from plausible candidates, while the latter is to further distinguish corruptions of a same original sequence from those of others. As such, eHealth can learn language semantics at both token and sequence levels. Extensive experiments on 11 Chinese biomedical language understanding tasks of various forms verify the effectiveness and superiority of our approach. We release the pre-trained model at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/Research/tree/master/KG/eHealth and will also release the code later.

The large amount of data available in social media, forums and websites motivates researches in several areas of Natural Language Processing, such as sentiment analysis. The popularity of the area due to its subjective and semantic characteristics motivates research on novel methods and approaches for classification. Hence, there is a high demand for datasets on different domains and different languages. This paper introduces TweetSentBR, a sentiment corpora for Brazilian Portuguese manually annotated with 15.000 sentences on TV show domain. The sentences were labeled in three classes (positive, neutral and negative) by seven annotators, following literature guidelines for ensuring reliability on the annotation. We also ran baseline experiments on polarity classification using three machine learning methods, reaching 80.99% on F-Measure and 82.06% on accuracy in binary classification, and 59.85% F-Measure and 64.62% on accuracy on three point classification.

We show that a simple gravitational theory can provide a holographically dual description of a superconductor. There is a critical temperature, below which a charged condensate forms via a second order phase transition and the (DC) conductivity becomes infinite. The frequency dependent conductivity develops a gap determined by the condensate. We find evidence that the condensate consists of pairs of quasiparticles.

While ``instruction-tuned" generative large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated an impressive ability to generalize to new tasks, the training phases heavily rely on large amounts of diverse and high-quality instruction data (such as ChatGPT and GPT-4). Unfortunately, acquiring high-quality data, especially when it comes to human-written data, can pose significant challenges both in terms of cost and accessibility. Moreover, concerns related to privacy can further limit access to such data, making the process of obtaining it a complex and nuanced undertaking. Consequently, this hinders the generality of the tuned models and may restrict their effectiveness in certain contexts. To tackle this issue, our study introduces a new approach called Federated Instruction Tuning (FedIT), which leverages federated learning (FL) as the learning framework for the instruction tuning of LLMs. This marks the first exploration of FL-based instruction tuning for LLMs. This is especially important since text data is predominantly generated by end users. Therefore, it is imperative to design and adapt FL approaches to effectively leverage these users' diverse instructions stored on local devices, while preserving privacy and ensuring data security. In the current paper, by conducting widely used GPT-4 auto-evaluation, we demonstrate that by exploiting the heterogeneous and diverse sets of instructions on the client's end with the proposed framework FedIT, we improved the performance of LLMs compared to centralized training with only limited local instructions. Further, in this paper, we developed a Github repository named Shepherd. This repository offers a foundational framework for exploring federated fine-tuning of LLMs using heterogeneous instructions across diverse categories.

Vision-Language (VL) models with the Two-Tower architecture have dominated visual-language representation learning in recent years. Current VL models either use lightweight uni-modal encoders and learn to extract, align and fuse both modalities simultaneously in a deep cross-modal encoder, or feed the last-layer uni-modal representations from the deep pre-trained uni-modal encoders into the top cross-modal encoder. Both approaches potentially restrict vision-language representation learning and limit model performance. In this paper, we propose BridgeTower, which introduces multiple bridge layers that build a connection between the top layers of uni-modal encoders and each layer of the cross-modal encoder. This enables effective bottom-up cross-modal alignment and fusion between visual and textual representations of different semantic levels of pre-trained uni-modal encoders in the cross-modal encoder. Pre-trained with only 4M images, BridgeTower achieves state-of-the-art performance on various downstream vision-language tasks. In particular, on the VQAv2 test-std set, BridgeTower achieves an accuracy of 78.73%, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art model METER by 1.09% with the same pre-training data and almost negligible additional parameters and computational costs. Notably, when further scaling the model, BridgeTower achieves an accuracy of 81.15%, surpassing models that are pre-trained on orders-of-magnitude larger datasets. Code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/microsoft/BridgeTower.

Autonomous agents have made great strides in specialist domains like Atari games and Go. However, they typically learn tabula rasa in isolated environments with limited and manually conceived objectives, thus failing to generalize across a wide spectrum of tasks and capabilities. Inspired by how humans continually learn and adapt in the open world, we advocate a trinity of ingredients for building generalist agents: 1) an environment that supports a multitude of tasks and goals, 2) a large-scale database of multimodal knowledge, and 3) a flexible and scalable agent architecture. We introduce MineDojo, a new framework built on the popular Minecraft game that features a simulation suite with thousands of diverse open-ended tasks and an internet-scale knowledge base with Minecraft videos, tutorials, wiki pages, and forum discussions. Using MineDojo's data, we propose a novel agent learning algorithm that leverages large pre-trained video-language models as a learned reward function. Our agent is able to solve a variety of open-ended tasks specified in free-form language without any manually designed dense shaping reward. We open-source the simulation suite, knowledge bases, algorithm implementation, and pretrained models (https://minedojo.org) to promote research towards the goal of generally capable embodied agents.

Summarization datasets are often assembled either by scraping naturally occurring public-domain summaries -- which are nearly always in difficult-to-work-with technical domains -- or by using approximate heuristics to extract them from everyday text -- which frequently yields unfaithful summaries. In this work, we turn to a slower but more straightforward approach to developing summarization benchmark data: We hire highly-qualified contractors to read stories and write original summaries from scratch. To amortize reading time, we collect five summaries per document, with the first giving an overview and the subsequent four addressing specific questions. We use this protocol to collect SQuALITY, a dataset of question-focused summaries built on the same public-domain short stories as the multiple-choice dataset QuALITY (Pang et al., 2021). Experiments with state-of-the-art summarization systems show that our dataset is challenging and that existing automatic evaluation metrics are weak indicators of quality.

Our paper presents My3DGen, a practical system for creating a personalized and lightweight 3D generative prior using as few as 10 images. My3DGen can reconstruct multi-view consistent images from an input test image, and generate novel appearances by interpolating between any two images of the same individual. While recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of personalized generative priors in producing high-quality 2D portrait reconstructions and syntheses, to the best of our knowledge, we are the first to develop a personalized 3D generative prior. Instead of fine-tuning a large pre-trained generative model with millions of parameters to achieve personalization, we propose a parameter-efficient approach. Our method involves utilizing a pre-trained model with fixed weights as a generic prior, while training a separate personalized prior through low-rank decomposition of the weights in each convolution and fully connected layer. However, parameter-efficient few-shot fine-tuning on its own often leads to overfitting. To address this, we introduce a regularization technique based on symmetry of human faces. This regularization enforces that novel view renderings of a training sample, rendered from symmetric poses, exhibit the same identity. By incorporating this symmetry prior, we enhance the quality of reconstruction and synthesis, particularly for non-frontal (profile) faces. Our final system combines low-rank fine-tuning with symmetry regularization and significantly surpasses the performance of pre-trained models, e.g. EG3D. It introduces only approximately 0.6 million additional parameters per identity compared to 31 million for full finetuning of the original model. As a result, our system achieves a 50-fold reduction in model size without sacrificing the quality of the generated 3D faces. Code will be available at our project page: https://luchaoqi.github.io/my3dgen.

Recent methods in speech and language technology pretrain very LARGE models which are fine-tuned for specific tasks. However, the benefits of such LARGE models are often limited to a few resource rich languages of the world. In this work, we make multiple contributions towards building ASR systems for low resource languages from the Indian subcontinent. First, we curate 17,000 hours of raw speech data for 40 Indian languages from a wide variety of domains including education, news, technology, and finance. Second, using this raw speech data we pretrain several variants of wav2vec style models for 40 Indian languages. Third, we analyze the pretrained models to find key features: codebook vectors of similar sounding phonemes are shared across languages, representations across layers are discriminative of the language family, and attention heads often pay attention within small local windows. Fourth, we fine-tune this model for downstream ASR for 9 languages and obtain state-of-the-art results on 3 public datasets, including on very low-resource languages such as Sinhala and Nepali. Our work establishes that multilingual pretraining is an effective strategy for building ASR systems for the linguistically diverse speakers of the Indian subcontinent. Our code, data and models are available publicly at https://indicnlp.ai4bharat.org/indicwav2vec/ and we hope they will help advance research in ASR for Indic languages.