Baseline Methods Research Articles

Text‐Guided Interactive Scene Synthesis with Scene Prior Guidance

Abstract3D scene synthesis using natural language instructions has become a popular direction in computer graphics, with significant progress made by data‐driven generative models recently. However, previous methods have mainly focused on one‐time scene generation, lacking the interactive capability to generate, update, or correct scenes according to user instructions. To overcome this limitation, this paper focuses on text‐guided interactive scene synthesis. First, we introduce the SceneMod dataset, which comprises 168k paired scenes with textual descriptions of the modifications. To support the interactive scene synthesis task, we propose a two‐stage diffusion generative model that integrates scene‐prior guidance into the denoising process to explicitly enforce physical constraints and foster more realistic scenes. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms baseline methods in text‐guided scene synthesis tasks. Our system expands the scope of data‐driven scene synthesis tasks and provides a novel, more flexible tool for users and designers in 3D scene generation. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/bshfang/SceneMod.

Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction Based on Dual Social Graph Attention Network

Pedestrian trajectory prediction poses significant challenges for autonomous systems due to the intricate nature of social interactions in densely populated environments. While the existing methods frequently encounter difficulties in effectively quantifying the nuanced social relationships, we propose a novel dual social graph attention network (DSGAT) that systematically models multi-level interactions. This framework is specifically designed to enhance the extraction of pedestrian interaction features within the environment, thereby improving the trajectory prediction accuracy. The network architecture consists of two primary branches, namely an individual branch and a group branch, which are responsible for modeling personal and collective pedestrian behaviors, respectively. For individual feature modeling, we propose the Spatio-Temporal Weighted Graph Attention Network (STWGAT) branch, which incorporates a newly developed directed social attention function to explicitly capture both the direction and intensity of pedestrian interactions. This mechanism enables the model to more effectively represent the fine-grained social dynamics. Subsequently, leveraging the STWGAT’s processing of directed weighted graphs, the network’s ability to aggregate spatiotemporal information and refine individual interaction representations is further strengthened. To effectively account for the critical group dynamics, a dedicated group attention function is designed to identify and quantify the collective behaviors within pedestrian crowds. This facilitates a more comprehensive understanding of the complex social interactions, leading to an enhanced trajectory prediction accuracy. Extensive comparative experiments conducted on the widely used ETH and UCY benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed network consistently surpasses the baseline methods across the key evaluation metrics, including the Average Displacement Error (ADE) and Final Displacement Error (FDE). These results confirm the effectiveness and robustness of the DSGAT-based approach in handling complex pedestrian interaction scenarios.

Personalized Federated Collaborative Filtering: A Variational AutoEncoder Approach

Federated Collaborative Filtering (FedCF) is an emerging field focused on developing a new recommendation framework with preserving privacy in a federated setting. Existing FedCF methods typically combine distributed Collaborative Filtering (CF) algorithms with privacy-preserving mechanisms, and then preserve personalized information into a user embedding vector. However, the user embedding is usually insufficient to preserve the rich information of the fine-grained personalization across heterogeneous clients. This paper proposes a novel personalized FedCF method by preserving users' personalized information into a latent variable and a neural model simultaneously. Specifically, we decompose the modeling of user knowledge into two encoders, each designed to capture shared knowledge and personalized knowledge separately. A personalized gating network is then applied to balance personalization and generalization between the global and local encoders. Moreover, to effectively train the proposed framework, we model the CF problem as a specialized Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) task by integrating user interaction vector reconstruction with missing value prediction. The decoder is trained to reconstruct the implicit feedback from items the user has interacted with, while also predicting items the user might be interested in but has not yet interacted with. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other baseline methods, showcasing superior performance.

Scalable Surrogate Verification of Image-Based Neural Network Control Systems Using Composition and Unrolling

Verifying safety of neural network control systems that use images as input is a difficult problem because, from a given system state, there is no known way to mathematically model what images are possible in the real-world. We build upon recent work that considers a surrogate verification approach, training a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) as an image generator in place of the real world. This setup enables set-based formal analysis of the closed-loop system, providing analysis beyond simulation and testing. While existing work is effective on small examples, excessive overapproximation both within a single control period (one-step error) and across multiple periods (multi-step error) limits its scalability. We propose approaches to overcome these errors. First, we address one-step error by composing the system's dynamics along with the cGAN and neural network controller, without losing the dependencies between input states and the control outputs as in the monotonic analysis of the system dynamics. Second, we reduce multi-step error by repeating the single-step composition, essentially unrolling multiple steps of the control loop into a large neural network. We then leverage existing network verification algorithms to compute accurate reachable sets for multiple steps, avoiding the accumulation of abstraction error at each step.We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in terms of both accuracy and scalability using two case studies. On the aircraft taxiing system, the converged reachable set is 175% larger using the prior baseline method compared with our proposed approach. On the emergency braking system, with 24x the number of image output variables from the cGAN, the baseline method fails to prove any states are safe, whereas our improvements enable set-based safety analysis.

Active Symbolic Discovery of Ordinary Differential Equations via Phase Portrait Sketching

The symbolic discovery of Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) from trajectory data plays a pivotal role in AI-driven scientific discovery. Existing symbolic methods predominantly rely on fixed, pre-collected training datasets, which often result in suboptimal performance, as demonstrated in our case study in Figure 1. Drawing inspiration from active learning, we investigate strategies to query informative trajectory data that can enhance the evaluation of predicted ODEs. However, the butterfly effect in dynamical systems reveals that small variations in initial conditions can lead to drastically different trajectories, necessitating the storage of vast quantities of trajectory data using conventional active learning. To address this, we introduce Active Symbolic Discovery of Ordinary Differential Equations via Phase Portrait Sketching (APPS). Instead of directly selecting individual initial conditions, our APPS first identifies an informative region within the phase space and then samples a batch of initial conditions from this region. Compared to traditional active learning methods, APPS mitigates the gap of maintaining a large amount of data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that APPS consistently discovers more accurate ODE expressions than baseline methods using passively collected datasets.

Learning Multiple User Distributions for Recommendation via Guided Conditional Diffusion

Recommender systems are increasingly prevalent to provide personalized suggestions and enhance user satisfaction. Typical recommendation models encode users and items as embeddings, and generate recommendations by assessing the similarity between these embeddings. Despite their effectiveness, these embedding-based models struggle with modeling user uncertainty and capturing diverse user interests using a single fixed user embedding. Recent studies have begun to explore a user-distribution paradigm to learn distributions for users. However, this approach employs a single distribution per user, which fails to effectively delineate semantic boundaries, resulting in sub-optimal recommendations. To this end, we propose GCDR, a Guided Conditional Diffusion Recommender model, to learn multiple distributions for each user in this paper. Specifically, GCDR addresses two major challenges: 1) learning disentangled distributions, and 2) learning personalized distributions. GCDR captures inter-user and intra-user distribution properties through conditional and guided diffusion, respectively. It maintains user-specific embeddings to encode long-term interests for conditional diffusion, while for guided diffusion, it incorporates short-term interests encoded from recent interactions with category preferences. To align the diffusion model with the recommendation task, we train GCDR with three loss functions, included the user loss, the recommendation loss and the diffusion loss. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets show that GCDR is able to learn effective user distributions and is superior to thirteen state-of-the-art baseline methods.

AsyncDSB: Schedule-Asynchronous Diffusion Schrödinger Bridge for Image Inpainting

Image inpainting is an important image generation task, which aims to restore corrupted image from partial visible area. Recently, diffusion Schrödinger bridge methods effectively tackle this task by modeling the translation between corrupted and target images as a diffusion Schrödinger bridge process along a noising schedule path. Although these methods have shown superior performance, in this paper, we find that 1) existing methods suffer from a schedule-restoration mismatching issue, i.e., the theoretical schedule and practical restoration processes usually exist a large discrepancy, which theoretically results in the schedule not fully leveraged for restoring images; and 2) the key reason causing such issue is that the restoration process of all pixels are actually asynchronous but existing methods set a synchronous noise schedule to them, i.e., all pixels shares the same noise schedule. To this end, we propose a schedule-Asynchronous Diffusion Schrödinger Bridge (AsyncDSB) for image inpainting. Our insight is preferentially scheduling pixels with high frequency (i.e., large gradients) and then low frequency (i.e., small gradients). Based on this insight, given a corrupted image, we first train a network to predict its gradient map in corrupted area. Then, we regard the predicted image gradient as prior and design a simple yet effective pixel-asynchronous noise schedule strategy to enhance the diffusion Schrödinger bridge. Thanks to the asynchronous schedule at pixels, the temporal interdependence of restoration process between pixels can be fully characterized for high-quality image inpainting. Experiments on real-world datasets show that our AsyncDSB achieves superior performance, especially on FID with around 3% ∼ 14% improvement over state-of-the-art baseline methods.

Active Geospatial Search for Efficient Tenant Eviction Outreach

Tenant evictions threaten housing stability and are a major concern for many cities. An open question concerns whether data-driven methods enhance outreach programs that target at-risk tenants to mitigate their risk of eviction. We propose a novel active geospatial search (AGS) modeling framework for this problem. AGS integrates property-level information in a search policy that identifies a sequence of rental units to canvas to both determine their eviction risk and provide support if needed. We propose a hierarchical reinforcement learning approach to learn a search policy for AGS that scales to large urban areas containing thousands of parcels, balancing exploration and exploitation and accounting for travel costs and a budget constraint. Crucially, the search policy adapts online to newly discovered information about evictions. Evaluation using eviction data for a large urban area demonstrates that the proposed framework and algorithmic approach are considerably more effective at sequentially identifying eviction cases than baseline methods.

Multi-Modal Recommendation Unlearning for Legal, Licensing, and Modality Constraints

User data spread across multiple modalities has popularized multi-modal recommender systems (MMRS). They recommend diverse content such as products, social media posts, TikTok reels, etc., based on a user-item interaction graph. With rising data privacy demands, recent methods propose unlearning private user data from uni-modal recommender systems (RS). However, methods for unlearning item data related to outdated user preferences, revoked licenses, and legally requested removals are still largely unexplored. Previous RS unlearning methods are unsuitable for MMRS due to the incompatibility of their matrix-based representation with the multi-modal user-item interaction graph. Moreover, their data partitioning step degrades performance on each shard due to poor data heterogeneity and requires costly performance aggregation across shards. This paper introduces MMRecUn, the first approach known to us for unlearning in MMRS and unlearning item data. Given a trained RS model, MMRecUn employs a novel Reverse Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) objective to enable the model to forget marked data. The reverse BPR attenuates the impact of user-item interactions within the forget set, while the forward BPR reinforces the significance of user-item interactions within the retain set. Our experiments demonstrate that MMRecUn outperforms baseline methods across various unlearning requests when evaluated on benchmark MMRS datasets. MMRecUn achieves recall performance improvements of up to 49.85% compared to baseline methods and is up to 1.3× faster than the Gold model, which is trained on retain set from scratch. MMRecUn offers significant advantages, including superiority in removing target interactions, preserving retained interactions, and zero overhead costs compared to previous methods.

CoRe: Context-Regularized Text Embedding Learning for Text-to-Image Personalization

Recent advances in text-to-image personalization have enabled high-quality and controllable image synthesis for user-provided concepts. However, existing methods still struggle to balance identity preservation with text alignment. Our approach is based on the fact that generating prompt-aligned images requires a precise semantic understanding of the prompt, which involves accurately processing the interactions between the new concept and its surrounding context tokens within the CLIP text encoder. To address this, we aim to embed the new concept properly into the input embedding space of the text encoder, allowing for seamless integration with existing tokens. We introduce Context Regularization (CoRe), which enhances the learning of the new concept's text embedding by regularizing its context tokens in the prompt. This is based on the insight that appropriate output vectors of the text encoder for the context tokens can only be achieved if the new concept's text embedding is correctly learned. CoRe can be applied to arbitrary prompts without requiring the generation of corresponding images, thus improving the generalization of the learned text embedding. Additionally, CoRe can serve as a test-time optimization technique to further enhance the generations for specific prompts. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms several baseline methods in both identity preservation and text alignment.

Context-aware Graph Neural Network for Graph-based Fraud Detection with Extremely Limited Labels

Graph-based fraud detection is crucial in identifying illegal activities in social networks, finance, and other sectors. Despite recent progress in this area, most of current researches typically require a large amount of annotated data to demonstrate its benefits. In practice, obtaining sufficient high-quality annotated data is challenging, limiting the effectiveness of model training. Therefore, leveraging extremely limited label information is crucial to enhance model performance. We propose a context-aware graph neural network (CGNN) to address this. CGNN performs category semantic decomposition on the contextual neighbor features of the center node to enrich the category semantics. In the neighbor message aggregation stage, the denoising attention mechanism enables the center node to adaptively aggregate heterophilic and homophilic information from neighbors. Particularly for unlabeled data, feature augmentation within the category subspace and consistency regularization driven by entropy minimization ensure that such data can further enhance model performance under explicit semantic guidance. We demonstrate on four real-world datasets that CGNN significantly outperforms other baseline methods with extremely limited labels.

Watch Out for Your Guidance on Generation! Exploring Conditional Backdoor Attacks against Large Language Models

Mainstream backdoor attacks on large language models (LLMs) typically set a fixed trigger in the input instance and specific responses for triggered queries. However, the fixed trigger setting (e.g., unusual words) may be easily detected by human detection, limiting the effectiveness and practicality in real-world scenarios. To enhance the stealthiness of backdoor activation, we present a new poisoning paradigm against LLMs triggered by specifying generation conditions, which are commonly adopted strategies by users during model inference. The poisoned model performs normally for output under normal/other generation conditions, while becomes harmful for output under target generation conditions. To achieve this objective, we introduce BrieFool, an efficient attack framework. It leverages the characteristics of generation conditions by efficient instruction sampling and poisoning data generation, thereby influencing the behavior of LLMs under target conditions. Our attack can be generally divided into two types with different targets: Safety unalignment attack and Ability degradation attack. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that BrieFool is effective across safety domains and ability domains, achieving higher success rates than baseline methods, with 94.3% on GPT-3.5-turbo.

Apollo-Forecast: Overcoming Aliasing and Inference Speed Challenges in Language Models for Time Series Forecasting

Encoding time series into tokens and using language models for processing has been shown to substantially augment the models' ability to generalize to unseen tasks. However, existing language models for time series forecasting encounter several obstacles, including aliasing distortion and prolonged inference times, primarily due to the limitations of quantization processes and the computational demands of large models. This paper introduces Apollo-Forecast, a novel framework that tackles these challenges with two key innovations: the Anti-Aliasing Quantization Module (AAQM) and the Race Decoding (RD) technique. AAQM adeptly encodes sequences into tokens while mitigating high-frequency noise in the original signals, thus enhancing both signal fidelity and overall quantization efficiency. RD employs a draft model to enable parallel processing and results integration, which markedly accelerates the inference speed for long-term predictions, particularly in large-scale models. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets show that Apollo-Forecast outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 35.41% and 18.99% in WQL and MASE metrics, respectively, in zero-shot scenarios. Furthermore, our method achieves an acceleration of 1.9X-2.7X in inference speed over the baseline methods.

Symbolic Neural Ordinary Differential Equations

Differential equations are widely used to describe complex dynamical systems with evolving parameters in nature and engineering. Effectively learning a family of maps from the parameter function to the system dynamics is of great significance. In this study, we propose a novel learning framework of symbolic continuous-depth neural networks, termed Symbolic Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (SNODEs), to effectively and accurately learn the underlying dynamics of complex systems. Specifically, our learning framework comprises three stages: initially, pre-training a predefined symbolic neural network via a gradient flow matching strategy; subsequently, fine-tuning this network using Neural ODEs; and finally, constructing a general neural network to capture residuals. In this process, we apply the SNODEs framework to partial differential equation systems through Fourier analysis, achieving resolution-invariant modeling. Moreover, this framework integrates the strengths of symbolism and connectionism, boasting a universal approximation theorem while significantly enhancing interpretability and extrapolation capabilities relative to state-of-the-art baseline methods. We demonstrate this through experiments on several representative complex systems. Therefore, our framework can be further applied to a wide range of scientific problems, such as system bifurcation and control, reconstruction and forecasting, as well as the discovery of new equations.

Friends-MMC: A Dataset for Multi-modal Multi-party Conversation Understanding

Multi-modal multi-party conversation (MMC) is a less studied yet important topic of research due to that it well fits real-world scenarios and thus potentially has more widely-used applications. Compared with the traditional multi-modal conversations, MMC requires stronger character-centered understanding abilities as there are many interlocutors appearing in both the visual and textual context. To facilitate the study of this problem, we present Friends-MMC in this paper, an MMC dataset that contains 24,000+ unique utterances paired with video context. To explore the character-centered understanding of the dialogue, we also annotate the speaker of each utterance, the names and bounding bboxes of faces that appear in the video. Based on this Friends-MMC dataset, we further study two fundamental MMC tasks: conversation speaker identification and conversation response prediction, both of which have the multi-party nature with the video or image as visual context. For conversation speaker identification, we demonstrate the inefficiencies of existing methods such as pre-trained models, and propose a simple yet effective baseline method that leverages an optimization solver to utilize the context of two modalities to achieve better performance. For conversation response prediction, we fine-tune generative dialogue models on Friend-MMC, and analyze the benefits of speaker information. The code and dataset will be publicly available, and thus we call for more attention on modelling speaker information when understanding conversations.

Towards Ship License Plate Recognition in the Wild: A Large Benchmark and Strong Baseline

The paper targets the challenging task of Ship License Plate (SLP) recognition. Existing methods for SLP recognition are hampered by the scarcity of large and publicly available datasets, leading to evaluations on small and non-representative datasets. To alleviate it, we have built a large dataset, called SLP34K, which consists of 34,385 images collected by an intelligent traffic surveillance system. The dataset is carefully manually annotated with text labels and attributes, and presents high data diversity by multiple installation locations and long capturing period of the cameras. Additionally, we propose a simple yet effective SLP recognition baseline method. The baseline is equipped with a strong visual encoder that benefits from initial pre-training via self-supervised learning, followed by further refinement through our devised semantic enhancement module. Extensive experiments on SLP34K verify the effectiveness of our proposed baseline. Moreover, while our baseline is designed for SLP recognition, it can also be used for common scene text recognition and achieve state-of-the-art performance on seven mainstream scene text recognition datasets.

EMHI: A Multimodal Egocentric Human Motion Dataset with HMD and Body-Worn IMUs

Egocentric human pose estimation (HPE) using wearable sensors is essential for VR/AR applications. Most methods rely solely on either egocentric-view images or sparse Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) signals, leading to inaccuracies due to self-occlusion in images or the sparseness and drift of inertial sensors. Most importantly, the lack of real-world datasets containing both modalities is a major obstacle to progress in this field. To overcome the barrier, we propose EMHI, a multimodal Egocentric human Motion dataset with Head-Mounted Display (HMD) and body-worn IMUs, with all data collected under the real VR product suite. Specifically, EMHI provides synchronized stereo images from downward-sloping cameras on the headset and IMU data from body-worn sensors, along with pose annotations in SMPL format. This dataset consists of 885 sequences captured by 58 subjects performing 39 actions, totaling about 28.5 hours of recording. We evaluate the annotations by comparing them with optical marker-based SMPL fitting results. To substantiate the reliability of our dataset, we introduce MEPoser, a new baseline method for multimodal egocentric HPE, which employs a multimodal fusion encoder, temporal feature encoder, and MLP-based regression heads. The experiments on EMHI show that MEPoser outperforms existing single-modal methods and demonstrates the value of our dataset in solving the problem of egocentric HPE. We believe the release of EMHI and the method could advance the research of egocentric HPE and expedite the practical implementation of this technology in VR/AR products.

Quality over Quantity: Boosting Data Efficiency Through Ensembled Multimodal Data Curation

In an era overwhelmed by vast amounts of data, the effective curation of web-crawl datasets is essential for optimizing model performance. This paper tackles the challenges associated with the unstructured and heterogeneous nature of such datasets. Traditional heuristic curation methods often inadequately capture complex features, resulting in biases and the exclusion of relevant data. We introduce an advanced, learning-driven approach, Ensemble Curation Of DAta ThroUgh Multimodal Operators, called EcoDatum, which employs a novel quality-guided deduplication method to balance feature distribution. EcoDatum strategically integrates various unimodal and multimodal data curation operators within a weak supervision ensemble framework, utilizing automated optimization to effectively score each data point. EcoDatum, which significantly improves the data curation quality and efficiency, outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques, ranking 1st on the DataComp leaderboard with an average performance score of 0.182 across 38 diverse evaluation datasets. This represents a 28% improvement over the DataComp baseline method, demonstrating its effectiveness in improving dataset curation and model training efficiency.

MVCF-TMI: A Travel Mode Identification Framework via Contrastive Fusion of Multi-View Trajectory Representations

Travel mode identification (TMI) plays a crucial role in intelligent transportation systems by accurately identifying travel modes from Global Positioning System (GPS) trajectory data. Given that trajectory data inherently exhibit spatial and kinematic patterns that complement each other, recent TMI methods generally combine these characteristics through image-based projections or direct concatenation. However, such approaches achieve only shallow fusion of these two types of features and cannot effectively align them into a shared latent space. To overcome this limitation, we introduce multi-view contrastive fusion (MVCF)-TMI, a novel TMI framework that enhances identification accuracy and model generalizability by aligning spatial and kinematic views through multi-view contrastive learning. Our framework employs multi-view learning to separately extract spatial and kinematic features, followed by an inter-view contrastive loss to optimize feature alignment in a shared subspace. This approach enables cross-view semantic understanding and better captures complementary information across different trajectory representations. Extensive experiments show that MVCF-TMI outperforms baseline methods, achieving 86.45% accuracy on the GeoLife dataset. The model also demonstrates strong generalization by transferring knowledge from pretraining on the large-scale GeoLife dataset to the smaller SHL dataset.

SrSv: Integrating Sequential Rollouts with Sequential Value Estimation for Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

Although multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has shown its success across diverse domains, extending its application to large-scale real-world systems still faces significant challenges. Primarily, the high complexity of real-world environments exacerbates the credit assignment problem, substantially reducing training efficiency. Moreover, the variability of agent populations in large-scale scenarios necessitates scalable decision-making mechanisms. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework: Sequential rollout with Sequential value estimation (SrSv). This framework aims to capture agent interdependence and provide a scalable solution for cooperative MARL. Specifically, SrSv leverages the autoregressive property of the Transformer model to handle varying populations through sequential action rollout. Furthermore, to capture the interdependence of policy distributions and value functions among multiple agents, we introduce an innovative sequential value estimation methodology and integrates the value approximation into an attention-based sequential model. We evaluate SrSv on three benchmarks: Multi-Agent MuJoCo, StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge, and DubinsCars. Experimental results demonstrate that SrSv significantly outperforms baseline methods in terms of training efficiency without compromising convergence performance. Moreover, when implemented in a large-scale DubinsCar system with 1,024 agents, our framework surpasses existing benchmarks, highlighting the excellent scalability of SrSv.