Exploring Adversarial Transferability between Kolmogorov-arnold Networks

Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have emerged as a transformative model paradigm, significantly impacting various fields. However, their adversarial robustness remains less underexplored, especially across different KAN architectures. To explore this critical safety issue, we conduct an analysis and find that due to overfitting to the specific basis functions of KANs, they possess poor adversarial transferability among different KANs. To tackle this challenge, we propose AdvKAN, the first transfer attack method for KANs. AdvKAN integrates two key components: 1) a Breakthrough-Defense Surrogate Model (BDSM), which employs a breakthrough-defense training strategy to mitigate overfitting to the specific structures of KANs. 2) a Global-Local Interaction (GLI) technique, which promotes sufficient interaction between adversarial gradients of hierarchical levels, further smoothing out loss surfaces of KANs. Both of them work together to enhance the strength of transfer attack among different KANs. Extensive experimental results on various KANs and datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of AdvKAN, which possesses notably superior attack capabilities and deeply reveals the vulnerabilities of KANs. Code will be released upon acceptance.

VITA-1.5: Towards GPT-4o Level Real-Time Vision and Speech Interaction

Recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have typically focused on integrating visual and textual modalities, with less emphasis placed on the role of speech in enhancing interaction. However, speech plays a crucial role in multimodal dialogue systems, and implementing high-performance in both vision and speech tasks remains a significant challenge due to the fundamental modality differences. In this paper, we propose a carefully designed multi-stage training methodology that progressively trains LLM to understand both visual and speech information, ultimately enabling fluent vision and speech interaction. Our approach not only preserves strong vision-language capacity, but also enables efficient speech-to-speech dialogue capabilities without separate ASR and TTS modules, significantly accelerating multimodal end-to-end response speed. By comparing our method against state-of-the-art counterparts across benchmarks for image, video, and speech tasks, we demonstrate that our model is equipped with both strong visual and speech capabilities, making near real-time vision and speech interaction.

T2Vid: Translating Long Text into Multi-Image is the Catalyst for Video-LLMs

The success of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in the image domain has garnered wide attention from the research community. Drawing on previous successful experiences, researchers have recently explored extending the success to the video understanding realms. Apart from training from scratch, an efficient way is to utilize the pre-trained image-LLMs, leading to two mainstream approaches, i.e. zero-shot inference and further fine-tuning with video data. In this work, our study of these approaches harvests an effective data augmentation method. We first make a deeper inspection of the zero-shot inference way and identify two limitations, i.e. limited generalization and lack of temporal understanding capabilities. Thus, we further investigate the fine-tuning approach and find a low learning efficiency when simply using all the video data samples, which can be attributed to a lack of instruction diversity. Aiming at this issue, we develop a method called T2Vid to synthesize video-like samples to enrich the instruction diversity in the training corpus. Integrating these data enables a simple and efficient training scheme, which achieves performance comparable to or even superior to using full video datasets by training with just 15% the sample size. Meanwhile, we find that the proposed scheme can boost the performance of long video understanding without training with long video samples. We hope our study will spark more thinking about using MLLMs for video understanding and curation of high-quality data. The code is released at https://github.com/xjtupanda/T2Vid.

MME-Survey: A Comprehensive Survey on Evaluation of Multimodal LLMs

As a prominent direction of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have garnered increased attention from both industry and academia. Building upon pre-trained LLMs, this family of models further develops multimodal perception and reasoning capabilities that are impressive, such as writing code given a flow chart or creating stories based on an image. In the development process, evaluation is critical since it provides intuitive feedback and guidance on improving models. Distinct from the traditional train-eval-test paradigm that only favors a single task like image classification, the versatility of MLLMs has spurred the rise of various new benchmarks and evaluation methods. In this paper, we aim to present a comprehensive survey of MLLM evaluation, discussing four key aspects: 1) the summarised benchmarks types divided by the evaluation capabilities, including foundation capabilities, model self-analysis, and extented applications; 2) the typical process of benchmark counstruction, consisting of data collection, annotation, and precautions; 3) the systematic evaluation manner composed of judge, metric, and toolkit; 4) the outlook for the next benchmark. This work aims to offer researchers an easy grasp of how to effectively evaluate MLLMs according to different needs and to inspire better evaluation methods, thereby driving the progress of MLLM research.

VITA: Towards Open-Source Interactive Omni Multimodal LLM

The remarkable multimodal capabilities and interactive experience of GPT-4o underscore their necessity in practical applications, yet open-source models rarely excel in both areas. In this paper, we introduce VITA, the first-ever open-source Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) adept at simultaneous processing and analysis of Video, Image, Text, and Audio modalities, and meanwhile has an advanced multimodal interactive experience. Starting from Mixtral 8x7B as a language foundation, we expand its Chinese vocabulary followed by bilingual instruction tuning. We further endow the language model with visual and audio capabilities through two-stage multi-task learning of multimodal alignment and instruction tuning. VITA demonstrates robust foundational capabilities of multilingual, vision, and audio understanding, as evidenced by its strong performance across a range of both unimodal and multimodal benchmarks. Beyond foundational capabilities, we have made considerable progress in enhancing the natural multimodal human-computer interaction experience. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to exploit non-awakening interaction and audio interrupt in MLLM. VITA is the first step for the open-source community to explore the seamless integration of multimodal understanding and interaction. While there is still lots of work to be done on VITA to get close to close-source counterparts, we hope that its role as a pioneer can serve as a cornerstone for subsequent research. Project Page: https://vita-home.github.io.

GAPNet: Granularity Attention Network with Anatomy-Prior-Constraint for Carotid Artery Segmentation

Atherosclerosis is a chronic, progressive disease that primarily affects the arterial walls. It is one of the major causes of cardiovascular disease. Magnetic Resonance (MR) black-blood vessel wall imaging (BB-VWI) offers crucial insights into vascular disease diagnosis by clearly visualizing vascular structures. However, the complex anatomy of the neck poses challenges in distinguishing the carotid artery (CA) from surrounding structures, especially with changes like atherosclerosis. In order to address these issues, we propose GAPNet, which is a consisting of a novel geometric prior deduced from.

DSCA: A Digital Subtraction Angiography Sequence Dataset and Spatio-Temporal Model for Cerebral Artery Segmentation

Cerebrovascular diseases (CVDs) remain a leading cause of global disability and mortality. Digital Subtraction Angiography (DSA) sequences, recognized as the golden standard for diagnosing CVDs, can clearly visualize the dynamic flow and reveal pathological conditions within the cerebrovasculature. Therefore, precise segmentation of cerebral arteries (CAs) and classification between their main trunks and branches are crucial for physicians to accurately quantify diseases. However, achieving accurate CA segmentation in DSA sequences remains a challenging task due to small vessels with low contrast, and ambiguity between vessels and residual skull structures. Moreover, the lack of publicly available datasets limits exploration in the field. In this paper, we introduce a DSA Sequence-based Cerebral Artery segmentation dataset (DSCA), the first publicly accessible dataset designed specifically for pixel-level semantic segmentation of CAs. Additionally, we propose DSANet, a spatio-temporal network for CA segmentation in DSA sequences. Unlike existing DSA segmentation methods that focus only on a single frame, the proposed DSANet introduces a separate temporal encoding branch to capture dynamic vessel details across multiple frames. To enhance small vessel segmentation and improve vessel connectivity, we design a novel TemporalFormer module to capture global context and correlations among sequential frames. Furthermore, we develop a Spatio-Temporal Fusion (STF) module to effectively integrate spatial and temporal features from the encoder. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DSANet outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in CA segmentation, achieving a Dice of 0.9033.

HAGAN: Hybrid Augmented Generative Adversarial Network for Medical Image Synthesis

Medical Image Synthesis (MIS) plays an important role in the intelligent medical field, which greatly saves the economic and time costs of medical diagnosis. However, due to the complexity of medical images and similar characteristics of different tissue cells, existing methods face great challenges in meeting their biological consistency. To this end, we propose the Hybrid Augmented Generative Adversarial Network (HAGAN) to maintain the authenticity of structural texture and tissue cells. HAGAN contains Attention Mixed (AttnMix) Generator, Hierarchical Discriminator and Reverse Skip Connection between Discriminator and Generator. The AttnMix consistency differentiable regularization encourages the perception in structural and textural variations between real and fake images, which improves the pathological integrity of synthetic images and the accuracy of features in local areas. The Hierarchical Discriminator introduces pixel-by-pixel discriminant feedback to generator for enhancing the saliency and discriminance of global and local details simultaneously. The Reverse Skip Connection further improves the accuracy for fine details by fusing real and synthetic distribution features. Our experimental evaluations on three datasets of different scales, i.e., COVID-CT, ACDC and BraTS2018, demonstrate that HAGAN outperforms the existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance in both high-resolution and low-resolution.

Biphasic Face Photo-Sketch Synthesis via Semantic-Driven Generative Adversarial Network with Graph Representation Learning

In recent years, significant progress has been achieved in biphasic face photo-sketch synthesis with the development of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). Biphasic face photo-sketch synthesis could be applied in wide-ranging fields such as digital entertainment and law enforcement. However, generating realistic photos and distinct sketches suffers from great challenges due to the low quality of sketches and complex photo variations in the real scenes. To this end, we propose a novel Semantic-Driven Generative Adversarial Network to address the above issues, cooperating with the Graph Representation Learning. Specifically, we inject class-wise semantic layouts into the generator to provide style-based spatial supervision for synthesized face photos and sketches. In addition, to improve the fidelity of the generated results, we leverage the semantic layouts to construct two types of Representational Graphs which indicate the intra-class semantic features and inter-class structural features of the synthesized images. Furthermore, we design two types of constraints based on the proposed Representational Graphs which facilitate the preservation of the details in generated face photos and sketches. Moreover, to further enhance the perceptual quality of synthesized images, we propose a novel biphasic training strategy which is dedicated to refine the generated results through Iterative Cycle Training. Extensive experiments are conducted on CUFS and CUFSF datasets to demonstrate the prominent ability of our proposed method which achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

Medical Instrument Segmentation in 3D US by Hybrid Constrained Semi-Supervised Learning

Medical instrument segmentation in 3D ultrasound is essential for image-guided intervention. However, to train a successful deep neural network for instrument segmentation, a large number of labeled images are required, which is expensive and time-consuming to obtain. In this article, we propose a semi-supervised learning (SSL) framework for instrument segmentation in 3D US, which requires much less annotation effort than the existing methods. To achieve the SSL learning, a Dual-UNet is proposed to segment the instrument. The Dual-UNet leverages unlabeled data using a novel hybrid loss function, consisting of uncertainty and contextual constraints. Specifically, the uncertainty constraints leverage the uncertainty estimation of the predictions of the UNet, and therefore improve the unlabeled information for SSL training. In addition, contextual constraints exploit the contextual information of the training images, which are used as the complementary information for voxel-wise uncertainty estimation. Extensive experiments on multiple ex-vivo and in-vivo datasets show that our proposed method achieves Dice score of about 68.6%-69.1% and the inference time of about 1 sec. per volume. These results are better than the state-of-the-art SSL methods and the inference time is comparable to the supervised approaches.