Adaptive High-Frequency Transformer for Diverse Wildlife Re-Identification

Wildlife ReID involves utilizing visual technology to identify specific individuals of wild animals in different scenarios, holding significant importance for wildlife conservation, ecological research, and environmental monitoring. Existing wildlife ReID methods are predominantly tailored to specific species, exhibiting limited applicability. Although some approaches leverage extensively studied person ReID techniques, they struggle to address the unique challenges posed by wildlife. Therefore, in this paper, we present a unified, multi-species general framework for wildlife ReID. Given that high-frequency information is a consistent representation of unique features in various species, significantly aiding in identifying contours and details such as fur textures, we propose the Adaptive High-Frequency Transformer model with the goal of enhancing high-frequency information learning. To mitigate the inevitable high-frequency interference in the wilderness environment, we introduce an object-aware high-frequency selection strategy to adaptively capture more valuable high-frequency components. Notably, we unify the experimental settings of multiple wildlife datasets for ReID, achieving superior performance over state-of-the-art ReID methods. In domain generalization scenarios, our approach demonstrates robust generalization to unknown species.

On the Opportunities of (Re)-Exploring Atmospheric Science by Foundation Models: A Case Study

Most state-of-the-art AI applications in atmospheric science are based on classic deep learning approaches. However, such approaches cannot automatically integrate multiple complicated procedures to construct an intelligent agent, since each functionality is enabled by a separate model learned from independent climate datasets. The emergence of foundation models, especially multimodal foundation models, with their ability to process heterogeneous input data and execute complex tasks, offers a substantial opportunity to overcome this challenge. In this report, we want to explore a central question - how the state-of-the-art foundation model, i.e., GPT-4o, performs various atmospheric scientific tasks. Toward this end, we conduct a case study by categorizing the tasks into four main classes, including climate data processing, physical diagnosis, forecast and prediction, and adaptation and mitigation. For each task, we comprehensively evaluate the GPT-4o's performance along with a concrete discussion. We hope that this report may shed new light on future AI applications and research in atmospheric science.

ProxyLM: Predicting Language Model Performance on Multilingual Tasks via Proxy Models

Performance prediction is a method to estimate the performance of Language Models (LMs) on various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, mitigating computational costs associated with model capacity and data for fine-tuning. Our paper introduces ProxyLM, a scalable framework for predicting LM performance using proxy models in multilingual tasks. These proxy models act as surrogates, approximating the performance of the LM of interest. By leveraging proxy models, ProxyLM significantly reduces computational overhead on task evaluations, achieving up to a 37.08x speedup compared to traditional methods, even with our smallest proxy models. Additionally, our methodology showcases adaptability to previously unseen languages in pre-trained LMs, outperforming the state-of-the-art performance by 1.89x as measured by root-mean-square error (RMSE). This framework streamlines model selection, enabling efficient deployment and iterative LM enhancements without extensive computational resources.

Transformer for Object Re-Identification: A Survey

Object Re-Identification (Re-ID) aims to identify and retrieve specific objects from varying viewpoints. For a prolonged period, this field has been predominantly driven by deep convolutional neural networks. In recent years, the Transformer has witnessed remarkable advancements in computer vision, prompting an increasing body of research to delve into the application of Transformer in Re-ID. This paper provides a comprehensive review and in-depth analysis of the Transformer-based Re-ID. In categorizing existing works into Image/Video-Based Re-ID, Re-ID with limited data/annotations, Cross-Modal Re-ID, and Special Re-ID Scenarios, we thoroughly elucidate the advantages demonstrated by the Transformer in addressing a multitude of challenges across these domains. Considering the trending unsupervised Re-ID, we propose a new Transformer baseline, UntransReID, achieving state-of-the-art performance on both single-/cross modal tasks. Besides, this survey also covers a wide range of Re-ID research objects, including progress in animal Re-ID. Given the diversity of species in animal Re-ID, we devise a standardized experimental benchmark and conduct extensive experiments to explore the applicability of Transformer for this task to facilitate future research. Finally, we discuss some important yet under-investigated open issues in the big foundation model era, we believe it will serve as a new handbook for researchers in this field.