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Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), renowned for their low power consumption, brain-inspired architecture, and spatio-temporal representation capabilities, have garnered considerable attention in recent years. Similar to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), high-quality benchmark datasets are of great importance to the advances of SNNs. However, our analysis indicates that many prevalent neuromorphic datasets lack strong temporal correlation, preventing SNNs from fully exploiting their spatio-temporal representation capabilities. Meanwhile, the integration of event and frame modalities offers more comprehensive visual spatio-temporal information. Yet, the SNN-based cross-modality fusion remains underexplored. In this work, we present a neuromorphic dataset called DVS-SLR that can better exploit the inherent spatio-temporal properties of SNNs. Compared to existing datasets, it offers advantages in terms of higher temporal correlation, larger scale, and more varied scenarios. In addition, our neuromorphic dataset contains corresponding frame data, which can be used for developing SNN-based fusion methods. By virtue of the dual-modal feature of the dataset, we propose a Cross-Modality Attention (CMA) based fusion method. The CMA model efficiently utilizes the unique advantages of each modality, allowing for SNNs to learn both temporal and spatial attention scores from the spatio-temporal features of event and frame modalities, subsequently allocating these scores across modalities to enhance their synergy. Experimental results demonstrate that our method not only improves recognition accuracy but also ensures robustness across diverse scenarios.

Existing large pre-trained models typically map text input to text output in an end-to-end manner, such as ChatGPT, or map a segment of text input to a hierarchy of action decisions, such as OpenVLA. However, humans can simultaneously generate text and actions when receiving specific input signals. For example, a driver can make precise driving decisions while conversing with a friend in the passenger seat. Motivated by this observation, we consider the following question in this work: is it possible to construct a pre-trained model that can provide both language interaction and precise decision-making capabilities in dynamic open scenarios. We provide a definitive answer to this question by developing a new model architecture termed Visual Language Action model for Chatting and Decision Making (VLA4CD), and further demonstrating its performance in challenging autonomous driving tasks. Specifically, we leverage LoRA to fine-tune a pre-trained LLM with data of multiple modalities covering language, visual, and action. Unlike the existing LoRA operations used for LLM fine-tuning, we have designed new computational modules and training cost functions for VLA4CD. These designs enable VLA4CD to provide continuous-valued action decisions while outputting text responses. In contrast, existing LLMs can only output text responses, and current VLA models can only output action decisions. Moreover, these VLA models handle action data by discretizing and then tokenizing the discretized actions, a method unsuitable for complex decision-making tasks involving high-dimensional continuous-valued action vectors, such as autonomous driving. The experimental results on CARLA validate that: (1) our proposed model construction method is effective; (2) compared to the SOTA VLA model, VLA4CD can provide more accurate real-time decision-making while retaining the text interaction capability inherent to LLMs.

Autism spectrum disorder(ASD) is a pervasive developmental disorder that significantly impacts the daily functioning and social participation of individuals. Despite the abundance of research focused on supporting the clinical diagnosis of ASD, there is still a lack of systematic and comprehensive exploration in the field of methods based on Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly regarding the real-world clinical diagnostic scenarios based on Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, Second Edition (ADOS-2). Therefore, we have proposed a framework called ADOS-Copilot, which strikes a balance between scoring and explanation and explored the factors that influence the performance of LLMs in this task. The experimental results indicate that our proposed framework is competitive with the diagnostic results of clinicians, with a minimum MAE of 0.4643, binary classification F1-score of 81.79\%, and ternary classification F1-score of 78.37\%. Furthermore, we have systematically elucidated the strengths and limitations of current LLMs in this task from the perspectives of ADOS-2, LLMs' capabilities, language, and model scale aiming to inspire and guide the future application of LLMs in a broader fields of mental health disorders. We hope for more research to be transferred into real clinical practice, opening a window of kindness to the world for eccentric children.

3D Gaussian Splatting is capable of reconstructing 3D scenes in minutes. Despite recent advances in improving surface reconstruction accuracy, the reconstructed results still exhibit bias and suffer from inefficiency in storage and training. This paper provides a different observation on the cause of the inefficiency and the reconstruction bias, which is attributed to the integration of the low-opacity parts (LOPs) of the generated Gaussians. We show that LOPs consist of Gaussians with overall low-opacity (LOGs) and the low-opacity tails (LOTs) of Gaussians. We propose Spiking GS to reduce such two types of LOPs by integrating spiking neurons into the Gaussian Splatting pipeline. Specifically, we introduce global and local full-precision integrate-and-fire spiking neurons to the opacity and representation function of flattened 3D Gaussians, respectively. Furthermore, we enhance the density control strategy with spiking neurons' thresholds and a new criterion on the scale of Gaussians. Our method can represent more accurate reconstructed surfaces at a lower cost. The supplementary material and code are available at https://github.com/zju-bmi-lab/SpikingGS.

Humans naturally perform audiovisual speech recognition (AVSR), enhancing the accuracy and robustness by integrating auditory and visual information. Spiking neural networks (SNNs), which mimic the brain's information-processing mechanisms, are well-suited for emulating the human capability of AVSR. Despite their potential, research on SNNs for AVSR is scarce, with most existing audio-visual multimodal methods focused on object or digit recognition. These models simply integrate features from both modalities, neglecting their unique characteristics and interactions. Additionally, they often rely on future information for current processing, which increases recognition latency and limits real-time applicability. Inspired by human speech perception, this paper proposes a novel human-inspired SNN named HI-AVSNN for AVSR, incorporating three key characteristics: cueing interaction, causal processing and spike activity. For cueing interaction, we propose a visual-cued auditory attention module (VCA2M) that leverages visual cues to guide attention to auditory features. We achieve causal processing by aligning the SNN's temporal dimension with that of visual and auditory features and applying temporal masking to utilize only past and current information. To implement spike activity, in addition to using SNNs, we leverage the event camera to capture lip movement as spikes, mimicking the human retina and providing efficient visual data. We evaluate HI-AVSNN on an audiovisual speech recognition dataset combining the DVS-Lip dataset with its corresponding audio samples. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed fusion method, outperforming existing audio-visual SNN fusion methods and achieving a 2.27% improvement in accuracy over the only existing SNN-based AVSR method.

Deep learning has revolutionized artificial intelligence (AI), achieving remarkable progress in fields such as computer vision, speech recognition, and natural language processing. Moreover, the recent success of large language models (LLMs) has fueled a surge in research on large-scale neural networks. However, the escalating demand for computing resources and energy consumption has prompted the search for energy-efficient alternatives. Inspired by the human brain, spiking neural networks (SNNs) promise energy-efficient computation with event-driven spikes. To provide future directions toward building energy-efficient large SNN models, we present a survey of existing methods for developing deep spiking neural networks, with a focus on emerging Spiking Transformers. Our main contributions are as follows: (1) an overview of learning methods for deep spiking neural networks, categorized by ANN-to-SNN conversion and direct training with surrogate gradients; (2) an overview of network architectures for deep spiking neural networks, categorized by deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) and Transformer architecture; and (3) a comprehensive comparison of state-of-the-art deep SNNs with a focus on emerging Spiking Transformers. We then further discuss and outline future directions toward large-scale SNNs.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are extensively utilized in brain-inspired computing and neuroscience research. To enhance the speed and energy efficiency of SNNs, several many-core accelerators have been developed. However, maintaining the accuracy of SNNs often necessitates frequent explicit synchronization among all cores, which presents a challenge to overall efficiency. In this paper, we propose an asynchronous architecture for Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) that eliminates the need for inter-core synchronization, thus enhancing speed and energy efficiency. This approach leverages the pre-determined dependencies of neuromorphic cores established during compilation. Each core is equipped with a scheduler that monitors the status of its dependencies, allowing it to safely advance to the next timestep without waiting for other cores. This eliminates the necessity for global synchronization and minimizes core waiting time despite inherent workload imbalances. Comprehensive evaluations using five different SNN workloads show that our architecture achieves a 1.86x speedup and a 1.55x increase in energy efficiency compared to state-of-the-art synchronization architectures.

The Quick-view (QV) technique serves as a primary method for detecting defects within sewerage systems. However, the effectiveness of QV is impeded by the limited visual range of its hardware, resulting in suboptimal image quality for distant portions of the sewer network. Image super-resolution is an effective way to improve image quality and has been applied in a variety of scenes. However, research on super-resolution for sewer images remains considerably unexplored. In response, this study leverages the inherent depth relationships present within QV images and introduces a novel Depth-guided, Reference-based Super-Resolution framework denoted as DSRNet. It comprises two core components: a depth extraction module and a depth information matching module (DMM). DSRNet utilizes the adjacent frames of the low-resolution image as reference images and helps them recover texture information based on the correlation. By combining these modules, the integration of depth priors significantly enhances both visual quality and performance benchmarks. Besides, in pursuit of computational efficiency and compactness, a super-resolution knowledge distillation model based on an attention mechanism is introduced. This mechanism facilitates the acquisition of feature similarity between a more complex teacher model and a streamlined student model, with the latter being a lightweight version of DSRNet. Experimental results demonstrate that DSRNet significantly improves PSNR and SSIM compared with other methods. This study also conducts experiments on sewer defect semantic segmentation, object detection, and classification on the Pipe dataset and Sewer-ML dataset. Experiments show that the method can improve the performance of low-resolution sewer images in these tasks.

In sewer pipe Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) inspection, accurate temporal defect localization is essential for effective defect classification, detection, segmentation and quantification. Industry standards typically do not require time-interval annotations, even though they are more informative than time-point annotations for defect localization, resulting in additional annotation costs when fully supervised methods are used. Additionally, differences in scene types and camera motion patterns between pipe inspections and Temporal Action Localization (TAL) hinder the effective transfer of point-supervised TAL methods. Therefore, this study introduces a Semi-supervised multi-Prototype-based method incorporating visual Odometry for enhanced attention guidance (PipeSPO). PipeSPO fully leverages unlabeled data through unsupervised pretext tasks and utilizes time-point annotated data with a weakly supervised multi-prototype-based method, relying on visual odometry features to capture camera pose information. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that PipeSPO achieves 41.89% average precision across Intersection over Union (IoU) thresholds of 0.1-0.7, improving by 8.14% over current state-of-the-art methods., Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures

Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (GMNER) task aims to identify named entities, entity types and their corresponding visual regions. GMNER task exhibits two challenging attributes: 1) The tenuous correlation between images and text on social media contributes to a notable proportion of named entities being ungroundable. 2) There exists a distinction between coarse-grained noun phrases used in similar tasks (e.g., phrase localization) and fine-grained named entities. In this paper, we propose RiVEG, a unified framework that reformulates GMNER into a joint MNER-VE-VG task by leveraging large language models (LLMs) as connecting bridges. This reformulation brings two benefits: 1) It enables us to optimize the MNER module for optimal MNER performance and eliminates the need to pre-extract region features using object detection methods, thus naturally addressing the two major limitations of existing GMNER methods. 2) The introduction of Entity Expansion Expression module and Visual Entailment (VE) module unifies Visual Grounding (VG) and Entity Grounding (EG). This endows the proposed framework with unlimited data and model scalability. Furthermore, to address the potential ambiguity stemming from the coarse-grained bounding box output in GMNER, we further construct the new Segmented Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (SMNER) task and corresponding Twitter-SMNER dataset aimed at generating fine-grained segmentation masks, and experimentally demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of using box prompt-based Segment Anything Model (SAM) to empower any GMNER model with the ability to accomplish the SMNER task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RiVEG significantly outperforms SoTA methods on four datasets across the MNER, GMNER, and SMNER tasks., Comment: Extension of our Findings of EMNLP 2023 & ACL 2024 paper

The emergence of deep and large-scale spiking neural networks (SNNs) exhibiting high performance across diverse complex datasets has led to a need for compressing network models due to the presence of a significant number of redundant structural units, aiming to more effectively leverage their low-power consumption and biological interpretability advantages. Currently, most model compression techniques for SNNs are based on unstructured pruning of individual connections, which requires specific hardware support. Hence, we propose a structured pruning approach based on the activity levels of convolutional kernels named Spiking Channel Activity-based (SCA) network pruning framework. Inspired by synaptic plasticity mechanisms, our method dynamically adjusts the network's structure by pruning and regenerating convolutional kernels during training, enhancing the model's adaptation to the current target task. While maintaining model performance, this approach refines the network architecture, ultimately reducing computational load and accelerating the inference process. This indicates that structured dynamic sparse learning methods can better facilitate the application of deep SNNs in low-power and high-efficiency scenarios.

Humans learn multiple tasks in succession with minimal mutual interference, through the context gating mechanism in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The brain-inspired models of spiking neural networks (SNN) have drawn massive attention for their energy efficiency and biological plausibility. To overcome catastrophic forgetting when learning multiple tasks in sequence, current SNN models for lifelong learning focus on memory reserving or regularization-based modification, while lacking SNN to replicate human experimental behavior. Inspired by biological context-dependent gating mechanisms found in PFC, we propose SNN with context gating trained by the local plasticity rule (CG-SNN) for lifelong learning. The iterative training between global and local plasticity for task units is designed to strengthen the connections between task neurons and hidden neurons and preserve the multi-task relevant information. The experiments show that the proposed model is effective in maintaining the past learning experience and has better task-selectivity than other methods during lifelong learning. Our results provide new insights that the CG-SNN model can extend context gating with good scalability on different SNN architectures with different spike-firing mechanisms. Thus, our models have good potential for parallel implementation on neuromorphic hardware and model human's behavior.

Video text spotting (VTS) aims to simultaneously localize, recognize and track text instances in videos. To address the limited recognition capability of end-to-end methods, recent methods track the zero-shot results of state-of-the-art image text spotters directly, and achieve impressive performance. However, owing to the domain gap between different datasets, these methods usually obtain limited tracking trajectories on extreme dataset. Fine-tuning transformer-based text spotters on specific datasets could yield performance enhancements, albeit at the expense of considerable training resources. In this paper, we propose a Language Collaboration and Glyph Perception Model, termed LOGO, an innovative framework designed to enhance the performance of conventional text spotters. To achieve this goal, we design a language synergy classifier (LSC) to explicitly discern text instances from background noise in the recognition stage. Specially, the language synergy classifier can output text content or background code based on the legibility of text regions, thus computing language scores. Subsequently, fusion scores are computed by taking the average of detection scores and language scores, and are utilized to re-score the detection results before tracking. By the re-scoring mechanism, the proposed LSC facilitates the detection of low-resolution text instances while filtering out text-like regions. Moreover, the glyph supervision is introduced to enhance the recognition accuracy of noisy text regions. In addition, we propose the visual position mixture module, which can merge the position information and visual features efficiently, and acquire more discriminative tracking features. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Diffusion planners have shown promise in handling long-horizon and sparse-reward tasks due to the non-autoregressive plan generation. However, their inherent stochastic risk of generating infeasible trajectories presents significant challenges to their reliability and stability. We introduce a novel approach, the Trajectory Aggregation Tree (TAT), to address this issue in diffusion planners. Compared to prior methods that rely solely on raw trajectory predictions, TAT aggregates information from both historical and current trajectories, forming a dynamic tree-like structure. Each trajectory is conceptualized as a branch and individual states as nodes. As the structure evolves with the integration of new trajectories, unreliable states are marginalized, and the most impactful nodes are prioritized for decision-making. TAT can be deployed without modifying the original training and sampling pipelines of diffusion planners, making it a training-free, ready-to-deploy solution. We provide both theoretical analysis and empirical evidence to support TAT's effectiveness. Our results highlight its remarkable ability to resist the risk from unreliable trajectories, guarantee the performance boosting of diffusion planners in $100\%$ of tasks, and exhibit an appreciable tolerance margin for sample quality, thereby enabling planning with a more than $3\times$ acceleration., Comment: ICML 2024 (Spotlight)

Policy-based methods have achieved remarkable success in solving challenging reinforcement learning problems. Among these methods, off-policy policy gradient methods are particularly important due to that they can benefit from off-policy data. However, these methods suffer from the high variance of the off-policy policy gradient (OPPG) estimator, which results in poor sample efficiency during training. In this paper, we propose an off-policy policy gradient method with the optimal action-dependent baseline (Off-OAB) to mitigate this variance issue. Specifically, this baseline maintains the OPPG estimator's unbiasedness while theoretically minimizing its variance. To enhance practical computational efficiency, we design an approximated version of this optimal baseline. Utilizing this approximation, our method (Off-OAB) aims to decrease the OPPG estimator's variance during policy optimization. We evaluate the proposed Off-OAB method on six representative tasks from OpenAI Gym and MuJoCo, where it demonstrably surpasses state-of-the-art methods on the majority of these tasks., Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures

Natural Light Uncalibrated Photometric Stereo (NaUPS) relieves the strict environment and light assumptions in classical Uncalibrated Photometric Stereo (UPS) methods. However, due to the intrinsic ill-posedness and high-dimensional ambiguities, addressing NaUPS is still an open question. Existing works impose strong assumptions on the environment lights and objects' material, restricting the effectiveness in more general scenarios. Alternatively, some methods leverage supervised learning with intricate models while lacking interpretability, resulting in a biased estimation. In this work, we proposed Spin Light Uncalibrated Photometric Stereo (Spin-UP), an unsupervised method to tackle NaUPS in various environment lights and objects. The proposed method uses a novel setup that captures the object's images on a rotatable platform, which mitigates NaUPS's ill-posedness by reducing unknowns and provides reliable priors to alleviate NaUPS's ambiguities. Leveraging neural inverse rendering and the proposed training strategies, Spin-UP recovers surface normals, environment light, and isotropic reflectance under complex natural light with low computational cost. Experiments have shown that Spin-UP outperforms other supervised / unsupervised NaUPS methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance on synthetic and real-world datasets. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/LMozart/CVPR2024-SpinUP., Comment: Paper accepted by CVPR2024

Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (GMNER) is a nascent multimodal task that aims to identify named entities, entity types and their corresponding visual regions. GMNER task exhibits two challenging properties: 1) The weak correlation between image-text pairs in social media results in a significant portion of named entities being ungroundable. 2) There exists a distinction between coarse-grained referring expressions commonly used in similar tasks (e.g., phrase localization, referring expression comprehension) and fine-grained named entities. In this paper, we propose RiVEG, a unified framework that reformulates GMNER into a joint MNER-VE-VG task by leveraging large language models (LLMs) as a connecting bridge. This reformulation brings two benefits: 1) It maintains the optimal MNER performance and eliminates the need for employing object detection methods to pre-extract regional features, thereby naturally addressing two major limitations of existing GMNER methods. 2) The introduction of entity expansion expression and Visual Entailment (VE) module unifies Visual Grounding (VG) and Entity Grounding (EG). It enables RiVEG to effortlessly inherit the Visual Entailment and Visual Grounding capabilities of any current or prospective multimodal pretraining models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RiVEG outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the existing GMNER dataset and achieves absolute leads of 10.65%, 6.21%, and 8.83% in all three subtasks., Comment: Accepted to Findings of ACL 2024

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) mimic the information-processing mechanisms of the human brain and are highly energy-efficient, making them well-suited for low-power edge devices. However, the pursuit of accuracy in current studies leads to large, long-timestep SNNs, conflicting with the resource constraints of these devices. In order to design lightweight and efficient SNNs, we propose a new approach named LitE-SNN that incorporates both spatial and temporal compression into the automated network design process. Spatially, we present a novel Compressive Convolution block (CompConv) to expand the search space to support pruning and mixed-precision quantization. Temporally, we are the first to propose a compressive timestep search to identify the optimal number of timesteps under specific computation cost constraints. Finally, we formulate a joint optimization to simultaneously learn the architecture parameters and spatial-temporal compression strategies to achieve high performance while minimizing memory and computation costs. Experimental results on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Google Speech Command datasets demonstrate our proposed LitE-SNNs can achieve competitive or even higher accuracy with remarkably smaller model sizes and fewer computation costs.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) serve as one type of efficient model to process spatio-temporal patterns in time series, such as the Address-Event Representation data collected from Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS). Although convolutional SNNs have achieved remarkable performance on these AER datasets, benefiting from the predominant spatial feature extraction ability of convolutional structure, they ignore temporal features related to sequential time points. In this paper, we develop a recurrent spiking neural network (RSNN) model embedded with an advanced spiking convolutional block attention module (SCBAM) component to combine both spatial and temporal features of spatio-temporal patterns. It invokes the history information in spatial and temporal channels adaptively through SCBAM, which brings the advantages of efficient memory calling and history redundancy elimination. The performance of our model was evaluated in DVS128-Gesture dataset and other time-series datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed SRNN-SCBAM model makes better use of the history information in spatial and temporal dimensions with less memory space, and achieves higher accuracy compared to other models.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are gaining increasing attention for their biological plausibility and potential for improved computational efficiency. To match the high spatial-temporal dynamics in SNNs, neuromorphic chips are highly desired to execute SNNs in hardware-based neuron and synapse circuits directly. This paper presents a large-scale neuromorphic chip named Darwin3 with a novel instruction set architecture(ISA), which comprises 10 primary instructions and a few extended instructions. It supports flexible neuron model programming and local learning rule designs. The Darwin3 chip architecture is designed in a mesh of computing nodes with an innovative routing algorithm. We used a compression mechanism to represent synaptic connections, significantly reducing memory usage. The Darwin3 chip supports up to 2.35 million neurons, making it the largest of its kind in neuron scale. The experimental results showed that code density was improved up to 28.3x in Darwin3, and neuron core fan-in and fan-out were improved up to 4096x and 3072x by connection compression compared to the physical memory depth. Our Darwin3 chip also provided memory saving between 6.8X and 200.8X when mapping convolutional spiking neural networks (CSNN) onto the chip, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance in accuracy and latency compared to other neuromorphic chips.

Automatic sleep staging is essential for sleep assessment and disorder diagnosis. Most existing methods depend on one specific dataset and are limited to be generalized to other unseen datasets, for which the training data and testing data are from the same dataset. In this paper, we introduce domain generalization into automatic sleep staging and propose the task of generalizable sleep staging which aims to improve the model generalization ability to unseen datasets. Inspired by existing domain generalization methods, we adopt the feature alignment idea and propose a framework called SleepDG to solve it. Considering both of local salient features and sequential features are important for sleep staging, we propose a Multi-level Feature Alignment combining epoch-level and sequence-level feature alignment to learn domain-invariant feature representations. Specifically, we design an Epoch-level Feature Alignment to align the feature distribution of each single sleep epoch among different domains, and a Sequence-level Feature Alignment to minimize the discrepancy of sequential features among different domains. SleepDG is validated on five public datasets, achieving the state-of-the-art performance., Comment: Accepted by the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24)

A crucial reason for the success of existing NeRF-based methods is to build a neural density field for the geometry representation via multiple perceptron layers (MLPs). MLPs are continuous functions, however, real geometry or density field is frequently discontinuous at the interface between the air and the surface. Such a contrary brings the problem of unfaithful geometry representation. To this end, this paper proposes spiking NeRF, which leverages spiking neurons and a hybrid Artificial Neural Network (ANN)-Spiking Neural Network (SNN) framework to build a discontinuous density field for faithful geometry representation. Specifically, we first demonstrate the reason why continuous density fields will bring inaccuracy. Then, we propose to use the spiking neurons to build a discontinuous density field. We conduct a comprehensive analysis for the problem of existing spiking neuron models and then provide the numerical relationship between the parameter of the spiking neuron and the theoretical accuracy of geometry. Based on this, we propose a bounded spiking neuron to build the discontinuous density field. Our method achieves SOTA performance. The source code and the supplementary material are available at https://github.com/liaozhanfeng/Spiking-NeRF.

While advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience have enabled the emergence of neural networks capable of learning a wide variety of tasks, our understanding of the temporal dynamics of these networks remains limited. Here, we study the temporal dynamics during learning of Hebbian Feedforward (HebbFF) neural networks in tasks of continual familiarity detection. Drawing inspiration from the field of network neuroscience, we examine the network's dynamic reconfiguration, focusing on how network modules evolve throughout learning. Through a comprehensive assessment involving metrics like network accuracy, modular flexibility, and distribution entropy across diverse learning modes, our approach reveals various previously unknown patterns of network reconfiguration. In particular, we find that the emergence of network modularity is a salient predictor of performance, and that modularization strengthens with increasing flexibility throughout learning. These insights not only elucidate the nuanced interplay of network modularity, accuracy, and learning dynamics but also bridge our understanding of learning in artificial and biological realms.

Existing multi-agent PPO algorithms lack compatibility with different types of parameter sharing when extending the theoretical guarantee of PPO to cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). In this paper, we propose a novel and versatile multi-agent PPO algorithm for cooperative MARL to overcome this limitation. Our approach is achieved upon the proposed full-pipeline paradigm, which establishes multiple parallel optimization pipelines by employing various equivalent decompositions of the advantage function. This procedure successfully formulates the interconnections among agents in a more general manner, i.e., the interconnections among pipelines, making it compatible with diverse types of parameter sharing. We provide a solid theoretical foundation for policy improvement and subsequently develop a practical algorithm called Full-Pipeline PPO (FP3O) by several approximations. Empirical evaluations on Multi-Agent MuJoCo and StarCraftII tasks demonstrate that FP3O outperforms other strong baselines and exhibits remarkable versatility across various parameter-sharing configurations.

A longstanding challenge in Super-Resolution (SR) is how to efficiently enhance high-frequency details in Low-Resolution (LR) images while maintaining semantic coherence. This is particularly crucial in practical applications where SR models are often deployed on low-power devices. To address this issue, we propose an innovative asymmetric SR architecture featuring Multi-Depth Branch Module (MDBM). These MDBMs contain branches of different depths, designed to capture high- and low-frequency information simultaneously and efficiently. The hierarchical structure of MDBM allows the deeper branch to gradually accumulate fine-grained local details under the contextual guidance of the shallower branch. We visualize this process using feature maps, and further demonstrate the rationality and effectiveness of this design using proposed novel Fourier spectral analysis methods. Moreover, our model exhibits more significant spectral differentiation between branches than existing branch networks. This suggests that MDBM reduces feature redundancy and offers a more effective method for integrating high- and low-frequency information. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations on various datasets show that our model can generate structurally consistent and visually realistic HR images. It achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results at a very fast inference speed. Our code is available at https://github.com/thy960112/MDBN.

Decoding of seen visual contents with non-invasive brain recordings has important scientific and practical values. Efforts have been made to recover the seen images from brain signals. However, most existing approaches cannot faithfully reflect the visual contents due to insufficient image quality or semantic mismatches. Compared with reconstructing pixel-level visual images, speaking is a more efficient and effective way to explain visual information. Here we introduce a non-invasive neural decoder, termed as MindGPT, which interprets perceived visual stimuli into natural languages from fMRI signals. Specifically, our model builds upon a visually guided neural encoder with a cross-attention mechanism, which permits us to guide latent neural representations towards a desired language semantic direction in an end-to-end manner by the collaborative use of the large language model GPT. By doing so, we found that the neural representations of the MindGPT are explainable, which can be used to evaluate the contributions of visual properties to language semantics. Our experiments show that the generated word sequences truthfully represented the visual information (with essential details) conveyed in the seen stimuli. The results also suggested that with respect to language decoding tasks, the higher visual cortex (HVC) is more semantically informative than the lower visual cortex (LVC), and using only the HVC can recover most of the semantic information. The code of the MindGPT model will be publicly available at https://github.com/JxuanC/MindGPT., Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, submitted to anonymous conference

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) provide a direct pathway from the brain to external devices and have demonstrated great potential for assistive and rehabilitation technologies. Endogenous BCIs based on electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, such as motor imagery (MI) BCIs, can provide some level of control. However, mastering spontaneous BCI control requires the users to generate discriminative and stable brain signal patterns by imagery, which is challenging and is usually achieved over a very long training time (weeks/months). Here, we propose a human-machine joint learning framework to boost the learning process in endogenous BCIs, by guiding the user to generate brain signals towards an optimal distribution estimated by the decoder, given the historical brain signals of the user. To this end, we firstly model the human-machine joint learning process in a uniform formulation. Then a human-machine joint learning framework is proposed: 1) for the human side, we model the learning process in a sequential trial-and-error scenario and propose a novel ``copy/new'' feedback paradigm to help shape the signal generation of the subject toward the optimal distribution; 2) for the machine side, we propose a novel adaptive learning algorithm to learn an optimal signal distribution along with the subject's learning process. Specifically, the decoder reweighs the brain signals generated by the subject to focus more on ``good'' samples to cope with the learning process of the subject. Online and psuedo-online BCI experiments with 18 healthy subjects demonstrated the advantages of the proposed joint learning process over co-adaptive approaches in both learning efficiency and effectiveness.

Our comprehension of biological neuronal networks has profoundly influenced the evolution of artificial neural networks (ANNs). However, the neurons employed in ANNs exhibit remarkable deviations from their biological analogs, mainly due to the absence of complex dendritic trees encompassing local nonlinearity. Despite such disparities, previous investigations have demonstrated that point neurons can functionally substitute dendritic neurons in executing computational tasks. In this study, we scrutinized the importance of nonlinear dendrites within neural networks. By employing machine-learning methodologies, we assessed the impact of dendritic structure nonlinearity on neural network performance. Our findings reveal that integrating dendritic structures can substantially enhance model capacity and performance while keeping signal communication costs effectively restrained. This investigation offers pivotal insights that hold considerable implications for the development of future neural network accelerators.

Ad hoc teamwork requires an agent to cooperate with unknown teammates without prior coordination. Many works propose to abstract teammate instances into high-level representation of types and then pre-train the best response for each type. However, most of them do not consider the distribution of teammate instances within a type. This could expose the agent to the hidden risk of \emph{type confounding}. In the worst case, the best response for an abstract teammate type could be the worst response for all specific instances of that type. This work addresses the issue from the lens of causal inference. We first theoretically demonstrate that this phenomenon is due to the spurious correlation brought by uncontrolled teammate distribution. Then, we propose our solution, CTCAT, which disentangles such correlation through an instance-wise teammate feedback rectification. This operation reweights the interaction of teammate instances within a shared type to reduce the influence of type confounding. The effect of CTCAT is evaluated in multiple domains, including classic ad hoc teamwork tasks and real-world scenarios. Results show that CTCAT is robust to the influence of type confounding, a practical issue that directly hazards the robustness of our trained agents but was unnoticed in previous works., Comment: Accepted by ICML 2023

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have manifested remarkable advantages in power consumption and event-driven property during the inference process. To take full advantage of low power consumption and improve the efficiency of these models further, the pruning methods have been explored to find sparse SNNs without redundancy connections after training. However, parameter redundancy still hinders the efficiency of SNNs during training. In the human brain, the rewiring process of neural networks is highly dynamic, while synaptic connections maintain relatively sparse during brain development. Inspired by this, here we propose an efficient evolutionary structure learning (ESL) framework for SNNs, named ESL-SNNs, to implement the sparse SNN training from scratch. The pruning and regeneration of synaptic connections in SNNs evolve dynamically during learning, yet keep the structural sparsity at a certain level. As a result, the ESL-SNNs can search for optimal sparse connectivity by exploring all possible parameters across time. Our experiments show that the proposed ESL-SNNs framework is able to learn SNNs with sparse structures effectively while reducing the limited accuracy. The ESL-SNNs achieve merely 0.28% accuracy loss with 10% connection density on the DVS-Cifar10 dataset. Our work presents a brand-new approach for sparse training of SNNs from scratch with biologically plausible evolutionary mechanisms, closing the gap in the expressibility between sparse training and dense training. Hence, it has great potential for SNN lightweight training and inference with low power consumption and small memory usage.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have shown advantages in computation and energy efficiency over traditional artificial neural networks (ANNs) thanks to their event-driven representations. SNNs also replace weight multiplications in ANNs with additions, which are more energy-efficient and less computationally intensive. However, it remains a challenge to train deep SNNs due to the discrete spike function. A popular approach to circumvent this challenge is ANN-to-SNN conversion. However, due to the quantization error and accumulating error, it often requires lots of time steps (high inference latency) to achieve high performance, which negates SNN's advantages. To this end, this paper proposes Fast-SNN that achieves high performance with low latency. We demonstrate the equivalent mapping between temporal quantization in SNNs and spatial quantization in ANNs, based on which the minimization of the quantization error is transferred to quantized ANN training. With the minimization of the quantization error, we show that the sequential error is the primary cause of the accumulating error, which is addressed by introducing a signed IF neuron model and a layer-wise fine-tuning mechanism. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and low latency on various computer vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. Codes are available at: https://github.com/yangfan-hu/Fast-SNN., Comment: Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence

Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (MNER) on social media aims to enhance textual entity prediction by incorporating image-based clues. Existing studies mainly focus on maximizing the utilization of pertinent image information or incorporating external knowledge from explicit knowledge bases. However, these methods either neglect the necessity of providing the model with external knowledge, or encounter issues of high redundancy in the retrieved knowledge. In this paper, we present PGIM -- a two-stage framework that aims to leverage ChatGPT as an implicit knowledge base and enable it to heuristically generate auxiliary knowledge for more efficient entity prediction. Specifically, PGIM contains a Multimodal Similar Example Awareness module that selects suitable examples from a small number of predefined artificial samples. These examples are then integrated into a formatted prompt template tailored to the MNER and guide ChatGPT to generate auxiliary refined knowledge. Finally, the acquired knowledge is integrated with the original text and fed into a downstream model for further processing. Extensive experiments show that PGIM outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two classic MNER datasets and exhibits a stronger robustness and generalization capability., Comment: Accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2023

Objective. Spike sorting, a critical step in neural data processing, aims to classify spiking events from single electrode recordings based on different waveforms. This study aims to develop a novel online spike sorter, NeuSort, using neuromorphic models, with the ability to adaptively adjust to changes in neural signals, including waveform deformations and the appearance of new neurons. Approach. NeuSort leverages a neuromorphic model to emulate template-matching processes. This model incorporates plasticity learning mechanisms inspired by biological neural systems, facilitating real-time adjustments to online parameters. Results. Experimental findings demonstrate NeuSort's ability to track neuron activities amidst waveform deformations and identify new neurons in real-time. NeuSort excels in handling non-stationary neural signals, significantly enhancing its applicability for long-term spike sorting tasks. Moreover, its implementation on neuromorphic chips guarantees ultra-low energy consumption during computation. Significance. NeuSort caters to the demand for real-time spike sorting in brain-machine interfaces through a neuromorphic approach. Its unsupervised, automated spike sorting process makes it a plug-and-play solution for online spike sorting.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have superb characteristics in sensory information recognition tasks due to their biological plausibility. However, the performance of some current spiking-based models is limited by their structures which means either fully connected or too-deep structures bring too much redundancy. This redundancy from both connection and neurons is one of the key factors hindering the practical application of SNNs. Although Some pruning methods were proposed to tackle this problem, they normally ignored the fact the neural topology in the human brain could be adjusted dynamically. Inspired by this, this paper proposed an evolutionary-based structure construction method for constructing more reasonable SNNs. By integrating the knowledge distillation and connection pruning method, the synaptic connections in SNNs can be optimized dynamically to reach an optimal state. As a result, the structure of SNNs could not only absorb knowledge from the teacher model but also search for deep but sparse network topology. Experimental results on CIFAR100 and DVS-Gesture show that the proposed structure learning method can get pretty well performance while reducing the connection redundancy. The proposed method explores a novel dynamical way for structure learning from scratch in SNNs which could build a bridge to close the gap between deep learning and bio-inspired neural dynamics.

Targeting in-memory one-dimensional search keys, we propose a novel DIstribution-driven Learned Index tree (DILI), where a concise and computation-efficient linear regression model is used for each node. An internal node's key range is equally divided by its child nodes such that a key search enjoys perfect model prediction accuracy to find the relevant leaf node. A leaf node uses machine learning models to generate searchable data layout and thus accurately predicts the data record position for a key. To construct DILI, we first build a bottom-up tree with linear regression models according to global and local key distributions. Using the bottom-up tree, we build DILI in a top-down manner, individualizing the fanouts for internal nodes according to local distributions. DILI strikes a good balance between the number of leaf nodes and the height of the tree, two critical factors of key search time. Moreover, we design flexible algorithms for DILI to efficiently insert and delete keys and automatically adjust the tree structure when necessary. Extensive experimental results show that DILI outperforms the state-of-the-art alternatives on different kinds of workloads., Comment: PVLDB Volume 16

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are well known as the brain-inspired models with high computing efficiency, due to a key component that they utilize spikes as information units, close to the biological neural systems. Although spiking based models are energy efficient by taking advantage of discrete spike signals, their performance is limited by current network structures and their training methods. As discrete signals, typical SNNs cannot apply the gradient descent rules directly into parameters adjustment as artificial neural networks (ANNs). Aiming at this limitation, here we propose a novel method of constructing deep SNN models with knowledge distillation (KD) that uses ANN as teacher model and SNN as student model. Through ANN-SNN joint training algorithm, the student SNN model can learn rich feature information from the teacher ANN model through the KD method, yet it avoids training SNN from scratch when communicating with non-differentiable spikes. Our method can not only build a more efficient deep spiking structure feasibly and reasonably, but use few time steps to train whole model compared to direct training or ANN to SNN methods. More importantly, it has a superb ability of noise immunity for various types of artificial noises and natural signals. The proposed novel method provides efficient ways to improve the performance of SNN through constructing deeper structures in a high-throughput fashion, with potential usage for light and efficient brain-inspired computing of practical scenarios.

Accurate camera-to-lidar calibration is a requirement for sensor data fusion in many 3D perception tasks. In this paper, we present SceneCalib, a novel method for simultaneous self-calibration of extrinsic and intrinsic parameters in a system containing multiple cameras and a lidar sensor. Existing methods typically require specially designed calibration targets and human operators, or they only attempt to solve for a subset of calibration parameters. We resolve these issues with a fully automatic method that requires no explicit correspondences between camera images and lidar point clouds, allowing for robustness to many outdoor environments. Furthermore, the full system is jointly calibrated with explicit cross-camera constraints to ensure that camera-to-camera and camera-to-lidar extrinsic parameters are consistent., Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, ICRA 2023 conference

Uncalibrated photometric stereo (UPS) is challenging due to the inherent ambiguity brought by the unknown light. Although the ambiguity is alleviated on non-Lambertian objects, the problem is still difficult to solve for more general objects with complex shapes introducing irregular shadows and general materials with complex reflectance like anisotropic reflectance. To exploit cues from shadow and reflectance to solve UPS and improve performance on general materials, we propose DANI-Net, an inverse rendering framework with differentiable shadow handling and anisotropic reflectance modeling. Unlike most previous methods that use non-differentiable shadow maps and assume isotropic material, our network benefits from cues of shadow and anisotropic reflectance through two differentiable paths. Experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate our superior and robust performance., Comment: Accepted by CVPR 2023

In the "Beyond Moore's Law" era, with increasing edge intelligence, domain-specific computing embracing unconventional approaches will become increasingly prevalent. At the same time, adopting a variety of nanotechnologies will offer benefits in energy cost, computational speed, reduced footprint, cyber resilience, and processing power. The time is ripe for a roadmap for unconventional computing with nanotechnologies to guide future research, and this collection aims to fill that need. The authors provide a comprehensive roadmap for neuromorphic computing using electron spins, memristive devices, two-dimensional nanomaterials, nanomagnets, and various dynamical systems. They also address other paradigms such as Ising machines, Bayesian inference engines, probabilistic computing with p-bits, processing in memory, quantum memories and algorithms, computing with skyrmions and spin waves, and brain-inspired computing for incremental learning and problem-solving in severely resource-constrained environments. These approaches have advantages over traditional Boolean computing based on von Neumann architecture. As the computational requirements for artificial intelligence grow 50 times faster than Moore's Law for electronics, more unconventional approaches to computing and signal processing will appear on the horizon, and this roadmap will help identify future needs and challenges. In a very fertile field, experts in the field aim to present some of the dominant and most promising technologies for unconventional computing that will be around for some time to come. Within a holistic approach, the goal is to provide pathways for solidifying the field and guiding future impactful discoveries., Comment: 80 pages accepted in Nano Futures