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The high complexity of DNS poses unique challenges for ensuring its security and reliability. Despite continuous advances in DNS testing, monitoring, and verification, protocol-level defects still give rise to numerous bugs and attacks. In this paper, we provide the first decision procedure for the DNS verification problem, establishing its complexity as $\mathsf{2ExpTime}$, which was previously unknown. We begin by formalizing the semantics of DNS as a system of recursive communicating processes extended with timers and an infinite message alphabet. We provide an algebraic abstraction of the alphabet with finitely many equivalence classes, using the subclass of semigroups that recognize positive prefix-testable languages. We then introduce a novel generalization of bisimulation for labelled transition systems, weaker than strong bisimulation, to show that our abstraction is sound and complete. Finally, using this abstraction, we reduce the DNS verification problem to the verification problem for pushdown systems. To show the expressiveness of our framework, we model two of the most prominent attack vectors on DNS, namely amplification attacks and rewrite blackholing., Comment: Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages (POPL) 2025

An emerging commonality among the recently observed pulsar halos is the presence of distinct radiation patterns at high energies, while no extended radiation is detected around the GeV energy band. This commonality suggests that pulsar halos play a crucial role in the local propagation of cosmic rays, making it necessary to investigate the underlying mechanisms of this phenomenon. This work focuses on the 3D propagation study of cosmic rays, incorporating the Geminga pulsar into our propagation model to investigate its contribution to different observational spectra. We consider Geminga a dominant local source of positrons, successfully reproducing the observed positron spectrum and multi-energy spectra of the Geminga halo. Through calculations of signal and background at different angles, we find that: (1) at low energies, the slow diffusion characteristic around the pulsar region leads to a low electron density in the extended area around Geminga, causing the background radiation to exceed the signal intensity far; (2) at high energies, the larger effective diffusion radius of high-energy electrons/positrons causes the signal from Geminga to dominate the local high-energy phenomena; (3) the observed fluctuation of diffuse gamma-ray radiation by LHAASO is likely due to the incomplete subtraction of radiation from the local halo. We hope LHAASO will detect more cosmic ray halo sources to validate our model further.

Modern web services crucially rely on high-performance distributed databases, where concurrent transactions are isolated from each other using concurrency control protocols. Relaxed isolation levels, which permit more complex concurrent behaviors than strong levels like serializability, are used in practice for higher performance and availability. In this paper, we present Eiger-PORT+, a concurrency control protocol that achieves a strong form of causal consistency, called TCCv (Transactional Causal Consistency with convergence). We show that Eiger-PORT+ also provides performance-optimal read transactions in the presence of transactional writes, thus refuting an open conjecture that this is impossible for TCCv. We also deductively verify that Eiger-PORT+ satisfies this isolation level by refining an abstract model of transactions. This yields the first deductive verification of a complex concurrency control protocol. Furthermore, we conduct a performance evaluation showing Eiger-PORT+'s superior performance over the state-of-the-art.

Abstract Modern image generation (IG) models have been shown to capture rich semantics valuable for image understanding (IU) tasks. However, the potential of IU models to improve IG performance remains uncharted. We address this issue using a token-based IG framework, which relies on effective tokenizers to project images into token sequences. Currently, pixel reconstruction (e.g., VQGAN) dominates the training objective for image tokenizers. In contrast, our approach adopts the feature reconstruction objective, where tokenizers are trained by distilling knowledge from pretrained IU encoders. Comprehensive comparisons indicate that tokenizers with strong IU capabilities achieve superior IG performance across a variety of metrics, datasets, tasks, and proposal networks. Notably, VQ-KD CLIP achieves $4.10$ FID on ImageNet-1k (IN-1k). Visualization suggests that the superiority of VQ-KD can be partly attributed to the rich semantics within the VQ-KD codebook. We further introduce a straightforward pipeline to directly transform IU encoders into tokenizers, demonstrating exceptional effectiveness for IG tasks. These discoveries may energize further exploration into image tokenizer research and inspire the community to reassess the relationship between IU and IG. The code is released at https://github.com/magic-research/vector_quantization., Comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 2024

Developing agents capable of navigating to a target location based on language instructions and visual information, known as vision-language navigation (VLN), has attracted widespread interest. Most research has focused on ground-based agents, while UAV-based VLN remains relatively underexplored. Recent efforts in UAV vision-language navigation predominantly adopt ground-based VLN settings, relying on predefined discrete action spaces and neglecting the inherent disparities in agent movement dynamics and the complexity of navigation tasks between ground and aerial environments. To address these disparities and challenges, we propose solutions from three perspectives: platform, benchmark, and methodology. To enable realistic UAV trajectory simulation in VLN tasks, we propose the OpenUAV platform, which features diverse environments, realistic flight control, and extensive algorithmic support. We further construct a target-oriented VLN dataset consisting of approximately 12k trajectories on this platform, serving as the first dataset specifically designed for realistic UAV VLN tasks. To tackle the challenges posed by complex aerial environments, we propose an assistant-guided UAV object search benchmark called UAV-Need-Help, which provides varying levels of guidance information to help UAVs better accomplish realistic VLN tasks. We also propose a UAV navigation LLM that, given multi-view images, task descriptions, and assistant instructions, leverages the multimodal understanding capabilities of the MLLM to jointly process visual and textual information, and performs hierarchical trajectory generation. The evaluation results of our method significantly outperform the baseline models, while there remains a considerable gap between our results and those achieved by human operators, underscoring the challenge presented by the UAV-Need-Help task.

Mixture-of-Experts large language models (MoE-LLMs) marks a significant step forward of language models, however, they encounter two critical challenges in practice: 1) expert parameters lead to considerable memory consumption and loading latency; and 2) the current activated experts are redundant, as many tokens may only require a single expert. Motivated by these issues, we investigate the MoE-LLMs and make two key observations: a) different experts exhibit varying behaviors on activation reconstruction error, routing scores, and activated frequencies, highlighting their differing importance, and b) not all tokens are equally important -- only a small subset is critical. Building on these insights, we propose MC-MoE, a training-free Mixture-Compressor for MoE-LLMs, which leverages the significance of both experts and tokens to achieve an extreme compression. First, to mitigate storage and loading overheads, we introduce Pre-Loading Mixed-Precision Quantization, which formulates the adaptive bit-width allocation as a Linear Programming problem, where the objective function balances multi-factors reflecting the importance of each expert. Additionally, we develop Online Dynamic Pruning, which identifies important tokens to retain and dynamically select activated experts for other tokens during inference to optimize efficiency while maintaining performance. Our MC-MoE integrates static quantization and dynamic pruning to collaboratively achieve extreme compression for MoE-LLMs with less accuracy loss, ensuring an optimal trade-off between performance and efficiency. Extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness of our approach. For instance, at 2.54 bits, MC-MoE compresses 76.6% of the model, with only a 3.8% average accuracy loss. During dynamic inference, we further reduce activated parameters by 15%, with a performance drop of less than 0.6%., Comment: 18 pages

We propose a new method, which is called the tautological flow method, to analyze the integrability of partial difference equations (P$\Delta$Es) based on that of PDEs. By using this method, we prove that the discrete $q$-KdV equation is a discrete symmetry of the $q$-deformed KdV hierarchy, and we also demonstrate how to directly search for continuous symmetries and bihamiltonian structures of such a P$\Delta$E by using the associated tautological flows and their quasi-triviality transformation., Comment: 20 pages

Introducing user-specified visual concepts in image editing is highly practical as these concepts convey the user's intent more precisely than text-based descriptions. We propose FreeEdit, a novel approach for achieving such reference-based image editing, which can accurately reproduce the visual concept from the reference image based on user-friendly language instructions. Our approach leverages the multi-modal instruction encoder to encode language instructions to guide the editing process. This implicit way of locating the editing area eliminates the need for manual editing masks. To enhance the reconstruction of reference details, we introduce the Decoupled Residual ReferAttention (DRRA) module. This module is designed to integrate fine-grained reference features extracted by a detail extractor into the image editing process in a residual way without interfering with the original self-attention. Given that existing datasets are unsuitable for reference-based image editing tasks, particularly due to the difficulty in constructing image triplets that include a reference image, we curate a high-quality dataset, FreeBench, using a newly developed twice-repainting scheme. FreeBench comprises the images before and after editing, detailed editing instructions, as well as a reference image that maintains the identity of the edited object, encompassing tasks such as object addition, replacement, and deletion. By conducting phased training on FreeBench followed by quality tuning, FreeEdit achieves high-quality zero-shot editing through convenient language instructions. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of FreeEdit across multiple task types, demonstrating its superiority over existing methods. The code will be available at: https://freeedit.github.io/., Comment: 14 pages, 14 figures, project website: https://freeedit.github.io/

Panoptic narrative grounding (PNG), whose core target is fine-grained image-text alignment, requires a panoptic segmentation of referred objects given a narrative caption. Previous discriminative methods achieve only weak or coarse-grained alignment by panoptic segmentation pretraining or CLIP model adaptation. Given the recent progress of text-to-image Diffusion models, several works have shown their capability to achieve fine-grained image-text alignment through cross-attention maps and improved general segmentation performance. However, the direct use of phrase features as static prompts to apply frozen Diffusion models to the PNG task still suffers from a large task gap and insufficient vision-language interaction, yielding inferior performance. Therefore, we propose an Extractive-Injective Phrase Adapter (EIPA) bypass within the Diffusion UNet to dynamically update phrase prompts with image features and inject the multimodal cues back, which leverages the fine-grained image-text alignment capability of Diffusion models more sufficiently. In addition, we also design a Multi-Level Mutual Aggregation (MLMA) module to reciprocally fuse multi-level image and phrase features for segmentation refinement. Extensive experiments on the PNG benchmark show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance., Comment: Accepted by ACM MM 2024

Transformers have revolutionized the object detection landscape by introducing DETRs, acclaimed for their simplicity and efficacy. Despite their advantages, the substantial size of these models poses significant challenges for practical deployment, particularly in resource-constrained environments. This paper addresses the challenge of compressing DETR by leveraging knowledge distillation, a technique that holds promise for maintaining model performance while reducing size. A critical aspect of DETRs' performance is their reliance on queries to interpret object representations accurately. Traditional distillation methods often focus exclusively on positive queries, identified through bipartite matching, neglecting the rich information present in hard-negative queries. Our visual analysis indicates that hard-negative queries, focusing on foreground elements, are crucial for enhancing distillation outcomes. To this end, we introduce a novel Group Query Selection strategy, which diverges from traditional query selection in DETR distillation by segmenting queries based on their Generalized Intersection over Union (GIoU) with ground truth objects, thereby uncovering valuable hard-negative queries for distillation. Furthermore, we present the Knowledge Distillation via Query Selection for DETR (QSKD) framework, which incorporates Attention-Guided Feature Distillation (AGFD) and Local Alignment Prediction Distillation (LAPD). These components optimize the distillation process by focusing on the most informative aspects of the teacher model's intermediate features and output. Our comprehensive experimental evaluation of the MS-COCO dataset demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach, significantly improving average precision (AP) across various DETR architectures without incurring substantial computational costs. Specifically, the AP of Conditional DETR ResNet-18 increased from 35.8 to 39.9.

We introduce LLaVA-MoD, a novel framework designed to enable the efficient training of small-scale Multimodal Language Models (s-MLLM) by distilling knowledge from large-scale MLLM (l-MLLM). Our approach tackles two fundamental challenges in MLLM distillation. First, we optimize the network structure of s-MLLM by integrating a sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture into the language model, striking a balance between computational efficiency and model expressiveness. Second, we propose a progressive knowledge transfer strategy to ensure comprehensive knowledge migration. This strategy begins with mimic distillation, where we minimize the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between output distributions to enable the student model to emulate the teacher network's understanding. Following this, we introduce preference distillation via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), where the key lies in treating l-MLLM as the reference model. During this phase, the s-MLLM's ability to discriminate between superior and inferior examples is significantly enhanced beyond l-MLLM, leading to a better student that surpasses its teacher, particularly in hallucination benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LLaVA-MoD outperforms existing models across various multimodal benchmarks while maintaining a minimal number of activated parameters and low computational costs. Remarkably, LLaVA-MoD, with only 2B activated parameters, surpasses Qwen-VL-Chat-7B by an average of 8.8% across benchmarks, using merely 0.3% of the training data and 23% trainable parameters. These results underscore LLaVA-MoD's ability to effectively distill comprehensive knowledge from its teacher model, paving the way for the development of more efficient MLLMs. The code will be available on: https://github.com/shufangxun/LLaVA-MoD.

In this paper, we propose an Audio-Language-Referenced SAM 2 (AL-Ref-SAM 2) pipeline to explore the training-free paradigm for audio and language-referenced video object segmentation, namely AVS and RVOS tasks. The intuitive solution leverages GroundingDINO to identify the target object from a single frame and SAM 2 to segment the identified object throughout the video, which is less robust to spatiotemporal variations due to a lack of video context exploration. Thus, in our AL-Ref-SAM 2 pipeline, we propose a novel GPT-assisted Pivot Selection (GPT-PS) module to instruct GPT-4 to perform two-step temporal-spatial reasoning for sequentially selecting pivot frames and pivot boxes, thereby providing SAM 2 with a high-quality initial object prompt. Within GPT-PS, two task-specific Chain-of-Thought prompts are designed to unleash GPT's temporal-spatial reasoning capacity by guiding GPT to make selections based on a comprehensive understanding of video and reference information. Furthermore, we propose a Language-Binded Reference Unification (LBRU) module to convert audio signals into language-formatted references, thereby unifying the formats of AVS and RVOS tasks in the same pipeline. Extensive experiments on both tasks show that our training-free AL-Ref-SAM 2 pipeline achieves performances comparable to or even better than fully-supervised fine-tuning methods. The code is available at: https://github.com/appletea233/AL-Ref-SAM2.

Relativistic spin-polarized electron beams are important for fundamental research and the industry, but their generation currently requires conventional accelerators or ultrastrong laser facilities, limiting their accessibility and broad applications. Here, we put forward a novel method for constructing a compact efficient "polarizer" that achieves direct ultrafast conversion of relativistic dense electron beams into polarized ones, based on the beam "self-polarization" mechanism via simple beam-target interactions. In this scheme, as the electron beam grazes through the polarizer (a double-layer solid target), it ionizes the target and excites an asymmetric plasma field due to the plasma backflows. This field then reacts on the beam itself, triggering spontaneous radiative polarization and reflection of the beam, and ultimately yielding a dense polarized electron beam. Moreover, the double-layer target setup induces a plasma bubble that focuses the polarized beam and reshapes its polarization distribution. Our method is robust with respect to the beam and target parameters, and opens a new avenue for relativistic beam polarization with compact accessible devices, which would facilitate their broad applications and the development of related experiments, such as in strong-field QED studies, and polarized electron-positron and electron-ion colliders.

The rise of autonomous vehicles has significantly increased the demand for robust 3D object detection systems. While cameras and LiDAR sensors each offer unique advantages--cameras provide rich texture information and LiDAR offers precise 3D spatial data--relying on a single modality often leads to performance limitations. This paper introduces MV2DFusion, a multi-modal detection framework that integrates the strengths of both worlds through an advanced query-based fusion mechanism. By introducing an image query generator to align with image-specific attributes and a point cloud query generator, MV2DFusion effectively combines modality-specific object semantics without biasing toward one single modality. Then the sparse fusion process can be accomplished based on the valuable object semantics, ensuring efficient and accurate object detection across various scenarios. Our framework's flexibility allows it to integrate with any image and point cloud-based detectors, showcasing its adaptability and potential for future advancements. Extensive evaluations on the nuScenes and Argoverse2 datasets demonstrate that MV2DFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance, particularly excelling in long-range detection scenarios.

Since the discovery of cosmic rays (CRs) over a century ago, their origin has remained a mystery and a key research question. Recently, the LHAASO experiment identified the first CR super-acceleration source, the Cygnus bubble, which can accelerate CRs to energies exceeding 10 PeV. A pertinent question is: how much does the Cygnus bubble contribute to the CR spectrum observed on Earth? With the aim of answering that question, a 3D propagation analysis was conducted on CRs in this study. The Cygnus bubble was incorporated into our propagation model in order to determine its contributions to the observed spectra. First, we calculated the spectrum and spatial morphology of the Cygnus bubble to reproduce the observed LHAASO data. Subsequently, we calculated the diffuse $\gamma$-ray emissions produced by the CRs from the Cygnus bubble and the energy spectrum of the cosmic ray particles near Earth after propagation. Finally, we utilized a CR spatial-dependent propagation model to calculate the large-scale CR energy spectrum and the resulting diffuse $\gamma$-ray emissions. Our results indicate that: (1) the Cygnus bubble contributes minimally to the CR spectrum observed on Earth, (2) the emissions produced by the CR particles from the Cygnus bubble dominates the diffuse $\gamma$-ray emissions in that region, (3) the structural fluctuations of the diffuse $\gamma$-ray emissions observed by LHAASO are likely due to the local CR halo. We anticipate that LHAASO will identify more CR halo sources to validate our model.

Existing methods enhance open-vocabulary object detection by leveraging the robust open-vocabulary recognition capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP.However, two main challenges emerge:(1) A deficiency in concept representation, where the category names in CLIP's text space lack textual and visual knowledge.(2) An overfitting tendency towards base categories, with the open vocabulary knowledge biased towards base categories during the transfer from VLMs to detectors.To address these challenges, we propose the Language Model Instruction (LaMI) strategy, which leverages the relationships between visual concepts and applies them within a simple yet effective DETR-like detector, termed LaMI-DETR.LaMI utilizes GPT to construct visual concepts and employs T5 to investigate visual similarities across categories.These inter-category relationships refine concept representation and avoid overfitting to base categories.Comprehensive experiments validate our approach's superior performance over existing methods in the same rigorous setting without reliance on external training resources.LaMI-DETR achieves a rare box AP of 43.4 on OV-LVIS, surpassing the previous best by 7.8 rare box AP., Comment: ECCV2024

Open-Vocabulary Detection (OVD) is the task of detecting all interesting objects in a given scene without predefined object classes. Extensive work has been done to deal with the OVD for 2D RGB images, but the exploration of 3D OVD is still limited. Intuitively, lidar point clouds provide 3D information, both object level and scene level, to generate trustful detection results. However, previous lidar-based OVD methods only focus on the usage of object-level features, ignoring the essence of scene-level information. In this paper, we propose a Global-Local Collaborative Scheme (GLIS) for the lidar-based OVD task, which contains a local branch to generate object-level detection result and a global branch to obtain scene-level global feature. With the global-local information, a Large Language Model (LLM) is applied for chain-of-thought inference, and the detection result can be refined accordingly. We further propose Reflected Pseudo Labels Generation (RPLG) to generate high-quality pseudo labels for supervision and Background-Aware Object Localization (BAOL) to select precise object proposals. Extensive experiments on ScanNetV2 and SUN RGB-D demonstrate the superiority of our methods. Code is released at https://github.com/GradiusTwinbee/GLIS., Comment: accepted by ECCV 2024

Instruction generation is a vital and multidisciplinary research area with broad applications. Existing instruction generation models are limited to generating instructions in a single style from a particular dataset, and the style and content of generated instructions cannot be controlled. Moreover, most existing instruction generation methods also disregard the spatial modeling of the navigation environment. Leveraging the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), we propose C-Instructor, which utilizes the chain-of-thought-style prompt for style-controllable and content-controllable instruction generation. Firstly, we propose a Chain of Thought with Landmarks (CoTL) mechanism, which guides the LLM to identify key landmarks and then generate complete instructions. CoTL renders generated instructions more accessible to follow and offers greater controllability over the manipulation of landmark objects. Furthermore, we present a Spatial Topology Modeling Task to facilitate the understanding of the spatial structure of the environment. Finally, we introduce a Style-Mixed Training policy, harnessing the prior knowledge of LLMs to enable style control for instruction generation based on different prompts within a single model instance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that instructions generated by C-Instructor outperform those generated by previous methods in text metrics, navigation guidance evaluation, and user studies., Comment: ECCV 2024

Tabular data is one of the most common data sources in machine learning. Although a wide range of classical methods demonstrate practical utilities in this field, deep learning methods on tabular data are becoming promising alternatives due to their flexibility and ability to capture complex interactions within the data. Considering that deep tabular methods have diverse design philosophies, including the ways they handle features, design learning objectives, and construct model architectures, we introduce a versatile deep-learning toolbox called TALENT (Tabular Analytics and LEarNing Toolbox) to utilize, analyze, and compare tabular methods. TALENT encompasses an extensive collection of more than 20 deep tabular prediction methods, associated with various encoding and normalization modules, and provides a unified interface that is easily integrable with new methods as they emerge. In this paper, we present the design and functionality of the toolbox, illustrate its practical application through several case studies, and investigate the performance of various methods fairly based on our toolbox. Code is available at https://github.com/qile2000/LAMDA-TALENT.

In this paper, we analyze the spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of 17 powerful (with a spin-down luminosity greater than $10^{35}$ erg s$^{-1}$) young (with an age less than 15000 yrs) pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) using a simple time-independent one-zone emission model. Our aim is to investigate correlations between model parameters and the ages of the corresponding PWNe, thereby revealing the evolution of high-energy electron distributions within PWNe. Our findings are as follows: (1) The electron distributions in PWNe can be characterized by a double power-law with a superexponential cutoff; (2) As PWNe evolve, the high-energy end of the electron distribution spectrum becomes harder with the index decreasing from approximately 3.5 to 2.5, while the low-energy end spectrum index remains constant near 1.5; (3) There is no apparent correlation between the break energy or cutoff energy and the age of PWNe. (4) The average magnetic field within PWNe decreases with age, leading to a positive correlation between the energy loss timescale of electrons at the break energy or the high-energy cutoff, and the age of the PWN. (5) The total electron energy within PWNe remains constant near $2 \times 10^{48}$ erg, while the total magnetic energy decreases with age., Comment: 19 pages, 20 figures, 1 table accepted for publication in RAA

Tabular data is prevalent across various domains in machine learning. Although Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based methods have shown promising performance comparable to tree-based ones, in-depth evaluation of these methods is challenging due to varying performance ranks across diverse datasets. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive benchmark comprising 300 tabular datasets, covering a wide range of task types, size distributions, and domains. We perform an extensive comparison between state-of-the-art deep tabular methods and tree-based methods, revealing the average rank of all methods and highlighting the key factors that influence the success of deep tabular methods. Next, we analyze deep tabular methods based on their training dynamics, including changes in validation metrics and other statistics. For each dataset-method pair, we learn a mapping from both the meta-features of datasets and the first part of the validation curve to the final validation set performance and even the evolution of validation curves. This mapping extracts essential meta-features that influence prediction accuracy, helping the analysis of tabular methods from novel aspects. Based on the performance of all methods on this large benchmark, we identify two subsets of 45 datasets each. The first subset contains datasets that favor either tree-based methods or DNN-based methods, serving as effective analysis tools to evaluate strategies (e.g., attribute encoding strategies) for improving deep tabular models. The second subset contains datasets where the ranks of methods are consistent with the overall benchmark, acting as a probe for tabular analysis. These ``tiny tabular benchmarks'' will facilitate further studies on tabular data.

Despite real-time planners exhibiting remarkable performance in autonomous driving, the growing exploration of Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened avenues for enhancing the interpretability and controllability of motion planning. Nevertheless, LLM-based planners continue to encounter significant challenges, including elevated resource consumption and extended inference times, which pose substantial obstacles to practical deployment. In light of these challenges, we introduce AsyncDriver, a new asynchronous LLM-enhanced closed-loop framework designed to leverage scene-associated instruction features produced by LLM to guide real-time planners in making precise and controllable trajectory predictions. On one hand, our method highlights the prowess of LLMs in comprehending and reasoning with vectorized scene data and a series of routing instructions, demonstrating its effective assistance to real-time planners. On the other hand, the proposed framework decouples the inference processes of the LLM and real-time planners. By capitalizing on the asynchronous nature of their inference frequencies, our approach have successfully reduced the computational cost introduced by LLM, while maintaining comparable performance. Experiments show that our approach achieves superior closed-loop evaluation performance on nuPlan's challenging scenarios., Comment: ECCV 2024

Enabling humanoid robots to clean rooms has long been a pursued dream within humanoid research communities. However, many tasks require multi-humanoid collaboration, such as carrying large and heavy furniture together. Given the scarcity of motion capture data on multi-humanoid collaboration and the efficiency challenges associated with multi-agent learning, these tasks cannot be straightforwardly addressed using training paradigms designed for single-agent scenarios. In this paper, we introduce Cooperative Human-Object Interaction (CooHOI), a framework designed to tackle the challenge of multi-humanoid object transportation problem through a two-phase learning paradigm: individual skill learning and subsequent policy transfer. First, a single humanoid character learns to interact with objects through imitation learning from human motion priors. Then, the humanoid learns to collaborate with others by considering the shared dynamics of the manipulated object using centralized training and decentralized execution (CTDE) multi-agent RL algorithms. When one agent interacts with the object, resulting in specific object dynamics changes, the other agents learn to respond appropriately, thereby achieving implicit communication and coordination between teammates. Unlike previous approaches that relied on tracking-based methods for multi-humanoid HOI, CooHOI is inherently efficient, does not depend on motion capture data of multi-humanoid interactions, and can be seamlessly extended to include more participants and a wide range of object types., Comment: Project website: https://gao-jiawei.com/Research/CooHOI/. NeurIPS 2024 Spotlight

Lumina-T2X is a nascent family of Flow-based Large Diffusion Transformers that establishes a unified framework for transforming noise into various modalities, such as images and videos, conditioned on text instructions. Despite its promising capabilities, Lumina-T2X still encounters challenges including training instability, slow inference, and extrapolation artifacts. In this paper, we present Lumina-Next, an improved version of Lumina-T2X, showcasing stronger generation performance with increased training and inference efficiency. We begin with a comprehensive analysis of the Flag-DiT architecture and identify several suboptimal components, which we address by introducing the Next-DiT architecture with 3D RoPE and sandwich normalizations. To enable better resolution extrapolation, we thoroughly compare different context extrapolation methods applied to text-to-image generation with 3D RoPE, and propose Frequency- and Time-Aware Scaled RoPE tailored for diffusion transformers. Additionally, we introduced a sigmoid time discretization schedule to reduce sampling steps in solving the Flow ODE and the Context Drop method to merge redundant visual tokens for faster network evaluation, effectively boosting the overall sampling speed. Thanks to these improvements, Lumina-Next not only improves the quality and efficiency of basic text-to-image generation but also demonstrates superior resolution extrapolation capabilities and multilingual generation using decoder-based LLMs as the text encoder, all in a zero-shot manner. To further validate Lumina-Next as a versatile generative framework, we instantiate it on diverse tasks including visual recognition, multi-view, audio, music, and point cloud generation, showcasing strong performance across these domains. By releasing all codes and model weights, we aim to advance the development of next-generation generative AI capable of universal modeling., Comment: Code at: https://github.com/Alpha-VLLM/Lumina-T2X

3D lane detection and topology reasoning are essential tasks in autonomous driving scenarios, requiring not only detecting the accurate 3D coordinates on lane lines, but also reasoning the relationship between lanes and traffic elements. Current vision-based methods, whether explicitly constructing BEV features or not, all establish the lane anchors/queries in 3D space while ignoring the 2D lane priors. In this study, we propose Topo2D, a novel framework based on Transformer, leveraging 2D lane instances to initialize 3D queries and 3D positional embeddings. Furthermore, we explicitly incorporate 2D lane features into the recognition of topology relationships among lane centerlines and between lane centerlines and traffic elements. Topo2D achieves 44.5% OLS on multi-view topology reasoning benchmark OpenLane-V2 and 62.6% F-Socre on single-view 3D lane detection benchmark OpenLane, exceeding the performance of existing state-of-the-art methods., Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures, 6 tables

Motivated by the recent experimental measurements, we have investigated the Cabibbo-favored process $\Lambda_c^+ \to p \bar{K}^0\eta$, where the $N(1535)$ resonance is dynamically generated from the $S$-wave pseudoscalar meson-octet baryon interactions within the chiral unitary approach. The contributions from the intermediate $N(1650)$ and the predicted low-lying baryon $\Sigma^*(1/2^-)$ are also considered. In addition, a Breit-Wigner amplitude for the $N(1535)$ resonance is checked. By comparing with the measured $\eta p$, $\bar{K}^0 \eta$, and $p \bar{K}^0$ invariant mass squared distributions, our results support the interpretation of $N(1535)$ as a dynamically generated state. Furthermore, we demonstrate that, with the contribution from $\Sigma^*(1/2^-)$ taken into account, the calculated invariant mass spectrum agrees with the Belle measurements. Future precise measurements of the $\Lambda_c^+\to p \bar{K}^0\eta$ process can further elucidate the existence of the low-lying baryon $\Sigma^*(1/2^-)$., Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, the version of publication in PRD

Open vocabulary object detection (OVD) aims at seeking an optimal object detector capable of recognizing objects from both base and novel categories. Recent advances leverage knowledge distillation to transfer insightful knowledge from pre-trained large-scale vision-language models to the task of object detection, significantly generalizing the powerful capabilities of the detector to identify more unknown object categories. However, these methods face significant challenges in background interpretation and model overfitting and thus often result in the loss of crucial background knowledge, giving rise to sub-optimal inference performance of the detector. To mitigate these issues, we present a novel OVD framework termed LBP to propose learning background prompts to harness explored implicit background knowledge, thus enhancing the detection performance w.r.t. base and novel categories. Specifically, we devise three modules: Background Category-specific Prompt, Background Object Discovery, and Inference Probability Rectification, to empower the detector to discover, represent, and leverage implicit object knowledge explored from background proposals. Evaluation on two benchmark datasets, OV-COCO and OV-LVIS, demonstrates the superiority of our proposed method over existing state-of-the-art approaches in handling the OVD tasks., Comment: CVPR2024

To a simple polarized hyperplane arrangement (not necessarily cyclic) $\mathbb{V}$, one can associate a stopped Liouville manifold (equivalently, a Liouville sector) $\left(M(\mathbb{V}),\xi\right)$, where $M(\mathbb{V})$ is the complement of finitely many hyperplanes in $\mathbb{C}^d$, obtained as the complexifications of the real hyperplanes in $\mathbb{V}$. The Liouville structure on $M(\mathbb{V})$ comes from a very affine embedding, and the stop $\xi$ is determined by the polarization. In this article, we study the symplectic topology of $\left(M(\mathbb{V}),\xi\right)$. In particular, we prove that their partially wrapped Fukaya categories are generated by Lagrangian submanifolds associated to the bounded and feasible chambers of $\mathbb{V}$. A computation of the Fukaya $A_\infty$-algebra of these Lagrangians then enables us to identity these wrapped Fukaya categories with the $\mathbb{G}_m^d$-equivariant hypertoric convolution algebras $\widetilde{B}(\mathbb{V})$ associated to $\mathbb{V}$. This confirms a conjecture of Lauda-Licata-Manion (arXiv:2009.03981) and provides evidence for the general conjecture of Lekili-Segal (arXiv:2304.10969) on the equivariant Fukaya categories of symplectic manifolds with Hamiltonian torus actions., Comment: Fix graphical issues, add some references and expand some of the expositions in section 3. Comments welcome!

Collaborative perception empowers each agent to improve its perceptual ability through the exchange of perceptual messages with other agents. It inherently results in a fundamental trade-off between perception ability and communication cost. To address this bottleneck issue, our core idea is to optimize the collaborative messages from two key aspects: representation and selection. The proposed codebook-based message representation enables the transmission of integer codes, rather than high-dimensional feature maps. The proposed information-filling-driven message selection optimizes local messages to collectively fill each agent's information demand, preventing information overflow among multiple agents. By integrating these two designs, we propose CodeFilling, a novel communication-efficient collaborative perception system, which significantly advances the perception-communication trade-off and is inclusive to both homogeneous and heterogeneous collaboration settings. We evaluate CodeFilling in both a real-world dataset, DAIR-V2X, and a new simulation dataset, OPV2VH+. Results show that CodeFilling outperforms previous SOTA Where2comm on DAIR-V2X/OPV2VH+ with 1,333/1,206 times lower communication volume. Our code is available at https://github.com/PhyllisH/CodeFilling., Comment: 10 pages, Accepted by CVPR 2024

We define a certain extension of the Ablowitz-Ladik hierarchy, and prove that this extended integrable hierarchy coincides with the topological deformation of the Principal Hierarchy of a generalized Frobenius manifold with non-flat unity.

The rapid advance of deep reinforcement learning techniques enables the oversight of safety-critical systems through the utilization of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). This underscores the pressing need to promptly establish certified safety guarantees for such DNN-controlled systems. Most of the existing verification approaches rely on qualitative approaches, predominantly employing reachability analysis. However, qualitative verification proves inadequate for DNN-controlled systems as their behaviors exhibit stochastic tendencies when operating in open and adversarial environments. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for unifying both qualitative and quantitative safety verification problems of DNN-controlled systems. This is achieved by formulating the verification tasks as the synthesis of valid neural barrier certificates (NBCs). Initially, the framework seeks to establish almost-sure safety guarantees through qualitative verification. In cases where qualitative verification fails, our quantitative verification method is invoked, yielding precise lower and upper bounds on probabilistic safety across both infinite and finite time horizons. To facilitate the synthesis of NBCs, we introduce their $k$-inductive variants. We also devise a simulation-guided approach for training NBCs, aiming to achieve tightness in computing precise certified lower and upper bounds. We prototype our approach into a tool called $\textsf{UniQQ}$ and showcase its efficacy on four classic DNN-controlled systems., Comment: This work is a technical report for the paper with the same name to appear in the 36th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification (CAV 2024)

The objective of the collaborative vehicle-to-everything perception task is to enhance the individual vehicle's perception capability through message communication among neighboring traffic agents. Previous methods focus on achieving optimal performance within bandwidth limitations and typically adopt BEV maps as the basic collaborative message units. However, we demonstrate that collaboration with dense representations is plagued by object feature destruction during message packing, inefficient message aggregation for long-range collaboration, and implicit structure representation communication. To tackle these issues, we introduce a brand new message unit, namely point cluster, designed to represent the scene sparsely with a combination of low-level structure information and high-level semantic information. The point cluster inherently preserves object information while packing messages, with weak relevance to the collaboration range, and supports explicit structure modeling. Building upon this representation, we propose a novel framework V2X-PC for collaborative perception. This framework includes a Point Cluster Packing (PCP) module to keep object feature and manage bandwidth through the manipulation of cluster point numbers. As for effective message aggregation, we propose a Point Cluster Aggregation (PCA) module to match and merge point clusters associated with the same object. To further handle time latency and pose errors encountered in real-world scenarios, we propose parameter-free solutions that can adapt to different noisy levels without finetuning. Experiments on two widely recognized collaborative perception benchmarks showcase the superior performance of our method compared to the previous state-of-the-art approaches relying on BEV maps.

In this study, we delve into the generation of high-resolution images from pre-trained diffusion models, addressing persistent challenges, such as repetitive patterns and structural distortions, that emerge when models are applied beyond their trained resolutions. To address this issue, we introduce an innovative, training-free approach FouriScale from the perspective of frequency domain analysis. We replace the original convolutional layers in pre-trained diffusion models by incorporating a dilation technique along with a low-pass operation, intending to achieve structural consistency and scale consistency across resolutions, respectively. Further enhanced by a padding-then-crop strategy, our method can flexibly handle text-to-image generation of various aspect ratios. By using the FouriScale as guidance, our method successfully balances the structural integrity and fidelity of generated images, achieving an astonishing capacity of arbitrary-size, high-resolution, and high-quality generation. With its simplicity and compatibility, our method can provide valuable insights for future explorations into the synthesis of ultra-high-resolution images. The code will be released at https://github.com/LeonHLJ/FouriScale.

This survey presents a comprehensive analysis of data augmentation techniques in human-centric vision tasks, a first of its kind in the field. It delves into a wide range of research areas including person ReID, human parsing, human pose estimation, and pedestrian detection, addressing the significant challenges posed by overfitting and limited training data in these domains. Our work categorizes data augmentation methods into two main types: data generation and data perturbation. Data generation covers techniques like graphic engine-based generation, generative model-based generation, and data recombination, while data perturbation is divided into image-level and human-level perturbations. Each method is tailored to the unique requirements of human-centric tasks, with some applicable across multiple areas. Our contributions include an extensive literature review, providing deep insights into the influence of these augmentation techniques in human-centric vision and highlighting the nuances of each method. We also discuss open issues and future directions, such as the integration of advanced generative models like Latent Diffusion Models, for creating more realistic and diverse training data. This survey not only encapsulates the current state of data augmentation in human-centric vision but also charts a course for future research, aiming to develop more robust, accurate, and efficient human-centric vision systems.

Recent 3D object detectors typically utilize multi-sensor data and unify multi-modal features in the shared bird's-eye view (BEV) representation space. However, our empirical findings indicate that previous methods have limitations in generating fusion BEV features free from cross-modal conflicts. These conflicts encompass extrinsic conflicts caused by BEV feature construction and inherent conflicts stemming from heterogeneous sensor signals. Therefore, we propose a novel Eliminating Conflicts Fusion (ECFusion) method to explicitly eliminate the extrinsic/inherent conflicts in BEV space and produce improved multi-modal BEV features. Specifically, we devise a Semantic-guided Flow-based Alignment (SFA) module to resolve extrinsic conflicts via unifying spatial distribution in BEV space before fusion. Moreover, we design a Dissolved Query Recovering (DQR) mechanism to remedy inherent conflicts by preserving objectness clues that are lost in the fusion BEV feature. In general, our method maximizes the effective information utilization of each modality and leverages inter-modal complementarity. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in the highly competitive nuScenes 3D object detection dataset. The code is released at https://github.com/fjhzhixi/ECFusion., Comment: Accepted by ICRA 2024

Tumor lesion segmentation on CT or MRI images plays a critical role in cancer diagnosis and treatment planning. Considering the inherent differences in tumor lesion segmentation data across various medical imaging modalities and equipment, integrating medical knowledge into the Segment Anything Model (SAM) presents promising capability due to its versatility and generalization potential. Recent studies have attempted to enhance SAM with medical expertise by pre-training on large-scale medical segmentation datasets. However, challenges still exist in 3D tumor lesion segmentation owing to tumor complexity and the imbalance in foreground and background regions. Therefore, we introduce Mask-Enhanced SAM (M-SAM), an innovative architecture tailored for 3D tumor lesion segmentation. We propose a novel Mask-Enhanced Adapter (MEA) within M-SAM that enriches the semantic information of medical images with positional data from coarse segmentation masks, facilitating the generation of more precise segmentation masks. Furthermore, an iterative refinement scheme is implemented in M-SAM to refine the segmentation masks progressively, leading to improved performance. Extensive experiments on seven tumor lesion segmentation datasets indicate that our M-SAM not only achieves high segmentation accuracy but also exhibits robust generalization. The code is available at https://github.com/nanase1025/M-SAM.

LiDAR-based 3D object detection plays an essential role in autonomous driving. Existing high-performing 3D object detectors usually build dense feature maps in the backbone network and prediction head. However, the computational costs introduced by the dense feature maps grow quadratically as the perception range increases, making these models hard to scale up to long-range detection. Some recent works have attempted to construct fully sparse detectors to solve this issue; nevertheless, the resulting models either rely on a complex multi-stage pipeline or exhibit inferior performance. In this work, we propose SAFDNet, a straightforward yet highly effective architecture, tailored for fully sparse 3D object detection. In SAFDNet, an adaptive feature diffusion strategy is designed to address the center feature missing problem. We conducted extensive experiments on Waymo Open, nuScenes, and Argoverse2 datasets. SAFDNet performed slightly better than the previous SOTA on the first two datasets but much better on the last dataset, which features long-range detection, verifying the efficacy of SAFDNet in scenarios where long-range detection is required. Notably, on Argoverse2, SAFDNet surpassed the previous best hybrid detector HEDNet by 2.6% mAP while being 2.1x faster, and yielded 2.1% mAP gains over the previous best sparse detector FSDv2 while being 1.3x faster. The code will be available at https://github.com/zhanggang001/HEDNet., Comment: Accepted by CVPR 2024 (Oral)